After more than three hundred years of colonial rule, Filipinos began a revolution against the Spanish empire in August of 1896. By June of 1898, revolutionary forces had managed to overwhelm the Spaniards who were already reeling from the destruction of their navy in the initial days of their war with the United States and had been fatally weakened by the decade-long revolution in Cuba. In the Philippines, a Revolutionary government was formed under the dictatorship of Emilio Aguinaldo. It declared independence, convened a convention to write a constitution and briefly succeeded in forming a Republic led by the wealthiest men of the archipelago by January of 1899. But by February, Filipinos were engulfed in a new war against an emergent U.S. empire that was to last through much of the first decade of the twentieth century, leading to U.S. colonization of the Philippines until 1941.Footnote ²

During these turbulent years, Filipinos sought to account for the event of the Revolution as the struggle to regain, if not enact, their sovereignty. But given the class divisions in colonial society—divisions that were violently disturbed and nearly overturned in the course of fighting—sovereignty came to mean, and perhaps just as important, be experienced differently by different groups. In this essay, I want to ask about the relationship between sovereignty and revolution that circulated between the elites who sought to assume control of the Republic and the people who fought and supported the Revolution. Given the recent surge of scholarly interest in the question of sovereignty as it relates to power and freedom in the making of Western modernity, is there something that the history of the Revolution in the Philippines can contribute to our comparative understanding of this topic?Footnote ³ In particular, were there ways by which the Filipino Revolution, especially in its vernacular articulation, opened up alternative notions of sovereignty and other ways of experiencing freedom distinct from imperial notions of self-determination and absolute mastery?

I. SOVEREIGNTY AND THE POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF EMPIRE

Like many other nation-states, the Philippines bears an imperial inheritance. More than three centuries of Spanish colonial rule have left behind a certain idea of sovereignty rooted in Christian thinking. It is an idea of sovereignty that gives the ruler the freedom to take exception to the law. Whether embodied by the king, by the state or, in its nationalist revolutionary moment, by the people, sovereignty is the power to define and decide upon what is exceptional, so exceptional as to warrant the breaking of laws in view of either preserving or destroying the existing order and establishing a new one altogether. In Carl Schmitt's oft-quoted definition, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”Footnote ⁴ It is the sovereign who, in founding the law, gives to himself the license to operate both inside and outside of it. The self-legislating and self-granting agency of the sovereign is precisely what allows him to decide who will live and who will die, and what forms such living and dying are to take; who is the friend and who is the enemy and the terms of such friendship and enmity; and who is the citizen and who is the foreigner and the laws of citizenship that allow for the assimilation or expulsion of the foreign.

The power to decide on the exception—to break with the norm, rupturing the precedents and processes of deliberation and debate—gives to sovereignty an absolutist nature. Jean Bodin writing some three and a half centuries earlier (1576) foreshadows Schmidt in saying, “Sovereignty is not limited either in power or in function or in length of time…. For he is absolutely sovereign who recognizes nothing, after God, that is greater than himself.”Footnote ⁵ Sovereignty as absolute power is thus absolutely free of any obligations and conditions. This makes it a kind of impossible power, truly exceptional because it is beholden to no one and nothing else but God. However, rather than serve as a limit, God here figures an infinite force, exceeding any attempt at codification into positive human law. Like a pure gift, it can neither be calculated nor reciprocated. True sovereignty, freed from limits of human laws, is beholden only to God's laws. The sovereign comes to be the sole agent of Divine power. He thereby embodies the impossible possibility of a thoroughly non-human, immortal power manifesting itself in the world.Footnote ⁶

This awesome conception of sovereignty, however, ran into insurmountable difficulties in the case of the Spanish empire in its efforts to rule the Indies. The assertion of the king's power always required its representation and delegation. His absolute power to decide was undercut by the recurring need to channel his will through the mediating institutions of colonial bureaucracies, courts of law, the movement of armies and missionaries, the coercive collection of tribute and labor, periodic inspections, and annual visitations of the colonies which generated endless cascades of paperwork, all of which distorted and deformed even as they sought to convey the shape and substance of royal authority.Footnote ⁷ Imperial sovereignty, if there was such a thing, was thus split between an absolute prerogative to decide and take exception, and the necessity to divide and partition itself among its various representatives and representations, rehearsing and exhibiting its capacities in spectacles whose meanings and dissemination it could not always control. Less than absolute, sovereignty was always other than itself.

We can see the animating contradictions of Spanish imperial sovereignty, for example, in one of its important institutions, the Patronato Real or the Royal Patronage of the Catholic Church. Emblematic of the vanguard role of the Spanish Crown in the Counter-Reformation, the Patronato Real obligated the monarch to supply the material and military needs of the Church and further its planetary project of evangelization. It grew out of the imperative to conjugate colonialism with Catholic conversion. Beginning with a series of Papal Bulls between 1486 and 1493, the Crown received the Indies as a Papal “donation,” a gift for which it would assume the responsibility of converting its native peoples. The Patronato also granted the Crown the right to all tithes collected in the Indies and, more important, the privilege to appoint bishops and assign parishes that fell vacant in all the colonies beginning in 1508. Evangelization in turn legitimized conquest as a supremely moral undertaking designed to liberate the very subjects it subjugated, filling them with the Word of God that resonated with the Will of the Spanish King. Acting as the “vicar of Christ,” the King enjoyed what some Dominican theologians described as a “supernatural sovereignty” over the Indies. Unlike the “natural sovereignty” that local princes exercised to insure the earthly needs of their people, supernatural sovereignty meant that the King was obligated to act in ways that would insure the salvation of the souls of all colonial subjects. He was thus expected to use everything within his powers to intervene and protect Christian converts against the threat of non-Christians. Such included waging “just wars” meant to secure the submission as well as consent of natives to the King's protection. Imperial sovereignty was thus meant to secure the global conditions necessary to spread the Word of God.Footnote ⁸

In a similar vein, the Laws of the Indies (Recopilación de las leyes de los reinos de Indias, 1681) were meant not only to address and synthesize the administrative complexity of empire. It was also cast as the positive encoding of natural law, which in turn was thought to derive from Divine Law. The first law of Recopilacion, for example, situates colonization as the work of evangelization. It lays out the law as if it were continuous with the confession of the Faith:

We can see, then, how Spanish imperialism was sustained by a political theology. State power was understood in ideal terms not merely as a means for the accumulation of wealth, but also as the expression and extension of Divine power. Human laws were thus regarded as the instruments for the actualization of natural and Divine Law. In this context, sovereignty possessed what we might think of as a magical quality owing to its transcendent source. Because it rested on that which was immortal and non-human, its force was such that it could break with and thereby free itself from every human norm and custom so as to pave the way for the emergence of new social order under God's name. Colonial intervention in the name of Christian conversion was thus construed as an act of liberation. It was a means for establishing the King's supernatural sovereignty to free native peoples where before only the tyranny of paganism and demonic practices existed. Not surprisingly, this stunningly modern conception of imperialismFootnote ¹⁰ was predicated on an order constituted in and through a hierarchy that reached down from heaven to earth: God, King, colonial officials and missionaries ruling over local elites and the mass of male and female natives. It was an order that was further articulated through a linguistic hierarchy: Latin as God's language and Castilian as the idiom of the King and his officials on top, local vernaculars as instruments of conversion and colonial command for native subjects below.Footnote ¹¹

But as I have indicated, Spanish political theology was far from seamless. In practice, the Sovereign could never be fully sovereign.Footnote ¹² Imperial sovereignty was always fraught, mired in the material complications of historical contingencies: ambitious merchants and corrupt officials, for example, or foreign pirates and rebellious natives. In the case of Spain, Church and state relations were as mutually dependent as they were antagonistic, as each sought to gain absolute prerogative over the other. Symptomatic of these tensions was the essential yet odd position of the missionary priest.Footnote ¹³ The key importance of evangelization placed the Spanish missionary as an indispensable relay in the transmission of God's Word and the King's Will. Often the only representative of empire in the farthest reaches of the realm, the missionary enjoyed considerable influence and great latitude in interpreting, or more often, setting aside the laws of the King in the name of preserving and furthering God's laws. The missionary's power was further enhanced by his knowledge of native speech. It allowed him to stand as the indispensable mediator between colonizers and colonized, translating between the demands of one and the responses of the other. Capable of traversing different political, social, and linguistic realms, the missionary occupied a position at a remove from all these. In this way, the clergy constituted a critical force within colonial society. Intimately, at times oppressively involved in the day to day affairs of the people, he came to possess the power to decide on the exception—for example, abusive colonial officials, accused sorcerers, heterodox ritual practices, or subversive nationalists. This capacity for deciding not only what was an exception but how to deal with it turned the priest into a kind of sovereign power himself, often undercutting the authority of the King's colonial representatives in Manila. The missionary was thus a sort of double agent, simultaneously enacting and limiting, enabling while challenging the absolutist vocation of the King's supernatural sovereignty.

The contradictions of Spanish imperial sovereignty were further sharpened in the aftermath of the Napoleonic invasions and the momentous loss of Spanish possessions in the Americas during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The rise of a liberal constitutional regime in Spain was meant to repudiate monarchial absolutism. Yet, it sought to consolidate what was left of the empire after the 1820s by redeploying the economic and political mechanisms of its Bourbon dynastic predecessor. Throughout the nineteenth century, both liberal and conservative governments rationalized and broadened the exercise of state power in what remained of Spain's imperial possessions—to make that power, in a word, more, not less, absolute. In the Philippine colony, this meant, among other things, strengthening the functions of the governor general, extending colonial control to areas previously outside of Spanish reach, launching military offensives against recalcitrant Muslim and other non-Christian tribes, consolidating the state monopolies on tobacco and alcohol, introducing a new tax code, revising the penal code, regularizing native names to ease tribute collection, attempting (and failing) to secularize parish churches and public education, and liberalizing foreign trade. But it also meant denying Filipino representation to the Spanish parliament, even as Puerto Rican and Cuban creoles were given seats. Deemed to be racially inferior and far more culturally heterogeneous by virtue of the presence of sizeable non-Christian populations that had long resisted Spanish rule, Filipinos—creole, mestizo, and indio alike—were consigned to live in a state of exception, subjects of Spanish sovereignty but ineligible for Spanish citizenship. And despite liberal animosity toward the friar orders whose properties had been despoiled in the Peninsula, in the Philippine colony, the liberal state redoubled its reliance on the regular orders so as to protect the regime against the rising tide of “filibusterismo,” or subversive thinking, and the frequent outbreak of peasant revolts.Footnote ¹⁴

These contradictions would be discerned most acutely by the ilustrados—the emergent, Spanish-speaking, Philippine-born, university-educated, racially mixed colonial bourgeoisie. Influenced by liberal ideals that professed equality under the law for all citizens of the Spanish imperial nation in the wake of the Cadiz Constitution, they felt simultaneously entitled to and excluded from a share in colonial power.Footnote ¹⁵ Desirous of tapping into the sovereign power of the state by way of assimilation into Spanish society and gaining representation in the Spanish parliament, ilustrado nationalists as self-styled sons of the nation targeted the friars in particular for blocking the path of their political ambitions. They blamed the soberania monacal, or monastic sovereignty, as Marcelo H. del Pilar put it, for all the colony's ills.Footnote ¹⁶ The friars responded by threatening ilustrados with imprisonment and excommunication. Calling each other filibusteros, or subversives, and thus traitors to the patria, Spanish friars and Filipino ilustrados sought to portray the one as the negation of the other. In doing so, each claimed the right to call itself the real patriot and thus a sovereign citizen while casting the other precisely as the exception to be expelled from the body politic.

Given the racial logic of imperial rule, it is not surprising that the Spanish liberal state despite its disdain for the friars would side with them against the growing militancy of Filipino nationalists. As separatist sentiments took hold over assimilationist aspirations, there arose in 1892 a secret revolutionary society called the Katipunan, literally “the gathering” dedicated to gaining freedom from imperial rule. With the Spanish discovery of its secret cells, colonial authorities were seized with terror at the prospect of a mass uprising and a race war. With the eruption of the Revolution in August of 1896, imperial sovereignty entered into a prolonged period of crisis. But rather than disappear, it continued to exist in displaced form, informing revolutionary discourses on “popular sovereignty.”

II. REVOLUTION AND POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY

What was the Revolution and how would it come to re-appropriate Spanish sovereignty? According to the Proclamation of Independence of 12 June 1898, written in Spanish and declared from the window of Emilio Aguinaldo's house in Kawit, Cavite, the Revolution was the people's response to “the ominous yoke of Spanish domination” that included “the arbitrary arrests and cruel treatments conducted by the Guardia Civil,” the “executions by firing squad… the unjust deportations of eminent persons of high social position, all at the instigation of the Archbishop and the friars.…”Footnote ¹⁷ Thus did the people (el pueblo) begin a “revolutionary movement (un movimento revolucionario)… with the purpose of recuperating the independence and sovereignty that Spain had taken from them…” when the latter began colonizing the archipelago in 1565. Revolution from the perspective of the Proclamation is the restoration of a pre-colonial sovereignty. It signaled the inauguration of a new era as a return to an ancient one.

What is curious about the Proclamation was that nowhere do we actually hear the “people” as the source of this document. The “we” that speaks in the declaration is not “we, the people,” but “we, the representatives of the people”: “And summoning as a witness to the rightness of our intentions the Supreme Judge of the Universe, and under the protection of the powerful and humanitarian North American nation, we proclaim and solemnly declare, in the name and authority of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands that they are and have the right to be free and independent; that they are totally free from any obedience to the Crown of Spain…” (42–43).Footnote ¹⁸

Though it claims to speak in the name of the people, the “we” that speaks in the Proclamation is one that is beholden to the recognition of two higher powers: God and the United States, which was responsible for bringing Aguinaldo, the leader of the Revolution, back to the Philippines from his exile in Hong Kong. The people are referred to instead in the third person plural as a “they,” as if they were apart from the “we.” The Proclamation was written by Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista, one of the elite members of Aguinaldo's Revolutionary Government, in Spanish, the lingua franca of the ilustrados but barely understood by the overwhelming majority of the masses. It is perhaps no surprise that the people figure neither as witnesses nor as guarantors to the Proclamation. As a “they,” they are spoken for and about, and do not speak for themselves. Neither are they expected to claim authorship retrospectively for the Proclamation that conjures their existence as in the case, most famously, of the American Declaration of Independence.Footnote ¹⁹ The Proclamation proclaims the success of the Revolution in restoring the people's lost sovereignty while at the same time restoring the social hierarchy that places “them” below “us,” the latter being the ilustrado elites who had earlier rejected the Revolution and would, after Aguinaldo's return in 1898, seek to control it for their own purposes.Footnote ²⁰ Independence here means the restoration of a chain of dependencies stretching from God, to a foreign benefactor, then on to an “enlightened” and wealthy minority, and finally to the mass of people. The Proclamation thus already contained the seeds of a counter-revolution that would undo the sovereignty of the people even as its ilustrado author and signers drew upon it to legitimize their post-revolutionary authority.Footnote ²¹

The ambivalent regard for the unstable force of the Revolution runs through much of the writings of the largely ilustrado leadership of the Revolutionary Government. Filipino elites sought to capitalize on yet contain the sovereign power of a people it claimed to represent. We can see this ambivalence, for example, in Apolinario Mabini (1864–1903), widely regarded as the most astute theoretician of the Revolution and the most gifted advisor of Emilio Aguinaldo, president of the Revolutionary Republic formed just north of Manila in Malolos, Bulacan. Mabini was born in the Tagalog province of Batangas of indio parents of modest means and educated in philosophy and law in Manila. Contracting an illness that left him paralyzed from the waist down in 1896, he had to be transported by hammock during the revolution as the Revolutionary Government sought to elude American forces. He was popularly known as the “sublime paralytic,” and unlike other prominent nationalist leaders never traveled outside the Philippines except when he was exiled to Guam by the Americans for refusing to take the oath of loyalty to the U.S. occupation government. It is remarkable that Mabini's modest background, lack of travel, and pronounced disability allowed rather than impeded a robust and sophisticated formulation of a revolutionary theory, certainly one far more nuanced than that propounded by the Proclamation of Independence.Footnote ²²

Filipinos fought, Mabini claimed, to attain independence, but not as an end in itself. Rather, it was to be the means to arrive at a “moral government” with which to secure the conditions for the general “well-being” and “happiness” of the country. Such conditions required, furthermore, a popularly elected and truly representative government that would, as he told the American military commander, General Joseph Wheeler, “assure all Filipinos of the freedom of thought, conscience, association; privacy of their persons, houses and correspondences; popular representation in the drafting of laws and imposition of taxes.” While the Revolution, according to Mabini, may have started out as an act of vengeance in 1896, it had by 1898 become transformed into something else: a manifestation of the irresistible movement of Reason around the world.Footnote ²³

Mabini in his writings repeatedly situates the Philippine Revolution as a continuation of the American and the French Revolutions, inspired by the same ideals and moved by the same aspirations for liberty, equality, and fraternity. Such, he argued, lent to the Revolution a cosmopolitan character in contrast to Spanish and American insistence that it was merely a Tagalog uprising. For Mabini, national history when seen through the optic of the Revolution was in fact an aspect of universal history that placed Filipinos at the vanguard of a global anti-colonial movement.Footnote ²⁴ It is this shared history of revolutionary beginnings that Mabini reminds Americans of in the aftermath of the Treaty of Paris and in the midst of the Filipino-American war. Indeed, in fighting the Americans, Filipinos “show to the United States that they possess sufficient culture to know their rights…. They hope that the war reminds the Americans what their forefathers had to sustain in their past against the English for the emancipation of their Colonies and what is today the free states of North America. At the time [of their own revolution], the Americans were in the place of the Filipinos today…. [T]he fighting is not due therefore to race hatred, but [to] the same principles sealed by the blood of their forefathers.”Footnote ²⁵

From Mabini's perspective, then, the Revolution was neither a race war nor a criminal act of uncivilized people, as both Spaniards and Americans had claimed. Rather, it was the most compelling evidence of the people's enlightenment, suggesting, thereby, an emergent historical kinship between revolutionary Filipinos and civilized Americans and Europeans. Such is underlined by the fact that, as Mabini points out, the Filipino people fought to recover and protect their “natural right” to be free, and in so doing joined their fate to that of all civilized peoples in the world. Indeed, it was because they were willing to sacrifice and die for their rights that Filipinos showed themselves capable of self-rule. For Mabini, it was never the Proclamation of Independence of 12 June 1898 or the establishment of the short-lived First Republic at Malolos and the Constitution that proved Filipino capacity for independence. In fact, he had repeatedly criticized these institutions as premature, and early on saw how they were being used by the ilustrados to put an end to the Revolution, in effect re-colonizing the nation under their rule. Rather it was the very fact of risking their lives to fight injustice that filled a people with what he called “virtue,” the capacity to place the common good above one's self-interests, a capacity he felt was scandalously lacking among the elite leaders of the Republic. For Mabini then, sacrifice borne of virtue was the essence of the Revolution, the basis of its legitimacy, and the proof of its modernity. Founded on Reason and stemming from “natural law,” it was propelled by a virtuous people simultaneously enacting the very thing it sought to restore to itself: its own sovereignty.Footnote ²⁶

In Mabini's account of the history leading up to the Revolution, he cites a common theme in nationalist historical thinking: that a bond of friendship and mutual support characterized the initial relationship between indios and Spaniards sealed by the blood compact, or pacto de sangre. This originary social contract was betrayed by Spanish duplicity and oppression, and Filipinos would respond by rebelling.Footnote ²⁷ By breaking the social contract, the Spaniards had broken the natural law. So, too, had the Americans who, in signing the Treaty of Paris (1899), assumed sovereignty over the Philippines from Spain in exchange for the sum of US$20 million. For Mabini, such an act amounted to treating the Filipinos as if they were slaves to be bought and sold, and so represented a barbaric regression on America's part. In using the instruments of positive international law, the Americans gained legal title to the Philippines, but did so by violating natural law that forbade slavery and the usurpation of another people's sovereignty.Footnote ²⁸

In rising up first against the Spaniards then against the Americans, Filipinos were seeking to restore what justly pertained to them. “Then and now our battle cry remains to be natural law, the eternal foundation and regulator of justice and of all human laws. It is God's law promulgated in men's conscience….” Natural law, in turn, “recognizes no other sovereignty except that of the people…. [T]heir precepts are orders from Divine Reason dictated to the human conscience.”Footnote ²⁹ Popular sovereignty derived from natural law is thus a function of Divine sovereignty and so shares in its unassailable and absolute nature. As with the Proclamation of Independence, Mabini frames the Revolution as a kind of restoration to the extent that it also marks an exceptional event: the recovery of the people's natural right as the providential revelation of God's will. In breaking with the politics of empire, he also reiterates its political theology. In attempting to undo imperial claims, he resorts to a language of rights that finds its ultimate sanction in the Christian notion of natural law.Footnote ³⁰ Sovereignty in this case rests on the people but only insofar as they are infused with Divine Reason and thus become the privileged instruments of His will. Their freedom, if it exists at all, is indissociable from their subordination to and assimilation of His awesome power. In this sense, Revolution as the recovery of a people's right to be sovereign is also paradoxically the restoration of God's unending rule over man.

It is important, however, to stress that Mabini's texts do not merely occasion the return of the imperial specters of political theology. There is another powerful force which inhabits all of his writings, and that is of course the Revolution whose eruption points to other possibilities. The Revolution comes across not simply as the medium for the restoration of absolute sovereignty in a national body that would lead to rational institutions even as it restores social hierarchy. It can also appear as a radically new, profoundly unrecognizable and therefore thoroughly inhuman force. In one essay, Mabini writes of the fear and trembling that the Philippine Revolution had struck in the hearts of other European colonizers who saw it as “contagious, very contagious.” For the Revolution “bears in its volcanic bosom the germ of yellow fever or the bubonic plague, which is fatal to their colonial interests. In the not so distant future, it could constitute the uncontrollable dike against their overwhelming ambitions.” In another piece, he writes, “The American authorities will understand that it is senseless to claim that the Revolution can be stifled by force because there is no human force capable of preventing the natural flow of things.” And in addressing the conservative ilustrados Pedro Paterno and Felipe Buencamino, he warns of the “dangers” that another revolution would bring should the Republic negotiate with the Americans without first securing the recognition of Filipino rights. Without justice, there can be no peace, he avers, only an unending uprising beyond the Republic's—or any other regime's—control.Footnote ³¹

In this and other passages, the Revolution exceeds both human and, it would seem, Divine agency. Its “naturalness” leads not to the creation of new institutions much less to the revelation of Divine Reason, but to sheer destruction. Like a plague, it knows no boundaries and respects no rank, inflicting everyone with its relentless violence. Its effects are unforeseen and beyond anticipation, incurring losses beyond calculation. In this sense, the Revolution becomes an event that cannot be recuperated for social uses inasmuch as it impairs the very mechanisms and agencies of social recuperation. Leading neither to restoration nor return, the Revolution here is imagined to escape the sovereign determination of both the human and the divine. In the name of justice, the Revolution as such could just as easily sow injustice, or more precisely—and here is the source of real terror—confuse men's minds about the difference between the two. Such is the case, for example, when revolutionary fighters find themselves overcome with urges they cannot control. Mabini at one point imagines the following scenario:

Here, Mabini paints a lurid account of Revolution unmoored from Reason and bereft of virtue. No doubt this scenario was based on reports that the Malolos Republic was constantly receiving regarding the abuses of the revolutionary army.Footnote ³³ The “fever” of the Revolution infects fighters with an exaggerated pride that leads them to assume arbitrary power over their prisoners, women, and property. It leads them, that is, to take exception to all consideration of law, natural as well positive, acting with a kind of violence freed from all restraints. For them, sovereignty devolves into sheer destructive power, and it is not until Divine retribution is threatened that they are overcome with the very terror that they themselves had unleashed.

Side by side with the concept of the Revolution as the collective sacrifice and struggle with which to restore a people's natural rights protected by a Republican state, there is thus the ongoing danger of the Revolution as the dissolution of such rights, unleashing a state of permanent violence by way of civil war. In such a case, society would be reduced to a “corpse,” a body without its soul. Mabini writes, “The same happens in all societies. If there is no more than the reunion of men that move with neither direction, nor order nor harmony, society becomes a veritable corpse, because what one does the other will surely undo. It will not be long when this gathering will fight among themselves and dissolve themselves like a corpse that does not take long to decompose. It is thus necessary to have a soul that will move this gathering toward one sense or another, and this soul is authority. How does authority function? It functions like the human soul, inasmuch as society is nothing more than a great individual, comparable to a giant.”Footnote ³⁴

By raising the possibility of pure violence, the Revolution turns every man against every form of authority and thus threatens to rob society of its soul. In doing so, it converts society into a spectral version of itself. It is in light of this permanent possibility of social death that authority becomes essential as a way of resurrecting social life. Furthermore, it is an authority that, as Mabini repeatedly reminds us, resides in the people.Footnote ³⁵ The notion of popular sovereignty thus turns on (in all senses of that phrase) the Revolution as much as the Revolution promises to return popular sovereignty. On one hand, popular sovereignty seeks to contain the Revolution from unleashing pure violence that will kill society. On the other, it is precisely the Revolution that creates the people as the locus of sovereign power in the first place. The Revolution then constantly disrupts the question of sovereignty. It challenges not only the colonial state's and the Catholic Church's claims of possessing absolute power; it also sabotages popular assertions of such power. Similarly, the Revolution dramatizes the innate capacity of a people guided by a law natural to all humans to protect their rights and demand recognition from others. At the same time, it threatens to violate not only positive human laws but putative natural laws—what today we more commonly refer to as “human rights”—giving rise to a spectral society incapable of making or preserving laws as such, and thereby unable to distinguish between just and unjust acts.

In Mabini then, we get a sense of the Revolution as an event that periodically calls into question various claims of sovereignty whether based on the reason of force or the force of reason. It undermines imperial hegemony and its political theology, linking the nation with other global movements of progress and democracy. But it also excavates the irrational foundations of rational institutions, exposing the terror-filled excesses of the sacrificial economy of virtue. It is, however, important to stress that the deconstructive effects of the Revolution do not end with the sheer destruction of oppressive social orders; nor does it rest mainly on the propagation of terror and the spread of criminality. Other accounts of the Revolution left behind by Filipino fighters suggest that it was always something more than the practical appropriation and unraveling of the received notions of sovereignty as we have seen in our reading of Mabini. They also reveal how the Revolution occasionally opened up the possibility of another kind of sovereignty, one that did not entail the exercise of power and the delusions of empowerment. Rather, it stemmed from a vernacular experience of freedom, or what in Tagalog is called kalayaan: freedom not only from the violence of colonial law, but also one that arises from a popular conception of unity and compassion.

III. SOVEREIGNTY AND THE VERNACULAR EXPERIENCE OF FREEDOM

A popular song in the Southern Tagalog region about the Revolution during the early years of the twentieth century begins:

When Rousseau asks what is “the act by which a people becomes a people…” and so sets “the real foundation of society,”Footnote ³⁷ the song above provides one answer in the Philippine context: the act of welcoming. The song calls out the people (mga kababayan), who are also its singers and listeners. It conjures a “we” that comes about in the process of hailing and being hailed (halina, halina) to greet (salubungin) the Filipino fighters led by General Macario Sakay who are coming to their town. In the song, the arrival of the fighters coincides with the coming to be of the singers/listeners through the performance of their song. Both fighters and singers/listeners are joined as part of the emergent “bayan” or hometown, which can be glossed as “nation,” indicated by the Tagalog word for countrymen “kababayan,” literally one who is part of or attached to the same country.Footnote ³⁸

In contrast to the Proclamation of Independence and to Mabini's discourse on popular sovereignty derived from natural law, the song evinces no hierarchical relationship between “we” and “they.” Rather, it declaims each one to be part of the other—kababayan—to be, that is, the people whose gathering and emergence as a people is occasioned by the act of inviting and welcoming revolutionary fighters, that is, those who are part of them. The people come to exist, then, by inviting and welcoming the other who is also a part of themselves and not merely their representatives. It is not the Word of God, the ruler's decision, or the passing of laws that bring about the existence of a people. It is the people themselves who in singing proclaim and so generate their own existence. That they do so in the midst of greeting the fighters means that their identity comes not before, but only in the very act of welcoming the other regarded as part of themselves. We can think of the song, then, as revolutionary in so far as it sets forth a singular event: the self-constitution of a people that occurs in the very act of inviting and welcoming their own arrival, but an arrival which is never completed and is always unfolding. In breaking with the norms of colonial hierarchy, this act of self-constitution, open-ended and always yet to come, is of course the event of the coming of popular sovereignty itself.

There is, however, another dimension to the event of the people's self-becoming. In the other stanza of the song, “we”—both the singers and hearers—are asked to attend to the suffering and deprivation that revolutionary fighters have had to undergo. It portrays them as “pitiful” (kaawa-awa), like the rest of the country. Their suffering in fact is a response to the hardships experienced by the “motherland” which is also “ours,” its children. Their pitiful state is thus already a sign of compassion for the motherland's prior suffering that in turn can be interpreted as an invitation to respond in kind. Turning to the image of suffering fighters, “we” are drawn to have compassion for them (pagmamalasakit) and in doing so, become one with them (tayong lahat mag-kaisa). Here the words for pity, awa, and compassion, pagmamalasakit, convey the sense of collective sharing in the other's loss. The imperative to unite is spoken of as mag-kaisa, formed by the addition of the prefixes “mag” and “ka” to the root word, “isa,” one, that envisions the serial, open-ended addition of other ones. It is realized through an act of mourning whereby one is exposed and so taken up by the loss of the other (in both senses of the genitive). As with the acts of hospitality—of invitation and welcoming—mourning constitutes a “we” who comes to be by sharing and partitioning itself with the other who is also torn apart. Sovereignty as the event of self-constitution constitutes an exception to the norms of colonial rule. But it does so through acts of self-partitioning by way of hospitality, pity, compassion and mourning: in short, by an ongoing orientation to the coming of the other that one seeks to join rather than master. This joining with the other, or damayan (about which I will say more later), in turn comprises the vernacular experience of freedom, or kalayaan, as I hope to show in two other accounts of the Revolution.Footnote ³⁹

The first comes from Santiago Alvarez (1872–1930), one of the leaders of the Revolution. In his memoirs written in the 1920s, Alvarez recalls life in the liberated towns of Cavite, a province south of Manila, during the initial flush of victory against the Spanish forces in September 1896. Reading it, we get a sense of the sheer enjoyment that comes not only from being freed from Spanish rule, but also by the unexpected experience of coming together through ongoing acts of generosity:

In another passage, Alvarez speaks of people “mad” (nag-uulol) with happiness. “At the sound of canon fire, they would laugh as if these were merely the sound of fireworks at a celebration…. There was singing, dancing, eating under the shade of trees, gambling and cockfighting everywhere, all of which set aside the anticipation of having to offer blood and life….”Footnote ⁴¹

Alongside accounts of horrific battles, heroic sacrifices, and unforgivable betrayals, Alvarez's memoirs are peppered with recollections of these moments of “mad” (ulol) happiness. To be sure, these did not last long. The state of “sibling love” could neither be consolidated nor sustained in the face of Spanish attacks and the factional strife that would eventually tear the revolutionary movement apart. But it is precisely the surprising and exceptional occurrence of “love” (pagibig), the joining of one with the other outside the norms of colonial convention and law, that Alvarez and his readers savor, lingering on the memory of moments which could be neither consolidated nor institutionalized. Rather, the pleasure of recalling the experience of liberation here comes precisely from their vanishing. What remains are the images of laughter and celebration in a time suspended from the temporality of both Spanish and U.S. colonial rule. Like the revolutionary song we heard earlier, Alvarez's account conveys a sense of the people realizing their sovereignty as an emergent unity enacted through quotidian, ongoing acts of hospitality. Sovereignty in this context is less a decisive break with the norm as it is ordinary gestures taking on extraordinary significance. It is perhaps for this reason that rather than exercise a newfound mastery over the Enemy, popular sovereignty assumes a happy indifference to its threats.

These moments in Alvarez's account resonate with the memoirs of one of the most prominent revolutionary leaders and president of the First Philippine Republic, Emilio Aguinaldo. Like Alvarez, Aguinaldo wrote in Tagalog rather than Spanish, reflecting his lack of formal education. Both also came from the ranks of the municipal elite, and unlike the wealthy ilustrados who dominated the Republic, were far more in tune with the people who fought in and supported the Revolution from its inception. Writing in the 1960s, Aguinaldo relishes the “delicious” memories of the early days of the Revolution: “How delicious (sarap) to remember the purest (dalisay) and perfect oneness (pagkakaisa) during those days when revolutionaries and townspeople were joined in one purpose: to save the Mother Country (Inang Bayan) from its pitiful condition.”Footnote ⁴² Aguinaldo refers to this intimate “oneness” between and among fighters and townspeople as “pag-iibigan,” or love. Such love was “truly impressive.” Because of this, one would never hear of robberies, or rapes, or extortions that used to happen night and day. And it was even delightful to see men and women going about all day in complete peace without anyone disturbing them, and that everyone greeted each other brother/sister (kapatid).”Footnote ⁴³

This sense of oneness and ease of movement bespoke of a freedom from fear and need. Felt as a kind of intense love between revolutionary fighters and townspeople, this freedom arises from what Aguinaldo refers to as “damayan,” from the root word “damay,” to mourn a loss as well as to sympathize with that of another's. It also means to participate and share in the other's work, to bear the other's sorrow and so to answer to his or her need.Footnote ⁴⁴ As an ethic of compassion, damayan generates the radical identification of one with the other, implicating each in the other's deeds and sentiments. Revolutionary love consists, then, of continuous acts of damayan, as when townspeople enthusiastically greet arriving revolutionaries with great shows of generosity: “They invited all of the troops to come and eat so that all the houses served food without anyone asking them to”; “When those from there [Talisay] saw us… they were overcome with joy (galak)…. All of the houses, even the smallest huts, eagerly fed and welcomed the troops”; “When we arrived in Silang, we were enthusiastically greeted and the food they served the troops was incredible….”Footnote ⁴⁵ These and similar accounts of generosity are described by Aguinaldo as examples of “buong pagdamay,” of complete sympathy and reciprocity between the fighters and the people. Damayan as the basis of revolutionary sociality brings “galak,” or joy, and “ginhawa,” peacefulness, ease, and comfort to everyone, regardless of their social position. It is for this reason that acts of damayan conjure a sense of freedom, or kalayaan: “We should not forget the sweetness of our damayan,” Aguinaldo says at one point to hundreds of followers wishing to follow his troops into the mountains as they retreat from advancing Spanish forces, “that sooner or later we might attain our cherished freedom (kalayaan).”Footnote ⁴⁶Damayan is thus not only the substance of revolutionary love; it is also the path to a different kind of sovereign existence.

We can perhaps better appreciate this notion of sovereign experience in the memoirs of Alvarez and Aguinaldo by further inquiring into its vernacular context. Sovereignty that arises from acts of damayan is deeply associated with kalayaan, the Tagalog word usually translated as “freedom.” It is important to note, however, that there is no easy correspondence between these two words, “freedom” and “kalayaan.” As the historian Reynaldo Ileto has pointed out, kalayaan has meant both more and less than “freedom,” holding a range of connotations that exceed words such as “independence,” “autonomy,” and the political-theological implications of sovereignty. Pointing out the historical link between katipunan—the word as well as the name of the secret revolutionary organization—and kalayaan, Ileto writes:

Ileto asks us to consider kalayaan in its proto-political sense as a return to the state of layaw—the pre-oedipal moment of perfect reciprocity between mother and child. Idealized as a state of bonding without bondage, the condition of layaw, similar to that of damayan, comes from acts of giving that do not expect a return and so escape the economy of the gift; of taking without incurring a debt and so dispense with the formation of hierarchy. Freed from the need to calculate and wait, reciprocity ceases to be reciprocal altogether. Similarly, recognition is no longer recognizable, having done away with the protocols of mediation and forms of social hierarchy. Indeed, one might even say that the state of layaw, so far as it centers on the relationship between mother and child, is one where the father counts for little, if at all. The latter has yet to make his presence felt, much less assert his authority over the family by establishing the law regulating the relationship between mother and child.

It is not difficult to see how kalayaan, or “freedom” understood as layaw, can easily slide into the sense of damayan. It, too, conjures a scene of sovereignty that, as in the revolutionary song and in the accounts of Alvarez and Aguinaldo, engenders constant caring. Outside the violent inequalities and inequities that inhered in the colonial and Republican state, the state of kalayaan comes across as a site of uncommon hospitality whereby whoever or whatever comes, whenever it comes, enters without need for permission. For all these reasons, sovereignty as the experience of kalayaan is not so much the power to decide on the exception, as Schmitt would put it. Relying on the reliance of every one on every other, kalayaan is contingent on everyday acts of damayan. For this reason, the realization of sovereignty as freedom, like that of love and pity, will always be deferred, always to come, and thus always to be welcomed.Footnote ⁴⁸

In both Aguinaldo's and Alvarez's account of Cavite, we can imagine life briefly attaining the state of kalayaan. The people momentarily free themselves from the labor of fighting and the struggle for recognition. There is only consumption beyond necessity, sibling love without patriarchal law, and collective joy in the face of terrible threats from the Enemy. In the midst of the Revolution, the world appears not simply upside down, but wholly new. It is new because its appearance could have been neither anticipated nor calculated, happening suddenly only to vanish, always it seemed for the first and for the last time. For this reason, we can think of popular sovereignty generated by the coming of kalayaan as a state of exception, perhaps akin to a miracle.

Mabini as we saw considered popular sovereignty in such terms, as the decisive and therefore miraculous moment when Divine Reason was made manifest in human reason. However, the accounts we've been reading also suggest a way of thinking about the miracle in its atheological sense that is less about the revelation of Divine Sovereignty than about the surprising occurrence of an event woven into rather than separate from the fabric of everyday life.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is surprising inasmuch as the exact moment and meaning of its arrival surpasses whatever horizon of expectation or detailed calculations we might have. Hence does a miraculous event compel multiple and repeated interpretations, retellings, and rememberings, none of which can ever exhaust much less fully account for what happened, let alone its full significance. A miracle thus furnishes a sign for an open-ended future of interpretive possibilities and the social lives these bring forth. As such, it calls for ongoing response to and responsibility for what or whoever a miracle brings in its wake. In this way, miracles, if they exist, have the power to awaken the transformative potential of ordinary acts, exposing the contingency of the everyday and the everydayness of contingency. In the context of Filipino revolutionary history, the extraordinary if temporary occurrence of kalayaan brought about the miracle of popular sovereignty. It entailed, as we have seen, not only the rupturing of daily life but also the intensification of its possibilities. Such possibilities included, but were not limited to the contagious spread of mutual pity, the extravagant displays of generosity, alongside the blissful if fleeting feelings of unity that came with the act of welcoming the coming of the Revolution.Footnote ⁵⁰

CODA

The political theology of the Spanish empire asserted the possibility of the impossible: Divine force as absolute power incarnated in the sovereign's body and expressed in his capacity to take exception. The Filipino Revolution, as I have argued, simultaneously dismantled even as it re-appropriated this enduring and terrifying fiction, locating it in the body of the people, at once the agent of and threat to the realization of a post-revolutionary Republic where its leaders were concerned. But from another perspective, the Revolution was also capable of bringing about popular sovereignty as the ordinary experience of extraordinary joy, of freedom arising from compassion and generosity, and of the miraculous, if evanescent, opening of an entirely new life whose traces continue to arrive from the future within and beyond the nation-state.