Sovereignty, Torture and Blood: Tracing Genealogies and Rethinking Politics‪.‬

Recently there has been increasing theoretical debate over the meaning of political sovereignty, in part prompted by concerns over the treatment of asylum seekers and State responses to political insurgency and 'terror.' This essay examines the logic of contemporary sovereignty through the lens of recent media discussion on the use of torture and the capacity of the State to denaturalise citizens. It is argued that given the aim of biopolitical sovereignty to 'both foster life and disallow it to death,' then torture can be said to sit at the nexus of these powers, since it involves the simultaneous deployment of forms of violence and care. Citizenship reveals the blood link between biology and sovereign, reflecting the fundamental importance of the concept of biopower to understanding contemporary sovereignty. It is argued that one of the key challenges today is to unthink the close 'blood and soil' relationship that continues to inform contemporary political discourse. 1. Michel Foucault offers an acute reminder that political theory's obsession with sovereignty has clouded opportunities for other equally important perspectives on the nature of power. In his words: "we need to cut off the King's head: in political theory that has still to be done" (1980: 121). Yet as Foucault's later work on both government and sovereignty demonstrate, there are questions relating to the genealogy of sovereignty within global political relationships that beg continued analysis.