Staging the Political: Drama and the Theory of the State in Europe's Age of Crisis

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will welcome Bojan Kovačević for a presentation of his ongoing research on theatre as a possible language for political theory in a European context marked by crisis. Questioning the silence of the classics in the face of contemporary disorder, he explores dramatic scenes as spaces where concepts of the state and law are both formulated and tested.

Presentation of the project

Political theory reveals its deepest insights in moments of threatening disorder, when the serenity of the old world begins to falter. Crisis thus becomes an opportunity to reflect on the political—a Machiavellian moment for those who write about the state and the law. Yet, the current European age of crisis has failed to awaken theoretical imagination. Entrenched in technocratic paradigms, scholars in European studies often attribute the instability of their states to citizens’ credulity, the lies of “populists,” or external actors such as Russia, China, or U.S. elections.

However, crisis should serve as a catalyst to reengage with the classics, around the enduring tensions between life and form, liberty and power, change and order, democracy and anarchy, republic, tyranny, and dictatorship. And yet, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, and Carl Schmitt remain silent—exiled to the margins by political thought textbooks. How can we make them respond to our present calls? This is the fundamental question that animates our study.

In search of a new language for political theory, we turn to the theatre. On stage, everything that matters to the thought of the state and the law unfolds within a few hours. Theatre brings to light the values, representations, customs, laws, prejudices, and illusions of the established order—disrupted by the seditious surplus of life (Mehr-Leben, in Georg Simmel’s terms). This force first questions the existing order, then overturns it, embarking on a frantic quest to create a new world—or else wanders aimlessly among the ruins of the old.

Dramatic art thus becomes a new language for thinking the state: an artificial respiration administered to a faltering European political thought. What new insights into classical problems of political theory might emerge from a narrative about the European Union told in the language of dramatic literature? Who is the director? What do the backstage and the actors look like? Where does the turning point come from, what foreshadows it, what conceals it? How might the denouement unfold?

And above all: how do theatre practitioners respond to the crisis? What artistic resonance does this axiological and administrative confusion—so visible across Europe—find on the stages of Parisian theatres?

Speaker

Bojan Kovačević is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade. His research focuses on the history of political thought, political theory, the history of drama and theatre, federalism and constitutionalism theory, and the political system of the European Union.