ABSTRACT
Achille Mbembe explains that the ‘ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and the capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die’. The state of unrest is a limit situation for the sovereign apparatus, a moment when the habitual relations of peace and calm on which sovereignty relies begin to break down. The dislocated debate between Michael Foucault and Giorgio Agamben over the relation between sovereign and governmental power is important throughout the book, but also it is achingly familiar in contemporary critical (legal) theory. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a ‘people’, but with a ‘population’, with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illness, patterns of diet and habitation. The government sign for the sovereign; they make its structure present in ways that are impossible for the pure sense of auctoritas.
