“But it seems that a time will come when the second option is chosen, and the ruler, whether the traditionally anointed one or his usurper, will have to assert sovereignty, a new mode of centrality that claims and enforces the right to be the judge of last resort in all disputes involving lower centers of power.”
From the Archive
“The asymmetrical sovereignty of Leviathan only extends to a human monarch the sacred difference of the center.”
“Insofar as sovereignty is always exercised rather than held, it is always secure—and what would it mean to “hold” sovereignty other than to exercise it repeatedly and explicitly?”
“Sovereignty is always passed off—to be sovereign is to decide upon one’s successor.”
“The implication, then, is that sovereignty is always oriented toward futurity, always a bridge between past and future.”
“Sovereignty draws both emulation and resentment toward itself, and in this way brings resentment to a central point where it can be overawed and reframed as unappeasable and hence transgressive if not “donated” to the sovereign.”
“This division is what provides the opening to modern liberal and democratic politics, which simply replace “God’s will” with the “people,” or the “individual,” or the “nation,” or the “oppressed,” or the “workers,” or some other entity in positing a “real” sovereign to which the actual sovereign must defer.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.Sovereignty is a mode of centrality. It is the assertion, by an occupant of the center, of the right to be the judge of last resort in all disputes among lower centers of power — extending to a human ruler the sacred difference of the center, and so drawing both emulation and resentment toward itself.
It is never simply possessed. Sovereignty is always exercised rather than held, and always passed off: to be sovereign is to be turned toward one’s own succession. Its central problem is therefore temporal — securing the passage of the center across time without collapsing into rivalry.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“This is where centrality resides, in this communication of the absolute imperative through sovereignty, in any territorially or even culturally bound social order. For both metaphysics and monotheism, the target of the absolute imperative is the individual mind or soul—both would very much like to sideline or instrumentalize the question of sovereignty.…”
“It is not surprising that a mode of thinking that that sees every human step forward as a further excavation of our origins might have reactionary implications. The reactionary thinking I propose involves paring down a model of sovereignty to its most minimal, and fighting against everything that is in the way of seeing and presenting that model. And the…”
“This process is the source of the unsecure sovereignty that Reactionary Future considers the prime political and moral evil. Those capable rivals draw upon phantom modes of centrality (some relation between each individual separately and some unoccupied legal, moral, administrative, or spiritual center to which some rival center of power just happens to…”
“Paradox is constitutive of power and sovereignty as well, a point of supreme importance for absolutism. Power is located at the center—whoever occupies the center is powerful. If we attend to some object that is both attractive and repellent (a source of desire and therefore danger), that object exercises power over us (it holds us in place, first of all).…”
“I would like to make the whole question of insiders and outsiders more precise--the more power is divided, the more fluid this becomes. Hence the importance of looking past the public/private distinction--something like the Trilateral Commission could be sovereign (I don't say that it ever was); for that matter, if Hillary had won, maybe the Clinton…”
“We can grant that all this is also an attempt to unify—removing the artificial mode of sovereignty will allow the true sovereignty of human nature to assert itself. But while one can point to centers, large and small—one person’s decision and reputation really is respected where another’s isn’t—every attempt to point to human nature in what humans actually…”
“By making the relation to the law central to sovereignty, we can return to the question of “who rules”? The problem posed by formalist neo-reactionary theory is the discrepancy between actual power and formal power: the power exercised by, say, the media, goes unrecognized in a political theory that refuses to look past the obfuscations of the…”
“[Q:Reader] How do you reconcile the GA notion that 'there is always someone directing discourse', i.e. the NRX notion that 'sovereignty is indivisible', with the fact that we see competing power structures in the real world (which is also discussed in your model). Does the indivisibility notion only apply locally to individual decisions? As in, in every…”
“Sovereignty, tech and finance are to be articulated into a single scenic articulation, which on the terms of center study means the articulation of succession, the soliciting of the center and the prolonging of the imperative. Succession has served as the center of thinking about sovereignty, uniting what Anthropomorphics calls the “signifying center” (the…”
“The sacred being at the center exists above and beyond any of its concrete manifestations, it is addressed, it has intentionality, it can choose to be present or not—before any of these capacities are attributed to any of the members of the community. The sacred being is “humanized” before the humans are, it is anthropomorphized before there are humans on…”
Key Texts
Where the term is defined.
Develops sovereignty as a mode of centrality.
Develops sovereignty as a mode of centrality.
Develops sovereignty as a mode of centrality.
Develops sovereignty as a mode of centrality.
Develops sovereignty as a mode of centrality.