The Sovereign and its Neighbor—A Dialog

Talk for the Worshop “Digitale Souveränität im Widerstreit”

May, 21–22 Lüneburg

1. The Antinomies of Sovereignty

We are gathered over these two days to discuss the question of sovereignty in the context of digitality. What might digital sovereignty mean, and what would it look like? Are digital media not, by their very nature, antithetical to sovereignty? At the turn of the twenty-first century, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy were already analyzing the deconstructive pressure that new modes of communication exert on a concept of sovereignty, which has signified since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) “supreme authority within a territory” (Besson 2011, 1). 

1.1 Teletechnologies and Sovereignty

Derrida approaches the question of what he calls teletechnologies—fax, telephone, email, internet—in the context of his work on hospitality, a concept he understands as intimately and aporetically bound to sovereignty. In its unconditional form, hospitality is the antinomy of sovereignty. To be truly hospitable, the host must welcome the other unconditionally—whoever they may be—without demanding a justification or expecting anything in return. Unconditional hospitality is a welcoming that exceeds the law. But hospitality without condition implies the readiness to relinquish mastery over one’s home to whoever crosses its threshold. Derrida illustrates the aporia of hospitality in the formula “make yourself at home” (fais comme chez toi), which can be literally translated by “behave like you are at home.” This typical expression of hospitality invites the guest to become, however provisionally, the master of the home. To be unconditionally hospitable therefore means to surrender sovereignty over one’s home. Yet, without a sovereign host, there is no hospitality to offer. The mutual undoing of sovereignty and hospitality can only be mitigated by what Derrida calls “conditional hospitality.” The conditional laws of hospitality render the guest subject to an existing legal and normative order, circumscribing the unconditional openness that hospitality, in its true form, demands. 

The openness of the home is not only the condition for welcoming the other but also for making the home livable for oneself. If I am not free to come and go, I am not the master of my home. A home without openings is closer to a prison than to a home. In that sense, to inhabit sovereignly necessarily entails an openness toward the outside, such that the outside is already invited in as a possibility. The possibility of having the outside in is simultaneously the condition of sovereignty and its inherent limitation.

It is in this context that Derrida discusses the way teletechnologies invite themselves in our home: haunting its closure. Derrida understands teletechnologies as forces of dislocation that deconstruct the boundaries between the self and the other, inside and outside, the public and the private sphere: “all those machines that introduce ubiquitous disruption, and the rootlessness of place, the dis-location of the house, the infraction into the home” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 91). 

Since Derrida’s somewhat utopian reading of the deconstructive potential of teletechnologies, it appears that instead of challenging the closure of the home and state control, teletechnologies have become instruments of unprecedented control over its borders. The dislocating quality of digital technology allows it to introduce the border everywhere, reaching the molecular level of the body and turning bodies into borders, to use Achille Mbembe expression (Biometrics, DNA-Tests). The proliferating ways in which digital technologies are regulating access to places, services, and information have multiplied, rather than reduced, forms of state inhospitality. 

1.2 Ecotechnics and Sovereignty

In Singulier Pluriel written in 1996 and Corpus in 2000, Jean-Luc Nancy, for his part, examines the impact of digital media through what he terms ecotechnics—a concept joining the oikos of our global togetherness with technology. Ecotechnics designates the capacity of technology—a technology that would be freed of capital and sovereignty as he writes in Singular Plural (140)—to make each of us the neighbor of someone who may live close or very far. In Corpus, Nancy defines the “neighbor” as a techne that expresses the non-sovereign configuration of the world. Ecotechnically neighboring bodies are singularities exposed to one another, affecting one another, partaking in a shared world, as so many irreducible parts of a “we.” Ecotechnics offers an alternative to the political model of sovereignty and its technologies. 

Current technology already dissolves state sovereignty into a planetary oikos. This dissolution gives rise to what Nancy calls in Singular Plural “domination without sovereignty” (36)—a form of domination that retains the logic of exception and the power to destroy and appropriate, while drawing new lines of demarcation no longer between nation-states but between rich and poor, included and excluded, North and South. Nancy’s assessment of this transition is ambivalent: while new technologies dismantle the vertical model of sovereignty, they simultaneously repeat some of its most essential features. Ecotechnics, by contrast, expresses a utopian horizon: what technology could be if it weren’t the instrument of sovereignty and capital.

1.3 Political Economy of Technology

These deconstructive readings of technology in its relation to sovereignty underestimate a factor essential to both the development of new technology and the imposition of one technology over another since the Industrial Revolution; this factor is Capital. No account of digital technology can afford to ignore its material conditions of possibility—and this is truer than ever in the age of machine-learning-based generative AI. Generative AI, far from emerging out of some internal necessity governing the evolution of technology, was made possible only through what David Harvey calls Capital’s “accumulation by dispossession,” the enduring form taken by Marx’s “primitive accumulation.” Today’s large language models were only made possible through the systematic extraction of the totality of textual data present on the internet, with no regard for geographical provenience, cultural history, or the conditions under which that data was produced. Data treated as a global resource to be mined without consent, annotated on the cheap by workers in the Global South for the benefit of Big Tech and United State’s military and imperialist ambition, entirely bypasses sovereignty.

Even copyright law—the integral purpose of which it is to protect the products of intellectual and creative labor as the property of their creators—has been rendered largely toothless, as a recent US ruling demonstrated when authors who objected to their works being used without consent to train generative models were told that big tech use of the data is transformative enough to make it fair use.

If the state refuses to represent the interests of the people against the rapaciousness of Big Tech—I am also thinking of the construction of resource-hungry data centers in the US driving up energy prices for ordinary consumers and polluting local water supplies—one must ask what remains of the state’s sovereign function. 

What remains of state sovereignty consists in enforcing the borders of the state enclosure, surveilling its inside and waging war on its outside—all three operations highly reliant on machine-learning-based AI. Pushed to its ultimate consequences, sovereignty turns the state enclosure into a windowless fortress. This tendency is not solely manifest in the US: in Germany, we witness to the acquisition and deployment of Palantir surveillance software by German police forces, and the current coalition’s push to remilitarize the country in the name of “defending democracy.”

2.   The Unmoved Mover

My hypothesis is that sovereignty names a certain structure of psycho-political desire, whose horizon is the windowless fortress. 

Western political philosophy establishes a historical and structural continuity between the sacred and the sovereign, the sovereign being the form that power assumes in the process of its secularization. In her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown describes this continuity by stressing how characteristics traditionally attributed to God are ascribed to the sovereign.[1] The sovereign is that which is not affected, conditioned, moved by anything else, nor “subordinated”[2] to anything else. Analyzing the theological origins of the concept of sovereignty, Brown mentions that the sovereign is akin to the “unmoved mover”—Aristotle’s definition of the First Principle.[3]

If we take this origin seriously, sovereign is the name of that which moves, affects others but isn’t affected or altered in any way in return. The sovereign exerts a one-sided, asymmetrical relationality: it relates to an other, acts upon it, yet this other cannot relate to it or act upon it in any way. The unmoved mover names an affection and even an auto-affection without affectability. Of course, sovereignty understood as absolute, conditioned by nothing else, does not exist anywhere. As Wendy Brown insists: “Sovereignty… is completely dependent and relational, even as it stands for autonomy, self-presence, and self-sufficiency.”[4]

In Rogues where he discusses the question of sovereignty, Derrida also points to Aristotle’s unmoved mover to insist on its circularity. This leads me to relate the sovereign as unmoved mover to the movement of auto-affection. Auto-affection names, in Derrida’s deconstructive reading of this phenomenological term, the structure of reflexivity at the core of sentience in any living being. In the movement of affecting oneself, touching oneself, hearing oneself speak, the self splits into the affecting and the affected, differing from itself in the very movement of relating to itself. The self becomes different from itself each time it feels itself.

The sovereign understood as unmoved mover is doubly aporetic: Toward the outside and toward itself. First, toward the outside, the neighboring other represents the sovereign’s aporia. Without a neighbor—that is, without difference and without relation to an other than itself—there is no need for sovereignty, since there is nothing against which the sovereign must exert its power, nothing that could condition or affect it, forcing it to assert itself. But by having a neighbor, the sovereign suddenly stands in relation to something it is not, something it must assert itself against, and that it must subjugate or even destroy in order to prevent itself from being affected by it. Second, as the unmoved mover, the absolute sovereign fully determines itself, that is affects itself. And by the law of auto-affection, the sovereign differs from itself, becomes other to itself in the movement of affecting itself, such that its closure splits open and lets difference in, deconstructing sovereignty from within. There is no self-determination without difference.

These are the two structural-logical reasons why unconditional sovereignty is aporetic and tends to deconstruct itself. And yet unconditional sovereignty corresponds in my view to a deadly desire which—taken to its logical extreme—excludes all externality, all difference, seeks to be absolutely self-contained, self-possessed, self-sufficient. It is the desire to affect without being affected in return, a one-sided relation that isn’t one. It presupposes the subjugation of the other, the erasure of heteronomy, the systematic foreclosure of vulnerability, relationality, and interdependence. It conflates self-determination with the possession of a piece of the earth. This desire turns the state into the totalitarian fortress without window of the ethnostate. 

3. Conclusion

After finishing writing my presentation, I went back to the proposal and reread it. I couldn't help noticing that my own perspective points toward not so much a set of diverging values, interests, or norms, but rather towards a totalizing horizon in which the interests of the tech industry converge with those of the state, under the guise of surveillance and war, leaving little space to competing forms of self-determination. I am convinced that the concept of sovereignty—due to its theological nature, the libidinal investment it attracts, and its entanglement with capital, which again ties self-determination to possession through the concept of enclosure—is not salvageable and serves to protect the interests of the strongest.

Katia Schwerzmann

[1] (Brown 2010)

[2] (Nancy 2000, 120)

[3] Book 12 (Λ) of Aristotle, Metaphysics.

[4] (Brown 2010, 65)