In this artificially intelligent age of plagiarism, it is very easy to access original quotations, but still, one cannot be sure whether the sentence picked up from a PDF source on the internet has the exact wording you have in mind. All my Foucault oeuvre are not where I am at but on my bookcase at the university; I want to start this column simply by drawing your attention to the prophecy philosopher Michel Foucault had ages ago, which reminds me of Donald Trump.
Foucault compared problematic sovereignty issues with the rights and obligations of society, asking whose head should be "cut off", the king’s or someone else’s? So, I take Google’s word for it: Foucault really said in one of his lectures, which years later was added to translated books, that, “We need to cut off the King's head; (but) in political theory that has not been done yet.”
It is such a colorful expression, even for Foucault, that I still remember it years after hearing it from Professor Samuel P. Huntington at, ahem, Harvard's Center for International Affairs. What Foucault meant, Huntington said, was that we still theorize that political power emanates from a central authority because the “political science is still based on a monarchical conception of power.” We have to separate the “body politic” from its so-called heads, e.g., leaders, war heroes, presidents, autocratic party heads, etc. The issue resembles when U.S. President Donald Trump started acting on what modern political theorists disdainfully call “sovereigntist logic,” which started haunting the recent political narratives coming from the U.S. last week.
Trump is testing the U.S. political environment to see if he could defy the courts and overrule the federal judges. The chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., directed the government from the bench to turn the planes around carrying the deportees. That did not happen, though the administration claims it did not deliberately defy the judge. Trump also floated some ideas like sending Americans to foreign prisons, especially shipping those charged with attacking Elon Musk’s Tesla cars “to serve time in lovely prisons in El Salvador.” He still rants about annexing Canada or changing the common border. His minions talk about sanctioning this country or that country to restrain their development of this capability or that capability. We are still not talking about Trump’s negotiation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on how many provinces Ukraine should yield to Russia.
The issue is “the problem of sovereignty": Can a democratically elected head of state or a prime minister of a sovereign country declare exceptions from the rule of law?
The U.S. did it before. Remember the contentious practices undertaken since 9/11 in the name of the so-called war on terror: the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the internment of foreign terrorists in prisons in the U.K., the extrajudicial killing of terrorists by the U.S. in third countries, the war in Iraq, the use of torture by Western states, the U.S. visa and entry discrimination of Muslims.
In conventional political science, the head of a sovereign state can decide on an exception. The very definition of sovereignty consists of an authority to declare exceptions to normal civil liberties, human rights, the rule of law and so on. He takes it from the people of society. Of course, you may have “individual dissent” necessary for a society's healthy working.
Or can he? Can a head of a sovereign state do whatever he wants if the subject has not been covered in the conventional law books?
Should our political philosophy, which was erected around the problem of sovereignty, be divorced, as Foucault stipulated in the 1970s, from archaic political theory, which still acts as the basis of the modern political narrative? Are our contemporary societies, especially the U.S., ready for a constitutional crisis?
Former U.S. President George Bush, the father, waiting for an excuse to assault Iraq, had found this opportunity in Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. At least he had to goad Saddam to invade Kuwait! But his successor, Bush the son, did not look for an excuse as slimy as Aesop’s hungry wolf; he declared an unjust war on Iraq simply because the Israeli lobby wanted him to. This is the Hobbesian Leviathan that Foucault said we should get rid of by cutting his head off.
The vengeful Trump provides a more radical interpretation of contemporary world politics. We may laugh off his antics like invading Greenland or owning the Gaza Strip in Palestine, but Trump presents a sovereign political power that would exceed all limits and become what Foucault termed “the model of Leviathan, that model of an artificial man who is at once an automaton, a fabricated man, but also a unitary man who contains all real individuals, whose body is made up of citizens but whose soul is sovereignty.”
“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means,” Foucault called it. Almost 10 years later, famous writer George Orwell would say it differently: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Today, we know that power is a collection of multiple interests, expectations and practices. We really might not expect Trump to convert American democracy into some authoritarianism, just “ignoring the Constitution, ignoring the judiciary,” as Shira Scheindlin, a former federal judge in Manhattan who served on the bench for 22 years, puts it.
Could he? And why not?
The Trump White House informed Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the government to turn the planes around carrying the deportees, saying, “Oops, we cannot reach the pilot!”
So Foucault seems to be right when he says, “We need to cut off the King's head and defend the society.”
