Suchergebnisse

This article offers the first comparative study of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke's readings of the Biblical figure of Jephthah the Gileadite and, in particular, the latter's notorious appeal to God that leads to the killing of his own daughter. To outline its argument, I focus on a critical moment in Hobbes and Locke's corpuses where they both appeal to Jephthah's vow to support their theories of sovereign right: Hobbes' account of the right to punish in Leviathan and Locke's account of the right to go to war in the "Second Treatise of Government." If Hobbes and Locke's readings of Jephthah differ considerably – the one focusing on Jephthah's daughter, the other on Jephthah himself; the one exploring domestic political theory, the other international relations theory; the one seeking to legitimize the right to punish, the other the right to go to war – I contend that both see Jephthah's story as an allegory for the origins of sovereign violence in self-sacrifice or even martyrdom. For Hobbes and Locke, Jephthah's fate becomes a kind of arcane theological paradigm for sovereign killing: what begins as the religious power to die ends up as the political power to kill. In the obscure story of Jephthah the Gileadite, then, I conclude that Hobbes and Locke set in motion what we might call a martyrological machine at the core of the modern liberal state. What if liberalism is constituted less by its professed love of "life" – private interest, private property, self-preservation, self-determination – than a willingness to sacrifice everything and die?

This article proposes a political prehistory of drone theory that traces its juridico-political evolution from the 17th century to the present day. To outline my argument, I construct a constellation between Hobbes's theory of sovereign punishment in Leviathan and Chamayou's critique of drone warfare in Drone Theory to illuminate the political origins of drone violence. First, I argue that Hobbes's social contract theory lays the conceptual groundwork for Chamayou's drone theory. Second, I contend that Hobbes's theory of the sovereign punishment of domestic citizens preempts Chamayou's critique of drone warfare against foreign enemies. Finally, I speculate that Hobbes's theory of punishment is founded upon a sacrificial paradigm that returns in the phenomenon of domestic drone strikes. In summary, I argue that Hobbes might be something close to the first drone theorist insofar as his political theory systematically produces the state of exception between citizen and enemy in which the drone operates today. What, then, are the theoretical origins of drone warfare? How does the punishment of citizens prefigure drone warfare against foreign enemies? To what extent might even citizens themselves be a species of drone who may be activated by the sovereign at any point?

This essay seeks to explore the position of citizen sacrifice in Rousseau's political theology from The Social Contract to "The Levite of Ephraïm." To summarize, I contend that Rousseau's political theology starts out by seeking to prohibit religious sacrifice as something inimical to both natural and positive law, but ends up attempting to appropriate or internalize this sacrificial economy within his theory of citizenship. If Rousseau presents his theory of civil religion as a means of neutralizing the violence of sectarian religions, for example, I contend that this civil profession of faith is itself a species of sacrificial theology which is explicitly designed to create a citizen who is capable of sacrificing their life to the state. In "The Levite of Ephraïm"—a prose poem which begins and ends with the dismemberment of a woman—Rousseau's political theology of citizen sacrifice assumes its most graphic allegorical form.

This essay explores a series of sovereign 'machines' – slaves, puppets, automata – in political theory from Benjamin to Agamben. It is now well-documented that the philosophical question of 'the machine' – of whether a complex system requires a human operator or whether it can function autonomously – is also a crucial political question that haunts every discussion of sovereignty from Hobbes onwards. However, my wager in what follows is that this machine is not just a metaphor for a metaphysical situation – whether it be rationality (Hobbes), bureaucratization (Weber), neutralization (Schmitt), historicism (Benjamin) or governmentality (Foucault) – but a material phenomenon that carries transformative political promise and threat. To summarize the argument of this essay, I contend that 'sovereign machines' like slavery (Aristotle, Hegel, Kojève, Agamben), puppets, automata or clockwork (Descartes, Hobbes, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida), lens, optics and mirrors (Hobbes, Kantorowicz, Benjamin, Lacan, Foucault) and so on do not merely reflect but change our understanding of the causal relationship between sovereignty and governmentality, decision and norm, exception and rule. If the self-appointed task of the modern political theorist has so often been to obtain or regain sovereignty of, or over, the machine – to jam its gears – I seek to expose what the later Derrida calls the 'machine' of sovereignty itself. In conclusion, I argue that political theory's attempt to reveal or retroactively invent the sovereign person at the heart of the machine only ends up revealing the sovereign machine at the heart of the person. What – if anything – is really inside the machine of sovereignty?

This article explores the fate of political theology in Kazuo Ishiguro's speculative fiction Never Let Me Go (2005) and, by implication, in contemporary fiction more broadly. To pursue a reading of Christianity that extends from Hegel through Lacan to Žižek, the article argues that political theology's future may perversely lie in a materialism emptied of all transcendental guarantees: political theology is the historically privileged master fantasy or illusion which reveals the fantastic or illusory status of our entire relation to the real in (neo-)liberal modernity. In conclusion, the article argues that Ishiguro's fiction may thus be read less as a melancholic dystopian study in total ideological capture or surrender than as the representation of a state of immanent freedom beyond the power relations of (neo-)liberal subjectivity.