Article

‘‘To be human, nonetheless, remains

a decision’’: Humanism as decisionism
in contemporary critical political theory

Diego H. Rossello
Instituto de Ciencia Polı́tica, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860,
Macul, Santiago, Chile.
drossello@uc.cl

Abstract This article suggests that humanism is a decisionism in contemporary

critical political theory. Despite obvious and multiple differences, leading critical the-
orists like Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Jürgen Habermas, among
others, share an investment in stabilizing the human being as a ground of the political.
This stabilization of the human should concern political theorists, as this article argues,
because it uncritically reproduces conceptual affinities between the notion of the human
being and sovereign authority. By investing in the stability and centrality of the human
being, these theorists perform what will be called, paraphrasing an often neglected
argument by Carl Schmitt, a decision to be human. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I
argue that Schmitt’s decisionism is not merely circumscribed to sovereignty’s juridico-
political dimension, but that it also includes a peculiar commitment to God’s decision to
become human in Christ. Against this decisionism as humanism, the article draws on
Walter Benjamin, Roberto Esposito, and Jacques Derrida to propose an alternative
politics that destabilizes humanity and sovereignty through the emergence of the ani-
mal, or what will be called melancholic lycanthropy.
Contemporary Political Theory (2016). doi:10.1057/s41296-016-0070-2

Keywords: humanism; decisionism; melancholy; sovereignty; animality

… while it may generate anxiety, animal subjectivity does not threaten

modern rule… Superior intelligence enabled humans long ago to domesticate
animals, ensuring that any subjectivity they might have will lie safely
‘‘beneath’’ human rule.
Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, ‘‘Sovereignty and the UFO’’
… a sound political conception depends above all on concentrating on the
human person… the part of animality in such a set-up is immense…. It

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory

www.palgrave.com/journals
 Rossello

follows, therefore, that a work of education, taming the irrational to reason…

must be pursued within the political body, it follows that this latter must be in
a state of tension and defense against perpetual internal and external threats
of disintegration and destruction…
Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy
… I only wanted to tell you that the fine formula: the human is a human to the
human a human – homo homini homo – is no solution, but rather only the
beginning of our problematic. I mean this critically, but in a thoroughly
affirmative way, in the sense of the verse: To be human, nonetheless, remains
a decision.
Carl Schmitt, Dialogue on Power and Access to the Holder of Power
In this article, I suggest that humanism is a form of sovereign decisionism in
contemporary critical theory. According to my reading, leading critical theorists
like Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, Eric Santner, Jürgen Habermas, and the
predominant theoretical approaches to human rights, despite their obvious and
multiple differences, share an investment in stabilizing the human being as a
ground of the political (Žižek, 2009; Agamben, 1998, 2004, 2008; Santner, 2006,
2012; Habermas, 2003, 2010). This stabilization of the human should concern
political theorists, I suggest, because it reproduces metaphysical affinities between
the notion of the human being and sovereign authority. Thus, whereas humanism is
often portrayed as a much needed barrier against the excesses of sovereign power, I
argue that humanism is co-implicated with sovereignty’s metaphysical assumptions
in the first place.
In a provocative article, Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall explore the
metaphysical affinity between sovereignty and humanism and coin the term
‘‘anthropocentric sovereignty’’ (Wendt and Duvall, 2008). According to them,
anthropocentric sovereignty operates under the modern assumption that only
humans rule (or question rule, for that matter): neither God nor Nature can rule or
challenge human rule. Hence, anthropocentric sovereignty remains metaphysically
blind to non-human forms of life. Wendt and Duvall focus on non-human alien life
but their essay has implications for animal life too. Their concern is that the
sovereign state, because it cannot establish whether UFOs are extraterrestrial or
not, remains ill-equipped to securitize the UFO threat, and can only produce
ignorance about it. In the course of their discussion, the authors mention, but do not
fully explore, the possibility of an animal exception to anthropocentric sovereignty.
Wendt and Duvall believe that although anthropocentric sovereignty could be
unsettled by claims such as animal conscience and animal rights, in the end ‘‘while
it may generate anxiety, animal subjectivity does not threaten modern rule either
physically or ontologically’’ (2008, p. 624). However, one may ask: how is anxiety
generated by a threat that has already been securitized? Wendt and Duvall

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory

 Humanism as decisionism in contemporary critical political theory

circumscribe the possibility of an animal exception to animal conscience or rights,

but what if there are other forms of emergent animal subjectivity that may question
anthropocentric sovereignty? According to my reading, an animal exception is still
conceivable, and melancholy, instead of anxiety, is the affective disposition that
can help us grasp the implications of such exception.
Mobilized mainly in psychoanalytic contexts, melancholy is often understood as
a response to the lost object that, unlike mourning, refuses to accept such loss and
remains pathologically attached to it (Freud, 1917). But melancholy has a richer
history beyond its rendering in psychoanalysis. Ancient Byzantine physicians, early
modern physiologists, and contemporary psychiatrists focus on a peculiar inflection
of melancholia called lycanthropy: the acute melancholic syndrome of deperson-
alization where the person feels, and acts, as if he or she has turned into an animal
(Burton, 2001; Fahy, 1989). According to my reading, the undecidable status
between humanity and animality brought about by melancholic lycanthropy can be
conceived as an animal exception that requires periodic and sustained decisions to
be human: a decision to be human is made in order not to be taken over by
animality.
The notion of decisionism, as it is well-known, is intrinsically linked to Carl
Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty. According to the German legal theorist,
sovereignty is defined by the capacity to decide on the exception: ‘‘sovereign is
he who decides on the exception’’ (Schmitt, 1985, p. 5). But before this argument,
in his book Political Theology of 1922, Schmitt had access to another version of
decisionism in the work of a writer he admired: the mystical Catholic poet Theodor
Däubler. Schmitt showed a sustained interest in Däubler’s work throughout his life;
he dedicated a short study to the epic poem Das Nordlich in 1916 (Schmitt, 1991),
and included a line of this long poem in a script he wrote to be broadcast on the
radio, in 1953 (Schmitt, 2015, p. 31). The suggestive line of Däubler’s poem
included by Schmitt in the script reads: ‘‘to be human, nonetheless, remains a
decision [Doch Mensch zu sein, bleibt trotzdem ein Entschluss]’’ (Schmitt, 1991).1
What this quote by Schmitt reveals is the co-implication of humanism and
sovereign decisionism. Focusing on this co-implication is important because it
gives us critical purchase not only on the affinities between sovereignty and
humanism, rarely focused on, but also on the critical discourses that are supposed to
question them. Critical political theorists and human rights theorists pit humanism
against sovereignty in the hope of limiting, if not bringing to an end, the unchecked
exercise of sovereign power. But instead of questioning affinities between
sovereignty and humanism, these theorists inadvertently reinforce them by
buttressing humanism without ever unsettling anthropocentric sovereignty’s
metaphysical comfort zone. Thus, drawing on the works by Jacques Derrida,
Walter Benjamin, and Roberto Esposito, and in contrast to humanist critical
theorists, this article proposes a critique of humanism as decisionism based on
melancholic lycanthropy (Derrida, 2008; Benjamin, 2003; Esposito, 2012b).
 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory
 Rossello

The article proceeds as follows. The first section introduces, both historically
and analytically, the notion of melancholic lycanthropy. I find a sustained interest
in lycanthropy in the canon of political theory, and suggest that lycanthropy can
inform a critique of sovereignty and humanism. The second section tracks and
questions, from the perspective made available by melancholic lycanthropy,
different versions of humanism as decisionism in the works of relevant
contemporary critical political theorists. The third section concludes by highlight-
ing the contribution that melancholic lycanthropy can make to critically assess our
contemporary attachment to the stability of the human person and its dignity.

Melancholic Lycanthropy: To be or Not to be Human

Recent works in critical political theory have put the lycanthrope (from the Greek
lykos, wolf) at the center of their analysis (Agamben, 1998; Dumm, 2005; Derrida
2009; Rossello, 2012; Dienstag, 2015; Torrano, 2016). Derrida and Agamben, for
example, find in the lycanthrope a liminal figure that resists assimilation into the
civilizing practices of the sovereign state and remains outside the contours of the
political. Whereas for Agamben, the lycanthrope is a figuration of the homo sacer,
the person who can be killed without committing homicide or sacrifice, for Derrida
the werewolf points us to the outlaw, a creature that roams in the contours of the
law. Despite the contemporary return of the wolf-man, taking lycanthropy seriously
will no doubt still be seen as idiosyncratic, and so it may be worthwhile to track the
figure through the canon of political theory.
Revealing references to lycanthropy in the canon of political theory go back to
Plato’s discussion of the degeneration of political regimes from enlightened rulers
to wolf-like tyrants. According to Plato in The Republic, a tyrant gradually becomes
more bloodthirsty, driving people into exile, killing his kinsmen and ultimately
‘‘turning from man into a wolf’’ (Plato, 2003, p. 280). Lycanthropy also features as
a concern in Jean Bodin’s inaugural formulation of sovereign authority, and in
King James I, the melancholic ‘‘philosopher-king’’ who was forced to defend the
grounds of his own investiture. Contrary to the consensus among French Catholic
theologians of the time, Bodin argued that ‘‘it is clear that men are sometimes
transmuted into beasts while their human shape and reason remain’’ and this is done
‘‘either by the power of God directly, or He gives this power to Satan the executor
of his will’’ (Bodin, 1995, p. 128). Conversely, King James I took sides with
ancient Byzantine doctors and physiologists (Aëtius of Amida and Plautus
Aegineta) and claimed that lycanthropes were not possessed by the devil (nor,
presumably, inspired by God, which Bodin also countenances) but suffered an
acute melancholic syndrome (King James I, 2008, p. 57).
In his book The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, one of the most exciting
and puzzling English writers of the 17th century, dissented from ancient Byzantine

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory

 Humanism as decisionism in contemporary critical political theory

physicians who had classified lycanthropy as a kind of melancholy, and suggested

that this malady should be categorized instead as a type of madness or frenzy
(Burton, 2001, pp. 139–143). Burton defined lycanthropy as ‘‘lupinam insaniam, or
wolf-madness, when men run howling about graves and fields in the night, and will
not be persuaded but that they are wolves, or some such beasts’’ (Burton, 2001,
p. 141). Thomas Hobbes, the most exemplary theorist of sovereignty and Burton’s
contemporary, famously draws on Plautus’s phrase homo homini lupus, man is a
wolf to man, to allegorize the anarchical and pre-political state of nature, before the
creation of a sovereign state (Hobbes, 1998, p. 89). In addition, Derrida has
recently discussed Jean Jacques Rousseau’s self-description in the Confessions as a
loup-garou, a werewolf or outlaw (Derrida, 2009, p. 63).
Beyond the canon of political theory, contemporary psychiatry defines lycan-
thropy either as the ‘‘belief that one can change himself or other into a wolf or some
other animal,’’ and links it to related syndromes such as ‘‘insania lupina;
melancholia; melancholia zooanthropia’’ (Campbell, 2009, p. 569), or simply
conceives of it as a ‘‘severe type of depersonalization’’ (Surawicz and Banta, 1986,
p. 38). Scholars in psychiatry have also noted that the notion of lycanthropy has
now expanded so as to embrace the delusional transformation not only into a wolf,
but also into other animal species (Keck et al. in Blom, 2014, p. 96). As I conceive
it, the notion of melancholic lycanthropy includes, but is not limited to, its uses in
psychiatric discourses.
Beyond the vernaculars of psychology and the history of political thought, post-
humanist theorists as well as scholars interested in melancholy ultimately remain
inattentive to the potential of lycanthropy but may contribute to our thinking about
it. Post-humanist theorists in general, and those focused on animal studies in
particular, have been performing a sustained critique of humanism with
consequences for the realm of ethics but remain at a distance from political theory
(Hayles, 1999; Haraway, 2004; Calarco, 2008; Weil, 2012; McCance, 2013). On
the other hand, debates surrounding the politics of melancholia often do not attend
to the link between this peculiar affect and animality (Brown, 1999; Žižek
2000a, b; Mladeck and Edmonson, 2009; Ferber, 2013). In this context, it may be
instructive to turn to Benjamin, Derrida, and Esposito, whose works offer
unexplored conceptual resources for linking lycanthropy to a critique of
sovereignty and humanism.
Benjamin’s writings destabilize the notion of human being as they mobilize, and
give life to, a vast repertoire of non-human forms of creaturely life such as dogs,
angels, stones, among many others (Hanssen, 2000; Santner, 2006). Among
Benjamin’s improbable creatures, I single out the melancholic prince discussed in
his book on the German Trauerspiel, because his or her indecisiveness, together
with the process of depersonalization that affects him or her, seems to undermine
not only the foundations of sovereign power, but also the prince’s own human
status. According to Benjamin in the Trauerspiel book, the prince ceases to be a
 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory
 Rossello

representative of God on earth and is affected by melancholy. This melancholy is

not only religious, but also physiological: the melancholic is afflicted with a
superabundance of black bile characteristic of the rabid dog (Benjamin, 2003,
p. 152). Thus, in Benjamin’s description, the melancholic prince of the baroque
mourning play cannot decide on the exception (Weber, 1992) and fails to secure not
only the state but also his or her status as human. Discussing princely melancholia,
Benjamin writes: ‘‘in the ruler [Herrscher], the supreme creature, the animal [Tier]
can re-emerge with unsuspected power’’ (Benjamin, 2003, p. 86).
Esposito also reflects upon the link between melancholy and the stability of the
polity. On the one hand, Esposito alerts us about the political valence of
melancholia as an affective disposition associated with both mental and civil
instability, but he ultimately remains inattentive to a possible connection with
animality (Esposito, 2012a, pp. 27, 30). On the other, he discusses the problem of
the animal in the human, but misses its link with melancholy, and focuses instead
on the exclusion of animality in the conceptual construal of human rights. Esposito
reminds us that the Catholic personalist philosopher Jacques Maritain was a key
inspiration for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that he had little
esteem for the animality of the human being. According to Esposito, for Maritain
‘‘(a) human being is a person precisely because (and only if) it maintains full
control over its animal nature,’’ and adds ‘‘(a)nd the reason why human beings have
an animal nature is so they can measure against it their sovereign status as a
person’’ (Esposito, 2012b, p. 89).
Derrida also challenges the notion of the human individual considered as
autonomous and self-contained, presupposed in our conceptualization of rights, by
focusing on the notions of ipseity and autos.2 According to Derrida, ‘‘[b]efore any
sovereignty of the state, of the nation-state, of the monarch, or, in democracy, of the
people, ipseity names a principle of legitimate sovereignty’’ (Derrida, 2005, p. 12).
Thus, ipseity, the self or selfhood, the autonomous individual human being
construed by the Western philosophical tradition, not only bears the marks of
sovereignty, but is sovereignty even ‘‘before’’ the state. Through the notions of
lycology and lycanthropy, among others, Derrida renews his critique of a self
(sovereign and human) haunted by the animal that therefore he or she is.3
But Derrida and Benjamin cannot be brought together easily, for Derrida has a
powerful critique of Benjamin, one that is highly relevant to the issues explored
here: Derrida is indebted to Benjamin’s critique of sovereignty, but Derrida also
alerts us to the problematic status of melancholy in Benjamin’s argument. Derrida
objects to Benjamin’s argument on creaturely melancholy, of the sorrow of
animals, nature and the indecisive prince, because Benjamin’s take on creaturely
mournfulness occurs ‘‘within the time frame of redemption’’ (Derrida, 2008, p. 20).
According to Derrida, Benjamin’s understanding of melancholy is ultimately
postlapsarian, it occurs ‘‘after the fall and after original sin’’ (Derrida, 2008, p. 20),
and it bears the marks of its redemptive framing. Thus, Benjamin’s reading of
 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory
 Humanism as decisionism in contemporary critical political theory

melancholy misses the moment in Genesis, still in Eden, when human authority
over animals is established by way of the power of naming.
Derrida argues that in the return to the ‘‘timelessness of paradise’’ that is staged
in the German baroque mourning play, melancholy equalizes all creaturely life by
way of a via negativa: creatures are now equal on the basis of their irredeemability.
But for Derrida, there is an important, if usually overlooked, asymmetry. Focusing
on the second version of Creation in Genesis, when God invites Adam to name the
animals, Derrida argues that God summons the animals ‘‘in order to ‘subject’ …
them to man’s command, in order to place them under man’s ‘authority’ … God
destines the animals to an experience of the power of man’’ (Derrida, 2008, p. 21).
By naming the animals, Adam establishes his prerogative to ‘‘subject [assujetisse],
tame, dominate, train, or domesticate the animals born before him and assert his
authority over them’’ (Derrida, 2008, p. 16). Derrida here mobilizes a vocabulary
central for political theory: subject, authority, power, domination, among others.
For Derrida the scene of Adam naming the animals is a political scene, a
foundational moment of human authority over non-human creatures, even though it
occurs in ‘‘a time when there was not yet time’’ (Derrida, 2008, p. 22), namely, in
the timelessness of Creation before the fall.
Taking Derrida’s critique of Benjamin seriously calls us to think about the
political importance of acts (both inaugural and daily thereafter) of subjection of
animals and nature. In the act of naming, Adam extracts himself from the realm of
animality, and is bound to be the lord of his own animal body and of non-human
forms of life: Adam performs a decision to be human. Seen in this light,
lycanthropy, the kind of melancholic syndrome that brings forth an undecidable
state between humanity and animality, signals the possibility of undoing the
‘‘originary’’ act of subjection, or at least of marking creaturely resistances to it.
Thus, lycanthropy serves to trace and question the theoretical and philosophical
discourses that refer to or enact, willingly or unwillingly, the primal scene of
animal subjection. This is important because the ‘‘founding moment’’ of the de-
animalization of man is necessary for sovereignty and/as humanism to come to be.
The fact that this decision to be human is never over, the fact that it recurs is key to
any project that seeks to analyze its singular configurations in different periods,
texts, and thinkers.

Deciding to be Human in Contemporary Critical Political Theory

In the introduction, I suggested that Schmitt’s decisionism is not merely

circumscribed to the juridical dimension of state sovereignty, but that it stages a
metaphysical commitment to the stability of the human person as such. Schmitt’s
understanding of sovereign decisionism bears the marks of his framing in terms of
political theology, and remains attached to God’s decision to become human in

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory

 Rossello

Christ (Schmitt, 1996). This theologico-political decision to become human leads

Schmitt to a politics of stabilization of the civitas humana, or the human city,
widely understood.4 But the complicity between sovereign authority and the human
person, or the affinity between modern sovereignty and humanism, has often been
downplayed in the hope that a right kind of humanism could provide a limit to
sovereign power. As we shall see, the works by Habermas, Žižek, Agamben, and
Santner are all representative of this idea, even if their approaches to the human
differ widely. Thus, liberal subjects who deliberate; anti-melancholic subjects of
the passage à l’acte; and mortalist humanists who focus on vulnerability, all claim
to be opposing Schmitt’s state-based sovereign decisionism. But are they really
opposing Schmitt? Or are they re-citing him?
The work by Eric Santner, an otherwise refined and challenging reader of
Benjamin’s work, is a good example of how a critical project that re-works
Benjamin’s insights on creaturely life risks falling back into merely replaying the
decision to be human. In his book The Royal Remains, Santner offers an alternative
narrative of the development of political modernity. Whereas the now conventional
story is one of re-distribution of power from top to bottom in the break from
absolute monarchy to popular sovereignty, Santner argues that the royal remains
after democratic revolutions. These remains take place, and are displaced, in the
transition from the political theology of royal authority to the biocracy of popular
sovereignty.
Drawing on Ernst Kantorowicz’s argument in The King’s Two Bodies, Santner
holds that the political theology of royal authority depends upon the doctrine of the
double body of the king. On the one hand, the king has a mortal body, vulnerable to
illness, aging and decay; on the other, the king bears a mystical-supernatural body
whose immortality and invulnerability are required and presupposed in royal
succession. According to Santner, the distinction between two kingly bodies does
not disappear with the advent of democratic revolutions but gets re-distributed in
each citizen of the new sovereign body: the people.
The Royal Remains offers an impressive account of the excitations of the flesh of
the political in a variety of theoretical registers (political theology, psychoanalysis,
political theory, and more) and sensitizes us to the pressures, and not just the
liberations (usually focused on) that may result from democratic revolutions.
However, my investigation of humanism as decisionism leads me to depart from
Santner at a crucial point: his insistence on that which distinguishes the human
political community from any other form of life. Linking the notion of flesh with
his prior notion of ‘‘creaturely life,’’ Santner argues:
By ‘‘creaturely’’ I do not simply mean nature or living things or sentient
beings, or even what the religiously minded would think of as the whole of
God’s creation, but rather a dimension specific to human existence, albeit one
that seems to push thinking in the direction of theology. It signifies a mode of

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory

 Humanism as decisionism in contemporary critical political theory

exposure that distinguishes human beings from other kinds of life: not
exposures simply to the elements or to the fragility and precariousness of our
mortal, finite lives, but rather to an ultimate lack of foundation for the
historical forms of life that distinguish human community (Santner, 2011,
p. 5; emphasis added).
This paragraph sums up the most salient insights in Santner’s work and its most
thought-provoking limitations. Santner restates the distinction between humans and
other forms of life three times; why? As we shall see later on, his thrice-stated
decision to be human can be seen as a theologico-political decision upon the animal
exception. This decision was already anticipated in the early pages of the book,
when Santner states that he plans to rework Benjamin’s insights towards ‘‘a kind of
philosophical anthropology’’ (Santner, 2011, p. xx). However, why are these
decisions necessary, if at all? Santner justifies these decisions by alluding to a
certain ‘‘dimension’’ that seems to ‘‘push thinking’’ towards theology.5
But this push towards the theologico-political is neither irresistible nor
irreversible. On the contrary, Santner’s emphasis on the push towards theology
may also incite a counter-push: a process of melancholic depersonalization that
withdraws from the theologico-political dimension of sovereignty and sensitizes us
to the emergence of the animal that (in Derrida’s terms) therefore we are. In
Santner’s terms, we might suggest that this pre-symbolic and pre-somatic stuff that
pushes towards the theological might in fact be pushing towards what, drawing on
Derrida, we may call the lycological. This is what forces Santner to decide upon it.
What I call ‘‘melancholic lycanthropy’’ reorients us from a sphere that is allegedly
characteristic of the human being, but which can be seen as a metaphysical and
onto-theological recasting of sovereignty, towards a melancholic depersonalization
that encounters and makes room for the animality in/of the human being.
In many ways, Santner is indebted to Giorgio Agamben. Agamben, too, is
concerned with a widespread re-distribution of the indistinction between human
and animal in modern sovereignty (Agamben, 2003). Agamben reads the
possibility of becoming wolf as part of ‘‘a condition in which everyone is bare
life and a homo sacer for everyone else’’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 106). Modern
sovereignty generates bare life, Agamben argues, because Hobbes’s view of the
state of nature as a place where man is a wolf to man is never totally excluded by
contracting into a sovereign body. Quite the opposite, the ‘‘lupization of man and
humanization of wolf is at every moment possible,’’ because the violent state of
nature is presupposed in the civil state (Agamben, 1998, p. 106). Reworking the
Schmittian category, Agamben calls this excluding inclusion of the wolf in the city
the ‘‘state of exception’’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 109).
Agamben’s focus on lupization and humanization may suggest his position is
close to my own. But there are important differences here. From my perspective,
Agamben’s main concern in his reading of Hobbes’s political theory is the ever

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory

 Rossello

present risk of de-humanization, namely, the transformation of the human being

into a life that is superfluous and expendable. Agamben’s genealogical recuperation
of the werewolf figure as an outlaw insists on this concern: he reminds us that the
wargus or caput lupinem of the laws of Edward the Confessor never ceases to be a
human being, even if (or precisely when) it is figured as a wolf. Thus, Agamben
reads the werewolf as a figuration of human vulnerability, not as the possibility of
an animal exception with potential for questioning anthropocentric sovereignty
(Agamben, 1998, p. 109).6
Paradoxically, it can be argued that Agamben performs a humanization of the
wolf: he imposes a philosophical anthropology of human vulnerability onto
incipient symptoms of lycanthropy. As we saw with Santner, so, too, with
Agamben, there is here a decision to be human. Agamben makes clear that ‘‘at
issue [here] is not simply fera bestia and natural life’’ (as if animals and nature
were irrelevant for the issue under consideration: sovereignty) but a sovereign-led
process of de-humanization that culminates in the concentration camp (Agamben,
1998, p. 106). Thus, while Agamben reads the indistinction between man and wolf
as an attack on the dignitas of the human being, I suggest we can also read it as the
emergence of the animal that resists humanization, that is to say, as a symptom of
resistance to the forceful de-animalization of the human being.
Attending to lycanthropy may offer an antidote to the stabilization of the human
being favored by humanism as decisionism. But the risk here is that we might fall
into a peculiarly despondent affect, characteristic of critical approaches, often
dubbed as left melancholia. This risk is important if it prevents us from affirming
lycanthropy’s political potential. In an insightful article, Wendy Brown discusses
ambiguities of the melancholic temper in the leftist political imaginary. According
to Brown, Benjamin had ‘‘a well-developed appreciation of the productive value of
acedia, sadness, and mourning for political and cultural work,’’ and even conceived
of melancholy as ‘‘something of a creative wellspring’’ (Brown, 1999, p. 20). But
Brown also acknowledges that Benjamin was a fierce critic of ‘‘left melancholia,’’
namely, of the ‘‘mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to feelings,
values and worldviews’’ that constitute the left and which remain ‘‘thinglike and
frozen,’’ deprived of life force, in the hearts of the would be leftist (Brown, 1999,
p. 26). Brown invites us to resist the traditionalist and backward-looking aspects of
the left melancholia and to find new ways of invigorating classic ideals of the left
such as ‘‘dignity, equality, and freedom’’ (Brown, 1999, p. 26).
Brown, like Benjamin, is both attracted to and repelled by melancholy. The
attraction in Benjamin’s understanding of melancholy stems from a certain fidelity
or ‘‘loyalty to the world of things,’’ mediated by the knowledge that the
melancholic contemplator ‘‘embraces dead objects … in order to redeem them’’
(Benjamin, 2003, p. 157). The redemptive power of melancholy is added by
Benjamin to a historical trend, traceable from Aristotle to Marsilius Ficinus, that
links the saturnine temper to genius and scholarly pursuits. The worry about
 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory
 Humanism as decisionism in contemporary critical political theory

melancholy, however, apparent in both Brown and Benjamin, resides precisely in

its alleged contemplative impulses that breed passivity, inaction, sloth, deferral, and
suggests self-absorption, isolation, self-centeredness, and disconnection from
people and things. These traits are often emphasized by critics of the politics of
melancholia who argue for the primacy of the (revolutionary) act for obtaining a
radical political change. According to these critics, the melancholic is the
paradigmatic product of capitalism, the isolated and inactive individual who
remains immersed in capitalist social relations even (or precisely) when she or he
sorrowfully denounces them.
Slavoj Žižek represents the anti-melancholic position, provocatively linking
melancholy with what he describes as the ‘‘politically correct’’ stance regarding the
lost object. According to Žižek, the melancholic’s fidelity to the lost object explains
‘‘postmodern’’ political agendas like the ones furthered by queer and postcolonial
studies. Žižek sees melancholy at work when gays and lesbians are conceived as
remaining loyal to the initial, and repressed, identification with the same-sex
libidinal object, and when colonized populations are thought of as melancholically
attached to their traditional ways of life despite their violent immersion in global
capitalism. Žižek believes that the ‘‘postmodern’’ politics of melancholia cannot
question the capitalist social relations that structure our life in common, offering
instead a merely politically correct commentary on those relations (Žižek, 2000a, b).
Žižek also reads the rehabilitation of melancholia in the ‘‘postmodern’’ political
agenda as typically anti-Hegelian. Whereas Žižek understands the work of
mourning as killing the object for a second time by finally coming to terms with the
loss, melancholy resists the notional sublation of the object and remains suspended
in its attachment to it. Melancholy’s stark resistance to move on, to reabsorb or re-
appropriate the lost object, remains an obstacle for the dialectical movement of
affirmations and negations embraced by Žižek. According to him, melancholy
interrupts the dialectical Aufhebung because it confuses lack (the motor of
dialectics for Žižek) and loss. But nothing was actually possessed and then lost,
Žižek argues, (‘‘the object is lacking from the very beginning… its emergence
coincides with its lack’’) and so the translation of lack into loss paradoxically
reinforces the idea of our possession of the object and allows the melancholic to
possess it ‘‘in its very loss’’ (Žižek, 2000a, b, p. 660). The ambivalence that Brown
and Benjamin cultivate in relation to melancholia is ultimately dismissed by Žižek
on behalf of a radically emancipatory act.
Žižek’s anti-melancholic stance is partnered with a materialist theology that
emphasizes continuities between Marxism and Christianity criticizing what he sees,
in Derrida and Levinas, as a melancholic ‘‘primordial passivity [that is] infinitely
indebted and responsible to the call of an Otherness [and] never acquires positive
features but always remains withdrawn’’ (Žižek, 2000a, b, p. 664). Žižek calls for
us to attend to the theological significance of the incarnation of God in Christ as a
religious suspension of the ethical that disrupts the social and political fabric of the
 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory
 Rossello

pagan world.7 Here, we have the original lost object, ‘‘once God became man, there
was no longer a God one could return to or become’’ (Žižek and Milbank, 2009,
p. 31), and we have Žižek’s favored response: do not try to recover God, nor mourn
its passing, but rather endorse the becoming-human of God as well as the
impossibility of going back to a purely transcendent God, at a distance from human
affairs. This is the challenge of embracing what Žižek calls the ‘‘monstrosity of
Christ.’’
However, according to Žižek, the Holy Spirit remains in (and through) the
community of believers and the promise of its realization on earth is to be found in
Marxism, the only metaphysical position that can deliver on the promise. The Holy
Spirit thus becomes the specter of communism haunting Europe, and the world.
Thus Žižek’s ‘‘theological materialism’’ seeks to articulate Marxism and
Christianity as the sole two metaphysical positions alternative to liberal-capitalism
(see Žižek, 2000a, b, p. 2).
Žižek’s re-reading of Christianity joins Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty in
celebrating the political implications of a God that decides to become human. But
whereas Schmitt seeks to honor the Christian God-made-man by thinking the
sovereign representative in the image of the authority exercised by the Roman
Catholic Church (Schmitt 1996), Žižek’s materialist theology emphasizes the fact
that once God decides to become human (and dies as human), the ‘‘immaterial’’
God ceases to exist, and sovereignty is exercised by a community of human
believers. Whereas incarnation means for Schmitt that political authority should be
circumscribed to a personal and decisionist representative sovereign, for Žižek
sovereignty takes the form of a community of believers embracing some version of
communism. In both cases, however, human sovereignty remains untouched and is
grounded in God’s metaphysical decision to be human. Thus, although Schmitt’s
political theology and Žižek’s materialist theology seem to derive distinct, and
ultimately opposed, political implications from incarnation, they both find in God-
made-man an event that ultimately informs and animates their political theories.8
We can see their commonalities best from the perspective of lycanthropy – and this
is one of the virtues of this perspective.
A political theory of lycanthropy, inspired by Benjamin, and Derrida, and
complemented by Esposito, mobilizes melancholic lycanthropy precisely to show
the link between sovereignty and the onto-theological foundations of becoming
human. From the perspective of lycanthropy, Žižek’s conception of the monstrosity
of Christ wants to have its cake – to become human – and eat it too – to become
monstrous. According to Žižek, following a remark by Hegel, Christ’s monstrosity
lies in the fact that ‘‘the finite fragile individual is ‘inappropriate’ to stand for God’’
(Žižek and Milbank, 2009, p. 74). What Žižek (and perhaps also Santner) does not
see is that monstrosity is not engendered by the abyss of dignitas separating the
humble human vessel from the Almighty God. Rather, the abyss of dignitas,
reinforced by incarnation, is already at work in the human – between the human, its
 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory
 Humanism as decisionism in contemporary critical political theory

own animality, and the rest of non-human animals. Incarnation may be seen from
this perspective as actuating this prior trauma: a re-humanization that goes back to
the violent subjugation whereby Adam named the animal, and inaugurated
humanism.
Unlike Žižek, Habermas and Francis Fukuyama return to Aristotle to vouchsafe
the dignity of the human person. As is well-known, Aristotle argued in The Politics
that ‘‘he who is unable to live in society … must be either a beast or a god: he is not
part of a state’’ (Aristotle, 1996, p. 14). Aristotle’s fundamental cartography of the
human city remains as vibrant as ever, or so it seems. To this day, political theorists
draw on Aristotle to defend a certain enlightened idea of human nature against
modern science and technology: to play God regarding biotechnologies may in fact
turn the human species into mere cattle. The contribution lycanthropy might make
here is necessary, even pressing.
Fukuyama relies on an Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing to
oppose the perils of a Huxleian world caused by contemporary biotechnology
(Fukuyama, 2002a, b). Jürgen Habermas, also draws on Aristotle to reassert the
humanist contours of our moral and political self-understanding. Habermas
mobilizes Aristotelian intuitions to sensitize us to the disruptive and dehumanizing
potential of developments in science and technology, specifically the manipulation
of the human genome. Habermas asserts that, unlike the ethos advanced by
biotechnologies, our lifeworld continues to be ‘‘in a sense, Aristotelian,’’ namely,
we ‘‘do not think twice before distinguishing between inorganic and organic nature,
plants and animals … animal nature and the reasoning and social nature of man’’
(Habermas, 2003, p. 44).
For Habermas, humans, who are neither beasts nor Gods receive orientation from
distinctions between the natural and the artificial, what is grown and what is made,
despite the fact that these distinctions no longer have the ontological traction they
once did. By enabling us to treat other human beings as means, and not as ends in
themselves, biotechnologies destabilize the distinctions that shape our sense of
moral community. The possibility of manipulating the genetic information of
humans to come, creating designer babies or enhancing certain physical capabil-
ities, threatens the moral self-understanding of humanity. If the dignity of human
life is obtained through socialization and intersubjective agreements achieved by
communication, Habermas says, the alteration of genetic information of future
generations of human beings frames them as objects and leaves them irrevocably
outside of the moral conversation.
The perspective provided by lycanthropy invites us to consider the possibility
that Fukuyama and Habermas share, perhaps unwittingly, Schmitt’s decision to be
human. For Fukuyama and Habermas, the problem is not, as it was at times for
Schmitt, the depersonalizing forces of the state as a machine (which undoes the
possibility of decision) but rather the technology of biotechnology, which increases
some choices – like what kind of babies to have – but at the cost of undermining the
 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory
 Rossello

thing that makes choosing significant: humanity itself. Whereas Fukuyama

advocates for national and transnational regulation of the use of biotechnology
(for instance, to prevent human cloning), Habermas recasts the project of a moral
community to secure our self-understanding as ‘‘members of the species of
‘humanity’’’ (Fukuyama, 2002a, b, pp. 56–63; Habermas, 2003, p. 40). Habermas
ultimately advocates an ‘‘ethics of the [human] species’’ (Habermas, 2003, p. 37).
The positions of Habermas and Fukuyama are in tension with critical perspectives
that show the constitutive instability of human nature. These perspectives either
stress the unstable nature of human nature by attenuating the distinction between
human, and machine, i.e., in the figure of the cyborg discussed by Katherine Hayles
and Donna Haraway, or by interrogating the distinction between human and animal,
i.e., in Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism and Deleuze’s notion of becoming-
animal (Hayles, 1993; Haraway, 1991; Derrida, 2008; Deleuze and Guattari, 2004).
As I see it, the notion of melancholic lycanthropy introduced in these pages has
strong affinities with such post-humanist positions and generates compelling
responses to the effort now to generate an ethics of the human species.
But lycanthropy also posits its own specific contribution to make to political theory.
Focusing on an affective disposition that makes the human status undecidable,
lycanthropy offers a glimpse of a road not taken where the central figure is not the
Schmittian decision to be human, but rather a more hospitable disposition towards the
undecidability that haunts such decision. By focusing on such undecidability,
lycanthropy questions the link between sovereignty and humanism, and this
questioning has consequences for our contemporary understanding of what it means
to be human, and what it means to protect and respect the human being and other non-
human creatures. Thus, according to the perspective made available by lycanthropy,
even notions such as human rights can be seen as decisions to be human.

Concluding Remarks

As we have seen, contemporary critical theorists like Santner, Agamben, Žižek, and
Habermas, despite their many differences, coincide in performing different versions
of what I called a decision to be human. These authors decide to be human as a
reaction against different versions of an animal exception: the creaturely pressures
produced by the ex-citations of law and sovereignty; the lupization of man generated
by the state of exception; the melancholic passivity of postmodern ethics; and the
manipulation of the human genome that risks turning human beings into mere cattle.
Thanks to these decisions, anthropocentric sovereignty remains strong and the
symptoms of lycanthropy remain more or less under control.
Or so it seems. After the horrors of WWII, the notion of universal human rights
became the new conceptual ground for fostering an unconditional respect for
human dignity. It was decided that, after Nazi concentration camps and Soviet

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory

 Humanism as decisionism in contemporary critical political theory

gulags, we have good reasons to be on guard against excesses of the sovereign

nation state, and to invest in the protection of human dignity as a way of impeding
the return of such excesses. But we also, perhaps mistakenly, dismissed the idea
that human dignity conceived in this way depends upon something like the
mechanisms of investiture on which divine royal authority depended, and modern
sovereignty still depends.
Santner’s reading of Kantorowicz helps us grasp this paradox of dignitas in a
way that is significant for my argument on lycanthropy. In a little noted discussion
at the end of his book, Kantorowicz suggests that the human, just like the king, is
also the product of an investiture. Kantorowicz reads Dante Alighieri’s Divine
Comedy as positing the question of whether:
the capacity of ‘‘Being Man’’ … did not amount to an ‘‘office,’’ the highly
responsible office of Man towards mankind – an office equal in rank and
responsibility and universality with papatus and imperiatus and adorned with
a Dignity no less sempiternal than that of either the emperor or the pope: the
Dignity of Man (Kantorowicz, 1997, p. 460).
Kantorowicz seems to suggest that being human is also a high office with a
dignitas attached to it. Humanisms of different sorts have tried to sustain and
reinforce the investiture of the human in distinct ways, but often with a tendency to
miss the fable or the fictive aspect of the human office (Kahn, 2009). Humanism
has a tendency to overact its role – melancholic lycanthropy reminds us of this.
Thanks to this reminder, we can see that after WWII, Schmitt’s theory of
sovereignty was deemed unable to guarantee human dignity, and some turned to the
Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain for an alternative.
Maritain’s ‘‘Christian democratic’’ vindication of the dignity of the human person
seemed more attuned to the new and incipient post-sovereign conceptions of global
citizenship. Maritain believed (in tension with Schmitt) that contemporary liberal
democracy could be reconciled with Christian values and the enforcement of human
rights. Recent works in human rights’ scholarship remind us that Maritain was
influential in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948
(Dougherty, 2003, p. 100; Moyn, 2015). For him, Catholicism pointed in a different
direction than it did for Schmitt, and this was an important challenge to Schmitt.
However, in a chapter especially dedicated to ‘‘Animality and Personality,’’
Maritain recasts (transfers) the Schmittian decision to be human to, and in, each
and every human person. Maritain holds that because the person is ‘‘an animal
gifted with reason’’ the ‘‘part of animality in such set-up is immense’’ and therefore
‘‘a work of education, taming the irrational to reason, and developing the moral
virtues, must constantly be pursued within the political body’’ (Maritain, 2000,
p. 100). According to Maritain, ‘‘we have yet emerged so little from animality; the
part of malice, of latent barbarism and of perversion is so great in us’’ that the task
of securing the dignity of the human person requires a struggle against the darkest
 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory
 Rossello

forces in our own selves (Maritain, 2000, p. 101). Here animality is recognized but
is treated as irrationality and barbarism.
This gloomy cartography of human nature was a product of the midcentury
barbarisms in which Schmitt himself played a part. But Esposito reminds us that
Maritain’s project of subjugating the animal in the person exhibits tensions that
press themselves more forcefully upon us when we attend to the very declarations
of human rights designed to settle them. From this perspective, human rights are
themselves the product of a decision, of a universal declaration to be human and to
have rights as humans, and of the institutional mechanisms (investitures) then put
in place and legitimated by such declarations (Hamacher, 2006). Thus, we may see
the declarations of human rights as having not just a politically progressive
dimension, but also a domesticating, sovereign function. The perspective of
lycanthropy contributes to the understanding of this unexpected sovereign function
of humanism under the guise of human rights. It also calls our attention to the
limitations of the humanist approach.
For example, let us consider the following scenario where lycanthropy has been
used to pathologize oppressed minorities. Early twentieth century American
physicians argued, in a pseudo-scientific fashion, about the alleged tendency in
African Americans (both men and women) to suffer from lycanthropy – understood
here as the excessive sexual appetite of the werewolf (McWhorther, 2009, p. 155).
Perhaps, the consequences of this pathologization are more long lasting, and deeply
ingrained, than one may have thought. One may be tempted to suggest that the
legacy of animalization of a racial minority in terms of lycanthropy could still
contribute to the framing of African Americans as a threat that leads to
‘‘securitization,’’ and, further, to the justification of police brutality. Claiming
human rights in this context, without the theoretical caution instilled by
lycanthropy, may not break entirely free from the securitizing gesture.
But a politics of lycanthropy may help us break with the circularity of the security
dilemma – the dilemma that concerned Wendt and Duvall. Lycanthropy can be
affirmed precisely to subvert pathologization and securitization, as when queer black
feminist scholars frame their critique of gender and racial biases in academia through
the figure of the werewolf (Calafell, 2012), and when eco-feminists see werewolf
heroines in literature and film as performing animality in ways that question
patriarchy and a disenchanted understanding of nature (Bourgaut du Coudray, 2003).
In addition, recent exploratory studies on the notion of species identity disorder or
species dysphoria have been undertaken, and the otherkin subculture (a group of
people who identify themselves as part human and part animal) has gained public
notoriety (Earls and Lumiére, 2009). Scholars see in this subculture potential for a
‘‘transpecies identity’’ that represents: ‘‘a fluid position that questions categories
including concepts of species and dimorphic concepts of gender’’ (Johnston, 2013).
Thus, beyond left melancholia, lycanthropy speaks of the possibility of shape-
shifting, malleability, contingency, and transformation; of drawing on the resources
 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory
 Humanism as decisionism in contemporary critical political theory

of animality to reshape the contours of the political and the self in new and
unexpected ways, beyond the securitizing imperatives of both sovereignty and
humanism. Critical and democratic theorists attentive to lycanthropy may find their
humanism defeated by it, but they may also find that lycanthropy also opens
possibilities for metamorphosis and change.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Julieta Suárez-Cao, Inés Valdez, and two anonymous reviewers
for comments, suggestions, and criticisms. Special thanks go to Bonnie Honig for her
substantial feedback to several drafts of this paper. All remaining mistakes are my
own. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support of FONDECYT (Project
11130663) and the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in
Latin America (RS130002), supported by the Millennium Scientific Initiative of the
Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism of Chile.

About the Author

Diego Rossello received his Ph.D. in Political Science at Northwestern University,

USA. He is an assistant professor of political science at the Institute of Political
Science, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and the editor of Revista de
Ciencia Polı́tica. He teaches political theory, with emphasis in the areas of critical
political theory, and the history of political thought. His current research interests
include critical approaches to human rights, political theology, and animal studies.
His work has been published in journals such as Notre Dame Philosophical
Reviews, New Literary History, Philosophy Today, Political Theory and Contem-
porary Political Theory, among others. He has also translated the book Nietzsche’s
Animal Philosophy by Vanessa Lemm into Spanish. He has been a Fellow of the
Paris Program in Critical Theory (Northwestern University) and of the Law and
Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop (Columbia University). He is currently
working on a book manuscript that discusses the politics of human–animal
indistinction in modern sovereignty.

Notes

1 The line quoted by Schmitt belongs to Däubler’s poem ‘‘Entschluss [Decision],’’ see Schmitt (1991).
2 The notions of ipseity and autos are discussed and alluded to in several texts by Derrida. However,
substantial treatments of these notions can be found in Derrida (1973, 2005, 2009).
3 For a discussion of lycology and lycanthropy, see Derrida (2005, pp. 69 ff) and Derrida (2009,
pp. 100 ff).

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory

 Rossello

4 In Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Schmitt argues that the modern state can learn from the
formal superiority of the Roman Catholic Church. Schmitt writes: ‘‘But it [the Catholic Church] has
the power to assume this or any other form because it has the power of representation. It represents
the civitas humana. It represents at every moment the historical connection to the incarnation and
crucifixion of Christ. It represents the Person of Christ himself: God become man in historical
reality’’ (1996, p. 19).
5 Although it is not quite clear what Santner means by this, it can be inferred that he has in mind a
certain critique of the theologico-political dimension of modern sovereignty; of the excitation of
human life by its entrance in the mythical-legal realm of law described by Benjamin in his famous
Critique of Violence. But why should we see this excitation exclusively or even primarily in terms of
the theological political frame that Santner wants to privilege?
6 I borrow this critique of the notion of vulnerability as the new (mortalist) humanism from Honig
(2010).
7 According to Žižek, the Derridean/Levinasian ‘‘postsecular thought’’ generates what he describes as
a ‘‘postdeconstructionist and indeconstructible form of spirituality’’ based on an always-already
withdrawn and unattainable Otherness (Žižek, 2000a, b, p. 664).
8 This affinity between Schmitt’s decisionism and Žižek’s understanding of the act has also been
identified by Erik Vogt, see Vogt (2006, pp. 14–29). In the case of Žižek, the centrality of incarnation
is particularly striking because it goes against a plurality of critical discourses, ranging from
mainstream Marxism to psychoanalysis, that Žižek otherwise seems to endorse.

References
Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2003) The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attel. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Aristotle (1996) The Politics and The Constitution of Athens. In: S. Everson (ed.). Translated.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benjamin, W. (2003) The Origin of the German Tragic Drama. Translated by Joan Osbourne. London:
Verso.
Blom, J.D. (2014) When doctors cry wolf: A systematic review of the literature on clinical lycanthropy.
History of Psychiatry 25(1): 87–102.
Bodin, J. (1995) On the Demon-Mania of Witches. With an Introduction by J. L. Pearl. Translated by R.
A. Scott. Toronto: CRRS Publications.
Bourgault du Coudray, C. (2003) The cycle of the werewolf: Romantic ecologies of selfhood in popular
fantasy. Australian Feminist Studies 18(40): 57–72.
Brown, W. (1999) Resisting left melancholy. Boundary 2 26(3): 19–27.
Burton, R. (2001) The Anatomy of Melancholy. With an Introduction by W. H. Gass. New York: New
York Review of Books.
Calafell, B.M. (2012) Monstrous femininity: Constructions of women of color in the academy. Journal
of Communication Inquiry 36(2): 111–130.
Calarco, M. (2008) Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York,
NY: Columbia University Press.
Campbell, R.J. (2009) Campbell’s Psychiatric Dictionary: The Definitive Dictionary of Psychiatry.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004) A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum.

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory

 Humanism as decisionism in contemporary critical political theory

Derrida, J. (1973) Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, J. (2005) Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2008) The Animal that Therefore I am. In: M.-L. Mallet (ed.). Translated by D. Willis. New
York, NY: Fordham University Press.
Derrida, J. (2009) The Beast and the Sovereign (Vol. I). Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Dienstag, J.F. (2015) Evils of Representation: Werewolves, Pessimism, and Realism in Europa and
Melancholia. Theory & Event 18(2), The Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved October 26,
2015, from Project MUSE database.
Dougherty, J.P. (2003) Jacques Maritain: An Intellectual Profile. New York, NY: The Catholic
University of America Press.
Dumm, T. (2005) Wolf-man and the Fate of Democratic Culture: Four Fragments. Law, Culture and the
Humanities 1(2): 178–185.
Earls, C. and Lumiére, M. (2009) A case study of preferential bestiality. Archives of Sexual Behavior
38(4): 605–609.
Esposito, R. (2012a) Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. New York: Fordham U.
Press.
Esposito, R. (2012b) Third Person: Politics of Life and the Philosophy of the Impersonal. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Fahy, T.A. (1989) Lycanthropy: A review. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 82(January): 37–39.
Ferber, I. (2013) Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s Early Reflections on Theater and Language.
Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Freud, S. (1917) Mourning and melancholia. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic
Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, pp. 237–258
Fukuyama, F. (2002a) Gene regime. Foreign Policy 129: 56–63.
Fukuyama, F. (2002b) Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New
York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Girous.
Habermas, J. (2003) The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity.
Hamacher, W. (2006) The right not to use rights: Human rights and the structure of judgments. In: H de
Vries and L. E. Sullivan (eds.), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (pp.
671–690). New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
Hanssen, B. (2000) Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings and Angels.
California: University of California Press.
Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge.
Hayles, K. (1993) How we became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hobbes, T. (1998) Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive). Indianapolis: Indiana, Hackett Publishing
Company.
Honig, B. (2010) Antigone’s two laws: Greek tragedy and the politics of humanism. New Literary
History 41(1): 1–33.
Johnston, J. (2013) On having a furry soul: Transpecies identity and ontological indeterminacy in
Otherkin subcultures. In: J. Johnston and F. Probyn-Rapsey (eds.) Animal Death. Sydney: Sydney
University Press.
Kahn, V. (2009). Political theology and fiction in the king’s two bodies. Representations 106: 77–101.
Kantorowicz, E.H. (1997) The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. With a new
preface by W. Chester Jordan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
King James, I. (2008) Demonology. London: Forgotten Books.
Maritain, J. (2000) Christianity and Democracy. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
McWhorter, L. (2009) Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy. Indiana: Indiana
University Press.

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory

 Rossello

Mladeck, K. and Edmonson, G. (2009) A Politics of Melancholia. In: C. Strathausen (ed.), A Leftist
Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics (pp. 208–234). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesotta Press.
Moyn, S. (2015) Christian Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Plato (2003) The Republic. In: J. R. F. Ferrari (ed.). Translated by T. Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rossello, D (2012) Hobbes and the Wolf-Man: Melancholy and Animality in Modern Sovereignty. New
Literary History, 43(2): 255–279.
Santner, E. (2006) On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Santner, E. (2011) The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Schmitt, C. (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by G.
Schwab. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.
Schmitt, C. (1991) Theodor Däublers ‘‘Nordlicht’’: Drei Studien über die Elemente, den Geist und die
Aktualität des Werkes. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
Schmitt, C. (1996) Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Translated and Annotated by G. L. Ulmen.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Schmitt, C. (2015) Dialogues on Power and Space. Cambridge: Polity.
Surawicz, F.G. and Banta, R. (1986) Lycanthropy Revisited. In: C. Otten (ed.) A Lycanthropy Reader:
Werewolves in Western Culture. New York, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Torrano, A. (2016) Werewolves in the Immunitary Paradigm. Philosophy Today (forthcoming).
Vogt, E.M. (2006) Schmittian Traces in Žižek’s Political Theology (and Some Derridean Specters).
Diacritics 36(1): 14–29.
Weber, S. (1992) Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Diacritics 22(3/4): 5.
Wendt, A. and Duvall, R. (2008) Sovereignty and the UFO. Political Theory 36(4): 607–633.
Žižek, S. (2000a) Melancholy and the act. Critical Inquiry 26(4): 657–681.
Žižek, S. (2000b) The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London:
Verso.
Žižek, S. and Milbank, R. (2009) The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? C. Davis (ed.).
Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory