“There is a truly remarkable persistence and consistency in Eric Santner’s relentless endeavor which I have been passionately following over the years. From My Own Private Germany (1996) and On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (2001) to On Creaturely Life (2006), there is a far-reaching and ever expanding pattern of reflection on the very conditions of the emergence of modernity, the ways in which it has been underpinned, in a multiplicity of ways, by a pound of ‘spectral yet visceral’ flesh. This research has reached its most lucid and complex form so far with The Royal Remains, the vast politico-theological and psychoanalytic narrative about how the demise of transcendence has left us with a ‘surplus of immanence’, a bodily too-muchness, an errant fleshy excess that still defines our condition and haunts it. From Marat’s death to Rilke’s Malte, from Kafka’s country doctor to Foucault’s biopolitical body, there is an overarching and  developing plot, masterly told by one of the great theoreticians of our era.”

Mladen Dolar

“This is a major book by one of the most original and skilled critic-thinkers of our time. The Royal Remains—the newest installment in Eric L. Santner’s intellectual saga—charts the transition from personal to popular sovereignty, which is also the movement from the subject to the citizen. Santner is a master of the creative conjunction and here he generates dazzling readings that illuminate multiple texts and traditions of thinking. These same readings also lead directly and without apology to genuine insights into the ways we live, and fail to live, now—and how we might live better.”

Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine

“To read any work by Eric L. Santner is to enter a crowded, glorious, and alien world. A brilliant contribution to democratic and literary theory, political theology, secular studies, and aesthetics, The Royal Remains is a generous and humane book that is quite simply a must read.”

Bonnie H. Honig, Northwestern University