Critiquing Sovereign Violence: Law, Biopolitics, Bio-Juridicalism

by Gavin Rae

Overview

Gavin Rae offers an original approach to sovereign violence by looking at a wide range of thinkers, which he organises into three models. Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari form the radical-juridical perspective; Foucault and Agamben the biopolitical; Derrida the bio-juridical – which Rae argues produces the most nuanced account. Rae engages with new translations of 'The Beast and the Sovereign' and 'The Death Penalty' to show that Derrida offers a radical and alternative angle in which violence is placed between law and life, simultaneously creating and regulating each through the other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474445283
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	04/25/2019
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gavin Rae is Associate Professor in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. His research interests lie in nineteenth and twentieth century European philosophy, where he works at the intersection of socio-political philosophy, ontology, and ethics. Besides over fifty published articles and book chapters, he is the author of six monographs, the most recent of which are Poststructuralist Agency (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2020); Critiquing Sovereign Violence (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2019); Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2019); and the co-editor of six edited collections, the most recent of which are Transformation in Contemporary French Theory, edited with Emma Ingala and Cillian Ó Fathaigh (Edinburgh UniversityPress, forthcoming), Philosophy across Borders, with Cillian Ó Fathaigh (Routledge, forthcoming), and Subjective Agency and Poststructuralism, with Cillian Ó Fathaigh (Routledge, forthcoming). He is currently the Principal Investigator for a major four-year project funded by the Spanish Government titled “The Politics of Reason.”

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Classic-Juridical Model

Part I: The Radical-Juridical Critique

1. Critiquing Violence: Walter Benjamin on Law and the Divine

2. Divinity within the Law: Carl Schmitt on the Violence of Sovereignty

3. Violence and Power: Arendt on the Logic of Totalitarianism

4. Disrupting Sovereignty: Deleuze and Guattari on the War Machine

Part II: The Biopolitical Critique

5. From Law to Life: Foucault, Sovereignty, and Biopolitical Racism

6. Agamben on Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and Civil War

Part III: The Bio-Juridical Critique

7. Life and Law: Derrida on the Bio-Juridicalism of Sovereign Violence

Conclusion

Bibliography; Index

What People are Saying About This

Grinnell College Alan D. Schrift

Gavin Rae here offers a welcome addition to the philosophical literature on a topic – sovereignty and its relation to violence – that is at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship in a variety of fields. After carefully articulating several 20th century theorists’ challenges to a law-based model of sovereignty, Rae argues that Derrida’s 'bio-juridical' approach offers an innovative perspective that avoids the problems that he diagnoses in Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, Agamben and other theorists.

Editorial Reviews

Gavin Rae here offers a welcome addition to the philosophical literature on a topic – sovereignty and its relation to violence – that is at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship in a variety of fields. After carefully articulating several 20th century theorists’ challenges to a law-based model of sovereignty, Rae argues that Derrida’s 'bio-juridical' approach offers an innovative perspective that avoids the problems that he diagnoses in Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, Agamben and other theorists.

Grinnell College Alan D. Schrift