"The Beast and the Sovereign" was the title of Jacques Derrida's last seminar. Following it, the exhibition and publication at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and MACBA, Barcelona (2015) were named. They deal with constructions of the political sovereign in Western thought traditions. For Derrida, the beast and the sovereign symbolized two opposing figures of the political, both positioned outside the law: the beast, which knows no law, and the sovereign, who has the power to suspend the law. It concerns the binary power relations that can be derived from this peculiar pair. During the exhibition, a conflict arose at MACBA when a work by Ines Doujak was to be censored. The publication refers to this incident.