There is an old kinship between terror, judgment, and the city. That relation and the promises it may hold for the almost equally old conceptrepublicanism, are the subject of this book.

This is how the story starts. It is 1982. A city’s survival is at stake, and everything depends on our decision: this is what the philosopher Michael Levin invites us to imagine. Levin gives us a particular city; it stands in for any other. His famous fable terrifies, but it is a pedagogical, or better yet, acivicexperience that he intends. (If we are terrified enough, we...

Here’s a joke with a trick to it.

Francisco Franco spoke with a magisterial “we” that some found pleasantly archaic, others rather sinister. Taken with the syncopating hand movements that punctuated his speeches, the collective pronoun irresistibly wed the notional corporate body of the Spanish state to Franco’s own. In the early 1970s Franco is reputed to have announced the beginning of a new economic movement intended to catalyze the Spanish economy, which was threatening to stagnate after the brief boom of the 1960s. News of the announcement took the shape of thischiste, to be told with the Caudillo’s...

Grant me, for now, the distinction between the terrorist and the foundational terror that radical democratic republicanism guards—the condition of its ethical form, the weak concept or the weak norm at its breast. Converting ungovernable semantic excess into a weak norm for thought and conduct seems a tolerable, if still fairly abstract program. Certainly, it would appear to be a distinctively modern one: inseparable from a post-Romantic literary-political lexicon, specific to a transitional state form, pertinent at one time but not all. My example has been the construction of political movement in the postwar Spanish imaginary: a Falangist state...

A group of men enter a famous, forbidden cave located in the cellar of a tower—or is it a church? a house?—in a city on a hill. The date—sometime in the year 1546. The new ruler has sent the adventurers to look for something—treasure, perhaps. They were told, “In the cave you will find something.” They return to the surface much later, terrified and empty-handed, giving strange and contradictory accounts of what they saw underground: vast caverns, animated statues, rivers, mysterious roaring winds. Many of them die soon after. The cave is sealed by the powerful...

To distinguish between the terror of sovereign power and weak or defective concepts that shelter the terror of association and provide grounds for a critique of terrorism. To imagine and provide, as it were, the concept of these weak or defective concepts, then the means for their actualization—these are tasks that take thought beyond the stultifying opposition to imagination and vision that Dante the poet enjoins upon us when he urges his readers not to attend to the form of torture and to consider instead its theological consequences and justification—la gran sentenza. What exactly constitutes a weak concept,...

Now consider the “moment of the boomerang.” The context: what Hardt and Negri’sEmpirecalls, borrowing from Sartre’s Preface to Fanon’sThe Wretched of the Earth, the “reciprocal destruction of the European Self—precisely because European society and its values are founded on the domestication and negative subsumption of the colonized. The moment of negativity is posed as the necessary first step in a transition toward the ultimate goal of a raceless society that recognizes the equality, freedom, and common humanity of all.”¹ This “coherent dialectical logic,” Hardt and Negri suggest, must fail, because “reality and history … are not...

In an interview published in 1972, the director Gillo Pontecorvo was asked by Joan Mellen, a film historian, to reflect onThe Battle of Algiers.¹ “It is clear,” she asked, leadingly, “that you have made a film on the side of Algerian independence. But is this undermined in any way by treating the violence committed by the Algerians and French in a one-to-one relationship? You show the Algerians killing someone, then the French retaliating, then the Algerians, etc., whereas in the historical situation the French killed hundreds of thousands more than the Algerians, including women and children. There is only...

The thrill, the joy are palpable: women and men squeezed onto the balconies and leaning out the windows of the Casino Republicano; a packed crowd lifting or tossing their hats; two figures—youngish, in coat and necktie—raise the tricolored flag, which hangs steep in the breezeless sunlight at the center of the photograph.We watch the throng from a balcony across the street, or through a window, or from a low rooftop; a trick of the composition lines up our eyes with the hands pulling the ropes that hoist the flag and thus places the camera’s work and our own...