Clare Monagle

Dimitris Vardoulakis

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.

On Sovereignty

The Politics of Nothing

The Doppelganger presents literature as the double of philosophy. This relation is historically rooted in the genesis of the doppelganger as literature's response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity: The term doppelganger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism's assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality, and human agency. This critique prefigures late twentieth- century extrapolations of the subject as decentered. From this perspective, the doppelganger has a family resemblance to current conceptualizations of subjectivity. It becomes the emblematic subject of modernity. This is the first significant study of the doppelganger's influence on philosophical thought. Reading literature philosophically and philosophy as literature, Vardoulakis examines authors such as Franz Kafka, Maurice Blanchot, and Alexandros Papadiamantes and philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida to show how the doppelganger emerges as a hidden and unexplored element both in conceptions of subjectivity and in philosophy's relation to literature.

Literature's Philosophy

The Doppelgänger

Brings Kafka’s fiction into conversation with philosophy and political theory. Many of Kafka’s narratives place their heroes in situations of confinement. Gregor Samsa is locked in his room in the Metamorphosis, and the land surveyor in The Castle is stuck in the village unable either to leave or to gain access to the castle. Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that Kafka constructs these plots of confinement in order to laugh at his heroes’ futile attempts to express their will. In this way, Kafka emerges as a critic of the free will and as a proponent of a different kind of freedom: one focused within the confines of one’s experience and mediated by one’s circumstances. Vardoulakis contends that his sense of humor is the key to understanding Kafka as a political thinker. Laughter, in this account, is the tool used to deconstruct power. By placing Kafka in dialogue with philosophy and political theory, Vardoulakis shows that Kafka can give us invaluable insights into how to be free—and how to laugh. “Vardoulakis’s original new book contributes to the fields of Kafka studies, political theory, and contemporary European philosophy by forcefully realigning our understanding of the problem of freedom and the free will as it traverses Kafka’s literary texts. Its greatest strength lies in its careful and rigorous exposition of the refractory concepts of freedom that circulate through Kafka’s most canonical works.” — Gerhard Richter, author of Inheriting Walter Benjamin “Freedom from the Free Will is at the forefront of a vibrant new development in Kafka studies that, without succumbing to old debates about Kafka’s supposed ‘religiosity,’ rigorously works out the philosophical undercurrents and theoretical consequences of his literary practices. The laughing, playful Kafka encountered in Vardoulakis’s book creates concepts of freedom that cannot be found elsewhere.” — Peter Fenves, author of The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time

On Kafka's Laughter

Freedom from the Free Will

By radically re-reading the 'Theological Political Treatise', Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that Spinoza's Epicurean influence has profound implications for his conception of politics and ontology. This reconsideration of Spinoza's political project, set within a historical context, lays the ground for an alternative genealogy of materialism.

Authority and Utility in Materialism

Spinoza, the Epicurean

Brian Nelson

Leslie Hill

Professor of French Studies Leslie Hill

What does it mean to come after Blanchot? Three things, at least. First, it is to recognise that it is no longer possible to believe in an essentialist determination of literary discourse or of aesthetic experience. All this has disappeared; and there is no way back. Second, there is the question of history. What is Blanchot's legacy to us, his readers? Any name, however, irreplaceably singular, is always already preceded, limited, challenged even, by the abiding anonymity of the person, animal, or thing it claims to name. Every name is necessarily impersonal, anonymous, other. Blanchot "after Blanchot," then, can best he understood in the sense of that which is "according to Blanchot"--and that is nothing other than the infinite process of reading and rereading Blanchot: without end. Here, a third meaning to the phrase "after Blanchot" comes into view. For if we come after Blanchot, it is surely because Blanchot is still before us, still in front, still in the future, still to come.

Literature, Criticism, Philosophy

After Blanchot

The interdisciplinary relevance of Spinoza today.

Spinoza Now

Chris Danta

In the variegated history of the philosophical definitions of man, one has survived since it has been given the status of the self-evident. The definition in question comes from Aristotle’s Politics: “the human is a political animal” (1253a3). There is something indisputable about this characterization: humans are, indeed, the most social of animals – they are denizens of the polis with its institutions and laws, its rulers, judges and generals. It would be difficult to contend that any other animal has recourse to the political as much as the human. Aristotle’s Politics need not be surrendered to the strictures of humanism. It remains amenable to the new schema for the political animal that we are sketching here. Each article collected in this issue responds – in its own way and by establishing its own protocols – to the exigency of the animal as it was formulated in Aristotle’s Politics. Each article is an act of response, a moment of interruption.

Special Issue of SubStance, Issue 117, 37:3 (2008)

The Political Animal

Andrew Benjamin 

Collected essays consider points of affinity and friction between Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Despite being contemporaries, Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger never directly engaged with one another. Yet, Hannah Arendt, who knew both men, pointed out common ground between the two. Both were concerned with the destruction of metaphysics, the development of a new way of reading and understanding literature and art, and the formulation of radical theories about time and history. On the other hand, their life trajectories and political commitments were radically different. In a 1930 letter, Benjamin told a friend that he had been reading Heidegger and that if the two were to engage with one another, “sparks will fly.” Acknowledging both their affinities and points of conflict, this volume stages that confrontation, focusing in particular on temporality, Romanticism, and politics in their work.

Benjamin and Heidegger

Sparks Will Fly

What does it mean to think about, and with, Spinoza today? This collection asserts the importance of Spinozan thought, asserts the importance of Spinoza's philosophy of immanence for contemporary cultural and philosophical debates.

Dimitris Vardoulakis

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