{"id":1534,"date":"2025-04-07T14:23:18","date_gmt":"2025-04-07T13:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/?p=1534"},"modified":"2025-05-30T18:20:47","modified_gmt":"2025-05-30T17:20:47","slug":"sovereign-is-he","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/?p=1534","title":{"rendered":"Sovereign is he\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cSovereign is he who decides on the exception.\u201d<\/a>1<\/sup><\/a> \u2018The exception\u2019 is the state of emergency. Of course, \u2018he who\u2019 is not originally or theoretically sovereign; \u2018the people\u2019 are, according to Hobbes and everyone since, and Peter Sloterdijk contends that this originates with the Romans expelling their king, Tarquin, and choosing the republican form. And therein lies the rub. The electoral process, which is thought to elect \u2018representatives\u2019 of \u2018the people\u2019, throws up those who find the limitations of the people\u2019s sovereignty too constricting: constitutions, assemblies, deliberations, legislation etc. Thus throughout the very short history indeed of people\u2019s sovereignty, the necessary emergencies have always turned up. Today it is the emergency in the US \u2013 there isn\u2019t one \u2013 requiring the POTUS to take drastic measures. He is a man who chafes at having limits put on him by \u2018the people\u2019, a completely abstract thought, but in reality by other elected \u2018representatives\u2019 of the people who themselves rarely have the slightest idea of \u2018representing\u2019, but rather are concerned for advancing their own sovereignty in whatever limited domain they can. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interpolation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The purpose of the emergency or the state of exception is quite simple and mundane: a rising middle class who took power, and used that as a means to enrich themselves. The Napoleonic Wars, for example, licensed them to introduce for the first time an income tax on ordinary people rather than wealth taxes on those who could afford them. Moreover, it allowed them to license government debts from usurers and the interest that accrued from them and then to pass on the burden of servicing the debt to mankind at large. Of course monarchs had done that, but they were their own private debts; now they have become national debts to be paid from the income tax and other invented taxes such as VAT, which to their shame Muslim nations have embraced wholesale, and thus all the rigmarole of democracy just to present a facade that it is as if popular opinion wants <\/em>to be taxed onerously.<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/a>The European Civil War 1917-1945<\/strong><\/a>2<\/sup><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the latter stages of the event that lies at the foundation of our age, the European Civil War, six men climbed up to the point where they could leverage an emergency to lay claim to their respective sovereignties with an eye to the main goal, global sovereignty, with an emergency that they together created: Mussolini, Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and the Emperor of Japan (https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/iplayer\/episode\/p009bhtp\/the-war-lords-3-winston-churchill<\/a>) each with a lust for total power not only in his own domain but a global ambition, particularly Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Then, although Roosevelt built the atomic bomb, Truman dropped it because of the \u2018emergency\u2019 of bringing the war to an end, although in fact the Japanese were trying to negotiate surrender.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The War on Terror<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our more recent history, mediocre men have had the \u2018war on terror\u2019, a gift from Bin Laden and his cohorts, whom Adam Curtis showed in \u201cThe Power of Nightmares\u201d<\/a>3<\/sup><\/a> were co-dependent with the US State Department on the need for a global enemy and thus on an emergency or \u2018state of exception\u2019. Thus the former by his state of exception gave himself sovereignty over the Divine and the Prophetic according to both of whom murdering civilians indiscriminately is prohibited absolutely. Significantly, of course he handed his adversaries the excuse they needed to carry out a plan they had long hatched, only needing a suitable provocation to expedite. The two parties depended on each other to lay claim to the sovereignty they desired. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When that argument wore thin, then the \u2018pandemic\u2019 turned up, for which various agents had been readying, and preparing public opinion for years. It turned up on the current incumbent\u2019s previous watch too. Again, it was global sovereignty that was the object of desire, since the US as the hegemon is the door to that ambition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>World dominion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is Nietzsche who:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2026 is the first to pose the thoughtful question \u2013 thoughtful in that it starts from metaphysics and points back to metaphysics \u2013 which we formulate as follows: Is the man of today in his metaphysical nature prepared to assume dominion over the earth as a whole? Has the man of today yet given thought in any way to what conditions will determine the nature of such worldwide government? Is the nature of this man of today such that it is fit to manage those powers, and put to use those means of power, which are released as the nature of modern technology unfolds, forcing man to unfamiliar decisions? Nietzsche\u2019s answer to these questions is No.\u201d<\/em><\/a>4<\/sup><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Heidegger makes clear that this is to do with Nietzsche\u2019s widely misunderstood Overman about wh0m he writes: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe superman never appears in the noisy parades of alleged men of power, nor in the well-staged meetings of politicians. The superman\u2019s appearance is likewise inaccessible to the teletypers and radio dispatches of the press which present \u2013 that is, represent \u2013 events to the public even before they have happened. This well made-up and well staged manner of forming ideas, of representation, with its constantly more refined mechanism, dissimulates and blocks from view what really is<\/em>.\u201d<\/a>5<\/sup><\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLet me stress it again: the superman in Nietzsche\u2019s sense is not man as he exists until now, only superdimensional. The \u201csuperman\u201d does not simply carry the accustomed drives and strivings of the customary type of man beyond all measure and bounds. Superman is qualitatively, not quantitatively, different from existing man. The thing that the superman discards is precisely our boundless, purely quantitative nonstop progress. The superman is poorer, simpler, tenderer, and tougher, quieter and more self-sacrificing and slower of decision, and more economical of speech.\u201d<\/a>6<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then President Putin, with his own needs and  with his invasion of Ukraine, supplied his opponents with the emergency they needed, and quite suddenly the pandemic was over. It became yesterday\u2019s news almost overnight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, in their turn, Hamas handed the Israelis, and by extension the US State Department, a gift on a plate: the excuse they needed to turn Gaza and then the West Bank into a field of slaughter, perpetuating the aspiration to sovereignty of one very unsavoury criminal and contributing to the aspiration of a certain POTUS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>\u2018The people\u2019, the mediocre and the bourgeoisie<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since its arrival in the French Revolution the cry of \u2018the people\u2019 has been the means by which mediocre people (mediocre being \u201cfrom Latin mediocris<\/em> \u2018of middle height or degree\u2019\u201d)<\/a>7<\/sup><\/a> sought aspirationally to climb out of their middle class backgrounds and take sovereignty \u2013 bankers, lawyers and journalists, in other words: the bourgeoisie<\/em>. One must remember that these people are a \u2018middle\u2019 class in every way: in terms of wealth, even when they reach millions, and intellectually they scavenge off the great heritage of mankind producing studies that both tell you why you must read Carl Schmitt, for example, and more importantly what you have to understand from him, which is probably not what he tried to convey. We could make the same point about anyone from Plato to Wagner and so on. And we are as grateful as others for the \u2018honourable exceptions\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The middle class is a missionary movement with global aspirations and in Napoleon found its apostle. It again appeared in identical fashion in the Russian Revolution, with global aspirations, and if Ernst N\u00f6lte is to be accepted, although not everyone does, bringing about Fascism and Nazism as reactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Banking<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The revolutions and wars were staging posts on the arrival of banking from the underneath to the fore. The World Wars saw the institution of the major global banking institutions, in 1944 at Bretton Woods, the World Bank, the IMF and so on \u2013 the Bank of International Settlements previously founded in 1930 to oversee debt reparations by the Germans for the first stage of the War conventionally known as the First World War \u2013 with the international legal order, the UN, which would cement the nations together impotently to the banking order. What was a period of unparalleled chaos and de-struction would produce very tangible structures indeed, while simultaneously licensing the bankers\u2019 favourite nation in the Middle East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reality-show POTUS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our current dis-order \u2013 presided over by an apparently super-erratic reality-show host, making a series of moves widely understood to bring pan-demonium to the world economy, punishing Lesotho and other desperately poor nations with their tariffs \u2013 also reveals a surprising order, in its de-struction bringing about the strengthening of banking structures, the POTUS presiding over an all-engrossing piece of theatre, which is nevertheless vital to this project. He had dismantled the US apparatus to channel funds to a whole host of societies, USAID thus engendering in them a dependence on global capital. With the destruction of USAID, they, convinced of their desperate need, will of course go to those international banking institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, and that global agenda will be enormously advanced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the middle class have arrived centre stage, lacking the strengths of character of people who actually work and do things, with their capitalism exploiting the labour of the disenfranchised poor, lacking too the merits of the aristocratic order they abolished, neither knowing noblesse oblige<\/em> nor the ethics of service and work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the Muslims arrive in this age and on this late modern stage with its usury capitalism having imbibed the usury that guarantees their destruction and the seizure of their lands and their wealth and the loss of their deen<\/em>. And yet, the Muslims alone hold the key to the matter: the abolition of usury, the vital obligation of the provision of free markets for any to enter except for usurers, leadership which empowers the people of knowledge among whose duties it is to prevent usury in trade, and the establishment of sound currency, the whole revolving around the pillar of zakat<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zakat<\/em> is the Robin Hood tax which takes from the rich, not out of any ressentiment towards them and thus is not a punitive tax such as that of the welfare states which arguably forced global capital off-shore<\/a>8<\/sup><\/a> and set up a dialectic to which there is no solution. And zakat<\/em> is not a miserable dole that keeps the poor dependent in their poverty as a terrible warning to others to submit to capitalism lest a similar fate befall them, but actually a sharing of capital \u2013 gold, silver, sheep and cattle, grains and the like \u2013 that allows the poor to lift themselves up. But this requires a figure who has been absent for too long: the leader. This is not the fantasy of the caliphate that some have, but initially just someone(s) who will take the lead and dominate the commercial sphere, in the name of the Divine not in the name of \u2018the people\u2019.<\/a>9<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Only the Divine can save us<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the last word must go to Martin Heidegger via Giorgio Agamben:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHeidegger\u2019s abrupt statement in the 1976 interview with \u201cder Spiegel\u201d: \u201cOnly a God can save us\u201d has always aroused perplexity. To understand it, it is first necessary to return it to its context. Heidegger has just spoken of the planetary domain of technique that nothing seems to be able to govern. Philosophy and other spiritual powers \u2013 poetry, religion, the arts, politics \u2013 have lost the ability to shake or otherwise orient the lives of the peoples of the West. Hence the bitter diagnosis that they \u201ccannot produce any immediate change in the current state of the world\u201d and the inevitable consequence that \u201conly a God can save us\u201d.\u201d<\/a>10<\/sup><\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And he concludes: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow should we understand the philosopher\u2019s bitter diagnosis? In what sense \u201conly a God can save us\u201d? For almost two centuries \u2013 since Hegel and Nietzsche declared his death, the West has lost its god. But what we have lost is only a god to whom it is possible to give a name and an identity. The death of God is, in truth, the loss of divine names (\u201cthe divine names are missing\u201d, H\u00f6lderlin lamented). Beyond the names, the most important thing remains: the divine. As long as we are able to perceive how divine a flower, a face, a bird, a gesture or a blade of grass, we can do without a God that can be named. The divine is enough for us, the adjective matters more than the noun. Not \u201ca God\u201d – rather: \u201conly the divine can save us\u201d.\u201d<\/a>11<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here we beg to differ with Agamben in spite of his eminence and the great respect we have for him. \u2018The Name\u2019 has a chequered history. Rabbinical Judaism anathematised its mention, except for in the Temple in Jerusalem during the cacophony of horns at the Passover, when the priest invoked it but none could hear it. Subsequently there arose among the Jews figures called Baal Sham (in Arabic Ba\u2018l al-ism<\/em> \u2013 master of the Name), who similarly monopolised the Name but in an esoteric fashion that can only be characterised as deeply magical. These figures were to give birth to a cult, wrongly thought of as \u2018Orthodox\u2019, called the Hasidim. It is not accidental that one discovers this obscure part of history when exploring the roots of Freemasonry, although there appears to be no direct connection between the two groups. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leapfrog the intervening centuries and the \u2018death of God\u2019, and the circle comes around again to the Divine Name or rather Names. Without \u2018Name\u2019 we have only the god of the philosophers, and as Heisenberg said to Pauli in Copenhagen: \u201cI might go on to remind you of Pascal\u2019s famous text, the one he kept sewn in his jacket. It was headed \u2018Fire\u2019 and began with the words: \u2018God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob \u2013 not of the philosophers and sages.\u201d<\/a>12<\/sup><\/a> It is time for His name and His names. And He is called by His name and called upon by it, for sovereign is He.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Footnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>1<\/a>  Carl Schmitt, Political Theology \u2013 Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>2<\/a>  Ernst N\u00f6lte, Der europ\u00e4ische B\u00fcrgerkrieg, 1917\u20131945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus \u2013 The European Civil War 1917-1945<\/em>, translated by two anonymous writers, Publius Agrippa and Russian Cosmist. https:\/\/theognisomegara.substack.com\/p\/ernst-noltes-european-civil-war-1917<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fran\u00e7ois Furet differed with N\u00f6lte and they had a correspondence which was collected in a book Fascism and Communism.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>3<\/a>  https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/iplayer\/episodes\/p088s5k4\/the-power-of-nightmares<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/ThePowerOfNightmares-AdamCurtis<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>4<\/a>  Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?<\/em> p.65<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>5<\/a>  Ibid. p. 72-73<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>6<\/a>  Ibid. p. 69<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>7<\/a>  Oxford English Dictionary<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>8<\/a>  Rana Dasgupta \u2013 \u201cThe Demise of the Nation State\u201d, https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/news\/2018\/apr\/05\/demise-of-the-nation-state-rana-dasgupta<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>9<\/a>  Economist Michael Hudson sees how the liberal order removes any reins on the ambitions of capital, and that paradoxically, despots and tyrants reign it in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>10<\/a>  https:\/\/www.quodlibet.it\/giorgio-agamben-solo-un-dio-ci-pu-lvare<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>11<\/a>  Ibid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>12<\/a>  Werner Heisenberg, \u201cPositivism, Metaphysics, and Religion\u201d, Physics and beyond: encounters and conversations.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cSovereign is he who decides on the exception.\u201d1 \u2018The exception\u2019 is the state of emergency. Of course, \u2018he who\u2019 is not originally or theoretically sovereign; \u2018the people\u2019 are, according to Hobbes and everyone since, and Peter Sloterdijk contends that this originates with the Romans expelling their king, Tarquin, and choosing the republican form. And therein lies … <\/p>\n

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