Books by Camil Francisc Roman
Divinization and Technology. The Political Anthropology of Subversion (Routledge), 2019
This book offers a political anthropological discussion of subversion, exploring its imbrication ... more This book offers a political anthropological discussion of subversion, exploring its imbrication with technological and divinization practices, and uncovering some of its particular effects on human existence, from prehistory until the contemporary age. Subversion is often romanticized as a means of opposing or undermining power in the name of supposedly universal values, yet techniques of subversion are actually deployed by people of all modern political and philosophical persuasions. With subversion having become a tool of mainstream ‘power’ that threatens to dominate social and political reality and so render the populace servile and subject to a generalized culture industry, Divinization and Technology examines the ways in which technology and divinization, with their efforts to unite with divine powers, can be brought together as modalities of subversion.
Chapters by Camil Francisc Roman
Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimetism, 2022
Taking cues from Michel Serres’ masterwork on the parasite, the chapter analyses sovereign power ... more Taking cues from Michel Serres’ masterwork on the parasite, the chapter analyses sovereign power and our rulers’ politics of the pandemic as elementary parasitic social relation. It demonstrates how the presence of plague doctors on Hobbes’ frontispiece of the 1651 edition of the Leviathan is indicative of the sovereign’s knowledge concerning a peculiar science of the living dead that aims at metamorphosis, or the control and transformation of liminal crisis situations. Applied to the contemporary pandemic, the living dead concept captures not only the ontological nature of viruses and of our sovereign rulers as beings of pure relationality, but also refers to the people’s condition between life and death, between the certainty of disease and the uncertainty of life. This liminal state is susceptible to radical social control and change. The current cultural form manifesting the science of the living dead is identified as ideotechnopreneurial power, a parasitic combination of three human types: the ideologue, the technocrat/scientist and the entrepreneur. By focusing mainly on collective lockdowns and analysing them as artificial matrixes of relative transformation, this chapter pins down the exact technique through which the ruling ideotechnopreneurs have achieved the objectification of whole populations to parasitic existence and inhuman government.
Modern Leaders: Between Charisma and Trickery -- by A. Horvath, A. Szakolczai and M. Marangudakis (eds.) (Routledge) , 2020
This chapter argues for the centrality of ‘charismatic domination’ among Weber’s ideal-types of l... more This chapter argues for the centrality of ‘charismatic domination’ among Weber’s ideal-types of legitimate authority and emphasizes its vital importance for our understanding of political life and modern democracy. It achieves this by providing an anthropological interpretation of charisma as a symbol of order expressing the classical Greek and Christian outlook on existence as metaxy. The argument exposes the errors involved in the application of positivist and critical methodologies to charisma and then elaborates the anthropological approach by linking charisma with the experience of liminality and with the political. In this context, charisma properly understood is identified as a restorative quality aimed at safeguarding against depersonalization processes and the corruption of gift relations. Charisma attains this by pointing towards right relations among three active powers characteristic of political life and the anthropological condition: the one, the few and the many. The chapter closes with a few reflections on the strains emerging between the practice of modern democracy and charisma. By introducing a fourth active power – the incommensurable all – modern democratic politics symbolically transforms the citizen body into a charismatic people, hence corrupting our understanding of charisma through reducing it to a mere electoral leader-shop, of puritan genesis.
Divinization and Technology. The Political Anthropology of Subversion (Routledge 2019)
In Chapter 3 Camil Francisc Roman shows how the experience of the 'modern' emerged by substitutin... more In Chapter 3 Camil Francisc Roman shows how the experience of the 'modern' emerged by substituting the Christian ethos of life with the ethos of the void as the logic of formless subversion. Key to this development was the multiplication of the 'derivative self', whose locomotive energy is 'self-interest' or the insatiable desire for selfaggrandisement through the absorption of the void into the inner self. Exploring the links between faith, reason, form and participatory ontology, this chapter illustrates how this process of divinising the void can be traced back to the split between reason and faith effected by the rise of modern philosophy. The discussion then moves on to the rise of modern politics by looking at the French revolution as a perpetual ritual passage, providing the frame for a state of permanent transition and the political consecration of the derivative self. The void be-comes at this point symbolised and replicated through modern democracy's empty place of power and its formless, limitless sacred. However, while the modern as void is concealed by the mimicry of technological construction replacing natural form, it is also to a degree annihilated by the failed sacri-ce of the Christian ethos of life.
'Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality', eds. Agnes Horvath, Bjorn Thomasson, Harald Wydra
to exclude from the social contract, but "Louis appointed by divine right," the consequence being... more to exclude from the social contract, but "Louis appointed by divine right," the consequence being that "with him, in a certain manner, died temporal Christianity" as well (Camus 2000: 90, 91). Camus' philosophical refl ections open the fl oor to the essential problems of the advancing revolutionary drama: the role of the royal trial and death in the demise of an ancient political theology that wrapped the worldly French prince in a Christian transcendental cosmology , and the bearing Louis XVI's execution had on the subsequent revolutionary trajectory.
Papers by Camil Francisc Roman
Historical Sociology / Journal of Historical Social Sciences.
This paper argues for a political anthropological approach to the study of the French revolution.... more This paper argues for a political anthropological approach to the study of the French revolution. Looking at the revolution as a moment of liminality, it substantiates two interconnected points. The first is that a proper understanding of the revolutionary dynamic and its lasting effects have to engage closely with the transformation of the sacred and its relation to the existen-tial void. Situated in post-Durkheimian sociology and post-Kantian philosophy, this argument advocates the methodological normalization of metaphysics, drawing attention to the fact that faith belongs to the symbolic, existential and representational realities of any political order, and hence also of its underlying knowledge systems. The second point argues that through the sacrifice of Louis XVI, the French revolution consecrated the ritual and existential sacrifice of the Christian Father. This historical experience is conceptualized as the people's third body, and the new configuration of the sacred to which it gives birth is interpreted in terms of the liminal void. In this way, the French revolution is shown to constitute the transition from a political order of embodiment – participation in the divine, symbolized by the sacred royal body to a political order of bodies; participation in the liminal void, symbolized by the sacred empty place of the power of the modern democratic imagination.
Journal of International Relations and Development , 2018
This paper captures the processes by which the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars redefined... more This paper captures the processes by which the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars redefined enduringly the logics of interaction between Prussia/Germany and France. It explains transformations of power, political imagination and social organisation that are key to understanding the 'special' nature of contemporary German–French relations. The paper finds that historical and international relations narratives fail to address the entire range of system-level transformations in the international order. Making use of approaches and concepts such as liminality, communitas, mimetic theory and the sacred, this paper proposes a novel, political anthropological perspective on such transformations, conceiving them as the interlocking of mimetic binds. First, I present wars and revolutions as liminal moments of collective threshold experiences. Second, I show how the liminal process functions at the international system-level. Third, I explain the challenge that the approach of liminality is posing to theories of international and systemic change. Fourth, I analyse the liminal process in Prussia and show how the said wars brought the French and the Prussians/Germans in a long-term mimetic rivalry. Finally, I argue that the proposed theoretical framework can take the research on international institutions and nationalism beyond the narratives of sociology, political science and historical studies.
International Political Anthropology, 2018
This paper discusses Arpad Szakolczai's Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary, enquiring i... more This paper discusses Arpad Szakolczai's Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary, enquiring into the constitutive relations between theatre, novels and modernity. It situates the book within Szakolczai's larger work, addressing methodological and substantive issues regarding the nature of modernity as a place of permanent liminality, and claiming that the author's book inaugurates the scientific novel as a new academic genre. After presenting and discussing the four parts of the book tracing the transformation of the world into a global theatre, and the role novels play in analysing a thoroughly theatricalised reality, this paper problematizes two essential aspects emerging from the book. First, the relation between modern science and modern theatre needs to be explored in more depth, focusing on their shared outsider position and the transformation of people into "spectators". Second, the relation between the Christian understanding of evil and the anthropological concept "trickster" requires further clarification, thinking about the distinctions and overlaps between the idea of "evil" rooted in corrupt social practices and "evil" as the corruption of substances and forms.
International Political Anthropology
In contemporary social and political theory, there is a situation in which little progress can be... more In contemporary social and political theory, there is a situation in which little progress can be made. This deadlock is the result of the " only one way in/out " approach that paralysed thinking. We have big names, but very few ideas of how to explain the world and ourselves living in it. This blind alley only answers questions of alienation with more alienation, and of exploitation with more exploitation, like Marxism; it offered more disorder to situations of confusion, like Hobbes; more discipline to concerns with discipline, like Foucault. The blockage seems to be eased by Heinrich Popitz's political anthropology. Popitz secured the condition of power in us and so relieved us from the idea of institutional coercion, an idea so popular in the last 300 years or so. But this freedom from the pain and worry of power above us did not ease the burden of human nature, as Popitz's main argument follows the line of the sinful anthropos. So, our dexterity in the performance of powerful humans is blocked again. How to lessen this discomfort, how to return to anthropos – if this is the right question at all – is the topic of this Symposium on Heinrich Popitz's extraordinary book on power.
The introduction to the Symposium on Heyking's The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Frien... more The introduction to the Symposium on Heyking's The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship presents two interconnected methodological issues pertaining to the book's claims comparing (political) friendship between the moderns and the ancients. Specifically, it draws attention to an insufficiently elaborated understanding of " love " and of its ontological status in modernity, and it points towards the need to clarify the component of mimetic theory in the discussions around the experience of friendship.
This introduction argues for a historical and anthropological contribution to the study of politi... more This introduction argues for a historical and anthropological contribution to the study of politics. It presents Tilo Schabert's work on the political beginnings of human existence and links his political theory to a type of Alexandrian and Byzantine Neoplatonic Aristotelianism. It maintains that Schabert's book offers a modernist theological frame for the construction of a power mechanism of freedom and that the grounding (and experiential source) of his methodology lies in the liminal void and its metaphysics.
book reviews & essays by Camil Francisc Roman
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Books by Camil Francisc Roman
Chapters by Camil Francisc Roman
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book reviews & essays by Camil Francisc Roman