The God Who Deconstructs Himself ─ Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida

"Mansfield's work has a specific contribution to make both through the distinctive focus of its reading and through its insightful analyses ...the author's scholarship is excellent, showing not only a mastery of the relevant literature but also a thoughtful and fine-tuned analysis of its complexities."---Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University

"A rich and provocative reading, the focus of which contributes a new perspective to the literature on Derrida and deconstruction."---Veronique Foti, Pennsylvania State University

No topic has caused more discussion in recent philosophy and political theory than sovereignty. From late Foucault to Agamben, and from Guantanamo Bay to the "war on terror," the issue of the extent and the nature of the sovereign has given theoretical debates their currency and urgency.

The aim of this book is to help outline Jacques Derrida's thinking on sovereignty in its relationship to subjectivity. It investigates the late work Rogues: Two Essays on Reason as not only Derrida's fullest statement of his thinking on sovereignty but also as the destination of his career-long interest in questions of politics and self-identity. The book argues that in Derrida's thinking of the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity---and the related themes of unconditionality and ipseity---we can detect the outline of Bataille's adaptation of Freud. In Bataille's hands, Freud's "economic" theory of subjectivity became a key to the nature of interrelationship, specifically the complex and shifting relationship between subjectivity and power. Derrida connects not only with Bataille's irrepressibly outrageous thinking but with the early-twentieth-century scientific revolution through which "energy" became ontology. Derrida echoes and adapts Bataille's thinking while radically de-literalizing it. The results are crucial for understanding Derrida's views on power, subjectivity, and representation, as well as all of the other key themes in late Derrida: hospitality, justice, otherness, and the gift.

Nick Mansfield is Professor in Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney.