What is the Commune? A leading radical historian looks at the global resurgence of the commune and asks how they can become sites of liberation.
When the state recedes, the commune-form flourishes. This was as true in Paris in 1871 as it is now whenever ordinary people begin to manage their daily lives collectively. Contemporary struggles over land – from the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes to Cop City in Atlanta, from the pipeline battles in Canada to Soulèvements de la terre – have reinvented practices of appropriating lived space and time. This transforms dramatically our perception of the recent past.
Rural struggles of the 1960s and 70s, like the “Nantes Commune,” the Larzac, and Sanrizuka in Japan, appear now as the defining battles of our era. In the defense of threatened territories against all manners of privatization, hoarding, and infrastructures of disaster, new ways of producing and inhabiting are devised that side-step the state and that give rise to unprecedented kinds of solidarity built on pleasurable, fruitful collaborations. These are the crucial elements in the present-day reworking of an archaic form: the commune-form that Marx once called “the political form of social emancipation,” and that Kropotkin deemed “the necessary setting for revolution and the means of bringing it about.”
In 1950, the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz privately published, at his own expense, a short book entitled The Fundamental Issue. It cost him $425 – perhaps about $5000 today. It concerned a loyalty oath at the University of California, first proposed in 1949, which he had refused to sign.
Ernst KantorowiczCover of The Fundamental Issue
The oath in its initial form, from the Constitution of State of California, read:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of my office according to the best of my ability.
To this was added, on 25th March 1949 the requirement to swear that:
I do not believe in, and am not a member of, nor do I support any party or organisation that believes in, advocates or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government by force or violence.
This was revised on 24th June 1949 to be the Constitutional oath, plus the addition:
: that I am not a member of the Communist Party, or under any oath, or a party to any agreement, or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath (taken from Stewart, The Year of the Oath).
As Kantorowicz recalled in his ‘Prefatory Note’ to The Fundamental Issue:
If you are not a Communist, why can’t you sign the oath?” How often has this question been asked and still is asked? The answer is that from the very beginning it was true that “The issue is not Communism; it is the welfare and dignity of our University” (Alumni Letter, August 17, 1950). The forcibly imposed oath with its economic sanctions and encroachments on tenure, rejected almost unanimously by the Faculties of the University of California, was at first one of the most thoughtless and wanton, later one of the most ruthless attacks on the academic profession at large.
… Why I did not sign the oath—although, or because, I am not and never have been a Communist, and although, or because, I am genuinely conservative and never have been taken for anything else—I shall indicate in the following pages.
… What the fundamental issue is has been obvious to me from the minute the controversy started. Perhaps I have been sensitive because both my professional experience as an historian and my personal experience in Nazi Germany have conditioned me to be alert when I hear again certain familiar tones sounded. Rather than renounce this experience, which is indeed synonymous with my “life,” I shall place it, for what it is worth, at the disposal of my colleagues who are fighting the battle for the dignity of their profession and their university (p. 1).
The Fundamental Issue contains three documents – a speech and a letter by Kantorowicz, and one by Walter Horn, acting Chairman of the Department of Art – and then a long set of ‘Marginal Notes’ by Kantorowicz, together with some further documents in appendices.
At the beginning of the first document, a speech he gave to the Academic Senate, Northern Section, on June 14th 1949, Kantorowicz proclaims:
As a historian who has investigated and traced the histories of quite a number of oaths, I feel competent to make a statement indicating the grave dangers residing in the introduction of a new, enforced oath, and to express, at the same time, from a professional and human point of view, my deepest concern about the steps taken by the Regents of this University.
Both history and experience have taught us that every oath or oath formula, once introduced or enforced, has the tendency to develop its own autonomous life. At the time of its introduction an oath formula may appear harmless, as harmless as the one proposed by the Regents of this University. But nowhere and never has there been a guaranty that an oath formula imposed on, or extorted from, the subjects of an all-powerful state will, or must, remain unchanged. The contrary is true. All oaths in history that I know of, have undergone changes. A new word will be added. A short phrase, seemingly insignificant, will be smuggled in. The next step may be an inconspicuous change in the tense, from present to past, or from past to future. The consequences of a new oath are unpredictable. It will not be in the hands of those imposing the oath to control its effects, nor of those taking it, ever to step back again (p. 4).
“Both history and experience have taught us…”. The history was his vocation, but the experience was important too. Kantorowicz’s Jewish identity had become an issue when the Nazi party seized power in Germany in 1933. Kantorowicz was initially allowed to continue teaching at the University of Frankfurt because of his military service in World War One. On 20th April 1933 he sent a letter to the Minister of Education, protesting strongly about restrictions, and countering the idea that his Jewish and German identity were at odds (the letter is in Ralph E. Giesey, “Ernst H. Kantorowicz”). But two weeks into the Winter Semester of 1933, students protested against his lectures and boycotted them, ignoring the military service exception. This led Kantorowicz to spend the rest of that academic year in Oxford, as a senior research fellow at New College. He returned to Frankfurt in July 1934, but this coincided with a requirement that all functionaries swear an oath of loyalty to “the head of the Empire and the German Peoples, Adolf Hitler”. Kantorowicz refused, and requested a transfer to Professor Emeritus status – he was only 39 at the time – which would allow him to be exempt from the oath, but of course he had to stop teaching. He remained in Germany until December 1938, working mainly at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Berlin. His work there led to the book Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship. Largely completed in 1938, it was not published in Germany, due to restrictions on Jewish publication. Kantorowicz rewrote Laudes Regiae in English, and published it in 1946.The final spur to end to his time in Germany came with Kristallnacht in November 1938. He held a temporary post at the Johns Hopkins University before moving to Berkeley in 1939, initially in a one-year post. In these positions the Universities received support from the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars and the Oberlaender Trust of the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation.
The oath in California in 1949, therefore, had links back to his experience fifteen years before in Germany. In retrospect, the incremental nature of the Nazi oppression of Jewish people is clear, even if the outcome was impossible to predict at the time. With the benefit of that historical experience, his reaction to the oath in the USA perhaps become easier to understand. As his biographer Alain Boureau notes, even in the USA the “imposition of an oath was not a novelty; already in 1942, the university, imitating a practice created in New York in 1937, required its members to take an oath of allegiance to the state and nation. But this earlier oath had none of the repressive tones present in that of 1949” (p. 82). Indeed, as his most recent biographer, Robert Lerner indicates, Kantorowicz would have already “sworn that he had never been a Communist during his naturalization procedures in 1945” (p. 321).
Kantorowicz took the lead in opposing the oath in California, right from the start, alongside colleagues. Kantorowicz was unusual in his resistance because it was not from the perspective of militancy, or even progressive politics. It was because of a conservative sense of hierarchy and order. It was the challenge to the tenure system and university autonomy from the state, an objection to the process rather than the content. The final section of Kantorowicz’s address to the Senate is striking in this regard:
I am not talking about political expediency or academic freedom, nor even about the fact that an oath taken under duress is invalidated the moment it is taken, but wish to emphasize the true and fundamental issue at stake: professional and human dignity.
There are three professions which are entitled to wear a gown: the judge, the priest, the scholar. This garment stands for its bearer’s maturity of mind, his independence of judgment, and his direct responsibility to his conscience and to his God. It signifies the inner sovereignty of those three interrelated professions: they should be the very last to allow themselves to act under duress and yield to pressure.
It is a shameful and undignified action, it is an affront and a violation of both human sovereignty and professional dignity that the Regents of this University have dared to bully the bearer of this gown into a situation in which— under the pressure of a bewildering economic coercion—he is compelled to give up either his tenure or, together with his freedom of judgment, his human dignity and his responsible sovereignty as a scholar (p. 6).
The juxtaposition of the judge, the priest and the scholar is striking, especially when we think of his interest in political theology.
His speech to the Senate was followed by a letter sent to President Robert Gordon Sproul on October 4th, 1949. This is the second text in The Fundamental Issue. This letter has a striking beginning:
Dear President Sproul:
Dante, quoting Aristotle, has remarked that ‘every oblique action of government turns good men into bad citizens’ … (p. 6).
Quite apart from how we might analyse this remark, and the conceptual shifts between Greek, Latin or proto-Italian and modern English, who among us would begin a letter to our institutional head today, perhaps especially one trained as an engineer, with these two historical figures?
As is fairly well known, Kantorowicz was among a list of non-signers dismissed by the Board of Regents on August 25th, 1950. The outbreak of the Korean war in June 1950 did not help things: “The fact that the country now was literally at war with communism did not bode well for the future of the nonsigners” (Lerner, p. 322). Kantorowicz spent one year at the Dumbarton Oaks Foundation research library but while there in December 1950 was offered a post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton by its director, Robert Oppenheimer. He did not formally resign from Berkeley so as not to jeopardise proceedings against them, but told Oppenheimer he would accept, but for the moment only informally (4 January 1951).
Your letter of December 29th has certainly lit up the otherwise so gloomy outlook for 1951, at least within the purely personal sphere, and after the low of the paralysing ‘Year of the Oath’ this invitation fills my spirits again with new buoyancy and gives my desire to work a new impetus.
In fact, I am looking forward impatiently to settling down peacefully in Princeton. The terms you have outlined to me open up a new perspective of my life as a scholar, and it seems almost unbelievable to me that in future no classwork or semester routine shall compel me to break off my own work in the midst of a sentence and that instead I shall be able to finish all my unfinished studies and sail, once more, freely and like a young adventurer on that vast ocean of historical problems (Kantorowicz to Oppenheimer, 4 January 1951).
He later wrote to Oppenheimer that he had informed Berkeley he was “unavailable” from 30 June 1951.
This rather clumsy formulation was chosen by our lawyer in order to avoid the word “resignation” which might jeopardize my further participation in the still pending law-suit, the first hearing of which before the Supreme Court of California was very promising (Kantorowicz to Oppenheimer, 28 June 1951).
It was in Princeton that he completed The King’s Two Bodies, the book for which he is best known today. Retrospectively, Kantorowicz won a case for unfair dismissal from California, and the offer of reinstatement, but remained at Princeton until his death in 1963.
References
Alain Boureau, Kantorowicz: Stories of a Historian, translated by Stephen G. Nichols and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Bob Blauner, Resisting McCarthyism: To Sign or Not to Sign California’s Loyalty Oath, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Stuart Elden, “Beyond the King’s Two Bodies”, Berfrois, 21 February 2017, (review of Robert E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life) – archived here
David P. Gardner, The California Oath Controversy, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967.
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946.
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Robert E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
George R. Stewart, The Year of the Oath: The Fight for Academic Freedom at the University of California, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1950.
Ralph E. Giesey, “Ernst H. Kantorowicz: Scholarly Triumphs and Academic Travails in Weimar Germany and the United States”, The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 30, 1985, 191–202.
Archives
Ernst Kantorowicz faculty files, Institute for Advanced Study archives, Princeton
Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars records, New York Public Library, special collections, https://archives.nypl.org/mss/922
This is a revised and updated version of part of an unpublished paper I gave in 2019 at a workshop on Ernst Kantorowicz and Shakespeare. It is the seventh post of an occasional series, where I try to post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. The other posts so far are:
“Interview with James Bernauer”, Agustín Colombo and Bernales Odino Martín, Dorsal: Revista de estudios Foucaultianos, 2025 (open access pdf)
An interesting interview with James Bernauer about attending Foucault’s lectures, meeting him, organising a meeting with theologians, and Foucault’s impact on his work.
In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In Unmaking Botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices. From the culinary textures of rice and the lyrics crooned to honor a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fiber, she illuminates how vernaculars of plant knowing in the Philippines exposed the philosophical and practical limits of botany. Such vernaculars remained as sovereign forms of knowledge production. Yet, at the same time, they fueled botany’s dominance over other ways of knowing plants. Revealing this tension allows Gutierrez to theorize “sovereign vernaculars,” or insight into plants that made and unmade the science, which serves as a methodological provocation to examine the interplay of different knowledge systems and to study the history of science from multiple vantage points.
Since the last update in December, I’ve been making some good progress on this project. The focus has mainly been on Benveniste’s work in the 1960s. But, as ever, I’ve found myself backtracking to earlier parts of his career and seeing some potentially interesting diversions from that focus.
I went down a little detour about the decipherment of Linear B, as both Benveniste and Dumézil used this as an example in their teaching, and because both attended the first international conference on Mycenaean studies in 1956, held just outside of Paris and organised by Michel Lejeune and Pierre Chantraine. While the story of the deciphering has been told, the French connection is less explored, particularly in terms of Lejeune’s subsequent work. I say more about that story here.
I also discovered that there is a record of Benveniste’s 1937 lecture to the Prague Linguistic Circle, for which he told Roman Jakobson after the war that his papers were lost when his flat in Paris was occupied. The short summary, published in Czech, is translated by John Raimo and discussed by me here. I also mention Jakobson’s report of a lecture Benveniste gave in Brno on the same visit to Czechoslovakia. A couple of small pieces of evidence to add to the story of Benveniste’s early career.
Returning to my current focus on his final publications, I worked on Benveniste’s book Titres et noms propres en iranien ancien. It is another very specialist study, but which helps to shed some light on some of his other projects, some incomplete, and his collaborative work with archaeologists and epigraphists. It’s also interesting I think, because it touches on similar themes to his Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, but unlike that book it has more academic references. The discussion of Benveniste’s final few courses is now properly supported by references to the shorter publications from the 1960s, many of which are in Problémes de linguistique générale, especially its second volume. (Only a few pieces in there are in English translation.) A few late pieces which are not collected there or elsewhere can be difficult to find, but I think I’ve located most of them.
I also wrote a short piece on Foucault’s 1972 visit to Cornell University, though I’d hoped the archives there might shed some more light on his short lecture trip. Posting that led to a source of which I was unaware which adds a bit more detail. I also updated an earlier post about Marie-Louise Sjoestedt – an interesting and tragic French Celtic scholar, who was a friend and colleague of both Benveniste and Dumézil. The updated piece is here. I’m hoping that I’ll make time in 2025 for more of these short pieces – brief sketches of a history, notes towards something, thoughts on a recent book, a development of an idea I only touch upon in a more formal text. I say more about these pieces, and a couple of others I’ve shared so far, which I’m calling ‘Sunday histories’, here.
Much of the work in early January was trying to get the text into as good a shape as possible before my New York trip. I didn’t manage to get as much done as I’d hoped, and the two main tasks left for this chapter are Benveniste’s Vocabulaire – the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, and then the parallel discussion of Dumézil’s career.
Institute for the Study of the Ancient WorldButler Library, Columbia UniversityNew York Public LibraryRockefeller Archives Center
I’ve been in New York a couple of weeks, spending time at the Remarque Institute at New York University where I’m based, and going to some events there, and a few elsewhere at NYU. I’ve committed to giving very few talks while I’m here. One was online for the University of Nottingham Futures of Ideology series. I’ll be making a side-trip to Buffalo to speak to the Just Theory series in Comparative Literature, and giving two short papers to events at Remarque.
One of the reasons why some time in the United States was appealing was the chance to get to some archives. I haven’t been here for several years and there are some interesting things to explore. Dumézil and Benveniste visited the US a few times. Dumézil had a series of visiting posts here after his retirement from the Collège de France, but there are, to my knowledge, relatively few sources here for his story. But other related figures do have material here. This includes Claude Lévi-Strauss, who spent much of the war in the United States, and Roman Jakobson, who also came at that time, but ended up staying here after the war. Jakobson’s main archive is at MIT, but there are some things here in New York. Walter Henning, whose main archive is in Germany, spent the final years of his career here. There is also correspondence between some of the people I’m working on in various archives. Some of these are further afield, and so I’ve been sending off a lot of requests to find out the extent of material. Some archives are very generous in scanning material, either free of charge or for a small fee. Others have digitised a lot of material already. One in New York only permits researchers to use their reading room if material is not already scanned, and led me to 11,000 pages of material relating to Ernst Kantorowicz. He’s certainly someone I’m interested in, but only as a very peripheral figure to the main story. When it is of that scale, I’d rather spend some weeks working through it on site than looking at it on a screen. But when it’s more like 20 pages, having something scanned and saving a flight is really appreciated.
I first looked at some of the Semiotext(e) papers at New York University, but that didn’t have as much about their conference on Benveniste as I’d hoped. The conference was initially planned for an issue of the Semiotext(e) journal, but ended up in Thomas Sebeok’s journal Semiotica instead. More useful material was at the New York Public Library, which has the papers of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars. There is some interesting detail on a few people connected to my project. I’d not used their archive collections before, but there is at least one reason to go back.
Columbia University has some materials relating to Jakobson, who taught there for a few years before moving to Harvard. They also have the archives of a few people who were in correspondence with him and Alexandre Koyré, so it’s an interesting source of material. My first ever experience of working with archives was at Columbia, over twenty years ago, when I was working on Henri Lefebvre, as they have the archives of his friend and co-author Norbert Gutermann. The reading room has changed a lot but it was good to be back. I have a couple more trips there planned.
I also made a first visit to the Rockefeller Archives Center, which is about an hour north of New York City in Sleepy Hollow. My first appointment was cancelled due to the weather – it has been very cold here, with quite a bit of snow. The archives here have some material relating to funding for refugee scholars in the 1930s and 1940s, including Jakobson and Koyré, but also the papers of the Ford Foundation who funded Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s. the Rockefeller Foundation also supported some projects that Benveniste undertook in the 1950s, including meetings with American linguists, a conference he organised in Nice, and his linguistic fieldtrips to work with native American groups in the Pacific northwest. There was a lot more material than I expected, and I hope I can get back.
It’s also been great to have such excellent libraries here. The Bobst Library of NYU is one I’ve used before, and has a great collection. The Butler library at Columbia has a huge collection, and on previous New York trips it has been a regular place to visit. The current security at the Columbia campus means that just using the library is difficult, but if you have an appointment with manuscripts then you get a QR code to allow access. So, for that reason I’ve been using the New York Public Library more for its main collection. I’ve also been up to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, part of NYU near Central Park, which had a couple of hard-to-find things.
While I’m in Buffalo I plan to look at their archives relating to Foucault’s two visits in 1970 and 1972, and I also have a planned trip to Harvard and MIT to look at some things there. I’m also trying to get ahead with what I think will be the next project after this one, on Koyré. I’m not sure what form that will take yet, but I hope at least a couple more articles beyond the one I’ve published (open access) and the one on Canguilhem and Koyré I’ve presented (audio). Koyré was in the United States during the war, teaching at the École Libre des Hautes Études and the New School, and then was here in several visiting positions in the post-war period. There are some records of his teaching in these different places, and some correspondence. Some of this is nearby, other parts are further afield, so I’m making a lot more requests. A couple of the future ‘Sunday Histories’ will say more about what I’m finding out about him, his teaching and his intellectual friendships.
Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications. The re-edition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna is now published. There is a lot more about the earlier Foucault work here. The final volume of the series is The Archaeology of Foucault,and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society I co-edited on “Foucault before the Collège de France” has some important contributions on the earlier parts of Foucault’s career, and is currently available free to access. My article “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity” was published in the Journal of the History of Ideas; “Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France” is online first and open access.
Writing Intellectual History after the “Age of Forms”: An Interview with Elías J. Palti – Journal of the History of Ideas blog – Part I and Part II
In this interview, primary editors Jacob Saliba and Zac Endter speak with award-winning and internationally recognized intellectual historian Elías Palti on his most recent work, Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Based on Seeley Lectures recently given at Cambridge University, the book consists of a meta-history of intellectual history in the last century. From the “Cambridge School,” Hans Blumenberg, and Reinhart Koselleck to Pierre Rosanvallon and Michel Foucault, Palti weaves together a complex range of thinkers as well as carefully reconstructs a wide array of concepts at the core of why and how intellectual historians do what they do. Ultimately, Palti seeks to clarify the evolving conditions, stakes, and epistemological ground on which intellectual history was built in the past and continues to be built up to the present.
Examines the use of ironic language among political leaders in international politics.
Irony in International Politics investigates ironic language in international politics, focusing on how political leaders use irony to articulate failures of the liberal international order. Underlining the political, performative, and affective nature of irony in international politics, the book introduces a novel typology of four forms of irony: justice-seeking irony, hegemony-seeking irony, recognition-seeking irony, and disruption-seeking irony.
Irony is typically understood as a tool of the underdog who seeks to reveal the hypocritical nature of the powerful, but Irony in International Politics shows that irony is increasingly used by the powerful who expose that there is a wide gap between the ideal and the actual in international politics. Studying cases from Turkey, the United Kingdom, Hungary, the United States, Sweden, Germany, Greece, and Russia, the book illustrates how the post-Cold War era represents a distinct scene of irony with its particular identity struggles and power asymmetries that have prompted ironic reactions.
Latin American Geographies introduces student readers to cutting-edge scholarship on a range of topics from Indigenous geographies to sustainable development and dependency theory. The book is written primarily by a Latin American-based authorship and blends complex theory with in-depth case studies in an accessible way for students with little prior knowledge.
Each chapter contains a general overview of the topic and includes summary boxes, review questions and annotated further readings. The book is divided into three sections. Section 1, “Core Themes,” gives the reader the necessary historical, conceptual and theoretical tools to make sense of and engage in contemporary geographical debates in Latin American geographies. It is divided into four areas, covering major sub-themes (historical and colonial geographies, political geographies, economic and urban geographies, and development and environmental geographies). Section 2, “Key Perspectives,” outlines key identities and positionalities that have had a profound impact on Latin American geographies, exemplifying their significance through a range of case studies. Section 3, “Uneven Processes,” provides an in-depth analysis into core geographical trends across three main themes: ecologies, urbanisation and resistance.
The book is unique in providing an introduction to Latin American geography that showcases the ideas of some of the region’s leading geographical thinkers. Aimed at undergraduate students, chapters will also be of relevance to advanced researchers looking for introductions to specific areas. The book is designed for use in the classroom as well as for independent learning.
This book expands on theories of “theatricality” in French and critical studies, adopting a transdisciplinary approach that reaches beyond performance studies into poetry, media technology, translation, and psychoanalytic theory.
Building on Artaud’s concept of theater as a “plague”—an unpredictable, cataclysmic, and contagious force that disrupts power structures and knowledge—the book challenges Aristotelian norms of theater as a medium of “healing” and “teaching.” Instead, theatricality emerges as a force of radical disruption, what Artaud called “the return of the repressed,” demanding openness to otherness.
The chapters present theatricality as primarily aural rather than visual, inciting “paranoiac listening,” invoking unretrievable “primal scenes,” and allowing unconscious “psychic” contamination. “Theatricality” is explored through works by Artaud, Genet, Novarina, and Koltès, but also Freud, Barthes, Kristeva, Girard, and Derrida. Each writer challenges the premises of their own artistic genres and fields of study, questioning binary systems like artistic production versus theoretical articulation, the technological versus the natural, and art versus life.
As shown, these binaries underpin mechanisms of repression, sacrificial violence, and the exclusion of the voiceless other. The book assigns a generative function to traditionally maligned notions like unintelligibility, madness, marginality, contagion, and criminality.
A globe shows the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and corporations.
Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only commodity: bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Over time, economists, theorists, statesmen, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, charter cities controlled by foreign corporations, and even into outer space. By mapping this countergeography, which decides who wins and who loses in the new global order—and helping us to see how it might be otherwise—The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.
