Diß ist die Zeit der Könige nicht mehr

What happens, in religious and political contexts, when the sovereign – leader or pope, king or queen – decides to (or is forced to) step down? In other words: when sovereignty fails? Or is such a decision still a (if not the highest) manifestation of sovereignty? The seminar will visit such (and similar) questions in the encounter between Jesus and Pilatus (according to the Gospels); in Giorgio Agamben's essay The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days; in Ernst Kantorowicz' The King's Two Bodies; in Hölderlin (Der Tod des Empedokles) and Georg Büchner (Der Hessische Landbote); in Max Kommerell's Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik); in Bertolt Brecht and Hannah Arendt (On Revolution). Taught in German.