주권과 인민주권: 라캉과 함께 아감벤을

Abstract

The power of nation-states has been weakened by a series of world wide events and tendencies; the end of the Cold War, diffusion of terrorism, the eclipse of US hegemony etc. They have also made the scope of national sovereignty obscure. Along with that, the discrepancy between citizenship and human rights has been widened and sometimes citizenship has been suspended on the pretext of a state of emergency even in the domestic arena. In these conditions, the theories of G. Agamben have emerged as an important resource to interpret the main symptoms of our times. Agamben’s theories, however, have difficulties in elucidating the indigenous structure of modernity, for he always traces and reduces the modern political categories to western metaphysics. This paper aims to analyze the inner logic of popular sovereignty as an invention of modernity in comparison with the Agambenian sovereignty. We can find more inclusive framework for the comparison in Lacan’s theory of sexuation. Trying to apply Lacan’s theory to the Aagambenian sovereignty, it is revealed that the structure of sovereignty corresponds exactly to the Lacanian structure of masculinity. Both of them depend on an exceptional element to constitute the whole. On the contrary, popular sovereignty has a high congruity with the Lacanian structure of femininity, which rejects the reduction of singularities to the whole and exemplifies the constitutive impossibility of the whole. It opens the way to thinking about and practicing the possibility of the politics without exclusion other than the totalizing politics of sovereignty which necessarily implies the exclusion of some people.