A Politics of the Scene

Juxtaposing readings of three plays of William Shakespeare and two major treatises in political philosophy-Plato’s Republic and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan-Kottman contests the figural ground from which political philosophy emerges and suggests how a Shakespearean sense of the ‘scene’ might open up new avenues for thinking about politics. A Politics of the Scene builds especially on the reflections of Hannah Arendt and offers a speculative approach to politics that abandons taxonomical and scientific ambitions in order to finally reckon with the world as a stage.