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The Royal Remains
The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty
By ERIC L. SANTNER
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-73536-8
Chapter One
Sovereignty and the Vital Sphere
I
One of the most influential recent reflections on the transition from royal to popular sovereignty and the fundamental sorts of political, social, and existential questions it raises is Claude Lefort's essay "The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?" In his essay, which, like every intervention into this field of inquiry, cites Kantorowicz's work as a primary point of reference, Lefort makes very clear that his main concern is precisely in differentiating what he calls "the symbolic dimension of the political" from what political science typically characterizes as its object of study. His focus is not so much the narrowly conceived "regional ontology" of political science as it is the dimension or element in which politics touches on the intelligibility of the social world more generally, on one's sense of the coherence, continuity, and vibrancy of the form of life into which one is inscribed and from which one derives one's most basic sense of orientation in the world. What is at issue here is the authoritative grip of how "things are done" as well as one's own sense of existential legitimacy: that one has a place in the world that entitles one to enjoy a modicum of recognition of one's words and actions. This entitlement to enjoyment/ enjoyment of entitlement points, as Lefort puts it, to "a hidden part of social life, namely the processes which make people consent to a given regime—or, to put it more forcefully, which determines their manner of being in society—and which guarantee that this regime or mode of society has a permanence in time, regardless of the various events that may affect it" (2 4–5). In his critique of what he sees as liberal thought's attempts to reduce power to an instrumental function and the people to "a fiction which simply masks the efficacy of a contract thanks to which a minority submits to a government formed by a majority," Lefort puts it even more starkly by suggesting that such reductions amount to erasing "both the question of sovereignty and that of the meaning of the institution, which are always bound up with the ultimate question of the legitimacy of that which exists" (232; my emphasis).
Very early in the essay, Lefort, the editor of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's posthumous works, appropriates his former teacher's difficult and evocative notion of the "flesh of the world" to characterize this "primal dimensionality of the social" that in turn implies "an idea of its primal form, of its political form" (2 8). "Flesh," in this context, refers not to the corporeal matter beneath the skin that normally remains hidden from view, but rather to the semiotic—and somatic—vibrancy generated by the inscription of bodies into a normative social space in the first place, by this interlacing of entitlement and enjoyment that opens up the possibilities of distinctively human forms of wretchedness and joy, of misery and jouissance. As I have stated, my goal is to explore some of the modes of appearance of the "flesh of the world" at the point where the body of the king is no longer able to give some measure to, no longer able to figure, form, and distribute, this sublime somatic materiality that, as Lefort suggests, serves as the very "stuff" that binds subjects to that space of representation that is the "body politic."
The editors of a recent volume of essays on the "Republican Body" have put the problem quite succinctly: "With democracy the concept of the nation replaced the monarch and sovereignty was dispersed from the king's body to all bodies. Suddenly every body bore political weight.... With the old sartorial and behavioral codes gone, bodies were less legible, and a person's place in the nation was unclear." My own interest is less about the transformation of social codes than about the agitations of the "flesh" brought about by this shift, the nature of the "matter" that accounts for the new "political weight" of every citizen. To put it in terms suggested by Lefort, the reference to power as an "empty place," as an absent center that is ostensibly the defining feature of democratic societies, does not get rid of the problem of the carnal or corporeal dimension of representation. It does, however, make it much harder to delimit and locate. My hunch is that a great deal of modernist art and literature can help us in these efforts. And as we shall also see, it was not for nothing that Merleau-Ponty characterized Freud as, above all, a philosopher of the flesh.
In a first approach, I would propose that the notion of the "flesh" refers to the substantial pressures, the semiotic and somatic stresses, of what I have elsewhere characterized as "creaturely life." By "creaturely" I do not simply mean nature or living things or sentient beings, or even what the religiously minded would think of as the whole of God's creation, but rather a dimension specific to human existence, albeit one that seems to push thinking in the direction of theology. It signifies a mode of exposure that distinguishes human beings from other kinds of life: not exposure simply to the elements or to the fragility and precariousness of our mortal, finite lives, but rather to an ultimate lack of foundation for the historical forms of life that distinguish human community. This lack, this crucial missing piece of the world, to which we are ultimately and intimately exposed as social beings of language is one that we thus first acquire by way of our initiation into these forms of life, not one already there in the bare fact of our biological being (and, thus, one not readily accessible to the biological sciences). We could say that the precariousness, the fragility—the "nudity"—of biological life becomes potentiated, amplified, by way of exposure to the radical contingency of the forms of life that constitute the space of meaning within which human life unfolds, and that it is only through such "potentiation" that we take on the flesh of creaturely life. Creatureliness is thus a dimension not so much of biological as of ontological vulnerability, a vulnerability that permeates human being as that being whose essence it is to exist in forms of life that are, in turn, contingent, fragile, susceptible to breakdown. But here we need to go a step further. For as we shall see, the very ways in which human communities attempt to shelter—to immunize—their lives from such vulnerability effectively serve to intensify it. The paradox at work here is, in short, that the defense mechanisms cultures use to protect against a primordial exposure—to "cover" our nudity—serve in the end to redouble this exposure and thereby to "fatten" the flesh of creaturely life. It thus becomes next to impossible to isolate definitively an "original" condition from one co-constituted by the very efforts aimed at managing or defending against it.
At first glance it would seem that we are dealing here with a rather straightforward dialectic familiar to any parent who has struggled with balancing the interests of protecting his or her child from harm with those of fostering the child's growth and vitality. The danger is that too much protection, that is, a too vigorous attempt to immunize the child against risk, can end up arresting the child's development: the protective shelter becomes a sterile enclosure, the immune response becomes a kind of autoimmunity, attacking the vitality at issue. By failing to see that human flourishing includes the capacity to be unwell, the parent bent on protecting the child from anything that might threaten her well-being ends up isolating her from what might stimulate her own vital resources of self-preservation and development, her robustness. One can, of course, make the same observation with respect to a democratic state that is tempted to limit the freedoms of its citizens in the name of protecting lives during periods of heightened risk. At a certain point the measures designed to immunize the population against risk begin to destroy the vibrancy of the community and the values on which its civic life is based. In numerous spheres of activity, strategies of self-preservation can, in short, become a form of mortification; in each case, out of a fear of breakdown or dying, of exposing oneself to what is perceived to be mortal risk, one preemptively deadens oneself.
I will argue, however, that this conception of an "immunological dialectic" whereby shelter becomes its own kind of life-threatening exposure, immunity becomes autoimmunity, self-preservation becomes a mode of mortification, life drive becomes a kind of death drive, fails to capture the full complexity of the phenomena in question. Something falls through the cracks of the dialectic and keeps returning to its place to initiate the whole process again, indeed to endow it with the aspect of a repetition compulsion; this something is the dimension I am trying to capture with the notion of the flesh that both does and does not belong to the life at issue in the efforts at immunization it seems to call forth over and over again.
II
In recent work, the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito has focused on the concept of immunization as the key to grasping the biopolitical turn of modernity as first theorized by Michel Foucault. Esposito even suggests that it has greater explanatory value for understanding modernity than more familiar notions such as rationalization, secularization, or (the crisis of) legitimation. In what follows I try to develop a feel for the immunological dialectic—and, just as importantly, what both escapes and drives it—by way of an extended "conversation" with Esposito's work, which represents, next to Agamben's writings, the most comprehensive and compelling engagement with the subject of biopolitics I know.
Esposito develops his conception of the immunization paradigm apropos of a perceived equivocation in Foucault's writings and lectures concerning the status of the concept of sovereignty in the passage from the ancien régime to modernity, the passage that I have proposed to analyze by way of the "metamorphosis" of the King's Two Bodies into the People's Two Bodies. In some of his writings, it would appear as if Foucault was committed to the view that the displacement of royal by constitutional forms of governmental power and authority in European nation-states over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries signaled the emergence of a radically new form of power and set of power relations between states and subjects that could no longer be understood with the conceptual tools of the classical theories of sovereignty and indeed that such power relations more or less completely superseded the dynamics of sovereignty in the actual regulation of the lives of modern citizens; if the concept and figure of sovereign power lived on at all, they survived merely as an ideological phantasm that had outlived its true historical space and moment. The sovereign had long been dead, but it took Foucault to remind him of that on behalf of the rest of us.
On this view, what Foucault referred to as "disciplinary power" and "biopower" thus represents forms of governmentality that follow upon the demise of sovereign power, a demise that could more or less be correlated with the effective end of monarchy in Europe. Sovereign power, Foucault argues, was power based on the principle of deduction: "Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately of life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it." But, as he continues, "since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. 'Deduction' has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them" ( 36). Very simply, "the old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life" (39–40).
Foucault goes on to argue that a crucial consequence of this shift in modes of governmental power and authority "was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law.... The law always refers to the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory mechanisms. It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility" (144). "I do not," he adds, "mean to say that the law fades into the background or that the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the juridical institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life" (144). He famously summarizes this shift in the semantics and dynamics of governmental power and authority:
For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time.... part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life. (142–43)
One can take the real measure of such transformations in the changing status of the criminal and his act at this threshold of modernity. As Esposito puts it, "In the moment in which the criminal act is no longer to be charged to the will of the subject, but rather to a psychopathological configuration, we enter into a zone of indistinction between law and medicine in whose depths we can make out a new rationality centered on the question of life—of its preservation, its development, and its management." This new chapter in the "governmentalization of life" does not imply, Esposito continues, "a withdrawal or contraction of the field that is subjected to the law. Rather, it is the latter that is progressively transferred from the transcendental level of codes and sanctions that essentially have to do with subjects of will to the immanent level of rules and norms that are addressed instead to bodies" (28; my emphasis).
In some of his writings, Foucault has correlated this process of immanentization to a kind of agon that at a certain point begins to agitate the law from within, to something like a chronic state of emergency within the domain of law itself. In one of many discussions of "disciplinary power," Foucault traces a sort of ascending scale of perturbations within the realm of law:
In appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an infra-law. They seem to extend the general forms defined by law to the infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear as methods of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these general demands. They seem to constitute the same type of law on a different scale, thereby making it more meticulous and more indulgent. The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law. They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities.... Moreover, whereas the juridical systems define juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. In any case, in the space and during the time in which they exercise their control and bring into play the asymmetries of their power, they effect a suspension of the law that is never total, but is never annulled either.
What is particularly striking is that Foucault sets this self-splitting, self-supplementation, and even (partial) self-suspension of the law over against the body of the king, that remarkable, quasi-human thing that, as Foucault had learned from Kantorowicz, was itself the product of a process of gemination, doubling, or self-supplementation. Here I would like to return to a passage already cited in the preface: "The body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence, with the force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite extreme of this new physics of power ...: a physics of a relational and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations." What I believe Foucault has drawn attention to here without being fully able to name it is, precisely, the mutation of the King's Two Bodies into the People's Two Bodies: the migration of the royal flesh—that "strange material and physical presence" endowed with a peculiar force—that supplants the merely mortal body of the king into the bodies and lives of the citizens of modern nation-states. This mutation calls to the scene the "experts" charged with managing the sublime somatic substance of the new bearer of the principle of sovereignty. And if, as Foucault suggests, such management can be characterized as a kind of "physics," it is one that is deployed with respect to a materiality the real strangeness of which we have yet to fully appreciate. What remains clear, however, is that the transmission of the force associated with it is no longer limited to "some few others."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Royal Remains by ERIC L. SANTNER Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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