Filozofija i drustvo 2017 Volume 28, Issue 1, Pages: 5-21
https://doi.org/10.2298/FID1701005M
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An audience with … the public, the representative, the sovereign
Milanese Niccolo (Centre d’etudes sociologiques et politiques Raymond Aron (CESPRA), EHESS, Paris)
The right of audience, in common law, is the right of a lawyer to represent a
client in a court. Royalty, the Pope and some Presidents grant audiences.
What does the power to grant an audience consist in? And what does it mean to
demand an audience (with)? Through a reading of the way in which the
vocabulary of theatre, acting and audience is involved in the generation of a
theory of state by Hobbes and Rousseau, this paper looks to reopen these
questions as a political resource for us to re-imagine and refigure our ways
of being together. Through readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, it looks at the
ways in which the performance of politics creates the public, the
representative and the sovereign and the ways these figures interact. It
proposes an alternative role for theatre as places of affective learning and
a civic ethics of playfulness, in which the auto-institution of the state as
an imagined collectivity is fully assumed.
Keywords: public, sovereignty, performance, audience, Rousseau, rhetoric, authority, representation, Hobbes