Hobbes’s Counsel

Abstract

This text is the translation of the original “Le conseil de Hobbes”, forthcoming in Derrida et la politique, edited by Fernanda Bernardo. It develops a Derridean hypothesis upon democracy and sovereignty through a reading of the figure of the counsel and the philosophy of language in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Perhaps, there is no philosopher who has defended the absolute and indivisible character of sovereignty more strongly than Hobbes. However, Hobbes recognizes that sometimes the sovereign cannot decide by itself and thus it faces with the necessity of taking into account the counsel of subjects. Does this recourse to others compromise the indivisibility of the sovereign power of decision? This essay proposes a reading of the conceptual figure of the counsel in the philosophy of language that Hobbes elaborates as a part of his political thought. It thus draws attention to Hobbes’s attempts to incorporating the rhetoric of the counsel into the structure of the sovereign power without harming the supremacy of the same. By showing how the distinctions that Hobbes introduces within the rhetoric of the counsel do not accomplish his aim to domesticate the risk that the counsel itself constitutes for the sovereign, this essay demonstrates that Hobbes’s political thought is irreducibly threatened by the deficit that constitutes and deconstitutes the sovereignty of the Leviathan. Scattering the instance of decision beyond the figure of the sovereign, the counsel appears in Hobbes’s text as an opening towards the irreducibility of democracy.