Modernity generated multiple concepts of sovereignty beyond the democratic norm-producing demos.

Evidence

The aim of this essay is not to debate the singularity of the extermination of the Jews or to hold it up by way of example. I start from the idea that modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignty—and therefore of the biopolitical. Disregarding this multiplicity, late-modern political criticism has unfortunately privileged normative theories of democracy and has made the concept of reason one of the most important elements of both the project of modernity and of the topos of sovereignty. From this perspective, the ultimate expression of sovereignty is the production of general norms by a body (the demos) made up of free and equal men and women. These men and women are posited as full subjects capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation. Politics, therefore, is defined as twofold: a project of autonomy and the achieving of agreement among a collectivity through communication and recognition. This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 13

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the book’s core move: sovereignty/necropolitics is an alternative to (not a complement of) normative democratic theorizing built on reason, the demos, and communicative agreement — and it frames what Mbembe will dismantle.
• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose’s scaffolding of Orientalism/colonial-psychology vocabulary — this is the theory of sovereignty the Islamophobia readings will implicitly assume or contest. — connects to: Sovereignty fragments into overlapping partial rights to rule. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 122; Democratic leveling rhetoric can cloak transfer of sovereignty to one man — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 672; Responsibility-to-Protect discourse shifted sovereignty from nations to individuals (+2 more)

Related

• Sovereignty fragments into overlapping partial rights to rule. (similarity 0.81)
• Democratic leveling rhetoric can cloak transfer of sovereignty to one man (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Sovereignty fragments into overlapping partial rights to rule. #expands (0.82) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 122
• Democratic leveling rhetoric can cloak transfer of sovereignty to one man #exemplifies (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 672
• Hypernationalist rhetoric served to justify a supranational monopoly of power #exemplifies (0.78)
• Responsibility-to-Protect discourse shifted sovereignty from nations to individuals #exemplifies (0.75)
• Monotheistic sacred narratives ground colonial sovereignty and identity against the Other. #exemplifies (0.72) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 99