SOVEREIGNTY INC , . ALSO PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies AmAndA Anderson, ritA Felski, And toril moi Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory Wendy BroWn, Peter e. Gordon, And mAx Pensky Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State PAul ChristoPher Johnson, Each TRIOS book PAmelA e. klAssen, addresses an important And WinniFred FAllers sullivAn theme in critical theory, Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism philosophy, or cultural mArCus Boon, eriC CAzdyn, And studies through three timothy morton extended essays written in close collaboration by leading scholars. SOVEREIGNTY INC , . THREE INQUIRIES IN POLITICS AND ENJOYMENT WILLIAM Mazzarella ERIC L. Santner AARON Schuster The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2020 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 isBn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 66838- 3 (cloth) isBn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 66841- 3 (paper) isBn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 66855- 0 (e- book) doi: https:// doi .org /10 .7208 /chicago /9780226668550 .001 .0001 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Mazzarella, William, 1969– Brand(ish)ing the name, or, Why is Trump so enjoyable? | Santner, Eric L., 1955– Rebranding of sovereignty in the age of Trump. | Schuster, Aaron, 1974– Beyond satire. Title: Sovereignty, Inc. : Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment / William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, Aaron Schuster. Other titles: Trios (Chicago, Ill.) Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, [2020] | Series: Trios | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: lCCn 2019031018 | isBn 9780226668383 (cloth) | isBn 9780226668413 (paperback) | isBn 9780226668550 (ebook) Subjects: lCsh: Trump, Donald, 1946– | Genet, Jean, 1910– 1986. Balcon. | Political culture— United States. | Branding (Marketing)— Political aspects— United States. | Authority. | United States— Politics and government— 2017– Classification: lCC e913.3 .s69 2020 | ddC 973.933— dc23 lC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031018 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of Ansi/niso z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). CONTENTS Introduction: In the Beginning Was the Brand Name William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster 1 THE REBRANDING OF SOVEREIGNTY IN THE AGE OF TRUMP Toward a Critique of Manatheism Eric L. Santner } 19 BRAND(ISH)ING THE NAME or, Why Is Trump So Enjoyable? William Mazzarella } 113 BEYOND SATIRE The Political Comedy of the Present and the Paradoxes of Authority Aaron Schuster } 161 INTRODUCTION In the BegInnIng Was the Brand name William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster 1 Because it was in some ways too good a match for the essays col- lected here, we decided not to make use of an image that would have emblematized the claims on which they all in one way or another converge, claims themselves encapsulated by the title of this book: Sovereignty, Inc. The idea was to make a slight adjust- ment to the famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, to place on the breast of the figure of the sovereign towering over his lands the brand name Trump, much as it appears on the current American president’s various hotels and condomini- ums. As noted, the image simply hit the nail on the head with a bit too much force. Much of what we wanted to say was in some sense all there: the return of a monarchical style of authority but now under the sign of a brand; the composition of the sover- eign figure from a multitude of bodies held together by exuber- ant participation in the sovereign’s own self-a ggrandizement, his own compulsively repetitive autodoxologies; the relay of gazes constituting the figure (the eyes of the subjects are raised toward the head of the sovereign while his gaze is turned toward the spectator— or perhaps better: the television camera); the strange combination of corpulence and artificiality. And indeed, 2 introduCtion the motto from the book of Job inscribed at the top of the image seemed to capture the American president’s obsession with rankings (Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei— There is no power on earth to be compared to him). And finally, the Trumped-u p image would also have served to mark the mu- tation of the canonical treatise on the social contract theory of sovereign authority into something akin to the art of the deal, a treatise on sovereignty into a handbook of business and man- agement. For some decades now, the global present has easily— perhaps too easily— been diagnosed as “neoliberal.” Too often, we feel, this diagnosis has smuggled in a kind of excarnation of the social, a forgetting of the flesh. To be sure, there has hardly been silence around “the body”— the body as the signifying sur- face of disciplinary power, the body as the evidentiary support for hegemonic agendas whose purpose and telos always lie else- where, and of course the body as irreducible site of resistance. Against the prevailing tendency to theorize the neoliberal mo- ment as a time of administrative capture, as an era of increas- ingly watertight logic of governmentality, we consider bodies as sites of exceedingly laborious enjoyment, as localizations of the business— and busyness— of corporate jouissance. We ap- prehend the political present as an anxiously vital, and vitally corporeal, space of fantasy. The claim of these essays is that we have all, in one way or another, been drafted into the liturgical labor that animates this space and thereby sustains the effects of sovereignty in its new forms and configurations. Our title is also an affectionate nod to Jean and John Coma- roff’s Ethnicity, Inc. If the Comaroffs are concerned with the commodification of identity, then perhaps one could say that we are concerned with the commodification of sovereignty— if by that phrase one understands a perpetually tense and gener- atively unresolvable relation. Ours is the age of crowdsourcing and “prosumption”— the supposedly democratized reconcilia- tion of production and consumption, of sovereignty and citizen- William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster 3 ship, that the distributed interactivity of the internet enables. No longer, we are told, must we accept the faceless authority of distant corporations and bureaucracies. Today, politicians as well as brands present themselves as always already “ours”— intimately solicitous, customizable, concerned only with the im- maculate realization of our desires. In a time of immediation— the intensely mediated production of immediacy-e ffects— we appear finally to have overcome the besetting problem of lib- eral democracy: how to make the brand-s overeign fully present, fully responsive, and fully isomorphic with the agitated flesh of the multitude. Here the medium is not so much the message as a site of the burning jouissance of the brand. The fact that, in this scenario, fully alienated labor becomes hard to tell apart from fully integrated labor should be an early warning sign. Or at the very least, it ought to be a signal that we might need some new ways of making sense of the frantic mo- tion in which we, today more than ever, find ourselves. We may decry the data- mining agenda that hovers behind every new life- enhancing app. We may quite legitimately continue to be concerned about the ever- tightening networks of surveillance and control that form the sober side of the cooing consumer come- ons which greet us at every step. But where in this sce- nario do we place the manifestly excessive gestures, the glorious gratuitousness, of our current crop of neopopulist leaders? And where in this neoliberal dream of seamless governmentality, of a perfectly harmonized society, do we place our own increas- ingly compulsive inability to rest? At one level, the three essays in this book are inquiries into the economization of fantasy: how libidinal investments can/ not be harnessed to projects of power and value. At another level, as the opening figure of the branded Leviathan suggests, these are also meditations on how, today, we are recruited, drafted into the production of glory. Bringing together Sant- ner’s engagement with the carnal traces of magnificence in the headless body of the multitude, Schuster’s investigations into