ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a certain form of sovereign subjectivity is what necessarily remains after the labour of post-structuralist criticism and, moreover, makes meaningful its entire project. It discusses the affinities between the political ontologies of Schmitt and Michel Foucault in terms of ontological extremism, a metaphysical disposition that locates the conditions of possibility of order in the founding rupture of the exception. In Schmitt's approach this rupture takes the form of sovereign decision on the exception. In contrast, Foucault's work is often read as an outright denial of the theory of sovereignty in favour of the analysis of manifold forms of power relations immanent to the social realm. While Foucault's historical ontologies of power relations convincingly demonstrate the crisis of sovereignty in its ontic aspect, that is a shift from the transcendent power of the monarch to the immanent rationality of government, this crisis does not in itself challenge sovereignty as an ontological condition of possibility of order.
