Dear Mireille,

I had to think about your comment, and again, as very often with our cross-disciplinary exchanges, it makes me think where I did not, and to be specific, it forces me to think what I was talking about by using the substantives "sovereignty" or "sovereign" and the adjective "sovereign".

Here is an attempt to make clearer what I had in mind in writing this text, hopping that is shows how ours points of view are not in contradiction, even if they ask for some tuning of our disciplinary acceptation of those terms. Points of view not in contradiction, but however starting from different problems and then deploying them on different ontological grounds, required by the questions they ask. What it is certain, now, and which your comment forces me to think about, it is the necessity to make this ontological ground explicit. And so, let’s try to do so.

The problem of Foucault, at the epochs he talks about sovereignty, is to explore how it is possible to resist to certain forms of power when those forms of power produce resistance. Telling so is a way to avoid giving features to what would be the right or the wrong power, the legitimate or the illegitimate ones, to avoid giving a normative definition of power.
That induces that he does not defend or criticize the model of sovereignty as such.

But it is also starting from the acknowledgement that the sovereignty model is putting to the test, putting in crisis. This statement of fact is not so far from this other one taking into account into our IAP: the crisis of the representational principles. If the reconceptualization of the sovereignty by Montesquieu allows refuting the sovereignty in the name of this sovereignty itself, it is difficult for me to keep this conception straight on its legs while the representational principles are putting into questions.

But let’s go back to Foucault.

Then, the guillotine is not firstly directed against the sovereignty model, nor against what or who incarnates this model, but mainly against what it makes impossible to think when it is kept as the only source of power.

What does it make impossible to think? All the other forms of powers that are strategically produced beside and through sovereignty. Foucault designates some of them (disciplines, biopouvoir,?), but the list is not exhaustive.
Then, in order to think those other forms of power (economical, ?), that we can see at work in our IAP transversal themes (GMOs, correlated humans,?), in order to understand where their power (puissance, capacité de produire des effets) come from, it is effective to ontologically pull out any productive power (puissance) to sovereignty, and direct the light to other part of the process.

Let’s take a very easy image, perhaps maybe in default because too much simplistic. But enough striking to be tried.

There is a pretty little chalet built three centuries ago. The building is not bad. The upkeep has been good. The place was chosen for the space, the view, the calm, the beautiful environment, the river at the bottom of the hill. The housekeepers take care of the chalet as "bon père de famille". The propriety is granted, official. But, years after years, motorways are constructed, trees are destructed, factories are built, the river is polluted. The life in the chalet has been changed. Whatever the material quality of the house, whatever the official property, the occupants do not have the same life than before. They do not have the same power of living they have before.
What to do? Keeping eyes and ears closed to the environment and still being the ’bon père de famille’ for the house? Or looking how this living has been changed because its environment has been change, even if the house seems to be as beautiful as ever, to understand how those new relations and the power they get to change this life have been produced? Then the housekeeper leaves the housekeeping of the house and goes out.

I agree, it’s a very childhood example.
Foucault looks outside the house of sovereignty to try to understand how the adding of other ones beside it has changed its color.

Now, let’s move to a more technically level.
What I did not do in my short text was to make a difference between forms of power and sovereignty. I took the bad slide to induce that sovereignty and hegemony was synonymous and identified them as obstacles of the made of politics. The clarifying here done avoids this risk. It helps me to make a distinction between ontological powerlessness of the sovereignty, in order to deploy another level of understanding, and an effective powerlessness of the sovereignty, acknowledged or desirable, that is not the point of the text, neither of the analyze.

Other forms of power, as devices of disciplinary powers or devices of biopolitics, have not replace the form of sovereignty, but acting with it, they displace its function. In order to see how do work those others forms of power, Foucault lays out another ontological level which is the one of the micropowers: all the relation of forces through which relations of power are drawn. The power to which Foucault redirect his analyze are the ones that are not directly addressed to individuals but the ones that integrate relations of force between individuals, groups, non-humans as well. "Integration" that means that those powers gain their power (puissance) from the coordination and the finalization of already existing relations of force. That means that those new forms of power are not the source of their proper power (puissance), but gain it always from others than them.

Those others can be the relations between the State and the Scientists at universities, as shown by the GMO creation for the profit of other powers than State or Scientists or University. The life patenting can be seen as an enterprise of capture through which new forms of powers, capitalistic, has made do things to Sates. Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre, in a forthcoming book about "Sorcellerie capitaliste", talk about the interesting articulation "étatico-capitaliste", where powers of the State has been captured on a double level: capitalism makes do the State and the State lets do capitalism.

But on a more micro level, those others relation of forces are also each of the ones between a bike and the cars in town, between the researchers, between lovers, between parents and children,?

Any form of power between humans (patriarchy, hierarchy at work place, economical hegemony, Sate, ?) is always the effect, the integration, the coordination, the finalization of already existing relation of forces that are not reduced to relations between humans.

And even, maybe, a same relations can be seen as a power - gaining its power (puissance) from other relations of forces, and having stabilized those relation of forces in precise types of relations of power - or as a relation of forces - through which other relations of powers could be produced. This is a matter of angle of view, of macro or micro level, and precisely of the effects expected from it: description- understanding and transforming.

Sovereignty, as posed by principle, and as organized around the fact that it is the only source of power, can not help to understand and even more to transform others forms of power that exercise themselves by carrying on regardless.

If Foucault tried to think how to resist, in this genealogical period, he took the risk to be locked in a general frame of resistance and domination, where the war and the strongest would have had the last word. Being free would have meant being able to resist with the same weapons.
He offered another issue in what is identified as the third part of his work, the ethical part, which I prefer to identify as the ethico-political part, because relation to the self is a political relation in his view. "The private is politic", said feminists.

There another strategic point is used: the subject. But warning, not the subject of law, or the political subject, or the philosophical subject, all of them being the sovereign (of their will, of their acts, of their destiny). The subject on light is the point where relations of forces are crossing, making this subject as well. But this time, those relations of forces are not crossing as producing the subject only as effect. This time, the subject itself can use those relations of forces, crossing at its corner, in order, by transforming itself, to transform the way those relations are crossing at its corner and at the corner of others. To think it, Foucault needs to re-define power, to enlarge its acceptance: from strategic power to governmental technologies as the practices where are defined, organized, constituted the strategies that individuals, as free, can have to each others, that means to themselves as well. Governing the soul is re-appropriated by the subjects themselves from the biological and disciplinary power. From the government of ourselves and of others, as linked, any strategic relation of power can be produced as domination, institutionalized asymmetrical relation, or as an open and reversible relation of power where new subjectivation (process) can be created that means invented. Governmentality as a new generic definition of power (puissance).

It seems that I left the premise question at stake: sovereignty as by seen by law.
But the move is the same: create another ontology, as a new way of putting light of what exists, in order to understand how relations of power work. The mean used by Foucault is to put sovereignty apart, giving it an ontological powerlessness, to see what happens through other glasses, through another lighting. And the problem and the mean is the same whatever the sovereignty is: legal, political, epistemological, psychological?

I hope those propositions, still in process in my own work, can help. However, having to respond to your question, already clarifies it for this work. Thanks.

Kind regards,

Nathalie