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13.9. Localizing Timor and the Dicisions of Modern Sovereignty

Dylan Fagan (University of California, Berkeley)

Abstract

Much contemporary Anthropology and Critique of biopolitics and modern power and sovereignty has turned from questions of immanent causality (Foucault 1990) to the operation of the body in or as sovereignty that has been considered as both gendered and sexuated (seeLacan 1998 and Derrida 2009). The ramifications of these demonstrations have engendered a wide field of critical interdisciplinaryresearch. Yet all of the empirical classifying of there petitive gestures of sexuation-in-species being of the sovereign body,and proclaiming its incommensurability to itself and its representability, has done little to dislodge the essential secrecy or magic formula of the internal and inner divided economy of sovereign power. This gendered and sexuated topology of sovereignty has often analytically privileged the border regions of its body and organs.The border (read symptom)presents a troubling site for understanding the general outline of the sovereign procedure, as the border necessarily undertakes a transformation and distribution of difference by mean of the scission of the magic localized as border. Accordingly, the widespread worldwide empiricity of the nation-state border as a localization of war has contributed to the energy for the critique of this worlding-form of modern power and sovereignty. While drawing on this literature of psychoanalysis, anthropology, and linguistics, this paper attends to this panel’s call to engage the operation and bodying of sovereignty in the localization of east as Timor. Responding to Foucault’s provocation, what operation of sovereignty is authored in the name of timor? What is this collective subjectivization of timor in the period that calls itself “Reformation”? Beyond the sexuated and gendered sovereign body, this paper suggests that sovereignty is organized into a bipolarity of sovereign splacement (Badiou 2009). The paper investigates this coupling of force-place as timor by reading the cottage industry of internet writings meditating upon the etymology of “timor”. These writings make explicit timor in terms of inequality that emerge from thinking the east as necessarily equivocal to forms of negritude and blackness. The paper considers how this conceptualization of timor provides a suggestive way for thinking modern sovereignty as a structure drives whose economy distributes spatial dimensions of gender, sexuation, and abyssal difference in an Indonesian sovereign body.