In his article, 'The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty', Anthony Burke asks:
"What is "modern sovereignty"? In developing this concept, Hardt and Negri echo a powerful critique of sovereignty that refutes its basic essentialising claim: that sovereignty forms an unproblematic and legitimate site of authority and legal violence based on its status as a representative signifier for the nation, 'the people'. This is a form of ontological magic first visible in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, where he posits humanity moving on a journey from a mythical 'state of nature' to the 'body-politick', 'a multitude united in One Person'. (1985: 227) Based on this suffocating image of 'many wills' reduced to one, Westphalian sovereignty was made (via Machiavelli) into the basic structural and normative principle for International Relations: the rule of law and morality within the state; the rule of anarchy and amorality outside it, driven by states' eternal competition and struggle for power. (Hobbes 1985; George 1994: 71)"
The history of Australia has been one of the concealment of this violence that involves a politics of forgetting.
Burke says that this politics involves a trading of freedom for security coupled to a powerful image of sovereign identity as perpetually under threat, and as intolerant and repressive of difference.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 20, 2004 11:56 PM | TrackBack