Oedipal Sovereignty and the War in Iraq

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511581069.003

3 - Oedipal Sovereignty and the War in Iraq

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2009

Jeremy Arnold

Edited by

Austin Sarat and

Jennifer L. Culbert

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Austin Sarat: Affiliation:
Amherst College, Massachusetts
Jennifer L. Culbert: Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University

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Summary

You know, of course, that one does not count the dead in the same way from one corner of the globe to another.

– Jacques Derrida

That the dead are not always counted in the same way because the dead do not count in the same way is manifest in the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003. Justifications for the invasion, proffered from various positions on both the right and the left, reveal through their absence the dead bodies of those who are not and perhaps cannot be counted. What the invasion of Iraq has also revealed is a paradoxical aspect of sovereign power, an effect of sovereignty that traditional juridical accounts of sovereign power cannot explain: sovereignty is the cause of the very problems it claims the right to solve. The invasion of Iraq produced a specific space of violence that did not preexist the invasion, and since that time the United States has continued to claim the right to rid the space that it has created of the violence within. Far from being a war of defense and being not quite a war of aggression or territorial conquest, the invasion of Iraq was carried out in the name of the sovereign right to protect against a violence that did not in fact exist, and a threat that many justifiably claimed would never materialize.

Type: Chapter
Information: States of Violence
War, Capital Punishment, and Letting Die
, pp. 51 - 82

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511581069.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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