The Beast and the Sovereign, Biopolitics and Derrida's Menagerie

摘要

The two-volume set of The Beast and the Sovereign is a product of seminars delivered in 2001-03, including Derrida's written texts with supplementation from transcripts of the sessions. Both volumes are timely in feeling connected to particular times and places. The first volume is haunted by occasional mentions of 9/11, terrorism, and rogue states, written with the clear weight of a work still reeling in the face of political violence. The second volume also turns more personal with a consideration of solitude and a contemplation of death as the limit of sovereignty. At the beginning of one lecture Derrida marks the passing of his friend Maurice Blanchot and, for the reader, Derrida's own death hangs as a shadow over his careful contemplation of Heidegger's sense of how we make ourselves mortal. Readers of Derrida will recognize many of the themes that wind their way through the eclectic texts including the concept of sovereignty-sovereign power, national sovereignty, and sovereign selves-at the heart of Rogues (2005) and Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Borradorri, 2004), and other work produced in this time period.