Witchcraft, Statecraft, Mancraft

On the Demonological Foundations of Sovereignty

Bibliographic Data

ID12662377
AuthorsJonathon O’donnell (0000-0002-7794-4697, Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume21
Issue6
Pages530-549
Publication date2020-05-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Theology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1462-317X • E-ISSN: 1743-1719
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1462317x.2020.1759278
OpenAlexW3021313717
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited29

Questions of sovereignty remain central to political theology, yet the role played by demonology in sovereignty’s construction has yet to be closely examined. This article addresses this omission by exploring the relation between the phantasmatic figures of the “sovereign” and the “witch” in the work of Jean Bodin (1530–96). Early modern concepts of “witchcraft” and its prosecution have a constitutive relation to (theo)political sovereignty, modern gender relations, and the birth of the nation-state. Reading Bodin’s work on witchcraft alongside those on sovereignty, tolerance, and the household, I argue that the demonological witch forms a self-consolidating other at the foundation of modern constructions of sovereignty, tolerance, and the (cishetero)normative family – an excess or absence that reinforces and destabilizes gendered, sexual, political, juridical, and religious hierarchies that continue to influence the present. In doing so, I demonstrate that sovereignty rests on a demonological foundation

Environmental ethics · Law and economics · Political economy · Political science · Political theology · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

Tools

Open DOI