Selling Sovereignty

Sara Ahmed’s “The Organisation of Hate, “ Nicholas De Genova’s “The Production of Culprits,” and Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty collaborate within the collective investigations into spatiality in relation to economies and identities within transnational fields.  Ahmed’s analyses of hate and love within both the psychoanalytic and legal domains work to illustrate the truly paradoxical nature of space.  Sara Ahmed states, “If the demand for love is the demand for presence, and frustration is the consequence of the necessary failure of that demand, then hate and love are intimately tied together, in the intensity of the negotiation between presence and absence” [my own italic emphasis](Ahmed, 50).  Within this notion of love and hate, acceptance into spaces of “presence” or “absence” are constantly fluctuating, and are dependent upon varying vectors of being.  De Genova extends articulations of space-flux by noting how definitions of identity, in relation to national “citizenship,” have remained contradictory; “…‘illegality’ may entail a significant contradiction within the politics of nation-state space, it nevertheless has remained under ordinary circumstances a more or less viable way of life and transnational mode of being within the global space of capital” (De Genova, 438).

Wendy Brown highlights the connections between legality, space, and capital by painting the neoliberal state as an empowered, hegemonic instrument in conventionalizing desired standards within these aforementioned fields of power.  In her book she notes how differences in monetary privilege between nation-states spur the creation and extension of walls and borders.  These massive walls call to an oppressive history of empowered few and enslaved many due to capital discrepancies;  “Capital mocks efforts by national and subnational communities to contour their ways of life or to direct their own fates, making such efforts appear similar to those of feudal fiefdoms at the dawn of modernity” (Brown, 65).  Feudal kings and lords maintained power over their subjects with force and myths of “outside” invaders in which only the extensive powers of their feudal powers could protect them.  This narrative of an instable state is being reinscribed within the context of international terrorism and illegal immigration.  De Genova notes, “The metaphysics of antiterrorism is replete with an acute and beleaguered sensibility about the instability and permeability of nation-state space and borders” (De Genova, 423).  All of these paradoxes and contradictions work in painting a wider picture of neoliberal market control of identity constructions and space allocations.  The democratic ideal of personal sovereignty is seemingly faltering to the capitalistic, hegemonic realities of “global” markets and capital control.  Brown elaborates, “Nation-state sovereignty has been undercut as well by neoliberal rationality, which recognizes no sovereign apart from entrepreneurial decision makers…which displaces legal and political principles…with market criteria…” (Brown, 22).