Nonrepresentational Politics

The Third Citizen: Shakespeare\u27s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons by Oliver Arnold. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. 325. $55.00 cloth.

Humility, Obligation, and Obsolescence: Joseph Ratzinger Interpreted Through the Communitarian Critique

This dissertation explores four events in which Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) attempts to address the modern and post-modern worlds. I demonstrate that his treatments of the relationship between reason and revelation, the Enlightenment's legacy, universal values, identity, and pluralism are engaged with a similar set of concepts addressed in the communitarian critique's initial reaction to the notion of the original position advanced in John Rawls's A Theory of Justice and the libertarian spirit of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I posit that at the heart of this critique, as well as in Ratzinger's works analyzed here, is the concept of liberal entitlement as generated from Locke and other social contractors, and that bound up with this are a challenge against philosophic obsolescence and the absences of humility and obligation. It is through these three themes--humility, obligation, and obsolescence--that Ratzinger's political teaching and his own communitarian thought emerge in his writings. Particular attention is paid to the communitarian critique's discussion of the narrative method and the importance of identity, as they offer potential solutions for Ratzinger's desire for creating a non-coercive sense of civic obligation through a salient European identity and correcting the breakdown of common moral reference points in the West. This study ultimately explores where these select works by Ratzinger fit within this dialogue, and where they do not, as well as how they are situated within "garden variety" communitarianism of political theory and the Catholic Church's anti-liberal history. In doing so, Ratzinger's own communitarian thought takes shape

Unworking Milton: Steps to a Georgics of the Mind

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed to not one but two revolutions in the history of seventeenth-century English radicalism—the first, ‘the one which succeeded[,] . . . the protestant ethic’; and the second, ‘the revolution which never happened,’ which sought ‘communal property, a far wider democracy[,] and rejected the protestant ethic’—I show how Milton’s Paradise Lost gives substance to ‘the revolution which never happened’ by imagining a commons, indeed a communism, in which human beings are not at the center of things, but rather constitute one part of the greater ecology of mind within Milton’s poem. In the space created by this ecological reimagining, plants assume a new agency. I call this reimagining ‘ecology to come.

Open Subjects:English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability

Studies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections, and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, the study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be