Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm by Giorgio Agamben

Author:Giorgio Agamben [Agamben, Giorgio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2015-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

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.

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