Depotenzierung der Souveränität : Religion und politische Ideologie bei Claude Lefort, Slavoj Zizek und Karl Barth. Habilitationsschrift (Religion in Philosophy and Theology / RPT 85) (2016. 319 S. 234 mm)

The concept of sovereignty as characterised by Hobbes has shown itself to be crucial to politics and theology right up to the present. According to Carl Schmitt, it implies a law-positing power itself beyond the law which stems from the early Modern Age's metaphysical-theological inheritance. In contrast, the current political discourse no longer sees sovereignty as an inheritance of theology, but rather as a product of man's political imagination.
Belief in sovereignty relies on the fiction that absolute power is actually able to really exist and stably endure, thus bestowing political ideologies with necessarily totalitarian purposes. With reference to the critiques of sovereignty by the philosophers Claude Lefort and Slavoj Zizek and theologian Karl Barth, Rebekka A. Klein clarifies how such ideologies can be exposed and defused. The three thinkers initiate an attenuation of the concept of sovereignty by reinforcing its subversive.