After a Pause

Review of Petar Bojanic’s Book “Violence, Figures of Sovereignty”. Yekaterinburg: Kabinetny Ucheny. 270 p.

Abstract

Serbian philosopher Petar Bojanic is quite well-known to Russian-speaking readers. The book “Violence, Figures of Sovereignty” released by the Kabinetny Ucheny publishing house continues the theme of study into violence, its connection with the state, law, and sovereignty. Petar Bojanic proposes to focus on the reader's feelings from the encounter with violence, to pause, to put a comma, which allows a multiplicity of reactions and figures to emerge. Figures should be understood as anthropological types, as well as phenomena. Among them are the figures of enemy and friend which are classical for European philosophy. Bojanic turns to this pair of concepts proposed by Carl Schmitt as the main ones for the definition of sovereignty. The author of the book compares or confronts them in conceptual situations offered by Hobbes, Hegel, Kant, Arendt, and a number of other philosophers. In the course of this procedure, sovereignty as a stable and comprehensible category of political philosophy is criticised and interpreted in a different way. The violence that arises between enemy and friend and is used for the sake of maintaining sovereignty or destroying it in the opposite party, aggravates and uncovers the problems of the war ethics, the status of ‘last’ violence, and the justice of enmity, among other. This way to state the problem of the contemporary state of sovereignty explicates the relevance of the work presented, marking the limits of classical philosophical concepts.