Monagle Clare - The politics of nothing on sovereignty

The Politics of Nothing

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 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.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique.

Clare Monagle is a lecturer in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Australia. She has published widely on medieval thought, and has a forthcoming monograph, Trying Ideas: Peter Lombard, Christological Nihilism and Theological Controversy, 1050-1215.

Dimitris Vardoulakis is a lecturer at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is the author of The Doppelgnger: Literatures Philosophy (2010) and Sovereignty and Its Other (forthcoming). He is also the editor of Spinoza Now (2011).

The Politics of Nothing

On Sovereignty

Edited by

Clare Monagle and Dimitris Vardoulakis

First published 2013

by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2013 Taylor & Francis

This book is a reproduction of Culture, Theory and Critique, volume 51, issue 2. The Publisher requests to those authors who may be citing this book to state, also, the bibliographical details of the special issue on which the book was based.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN13: 978-0-415-50938-1

Publishers Note

The publisher would like to make readers aware that the chapters in this book may be referred to as articles as they are identical to the articles published in the special issue. The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen in the course of preparing this volume for print.

Contents

Clare Monagle and Dimitris Vardoulakis

Clare Monagle

Jrgen Fohrmann and (Translated by Dimitris Vardoulakis)

Charles Barbour

Dimitris Vardoulakis

Warren Montag

Ian James

Anna-Louise Milne

The following chapters were originally published in Culture, Theory and Critique, volume 51, issue 2 (July 2010). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:

A Sovereign Act of Negation: Schmitts Political Theology and its Ideal Medievalism

Clare Monagle

Culture, Theory and Critique, volume 51, issue 2 (July 2010) pp. 115-127

Enmity and Culture: The Rhetoric of Political Theology and the Exception in Carl Schmitt

Jrgen Fohrmann

Culture, Theory and Critique, volume 51, issue 2 (July 2010) pp. 129-144

The Ends of Stasis: Spinoza as a Reader of Agamben

Dimitris Vardoulakis

Culture, Theory and Critique, volume 51, issue 2 (July 2010) pp. 145-156

The Late Althusser: Materialism of the Encounter or Philosophy of Nothing?

Warren Montag

Culture, Theory and Critique, volume 51, issue 2 (July 2010) pp. 157-170

Naming the Nothing: Nancy and Blanchot on Community

Ian James

Culture, Theory and Critique, volume 51, issue 2 (July 2010) pp. 171-187

Next to Nothing: Jean Paulhans Gamble

Anna-Louise Milne

Culture, Theory and Critique, volume 51, issue 2 (July 2010) pp. 189-203

Charles Barbour lectures in Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Along with about a dozen book chapters, he has published on a wide variety of topics in journals such as: Educational Philosophy and Theory; The Journal of Classical Sociology; The International Journal for Semiotics and Law; Law, Culture and the Humanities; Parallax; Philosophy and Social Criticism; Telos; Theory, Culture and Society; and others. He has co-edited two collections, one on sovereignty with Routledge and one on Hannah Arendt with Continuum. He is currently working on two special issues of journals. His ongoing research projects concern questions of mendacity, on the one hand, and equality, on the other. His monograph, The Marx Machine: Politics, Polemics, Ideology, is available from Lexington.

Jrgen Fohrmann is Rector at the University of Bonn, Germany. His several books include Projekt der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Entstehung und Scheitern einer nationalen Poesiegeschichtsschreibung zwischen Humanismus und Deutschem Kaiserreich (1989) and, as editor or co-editor, Politische Theologie. Formen und Funktionen im 20. Jahrhundert (2003) and 1848 und das Versprechen der Moderne (2003).

Ian James completed his doctoral research on the fictional and theoretical writings of Pierre Klossowski at the University of Warwick in 1996. Since then he has been a Fellow and Lecturer in French at Downing College, University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Pierre Klossowski: The Persistence of a Name (Legenda, 2000), The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford University Press, 2006), and Paul Virilio (Routledge, 2007).

Anna-Louise Milne is a senior lecturer in the Department of French and Comparative Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris, France. Notable publications are two books on Jean Paulhan (The Extreme In-Between. Jean Paulhans Place in the Twentieth Century, Legenda 2006, and La Correspondance Paulhan-Belaval, Gallimard, 2005), and a recent contribution to the current centenary of the Nouvelle Revue Franaise in the form of a special issue of the Romanic Review on the relations between Gallimards foundational review and modernism. Her current research spins out of the centre/periphery dynamic explored in construction of the literary field, to consider its modalities in twentieth-century visions of and for the city of Paris.

Clare Monagle is a lecturer in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her speciality is the intellectual history of Medieval Europe. She received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University in 2007. She has published articles in Viator, Parergon and Postmedieval