Sovereignty’s predictive power over the future proves its grip on history

Evidence

The power of Jabotinsky’s essay lies in the fact of its forecasting accuracy, an index of the power of sovereignty, not only over the present, but over the future as well. His was a brilliant diagnostic that, in a few pages, summed up and captured the entire structure of colonization in Palestine and elsewhere. The reduction of the Palestinians and many others to inertia was the point of the iron wall, whether Zionist, British, or French. Latour’s Stone, exemplified and starkly manifested in the success of Jabotinsky’s diagnostics, is a story of presence, not agency—that is, as long as the Stone remains in existence. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 395

Categorization

• XREF: The Latour ‘Stone’ reference connects to object-oriented ontology and Latour’s work on nonhuman actants.