The Blog and The
Podcast have been going well since their inception in November. Almost past
1,000 views, which is far more than I expected for my measly reading notes.
Ever so thankful to all of those who follow and read my notes – indeed, I
cannot thank you enough.
I realised I had not
updated my log of what I am reading at the moment, alongside a list of some of
the books I received for Christmas. So here is what I am doing with my time
this January – in no particular order:
· Graham
Harman (2018) Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything,
London: Pelican Books.
· Giorgio
Agamben (2015) Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, Redwood City,
CA: Stanford University Press.
· Paolo
Virno (2008) Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, Los Angeles,
CA: Semiotext(e).
·
Slavoj
Žižek (2020) Hegel in a Wired Brain, London: Bloomsbury.
·
Philip
Cunliffe (2020) The New Twenty Years’ Crisis: A Critique of International
Relations, 1999-2019, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
· Michael
Sandel (2020) The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of The Common Good?,
London: Allen Lane Publishing. Martin Wight (1977) Systems of States, Leicester:
Leicester University Press.
I am currently watching
Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ as I happen to be finishing Kantorowicz’s ‘The
King’s Two Bodies’. Oddly, in the first few episodes of the first few
seasons, it feels as though the lines spoken by Queen Mary of Teck could have
come straight from Kantorowicz’s masterpiece. The emphasis of the death of the individual’s
body at the hands of the emergence of the Sovereign’s body is frequently one of
those posits that draws my mind back to Kantorowicz. However, there is one thing
in particular that connects Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ and ‘The King’s Two
Bodies’.
This is the notion of ‘The
Crown as Fiction’. In Kantorowicz’s case, his section of the same name
discusses the manner in which medieval glossators used the Roman law of
inheritance—specifically the ‘fiction of Law’ that ensured the continuity of
predecessor and successor—to elucidate the continuity of sempiternal authority.[1] In the case of the Netflix
show, there has been much talk as to whether or not the programme is a record
of historical events that are dramatized, or dramatic stories that have been historicized
– especially as far as the relationship between The Queen and Diana is concerned.
Perhaps there is a reconciliation here? Perhaps the very fictitiousness of ‘The
Crown’ is a myth-making tool in an era where the Royal Family have
experienced a rather great deal of internal fragmentation and ‘scandal’ – i.e.,
Prince Andrew’s relation to Jeffrey Epstein, alongside the negative press concerning
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Perhaps the very fictitious nature of ‘The
Crown’ ensures the continuity of the quasi-theological condition of the
British Monarchy in the contemporary era, as a relationship of quasi-mysticism
through the ‘fiction’ of the Queen’s personal and professional life. Even in a
psychoanalytic way, perhaps, ‘The Crown’ represents the unfulfilled wish
of desire to know the royals, and in this way unify with them as a
quasi-theological figure, except, interesting, via the body and life of the queen
– of Elizabeth Windsor, and not – as has so often in the past been attempted on
screen – the body and life of The Queen – of Elizabeth II Regina.
In this, the world of
the fiction blends with the world of the non-fiction, but still short of ‘The
Real’. Perhaps, thus, this is the ‘The Crown as NON-Fiction’.
[1] For more on this, Kantorowicz aside,
see: Victoria Kahn (2009) ‘Political Theology and Fiction in The King’s Two
Bodies’, Representations, 106 (1), pp. 77-101.,