8882. Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p123. The Foucauldian reliance on a referent follows from M. Foucault’s determination that projects of representation require some original source of truth.
8883. William Rasch, Sovereignty and its Discontents (London: Birbeck Law Press, 2004) p10
8884. Rasch p9
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Preemption rests. In designating anticipation as a strategic alternative, the Bush Administration seized authority to initiate military action to thwart any adversarial behavior before it could be realized. The role of strategic anticipation, post 9/11, reinvigorated the strength and innocence of the community after contact with an other by repositioning internal anxieties externally. Incorporating the 2002 Steven Spielberg sci-fi film noire Minority Report as an interpretive allegory, the Doctrine of Preemption is argued as a contemporary referent of American sovereignty, insofar as it domesticates the global theatre of deterrence with preemption articulated as a potential response.2
VVThe primacy of security, however, resides within a community’s political system, and if that political system is the communal norm, then it is the political that is the exception that establishes the norm. It is the political that retains primacy to other systems, according to Schmitt, though it does not annul the remaining autonomous systems; art, economic, legal, science.3 The primacy of security then reflects the primacy of the political, owing fealty to it. This hierarchy of the political becomes entangled with an additional binary in the problematic of liberalism and democracy, which originally was ‘what distinguishes government?’ invoking the governed. The binary which now distinguishes the political is opposition. The outcome is that government currently includes and excludes the governed in the distinction that liberal-democratic institutionalization sanctions opposition within it, but not to it – as an all inclusive hegemon.4
VVThus, current political party polemics hint at little more than organizational differentiation – that is each party survives the rotation from the role of governing to that of opposition and back, countering any concerns of domination by sanctioning opposition within the political system itself. However this dynamic threatens system stability by neutering the political. The effect of ideological disenchantment forewarns of either apathy or potential frustration within the citizenry as those constitutionally excluded, marginal communities under represented by both government and opposition, are discounted as not legitimately political and effectively neutralized through efficiency, or by a process Rasch terms invisibilization.[1]