Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts--in particular Sophocles' Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat--that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other--violence--especially when the question of a redefinition of membership is at stake. The book...