Mbembe and the Romance of Sovereignty (another post for Mr. Obama)

Would it not be fitting for us to think about Sir Gawain in terms of “Necropolitics” given that the poem’s plot centers on the struggle “to dictate who may live and must die… to kill or to allow to live” (Mbembe 11)?

To be sure, the plot of Sir Gawain is not concerned with a general question of living and dying, but instead on the event of “killing.” Unlike Mbembe’s notion of the topographies of sovereignty, the act of killing rests in the center of the text’s logic.

Mbembe asserts that the

ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty[1], its fundamental attributes. To exercise control over mortality and to define life is the deployment and manifestation of power (11-12).

As literary critics insistent on or nominally interested in employing Mbembe’s theory of “necropower,” we should take care to note that in this initial description of necropolitics rest three key planes: what “ultimate” sovereignty is, what the “limits” or fringes of sovereignty are, and how sovereignty is “deployed.” Killing, as an act, is not the “ultimate” expression of sovereignty, but rather the limit or borderland of sovereignty. The varying degrees of death and the multiple of ways of dying that are milder than the act of killing are what would seemingly rest in the land of “sovereignty” proper. The act of killing would be the city limits[2].

Traditional readings of Gawain center on the determination of Gawain as an individual:  as someone who volunteers himself to die, when given the choice to live, and when given the task of dying, eagerly takes hold of an object that will make him live.  Such focus on the individual is what Mbembe terms “the romance of sovereignty”, which:

rests on the belief that the subject is the master and the controlling author of his or her own meaning. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation (fixing one’s own limits for oneself). The exercise of sovereignty, in turn, consists in society’s capacity for self-creation through recourse to institutions inspired by specific social and imaginary significations (13). 

In Mbembe’s terms, traditional readings of Sir Gawain are short-sighted, romantic and incorrect.  The term “romance”, as Mbembe uses it, functions as a taunt to scholars—a sneering challenge to the impulse to read this text as an individual’s struggle with identity, virtue and the ultimate construction of self inwardly and outwardly.  

But of course, this poem is literally a “romance.” Instead of submitting ourselves to his taunts, I believe it would be more interesting to ask the ways in which the romance genre allows for us to read Gawain the way we do. As a foundational text and as a text participating in the once-popular romance genre, I wonder if Sir Gawain and texts like it create or perpetuate myths of sovereignty and death, self-creation and courage in the face of death.  As a provisionary answer, I would argue that Sir Gawain insists on a reading of Sir Gawain’s drive for self-determination by seating the act of killing at the center of the plot— a position diametrically opposed to Mbembe’s insistence that at the act of killing resides at the limits of necropolitical sovereignty.  The individual reader is narratologically convinced of the centrality of the individual’s quest for sovereignty in relation to his individual death in the act of killing. It would follow, then, that generations of readers would develop romantic notions that murder is the ultimate expression of power and that the individual’s evasion of such power is the goal of sovereignty.

While all the parts of necropolitics are there—killing, letting live, exercises of power—these parts are structured in ways ascribed to the narrative patterns and expectations of genre. Expectations and experiences of reading are only one of many possible problems[3] applying necropolitics to interpretations of Sir Gawain, but a big problem nonetheless for those concerned with making arguments about how to read literature.

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[1]  By the use of the term “limit,” Mbembe’s argument about the act of killing denotes the dictionary definition “a point or level beyond which something does or may not extend or pass.” While he follows the term “limit” with the term “fundamental attribute” this latter term is on the surface contradictory to the former. Whereas limit rests as the edge, “fundamental” is defined as “forming a necessary base or core.” To reconcile these two terms, I would think of “limit” and “fundamental attribute” as the maximum application point, the point at which, afterwards the terms are no longer legible: “the marker.” One could associate the “limit”/”fundamental attribute” connection with Derrida’s notion of a center and an outside, but that would be quite hard. Still, I think the fact that Mbembe reserves the term “ultimate”, meaning “final,” not to the act “to kill” but to the “capacity to dictate” shows above all that “the act of killing” is only a marker and not the goal of Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics.

[2] When Mbembe closes his essay naming “the creation of death-worlds,” he calls these places,  “new and unique forms” of “existence” wherein populations become “living dead.”  Necropolitics, it would seem to me, is concerned not with death as a biological concept, or the exercise of murder to assert power: but instead, creating the feeling of being dead—of living but as if one were dead.

[3] A second possible issue lies in issue of scale and definition. Mbembe says outright: “my concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle of autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (14). Mbembe does not care about autonomy or struggles against death, but with generalized ways that death is executed, and general populations. Mbembe does not care about the little people, he cares about the big deaths.