The Corporate Citizen and the Sovereign Exception: from 'homo sacer' to 'homo supra'
Keywords:
Corporate citizen, citizenship, state of exception, corporations, regulation, Ciudadano corporativo, ciudadanía, estado de excepción, corporaciones, regulaciónAbstract
This paper is concerned with a concept that has permeated discussions about the corporation in the early 21st century: the “corporate citizen”. The paper uses the liberal understanding of citizenship that involves responsibilities and duties owed to the state on one hand, and the rights guaranteed by the state on the other as its starting point, and applies this dualism to the corporate citizen. Yet the rights and duties applied to corporations are not strictly analogous to the corresponding rights and responsibilities of real flesh and blood citizens. Corporate citizenship implies a set of exceptional powers and privileges that combine to produce homo supra, a paradigmatic “supra-sovereign” subject that is empowered to enjoy sovereign protections and rights far-exceeding those that any ordinary citizen could expect. The paper thus shows how the process of ascribing corporate citizenship has become a key mechanism through which unequal power relations (and attendant privileges of class, gender and race etc.) is guaranteed.
El artículo se ocupa del concepto de “ciudadano corporativo”. Utiliza la forma liberal de entender la ciudadanía, la cual, como punto de partida, implica responsabilidades y deberes hacia el Estado, por un lado, y los derechos garantizados por el Estado, por el otro, y aplica esa dualidad al ciudadano corporativo. Sin embargo, los derechos y deberes impuestos a las corporaciones no son estrictamente análogos a los derechos y deberes de los ciudadanos de carne y hueso. La ciudadanía corporativa implica un conjunto de poderes y privilegios excepcionales que se combinan para producir el homo supra, un “supersoberano” paradigmático que es empoderado con amparos y derechos soberanos que exceden con mucho aquéllos que un ciudadano normal podría esperar. Así, el artículo muestra cómo el proceso de asignar la ciudadanía corporativa se ha convertido en un mecanismo por el cual se garantizan relaciones desiguales de poder.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-0937
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