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Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm was originally published in Italian in 2015 under the title Stasis: La Guerra civile come paradigma politico ©2015 Giorgio Agamben, originally published by Bollati Boringhieri editore, Torino.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Agamben, Giorgio, 1942- author.

[Stasis. English]

Stasis : civil war as a political paradigm / Giorgio Agamben ; translated by Nicholas Heron.

pages cm — (Meridian, crossing aesthetics)

“Originally published in Italian in 2015 under the title Stasis: la guerra civile come paradigma politico.”

“The two texts published here reproduce, with slight variations and additions, two seminars on civil war given at Princeton University in October 2001.”

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9605-7 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-8047-9731-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-8047-9732-0 (eBook)

1. Civil war—Philosophy.   2. Political science—Philosophy.   3. Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679. Leviathan.   I. Title.   II. Series: Meridian (Stanford, Calif.)

JC328.5.A32613 2015

303.6'401—dc23

2015026027

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/14.5 Adobe Garamond

STASIS

Civil War as a Political Paradigm

(Homo Sacer II, 2)

Giorgio Agamben

Translated by Nicholas Heron

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher

Editor

Foreword

The two texts published here reproduce, with slight variations and additions, two seminars on civil war given at Princeton University in October 2001. It is up to readers to determine to what extent the theses advanced here—which identify the fundamental threshold of politicisation in the West in civil war and the constitutive element of the modern State in ‘ademia’ (that is, in the absence of a people)—still apply, or whether, to the contrary, the passage into the dimension of global civil war has altered their meaning in an essential manner.

1. Stasis

1.   It is generally acknowledged that a theory of civil war is completely lacking today, yet this absence does not seem to concern jurists and political scientists too much. Roman Schnur, who formulated this diagnosis as early as the 1980s, nonetheless added that the disregard of civil war went hand in hand with the advance of global civil war (Schnur 1983, 121, 156). At thirty years’ distance, this observation has lost none of its topicality: while the very possibility of distinguishing a war between States and an internecine war appears today to have disappeared, specialists continue to carefully avoid any hint at a theory of civil war. It is true that in recent years, owing to the upsurge of wars impossible to define as international, publications concerning so-called ‘internal wars’ have multiplied (above all, in the United States); even in these instances, however, the analysis was geared not toward an interpretation of the phenomenon, but—in accordance with a practice ever more widespread—toward the conditions under which an international intervention becomes possible. The paradigm of consensus, which today dominates both political action and theory, seems incompatible with the serious investigation of a phenomenon that is at least as old as Western democracy.

ℵ There exists, today, both a ‘polemology’, a theory of war, and an ‘irenology’, a theory of peace, but there is no ‘stasiology’, no theory of civil war. We have already mentioned how, according to Schnur, this absence could be related to the advance of global civil war. The concept of ‘global civil war’ was introduced contemporaneously in 1963 in Hannah Arendt’s book On Revolution (in which the Second World War was defined as ‘a kind of civil war raging all over the earth’ [Arendt 1963, 8]) and in Carl Schmitt’s Theorie des Partisanen (Schmitt 2007), a book dedicated to the figure that marks the end of the conception of war of the Jus publicum Europaeum, which was grounded on the possibility of clearly distinguishing between war and peace, soldiers and civilians, enemies and criminals. Whatever date one wishes to trace this end back to, it is certain that today the state of war in the traditional sense has virtually disappeared. Even the Gulf War, the last conflict that still had the appearance of a war between States, was fought without the warring States declaring the state of war (which for some States, such as Italy, would have been unconstitutional). The generalisation of a model of war which cannot be defined as an international conflict, yet which lacks the traditional features of civil war, has led some scholars to speak of ‘uncivil wars’, which, unlike civil wars, appear to be directed not toward the control and transformation of the political system, but toward the maximisation of disorder (Snow 1996). The attention which scholars dedicated to these wars in the 1990s ultimately could not lead to a theory of civil war, but only to a doctrine of management, that is, of the administration, manipulation and internationalisation of internal conflicts.

2.   One possible reason for the lack of interest in civil war was the increasing popularity of the concept of revolution (at least, up until the end of the 1960s), which was often substituted for civil war, yet without ever coinciding with it. It was Hannah Arendt who, in her book On Revolution, unreservedly formulated the thesis of the heterogeneity between the two phenomena. ‘[R]evolutions’, she writes,

are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning [. . .] Modern revolutions have little in common with the mutatio rerum of Roman history or the stasis, the civil strife which disturbed the Greek polis. We cannot equate them with Plato’s metabolai, the quasi-natural transformation of one form of government into another, or with Polybius’s politeiōn anakyklōsis, the appointed recurring cycle into which human affairs are bound by reason of their always being driven to extremes. Antiquity was well acquainted with political change and the violence that went with change, but neither of them appeared to it to bring about something new. (Arendt 1963, 13–14)

Although it is likely that the difference between the two concepts is in fact purely nominal, it is certain that the concentration of attention on the concept of revolution (which for some reason seemed more respectable than that of stasis, even to a scholar as unprejudiced as Arendt), has contributed to the marginalisation of studies on civil war.

3.   A theory of civil war is not among the possible objectives of this text. Instead, I will restrict myself to examining the topic as it appears within Western political thought at two moments in its history: in the testimonies of the philosophers and historians of Ancient Greece and in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. The two examples have not been selected by chance: I would like to suggest that they represent the two faces, so to speak, of a single political paradigm, which manifests itself, on the one hand, through the assertion of the necessity of civil war, and on the other, through the assertion of the necessity of its exclusion. That the paradigm is, in truth, single, means that the two opposed necessities maintain a secret solidarity between them. And it is this secret solidarity that I will seek to grasp.

An analysis of the problem of civil war (or stasis) in classical Greece can only begin with the studies of Nicole Loraux, who dedicated a series of articles and essays to this theme, which were collected in 1997 in the volume La Cité divisée—the volume to which she used to refer as mon livre par excellence. As in the life of artists, so too in the life of scholars there are mysteries. Thus I was never able to successfully explain to myself why Loraux never included in the volume an essay written in 1986 for a lecture in Rome entitled ‘La guerre dans la famille’, which is perhaps the most important of all the studies she dedicated to the problem of stasis. The circumstance is all the more inexplicable given that she decided to publish the essay in an issue of the journal Clio dedicated to guerres civiles in the same year as the book, almost as if she were aware—but this would be a truly singular motivation—that the thesis defended in the essay went decidedly further in terms of originality and radicality than the already acute thesis advanced in the book. I will attempt, in any case, to summarise the essay’s findings in order then to attempt to locate what Feuerbach called the Entwicklungsfähigkeit, the ‘capacity for development’ that they contain.

4.   Other French scholars—allow me to mention at least two classics, Gustave Glotz and Fustel de Coulanges, and in their wake, Jean-Pierre Vernant—had underscored the importance of stasis in the Greek polis prior to Nicole Loraux. The novelty of Loraux’s approach is that she immediately situates the problem in its specific locus, which is to say, in the relationship between the oikos, the family or the household, and the polis, the city. ‘The matter’, she writes, ‘will be played out between three terms: the stasis, the city, the family’ (Loraux 1997, 38). Such an identification of the place of civil war entails redrawing the traditional topography of the relations between the family and the city from scratch. What is at issue is not, as the prevailing paradigm would have it, an overcoming of the family in the city, of the private in the public and of the particular in the general, but a more ambiguous and complex relation; and it is precisely this relation which we will seek to grasp.

Loraux begins her analysis with a passage from Plato’s Menexenus, in which the ambiguity of civil war appears on full display. Describing the stasis which divided the citizens of Athens in 404, Plato writes ironically:

Our war at home [ho oikeios hēmin polemos] was waged in such a fashion that were fate to condemn humanity to conflict no one would wish to see their city suffer this predicament in any other way. With such joviality and familiarity did those from the Piraeus and those from the city engage with one another [hōs asmenōs kai oike kai oikeiōs allēlois synemeixan]! (Menex., 243e–244a)

Not only does the verb that Plato employs (symmeignymi) mean both ‘to mingle’ and ‘to enter the fray, to fight’; but the very expression oikeios polemos is, to the Greek ear, an oxymoron: polemos designates external conflict and, as Plato will record in the Republic (470c), refers to the allotrion kai othneion (alien and foreign), while for the oikeios kai syggenēs (familiar and kindred) the appropriate term is stasis. According to the reading that Loraux gives to these passages, Plato seems to imply that ‘the Athenians had waged an internecine war only in order to better reconvene in a family celebration’ (Loraux 1997, 22). The family is simultaneously the origin of division and stasis and the paradigm of reconciliation (the Greeks, Plato will write, ‘fight amongst themselves as if they were fated to be reconciled’ [Rep., 471a]).

5.   The ambivalence of the stasis, according to Loraux, is thus attributable to the ambiguity of the oikos, with which is it consubstantial. Civil war is the stasis emphylos; it is the conflict particular to the phylon, to blood kinship. It is to such an extent inherent to the family that the phrase ta emphylia (literally, ‘the things internal to the bloodline’) simply means ‘civil wars’. According to Loraux, the term denotes ‘the bloody relationship that the city, as a bloodline (and, as such, thought in its closure), maintains with itself’ (Loraux 1997, 29). At the same time, precisely because it is what lies at the origin of the stasis, the family is also what contains its possible remedy. Vernant thus notes that the rift between families is often healed through an exchange of gifts, which is to say, by virtue of a marriage between rival clans: ‘In the eyes of the Greeks it was not possible to isolate the forces of discord from those of union either in the web of human relationships or in the constitution of the world’ (Vernant 1988, 31).

Even tragedy bears witness to the intimate link between civil war and the family, and to the threat that the Ares emphylios—the god of warfare who dwells in the oikos—brings to bear on the city (Eumenides, 862–3). According to Loraux, the Oresteia is simultaneously the evocation of the long chain of killings in the house of the Atridi and the commemoration of its overcoming through the foundation of the court at the Areopagus, which puts an end to the family massacre. ‘The civic order has integrated the family in its midst. This means that it is always virtually threatened by the discord that kinship is like a second nature, and that it has simultaneously always already overcome this threat’ (Loraux 1997, 39).

Insofar as civil war is inherent to the family—insofar as it is, that is to say, an oikeios polemos, a ‘war within the household’—it is, to the same extent—this is the thesis that Loraux seems to suggest here—inherent to the city, an integral part of the political life of the Greeks.

6.   Toward the end of her essay, Loraux analyses the case of a small Greek city in Sicily, Nakōnē, where, in the third century BCE, the citizens decided to organise the reconciliation following a stasis in a particularly striking way. They drew the names of the citizens in lots, in order to then divide them into groups of five, who in this way became adelphoi hairetoi, ‘brothers by election’. The natural family was neutralised, but this neutralisation was accomplished simultaneously through a symbol par excellence of kinship: fraternity. The oikos, the origin of civil strife, is excluded from the city through the production of a false fraternity. The inscription that has transmitted this information to us specifies that the neo-brothers were to have no family kinship between them: the purely political fraternity overrules blood kinship, and in this way frees the city from the stasis emphylos. With the same gesture, however, it reconstitutes kinship at the level of the polis: it turns the city into a family of a new kind. It was a ‘family’ paradigm of this kind that Plato had employed when suggesting that, in his ideal republic, once the natural family had been eliminated through the communism of women and goods, each person would see in the other ‘a brother or a sister, a father or a mother, a son or a daughter’ (Rep., 463c).

The ambivalent function of the oikos—and of the stasis that is inherent to it—is once again confirmed. And at this point, Loraux can conclude her analysis with a twofold invitation:

[S]tasis/family/city [. . .] these notions are articulated according to lines of force in which recurrence and superimposition mostly prevail over every continuous process of evolution. Hence the paradox and the ambivalence, which we have encountered many times. The historian of kinship may find here the occasion to re-examine the commonplace of an irresistible overcoming of the oikos by the city. As for the historian of politics, he will perhaps strengthen his conviction that ambivalence presides over the Greek reflection on the city once the stasis must be incorporated within it; for internal conflict must now be conceived as having actually emerged within the phylon, instead of having been imported from without, as a convenient solution would have it [. . .] We must attempt to think, together with the Greeks, the war within the family. Let us suppose that the city is a phylon; it follows that the stasis is its revealer. Let us make the city an oikos; on the horizon of the oikeios polemos thus looms a festival of reconciliation. And let us admit, finally, that between these two operations, the tension cannot be resolved. (Loraux 1997, 61–2)

7.   Let us attempt to summarise the findings of Loraux’s essay in the form of theses:

1) In the first place, stasis calls into question the commonplace that conceives Greek politics as the definitive overcoming of the oikos in the polis.

2) In its essence, stasis or civil war is a ‘war within the family’, which comes from the oikos and not from outside. Precisely insofar as it is inherent to the family, the stasis acts as its revealer; it attests to its irreducible presence in the polis.

3) The oikos is essentially ambivalent: on the one hand, it is a factor of division and conflict; on the other, it is the paradigm that enables the reconciliation of what it has divided.

What becomes immediately evident from this summary exposition is the fact that while the presence and function of the oikos and the phylon in the city are broadly examined and to a certain extent defined, it is precisely the function of the stasis, which constitutes the object of the investigation, which remains in the shadows. It is but a ‘revealer’ of the oikos. Reduced, in other words, to the element from which it originates and to whose presence in the city it can only attest, its own definition ultimately remains elusive. We will therefore attempt to examine Loraux’s theses in this direction, by seeking to determine the ‘capacity for development’ that they contain, which will enable us to bring to light this unsaid.

8.   Regarding the first point, I believe that my recent investigations have shown beyond doubt that the relations between the oikos and the polis, and between zōē and bios, which are at the foundation of Western politics, need to be rethought from scratch. In classical Greece, zōē, simple natural life, was excluded from the polis and remained confined to the sphere of the oikos. At the beginning of the Politics, Aristotle thus carefully distinguishes the oikonomos (the head of an enterprise) and the despotēs (the head of the family), who are concerned with the reproduction and conservation of life, from the statesman; and he sharply criticises those who maintain that the difference that separates them is one of quantity rather than one of kind. And when, in a passage that will become canonical in the Western political tradition, he defines the end of the polis as a perfect community, he does so precisely by opposing the simple fact of living (to zēn) to politically qualified life (to eu zēn).

This opposition between ‘life’ and the ‘good life’ is nonetheless at the same time an implication of the first in the second, of the family in the city and of zōē in political life. One of the aims of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Agamben 1998) was precisely that of analysing the reasons for, and consequences of, this exclusion—which is at the same time an inclusion—of natural life in politics. What relations should we suppose between zōē and the oikos, on the one hand, and between the polis and political bios, on the other, if the former must be included in the latter through an exclusion? From this perspective, my investigations were perfectly consistent with Loraux’s invitation to call into question the commonplace ‘of an irresistible overcoming of the oikos on the part of the polis’. What is at issue is not an overcoming, but a complicated and unresolved attempt to capture an exteriority and to expel an intimacy. But how should we understand the place and the function of civil war in this context?

9.   In this light, the second and third theses in which we have summarised Loraux’s research appear more problematic. According to these theses, the original place of the stasis is the oikos; civil war is a ‘war within the family’, an oikeios polemos. And an essential ambivalence inheres in the oikos (and in the stasis that is connatural to it), according to which it is simultaneously what causes the destruction of the city and the paradigm of its reunification. How can we explain this ambivalence? If the oikos, insofar as it contains strife and stasis within itself, is an element of political disintegration, how can it appear as the model of reconciliation? And why does the family irreducibly entail conflict at its centre? Why would civil war be a secret of the family and of blood, yet not a political mystery? Perhaps the location and generation of the stasis within the oikos, which Loraux’s hypotheses seem to take for granted, needs to be verified and corrected.

According to its etymon, stasis (from histemi) designates the act of rising, of standing firmly upright (stasimos is the point in the tragedy when the chorus stands still and speaks; stas is the one who swears the oath while standing). Where does the stasis ‘stand’? What is its proper place? In order to respond to these questions, it will be necessary to reconsider some of the texts that Loraux analyses in order to test her thesis regarding the family situation of civil war and to check whether they in fact consent to a different reading.

First of all, a citation from Plato’s Laws (869c–d):

The brother [adelphos, the blood brother] who kills his brother in combat during a civil war [. . .] will be held pure [katharos] as if he had killed an enemy [polemios]; the same will happen when a citizen has killed a citizen in the same conditions, or a stranger a stranger.

Commenting on this passage, Loraux once again perceives testimony of the intimate relation between stasis and the family:

[I]n the outburst of civil hatred, it is the nearest of kin that one kills [. . .] it is the immediate family that the stasis dissolves by dividing it. The real family in the city, the family as metaphor of the city. (Loraux 1997, 44)

Yet what follows from the text of the law that the Athenian of the Platonic dialogue proposes is less the connection between stasis and oikos than the fact that the civil war assimilates and makes undecidable brother and enemy, inside and outside, household and city. In the stasis, the killing of what is most intimate is indistinguishable from the killing of what is most foreign. This means, however, that the stasis does not have its place within the household, but constitutes a threshold of indifference between the oikos and the polis, between blood kinship and citizenship.

Another passage, this time from Thucydides (which Loraux cites in a footnote), confirms this new situation of the stasis at the border between the household and the city. Regarding the bloody civil war that had taken place in Corcira in 425, Thucydides records that the stasis attained such ferocity that ‘the family bond [to syggenēs] became more foreign than the factional bond [tou etairikou]’ (Hist., 3, 82, 6). Loraux explains that the inverse formulation—‘the factional bond became more intimate than the family bond’—would have been more natural for expressing the same idea (Loraux 1997, 35n45). In truth, what is once again decisive is the fact that the stasis, through a double displacement, confuses what pertains to the oikos with what is particular to the polis, what is intimate with what is foreign. The factional bond moves into the household to the same extent to which the family bond is estranged in the faction.

It is perhaps possible to interpret in the same sense the curious device contrived by the citizens of Nakōnē. Here too the effect of the stasis is that of rendering the oikos and the polis indiscernible: kinship is dissolved into citizenship, while the factional bond assumes, for the ‘brothers by election’, the incongruous form of a kinship.

10.   We can now attempt to respond to the question: Where does the stasis ‘stand’? What is the proper place of civil war? The stasis—this is our hypothesis—takes place neither in the oikos nor in the polis, neither in the family nor in the city; rather, it constitutes a zone of indifference between the unpolitical space of the family and the political space of the city. In transgressing this threshold, the oikos is politicised; conversely, the polis is ‘economised’, that is, it is reduced to an oikos. This means that in the system of Greek politics civil war functions as a threshold of politicisation and depoliticisation, through which the house is exceeded in the city and the city is depoliticised in the family.

In the tradition of Greek law, there is a curious document that seems to confirm beyond any doubt the situation of civil war as a threshold of politicisation/depoliticisation that we have just proposed. Although this document is mentioned not only by Plutarch, Aulus Gellius and Cicero, but also, and with particular precision, by Aristotle (Ath. Const., 8, 5), the valuation of stasis that it entails has appeared so disconcerting to modern historians of politics that it has often been ignored (even Loraux, who cites it in her book, does not mention it in the article). The document in question is Solon’s law, which punishes with atimia—which is to say, with the loss of civil rights—the citizen who had not fought for either one of the two sides in a civil war. As Aristotle bluntly expresses it,

whoever did not join sides [thētai ta opla, literally ‘provide the shield’] with either party when civil strife [stasiazousēs tēs poleōs] prevailed was to be held in dishonour [atimon einai] and no longer a member of the state [tēs poleōs mē metēchein].

(By translating it with capite sanxit, Cicero—Att., 10, 1, 2—correctly evokes the capitis diminutio, which corresponds to the Greek atimia.)

Not taking part in the civil war amounts to being expelled from the polis and confined to the oikos, to losing citizenship by being reduced to the unpolitical condition of a private person. Obviously this does not mean that the Greeks considered civil war to be a public good, but rather that the stasis functions as a reactant which reveals the political element in the extreme instance as a threshold of politicisation that determines for itself the political or unpolitical character of a certain being.

11.   Christian Meier has shown how a transformation in constitutional conceptuality took place in fifth-century BCE Greece, which was accomplished through what he calls a ‘politicisation’ (Politisierung) of the citizenry. Where social belonging had previously been defined primarily by conditions and statuses of various kinds (nobles and members of religious communities, farmers and artisans, heads of families and relatives, inhabitants of the city and of the countryside, masters and retainers), and only secondarily by citizenship with the rights and duties that the latter implied, now citizenship as such became the political criterion of social identity. ‘In this way’, he writes,

a specifically Greek identity arose—the political identity of citizenship. The citizens were expected to act ‘as citizens’ [bürgherlich], that is, ‘politically’ (in the Greek sense of the word), and this expectation was now given an institutional form. Political identity was not exposed to any significant competition from group loyalties based on religion, common economic interests, the individual’s place in the work space, or the like [. . .] In devoting themselves to political life broad sections of the citizenry in the Greek democracies saw themselves primarily as participants in the government of the polis. The polis rested essentially on their interests in order and justice, which formed the basis of their solidarity [. . .] In this sense, polis and politai could continue to interact [. . .] Hence, for a fairly large number of citizens, politics became a consuming interest that made up much of the content of their lives [Lebensinhalt] [. . .] There was a strict separation between the polis, the area in which they acted jointly as citizens, and the house, between politics and the ‘realm of necessity’ (anankaia). (Meier 1979/1990, 204/165–6)

According to Meier, this process of politicisation of the citizenry is specifically Greek, and was bequeathed by Greece, with alterations and discontinuities of various kinds, to Western politics. From the perspective that interests us here, it is necessary to specify that the politicisation of which Meier speaks is situated in the field of tensions between oikos and polis, which are defined by the polar opposed processes of politicisation and depoliticisation. In this field of tensions, stasis constitutes a threshold through which domestic belonging is politicised into citizenship and, conversely, citizenship is depoliticised into family solidarity. Because these tensions are, as we have seen, contemporaneous, what becomes decisive is the threshold in which they are transformed and inverted, conjoined and disjoined.

ℵ Meier broadly accepts the Schmittian definition of the political as ‘the degree of intensity of an association and a disassociation’. As he suggests, however, this definition concerns less the essence of the political than political unity. In this sense, as Schmitt specifies,

political unity [. . .] describes the most intensive degree of unity, from which, therefore, the most intensive differentiation, grouping into friend and enemy, is decided. Political unity is the supreme unity [. . .] because it decides and can, within itself, prevent all other opposed groupings from disassociating to the point of extreme hostility (i.e. to the point of civil war). (Schmitt 2000, 307)

In truth, if an opposed pair of concepts defines a particular field, neither of the two can be excluded entirely without compromising its reality. As the extreme degree of disassociation, civil war is, even from the Schmittian perspective, an ineliminable part of the political system of the West.

12.   Another Greek institution—which Loraux does not mention in the article, but to which she dedicates an important chapter (the sixth) of La Cité divisée—confirms this essential connection between stasis and politics: amnesty. In 403, following the civil war in Athens which concluded with the defeat of the oligarchy of the Thirty, the victorious democrats, led by Archinus, solemnly pledged ‘not in any instance to remember the past events [ton de parelēlythotōn mēdeni pros mēdena mnēsikakein]’ (Ath. Const., 39, 6), that is, not to prosecute crimes committed during the civil war. Commenting on this decision, which coincides with the invention of amnesty, Aristotle (Ath. Const., 40, 2) writes that in this way the democrats ‘behaved towards the past disasters in the most [. . .] statesmanlike manner [politikōtata (. . .) chrēsasthai]’. Amnesty with respect to civil war is thus the comportment most appropriate to politics. From the juridical point of view, stasis thus seems to be defined by two prohibitions, which perfectly cohere with one another: on the one hand, not participating in it is politically culpable; on the other, forgetting it once it has finished is a political duty.

The mē mnēsikakein formula of the amnestic oath is usually translated with ‘do not remember’ or even ‘do not be resentful, do not have bad memories’ (Loraux translates it as je ne rappellerai pas les malheures, ‘I will not recall the misfortunes’ [Loraux 1997/2001, 147/149]). The adjective mnēsikakos thus means ‘rancorous, resentful’ and refers to someone who harbours bad memories. It is doubtful, however, that the same applies for the verb mnēsikakein. In the cryptotype that rules the formation of compound verbs of this type in Greek, the active one is generally the second term. Mnēsikakein means less ‘to have bad memories’ than ‘to do harm with memory, to make bad use of memories’. In this case, it is a legal term, which refers to the fact of prosecuting someone for crimes committed during the stasis. The Athenian amnēstia is not simply a forgetting or a repression of the past; it is an exhortation not to make bad use of memory. Insofar as it constitutes a political paradigm inherent to the city, which marks the becoming-political of the unpolitical (the oikos) and the becoming-unpolitical of the political (the polis), the stasis is not something that can ever be forgotten or repressed; it is the unforgettable which must remain always possible in the city, yet which nonetheless must not be remembered through trials and resentments. Just the opposite, that is to say, of what civil war seems to be for the moderns: namely, something that one must seek to render impossible at every cost, yet that must always be remembered through trials and legal persecutions.

13.   Let us attempt to draw some provisory conclusions from our analyses:

1) The stasis does not originate in the oikos; it is not a ‘war within the family’, but forms part of a device that functions in a manner similar to the state of exception. Just as in the state of exception, zōē, natural life, is included in the juridical-political order through its exclusion, so analogously the oikos is politicised and included in the polis through the stasis.

2) What is at stake in the relation between oikos and polis is the constitution of a threshold of indifference in which the political and the unpolitical, the outside and the inside coincide. We must therefore conceive politics as a field of forces whose extremes are the oikos and the polis; between them, civil war marks the threshold through which the unpolitical is politicised and the political is ‘economised’:

This means that in classical Greece, as today, there is no such thing as a political ‘substance’: politics is a field incessantly traversed by the tensional currents of politicisation and depoliticisation, the family and the city. Between these opposed polarities, disjoined and yet intimately bound together, the tension—to paraphrase Loraux’s diagnosis—is irresolvable. When the tension toward the oikos prevails and the city seems to want to transform itself into a family (albeit of a particular kind), then civil war functions as a threshold in which family relationships are repoliticised; when it is instead the tension toward the polis that prevails and the family bond appears to weaken, then the stasis intervenes to recodify the family relationships in political terms.

Classical Greece is perhaps the place in which this tension found for a moment an uncertain, precarious equilibrium. In the course of the subsequent political history of the West, the tendency to depoliticise the city by transforming it into a house or a family, ruled by blood relations or by merely economic operations, will alternate together with other, symmetrically opposed phases in which everything that is unpolitical must be mobilised and politicised. In accordance with the prevailing of one or the other tendency, the function, situation and form of civil war will also change. But so long as the words ‘family’ and ‘city’, ‘private’ and ‘public’, ‘economy’ and ‘politics’ maintain an albeit tenuous meaning, it is unlikely that it can ever be eliminated from the political scene of the West.

ℵ The form that civil war has acquired today in world history is terrorism. If the Foucauldian diagnosis of modern politics as biopolitics is correct, and if the genealogy that traces it back to an oikonomical-theological paradigm is equally correct, then global terrorism is the form that civil war acquires when life as such becomes the stakes of politics. Precisely when the polis appears in the reassuring figure of an oikos—the ‘Common European Home’, or the world as the absolute space of global economic management—then stasis, which can no longer be situated in the threshold between the oikos and the polis, becomes the paradigm of every conflict and re-emerges in the form of terror. Terrorism is the ‘global civil war’ which time and again invests this or that zone of planetary space. It is no coincidence that the ‘terror’ should coincide with the moment in which life as such—the nation (which is to say, birth)—became the principle of sovereignty. The sole form in which life as such can be politicised is its unconditioned exposure to death—that is, bare life.

2. Leviathan and Behemoth

1.   You have before you a photocopy of the famous engraving from the frontispiece of the first edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, ‘printed for Andrew Crooke at the Green Dragon in St. Paul’s Churchyard’ in 1651. As has been rightly observed, this is ‘the most famous visual image in the history of modern political philosophy’ (Malcolm 1998, 124). Given that in those years emblematic literature had reached its apogee, it is reasonable to suppose that the author had intended to summarise in an image the entire content of the work (or at least its esoteric meaning)—the ‘idea of the work’, as is written in the engraving which Giambattista Vico chose for the frontispiece of his Scienza Nuova. And yet, despite experiencing a kind of acceleration in recent decades, the bibliography on this emblem par excellence of modern politics is relatively meagre. As happens every time that research is situated at the intersection of different disciplinary specialisations, the scholars who have confronted this task appear to move on a kind of terra incognita, whose navigation would necessitate combining the resources of iconology with those of what is arguably the most tenuous and uncertain discipline among the many taught in our universities: political philosophy. The knowledge that would be required here would be that of a science we could call iconologia philosophica; a science which perhaps existed between 1531 (the date of publication of Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata) and 1627 (when Jacob Cats’s Sinne- en minnebeelden appeared), but for which today we lack even the most elementary principles.

Figure 1   Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Crooke, London 1651. Frontispiece of the First Edition.

In my attempt to interpret the emblem, I will endeavour not to forget what it probably was in Hobbes’s intentions: a door or a threshold that would lead, even if in a veiled manner, into the problematic nucleus of the book. This does not necessarily mean that I intend to advance an esoteric reading of Leviathan. Carl Schmitt, to whom we owe an important monograph on the book, indeed intimates on numerous occasions that Leviathan might be an esoteric book. ‘[I]t is possible’, he writes,

that behind the image [of the Leviathan] is hidden a deeper, more mysterious meaning. Like all the great thinkers of his time, Hobbes had a sense for esoteric veils. He said about himself that now and then he made ‘overtures’, but that he revealed his thoughts only in part and that he acted as people do who open a window only for a moment and close it quickly for fear of a storm. (Schmitt 1982/1996, 43–4/26)

And again in 1945, in a letter to Ernst Jünger signed with the name of Melville’s character Benito Cereno, he writes:

This is a thoroughly esoteric book [ein durch und durch esoterisches Buch], and its inherent esotericism increases the deeper one penetrates into it. Take it off my hands! Put it back in its place! [. . .] Do not dive into its arcana, but wait until you have been initiated into it in an appropriate form and ultimately admitted. Otherwise, you may be seized by a fit of rage, which would be bad for your health, and try to destroy something that is beyond all destruction. (Jünger and Schmitt 1999, 193)

These remarks are obviously just as esoteric as the book to which they refer, yet they still do not succeed in grasping the arcana which they purport to know. Every esoteric intention inevitably contains a contradiction, which marks its point of distinction with respect to mysticism and philosophy: if the concealment is something serious and is not a joke, then it must be experienced as such and the subject cannot profess to know what he or she can only be oblivious to; if, conversely, it is a joke, then in this case the esotericism is even less justified.

It is possible, moreover, that in the very frontispiece with which we are concerned Hobbes had alluded to something like an ‘esoteric veil’. Indeed, the emblem contains at its centre a kind of veil or stage curtain upon which the title of the work is inscribed and which it would be theoretically possible to lift in order to see what lies behind it. Schmitt does not fail to observe that the ‘stage curtain that hangs at the centre alludes to the fact that here many things are said, but also many hidden’ (Schmitt 1982, 151). The most proper intention of one of the main currents of the political theory of the Baroque age, beginning with Arnold Clapmar’s De arcanis rerum publicarum libri sex (1605) and Christoph Besold’s Dissertatio de arcanis rerum publicarum (1614), is precisely that which distinguishes in the structure of power one visible face and another that must remain hidden (the veritable arcana imperii). Nothing could be further from the intentions of Hobbes, who, as has been suggested, wanted to put political philosophy for the first time on a scientific basis (Berns 1987, 396). If we will attempt in the ensuing pages to raise this curtain, this does not mean that we intend to attribute an esoteric intention to Hobbes. Unless one wants to call esoteric a writing that relies on alert readers; readers, that is to say—as any reader worthy of the name should be—capable of not allowing the particular details and modalities of the exposition to escape them.

ℵ A stage curtain already existed in the theatres of the classical world. It did not fall from above, however, but was raised from below (as in the curtain today in the German style) and stored in a cavity between the stage and the orchestra. I do not know when the curtain began instead to be dropped from above, as if what had to hide the theatrical scene and separate it from reality came from heaven and not from the earth, as in the ancient theatres. Today, as you know, the stage curtain for the most part opens horizontally from the centre, like a double blind. It is unclear whether it is legitimate to attribute significance to these changes in the stage curtain’s movement on the proscenium. In any case, the veil or stage curtain that in the frontispiece of Leviathan hides the symbolic centre of power is supported by two knots overhead and hence would fall from heaven and not from earth.

2.   The question of the artist—Abraham Bosse, according to the majority of scholars—who created the image following Hobbes’s instructions does not concern us here. More interesting is the existence of a manuscript copy on parchment, which Hobbes had prepared for Charles II and in which the image on the frontispiece presents some important differences—the most significant of which, to be sure, is that here the tiny men that form the Leviathan’s body are turned not toward the head of the sovereign as in the book, but toward the reader, that is, toward the sovereign for whom the manuscript was intended (Fig. 2). In this sense, there is not really a contrast between the two frontispieces, because in both cases the subjects direct their gaze toward the sovereign (in one image the other is actually present). In the highest part of the emblem, where the sword and the crosier which the Leviathan holds in his hands meet, we read a citation in Latin from Job 41: 24: Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei. This comes from the last part of the book, when God, in order to silence any remonstrance on Job’s part, describes to him the two terrible primordial beasts: Behemoth (in the Jewish tradition represented as a gigantic bull) and the marine monster Leviathan. The description of Leviathan insists on his terrifying force. In the Vulgate that Hobbes seems to follow:

Figure 2   Abraham Bosse, Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651. Copy on parchment. British Library, Mss. Egerton, 1910.

Canst thou draw out the Leviathan with a hook, or canst thou tie his tongue with a cord? [. . .] / In his neck strength shall dwell, and want goeth before his face. [. . .] / His heart shall be as hard as a stone and as firm as a smith’s anvil. / When he shall rise him up the angels shall fear and being affrighted shall purify themselves. / When a sword shall lay at him it shall not be able to hold, nor a spear, nor a breastplate, / for he shall esteem iron as straw and brass as rotten wood. [. . .] / He shall make the deep sea to boil like a pot and shall make it as when ointments boil. / A path shall shine after him; he shall esteem the deep as growing old. / There is no power upon earth that can be compared with him who was made to fear no-one. / He beholdeth every high thing; he is king over all the children of pride [Non est super terram potestas quae comparetur ei, qui factus est ut nullum timeret. / Omne sublime videt; ipse est rex super universos filios superbiae]. (Vulgate Bible 2011, 140–5)

In chapter 28 of the book, Hobbes explicitly refers to this biblical passage, writing of having compared the great power of the sovereign, to whom pride and other passions have forced men to submit themselves,

to Leviathan, taking the comparison out of the two last verses of the one and fortieth of Job; where God having set forth the great power of Leviathan, calleth him King of the Proud. There is nothing, saith he, on earth, to be compared to him. He is made so as not to be afraid. Hee seeth every high thing below him; and is King of all the children of pride. (Hobbes 1996, 221)

We will return to the particular eschatological significance of these animals, both in the Jewish and in the Christian traditions.

Immediately below the Latin citation, which constitutes in some way the impresa of the emblem (in the emblematic tradition, in which the frontispiece is inscribed, the image is always accompanied by a motto or impresa), we see a gigantic figure whose torso—the sole visible part of the body—is formed by a multitude of tiny human figures, in accordance with the Hobbesian doctrine of the covenant which unites the multitude ‘in one and the same person’ (Hobbes 1996, 120). The colossus wears a crown on his head, and holds a sword, the symbol of temporal power, in his right hand, and a crosier, the symbol of spiritual (or, as Hobbes prefers to say, ‘ecclesiasticall’) power, in his left. Hans Barion has observed that the image is symmetrically inverse with respect to the medieval representations of the Church, in which the right hand holds the crosier and the left the sword.

In the foreground, in such a way as to cover the rest of the colossus’s body, a rolling landscape, scattered with villages, leads to the image of a city, in which we clearly recognise the cathedral (on the left side, corresponding to the crosier) and the fortress (on the right side, corresponding to the sword).

The lower part of the frontispiece, which a kind of ledge separates from the higher part, contains, in correspondence with each of the colossus’s arms, a sequence of tiny emblems, five per side, which refer to temporal power (a fortress, a crown, a cannon, a panoply of flags and a battle) and to ecclesiastical power (a church, a mitre, the thunderbolt of excommunication, symbols of logical syllogisms and a kind of council). Between them hangs the stage curtain with the book’s title.

3.   An interpretation of the emblem must begin with the figure of the Leviathan-colossus. Scholars have so constantly focused on its significance as a symbol of the State that they have failed to pose some obvious questions concerning, for example, its position. Where is the Leviathan situated with respect to the other elements that compose the image?

In an exemplary study, Reinhard Brandt has attempted to sketch the part of the colossus’s body that is hidden from view, following the proportions of the Vitruvian canon (supposing, that is to say, that the head corresponds to an eighth of the entire body) (Brandt 1982, 211–12; fig. 3). The result is a human figure whose feet appear to float on exactly the point of the frontispiece where the name ‘Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury’ is written. I say ‘float’ because it is unclear on what they rest, whether on land or on water. If we suppose, as seems likely, that beyond the rolling landscape is the sea, this would accord perfectly with the fact that, in the biblical tradition, whereas Behemoth is a terrestrial animal, Leviathan is a marine one, a kind of enormous fish or whale—even though it is impossible ‘to draw it out with a hook’. (John Bramhall, who suggests, in his spiteful polemic with Hobbes, that the Leviathan of the book—‘neither flesh nor fish [. . .] a mixture of a god and a man and a fish’—is Hobbes himself, also asserts that ‘the true literall Leviathan is the whale-fish’ [Bramhall 1977, 459].) Schmitt’s hypothesis, according to which the Behemoth—Leviathan opposition would correspond to the fundamental geopolitical opposition between land and sea, thus finds a confirmation in the frontispiece.

What is decisive, in any case, beyond the opposition between land and sea, is the surprising fact that the ‘mortal God’, ‘the Artificiall Man called Common-wealth or State’ (as Hobbes defines him in the introduction), does not dwell within the city, but outside it. His place is exterior not only with respect to the walls of the city, but also with respect to its territory, in a no-man’s-land or in the sea; in any case, not within the city. The Commonwealth—the body political—does not coincide with the physical body of the city. It is this anomalous situation that we will have to understand.

Figure 3   Reinhard Brandt, design imposed on the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.

4.   Another anomaly of the emblem, no less enigmatic than the preceding and in all likelihood connected with it, is the fact that the city, with the exception of some armed guards and two very special figures situated close to the cathedral with whom we will soon be concerned, is completely devoid of its inhabitants. The streets are perfectly empty, the city is uninhabited: no one lives there. One possible explanation is that the population of the city has been fully transferred to the body of the Leviathan; this, however, would imply that it is not only the sovereign who has no place in the city, but that this is the case for the people as well.

The political emblem of the frontispiece thus contains enigmas and riddles that we will seek to resolve. Why does the Leviathan not dwell in the city? And why is the city uninhabited? Before attempting to respond to these questions, it will be worthwhile examining the findings of another study that calls into question the very consistency of the Artificiall Man ‘called Commonwealth or State’.

5.   In his essay on the frontispiece of Leviathan, Noel Malcolm has drawn attention to a passage from the ‘Answer to Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert’, which Hobbes wrote during the same period in which he worked on Leviathan. Hobbes, whose works include two treatises on optics (the Tractatus de refractione of 1640 and the First Draught of the Optiques of 1646), describes here an optical device that was apparently fashionable at that moment:

I believe (Sir) you have seene a curious kind of perspective, where, he that lookes through a short hollow pipe, upon a picture conteyning diverse figures, sees none of those that are there paynted, but some one person made up of their partes, conveighed to the eye by the artificiall cutting of a glasse. (Qtd in Malcolm 1998, 125; figs 4–5)

The fact that the Leviathan was an artefact, comparable, as Hobbes suggests in the introduction, to ‘Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch)’ (Hobbes 1996, 9), was perfectly well known; what Malcolm’s study suggests, however, is that what is in question here is not a mechanical contraption, but an optical device. The gigantic body of the Leviathan formed by innumerable tiny figures is not a reality, however artificial, but an optical illusion—‘a meer phantasme’, as Bramhall polemically defines it (Bramhall 1977, 459). And yet, in accordance with the increasing prestige that optics was acquiring in those years, the artifice is effective because it grants unity to a multiplicity.

Figures 4 and 5 Jean-François Niceron, La Perspective curieuse, ou Magie artificielle des effets merveilleux de l’optique, par la vision directe, la catoptrique, par la réflexion des miroirs plats, cylindriques et coniques, la dioptrique, par la réfraction des crystaux, Paris, 1638/1663, tables 48–9, via UCL Library, London.

A passage from Richard Fanshawe’s Epistle Dedicatory for his translation of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Pastor Fido (1647), which Hobbes probably knew, seems to confirm that precisely a contraption of this kind might be the source of the emblem of his Leviathan:

Your highnesse may have seen at Paris a Picture (it is in the Cabinet of the great Chancellor there) so admirably design’d, that, presenting to the common beholders a multitude of little faces (the famous Ancestors of that Noble Man); at the same time, to him that looks through a Perspective (kept there for that purpose) there appears onely a single portrait in great of the Chancellor himself; the painter thereby intimating [. . .] by a more subtile Philosophy [. . .] how the Body Politick is composed of many naturall ones; and how each of these, intire in it self, and consisting of head, eyes, hands, and the like, is a head, an eye, or a hand in the other: as also, that mens Privates cannot be preserved, if the Publick be destroyed. (Qtd in Malcolm 1998, 126)

The unification of the multitude of citizens in a single person is something like a perspectival illusion; political representation is only an optical representation (but no less effective on account of this).

6.   The enigma that the emblem poses to the reader is that of a city devoid of its inhabitants and that of a State situated outside its geographical borders. In Hobbes’s political thought, what could correspond to this apparent puzzle?

It is Hobbes himself who suggests a response in his De Cive when, in distinguishing between ‘people’ (populus) and ‘multitude’ (multitudo), he defines one of his fundamental theorems as a ‘paradox’ (paradoxum). ‘The people’, he writes,

is something single [unum quid], which has one will and to whom one action can be attributed. None of these can be said of the multitude. The people reigns in every city [Populus in omni civitate regnat]; even in a monarchy the people commands, for the people wills by the will of one man. The citizens, that is, the subjects, are the multitude. In a democracy and an aristocracy, the citizens are the multitude; but the council is the people [curia est populus]. And in a monarchy, the subjects are the multitude, and (although this is a paradox [quamquam paradoxum sit]), the king is the people [rex est populus]. Common men, and others who do not notice these things, always speak of a great number of men, that is, of the city [civitate], as the people; they say that the city rebels against the king (which is impossible), and that the people will and nill what troublesome and murmuring subjects will and nill; under the pretext of the people, they rouse the citizens against the city, that is, the multitude against the people. (Hobbes 1983, 190)

Let us seek to reflect on this paradox. It simultaneously implies a caesura (multitudo/populus: the multitude of citizens is not the people) and an identification (rex est populus). The people is sovereign on the condition of dividing itself, of splitting itself into a ‘multitude’ and a ‘people’. But how can the only real thing—the multitude of natural bodies, which so fascinated Hobbes (on 15 April 1651, after having just completed Leviathan, he writes: ‘I return to my interrupted Speculation of Bodies Naturall’ [Hobbes 1996, 491])—become one person alone? And what becomes of the multitude of natural bodies once it has been unified in the king?

ℵ Pufendorf stresses the fact that the Hobbesian axiom is a paradox in his commentary:

For a people or city is something single [unum quid], which has one will and to which a single action can be attributed, neither of which can be said of a multitude of subjects [. . .] even if the statement which follows, namely, that ‘the people rules in every city’ [populus in omni civitate regnat], ends up being an empty affectation. For the people signifies either the whole city, or else the multitude of subjects. In the first sense, the statement that ‘the people, that is, the city, rules in every city’ is tautological; in the second sense, the statement that ‘the people, that is, the citizens as distinguished from the king, rule in every city’ is false. In place of his next statement, that ‘in monarchies the people commands, for the people wills by the will of one man’, it would have been simpler to have said that in a monarchy the city is held to have willed what the monarch willed. Nor is the old paradox, ‘The king is the people’ [Rex est populus], to be explained in any other sense. (Pufendorf 1934, I: 673)From the perspective of a jurist such as Pufendorf, the paradox is thus resolved by interpreting it as a fictio iuris. In Hobbes, on the other hand, it preserves all its crudity: the sovereign is truly the people, because he is constituted—even if by virtue of an optical illusion—by the body of the subjects.

7.   The response to these questions is to be found in chapter 7 of De Cive where Hobbes asserts in no uncertain terms that at the very instant that the people chooses the sovereign it dissolves itself into a confused multitude. This happens not only in a monarchy, where as soon as the king has been chosen ‘the people is no longer one person, but a dissolved multitude [populus non amplius est persona una, sed dissoluta multitudo], since it was a person only by virtue of the sovereign power [summi imperii], which it has now transferred to him’ (Hobbes 1983, 7, 11: 155); but even in a democracy or an aristocracy, where ‘as soon as has the council been constituted, the people simultaneously dissolves [ea electa, populus simul dissolvitur]’ (Hobbes 1983, 7, 9: 154).

The sense of the paradox remains incomprehensible if we do not reflect on the status of this dissoluta multitudo, which obliges us to rethink the Hobbesian political system from scratch. The people—the body political—exists only instantaneously at the point in which it appoints ‘one Man, or Assembly of men, to beare their Person’ (Hobbes 1996, 120); but this point coincides with its vanishing into a ‘dissolved multitude’. The body political is thus an impossible concept, which lives only in the tension between the multitude and the populus-rex: it is always already in the act of dissolving itself in the constitution of the sovereign; the latter, on the other hand, is only an ‘Artificiall person’ (Hobbes 1996, 111), whose unity is the effect of an optical contraption or a mask.

Perhaps the fundamental concept of Hobbes’s thought is that of ‘body’. His entire philosophy is a meditation de corpore (and this makes him a Baroque thinker, if the Baroque can be defined as the union of a body and a veil), provided that we specify, as Hobbes does in The Elements of Law (2, 27, 9), that the people has no body of its own: ‘that the people is a distinct body from him or them that have the sovereignty over them, is an error’ (Hobbes 1969, 174).

Hobbes does not explicitly evoke the paradox of De Cive in Leviathan, but an attentive reading of chapter 18, ‘Of the Rights of Soveraignes by Institution’, enables us to specify the paradoxical status of the multitude. Here Hobbes writes that the members of a multitude who have obligated themselves by covenant to confer sovereign power to one person,

cannot lawfully make a new Covenant, amongst themselves, to be obedient to any other, in any thing whatsoever, without his permission. And therefore, they are subjects to a Monarch, cannot without his leave cast off Monarchy, and return to the confusion of a disunited Multitude; nor transferre their Person from him that beareth it, to another Man, or other Assembly of men. (Hobbes 1996, 122)

The apparent contradiction with the wording of De Cive is easily resolved if we distinguish, as Hobbes does, between the ‘disunited multitude’ that precedes the covenant and the ‘dissolved multitude’ (dissoluta multitudo) that follows it. The constitution of the populus-rex paradox is a process that issues from a multitude and returns to a multitude; but the dissoluta multitudo in which the people is dissolved cannot coincide with the ‘disunited multitude’ and expect to be able to name a new sovereign. The disunited multitude—people-king—dissolved multitude circle is broken in a point and the attempt to return to the initial state coincides with civil war.

8.   We can now understand why, in the emblem, the Leviathan’s body cannot dwell in the city (but floats in a sort of non-place) and why the city is empty of inhabitants. It is a commonplace that in Hobbes the multitude has no political significance; that it is what must disappear in order for the State to be able to exist. Yet if our reading of the paradox is correct—if the people, which has been constituted by a disunited multitude, dissolves itself again into a multitude—then the latter not only pre-exists the people-king, but (as a dissoluta multitudo) continues to exist after it. What disappears is instead the people, which is transposed into the figure of the sovereign and which thus ‘rules in every city’, yet without being able to live in it. The multitude has no political significance; it is the unpolitical element upon whose exclusion the city is founded. And yet, in the city, there is only the multitude, since the people has always already vanished into the sovereign. As a ‘dissolved multitude’, it is nonetheless literally unrepresentable—or rather, it can be represented only indirectly, as happens in the emblem of the frontispiece.

We have evoked the curious presence, in the empty city, of the armed guards and of the two characters whose identity it is now time to reveal. Francesca Falk has drawn attention to the fact that the two figures standing near the cathedral are wearing the characteristic beaked mask of plague doctors. Horst Bredekamp had spotted the detail, but had not drawn any conclusions from it; Falk instead rightly stresses the political (or biopolitical) significance that the doctors acquired during an epidemic. Their presence in the emblem recalls ‘the selection and the exclusion, and the connection between epidemic, health and sovereignty’ (Falk 2011, 73). Like the mass of plague victims, the unrepresentable multitude can be represented only through the guards who monitor its obedience and the doctors who treat it. It dwells in the city, but only as the object of the duties and concerns of those who exercise the sovereignty.

This is what Hobbes clearly affirms in chapter 13 of De Cive (and in chapter 30 of Leviathan), when, after having recalled that ‘all the duties of those who rule are comprised in this single maxim, “the safety of the people is the supreme law” [Salus populi suprema lex]’, he felt the need to specify that ‘by people we do not understand here a civil person, nor the city itself that governs, but the multitude of citizens who are governed [multitudo civium qui reguntur]’, and that by ‘safety’ we should understand not only ‘the simple preservation of life, but (to the extent that is possible) that of a happy life’ (Hobbes 1983, 13, 2–5: 195–6). While perfectly illustrating the paradoxical status of the Hobbesian multitude, the emblem of the frontispiece is also a courier that announces the biopolitical turn that sovereign power was preparing to make.

But there is another reason for the inclusion of the plague doctors in the frontispiece. In his translation of Thucydides, Hobbes had come across a passage in which the plague of Athens was defined as the origin of anomia (which he translates with ‘licentiousness’) and metabolē (which he renders with ‘revolution’):

And the great licentiousness [anomia], which also in other kinds was used in the city, began at first from this disease. For that which a man before would dissemble, and not acknowledge to be done for voluptuousness, he durst now do freely: seeing before his eyes with such quick revolution, of the rich dying, and men worth nothing inheriting their estates. (Hobbes 1843, 208)

Hence the notion that the dissoluta multitudo, which inhabits the city under the Leviathan’s dominion, may be compared to the mass of plague victims, who must be treated and governed. That the condition of the subjects of the Leviathan may be somehow comparable to that of the sick, is implied, moreover, in a passage from chapter 38 of Leviathan, in which Hobbes, glossing Isaiah 33: 24, writes that in the Kingdom of God the condition of the inhabitants is not being sick (‘The condition of the Saved, The Inhabitant shal not say: I am sick’ [Hobbes 1996, 317])—almost as if, by contrast, the life of the multitude in the profane kingdom were necessarily exposed to the plague of dissolution.

9.   In Hobbes’s thought, the intimate contradiction that marks what is arguably the fundamental concept of the Western political tradition—the concept of people—attains awareness. It has been observed that in the political-philosophical vocabulary of the West the same terms that designate the people as a politically qualified body also refer to a diametrically opposed reality, that is, to the people as a politically unqualified multitude (Koselleck 1992, 145). The concept ‘people’ thus contains an internal split, which, by always already dividing it into people and multitude, dēmos and plēthos, population and people, popolo grasso and popolo minuto, prevents it from being entirely present as a whole. Thus, from the perspective of constitutional law, on the one hand, the people must already in itself be defined by a conscious homogeneity, regardless of what kind (whether ethnic, religious, economic and so on), and hence is always already present to itself; on the other hand, as a political unity it can be present only through those who represent it. Even if we concede, as has happened at least since the French Revolution, that the people is the bearer of constituent power, to the extent that it is the bearer of this power it must find itself outside all juridical-constitutional normativity. This is why Sièyes could write that ‘on doit concevoir les nations sur la terre commes des individus hors du lien social ou, comme on l’a dit, dans l’état de nature’ (we must conceive the nations of the world as individuals outside the social bond or, as has been said, in the state of nature), and that a nation ‘ne doit ni peut s’astreindre à des formes constitutionnelles’ (neither should nor can subject itself to constitutional forms); nonetheless, for the same reason, it needs representatives (Sièyes 1970, 183).

The people, that is to say, is the absolutely present which, as such, can never be present and thus can only be represented. If we call ‘ademia’ (from dēmos, the Greek term for people) the absence of a people, then the Hobbesian State—like every State—lives in a condition of perennial ademia.

ℵ Hobbes was perfectly aware of the dangerous and constitutive ambiguity of the term people, to the extent that it always already contains the multitude within itself. In The Elements of Law, he thus writes that

[t]he controversies that arise concerning the right of the people, proceed from the equivocation of the word. For the word people hath a double signification. In one sense it signifieth only a number of men, distinguished by the place of their habitation; as the people of England or the people of France; which is no more but the multitude of those particular persons that inhabit those regions, without consideration of any contracts or covenants amongst them, by which any one of them is obliged to the rest. In another sense, it signifieth a person civil, that is to say, either one man, or one council, in the will whereof is included and involved the will of everyone in particular [. . .] [W]hereupon they that do not distinguish between these two significations, do usually attribute such rights to a dissolved multitude, as belong only to the people virtually contained in the body of the commonwealth or sovereignty. (Hobbes 1969, 124–5)

Hobbes therefore already clearly knows that distinction between population and people, which Foucault will place at the origin of modern biopolitics.

10.   If the dissolved multitude—and not the people—is the sole human presence in the city, and if the multitude is the subject of civil war, this means that civil war remains always possible within the State. Hobbes concedes as much without any reticence in chapter 29 of Leviathan, which treats ‘Of those things that Weaken, or tend to the DISSOLUTION of a Common-wealth’. ‘Lastly,’ he writes at the conclusion of the chapter,

when in a warre (forraign, or intestine,) the enemies get a finall Victory; so as (the forces of the Common-wealth keeping the field no longer) there is no farther protection of Subjects in their loyalty; then is the Common-wealth DISSOLVED, and every man at liberty to protect himselfe by such courses as his own discretion shall suggest unto him. (Hobbes 1996, 230)

This implies that so long as the civil war is in course and the fate of the struggle between the multitude and the sovereign has not been decided, there is no dissolution of the State. Civil war and Common-wealth, Behemoth and Leviathan coexist—just as the dissolved multitude coexists with the sovereign. Only when the internecine war concludes with the victory of the multitude will there be a return from the Common-wealth to the state of nature and from the dissolved multitude to the disunited multitude.

This means that civil war, Common-wealth and state of nature do not coincide, but are conjoined in a complicated relation. The state of nature, as Hobbes explains in the preface to De Cive, is what appears when one considers the city as if it were dissolved (civitas [. . .] tanquam dissoluta consideretur [. . .] ut qualis sit natura humana [. . .] recte intelligatur) (Hobbes 1983, 79–80), which is to say, from the perspective of civil war. In other words, the state of nature is a mythological projection into the past of civil war; conversely, civil war is a projection of the state of nature into the city: it is what appears when one considers the city from the perspective of the state of nature.

11.   The moment has now come to reflect on Hobbes’s choice of the term Leviathan as the title of his book, a choice whose reasons no one has succeeded in explaining in a satisfying manner. Why did Hobbes call the Common-wealth whose theory he sought to provide by the name of a monster that, at least within the Christian tradition, had acquired demonic connotations? It has been suggested that, by referring solely to the Book of Job, Hobbes was not fully aware of these strongly negative significations and had thus naively employed an image that his adversaries would then have the good fortune to turn against him (Farneti 2002, 178–9). To attribute ignorance to an author—and all the more so when the author in question is Hobbes, whose theological expertise is beyond any doubt—is methodologically even less advisable than attributing an anachronistic competence to them. Testimony that Hobbes was conscious of the negative implications of his title can be found, moreover, in the fact that, after having evoked the term Leviathan in chapter 17—‘This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN’—he immediately adds: ‘or rather (to speak more reverently)’ (Hobbes 1996, 120; in the Latin edition: ut dignius loquar). Furthermore, in the autobiographical poem composed in 1679, he writes: ‘The Book [. . .] / Known by its dreadful Name, LEVIATHAN’ (Hobbes 1680, 10). This led Schmitt to suggest that the choice of the image of the Leviathan had been a product of ‘the English sense of humour’, but that Hobbes had had to pay dearly for his imprudent evocation of a mythic force:

Whoever utilises such images, easily glides into the role of a magician who summons forces that cannot be matched by his arm, his eye, or any other measure of his human ability. He runs the risk that instead of encountering an ally he will meet a heartless demon who will deliver him into the hands of his enemies. [. . .] The traditional Jewish interpretation hit back at the Leviathan of Hobbes. (Schmitt 1982/1996, 124/82)

12.   The tradition that leads to the demonic interpretation of the biblical Leviathan and to the iconographic association between the Leviathan and the Antichrist has been reconstructed by Jessie Poesch (Poesch 1970) and Marco Bertozzi (Bertozzi 1983), who stress the importance, in this perspective, of Adso’s Letter on the Antichrist and Gregory the Great’s Moralia, where both Behemoth and Leviathan are associated with the Antichrist and the beasts of Revelation (Rev. 13). But already earlier Jerome, in his homily on Psalm 103 (104), writes that ‘the Jews say that God has made a mighty dragon called Leviathan which lives in the sea’, and adds immediately thereafter: ‘this is the dragon that was cast out of Paradise, beguiled Eve, and is permitted in this world to make sport of us’ (Jerome 1965, 228). This simultaneously Satanic and Antichristic interpretation of the Leviathan finds its iconographic crystallisation in the Liber Floridus, an encyclopaedic compilation assembled around 1120 by the monk Lambert of St Omer. The analogy between the image of the Antichrist seated on the Leviathan and that of the sovereign in Hobbes’s frontispiece is so striking that it is legitimate to suppose that Abraham Bosse and perhaps even Hobbes himself knew the miniature. The Antichrist, with a royal crown on his head, holds a lance in his right hand (just as Hobbes’s Leviathan holds a sword), while the left hand performs the gesture of benediction (which corresponds in some way as a symbol of spiritual power to the crosier of the frontispiece). His feet touch the spine of the Leviathan, represented as a long-tailed dragon partially submerged in water. The inscription above stresses the eschatological significance of both the Antichrist and the monster: Antichristus sedens super Leviathan serpentum diabolum signantem, bestiam crudelem in fine (Fig. 6).

13.   In the passage that we have just cited, Schmitt evokes the ‘traditional Jewish interpretation’ of the Leviathan. He clarifies this allusion in the course of his study. According to the Jewish-Kabbalistic interpretation, he writes, the Leviathan represents

the ‘cattle upon a thousand hills’ (Ps. 50: 10), namely, the pagan nations. World history appears as a battle of the pagan nations with one another. In particular, the Leviathan, the maritime powers, fighting against the land powers, the Behemoth [. . .] But the Jews stand by and watch as the nations of the world kill one another; this mutual ‘slaughter and massacre’ is for them legal and ‘kosher’. They therefore eat the flesh of the slaughtered nations and live off it. (Schmitt 1982/1996, 17–18/8–9)

This is clearly an anti-Semitic falsification of a traditional Talmudic (and not Kabbalistic!) tradition regarding the Leviathan, which Schmitt distorts intentionally. According to this tradition, which we find in numerous passages of the Talmud and the Midrash, the two primordial monsters, Leviathan and Behemoth, will fight one another in the days of the Messiah and both will perish in the struggle. Then the righteous will prepare a messianic banquet, in the course of which they will eat the flesh of the two beasts. It is likely that Schmitt knew this eschatological tradition, to which he refers in a much later article, evoking the ‘Kabbalistic expectancy of the messianic banquet, in which the righteous will feed on the flesh of the dead Leviathan’ (Schmitt 1982, 142).

Figure 6   Lambert of St Omer, Liber Floridus, 1120, Image of the Antichrist seated on the Leviathan, Ghent University.

14.   Whether or not Hobbes knew this Talmudic tradition, it is certain that the eschatological perspective was perfectly familiar to him. Moreover, it was already implicit in the Christian tradition, where the Leviathan was associated with the Antichrist, whom the Church Fathers, beginning with Irenaeus, had identified with the ‘man of anomia’ from the celebrated eschatological excursus of Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians (2 Thess. 2: 1–12). The miniature from the Liber Floridus is only the figurative representation of this convergence between the Leviathan and the Antichrist, between the primordial monster and the end of time. But an eschatological theme traverses the entire third part of Leviathan, which, under the heading ‘Of a Christian Common-wealth’, contains a veritable treatise on the Kingdom of God, a treatise so embarrassing for Hobbes’s modern readers that they have often simply repressed it.

Against the prevailing doctrine, which tended to interpret the New Testament concept of the Basileia theou in a metaphorical direction, Hobbes forcefully asserts that in both the Old and the New Testament the Kingdom of God signifies a real political Kingdom, which (having been interrupted in Israel since the election of Saul) Christ will restore at the end of time:

The Kingdome therefore of God, is a reall, not a metaphoricall Kingdome; and so taken, not onely in the Old Testament, but the New; when we say, For thine is the Kingdome, the Power, and Glory, it is to be understood of Gods Kingdome, by force of our Covenant, not by the Right of Gods Power; for such a Kingdome God alwaies hath; so that it were superfluous to say in our prayer, The Kingdome come, unless it be meant of the Restauration of that Kingdome of God by Christ, which by revolt of the Israelites had been interrupted in the election of Saul. Nor had it been proper to say, The Kingdome of Heaven is at hand; or to pray, Thy Kingdome come, if it had still continued. (Hobbes 1996, 283–4)

That what is at issue here is a fully political concept and that eschatology in Hobbes has a concrete political significance is reaffirmed in chapter 38:

Lastly, seeing it hath already been proved out of divers evident places of Scripture, in the 35. Chapter of this book, that the Kingdom of God is a Civil Common-wealth, where God himself is Soveraign, by vertue first of the Old, and since of the New Covenant, wherein he reigneth by his Vicar, or Lieutenant; the same places do therefore also prove, that after the comming again of our Saviour in his Majesty, and glory, to reign actually, and Eternally; the Kingdom of God is to be on Earth. (Hobbes 1996, 311)

Naturally, the Kingdom of God on Earth will be realised, according to Hobbes, as according to Paul and the Scriptures, only at the moment of the second coming of Christ. Until then, the analyses of the preceding books of Leviathan remain valid. Nonetheless, it is impossible to read Hobbes’s theory of the State as if the third part of the book, which contains the principles of what he calls ‘Christian Politiques’ (Hobbes 1996, 414), had not been written. Bernard Willms’s assertion according to which ‘political theology is the shibboleth of Hobbes-Forschung’ (Willms 1970, 31), must be further specified in the sense that political theology appears in Hobbes in a decidedly eschatological perspective.

In Leviathan, as has been correctly observed, Hobbes not only reduced Christian theology to prophecy and eschatology, but ‘prophetic authority has been projected into an eschatological future’. In this way, ‘his politics have taken on a messianic dimension, just as the messianism they entail is almost brutally political’ (Pocock 1989, 173–4). Indeed, what defines Hobbes’s theory is the fact that while the Kingdom of God and the profane Kingdom (the Leviathan) are perfectly autonomous, from the eschatological perspective they are somehow coordinated, since both take place on earth and the Leviathan will necessarily disappear when the Kingdom of God is realised politically in the world. The Kingdom of God—to adopt the title of one of Campanella’s treatises, which Hobbes could have known—is a veritable Monarchia Messiae: simultaneously the paradigm and the terminus of the profane monarchy.

15.   It is in this eschatological perspective that the enigmas of the frontispiece can find their solution. If we look again at the image of the Leviathan, we observe that the tiny bodies that constitute the body of the colossus are curiously absent from his head, which contrasts with the ancient and modern iconographic parallels that Horst Bredekamp has proposed in his investigation of the frontispiece (Bredekamp 2003), where the tiny figures are concentrated precisely in the head.

This seems to imply that the Leviathan is literally the ‘head’ of a body political that is formed by the people of the subjects, which, as we have seen, has no body of its own, but exists only in the body of the sovereign. But this image derives directly from the Pauline conception, present in many passages of the Letters, according to which Christ is the head (kephalē) of the ekklēsia, that is, of the assembly of the faithful: ‘He [Christ] is the head of the body of the assembly [hē kephalē tou sōmatos tēs ekklēsias]’ (Col. 1: 18); ‘Christ is the head from which the whole body, conjoined together and united through every articulation according to the operation of every limb, receives growth and edification’ (Eph. 4: 15–16); ‘The husband is head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the assembly, the body of which he is the saviour’ (Eph. 5: 23); and, finally, Rom. 12: 5, where the image of the head is missing, but where it is said of the multitude of members of the community that ‘we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are parts of one another’.

If our hypothesis is correct, the image from the frontispiece presents the relation between the Leviathan and the subjects as the profane counterpart of the relation between Christ and the ekklēsia. Yet this ‘cephalic’ image of the relation between Christ and the Church cannot be separated from the thesis of Pauline eschatology, according to which, at the end of time, when ‘the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him’, God ‘will be all in all [panta en pasin]’ (1 Cor. 15: 28). This apparently pantheistic thesis acquires its properly political sense if we read it together with the cephalic conception of the relationship between Christ and the ekklēsia. In the current state, Christ is the head of the body of the assembly; however, at the end of time, in the Kingdom of Heaven, there will no longer be any distinction between the head and the body, because God will be all in all.

If we take seriously the Hobbesian assertion according to which the Kingdom of God should be understood not metaphorically but literally, this means that at the end of time the cephalic fiction of the Leviathan could be erased and the people discover its own body. The caesura that divides the body political—a body visible only in the optical fiction of the Leviathan, but in fact unreal—and the real, yet politically invisible multitude, will be bridged at the end in the perfect Church. But this also means that until then no real unity, no political body is actually possible: the body political can only dissolve itself into a multitude and the Leviathan can only live together up until the end with Behemoth—with the possibility of civil war.

ℵ It is curious that in the Gospel the multitude that surrounds Jesus is never presented as a political entity (a people), but always in the terms of a crowd or a ‘mob’. In the New Testament, we thus find three terms for ‘people’: plēthos (in Latin, multitudo) 31 times; ochlos (in Latin, turba) 131 times; and laos (in Latin, plebs) 142 times (in the subsequent vocabulary of the Church, the latter will become a veritable technical term: the people of God as plebs Dei). What is missing is the term with political value—dēmos (populus)—almost as if the messianic event had always already transformed the people into a multitudo or a formless mass. In an analogous manner, the constitution of the mortalis Deus in Hobbes’s city results in the simultaneous dissolution of the body political into a multitude. Hobbes’s political-theological thesis according to which until the second coming of Christ there can be no Kingdom of God on earth equivalent to a political Common-wealth, implies that until then the Church exists only potentially (‘the elect, who so long as they are in this world are only potentially a Church, which will not be in actuality until they are separated from the reprobate and gathered together on the day of judgement’ [Hobbes 1983, 17, 22: 268]).

16.   It is time to examine the New Testament text in which tradition has unanimously viewed the description of the eschatological conflict which immediately precedes the establishment of the Kingdom of God and without which an understanding of Hobbes’s political thought would be incomplete: Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians. In this Letter, Paul, speaking to the Thessalonians of the Parousia of the Lord, describes the eschatological drama as a battle that sees on the one side the Messiah, and on the other the two characters whom he calls ‘the man of lawlessness’ (ho anthrōpos tēs anomias) and ‘the one who restrains’ (ho katechōn):

Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come unless the apostasy comes first and the man of lawlessness [ho anthrōpos tēs anomias], the son of destruction, will have been revealed, the one who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God. Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you? And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness [mystērion tēs anomias, which the Vulgate translates as Mysterium iniquitatis] is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed. And then the lawless one [anomos] will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth. (2 Thess. 2: 3–8)

When the Church had not yet closed its eschatological bureau, the identification of the two characters in question—‘the one who restrains’ and ‘the man of lawlessness’—had especially stimulated the hermeneutic acumen of the Church Fathers, from Irenaeus to Jerome and from Hippolytus to Tyconius and Augustine. While the second was unanimously identified with the Antichrist of the First Letter of John (1 John 2: 18), the first, following a tradition that Augustine treats extensively in De Civitate Dei, was identified with the Roman Empire. It is to this tradition that Schmitt, who sees in the doctrine of the katechōn the sole possibility of conceiving history from a Christian perspective, refers: ‘The belief that a restrainer holds back the end of the world’, he writes, ‘provides the only bridge between the notion of an eschatological paralysis of all human action and a great historical power like that of the Christian empire of the Germanic kings’ (Schmitt 1973/2006, 29/60). And it is in this ‘katechontic’ tradition that he locates Hobbes’s theory of the State.

17.   It is thus beyond doubt that in calling the Common-wealth by a name—Leviathan—which was at that time still a synonym for the Antichrist, Hobbes was conscious of situating his conception of the State in a decidedly eschatological perspective (the allusion, in the passage from De Cive cited just above, to a separation of the good from the reprobate in the Church, contains an implicit reference to the Second Letter to the Thessalonians). And precisely here the Schmittian interpretation of the Leviathan shows its insufficiency. It is no coincidence that in Leviathan, where we encounter more than fifty citations from the Pauline corpus, Hobbes never directly mentions the Second Letter to the Thessalonians. In Hobbes’s ‘Christian Politiques’ the State cannot in any way have the function of a power that restrains and holds back the end of time, and indeed is never presented in this perspective; on the contrary, as in the scriptural tradition that Hobbes perhaps ironically reclaims against a Church which seems to have forgotten it, the end of time can take place at any instant and the State not only does not act as a katechōn, but in fact coincides with the very eschatological beast which must be annihilated at the end of time.

Schmitt’s thesis according to which political concepts are secularised theological concepts is well known. This thesis must be further specified in the sense that what are secularised, today, are essentially eschatological concepts (consider the centrality of the concept of ‘crisis’, that is, of the fundamental terminus of Christian eschatology, the final judgement [Koselleck 2006]). In this sense, contemporary politics is founded on a secularisation of eschatology. Nothing could be more foreign to Hobbes’s thought, which allows eschatology its concreteness and its particular position. It is not the confusion of the eschatological with the political that defines Hobbes’s politics, but a singular relation between two autonomous powers. The kingdom of the Leviathan and the kingdom of God are two politically autonomous realities, which must never be confused; yet they are eschatologically connected, in the sense that the first will necessarily have to disappear when the second is realised.

Hobbes’s eschatology here exhibits a curious affinity with what Walter Benjamin articulates in the ‘Theologisch-politisches Fragment’. For Benjamin, too, the kingdom of God makes sense only as the eschaton and not as an historical element (‘From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus’ [Benjamin 2002, 305]). And for Benjamin, too, the sphere of profane politics is wholly autonomous with respect to it. Nonetheless, neither for Benjamin nor for Hobbes, does profane politics have, with respect to the Kingdom, any ‘katechontic’ function: far from holding back its advent, it is, to the contrary, Benjamin writes, ‘a category of its most unobtrusive approach’ (Benjamin 2002, 305).

By its nature, the Leviathan-State, which must ensure the ‘safety’ and ‘contentments of life’ of its subjects, is also what precipitates the end of time. The alternative that John Barclay articulated in his novel Argenis as the justification of absolutism (‘Either give the people back their freedom or assure the domestic tranquility’ [Koselleck 1988, 18]) necessarily remains unresolved. Hobbes knew the passage from the First Letter to the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 5: 3; the Letter is cited in chapter 44 of Leviathan [see Hobbes 1996, 427]), in which ‘peace and security’ (eirēnē kai asphaleia) coincide with the catastrophic advent of the day of the Lord (‘When they say, “There is peace and security,” then destruction will come upon them’). This is why Behemoth is inseparable from Leviathan and why, according to the Talmudic tradition that Schmitt evokes, at the end of time ‘Behemoth will, with its horns, pull Leviathan down and rend it, and Leviathan will, with its fins, pull Behemoth down and pierce it through’. Only at this point may the righteous be seated at their messianic banquet, freed forever from the bonds of the law:

The Sages said: And is this a valid method of slaughter? Have we not learnt this in a Mishnah: ‘All may slaughter, and one may slaughter at all times, and with any instrument except with a scythe, or with a saw, or with teeth, because they cause pain as if by choking, or with a nail’? R. Abin b. Kahana said: The Holy One, blessed be He, said: ‘A new Torah shall go forth from Me’. (Leviticus Rabbah 1961, 13, 3: 167; cf. Strack and Billerbeck 1928, 1163; Drewer 1981, 152)

It is perhaps owing to an irony of fate that Leviathan—this text so densely and maybe ironically eschatological—has become one of the paradigms of the modern theory of the State. But it is certain that the political philosophy of modernity will not be able to emerge out of its contradictions except by becoming aware of its theological roots.

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MERIDIAN

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Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise

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Susan Bernstein, Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger

Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life

Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology

Jean-Luc Nancy, Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus

Carol Jacobs, Skirting the Ethical: Sophocles, Plato, Hamann, Sebald, Campion

Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable

Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, 2 volumes, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg

Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Literature and Law in the Time of a Truth Commission

Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, edited by Thomas Albrecht, with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rottenberg

Arendt, Hannah, Reflections on Literature and Culture, edited by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb

Alan Bass, Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care

Jacques Derrida, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . .

Ernst Bloch, Traces

Elizabeth Rottenberg, Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert

David Wills, Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction

David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life

Jacques Derrida, On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy

Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason

Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses

Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans

Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II

Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics

Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2

Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal

Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy

Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness: (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis)

Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork

Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages

Peter Szondi, Celan Studies

Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse

Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come

Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden

Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, edited by Peggy Kamuf

Cornelius Castoriadis, On Plato’s ‘Statesman’

Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1

Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic

Peter Fenves, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin

Jill Robbins, ed. Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas

Louis Marin, Of Representation

J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature

Maurice Blanchot, Faux pas

Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural

Maurice Blanchot / Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony

Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System

Emmanual Levinas, God, Death, and Time

Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia

Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

Ellen S. Burt, Poetry’s Appeal: Nineteenth-Century French Lyric and the Political Space

Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas

Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan

Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book

Deborah Esch, In the Event: Reading Journalism, Reading Theory

Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard

Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content

Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics

Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures

Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience

Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays

Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis

Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics

Francis Ponge, Soap

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus

Werner Hamacher, Pleroma--Reading in Hegel

Serge Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter

Serge Leclaire, A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive

Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature

Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination

Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics

Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names

Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus

Maurice Blanchot, Friendship

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses

Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point

David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism

Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion

Hans-Jost Frey, Studies in Poetic Discourse: Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hölderlin

Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field

Nicolas Abraham, Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis

Jacques Derrida, On the Name

David Wills, Prosthesis

Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire

Jacques Derrida, Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994

J. Hillis Miller, Topographies

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner)

Jacques Derrida, Aporias

Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject

Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime

Peter Fenves, “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom

Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher

Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence