Plastic Sovereignties

Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and translations, as well as several books on contemporary comparative fiction and political and aesthetic philosophy. His books include Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (2019), Plastic Sovereignties: Agamben and the Politics of Aesthetics (2016), François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought (2020), and Being Vulnerable (2023).

• Prologue: The Future of SovereigntyPart I: Aesthetics1: An Experiment with Language2: The Divine Violence of Storytelling3: From Translatability to PoliticsPart II: Economy4: The Proletariat’s Bare Life5: Technology, Ontology, Politics6: The Work of InoperativityPart III: Politics7: Agamben in America8: Sovereignty’s Glitches9: Formations of Infancy

Let’s say　Zoe　is matter, and　Bios　is form. If sovereignty tends to assimilate them and reduce them to a magma, the task of displacing sovereignty is then to reaffirm the plasticity of life, its shaping power. Such a displacement cannot happen from the outside. Change will occur from within, because there is no «other» of sovereignty. Rejecting all form of transcendence or messianism and providing us with a highly original reading of Agamben, De Boever proves that sovereignty implies its own transformability.