ABSTRACT
The previous chapter attempted to demonstrate how the traditional Westphalian notion of sovereignty that would also have easily complied with Kant’s obsession with non-contradiction – there can only be one sovereign – had to gradually make way for an explicitly contradictory and paradoxical notion that required an ‘ethical’ and, hence, non-sovereign use of sovereign power. But rather than submitting state sovereignty to the majesty of inalienable human rights as the current standard interpretation in international relations and politics seems to do, Derrida viewed democratic self-determination and human rights as two sides of a single aporetic and radically undecidable sovereignty: the sovereignty that makes self-determination and autonomy possible also includes within itself the ‘rogue’ glitch that affirms the individual as sovereign. It is not one sovereignty against another – the state against the individual human being – but, rather, ‘sovereignty against sovereignty’ in one circular movement. But there is another tradition that specifically attempts to anchor political
self-determination and autonomy with the sovereignty of a decision. In his celebrated pamphlet on the Third Estate from 1789, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès makes what he considers to be a ground-breaking distinction between a power that has been ‘constituted’ and the ‘constituent’ or ‘constitutive’ power that must by necessity lie behind it. Sieyès distinguishes between two different parts in the positive constitutional laws of a state. The first part regulates the organization and the functions of the legislative body, while the second part
addresses the various ‘active’ bodies or, in other words, the executive. Both parts, however, share a common origin:
These [constitutional] laws are called fundamental, not in the sense that they could become independent of the national will, but because the bodies to which they grant existence and means of action cannot modify them. Neither aspect of the constitution is the creation of the constituted power, but of the constituent power. No type of delegated power can in any way alter the conditions of its delegation.
