Conquest founds legitimate sovereignty because the defeated prefer life to death

Evidence

Here we obviously have a relationship of domination based entirely upon war and the prolongation, during peacetime, of the effects of war. Domination, you say, and not sovereignty. But Hobbes does not say that: he says we are still in a relationship of sovereignty. Why? Because once the defeated have shown a preference for life and obedience, they make their victors their representatives and restore a sovereign to replace the one who was killed in the war. It is therefore not the defeat that leads to the brutal and illegal establishment of a society based upon domination, slavery, and servitude; it is what happens during the defeat, or even after the battle, even after the defeat, and in a way, independently of it. It is fear, the renunciation of fear, and the renunciation of the risk of death. It is this that introduces us into the order of sovereignty and into a juridical regime: that of absolute power. The will to prefer life to death: that is what founds sovereignty, and it is as juridical and legitimate as the sovereignty that was established through the mode of institution and mutual agreement. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 111

Categorization

• XREF: This is the direct ancestor of Foucault’s own later claim (and of biopolitics/necropolitics scholarship) that sovereignty operates on the power to let live or make die — fear of death is the founding will. Connects to Mbembe’s necropolitics in the reading list. — connects to: War exercises sovereignty through the right to kill. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 7; In sovereign narratives, emancipation and killing are bound to truth and death — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 56; Only the radical will to live founds sovereignty, regardless of will’s form — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 112 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Foucault’s reading: Hobbes’s sovereignty by acquisition is not brute domination but a juridical regime founded on the vanquished’s will to live — conquest is legitimated.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this exposure of the fear-of-death foundation of sovereignty prepare Foucault’s turn to the weapon/race-war counter-discourse of sovereignty in the following lectures?

Related

• Only the radical will to live founds sovereignty, regardless of will’s form (similarity 0.81)
• Hobbes denies war any role in founding sovereignty (similarity 0.80)