Benjamin Lewis Robinson – författare

Modern politics is preoccupied with states of emergency. Yet emergency politics obscures underlying socio-economic, infrastructural, and ecological conditions of need. Prompted by Hannah Arendt's claim that theater is "the political art par excellence," Benjamin Lewis Robinson treats this political perplexity as a theatrical problem. In the company of Arendt and political thinkers including Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School, Rosa Luxemburg and Martin Heidegger, Robinson revisits the entwined histories of politics and theater, analyzing plays that stage the political scene as an always asymmetrical coupling of need and emergency.In Arendt's view, the defining tendency in modern politics is for need to emerge where it has no right to appear, posing a threat to politics as such. In contrast, the works of theater addressed in Need / Emergency concern moments when, whether it ought to or not, need does appear – demanding justice. Writing in exigent times, Elfriede Jelinek, Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, and Friedrich Hölderlin produced formally innovative political theater. Not reducible to the drama of emergency, these plays bring into focus the very need for politics. Moving fluently between theory and theater, Robinson offers a critical study of biopolitics and emergency politics in times of poverty, plague, infrastructural predation, and forced displacement, from the French Revolution to the climate crisis.

Modern politics is preoccupied with states of emergency. Yet emergency politics obscures underlying socio-economic, infrastructural, and ecological conditions of need. Prompted by Hannah Arendt's claim that theater is "the political art par excellence," Benjamin Lewis Robinson treats this political perplexity as a theatrical problem. In the company of Arendt and political thinkers including Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School, Rosa Luxemburg and Martin Heidegger, Robinson revisits the entwined histories of politics and theater, analyzing plays that stage the political scene as an always asymmetrical coupling of need and emergency.In Arendt's view, the defining tendency in modern politics is for need to emerge where it has no right to appear, posing a threat to politics as such. In contrast, the works of theater addressed in Need / Emergency concern moments when, whether it ought to or not, need does appear – demanding justice. Writing in exigent times, Elfriede Jelinek, Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, and Friedrich Hölderlin produced formally innovative political theater. Not reducible to the drama of emergency, these plays bring into focus the very need for politics. Moving fluently between theory and theater, Robinson offers a critical study of biopolitics and emergency politics in times of poverty, plague, infrastructural predation, and forced displacement, from the French Revolution to the climate crisis.

Is justice only achievable by means of bureaucratization or might it first arrive with the end of bureaucracy? Bureaucratic Fanatics shows how this ever more contentious question in contemporary politics belongs to the political-theological underpinnings of bureaucratization itself. At the end of the 18th century, a new and paradoxical kind of fanaticism emerged - rational fanaticism - that propelled the intensive biopolitical management of everyday life in Europe and North America as well as the extensive colonial exploitation of the earth and its peoples. These excesses of bureaucratization incited in turn increasingly fanatical forms of resistance. And they inspired literary production that provocatively presented the outrageous contours of rationalization. Combining political theory with readings of Kleist, Melville, Conrad, and Kafka, this genealogy of bureaucratic fanaticism relates two extreme figures: fanatical bureaucrats driven to the ends of the earth and to the limits of humanity by the rationality of the apparatuses they serve; and peculiar fanatics who passionately, albeit seemingly passively, resist the encroachments of bureaucratization.