Sebastian Kirsch: The Sovereign and his Double. Reflections on the Cynic tradition of the ‘anti-king’

Lecture as part of the IFTR 2025 conference Performing Carnival: Ekstasis, Subversion, Metamorphosis at the University of Cologne, 9–13 Jun 2025

A precursor and at the same time close relative of the so-called carnival kings is the figure of the ‘anti-king,’ which plays an important role in descriptions of the ancient Greek Cynics and their scandalous actions: The ‘anti-king’ is an obscenely clownishly distorted mirror figure of the sovereign who, surprisingly, claims to be the true sovereign, king or lord precisely because of his ‘asocial’ traits. This is exemplified in the confrontations between Diogenes of Sinope and Alexander the Great described by Diogenes Laertius, among others. The lecture will focus on this figure of the ‘anti-king’ in the Cynic tradition. Above all, it will examine its ambivalences, especially with regard to its instrumentalizability for (neo-)fascist politics. To this end, the lecture will also draw on Michel Foucault’s portrait of Cynicism from his last lecture series “The Courage of Truth.”

more information on the lecture

Theater scholar Sebastian Kirsch is a postdoctoral researcher with the project Street Scenes. Transformations of the Street as a Theatrical Reference Space.