An Anthropocentric Sovereignty

Few ideas today are as contested as sovereignty, in theory or in practice. In sovereignty theory scholars disagree about almost everything—what sovereignty is and where it resides, how it relates to law, whether it is divisible, how its subjects and objects are constituted, and whether it is being transformed in late modernity. These debates are mirrored in contemporary practice, where struggles for self-determination and territorial revisionism have generated among the bitterest conflicts in modern times.

Throughout this contestation, however, one thing is taken for granted: sovereignty is the province of humans alone. Animals and Nature are assumed to lack the cognitive capacity and/or subjectivity to be sovereign; and while God might have ultimate sovereignty, even most religious fundamentalists grant that it is not exercised directly in the temporal world. When sovereignty is contested today, therefore, it is always and only among humans, horizontally so to speak, rather than vertically with Nature or God. In this way modern sovereignty is anthropocentric, or constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone s1Anthropocentrism need not mean all human beings, since historically many physical humans were not considered humans socially. cf. Philip Almond, “Adam, Pre-Adamites, and Extra-Terrestrial Beings in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Religious History 30 (2006): 163-74.. Humans live within physical constraints, but are solely responsible for deciding their norms and practices under those constraints. Despite the wide variety of institutional forms taken by sovereignty today, they are homologous in this fundamental respect.

Anthropocentric sovereignty might seem necessary; after all, who else, besides humans, might rule? Nevertheless, historically sovereignty was less anthropocentric. For millennia Nature and the gods were thought to have causal powers and subjectivities that enabled them to share sovereignty with humans, if not exercise dominion outright s2Majid Yar, “From Nature to History, and Back Again: Blumenberg, Strauss and the Hobbesian Community,” History of the Human Sciences 15 (2002): 53-73.. Authoritative belief in non-human sovereignties was given up only after long and bitter struggle about the borders of the social world, in which who/what could be sovereign depends on who/what should be included in society s3Gesa Lindemann, “The Analysis of the Borders of the Social World,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35 (2005): 69-98.. In modernity God and Nature are excluded, although in this exclusion they are also re-included as the domesticated Other. Thus, while no longer temporally sovereign, God is included today through people who are seen to speak on Her behalf. And while Nature has been disenchanted, stripped of its subjectivity, it is re-included as object in the human world. These inclusive exclusions, however, reinforce the assumption that humans alone can be sovereign. In this light anthropocentric sovereignty must be seen as a contingent historical achievement, not just a requirement of common sense. Indeed, it is a metaphysical achievement, since it is in anthropocentric terms that humans today understand their place in the physical world. Thus operates what Giorgio Agamben calls the “anthropological machine.” s4Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

In some areas this metaphysics admittedly is contested. Suggestions of animal consciousness fuel calls for animal rights, for example, and advocates of “Intelligent Design” think God is necessary to explain Nature’s complexity. Yet, such challenges do not threaten the principle that sovereignty, the capacity to decide the norm and exception to it, must necessarily be human. Animals or Nature might deserve rights, but humans will decide that; and even Intelligent Designers do not claim that God exercises temporal sovereignty. With respect to sovereignty, at least, anthropocentrism is taken to be common sense, even in political theory, where it is rarely problematized s5Both the promise and the limits of modern critique are suggested by Jürgen Habermas, “A Conversation about God and World,” in Religion and Rationality, ed. E. Mendietta (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002), 147-67; and William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)..

This “common sense” is nevertheless of immense practical significance in the mobilization of power and violence for political projects. Modern systems of rule are able to command exceptional loyalty and resources from their subjects on the shared assumption that the only potential sovereigns are human. Imagine a counterfactual world in which God visibly materialized (as in the Christians’ “Second Coming,” for example): to whom would people give their loyalty, and could states in their present form survive were such a question politically salient? Anything that challenged anthropocentric sovereignty, it seems, would challenge the foundations of modern rule.

In this article we develop this point and explore its implications for political theory. Specifically, our intent is to highlight and engage critically the limits of anthropocentric sovereignty. In doing so, we seek to contribute to an eclectic line of critical theory of modern rule—if not sovereignty per se—which problematizes its anthropocentrism, a line that connects (however awkwardly and indirectly) Spinozan studies (including Donna Haraway and Gilles Deleuze) to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jane Bennett, and others s6Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (London: Routledge, 1991); Giorgio Agamben, The Open; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); and Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). . We do so through the phenomenon of the Unidentified Flying Object, or “UFO” n1We refer to “the” UFO, because that is how UFOs are treated in modern rule, as singular phenomenon. As known from subsequent identifications, however, UFOs are in fact not all the same., the authoritative disregard for which brings clearly into view the limits of anthropocentric metaphysics.

We proceed in four sections. In the first, we describe an animating puzzle—the “UFO taboo”—in order to set the empirical basis for our theoretical intervention. In the next we make this taboo puzzling through an immanent critique of the authoritative claim that UFOs are not extraterrestrial (ET). Then, in the third section, we solve the puzzle through a theoretical analysis of the metaphysical threat that the UFO poses to anthropocentric sovereignty. We conclude with some implications for theory and practice.