Faculty Bibliography Spotlight: Jill Stauffer
Citation:"Equality and Equivocation: Saving Sovereignty from Itself," Law, Culture, and the Humanities 6, no.2, 2010.
When I was invited to contribute to a themed journal issue on "sovereignty," I took it as a challenge to figure out for myself, finally, what had always bothered me about Giorgio Agamben's widely praised work on the concept. Agamben argued, famously, that the concentration camp is the nomos of modernity -- a better figure for our form of law than the more popular ideas of rights and citizen -- and used an arcane figure from Roman law called homo sacer to make an argument about what sovereignty really means in the Western tradition. His reading of the concept is rich and impressive, but his conclusion finds sovereignty to be not much more than domination. In my paper I pay close attention to a more varied and equivocal set of meanings for both law and sovereignty in the Western legal tradition. I show that Agamben reduces both terms to ciphers so that he can more easily dismiss them, and that in so doing he neglects to reckon with a richer heritage of legal thought and practice that offers possibilities for justice we may not wish to let go. Agamben's argument, in rejecting some terms too easily, accepts other terms as easily, terms that he also tries to overturn. The result: he criticizes modern law for its lost connection to justice (and so accepts a reduction of law to power or social utility), but because he is blind to a wide range of other possibilities within that same legal heritage, he never really challenges the reduction of law to power or social utility. To wrap up the argument I use the work of Marianne Constable to suggest an alternate set of conclusions about sovereignty in our time.
Jill Stauffer is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College.
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