Life at the Limit: body, eroticism and the excess

The paper explores the potentiality of life’s excess in situations such as detention at Guantánamo Bay and how these challenging and oppressive situations can constitute a different relationship between life and sovereign power/violence. Instead of condemning the concept of sovereignty as a whole, the paper first draws a distinction between sovereign violence (which aims to imprison life) and sovereign experience (as an experience of life’s excess) and, following Georges Bataille, delves into the latter. In doing so, the paper engages with moments where life is at the limit of sovereign order and with its excess defies it.