State, Security, and Subject Formation

Anna Yeatman, Magdalena Zolkos, Anna Yeatman, Magdalena Zolkos

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780826442840
• eBook ISBN: 9781441102249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

State, Security, and Subject Formation addresses the question of how to secure the conditions for a civil and peaceful life together. It brings together leading scholars to examine democracy from two approaches: peaceful coexistence and the secular state as public authority and the necessity of division between communities of faith that allows for a state that defends the values of the community. This book aims to understand the rationality that informs both approaches, interpreting the subjectivities within each.

To do so, the interdisciplinary, scholarly essays examine 17th century political thought and how it is caught up in debate about the relationship between faith and the state at a time when religious wars are endemic and profoundly destructive. They also provide an in-depth discussion of contemporary 21st and 20th century approaches to the question of security and the issue of subjective capacity for peaceful co-existence.

Civil Order and Politics is the outcome of an intensive cross-disciplinary cooperation and, as such, not only demonstrates the richness of relevant themes and issues, but also brings to the fore challenges and problems associated with civil practice and theorizing of politics. Through its thematic juxtaposition of state, security, and subjectivity within the framework of civil order and politics, the book fills a gap in the contemporary political literature that will be of interest to anyone studying and researching these issues.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter 1 State, Security, and Subject Formation—an Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Man and the Citizen: the Pluralization of Civil Personae in Early Modern German Natural Law
• Chapter 3 Reassembling Civilization: State-Formation, Subjectivity, Security, Power
• Chapter 4 Without Exception: Democracy and Sovereignty after Carl Schmitt
• Chapter 5 Antisecurity Personae: from David Dyzenhaus’s Human Rights Lawyer to Giorgio Agamben’s Illuminato
• Chapter 6 Doubt, Ambiguity, and Subject Formation
• Chapter 7 The Subject “At the Gates of the Polis”: Theorizing Transitional Civic Order from the Site of Trauma
• Chapter 8 Self-Preservation and the Idea of the State
• Chapter 9 Society, State, Security, and Subject Formation: the Emergence of Modern Neutrality Society and the Formation of the Types of Subjects It Requires
• Chapter 10 Anticolonial Nationalisms: the Case of India
• Chapter 11 The Sense of Existing and Its Political Implications (on François Flahault’s “General Anthropology”)
• Bibliography
• Index