The republic in the air: State of nature theory and the dreaming of the state.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation sets out to demonstrate the role of state-of-nature discourse in the material creation of the political state. The issue is broached via state-of-nature discourse as this extends, in the field of conventional political science, from the writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and others to certain central texts in contemporary democratic theory (chiefly John Rawls' <italic> A Theory of Justice</italic> on the contractarian side, Robert Nozick's <italic> Anarchy, State and Utopia</italic> on the libertarian). An investigation of the language of these texts reveals that the state of nature, as practical, imaginative and/or theoretical construct, is proscribed for the political subject, not only in a temporal or physical sense, but also and most importantly in a discursive one. One speaks about the state of nature only from within the state, from under the rule of state-building, and as a consequence one cannot signify what is not (what is outside, what is before) that state. The discourse of the state of nature therefore always forecloses upon itself as it “always already” gives rise to the state in language, a state which itself contains that discourse entirely.
This critique is carried out with the aid of certain perspectives and models belonging to poststructuralism, including texts of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, and to one of poststructuralism's predecessor critiques, the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Considering the disciplinary affiliation of poststructuralist philosophy with literary studies, my argument also naturally makes use of the idea of the literary text (as itself a self-contained critique of language, a continually forgotten and aestheticized tool for the interpretation of “nonliterary” discourse), specifically John Milton's <italic>Paradise Lost</italic>—this work serves as an interdisciplinary starting point (with close connections to contemporary contractarian texts, e.g., Hobbes') for the above inquiry, while offering as poetry a concentrated demonstration of how the fissured edifice of language proscribes the prestate or the nonstate. In connection with Miltonic eschatology, too, this dissertation also considers utopianism (as the impulse which must inform political discourse on both the state-of-nature and the state to come) as a possible target of its critique.