In this new book, Dimitris Vardoulakis asks how it is possible to think of a politics that is not commensurate with sovereignty. For such a politics, he argues, sovereignty is defined not in terms of the exception but as the different ways in which violence is justified. Vardoulakis shows how it is possible to deconstruct the various justifications of violence. Such dejustifications can take place only by presupposing an other to sovereignty, which Vardoulakis identifies with radical democracy. In doing so, Sovereignty and Its Other puts forward both a novel critique of sovereignty and an original philosophical theory of democratic practice.
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface
- Preamble, or Power and Its Relations
- 1 Judgment and Justification
- Justification or Judgment?
- Sovereign Discomfort: The Immediacy of Justification
- Dejustification, or the Historicization of the Trinity of Justification
- Democratic Judgment, or the Exigency of Participation
- An Other Narrative: On Method
- 2 The Vicissitude of Participation: On Ancient Sovereignty
- War and the State: On the Foundation and Perpetuation of the Polis in Thucydides
- Self-sufficiency: Pericles’s “Funeral Oration,”
- “Invincible Eros” in Sophocles’s Antigone: For the Love of Democracy
- Universal Agape in Christian Sovereignty: Augustine’s City of God
- 3 The Propinquity of Nature: Absolute Sovereignty
- The Subject of Psychology and the Law: Machiavelli and Bodin
- Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyself: Hobbes’s Artificialities
- There Must Be Madmen. . . . The Absoluteness of the Sovereign in the Leviathan
- Melancholia as Dejustification: Hamlet’s Anti-absolutism
- 4 Revolution and the Power of Living: Popular Sovereignty
- “The Sovereign Is Always What It Should Be”: Rousseau’s Perpetual Revolution
- The Other of Obedience: Spinoza’s Dejustification of Sovereignty
- The Regime of Broken Promises: The Possibility of Democracy
- The Paroxysm of the Aleatory: Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas
- 5 Democracy and Its Other: Biopolitical Sovereignty
- Normalizing the Exception
- The Unsavables: Marx’s Wager
- Acts of Democracy: The Primacy of the Effect in Foucault’s Theory of Power
- The Unexceptional: Coetzee’s Michael K. and Resistance
- Epilogue: A Relational Ontology of the Political
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
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