Leviathan and the potentialities of justice: A contemporary debate

This thesis aims to inquire into human nature, ethics, political and legal philosophy in terms of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan with the concepts of contemporary philosophers. Throughout the thesis, philosophers such as Arendt, Agamben, Deleuze, Derrida, Esposito, Foucault, Haraway, Ricoeur, Said are investigated in order to explain Leviathan and similar types of sovereignty, and the monstrosity of the human being who creates these sovereignties is explored in the context of their ontological, legal and literary contributions to today's discourses on politics, law and justice potentialities. While the texts from different schools and disciplines are examined with the critical approach that Derrida conceptualizes as deconstruction, the monstrosity of Leviathan becomes methodologically applicable through the approaches of monster studies. In this way, the distinctions between human and monster, exception and sovereignty, natural and artificial, real and metaphor disappear, and today's new Leviathans, such as Barreto's Cerberus, Schepelle's Frankenstate, and König's Algorithmic Leviathan, come to be explained in the context of neoliberalism, autocratic legalism, and algorithmic governmentality. While the mechanisms of violence brought to the agenda by today's monsters and the areas of struggle against them are discussed, the constitutive potential role of Leviathan and the human being it creates in establishing a just society is revealed with alternative political and legal philosophy understandings. This constitutive role arises from the indistinguishable nature of human and monster and the undecidable structure of law and justice.