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 ar-
tisans, heads of families and relatives, inhabitants of the city and of the country-
side, 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 cit-
izens 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 pri-
marily 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)
262
HOMO SACER II, 2
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 deci-
sive 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 ar-
ticle, 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 parelēly thotōn
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,
STASIS 263
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, how-
ever, 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 unpolit-
ical (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’:
politicisation ←
→ depoliticisation
oikos stasis polis
dissolved
multitude
civil war
people-king
disunited
multitude
264
HOMO SACER II, 2
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 op-
posed 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 mo-
ment an uncertain, precarious equilibrium. In the course of the subsequent po-
litical 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 accor-
dance 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 frontis-
piece of the first edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, ‘printed for An-
drew Crooke at the Green Dragon in St. Paul’s Church-yard’ 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 in-
cognita, 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 philo-
sophica; 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.
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
265
Figure 1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Crooke, London 1651. Frontispiece of the First Edition.
STASIS 267
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 conceal-
ment 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 con-
cerned Hobbes had alluded to something like an ‘esoteric veil’. Indeed, the em-
blem 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 o
f the Baroque age, beginning with Arnold Clap-
mar’s De arcanis rerum publicarum libri sex (1605) and Christoph Besold’s Dis-
sertatio 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 es-
oteric 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
Figure 2. Abraham Bosse, Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651. Copy on
parchment. British Library, Mss. Egerton, 1910.
STASIS 269
be—capable of not allowing the particular details and modalities of the exposi-
tion 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
The Omnibus Homo Sacer Page 40