Staging Sovereignty

Auteur
Arthur Bradley is professor of comparative literature at Lancaster University. His most recent book is Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure (Columbia, 2019).

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This book explores the relationship between theater and sovereignty in modern political theory, philosophy, and performance.

Résumé
To become sovereign, one must be seen as sovereign. In other words, a sovereign must appearphilosophically, politically, and aestheticallyon the stage of power, both to themselves and to others, in order to assume authority. In this sense, sovereignty is a theatrical phenomenon from the very beginning.

This book explores the relationship between theater and sovereignty in modern political theory, philosophy, and performance. Arthur Bradley considers the theatricality of powerits forms, dramas, and iconographyand examines sovereignty's modes of appearance: thrones, insignia, regalia, ritual, ceremony, spectacle, marvels, fictions, and phantasmagoria. He weaves together political theory and literature, reading figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben alongside writers including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller, Melville, Valéry, Kafka, Ionesco, and Genet.

Formally inventive and deeply interdisciplinary, Staging Sovereignty offers a surprising and original narrative of political modernity from early modern political theology to the age of neoliberal capitalism.