Pier Giuseppe Monateri, Dominus Mundi: Political Sublime and the World Order

Abstract

1 – has been receiving increasing attention internationally. Pier Giuseppe Monateri’s latest monograph may well be listed among the titles belonging to this tradition (a term to be used cautiously). Indeed, in this book Monateri uncovers “the dark side of the genealogy of the modern political which happened to be denied by rationalism and to fall into latency” (101). In so doing, Monateri relates the origin and development of modern philosophical, political, and legal consciousness as well as sovereign prerogatives to episodes of “magic and occultism, which contributed to defining and developing the concept of sovereignty as we know it today” (3). More specifically, going “one step further than post-modern theories” (166; emphasis in original), the author claims that after having represented the cornerstone of Roman imperialism, the ideology of dominus mundi, with its emphasis on “a single legitimate universal authority” (4), left the scene to the Westphalian construct of independent sovereign states and international relations to then re-appear today in the guise of global processes of world domination. Monateri places Thomas Hobbes’s political theory and the “meeting of the Leviathans” (5) at the center of a crucial passage between the dissolution of the Roman imperialist, all-encompassing ideology of supremacy and the current emergence of “non-Westphalian creatures” (ibid.) at the global level. On these lines, and against the (by now) conventional view of Carl Schmitt and his “contemporary epigones like Hart and Negri, and Agamben” (2), Monateri points at “the demonological, and as such exotic and heterodox, rather than theological and level headed” (134; emphasis in original) essence of modernity and in particular, “of the modern Western concept of the political” (ibid.). Unveiling “the occult prerogatives of the “political” (3) is all the more relevant given that, Monateri asserts, “the current context of globalisation represents the reappearance of the ghost of the Dominus Mundi, which lies dormant as a repressed political figure, a refoul e” (5; emphasis in original). In terms of methodology, Monateri opted for the literal analysis of selected texts and iconographic representations (a sort of Agambenian philosophical archaeology, which the author turns against Agamben (140, 147–8)), such as the Antonine Column (28) and the Leviathan’s frontispiece (112). As the title makes it clear, a key role is played by the notion of “sublimity”. Monateri clarifies that the term “is not a neutral label” (12). Instead, “it consciously represents the establishment of a parallel with the language of witchcraft, spell and magic” (ibid.). Drawing from Duncan Kennedy and Edmund Burke (10, 101), Monateri uses the ontological category of the sublime as an operational device to LAW & LITERATURE VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1 BOOK REVIEWS