Wednesday seminar: Time and Sovereignty

This seminar is part of the Wednesday seminar series this autumn, where we explore ways of sharing and minor gestures. Here you can learn more about the series and discover upcoming seminars!

Sovereignty is usually defined as supreme authority in the context of ruling over a territory or a population. In this seminar, Michael Marder argues that it is, above all, a movement of overcoming: a perpetual surpassing of limits, whether legal, geopolitical or, in the end, temporal. Time is sovereignty's last frontier. Tracing the idea from Roman imperium through Bodin’s “absolute and perpetual power,” Hobbes’s “mortal god,” and Schmitt’s decision on the exception, we ask how rulers have tried to master time: rationing it for their subjects and, now that world leaders are overheard discussing organ transplants and immortality, seeking to escape mortality altogether. Here lies a paradox. Sovereignty lives by overcoming limits, and time is the limit that lets everything be. The final triumph over time, realized on earth rather than in the beyond of salvation, would s spell out the end of existence.

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, and a Visiting Professor in the VIAD Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. His most recent books include The Phoenix Complex (2023), Time Is a Plant (2023), with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place (2024), Eco-F Freud (2025), Metamorphoses Reimagined (2025), with Anais Tondeur, Fiori di fuoco (2025), and Of Joints and Other Articulations (2026). More information at michaelmarder.org

Host: Cecilia Roos