Who is the sovereign?
He goes unnamed.
Where is the sovereign?
At the center.
Sovereignty is the anonymity of the iterative center. The iterative center is the practical simulacrum of the originary scene. It is the repetition-unto-death of the sacrificial sentiment that founded the corpus over which the sovereign rules. Its anonymity lies in its unnameability. The center—the organ of merum imperium—cannot be graced by the Word, for it is the center to which the Word owes its genesis. Schmitt rightly points out that the locus of sovereignty exists both within and without the law. The sovereign is the first-mover of law-making, mythic violence and yet he is inscribed in his creation. Merum imperium does not exist except by the law it designates. Its position is purely retroactive and autogenetic.
The sovereign is nothing more than its embodied sovereign affect, the identity of which is predicated on the withdrawal from chronic orientation toward the future; from the present's subsumption by the future. Sovereignty is a refusal to participate in a very real eschatological experience of time—a modality that has not been done away with and cannot be done away with so long as we can escape into sovereignty; so long as we can still renounce the empty Ecclesia, or "the Church".
The Church integrates the future as the possible End of the World within its organization of time; it is not placed at the end point of time in a strictly linear fashion. The end of time can be experienced only because it is always already sublimated in the Church. The history of the Church remains the history of salvation so long as this condition held.
(Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past)
"Ecclesia" in our context does not refer to any one worldly ecclesiastical institution. In its worldly configuration, it is simply the motor by which the future embeds itself in the present as does a parasite in flesh. It is the unidirectional transfiguration of the present into the future within the present. In Valentinian gnostic literature, Ecclesia (manifest in fullness) is reduplicated into emptiness as seeds of the heavenly archetype. Through this lens we may view Apocalypse as a vertical dyad. In reality we participate in the Ecclesia of becoming-emptiness/emptying-out (of kenoma), but in virtuality we participate in the Ecclesia of becoming-fullness/filling (of pleroma). It cannot be ignored, either that Ecclesia is inextricably bound to Anthropos. Together they constitute the basest Aeon. The existence-for-Apocalypse generated and mediated by Ecclesia-as-seed is embodied in Anthropos via Ecclesia's activity as a conduit. Through the Church, Man (similarly reduplicated) is rendered apocalyptic.
The real flow of eschatology from the kenotic Ecclesia to the kenotic Anthropos is, of course, reflected into the virtual. In pleromatic fullness, however, this flow engenders the ever-present Apocalypse in lieu of the katechon. In the virtual, the katechon is always a thing of the past. In fact, this is the only way one can define virtuality. In the regime of reality Apocalypse is always, as Koselleck remarks, sublimated in the Church, but this lends itself to the fugitive immanence of Parousia in Man-the-Church.
This hidden Parousia is manifest as Logos. The absolute internal integration of the aeon into which it incarnates—Man-the-Church—is the self-emptying Corpus (the animal flesh derivative of Nefesh Behamit) that accepts into itself the becoming-fullness of Logos. Usefully, we can map these categories onto Kant’s sensibility and reason. The Logos of Man-as-Church is the manifest transcendental subject in its inextricable unity with its immanently-externalized animality. Finally, then, sovereignty can be described as the transcendental subject’s dismissal of its animality insofar as animality is an ontological orientation toward Apocalypse. In dismissing Apocalypse, however, the transcendental subject dismisses itself insofar as it is immanent in rationality only as long as it is based in a providential chronology.
God mutilates Himself...