Finally...my blog 8

            I was really hoping this week to be able to point out how Mbembe’s thoughts on death and sovereignty and states work in Marie de France’s Equitan. Equitan is about a seneschal who loves his wife, but this wife has an affair with Equitan, the king. After some time, they decide that in order to be together they must kill the seneschal, but the seneschal discovers them and kills them instead. They burn to death in a bath of boiling hot water. Despite the relevance I thought Mbembe would have to Equitan (and that someone with a little more practice may be able to discern), I have more questions than conclusions.

            My primary struggle with Mbembe is with his terms—what does he mean by sovereignty? Or subject? Biopower? At some points in the article Mbembe seems to be indicating a pre-defined definition (Foucault’s biopower) (12), and then at other times he presents multiple definitions (or, granted, these are perhaps reformulations of one definition in an attempt at clarity). Sovereignty is a good example of this. On page twelve, “To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power, and on page sixteen, sovereignty is “primarily expressed as the right to kill.” I am never sure if these definitions apply to anyone who could take power, or only those who have power. Because also on page sixteen, “sovereign” seems to be refer to just one person, and because part of the context of this article is the political state, which typically has one “sovereign” ruler. And does “subject” refer to a citizen who is under the rule of a sovereign (and so powerless, in some ways), or it is someone who has distinguished themselves from an object, someone who is active and has power? Without knowing how these terms are being used, I don’t know how to access this article.

            When it comes to Equitan I really see a potential for connection with Mbembe’s text, because there are three people who decide on one another’s deaths, and so sovereign in the sense of taking power would apply here. And maybe especially because it is the king (sovereign?) who first plots against his seneschal (subject?), and he is exercising his sovereign (kingly) right to decide a death. However, is death really a state issue in this story? Equitan does not seem to oppose the seneschal’s life, but his marriage. It’s more of a disregard for life rather than a deliberate acting against it, I think. But maybe the two are not opposed as I think they are, and Mbembe addresses it somewhere? And what can I make of the fact that the seneschal decides on and accomplishes the death of Equitan (and his own wife)? In the context of the story, he is in a sense the sovereign of his own wife, just as Equitan is sovereign over him, so his killing of his wife, especially because it responds to a transgression, may simply be an exercise of sovereignty in the sense of having the power to decide death. But the seneschal kills his sovereign (seriously, am I using this all wrong?!), which is problematic in its implications for the state. What makes it extra problematic for me is that even though the seneschal does kill the king as a kind of punishment, it’s also a reaction of passion and not, I think, an act of war or assertion of a right to kill just anyone.

            Finally, the last on the short list of confusing notions I’m entertaining is that Mbembe is focusing on a “modern state”—which I also don’t know what that is! Are we talking about “the modern era” as in back to Early Modern? Or since 1900 with modernism and post modern? And even though medieval feudal society is not modern, is it disqualified from the ideas Mbembe proposes about death and sovereignty?