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Prof. Dr. Petar Bojanić

University of Belgrade and University of Rijeka

Curriculum Vitae

Petar Bojanić studied philosophy at the University of Belgrade and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), where he received his D.E.A. for a work on “La figure de la paix chez Levinas et Kant” (supervised by Jacques Derrida) in 1997. In 2003, he received his Doctorat de 3e cycle from the University of Paris X (Nanterre) for his dissertation “La guerre (dernière) et l'institution de la philosophie” (Dissertation committee: Etienne Balibar, Gérard Bensussan, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy).

Since 2004, Petar Bojanić was a lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, and he has been a fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT) at the University of Belgrade since 2005. Since 2009, he is director of the Centre for Ethics, Law and Applied Philosophy (CELAP) in Belgrade. Since 2010, he also serves as director of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT). Moreover, he is the director of the Center for Advanced Studies – South East Europe (CAS) at the University of Rijeka since its founding in 2013. He has held numerous fellowships and visiting professorships, inter alia at the Society for Humanities at Cornell University (USA), at the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen (Great Britain), at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bologna (Italy), and at KWI Essen (Germany).

Following a research stay at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” from June to September 2014 and from April to July 2016  he was once again Fellow from August to November 2017.

Areas of Research

Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Law, Phenomenology, European Philosophy, Jewish Political Tradition

Research Project

On Institutional Agency (Deontic Powers of Institutions)

Anotated critical edition of W. Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”
(Together with J. Butler and A. Deuber-Mankowsky)

My intention is to continue, and indeed complete, my work from a two years ago in Bonn, writing the book On Institutional Agency (Deontic Powers of Institutions).I would like to use a portion of the time in Bonn to bring to a close a new project on which I am working together with Judith Butler, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, and others. It is an annotated critical edition of Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt.” First published in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Band 47, 1921) (the same journal in which Carl Schmitt will publish the first edition of Der Begriff des Politischen in 1927), the text, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” was initially rejected by Die weissen Blätter for being too long and difficult. The various texts and books on Benjamin in recent years constantly emphasize that Benjamin intended to write a book on politics in three parts (or tomes): “Die wahre Politiker,” “Die wahre Politik,” while the third was to be a critique of a novel by Paul Scheerbart. It seems that “Critique of Violence” was to be the first portion of the second book, entitled “Abbau der Gewalt,” while the title of the second part of the second book was to be “Teleologie ohne Endzweck.” Thus, “Critique of Violence” is de facto another name for “Dismantling Violence.” Practically nothing of this project exists. Further, if we take into account that certain crucial letters from Scholem regarding Benjamin's text are also missing, and that certain important texts have only recently been discovered – it is entirely possible that the interpretation of Benjamin's project could soon be more complete and entirely different.

Selected Publications

  • Violence and Messianism, London: Routledge, forthcoming in 2017.
  • Peter Eisenman. In Dialog with Architects and Philosophers (ed. with V. Djokic), Milano: Mimesis International, 2017.
  • Violence et Messianisme, Paris-Milano: Librerie Philosophique J. Vrin; Mimesis International, 2015. (published in Italian and Serbian; in preparation Russian, Spanish and Hungarian translation)
  • „Europe as Contre-Institution: Hospitality versus Sovereignty. Saint-Simon with Jacques Derrida“, In B. Liebsch & M. Staudigl (eds.), Perspektiven europäischer Gastlichkeit, Bonn: Velbrück Wissenschaft Verlag, 2016, 579-589.
  • Un matrimonio sfortunato. Derrida e architettura (ed. with Damiano Cantone), Aut-Aut, n. 368, 2015
  • World Governance (ed. with Babić Jovan), Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010, reedited 2013.
  • De la Terreur à l'Extrême–violence, (ed. with Sibertin–Blanc Guillaume), Paris, Belgrade: EuroPhilosophie, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory 2013.
  • Semantics of Statebulding: Language, Meanings and Sovereignty, (hg. mit Vojin Rakić, Nicholas Onuf, Nicolas Lemay–Hebert), London: Routledge 2013.
  • Force and Forms of War, Sremski Karlovci; Novi sad: Izdavačka knjižarnica ZS 2012.