Traumatized sovereignty

Richard Kearney is well known as the author of The Wake of Imagination and considerations of the various strands of European philosophy and dialogues with continental thinkers, but he has also long been engaged with the public life of Ireland. He edited The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (1982 and 1987), submitted a proposal on the "problem" of Northern Ireland to the New Ireland Forum at Dublin Castle in 1983, and submitted others to the Opsahl Commission in Belfast in 1993 and to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin Castle in 1995. He published Myth and Motherland in 1984, edited The Irish Mind (1985), published Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (1988), edited Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s (1988), and published Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (1996). The list is by no means exhaustive, but what it amounts to is Kearney's sustained phenomenology of Ireland. Those writings have included treatments of Irish philosophers (Berkeley, Toland, and Tyndall); detailed analyses of Irish writing, including fiction by Yeats and Joyce, to be sure, but also by Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and John Banville; drama by Tom Murphy and Brian Friel; and poetry by a list of Irish poets too long to give here. His writings include examinations of Irish cinema and painting, excursions into Irish history (e.g., the Easter Rising of 1916), interrogations of the institutions of Irish life (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church), and considerations of Irish political life. What is more, none of this work has been divorced from a personal intellectual involvement in that life. This is a personal practice, a lived and lively engagement with the phenomenon Ireland, a practice that is conducted both up close and in detail, from a distance and en gros. The question he poses is this: what is Ireland? It is a question that, not long ago, would be answered with little hesitation in terms of nationhood, national territory, statehood, and national sovereignty; not long before that, it would be answered in terms of people and race. Now, thanks to the changing shape of Europe, thanks to the prosperity that has turned Ireland from a producer of emigrants to one with increasing numbers of immigrants, thanks to recent shifts in the various positions that go to make up the Northern Ireland problem, but especially thanks to the work of engaged intellectuals like Kearney, a response in those well-worn terms is hardly possible. The question is as provocative as ever, and there are still those who feel compelled to reinforce (or enforce) their responses with bombs and gunfire; thankfully, though, their numbers have dwindled. It is plain to the rest of us, meanwhile, that this is a question that can only be answered with hesitation and perhaps with more questions, but always with the knowledge that each answer will itself be questionable, which is to say that each answer must return to the questioner as a question. My specific question here is the following: In a phenomenology of Ireland, what role can the concept of sovereignty play? How can it help us see what Ireland is? And then, so what? (The "so what?" silently accompanies all philosophical questions, but I make it explicit here because Kearney's work refuses to allow it to remain silent.) At the beginning of Postnationalist Ireland, Kearney presents a brief genealogy of the term sovereignty. In the beginning, as the Latin superanus, it meant "supreme power," the ultimate authority or overseer of order. In the sixteenth century, Bodin took it up as absolute sovereignty in which the sovereign king made the laws but was not himself subject to them, and this was further developed by Hobbes. Locke and Rousseau propelled the shift to popular sovereignty in the seventeenth century, with the French constitution of 1791 pinning down the concept further by adding the qualification national, yielding the term national sovereignty. In the nineteenth century, England saw the development of the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, while the United States established a principle of constitutional sovereignty. While each adhered more or less closely to Rousseau's dictum-"sovereignty is one, indivisible, unalienable, and imprescribable"-Kearney also sees in them evidence of an evolution of the concept that paved the way for a pluralist version (in which power is recognized as residing in several centers at once) and a dual version (in which power is shared between, for example, a single federal power and among many local powers). This eventually makes possible a radical undermining of Rousseau's claim and the entry of such terms as pooled sovereignty or shared sovereignty into our political vocabulary. I will examine this concept of sovereignty in the light of the most sovereign of all rights; the right to wage war. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it in "War, Law, Sovereignty-Techne," this is the most sovereign right because it allows a sovereign to decide that another sovereign is the enemy and to set about conquering him, which is to say, destroying him, relieving him of his sovereignty.1 Talk of war is indeed appropriate to Northern Ireland (albeit controversial). As Kearney puts it, "the twenty-five-year war in Ulster epitomized the clash of irreconcilable territorial claims" (PNI, 2). I would add that these were also irreconcilable sovereign claims. But in Northern Ireland it is a matter of competing claims emerging within one political state, and this is the source of controversy over calling the troubles a war; to do so is to recognize the sovereignty of those (the nationalist paramilitaries) who have declared war on the established sovereign power. I argue that what has happened in Ireland amounts to a trauma for the sovereign nationalist community. There has been personal trauma on all sides, but the phenomenon of a traumatized sovereignty is, though related, a different matter. I ask, in addition, if Kearney's recent work on narrative suggests a possible therapy for this trauma. Just as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up in the hope of bringing healing, what forum for the recounting of narratives might help heal the wounded sovereignty in Northern Ireland?