Miguel Vatter

Sovereignty-based on a claim to irresistible authority-and "speaking truth to power" (or "parrhesia") are evidently opposed and yet they seem to have a strange affinity with one another. Since at least Plato the affinity between the true sovereign and the philosopher who speaks or counsels truth to power is a well-known topos, having been revived in the 20th century by thinkers like Kojeve, Strauss, Schmitt, and, lastly, by Foucault in his lectures dedicated to ancient Greek political philosophy. In this paper I propose to revisit one of the most famous of such encounters in the modern period, namely, the one between the German poet Goethe and Napoleon at the time of his invasion of Germany. This encounter has been reconstructed by Blumenberg in Work on Myth but to date has received little if any attention in the debate on frank speech and political power. My reading of Blumenberg's discussion will frame it in the context of his ongoing polemic/debate with Schmitt's idea of sovereignty. To Schmitt's belief that sovereignty depended on the parallelism between One God and One People (whose unique representative is the human sovereign), Blumenberg later in his career opposes an antinomical struggle between two gods: "only a god can resist a god". This phrase was Goethe's response to Napoleon, and along with setting up a conflict between two mundane gods and their representatives, it also connotes a struggle between the claims of poetry and those of politics. Decoding its meaning allows me to bring together and connect in a new way the discourse on political transcendence related to political theology and the discourse on parrhesia or frank speech lately revived by Foucault.

One of the important features of neoliberalism is its adoption of " rule of law " as a fundamental condition for the proper operation of a free market and as a medium for the disembedding of the market from the state. However, " rule of law " is traditionally understood to be one of the defining features of republicanism. How is one to understand this coincidence? And where does the real difference between neoliberalism and neorepublicanism lie? This chapter addresses the changes that neoliberal thought makes to the republican conception of " rule of law " in order to render it functional to its own imperatives, primarily the defence of the " spontaneous order " (Hayek) of the economy with respect to state planning and legislation. The chapter discusses Hayek's adoption of the concept of concrete order (nomos) originally introduced by Schmitt in the early 1930s, and discusses how and why it functions in Hayek's central distinction between " judge-made law " and (parliamentary) " legislation. " By emphasizing the former at the expense of the latter, neoliberal thinking at once diminishes the political power of the people and attempts to steer constitutional thinking and practice towards a mere " negative " constitutionalism that protects the interests of private persons (including corporations) at the expense of the common interests of the people.

This response discusses the possibility of an affirmative biopolitics based on a materialist and atheist idea of eternal life in light of some of the challenges raised by the critiques of Morejón, Ricciardi, and Fenves. The first challenge concerns whether an affirmative biopolitics is at all possible given that biopolitics contains as an imma-nent possibility a racial politics that leads to a " necropolitics " (Mbembe). The second challenge concerns the political character of Italian theory, especially in Agamben, and its relation to communism and republicanism. The third challenge concerns the applicability of recent cosmological speculations for the purpose of joining messianism and historical materialism in Benjamin's thought.

El estado moderno, con todos sus poderes, es un " poder constituido " y está basado en la representación política. El poder constituyente, por el contrario, es el poder de un pueblo para instituir o desinstituir una forma de Estado. Pareciera que tal poder constituyente es completamente extraño a la esfera de la representación y así se ha conceptualizado en recientes discusiones. Este ensayo quiere repensar la relación entre poder constituyente y principio de representación. El ensayo plantea dos argumentos: primero, que el poder del pueblo requiere de un " device of representation " (para usar el termino de Rawls) si quiere ser constituyente. Es decir, se debe de pensar una relación interna entre poder constituyente y representación política. Pero, al mismo tiempo, este ensayo argumenta que la forma de representar al orden constituyente no puede ser ni "monárquica" (o populista) ni "parlamentaria" y que existe una forma de representar al pueblo que no presupone al pueblo ni como una multitud suelta sin poder (Hobbes) ni como algo ya siempre constituido y representado en tanto forma estatal (Sieyès, Schmitt). Esta representación alternativa sería la forma indicativa y no electoral de formar asambleas constituyentes.

... was at stake in the early 1930s polemic between the jurist Carl Schmitt – who coined the term ―political theology‖ – and the Protestant (converted to Catholicism) theologian Erik Peterson. At the time, the polemic was stillborn, but Schmitt himself revived it in ...

... vanessa Lemm, migueL vatter 130 ... arendt es, probablemente, la pensadora del siglo XX que más fuertemente abogó por el retorno del espacio público en nuestras vidas políticas, a efecto de resistir la privatización característica de la gubernamentalidad liberal de la vida y el ...

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations to the Works of Machiavelli
1. Context: The Renaissance and the Machiavellian “Moment”
2. Overview: The Prince as a Work of Rhetoric and of Philosophy
3. The Seduction of a Prince: Dedication.
4. Acquiring State: chapters 1-6.
5. Securing Society: chapters 7-10.
6. Arming the People: chapters 11-14.
7. The New Prince Goes through the Looking Glass: chapters 15-23.
8. Disarming Fortune and the Arming of Heaven: chapters 24-26.
9. Reception and Influence
Notes
Notes for Further Reading
Selective Bibliography

Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth are representative figures of a generation of political theorists who stand under the shooting star of May 1968, the high season of insurrectionary politics in the last half century. The books under review offer a welcome opportunity to consider the lessons they draw from this event and its aftermath at the twilight of their careers. However, taken as a whole these books also reveal the limits of this style of radical democratic theory which only in a very approximate way has registered the passing of the baton, which occurred roughly during the same period, between a politics aiming at emancipation and a politics of governmentality or biopolitics.

... The study of the “temporal fundaments” of liberal democracy advocated by Scheuerman is an important and worthwhile endeavor, but it should be carried out with a view to examining their internal relation to the ... replacement of political power (popular sovereignty) by biopower. ...

RESUMEN el tema central de esta entrevista es la biopolítica y su situación respecto a las tradiciones de filosofía moderna. asimismo se discute la relación entre las ideologías políticas del siglo XX y el surgimiento de la biopolítica. por último, la entrevista aborda la ...