Order and Chivalry. Jesus D. Rodriguez-Velasco

with sovereignty and the idea of “justice” where the juridical and political violence with which the fraternity seeks to equip itself is manifested.

      The definition Carl Schmitt gives of the sovereign is this: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Political Theology, 5). The expression has a double significance: it is the sovereign who decides what case can be considered an exception, and it is also the sovereign who decides how it is necessary to act in case of a state of exception. The second sense is a correlative of the first.

      The capacity of the Hermandad to self-regulate the exercise of violence “con las justicias del Rey” is given at the precise moment in which “el Rey” only exists through the council of regency. Given this, the political body of the monarch is held in a state of suspension; it is, in effect, divided into a varying number of natural bodies until the natural body of the monarch reaches the age at which he can receive the political body. It is in the context of this state of suspension that the fraternity invokes, therefore, a proportional allotment of the king’s political body with the justicias through which he might act and legitimate himself. The fraternity proposes to participate in a sovereign activity, consisting of determining that all attacks on the fraternity itself constitute a state of exception or emergency to which it must rightfully respond through violence.

      The strategy of protection and institutional violence is again twofold. The way in which the fraternity situates itself in the liminal and displaced space to which I have alluded on various occasions allows for the two-sidedness of this strategy. On one hand, the expression presupposes the existence of a kind of external shell for the fraternity, making it concrete, providing it with content, or presenting it as continent as it designates those who are in its interior by the exclusion of “los que non sson desta hermandat” [“those who are not members of this fraternity”]. On the other hand, it situates the fraternity within that space of sovereignty in which states of emergency are decided and reacted to. That is the strategic space in which the institution and its direct participation in negotiations of power are created.