In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes's landmark work on political philosophy, James Martel argues that although Hobbes pays lip service to the superior interpretive authority of the sovereign, he consistently subverts this authority throughout the book by returning it to the reader.Martel demonstrates that Hobbes's radical method of reading not only undermines his own authority in the text, but, by extension, the authority of the sovereign as well. To make his point, Martel looks c...

Although Haitian revolutionaries were not the intended audience for the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they heeded its call, demanding rights that were not meant for them. This failure of the French state to address only its desired subjects is an example of the phenomenon James R. Martel labels "misinterpellation." Complicating Althusser's famous theory, Martel explores the ways that such failures hold the potential for radical and anarchist action. In addition to the Haitian Revolutio...

Winner, 2002 French Translation Prize for NonfictionMurderous Consent details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it’s classically understood. Marc Crépon insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, ...

This groundbreaking handbook reviews, consolidates, and develops the growth of scholarship on ideology as it occurs as part of our political landscape and within the systems of thought and belief that collectively constitute our political subjectivity.It presents ideology functioning on the level of imagination and representation not only as a written and verbal language but also as expressed through architecture, art, media technologies, work, ritual practices, and other forms of ...

This thoroughly revised edition has been updated to incorporate recent case studies, biographies, syntheses, journal articles and scholarly conferences that appeared in conjunction with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 2014.The original version of this work, published by James Joll in 1984, quickly became established as the authoritative introduction to the subject of the war’s origins. Significantly expanded by Gordon Martel in 2007, this volume continues to...

Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother,Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal proposes a new interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through this maternal relation, their writing appears as the product of an "anxiety" rising not from paternal influence, but from the violence done to their mother in their attempts at self-creation through writing. In order to bring to li...

Divine Violence looks at the question of political theology and its connection to sovereignty. It argues that the practice of sovereignty reflects a Christian eschatology, one that proves very hard to overcome even by left thinkers, such as Arendt and Derrida, who are very critical of it. These authors fall into a trap described by Carl Schmitt whereby one is given a (false) choice between anarchy and sovereignty, both of which are bound within—and return us to—the same eschatological enve...

Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” widely considered his final word on law, proposes that all manifestations of law are false stand-ins for divine principles of truth and justice that are no longer available to human beings. However, he also suggests that we must have law—we are held under a divine sanction that does not allow us to escape our responsibilities. James R. Martel argues that this paradox is resolved by considering that, for Benjamin, there is only one law that we must ...

Notions of love intersect with ideas on personal liberty, obligation, individuality, self, and difference in this study. James Martel contends that theorists' inattention to the subject has impoverished our explorations of political discourse.

Uncannily similar projects, Beckett's and Derrida's oeuvres have been linked by literary and philosophy scholars since the 1990s. Taking into consideration their shared historical and personal contexts as writers whose main language of expression was 'adopted' or 'imposed', this Element proposes a systematic reading of their main points of connection. Focusing on their engagement with the intricacies of beginnings and origins, on genetic grounds or surfaces analogous to the Platonic khôra,...

In 1971, a wealthy libertarian real estate developer named Michael Oliver decided that the only way to escape taxes and government overreach was to build a brand new country from scratch. His plan was audacious: dump barges of sand onto the Minerva Reefs, a shallow, submerged coral atoll in the South Pacific, and declare the birth of the Republic of Minerva. Reef of Rebels tells the bizarre, true story of this utopian micro-nation. Oliver actually succeeded in raising land above sea level,...

In Anarchist Prophets James R. Martel juxtaposes anarchism with what he calls archism in order to theorize the potential for a radical democratic politics. He shows how archism—a centralized and hierarchical political form that is a secularization of ancient Greek and Hebrew prophetic traditions—dominates contemporary politics through a prophet’s promises of peace and prosperity or the threat of violence. Archism is met by anarchism, in which a community shares a collective form o...