Derrida'da egemenlik ve hayvan sorusu

Derrida's last seminar "The Beast and the Sovereign" links two concerns of deconstructive thought. The starting point of the seminar is the question of what intertwines the history of the concept of sovereignty with that of a thinking and treatment of so-called animal life. Derrida aims to explore the "logics" behind the submission of the beast to political sovereignty, as well as the analogy between the two that one so often comes across in political theory and discourse. What guides the seminar through though, between "the beast and the sovereign" - and my focus will be on these threads - are the larger questions of "propers of man," the supposed limits between man and what he calls the animal, the relation between the law and the living being, and the necessity of thinking responsibility in a new way, through a rethinking of "life." We will come to see that, between "the beast and the sovereign," the questions of animality and of sovereignty are inseparably bound. The analogy between the beast and the sovereign traverses the whole history of thinking of the political in the West. Throughout the seminar, we come to see that the relation of resemblance between the two does not call for identity but for an undecidable difference and serves both for positioning sovereignty outside of law and deconstructing its supposed indivisibility. The related question to the one of analogy will be about the figuration of man as "political animal" or "political living being" (politikon zoon), a figuration that has survived throughout centuries of thought to show itself once again in the contemporary discussions. Derrida's former concern about the complexities of the question of animality and sovereignty is also about the reexamination of this definition, so is his later polemics with Agamben. The coupling of the beast and the sovereign is in fact an echo of many other couples, like man and animal, politics and life, Law and outlaw, force and right, reaction and response, life and death. And it is deconstruction's call and a call for deconstruction for all the other couples in Western philosophy that is to be problematized, and that deconstruct themselves on the way to a new thinking, and to another ethics and politics, thus another thinking of freedom and responsibility. Sovereignty is the arbitrary and violent positing of power as right; the very problem of sovereignty is this problem of the relation between force and right. Derrida tells us that sovereignty has always been assumed and posited as indivisible. It is this supposed indivisibility that makes it an absolute. But it is also acknowledged, at least in accounts of political sovereignty, that sovereignty is not natural. If sovereignty is thus posited and not a natural given, this means it has a fictional structure. As such, sovereignty in the traditional sense cannot be the absolute that it was taken to be; instead, the concept of an indivisible, supreme, absolute sovereignty has always been some sort of fiction. So there is no sovereignty, but only the effect of sovereignty as a phantasm. the task will be to problematize the figure of the threshold in problematizing the Law itself, as "proper to man," and also its separation from its other, physis or "natural life." The whole seminar, circulating around the complex linkage between the question of animality and the sovereignty, thus the politicity of man, was also taking as its task a reelaboration of the relation between the Law and life, the Law and the living being. It is in this context that Derrida tackles with Agamben's discourse in Homo Sacer in the twelfth session of the seminar, where the question will be of the division of Law and life as well as the internal division in the notion of life itself, bios and zoē. Derrida returns to Aristotle's Politics in order to examine the definition of man as politikon zōon within its textual context and from this point his explicit criticism of Agamben unfolds. Derrida's critique is threefold: one, it takes issue with the zoē/bios distinction; two, Agamben's interpretation of modernity and the biopolitical, and, three, Agamben's conceptual tool of "bare life". All three criticisms are intertwined and they derive from a more profound problem Derrida identifies in Agamben's philosophizing. Agamben's proposed resolution to the fracture between bios and zoē that characterizes Western politics is conceptualized as "form-of-life," "a bios that is only its own zoē," a life that cannot be separated from its form. What Derrida has demonstrated, if not stated explicitly, is that man as a political being, in his politicity, always already, by his nature, has a life which can be described as a bios that is only its own zoē. Perhaps it is better to say that the bios/zoē distinction itself has been rendered inoperative with Derrida's attestation that man as a living being has the form "political" essentially. Derrida aims to make it possible to think about the relation between politics and life, power and living, sovereignty and biopolitics in other ways, not constraining the analysis to a single figure of explanation. The relation between politics and the living remains to be thought on a new terrain which is not marked with the severe distinction between sovereignty and "bare life," a terrain that is open to the immanent articulations of different forms of life and sovereignty. Thought can access this terrain through deconstructing a pure concept of sovereignty that presupposes indivisibility, namely, the metaphysics of sovereignty. From the question of sovereignty, we have come to that of responsibility and realized that a rethinking of responsibility entailed a rethinking of life. The relation between life and power brought us back to politics and the propers of man, which redirected us to the question of the animal. The questions of sovereignty and animality inevitably call each other, as they share the axes of ethics and politics upon which the questions of the propers of man take place. So the final question is, how are we to think ethics and politics anew, taking as a lead what the analysis had put forward? It is clear that the questions of sovereignty and animality have to be taken together, because the notions of freedom, decision, power and responsibility conjoin at their points of intersection. But it is also because a rethinking of life passes through this intersection point. The question of the animal is in fact an aspect of the more encompassing question of life, the living in life. What we take to be 'animal life' in difference from the so-called human is in fact and already "a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living," or better, "a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead." Derrida tries to track/trace the line of a thinking of life that xiii is not only limited to 'the animal,' but one that incorporates the questioning of all the concepts that are affiliated with the living, and then extending the question to the non-living. The concept of autoimmunity makes it possible to rethink the notion of life before any opposition between life and its others. The autos is autoimmune, but moreover, life autoimmunizes itself, it admits non-life, in order to live on, to survive. Another thought of ethics and politics has to go through the thinking of the unconditional without sovereignty, of the event as im-possibility and life as survival