Arthur Bradley is Professor of Comparative Literature in the School of Arts at Lancaster University. His most recent books are Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure (Columbia UP, 2019) and Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy (Columbia UP, 2024). In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Bradley discusses his new book, how it relates to contemporary issues, and where his work will go from here.
What is your work about?
This book explores the relationship between theater and sovereignty in modern political theory, philosophy, and drama. To become sovereign, I argue that we must be seen as sovereign—philosophically, politically, and aesthetically—both to ourselves and others. For me, this means that sovereignty is a theatrical phenomenon from the very beginning. If a sovereign must be seen to be sovereign, the book goes on to argue that we can thus construct a phenomenology of sovereignty’s particular modes of appearance in the world: thrones, insignia, regalia, ritual and ceremony, drama and spectacle, marvels, fictions, and phantasmagoria. In a series of chapters weaving together political theory (Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schmitt, Derrida, Agamben) and literature (Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller, Melville, Valéry, Kafka, Benjamin, Ionesco, Genet, Brook), I thus seek to re-stage the story of political modernity from the Puritan prohibition on the London theaters to the age of post-truth.
What topics does the book address?
To be clear, Staging Sovereignty seeks to be neither a work of orthodox political theory nor a study of political theater so much as an exercise in what I call political “thaumaturgy”: a political science of sights, wonders, marvels, miracles, artifices, optical illusions, special effects and conjuring or confidence tricks that may or may not be “real.” It attempts to occupy what I see as a kind of disavowed middle ground between the allegedly disinterested “view from nowhere” of modern political theory and the allegedly interested, partial, or mediated view of theater. In practice, this means that the book is (generically) what it is about (thematically): a set of unapologetically performative, improvisatory—indeed, “theatrical”—essays.
Firstly, Chapter 1 explores the representation of the royal throne, chair, office, or seat of power via readings of Shakespeare, Kant, Ionesco, and Bacon. Chapter 2 turns to depictions of the political theological ritual of royal anointment with oil in Shakespeare, Milton, and Melville. Chapter 3 analyses the figure of the veiled or secret sanctum sanctorum of power in Hobbes, Benjamin, Deleuze, and Derrida. Chapter 4 examines representations of the larger political court, chamber, or antechamber, which surrounds the inner sanctum of power in Schiller, Kafka, Benjamin, and Schmitt. Chapter 5 considers dramatizations of the rite of political investiture with regalia or clothing in Montaigne, Kafka, Genet, and Agamben. Chapter 6 surveys the staging of the trope of the political puppet show or marionette theater in the works of Aristotle, Cervantes, Benjamin, and Derrida. Chapter 7 examines the representation of the theatrical crowd or audience through the works of Le Bon, Jarry, Kelsen, and Foucault. Finally, a brief Conclusion rehearses the theater director Peter Brook’s famous theory of modern theater as an empty space.
In each chapter, I thus seek to rehearse a few scenes, vignettes, or fragments in the representational life of one privileged “prop” or property within the theater of sovereignty—thrones, regalia, the court, and so on—from the early modern period to the present to tell a larger story about political modernity itself. What if what we too easily call “theatricality” remains an irreducible element within a modern political theory and praxis that frequently presents itself as resolutely anti-theatrical?
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
For me, the book consists of a series of standalone chapters that can be read in any order but ultimately, they all attempt to tell the same story about the transition from political premodernity to modernity. To simplify, I argue that what happens in modernity is that we move from what I call a “theater of sovereignty”—in which a real or personal sovereign like a king is the first or principal representative around whom the whole system of political representation revolves—to a “sovereignty of theater” in which the allegedly pure or empty space of representability itself takes center stage. If you want an example of what I mean here, the book’s defining trope is the idea of politics as an empty space or bare stage: Claude Lefort, for example, famously defines democracy as an empty space that belongs to no one—not God, not the King, not even the People. In Lefort’s idea of the empty space, which is coincidentally also the title of a famous book by the theater director Peter Brook, I argue that democracy becomes an intrinsically theatrical phenomenon: we agree to participate in an infinite work of representability without any “real” that underpins it.
How is this work relevant to the contemporary world, historical ideas, or everyday life?
If we turn to the modern democratic political scene – which appears at first glance to dispense with the kind of ritual and ceremony associated with premodern forms of sovereignty—I think we can still see various symptoms of the intrinsic relationship between politics and theatricality that I’m canvassing for in this book. To simplify again somewhat, we are all (rightly) suspicious of charismatic political leaders who appear actorly, showy, or inauthentic. They are regularly accused of merely “playing” politics, whereas “real” politics is, or at least should be, a noble, serious business. However, on the other hand, any politician who aspires to be strictly serious—such as the uncharismatic, policy-orientated, and technocratic leader—immediately faces the counter-accusation of lacking a compelling “vision,” ”story,” or “narrative” to capture the popular political imagination. In the book, I thus try to explain why politics needs theater even or especially as it disavows it: what we call “politics” is just a kind of “playing” politics, and, coincidentally or not, my final chapter concludes with a discussion of Donald Trump.
How have readers responded?
I’ve received a couple of very generous reviews of the book already in Textual Practice and Theory, Culture & Society, as well as some kind and thoughtful feedback from friends, colleagues, and even strangers. In the last few months, I’ve also started presenting the book at literary festivals, graduate seminars, and conferences in Europe and the USA, and it’s been great to be able to talk to actual readers in person about it.
What directions would you like to take your work in the future?
In the next few years, I would like to pursue a few different projects if I am spared.
Firstly, I have an idea for a short book called Political Theology of the As If, which will explore the role of the “As if”—neurotic illusions, self-conscious or regulative fictions, and political mythologies—in some of the formative debates around political theology in the 1920s and 30s via the work of Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Sigmund Freud.
If I look a bit further ahead, I have a larger project on representations of the figure of the corpse in political modernity, from Hobbes to Foucault, that I’ve been working on for a few years now and would like to bring to fruition. In this project, I’m interested in exploring the idea that the literary and philosophical treatment or mistreatment of the dead body—whether, for example, it is buried or left to rot, whether it remains intact or is dismembered, whether it is mourned or disappeared, indeed whether it is even reanimated and brought back to life as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster—might become an allegory for the birth of the modern itself.
In the last few years, I’ve already published some parts of this project in essays on Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Freud, and others, but my longer-term hope is to work it up into a book or possibly two books.
Arthur Bradley
Arthur Bradley is Professor of Comparative Literature in the School of Arts at Lancaster University. His most recent books are Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure (Columbia UP, 2019) and Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy (Columbia UP, 2024).
Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.
