The rejection of sovereignty also implied a certain denial of a unified geometry from whose center power emanated uniformly. Foucault opted to investigate the particular disciplines and discourses that display a polimorphous, distributed, institutionalized power. Thus sovereignty as a classical concept, maintaing the form of a unique instance, had to be tempered by a local analysis of certain concrete practices. Governance also refers to a plurality of activities, procedures and instances in charge of attaining political results. The idea of governance without government also hints at this transformation of power without sovereignty, subjectivity without individual.(1)
A brilliant analysis of the standing of sovereignty is offered in Mairet’s work, Le Principe de Souvereinété. To him sovereignty has exhausted all its potential and thus only remains as a residue. It does not convey any horizon of future, but will decay for its revolutionary hallmark has already vanished; its functionality achieved. The absence of novel projects, new possible planes of construction, leaves it half-dead, only waiting for future configurations, to definetly transform, erode it. It only remains, according to our definition, as an insisting concept; it cannot evolve.(2) Sovereignty is also related to the decline of the individual conceptualized as a locus of will.(3) Auschwitz implied the crucifixion of the idea of individual, both the moral subject and the massification of torture and death, Hiroshima the forclusion of sovereignty and the ultimatum of the late medieval superior non recognoscens, sovereignty had to cede when external power can annihilate all prospect of life.
(1) We could trace certain dyadic relations between man and state, subject and power, and the one that will be analyzed, sovereignty and individual.
(2) “Notre siècle qui s’achève est celui de l’achèvement de la souveraineté; avec lui la souveraineté prend fin car elle s’accomplit.” G. Mairet, Le principe de souverainteté. Histoire et fondements du pouvoir moderne, Paris, 1997, p. 162.
(3) “Si donc la moralité de mon action procède de sa possible universalité, il faut que l’individu cesse d’être individuel, en quelque sorte.”Ibid., p. 177.
