Law, ethics and the biopolitical

The dissertation starts by defining a 'crisis of sovereignty' in political science and the philosophy of law; it argues the central issues relate to determining legal authority without national sovereignty as an ultimate referent. Based on an analysis of a debate between legal positivism and natural law theory, it argues that increasingly there is agreement in Anglo-American legal studies that legal authority is not synonymous with the nation-state but with an Aristotelian concept of the common good. Even in the historically opposed approaches of legal positivism and natural law theory the relationship between law and ethics is being redefined in reference to 'human rights' or a 'natural law of survival,' which is understood as the common good of humanity and justification for the legal authority that secures it. To critically analyse this development, I consider two new versions ethics that have also emerged in the twentieth century, the ethics of psychoanalysis and bioethics. The ethics of psychoanalysis will be used to articulate precisely how the Aristotelian notion of the common good has different political and legal implications today than it did for the Greeks. This argument then connects the bioethical good---the sanctity of life---to theories of biopolitics and suggests that legal authority based on the common good defined as 'life' is connected to a form of biopolitical sovereignty and organised around an imperative to live. Based on this conclusion, the study criticizes the idea of 'limited national sovereignty' and doctrines of human rights that have been offered as remedies to the crisis of sovereignty. It concludes by considering the possibility of a psychoanalytic political philosophy, the political meaning of life and death and the role of violence in an ethico-politics of the future.