Super-Sovereignty

“Super-sovereignty” is Adam Katz's translation of “imperium in imperio."

The imperium in imperio is, in the first instance, the compromising of sovereign authority with the attribution of sovereignty to another authority within the same system. So, for example, who is sovereign in the US—the president? The Supreme Court? Congress? The Constitution? Once we start questioning, on the assumption that there can be only one sovereign, things can get very complicated—is the media sovereign? The “narrative”? and so on. “Super-sovereignty” shifts the question from some actual figure to the disciplinary conceptual authority invoked in order to assail (or qualify, obstruct, modify, etc.) any exercise of sovereignty. Someone has to invoke the concept, but in doing so is less claiming to exercise sovereignty than laying conditions under which we would “recognize” the “legitimacy” of the author of sovereign acts or, on the contrary, withdraw our “consent” until it can be delivered to some authority deemed legitimate.

So, the president, congress, the courts can carry out sovereign acts (we don’t, then, have to decide who is, in the last instance, sovereign) with some invocation of the super-sovereignty enabling it. All questions regarding the locus of sovereignty are not thereby settled—as always, the purpose is to replace a vocabulary that facilitates and multiplies the confusions generated by the liberal order with a vocabulary that has us looking for an enduring order even within the liberal one.