Sovereignty as Practice and Manifestation : Terror, Reform, and the Poetics of Rule in Early Modern Russia and Europe (Cycle de conf. de K. Ospovat ENS Paris)
Cycle de conférences du prof. Kirill Ospovat
Sovereignty as Practice and Manifestation : Terror, Reform, and the Poetics of Rule in Early Modern Russia and Europe
Durant les mois de septembre et octobre 2017, le labex TransferS et Ada Ackerman (THALIM) accueillent Kirill OSPOVAT, de l’Institut d’études slaves, Université Humboldt de Berlin (Allemagne) pour un cycle de conférences, dont le descriptif se trouve ci-dessous :
Sovereignty as Practice and Manifestation : Terror, Reform, and the Poetics of Rule in Early Modern Russia and Europe
This lecture course will address the cultural archeology of royal sovereignty enacted during the Westernizing reforms of Russia’s first emperor, Peter the Great (1672-1725) and his successors who returned Russia to the “concert of Europe”. Diverging from usual historical accounts, I will pursue a comparative, interdisciplinary and theoretically charged perspective. Situated between political history, history of ideas, cultural semiotics and the Foucauldian archeology of politics, or governmentality, the course will explore the foundational notions of the political which permeated and shaped the practices and symbolic visions of royal rule. Concentrating on a single period and a series of closely-related episodes and texts, I will offer an in-depth historical hermeneutics erasing the boundaries between knowledge and power, action and representation, politics and aesthetics. I will explore the mutual dependence of political authority, forms of knowledge, and modes of subjectivity. In doing this, I will inscribe Petrine Russia into a broad picture of early modern visions of sovereignty (Machiavelli, Bodin, Bacon, Hobbes) and knowledge (Descartes, Locke, Leibniz) as well as their interpretations in the work of twentieth- and twenty first-century scholars and cultural theorists (Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Yury Lotman).