“Sovereignty” confounds, and the fate of the “subject” thus appears uncertain. Thus, sovereignty is perpetually rethought by critical philosophers, borders perpetually reconceptualized, and the “political subject” perpetually resurrected from abandonment. In this essay, I present a different, decolonial, view of sovereignty as a philosophical invention. I begin by identifying three incommensurable conditions of subject-beingness: the precarious citizen-subject, the abject subject of “exceptional” bans, and the trans-territorial subject of “exemptional” license. Rather than aberrations, these are co-constitutively regulated and enforced by the invention of sovereignty that constructs the materialities of differentiated subject-beingness within a global biopolitical regime of (b)ordered bodies-within(/out)-territory based on the incommensurable rationalities of license, containments, and bans. The aim of this correction to the philosophy of sovereignty is to further the tasks of denormalizing the coloniality of (b)ordering that has captured, emplaced, and banned imaginations of being(-otherwise). Conversely, a decolonial philosophy normalizes the oppositions to sovereign presents and naturalizes the many witnessed refusals and rejections of the present normalities of violence and dispossession. To de-invent sovereignty is to therefore re-invent philosophy as decolonial praxes.
