Miguel Vatter
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 364698 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Miguel Vatter |
| NOMBRES | Miguel |
| APELLIDO | Vatter |
| FIRMA | VATTER M |
| AFILIACIONES | Flinders University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2384-8920 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 59 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 76 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 57 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1995 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Kojève’s planetary approach to Greek philosophy
This article discusses the second volume of Kojève’s Essai d’une historie raisonnée de la philosophie paienne dedicated to Plato and Aristotle. In particular it examines the strange emphasis and interpretation that Kojève gives of the central role played by astral theology in the philosophy of both Plato and Aristotle. The astral theology of the classical Greek philosophers was given pride of place by Werner Jaeger’s reconstruction of Aristotle’s…
Archipelagic Geopolitics and the Oceanic Embedding of the Nomos of the Earth
This article brings into dialogue the debate on the governance of the global commons and the emergent postcolonial discourse on ‘archipelagic thinking’ on the basis of an interpretation of Carl Schmitt's idea of the Grossraum in international law. It analyses two axioms in Schmitt's discourse on international law: the first is that the character of law as nomos varies depending on the elements of planetary habitability, such as earth, sea, air an…
Archipelagic Thinking and Its Political Implications in the Western Pacific
This special issue aims to illustrate how the emerging approach of archipelagic thinking can contribute to political theory and international relations theory, and it attempts to grapple with the geopolitical and ontological complexities of the South China Sea and Western Pacific. Archipelagic thinking is an emerging interdisciplinary approach in island studies, political anthropology and political ecology. The interest of archipelagic thinking f…
Biopolitics After Covid
In this essay we take stock of the shortcomings, successes, and promises of 'biopolitics' to understand and frame global health crises such as COVID-19. We claim that rather than thinking in terms of a special relationship between Western modernity and biopolitics, it is better to look at a longer and more global history of populations' politics of life and health to situate present and future responses to ecological crises. Normatively, we argue…
Response to Charles H. T. Lesch’s Review of Divine Democracy
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Aby Warburg and astral theology
ABSRTACTThis article offers a new reading of Aby Warburg's seminal lecture on “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” in which he deciphered some of the obscure iconography as referring to astrological decans of Egyptian and Indian provenance. The article argues that Warburg recovered the ancient discourse of “astral theology,” of neo-Pythagorean and Platonic provenance, in order to bolster his more general an…
The Viral Politics of Covid-19
Introduction. Crediting God with Sovereignty
Chapter 10 Natural Right and State of Exception in Leo Strauss
Crediting God
Tocqueville suggested that "the people reign in the American political world like God over the universe.” This intuition anticipates the crisis in the secularization paradigm that has brought theology back as a fundamental part of sociological and political analysis. It has become more difficult to believe that humanity’s progress necessarily leads to atheism, or that it is possible to translate all that is good about religion into reasonable ter…
Theology and World Politics
Response to Readers of Divine Democracy
Viral Politics of Covid-19
Living Law
This book discusses the political theology developed by German Jewish philosophy in the 20th century on the basis of its original reconstruction of the teachings of Jewish prophetology. In the shadow of the modern experiences with anti-Semitism, the rise of Zionism, and the return of charismatic authority in mass societies, the discourse of Jewish political theology advances the radical hypothesis that the messianic idea of God’s Kingdom correlat…
The Third Rome and Russian Republicanism
This article brings to bear contemporary discussions on Machiavelli and republicanism on Kharkhordin's discussion of Russian republicanism and autocracy and its reception of models from Venice and Byzantium
The Republic of the Living
Theocratic Legal Revolution and the Origins of Modern Secularism in Dante
This article discusses an anti-sovranist variant of political theology. Recent work on the sociology of modern constitutionalism has identified its source in the so-called Papal legal revolution that proclaimed the autonomy of the Church in relation to the Empire. The claim is that this legal revo-lution contributed to the “secularization” or de-sacralization of political power and established legali-ty as the principle of legitimacy. This paper …
Divine Democracy
The ‘return of religion’ in the public sphere and the emergence of postsecular societies have propelled the discourse of political theology into the centre of contemporary democratic theory. This situation calls forth the question addressed in this book: Is a democratic political theology possible? Carl Schmitt first developed the idea of the Christian theological foundations of modern legal and political concepts in order to criticize the secula…
Dignity and the Foundation of Human Rights
The aim of this article is to give a new reconstruction of the conception of human dignity as a pre-associative yet legal status. Such a legal conception of human dignity carries a universal legal obligation to respect the “innate” right to independence and enables us to move beyond the impasse between moral and political views of human rights. The argument has a normative and a genealogical component. The normative component shows why a legal co…
Liberal Governmentality and the Political Theology of Constitutionalism
'The king reigns but does not govern'. This formula, which according to Carl Schmitt was coined by Adolphe Thiers, a French liberal historian and politician, enemy of Bonapartism yet suppressor of the Paris Commune, has become today the most important formula in the study of liberalism. Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben both understand this formula as capturing something essential about liberalism as a form of governmentality that guides the co…
“Only a God Can Resist a God.” Political Theology between Polytheism and Gnosticism
Sovereignty – based on a claim to irresistible authority – and “speaking truth to power” (or parrhesia) are evidently opposed and yet they seem to have a strange affinity with one another, at least if one follows Foucault’s last lectures on this motif of political philosophy. This article revisits Hans Blumenberg’s reconstruction of the meeting between the German poet Goethe and the French emperor Napoleon as an example of a parrhesiastic encount…
Of asses and nymphs
Is Machiavelli an Epicurean in his political and religious thought? Recent scholarship has identified him as the foremost representative of Epicureanism in Renaissance Florence. In particular, his incomplete epic poem, The Ass, is read as an expression of his adherence to Lucretian naturalism. This article offers a new reading of the poem and shows that its teaching reveals that Machiavelli is closer to a Platonic variant of classical naturalism …
Divine Democracy
The ‘return of religion’ in the public sphere and the emergence of postsecular societies have propelled the discourse of political theology into the centre of contemporary democratic theory. This situation calls forth the question addressed in this book: Is a democratic political theology possible? Carl Schmitt first developed the idea of the Christian theological foundations of modern legal and political concepts in order to criticize the secula…
Machiavelli After Marx
The climate of history in a planetary age
Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt
This essay discusses the genesis of Arendt's concept of natality, and the reasons that led her to claim natality as a fundamental concept of political thought.The essay argues against the widespread thesis that Arendt took her idea of natality from Heidegger's existential analysis of human life.It argues, instead, that Arendt's account of natality should be situated within the discourse of bio-politics, and that it is based on a conception of lif…
The quarrel between populism and republicanism
Biopolitics
Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life Miguel Vatter (bio) Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 304 pp., ISBN 978-0816649907 Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 208 pp., ISBN 978-295-98791-0 Thomas Lemke, Biopolitik zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2007), 171 pp., ISBN 9…
Machiavelli and the Republican Conception of Providence
Machiavelli often seems to advocate a conception of religion as an instrument of political rule. But in the concluding chapter ofThe PrinceMachiavelli adopts a messianic rhetoric in which politics becomes an instrument of divine providence. Since the political project at stake inThe Prince, especially in this last chapter runs against both the interests and the ideology of the Catholic Church in Italy, some commentators have argued that Machiavel…
Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza
Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza:On the Relation between Political Theology and Liberalism Miguel Vatter (bio) Introduction Among those thinkers who experienced the emergence of totalitarian regimes and lived to offer a theoretical analysis of them, it is not infrequent to notice the absence of what in our times is presented as unquestionable evidence: the conviction that liberalism constitutes a political system antithetical …
The Idea of Public Reason and the Reason of State
Rawls and Schmitt are often discussed in the literature as if their conceptions of the political had nothing in common, or even referred to entirely different phenomena. In this essay, I show how these conceptions share a common space of reasons, traceable back to the idea of public reason and its development since the Middle Ages. By analysing the idea of public reason in Rawls and in Schmitt, as well as its relation to their theories of politic…
Political ontology, constituent power, and representation
In this piece, I discuss some aspects of the tension between democracy and constitutionalism in light of Pettit’s attempt to think popular control of government by way of a mixed constitution and the introduction of an alternative concept of representation
Human Rights, Legal Personhood and the Impersonality of Embodied Life
Since Locke, the concept of person has been closely linked to the idea of a subjective natural right and, later, to the concept of human rights. In this article we attempt to trouble this connection between humanity and personhood. For personhood is also an apparatus or dispositive of power. In the first half of the article, we identify a fundamental problem in the usual way human rights are connected to legal personhood by making use of insights…
Eternal Life and Biopower
Eternal Life and Biopower Miguel Vatter (bio) Thanatopolitics, Biopower, and Contemplative Life Foucault introduced the concept of biopower to explain how something like "thanatopolitics," the mobilization of entire populations "for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity," became the norm in the twentieth century (1990, 137). Agamben and Esposito have since offered two paradigms that seek to explain the seemingly inevita…
Althusser et Machiavel
Après 1977, la pensée d'Althusser effectue un « tournant » en s'écartant du Marxisme-léninisme. Les écrits posthumes de cette période tardive constituent une source d'inspiration extrêmement riche pour une pensée post-marxiste. On peut y trouver une réfutation des erreurs du marxisme-léninisme qui selon Louis Althusser auraient deux racines : d'un coté la dévaluation et l'incompréhension de l'autonomie du politique et de l'autre la dépendance vis…
The climate of history in a planetary age
Dignity and the Foundation of Human Rights
The aim of this article is to give a new reconstruction of the conception of human dignity as a pre-associative yet legal status. Such a legal conception of human dignity carries a universal legal obligation to respect the “innate” right to independence and enables us to move beyond the impasse between moral and political views of human rights. The argument has a normative and a genealogical component. The normative component shows why a legal co…
Republics are a Species of State
Machiavelli's The Prince is often credited with introducing a modern conception of the state. However, there is controversy over whether such a conception is compatible with his republican theory of freedom. This article delineates the ancient, medieval and modern roots of Machiavelli's state and offers an hypothesis as to how principality and republic fit together in his political thought
Politico-Theological Foundations of Universal Human Rights
Today it has become nearly commonplace to understand the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a new, positive "basic law" for global civil society. Yet this Kelsen- inspired, positivist understanding of the UDHR covers over both the theologico-political and the bio-political presuppositions of the doctrine of "basic rights" voiced through the UDHR. In order to bring to light these dimensions of universal human rights, this paper offers an int…
The People Shall Be Judge
This essay offers an interpretation of Kant’s republicanism in light of the problem of political judgment. Kant is sometimes thought to base his conception of law on an idea of sovereignty drawn from Hobbes and Rousseau, which would leave little room for popular contestation of the state. In this essay, I reconstruct Kant’s account of the rule of law by bringing out the importance of his theory of judgment. I argue that for Kant the civil conditi…
Republicanism or Modern Natural Right
Republicanism or Modern Natural Right?The Question of the Origins of Modern Representative Democracy and the Political Thought of Giuseppe Duso Miguel Vatter (bio) Introduction: Duso's Contribution to the Contemporary Debate on Representative Democracy Giuseppe Duso's work in political theory during recent decades has focused on the contradictions or aporiae implicit in the very idea of representative democracy. This theme is not surprising comin…
La politique comme guerre
de ce numéro sur Cairn.info
Vita della mente e tempo della polis
Luc Ferry’s Political Philosophy
Vita della mente e tempo della polis
Taking Exception to Liberalism
Taking Exception to Liberalism
Between form and Event
The Encounter of Action and Times as Explanation of Fortuna
Phenomenology in Kant’s Idealism
La politique comme guerre
de ce numéro sur Cairn.info
Althusser et Machiavel
Après 1977, la pensée d'Althusser effectue un « tournant » en s'écartant du Marxisme-léninisme. Les écrits posthumes de cette période tardive constituent une source d'inspiration extrêmement riche pour une pensée post-marxiste. On peut y trouver une réfutation des erreurs du marxisme-léninisme qui selon Louis Althusser auraient deux racines : d'un coté la dévaluation et l'incompréhension de l'autonomie du politique et de l'autre la dépendance vis…
Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza
Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza:On the Relation between Political Theology and Liberalism Miguel Vatter (bio) Introduction Among those thinkers who experienced the emergence of totalitarian regimes and lived to offer a theoretical analysis of them, it is not infrequent to notice the absence of what in our times is presented as unquestionable evidence: the conviction that liberalism constitutes a political system antithetical …
Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt
This essay discusses the genesis of Arendt's concept of natality, and the reasons that led her to claim natality as a fundamental concept of political thought.The essay argues against the widespread thesis that Arendt took her idea of natality from Heidegger's existential analysis of human life.It argues, instead, that Arendt's account of natality should be situated within the discourse of bio-politics, and that it is based on a conception of lif…
"Seminario "Libertad, igualdad, ¿fraternidad
Americanae nace como un proyecto conjunto que surge dentro de la Red Europea de Información y Documentación sobre América Latina (REDIAL), y que ha afrontado la Biblioteca de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). Esta nueva biblioteca virtual hace más accesibles los libros digitales de tema americanista a los investigadores y usuarios interesados de cualquier parte del mundo
In Odradek’s World
This essay reconstructs Agamben’s theory of bare life as an example of an affirmative biopolitics, a politics of life that lies beyond sovereignty. The essay shows that his account of bare life constitutes a reworking of four central motifs found in Marx’s historical materialism: the facticity of alienated existence, the fetishism of commodities, the profanity of bourgeois society, and the nihilism of revolution. Agamben’s renewal of historical m…
The Idea of Public Reason and the Reason of State
Rawls and Schmitt are often discussed in the literature as if their conceptions of the political had nothing in common, or even referred to entirely different phenomena. In this essay, I show how these conceptions share a common space of reasons, traceable back to the idea of public reason and its development since the Middle Ages. By analysing the idea of public reason in Rawls and in Schmitt, as well as its relation to their theories of politic…
Biopolitics
Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life Miguel Vatter (bio) Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 304 pp., ISBN 978-0816649907 Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 208 pp., ISBN 978-295-98791-0 Thomas Lemke, Biopolitik zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2007), 171 pp., ISBN 9…
Introducción a dossier Biopolítica y Filosofía
Republicanism or Modern Natural Right? The Question of the Origins of Modern Representative Democracy and the Political Thought of Giuseppe Duso
Research Article| July 01 2010 Republicanism or Modern Natural Right? The Question of the Origins of Modern Representative Democracy and the Political Thought of Giuseppe Duso Miguel Vatter Miguel Vatter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2010) 10 (2): 99–120. https://doi.org/10.2307/41949694 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mig…
Eternal Life and Biopower
Eternal Life and Biopower Miguel Vatter (bio) Thanatopolitics, Biopower, and Contemplative Life Foucault introduced the concept of biopower to explain how something like "thanatopolitics," the mobilization of entire populations "for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity," became the norm in the twentieth century (1990, 137). Agamben and Esposito have since offered two paradigms that seek to explain the seemingly inevita…
Republicanism or Modern Natural Right
Republicanism or Modern Natural Right?The Question of the Origins of Modern Representative Democracy and the Political Thought of Giuseppe Duso Miguel Vatter (bio) Introduction: Duso's Contribution to the Contemporary Debate on Representative Democracy Giuseppe Duso's work in political theory during recent decades has focused on the contradictions or aporiae implicit in the very idea of representative democracy. This theme is not surprising comin…
Crediting God
The People Shall Be Judge
This essay offers an interpretation of Kant’s republicanism in light of the problem of political judgment. Kant is sometimes thought to base his conception of law on an idea of sovereignty drawn from Hobbes and Rousseau, which would leave little room for popular contestation of the state. In this essay, I reconstruct Kant’s account of the rule of law by bringing out the importance of his theory of judgment. I argue that for Kant the civil conditi…
Poder, vida y subjetivación
CM y LQ): en el debate contemporáneo sobre "biopolítica", en particular en el contexto italiano y siguiendo, entre otros, el impulso de Roberto Esposito, ha cobrado una cierta fuerza la idea de que una verdadera resistencia al gobierno sobre la vida tendría que implicar necesariamente repensar la categoría de la "vida" (más allá de las oposiciones metafísicas entre lo humano y lo animal, o entre bios y
The quarrel between populism and republicanism
Machiavelli and the Republican Conception of Providence
Machiavelli often seems to advocate a conception of religion as an instrument of political rule. But in the concluding chapter ofThe PrinceMachiavelli adopts a messianic rhetoric in which politics becomes an instrument of divine providence. Since the political project at stake inThe Prince, especially in this last chapter runs against both the interests and the ideology of the Catholic Church in Italy, some commentators have argued that Machiavel…
Politico-Theological Foundations of Universal Human Rights
Today it has become nearly commonplace to understand the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a new, positive "basic law" for global civil society. Yet this Kelsen- inspired, positivist understanding of the UDHR covers over both the theologico-political and the bio-political presuppositions of the doctrine of "basic rights" voiced through the UDHR. In order to bring to light these dimensions of universal human rights, this paper offers an int…
The Republic of the Living
Philosophy (40 obras) · Law (39 obras) · Political science (38 obras) · Politics (38 obras) · Sociology (23 obras) · Epistemology (22 obras) · Political Theology and Sovereignty (19 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought (16 obras)