"The greatest possible mastery, the greatest possible

self-presence of life": Derrida and the Deconstruction of

Sovereignty

Laura Odello, D. J. S. Cross

CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2017, pp.
141-162 (Article)

Published by Michigan State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/668351

Access provided by BTCA Universitat de Barcelona (10 Jan 2019 15:14 GMT)
 “The greatest possible mastery,
the greatest possible
self-presence of life”
Derrida and the Deconstruction of Sovereignty

Laura Odello
Collège international de philosophie, Paris

Translated by D. J. S. Cross

1967: WRITING AND DIFFERENCE, VOICE AND PHENOMENON, OF GRAMMATOLOGY.

If one reads through these texts by Jacques Derrida, which will have been an
event in the philosophical landscape,1 one is struck, if not by the total absence,
at least by the extreme scarcity of the signifier “sovereignty.” With the excep-
tion of the study dedicated to Bataille in Writing and Difference and a few
occurrences in Of Grammatology, the word is lacking.2 Only late does it come
to occupy center stage: it will begin to inhabit the Derridean lexicon in and
after the works and seminars of the 1990s, which are dedicated more and more
explicitly to juridico-political questions or to those figures of responsibility
constituted by the secret, testimony, hospitality, pardon, and the death pen-

CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2017, pp. 141–162. ISSN 1532-687X.
© 2017 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.

 141
142  “The greatest possible mastery, . . . self-presence of life”

alty. Finally, with the last seminar, the word will fully figure in a title: The Beast
and the Sovereign.
Why this quasi-absence in the first texts? How to read it? Is one to deduce
on its basis that Derrida’s thought will have undergone a turn? That Derrida’s
interest for the political thing, as commentators so often say and repeat,
manifested itself rather late in his life and in his work?
Derrida himself protested against such readings, which indeed seek to
identify a sort of ethico-political shift in his philosophical trajectory of the last
years.3 Rather than the reception of his so-called political thought (as if it were
isolatable as such), in question here will thus be a certain internal necessity
that, beyond undeniable changes in tone and accent, defies the possibility of a
historical periodization. Precisely on this basis, with the guiding thread of this
necessity internal to thinking, an entirely other work must be undertaken,
namely, an analysis of the concept of sovereignty that brings forth the admi-
rable consistency and uninterrupted perseverance of a discourse that will
have always been political, from the very first writings to the posthumous
publications.4
For reasons pertaining to this fundamentally political scope of decon-
struction, I do not share the periodizing compulsion of certain readers of
Derrida who desperately seek to identify a “before” and an “after,” a “first
Derrida” and a “last Derrida.” No turn, then, no tournant or Kehre because,
as Derrida himself writes in Rogues, “the thinking of différance [has] always
[been] a thinking of the political, of the contour and limits of the political”
(Derrida 2005b, 39). Deconstruction responds each time and ceaselessly to the
same injunction to resist every principle of power,5 that is to say, all hegemony
that organizes a text or a context.
From the mid-1980s onward, however, what changes little by little resides
in the formulation of this intrinsically political scope of deconstruction in a
discourse, the codes of which stem more recognizably from conventional
politics. For, on the one hand, this discourse ends up more directly confront-
ing concepts and a corpus of texts traditionally assigned to the field that we
call “political philosophy” (Bodin, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Beccaria,
Marx, Schmitt . . . ). And, on the other hand, it struggles with themes
stemming from what we commonly call “current affairs” in politics (the death
 Laura Odello  143

penalty, pardon, state sovereignty in the age of globalization . . . ).6 This more
explicit confrontation could not have taken place, however, without the pre-
paratory work for “the premises of a political discourse in harmony with the
demands of a deconstruction,”7 without the lengthy work developing the
discursive and theoretical conditions necessary to do justice to the demands
of deconstruction.8 To the demands, that is, of what happens or comes [ce qui
arrive] (this is one of the rare “definitions” of deconstruction that Derrida
ventured),9 namely, politics insofar as it is itself undergoing deconstruc-
tion, the political thing in the process of deconstructing itself, of
self-deconstruction.
Thus, for Derrida, preparing discourse (but also the practice of political
engagement)10 comes down, on the one hand, to interrogating the codes and
conventions that have organized and still organize politics as well as the
philosophemes that have always been inseparable from it. Which means
questioning the discursive, theoretical, and conceptual contexts that shape
the juridico-political institutions insofar as these contexts are produced by
metaphysical determinations of man as a sovereign ipseity and self-
determination.11 Yet, on the other hand, thinking politics in accordance with
the demands of deconstruction also comes down to taking into account the
deconstruction under way in the political thing today, that is, what happens
(to it), what is at work and dislocated in political sovereignty itself as the
movement of its “own” deconstruction. For, if deconstruction is “what hap-
pens” [ce qui arrive], it happens in the things themselves, in experience in
general, in the philosophical text and in the political text: deconstruction
should be thought, then, both as a practice of writing that radically interro-
gates the philosophical tradition in its systematic relation to political thought
(sovereignty constituting the essential pivot of this solidarity) and as the
self-deconstruction of sovereignty under way in the political itself (as well as
in the juridical, the historical, the social, the economic . . . ).12 Now, this adjust-
ment of political discourse to the demands of deconstruction will have had
the effect of dislocating the very concept of the political as well as the criteria
and protocols that define it as a unified space that is sovereign, immune, free,
autonomous, and so forth. (“Democracy to come” will be the name of this
dislocating force, of this ultrapolitical unconditionality that traverses and
144  “The greatest possible mastery, . . . self-presence of life”

divides the political by exposing it to its other, that is, to an excessive and
hyperbolic alterity that, even as it constitutes the political, remains absolutely
heterogeneous to it.)
If the vocation of deconstruction is to resist every principle of power, it
contests above all every configuration of power as primacy, principality, or
originary and absolute supremacy: in short, the power of arkhè and, as
arkhè, the sovereign regime of what commences and commands. Even if the
word only imposed itself relatively late, the notion of sovereignty will have
always been the very object of deconstruction: to deconstruct—this is my
hypothesis—will have always meant to deconstruct sovereignty, if one
understands by sovereignty, as Derrida explicitly will, the power [le pou-
voir] held by every ipseity (every subject, then) to be able to be itself
[pouvoir être soi],13 to say “I can,” to define itself and to posit itself sovereignly
as a self, as the same, as the self-same. Even before soliciting political concepts
(the onto-theology founding the political), deconstruction thus works to
question the sovereignty of the subject, its power or its mastery: even before
the word “sovereignty” appears, the questioning of sovereign ipseity was
always engaged under other names and in other discursive strategies through
which Derrida ceaselessly worked to decenter radically the self-positing of the
subject.

BEING ABLE TO BE ONESELF [POUVOIR ÊTRE SOI]: THE

WHEEL AND THE AUTOPOSITING OF THE IPSE

When he speaks of the sovereign subject, Derrida aims at the largest sense of
the term as it recurs throughout the occidental philosophical tradition: mas-
culine figure of the king, of the master, of the chief, of the father of the family,
of the husband. Yet, before even being determined as a philosophical or
philosophico-political figure of identity, sovereignty is the ipseity of the ipse,
the being-self of a self.
The Latin ipse, which translates the Greek autos, signifies the self, the
being properly itself, thus the same of the self-same as well as the power to be
a self, namely, the sovereignty of an I can implied in every self.14 Before any
identity-based form of the I, the sovereign subject is ipseity as the power to be
 Laura Odello  145

the I that can say I-can. In the chapter dedicated to the theme of hospitality in
Indo-European Language and Society, Benveniste reconstitutes the semantic
chain in which the term ipse is inscribed and to which Derrida regularly
refers.15 For, beyond the history of the philosophical conceptuality in which
the very structure of ipseity reveals itself, the etymology of ipse also allows
Derrida to associate the authority [instance] of the self to the principle of
power. The sovereign in general, the master, is indeed he who is himself, he
who can designate himself as “himself” or whom others can designate as
“himself”:16 without using the word “sovereignty,” Benveniste would neverthe-
less give it a veritable definition as “authority of the ipse, of the same, of the
properly oneself” (Derrida 2009a, 68), the sovereign being he who has the
potency or the power of self-determination, he who accredits himself as
himself.17
Following the semantic chain reconstituted by Benveniste (hosti-pet, potis,
potest, ipse, etc.), this sovereignty defined as the thesis of the self or the
positing of the self,18 this ipseity of the sovereign self-positing is always char-
acterized in a virile or phallic fashion as the potestas of the master or head of
the household, of the pater familias: androcentric and phallocentric, it is the
prerogative of he who is master of himself, of his house, in his household
where he commands by inviting and receiving whom he pleases.19 Ipsological
sovereignty is the sovereignty of the hospes, of the “host” (hosti-pet-s literally
signifying “guest-master” [Benveniste 1973, 72]).20
If such a concept of sovereignty is regularly supported by Benveniste’s
analyses—in particular in the seminar on hospitality and in The Beast and the
Sovereign or again in Monolingualism of the Other and in Rogues—Derrida
nevertheless affirms that one need not wait on etymology to recognize what
thus links self and power: sovereignty is a force (kratos) analytically compre-
hended in the very principle of ipseity (namely, the principle of a sovereignty
recognized as legitimate, of an authoritative force accredited with domi-
nance), the autopositing of which consists in a circular movement that every
autos or ipse accomplishes around the self in a gesture of totalization and
self-reappropriation.21 The ipse is constituted as a turn around the self [le tour
de soi]; it posits itself as a power for simultaneously totalizing and gathering
with the self.
146  “The greatest possible mastery, . . . self-presence of life”

Even before its configuration as the sovereignty of a subject, of God, of the

monarch, or of the people, the ipse is nothing other than that which accom-
plishes this turn around the self to become one with itself. The ipseity of the
One and the sovereignty of the self require the circularity of a self-totalization
as the reappropriation of the same. And this is the circularity that Derrida
deposits in the exemplary figure of the wheel, entrusting it with the illustra-
tion of the force or the power of autonomous and autotelic gathering.22 Auton-
omous because the apparatus of the wheel describes the at once spontaneous
and mechanical movement of a machine that turns all by itself, that is, by
giving itself its own law. Autotelic because this circular movement of turning
around oneself has for its end the return to the self, the return-to-self that
totalizes by becoming a whole [un tout] and an entirety [un ensemble] with
itself.23
Whether a question of the autonomy of a subject or of the autonomy of a
communal space, in the circular movement of its gathering autopositing and
its sovereign self-reappropriation, ipseity has the power to remain close to
itself: it consists, just like the wheel, in its “own rotation” around itself (Derrida
2011a, 75), turning around itself without becoming distant from itself. Figure
par excellence of sovereign ipseity, the wheel then becomes, for Derrida, “a
sort of incorporated figural possibility” (Derrida 2011a, 75), the trope or the
physical and corporal figure that incarnates, in the world, all the movements
of a self returning to itself as they are also at work in the historical and political
machines of sovereignty in what one must indeed call its auto-immune pros-
thetics.24
Yet, such a simultaneous gathering of the self with itself is, of course, a
simulacrum for Derrida. It is a lure [leurre], a phantasm that produces the very
fable of sovereignty by dissimulating the alterity constitutively at stake in
turning around the self: the circle cannot close upon itself because the self, in
turning around itself, is in the end no longer the same.

AUTO(HETERO)AFFECTION OR SOVEREIGN LIFE

Ipseity is thus at the center of the circle of this gathering self-reappropriation.

A circle that Derrida defines as auto-affective, because the autopositing of
 Laura Odello  147

sovereign ipseity is nothing other than the power to auto-affect oneself or to

relate to oneself. The self does not exist before this auto-affective possibility.25
In Of Grammatology, from 1967, Derrida describes the movement of auto-
affection as the universal structure or the condition of experience that char-
acterizes every living thing. Auto-affection, as the possibility of self-relation, is
the very life of the living insofar as it is capable of an auto-affective experi-
ence.26 And this is the power that, later, Derrida will qualify as sovereign.
Now, the purest and most proper form of auto-affection is the experience
of the phone៮ , of the voice. Through the experience of hearing-oneself-speak,
the sovereign subject seems to accomplish the turning around itself and to
return to itself without leaving itself: by hearing itself speak, the ipse
constitutes itself in the truth of a living and present speech full of sense,
that is to say, as a logocentric subject. As one can read in Of Grammatology,
the epoch of metaphysics, defined as the history of being’s determination
as presence, is constituted in this logocentric horizon by assigning the
origin of truth to logos and by rejecting writing out of this plenitude
(Derrida 1997, 3). Logocentric metaphysics, in sum, would correspond to the
philosophical moment characterized by the affirmation of an essential and
privileged link between logos and phone៮ (Derrida 1997, 40). And it is this
powerful [puissante] alliance that constitutes the phonologocentric subject
in the purest and most universal of auto-affections: “the experience—or
consciousness—of the voice.”27
The voice, indeed, is a signifier capable of transporting logos without
making the subject leave itself. Thanks to the audiophonic apparatus, the
subject hears itself speak; it listens to its own voice in the very act by which
that voice offers itself directly to consciousness: directly, that is, without
passing through exteriority, without passing through the materiality of a
signifier that would contaminate the very ideality of logos. Powerful alliance,
then: the voice erases itself before sense; it makes itself transparent to make
immediately visible, without any exterior mediation, the concept itself, ideal-
ity in its very presence, in self-presence. The phone៮ , the singular auto-affection
made possible by the vocal gesture as the experience of hearing-oneself-speak,
in fact constitutes consciousness itself understood as the self-presence of
sense. The voice is consciousness.28
148  “The greatest possible mastery, . . . self-presence of life”

The pivot of this phonologocentric apparatus, around which the power of

the ipse is constructed, is the movement of idealization through which the ipse
institutes a relation to itself by auto-affecting itself in an absolutely pure and
universal fashion (between the voice and idealization there is a complicity
that Derrida qualifies as “unfailing” [Derrida 2011b, 64]).29 In Voice and Phe-
nomenon, while analyzing the doctrine of signification proposed by Husserl
(particularly in the Logical Investigations) and while emphasizing in that doc-
trine the privilege of the phonic signifier in the very constitution of conscious-
ness as the self-presence of sense, Derrida indeed affirms that, to understand
the power of the voice as “technical mastery of object-being” (Derrida 2011b,
65), one must think the constitution of the ideal object: the latter is character-
ized by an infinite iterability at the heart of which the identity of sense present
to intuition is conserved.30
This, then, is the unfailing complicity: this idealization, this idealizing
mastery as the possibility of indefinite repetition of the same, is made possible
only by the voice. For it consists, on the one hand, in the movement of the
subject that makes the object available by submitting it to its power of repe-
tition (the ipse augmenting its force as its power of repetition is idealized, as
the signifier is submitted to the ideality of the signified),31 and it consists, on
the other hand and at the same time, in the erasure of the signifier (erasure at
work in the voice as a diaphanous and incorporal substance that already
seems to belong to the element of ideality).32
The auto-affective experience of the voice is thus lived by sovereign
ipseity as the spontaneous production of the signified within the self and
as the power to make it immediately available without passing through the
spatiality of an empirical outside. Vocal auto-affection, which idealization
renders pure and universal,33 is thus what makes possible the presence of
self-consciousness.
The ipseity that auto-affects itself in this way henceforth consists in the
generative principle or in the vital force that autoposits itself freely in and as
the movement around the self, in and as the circularity of a turning [tour] that
finds in itself its own origin and its own telos. If the history of metaphysics is, as
Derrida affirms in Voice and Phenomenon, the “absolute wanting-to-hear-
oneself speak” (Derrida 2011b, 88, translation modified), it is because all ipse
 Laura Odello  149

consists in this auto-affective self-reappropriation. Dream of a full speech,

enjoyment of a full and uninterrupted presence, as the very flux of conscious-
ness.34
Now, it is important for me to emphasize here that, in and after Voice and
Phenomenon and Of Grammatology, Derrida insists that, in the epoch of logo-
centrism this self-presence of life (this sovereignty of vital ipseity) and the
“unlimited power over the signifier” (Derrida 2011b, 69) are indissociable.
The vital power of the sovereign ipse seems to constitute itself, indeed, by the
erasure of the signifier: “phonic auto-affection, dispensing with all ‘exterior’
recourses, permits, at a certain epoch of the history of the world and of what
one calls man, the greatest possible mastery, the greatest possible self-presence of
life, the greatest possible liberty” (Derrida 1997, 286, emphasis mine).
The point in question here is capital: for it is here, precisely, that sover-
eignty and logocentrism are soldered or sutured to each other. If logocentrism
is the historico-philosophical moment that determined life as the greatest
possible self-presence, it is because it corresponds to this moment of absolute
privilege granted to the link between logos and phone៮ from which the subject
can auto-affectively autoposit itself as a vital and self-present force (and life is
nothing other than the very possibility of such a self-relation). Yet, if this
vitality becomes sovereign, if it unfolds as “the greatest possible mastery”
(Derrida 1997, 286), it is also because it finds its resource in the power to gather
that logos is: if the self takes on life as phonologocentric auto-affection, it is
because it posits itself or institutes itself as the power of self-reappropriation
in the gathering that totalizes around the self—the self or the ipse being at
once the arche៮ and the telos of this movement. It is in “Heidegger’s Ear,” over
the course of an analysis of logos as Versammlung, that Derrida formulates this
explicitly: logocentrism is less the philosophical operation that consists in
positing logos at the center than the interpretation of logos as “the gathering
that precisely concenters what it configures” (Derrida 1993, 187), that is, as the
power of holding together [tenir ensemble], of assembling [assembler], or
gathering the whole [rassembler l’ensemble] that it composes.35
Logos would thus be that vital force of concentration that maintains the
self and makes it being-one with itself. And this is why logos, whatever the
interpretation of it, is already of the order of power, of force, indeed, of
150  “The greatest possible mastery, . . . self-presence of life”

violence,36 as Derrida shows in reading Heidegger. Whether understood as a

gathering (Versammlung) or, later, as logical reason—as the sovereignty of a
reason always of the stronger [raison . . . du plus fort] and always winning out
over everything [qui a raison de tout]37—logos configures a relation and an
implementation of force, a sovereignty or a sovereign domination.
The epoch of logocentrism, in sum, the philosophical moment in which
the signifier is erased for the sake of the signified, the moment that merges
with the metaphysics of presence and of which we merely glimpse the closure,
this is what will have permitted the subject to constitute itself in and as “the
greatest possible mastery, the greatest possible self-presence of life,” (Derrida
1997, 286) that is, in and as the vital power of a self-present ipseity, gathered in
itself, around speech that it hears rising within itself, without leaving itself.
“The history of metaphysics is the absolute wanting-to-hear-oneself speak”
(Derrida 2011b, 88, translation modified). If the sovereign force of the phonol-
ogocentric subject is configured as “a limitless power over the signifier” (Der-
rida 2011b, 69)—for the voice allows ideality to be lived in the immediacy of
pure auto-affection insofar as it disappears as a signifier—hearing-oneself-
speak will have meant, for the logocentric subject, the power to access, with-
out empirical or exterior recourse, the ideality of logos or the sense that
emerges in the self and as the self: in sum, the power to access knowledge as
self-knowledge. Idealization, then, reveals itself as the operation of the sover-
eign mastery of a subject whose power is unfailingly associated with knowl-
edge [savoir]: indeed, knowledge as power marks with its logocentric stamp
the metaphysical notion of knowledge [connaissance] as the interrogation of
truth. The history of philosophy is the history of a sovereign power that has
knowledge at its disposal all while remaining assured by knowledge: this is,
moreover, why in Rogues Derrida will retrace the constitution of sovereignty
to a philosophical moment (inaugurated by Plato in the Republic) that pre-
cedes modern political onto-theology. To the moment, in other words, where
the philosophical question, which is ours still today, is posed: the question of
power-knowledge [pouvoir-savoir], of knowledge as power.38 In the Republic,
there where Plato hyperbolically describes the idea of the Good (as beyond
being, epekeina tes ousias) by defining it in terms of “majesty and power,”
Derrida sees the “quasi-inaugural” moment of the absolute, unconditional,
 Laura Odello  151

and anhypothetical principle of reason as power: “It is the superpowerful

origin of a reason that gives reason or proves right [donne raison], that wins
out over [a raison de] everything, that knows everything and lets everything be
known” (Derrida 2005b, 137–39). Now, this idea of the Good, this sovereign,
superlative, and all-powerful reason is essentially articulated with Plato’s
political thought, with the very idea of the polis or the politeia, thus inaugurat-
ing and opening the theologico-political tradition of sovereignty, the tradition
of the “sovereign good” (Derrida 2005b, 137–39).39 Long before all the modern
figures of the theologico-political, this Platonic “moment” thus marks politi-
cal sovereignty with its essential characteristics: hyperbolic potency, uncon-
ditionality, indivisibility. . .

THE LURE OF SOVEREIGNTY (TOWARD AUTO-IMMUNITY)

Sovereignty appears as such only when instituted by an operation of idealiz-

ing mastery, authorized by an unlimited power over the signifier: Derrida
shows that, in this auto-affective movement by which the ipse is meant to
accomplish the turn around itself according to the circular circulation of a
sense that passes from self to self, there is always already at work an alterity
that does not allow the ipse to totalize the desired closure of the circle around
the self. For its accomplishment in the circular movement of a wheel, the ipse
must allow itself to be traversed by an alterity that structurally constitutes it.
The turn around the self is indeed a lure that dissimulates the work of exclu-
sion that operates in the circle of ipseity: precisely by this work of exclusion
the auto-affective experience is lived as self-presence insofar as it suppresses
nonpresence—the lure that commands the epoch of logos consisting in the
valorization of this presence as originary, this presence that is nothing but an
effect of différance or writing.40
Put in other words and in the terms that interest us here, that is, in the
lexicon of this “greatest possible mastery” that the movement of idealization
confers upon the logocentric subject: if the vital power of the ipse consists in
the circular return to the self (and it is only on this condition that the ipse can
be itself), its sovereign power (as the power to reappropriate for itself the
presence that idealization infinitely defers) is traversed by an impotence
152  “The greatest possible mastery, . . . self-presence of life”

[impouvoir] that interrupts the potency [puissance] of the circle all while
making it possible. This is the lure structuring sovereignty: the ipse acquires
its power as it erases the alterity that constitutes it, hence, as it auto-divides
itself by thus limiting its own power [pouvoir].
I began with the hypothesis that, if sovereignty is a signifier that appears
rather late in Derrida’s lexicon, it has nevertheless constituted from the be-
ginning the very object or target of deconstruction, which ceaselessly takes
aim at this phantasmal lure or this simulacrum—in all its forms—of an ipseity
that dreams of autopositing itself autarchically by having in itself the very
principle of its commencement and command. Deconstruction, at bottom,
will have done nothing other than contest the lure of sovereignty, sovereignty
itself as a lure, as an illusion, or, as Derrida will say later, as a phantasm, the
all-powerful phantasm of sovereign power.
Yet, this concept of sovereignty, the thought of which Derrida will have
inaugurated even before employing the word, must be understood in the
powerful articulation of life and power that it designates, that is, in the pow-
erful articulation between—on the one hand, life as the power of auto-affection,
namely, the power to relate to oneself;41—and, on the other hand, power as the
vital force of self-determination or principle of life, sovereignty having always
been determined as the power to create, to engender, to produce the living (or
to mime the reproduction of the living: Derrida often recalls that the concept
of sovereignty is inscribed in a barely securalized theological inheritance).42
From 1967 on, at stake in ipseity as the auto-affective autopositing of the
self is thus the configuration of a constitutive relation between life and power.
And from 1967 on, for Derrida, this articulation between life and power defines
the very structure of the subject’s sovereignty as it has been determined by
logocentric metaphysics: that is, as power linked to life, being exercised on life,
constitutively articulated with the notion of life. And deconstruction will have
ceaselessly interrogated this articulation by affirming that biopolitics is not a late
configuration (Derrida polemically confronts Giorgio Agamben on this point in
The Beast and the Sovereign) but rather the very stake of power that, as such, has
never been anything other than biopower, a power over life and as life.43
Perhaps the great and sole issue of deconstruction will have been the
phonologocentric subject’s “greatest possible mastery” accompanied by the
 Laura Odello  153

“greatest possible self-presence of life”: this is the enigma—as Derrida calls it

from Voice and Phenomenon to Rogues and The Beast and the Sovereign—the
enigma of a life that sovereignty works to reinforce, to augment, to keep within
the phantasmal desire of death’s exclusion.
To rethink sovereignty otherwise thus consists, for Derrida, in the decon-
structive necessity of configuring an other thought of life, an other thought of
the living.44 A necessity that remains indissociable from the demand for an
other thought of the possible, that is, of a possible other than that of power as
the sovereign autopositing of a supposedly originary and autonomous ipseity.
Of a possible as im-possible or as im-potency [im-pouvoir].
Derrida’s entire oeuvre turns upon this “old-new enigma . . . of sover-
eignty” (Derrida 2005b, xii) articulated and disarticulated at the intersection
of the two enigmas woven together in it: “the enigma of the living being” and
the enigma “of a potency, a power, an ‘I can’” (Derrida 2009a, 219 and 259).
Derrida’s entire oeuvre testifies only to this double injunction (deconstruct
power as life and life as power), which merges with the very self-
deconstructive movement of sovereignty and the auto-immune paradoxes of
the self as a rotary circuit against—entirely against—the self, as the auto-
infection of the auto-affective movement that by itself produces its own con-
tamination. It is, indeed, this lure of sovereignty, this same phantasmal pro-
cess of the self’s autopositing denounced from the beginning, that Derrida will
later call auto-immune.45

NOTES

1. In his biography, Benoît Peeters recalls the “philosophical coverage” that Jean Lacroix
dedicated to Derrida in Le Monde on November 18, 1967: “Philosophy is in crisis. This crisis
is also a renewal. In France, a whole constellation of (relatively) young thinkers are trans-
forming it: Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, etc. We now need to add to these names that of
Jacques Derrida” (Peeters 2013, 179).
2. See “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve” (Derrida 1978,
251–77). I reserve for another context a reading of the Derridean reading of sovereignty in
Bataille.
154  “The greatest possible mastery, . . . self-presence of life”

3. “That would be unfair, to say the least. It would be not to read, or to rely on appearances,
from the titles of the most recent books, such as Specters of Marx (1993), Politics of Friend-
ship (1994), or Of Hospitality (1997). It could be shown that that all began much earlier”
(Derrida 2005a, 115).
4. As Geoffrey Bennington writes, “deconstruction is the most radically political of dis-
courses” (Bennington 1993, 230).
5. See Derrida 2005a, 115.
6. “Deconstruction is not, should not be only an analysis of discourses, of philosophical
statements or concepts, of a semantics; if it is consequential, it has to challenge institutions,
social and political structures, the most hardened traditions” (Derrida 1995, 213, translation
modified).
7. “It could be shown that that all began much earlier. But I had first of all to prepare the
premises of a political discourse in harmony with the demands of a deconstruction, and
avoid the prevailing codes and criteria that it’s thought necessary to rely on for deciding
whether or not a language is political” (Derrida 2005a, 115).
8. “I’m sure this [political] dimension is more easily recognizable nowadays in the most
conventional of political codes. But it was decipherable in all my texts, even the oldest ones.
It’s true that in the course of the past twenty years I’ve thought that after much work I’d
sorted out, let’s say, for me, the necessary conditions (discursive, theoretical, conforming to
deconstructive demands) for manifesting this political concern without yielding, or yield-
ing too much I hope, to the stereotypical forms (which I consider depoliticizing in fact) of
intellectuals’ engagement” (Derrida 2005a, 152).
9. See note 12 below.
10. “When I went to teach clandestinely and got myself imprisoned in communist Czechoslo-
vakia; when I argued actively against apartheid, or for the freeing of Mandela, or against the
death sentence, for Mumia Abu Jamal; or when I took part in the founding of the Parlement
international des écrivains; when I wrote what I wrote about Marx, about hospitality or
undocumented persons, on forgiveness, witnessing, the secret, or sovereignty—just as
when I launched the Greph movement and the États Généraux de la Philosophie [States
General of Philosophy], then contributed to the creation of the Collège international de
philosophie [International College of Philosophy]—I would like to think that these forms of
engagement and the discourses that supported them were themselves in agreement (it isn’t
always easy) with the ongoing work of deconstruction. So I tried to adjust a discourse or a
political practice to the demands of deconstruction, with more or less success, but never
enough” (Derrida 2005a, 152).
11. Suffice it to think here of the Derridean analysis of the performative productions of law
(such as the rights of man or the concept of crime against humanity, juridical events that
have traversed the geopolitical scene since the end of the Second World War): in “University
without Condition,” Derrida assigns the humanities the deconstructive task of rethinking
man (his history and the history of the very idea of man, including the idea of the “proper to
man”) as well as the “juridical performatives that have given shape to the modern history of
this humanity of man” (Derrida 2002b, 231), that is to say, the international declarations
 Laura Odello  155

that, in the name of the universality of the rights of man, can always question the sovereign
power or the principle of sovereignty of nation-states, institute an international criminal
court, judge the heads of state beyond the justice of their state, and so forth. Far from
wanting to erase the concept of the rights of man, it is for Derrida thus a question of
interrogating the context or the set of presuppositions or conventional fictions (“as if”) that
authorize these same performatives.
12. “And ‘deconstructions,’ which I prefer to say in the plural, has doubtless never named a
project, method, or system. Especially not a philosophical system. In contexts that are
always very determined, it is one of the possible names for designating, by metonymy in
sum, what happens or doesn’t happen to happen, namely, a certain dislocation that in fact
is regularly repeated—and wherever there is something rather than nothing: in what are
called the texts of classical philosophy, of course and for example, but also in every ‘text’ in
the general sense that I try to justify for this word, that is, in experience period, in social,
historical, economic, technical, military, etc., ‘reality’” (Derrida 1995, 356).
13. Pouvoir is both a noun meaning “power” and a verb meaning “to be able.” Because English
requires two separate words or formulations for what is one word in French, Odello’s
seamless recourse to the same idea in different grammatical contexts cannot be economi-
cally captured in translation. I will continue to gloss the play wherever it is prominent.
Although it will at times lead to somewhat awkward formulations, I will also, for the sake of
clarity, render pouvoir as “power” and puissance as “potency.”—Translator.
14. “For the sake of an economy of language, let me simply announce in a word that, from now
on, each time I say ipse, metipse, or ipseity, relying at once on their accepted meaning in
Latin, their meaning within the philosophical code, and their etymology, I also wish to
suggest the self, the one-self, being properly oneself, indeed being in person. . . . I thus wish
to suggest the oneself [soi-même], the ‘self-same [même]’ of the ‘self [soi]’ (that is, the same,
meisme, which comes from metipse), as well as the power, potency, sovereignty, or possi-
bility implied in every ‘I can,’ the pse of ipse (ipsissimus) referring always, through a compli-
cated set of relations, as Benveniste shows quite well, to possession, property, and power, to
the authority of the lord or seignior, of the sovereign, and most often the host (hospites), the
master of the house or the husband. So much so that ipse alone, like autos in Greek, which
ipse can actually translate (ipse is autos . . . ), designates the oneself as master in the mas-
culine: the father, husband, son, or brother, the proprietor, owner, or seignior, indeed the
sovereign” (Derrida 2005b, 11–12). See also Derrida 1998, 14.
15. “Benveniste continues, defining without using the word sovereignty itself, precisely as
authority of the ipse, of the same, of the properly oneself—and this is why I am insisting on
it here and will often use the value and word ipseity in this sense, with all its implica-
tions . . . :
‘For an adjective that means “oneself” to become amplified to the sense of “master,” one
condition is necessary: a closed circle of people, subordinated to a central personage who
takes on the personality and complete identity of the group to the point of summing it up
himself; by himself, he embodies it. This is exactly what happens in the compound dem-
pot(i)- [skr.], “master of the house.” The role of the personage thus named is not to exercise
156  “The greatest possible mastery, . . . self-presence of life”

command, but to take on a representation that gives him authority over the family group,
with which he is identified’” (Derrida 2009a, 68; the citation of Benveniste is taken from
Benveniste 1973, 74).
16. According to Benveniste, the Latin form -pse (whence ipse) is inscribed in the same etymo-
logical filiation as potis (the two forms -pse and potis are variants of -pet, which composes
*hosti-pet from which derives the Latin hostis and hospes that translate the Italian ospite or
the French “hôte” [the English “host”]). Potis signifies master, spouse, husband (like the
Sanskrit pátih and the Greek pósis or despóte៮s) as well as self-identity. Now, interrogating
the double signification of “master,” Benveniste affirms: “While it is difficult to see how a
word meaning ‘the master’ could become so weakened in force as to signify ‘himself,’ it is
easy to understand how an adjective denoting the identity of a person, signifying ‘himself,’
could acquire the sense of master. This process, which illustrates the formation of an
institutional concept, can be corroborated elsewhere: several languages have come to
designate ‘the master’ by a term meaning ‘himself’” (Benveniste 1973, 74). Thus, Benveniste
continues, in spoken Latin Plautus uses the superlative of ipse, ipsissimus, to indicate the
“master,” the principal character, the only important one, the first. Or again, in Russian,
sam, namely “himself,” means “lord [seigneur].” And in the Pythagorean community, autos,
oneself, designates the master par excellence, Pythagoras. Derrida nevertheless marks a
reservation with respect to Benveniste’s analyses there where the latter is “naively aston-
ished” (Derrida 2001, 71): for, from “master” to “oneself,” it is not in the least a question of
being “weakened”; on the contrary, the power of the sovereign (of the master as master of
the house, husband, spouse, or father of the family) is essentially constituted as an identity-
based position of an ipse. “The sovereign, in the broadest sense of the term, is he who has the
right and the strength to be and be recognized as himself, the same, properly the same as
himself ” (Derrida 2009a, 66).
17. Benveniste again: “A verb derived from *poti-, like Skt. pátyate, Lat. potior ‘to have power
over something, have something at one’s disposal,’ already marks the appearance of a sense
of ‘to be able to.’ With this may be compared the Latin verb posside៮re, ‘possess,’ stemming
from *pot-sede៮re, which describes the ‘possessor’ as somebody who is established on
something. The same figurative expression has passed into the German word ‘besitzen.’
Again, in Latin we have the adjective compos ‘he who is master, who has command of
himself.’ The notion of ‘power’ (theoretical) is thus constituted and it receives its verbal
form from the predicative expression pote est, contracted to potest, which gives rise to the
conjugation possum, potest ‘I am capable, I can’” (Benveniste 1973, 74–75).
18. “The concept of sovereignty will always imply the possibility of this positionality, this thesis,
this self-thesis, this autoposition of him who posits or posits himself as ipse, the (self-)same,
oneself. And that will be just as much the case for all the ‘firsts,’ for the sovereign as princely
person, the monarch or the emperor or the dictator, as for the people in a democracy, or
even for the citizen-subject in the exercise of his sovereign liberty (for example, when he
votes or places his secret ballot in the box, sovereignly). In sum, wherever there is a decision
worthy of the name, in the classical sense of the term” (Derrida 2009a, 67). See also
“Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis)” where, in this
 Laura Odello  157

session of the seminar Nationalité et nationalismes philosophiques (École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1984–85), Derrida proposes to think national affirmation, as
well as nationalism, as having always been of a philosophical nature—in short, as a philoso-
pheme—to the extent that all political self-positing would have a relation to the universality
of the philosophical: “The self-positing or self-identification of the nation always has the
form of a philosophy which, although better represented by such and such a nation, is none
the less a certain relation to the universality of the philosophical. . . . [A] nation posits itself
not only a bearer of a philosophy but of an exemplary philosophy, i.e. one that is both
particular and potentially universal—and which is philosophical by that very fact” (Derrida
1992, 10).
19. “ . . . the autopositioning of sovereignty . . . is nothing less than that of ipseity itself, of the
self-same of the oneself (meisme, from metipsissimus), an ipseity that includes within itself,
as the etymology would also confirm, the androcentric positioning of power in the master
or head of the household, the sovereign mastery of the lord or seigneur, of the father or
husband, the power of the same, of ipse as the selfsame self” (Derrida 2005b, 142).
20. As Derrida writes in Adieu—to Emmanuel Levinas: “And perhaps . . . what is thus an-
nounced is a certain appropriating interpretation, indeed a politics of hospitality, a politics
of capacity, of power [pouvoir], with regard to the hôte, be he the one welcoming (host) or the
one being welcomed (guest). Power of the hôte over the hôte, of the host over the guest or vice
versa. The hosti-pet-s is the ‘guest-master,’ says Benveniste regarding a chain that would
link, like two sovereign powers, hospitality and ipseity” (Derrida 1999, 18). This semantic
chain also shows the intimate contamination of the hospitality of hospes and the hostility of
the hostis: “The genealogy that links the term ‘ipseity’ . . . to the semantics of hospitality, to
the hospes as hosti-pet-s, namely, the guest-master, where the significations of the self, of
mastery, possession, and power are intertwined in a very tight web, in proximity to the
hostility of the hostis—this genealogy, which we recalled earlier, is here affirmed” (Derrida
1999, 57). The semantics of hospes and hostis cross at the notion of “stranger” or “foreigner”
[étranger], understood as he who is welcomed by the head of the house as host or as enemy:
the spectrality of such a filiation constitutively haunts this hospitality of the host that
Derrida rechristens hostipitality [hostipitalité], just as it haunts ipseity itself.
21. “But do we really need etymology when simple analysis would show the possibility of power
and possession in the mere positioning of the self as oneself [soi-même], in the mere
self-positioning of the self as properly oneself? The first turn or first go-round of circularity
or sphericity comes back round or links back up, so to speak, with itself, with the same, the
self, and with the proper of the oneself, with what is proper to the oneself proper. The first
turn does it; the first turn is all there is to it [le premier tour, c’est tout]. The turn, the turn
around the self—and the turn is always the possibility of turning round the self, of returning
to the self or turning back on the self, the possibility of turning on oneself around oneself—
the turn [tour] turns out to be it [tout]. The turn makes up the whole and makes a whole with
itself; it consists in totalizing, in totalizing itself, and thus in gathering itself by tending
toward simultaneity; and it is thus that the turn, as a whole, is one with itself, together with
itself. We are here at the same time around and at the center of the circle or the sphere
158  “The greatest possible mastery, . . . self-presence of life”

where the values of ipseity are gathered together, the values of the together [ensemble], of
the ensemble and the semblable, of simultaneity and gathering together, but also of the
simulacrum, simulation, and assimilation” (Derrida 2005b, 12). If the sovereign autoposit-
ing of the ipse implies a force, a kratos, namely, the power to give oneself by oneself one’s
own law, the term “ipsocratic” is a redundant expression, a pleonasm: “The attribute
‘ipsocentric’ intersects and links with a dash all the others (those of the phallus, of the
father, of the husband, son, or brother). Ipsocentric could even be replaced by ipsocratic,
were that not a pleonasm, for the idea of force (kratos), of power, and of mastery, is
analytically included in the concept of ipseity” (Derrida 2005b, 17). On the spectral relation
between the force of law and violence, see Derrida 1990, 1000–1003.
22. In Rogues, Derrida refers to the figure of the wheel to describe the circular movement of
ipseity’s autopositing, referring not so much to technical possibility or to the geometric
figure of the circle or the sphere as to the “rotary motion of some quasi-circular return or
rotation toward the self,” that is, to the automobile and autonomous movement “of sover-
eign self-determination, of the autonomy of the self, of the ipse, namely, of the one-self that
gives itself its own law” (Derrida 2005b, 10–11).
23. Over the course of a reading that crosses Robinson Crusoe and Heidegger’s Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics in the second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida also
lingers on the wheel, this autonomous machine that, simultaneously mechanical and
spontaneous, turns all by itself in turning upon itself. In its “autonomization” or “automa-
tization,” “the pure spontaneity of [auto-mobile] movement can no longer be distinguished
from a mechanization, a progress in the mechanization of an apparatus that moves by
itself, auto-matically, on its own, toward itself at the moment it travels toward the other, for
the other, in view of the other, elsewhere and far away” (Derrida 2011a, 78).
24. “ . . . as soon, then, as the wheel describes the circular return upon itself around an immo-
bile axis, it becomes a sort of incorporated figural possibility, a metaphora (metaphora in
Greek means vehicle, even automobile, autobus) for all bodily movements as physical
movements of return to self, auto-deictics, autonomous but physical and corporeal move-
ments of auto-reference, and therefore more than the mirror and specularity in general,
more than theoretical reflection which consists merely in seeing one’s own image. This
metaphor carries or transports the dream of being oneself, in displacement, of displacing
oneself while remaining oneself, of being one’s own rotation around oneself, of pulling the
body and the incorporated relation to oneself, in the world, toward the return to self around
a relatively immobile axis of identity—not absolutely immobile, for the axis, the axle, the
hub moves too, but immobile with respect to the circle of the wheel itself which turns
around it” (Derrida 2011a, 75). See also: “everything that can happen to the autos is indisso-
ciable from what happens in the world through the prosthetization of an ipseity which at
once divides that ipseity, dislocates it, and inscribes it outside itself in the world . . . The
wheel is not only a technical machine, it is in the world, it is outside the conscious interiority
of the ipse, and what I want to say is that there is no ipseity without this prostheticity in the
world, with all the chances and all the threats that it constitutes for ipseity, which can in
this way be constructed but also, and by the same token, indissociably, be destroyed”
 Laura Odello  159

(Derrida 2011a, 88). On the question of the death penalty as a prosthetic machine of
sovereignty, I take the liberty of referring to “Putting an End: Derrida and the Death
Penalty” (Odello 2017).
25. “ . . . the self does not exist before all else, before this movement of auto-affection” (Derrida
1987, 359).
26. “Auto-affection is a universal structure of experience. All living things are capable of [en
puissance de] auto-affection. And only a being capable of symbolizing, that is to say of
auto-affecting, may let itself be affected by the other in general. Auto-affection is the
condition of an experience in general. This possibility—another name for ‘life’—is a general
structure articulated by the history of life, and leading to complex and hierarchical opera-
tions” (Derrida 1997, 165).
27. “The logos can be infinite and self-present, it can be produced as auto-affection, only
through the voice: an order of the signifier by which the subject takes from itself into itself,
does not borrow outside of itself the signifier that it emits and that affects it at the same
time. Such is at least the experience—or consciousness—of the voice: of hearing
(understanding)-oneself-speak [s’entendre-parler]. That experience lives and proclaims
itself as the exclusion of writing, that is to say of the invoking of an ‘exterior,’ ‘sensible,’
‘spatial’ signifier interrupting self-presence” (Derrida 1997, 98).
28. “Phone៮, in effect, is the signifying substance given to consciousness as that which is most
intimately tied to the thought of the signified concept. From this point of view, the voice is
consciousness itself. When I speak, not only am I conscious of being present for what I
think, but I am conscious also of keeping as close as possible to my thought, or to the
‘concept,’ a signifier that does not fall into the world, a signifier that I hear as soon as I emit
it, that seems to depend upon my pure and free spontaneity” (Derrida 1981, 22). See also
Derrida 2011b, 68, and Derrida 1997, 19–20 and 166.
29. See Derrida 1997, 11–12.
30. See Derrida 2011b, 44–45.
31. See Derrida 1997, 165–66.
32. See Derrida 2011b, 66.
33. “The operation of ‘hearing-oneself-speak’ is an auto-affection of an absolutely unique type.
On the one hand, it operates in the medium of universality. The signifieds which appear in
it must be idealities that we must idealiter be able to repeat or transmit indefinitely as the
same. On the other hand, the subject is able to hear himself or speak to himself, is able to let
himself be affected by the signifier that he produces without any detour through the agency
of exteriority, of the world, or of the non-proper in general. Every other form of auto-
affection must either pass through the non-proper or renounce universality” (Derrida
2011b, 67). Idealization thus allows the subject, on the one hand, to auto-affect itself purely
in the spontaneity of its own interiority that it grasps immediately and, on the other hand,
to have a relation to the signified that guarantees it the universality of its knowledge.
34. “Sovereignty is presence, and the enjoyment [jouissance] of presence” (Derrida 1997, 296,
translation modified). On the auto-affection of ipseity as the vital circle of a self-enjoyment,
see also Derrida 2005b, 15.
160  “The greatest possible mastery, . . . self-presence of life”

35. “At bottom logocentrism is perhaps not so much the gesture that consists in placing the
␭ó␥␱␵ [logos] at the center as the interpretation of ␭ó␥␱␵ as Versammlung, that is, the
gathering that precisely concenters what it configures” (Derrida 1993, 187).
36. When he interprets logos, Heidegger’s register is that of supremacy, of predominance, of
mastery, and of violence (to which the whole lexicon of Walten and Gewalt attests). See
Derrida 2009a, 318–20, and Derrida 2011a, passim. On the question of Walten, see Odello
2014.
37. See Derrida 2005b, 101.
38. See Derrida 2005b, 136–37.
39. See also Derrida 2007.
40. Of différance, because presence originates only in the suppression of what is supposed to
interrupt it: “That which is not subjected to the process of differance is present” (Derrida
1997, 166); or again of writing, because writing is already at work in the living speech of the
logos; it traverses language while making it possible, the threatening supplement of writing
being older than speech itself (166–67). See also “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Derrida 1983.
41. All throughout metaphysical history, logos or sense has been produced as vital self-relation,
“as the act of living, as the act of being alive” (Derrida 2011b, 9, translation modified), that is,
as the self-presence of a life and a living present the preservation of which the movement of
idealization is supposed to guarantee.
42. See Derrida 2005b, 154, and Derrida 2002b, 207. If sovereignty refers to supreme all-
powerfulness, to the originary and underived power to command, to the arche៮ as principle
and absolute beginning, then the true sovereign is God: “‘sovereign,’ ‘superanus,’ from
‘superans,’ designates first of all the almightiness, predominance and superiority of God, of
the Lord-God, then of the absolute monarch by divine right” (Derrida 2009b, 127).
43. Biopolitics, even if it produces ever-new configurations, is something as old as sovereignty,
“an archi-ancient thing and bound up with the very idea of sovereignty” (Derrida 2009a,
330). For a reconstruction of the philosophical stakes of the polemic between deconstruc-
tion and biopolitical thought, see Regazzoni 2012, 19–43.
44. See Derrida 2005b, 5.
45. The lure or phantasm of sovereignty is indeed set out in 1967, on the one hand, as the
auto-hetero-affective structure of life insofar as it is traversed by a sacrificial instance that
divides it from within, and on the other hand—according, however, to the necessity of an
indissociable articulation between two parts—as the differential deferral of presence that
the power of idealization produces precisely to master the reappropriation of it better. This
totality insofar as it is interrupted, this circular gathering insofar as it is impeded, is
precisely the lure or the constitutive phantasm of sovereignty. In this division of self-
present life affirmed only in the power to idealize (that is to say, to repeat, thus to differ and
to defer), Derrida shows the very self-division of life at work, which is produced auto-
affectively as “the self-relation in the difference with itself” (Derrida 2011b, 71). Life, in sum,
is constituted in self-dividing. At work in sovereign power is thus the constitutive mark of
the other or of death, the excessive trace of the coimplication of life and death, which
Derrida will call life-death [la vie la mort]. This thought of the trace will be configured later
 Laura Odello  161

in the logic of autoimmunity that, in and after Specters of Marx, will impose itself with
necessity as an unavoidable characteristic of deconstruction. Derrida will convoke it to
describe the death penalty, the apparatus of onto-theologico-political sovereignty par
excellence: namely, the death machine in the service of life, the prosthetic artifact of
sovereignty as power that puts to death precisely to be able to save life, to immunize life
against death. In the autoimmune functioning of this “dead machine yet more than living”
(Derrida 2002a, 86), of this sovereign prosthesis, one can find again the same logic that
Derrida analyzes in his first texts, namely, the logic of a life that, to ensure and defend its
sovereign potency, detaches itself from its own vital presence by self-division: the question,
“itself enigmatic,” of the death penalty is the question of indemnity, of the auto-immune
indemnitization of the life that protects itself by dividing itself, by letting itself be consti-
tuted by the death that it needs to be indemnitized (Derrida 2013, 69). One could easily show
the strict link between the power at stake in the death penalty apparatus (which puts life to
death to immunize it against death) and the apparatus that presides over the movement of
idealization (which introduces repetition or absence to appropriate presence better): death
(non-presence) is at once what prevents life (presence) or makes it impossible and the
necessary requisite for some life (some presence) to be possible.

REFERENCES

Bennington, Geoffrey. 1993. Derridabase. In Jacques Derrida, 1–316. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.
Benveniste, Émile. 1973. Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer. Coral
Gables: University of Miami Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve.
In Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 251–277. London, England: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
. 1981. Positions, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1983. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1987. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
. 1990. Force de loi: le “fondement mystique de l’autorité”/Force of Law: The “Mystical
Foundation of Authority,” trans. Mary Quaintance. Cardoza Law Review 11, no. 5–6: 919–
1045.
. 1992. Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis), trans.
Geoffrey Bennington. Oxford Literary Review 14, no. 1: 3–24.
. 1993. Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV). In Reading Heidegger:
Commemorations, ed. John Sallis, 163–218. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
.1995. Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
. 1997. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
162  “The greatest possible mastery, . . . self-presence of life”

. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 1999. Adieu—to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 2001. A Silkworm of One’s Own. In Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, Veils, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington, 17–92. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 2002a. Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Religion
Alone, trans. Samuel Weber. In Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, 42–101. New York:
Routledge.
. 2002b. Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 2005a. Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 2005b. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 2007. Le souverain Bien—ou l’Europe en mal de souveraineté. Cités 30, “Derrida
politique”: 103–140.
. 2009a. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
. 2009b. Unconditionality or Sovereignty: The University at the Frontiers of Europe,
trans. Peggy Kamuf. Oxford Literary Review 31, no. 2: 115–31.
. 2011a. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vol. 2, trans. Bennington Geoffrey. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
. 2011b. Voice and Phenomenon, trans. Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
. 2013. The Death Penalty. Vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Odello, Laura. 2014. Walten o la forza ultra-sovrana. In L’a-venire di Derrida, ed. Gianfranco
Dalmasso, Carmine Di Martino, and Caterina Resta, 355–370. Milan: Mimesis.
. 2017. Putting an End: Derrida and the Death Penalty, trans. Brigitte Stepanov. In The
End of the World: Contemporary Philosophy and Art, ed. Susanna Lindberg and Marcia
Sa Cavalcante Schuback, 91–102. Oxford, UK: Rowman and Littlefield.
Peeters, Benoît. 2013. Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown. Malden, MA: Polity.
Regazzoni, Simone. 2012. Derrida. Biopolitica e democrazia. Genova: Il Melangolo.