The epigenesis of the sovereign fantasy: from political theology to relational exposure

Marinos Diamantides

Chapter 21 in Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Sovereignty, 2026, pp 377-406 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter examines the persistence of sovereignty not as an institutional residue but as a symbolic and affective fantasy continually restaged within Western constitutional imagination in times of legitimacy crises and regardless of secularization. Against accounts that interpret modern law as a secular surrogate for the divine, and on the premise that affective meaning is more fundamental than cognition, the author argues that such crises reactivate archaic rituals encoding myths we no longer believe in, thereby exposing the theatrical structures through which power conceals its fragility and absence, even as it disperses into bureaucracy and digital infrastructures. Drawing on genealogy, political theology, and critical philosophy, the chapter highlights an epigenetic process that continues to generate constitutional theories which proclaim a break from sovereignty yet often reproduce sacred symbolic economies. Rather than resolving this impasse, the author foregrounds parody, inoperativity, and relational exposure as ways of suffering the persistence of the universal theologico-political problem without rehearsing old Occidental political theologies. In this sense, an ethics of responsibility toward the Other emerges not as a transcendence of sovereignty but as a response to its unfinished and inescapable theater.

Keywords: Crises of Legitimacy; Political Theology; Fantasy; Myth; Constitutional Imagination; Symbolic Economies; Theater of Power; Inoperativity; Responsibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781803926346
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