Image and Sovereignty

After Nietzsche, Georges Bataille is the only one who experienced and exposed, as his most intimate and powerful project, the reversal of the meaning the word “subject” used to have until the end of the 18th century, namely, being the subject of a sovereign. Bataille experienced and exposed the birth of the (sovereign) subject, for what it was: the ruin of the subject, which means: the impossibility of witnessing, as a subject, the fact of being a (sovereign) subject. This revolution of the subject (and with it the urgent necessity of re-playing the becoming citizen of the subject) has been largely obfuscated in the recent theoretical approaches to the question, in particular in Giorgio Agamben’s apocalyptic conceptualization of sovereignty and bare life.