Sovereign Destruction: On Life and Death in Politics

Achille Mbembe and Adriana Cavarero offer two very profound neologisms necropolitics and horrorism that can equip one with a better understanding of life and death in the modern political community or sovereign unit (as in the case of the nation-state). If one goes through the rupture of thinking modern sovereignty following the Foucaultian inversion of war as the continuation of politics by other means, the place of violence is inevitable. What is considered as sovereign order in the same time is the place that was violently occupied, upon which was decided that will represent the constitution of power and the rule of a figure that in modern perspective is the rule of body politic i.e. of the sovereign. Thus, what was emphasized as a concern regarding modern sovereign rule opting towards material destruction of human bodies and populations, most certainly helps to explain contemporary political violence. Also what else is recognized are all other forms of war, all its extensions in every political community, since what war bears is not always and only terror, it is horror above all as an even more profound and at the same time excessive violence that spreads over war scenes.