Sovereign Dissociations.

The proposed paper explores the promise of democracy in excess of an influential liberal trope. In short, this trope envisages democratic sovereignty as rescuing - with as minimal an impact on individual freedom as possible - humanity from an insecure, natural state. Against this formulation, Agamben depicts liberal sovereign politics as constituting a brutalizing form of life - by 'exceptional' measures - that serves as the sovereign's other. Here, the liberal sovereign does not rescue subjects from a brutal, lawless state of nature; rather, it plunges them into a perpetual condition of violence in which 'order' is exacted by generating homo sacri who are subjected to sovereign decree. In this scheme, the Hobbesian state of nature appears less as an insecure condition to be renounced than as a potentially liberating, non-liberal, political terrain; thus, Agamben gestures toward an emancipating potential in limbo from the violence of liberal sovereignty and its law. Questioning the revolutionary destruction implied by Agamben's evocative account, this paper will instead explore sovereignty as a key element of finite calculations within a broader promise of what Derrida describes as 'democracy to come.' Working through this idea, the paper will explore democratic politics as the perpetual negotiation of dissociation that gestures towards an incalculable promise of 'being with'. Perhaps, state sovereignty might be considered as a way in which 'democracy' has been calculated through dissociating images of monarchical sovereignty. This horizon allows one to reconsider sovereignty through newly emerging negotiations that make sense by dissociating images of nation state sovereignty, but not of sovereignty per se. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]