In this video, Adrian Pabst interviews David Pan about the current issue of Telos, a special issue about Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play. David has translated Schmitt’sHamlet or Hecuba and also co-edited the special issue together with Julia Lupton. The significance of this book for a proper understanding and assessment of Schmitt’s oeuvre can hardly be overstated. It highlights the centrality of culture and literature in his political thought, including the role of myth, theater, representation, and tragedy. The conversation with David also touches on the concrete contemporary relevance of these themes for politics, in particular a broader notion of truth and values than technocracy or managerialism.
Timothy Wong’s “Steward of the Dying Voice: The Intrusion of Horatio into Sovereignty and Representation” appears in Telos 153 (Winter 2010). Read the full version at TELOS Online website.
This article examines the issue of early modern sovereign succession and political representation through the figure of Horatio. Using Carl Schmitt’s comments on the “dying voice” in the first appendix of Hamlet or Hecuba, and his theory of political representation, this essay argues that Horatio represents the transitional space between the fading vestiges of political theology, and the first traces constituent sovereignty. In his role as mediator of the sovereign word of King Hamlet and the dying voice of Prince Hamlet, Horatio becomes the proto-constituent subject who signals the genesis of a reoriented political agency that is constituted by popular consent rather than authoritarian rule. Furthermore, Horatio is the paradoxical representative that both represents the body politic (in the sense of the King’s two bodies) to the people and the popular will to itself.
In this video from the 2011 Telos Conference, held on January 15-16 in New York City, Adrian Pabst interviews Professor Marcia Pally from NYU. Marcia is Professor of Multilingual and Multicultural Studies, and her current work is on “new evangelicals” in the United States and elsewhere. The conversation with Marcia revolves around the long, progressive tradition of evangelicalism going back to the nineteenth century that is coming once more to the fore. Instead of endorsing big government or championing big business, the “new evangelicals” view civil society was more primacy than either state or market. For this and other reasons, they appeal to non-market motives such as solidarity and sympathy in order to transform market institutions and address pressing problems such as poverty, inequality and social exclusion.
In this video from the 2011 Telos Conference, held this past weekend in New York City, Russell Berman welcomes the conference participants and discusses some of the conference’s key themes: economics and politics, neo-liberalism and neo-socialism, the state of exception, rituals and ritualized behavior, and more.
Drew Daniel’s “‘Neither Simple Allusions Nor True Mirrorings’: Seeing Double with Carl Schmitt” appears in Telos 153 (Winter 2010). Read the full version at TELOS Online website.
In response to recent criticisms of Schmitt’s argument as “tendentious” and symptomatic, this essay seeks to perform a reparative reading of the central claim of Hamlet or Hecuba for a substantial resemblance between the events within Shakespeare’s play and the murky circumstances surrounding the death of King James’s father, Lord Darnley. First, the historical archive surrounding Lord Darnley’s death is sounded for evidence that might support Schmitt’s claim and illuminate unresolved questions within the plot of Hamlet (in particular, the mysterious “sins” referred to by the Ghost). Secondly, the archive of James’s own published writings on sovereignty, demonology, and witchcraft are placed into relation with Jean Bodin’s similar writings, and brought to bear upon Schmitt’s reading of Shakespeare’s ghost scenes. The cruxes within Shakespeare’s play and Schmitt’s text about the ghost scene (“spirit of health” or “goblin damned”? Catholic or Protestant?) illuminate the relationship between sovereignty and demonology in early modern England: the two discourses are linked by the attempt to establish the divine status of sovereignty and the corresponding subordination of demons and ghosts to theologically established limits and laws. Departing from Schmitt’s initial arguments, this essay extends them in order to illuminate the political-theological terrain within which Hamlet functions.
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This article examines the issue of early modern sovereign succession and political representation through the figure of Horatio. Using Carl Schmitt’s comments on the “dying voice” in the first appendix of Hamlet or Hecuba, and his theory of political representation, this essay argues that Horatio represents the transitional space between the fading vestiges of political theology, and the first traces constituent sovereignty. In his role as mediator of the sovereign word of King Hamlet and the dying voice of Prince Hamlet, Horatio becomes the proto-constituent subject who signals the genesis of a reoriented political agency that is constituted by popular consent rather than authoritarian rule. Furthermore, Horatio is the paradoxical representative that both represents the body politic (in the sense of the King’s two bodies) to the people and the popular will to itself. 
