ABSTRACT
Sovereignty evokes strong feelings, but rarely ones of joy or elation. We become most acutely aware of sovereignty when it appears on the verge of collapse, perhaps by invading armies, illegitimate governments, or, for reactionaries, the proverbial “migrant flood”. However, these crises, real or imagined, neglect the chronic sovereign crisis of the citizenry’s alienation from institutions of governance that results in their disenchantment with politics. This crisis reveals their inability to redefine institutions when they no longer satisfy desires for new beginnings as lives, circumstances, and polities change. The trick of sovereign foundation lies in institutionalizing the revolutionary spirit, through which the new polity is thrillingly founded, without subsequently killing that spirit through routinization once the governance of daily life begins. This chapter asks where the revolutionary spirit comes from to learn how to master the trick, and, related, why we bother to struggle to constitute new sovereign spaces in the first place. It argues that this struggle reflects the human capacity to initiate new beginnings, expressed through the impulse to love. It regards love not simply as caring feelings towards others or desires for pleasure, but rather as the struggle to experience the thrill of new possibilities, offered only through our relationships with others, lest life become moribund. Love underpins three fundamental human activities, which, when examined together, illuminate the contours of today’s chronic sovereign crisis: the desire and care for children; the desire for intimacy and growth with a lover; and the desire for action to rejuvenate shared political space.
