Arthur Bradley, "Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy" (Columbia UP, 2024)
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Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Aileen Zhou. Today I'm thrilled to have Professor Arthur Bradley on the show to talk about his fascinating new book titled "Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy" published by the Columbia University Press in November 2024.

This book discusses the relationship between theater and sovereignty in modern political theory, philosophy, and performance. It really covers a diverse range of thinkers and texts from political theorists such as Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Schmitt, Derrida, Foucault, and Agamben to playwrights, novelists, and artists such as Shakespeare, Kafka, Cervantes,

Il Nisku, Jeunet, and Bacon. What makes this book stand out is its formally inventive and deeply interdisciplinary approach, which offers us a fresh narrative of political modernity spanning from early modern political theology all the way to the age of neoliberal capitalism. So hello, Professor Bradley, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much, Aileen. It's great to be here. Of course. So could you start off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us about how this book came to life? What motivated you to write it?

Yes, thank you. I'm a professor of comparative literature at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, and I've always worked at the intersection of literature, political theory, philosophy and other disciplines. I've always seen myself as an interdisciplinary scholar.

As I say in the preface to Staging Sovereignty, I actually started working on this book during lockdown, during the lockdown of 2020. And I really just started working on it whenever I could find a moment and working with the materials that I had at hand. So books that were...

you know, in my home or materials that I could access online, which might help to explain the slightly unusual structure of the book that you've already been mentioning.

But I think in more general terms, and it took me a little while to realize this, this is a book about something that I've really loved all my life, going all the way back to my childhood, although it's something I've never really written about before. And it's the experience of the theater and of going to the theater. So that's really the origins of the book. Interesting. As I was reading, I was truly struck by...

like how expansive and interdisciplinary this book is. For me, it's so eye-opening and also it feels distinct from many conventional academic works, you know. So I'm wondering how you see this book connecting with your previous work or how does it carve out a new direction for you? Yeah, thank you. I've written lots of works of literary criticism in the past and also more orthodox

philosophy and works of political theory. But I think this is probably the first book where I've tried to bring all my different interests together in one single work and to construct a kind of

intersection or middle ground between them. So it's really an expression of all my different interests and eccentric interests in all kinds of different things from philosophy to literature to drama to art and so on. And that made it a lot of fun to write and a lot of fun to work on.

Yes, we've been talking about this book includes such a variety of materials and discipliners. So could you give us an overview of the chapters and tell us how you organize these materials in this way? Yeah, sure. So I wanted to write a book that is formally organized.

or generically what it is about thematically. So that at the level of the writing itself, it kind of reflects the argument.

And as I've tried to hint to you already, the book tries to describe a sort of middle ground or an intersection between political theory and theater. And it moves back and forth between works of drama by people like Shakespeare or Schiller, works of political theory from Plato to Hobbes and Rousseau and so on, philosophy, theology and history.

So it came to me quite quickly that rather than writing an orthodox work of academic scholarship, such as a book, a work of political theory or a history of political theater, I wanted to do something a little bit different. I wanted to stage or perform the middle ground that I was writing about

in my own writing. So I wanted the book to dramatize, so to speak, my own argument. And by telling a series of stories about specific props and objects in the life world of politics, I have chapters on thrones, on regalia, on holy oil, on courts and antechambers, and so on.

The book really tries to describe what I've called or what you called in your introduction, the intrinsic theatricality of politics and more particularly of political theory.

So in that sense, the book is really a set of high wire acts or performances, which I hope will make it an interesting and intriguing read for readers, because it hopefully occupies the kind of unsettling ambiguity between the truth and the spectacle that it simultaneously describes.

Yeah, exactly. Because, I mean, you described your writing as performative and theatrical. That's exactly how I felt when I first browsed the table of contents and the section titles of each chapter. So other than your personal interest, do you think

like, why such a unique writing style or an interdisciplinary approach is so crucial at the contemporary moment for academia? Yeah, that's very interesting question. I mean, I'm aware that contemporary academia is experimenting with form in really interesting ways.

in ways that weren't really possible when I was a young scholar many years ago. In those days, you either wrote orthodox works of academic scholarship or you went off and became a creative writer, a novelist, or a dramatist, or something like that. But I'm really interested in seeing the emergence of new kinds of para-academic or trans-academic genres of writing, which

bring together creative and critical writing or bring together autobiography and scholarship. So, I mean, this book is in no sense an autobiography except insofar as it's a, I guess it's a guide to my interests and my particular investments. But I think perhaps it could be seen within that, the context of this new book

to turn to power academic experimentation. Interesting. And I think we can dive deeper into the content and the chapters. So while the book mostly focuses on modern political thoughts, it actually begins with Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

So I'm wondering why you chose to start there and how the historical pairing of theatre and theory is still relevant to us today. Yeah, thank you. I decided to start with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, partly because it's one of the most over-interpreted and over-determined texts in the history of philosophy. It's almost the one story that

everyone knows, even if you've never read anything else by Plato or by any other philosopher. But I think something that hasn't really been brought out enough before by previous scholarship is that the cave is also a kind of theater. Okay, so it

to recall Plato's story, he develops this allegory for Glaucon as he asks him to imagine this dark cave in which a set of prisoners are sitting watching a sort of puppet show, a light show or a

projected upon the wall for them by the flames or the by the by the light the candlelight in the in the cave and the prisoners come to view this this puppet show this theater as reality they take it for truth and when what they really need to do is to go outside into the pure light of day and experience the real truth so

I begin with Plato's Allegory of the Cave because in a way it's also an allegory of the relationship between politics and theatre. Plato is not a big fan of theatre and of the mimetic arts generally. He criticizes them quite a lot. He tells us to be suspicious of them. And the reason we should be suspicious of them is because they distort or dissimulate this thing called the truth.

and our contemplation of the truth. So what's interesting, I think, is that right at the very beginning, the institution of Western metaphysics, if you like, you get an opposition and a hierarchy between theory and theater, between theoria and theatron. Plato opposes theoria, a term that

for better or worse, will come to be translated as theory, but really means something like wonder, the disinterested contemplation of the ideal forms.

Plato opposes theoria to the mimetic arts, to theater, to poetry, which he notoriously sees as a kind of derivative secondhand representation of the truth. As many people will know, Plato has no place for the poets in his ideal republic.

However, what I try to argue over the course of the book is that theoria and theatron, theory and theatre, have always been and will always be mutually implicated. There's no view from nowhere in which we can obtain an entirely disinterested and objective, unmediated view of the truth.

In this sense, I think it's also important that actually theoria and theatron have a common root in the Greek verb theia, to see. They're both forms of vision. So what the book tries to do is to unpack the mutually antagonistic, but also antagonistic,

I try to argue mutually constitutive relationship, inextricable relationship between theory and theater. Yeah, thank you for explaining that for us before we

talk more about the cases you mentioned. And then you've, you've written in your book that it isn't really a work of political theory or a study of political theater, but something you call political thaumaturgy. So what do you, what do you really mean by that? And what are the distinctions? Yeah.

Yeah, so the subtitle of the book is Theory, Theatre, Thaumaturgy. As I've been saying, what I'm trying to do in this book is to articulate this sort of gray zone, excluded middle, whatever you want to call it, between theory and theatre, between theoria and theatron. And this leads me to introduce another much more obscure and largely forgotten third Greek term called

in order to negotiate between them, in order to articulate this middle ground. And that word is thaumaturgy. Okay, now thaumaturgy is an ancient Greek word which consists of thauma, which means wonder, spectacle, marvel, miracle. Turgy meaning a kind of work, wonder working of some kind or another.

So why do I turn to thaumaturgy as my mediating term between theory and theater? Well, I think thaumaturgy has a really interesting and complex role in this story of the relationship between philosophy and theatricality. On the one hand, Plato and Aristotle...

both famously argue that Thauma, wonder, is a beginning of philosophy. The very first philosophical moment or philosophical gesture is that simple experience of wonder at the world.

But on the other hand, thauma is also famously associated with, not just with wonder and truth, but with spectacle and with the mimetic arts more generally, arts such as puppetry, for example, the ancient Greek word for a puppet master,

again, is derived from from thaumaturgy. So a political thaumaturgy, which is my name for the the kind of work I'm trying to do in this book, is an attempt to construct a new a new kind of political writing that that occupies this obscure

excluded middle, if you like, or middle ground between the alternatives of theory and theatre, between the supposedly disinterested contemplation of truth on the one hand and the supposedly partial, implicated, embodied form of vision called theatre.

I'm wondering, can you, because as you said, like in the seven main chapters of the book, each one is about like a prop. So could you give us an example of that, like probably your favorite example, your favorite prop or a spectacle to explain that?

Thank you. That's really interesting. So, yeah, so I decided to organize the book in a slightly counterintuitive way. So it's not a straightforward march or procession through the history of philosophy or through the history of political theory or political theater, though it does try and tell a story. Instead, I...

I wanted to describe something called the Theatre of Sovereignty. And in fact, the original title of the book was Theatre of Sovereignty. And I wanted to describe some of the props, the properties, that's where the word prop comes from, the constitutive elements that go to make up this thing called the Theatre of Sovereignty. So, for example, in chapter one, I look at the figure of the chair.

and the figure of the chair from Shakespeare's Macbeth all the way through to Eugène Ionesco's play Les Chaises.

So in later chapters, I look at figures like The Puppet Show. I look at the role played by The Crowd in the work of Alfred Jarry and all the way up to Michel Foucault and even contemporary discussions of figures like Donald Trump.

I don't know if I have a favorite. That's a really good question. But I guess the one that comes to mind for me is a discussion of this thing called holy oil, which is an essential element in the recognition, the public's real and symbolic recognition of sovereignty going all the way back to the Hebrew Bible.

Jesus Christ, for example, literally translates as Christus, is the translation of the Hebrew Messiah, and Messiah means the anointed one, the one who has been anointed with oil.

And we can trace this story of holy oil from the Hebrew Bible through to the Middle Ages because it is increasingly incorporated into coronation ceremonies for monarchs, for European monarchs.

And we can even trace it up to works like Melville's Moby Dick, which is a text which is all about a particular for a particular ingredient within holy oil called ambergris, which is whale sperm and is used in.

Historically, and in modernity is used in in anointment ceremonies and I read Melville's text as as very much a kind of democratization of this process of or of this this process of political theological anointment.

So what I'd really try and do in this chapter then is to trace the story of Holy Oil and what happens to Holy Oil over modernity. And in some ways, this chapter is a microcosm of what I try and do in the book as a whole, because Holy Oil begins life as what you might call a kind of realist experience.

imprimatur, an indelible, inalienable sign of sovereignty and something that ultimately comes from God alone. The one who has been anointed by God or in the name of God cannot have that anointment removed from them. I mean, this will become the kind of justification for royal sovereignty in the Middle Ages and later.

But by the time we get to the English Reformation, the early modern period, what we find really interesting is a really, I call it an oil war, a kind of debate over what exactly this thing called holy oil is and what its representational properties are. So, yeah.

We get English Reformation thinkers arguing effectively that holy oil is just a kind of theatrical grease paint. It really means nothing. It has no magical or theological properties whatsoever. And just as it can be applied to a monarch or a sovereign, it can just as easily be removed from them.

So I then trace the journey of this thing called Holy Oil all the way up to post-modernity. I even have a discussion of the recent coronation of Charles III, the recently crowned king of England or of the United Kingdom, which is the first anointment ceremony for a very, very long time that...

it no longer contains ambergris, no longer contains whale oil. And I like, I try and argue that effectively this thing called holy oil today becomes a sort of, um,

multipurpose, all-purpose democratic elixir, something that can be applied to anything, by anything whatsoever, to bestow upon it some kind of particular political value. It's close to something like what Jacques Lacan calls the "objet petit a" in his work.

So that chapter is really just one example of a larger story that I try and tell in the book in general, which I guess I would call the passage from a theater of sovereignty to a sovereignty of theater. And that's something that we can discuss later on if you like.

Yeah, definitely. But before that, I want to circle back a little bit. So why did you change the title from the Theatre of Sovereignty to Staging Sovereignty? Like why the stage is important or the act of staging is important?

Yes, I mean, titles are always a part of a discussion between the author and the publisher. And, you know, I can understand why staging sovereignty, I think, is perhaps a more powerful and saleable title. So, yeah, I really like staging sovereignty as a title. But I think it...

it works, this concept of the theater of sovereignty and the sovereignty of theater is something that I discuss throughout the book and wanted to, so it's just something I wanted to bring up to explain that. Okay, so I think then we can

Could you talk more about this passage from the theater of sovereignty to the sovereignty of theater? Like, how does it happen and what does it really mean? Yeah, sure. So,

As you said in your introduction, this book is in some ways an attempt to retell what's now a very famous story, which is the birth of what we call modernity. What happened? What were the historical and philosophical conditions that midwifed modernity into being?

to be clear there's lots and lots of answers to that question by lots and lots of uh very very uh important thinkers but what i argue in the book is that we might describe the birth of modernity as the movement from what i call a theater of sovereignty in which a real or personal sovereign such as a prince or king is the first or principal political representative

to a sovereignty of theatre in which that real presence, if you like, of the prince or the king or the sovereignty is dissolved and replaced with a sort of pure or empty space of representability itself, which takes centre stage.

So we move from the representation of something, of some real presence, to the representation of representability. And I can go on and talk about that in more detail if you like later.

And if we want to find an image of this sovereignty in modernity, it's no longer Plato's cave, for example. I call it the figure of the empty space. And actually, the very beautiful cover of the book is an image of an empty space, an empty stage.

And this figure of the empty space is one which simultaneously haunts discussions of political modernity from Hobbes through Jean-Jacques Rousseau up to people like Claude Lefort.

But it also appears in lots of discussions of modern theater, principally by people like Peter Brook. And in this thing called the empty space, which at one level appears to be the most anti-theatrical space imaginable. It's a space that's been emptied of any residue of representation. There are no props. There are no actors. There's nothing. It's simply a bare space that exists as is.

What I try and argue is that instead, counterintuitively, we don't encounter a space without representation, but a kind of pure representability without any content whatsoever.

So what I try and do in each chapter of the book, and I guess the chapter on holy oil would be one example of this, is to tell the story of this kenosis or emptying out of the theater of sovereignty into the sovereignty of theater from the perspective of

of a specific prop or object when holy oil ceases to be something that represents a real or material or sacred presence and becomes simply a representational machine that can be applied pretty much a fungible token that can be applied anywhere and to anything. There's just so many things to further discuss. And I'm thinking so...

What are some of the consequences of this, the empty space or the nothingness in the sovereignty of theatre? Sure. If we think about it, you know, if you want to take some modern political examples, I guess, because the discussion so far has been obviously a little bit historical and abstract.

I mean, I would just think about and ask listeners to maybe think about the relationship between politics and theatricality today, you know, just at the level of our everyday discourse, because it doesn't take a lot of consideration to see that there's something strange or interesting going on in this relationship between politics and theatre, that they seem to have a sort of love-hate relationship.

On the one hand, for example, we're all suspicious of politicians like Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump who are alleged to be actors or literally have a background in the entertainment business. We're suspicious of them because we think they're in some sense not real. They're simply acting.

And we always use phrases if we want to criticize someone, we want to criticize a politician for not being serious. An expression that we often find in Europe and America is an expression like playing politics. You know, you're playing politics with an issue. You're not taking it seriously. You're just a performer or an actor. And of course, I mean, this is interesting.

Many books have already been written about the relationship between politics and acting at some level. So on the one hand, we're all suspicious of politicians who appear to be actors or who used to be actors, and we suspect their authenticity.

But on the other hand, what I find really interesting is that the reverse is also true, is that when we get politicians who are allegedly serious or authentic in one way or another, they're often criticized for not having a story or a narrative that they can tell over and above a set of very prosaic

So we also get politicians in my lifetime, figures like Tony Blair in the UK or Barack Obama in the United States.

who are praised to the skies for their ability to, as I say, to narrate a story, to have a narrative, to tell us where we're going. And in the recent American presidential election, it's interesting that this is something that Kamala Harris was also criticized for not developing fully enough. It's not enough to simply be a manager or a politician. You also need to be an actor.

So I find this relationship between theory and theater really interesting because on the one hand, they seem to detest one another, but politics seems to...

decry and disavow theater. But on the other hand, theater returns and theater seems to be an essential part of politics, a part of politics that can never simply be disavowed. So this is, at a very simple and simplistic level, is one of the things I mean by this thing called the empty space, is that even the attempt to empty theater

of any trace of theatricality always simply seems to be the prelude to the return of theatre and the return of representation as in some sense essential to politics. That's interesting. As we're talking about the contemporary Europe and European and American politics, I think another key topics or a key concept we can't

avoid is democracy. And what I found really interesting is what you write on page 52,

When we talk about the chair, the empty chair, the empty seat of power, you write that if democracy is really an empty space that can be permanently occupied by no one after all, then every legitimate, even elected occupant of the democratic seat of power is unless or until they vacate the space, all this virtually illegitimate space.

a potential dictator, imposter or usurper. So would you like to elaborate more on that? Yeah, thank you. Yes. So I argue that sovereignty is an intrinsically theatrical concept in the book. And one of my, I guess my

My mantra is throughout the book, rewriting Carl Schmitt and his famous work, is that to be sovereign, sorry, we must be seen as sovereign. No one can be sovereign in the dark or invisibly. We have to be seen by sovereign both by ourselves and by others. And I mean seen in a philosophical, a political, and also a visual sense.

phenomenological sense here too. And sovereignty is always mediated through a series of representational props or properties or devices such as thrones, regalia, rituals and ceremonies, and so forth.

Which brings us to democracy, because at one level, modern democracy prides itself on dispensing with, doing away with the old political theological rituals and ceremonies associated with previous forms of

of sovereignty. Okay? I mean, you know, the election of a prime minister or a president is obviously very different from the coronation of a medieval monarch. However,

I guess this is something that, that, that you can see coming now and hopefully listeners will be able to see coming as well. Um, what I argue in the book is a democracy, modern democracy, this allegedly anti theatrical, uh, space, uh, is, is no less a theatrical phenomenon. It's just a different kind of theatrical phenomenon from some of its predecessors. And for me, the work of the French political theorist, Claude Lefort is very, uh,

useful here. Lefort defines democracy, very famously defines democracy as the empty space, the space that belongs to no one, not to a king, not to a god, not even to the people.

And in the first chapter, or in the introduction to the book rather, I argue that Lefou effectively reveals that the democratic process is an intrinsically theatrical phenomenon. I don't think it's a coincidence, or if it is a coincidence, it's a revealing one, that this concept of the empty space is both a modern political and a modern theatrical idea.

Because what's going on in that idea of the empty space, that what we're doing when we're voting in a democratic election, in other words, is what? We're effectively agreeing on something, but we're not agreeing on anything.

anything real on any underlying political or theological ground to the political. We're simply agreeing to participate in an infinite work of representation, an infinite work of representability without end and without any real that underpins it. You know, we vote in election purely in order that we may vote again in five years time or 10 years time.

So this really brings me to your question, which is partly an idea that I'm indebted to Slavoj Žižek for in his reading of the empty space, which is that if the empty space belongs to no one, if no democratic political leader can occupy the empty space permanently,

then the relationship between the legitimate and the illegitimate leader, the elected and the usurper, for example, becomes a question of time. How long does one stay is the difference, the real difference between the Democrat and the dictator. We can all think of examples of dictators who

you know, established a temporary state of emergency when they first come to power. But that state of emergency always seems to become permanent. You know, it never goes away. It's never quite the right time to transition to a democracy.

So what I try and argue, particularly in that first chapter, is that the figure of the elected or legitimate, the democratic leader always has this dark twin, if you like, or secret share, which is the figure of the demagogue or the figure of the usurper, the figure of the regicide.

Because unless and until they vacate the empty space, the space that belongs to no one, it's a priori impossible to tell that a democratic leader is really a democratic leader. I hope that makes sense. Yeah, definitely. And I think another question is, can we imagine an alternative to such...

a democracy or such a theatricality of politics. I think what I mean

as you've included some non-Western or decolonial cases in your book, which I really appreciated. So I was wondering if you could explain how they might align with or challenge such a Eurocentric, Euro-American centric concept of democracy or sovereignty or this

the theatre. Yeah, thank you very much. And you're right. I mean, I'm afraid the story that I'm telling is for better and worse, a predominantly European one. And, you know, I'd be really interested to hear from you and from any other listeners about how this could be extended or the story I'm telling could be extended or challenged or resisted in interesting ways.

One exception to that is the work of the very famous Kenyan dramatist and critic Ngugi Waithiongo, who is a

very well known both as a playwright, a writer, an author and a theorist more generally. As I try to argue in the conclusion of the book, Ngugi's work, both his actual work of theatre and his theoretical writing on theatre,

can in certain respects be situated within the larger story, the larger narrative or argument of the book, because there are certain parallels between his attempt in the 1970s to recover what he saw as a popular indigenous form of Kenyan theatre from British colonialism and the work of European figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alfredo Iayi, Arthur

Brecht and Peter Brook. And I think it's really interesting that Ngugi actually references explicitly the work of Peter Brook when he talks about his own attempt to literally build a new empty space, a new theatrical space that is outside the trappings of colonial representationalism.

But what I find really interesting about Ngugi, and hopefully this moves towards answering your question, is that in the end, his version of the empty space is, I think, radically different from that of Brooke and arguably antagonistic towards it as well, because Ngugi disavows Brooke's theory of theatre as an empty space.

The idea that theatre can happen anywhere and at any point in time. All you need is a bare space, says Peter Brook. It doesn't need to happen on Broadway or the West End of London or something like that.

In the end, Ngugi disavows this theory of theatre as an empty space. On the grounds, though he doesn't quite put it in such terms, that there's something residually colonialist about it. One of the most famous gestures of colonialism is always that there was no one here before we, the colonists, arrived. It was just an empty space.

And I think Ngugi effectively argues that there is no such thing as an empty space. There's only a space that has been more or less violently emptied, vacated of life, of history, of people. And so the book ends really with bringing the story of the empty space up to date through a kind of

colonial or decolonial rereading of Peter Brook and particularly the story of Brook's very controversial attempt to stage the Mahabharata, the Indian epic in

in various spaces, but particularly in New York in the 1980s. A work which, again, more or less violently, I think, effectively empties out quite a lot of the context of that work in order to create this alleged or theoretical empty space. Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. And I think...

Another thing, actually, as we discussed before we started this recording is because I'm doing film and media studies and I'm really interested in, you know, media and visual studies.

I think my favorite chapter is chapter three, when you started with the curtain in the title page of Leviathan. So could you, would you want to talk more about that? Like why is that a very seemingly trivial image of,

brings up a whole chapter and you started from Hobbes into Benjamin, Derrida and Deleuze.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, it's I think that's a good example of this this sort of high wire performance act that I'm trying to pull off in this book. I guess it started that chapter really started with just a very simple observation, which is why? Why is there a curtain on the cover of Hobbes's Leviathan? You know, if anyone takes a look at the cover, it's a cover that was apparently designed by Hobbes himself.

the actual name and title of the book and Hobbes's own name appears embroidered upon a very sort of heavily tasseled decorative curtain.

And I was really struck that almost nobody talks about this in the history of Hobbes' scholarship. All the more surprise because this is probably one of the most over-interpreted images in the history of political theory. Almost every aspect of Hobbes' cover, the frontispiece to Leviathan, has been discussed in laborious detail.

So really my starting point was just a kind of quite a naive question in a way, which is why is there a curtain? What does the curtain conceal or veil something? What might lie behind the curtain? So that took me on a deep dive again through the history of philosophy, political theory, because

One of the very few figures to talk about the curtain horse bread account very famous German visual theorist references the Hebrew Bible again and sees Hobbes's book isn't in a certain sense a reference back to the veil that hides the holy of holies in the Hebrew Bible.

So I then proceed through a series of scenes, if you like, which look at different kinds of political curtains in the work of Walter Benjamin, who once attempted to write something he called a ridologie, literally a curtainology,

the work of Gilles Deleuze on the fold, and also Jacques Derrida's own reading of Hegel and the curtain that veils the Holy of Holies in Glah, before circling back ultimately in the end to Hobbes himself.

And my concluding argument is, in a sense, again, symptomatic of this larger argument I want to make about the move from a sovereignty, a theater of sovereignty to a sovereignty of theater, in which effectively I conclude that there is nothing behind the curtain of Hobbes's movement.

Uh, the Commonwealth actually is the curtain itself. Okay. Um, and this is something which I, I, I try and, uh, explain in various ways, but particularly through, um, uh,

a Baroque painting, which is almost contemporaneous to Hobbes's own work, a painting of a curtain, which, you know, very beautiful, decorative, Baroque, Trump loyal, eye-fooling, eye-tricking painting

conceit where the painting allegedly conceals a curtain only to reveal that actually no the painting itself is the curtain and I use this as a way to discuss and to problematize some of the oppositions between nature and culture between the state of nature and civil society that mobilize in the larger architecture of Hobbes' work

I really love this chapter and as we're coming to an end of our interview, I wanted to ask do you have any advice or suggestions for young scholars or students in political thought or in philosophy

like how like do you want to give them any advice or suggestions that's a really good question and you know it's a very difficult question to answer because i think for for many reasons these are these are not good times uh for uh academia in in the arts and humanities and you know for for for my younger colleagues and and and for my students um

I guess what I would say, or looking back on my own career, I guess I think this as well, is that I think it's really crucial for younger colleagues, for everyone to stay in touch with whatever it was that brought them into the

academia into political theory in the first place. I think everyone comes to research with a question of some kind, maybe a question that's still unconscious or unformulated or a problem, something that kind of nags away at you. I mean, I don't think there's any... I wonder what was that question for you?

That's a really good question. And I guess this is going to sound like I'm not answering it, but I'm still trying to find out what my question is, I guess. Okay. But

But I think I think everybody has one. And I think my job, as you know, when I teach and work with younger scholars, is to try and help them articulate whatever their their project is, whatever it is that is is nagging away at them to try and do that. And and I think the best way.

academics, the best scholars I know are people who in some sense remain really close to and in touch with that thing that brought them into scholarship in the first place, that original love, curiosity, passion. Yeah, definitely. So I think my last question is, what are you currently working on? Do you want to share with us something about your next project or anything exciting?

Oh, thank you. Well, I'm doing a few things, but I'm actually planning a new book, which is on the figure of the political corpse, the corpse, the dead body, as a sort of metaphor or allegory, again, for the birth of political modernity. I don't know if you or any listeners have watched the recent...

Netflix adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Are you familiar with that? No. No. Okay. It's a great, it's a wonderful novel by Patricia Highsmith about a murderer. And one of the, you know, if you watch it and anyone who's watched it will know,

One of the things that makes clear that the really difficult thing about murder is not killing somebody, that takes a second, but figuring out what to do with the body, you know? And so you get entire episodes of this series, which are really this man, Ripley, having murdered someone, trying to figure out how do I get rid of this body from my apartment? You know, and how do I get away with this crime I've committed? So in that spirit...

That actually reminds me of Hitchcock's Rear Window.

Yeah, perfect. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. So in that spirit, I am examining or I want to examine the fate of some very famous and some not so famous corpses in the history of political theory. And probably the most famous one of all is Crayon in Antigone, you know, the unburied body. But there are also some really interesting dead bodies in Hobbes, in Rousseau, in

up to people like Freud's primal father, the father who must be killed and dismembered in order for society or civilization to begin mythologically. And so I'm really interested in what these corpses represent and how are they disposed of? Are they left to rot? Are they buried and commemorated? Are they dismembered and eaten? Are they reanimated and brought back to life, like in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? And

what do these kinds of afterlives or futures of the corpse, what might they have to say about us in this thing called modernity? So that's hopefully what I'm going to be working on in the next few years. That sounds really cool. And I think somehow I can imagine it will be as expensive and fascinating as this book, because you just brought up so many things.

That's very kind of you to say so. And I'll definitely go and rewatch Rear Window. It's been a long time since I've seen it. But you're right. I think I never thought of it before, but I think I need to look at that. Amazing. So thank you so much for coming on the show. And I hope to feature your book again on our show, your next book when it comes out. Thank you so much, Eileen. It's my pleasure. Thank you.