A post-modern Hetoimasia - feigning sovereignty during the state of exception

Diamantides, Marinos (2019) A post-modern Hetoimasia - feigning sovereignty during the state of exception. In: Goodrich, P. and Rosenfeid, M. (eds.) Administering Interpretation: Derrida, Agamben, and the Political Theology of Law. New York, U.S.: Fordham University Press, pp. 189-233. ISBN 9780823283781.

Abstract

With reference to political decisions, court rulings and images from Greece at the peak of her sovereign debt crisis – including of a dog that ended up on the Hellenic President’s throne during a state ceremony – this chapter engages with Giorgio Agamben's view that sovereignty, although spectacular and necessary in choral and acclamatory terms, is antinomically related to apparatuses of administration which tend to extricate things from the sphere of human judgments and law. In addition to my tentative summary and illustration of this oikonomia, whereby the legitimate sovereign 'rules but does not govern,' I also propose a distinction between two versions of this political theology. Whereas in its Occidental version - stretching from the late medieval times through to modernity - political and legal constitutional thinking insulates sovereignty from its practical failures and contradictions, in the Eastern Roman Empire there was no equivalent political theology of public law to gloss over the anomie of oikonomia. Indicatively, the coronation of each new emperor - most frequently following a coup or conspiracy - was accompanied by a publicly staged representation of the events of the usurpation. Perhaps, I lastly speculate, subjectivity today is captured in neo-Byzantine: that is we are fascinated by the game of thrones exposed in an age of transparency as well as real and fake news, and by spectacles encoding belief in authority, in equal measure. It remains to be seen if this schizophrenic enjoyment endures or gives rise to new imaginations of politics and authority.

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