The Politics of Nothing: On Sovereignty
Dimitris Vardoulakis, Clare Monagle
Language: English
Pages: 151
ISBN: 1138946613
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book questions what sovereignty looks like when it is de-ontologised; when the nothingness at the heart of claims to sovereignty is unmasked and laid bare. Drawing on critical thinkers in political theology, such as Schmitt, Agamben, Nancy, Blanchot, Paulhan, The Politics of Nothing asks what happens to the political when considered in the frame of the productive potential of the nothing? The answers are framed in terms of the deep intellectual histories at our disposal for considering these fundamental questions, carving
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out trajectories inspired by, for example, Peter Lombard, Shakespeare and Spinoza. This book offers a series of sensitive and creative reflections that suggest the possibilities offered by thinking through sovereignty via the frame of nihilism.
the divine. The Council asserted that it was better to err on the side of the principle of dissimilarity, to keep statements about God firmly in the realm of what could be said in absolute faith and in absolute certainty. The genealogy of the language of Lateran IV is complicated, as my elaboration has shown. The detail is important, however, as it shows that an assuredness of Roman Catholicism as the glue of Christendom did not necessarily produce a politicised discourse of amities and
rejection of either a psychological or a historical exegesis of Hamlet, which also aims to ‘eliminate the prejudices of a romantic aesthetic’, Schmitt places at centre stage the curious relationship between Hamlet and his mother, whose possible complicity in the murder of her husband as well as her marriage to the murderer remain, in substance, unspeakable for Hamlet (Schmitt 1956: 70). Such silence, for Shakespeare, had nothing to do with ‘sparing the ladies’, he was not concerned with a ‘lady
mention here briefly only the following. According to that which Dühring framed as an uncircumventable and substantiated argumentation, the ‘Jew’ was attributed first of all the intentionally third character: the ‘Jew’ was the character that associated with neither the one nor the other side, pursuing instead its ‘self-interested affairs’ with both sides. For Dühring, then, the ‘Jew’ represents everything that is beyond culture, since culture presupposes for him a stable identity that can mark
the exception, or to decide when it is necessary to break the law in order to preserve or maintain it. But for the same reason, this sovereign is never, like Bataille’s, entirely outside of the law, but always inside and outside at once, or on the border or the threshold between law and lawlessness. ‘Although [the sovereign] stands outside the normally valid legal system’, Schmitt insists, ‘he nonetheless belongs to it’ (Schmitt 2005: 7). And in this sense, the sovereign’s decision is not an
Underground Current’ thus exhibits a strange unthought mimicry of the very ‘transcendentalism’ Althusser once subjected to critical scrutiny, tracking it in all its ruses through the thickets of Foucault’s first major text. To discern the existence of another notion of the void, not only irreducible to the first but actively antagonistic to it, we will return to Althusser’s summary of ‘the philosophy of the void’: it is not only ‘a philosophy which says that the void preexists the atoms that