Peter DeGabriele (Mississippi State University), “Sovereign (Ir)responsibility: Hobbes among the Drones”
Please join us for another CuSPP Seminar in person (BPB W3.03) and online on Thursday, 23 May from 1-2pm. Please refer to the CuSPP email or email Wesley.Lim@anu.edu.au for the link.
Shuttling between analyses of a 2012 series of memes entitled “Texts from Drone” and the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, this talk will explore how enlightenment theories of moral responsibility and causation relate to contemporary drone warfare. Ultimately, it argues, only an externalist account of causation combined with a Hobbesian account of sovereignty is adequate to understand the political significance of drone warfare.
Peter De Gabriele graduated from the Australian National University in 2002 with a B.A in Women’s Studies (Hons) and Film Studies before receiving his Ph.D in English from The University at Buffalo-SUNY in 2009. His first book, entitled Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth Century Literature and the Problem of the Political was published by Bucknell University Press in