Review: Arthur Bradley, ‘Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy’
Review of Arthur Bradley’s Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theatre, Thaumaturgy’ (Columbia University Press), 336 pages
Abstract
If the sovereign is to be sovereign, must they be seen as sovereign? In Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy, Arthur Bradley takes up this very question. He argues that less than what the sovereign does, how the sovereign is seen is decisive. By arguing this way, Bradley draws our attention to the role of theatricality in the production and reproduction of sovereignty: the props that endow the natural body with the signifiers of sovereignty, the architecture of the stage on which that body appears, and the costumes that clothes it in power. Through a series of virtuoso readings of political philosophers, from Hobbes to Rousseau and Benjamin to Deleuze, Bradley examines the different aspects and dimensions of this theater of sovereignty.
Reviewed by K. Daniel Cho
Arthur Bradley’s (2025) exciting new book, Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy, uses the lens of theater to examine the forms and mechanisms through which sovereignty is constituted. Yet, from the outset, we must be clear that by “the theater,” what Bradley means is not simply live stage performance (although it is that too) but, rather, a form of presentation, which is as much constituting as it is constituted, “not merely the decorative façade or surface of a preexisting realpolitik but something that penetrates all the way down into the allegedly raw or naked ‘real’ of power itself” (5). To put it another way, we should not go into Staging Sovereignty expecting a series of readings of stage plays (although we get those too), as if theater were merely a form of narrative art and the lessons elicited, metaphor and analogy. For while theater is indeed a performing art, it is not so much the performance of the actors on the stage of the theater house that has Bradley so concerned as it is the performance of the sovereign on the stage of world politics—or, rather, I should say, the performance (or, indeed, performances) that stage sovereignty itself, for performance, and thus theater itself, as Bradley conceives it, is the very means by which sovereignty is seen and therefore constituted. Thus, after stunning readings of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in the first chapter, “In the Chair”—a chapter in which we learn that the chair, throne, or office is itself imbued with authority and power, such that anyone who sits in or occupies it appears to be the sovereign, fully endowed with all the powers of the office, as if they possessed those powers within their own person; a chapter in which we learn that the ideal of democracy is the empty chair itself, an emptiness that always delegitimizes as it legitimizes anyone who sits in it; a chapter in which we receive stunning readings of Kant and Deleuze, as well as the “Screaming Popes” of Francis Bacon—references to the stage recede into the background as equally stunning, and indeed provocative, readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, Milton and Melville, Agamben and Benjamin, just to name a few, come into the foreground.
What Bradley wants to argue over the course of these seven chapters is not that one learns lessons on sovereignty by watching the theater but, rather, and more importantly, that there is a veritable theatricality to sovereignty itself—a “minimal or minimalist theater of sovereignty” (3, original emphasis), as he calls it—and that it is through this minimal theatricality that sovereignty becomes legible at all. Thus, Bradley argues, it is the paraphernalia of this minimalist theater—the props, costumes, rituals, architecture, and stagecraft—and not the physical person (or natural body) of the sovereign themselves, that are the true sources of sovereign power, an argument that steers the theorization of sovereignty away from what the sovereign does and toward how the sovereign is seen. Sovereign, in other words, for Bradley, is not “he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt, 1985: 5) but, rather, “(s)he who is seen as sovereign” (Bradley, 2025: 5).
Each of the book’s seven chapters then examines a different aspect of this minimalistic sovereign theater, which can all be organized into three broad categories: props, architecture, and costume. In the first category of props, we find items, like the chair and oil, that endow the natural body with all the powers of sovereignty. Having already glossed the chair above, let me touch on oil. Beginning with the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II—the first coronation to appear on television—Bradley questions the sacred oil, which is used in the anointing of the new monarch, as well as the ritualistic unction itself, for the role it plays in the making of sovereignty. If the sovereign can be defined purely by its function, as Schmitt believes, then why was so much effort made to bring this ancient ceremony into the modern age, to make it televised theater, as it were? Does it not mean that the anointment of the would-be sovereign’s head with oil is necessary to make the sovereign legible precisely as sovereign? And if so, does this not mean that the oil itself is somehow endowed with sovereign power, a power that transfers to the body of the would-be sovereign through the performance of the ceremony itself? If all this is true, as Bradley argues it is, then we must pay careful attention to the props that are used to signify sovereignty. Far from ancillary or purely ceremonial, these props are part and parcel of sovereignty itself, which means we can trace the mutations and permutations of sovereign power from monarchy to democracy by following their movements and histories. Thus, by following the political economy of oil—rather than its discursive changes—Bradley orients our attention away from the verticality of sovereign power and towards its horizontality. Sovereign power, not as something that descends from God but, rather, something that “spreads out horizontally, like an oil slick, across, through, and between different political land masses, apparently bestowing its supernatural legitimacy on everything from divine right monarchy to global capital” (61). Or, as Melville (2009) once put it, the whalers, and not God, are the ones who “supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff” (123). What such attention to the props of sovereignty affords then is a construal of liberal democracy and global capitalism that implicates both in the superstitions of divine right monarchy, as the oil of the monarch transforms and reappears now as the blood and tears of the people or indeed the “blood and dirt,” which Marx (1990) tells us, baptizes capital from “head to toe” (926) as it enters the world.
It is not enough, however, for the sovereign to hold the correct props; they must also appear within the right frame. Elizabeth, for example, must appear on television, at the appropriate venue, in the proper mise-en-scène to be legible as Queen at all. There is, in other words, a certain architecture to sovereign theater. All at once then Bradley’s analysis expands to include arrangements, which, while structuring the sovereign’s appearance, were once thought to be insignificant. Exemplary in this regard is the lobby or antechamber. Inside the lobby are all those patrons who await an audience with the sovereign: advisors, counsellors, and donors who vie with each other for the best seats for influencing the sovereign’s agenda. Who makes it through the queue and in what order thus determines, in no small part, what the sovereign will decide, and if those decisions, taken collectively, determine how we see and judge the sovereign, then this lobby of lobbyists is an essential part of sovereignty, indeed as essential as the sovereign themselves. “If the sovereign is still the one who decides,” writes Bradley (2025), then “…the trusted counsellor…also begins to participate in sovereignty by becoming the one who…decides upon what is or is not up to the sovereign to decide” (120, original emphasis). In this way, Bradley puts theoretical weight behind all those jokes about “President” Musk. Though these jibes are meant to highlight Trump’s insignificance, they identify a certain truth: all sovereigns, not simply Trump, like a Mannerist painting, are a compilation of the figures that surround them, what Bradley calls “distributed sovereignty” (24). But Bradley’s analysis also tempers that joke: to properly understand something like the Trump presidency, one must resist the temptation to single out Trump himself, which the “President” Musk joke of course indulges, and instead take stock, not only of Musk but of all those shadowy figures that await in queue in Trump’s antechamber.
So much of the sovereign’s appearance—perhaps even more than props and architecture—depends on the sovereign’s dress; thus, costume is the third and final category that Bradley examines. When Robert Francis Prevost emerged on May 8, 2025, as Pope Leo XIV, this Chicago native did not wear the shirt of his beloved White Sox or even in his Cardinal vestments; rather, he wore the Pope’s cassock, zucchetto, and pellegrina. This is not a mere matter of decorum. The sovereign must appear as sovereign, which they cannot do without donning the proper clothes, a reliance that makes it seem as though the sovereign is powerless without the proper attire. While this belief in the powerlessness of the naked body has animated much of the critique of sovereignty, Bradley issues a warning. Drawing on Erik Peterson’s (1993) classic essay, “A Theology of Dress,” which argues that the prelapsarian body is not in fact nude but is clothed in God’s glory, Bradley argues that the very nakedness of the sovereign—and thus the appearance of weakness—is itself a product of the costume. When we defrock the sovereign, “we do not find anything like an unadorned ‘naked body’ of power, whether pristine or dirty, innocent, or shameful, because that nudity itself turns out to be a retroactive work of political theological glorification” (Bradley, 2025: 163). Indeed, it is a trend now for leaders to glory in their nakedness. From television shows like Undercover Boss, through the casually-dressed pastor, to the imbecilic president, sovereigns everywhere readily admit they have no clothes, that they are just bodies; and yet, it is this very admission that empowers them, as if their nakedness, like God’s glory itself, forms a second layer of costume. “[T]hink, for example,” writes Bradley, “of how modern political leaders are all too happy to confess their human, all-too-human weakness in the face of the awesome responsibilities of office even as they continue to wage wars, cut welfare spending for the poor, and so on” (166). Bradley’s exhortation is that we move the critique of sovereignty beyond the simple—and simplistic—strategy of highlighting the sovereign’s nakedness and toward the recognition of the costume of nudity itself.
Focused on stagecraft, rather than the natural body, Bradley adroitly evades questions of personality, which seem now to dominate the critique of sovereignty, whether academic or popular. Thus, when Trump finally does appear in the book, Bradley withholds from engaging in personal attacks—which always pivot on the moral—and instead reflects on the relationship between the spectator and the sovereign. Extracting the political stakes of Peter Brook’s famous reduction of theater to a single actor and spectator, Bradley observes the constitutive role the people play in the making of sovereignty. Like the actor who requires spectators, the sovereign requires people who see them as sovereign. It is therefore inconsequential whether we insult or mock Trump; what matters is only that we are watching. “For Trump and company,” Bradley writes, critically of Jacques Ranciere’s notion of the emancipated spectator, “…we spectators are free to cheer or boo, laugh or scorn, praise or blame in equal measure—so long as we continue to pay unemancipated attention” (222-223).
Thus, by focusing on the accoutrements of sovereignty, rather than on the natural body itself, Staging Sovereignty joins a tradition of theorizing that avoids the person of the sovereign—what Bradley calls “sovereign personalism” (25)—and instead attends to the forms, structures, and mechanisms that produce, and indeed reproduce, sovereignty. The most prominent figure in this tradition is of course Ernst Kantorowicz (1985), who in his seminal The King’s Two Bodies argued that the body politic outlives the natural body of the king, always migrating to the next king’s body. More recently is Eric Santner’s (2011) The Royal Remains, which locates an excessive dimension of sovereignty—what he calls “the flesh”—that under democracy both blesses and curses the people. What Bradley’s Staging Sovereignty contributes to this tradition then is an analysis of the very materials, both objective and ritualistic, through which the excesses of sovereignty, whether Kantorowicz’s second body or Santner’s flesh, are passed on—passages without which sovereignty could not exist.
References
Bradley, A. (2025) Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kantorowicz, E. (1985) The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Marx, K. (1990) Capital: Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin.
Melville, H. (2009) Moby-Dick or, the Whale. New York: Penguin.
Peterson, E. (1993) “A Theology of Dress.” Translated by Dom Hugh Gilbert. Communio 20(Fall): 558-568.
Santner, E. (2011) The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schmitt, C. (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by
George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
K. Daniel Cho is Professor of Education at Otterbein University, Columbus, Ohio, USA. He works on psychoanalysis in a variety of disciplinary contexts. His most recent book is Genius After Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan (Bloomsbury, 2025). He is currently working on a book-length study of the political theology of Sigmund Freud and Carl Schmitt.
Email: dcho@otterbein.edu
