In his latest book, Eric Santner explores the transformations of the principle of sovereignty in European modernity. While Ernst Kantorowicz argued that the "second body of the king" gave a corporeal dimension to the principle of sovereignty, Santner's thesis is that this did not disappear from the political realm with the vanishing of the sovereign. Rather, the "flesh" of sovereignty transitioned into the body of the people and thus into democratic modernity, where it appears at the intersection of the body and the signifier of the subject. Santner's concept of flesh encapsulates a dimension of the experience of modernity, which he illustrates in the theories and practices of literary and visual modernism and recognizes at the core of modern biopolitics. Santner juxtaposes analyses of Kantorowicz, Carl Schmitt, Agamben, and Arendt with interpretations of Hofmannsthal, Kafka, and Rilke.