| My dissertation offers a combined genealogical and interpretative study of the way the distinction between human and animal is established and invoked in foundational texts of modern sovereignty. In four chapters that range from Hobbes' theory of sovereignty haunted by the problem of melancholy, to contemporary critical approaches to the relationship between sovereignty and humanism, my dissertation re-frames discussions about human domination over non-human animals and sovereign authority. It also makes novel contributions to the question of what it means to be a political animal. I call into question a fundamental assumption: the idea that we humans, in contrast to non-human animals and nature, are distinctively political because we possess logos (speech, reason). I find evidence in the texts that I study that the distinction between humans and animals established in these terms generates melancholy, as the animality of the human being (as well as non-human animals and nature) remains excluded from the realm of politics. My dissertation alerts us to the consequence of this exclusion: the constant return of the animal in the human city. The notion of lycanthropy is introduced as an articulation of melancholy and animality that accounts for the recurrence of the animal in the realm of the political. |
