German professor Klaus Mladek and English professor George Edmondson are currently editing a collection of essays, "Sovereignty in Ruin: Politics in Crisis," which will include the work of prominent critical theorists like Judith Butler, according to Mladek.
The collection seeks to provide an alternative to conventional channels of politics, which Mladek and Edmondson "perceive to be in a deep crisis," Mladek said. Duke University Press will publish the book in 2013.
"Political theory has been obsessed with the figure of the sovereign and the nation-state," he said. "We are trying to explore a politics that investigates non-sovereign formations such as masses and multitudes, animals, bacterial life and tele-technologies."
The collection also includes essays by cultural theorists and philosophers Cary Wolfe, Roberto Esposito and Carlo Galli, according to Mlavek.
Mlavek said he believes the collection is important because scholarship since the 1990s has been preoccupied with figures of sovereignty.
"We have to really ask directly where the crises of nation-states and sovereignty are detectable and how we could find non-sovereign types of politics," he said.
The 2009 Humanities Institute "States of Exception: Sovereignty, Security, Secrecy," sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities, formed the framework for the collection, according to former Leslie Center Director and Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities Adrian Randolph. Mladek and Edmondson directed the 2009 Humanities Institute, Randolph said.
Over the course of each yearly Humanities Institute, College professors and experts from other institutions attend lectures pertinent to their research and discuss their own work, according to current Leslie Center Director Colleen Boggs. During "States of Exception," Dartmouth professors and experts in literary studies, political science, philosophy, Native American studies and women and gender studies attended their colleagues' lectures and seminars and "discussed theoretical concepts of sovereignty' alongside their real-life impact on public policy and political implementation," Boggs said.
Randolph said that the topic of the 2009 Humanities Institute was selected for its relevance to a number of fields of study and contemporary politics and intellectual life.
Butler's book, "Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence," provided "important frames for the discussion during the Institute," Boggs said. The book questions the new forms of vulnerability to which people are exposed when they are between or removed from states, according to Boggs.
In 2009, Butler presented a lecture, "The Company We Keep: Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem,'" discussing Arendt's coverage of the 1960-1961 criminal trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. In the presentation, Butler argued that Arendt herself grappled with Eichmann's character and that the court in Jerusalem delivered only partial justice, according to Mlavek.
From her analysis of Arendt's work, Butler extracted a political philosophy, known as the dispersion of sovereignty, according to Mlavek. She argued that there is no longer any single agent above the social field that commands everything.
Mlavek and Edmondson asked Butler to expand her lecture into an essay for publication in the collection due its relevance and her status among theorists.
"Butler is maybe and arguably the most important political philosopher in the United States at the moment," Mlavek said. "Butler's article perfectly exemplifies the themes of a politics that can no longer rest on those clear distinctions."
Kelsey Henry '15, who took Edmonson's introductory literary theory course during Winter term, said Butler's book, "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity," also reflects the interdisciplinary nature of her studies, which are relevant to both politics and social theory.
"I really feel what she was theorizing, while at its core about gender, was really about this concept of permeating boundaries and what happens at the boundaries," she said.
Edmondson could not be reached for comment by press time.
