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Document Details : Title: Scandals of Sovereignty Author(s): ROSEN, Adam Journal: Ethical Perspectives Volume: 14 Issue: 3 Date: September 2007 Pages: 311-340 DOI: 10.2143/EP.14.3.2025357 Abstract : Despite the historical implausibility of contemporary commitments to a sovereign state-centric geopolitical imaginary, these commitments are indeed in force. Unfortunately, though, contemporary political theory and political philosophy are unable to account for the momentum of the sovereign state-centric geopolitical imaginary. The author claims that much of International Relations theory is a symptom of, rather than a serious analytical engagement with, this imaginary. He then provides an account of sovereignty as conceptually contradictory, exposing sovereignty as caught in a transcendental deadlock wherein its conditions of possibility are at once its conditions of impossibility. Sovereignty is discussed as necessarily incoherent, leveraging the claim that sovereignty must be understood through the ill-fated attempts to instantiate it historically – attempts which, due to their conditions of (im)possibility, are incessantly incomplete and thus ever repeated through domestic and foreign policy making. |
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