Search results for ""Author Eric L. Santner""

'The king is dead. Long live the king'! In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign - and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In "The Royal Remains", Eric L. Santner argues that this carnal dimension of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it has migrated to a new location - the life of the people - where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and, usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious - which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways - are really the uncanny second life of these royal remains, now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, "The Royal Remains" locates much of modernity-from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments - in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature.

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This text puts Sigmund Freud in dialogue with his contemporary Franz Rosenzwig in the service of re-imagining ethical and political life. It expl ores the theological aspects of Freud's writings and reveals the psychoanalytic implications in the religious philosophy of Rosenzwig's work, "The Star of Redemption". Santner makes an argument for understanding theological notions of revelation in theraputic terms and offers a look at how this understanding suggests ways of re-conceiving political community. Revelation itself becomes redefined as an openess towards what is singular, enigmatic, even uncanny about the "Other", thereby linking a theory of drives and desire to a critical account of sociality. By bringing Freud and Rosenzwig together, Santner clarifies the connections between psychoanalysis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, and illuminates what it means to be open to another person or culture and to share the responsibility for one's implication in the dilemmas of difference.

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'The king is dead. Long live the king'! In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign - and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In "The Royal Remains", Eric L. Santner argues that this carnal dimension of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it has migrated to a new location - the life of the people - where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and, usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious - which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways - are really the uncanny second life of these royal remains, now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, "The Royal Remains" locates much of modernity-from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments - in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature.

Read more less

In "The Neighbor", three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how the problem of neighbor love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor," Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt's political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen," Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Zizek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, "The Neighbor" has proven to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. This new edition contains a new preface by the authors.

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What does the name Trump stand for? If branding now rules over the production of value, as the coauthors of Sovereignty, Inc. argue, then Trump assumes the status of a master brand whose primary activity is the compulsive work of self-branding--such is the new sovereignty business in which, whether one belongs to his base or not, we are all "incorporated." Drawing on anthropology, political theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theater, William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster show how politics in the age of Trump functions by mobilizing a contradictory and convoluted enjoyment, an explosive mixture of drives and fantasies that eludes existing portraits of our era. The current political moment turns out to be not so much exceptional as exceptionally revealing of the constitutive tension between enjoyment and economy that has always been a key component of the social order. Santner analyzes the collective dream-work that sustains a new sort of authoritarian charisma or mana, a mana-facturing process that keeps us riveted to an excessively carnal incorporation of sovereignty. Mazzarella examines the contemporary merger of consumer brand and political brand and the cross-contamination of politics and economics, warning against all too easy laments about the corruption of politics by marketing. Schuster, focusing on the extreme theatricality and self-satirical comedy of the present, shows how authority reasserts itself at the very moment of distrust and disillusionment in the system, profiting off its supposed decline. A dazzling diagnostic of our present, Sovereignty, Inc., forces us to come to terms with our complicity in Trump's political presence and will immediately take its place in discussions of contemporary politics.

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What does the name Trump stand for? If branding now rules over the production of value, as the coauthors of Sovereignty, Inc. argue, then Trump assumes the status of a master brand whose primary activity is the compulsive work of self-branding--such is the new sovereignty business in which, whether one belongs to his base or not, we are all "incorporated." Drawing on anthropology, political theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theater, William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster show how politics in the age of Trump functions by mobilizing a contradictory and convoluted enjoyment, an explosive mixture of drives and fantasies that eludes existing portraits of our era. The current political moment turns out to be not so much exceptional as exceptionally revealing of the constitutive tension between enjoyment and economy that has always been a key component of the social order. Santner analyzes the collective dream-work that sustains a new sort of authoritarian charisma or mana, a mana-facturing process that keeps us riveted to an excessively carnal incorporation of sovereignty. Mazzarella examines the contemporary merger of consumer brand and political brand and the cross-contamination of politics and economics, warning against all too easy laments about the corruption of politics by marketing. Schuster, focusing on the extreme theatricality and self-satirical comedy of the present, shows how authority reasserts itself at the very moment of distrust and disillusionment in the system, profiting off its supposed decline. A dazzling diagnostic of our present, Sovereignty, Inc., forces us to come to terms with our complicity in Trump's political presence and will immediately take its place in discussions of contemporary politics.

Read more less