The previous chapter started out from a Nietzschean observation: only that which has no history can be defined. But how can we write a history of that which cannot be defined, lacks stable meaning and reference, and which does not exist except by being known, and then within a knowledge which presupposes the sovereignty of the knowing subject?

As I shall argue in this chapter, to write a history of sovereignty is to write a political history of the knowledges that makes sovereignty intelligible, a history of the unthought parts of our political understanding. Strictly speaking, the object of study is therefore held in suspense; as with histories of other central and ambiguous concepts, a history of sovereignty must be a history without fixed referent, since it is precisely a history of this referent and its formation in time.