Bulletin n. 3/2010
January 2011
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Reid Julian
    Of nomadic unities: Gilles Deleuze on the nature of sovereignty
    in Journal of International Relations and Development , Volume 13, Number 4, December ,  2010 ,  405-428
    This paper develops Deleuze's critique of the political ideal of sovereignty by examining his philosophy of nature. In their exultation of the ideal of sovereignty, traditional forms of political theory reflect only one aspect of nature. That is, its tendency toward unity. As such, they obscure what is most ‘true’ of nature, and what is most ‘true’ of peoples and individuals, which is their tendency toward multiplicity. While Deleuze's work has received significant attention in IR, the value of his philosophy of nature for the more concretely political problem of sovereignty is still to be fully realised. Beyond its under-representation in debates concerning political problems, Deleuze's work also suffers from misrepresentation. There is an abiding misconception of Deleuze as a theorist of the possibility of a ‘world without sovereignty’. This paper dispels that particular misconception by demonstrating Deleuze's attention to the necessity of the recurrence of the problem of sovereignty as a condition for an understanding of political agency.
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