Eric Santner Research Articles

On Becoming Creatures: Being Called to Presence in a Distracted World

AbstractIn the biblical creation story human beings are depicted as beings ejected from the true home given to them in creation and entrapped in the dynamics of their flight from God. Franz Rosenzweig suggested that modern life is best understood as a type of chronic living death characterized by an animate but nevertheless sterile experience of loss. Following Eric Santner's presentation of this theme in Rosenzweig, this article will explore what it might mean to recover a sense of the goodness of place and particularity. I will examine Santner's suggestion that to become present to ‘place’ is to have undergone the ‘undeadening’ intervention of another person, who offers us an exit route in the midst of the tangle of our lived lives. I will then show how the main lines of his analysis both parallel and offer ways to sharpen important aspects of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's account in Creation and Fall of the dynamics of the Fall and the healing of creatures. Human beings are depicted by Bonhoeffer as in need of being transformed into creatures, a theological insight resting on a complex account of creation, and which I will suggest, in conclusion, is a particularly important theme of a Christian gospel that can speak to a world saturated by the desire to be elsewhere.

“To be human, nonetheless, remains a decision”: Humanism as decisionism in contemporary critical political theory

This article suggests that humanism is a decisionism in contemporary critical political theory. Despite obvious and multiple differences, leading critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Jurgen Habermas, among others, share an investment in stabilizing the human being as a ground of the political. This stabilization of the human should concern political theorists, as this article argues, because it uncritically reproduces conceptual affinities between the notion of the human being and sovereign authority. By investing in the stability and centrality of the human being, these theorists perform what will be called, paraphrasing an often neglected argument by Carl Schmitt, a decision to be human. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that Schmitt’s decisionism is not merely circumscribed to sovereignty’s juridico-political dimension, but that it also includes a peculiar commitment to God’s decision to become human in Christ. Against this decisionism as humanism, the article draws on Walter Benjamin, Roberto Esposito, and Jacques Derrida to propose an alternative politics that destabilizes humanity and sovereignty through the emergence of the animal, or what will be called melancholic lycanthropy.

Ernst kantorowicz, Richard II, Political Theology and Psychoanalysis

This paper investigates first how the recent discourse of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies is correlated with the recent discourse on political theology and its attention on sovereignty, unfolded with Carl Schmitt, Water Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. Then, it examines how Kantorowicz’s sovereignty he traces through the interpretation of Shakespeare’s Richard II with the focus on Richard’s deposition is associated with the psychoanalytic interpretation of subjectivity of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Thus, this paper bridges between the political theology and the psychoanalysis. It shows that the sovereignty Kantorowicz and Shakespeare represents through the fall of Richard resembles ‘the flesh’ or ‘the monstrous creature’ that Eric Santner terms in defining the psychoanalytic subject, and Freud’ and Lacan’s ‘libido’, ‘lamella’, ‘jouissance’ and ‘death-drive’. Besides, this paper argues that Kantorowicz’s sovereignty of Richard and the psychoanalytic subject is nearer to Lacan’s feminine subjectivity than to his masculine subjectivity. Withdrawing a little from the main interest in the dynamic between Richard and Bolingbroke both in the (new) historicist and the character criticism, it reexamines the female characters in this play, the duchess of Gloucester, the duchess of York and Queen Isabel. The female characters, generally silenced and remaining as minor characters, nevertheless, present the alternative political perspective toward the male-centered politics constituted by blood and family. In this aspect, the female characters function as providing the looking-awry view(gaze as Lacan’s term) contrasted with the traditional, conservative, linear, and centric view, to the front facade of Richard and Bolingbroke. Especially, Isabel who is conscious of this looking awry view and thus feels the ‘nameless woe’, not only embodies the feminine subjectivity but also presages Richard’s sovereignty as seen in his shattering of the mirror.

Animating the machinery: prophecy and Lady Eleanor Davies

Using Eric Santner’s text The Royal Remains, which explores the way the body politic possesses and yields the excess sovereignty from the king’s deposed and dead body, this essay argues that Lady Eleanor Davies’ anointing as a prophet and handmaid of the Holy Spirit parallels Santner’s masculine examples of political and artistic agency emerging at the time of King James I’s death. Applying this argument to Lady Eleanor Davies’ initial prophecies, A Warning to the Dragon (1625, 1633) and Given to the Elector, Charles of the Rhyne (1633), this paper demonstrates how Lady Eleanor Davies established her own sovereignty through her prophecies preceding the English Civil War. This essay focuses on A Warning and Given to the Elector as the moment at which she is “reborn” into the office of prophet and claims the title “Handmaid of the Holy Spirit.” Moving beyond political agency, Lady Eleanor claims sovereignty not only to predict the downfall of King Charles I’s claim to the throne, but also to anoint a new inheritor to the throne of England. By taking up the mantle of prophecy, Lady Eleanor challenges conventional understandings of how the political figures influenced and attempted to claim sovereignty during the English Civil War.

Outlandish Apocalyptics and Creaturely Life in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’

This article offers an analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story ‘My kinsman, Major Molineux’ in terms of Frank Kermode’s characterization of modern apocalypse. In Kermode’s optic, the transformation of apocalyptic narratives in modernity reflects a generalized move towards immanence, making them inherently self-falsificatory. The analysis highlights this double logic (immanence and self-falsification) in Hawthorne’s tale by indicating how it, on the one hand, sets up a series of contrasts between the protagonist Robin and the townspeople he meets during his search for his kinsman Molineux, and, on the other, highlights the self-falsificatory nature of the post-revolutionary social order by showing how it copies the legitimating rituals of the old regime. By drawing attention to this twofold dynamic of separation and self-alienation, the article complicates an established perspective in Hawthorne scholarship that approaches the tale as a parable of the young America. Rather than merely highlighting the transition from a monarchical system of entitlement to a voluntaristic republican order, Hawthorne’s ‘Molineux’ offers an astute reflection on how the symbolism of the former – what Eric Santner refers to as the ‘royal remains’ – survives in the latter.

Metaphors Happen: Miracle and Metaphor in Helena María Viramontes'sTheir Dogs Came with Them

This essay argues that metaphors are not objects that simply appear in literature but are phenomena, contingent on a reader's anticipation and affirmation. This dialectical relation, between the metaphors consciously and unconsciously patterned in texts and the receptivity of readers to notice those metaphors, sustains the possibility of imagining and potentially creating other conceptions of history and community. In Helena María Viramontes's novel Their Dogs Came with Them, metaphors are paired with miracles, and both envision alternative worlds. For Viramontes, the neighborhood grounds the material conditions of characters' lives, yet it figures and stages transformative encounters. Drawing on theory by Eric Santner and Alain Badiou, this essay examines how Viramontes's novel, while determinedly realistic, sustains the possibility of transformation signaled by the metaphor.

‘Ceremonious ape!’

In this essay I will trace the double process of dehumanisation and re-humanisation manifest in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, his short 1982 play Catastrophe, Teevan’s Kafka’s Monkey and Vesturport’s 2006 adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. These plays enact the destabilisation of the human and enter ‘creaturely’ territory only to convey anthropomorphic performances of the human model. The concept of the creature, theorised variously by Julia Luton, Eric Santner and Anat Pick, describes the being that arises when the human is denuded and life persists beyond supposedly constitutive human values and normative structures. In these Beckett plays and adaptations of Kafka in particular, however, uncanny creatures echo the human through what Beckett scholar Shane Weller calls ‘forms of weakness’, or ruined versions of the paradigm: ‘a negatively determined being (or ‘un-’ being) [...], that is defined principally by its inabilities (in motion and speech), its suffering and its status as an object of revulsion’ (Weller 2013: 20). In effect, the audience witness deanthropomorphised creatures that proceed to carry out anthropomorphic acts. As human specificity dissolves into the vulnerable material conditions of organic life in general, the resulting creatures continue to play up to the idea of humanity, which only serves to disclose the constructed nature of the category itself.

Ordinary Emergences in Democratic Theory

Apolitical scientist working at the intersection of political theory and the critical humanities, Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media, and Political Science, at Brown University. She was previously assistant and associate professor at the Department of Government, Harvard University, and Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor at Northwestern University. She is also Affiliate Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Professor Honig's work has been influential in the fields of democratic theory, legal studies, feminist theory, immigration studies, and literary and cultural theory, among others. She has published in prestigious journals across the social sciences and the humanities such as American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Arethusa, New Literary History, Social Text, and diacritics, among many others. An internationally renowned scholar, her work has been translated into Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, Korean and Rumanian.Trained at Concordia University (B.A.), in Montreal, The London School of Economics (M.Sc.), and The Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D.), where she worked under the supervision of Richard E. Flathman and William E. Connolly, Professor Honig is a leading proponent of agonistic democracy. Her first book Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993) was awarded the Scripps Prize for best first book in political theory. In the book Honig discusses liberal, communitarian and republican attempts to insulate politics from conflict and uncertainty. Drawing on Nietzsche, Arendt, Machiavelli, and Derrida, among others, Honig explores an alternative approach in political theory that tracks the disruptive remainders of political closure or settlement and recasts them as potential sites of democratic freedom or engagement. Her second monograph, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton University Press, 2001), established her as an influential voice in the politics of immigration. Here Honig mobilizes readings of the Biblical book of Ruth as well as of popular movies such as The Wizard of Oz, Shane, and Strictly Ballroom to interrogate the myth of an immigrant America where the foreigner is often seen not just as a threat, but also as a supplement or source of renewal for democracies whose energies are depleted. Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton University Press 2009), her third monograph, was the co-winner of the David Easton Prize and discusses sites of potential democratic emergences in a time of sovereign exception and emergency politics. Her fourth monograph, Antigone Interrupted (Cambridge University Press, 2013), offers an original interpretation of Sophocles's Antigone that explores previously neglected resources for thinking agonistic sorority in the play. The book has already been the subject of critical exchanges with the author in journals such as Philosophy Today, International Journal of the Classical Tradition and PhiloSOPHIA. In a recent essay in boundary 2, called Three Models of Emergency Politics, Honig develops and extends her thoughts on emergency politics drawing on material from Emergency Politics and Antigone, Interrupted, to engage critically with Elaine Scarry's Thinking in an Emergency.Professor Honig has also been a prolific editor of influential academic volumes. She edited Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Penn State, 1995) and co-edited Skepticism, Individuality and Freedom: The Reluctant Liberalism of Richard Flathman (Minnesota, 2002) and the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory (Oxford, 2006). She is also co-editor of a symposium in the journal Theory & Event dedicated to the films of the Danish cinematographer Lars von Trier, scheduled to appear, in revised form, as a book with Oxford University Press . In 2013, Professor Honig delivered the Sydney Lectures as part of the Thinking Out Loud Series, and in 2014, she performed for the second time as a respondent to the Tanner Lectures, these delivered by Eric Santner at the University of California, Berkeley. …

Re-Reading Wordsworth’s “Michael”: Sacramental Poetics in a Secular Age

AbstractThis essay focuses on how William Wordsworth’s “Michael can be considered an aesthetic or phenomenological transcription of what it feels like to go through the investiture crisis experienced when one abruptly transitions from the self-enclosed world of local knowledge into the unbounded world of secular modernity. I argue that the poem functions as an example of sacramental poetics, or a poetics that is potentially able to not only signify but also effect grace by affecting the body of the observant participant in a special way. The first of three sections explores how “Michael” might conform to T. S. Eliot’s conception of a dissociation of sensibility, and responds to Marjorie Levinson’s influential reading of the poem. The remaining two sections aim for more novel speculations about what the poem by first drawing upon the work of the political theorist William Connolly and the neurobiologist Joseph LeDoux to explore how the sensibilities “Michael” invokes in its readers might be related to a sacramental poetics that affects the infrasensible dimension of being human. Finally, in the last section I demonstrate how Eric Santner’s conception of psychotheology can be used to further clarify how and why “Michael” might function as a sacramental poetics, and conclude by suggesting how the poem has the potential to help us see more fully what the study of religion and literature might mean in a secular age.

Wols and Smallness

This paper examines the work of the German-born artist Wols in relation to questions of scale. It focuses upon the very small, intricate drawings that Wols made in the mid-1940s, but also bears upon his close-up photographs of kitchen detritus from the late 1930s, as well as his poems and aphorisms. Situating Wols within the artistic and intellectual climate of post-war France (and with particular reference to the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Gaston Bachelard), I explore how the teeming detail of his drawings, by encouraging very close looking into unfamiliar pictorial worlds, induces a sense of proximity and exposure. This, together with Wols’ obsessive, agitated facture, can usefully be analysed in terms of what Eric Santner has called ‘creaturely life’. In this respect, Wols’ work aligns not with the gestural abstraction of the New York School, but rather with, for example, the mescaline drawings of Henri Michaux and the microscripts of Robert Walser. Furthermore, I argue that the dramatization of the human rendered ‘creaturely’ not only has a particular purchase on the conditions of life in France in the 1940s, but also on the fate of the artwork unmoored from the form of life from which it emerged.

Book Review: The Creature and the Sovereign: On Eric Santner’s New Science of the Flesh, by Eric Santner

Book Review: The Creature and the Sovereign: On Eric Santner’s New Science of the Flesh, by Eric Santner

Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel by Arne De Boever (review)

De Boever, Arne. 2013. Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. New York: Bloomsbury. $100.00 hc. $25.99 eBook. 192 pp.Arne De Boever's new work falls within what he terms an interdisciplinary vitalist in the humanities (2; emphasis in original). Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel addresses the definability and livability of life in the grip of biopolitics and thus intersects with the political project and theory of such thinkers as Judith Butler, Eric Santner, Melinda Cooper, and Giorgio Agamben. The twist, however, is that Narrative Care hinges this trend to literary theory and analyzes the lives of literary characters. Through close reading of four contemporary Anglophone novels-J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man (2005), Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2010), Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions (2002), and Tom McCarthy's Remainder (2005)-Narrative Care proposes theory of the novel that closely relates it to biopolitical regime. Tailoring Michel Foucault's notions of biopolitics and care, De Boever evaluates the lives of the characters caught up in this regime as well as the style and effect of the authors who resist it.De Boever argues that the novel is deeply complicit with what Foucault terms biopolitics, politics that operates through norms rather than laws and that controls, regulates, and transforms life. As De Boever clearly articulates, the notion of biopower has disquieting implications: It is within the realms where we think we are free-that is, where power refrains from positively implementing itself-that we turn out to be most controlled (37). The novel not only arises at the same point in history as this new of power but also attends to and governs individual lives; both the novel and biopolitics foster life until the point of death (45). This theory takes seriously the lives of characters: fictional characters not only allegorize our own biopolitical subjectivity but also have lives of their own that matter analytically, politically, and ethically. The novel is thus simultaneously form of life-writing and biopolitical regime, both a practice of and a dark apparatus of capture (8, 21; emphasis in original). In spite of the severity of his critique-De Boever will, somewhat problematically, compare the novel to concentration camp-the novel as genre survives due to the pharmacological nature of narrative care. As Jacques Derrida elaborates in Plato's Pharmacy (1972), pharmakon means both poison and cure: thus pharmacological narrative care has the potential not only to control but also to liberate. Authorial self-reflexivity, for example, can call attention to and so resist the novel's biopolitical regime.Although De Boever acknowledges that he adapts the meaning and applicability of biopolitics (by relating it to care and applying it to postmodernism and trauma studies), his argument is most cogent when he keeps close to Foucault's usage. His chapter on Coetzee's Slow Man is therefore his strongest, showcasing the cooperation of philosophy and literary theory that enables his argument. Slow Man ties together many of the elements of De Boever's theory: it deals with care thematically and formally, drawing attention to the practice of writing by interrupting the narrative to introduce its author, Elizabeth Costello, character in another of Coetzee's novels. …

‘A mysterious malady of the times’

Eric Santner has described a peculiar agitation that increasingly haunted people in the wake of the shift in political theology after the French Revolution. The ‘substance’ that previously gave the sovereign his or her splendour was turned into an immanent pressure: an irritation of the flesh. Early in his life, Robert Musil visited a psychiatric hospital in Rome. He was struck by the physical agitation of the patients and sensed a similarity between their spasms and the general state of society. He repeatedly compared his times to a madhouse. This agitation was increased by the prevailing moral rigidity. Moreover, both Ulrich, the protagonist of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and Musil himself display a remarkable incapacity to adopt a social position in society. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is a novel that takes up the task to find a way to cope with the agitation of the flesh, as Santner described it. Musil called the problems of his time ‘symptoms’ and with his novel he wanted to find a way to work through these symptoms. Musil's work is thus a rich exploration of the phenomena Santner has described.

Slavoj Žižek, the Death Drive, and Zombies: A Theological Account

AbstractIn this article, I discuss the question of the hybridity of the religious and the secular through the example of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and his psychoanalytically inspired notion of the undead. The undead is Žižek's rendering of the Freudian death drive, and as the undead is instantiated in the popular culture cliché of the zombies, we need to look no further than to George A. Romero's classic zombie movie Night of the Living Dead from 1968. Thus, this article proceeds in three steps: first, I trace the concept of the death drive from Freud to Žižek, supplemented, for their theological importance, by two contemporary philosophers, Jonathan Lear and Eric Santner. Second, I discuss the zombie in contemporary popular culture, with a focus on Romero's movies, and whether such cinematic representations can function as a kind of cultural critique. In conclusion, I return to the question of theology by showing what Žižek means by theology and contrasting as well as comparing his philosophy to Augustine's anthropology. Despite Žižek's atheistic confession and his dismissal of all pre‐modern philosophy and theology, I show that Augustine's anthropology is structurally similar to Žižek's, thus suggesting that the relationship is more complex than Žižek allows. Both are united in rejecting any superficial and transparent understanding of self, and become, consequently, an example of the ambiguous relationship between religion and secularity in contemporary times.

The Lists of W. G. Sebald

The Lists of W. G. Sebald

Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean

“Analogue: On Tacita Dean and Zoe Leonard” draws on surrealist conceptions of automatism and chance. It engages with current debates concerning artistic agency and automatism that hinge on the difference between digital and analogue photographic processes. The debate is joined in this paper through the work of two artists who attach great value to the analogue medium. Both Leonard and Dean are resistant to the inexorable rise of digital photographic technologies and the corresponding near obsolescence of the analogue. In response, they are concerned to make salient the virtues or specific character of analogue film such as its indexicality and openness to chance—characteristics the full significance of which may only have become apparent under pressure of digitalization. Drawing on Eric Santner’s account of the concept of “exposure,” Iversen draws attention to a kind of photographic art practice that is marked by contingency and seared by reality.

Dekonstrukcja i plenienie się podmiotu. Nowe tryby upodmiotowienia w zwyczajnej kulturze

This analysis is focused on the transition from pastoral care to the dispositif de sécurité. The dispositif de sécurité abandons discipline, which proves too expensive, to replace it with a “scientific” apparatus. While discipline produced a neurotic subject, a question arises what kind of subjectivity is generated by the dispositif de sécurité. According to Georgio Agamben, apparatus multiplies the modes of subjectivity. Still, as the individual grows in meaning, the social bonds and symbolic functions decline. Thus, as a result of the operation of the new modes of subjectivity, individuals fall into the protocosmic existence (Eric Santner) or the vie foetale (Jean-Claude Kaufmann). Paradoxically, more and more easily attainable subjectivity causes the “effacement of man”.

Documenting The Paedophile: Virtual White Men In The Era Of Recovered Memory

Abstract This essay argues that Andrew Jarecki's 2003 documentary Capturing the Friedmans is part of a larger recent film trend in which remembered scenes of adult/child sex are used to reconfigure the meaning of white masculinity. In several recent films, memories of child sexual predators emerge on screen in scenes best described as 'virtual'. In particular, the white paedophile appears in liminal filmic spaces that replace historically specific reference points with the virtual codes of an explicitly technologically mediated reality. Building on theories of virtuality developed by Katherine Hayles and Brian Massumi, this essay argues that the white paedophile technologically re-mediates residual forms of while masculinity and refunctions them for the era of neo-liberalism. Jarecki's Oscar-nominated documentary best reveals the technological relations through which the white paedophile appears as the virtual image of a neoliberal 'real', part of a visual code of memory produced for what Stuart Hall calls new times. Keywords Paedophile; sexuality; memory; virtuality; film; documentary; masculinity; whiteness; Andrew Jarecki; Capturing the Friedmans Every time you think you have the truth in this film it sort of slithers away down some corridor and suddenly you're left wondering again. I felt that was one of the things that had to come across about the film, was how hard it was to find the truth, how hard it is to find the truth, how our memories change over time to suit our needs. You know, we think we put our memories away in a box and we can go check on them later and they'll be the same; they're never the same, they're just these electro-chemical bubbles that continue to bubble over time. Andrew Jarecki, Interview with Charlie Rose (24 June 2003). Many critics argue that we are in ait era defined by memory. The post- 1945 period is marked by a generalised trauma culture, one that has produced what Eric Santner calls a 'rhetoric of mourning' iterated as 'shattering, rupture, mutilation, fragmentation, to images of fissures, wounds, rifts, gaps, and abysses'.1 This insight is echoed by such diverse critics as Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Ian Hacking, and Andreas Huyssen, each of whom posits a turn toward memory as the historical discourse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.2 Film critics have also noted a marked memory turn in the cinema of this era, particularly in films treating crises in white masculine authority in the United States. In films like Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) and Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), memory becomes the vehicle through which such authority crises are introduced, negotiated and resolved into new forms of white masculine identity. What is less frequently noted however is a peculiar subset of the new memory genre: films treating haunting memories of childhood sexual abuse. In films such as Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Clint Eastwood's Mystic River (2003), Gregg Aiaki s Mysterious Skin (2004), and Nicole Kassell's The Woodsman (2004), memories of child sexual abuse repeatedly return prototypical white men to scenes of a specifically sexual vulnerability. This condition of vulnerability is then resolved cinematically, through the crafting of the white 'paedophile' as both sexual type (empirically distinguishable from normal men) and virtual image (outside the representation of either past or present). Memory is yoked to a regime of what Katherine Hayles and Brian Massumi theorise as 'virtuality,' allowing the white paedophile to emerge as the vehicle for the reformation of troubled white masculinity as well as the medium for new technological relations of reality associated with neoliberalism. This essay focuses on Jarecki's 2003 documentary Capturing the Friedmans, arguing that this Oscar-nominated documentary best reveals the technological relations through which the white paedophile appears as the virtual image of a neoliberal 'real', part of a signature visual code in what I call memory for new times. …

Fleshing out Political Theology: Santner's The Royal Remains

Fleshing out Political Theology:Santner's The Royal Remains Diego Rossello (bio) Eric Santner , The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. University of Chicago Press: 2011. US $19.89 (paper). US $81.09 (cloth). 259 pages. ISBN 13: 978-0-226-73536-8 Eric Santner's book is an engaging tour-de-force through the vestiges of divinely authorized royal authority in our allegedly secular, and post-monarchical, modern democratic culture. Skillfully combining insights from political theology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism and biopolitics, Santner suggests that, despite conventional wisdom, the royal remains in the new bearer of sovereignty: the people. At stake in Santner's account is the "flesh" that fattens monarchical authority, a type of excessive vibrant materiality that supplements and sustains the kingly body, and whose horizontal redistribution among citizens in a polity, furthered by democratic revolutions, becomes the object of a new science of the flesh. Santner finds sketches of this new science in biopolitics, particularly in the works by Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito, but he offers startling contributions of his own. Key to Santner's original account of the shift from monarchical power to popular sovereignty is Ernst Kantorowicz's idea of the king's two bodies. According to Kantorowicz's well-known argument, in medieval and early modern Europe the king was conceived as having a double body: a mortal, human body subject to illness, aging and decay; and a subtle, immaterial or mystical body, unaffected by time and mortality, that secures royal succession. Santner's insightful contribution is to read the mystical body of the king as evidence of a "too muchness" (30) of "sublime somatic materiality" (4) intrinsic to the king's constitutive role in the symbolic structure of a body politic. According to Santner, the "fleshy excess" (26) secreted by royal authority persists after, and is redistributed by, the advent of popular sovereignty, generating novel pressures and excitations on every individual bearer of sovereign power. Santner's idiosyncratic take on the shift from monarchy to biocracy productively challenges our conventional wisdom on what political modernity means, and sheds new light on the implications of processes of destitution—royal or other. Unlike standard accounts of secularization of Kantian and Weberian inspiration, Santner's path to modernity is not driven by moral progress, rationality or disenchantment. Rather, the strength of Santner's argument lies in mapping the metamorphosis and displacement of an enchanted royal materiality that, despite its elusiveness, is held to inform the very structure of our political life. Santner attunes us to this elusive materiality by reminding us that there is "more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought" (46). His suggestion is compelling. If we are persuaded by it there is no room for a gradual and incremental departure from a theologically inspired world. If the royal remains, political theology remains with it. Santner can therefore be read as agreeing with Carl Schmitt and Claude Lefort on the permanence of the theologicopolitical, even if he departs from them in crucial ways. Unlike Schmitt, Santner does not concentrate on the fleshy excess in the figure of the sovereign representative, whose decision on the exception is analogous to a miracle, but tracks its redistribution among every single member of the polity—who now bears a specific (and excessive) political weight. Unlike Lefort, in turn, the shift from monarchy to biocracy does not produce an empty space of power, a kind of constitutive lack in the realm of political representation. Instead, a formless excess of "'biopolitical' substance" (59) is produced, and gives shape to forms of creaturely life. Santner defines creaturely life as a dimension of ontological vulnerability produced by our "exposure to the radical contingency of the forms of life that constitute the space of meaning within which human life unfolds" (5, 6). The response to this exposure is a paradoxical overreaction: the attempt to immunize ourselves from vulnerability leads to a double exposure, and therefore to a fattening of the "flesh of creaturely life" (6). Thus, Santner's account of the demise of royal political authority is marked by a surplus or excess of somatic materiality, not (or not merely) by a...

The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within

Drawing on the work of Eric Santner, Slavoj Žižek, and Alenka Zupančič, this paper constructs a theory of subjective singularity from a Lacanian perspective. It argues that, unlike the "subject" (who comes into existence as a result of symbolic prohibition), or the "person" (who is aligned with the narcissistic conceits of the imaginary), the singular self emerges in response to a galvanizing directive arising from the real. This directive summons the individual to a "character" beyond his or her social and intersubjective investments. Consequently, singularity expresses the individual's nonnegotiable distinctiveness, eccentricity, or idiosyncrasy at the same time as it prevents both symbolic and imaginary closure. It opens to layers of rebelliousness that indicate that there are components of human life that exceed the realm of normative sociality. Indeed, insofar as singularity articulates something about the "undead" pulse of jouissance, it connects the individual to a paradoxical kind of immortality. This does not mean that the individual will not die, but rather that he or she is capable of "transcendent" experiences, such as heightened states of creativity, that (always momentarily) reach "outside" the parameters of mortal life. Such experiences allow the individual to feel "real" in ways that fend off symbolic abduction and psychic death.