Tyranny Is Dead, Long Live the Tyrant

In On Violence, Hannah Arendt argued that the eruption of violence on campuses in 1968 could be partly understood as a frustrated reaction to the excessive bureaucratic and technological mediation of (then) contemporary society. Arendt described this situation as ‘tyranny without a tyrant’. Compromised by its incapacity to recognize the experience of racially marked subjects and its condemnation of African creolity, the question animating Arendt’s analysis, namely whether bureaucratization and mass mediatization changes the nature of tyranny, nonetheless remains relevant. That question had been posed by Leo Strauss in 1948, in his reading of Xenophon’s Hiero, or Tyrannicus, which would later be debated by Alexandre Kojève. There, Strauss asserted the persistence of tyranny, which is nonetheless transformed in modernity by the capacity for totalization inherent in technology. Contemporary political theory, dominated by questions of sovereignty and the question of the decision, now finds itself in need of a theory of tyranny distinct from sovereignty — which is no longer operative. This talk attempts to contribute to that project, drawing on the Strauss-Kojève debate, as well as the anthropological archive, to ask why it is that contemporary tyranny is so obsessed with the question of private life, and especially the sexed and gendered basis of ‘family’, and the norms that might govern it. To explore that issue, it asks: What happens to tyranny in a media context defined by public intimacy, and the collapse of love and recognition? What does technocapitalism want? And how can one think about relation and recognition in a manner that can escape the pitfalls of melancholia for a once and future tyranny?Rosalind C. Morris is a writer, cultural critic, documentarian, and Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her most recent publications are: Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa (Columbia University Press, 2025), and For Lack of a Dictionary: poems (Fordham University Press, 2025).