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
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HOMO SACER II, 2
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 r
politicisation ←
→
eturn to the initial state
depoliticisation
coincides
oikos stasis polis
with civil war.
dissolved
multitude
civil war
people-king
disunited
multitude
8. We can now understand why, in the emblem, the Leviathan’s body can-
not 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 polit-
ical 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 multi-
tude—then the latter not only pre-exists the people-king, but (as a dissoluta mul-
titudo) 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;
STASIS 279
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 fron-
tispiece. 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 trans-
lates 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 dissem-
ble, 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)
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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 con-
cept 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 homo-
geneity, 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 po-
litical 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.
STASIS 281
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 pres-
ence 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 with-
out 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 pro-
tection 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 dis-
solution 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 coin-
cide, but are conjoined in a complicated relation. The state of nature, as Hobbes
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HOMO SACER II, 2
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). Further-
more, 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 sum-
mons 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 Le-
viathan and to the iconographic association between the Leviathan and the Anti-
christ has been reconstructed by Jessie Poesch (Poesch 1970) and Marco Bertozzi
STASIS 283
(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 Le-
viathan 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 Levia-
than 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 mon-
ster: 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 Be-
hemoth [ . . . ] 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 inten-
tionally. According to this tradition, which we find in numerous passages of the
Talmud and the Midrash, the two primordial monsters, Leviathan and Behe-
moth, will fight one another in the days of the Messiah and both will perish in
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