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the state of exception
Alexander Hirsch
Department of Political Science, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK 99701, USA. [email protected]
Abstract
Most contemporary political theories of sovereignty–from Giorgio Agamben to Achille Mbembe – have argued that the emergency powers claimed by the Bush administration under the auspices of the War on Terror epitomized what Carl Schmitt calls a state of exception. If so, I argue, perhaps it is time for new visions of sovereignty to emerge, ones attendant to the eccentricities of the present conjuncture. Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring are but two obvious examples of counterpublics that seem to have presented new modalities of sovereign life worth reflecting upon. Hardly states of exception, these are scenes of sovereignty that are more fraught and precarious, more democratic. I argue that the theories of sovereignty of George Bataille and Frantz Fanon may hold clues for coming to terms with these new sovereign scenes. Though often under-emphasized in the scholarly literature on Bataille and Fanon, for both thinkers sovereignty is a condition of existence, an expression of a surreal mode of esthetic experience and poetic beauty. I argue that drawing attention to the comparison of the political thought of Bataille and Fanon, and especially to the value of surrealism for contemporary political theory generally, holds promise for those of us interested in chal-lenging the Schmittian consensus. At stake is a refreshed understanding of sovereignty, not as norm or exception, but as a condition of political life lived by everyday subjects caught in a surreal state in-between.Contemporary Political Theoryadvance online publication, 10 September 2013; doi:10.1057/cpt.2013.25
Keywords:sovereignty; surrealism; Bataille; Fanon; Hegel; violence
Many of the debates on the contemporary scene of political discourse orbit around the question of sovereignty. Is sovereignty a mode of indivisible, monarchical abso-lutism, enthroned by the state–l’etat, c’est moi–as it was for Hobbes (1991), Bodin (1992) and DeMaistre (1994)? Or is sovereignty about evenly distributing power among a host of balanced institutions, per Polybius (2010), Montesquieu (1989), or Publius (2012)? Perhaps sovereignty ought to be conceived primarily as a spatial order, a form of territorial enclosure, as the Westphalians thought? If so, is this
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political shelter essentially a means of immunizing the domestic order against the perceived threat of alien incursion, as Derrida (2005) and Esposito (2011) have argued? Is it accurate to say, as others have argued, that political borders are becoming more permeable as the tentacular reach of neoliberal global capital slackens sovereign control (see Brown, 2005; Ong, 2006)? Has this mode of sovereignty undergone a paradigm shift in the contemporary period such that, as Foucault (2003) has argued, state sovereignty has been supplanted by circuits of disciplinary biopower? Then again, these may be the wrong questions. Sovereignty may well be the fantasy of any such control, the pretension to mastery and security where none in fact exists (Berlant, 2011). Perhaps sovereignty betokens an empty place, impossible to occupy, such that those who exercise public authority can never quite claim to appropriate it (Lefort, 1991).Carl Schmitt, notorious crown jurist of the Third Reich, casts a long shadow over these debates. His critique of liberal constitutionalism and parliamentary consensus politics is by now familiar:‘The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure…in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion’(Schmitt, 2005, p. 63). The‘decisionism’that Schmitt supports in lieu of liberalism’s‘eternal conversation’starts with the‘state of exception’. Writes Schmitt (2005),‘The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: it confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception, the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition’(p. 15). In the suspension of everyday law, and the declaration of an emergency power, an exception is invented. And he who decides when, where and why this exception can take place, Schmitt tells us, is sovereign.
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2011 was one of global uprisings–from the Arab Spring, to the ‘hot’Iberian and Hellenic summer, to the‘occupied’fall. Hardly states of exception, these are scenes of sovereign life that are more fraught and precarious, more democratic. These are instantiations of sovereignty from below. Where Schmitt proposes the exception as a sovereign breaking through the‘torpid crust of ordinariness’, these recent events call on us to re-think sovereignty as connected to what breaks from the norm–exception binary itself.1If so, perhaps ours is a time for proposing or revisiting alternative theories of sovereignty, visions that may hold clues for coming to terms with our own political present.Here I want to explore a twin set of such alternatives, theories of sovereignty that depart from the now well-worn decisionist argument. My guiding lights in this regard are an unlikely pair. First, George Bataille: scandalous eroticist, philosopher of excrement, mystic poet of the sacred void; second, Frantz Fanon: Martinican revolutionary, psychopathologist of racial hegemony, existential phenomenologist. Hardly a star-crossed couple, Bataille and Fanon express contrasting ethico-political projects.2 There are, however, important cross-currents. From both Bataille and Fanon we glean a mode of sovereignty that cuts across the state of exception. Moreover, in their respective claims about sovereign life, both Bataille and Fanon were profoundly influenced by surrealism. This article aims to clarify the alternatives to the Schmittian state of exception represented by Bataille and Fanon, to underscore the influence of surreal esthetic experience on both conceptions, and to contrast Bataille’s theory of sovereignty with Fanon’s.
Surrealism is,first and foremost, about the uncanny reversal of worlds.3It values schisms, sensual derangements and unexpected juxtapositions, all of which encou-rage an exuberant mode of looking that draws on dreamscapes of unconscious desires and fantasies (see, for example, Krauss, 1994; Foster, 1995; Caws, 2010). For both Bataille and Fanon, sovereignty is ultimately an expression of this surreal world. In particular, both thinkers were drawn to the way surreal art (and especially surreal poetry) emphasized dialectical detritus–which is to say, the excessive remainder that survives the processes of sublation exalted in the German Idealist philosophy of Hegel. In their respective efforts to politicize this excessive surplus, both thinkers developed theories of surreal sovereignty that also challenged the orthodoxy of that quintessential surrealist progenitor, André Breton.
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the colony, insofar as they deny the colonized a sense of subjective dignity and self-worth. For Fanon, it is resistance to this perverse and‘Manichean’colonial ordering that constitutes what he calls‘true sovereignty’.Despite this diametrical opposition, I argue that both thinkers provide us with a means of thinking about sovereignty not as norm or exception, but rather as a condition of experience lived by everyday subjects caught surreally in-between. In this sense, their theories of sovereignty present compelling–albeit contrasting– alternatives to Schmitt’s decisionism. Rather than weigh in on which thinker is more right, I view the dispute between Bataille and Fanon as an invitation to deepen questions that probe the vicissitudes of sovereignty in our political present. To ask whether sovereignty essentially enables or disables subjectivities, whether sovereignty is animated by memory or forgetting, and to find in sur-realism a poetics of violence that foregrounds the conditions of possibility for both is already to pose questions more germane to what appears to be unfurling in our midst.
The following is broken down into four sections. Thefirst two review the influence of surrealism on the theories of sovereignty in Bataille and Fanon, respectively. Each section also concludes by indicating where the points of departure from Schmitt are located. The penultimate section contrasts Bataille and Fanon, finding the two in some ways radically opposed, despite their common enthrallment with surrealism and their mutual departure from Schmitt. Thefinal section returns to the idea that contemporary political shifts may call on us to develop alternative approaches to the question of sovereignty, which I argue can generatively take Bataille and Fanon as sources of inspiration.
Sovereignty: Marvelous Abandon
Bataille’s theory of sovereignty starts with his critique of Hegel. Bataille faithfully attended Alexandre Kojève’s famous 1930s lecture series on Hegel at theÉcole des hautes études. Reportedly, the seminars left Bataille quaking with an overwhelming sensation, one in which he felt‘bursting, crushed, killed twice over: suffocated and transfixed’ (quoted in Surya, 2002, p. 189). The power of Kojève’s gripping interpretation of Hegel apparently induced profound and devastating effects. ‘No one better than [Hegel]’, Bataille later wrote,‘understood in depth the possibilities of intelligence’(quoted in Surya, 2002, p. 189).
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self-aware and omniscient at the‘End of History’, remains suspect Bataille argues insofar as the very consciousness we have of ourselves is always already constituted by the dismissal or exclusion of that which cannot be reduced to consciousness itself. In other words, Bataille’s objection to Kojève derives from the assertion that we can only make the claim to have absolute self-knowledge if we admit that there is something that escapes conscious knowledge, something that eludes our grasp, something that calls our self‐certainty into question.Key to this challenge to the theory of absolute knowledge is Bataille’s discussion of death, an experience that captures precisely that which cannot be reduced to‘the understanding’. Writes Bataille (1994):
In order for man to reveal himself ultimately to himself, he would have to die, but he would have to do so while living–watching himself ceasing to be. In other words, death itself would have to become (self-)consciousness at the very moment that it annihilates the conscious being. (p. 131)
The only way for‘desiring man’to become revealed to himself in totality, and thus to attain the satisfaction and self-understanding that accompanies such sated desire, would be‘[for him] to plunge into nothingness, to die’ (Bataille, 1994, p. 149). Unless man lives his own death, unless he survives the experience of his own limit, he cannot know his own existence in its entirety. As such,‘authentic wisdom’, of the sort Hegel’s ‘Wise Man’ is meant to possess, is possible ‘only if the Sage raises himself to the height of death’. This level of self-understanding can only take place, Bataille insists, insofar as ‘man dwells with the negative’, which is to say, insofar as he assumes the possibility of his own death–something which amounts, however ironically, to a fundamental betrayal of self-understanding itself. As Richardson (1996) puts it,‘For Bataille, it is conceptually impossible to know or communicate with what is beyond death, since death is an absolute limit of human experience, beyond which we cannot travel and return … The most one can experience is the vertigo of the edge of the chasm’, (p. 18). Indeed, for Bataille, death exemplifies an excessive ‘beyond’ of experience that cannot be wholly integrated or reconciled. This ‘beyond’ is located in a sphere of ‘non‐meaning’, where residual and irrecoverable scraps of non-experience coalesce in what Bataille terms‘the general economy’. This is a space where the remaindering waste from Hegel’s dialectic traffics.
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sovereignty is the experience of dismantled selfhood that takes place in a moment of ‘decreation’.5Bataille (2012) puts it this way:Consciousness of the moment is not truly such, is not sovereign, except in unknowing, only by canceling, or at least neutralizing, every operation of knowledge within ourselves are we in the moment, withoutfleeing it. This is possible in the grip of strong emotions that shut off, interrupt or override the
flow of thought. (my emphasis, pp. 282–283)
Sovereignty can only take place, in other words, when rational processes of thought and calculation are deferred and self-consciousness itself hangs interrupted. All sense of ends and means, or for that matter all distinctions between subjects and objects, dissolves in an indeterminate field of interfolding communion. And this utterly ‘useless and senseless’ moment of sublime selflessness is precisely what sovereignty amounts to.6
This vision is not, of course, cognate with traditional conceptions that equate sovereignty with the authoritative command of the state. ‘The sovereignty of the master (or the king)’, writes Bataille (2006), ‘is an inconsequential sovereignty’ (p. 172). Bataille’s way of talking about sovereignty also departs from what Schmitt claimed in the same historical milieu. Recall that, for Schmitt, sovereignty issues in the interruption of ordinary lawfulness. The sovereign appears in a moment when quotidian rule is suspended and the exception is decided. In Bataille’s case, however, the whole rule-exception dyad upon which Schmitt’s argument presumptively rests is detonated. For Bataille (1991), sovereignty is what is left when everything else has been stripped away,‘when anticipation dissolves into nothing’(p. 3). Schmitt (2007) may have argued that‘when looked at normatively, the sovereign decision emanates from nothingness’(p. 31) (that is, the decision appears to come out of nowhere), but for Bataille one might say that sovereignty works in precisely the opposite fashion. Sovereigntyends with nothingness, with a clearing away of the political ordering Schmitt describes. For Bataille, sovereignty is about returning to nothingness. He emphasizes a line of flight from logic, reason and knowledge, brought about through risking or putting into play (mettre en jeu) the entirety of one’s existence (see Gemerchak, 2003, p. 44). Such sovereignty can be accessed only when we act without reference to that which decisionism tacitly depends upon: utility, calculation and rationality.
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as‘the point that opens the void’, thus articulating a language that‘leads nowhere and asserts nothing’(p. 149). For Bataille, the explicit objective of such poetry is to awaken the reader to the sacred domain of erotic immersion in an overwhelming sovereign reality. ‘For us’, Bataille (1994) confirms, ‘ “poetic” cannot have a set value in the same way as an Anjou wine, or English cloth… “Poetic”undercuts the desire in us to reduce things to the dimensions of reason’(p. 138). Indeed, as Bataille put it in a letter to René Char, ‘Surreal poetry, written or illustrated, is the only sovereign cry’.Consistent with this view, in 1929, Bataille launched a surrealist journal, Documents, conceived as a‘war against received ideas’. Although its lifespan was short, the journal managed to attract several prominent figures of the surrealist movement, including Michel Leiris, Joan Miró, Robert Desnos and André Masson. Against the modish surreal methodology of the day– and especially calling into question the ‘automatic writing’ of André Breton, which circumvented the ‘ con-scious control of image-making’ –Documentsset out to embrace‘violence, sacrifice and seduction’ as the principal tenets of a surrealist poetics. Much of the journal focused on articulating what Bataille (following Hegel) termed ‘impotent beauty’. By this, Bataille (1990) meant to express the idea that truly beautiful appearances and experiences do not (indeed,cannot) act,‘since action wouldfirst destroy what beauty is: beauty which seeks nothing’(p. 16). Such beauty is sovereign insofar as it‘is on that side of the world where nothing is yet separated from what surrounds it … Beauty is sovereign, it is an end, or it is not: that is why it is not susceptible to acting, why it is, even in principle, powerless …’ (p. 16). Sovereignty is on the side of beauty, in other words, insofar as beauty leads nowhere, insofar as it is powerless to accomplish anything. Beauty remains utterly useless, inassimilable and, as such, thoroughly sovereign.7
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through forgetting, a letting go of one’s sense of self. And surrealism holds the key to this forgetfulness, given its attunement to a reality fecund with oblivion.9Sovereignty: Regenerational Violence
In 1934, several prominent Parisian surrealist poets–many of whom Bataille read and extolled–released the acerbic anti-colonial treatiseNegro: an Anthology. The appearance of the volume was an astonishing accomplishment, not least because it provoked significant interest in Communist Party politics in the Caribbean colonies.10 Perhaps most interesting was the anthology’s approach, which sought not to stage explicitly polemical responses to the manifest abuses of colonialism, but rather to engage and diagnose the psychic dimensions of imperialist rule.11
Perhaps the most essentialfigure to emerge in the midst of this movement was Aime Césaire. His epic of surreal poetry, Cahiers d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land),first appeared in 1939, and to aflush of acclaim (it was once lauded by Breton as ‘nothing less than the greatest lyric monument of our time’).‘Listen to the white world’, Césaire (1969) wrote in one of the text’s well-known passages, ‘appallingly weary from its immense effort / the crack of its joints rebelling under the hardness of the stars / listen to the proclaimed victories which trumpet their defeats / listen to their grandiose alibis (stumbling so lamely)’ (p. 76). The gauntlet was thrown down to colonialism: ‘Pity for our conquerors, all‐knowing and naïve! / Accommodate yourself to me. I won’t / Accommodate myself to you!’(p. 76).12
For Césaire surrealism furnished anti-colonialism with a‘method of negativity’, which is to say, an esthetic mode of resistance to the unjust suffering taking place in the French and Belgian colonies, especially in the African and Caribbean worlds. Viewed as a weapon–a‘miraculous weapon’ –that‘exploded the French language’, surrealism represented for Césaire a‘liberating factor’and a‘process of disalienation’, which helped summon up unconscious forces to‘plumb the depths’and‘reclaim Africa’. Indeed, for Césaire, surrealism meant revolution, and ‘surrealist poetry equaled insurrection’:
Revolt against Western rationalism! Revolt against Western colonialism! Revolt against browsing peacefulness of the Martinican … A fundamental revolt against a world torn by its own contradictions, the modern world.
Part of surrealism’s revolutionary appeal stemmed from its propensity for deconstructing binaries. In Tropique, the literary journal he helped to found with René Ménil, Césaire wrote:
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will be transcended…Colonial stupidity will be purified in the blue weldingflame. Our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel our amazing communions will be rediscovered. Surrealism – the tightrope of our hope … (quoted in Richardson, 1996, p. 7).13
Césaire (1984) would go on to affirm the anti-colonial politics inherent to such a surrealist poetics by invoking its attack on reason:‘Because we hate you, you and your Reason, we claim kinship with dementia praecox, withflaming madness, with tenacious cannibalism’, (p. 13). Surrealism was for Césaire, as for Bataille, a radical ‘anti-discourse’, one that‘endlessly reinforced the massive army of refusals’.
From Césaire (his mentor) Frantz Fanon learned much. In a famous passage at the heart of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon appears to imitate Césaire’s surrealist principles:‘since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason’.14By this, Fanon means that in its esthetic reversal of worlds, surrealism manages to overturn the logical coherence of colonial racial orderings and the linguistic regimes they depend upon. And yet, for Fanon, Césaire’s Negtritudist search for an‘essential Black soul’ –an immutable Black identity abstracted from historical time and cultural context – was problematically implied in an empty celebration of an exotic‘ancestralism’, that is, of ‘a romantic fascination with the African personality, and its decorous revolt against modernity’. There is nothing, writes Fanon, sovereign in Negritude’s rhetoric of fixed identity, or in its ‘cult of gratuitous racial commonalities and ancestral essences’. Responsibility for this ‘racialization of thought’, he writes, must in thefirst place be assigned to colonial racism, against which the Negritude movement is but‘the emotional if not logical antithesis’(quoted in Sekyi-Otu, 1996, p. 181).
Fanon contrasts Negritude with what he calls ‘true sovereignty’. First and foremost, Fanon insists in Black Skin, White Masks, this means that sovereignty must be viewed in the context of the‘racial Manicheanism’of the colony.‘To believe that it is possible to create a Black culture’, Fanon (2005) writes of Negritude’s idealism,‘is to forget that niggers are disappearing’(p. 234). For Fanon, colonial regimes operate by effacing the subjectivity of those who are colonized. The resulting humiliation and self-loathing are endemic to the colonial project.15Thus, true sovereignty requires a certain ethos of decolonization that reverses this process. Specifically, for Fanon, ‘true sovereignty’ in the colony requires violent action, specifically one that restores to the colonized a sense of self‐worth. InThe Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (2005) explains:
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The violence launched by the settler would be hurled back at him, ‘like a boomerang’, at the moment the‘natives’volcanic mad fury’erupted.16Importantly, for Fanon, the return of violence to its point of origin is an effect of an originary violence cast upon the Native at the moment of colonial expropriation. Thisflorescence of anti-colonial action is not a reactional violence, but is rather a cathartic discharge of the traumatic damage stored in the psyche of the Native.17
For Fanon, true sovereignty is first and foremost then a project of postcolonial regeneration.18 In this sense, Sekyi-Otu (1996) writes about Fanon’s theory of sovereignty as representing a mode of‘political education’, as in ‘the practice of teaching the people a remembrance of their sovereignty’ (my emphasis, p. 211). Fanon (2005) supports this pedagogical interpretation in a passage of Wretched: ‘Political education means opening the people’s minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence …as Césaire said, it is“to invent souls” ’ (p. 197). In the end, sovereignty for Fanon (2005) must ultimately be a mode of remembering that restores dignity:
During the colonial occupation the people were told that they must give their lives so that dignity might triumph. But the African peoples quickly came to understand that it was not only the occupying power that threatened their dignity. The African peoples were quick to realize thatdignity and sovereignty were the exact equivalents, and in fact, a free people living in dignity is a sovereign people. (my emphases, p. 203)
Thus, for Fanon, sovereignty entails recalling dignity for oneself. For Fanon, ‘dignity and sovereignty are exactly equivalent’.19 This dignity consists in the experience of defying the colonial status one has been assigned as a disposable, socially dead subject. From this vantage, Fanon tells us,‘Decolonization fundamen-tally alters being’, not in a ‘single move to absolute sovereignty … in one fell swoop’, but rather by virtue of a painstaking and ‘arduous path’ to launch new historical trajectories that place the colonized back into the world.
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oppressor and temporarily opens a space in which subversive, violent and transfor-mative action can be taken.Bataille Contra Fanon
For both Bataille and Fanon, Hegel’s dialectical thinking is woefully limited. For Bataille, Hegel falters by neglecting the‘unemployed negativity’that always hangs at the margins, foiling any sweeping claim to universality. Death remains the quintessential kernel of human experience utterly insubordinate to the ‘absolute knowledge’beheld by the omniscient‘Wise Man’standing at the‘End of History’. Death exemplifies an excessive beyond of all experience. This sense of beyondness reveals a sphere of non-meaning–a‘general economy’ –where the vestiges of the absolute yield sovereign being, which is to say, irrational, obscene and irrevocable loss. Such‘formless, transgressive being’is articulated best, for Bataille, by poetic expressions of surrealist experience. Such expressions eviscerate the very meaning of words, thus rendering them useless, beautiful and as such sovereign. Sovereignty appears where all limits are swept away, where a flood tide has washed from experience all false and restrictive boundaries. Here–where no rational appraisal of autonomy is possible, where no singularity or subjective individuation can survive, where the structure of cause and effect has been replaced by afield of sacred intimacy– this is where sovereignty lies for Bataille, in a nexus of sublime forgetfulness.
For Fanon, by contrast, Hegel’s logic fails to register the historical particularity of the racial economy of the colony. The hegemonic racial ordering imposed on the oppressed in the colony is achieved in the circumvention of the early stage in Hegel’s famous master–slave dialectic. In Black Skin, White Masks, for instance, Fanon argues that no struggle for recognition is staged by the colonizers, as the colonizer seeks not ontology, self-consciousness or freedom, but rather the profits reaped by an enslaved labor force.22 In the colony, where ‘niggers disappear’, a surrealist poetics disturbs the Manichean racial ordering of meaning. Ultimately, however, true sovereignty can be achieved only with the imposition of a countervailing and violent anti-colonial revolution. Returning violence for violence, the colonized activate a restored sense of dignified self-worth. Sovereignty remains, for Fanon, the freedom felt in the recognition of one’s particularity, in the remembrance of one’s own humanity.
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individuals as such’has been realized. For Fanon, this abnegation of subjective particularity is precisely the problem with colonial hegemony. For Fanon, the sovereign struggle works to dignify self‐consciousness and not to obliterate it. The colonized who sacrifice their oppressors do not relapse into Bataille’s sublime forgetting. Quite the contrary – for Fanon sacrifice restores to the colonized a remembered subjecthood. To be fair, in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon does laud the Negritude movement’s ‘subjective necessity’, which lies in its power to transform or rebuild the character of the intellectual who must, as he writes in an almost Bataillean vein,‘lose himself at whatever cost in his own barbarous people’. However, whereas Bataille argues that such loss is the upshot of unproductive expenditure (this useless, senseless loss is sover-eignty), Fanon tells us that the opposite may be true oftruesovereignty (which is productive, not destructive, of power). Fanon (1969) writes that ‘the war of liberation is the grandiose effort of a people, which has been mummified, to rediscover its own genius, to reassume its own history and assert its sovereignty’ (p. 83). Here violence catapults ‘spectators crushed in their inessentiality into privileged actors’, which is to say, actually existing, self-recognizing, liberated beings.For Bataille, of course, sovereignty amounts to precisely the‘inessentiality’Fanon decries. Bataille exalts the effects of dehumanization. The important difference here is that whereas sovereignty for Bataille refers to that ‘moment of plenitude of the instant, in which the other is no longer “other than me”, in which I am no longer “other than him” ’, for Fanon, sovereignty refers specifically to the moment the ‘other than me’ is made salient. Indeed, for Bataille, sovereignty is achieved in the dissolution of what, for Fanon, amounts to sovereignty itself. Perversely enough, one might go so far as to argue that the colony, as described by Fanon, epitomizes the ideal sovereign space for Bataille. Freed by the White master of his ontological burden, the Black colonial subject is spirited out of the world of utility and is instead gloriously squandered without return.24
Despite this diametrical opposition, both Bataille and Fanon share a common intellectual and political debt to surrealism. For both thinkers, surrealism manifests an esthetic of transgression, one that upends categories of thought deeply embedded in the occidental imaginary. Surrealism portends an experimental mode of sover-eignty, not hemmed in by rational discourses or legalistic institutionalisms, but rather mapped in a shifting assemblage of sensations, forces, practices, relations and emergences. And at the end of the day it is surrealism’s radical ambition that draws both thinkers: surrealism that seeks not merely to invent a distinct esthetic, but moreover to imagine a new self, an uncanny self proportionate to the convulsive beauty it valorizes.25
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that he has attained a sovereign condition of ‘happiness that defies all reason’. The experience is self‐annihilating: ‘There was no more authentic reality in me’. Bataille describes such reason-defying self-obliteration as a‘fall into nothingness… the fall into the emptiness of the sky…the empty infinite of freedom’, which is linked to death, beauty and ultimately to ‘that most essential human possibility: sovereignty itself’.26In the‘Fact of Blackness’chapter ofBlack Skin, Fanon strikes a passage that is almost directly in conversation withBlue of Noon, both in its vertiginous surreal imagery and in its depiction of freedom as being inexorably linked to nothingness (albeit now in reverse fashion).‘Yesterday’, writes Fanon,
awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep. (p. 140)
This is Fanon’s rejoinder to the dubious counsel of a disabled veteran who has advised that he submit to his racial subjection, that he ‘adopt the humility of the cripple’, and‘resign himself…[to his] color the way I got used to my stump’.‘With all my strength’, Fanon insists,‘I refuse to accept that amputation…I feel myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit’(p. 140). Where Bataille delights in Troppmann’s self-evisceration, Fanon refuses the empty silence found there. The dizzying, swirling, beckoning sky to which Fanon turns is indeed ‘convulsively beautiful’. However, it is also the source of a promise that the enslaved in the colony can never realize. This because the colonized are cut off from the kind of freedom Bataille describes. Forgetting is, as such, cognate not with sovereignty, but rather sover-eignty’s opposite.
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Sovereignty Surreal
Today, sovereignty appears to be on the move. Aihwa Ong has suggested that global capital has patterned the world into reconditioned zones of production, distribution and consumption entailing‘adjustments and compromises in national sovereignty’. The result has been a recalibration of‘graduated sovereignty’, which for Ong (2006) refers to‘the effects of aflexible management of sovereignty, as governments adjust political space to the dictates of global capital, giving corporations an indirect power over the political conditions of citizens in zones that are differently articulated to global production andfinancial circuits’(p. 78). In reading contemporary mutations of sovereign life in this fashion, Ong argues for a more expansive view of Schmittian exceptionalism: ‘I conceptualize the exception more broadly, as an extraordinary departure in policy that can be deployed to include as well as to exclude’. By this, Ong means that though contemporary critics often turn to Schmitt in order to theorize Guantánamo Bay and all the exclusions upon which that particular sovereign exception depends, for instance, the market-driven logic of the exceptionquaglobal capital can also be a‘positive decision to include selected populations and spaces as targets of calculative choices and value‐orientation associated with neoliberal reform’.
Of course, in a world beset by economicflux, brought on by the globalfinancial crisis of 2008, one wonders just how totalizing the neoliberal technologies of disciplinary power Ong describes truly are. Sovereignty, in the current conjuncture, appears to be less obviously a technology of neoliberal governmentality. The temper has changed, generative openings are surfacing and re-surfacing. New forms of sovereign life, rich and thick with political possibility, have been proliferating in West Asia and Northern Africa, where the Arab Spring is working to sweep away old decisionist regimes; in the Iberian and Hellenic worlds, where upheaval is a recurrent potentiality; and in the United States, where the Occupy movement managed to galvanize popular unrest and dissatisfaction with neoliberal policies, if only for a moment.
I would argue that these are events of what Sheldon Wolin calls fugitive democracy. By democracy Wolin (1996) does not mean something akin to liberal procedural justice; rather,‘democracy needs to be reconceived as something other than a form of government: as a mode of being conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily, but is a recurrent possibility so long as the memory of the political survives’(p. 22). Democracy for Wolin, in other words, is not about legal institutionalism, public administration or decisionist forms of exceptional power imposed from on high. Rather, democracy appears inflash scenes of constituent power that percolate up from below. Such moments call for a theory of sovereignty tantamount to the‘mode of being conditioned by bitter experience’ they epitomize.27
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being. Specifically, sovereignty is a condition shot through with surreal experiences that render strange the familiar categories of thought, replacing them with new structures of feeling. For Bataille, these experiences are decreative, while for Fanon they are recreative. For Bataille, sovereignty ecstatically dislocates the subject, whereas for Fanon sovereignty regenerates a remembered subjectivity to those from whom it has been taken.To indicate that Bataille and Fanon speak to our political present is not to sound sanguine about the prospects for wholesale transformation. The question for the new sovereignty projects emergent on the world stage is how to sustain, in the post-insurrection phase, contestations over the meaning and modalities of social change. This is a question that scholars and activists will continue to ponder and debate. What does appear clear, however, is that there is something that exceeds the regulatory function of neoliberal sovereignty’s spaces and targets of‘calculative choices and value‐orientations’. Bataille and Fanon are stewards of these excessive spaces. And in their surreal visions of sovereignty, something is born out that eludes the grasp of decisionist politics, something worth dignifying.
Notes
1 For an excellent critique along these lines, see also Honig (2009). Exploring an alternative to Schmitt, Honig looks to Franz Rosenzweig’s theory of miracles, whereas here I am interested instead in
surrealism and sovereignty in Bataille and Fanon. In the end, this article’s aim is not only to contrast
Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty with what I argue represents two alternatives more germane to the
present conjuncture, but also to enliven political theory to the surrealist tradition more generally. 2 Importantly, however, despite these important differences, as shall be seen, both theories of sovereignty
are inspired by an appreciation for the idea that the political is shot through with esthetics. Contemporary political theory is brimming with felicitous interventions from scholars who, in drawing especially on Arendt’s (1989) late work on Kant’sCritique of Judgmentand Rancière’s
(2006) more recent notion of the‘distribution of the sensible’, have revivified an interest in political
esthetics. Since this‘aesthetic turn’(Shapiro, 2012), quite a lot of attention has been paid, for example,
to the melancholic politics of tragedy, the emotive intuitivism of the Romantics and the prophetic voice of African–American literature in W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr and others.
Unfortunately, however, very little has been written on the esthetic genre I focus on here–surrealism–
which both Bataille and Fanon took to be foundational in their respective theories of sovereignty. 3 Though there is likely no incontrovertible definition of surrealism, it is safe to say that there is a
traceable genealogy of those who ascribed to what could be called its central tenets. Most histories emphasize the Swiss–German influence of Dada in the 1920s and 1930s on surrealism, which emerged
a full-blown movement in France only with the appearance of Guillaume Apollinaire’s playLes
Mamelles de Tiresias(wherein the word‘surrealism’first appears in 1903). Other important works
would include (but not be limited to) Louis Aragon’sParis Peasant; Andre Breton’sMad Love;Tristan
Tzara’sApproximate Man; Man Ray’sIndestructible Object; Max Ernst’sThe Elephant Celebes;
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contortions, and rhetorical twists and reversals. The object was to undo the reigning bourgeois mentality of order and luxury and to replace it with esthetic forms derived from the deepest depths of the human imagination. The art historian Caws (1997) writes that this impulse was inherently defiant:
‘surrealism believed in the constant temptation to confront everything existing now with everything
that could exist, to summon forth from things never yet seen what could best render the things seen less blatantly visible’(p. 285). For reliable histories of surrealism, see also, for example, Vaneigem and
Nicholson-Smith (2001); Durozoi and Anderson (2004); and Caws (2010).
4 It is of course important to note that Kojève is not Hegel. Although Kojève’s appropriation of Hegel is
clearly not faithful (it is at times apocryphal), it is nonetheless the version both Bataille worked with. As such I will not spend much time correcting Kojève; rather I will be emphasizing what it is Bataille did with his understanding of Hegel. For readings of Hegel that depart from the Kojèvian, see, for instance, Nancy (2002) and Plotnitsky (1993).
5 For Simone Weil, decreation refers to a certain unselfing, or what she describes as the dissolution of the subjective ego. See Weil (1952).
6 For more on the Nietzschean roots of this accounting, see, for example, Weiss (1986), Foucault (1998), Morasco (2010) and of course Bataille (1998).
7 This contrasts radically with other political theories of beauty that tend to emphasize beauty’s utility.
Scarry (2001), for example, follows from Iris Murdoch and others in arguing that beauty‘decenters us’.
When exposed to beautiful appearances, Scarry argues, an ‘unselfing’ takes place and our self‐
absorption falls away, being replaced with a blissful sense of being opiated. This esthetic experience, Scarry explains, presses us for a greater concern for justice, insofar as justice requires that we be relieved of the pressure to feel at the center of the universe. Of course, as I have already indicated, Bataille too shares in the idea that witnessing beauty prompts a radical decentering. However, heflips on its head the notion that beauty leads to justice, insofar as beauty remains ultimately powerless, which is to say, sovereign. Insofar as beauty operationalizes something, or prompts an intended effect, it ceases to be beautiful, it ceases to be an experience in decreation, and thus it ceases to be sovereign. 8 In a sophisticated critique of Jean-Paul Sartre, Bataille affirmed surrealism’s principle of revolt
(morale de revolte), which issues in the ‘sovereign cry’. Specifically, Bataille took issue with the
notion, espoused by Sartre, that literature ought to be‘subordinated to action’. As Bataille put it in
1945, Lapoesie est hors la loi(poetry is outside the law). In other words, for Bataille, sovereign beauty is never subordinate to action. Indeed, the point is that beauty is sovereign as it never acts as such. 9 Of course, one might note that Bataille is here in conversation with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of
ontological immanence. Much has been made of the influence of Spinoza and Bergson on Deleuze. Unfortunately, much less attention has been paid to the influence of Bataille on Deleuze in this regard. For an account of the similarities and differences between the two thinkers see, for instance, Kaufman (2012). Although there are important parallels between Deleuze and Bataille on the question of immanence, I would caution that these are not necessarily equivalences.
10 Up until the mid‐1920s, the European surrealists were largely cultural iconoclasts who made radical
pronouncements but displayed very little interest in politics. However, that changed in 1925, when the Paris Surrealist Group and the French Communist Party were drawn together by their support of Abd‐el‐Krim, the leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco. They actively
called for the overthrow of French colonial rule thereafter. That same year, in an‘Open Letter’to writer
and French ambassador to Japan Paul Claudel the Paris group announced,‘We profoundly hope that
revolutions, wars, colonial insurrections, will annihilate this Western civilization whose vermin you defend even in the orient’. After 7 years, the Paris group produced its most militant statement on the
colonial question to date. Titled‘Murderous Humanitarianism’, drafted by Rene Crevel and signed
by Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Benjmin Peret, Yves Tanguy, Pierre Yoyotte and J.M. Monnerot, the document was a relentless attack on colonialism, capitalism, the clergy, the‘black bourgeoisie’
and‘hypocritical liberals’. They argue there that the very humanism upon which the modern West
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‘We Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favor of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the color question’.11 In one single volume ofLégitime defense, the group’s literary journal (the titleLégitime defensederived from an early short story of André Breton), the Caribbean Surrealist Group had managed to receive strict censure by the French authorities who not only summarily banned the journal and blocked any further pending publications from print, but also suspended the grants and scholarships thatfinanced their stay at the Sorbonne. Although it was repressed almost at the very moment it was released, the journal managed to reach wide circles of readership (perhaps, ironically, as a consequence of its censorship), and provoked resonating ripple effects. It is significant that the volume was signed by two Martinican intellectuals, Jules Monnerot and Pierre Yoyotte, who since 1931 had led the Caribbean Surrealist Group, a radical collective of Martinican students at the Sorbonne. Among the volume’s
many readers were Leon Damas, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, all of whom were also studying in Paris at the time. In collaboration the three launched their own 1934 publication,L’Etudiant noir, which laid the conceptual groundwork for the anti‐colonialist‘Negritude’movement soon to follow.
12 For an apt commentary on this passage, see, for instance, Richardson (1996, p. 6). 13 See also, for example, Richardson (1996, p. 137) and Tythacott (2003, p. 196). 14 See also, for example, Alessandrini (1999, p. 149).
15 For more on Fanon’s critique in this regard, see, for instance, Lane (1998), Gilroy (2006) and Bhabha
(2004).
16 For a contrast between Fanon and Arendt on the relationship between violence and power, see, for example, Frazer and Hutchings (2008) and Hirsch (2013).
17 On this point, see also Gibson (2003). For me, it is a fair question to ask whether or not this anti-colonial violenceis violent at allgiven the fact that by this point the colonized are mere objects. Whether and to what extent objects can commit acts of violence is a question perhaps well contextualized in the fascinating recent turn in political theory to objects and their relations. See, for example, Bennett (2010).
18 On this point and more, see especially Kohn and McBride’s (2011) rich reading inPolitical Theories of
Decolonization.
19 Despite the overtones, importantly, I would argue that the emphasis Fanon places on dignity is not Kantian in origin. Readers will recall that, for Kant, sovereignty is the correlate of a self-determination projected by an autonomous and agentic subject who chooses freely and actively to abide by moral laws and categorical imperatives. In the case of the colony, Fanon (2005) argues, such thinking‘seems
like collections of dead words’(p. 47). In the colony the Black subject is barred from the kind of human
freedom Kant takes for granted. Some, such as Kelly Oliver, have argued that this movement beyond Kant suggests that, for Fanon, sovereignty must be jettisoned in favor of a freedom located in‘the
body’s responsive agency unfettered from notions of self‐enclosed ego or sovereign subject’(Oliver,
2004, p. 62). This Oliver terms‘agency without sovereignty’. This is not quite right. For Fanon, as I have argued above, sovereigntyisindeed the goal. Sovereignty amounts to agentic dignity itself. 20 For a terrific reading of‘actional subjectivity’, one that I take to be emblematic of Fanon’s approach,
see Ziarek (2001, p. 16).
21 For a more detailed reading of the importance of public memory for Fanon, see, for example, Drabinski (2013).
22 One might say that both Bataille and Fanon bear Hegelian critiques of Hegel. For more on what I see as Fanon’s Hegelian critique of Hegel, see, for instance, López (2013). López writes that‘Fanon sees in
the Lordship and Bondage (Master and Slave) relation of Hegel’s Phenomenology the
life-endangering, yet life-affirming risk that the slave must take in order to transcend the reality that the other has imposed on him–the reality of being seen and known by the master strictly as an object.
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reality–to reassert one’s place within the reality of reciprocal, mutual recognition between subjects’. This is precisely how I read Fanon as well. Recall that, for Bataille, sovereignty is equally brought about through risking or putting into play (mettreen jeu)the entirety of one’s existence.
23 On sacrifice as an ancient concept of collective bloodshed revived in twentieth-century French philosophies of political violence, see, for example, Goldhammer (2005).
24 It should be noted that Bataille also argues that, in a sense, sovereignty may stand as a guard against the kind of subjugation Fanon condemns. No sovereign being can be enslaved, Bataille argues, insofar as he is emptied of any will or intention, whim or desire. Indeed sovereign non-beings cannot be made subject to injustice, by virtue of the fact that they have no enslaveable essence.
25 ‘Convulsive beauty’is Breton’s (1994) phrase. Hal Foster notes that‘Breton associates this beauty with
three kinds of uncanny experience that he never quite defines:“fixed-explosive,” “veiled-erotic,”and “magical-circumstantial” ’. For more, see Foster (2006, p. 249).
26 On this point, see also Baugh (2003, p. 55). Bataille criticized any effort to subordinate surrealism’s
method of negativity to the service of‘an idea’. His surrealism was destructive, but without purpose or
use. In this sense, Bataille describes his surrealism as beginning only with the‘absence of works’. Only
with absence canle grand surrealism commence. In this sense, he saw himself as ‘beyond but
alongside surrealism’. Bataille sometimes called this‘extremist surrealism’. See also Burger (2002);
Ades and Baker (2006); Biles (2007); and Gasché (2012).
27 For more on‘fugitive democracy’, especially as it is contrasted with messianic structures of redemption figured in Agamben, see, for instance, Hirsch (2011).
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