Klein Schaarsberg, Suzanne
(2016)
Recovering a political life: Agamben’s Pauline messianism as a challenge to sovereign power.
Master thesis, Master Religion and the Public Domain.
Abstract
Agamben’s theory on sovereign power has led to a scholarly debate on how to escape the narrow forms of life that are available within the sovereign social order as political ways of being. By referring to illegal immigrants in the Netherlands, this dissertation analyses how sovereign power comes into being through sacrificing acts that exclude bare life and the divine from the political community. In relating the emergence of sovereign power back to a theological shift from scholasticism to nominalism in the fifteenth century, this dissertation will show how sovereign power remains related to a sense of sacrality. This sense of sacrality implied in sovereign power, I argue, is the reason Agamben’s study on the letters of Saint Paul in the time that remains potentially offers a successful way of confronting the sovereign logic. Because Agamben’s messianism is able to restore a sense of potentiality to being, I contend it is able to break open the sovereign relationship between ontology and politics. This dissertation will argue that as a result new kinds of political subjectivity become available.
| Type: |
Thesis
(Master)
|
| Supervisors (RUG): |
| Supervisor | E-mail | Tutor organization | Tutor email |
|---|
| Wilson, E.K. | E.K.Wilson@rug.nl | | | | Jedan, C. | C.Jedan@rug.nl | | | | Slob, W.H. | W.H.Slob@rug.nl | | |
|
| Degree programme: |
Master Religion and the Public Domain |
| Academic year: |
2014- 2015 |
| Date of delivery: |
02 Dec 2016 |
| Last modified: |
02 Dec 2016 09:25 |
| URI: |
https://ggw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/99 |
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