The group’s sovereign is a self-imposed defense against seriality, not an imposition from without.

Evidence

At this point, of course, the implicit frame of reference has been shifted from the French Revolution to the control of Stalin over the Soviet apparatus; and with this development the life, the vital evolution of the group has for all practical purposes ceased. This is not yet a dissolution back into seriality, which might indeed be the next stage in the group’s history, if it can still be said to have one: for it is important to remember that along with the oath and the Terror, along with structure and organization, the taking of a sovereign is something the group does to itself in order to remain in existence, in order precisely to ward off the increasingly insistent forces of seriality at work all around it. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 534

Categorization

• XREF: Sartre’s claim that the group chooses its own sovereign to ward off seriality echoes the Frankfurt School’s analysis of authoritarian leadership as mass self-subordination — Adorno’s ‘Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda.’ — connects to: Submission to external authority can constitute rather than constrain the self; Sovereignty rests on the power to kill, not the power of exception — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 703

Broader Connections

• Submission to external authority can constitute rather than constrain the self #contradicts (0.78)
• Sovereignty rests on the power to kill, not the power of exception #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 703