Sovereignty death literature unconditionality democracy university

J. P. Miller

pp. 25-36

in: Peter Pericles Trifonas, Michael A. Peters (eds), Deconstructing Derrida, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

My title is a series of six nouns set side by side without any verb or other ligature. How can they all be related? Perhaps it is impossible. That is my question here. Before trying to answer that question, let me begin by saying that it is difficult these days to talk dispassionately about sovereignty and death. We are now living in the United States in the midst of an unparalleled example of usurped or illegitimate sovereignty wantonly exercised. We have a president who was not elected and who is with his executive branch pursuing a policy of preemptive strikes, rejection of international treaties or international law, destruction of the environment, bankrupting the nation by running up gigantic deficits in order to benefit the rich, establishment of a permanent state of emergency justifying the suspension of constitutional civil liberties, and infliction of a constant state of terror on our citizens through the mass media and daily lies, such as the lies about Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" and his ties with Al-Qaeda.