Jordan Sheridan 1
Political Sovereignty and the Figure of the Animal in Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the
Sovereign
In an interview with Giovanna Borradori three weeks after the 2001 attacks on the World
Trade Center, Jacques Derrida is asked whether the attacks were “one of the most important
historical events we have witnessed in our lifetime” (Borradori 86). Derrida insists that in order
to properly frame the attacks we first need to establish a new “philosophical reflection” that
understands how “September 11 is still part of the archaic theater of violence aimed at striking
the imagination” (Dialogues 101). By looking at September 11 through the frame of political
sovereignty, we can understand how both the attacks and the responses to the attacks are part of a
larger history of political violence. My Masters thesis will investigate how Derrida’s lectures
(between December 12, 2011 and March 27 2012) entitled The Beast and the Sovereign
represent an examination of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre through his
most sustained reflection on the relationships between bestiality, animality, and political
sovereignty. More particularly, I intend to read The Beast and the Sovereign as a text that
mobilizes the language of bestiality and animality within discourses of political sovereignty to
understand the relationship between these discourses and discourses surrounding September 11.
The Beast and the Sovereign begins by reminding us that the “beast is not exactly the animal”
(Beast 1), but rather that “man is the beast for man” (Beast 30). This distinction is important to
understand because it distinguishes this text from Derrida’s earlier investigations into the concept
of the animal by keeping us in the realm of language. The word beast is an analogy that puts an
oppositional limit between two figures of man, or two groups of people; the analogy “brings man
and animal close in order to oppose them” (Beast 14). However, as Derrida states, “the word
‘analogy’ designates for us the place of a question rather than an answer” (Beast 14). What
exactly does it meant to bring the animal so close to the human only to oppose them? Whose
Jordan Sheridan 2
interests does this “affabulation” (Beast 35) of politics serve? I argue that The Beast and the
Sovereign uses this analogy between the beast and the sovereign to understand how the
discourses surrounding September 11 are part of a history of political theory that places concepts
of fear and terror at the center of what it means to be a political subject, what Derrida has
elsewhere called the “process of autoimmunity” (Dialogues 101). Autoimmunity is a term
Derrida uses to describe how sovereignty creates fear of the unknown so that what is feared is
fear itself. This process is involved with a “knowing how to cause fear, knowing how to terrorize
by making known” (Beast 39), and with this in mind Derrida looks to the repetitions of the
images of September 11 as mediation and manipulation of how the event signifies a future fear.
Chapter One will look at how Derrida configures the analogy of the beast in relation to
his work on the question of the animal, and will demonstrate where Derrida’s interests stand in
relation to the field of critical animal studies. I will focus explicitly on how the figure of the
animal is an important allegory for power dynamics in political discourses. Ultimately, this
chapter will position The Beast and the Sovereign as distinct from Derrida’s previous
investigation of the question of the animal in The Animal That Therefore I Am. The former
focuses on how the figure of the animal has been put to use in political discourses, while the
latter probes the history of continental philosophy to expose the moments where philosophical
theories begin to fray specifically when they posit the limits between the categories of human
and animal. The Beast and the Sovereign takes us into the concept of man as political animal to
see how the concepts of “law” “sovereignty” and “state” are essential to how the concepts of
“man” and “animal” have historically been crafted in the West. However, Derrida asks us to
consider what exactly it means to use the figure of the animal to represent sovereignty to force us
to think about how this configuration naturalizes political violence by replacing the violence of
sovereignty with the violence of nature.
Jordan Sheridan 3
Chapter Two will look closely at the texts that concern Derrida in The Beast and the
Sovereign. I will examine Derrida’s discussion of how the figure of the animal signifies power
relationships in discourses of political sovereignty. I will then begin to link this discussion to
modern politics, and more particularly the discourses surrounding the attacks on the World Trade
Center. I will focus on how the first three lectures establish the relationship between The Beast
and the Sovereign, how each figure exists outside of the law, and how exactly this being outside
of the law is characterized in each instance. Guided by the phrase, “the sovereign like a God, like
a beast” (Beast 57) Derrida undertakes a series of nuanced readings of theorists, such as Jean
Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt. These readings flesh out how the notion
of being outside the law is simultaneously outside the law, but also formulates the very basis of
that law. Derrida is interested in how these configurations of the law all use the figure of the
animal to articulate the sovereign’s relationship to both figures of the divine and humanity, for
the sovereign is simultaneously both God and beast. But where is the human in this relationship
between God and Beast? Who exactly is the law for, and what is its function? Derrida
demonstrates that there is much more at stake in this formulation, for the figure of the animal is
also a way to naturalize sovereign power as a force that creates the law by exempting sovereignty
from the law. I will then show how Derrida uses this understanding of how the figure of the
animal naturalizes violence in order to theorize September 11 and the United States’ “virtually
sovereign role among sovereign states” (Dialogues 94) in the modern political sphere. In The
Beast and the Sovereign Derrida links this conception of the United States to the term “rogue
state” while simultaneously pursuing what it “tells us about animality or bestiality” (Beast 19).
The “rogue state” is a term used by the United States to define nations that do not recognize the
legitimacy of international law and deliberately violate its mandates. The concept of the rogue
state was meant as a foil for how the United States views itself within global politics, but upon
Jordan Sheridan 4
closer inspection we see that, by its own definition, the United States emerges as the most rogue
of all. Derrida uses the rogue state to link September 11 and the reactions by the United States
government to the concept of global terrorism and to the history of the analogy between the beast
and the sovereign.
Chapter Three will link The Beast and the Sovereign explicitly to Derrida’s critiques of
modern nation state sovereignty and to the discourses surrounding September 11. I will focus on
how the creation of fear and terror by sovereign states is a process of autoimmunity, and that
what causes “fear is never fully present” (Beast 41), but rather exists virtually, as a future that
people must be protected from. In this way, Derrida posits that in the case of September 11 the
United States’ government uses images of the World Trade Center as a way to spread fear, but
also to use that fear to strengthen its political sovereignty. I will then show how Derrida’s
critique of the reaction to September 11 fits within his larger critique, outlined in Chapter Two,
of the history of political discourses of sovereignty that figure the animal in order to naturalize
political violence. By linking September 11 to these discourses, Derrida shows that
representations of the attacks are part of a similar naturalization of violence that gives the United
States’ government “moral” justification to enact war and how this is a fundamental
contradiction its own promise of democracy.
This project is unique in that it seeks to link the current formulations of political
sovereignty to the history of naturalized violence established through the figure of the animal.
By examining the figure of the animal I hope to unearth the relationship between animality,
bestiality and political sovereignty, but also that this history is relevant to how sovereign power
is exercised today. It will be a privilege to carry out this research under the direction of my
supervisor Dr. David Clark, and my second reader Dana Hollander.
Jordan Sheridan 5
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