Sovereignty rests on the power to kill, not the power of exception

Evidence

Sovereignty amounts in the final determination not just to the power or right to determine the state of exception, as Carl Schmitt so famously has put it. Achille Mbembe, following Foucault, emphasizes that it concerns even more basically power over the right to kill. No doubt the power over exception could be said to entail the power over killing. But the sovereign’s defining power over killing remains no matter the declaration of exceptionality. If every state killing is legitimated through the at least implicit declaration of exceptionality, exceptionality must either be instrumentally in service of sovereign power and not its ground, or it is simply moot. The sovereign’s defining power to kill accordingly must be more basic than the power over exceptionality. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 703

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Schmitt’s state of exception and Mbembe’s necropolitics — extends the reader’s existing notes on sovereignty and sacrifice. — connects to: The group’s sovereign is a self-imposed defense against seriality, not an imposition from without. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 534
• DEEPTHINKING: The logical reduction — that if exceptionality legitimates every killing, it must only be instrumental to sovereign power, not its ground — is a tight, paradigm-shifting argument about what sovereignty actually is.