Introduction. The negativity of sovereignty, now

This book is a reproduction of Culture, Theory and Critique, volume 51, issue 2. The title of this collection is inspired by Georges Bataille's famous formulation: 'Sovereignty is NOTHING' (1980: 300). Here, Bataille suggested that sovereignty resides in the ecstatic moment of forgetting, outside of knowledge, chronology and causality. For Bataille, sovereignty exists only in moments of absence, only when referentiality is abandoned and the nothing is paramount. It can only be known on the via negativa, through its effects of, for example, horror, disgust, hysteria, elation or intoxication. Bataille's gesture was to move the concept of sovereignty beyond the juridical, towards subjectivity in the broadest sense. The subject experiences sovereignty through the miraculous moment of rupture into the nothing, which, in turn, itself ruptures the coherence of the subject. Bataille's statement may appear too obscure or 'metaphysical' in a world that became obsessed with questions about sovereignty after the events on September II, 2001. Much of the legal debate that took place in the United States, for example, about the correct treatment of enemy combatants hinged on whether or not suspected terrorists should be understood to be citizens of sovereign states, and therefore permitted the protections of the Geneva Convention. And many critical readings of the presidency of George W. Bush were concerned by his extra-judicial decisions, concerned at the presidential assertion of his own exceptional sovereign powers at the expense of due process. The realpolitik of sovereignty, expressed through questions about who has it and what it really means, has been laid bare in the international politics of the post-91 II world. It is this political context that makes Bataille's gnomic statement that 'Sovereignty is NOTHING' indispensable for beginning a conversation about sovereignty and modernity. In spite of the seeming opaqueness of Bataille's words, his assertion speaks to both modernist and post-modernist unmaskings of the nothing at the core of sovereignty. That is, much twentieth-century theoretical writing has been concerned to show how sovereign claims to authority arc always grasping towards an illusory universality. They claim an always deferred higher power as a source of legitimacy. Bataille's proclamation of the nothing at the heart of sovereignty is emblematic of these larger inquiries into the assumptions that generate legitimacy in culture and politics. As such, it functions as a hermeneutic informing this collection of essays. They each seek to consider what happens to sovereignty when its profound nothingness is made explicit. What does this do to conceptualisations of sovereignty? How can a politics be articulated in the face of the nothing?