Phantasms of Sovereignty, and Unconditional Resistance. Thinking

Legitimacy beyond Performative Powers.

Thomas Clément Mercier

Department of War Studies, King's College, London, UK

1 Fassett Road, London E8 1PA

+44 797567 5911

thomas.mercier@kcl.ac.uk

Thomas Clément Mercier is currently in the writing-up phase of his PhD at King's College, London (War Studies Department). His interests are located at the intersection between political theory, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. His current research constitutes an analysis of Derrida's notion of performative violence in respect to International Relations theory and sociological methodology: how does accounting for the 'force of law' (understood as the juridic force attached to language and linguisticality in general) must affect the concepts of 'power' and 'violence' such as defined in social sciences? How does it alter the traditional dichotomy between legitimate and illegitimate violence? And what does this alteration entail as to the definition of a specifically democratic legitimacy?... Indeed, the 'logic' of performativity challenges the autonomy of ideality (or conceptuality) in its articulation to violence, and therefore implies a deconstructive reading of notions such as 'ideology', 'legitimacy' and 'épistémè'. Such critique (drawing mainly on Marx & Engels, Weber, Foucault, Mouffe and Balibar) calls for a more originary articulation between violence and legitimacy, located in the archi-performative juridicity attached to différance. This requires the elaboration of a non-ontological 'concept' of violence, understood as an essentially differential force of deconstruction. The title of his project is 'Violence and legitimacy: an articulation beyond power. Towards a post-performative approach to democratic legitimacy'; it is supervised by Vivienne Jabri and Mervyn Frost.

This is not the final version of this essay.

Please do not cite without permission of the author.

Phantasms of Sovereignty, and Unconditional Resistance. Thinking

Legitimacy beyond Performative Powers.

ABSTRACT: In this article, I engage with Derrida's deconstructive reading of

Austin's theory of performativity in order to analyse the sovereignty-legitimacy

paradigm in its Weberian form. First, I highlight an essential articulation between

legitimacy and sovereign ipseity (understood as the autopositioned power-to-be-

oneself, beyond the sole example of State sovereignty). Secondly, I identify a

more originary force of legitimacy which remains foreign to the order of the

performative (conceived as self-presentational event) because it is the condition

for both its position and its deconstruction. This suggests an essential

pervertibility and fallibility of the performative, which implies a 'mystical'

legitimacy and a paradoxical, divisible and self-different sovereignty. In the

structural divisibility of legitimacy and sovereignty, I see the condition for an

irreducible coloniality of all language, but also the possibility of an unconditional

resistance located in the radical interpretability of the law, beyond all determined

representations of powers, dominations, resistances or revolutions. This reflection

is triggered by a reading of Cynthia Weber's theory of 'performative states’,

describing sovereignty under the form of an impossible ontology, which leads me

to elaborate the notion of legitimation-to-come as a non-ontological 'concept':

this notion of an unconditional legitimacy, beyond sovereignty, binds beliefs and

phantasms to the unpresentable force of the event. Pursuing the efforts of Cynthia

Weber and Rob Walker, I attempt to sketch the implications of this archi-

performative legitimacy in respect to the protocols of legitimation of

International relations theory and sociological methodologies, through an

analysis of their persistent ontological presuppositions.

KEYWORDS: legitimacy; sovereignty; domination; deconstruction; Jacques

Derrida; Max Weber; Cynthia Weber; International Relations theory.

'Try again. Fail again. Fail better': Samuel Beckett's quote from Worstward Ho

(1983) has become ubiquitous, awkwardly colonising the most unlikely of contexts.

Truncated, extracted from its original body, it has come to be reinterpreted as an

inspirational mantra, summoned in self-help books and printed on colourful posters in

order to put an optimistic twist on human failures all around the world (Beauman 2012).

This globalised and merchandised appropriation through pop culture was unpredictable,

to say the least: one could hardly imagine more complete betrayal than the

transformation of Beckett's gloomy, self-destructive imperative to go worstward into a

'feel-good' encouragement to persevere despite failure. Whether we consider this

'Few would dispute that sovereignties are rarely as structurally, logically or topologically tight as their practices would have us believe. Sovereignties fall apart in the always potential contingency of everyday life. Even the most absolute sovereign authority has unintended consequences. What can go wrong often does. The unanticipated happens. Rationalities breed irrationalities. Lines take flight. Corruptions ensue. Times take their toll. Subjectivities perform themselves differently. Familiarity breeds contempt. Lives outmanoeuvre those who live them. Transgressions shift as well as sustain the norm.'

(Walker 2010, 192) 'Besides the uttering of the words of the so-called performative, a good many other things have as a general rule to be right and to go right if we are to be said to have happily brought off our action. What these are we may hope to discover by looking at and classifying types of case in which something goes wrong and the act — marrying, betting, bequeathing, christening, or what not — is therefore at least to some extent a failure: the utterance is then, we may say, not indeed false but in general unhappy. And for this reason we call the doctrine of the things that can be and go wrong on the occasion of such utterances, the doctrine of the Infelicities.'

(Austin 1962, 14) 'All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'

(Beckett 1983, 7)

continuous (mis)interpretation of the 'fail better' injunction as shocking or intriguing,

saddening or amusing, it somehow testifies of an essential possibility of performative

distortion consubstantial with the logic of interpretability: language failing to perform

out of its initial context of utterance, or already performing something else; failing to

succeed, certainly, but already becoming other or otherworldly; failing better,

differently, through a monstrously generative process performing beyond good or evil,

right or wrong, detached from its supposed originarity. Are we still talking, here, about

the same 'failure'? How may we envisage the evental force of this other fallibility,

located before or beyond failure and success, and transforming through its monstrous

event the very conditions of its legibility and legitimacy?

On an explicit level, Beckett's Worstward Ho constitutes a literary

experimentation in which some narrative instance enjoins itself to produce the worst

possible work of fiction. In this sense, this effort already presupposes the existence of

criteria of literary quality and legitimacy and, seemingly, an inversion thereof. The

notion of 'failing better' thus seems to constitute an exhortation to fail completely and

absolutely. But soon the difficulty to achieve this goal becomes manifest: 'The words

too whosesoever. What room for worse! How almost true they sometimes almost ring!

How wanting in inanity!' And the narrator laments: 'Far from wrong. Far far from

wrong' (Beckett 1983, 21)... Of course, on an implicit level, absolute failure never was

an option: no one would expect a Nobel Prize winner to deliver an unmitigatedly

terrible piece of work. And beyond the sole measure of its author's prestige, beyond

literary prizes and institutional legitimacies, Worstward Ho constitutes a masterpiece of

dark comedy and performative writing. In its performance, and through a vertiginous

mise en abyme, Beckett interrogates the referential power of language and emphasises

its incapacity to instantiate the very thing that it enunciates: 'Say a body. Where none'

(7). But what is then left as oeuvre? And what should this significant remainder say

about failure itself? Had Beckett managed to fail completely, his attempt would then

constitute, somewhat legitimately, a roaring success. But in and through its failure to

fail, Worstward Ho is already something else, beyond failure and success. What is it? A

performative contradiction? A lamentable triumph? In this paradoxical knot, something

happens which cannot equate pure failure, some sort of transmutation exceeding and

displacing the failure/success binary opposition: something like a deconstruction. Here

is the paradoxical rule, the unjustifiable force of its singularity: Beckett's most nihilistic

impulses, even in his most pessimistic works, are outmanoeuvred and overtaken by the

very event of his performance and writing, by his humour and irony, as well as their

lasting performative impact on the literary scene — and far beyond, through the most

unpredictable or intempestive of manifestations, maybe beyond the visibility of any

horizons. Derrida interpreted this paradox at the heart of Beckett's oeuvre as a

deconstructive (or self-deconstructive) dimension: 'A certain nihilism is both interior to

metaphysics (the final fulfilment of metaphysics, Heidegger would say) and then,

already, beyond. With Beckett in particular, the two possibilities are in the greatest

possible proximity and competition. He is nihilist and he is not nihilist' (Derrida 1992,

61).

How could one 'fail better'? A failure worthy of the name, a 'successful' failure,

so to say, may only be validated as such because it fails to meet legitimating criteria for

success. What is then the rationale behind the 'better' good that may be associated with

failure according to Beckett's oxymoron? Following which criteria of legitimation may

such 'betterness' be attested? Beyond the simple failure to meet existing criteria, beyond

existing conditions of validation and legitimation, 'failing better' seems to indicate the

possibility of another legitimacy, in and through which failure and success would still

be undistinguishable and co-implicated, wherein criteria of legitimacy and illegitimacy

remain suspended to the radical undecidability of an event. The notion of an essential

fallibility that I am trying to elaborate here does not simply designate the failure to

conform to existing conditions of success and legitimating conventions. Fallibility

implies a generative transformation of the conditions of legitimation determining

success or failure, so that what may or should have appeared as failure according to

preexisting conventions will have already altered, in its event, the interpretative models

through which it might be considered as successful or not. Failing better: in this sense,

the comparative 'better' refers to the performative invention of new modes of

legitimation, ones which do not pre-exist the so-called performative utterance which

forcefully imposed them. This is the condition to think the eventness of a true

performative, capable of transforming, as an event worthy of the name, the conditions

of its own readability (Derrida 2002b, 271). But this signifies a structural illegibility of

the event 'itself' at the ontological level, since legitimating conventions, which

determine its interpretability, are themselves suspended to another performative event,

itself or an other, itself as an other. In this out-of-joint space or time, the performative is

neither a complete failure nor a complete success: failing and succeeding at once or in

turn, both legitimate and illegitimate, it locates itself in the paradoxical a-legitimacy1 of

a rampant fallibility.

*

For a long time, the notion of sovereignty seemed to exclude all fallibility. In its

concept, this excessive or hyperbolic superiority, superiority itself2, implies the

automatic success of a self-legitimating, all-powerful arkhe — which instantiates power

as commencement, originary authority and principle of command. Through the defining

feature of self-determination, sovereignty supposedly excludes failure, and the motif of

this exclusion permeates and affects all its philosophical and sociological definitions,

even the most 'critical'. For that matter, failure was certainly not an option for the

triumphant State, such as defined by Max Weber — to the extent that the term 'success'

(Erfolg) was made part of its definition:

The state is the human community that, within a defined territory — and the key word here is "territory" — (successfully [mit Erfolg]) claims the monopoly of legitimate force [physischer Gewaltsamkeit] for itself. (M. Weber 2008, 156)

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this definition for subsequent works

in sociology and International Relations theory. There is an argument to be made that

the whole history of IR has been constituted through the unfolding of the theoretical

implications of Weber's definition for the international, followed by their meticulous

deconstruction in the hands of constructivists and poststructuralist theorists.

Schematically, the main objects of contention were: M. Weber's assumption that the

State's monopoly of legitimate violence could be contrasted with international anarchy,

and its influence on Morgenthau, Aron, and subsequent 'Realism' (Ashley 1888; Walker

1993a; Walker 1993b, 180; C. Weber 2010, 20-21); M. Weber's inscription of the State

within a definite territory, thus essentialising structural categories of inside/outside

(Walker 1993b, 126), and defining them according to a sovereign 'ontopology' (Derrida

1994, 102; Campbell 1998, 80); M. Weber's reluctance to account for the State's foreign

policy and its decisive role in the definition of the State's prerogatives as a systemic

actor (Thomson 1994; C. Weber 1995, 106); the incapacity of the definition to

encompass all forms of sovereign States (C. Weber and Biersteker 1996, 14); its overall

lack of historicity resulting in a conflation of distinct forms of polities and violences

(Thomson 1994).

All these studies have profoundly reshaped IR theory through the critique of one

of its most durable methodological presuppositions. Here, I hope to offer a related,

though hopefully original, reading of Max Weber's definition of the State, by

emphasising two little nouns, often ignored, which have durably influenced our views

of the State as a nexus of sovereignty and legitimacy, and our representation of political

theory as an ontology of domination: 'success' (Erfolg), and 'present'. This second term

is evoked immediately after Weber's definition of the State, as his description is said to

be 'the specific characteristic of the present [Gegenwart]' (M. Weber 2008, 156). This

appeal to contemporaneity, to the presence of present, is constant in Weber's 'sociology

of domination', which explicitly considers the State as a finished product, an

achievement, a telos: 'the concept of the state has only in modern times reached its full

development [Vollentwicklung]' (1978, 56; my emphasis). These two motifs, success

and presence, consolidate each other, and orientate the whole of Weber's theory of

political domination, through its culmination in the State. But what are the ontological

presuppositions in defining sovereignty and legitimacy from the perspective of present

success? The successful presence of a domination, the dominant success of a self-

presence: these expressions all seem to describe the logic of ontology itself, the

ontological gesture at its most legitimate, that is to say its most sovereign.

In this article, I wish to provide an analysis of the theoretical presuppositions of

Weber's sociology of success, by challenging the conceptual and practical complicity

between these two concepts, sovereignty and legitimacy, and by emphasising their

structural fallibility. In order to do so, I will first focus on State sovereignty by

analysing the work of IR theorists who have critically addressed sovereignty as a

performative — Cynthia Weber's seminal work being here the prime example. I will

highlight the implications of this theoretical gesture with regard to the motif of

legitimacy. Then, I will emphasise what I believe to be a more originary articulation

between sovereignty and legitimacy, located in the sovereign self-presence of

performativity conceived under the form of an ontology. This will imply an explication

with Max Weber's hermeneutics of legitimacy, through and beyond the example of

State's domination. Indeed, I wish to provide an epistemological critique of M. Weber's

verstehende Soziologie (interpretative sociology) in order to expose the problematic co-

constitutionality of sovereignty and legitimacy in what I define as a 'socio-ontolology of

success'. I hope to demonstrate that the sociological concept of legitimacy presupposes

an ontology of political domination and a tacit acknowledgement of the sovereignty of

self-presence: what Derrida names 'ipsocentrism', or 'ipsocracy' (Derrida 2005a, 17; 51).

Through this representation, legitimacy is already sovereign, conceived as a self-

presentational, self-identical, self-performing ipseity. In this sense, the phantasm of

State sovereignty is only one example of the general form taken by sovereign ipseity,

although it might appear as its most powerful expression or illustration. As a rule,

ipseity instantiates the articulation between sovereignty and legitimacy under its most

general form, in the self-presence or self-power of autopositioning:

Before any sovereignty of the state, of the nation-state, of the monarch, or, in democracy, of the people, ipseity names a principle of legitimate sovereignty, the accredited or recognized supremacy of a power or a force, a kratos or a cracy. That is what is implied, posed, presupposed, but also imposed in the very position, in the very self- or autopositioning, of ipseity itself, everywhere there is some oneself, the first, ultimate, and supreme source of every 'reason of the strongest' as the right [droit] granted to force or the force granted to law [droit]. (Derrida 2005a, 12)

Finally, through the emphasis on the auto-heteronomic character of law and legitimacy,

I will try to elaborate a form of non-ontological, non-presentational legitimation, which

signifies the chance of an unconditional resistance located before and beyond the

performative power of sovereign ipseity.

1. Performativity, sovereignty and legitimacy

In her reading of sovereignty as a performative, Cynthia Weber emphasised the

discursive and therefore non-natural character of the State, following in this a

philosophical and sociological tradition which could be traced back to Hobbes, Marx

and (Max) Weber. But she goes further: this de-naturalisation is explicitly connected to

an understanding of the State as a subject whose ontological identity is itself dependent

on effects of performativity. She argues 'that sovereign nation-states are not pre-given

subjects but subjects in process and that all subjects in process (be they individual or

collective) are the ontological effects of practices which are performatively enacted'

(1998, 78). This constituted both an invaluable contribution to, and a serious blow

against, International Relations Theory, since the notion of performativity questions the

methodological foundations, the conceptual protocols and hence the legitimacy of the

discipline itself:

A performative reading of IR theory would suggest that the discourse of IR theory affects both the subjectivity of the state and the normativity of sovereignty as prediscursive. However, neither sovereignty nor states are prediscursive. Rather, to paraphrase Butler yet again, sovereignty should be understood as the discursive/cultural means by which a 'natural state' is produced and established as 'prediscursive'. For example, the traditional IR definition of sovereignty — absolute authority over a territory occupied by a relatively fixed population and recognised as sovereign by other sovereign states — renders the state prediscursive. Each of the four components of state sovereignty — authority, territory, population, and recognition — presupposes a state that needs no analytical interrogation. This definition of sovereignty naturalises authority of the state, the territory of a state, a population within a state, and recognition of the state by other states. (1998, 92)

Thus, through her reading of Judith Butler's work on performativity, Cynthia Weber

provided a fresh methodological outlook and powerful critical tools in order to reframe

and challenge the objects that IR, as a discipline, concerns itself with. But beyond this

(which constitutes a classic paradigm shift), she also contributed to show that IR theory,

while presenting itself as a theoretical effort (and thus as a mere constative), already

induces effects on the practical field, legitimating or enabling certain practices (never

without violence) by informing or formatting the interpretative models through which

'international relations' are analysed and experienced — performed.

Cynthia Weber thus highlighted, theoretically and performatively, the

performative effects of IR theory, by interrogating the limit between constative and

performative at the level of theorisation. In this gesture, she seems to favour a certain

interpretation of performativity, in the wake of Derrida (2002c, 49) and Butler (1993,

11), according to which the distinction between constative and performative 'functions'

of language is ultimately undecidable. In Geoffrey Bennington's words:

the thing is done, via an undecidability of constative and performative values ([...] there is no performative which does not also involve an at least implicit description of the state of affairs it produces) in a pseudo-present that would be the fiction of the origin-point of the State or the nation. [...] Every law tries to ground its justice in justesse, transforming the violence of its performative force into a calm constatation of the state of affairs it produces [...]. This schema only allows injustice to be thought on the model of falsity. (Bennington 1993, 233-240)

J.L. Austin had already expressed, though on different theoretical grounds, the difficulty

to stabilise the limit between constative and performative; this difficulty challenged his

initial intent, as old as performativity, to 'isolate' the performative by maintaining a clear

distinction between constative utterances and speech acts (Austin 1962, 4). Following

Bennington's argument, I would like to clarify the articulation between falsity and

performativity, and thus interrogate the power of theoreticity, theory as power.

Austin's initial distinction relied on the idea that constatives are either true or

false, while performatives instantiate their own event, and thus cannot be said to be true

or false with reference to admitted conditions of referentiality. However, in the same

lectures, Austin later recognised a 'problem' (98) in 'the radical instability of the

division' between constatives and performatives (Boucher 2008, 152); he thus

complexified the binary opposition by advocating a different framework (Austin 1962,

98-100). Geoff Boucher describes this theoretical shift as such:

Austin abandoned the initial binary distinction between constative and performative for a ternary distinction between illocutionary force (performative dimension), locutionary act (constative dimension) and perlocutionary consequences (the ability of speech acts to engender consequences in partners in dialogue, for instance, persuasion). (Boucher 2008, 152)

Each speech act (or 'statement') may possess one and the other 'dimension' because it

always contains both a locutionary and an illocutionary component, which goes to make

the performative-constative distinction problematic. Ultimately, Austin argues that a

statement may only be deemed to be true or false depending on the context of utterance,

and thus on a certain illocutionary force: ' "true" and "false" [...] do not stand for

anything simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right or proper thing

to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these circumstances, to this audience, for these

purposes and with these intentions' (Austin 1962, 144). It follows that 'the truth or

falsity of a statement depends not merely on the meanings of words but on what act you

were performing in what circumstances' (144). Austin thus puts emphasis on the

'effects', the effectivity, the 'force' of the performatives, and on the 'capacity' of the

actors (Austin 1962). But these various notions (which are intended to explain and

dissipate the 'magic' of performatives [Boucher 2008, 152]) put all the weight of the

argument on the notions of 'success' and 'felicity'. Not only the performative power, but

also the conditions of truth or falsity of the statement, now entirely depend on the

illocutionary force and the context of utterance, in other words, on conditions of

satisfaction and legitimating conventions: 'the illocutionary force of the utterance now

depends upon what factually is the case in the context that supplies the "conditions of

satisfaction" for the performative legitimacy of the speech act' (Boucher 2008, 152; my

emphasis). If one may evaluate the success or failure of a performative, there is thus the

assumption that such context may be relatively stabilised, and that the conditions of its

legitimation be analysed — which must involve a certain prioritisation of the constative

dimension over the performative. In other words, the relative stabilisation of the

'conditions of satisfaction' for a speech act may provide a relative determination of the

conditions of truth or falsity of a statement, and thus relative criteria towards

determining what may or may not be considered as a successful speech act according to

a constative appraisal. In this circular gesture (on which the notion of intersubjectivity,

for instance, relies), Austin durably circumscribed, through a theoretical constative, but

with undeniable performative impact, the domain of competence of so-called speech act

theory and pragmatics of language, as well as their conditions of legitimation.

It is impossible in the scope of this article to review all the debates surrounding

theories of performativity3. I shall focus on the aspects concerning legitimacy. While

performativity studies have always been concerned with questions of legitimation, these

never quite came to the centre of the argument4. This might be due to a structural

difficulty as to the juridic force or power of the performative, on which the conceptual

articulation between performativity and legitimacy relies. The performative indeed finds

itself on both 'sides' of the legitimation process: it must always be legitimated (this is

the condition of its 'success' or 'felicity') and legitimating (because it produces,

performatively, an utterance with juridic value). When one interrogates the notion of

legitimacy in terms of performativity, it seemingly becomes unconceivable, irreducibly

disseminated. Indeed, performative legitimation concerns not only the performative

utterance which is under scrutiny in its legitimating power (for instance: such or such

practices or discourses of State sovereignty), but also the legitimacy of the legitimating

conventions (themselves performative) supposedly enabling said discourses or

practices, and finally the legitimacy of the interpretative models through which we

appraise these matters of performativity-legitimacy. Each one of these analytical levels

may, at once or in turn, be envisaged as performative or constative, as a legitimating or

legitimated device, which allows for all possible confusions, conflations, and always

with the risk of confirming, qua performative ontologisation, existing modes of

legitimation, that is to say, in Max Weber's terms, structures of domination. In isolating,

for theoretical or critical appreciation, a performative, one must always presuppose (at

least provisionally) the presence and legitimacy of the contextual conventions which

made the performative 'successful' or 'unsuccessful', and which made the theoretical-

critical pondering of this 'success' possible in the first place... At a general epistemic

level, the ultimate undecidability between constative and performative signifies that

theories of performativity imply an uncontrollable mise en abyme, an irreducible

overdetermination of praxis by theoria, and of theoria by praxis: will it ever be possible

to know, to produce a thoroughly constative theorisation of performativity, and to define

what a performative exactly is5? And what will be the performative implications of such

definition, notably with regard to its legitimacy, as well as its legitimating power?

This problematisation of performative legitimacy directly concerns the notion of

sovereignty, inasmuch as sovereignty should present itself as the unchallenged

foundation for legitimacy and law. But like the performative, so-called sovereign

decisions (characterised, at least in principle, as self-determined and autoposited) may

be placed, depending on interpretations or critical appraisals, on either side of the

legitimating-legitimated division6. In the notion of performativity, sovereignty, like

legitimacy, seems to divide itself, which should imply a paradoxical understanding of

both concepts; such theoretical difficulties, which concern the sovereignty-legitimacy

paradigm in relation to performativity, should forbid any hasty reification of either

notion into ontological categories. Cynthia Weber, through her definition of 'a

performative notion of sovereignty and ontology' (1998, 89) helps us clarify these

difficulties:

States and sovereignty [...] are forever in the realm of discourses and cultural, not in the realm of the natural. If we accept that [...] states and sovereignty are both discursive effects of performative practices, then it follows [...] that there is no sovereign or state identity behind expressions of state sovereignty. The identity of the state is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its result. One of these expressions is sovereignty, and state sovereignty gets performatively enacted through various sex, sexuality, and gender codings. [...] sovereign subjectivity can only be performatively enacted for it has no foundational ontology. (90-91)

This description has the immense merit of challenging the homogeneity and unity of the

concept of sovereignty: at its most consequential, the theory of performativity implies

the idea of a non-identical, divisible, deferred and differing sovereignty (souveraineté

différante). If there is no sovereign identity behind expressions of State sovereignty, it

follows that these expressions cannot refer to a preexisting legitimating referent in order

to posit themselves as sovereignly legitimate: in all rigour, the logic of performativity

requires that every performative produces the conditions of its own referentiality. This

paradoxical referentiality challenges what Cynthia Weber calls 'the logic of

representation' (C. Weber 1995, 127-128), and it would ultimately require, for the

performative to be truly legitimate, that it enclose itself into a perfect, tautological circle

of self-justified force and violent self-justification. The notion of a 'successful'

performative would thus allow the closure of this circle in the fictional moment of its

inauguration. In this moment, the performative is the force, is legitimacy, is the self, is

the performative, etc. — and the performative may legitimate itself by instantiating the

ontological presence of a sovereign ipseity: 'performative tautology or a priori synthesis'

(Derrida 2002b, 267).

This idea of a non-referential or non-representational positioning of so-called

'speech acts' is easy to conceive when it comes to performatives which are said to found

a State or a legal order through some forceful 'declarations of independence' (Derrida

2002c, 46-54) — for instance in contexts that may be interpreted as revolutionary

situations. However, the same difficulty arises whenever sovereignty is invoked in order

to legitimate practices positing themselves through this very invocation, which always

constitutes an interpretative effort with performative implications. This positing

performs sovereignty (without constituting it ontologically) through an active

interpretation of said sovereignty, and of its corollary normative or legitimating

principles. This is because 'sovereignty' as such, just like 'legitimacy', is a meaningless

word in itself, and only depends on the interpretative gestures which supposedly

institute it by performing it. Performatives would thus produce the conditions of their

own legitimation by postulating or hypothesising the protocols of their intelligibility,

and the legitimating power that they supposedly result from. In this respect, legitimacy

is always presupposed although it has no ontological foundation. This process implies a

referentiality without ultimate referent, a sui generis capacitating title, a performative

power which, ultimately, would only rely on itself (and on the 'future' reception of its

own doing) in view of producing the discourse of its self-legitimation, thus

consolidating the phantasm of an ipsocratic coup de force:

A 'successful' revolution, the 'successful' foundation of a state (in somewhat the same sense that one speaks of a 'felicitous performative speech act') will produce after the fact [après coup] what it was destined in advance to produce, namely, proper interpretative models to read in return, to give sense, necessity and above all legitimacy to the violence that has produced, among others, the interpretative model in question, that is, the discourse of its self-legitimation. (Derrida 2002b, 270)

The epistemic risk, here, is to validate (juridically and performatively) this phantasm of

sovereign ipseity by validating (through a supposedly theoretical-constative gesture)

this 'hermeneutic circle' (Derrida 2002b, 270), and therefore to enact (seemingly

constatively, but always through some performative interpretation with empirical

implications) the 'success' of the performance of sovereignty and of its self-legitimating

discourse: in spite of its admittedly non-natural character, sovereignty would thus

equate its 'own' performative power, being the product of its 'own' narrating.

The concept of self-legitimation or 'self-justification' (Selbstrechtfertigung)

plays a decisive role in Max Weber's sociology of domination as legitimate domination.

He argues that 'it is self-evident that the continued exercise of every domination (in our

technical sense of the word) always has the strongest need of self-justification through

an appeal to the principles of its legitimation' (1978, 954; 1976, 549; translation

modified). And beyond sociology: Weber argues that the necessity of self-justification

is actually not restricted to political domination, and not even to social structures

themselves:

We have encountered the problem of legitimacy already in our discussion of the legal order. Now we shall establish its importance in even more general terms. For a domination, this kind of justification of its legitimacy is not a matter of theoretical or philosophical speculation; it rather constitutes the basis of very real differences in the empirical structures of domination [Herrschaftsstrukturen]; this is due to a very universal fact: any power or force [Macht], and even more generally any chance of life [Lebenschance], needs self-justification [Selbstrechtfertigung]. (M. Weber 1978, 953; 1976, 549; translation modified)

In this presentation, legitimation seemingly operates, vis-à-vis the situation of

dominance, according to a logic of supplementarity (Derrida 1997, 163): self-

legitimation contributes to power structures at an essential level by constructing the

'myth' (Legende) of a superiority, but it is defined as a non-originary characteristic of

the order itself, since it only enacts already-existing 'superiorities' (Überlegenheiten). In

this theoretical architecture, power, as dominant power, superior mastery, in short,

superiority itself (perhaps sovereignty) is postulated as the already-existing subject, as a

prior self, powerful ipseity which generates its own 'legend', the discourse of its self-

legitimation. Power comes first, as the 'factual' superiority of a 'factual' ipseity (the

dominant subject, an individual or a group of individuals) which merely needs to justify

this powerful position, and does so because it can: it has the power to do so because it

has the power to be itself and, therefore, to justify itself. Power is its own origin, self-

present, a 'prediscursive' selfness (as Cynthia Weber puts it), a site from which it can

generate legitimacy as mere supplement.

2. Fallible performatives: perverformativity and phantasmaticity

How may we analyse the performative power of legitimacy without

essentialising performativity itself? This is a risk that Cynthia Weber is fully aware of,

as she affirms that her 'performative understanding of state sovereignty allows one to

investigate how sovereign practices confer sovereign status onto states without reifying

the state or sovereignty' (C. Weber 1998, 92; my emphasis). Playing on Butler's Gender

Trouble, she associates the performance of sovereignty with a 'fundamental "trouble" or

crisis of representation' (93). Most significantly, and still paraphrasing Butler, she

argues that performative sovereignty is an indication that ' "being" a state and/or

sovereignty is fundamentally impossible' (92). This impossible ontology signifies that

performativity is only possible because its referential or representational effort is

structurally destined to 'fail' (93). The emphasis on this essential fallibility of

sovereignty has been a decisive feature of IR theory in its post-structuralist moment7.

For instance, Rob Walker evoked many times the essential fallibility of the sovereign

State, such as exemplified in the exergue of this article. This notion was already

emphasised in Inside/Outside, in which Walker argues, against the 'conventional story'

of statecraft, that the States are constantly threatened by the potential failure to be

considered as legitimate:

the state appears in the conventional story as a formal and almost lifeless category, when in fact states are constantly maintained, defended, attacked, reproduced, undermined, and relegitimised on a daily basis. (Walker 1993, 168)

In the wake of Rob Walker and Cynthia Weber, I wish to explore the theoretical

implications of understanding sovereignty as structurally fallible, as well as the

compulsive drive of quasi-machinistic repetition that such fallibility entails. How might

accounting for this originary fallibility affect the methodology of IR theory and

sociology? My goal is to provide, following Derrida's works on performativity and

eventness, a non-presentational, non-ontological understanding of performativity and

legitimacy. This distinction, I believe, needs to be fully clarified in order for us to

interrogate the conditions of production of the 'autos' or 'self', presupposed by the notion

of 'self-legitimation', itself consubstantial with the definition of sovereignty as

sovereign ipseity. This implies challenging the assumption that the performative could

coincide with its 'own' event, that it may ontologically produce the condition of its 'own'

intelligibility, legitimacy and credibility.

In Excitable Speech8, Butler described Derrida's conception of fallible

performatives as such:

the failure of the performative is the condition of its possibility [...]. That performative utterances can go wrong, be misapplied or misinterpreted, is essential to their "proper" functioning [...]. Indeed, all performativity rests on the credible production of "authority" and is, thus, not only a repetition of its own prior instance and, hence, a loss of the originary instance, but its citationality assumes the form of a mimesis without end. The imposture of the performative is thus central to its "legitimate" working: every credible production must be produced according to the norms of legitimacy and, hence, fail to be identical with those norms and remain at a distance from the norm itself. The performance of legitimacy is the credible production of the legitimate, the one that apparently closes the gap which makes it possible. (Butler 1997, 151; my emphasis)

The fallibility of the performative is necessary for a simple reason: if the performative

were absolutely conform, identical to preexisting referents or norms, if it merely

validated or equated, without rupture or 'distance' of any sort, the legitimating

conventions which supposedly enabled it, then it could not be said to produce an event

in any meaningful way (while eventness should be the condition for performativity).

Such performative would not even be identifiable as such: it would escape all possibility

of representation, interpretation, or appraisal. If it is to produce an event, a performative

must involve a rupture of context, some interpretative gesture vis-à-vis existing norms,

and must thus expose itself, from the onset, to counter-interpretations: the conditions of

its legitimacy are the conditions of its illegitimacy, because the performative can never

thoroughly stabilise all protocols of legitimation, opening itself to other interpretative-

legitimating readings, other protocols of legitimacies, legitimacies-to-come. This

signifies that the performative must always fail to be unmitigatedly legitimate and

legitimated; the conditions of its 'success' or 'failure', the very conditions of its

theoretical or empirical intelligibility, are ultimately suspended to protocols of

interpretation which are also dependent on a 'performative violence' (Derrida 2002a,

51), and which can never, for the same reasons, present themselves absolutely and

without contradiction. Consequently, and contrary to the traditional performative

(conceived as power of self-presentation and self-position), this 'performative violence'

is also a force of différance, with deconstructive effects, implying a performativity

before and beyond its stabilisation into isolated performative 'acts', 'subjectivities',

'powers', 'authorities' or 'dominations' — all that we could call, following Cynthia

Weber, 'performative states' (be them states or States).

In Derrida's words: the 'originary performativity' 'does not conform to

preexisting conventions, unlike all the performatives analyzed by the theoreticians of

speech acts', but its 'force of rupture produces the institution or the constitution, the law

itself, which is to say also the meaning that appears to, that ought to, or that appears to

have to guarantee it in return' (1994, 36). This 'originary performativity' is thus a 'force

of transformation' (Dillon 2007) affecting performatives in their so-called self-origin: as

performativity differing from itself, legitimacy differing from itself, it both commands

and challenges performatives before and beyond any self-justifying closure.

The idea of a failing presentationality, of a quasi-ontology beyond

performativity, is notably expressed by Derrida through the notion of perverformativity

(Derrida 2008, 224; Hamacher 2008, 196), which signifies the always possible

pervertibility of the performative: in this possibility, the opposition between felicity and

infelicity is exceeded by a more powerful 'logic', akin to what I defined as an originary

fallibility of the performative. It does not signify that all performatives must

systematically 'fail' or become parodic or perverted; rather, that the conditions of their

success or failure depend on another interpretation (itself performative and thus

pervertible), which structurally prevents the closure of circular performativity into

tautological self-presence. Pervertibility is a becoming-other. The paradoxical 'success'

of the performative is suspended to the signature of the unpredictable other; as such, this

'success' can never absolutely equate itself, and is always already subject to a

differentiating and transformative reinterpretation, relocation and excessive

relegitimation. The hermeneutic circle of the performative is thus threatened by an

always-possible perversion of the normativity that it meant to instantiate. This

possibility is irreducible; it supposes a structural pervertibility of the normative power

of the performative, of the performative as normative. It signifies a mutual

contamination of perversity and normativity before and beyond the perverse/normal

distinction9.

As the conditions of its satisfaction are suspended to the event of a legitimation-

to-come, the true 'success' of the performative remains ultimately enclosed into a

mystique, a secret. I emphasise this notion because the 'mystical' dimension will return

in our analysis of Max Weber's verstehende Soziologie:

Even if the success of performatives that found a law (for example, and this is more than an example, of a state as guarantor of a law) presupposes earlier conditions and conventions (for example, in the national and international arena), the same "mystical" limit will reemerge at the supposed origin of said conditions, rules or conventions, and at the origin of their dominant interpretation. (Derrida 2002b, 242)

Essentially secretive, self-separated, founded in unpresentable eventness, the

performative involves a force of obligation which is irreducibly fictional or fabular. Its

'success' ultimately relies on an act of faith. In this paradoxical relation to eventness, the

performative thus capitalises on 'credibility' (to speak like Butler), on 'beliefs' (to speak

like Max Weber), or on what Derrida calls, in order to name the paradoxical effectivity

and force of this 'make-believe' without opposite, the phantasma:

As we know, phantasma also named for the Greeks the apparition of the specter, the vision of the phantom, or the phenomenon of the revenant. The fabulous and the phantasmatic have a feature in common: stricto sensu, in the classical and prevalent sense of these terms, they do not pertain to either the true or the false, the veracious or the mendacious. They are related, rather, to an irreducible species of the simulacrum or even of simulation, in the penumbral light of a virtuality that is neither being nor nothingness, nor even an order of the possible that an ontology or a mimetology could account for or subdue with reason. No more than myth, fable and phantasm are doubtless not truths or true statements as such, but neither are they errors or deceptions, false witness or perjuries. (Derrida 2002a, 28)

The notion of a phantasmatic legitimacy would thus imply a hauntological (rather than

ontological) understanding of performativity (Derrida 1994, 202; Hamacher 2008, 191-

192). Etymologically, the notion of performativity refers to the performance of an act

which can fully accomplish or 'furnish' the event that it instantiates: 'to perform' derives

from Old French parfornir (to carry out, fulfill, furnish completely). This can only

result in an account of eventness characterised by an ontology of self-presence. On the

contrary, phantasmaticity would refer to an unfulfilled performativity, incapacitated in

its effort to instantiate the very event that it strives to perform. By definition, a

phantasm does not present itself: it exceeds the categories of felicity or infelicity,

veraciousness or falsity, being and nothingness. Phantasmaticity thus implies a non-

ontological relation to truth and legitimacy, a relation that is neither representational

(like the constative) nor (self-)presentational (like the traditional performative).

3. Deconstructing the sovereignty-legitimacy paradigm: symbolic powers and the

coloniality of language

Accounting for the fallibility of the performative induces a reconfiguration of

the articulation between sovereign power and legitimacy such as presented by Max

Weber in his theory of domination. In Economy and Society, the socio-historical process

of legitimation is conceived as a form of instrumentalisation of 'cultural phenomena' in

order to consolidate domination. Weber's technical definition of legitimacy presupposes

a 'spontaneous' obedience to domination, some irreducible 'will to obey' (1976, 122),

which may be politically influenced through a certain control over the psychological

factors and the 'subjective signification' (1978, 4) of such obedience. This may include

some form of 'mass domestication' through the efforts of religious authorities (1978,

477), the imposition of a 'myth' (Legende) justifying the superiority of the dominant

group (953-954), or specific politics of education and language, as demonstrated in the

chapter 'The Basis of Legitimacy': 'The scope of determination of social relationships

and cultural phenomena [Kulturerscheinungen] by virtue of domination is considerably

broader than appears at first sight. For instance, the domination exercised in the schools

has much to do with the determination of the forms of speech and of written language

which are regarded as orthodox' (1978, 215; translation modified). This factorisation of

culture into the phenomenon of domination is one of the most important aspects of the

Weberian legacy. Bourdieu, for instance, was particularly interested in the cultural

implications of Weber's domination-legitimacy paradigm, which he re-interpreted under

the name of symbolic capital, power or violence, also involving some politics of

performativity (Bourdieu, 1991).

This cultural and linguistic dimension of political power (unless it be, rather, an

immediate politicity of all culture and language) was approached differently by Derrida:

in The Monolingualism of the Other (1998), he defined an essential 'coloniality' of all

linguisticality, of 'the very language of the Law', of 'law as language' (39). This

irreducible coloniality involves the violence of an 'originary "alienation" which

institutes every language as a language of the other: the impossible property of a

language' (63). I shall return to this structural 'otherness' or heteronomy of law and

language in my conclusive remarks, as it might be the chance for another representation

of legitimacy, beyond socio-ontological categories and beyond performativity. Before

we get there, Derrida defines a tendency 'to reduce language to the One, that is, to the

hegemony of the homogeneous' (1998, 40). The attempt of 'homo-hegemony' is at work

in all culture, which always implies some form of epistemic violence or 'domestication',

violent alienation and expropriation, be it in their traditionally 'colonial' form or not10.

This ipsocratic (2005a, 17) tendency, which might be defined, in M. Weber's terms, as

an effort of monopolisation of legitimacy, is first and foremost inscribed in the

coloniality of language itself, and thus exceeds in its scope the traditional concepts of

political power, centralised sovereignty or monopolistic domination. This does not

mean that this attempt to monopolisation is not in itself 'legitimate': it is the very

legitimacy of performative power at work, characterised, in its effort of self-assertion

and self-legitimation, by a tendency to conceal the heterogeneity of the event precisely

because it signifies the defeat of performativity.

The deconstructive approach to performativity allows us to emphasise the

fallibility of the homo-hegemonic monopolisation of legitimacy, and thus to do justice

to the event before and beyond performative sovereignties. Indeed, the very concept of

monopolistic legitimacy constitutes, in itself, an occultation of the differential process

of legitimation implied by the logic of performative interpretability. Derrida, in a

reading of Bourdieu, expressed his distrust vis-à-vis the sociological concept of

legitimation for similar reasons: all effort of institutionalisation implies a de- and re-

contextualisation of legitimacies, that is to say a differing legitimation or a differing

interpretation of existing legitimacies (which are, in themselves, 'always heterogeneous

and worked through by contradictions'): 'This simple fact is enough to threaten the very

concept of legitimation to the core: it has no opposite. Nonlegitimacy can appear as

such, be its signs ever so discreet, only in a process of prelegitimation' (Derrida 2002d,

14). The notion that legitimacy is always heterogeneous, even in and through the

supposed homo-hegemony of the dominant's 'legend', goes to subvert the definition of

the State as monopoly of legitimate violence. It also signifies that there is no 'outside' of

legitimacy: every political situation, every domination, even the most centralised in

appearance, must present conflicts in legitimacies and in the interpretations thereof. In

this sense, the definition of the State as centralised or monopolistic is itself the result of

a legendary or fabular discourse. Interestingly, this same conviction is what justifies

Max Weber's implicit suspicion towards the 'juristic' 'conception' of 'sovereignty', which

conceals, in the name of sovereign 'unity', the competitive character of transactions and

negotiations between different organs within the State (M. Weber 1978, 670). But the

same questions may be raised with regard to 'monopolised' legitimacy. In other words,

the definition of legitimacy as monopolistic operates as a performative (forceful)

stabilisation of the differential violence implied by the interpretability of said

legitimacy, within the State and beyond, and always in the name of some tentative

homo-hegemony.

How should this affect the definitition of the State as a strictly 'sociological'

object? The expression of (legitimate) sovereignty, through its sociological translation

into the 'monopoly of the legitimate use of physical constraint', is put in question,

virtually, with every performative interpretation of its legitimating principles (and,

naturally, of the violence that is supposedly enacted in the name of these principles).

Each interpretative reading of practices, within or without the State, already constitutes,

potentially, a rupture of its monopoly by calling for other legitimations (and by

anticipating, at least virtually, on the violence and/or counterviolence of their

enforcement). In the same manner, each (violent) operation of law-enforcement

attributed to 'the State', even the least violent and the most 'routinised' in appearance,

potentially betrays the monopoly of legitimate violence because it is ultimately

dependent on interpretative-performative readings (and not only so-called 'self-

legitimating' discourses), which may always highlight the illegitimate character of such

violence. The same can be said about anyone attempting to justify the 'conservation' or

'reproduction' of the so-called 'present' situation, as they must argue their case through

the invocation of a non-presentable present, in the name of some ('better' or 'less bad')

future. Everytime one speaks for 'us', each time one says 'we', 'our present', 'our State' or

'our people', they must speak in the name of an unpresentable event (Derrida 2002b,

269), anticipating on some other, undefinable succes beyond names and legitimacies.

This inaugural moment is unjustifiable in the eyes of the present.

In "Force of Law", Derrida demonstrates that there is 'something of the [...]

revolutionary situation' 'in every reading that founds something new' by providing a

transformative, and therefore forceful, interpretation of the law and of its legitimating

principles. But this reading, because it is already transformative, may only appear as

illegitimate, unreadable and unintelligible with respect to so-called 'present' norms: its

conditions of legitimacy thus remain 'unreadable in regard to established canons and

norms of reading — that is to say the present state of reading or of what figures the

State (with a capital S), in the state of possible reading' (Derrida 2002b, 271). Whenever

one criticises the present situation, the current 'state' of affairs, they may only do so in

the name of different legitimating principles, or according to a different enunciation of

said principles; however, they must always partly play on something of the anterior

norm. Every politician, for instance, calling for a transformation of institutions, be it

against the State or 'within' the State, must justify their efforts by assuming different

legitimating principles, which signifies, always partially, different interpretations of

existing legitimacies. This effort of legitimation is always somewhat violent and

illegitimate because it implies delegitimating at least some aspects of the existing order,

in the name of a different law (and, already, in the name of its enforcement). Due to this

constitutive interpretability-fallibility of performativity, what is enforced as legitimate

violence may also appear, at least virtually, as illegitimate violence: in 'the "logic" of

this readable unreadability' (Derrida 2002b, 271), legitimate violence may always be

read as violent illegitimacy — both in turn and at once.

In this perspective, the notion of self-legitimation thus becomes virtually

nonsensical, because legitimation is always dependent on some differential

interpretation, which will claim to validate (or invalidate) 'the State' before or beyond

the ipseity of a self. There is no 'selfness' of the State. What figures the State in its

spectral essence is an ensemble of practices and legitimating conventions, already

potentially illegitimate because fundamentally contradictory or incompatible, and

phantasmatically held together through the 'presence' without presence of the State.

Beyond performative legitimacy, the State thus seems to instantiate (or to stabilise) this

impossible cohabitation (co-haunting) of legitimacy and illegitimacy, legitimacy as

illegitimacy, co-implicating the State and its other (the State as its other) in and through

what Cynthia Weber may have called an 'impossible' ontology. For these reasons, this

quasi-ontology is as much a hauntology. The impossible contradiction is made

seemingly possible through the spectral body of the State's phantasmatic sovereignty,

and is re-instituted, each time anew, each time self-contradictorily, through forceful

efforts of domestication and destructive violences, always physical and symbolic, both

punctually localised and spectrally disseminated. Indeed, emphasising the phantasmatic

dimension of the State's 'domination' is not to say that the phantasm does not have

'undeniable consequences', and often forceful, hurtful implications (Derrida 2011, 185);

but the phantasm escapes, by definition, the conditions of ontological performativity:

self-production, self-presence and sovereign ipseity. If there is 'the State', it involves

structural divisibility, autoimmune destructions, suicidal practices and self-betrayals,

but also brutal reinventions and violent convulsions which, each time singular, put to

question the homo-hegemony of sovereignty and the conditions of its legitimacy. We

are thus far from the idea of an 'effective' structure of domination, of a 'present',

'successfully' claimed, monopoly of legitimate violence. Consequently, calling this a

'success' (Erfolg) would already constitute a performative, legitimating reading of what

the State phantasmatically constitutes as monopolistic homo-hegemony. It is not certain

that the concept of domination (Herrschaft), through its persistent reliance on the ipseity

of the Lord, Herr, dominus, is able to render the undeniable, though irreducibly

disseminated and differentiated, violence of such spectrality.

4. Phantasmaticity and fictionality

What remains to think is the 'logic' of the phantasm, at the intersection of

psychoanalysis and political theory. Indeed, according to Derrida, 'psychoanalysis has

not yet undertaken and thus still less succeeded in thinking, penetrating, and changing

the axioms of the ethical, the juridical, and the political, notably in those seismic places

where the theological phantasm of sovereignty quakes and where the most traumatic,

[...] the most cruel events of our day are being produced' (2002a, 244). Exceeding the

categories of socio-onto-phenomenology, the phantasm involves 'a symptomatology of

the unconscious' (57). It locates itself beyond the mere opposition between

consciousness and unconscious, and implies some form of vision and visibility, some

appearance and disappearance of the phenomenal apparition (phaínesthai, Erscheinung)

— but it escapes the fully visible presence of a theoria. The phantasm does not present

itself: its existence may only been reconstructed, presumed, allegedly testified, and thus

implies some irreducible appeal to belief and faith, even to 'self-belief' — a notion

which already signifies a split within the identity of individual ipseity, and affects the

motif of 'subjective signification', in Max Weber's sense, with an irreducible self-

division. No one has ever 'seen', what one calls 'seeing', or of course 'touched', a State,

its sovereignty or legitimacy. But furthermore, no one can testify absolutely for one's

interpretation thereof, and for the promise of ipseity that it supposes. These objects and

their interpretation, each time unique, are only possible. They may be. However, a

phantasm cannot be rejected as an illusion through a mere theoretical dissipation. The

phantasmatic is precisely what allows what 'may' be to have some sort of operability: it

upholds the referentiality to some phantasmal ipseity (that of the State, for instance,

sovereignty in its most powerful legitimacy), while this ipseity may only exist as

infinitely divisible, always differing from itself, legitimate-illegitimate, suspended to

another legitimacy and to the other's signature. As the success of this performative

referentiality is ultimately dependent on the force of the event, there is no way to

demonstrate the reality of a phantasm, to circumscribe its truth and to draw its limits: by

definition, a phantasm is always somehow failing in the eyes of an ontology11. This

does not mean that the phantasm has no effectivity; it might even be extremely powerful

at other levels, through effects of haunting and 'unconscious beliefs' — which suggests a

paradoxical force of the phantasm, under the 'amorphous' form of phantasmal eventness

(Derrida 2011, 185-186) which may remain silent, invisible and secret, at the border

between consciousness and unconscious.

However, it would seem that in the State, the phantasmatic should be at its most

powerful: 'An omnipotent phantasm, of course, because it is a phantasm of

omnipotence. [...] the word sovereignty has only ever translated the performative

violence that institutes in law a fiction or a simulacrum' (Derrida 2005c, 106; translation

modified). As a phantasmatically centralised, monopolistic point of referentiality, as the

locus of the greatest force and legitimacy, State's sovereignty supposedly upholds all

phantasmaticity through the attempted legitimation of its own phantasm. This is the

very violence of its fabular power. But even so the phantasm preserves an irreducible

fictionality, which affects the conditions and the structure of political domination. As a

'subject' (and a supposedly sovereign subject), I do as if I could grasp the event of the

State as an all-powerful performative; as if it were possible to know once and for all if

such performative were successful or not; and as if I knew what success is (in other

words: what ontology is). The phantasm thus signifies the irreducibility of a possible

fictionality of all language and all experience (Derrida 2002c, 354), especially whenever

and wherever some sovereign ipseity is concerned. In this spectral economy, the

possibility of fiction affects all transactions and definitions, all ontologies, which

implies that we must speak as if there were no phantasms, as if we knew exactly what

we meant when we speak of 'the State', of its sovereign ipseity, and, first and foremost,

as if we knew what we meant when we say 'I', 'I believe', 'I believe I can say I' (etc.); for

instance: 'I believe in the legitimacy of the State', or 'I believe that the State successfully

claims the monopoly of legitimate violence' (which should be two different things, as I

will show in a moment). In other words, the 'as if' of the phantasm forces us to abide to

an archi-originary fictionality, to an irreducible substrate of belief, and this at the very

moment when we claim that there may be something else than fictions, and that

ontological categories may be more than quasi-ontological or phantasmatic categories.

There is no other option than to believe that there be more than mere beliefs, more than

mere legitimate beliefs or credible legitimacies: in this nexus of legitimacy and

'religiosity' (Derrida 2002b, 70), the sovereign ipseity of the believer and that of the

'thing' believed (par excellence: the onto-theological phantasm of State's sovereignty)

are mutually phantasised and spectrally cemented. This process of reciprocal haunting

makes it impossible to identify the source of legitimation and sovereignty (be it the

individual's or the State's): their common origin is this archi-originary belief without

opposite, 'this fiduciary "link" ' to the other as pure singularity (55). Needless to say

that, in this appeal, such belief may only appear as paradoxical, fragile and haunted.

5. Max Weber's 'as if': Macht, domination and legitimacy

If I insist on the fictionality of this 'as if', the possibility of which contaminates

all language and all experience, that is because it is explicitly and repeatedly mentioned

by Max Weber, and constitutes the paradoxical foundation, admittedly 'awkward', of his

sociology of domination (Herrschaftssoziologie). According to Weber, the analogical

structure of the 'as if' (als ob) remains absolutely 'unavoidable' (unvermeidlich), simply

because it allows him to account for domination sociologically, that is to say faithfully

to 'sociological conceptuality' (M. Weber 1978, 946; 1976, 544): what is at stake, here,

is the definition of the conditions of possibility of understanding 'domination'

(Herrschaft) according to the protocols of sociological methodology, in opposition to

the formless concept of power (Macht). This is crucial, because the 'sociological

concept of domination' (1978, 53) also determines those of 'politics' and 'the State' (as

Herrschaftsstruktur). Indeed, Max Weber's conviction is that the term Macht (power,

force12) has no socio-ontological consistency: 'The concept of power [Macht] is

sociologically amorphous. All conceivable qualities of a person and all conceivable

combinations of circumstances may put him in a position to impose his will in a given

situation' (1978, 53). Because Macht is not a relevant or precise enough notion in

sociological terms, Weber then suggests that it should not be used, and prefers the more

'technical' concept of domination: 'The sociological concept of domination must hence

be more precise and can only mean the probability that a command [Befehl] will be

obeyed [Fügsamkeit]' (53). Whatever the worth of this conceptual precision, it is of

interest that the notion of power or force (Macht) is from the onset considered as

inapplicable in a sociological perspective, which signifies that political sociology can

only concern itself, as sociology of domination, with this representation of domination,

understood as the study of the probability (Chance) that an order (Befehl) be followed.

Max Weber thus conceives sociological method as a study of the conditions of

possibility of compliance or submission (Fügsamkeit), which shall indeed lead to a

sociological enactment of the successful reproduction of domination. His theoretical

exclusion of the concept of Macht is as much a recognition of an epistemic or

conceptual limit (the amorphousness of power or force, unpredictable and escaping

ontological formalisation), as it is a delimitation of the field of applicability and domain

of competence of sociological methodology: there cannot be any socio-ontology of

Macht, and this is why one needs a clear concept of domination.

The concept of legitimacy is the most important, but also (and admittedly) the

most fragile element of this theoretical architecture. Legitimacy depends on an

analogical reasoning which suspends obedience to an 'as if': in a situation of

'domination', everything happens as if the dominated individual were making the will of

the dominant the impulsion of their own action:

As 'domination', we shall understand here the following state of affairs: that a manifest will (an 'order') of the 'dominant(s)' intends to affect, and effectively affects, the activity of others (the 'dominated', singular or plural), in such a way that this activity, to a socially relevant degree, occurs as if the dominated had made the content of the dominant's order the very maxim of their activity for its own sake. (This is what we call 'obedience'.)

This formulation, with the 'as if', sounds awkward, but it is unavoidable if one wants to take as basis the concept of domination that we have hypothesised. (M. Weber 1978, 946; 1976, 544; translation modified; my emphasis)

Why is the 'as if' unavoidable? This is for two correlated and somewhat mutually

exclusive reasons. First, it is a requirement of Max Weber's interpretative method,

verstehende Soziologie: 'Sociology [...] is a science concerning itself with the

interpretative understanding [deutend verstehen] of social activity and thereby with a

causal explanation of its course and effects. We shall speak of 'activity' [Handeln]

insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning [subjektiven Sinn] to his

behaviour — be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence. Activity is 'social' insofar

as its subjective meaning takes account of the behaviour of others and is thereby

oriented in its course' (1978, 4; translation modified). In accounting for the inner,

'subjective' signification of obedience, interpretative sociology thus strives to

understand the 'phenomenon of domination' (1978, 216; 1976, 124: Erscheinung der

Herrschaft) through the validity of its legitimation, and thus to establish causal

inferences, as well as a typological and taxonomic classification of

domination/legitimation (more exactly: of different types of dominations in function of

their mode of legitimation). Without the assumption ('as if') of this subjective meaning

(and thus of the general criteria of validation for different types of dominations), there

would be no way to dissociate domination from the amorphousness of Macht. Thus, the

conditions of possibility of legitimacy are also the conditions of legitimation of the

sociological method in its power to interpret (verstehen) force and domination, and,

subsequently, politics and the State. Secondly, Weber is indeed very cautious when it

comes to determining the conditions of possibility of the interpretative gesture itself —

which must presuppose, following the empirical cases, a methodological individualism,

the recognition of a play between honesty and dishonesty, the postulate of self-

consciousness, the pondering of irrational motives, etc. (see M. Weber 1978, 4-22). The

mitigating factors of 'probability', 'plausibility' or 'possibility' (7-12; 17-20) are thus as

much on the side of the interpretative methodology as on that of domination itself

(understood as the probability that an order may be obeyed), which implies a redoubling

of the 'as if': not only the 'dominated' individual seems to act as if the content of the

dominant's order determined the maxim of their activity for its own sake, but the

sociologist-interpret must do as if this 'as if' were sufficient to determine the presence of

legitimacy, that is to say to determine the reality, the force and the influence of

legitimacy as such — and, following, the reality of political domination, and of the

State as such. Because legitimacy 'itself' escapes empiricity, while remaining

'unavoidable' in order to distinguish domination from purely amorphous Macht, the

sociologist must do as if there were no 'as ifs', and as if interpretability were already

socio-ontologically descriptive — which entails the reduction of the 'as if' (the assumed

'subjective signification' of an activity) into the indication of the presence of a

legitimate domination as such. This reduction of interpretability into a socio-ontology is

finally enacted when, despite all the 'as ifs', sovereign domination is defined as 'success'

(and, exemplarily, through the definition of the State's claim to the monopoly of

legitimate violence as essentially 'successful'). This gesture validates legitimate

domination as an ontological success in and through its supposed influence as such, as

legitimate, on the activity of the dominated individual — which implies an

interpretative choice in favour of a socio-ontology that must suspend all the as ifs.

6. Believing and resistance, beyond sovereign ipseity: auto-heteronomy

As a conclusion, I will collect my previous remarks through the formalisation of

a certain overarching contradiction in the epistemic principles of Max Weber's

interpretative sociology. I shall then emphasise an uncanny relation between the concept

of belief (which is at the basis of Weber's hermeneutics of legitimacy) and that of

individual ipseity. This will be the occasion to sketch another 'logic' of legitimation,

through the elaboration of a non-ontological, non-ipsocratic 'concept' of legitimacy.

On the one hand, Weber strives to give a sociological account of so-called

'irrational phenomena' (irrationale Erscheinungen): 'sociological investigation attempts

to include in its scope various irrational phenomena, such as prophetic, mystic, spiritual

[pneumatische] and affectual modes of action, formulated in terms of theoretical

concepts which are adequate on the level of meaning' (1978, 20; 1976, 10; translation

modified). The consequence of Weber's phenomenology (or phantasmology) is an

inflation of discourses concerned with 'subjective signification', be it rational or

irrational. The appeal to 'beliefs in legitimacy' (Legitimitäts-Glauben) (1978, 31; 1976,

16) is constant in Economy and Society, and conditions all matters of legitimation, not

only in the 'technical', 'sociological' sense of the term, but in its irreducibly disseminal

polysemy: the obligatory force of legitimation potentially assumes political, economic,

or religious dimensions — the three domains being brought together, notably, through

the antanaclastic usage of the term 'credit' (Kredit) (1978, 588; 1976, 355). The recourse

to the credo of 'beliefs', and thus to a certain religiosity, concerns more particularly the

concept of charismatic legitimacy, which is explicitly presented as a secularisation of a

Christian motif: 'The concept of "charisma" ("the gift of grace") is taken from the

vocabulary of early Christianity' (1978, 216). But the appeal to beliefs is also constantly

asserted in relation to specifically 'rational' modes of legitimation, such as the State's

(for instance: 1978, 903-904, where the notions of 'prestige' and 'consecration' [Weihe]

play a significant role13). In the last instance, the legitimating power of narrative fiction

(notably through the structuring concept of 'self-legitimation' as 'myth' or 'legend') must

always find effectivity through the belief or 'acceptance' (953) of the dominated

individuals. Nothing can ultimately prove this acceptance, or, conversely, its

'problematisation' (953). The force of legitimacy is thus always dependent on the

mystique of an 'as if' which, in itself, cannot be empirically observed or proved as such,

and escapes phenomenologisation or ontologisation.

On the other hand, Weber attempts to stabilise the effects of this limitless

phantasmaticity through the maintaining of socio-ontological categories. The main

recourse of this ontology is his methodological individualism, which anchors Weber's

phantasmology into an ipsocentric representation of 'reality'. In a fashion reminiscent of

Marx and Engels' theory of ideology14 (such as presented in The German Ideology), this

gesture starts with an anthropological grounding of phantasma 'in the heads of real men'

(in den Köpfen realer Menschen): 'collective constructs' (Kollektivgebilde) are

essentially defined as mere thoughts (Denken) or representations (Vorstellungen),

although, as such, they affect tremendously (gewaltige), and even dominate

(beherrschende) the activity of individuals (1978, 14; 1976, 7). Even so, the dominant

power of phantasms, which supposedly determines the structure of legitimate

obedience, remains, however, suspended to the analogical logic of the 'as if'. In many

ways, Weber's definition of the domination-obedience structure functions as a parodic

perversion of Kant's categorical imperative. For instance, from the Groundwork: 'The

formal principle of these maxims is, act as if [als ob] your maxims were to serve at the

same time as a universal law (for all rational beings)' (Kant 1997, 45). But while Kant's

categorical imperative is the transcendantal foundation of moral autonomy, Weber

formalises, under the structure of legitimate domination, a radical heteronomy, since the

dominated individual acts as if they were making the content of the dominant's will the

maxim of their action. In and through legitimation, domination functions as a transfer of

will, as if the dominant's 'will' were ventriloquing the dominated, and expressing itself

directly through the dominated's activity. It almost happens as if the dominant's 'order',

his or her 'will', did not even need to be enunciated as such, in a sort of machinistic

automatism through which legitimate law is enacted without performative interpretation

or transformative translation, and without remainder. Of course, Weber makes it

perfectly clear that the resources of the obedience may be diverse, contradictory, and

ultimately unknowable; however, legitimate domination always supposes 'a minimum

will to obey' (Minimum an Gehorchen wollenn) (1976, 122), which signifies,

necessarily, some abdication of personal will in the name of some other law or

legitimacy. What Weber fails to conceptualise is the paradoxical mechanism of this

willful abdication in favour of another will. In this gesture, Weber still sees the ipseic

expression of a 'subjective meaning', even though this meaning is not exactly

'sovereign', since it is defined through a radical heteronomy of the law (through 'beliefs'

or an 'acceptation' by the dominated). The concept of legitimacy, and the logic of beliefs

('rational' or not) attached to it, thus seem to preserve intact the ipseity of individuals

and that of the structure of legitimate domination that they supposedly uphold as such

through the 'as if' of their beliefs, making the power of the State 'successful' in its effort,

its 'will', to perpetuate itself as self-legitimating origin or arkhe.

In this conceptual architecture, the notion of 'belief' carries the weight of the

argument. Everything is laid out by M. Weber as if it were possible to theorise beliefs,

to take 'subjective meaning' as ontological object through and beyond sociological

interpretability. This is due to the fact that Weber binds the presence of 'beliefs' to what

he believes to be the only scale of signification accessible to sociological interpretation:

'subjective understanding' or individual ipseity (1978, 13). His justification for the

methodology of interpretative sociology relies on the notion that sociology should be

free of value judgements (Wertfreiheit), so that the sociologist can describe the actors'

beliefs, thus defining (through axiological neutrality) the subjective signification of

activity. But what does believing mean, 'this strange and troubling, unheimlich concept

of belief or credit, of the act of faith, of trusting' (Derrida 2014, 153)? 'What difference

is there between believing and not believing for the unconscious' (2011, 157) — and for

the phantasm? In The Death Penalty Vol. I (2014), Derrida showed that believing does

not have a contrary, because it involves a cognitive uncertainty and the phantasmatic 'as

if', that is to say a form of representationality before or beyond theoretical knowledge,

before full presence of consciousness. If I believe in something (for instance, in the

legitimacy of the State), it signifies that I only believe in it, and whatever the strength of

my faith, believing also implies the seduction of its own simulacrum, the simulation of

belief, active believing in my own belief, make-believe, and therefore nonbelief

(incroyance): I can only let 'myself' believe in something that must be, also, in all

rigour, somehow unbelievable, quite simply because it cannot be proved and

demonstrated beyond the phantasmatic. This spectral possession is already haunted by

its opposite. Believing (in some idea of legitimation, for instance) also signifies not

believing in it, both at once and in turn, thus revealing the self-differentiality of

legitimacy in a fashion akin to the deconstructive logic of performativity:

To believe is this strange divided state or this strange divided movement, quasi-hypnotic, in which I am not myself, in which I do not know what I know, in which I do not do what I do, in which I doubt the very thing I believe or in which I believe. Believing, in sum, is not believing; to believe is not to believe. And the whole origin of religion, like that of society, culture, the contract in general, has to do with this nonbelief at the heart of believing. (2014, 154)

Therefore, the position of beliefs as such is already an interpretative gesture, which

should go to problematise all attempt at an interpretative sociology pretending to

construct 'believing' as its object. The theoretical positing of beliefs, their description as

present and localised signifiers, and their ascription to determinate individuals, already

imply a stabilisation of conditions of legitimation and domination, notably through an

occultation of the essential self-division consubstantial with believing, self-separation of

the believing subject which affects all ipseity with an essential divisibility: 'this internal

division, this properly analytic dissociation, this cleavage, this split [schize] of believing

haunted by nonbelief is almost quasi-hypnotic, one might say spectral, quasi-

hallucinatory, or unconscious' (2014, 154). This hallucinatory spectacle signifies an

irreducible alienation, a dissociative experience in and through which beliefs uncannily

escape from the personal power and control of subjectivity as ipseity: beliefs exceed

identity and property, they do not belong. However, in Weber's paradoxical

anthropological methodology, the notion of ipseity remains defined as power, power to

be self, notably through the paradoxical possession of one's 'own' beliefs, and even

though this possession proceeds only under the mode of an 'as if'. This analogical

structure of possession, however, is not easily shaken off. The structure of believing as a

pre-subjective and pre-individual haunting, this fundamental recourse to an irreducible

fiduciarity which connects ipseity to the other, is actually presented by Weber as the

most adequate description of the relation of political domination and obedience.

Through the formulation of this 'as if' consubstantial with his hermeneutics of

legitimation-domination, Weber touches upon something of the paradoxical essence of

law and legitmation in relation to ipseity. The paradox is as follows: I have no other

choice than, performatively, enacting the Law, through my obedience, my beliefs, my

interpretations, my practices, (etc.), be it in order to 'accept' it or contest it — but Law

'itself' remains fundamentally heterogeneous and inappropriable. This double structure

determines our relation to 'Law as Language': 'Its experience would be ostensibly

autonomous, because I have to speak this law and appropriate it in order to understand it

as if I was giving it to myself, but it remains necessarily heteronomous, for such is, at

bottom, the essence of any law' (Derrida 1998, 39). The movement of this inevitable,

though ultimately impossible, appropriation is what Derrida names the 'auto-

heteronomic' structure of Language as Law. As such, this double structure both allows

the peformative position of ipseity, and forbids the closure of its performative power

into a tautological self-legitimation.

Certainly, this double movement is not without violence. First, it permits the

performative positing of the law, legitimacy, power, domination, colonialisms,

sovereignties, ipseities, and all the violences which go with these ontological categories;

but, secondly, it also signifies the essential inappropriability of these categories, always-

already deconstructible, affected by the force of the event and the tremendous effects of

the 'as if'. This second 'concept' of violence is thus an 'originary alienation', as it

demands the to-come of the signature of the other, of the unpresentable event. As such,

this force is also a chance given to possible ameliorations and progress: it is an archi-

performative promise, though one whose effects are forever undecidable and

fundamentally pervertible. This promise addresses itself to the im-possible other,

beyond localised conventions of legitimation, performative self-legitimations, and

sovereign ipseities.

*

In his conference "Politics as Vocation" (1919), Max Weber already approached

the essential im-possibility of politics, within the State and perhaps beyond, through

what I would call the self-excessive character of politicity:

It is completely true, and all historical experience confirms it, that what is possible could never have been achieved if one had not constantly reached for the impossible in the world. (2008, 207)

If we disconnect M. Weber's representation of politics from its socio-ontological

presuppositions (starting with its methodological individualism and its ipsocratic

concept of domination), we have here a definition of the political event as im-

possibility. The event, before or beyond politics, must exceed conditions of possibility

and legitimation attached to the traditional performative. This signifies that the event

must be essentially unpredictable, virtually secret and silent in spite of its force, and that

it can never be fully theorised or rationally arraigned. As such, the im-possibility of the

event is not an accidental characteristic of politics, which would remain localised, for

instance, in its revolutionary 'moments' (which are attached, according to Weber, to the

'extra-ordinary' and irrational character of charisma, defined as a 'specifically

revolutionary force' [M. Weber 1998, 244]). The radical a-legitimacy of the event is

what makes it possible for politics (and the State) to have a history: 'it is the whole

history of law' (Derrida 2002b, 270), as self-differential history.

In its im-possibility, the event implies a suspension of all phantasms of

'successful' sovereignties and legitimacies, of all beliefs and performative conventions,

in order to make law; and it does so from an atopic place where legitimacy and

illegitimacy are undistinguished. The im-possibility of the event is as much a fallibility,

because the conditions of its success and/or failure remain to come. Why insisting on

'fallibility' rather than 'failure'? Quite simply because, in order to determine a systematic

or automatic failure, one that would be absolutely certain and decidable as 'non-

success', we would still have to rely on some performative power or transcendental

agency, under the form of some sovereign decision based on assured conditions of

legitimacy-illegitimacy. On the contrary, the fallibility of the performative (fallible in

the face of the event) is a chance given to the event beyond the success or failure

determined by homo-hegemonic dominations and monopolistic legitimacies. As such,

the concept of legitimacy, even in its most rigorous 'sociological definition' (indeed

attached to hermeneutics of domination and compliance) must presuppose another

'concept' of legitimacy, essentially foreign to the order of presence and success. This

legitimation-to-come, always-already transformative at a practical-theoretical level,

implies a form of non-performative or archi-performative resistance to performative

conventions, located 'within' the State and already beyond, an 'impower' preceding

power itself and affecting it unconditionally (Derrida 2002a, 98). In other words, it

signifies the unconditionality of deconstructive interpretability, preceding and

subverting phantasms of performative sovereignties and monopolistic legitimacies by

pointing to their essential divisibility and differentiality. This force of 'unconditional

resistance' (204) is always-already affecting performative sovereignties, first and

foremost through an autoimmune resistance of sovereignty, of sovereign ipseity to itself,

to itself as other (244): through this auto-affective and self-resisting structure of ipseity,

sovereignty resists itself in the name of sovereignty, of another sovereignty-to-come,

stronger, despite its essential fallibility, than sovereignty. This other sovereignty, which

does not constitute a 'super- or hyper-sovereignty', would be sovereignty in différance15.

1 I construct the concept of 'a-legitimacy' following the model of Derrida's 'a-legality', which

designates a juridic force of 'founding violence' that is neither legal nor illegal:

any juridico-political founding of a "living together" is, by essence, violent, since it inaugurates there where a law [droit] did not yet exist. The founding of a state or of a constitution, therefore, of a "living together" according to a state of law [un état du droit], is always first of all a nonlegal [a-légale] violence: not illegal but nonlegal [a-légale], otherwise put, unjustifiable with regard to an existing law, since the law is inexistent there where it is a matter of creating it. No state has ever been founded without this violence, whatever form and whatever time it might have taken. (Derrida 2013, 29-30)

I prefer the term 'a-legal' rather than 'nonlegal', here used by Gil Anidjar to translate 'a-

légale', because the violence described by Derrida still has a relation to the legality of the

law, even though this binding relation, in its founding 'moment', also implies a

disconnection, a force of rupture and obligation (under the form of what could be described

as an 'arche-originary pledge [gage]' [cf. Derrida 2005b, 244; see also Senatore 2013, 7-10]).

The notion of this binding violence, 'archi-originary force' holding together the same and the

other, was explored further in The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. II (Derrida 2011, 104-105;

254).

2 The term 'sovereign' derives from 'superanus', the power above, higher, superior (see Derrida

2005a, 168; Bennington 2005; 2006).

3 For discussions of Austin's theory of performativity, see among others Benveniste (1971),

Derrida (1982; 1988; 2002a; 2005a), Gasché (1981), Lyotard (1984), Bourdieu (1991),

Butler (1993), Sedgwick (1993). For discussions of Derrida's critique of Austin, see Butler

(1993; 1997), Cavell (1994), Sedgwick and Parker (1995), Gould (1995), Hillis Miller

(2007), Hamacher (2008), Fritsch (2013). For an excellent overview of the 'deconstructive

gesture' in the history of performativity studies, see Senatore (2013).

4 The most memorable example of an attempt to associate performativity with legitimation is of

course Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1984), although the political dimension of this

work remains limited, attached as it is to a representation of power and performativity as

absolutely self-legitimating (see page 47); this conflation of performativity and legitimation,

through the recourse of ipseity, tends to prevent further reflection on the question (see also

Hillis Miller's analysis of Lyotard's theory of performativity [2007, 223-224]). In Excitable

Speech (1997), Judith Butler articulates an interesting conversation between Bourdieu and

Derrida, which showcases the political dimension of performativity, and indeed highlights its

relation to legitimation. See also Boucher's critique of Butler on the same topic (2008), and

Fritsch (2013) on the relation between performativity and normativity in Derrida.

5 Derrida underlines the irreducibly performative, and thus undecidable, character of

performativity as theory: 'In speaking of performativity, I think as much of performativity as

the output of a technical system, in that place where knowledge and power are no longer

distinguished, as of Austin's notion of a speech act not confined to stating, describing, saying

that which is, but producing or transforming, by itself, under certain conditions, the situation

of which it speaks [...]. Interesting and interested debates that are developing more and more

around an interpretation of the performative power of language seem linked, in at least a

subterranean way, to urgent politico-institutional stakes. These debates are developing

equally in departments of literature, linguistics, and philosophy [this text was written in

1980; needless to say that the conceptuality attached to performativity has spread, since then,

far beyond these three departments]; and in themselves, in the form of their interpretative

statements, they are neither simply theoretico-constative nor simply performative. This is so

because the performative does not exist: there are various performatives, and there are

antagonistic or parasitical attempts to interpret the performative power of language, to police

it and use it, to invest it performatively. And a philosophy and a politics — not only a

general politics but a politics of teaching and of knowledge, a political concept of the

university community — are involved there every time, whether or not one is conscious of

this' (2004, 100). I shall return to the implications of such politics of language and education

in relation to legitimacy.

6 The whole question, here, has to do with the unfindable limit between 'legitimating' and

'legitimated', activity and passivity, force and resistance, subject and object (etc.); this

difficulty entails a subsequent interrogation of the distinction between result (or 'success')

and process, under the form of a tension between legitimacy (Legitimität) and legitimation

(Legitimierung) — analysed, notably, by Bennington (on the subject of Pascal's calculating

machine): 'This tension can be read as the conflict between legitimation and legitimacy [...].

The "legitimate" machine has to have its legitimacy certified, signed and sealed, precisely

because in its essence it exceeds legitimacy' (1994, 139-140). I shall return to this tension

(and the excessive 'logic' implied by it) in my analysis of Max Weber, but I will just add here

that the hypothesis of a certain machinistic dimension in and of legitimation as

performativity (a 'performing' performativity) brings to mind Carl Schmitt's ambiguous

critique of Max Weber's theory of the State, described as an enormous machinery: 'The

modern state seems to have actually become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial

plant' (Schmitt 2005, 65). The idea of a self-maintaining, self-legitimating, purely

automatised performative machine is precisely what we are trying, following Bennington, to

deconstruct here — although on very different intellectual grounds than Schmitt's, of

course!... The impossible concept of an essentially fallible machinery (performing as

fallible), of a structurally pervertible performativity, involving the passive decision of a

heteronomic sovereignty, would maybe indicate the chance of thinking politics as event: this

would be the monstrous event of a political machine, somewhere between Weber and

Schmitt, in-between and already beyond: 'For that, it would be necessary in the future (but

there will be no future except on this condition) to think both the event and the machine as

two compatible or even indissociable concepts' (on this machine-event as 'super-monster',

see Derrida 2002a, 72-73). For a comparative study of Schmitt and Weber, see Ulmen

(1985) and Kalyvas (2008).

7 See also, among others, Ashley (1988), Campbell (1998), C. Weber (1995; 2001), C. Weber

and Biersteker (1996).

8 Butler's approach to performativity then diverges from Derrida's, notably by introducing the

notion of 'dominant discourse'. Unfortunately, I cannot discuss Butler's argument in this

essay.

9 I must admit failure: unfortunately, I have not managed to engage, in the limits of this essay,

with matters of gender and queer performativity. I, however, consider them as essential. I am

hoping that the motifs that I have sketched under the names of fallibility and pervertibility

may intersect with some of the fundamental problematics that Cynthia Weber elaborates in

her most recent work, notably: the question of queer failure in relation the (im)possibility of

Queer International Theory (2015a); and her pluralised understanding of the perverse and the

normal beyond binary oppositions (2015b)... On the notion of pervertibility, characteristic of

the event beyond performativity, see Derrida (2007, 459). On a certain Unheimlichkeit of

becoming-queer, see Derrida's article on Hopkins and Hillis Miller (2005d).

10 The motif of an irreducible coloniality of all culture and language in general might constitute

the most central subject of this essay, as it brings together, in their most radical articulation,

force and signification, that is to say sovereignty and legitimacy, while also pointing to their

necessary dispersion, differentiality and divisibility. This violence of language is thus as

much an impower, a failure to dominate. On this account, I would like to recall that the title

of the Irish prose piece that I commented upon in my introduction, Beckett's Worstward Ho,

is a parodic performance of Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho!, a 1855 novel exalting

colonial exploration, imperialist views and racist stereotypes. It would not be much of a

surprise if Beckett's performative work on the defeat of language also constituted an indirect

commentary on the defeat of Western imperialism and colonialism, and, more generally, of

national politics, of a certain politicity envisaged as power, power to name and to master the

world, sovereignly, through language (on "Beckett, Nationalism, and the Colonial Subject",

see Lloyd 1989)... Max Weber's logic of sovereignty-legitimacy, notably through the guise

of linguistic politics, education and domestication within the State, strangely resembles a

form of 'domestic' coloniality, which reminds me of this oxymoronic notion of a ' "domestic"

intervention', once hypothesised by Cynthia Weber (1995, 106), and which still sounds

nonsensical in the eyes of socio-ontology and International Relations theory — which does

not mean that it does not have infinite relevance at other levels.

11 Conversely, ontology may only result in a failed attempt to exorcise a more powerful and

more originary hauntology: 'To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to

introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with

the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology.

Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration' (Derrida

1994, 202).

12 I prefer, in this context, to translate Macht as 'force' or 'might', quite simply because the

notion of 'power' may also designate a legitimate, instituted power (such as the State's, which

could be rendered in German by the term Gewalt, and that Weber would certainly describe

as Herrschaft, 'domination'); whereas Max Weber, here, clearly specifies that Macht is a

very general and potentially pre-political concept, exceeding the scope of a pure sociology of

domination. The translation of Macht as 'power', under these circumstances, would imply an

understanding of this notion as an extremely mobile, disseminated and circulative

phenomenon, not unlike Michel Foucault's own understanding of pouvoir (see Foucault

1978; 1982). On this notion of power or force as essentially decentralised, disseminated,

differential, and divisible, see [reference hidden for anonymity reasons].

13 On the subject of the State's authority, I would like to underline another difficulty concerning

more specifically the legitimating role of violence itself. In Max Weber's theory of rational

legitimation and modern domination, the State's centralised violence is legitimated (that is

the 'normal' or normative articulation between violence and legitimacy), but it is also said to

be legitimating: the monopoly of legitimate violence (and especially the power 'over life and

death') provides a surplus of prestige and legitimacy to the modern institution of State's

sovereignty (1978, 904). There is thus an uncertainty concerning the factoring of violence

vis-à-vis legitimation: on the one hand, legitimate domination supposes that obedience

cannot be the direct result of violence, threat, or fear (37) (because, in this case, domination

would conflate with any 'amorphous' form of Macht as violent intimidation, whatever its

resources); but, on the other hand, political domination (for instance, the State's) is explicitly

defined as the type of domination whose 'specific' characteristic is the use of 'physical force

(Gewaltsamkeit)', or of the threat of its use, as the 'last resort' of its domination (54).

Between the actual exercise of violence, the threat of using force (and the induction of fear),

and 'spontaneous', legitimate obedience (which supposedly excludes violence and threat), it

becomes difficult to assign legitimacies or illegitimacies, and to decide if obedience is

actually based on fear or on legitimation... On these premises, how does one define and

circumscribe 'fear'? And how could this difficulty not affect, adversely, the conceptualisation

of legitimate domination?

14 On ideology and spectrality, see notably Derrida (1994). For an analysis of the spectral

character of ideology in relation to the notion of Herrschaft, and a comparative study, on this

subject, between Marx and Engels's theory of ideology and Weber's hermeneutics of

legitimacy, see [reference hidden for anonymity reasons].

15 The reference to 'super- or hyper-sovereignty' is a nod to the last lines of Derrida's last

seminar, and to his interpretative analysis of Heidegger's lexicon of Walten. The passage in

question explicitly connects the motifs of power, sovereignty, failure and death:

The question, that was the question of the seminar, remains entire: namely that of knowing who can die. To whom is this power given or denied? Who is capable of death, and, through death, of imposing failure on the super- or hyper- sovereignty of Walten? (Derrida 2011, 290)

I wish to leave my expression 'sovereignty in différance' to its internal ambiguity, because I

believe that it illustrates, quite economically, the difficulties and paradoxes implied by this

notion of 'hyper-sovereignty' — especially through Derrida's critical appraisal, which re-

qualifies the prevalence of Walten by articulating it to failure and death.

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