At first, I didn’t quite follow why and how Derrida segues from interrogating the fable and characteristics shared by the sovereign and the beast to post-9/11 media and political communication before circling back to Hobbes. But then I understood that he is laying out an argument about how political communication and the fable have certain characteristics in common with respect to the strategy of “making known,” faire savoir, toward what he calls a “becoming-fabulous of political action and discourse, be it described as military or civil, warlike or terroristic.” Thus, the seminar—the philosophical discourse—must “make known without fable.”
Yet, there’s more to the argument about post-9/11 political communication. It leads him back to Hobbes and the role of fear as the primary motivator for entering the contract (to gain protection) and keeping it (to avoid punishment), neatly encapsulated in the formula protego ergo obligo (the cogito ergo sum of the state, as Carl Schmitt has it). However, as Derrida argues, the structure established by the contract disguises its own perishability with the vocabulary of the divine, as if its structure were equally imperishable. And here, Q.E.D., the sovereign becomes exempt from the contract: Hobbes’s ultimately theological model of the political puts the sovereign outside the law, just like the beast or wolf is outside the law.
From there, Derrida rips into Hobbes’s “mediation argument” against God as a law above the law, landing on Hobbes’s double exclusion of god and the beast, where language enters the game. Both the beast and God (the sovereign’s sovereign) “do not respond,” as Hobbes argues, which can be read both in terms of response-as-speech and responsibility, which makes, for Hobbes, any covenant impossible with either.
The session concludes with final thoughts, quotations, and reading tasks in the context of contracts, particularly the “double-bind of domestication.”
Derrida, Jacques. “Second Session December 19, 2001.” In: The Beast & the Sovereign Vol.1, transl. Geoffrey Bennington. The Seminars of Jacques Derrida. Chicago UP: 2009.