Decrypting Sovereignty as Archism: Moving Toward a New Democracy (Decrypting Power and Coloniality: Philosophical Perspectives from and through the Global South)

Using the theory of encryption of power in a tight connection with the theory of archism sheds light on sovereignty and thus politics. Archism is that prevailing form of power that seeks to go nameless insofar as it claims to be ubiquitous and just how politics is.The theory of encryption of power explains how the use of language monopolizes and hides power, preventing access to it through the denial and neutralization of differences based on class, race, and gender.Archism and the theory of encryption of power are intimately linked: one potentializes and sharpens the other to bring together an especially pernicious form of sovereignty and its role in our world.Coloniality exists because it encrypts power. The encryption of power hides the ubiquity of archism and, in this way, preserves and enhances its power.A transcendent model, one that poses as ordinary, dictates from a vanishing point of invisibility-outside language and any relation-the conditions to which every and any form of b