The Royal Remains

"The king is dead. Long live the king!" In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereignand the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In The Royal Remains,Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of thestructures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new locationthe life of the peoplewhere something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconsciouswhich often manifest themselves in peculiar physical waysare really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. PairingFreud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal,and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, The Royal Remainslocates much of modernityfrom biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experimentsin this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature.

Eric L. Santner is the Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, professor of Germanic studies, and a member of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, most recently of On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, also published by the University of Chicago Press.