In this dissertation, I propose to re-cast the concept of sovereignty through a political diagnostic attitude. In order to articulate this alternative line of inquire, I suggest that Georges Bataille s work on sovereignty and Immanuel Kant s critique of the limits of political representation share the problematic of modern political subjectivity in ways that remain poignantly relevant to our present. The analysis proceeds through close textual readings of critiques of international politics concerned with questions of political change. Jens Bartelson, Martti Koskenniemi and Nicholas Onuf provide us with sophisticate analyses about the relationship between politics and law in the knowledgeable production of the limits of political modernity. Lastly, I follow the diagnostic movements present in those texts up to the limit that enables them. I conclude by arguing that the nature of this limit demands a slight shift in problematization, otherwise we risk missing important nuances in how political authority authorizes itself under the contemporary conditions that inform the problem of sovereignty.