The Non-Sovereign Self, Responsibility, and Otherness: Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Stanley Cavell on Moral Philosophy and Political Agency

Abstract

Defining non-sovereignty is an important task in a political theoretical landscape which often takes for granted that the globalised world is essentially interconnected but does not sufficiently interrogate what it means for subjects to be fully relational. Rosine Kelz argues on the first page of this sophisticated and timely work that non-sovereignty is a ‘condition political communities and singular individuals cannot overcome’ (p. 1). She gives a phenomenological account of this condition, which grows out of a dextrous overview of Heidegger’s ontology of subjectivity. [...]