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Global Sovereignty
Suhail Malik
Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 512
DOI: 10.1177/026327640602300292

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512 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

Global Sovereignty
Suhail Malik

Abstract Taking globalization to be in large part a consequence of American domination,

we follow Derrida’s characterization of this domination as being a mode of sovereignty
of world-scale institutions and force. Such sovereignty, which is also a roguery, is the
primary actual condition for a global knowledge. Bataille’s characterization of rogue
sovereignty, however, proposes that knowledge is eclipsed under such a condition by an
experience that is irreducibly an unknowing. Knowledge is thus corroded by – or, at
best, in a critical relation to – the manifestation of a global experience generated by the
actual conditions of globalization.
Keywords America, Bataille, Derrida, experience, political reason, rogue state, sover-
eignty

I
t is relatively uncontroversial to propose that ‘global knowledge’ – as a project, as a fact –
is consequent to the process of globalization that has taken place under this name since
the 1980s or thereabouts. But this obvious remark immediately indexes a question as to
what knowledge could in fact be if it is subject to this process. There are two aspects to this
question. The first, which we do not address here, concerns the very great difficulties that
‘the global’ as a name or modality of ultimate extension poses for a rational tradition in which
knowledge is (or has) a universal or absolute foundation. The second is what the current actu-
ality of the term global, its historical constitution, means for anything that could be called
global knowledge. This will be our primary concern.
It is self-evident that the specifics or content of knowledge are extended and transformed
by globalization, as a maximum world-limit of any knowledge-base, -distribution, or -contes-
tation. The question is whether what knowledge is also transforms in this process. It is proposed
here that it does since ‘global knowledge’ relies on the historical conditions of globalization for
its realization and reconfiguration of knowledge, and these conditions are in turn primarily
(which is not to say exclusively) occasioned and promulgated by America’s global dominance
which, in a complex manner, is sovereignly constituted. The following paragraphs attempt to
schematize in the most rudimentary fashion this determination of what globalization qua
America’s sovereign domination means for the possibility of global knowledge. The brevity of
this contribution permits only the signalling of several hypotheses regarding ‘global knowledge’
as it is thus occasioned. These hypotheses are consequent to the central issue that arises in
the course of the following pages: whether in fact there can be knowledge at all in the condition
of the global, or if the experience of that condition leads to the eclipse of knowledge.
Accepting for the sake of speed the commonplace that political-economic globalization has
been and continues to be secured and mobilized enormously by and for American interests,
sometimes under the name of neo-liberalism, the question remains as to what America’s domi-
nance is in this relatively new inter- and trans-national configuration of economic, political and
cultural interests – in short, how does the USA globally dominate? There is of course an
enormous literature on this, some of whose proposals can be signalled by terms such as Empire,
hegemony, security, and, of course, globalization itself. However, in order to address the
specific characterization of American sovereignty as primary condition for globalization, we
take up the less familiar account of US dominance as a voyoucracy proposed by Jacques
Derrida.

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Problematizing Global Knowledge – Citizenship/The Political/Global Sovereignty 513

Derrida takes up the term on the basis of the French translation for the phrase ‘rogue state’
as État voyou and from the French mid-19th-century bourgeois use of the term in order to
denounce ‘an illegal and outlaw power that brings together . . . all those who represent a prin-
ciple of disorder – a principle not of anarchic chaos but of structured disorder, so to speak, of
plotting and conspiracy, of primordial offensiveness and offences against public order’ (Derrida,
2005: 66). The phrase ‘rogue state’ is also used to denounce states that also represented a
‘principle of disorder’ or of terrorism in the eyes of the USA and other ‘supposedly legitimate
states’, as Derrida calls them, whose own legitimacy is founded in
respect [of] an international law that they have the power to control – for example, in the
modern and complex formation of a heterogeneous but oftentimes closely knit and tightly
bound group like the United States, the United Nations, and the Security Council, even
NATO (to which one might add for good measure alliances and coalitions like the G8, the
IMF, and so on). (Derrida, 2005: 68)
The denunciation of rogue states is thus ‘structurally homologous’ to the bourgeois denun-
ciation of a voyoucracy in order to secure their own legitimacy (to legitimate, if it can be put
this way). What is critical here is that the phrase ‘rogue states’ came to have prominence
exactly as the term and strategic policy of ‘globalization’ was being affirmed and instigated by
the Clinton administration in its early years through national and international institutions.
That is, rogue states are an indispensable designation for the securing of the claim to inter-
national legitimacy for globalization, by which is therefore meant a certain global order (for
which terrorism is a central rhetorical and factual operation, as Derrida mentions, 2005: 66).
Of the many ramifications of this (de)legitimation strategy only two will be taken up here:
first the characterization of a voyoucracy and second what purchase on legitimacy is retroac-
tively granted by the term on the powers that mobilize it. First, then, it is to be noted that a
voyoucracy is not an outright abandonment of order but is (presented as) the power or force
(a kratos) of an illegitimate and quasi-criminal (voyou) counter-order. Voyoucracy signals a
sovereignty exorbitant to the legitimate sovereignty of the State and law in the national or
international domain. The denunciation of rogue states is thus a matter of one kind of sover-
eignty against another, of legitimate against so-designated illegitimate sovereignties. To this end
Derrida remarks in passing that ‘if the voyou-cracy represents a power, a challenge to the
power of the State, a criminal and transgressive countersovereignty, we have here all the
makings of a counterconcept of sovereignty such as we might find in Bataille’ (2005: 67–8).
We will return in due course to this particular characterization of a voyoucracy since it will
bring us directly to the problem of whether a global knowledge can be established.
Second, international and national legitimacy and illegitimacy as it is proclaimed and insti-
tutionalized by dominant powers relies on a discourse and politics of democracy and freedom
or, in so-said contrary rogue political formation, their deprivation. This is evident in the
charters and ambitions of international institutions such as the UN, NATO, the G8, the IMF,
the EU and also, notably, for the USA too. Democracy is in this way a legitimation of inter-
national power, the democracy-globalization coupling serving to secure international political
and economic dominance by already powerful states (which is why China’s economic might
and limited democratic polity presents a more vexed problem for globalization under this aegis
than, say, India or Brazil).
Drawing on the example of the UN, Derrida notes that the ordering authority over the
international domain which promotes and acts as a supposed guarantor for democracy must
in fact be the strongest power in that putatively democratic institution and polity. As such it
‘organises and implements for use by the United Nations – precisely so that it itself may then
use the United Nations – all the concepts, ideas (constitutive or regulative), and requisite
political theorems, beginning with democracy and sovereignty’ (Derrida, 2005: 100, emphasis
in original). An immediate contradiction or aporia comes then to be demonstrated in the claim
to legitimacy, to setting the terms of legitimacy in and of democracy, by the currently dominant
state power(s): that ‘if the constitution of this force is, in principle, supposed to represent and

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514 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

protect this world democracy, it in fact betrays and threatens it from the outset in an auto-
immune fashion’ (Derrida, 2005: 100). Put starkly, the contradiction is this: ‘universal democ-
racy, beyond the nation-state and beyond citizenship, in fact calls for a supersovereignty that
cannot but betray it’ (Derrida, 2005: 101).
The contradiction between democracy and sovereignty is rendered here at a supernational
level but this is only a particular version of what takes place at all dimensions of democratic
organization: that sovereignty is the condition of democracy even as it prohibits a fully oper-
ational democracy. And, as is well known from the protest of anti-globalization movements,
this non-democratic, even anti-democratic, sovereignty that guarantees and legitimizes democ-
racy is in democratic terms only ever an abuse of power; an abuse that is, as Derrida puts it,
‘constitutive of sovereignty itself ’ and so constitutive of democracy. It follows that sovereignty
is rogue in democracy – and democracy is therefore guaranteed and harnessed by a power that
is itself ‘rogue’. If there is to be global democracy, there must be global sovereignty and so a
global voyoucracy, a rogue state that is beyond the terms of that democracy. The sovereign
state that orders legitimacy, which is the de facto condition of order, is necessarily voyou, rogue,
counter-ordering; an identity of opposing categories whose condensation can here be marked
(beyond the terms Derrida sets up) by the terms sovoyoureign or soverogue, a power that estab-
lishes only a quasi-order.
Today, Derrida continues, such states are only the USA and whatever (always subsidiary)
allies it picks up in the course of undertaking such actions in implementing its sovereignty. But
the USA is exceptional in this quasi-order in that it is the primary rogue state – the only truly
rogue state (as Chomsky also says for different reasons) – because of its outstanding inter-
national sovereign powers. US international domination – in the name of a common, global
democracy – is that of a global sovereignty (though this is not to say world sovereignty); it is,
as is often declared, a global abuse of power – necessarily so. This global sovereignty of the
USA is sometimes exercised through the UN but must also take place in terms of other
outstanding manifestations of power if it is to be ‘supersovereign’, including that of its military
(qua force), its economics (qua consumption), its cultural production (qua entertainment)
and its politics (qua democracy). Such sovoyoureign or soverogue power(s) are not occasioned
across or outside of democratic organization or polities at whatever level: it happens through
and in democracy, insistently so.
Soveroguery is the condition for the production of global knowledge and it is that by
which knowledge in its globality has to be comprehended. But how is sovereignty to be under-
stood in its identity with countersovereignty? We have seen that, for Derrida, Bataille’s ‘coun-
terconcept’ of sovereignty speaks to the counter-order of voyoucracy. We shall now take up
this account in order to more exactly determine the sovereignty of American global domi-
nance. Doing so will return us directly to the question of knowledge in the actual conditions
of globalization. Bataille’s interest in sovereignty is in a ‘general aspect that is opposed to the
servile and the subordinate’ (1993: 197); it is general because it can belong to anyone. Such
generality means that the determination of sovereignty cannot be restricted to its traditional
identification with the power of either the State or law as it has been from Plato to Hobbes,
Schmitt and, in a more complicated manner, Agamben. It can be the sovereignty of the
voyou, for example. Bataille draws up an initial distinction between the general aspect of
sovereignty and what the term means as regards a legally constituted and recognized state
or individual (that is therefore subordinate to law). However, as Derrida proposes, in its
sovoyoureignty or soveroguery, it is today the USA alone that sidesteps this distinction: yes,
the USA is of course a sovereign state in the legally constituted sense and so is subject to
international law; yet it is in a position to countermand the obeisance to any such law or
consensus of a general will, since it alone has the power to dominate and authorize non-legal
actions in outright and blatant defiance of international convention and expectations. In this
it exemplifies at a supernational level the general aspect of sovereignty beyond law of which
Bataille speaks.
The problem of the constitution of global knowledge can now be taken up since, for Bataille,

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Problematizing Global Knowledge – Citizenship/The Political/Global Sovereignty 515

sovereignty opposes and falls outside of servility, work and use, and knowledge is constituted
in a temporal binding through just these actions. Sovereignty is external to knowledge for
Bataille because, taking the stabilized modality of knowledge production known as science as
example, ‘to do science is to disregard the present time with a view to subsequent results’
(1993: 201–2). Relatively uncontroversial as this characterization may be, several significant
consequences follow from it: first, that the knowledge constituted in and by science, that is
the present activity of science, is directed by a futural determination, a future organized in
terms of use; second, knowledge unfolds in time; third, any knowledge that results from such
an activity is itself subject to the same condition, that is, the knowledge that results from
science is itself organized in terms of future results – which is to say, fourth, that through the
prospect of its use knowledge is constituted by the work of its future determinations. Hence
Bataille’s part conclusion: ‘to know is always to strive, to work; it is always a servile operation,
indefinitely resumed, indefinitely repeated’ (1993: 202). Knowledge as it is constituted by
science (as an exemplar) is organized with a view to use – whether that use is practical
(technics) or theoretical (science) is a secondary concern. Knowledge, then, is not sovereign
– at least, insofar as it is understood in terms of science or, more generally, a futural mobiliz-
ation. Put the other way, as Bataille affirms again and again, sovereignty cannot be known.
Accepting this characterization of sovereignty, the co-determination of American domination
and global knowledge is not then just a historical and political concern but also a theoretical
and conceptual one. More specifically, as much as the fate and problems of American domi-
nation (however it is characterized) is tied to the fate and problems of any attempt to construct
a theoretical or practical case for a global knowledge, so the question of American sovereign
domination of international and global politics in however complicated a sense is also a question
as to the conditions and possibility of global knowledge.
With Bataille, sovereignty is an experience that cannot be comprehended in science, not
even political science, and certainly not with regard to law in its primarily futural determina-
tion of the present. It cannot be regulated or experienced with view to any known future.
Rather, sovereignty ‘would have to occur in a moment’ which ‘remains outside, short of or
beyond, all knowledge’ (Bataille, 1993: 201). Such a moment cannot be known but is experi-
enced; as Bataille puts it, ‘consciousness of the moment is not truly such, is not sovereign,
except in unknowing. Only by cancelling, or at least neutralizing, every operation of knowl-
edge within ourselves are we in the moment, without fleeing it’ (1993: 203). It is the moment
that is sovereign in how it seizes the mind and abjures from its own futural determination,
refuting any conversion into work or use.
The interruption or blocking of this futural aspect of experience is not a voluntaristic action
or a programmable intervention but is for Bataille ‘possible in the grip of strong emotions that
shut off, interrupt or override the flow of thought. This is the case if we weep, if we sob, if
we laugh till we gasp’ (1993: 203). It is not the epiphenomena of ‘strong emotions’ such as
‘the burst of laughter or tears’ that stops thought; rather, the blocking of thought and knowl-
edge are occasioned by the ‘object of the laughter, or the object of the tears’, that is, by the
moments which occasion that laughter and those tears, ‘as if we were trying to arrest the
moment and freeze it in the constantly renewed gasps of our laughter or our sobs’ (Bataille,
1993: 203). It is the absolute momentousness and momentaryness of strong emotions, an
experience that is always particular, that therefore apprehend what is involved in sovereignty,
even as the latter defies knowledge or other attempts to determine it that can be futurally
organized. This momentary experience without knowledge is risk.
Sovereignty is in this sense a moment-ous and moment-ary experience that is unknown.
We return then to our primary concern: for, if the condition for globality in concrete sense is
in fact American domination and its primary roguery, a kind of ex-ordinate sovereignty, then
the global falls outside of knowledge. ‘Global knowledge’ is then an impossibility. With Bataille,
globality under the aegis of American sovereign domination is instead occasioned in a temporal
dimension counter to any knowable future, binding the mind to the present moment; it can
only be experienced, is only in its present.

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516 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

Evidence for this characterization of globality organized by sovereign domination is presented

by two symmetrical media-constituted phenomena: first, the discourse of American(-style)
politics and news, whose primary articulation tends towards a ‘strong emotionality’ attached to
a supposed exposure to risk rather than deliberative reasoning and knowledge-based judgement.
The primacy of conviction as a policy basis for George W. Bush’s presidency as much as its
partial though deliberate obliviousness to the demands of universal reason and knowledge are
co-ordinated in terms of this sovereign affect. The second phenomenon is terrorist activity,
which plays to the horizon of globality through the primacy of strong emotion. If it is banal to
say that the terrorist act lies outside of political reason, that formulation also suggests that it is
a sovereign unworking, a gripping of the individual and collective mind in the primacy of an
experience that is in principle unknowable, an act without a future to which, as Bataille says
of the general aspect of sovereignty, anyone can be subject. In the refutation of (prior or subse-
quent) knowledge by immediate experience and ‘strong feelings’ (shock, fear, concern), terror-
ism has no use but is a risk experience that shatters knowledge as universal political condition.
As such, it is the object of a global-moment which contributes to the constitution of a global
polity. Terrorism is in this sense in a symmetrical position to US public discourse in which it is
right at home, each avowing the other (sometimes under the title of a ‘politics of fear’).
These sovereign unworkings of knowledge as condition of global polity suggest that it is
today not knowledge that is significant to globality but rather a global experience which eclipses
knowledge. The power and dynamic of action cinema and the dominant entertainment indus-
tries more generally are critical here, as is the prominence of the media celebrity as a key
figure in global political concerns such as world poverty, climate control, and so on. In the
condition of the sovereignty of the global-moment, authority over public globality lies with
the celebrity pop star, sportsperson or film actor rather than the public intellectual or the
NGO specialist since what the media celebrity foregrounds, situates and organizes is the
primacy of the experience of these causes qua their emotionality. In this way these ‘simple
humanitarian’ emotional appeals in fact promulgate the dominance of a sovereign unknowing,
the evacuation of a futurity. Promoting globality under sovereign domination, they circuitously
serve the American domination of globalizing processes they so often protest against.
If global knowledge seems to be heading towards its supercession by global experience,
another fate for it is however suggested by its impossibility. For global knowledge is only
impossible insofar as (i) globality is constituted by US soveroguery, and (ii) we follow Bataille’s
characterization of sovereignty as an unknowing. If the first condition is our historical situ-
ation, the very term global knowledge challenges the theoretical security of the second. That
is, just as the consideration of the conditions of the global throws into question the meaning
and possibility of knowledge, so the preservation of some sense of knowledge can in theory
challenge the soverogue constitution of the global. For this, several questions would have to
be addressed; questions which, since they cannot be taken up here, remain at best hypothet-
ical and are instead presented only as a series of cautions:
• the global as it is constituted by American domination contends with traditional claims of
knowledge in admitting of the momentary, experiential conditions of its making;
• knowledge that holds fast to a horizon of universalism and use will be unable to address,
contest or effect the globality in which it nonetheless takes place, not least because it will
only fail to apprehend the momentary and experiential, which is to say, the historical,
production of the global;
• if there is to be global knowledge it must then abjure itself of universality (in order to be
global knowledge) and sovereignty (in order to be global knowledge);
• the global of ‘global knowledge’ would then have to be determined in terms other than its
historical constitution and regulation qua American domination and may in fact generate these
counter-conditions through its fabrication.
Global knowledge subject to these cautions – which we suggest are the only terms available
for it – is, in the terms presented by Bataille, a contradiction and an impossibility. That it is a

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Problematizing Global Knowledge – Citizenship/The Political/Global Sovereignty 517

theoretical contradiction is however no impediment to its realization: global knowledge is no

less contradictory and no less realizable than the soverogue. Not only because of the histori-
cal reason that any realization of global knowledge relies upon and is consequent to the quasi-
ordering of globality by American domination, but also because of the theoretical reason that
the opposition between the categories of the sovereign and the law-abiding is rendered obsolete
by US soveroguery. The USA acts both legally and extra-legally, subject to international
conventions and institutions (be they mobilized to ensure that the international order main-
tains enough authority and stability for the USA to be given the veneer of quasi-democratic
sanction and legitimacy) and in flagrant defiance or domination of them. In this duality, which
we have called the soveroguery of the USA, in the situation of the historical actuality of the
supernational quasi-order called globalization, the opposition between the sovereign and the
law-abiding is redundant. As then is the categorial and practical opposition between knowl-
edge and sovereignty, that is, between knowledge and the global. Amongst many other deter-
minations, what can then be realized since the global under the aegis of US soveroguery is: (i)
a knowledge that opens a futurity for the moment-ary and moment-ous unworking of the
global in its sovereign constitution, as global experience (in more politically recognizable terms,
a future that extends beyond the American domination of the global); and (ii) that such a
knowledge is an unworking of its future in use, which is to say, not subject to any known future
other than that which could be determined through the global. Global knowledge would then
be (to adopt a quasi-Derridean formula) an unknown future of knowledge, a future without
universality. Somewhat sovereign, global knowledge would be a knowledge and a future that
contends with yet contributes to an unknowledge of the global.

References
Bataille, George (1993) The Accursed Share, Volumes II & III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone.
Derrida, Jacques (2005) Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Suhail Malik teaches in the Department of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths College, London, and is
currently working on a philosophy of American power.

Democracy to Come
Irving Goh

talist cosmopolitanism. But should this be its final

Keywords cosmopolitanism, ‘democracy to
form?
come’, friendship, hospitality, reject
Democracy today wants to give itself to
anyone. This is testified to by its cosmopolitan
dissemination since the 20th century, and its auto-

I
n his discussion of the cosmopolitical and the deconstructive history as a multiplicity giving place
debate about the ‘end of history’, Derrida to fictions of itself, as demonstrated by Jacques
(1997c: 41) points to the ‘to-come’ character Derrida in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005).
of democracy as something that is intrinsic to the One might say that democracy’s giving itself to the
idea of democracy. The implication is that there world at large involves a certain hospitality, for that
can be no final state of democracy, no end to its giving involves inviting and receiving (just about)
history since openness to the event and to anyone. Today, democracy’s state of hospitality
becoming are aspects of the openness to alterity, appears to be reaching perfectibility, as almost all
that is, an ethic of hospitality that underlies states in the world have taken on a more or less
democracy. The history of democracy since Kant democratic countenance. And yet there can be no
has become aligned with the history of an occiden- doubt that, at the beginning of the 21st century,
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