An individual claims agency as an autonomous subject by rebelling against a declining ruling order.
He searches for principles of self-authorizing legitimacy of a new order, based on absolute freedom, which will plot its own history.
The antinomy of the autonomous subject becomes manifest as self-division between freedom and stasis.
The split subject commits the hubris/excess of one-sidedness and becomes a criminal.
The tragic antinomy of collective rebellion becomes manifest as the hubris of freedom which pursues justice though lawlessness.
The history of the modern tragedy of sovereignty, from Romanticism to Post-colonialism, may be written in terms of the agonism between the sovereign and the robber.
1 December 2020
Piano Poetry Pantelis Politics 