“The Light of Reason”: Reading the Leviathan with “The Werckmeister Harmonies”
2016; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/0090591716631019
ISSN1552-7476
Autores Tópico(s)Political Theology and Sovereignty
ResumoIn this essay I stage an encounter between Hobbes’s Leviathan and two versions of the “The Werckmeister Harmonies” (a chapter in Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance [1998] and a film version of the story by the director Bela Tarr [2000]). The story contains a number of Hobbes icons, for example, an enormous stuffed whale and a “Prince,” both of which arrive with a circus that comes to a Hungarian town and precipitates fear and chaos. I argue that the story thinks (differently within the two genres) both with and against Hobbes, enabled by Hobbes’s aesthetic style (which I elaborate) while at the same time challenging the historical prescience of his political philosophy. Sorting the diverse ontologies of the story’s main characters helps us better appreciate Hobbes as a writer and distance ourselves from Hobbes’s solution to political disorder.
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