Binding Violence

Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles' Antigone , D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom , and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat —that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other—violence—especially when