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.