STEFAN PAUL DOLGERT

Doctoral Candidate

Department of Political Science

Duke University

Visiting Assistant Professor

Williams College

Spring 2008

I will be completing my dissertation, entitled Citizen/Canine: Human and Animal in Ancient Greek Political Thought, at Duke University in the spring of 2008. Written under J. Peter Euben, Romand Coles, and Michael Gillespie, my work explores the sacrificial underpinnings of the concept of the political by examining the boundary between human and animal in Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato. I argue that animality as a category, trope, and signifier serves a functional rather than descriptive or ontological role: it is a moveable operator that is called forth by a metaphysics of sacrifice, by which I mean a worldview that claims violence to be a necessary foundation for human life, and which therefore tries to localize and contain this violence as much as possible through a system of sacrifice. In the Greeks we see the inception of this concept of the political, but it continues to inform the exclusions (friend/enemy, man/animal, rational/irrational) that mark the borders of the contemporary political community. My dissertation is thus directed both at the specific animal/human dichotomy as well as the larger question of political sacrifice and exclusion, and seeks to develop an alternative tradition of theory grounded in wonder and the tragic.

Links:

Curriculum Vitae

Dissertation Chapters:

1) Ghosts of Prometheus: The Sacrifice of the Animal in Liberal Animal Rights Theory

2) The Lion and the Ox: Achilles, Animals, and Politics

3) Standing Still at Aulis: Aeschylus and the Sacrificial Origins of the Political

4) The Just for Dessert: Plato Discovers the Animal

5) The Valley Beyond Mount Moriah: Challenging the Sacrificial Paradigm

Syllabi for Duke University courses:

POLSCI 199C, Violence and Political Theory

POLSCI 162, Human Rights in Theory and Practice

POLSCI 131, Introduction to American Political Thought