Loki: Sovereignty and Political Violence, for All Time Always

• In Event: Reimagining Politics: The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Politics, and Identity

Abstract

The Disney+ series Loki is one of the more complex entries in Phase Four of the MCU. To venture into all its intricacies requires a lot of the viewer. This includes grappling with how the show engages sovereignty, which is one of the most important concepts in political theory. In addition to its narrative, character, and multiverse elements, the show raises several thorny issues about sovereignty through its depiction of the Time Variance Authority (TVA), the main political institution in the show: what gives the TVA the legitimate right to police time and space?; what makes its legal proceedings valid?; who gets to decide precisely what the TVA can legitimately do, and how, when, and where they can act?; and, what is the political or legal rationale for its authority to prune or reset individual variants? To explore these questions – some of the most enduring and vexing questions about politics itself – and thus fully appreciate all of Loki’s dynamics as a show requires an analysis of sovereignty.
Helping us interpret these issues in this paper is the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has set the terms of the debate about sovereignty for the past twenty-five years of political theory with his works Homo Sacer (1998) and State of Exception (2005). Rather than focusing on the founding and operation of regular political and legal institutions and structures, Agamben emphasizes how the ways that the sovereign acts beyond the supposedly normal legal and political mechanisms – what he calls the “exception” – are in fact absolutely fundamental to the operation of sovereign political power. Bringing together Loki and Agamben helps illuminate the thorny questions at the heart of the series by illustrating the two central tensions of sovereignty in the study of political theory that Agamben poses in the most pointed way: first, what is the relationship between sovereign political power and the state of exception, and what are the consequences of that relationship? And, second, to what extent does sovereign power depend on violence against political others?
After examining the relationship of sovereignty to the legal order, the state of exception, political exclusion, and political violence in Agamben's thought, the paper examines two linked dimensions of sovereignty in Loki. First, we theorize the political authority of the TVA and He Who Remains as they administer the Sacred Timeline and prune variants and branches. Here, we argue that the TVA’s maintenance of the Sacred Timeline defines its sovereign activity and the exercise of its authority, manifesting as decision-making power about which temporal complications fall within that Timeline and which fall outside. Second, we analyze the political status of those who are pruned by the TVA – the characters Sylvie and Loki above all – using Agamben's discussion of the status of "homo sacer" (sacred man) and of violence against this figure. This part of the paper contends that variants pruned by the TVA exemplify what Agamben theorizes as bare life, the form of life banned from access to political rights and moral status and exposed to unpunishable violence and death.
In these ways, the representation of central tensions within sovereignty in Loki demonstrates how the TVA and He Who Remains' political power is thoroughly dependent on the exception they declare and create, and on the variants and timelines violently expelled from the Sacred Timeline. We conclude by interrogating how the responses of the characters Loki and (especially) Sylvie to political power illustrate the fraught dynamics of resisting sovereign power.

Authors

• John McMahon, SUNY Plattsburgh

• Danielle Hanley, Clark University