3 - Beyond subject and structure: towards a genealogy of sovereignty

Summary

[A]s long as we continue to contrast history directly with structure, we persist in believing that the subject can gather, build up and unify matter. But this no longer holds true if we think of ‘epochs’ or historical formations as multiplicities. The latter escape from both the reign of the subject and the empire of structure.

Deleuze, Foucault

The previous chapter started out from a Nietzschean observation: only that which has no history can be defined. But how can we write a history of that which cannot be defined, lacks stable meaning and reference, and which does not exist except by being known, and then within a knowledge which presupposes the sovereignty of the knowing subject?

As I shall argue in this chapter, to write a history of sovereignty is to write a political history of the knowledges that makes sovereignty intelligible, a history of the unthought parts of our political understanding. Strictly speaking, the object of study is therefore held in suspense; as with histories of other central and ambiguous concepts, a history of sovereignty must be a history without fixed referent, since it is precisely a history of this referent and its formation in time.