These days sovereignty seems both an omnipresent critical concern and something of an anachronistic political concept. On the one hand, over the past couple of decades critical attention to sovereignty has multiplied, evidenced both by the insistent fascination with the work of the German political theorist and legal scholar Carl Schmitt (routed, as it so often is, through the work of Giorgio Agamben) and through the expansion of sovereignty’s attachments – we find references to practical sovereignty (Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011), the sovereignty of critique (Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, 2015), corporate sovereignty (Joshua Barkan, Corporate Sovereignty: Law and Government Under Capitalism, 2013), and the sovereignty of data (Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud, 2016), to name but a few. For a concept long associated with final authority in the political sphere, it sometimes seems that nearly everything has been deemed sovereign. On the other hand, given its long association with the nation-state, now that we are supposedly entering the twilight of that political form, sovereignty seems, according to some, to be of increasingly less significance. This line of thinking, of course, has something of a storied lineage, most famously articulated by Michel Foucault, who in a 1977 interview put it this way:

中文翻译：

---

霍布斯、主权和早期美国文学

如今，主权似乎既是一个无所不在的关键问题，又是一个不合时宜的政治概念。一方面，在过去的几十年里，对主权的批判性关注成倍增加，这体现在对德国政治理论家和法律学者卡尔·施密特的工作的持续迷恋上（通常是通过Giorgio Agamben）并通过扩展主权依附——我们找到了对实践主权（Lauren Berlant，Cruel Optimism，2011）、批评主权（Rita Felski，The Limits of Critique，2015）、公司主权（Joshua Barkan，Corporate主权：资本主义下的法律和政府，2013 年）和数据主权（Tung-Hui Hu，云的史前史，2016 年），仅举几例。对于一个长期与政治领域最终权威相关联的概念，有时似乎几乎所有事物都被视为至高无上的。另一方面，鉴于它与民族国家的长期联系，现在我们应该进入这种政治形式的黄昏，据一些人说，主权似乎越来越不重要。当然，这种思路具有某种传奇色彩，最著名的是米歇尔·福柯 (Michel Foucault) 的阐述，他在 1977 年的一次采访中是这样说的：