Communal Sovereignty

This work identifies how previous offerings of sovereignty enable the marginalisation of community members, for whom they are supposed to legitimate communal authority. In response to this, the thesis realigns sovereignty around Levinas’ account of subjectivity. Doing this can better resist marginalising, and so reinforce sovereignty’s legitimating function.

Levinas’ subjectivity is shown to identify our inherent responsibility not to harm the other people we encounter, particularly in not repressing them under someone else’s comprehension. These inevitable social encounters are also shown to make crucial contributions to our political constitutions, necessitating sovereignty, through its concern to organise our social relations legitimately, to incorporate engagement with this responsibility. This results in an advocating ‘attendance’. Attendance means working to engage other people through attending to their expressions on their own terms, and consummating this attendance by addressing the concerns they identify ahead of our own.

The work employs Derrida and Fagan’s thought to identify how to incorporate such responsibility to the immediate other person we encounter into the structuring of a community concerned towards many people. This is achieved by identifying that such responsibility should not be realised through the sacrifice of other communal responsibilities, but rather through engaging with the tension between such responsibilities. Sovereignty is thus advanced by incorporating attendance as a value to characterise the community alongside other values such as security, freedom and equality.

Consequent from advocating such attendance to others, our social relationality is also underscored. This reveals our collaborative mediation as how we respond to the indeterminacy which our limited comprehension exposes us to. The dependence of our structures upon their constituents’ commitments is then also disclosed. Thus we identify the avenue through which we can ascribe the constituents the capacity to demand an incorporation of attendance into sovereignty so as to resist their marginalisation.