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A unique angle on the topic of sovereignty and violence
Sovereign violence is a dominant issue in contemporary political theory and has attracted much attention from proponents of biopolitics, critical theory, deconstruction and post-structuralism.
Gavin Rae offers an original approach to the topic by looking at a wide range of thinkers which he organises into three models. Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari form the radical-juridical perspective, Foucault and Agamben are biopolitical and Derrida is bio-juridical.
Gavin Rae offers an original approach to the topic by looking at a wide range of thinkers which he organises into three models: the radical-juridical perspective (Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari); biopolitical (Foucault and Agamben); and bio-juridical (Derrida).
Rae engages with new translations of Derrida's late seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign as well as The Death Penalty to show that Derrida offers a radical and alternative angle in which violence is placed between law and life, simultaneously creating and regulating each through the other.
Gavin Rae is Conex Marie Sklodowska-Curie Experienced Research Fellow at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.
List of contents
Preface; Introduction: The Classic-Juridical Model; Part I: The Radical-Juridical Critique; 1. Critiquing Violence: Walter Benjamin on Law and the Divine; 2. Divinity within the Law: Carl Schmitt on the Violence of Sovereignty; 3.Violence and Power: Arendt on the Logic of Totalitarianism; 4. Disrupting Sovereignty: Deleuze and Guattari on the War Machine; Part II: The Biopolitical Critique; 5. From Law to Life: Foucault, Sovereignty, and Biopolitical Racism; 6. Agamben on Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and Civil War; Part III: The Bio-Juridical Critique; 7. Life and Law: Derrida on the Bio-Juridicalism of Sovereign Violence; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Gavin Rae is Senior Visiting Research Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. He is the author of
Critiquing Sovereign Violence (Edinburgh University Press, 2019),
Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2019),
The Problem of Political Foundations in Carl Schmitt and Emanuel Levinas (Palgrave, 2016),
Ontology in Heidegger and Deleuze: A Comparative Analysis (Palgrave, 2014) and
Realizing Freedom: Hegel, Sartre and the Alienation of Human Being (Palgrave, 2011). He is co-editor of
Subjectivity and the Political: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2018) and
The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (Routledge, 2019).
Summary
Gavin Rae offers an original approach to sovereign violence by looking at a wide range of thinkers, which he organises into three models. Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari form the radical-juridical perspective; Foucault and Agamben the biopolitical; Derrida the bio-juridical – which Rae argues produces the most nuanced account.
