Signs, Designs and Sovereignty

Instructor: Colin Drumm Date & Time: May 28 , June 4, 11, 18, 25, July 2, 9, 16. 14:00-16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: This seminar considers the problem of political order as a matter of constitutional design, or as a question of the ordering of signs in time and space and across social difference. Special attention will be paid to the way that sovereignty, in the Western philosophical tradition, is understood as emerging as a symptom of the incompleteness of the law as an “algorithm” capable of producing decisions about any given state of affairs. This inherent incompleteness raises the specter of an unstable succession, or the potential failure of reproducing social order from the past into the future, and thus across the time of human generations and social reproduction. Readings will be drawn from classical and modern political thought — which may include Plato, Aristotle, Livy, Dante, Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, de Maistre, Cortés, Schmitt, Kantorowicz, Serres, Derrida, and other— as well as case studies on the rise and fall of institutions of constitutional order: the oracle of Delphi, the medieval church, and Bretton Woods and the dollar system. How might such an attention to the deep history of constitutions open possibilities for designing our world anew?

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