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🪵 The Threshold

For Bataille sovereignty means violating the death taboo rather than avoiding death

Properties2
tagsja-picks, define, xref, deepthinking, definitional_content, primary_study, singleton, category/definitional-content
aliases@mbembe_necropolitics_2003, loc. 32

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For Bataille sovereignty means violating the death taboo rather than avoiding death

Evidence

For Bataille, sovereignty therefore has many forms. But ultimately it is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have the subject respect. The sovereign world, Bataille argues, “is the world in which the limit of death is done away with. Death is present in it, its presence defines that world of violence, but while death is present it is always there only to be negated, never for anything but that. The sovereign,” he concludes, “is he who is, as if death were not… . He has no more regard for the limits of identity than he does for limits of death, or rather these limits are the same; he is the transgression of all such limits.” Since the natural domain of prohibitions includes death, among others (e.g., sexuality, filth, excrement), sovereignty requires “the strength to violate the prohibition against killing, although it’s true this will be under the conditions that customs define.” And contrary to subordination that is always rooted in necessity and the alleged need to avoid death, sovereignty definitely calls for the risk of death. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 32

Categorization

  • DEFINE: This defines Bataille’s sovereign as the one who negates death’s limit — a core concept for necropolitics.
  • XREF: Connects directly to the Agamben/Hobbes sovereignty literature — the sovereign as the one who can kill without crime. — connects to: For Bataille death is excess and self-consciousness, not Hegelian meaning. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 26
  • DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — subordination rooted in fear of death, sovereignty in risking death — reframes political authority as not about protection but about exposure to death.
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