The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II

Author(s): Jacques Derrida · Year: 2010 FR / 2011 EN (seminar given 2002–2003) · Type: lecture-course (seminar at EHESS)

The second and final volume of Derrida's last seminar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, 11 December 2002 – 26 March 2003. Ten weekly sessions, ~290 pages in the English edition. The companion to *The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I* (2001–2002). Posthumously edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud from Derrida's typescript; translated by Geoffrey Bennington with French marginal pagination preserved. The seminar's announced 11th–13th sessions were never given: Derrida marked S10 as a "definite stage of the seminar, before a long halt," then did not resume — he died of pancreatic cancer on 9 October 2004. The seminar's incompleteness is destinal, not editorial.

BS-II isolates, as Derrida announces explicitly (S1, p. 13), two texts to be read in conjoined commentary — Daniel Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe* (1719) and Heidegger's 1929–30 lecture course Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude). This is a methodological departure from BS-I's many-cornered spiral: instead of moving across thirteen texts in thirteen sessions, BS-II reads two texts in ten sessions, allowing each to "read the other in the margins."

The seminar's opening sentence — "I am alone" — at once names solitude and sovereignty (absolutus: detached, absolved, exceptional). The thesis built from this: sovereignty IS solitude, the ipse (BS-I's framing) is insular. The seminar's late-Derridean discovery, announced explicitly at S10 (p. 280): Heidegger's *Walten* — a "sovereignty so sovereign that it overruns any historical configuration of an onto-theological and therefore also theologico-political type." Walten exceeds the political-theological sovereignty (Bodin, Hobbes, Schmitt) that BS-I deconstructed; it names the prevailing-event that gives the ontological difference itself. The seminar's terminal question, left unresolved across S10 and never resumed: "Who is capable of death, and, through death, of imposing failure on the super- or hyper-sovereignty of Walten?"

Core Arguments

The seminar develops 41 numbered arguments across ten sessions (full extraction at .extraction-derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii.md). The thirteen most structurally load-bearing:

Claim: "I am alone" is at once the predicate of solitude and the predicate of sovereignty (absolutus); the homonymic slide from seul (alone) to le seul (the only one) is structural, not accidental. Because: "I am alone does moreover mean 'I am' absolute, that is absolved, detached or delivered from all bond, absolutus, safe from any bond, exceptional, even sovereign" (S1, p. 1). Rousseau's "I am alone and the only one" (Fifth and Seventh Reveries) houses both grammars non-accidentally. Against: A linguistic-empiricist reading: seul and le seul are two distinct lexical items; conflating them is wordplay, not ontology. (S1, pp. 1–8; S3, pp. 63–68.)
Claim: There is no world — only islands. The "world" is in every case constructed-simulated by stabilizing apparatuses (language, codes of traces), never natural. Because: "There is no world, there are only islands"; "between my world and any other world there is first the space and the time of an infinite difference, an interruption that is incommensurable with all attempts to make a passage, a bridge, an isthmus" (S1, p. 9). Celan's Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen is the seminar's recurring touchstone. Against: Husserl / Heidegger reply: there is one shared world as the horizon of all phenomenality. "There is no world" risks collapsing into solipsism. Derrida acknowledges the charge as "apocalyptic" but holds it (S10, p. 267). (S1, pp. 8–10; S10, pp. 263–69.)
Claim: Heidegger's three theses — der Stein ist weltlos / das Tier ist weltarm / der Mensch ist weltbildend (stone is worldless / animal is poor in world / man is world-forming) — form a triad whose central term is contradictory: the animal "both has and does not have world." This contradiction is load-bearing, not a slip. Because: Heidegger himself emphasizes Haben und zugleich Nichthaben von Welt (H, 293/199). The triad is not a continuous gradient but a discontinuous logic in which the middle term is internally split. Against: Heideggerian reading: "having in the mode of not-having" is rigorous phenomenological-ontological terminology; the animal has Umwelt but not Welt-als-solche. (S1, pp. 6, 11–13; S3, pp. 90–91.)
Claim: Walten is the deepest and most neglected word in Heidegger's lexicon — an "ultra-sovereign" sovereignty that exceeds and precedes the theologico-political, neither solely political nor solely theological, but the very ground from which both are derived. Because: Heidegger translates physis not as Wachstum (growth) but as sich bildendes Walten des Seienden im Ganzen. Walten covers everything (gods, men, beings); man is durchwaltet (traversed-and-crushed) by it. From 1929–30 onward (and especially in Einführung in die Metaphysik 1935 and Identität und Differenz 1957) the family deploys "superabundantly": walten, durchwalten, Mitwalten, umwalten, verwalten, Verwaltung, Übergewalt, vorwaltend, bewältigen, unbewältigt, Gewalt, Allgewalt, Gewalt-tat, Gewalt-tätigkeit. Against: An orthodox Heideggerian — Walten is precisely not sovereignty in the political-juridical sense; Heidegger's project is to step out of metaphysics of subjectivity and mastery. Naming Walten "ultra-sovereign" reabsorbs Heidegger into the very vocabulary he is dismantling. (S2, pp. 32–44; S8–S10.)
Claim: Walten would be too sovereign still to be sovereign. The excess of sovereignty would nullify the meaning of sovereignty. Because: In Identität und Differenz (1957), Heidegger writes "Im Austrag waltet Lichtung des sich verhüllend Verschließenden, welches Walten das Aus- und Zueinander von Überkommnis und Ankunft vergibt." Walten gives (and "mis-gives," vergibt) the ontological difference; it is not a being, not Being either, but the prevailing-event in which the difference takes place. It precedes any "highest being" (causa sui). The causa sui — Heidegger says in the same essay — is precisely the God to whom one neither prays nor sacrifices nor dances; "atheistic" thinking is closer to the Divine God than is onto-theology. Hence Walten exceeds onto-theological sovereignty. Against: One could read Walten as just another name for Being's Ereignis, drained of sovereignty-register; Derrida concedes Heidegger's defender's resources but holds the excess of the term resists this quietist reading. (S9, pp. 252–57; S10, pp. 279–84.)
Claim: Robinson Crusoe and Heidegger's Grundbegriffe are to be read together because they share a common Robinsonian démarche: a solitary subject seeking the closest, surest path, terrified of retracing his own steps. Heidegger philosophizes Robinson-style. Because: "Robinson Heidegger ... isolates himself from the whole tradition, from all traditions, and asks himself, out of nowhere, the question of the path" (S2, p. 33). The opening Sein und Zeit gesture (start from what is closest, Dasein) is "a hyperbolic Robinsonade." Both texts are obsessed with Richtung, Orientierung, Weg vs. Umweg; both fear the closure of the circular path on its own footprint. Against: A philologist's objection: the resemblance is metaphorical; Heidegger and Defoe belong to incommensurable genres. (S1, pp. 13–17; S2, pp. 33–46.)
Claim: Robinson's terror at discovering the bare footprint might be his own dramatizes a structural law (not a narrative trick) about ipseity-on-an-island: every step on a closed circuit is potentially the trace of one's own past or future, and ipseity is constituted by this undecidability. Because: "Is it me? Is it my track? Is it my path? Is it the specter of my print, the print of my specter? Am I coming back? Am I or am I not returning?" (S2, p. 48). Poll the parrot calling "Robin Crusoe, where are you?" returns Robinson's own voice from outside; the footprint may be his own returning; the wheel describes a circle that closes on its starting point. All three figures instantiate the same unheimlich return-of-self-as-other structure. Against: Robinson does, in the end, distinguish his own footprint (he can check); ipseity is not constituted by undecidability but by ordinary self-identifying capacities. (S2, pp. 48–55; S3, pp. 74–79.)
Claim: There is no ipseity without prostheticity-in-the-world; the autos (self-relation) is from the start inscribed outside itself via technical extension. The iterability that constitutes auto-relation also threatens it with auto-immunity. Because: "There is no ipseity without this prostheticity in the world, with all the chances and all the threats that it constitutes for ipseity, which can in this way be constructed but also, and by the same token, indissociably, be destroyed" (S3, p. 88). Robinson is repeatedly "born to be his own Destroyer" (RC, 37) — structural, not psychological. The wheel-prayer-parrot-autobiography triad is "auto-hetero-affective" by necessity. Against: The autoimmunity generalization risks rendering every self-relation pathological. (S3, pp. 79–88.)
Claim: Heidegger's Sterben/Verenden distinction — only man dies; the animal merely "perishes" — is a structural non-sequitur. The criterion of life (possibility of dying) is used both to include the animal in life and to exclude it from death-proper. Because: Heidegger says "the stone is not dead because it was never alive" (H, 265/179) — life = possibility of dying. But in §49 of the same 1929–30 seminar (and again in "Das Ding" 1950) Heidegger writes that "the animal cannot die in the sense in which dying is ascribed to humans, but can only come to an end." The same criterion of life founds and ruins animality. Derrida calls this "curious non-sequitur." Against: The verenden / sterben distinction introduces a finer phenomenological grain — life-as-such precedes death-as-such, and only Dasein has access to the latter. (S4, pp. 173–177.)
Claim: Heidegger's animal-doctrine is not a localized 1929–30 position but a thirty-year stable commitment. Restated word-for-word in "Das Ding" (1950) and continued through Identität und Differenz (1957). Because: "Only man dies. The animal perishes" appears verbatim in the 1950 "thing-Geviert" lectures (twenty years after Grundbegriffe). The Identität und Differenz essay continues the same logic via Walten. This is a sustained Heideggerian commitment, not a youthful slip; the residual humanism is durable. Against: One could argue each text contextualizes the formula differently; the cross-decade repetition is real but does not show a single doctrine. (S4, pp. 173–177; S5, pp. 180–187; S9, pp. 252–57.)
Claim: The choice between inhumation and cremation — the modern Western corpse-treatment options — is an autoimmune double bind: each option betrays what it tries to honour, and each generates reciprocal accusations of inhumanity against the other camp. Because: Inhumation promises space, time, locatability for mourning, but risks burying-alive and immobilizes the dead into a "res publica" of state-surveillance. Cremation avoids decomposition but is "a sort of irreversible murder" (S6, p. 235), dissolves space-and-time of the body, makes the dead "weltlos or even weltarm." Both are inversely autoimmune. The crematorium of Auschwitz silently underwrites every contemporary Western choice. Against: There are pragmatic and ethical reasons to choose one over the other that don't reduce to phantasmatic double bind. (S5, pp. 196–212; S6, pp. 230–245.)
Claim: There is no habeas corpus; the juridical concept of bodily sovereignty over one's own living body is a managed effect of an irreducible non habeas corpus, exposed at death as the non habeas corpse. Because: At death no decision concerning the corpse can be enacted by the dead person; the corpse is delivered to the survivors who become "the real sovereigns." The non-mastery at death exposes a structural truth about the living body. "Habeas corpus designates merely a way of taking into account or managing the effects of heteronomy and an irreducible non habeas corpus" (S5, p. 211). Against: Habeas corpus is a real, hard-won legal right whose deconstruction risks evacuating concrete protections. (S5, pp. 210–212.)
Claim: The seminar ends in question, not answer: "Who is capable of death, and, through death, of imposing failure on the super- or hyper-sovereignty of Walten?" — and Derrida marks "a definite stage of the seminar, before a long halt" (S10, p. 261). He intended to continue. He did not. Because: Heidegger himself concedes: "Nur an einem scheitert alle Gewalt-tätigkeit unmittelbar [...] Das ist der Tod" — only one thing immediately breaks all violence: death. Since Heidegger denies the animal access to "death as such," the question becomes: who can break Walten? Only Dasein? That re-installs the very sovereignty Walten was supposed to exceed. The announced 11th–13th sessions were never given; Derrida died Oct 2004 without resuming. Against: One could say this is biographical accident; Derrida thought he would resume. But the hanging-question is not stopping-place but structural: the seminar cannot be closed because Walten is precisely what cannot be circumscribed. (S10, pp. 261, 290.)

Full sequence of 41 numbered arguments at .extraction-derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii.md.

Argumentative Movement

BS-II does not move premise-to-conclusion; it moves by conjoined commentary. Each session re-reads Robinson Crusoe and Grundbegriffe in alternating margins, allowing the two texts to illuminate each other. The structural pattern: a Robinson-figure (the footprint, the wheel, Poll the parrot, the inhumed cave, the cannibal-fear, the conversion, the encounter with Friday) opens onto a Heidegger-figure (the als-Struktur, Benommenheit, the Walten, the Sterben/Verenden, the Antigone chorus, the Austrag), then back again.

Argumentative weight accumulates across sessions rather than within them. The Celan-line Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen operates as recurring touchstone, returning at unpredictable cadence (S1, S4, S6, S7, S10) to mark the seminar's deepest stake: ethics-without-world, carrying-as-survival. The Walten discovery accelerates through the seminar: introduced tentatively at S2 (the physis / Walten identification), routed through Trieb at S4, deepened through "Das Ding" at S5, brought to climax at S9–S10 (the Austrag / Identität und Differenz reading).

The closing session (S10) is the seminar's argumentative cap and its incompleteness: it opens with porter / to bear / tragen / Walten; develops the "no common world" thesis; stages the Iraq War (begun 20 Mar 2003) directly via Derrida's nightmare of being compelled to grant Bush-Saddam-Pope access to the logos apophantikos; delivers the long Kant section (als ob, "Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History," the 800-year-old man, Noah, Robinson as nostalgic figure); broadens the Robinsonade non-Europeanly via Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan; and closes with the Walten + Sophocles + staatschaffenden Handelns analysis, terminated by the question "who can impose failure on Walten?"

Recurring narrative refrains: "Was ist Welt?", "Die Welt ist fort", "I am alone", "I have not yet introduced the protocol of this seminar" (a phrase deferring closure across multiple sessions), "the als ob / as if."

Key Findings

Sovereignty-as-solitude (BS-II) refines sovereignty-as-ipseity (BS-I). BS-I framed sovereignty as auto-position of the ipse; BS-II shows that ipseity IS solitude — "I am alone" is the structural form of "I am sovereign." The voting booth (isoloir) as island makes this democratic. This layered analysis is the seminar's most direct extension of BS-I.
Walten as the seminar's late-Derridean discovery (S10, p. 280). The Heideggerian neologism-family names a sovereignty so sovereign that it exceeds onto-theology. This was not anticipated at BS-I; Derrida explicitly says he has discovered the term late in his life of reading Heidegger and that it "obliges me to put everything in a new perspective." Single most original conceptual contribution of BS-II.
The cross-decade philological argument about Heidegger's animal-doctrine (1929-30 → "Das Ding" 1950 → Identität und Differenz 1957). The doctrine "only man dies; the animal perishes" is a thirty-year stable commitment, not a youthful 1929-30 idiosyncrasy. This strengthens the BS-I candidate (claims#heideggerian-anti-humanism-conceals-aggravated-humanism) into a durable philological thesis.
The als-Struktur / Alsobstruktur coupling. Heidegger's "as such" (animal lacks it) and Kant's "as if" (humans relate to the world as if regulative-idea) are structurally co-readable: both forms of human sovereignty over animality, both work by Walten of the als. Derrida's coinage Alsobstruktur (S10) proposes a "serious debate" between Heideggerian als-Struktur and Kantian als ob.
There is no common world. Against Husserl's Lebenswelt, Heidegger's In-der-Welt-Sein, ancient kosmos, and Kant's Reich der Zwecke — Derrida claims the world is a "life insurance policy," an als ob contract by which living beings pretend to share enough world to persevere. The radical thesis Derrida himself flags as "apocalyptic."
The Robinsonade is non-European and pre-Defoe. Ibn Tufayl's 12th-century Hayy ibn Yaqzan — two islands, gazelle-suckled child, encounter with Asal, failed conversion-mission — is an Arabic-Andalusian precursor whose existence radically destabilizes the European canonization of Robinson Crusoe.
Sur-vivance / survivance as late-Derridean concept of trace: "sur-" without superiority, altitude, or sovereignty. The book as living-dead artifact ("Robinson Crusoe was indeed 'buried alive,' he was indeed 'swallow'd up alive'"). The trace begins with survival — not with life or death prior.
The Freudian Mischlinge as colonial-psychoanalytic key. Freud's 1915 "Das Unbewußte" metaphor for the doubly-inscribed phantasm-and-symptom (Mischlinge who "resemble Whites but betray their coloured descent") is, per Derrida, "not as metaphorical as all that" and gives "the key for at least the principle of a psychoanalytic politics or zoo-anthropological psychoanalysis." (S6, pp. 226–227.) The seminar's most explicit articulation of how psychoanalysis names the colonial-political structure.
The seminar's closing in a question. "Who is capable of death, and, through death, of imposing failure on the super- or hyper-sovereignty of Walten?" Derrida announced "a long halt" and did not resume; the question is the seminar's last word. The incompleteness is destinal, not editorial.

Methodology

Two-text conjoined commentary, with sustained philological-genealogical close reading. The principal Heideggerian texts are Sein und Zeit (1927, background), Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (1929–30, principal target), Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935, Walten superabundance), "Das Ding" (1950, animal-doctrine restatement), and Identität und Differenz (1957, Walten climax). The principal literary text is Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719, including the Farther Adventures). The methodological wager: Heidegger and Defoe are not historically influence-related but structurally co-readable as the same Robinsonian démarche.

Derrida triangulates with extensive secondary citations: Rousseau (Emile, Confessions, Reveries, Social Contract) on Robinson; Marx (Capital, Grundrisse) on the "Robinsonade"; Joyce's 1912 Trieste lecture on RC as British colonist; Virginia Woolf's introduction; Deleuze on Tournier's Vendredi; Coetzee's Foe. Then a deep Freudian register (1905 Drei Abhandlungen, 1915 "Das Unbewußte," 1915 Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 1914 History of the Psychoanalytic Movement), a Hegelian register (Preface to Phänomenologie), a Lacanian register (Sém. V on Friday's footprint and the mink), a Blanchotian register (neutre, L'attente l'oubli, Le pas au-delà), a Pascalian register (the "Memorial" of 1654), a Sophoclean register (Antigone chorus on polla ta deina), a Kantian register (B644, B651, B660, Groundwork B438, "Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History" 1786), and a non-European register (Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan, c. 1185).

The method is not historical-philological in the academic sense — it is philological-deconstructive: every text is read for its coups de force, its arbitrary methodological decisions, its silent humanism, its repressed als ob, its hidden Walten.

Concepts Developed

Concepts BS-II is the wiki's primary source on:

walten — the central late-Derridean discovery: ultra-sovereign sovereignty exceeding onto-theology; Heidegger's neologism-family from 1929-30 through 1957
survivance — late-Derrida concept of trace; "sur-" without superiority, altitude, or sovereignty; "begins with survival"
robinson-crusoe — figure of insular sovereignty; the "Robinsonade" tradition; RC as British colonial paradigm

Concepts BS-II substantially extends (with primary or near-primary contribution):

sovereignty — adds the BS-II solitude-figure; sovereignty-as-solitude refines sovereignty-as-ipseity
stimmung — adds Heidegger's Lang(e)weile / Sichlangweilen as Grundstimmung of the 1929-30 seminar
marionette — extends BS-I treatment with the BS-II wheel-prayer-parrot triad of auto-affective machines

Concepts Referenced

Concepts BS-II uses but does not develop:

jacques-derrida — entity receives a fourth register (the survivance / posthumous / "I die alone" register)
martin-heidegger — receives major extension: the 1929-30 Grundbegriffe, the Walten family, the als-Struktur, the Antigone-chorus reading, the cross-decade philological argument
immanuel-kant — receives "Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History," the als ob of regulative idea, Reich der Zwecke, the 800-year-old man, perpetual peace
paul-celan — Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen as load-bearing line for the entire seminar
sigmund-freud — receives major update via Trieb, "Das Unbewußte," Mischlinge-as-colonial-psychoanalytic-key
jacques-lacan — S9 reading of Sém. V on Friday's footprint, the mink, and the Vermögen of the signifier
gilles-deleuze — Logic of Sense appendix on Tournier's Vendredi; Robinson as figure of perversion
carl-schmitt — Defoe / Foe pun connects to Schmitt's foe / inimicus / hostis
thomas-hobbes — Robinson's foundational fear is "like Hobbes's man"
karl-marx — "Robinsonade" critique; Capital citations
friedrich-nietzsche — perspectivist-sovereign imposing conventional signification (S10)
aristotle — Peri hermeneias (logos apophantikos); Problemata on melancholy; Metaphysics on "the poets lie much"
g-w-f-hegel — Preface to Phänomenologie: "the life of Spirit endures death"; the Leichnam / corpse-of-unfulfilled-drive
edmund-husserl — L'origine de la géométrie introduction on the book as "geistige Leiblichkeit"; the Lebenswelt contested
michel-de-montaigne — Essais III.9 "De la vanité" for commourans (co-dyers)
jean-jacques-rousseau — Emile recommends RC as Emile's first book; "more alone than Robinson in the middle of Paris"

Authors who play structural roles but are new entity-page candidates:

daniel-defoe — author of Robinson Crusoe; the "Defoe / Foe" pun
maurice-blanchot — cremated 24 Feb 2003; the neutre; "buried alive" structure of fiction; "the world was lacking"
blaise-pascal — the "Memorial" (1654) against Heidegger's causa sui in S8
ibn-tufayl — author of Hayy ibn Yaqzan (c. 1185); the Arabic Crusoe-precursor

Authors referenced more lightly: Augustine, Knut Hamsun (cited symptomatically via Heidegger's Nazi-adjacent literary preference), Sophocles, John Donne (Holy Sonnets I), Bergson (The Two Sources), Joyce (1912 Trieste lecture; Ulysses), Virginia Woolf (RC introduction), J. M. Coetzee (Foe, Lives of Animals), Robert Antelme (L'espèce humaine), Henri Bergson, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Novalis, Pétrus Borel (French translator of RC), Meister Eckhart, Tim Bahti, Egidius Berns, Jeremy Bentham, Cary Wolfe.

Terminology

Selected technical terms with attestation:

Term	Language	English	Locations	Notes
Walten	German	sovereignty / predominance / hold-sway	S2, S4–S5, S7–S10 passim	The seminar's central late-Derridean discovery. A whole word-family: walten, durchwalten, Mitwalten, umwalten, verwalten, Verwaltung, Übergewalt, vorwaltend, bewältigen, unbewältigt, Gewalt, Allgewalt, Gewalt-tat, Gewalt-tätigkeit. Untranslatable as a single term; Kahn's French perdominer / "perdominate" captures only part.
Austrag	German	bearing-out / settlement / carrying-to-term	S9 pp. 252–57; S10 throughout	Heidegger's term in Identität und Differenz for the "between" of Being and beings; both juridical (contractual settlement) and natal (ein ausgetragenes Kind: a child carried to term).
als-Struktur / als ob / Alsobstruktur	German	as-such structure / as-if / as-if structure	S2, S3, S7–S10	Heidegger's als-Struktur (S2): animal lacks the "as such." Kant's als ob (S10): regulative idea. Derrida's coinage Alsobstruktur (S10): proposed analogous parallel.
Benommenheit / Umring / Sichumringen	German	captivation / encircling ring / self-encircling	S4 pp. 146–175	Heidegger's term for the animal's specific mode of being; the disinhibiting ring.
weltlos / weltarm / weltbildend	German	worldless / poor-in-world / world-forming	S1, S3–S7	Heidegger's three theses (1929-30); the stone / animal / man triad. The animal "both has and does not have world."
Sterben vs Verenden	German	dying vs perishing	S4 pp. 173–175; S5 p. 182	Heidegger reserves Sterben for Dasein; the animal merely verendet (comes to an end). Restated word-for-word in "Das Ding" (1950).
Lang(e)weile / Sichlangweilen	German	boredom / being bored	S1 p. 1; S3 pp. 64, 70–73	The Grundstimmung of Heidegger's 1929-30 seminar. Three forms. Robinson is not bored.
Trieb / Getriebenheit	German	drive / drivenness	S4 pp. 147–158	Heidegger via Novalis: "Unser Sein ist diese Getriebenheit." Derrida bridges with Freud's Trieb and with Walten.
Heimweh	German	homesickness	S4 pp. 147–149	Novalis's "Die Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh" — Heidegger's epigraph to Grundbegriffe.
Schwermut	German	melancholy / heavy-mood	S4 pp. 168–172	Heidegger via Aristotle's Problemata: melancholy as Grundstimmung of creators.
Mischlinge	German	mixed-race-individuals	S6 pp. 226–227	Freud's 1915 Mischlinge metaphor for doubly-inscribed phantasm-symptom — Derrida treats this as "not as metaphorical as all that" and the "key for psychoanalytic politics."
logos apophantikos / logos semantikos	Greek	apophantic discourse / significant discourse	S8 pp. 218–230	Aristotle, Peri hermeneias. The apophantic logos is that in which aletheuein or pseudesthai is possible.
commourans	Latin	co-dyers	S10 p. 263	From Montaigne, Essais III.9 — Derrida's name for the structural fact that beast and sovereign die together.
causa sui	Latin	cause of itself	S8 pp. 207–10	Heidegger in Identität und Differenz: the God of onto-theology, "to whom one neither prays nor sacrifices."
deinon	Greek	terrible / uncanny / wonderful / overwhelming	S10 pp. 286–88	Sophocles, Antigone chorus: "polla ta deina" — Heidegger translates as unheimlich.
psittakos	Greek	parrot	S10 p. 260	"Poll the parrot," "first victim of the humanist arrogance that thought it could give itself the right to speech."
survivance / sur-vivance	French	sur-vival / living-death	S5 pp. 193–195	Derrida's late concept of trace: "sur-" without superiority; "begins with survival."

The seminar leans heavily on untranslatable terms; this is constitutive, not incidental. The German Walten-family, the French survivance, the Greek deinon / logos apophantikos, the Latin commourans — all are kept in original language and read for the work the original idiom does.

Key Passages

Selected anchor-passages (full set in extraction note); the most structurally load-bearing:

"I am alone does moreover mean 'I am' absolute, that is absolved, detached or delivered from all bond, absolutus, safe from any bond, exceptional, even sovereign" (S1, p. 1) — anchors arg #1; sovereignty-as-solitude.

"I know a sentence that is still more terrifying, more terribly ambiguous than 'I am alone,' and it is, isolated from any other determining context, the sentence that would say to the other: 'I am alone with you.'" (S1, p. 1) — anchors the "alone with you" abyss.

"There is no world, there are only islands" (S1, p. 9) — anchors arg #2.

"Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen" (Celan, Atemwende, "Grosse, Glühende Wölbung"; cited at S1, p. 9 and recurring through every session) — the seminar's recurring touchstone.

"the stone is without world, the animal is poor in world, man is world-configuring" (Heidegger, H 261/176; cited S1, p. 11) — anchors Heidegger's three theses.

"the animal thus reveals itself as a being which both has and does not have world" (Heidegger, H 293/199; cited S3, p. 91) — anchors arg #3; the load-bearing contradiction.

"this all-powerful sovereignty of Walten is neither solely political nor solely theological" (S2, p. 42) — anchors arg #4.

"Walten would be too sovereign still to be sovereign" (S10, p. 279) — anchors arg #5; the late-Derridean discovery.

"I have just discovered a word that seems to oblige me to put everything in a new perspective" (S10, p. 280) — the seminar's late-life pronouncement on Walten.

"Im Austrag waltet Lichtung des sich verhüllend Verschließenden, welches Walten das Aus- und Zueinander von Überkommnis und Ankunft vergibt" (Heidegger, Identität und Differenz; cited S9, p. 256) — anchors the Walten / Austrag analysis.

"Die onto-theologische Verfassung der Metaphysik entstammt dem Walten der Differenz" (Heidegger, Identität und Differenz; cited S9, p. 257) — anchors arg #5; onto-theology issues from the Walten.

"Is it me? Is it my track? Is it my path? Is it the specter of my print, the print of my specter? Am I coming back?" (S2, p. 48) — anchors arg #7; the footprint of self-as-other.

"the wheel turns on its own. The machine is what works on its own by turning on itself" (S3, p. 78) — anchors arg #8; wheel as metaphora of ipseity.

"There is no ipseity without this prostheticity in the world, with all the chances and all the threats that it constitutes for ipseity" (S3, p. 88) — anchors arg #8.

"the animal cannot die in the sense in which dying is ascribed to humans, but can only come to an end" (Heidegger, H 388/267; cited S4, p. 175) — anchors arg #9.

"Only man dies. The animal perishes" (Heidegger, "Das Ding" 1950; cited S5, p. 182) — anchors arg #10; the cross-decade restatement.

"this curious non-sequitur" (S4, p. 176) — Derrida's diagnostic phrase, anchors arg #9.

"a survivance whose 'sur-' is without superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty" (S5, p. 194) — anchors survivance.

"It begins with survival" (S5, p. 194) — anchors survivance.

"individuals of mixed race ... resemble Whites but betray their coloured descent ... and on that account remain excluded from society" (Freud 1915; cited S6, p. 226) — anchors Mischlinge as colonial-psychoanalytic key.

"the key for at least the principle of a psychoanalytic politics or a political or even zoo-anthropological psychoanalysis" (S6, p. 226) — anchors arg / Mischlinge.

"Habeas corpus, at least, is not a habeas corpse, supposing there ever were such a thing" (S5, p. 211) — anchors arg #12.

"the autoimmune contradiction or aporia in which this last will is fatally caught" (S5, p. 211) — anchors arg #11; inhumation/cremation double bind.

"in the depths of the European scene, on the Western historical and political stage, be it conscious or unconscious, on the stage of memory ... crematoria and mass graves" (S6, p. 236) — anchors the Auschwitz-as-silent-reference.

"Die Welt is fort, ich muss dich tragen ... Allow me to say no more about this today" (S7, p. 175 — at Blanchot's cremation) — anchors arg #2 in the Blanchot-register.

"the world, a world, a world that is one, is what there is not" (S10, p. 267) — anchors arg #2; "no common world."

"Perhaps there is no world. Not yet and perhaps not since ever" (S10, p. 267) — anchors arg #2.

"a convenient and reassuring bit of chatter, the name of a life insurance policy" (S10, p. 267) — anchors arg #2; world as als ob life-insurance.

"co-diers [commourans], as Montaigne might have said" (S10, p. 263) — anchors commourans; the seminar's positive thesis on cohabitation.

"there is no possible war ... without logos apophantikos" (S10, p. 261) — anchors the Iraq-War nightmare.

"We'll be marking here a definite stage of the seminar, before a long halt" (S10, p. 261) — anchors arg #13.

"Nur an einem scheitert alle Gewalt-tätigkeit unmittelbar [...] Das ist der Tod" (Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik p. 121; cited S10, p. 290) — anchors arg #13; closing line of seminar.

"Who is capable of death, and, through death, of imposing failure on the super- or hyper-sovereignty of Walten?" (S10, p. 290) — the seminar's terminal question, never answered.

What's Not Obvious

Three things about BS-II that would not appear in a conventional summary.

The seminar's center of gravity is Walten, not the beast or the sovereign. A standard reading would emphasize the continuity with BS-I — same title, same animal-question, same sovereignty-deconstruction. But BS-II's most original contribution is the late-Derridean discovery (his word, S10 p. 280) that Heidegger's Walten names an "ultra-sovereign" sovereignty exceeding onto-theology, and that the political-theological sovereignty BS-I deconstructed (Bodin / Hobbes / Schmitt) is derivative of this more violent Walten. The seminar's terminal question — "who can impose failure on Walten?" — is not the BS-I question of "how is sovereignty deconstructible?" but the more radical "can anything break Walten?" Derrida himself signals the surprise: "late in my life of reading Heidegger, I have just discovered a word that seems to oblige me to put everything in a new perspective" (S10, p. 280). The seminar's title and surface continue BS-I; the seminar's depth shifts the entire register. See walten for the new concept's wiki home and claims#walten-exceeds-onto-theological-sovereignty (candidate).
The seminar is structured by Derrida's own approaching death without ever announcing it as such. The opening sentence is "I am alone" — but the seminar was given between 11 Dec 2002 and 26 Mar 2003, during which time Blanchot was dying (cremated 24 Feb 2003, between S6 and S7), the Iraq War began (20 Mar 2003, six days before S10), and Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (he died 9 Oct 2004). Derrida marks S10 as a "definite stage, before a long halt" and intends to resume — but does not. The themes — commourans (co-dying), "alone with you," "I posthume as I breathe" (S7, p. 173, re-citing his own Circumfession), the impossibility of carrying the world for the other, survivance as the trace that "begins with survival," the closing question "who is capable of death?" — are not biographically reducible, but they are not biographically separable either. The seminar's incompleteness is destinal, not editorial. To read BS-II as merely a continuation of BS-I is to miss its second register: a philosopher writing while not-quite-yet-dying, under his own approaching mortality. See claims#no-common-world-only-islands (candidate) for the structural radicalization this enables.
The Iraq War is structurally — not topically — present in Session 10. The seminar of 26 March 2003 is given six days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq begins (20 March 2003). Derrida narrates a nightmare in which he is compelled by a "super-Security Council" tribunal to defend the right of Bush, Saddam Hussein, Rumsfeld, Aznar, Blair, Chirac, Sharon, Arafat, Putin, and Pope John Paul II to access the logos apophantikos. He awakes affirming the painful diagnosis: "there is no possible war, among other things, without logos apophantikos" (S10, p. 261). The figure of Poll the parrot — Robinson's first non-human caller, "first victim of the humanist arrogance that thought it could give itself the right to speech" (S10, p. 260) — connects the seminar's animal-question to the present war: war requires logos apophantikos; the leaders who declare war are parrots compelled to be granted what Heidegger denies the animal. This is the seminar's most direct contemporary-political moment, and it lands six days into a war whose aftermath the seminar will not live to see analyzed. The S10 closing — "Heidegger's Walten / staatschaffenden Handelns (state-founding action)" + "Think about it when you're watching television" (p. 290) — completes the Walten / war / image-empire connection. See claims#walten-exceeds-onto-theological-sovereignty (candidate) for the political stakes.

Connections

companion to derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i — the immediately preceding seminar (2001-2002), 13 sessions, BS-I's many-cornered spiral. BS-II isolates two texts where BS-I spread across thirteen.
fulfills the deferred reading flagged at derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i S13 — the weltarm / weltbildend / weltlos triad now read in full.
discovers walten — the seminar's central late-Derridean conceptual contribution; ultra-sovereign sovereignty exceeding onto-theology.
develops survivance — the late-Derridean concept of trace ("begins with survival"; "sur-" without superiority).
develops robinson-crusoe — the figure of insular sovereignty; the Robinsonade as political-economic-philosophical type.
extends sovereignty — adds the BS-II solitude-figure (sovereignty IS solitude); refines BS-I's ipseity-thesis.
extends martin-heidegger — major: the 1929-30 Grundbegriffe, Walten family, als-Struktur, Sophocles/deinon, cross-decade philological argument.
extends immanuel-kant — "Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History," als ob of regulative idea, Reich der Zwecke, the 800-year-old man, perpetual peace.
extends stimmung — Heidegger's Lang(e)weile as Grundstimmung.
extends marionette — adds BS-II wheel-prayer-parrot triad as auto-affective machines.
extends paul-celan — Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen as load-bearing recurring touchstone.
extends sigmund-freud — the Mischlinge as colonial-psychoanalytic key; Trieb as bridge to Heidegger's Walten.
extends jacques-lacan — S9 reading of Sém. V on Friday's footprint and the mink; "Lacan's discourse is totally Heideggerian."
extends jacques-derrida — fourth register: survivance, posthumous, dying-with-the-other, "I posthume as I breathe."
contributes to claims#walten-exceeds-onto-theological-sovereignty (candidate) — the seminar's central claim.
strengthens claims#heideggerian-anti-humanism-conceals-aggravated-humanism (candidate) — adds the cross-decade philological argument (1929 → 1950 → 1957).
seeds claims#no-common-world-only-islands (candidate) — the "world as life-insurance policy" thesis.
introduces to the wiki daniel-defoe, maurice-blanchot, blaise-pascal, ibn-tufayl — new entities.
engages structurally with karl-marx — the Robinsonade as critique of bourgeois individualism (S1).

Critique / Limitations

The two-text method is a parti pris, not argued for. Reading Robinson Crusoe (1719 English novel) and Heidegger's Grundbegriffe (1929-30 German seminar) in conjoined commentary is announced as "improbable" and "a bit crazy" (S2, p. 45). The payoff is the seminar's authorization-by-results. A philologist could resist the method's license; the resemblance Derrida traces between Robinson and Heidegger may be metaphorical rather than structural.
The Walten-as-ultra-sovereign assimilation requires explicit Heideggerian defense. Derrida acknowledges that orthodox Heideggerians would refuse to call Walten "sovereignty" of any kind. Heidegger's whole project is to step out of the metaphysics of subjectivity and mastery; reabsorbing him under "ultra-sovereign" reapplies the language he is dismantling. Derrida's wager — that the excess of the term Walten (force, violence, deinon, Unheimlichkeit) resists the quietist reading — is genuinely contestable.
The "no common world" thesis is "apocalyptic" by Derrida's own diagnosis (S10, p. 267). It directly contradicts Husserlian-Heideggerian shared-world phenomenology, including the very Mitsein Derrida uses elsewhere. The wiki's existing phenomenological register (heavy on MP, Husserl, Heidegger) faces a head-on deconstruction here that Derrida does not arbitrate against the phenomenologists.
The Robinson-as-paradigm reading is European-provincial despite the S10 Ibn Tufayl detour. Derrida flags the non-European Robinsonade (Hayy ibn Yaqzan) at the very end of the seminar, in 1.5 pages, after 280 pages of European-canonical reading. The expansion is more gesture than analysis.
The seminar is unfinished. The announced 11th-13th sessions were never given (Derrida marks "a long halt" at S10 p. 261); the closing question — "who is capable of death, and, through death, of imposing failure on the super- or hyper-sovereignty of Walten?" — is left structurally open. Subsequent Derridean texts (Apprendre à vivre enfin 2004) suggest the question would not have received a positive answer.
S9 (12 Mar 2003) and S10 (26 Mar 2003) are partly improvised (per editorial preliminaries); the discussion session of 19 Mar 2003 is not included in the English edition. Treat citations to S9-S10 with appropriate care.
The reading of Heidegger's animal-doctrine across three texts (1929-30 / 1950 / 1957) is philologically strong but interpretively narrow. Derrida reads Heidegger's later texts on the animal as continuations of the 1929-30 doctrine; a Heideggerian could argue that "Das Ding" and Identität und Differenz operate in fundamentally different idioms (technology, Geviert, Ereignis) that recontextualize the animal-formula.

Sources

The seminar itself, the source of all citations above, is the raw file raw/The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II (Jacques Derrida).md. The persistent extraction note at .extraction-derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii.md contains the full Pass 2 (41 numbered arguments, ~75 concepts, ~150 evidence quotations, ~22 recurring motifs, ~30 entities) and Pass 3 (adversarial diagnostics, motif-weight scan, three silent keys, three claim candidates) workspace.

Bennington, Geoffrey (trans.), and Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, Ginette Michaud (eds.). The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-226-14430-6. Original: Séminaire: La bête et le souverain, Volume II (2002–2003). Paris: Galilée, 2010.