The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte
Vicente L. Rafael
Duke University Press: 2022
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A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas,’ remarked the eighteenth-century French publicist-lawyer Joseph Michel Antoine Servan. His ideas deeply influenced future generations of thinkers, foremost among them the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault deployed a novel analysis of the multifarious operations of power in modern society. Whereas absolute monarchs had the authority to condemn their subjects to death, modern sovereigns instead enjoy an even more awesome power to govern the everyday lives of their citizens. The book bursts into action with the graphic account of the the public torture and mutilation of Robert-François Damiens, who was convicted of regicide in Bourbon France. For Foucault, this ghastly rite was the ultimate representation of despotic power in pre-modern Europe.
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