Ямпольский М. Физиология символического. Возвращение Левиафана: Политическая теология, репрезентация власти и конец Старого режима

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794 М. Ямпольский. Физиология символического. Книга 1

о крови. И все, что она совершала, погружало ее в кровь, пропиты-

вало кровью Иисуса» (Ibid. Р. 69).

В связи с такими текстами Кампорези говорит о духе мясниц-

кой, царствующей в них, о влечении к шокирующим, пугающим

образам, характерным для «народного богословия».

510

Kelly George Armstrong. Conceptual Sources of the Terror //

Eighteenth-Century Studies. Vol. 14. № 1. P 18—36.

511

Burke Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France; Paine

Thomas. The Rights of Man. Garden City; New York: Anchor Press;

Doubleday, 1973. P. 90.

512

Ibid. P. 90.

Foucault Michel. La volonte de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.

P 177.

5,4

Ibid. P 180-181.

515

Марат Жан-Поль. Избранные произведения. М.: Издательство

Академии наук СССР, 1956. Т. 3. С. 114-115.

516

Робеспьер Максимилиан. Избранные произведения. М.: Наука,

1965. Т. 2. С. 140.

517

См.: МсManners John. Death and Enlightenment: Changing

Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-

Century France. Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University

Press, 1981. P. 402-403.

518

Lefort Claude. Democracy and Political Theory. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1988. P. 225.

519

Lepenies Wolf. Melancholie und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,

1969. S. 94-95.

520

Blumenberg Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modem Age. Cambridge,

Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983. P. 112.

521

Гегель Г.-В.-Ф. Эстетика. M.: Искусство, 1969. Т. 2. С. 13.

522

Mayer Hans. Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters. Cambridge,

Mass.: The MIT Press, 1982. P. 18.

Summary

Mikhail Iampolski. Physiology of the Symbolic. Book 1. The

Return of Leviathan: Political Theology, Representation of Power

and the End of the Old Regime.

The book analyses metamorphoses of Power in Europe of the 17

and the 18

centuries.

The first part focuses on a traditional, medieval notion of power.

The establishment of a sacred monarchy in Europe in the 8

century

changed a status of a king, whose body acquired a sacred dimension.

The use of the anointment previously reserved only for priests played

an important role in the fusion of Imperium and Sacerdotum in one

body and opened a dramatic period of a struggle between ecclesiastic

and secular powers. Anointment infused a kind of mystical, "liturgical"

symbolism into the body of a sovereign, a quality that in modern

times is usually defined as charisma. Ernst Kantorowicz characterized

this mystical symbolism as "object-centered mystery" because of its

specific relation to the materiality of the body, of its "realism"

Bodily signs specifically in the Trial by God (Dei judicium) or

ordeals (ordalium) embodied this symbolic power. In ordeal the God

marked the innocent or the guilty by an ambiguous bodily sign. This

bodily symbolism was based on a principle of spacial contiguity. The

power of a magical body presumed a direct touch (that ensured a

healing magic of a famous Royal Touch in the French monarchy).

In touch the transcendental and the material were paradoxically

united. Symbol in such a context was based on an obscure materiality

of a signified (bodily mark). According to Paul Ricoeur such

symbolism presumes a special kind of intentionality "which through

the material stain, the deviation in space, the experience of burden,

points to a certain situation of man in the Sacred; this situation,

aimed at through the first [material] meaning, is precisely stained,

sinful, guilty being. The literal and obvious meaning, therefore, points

beyond itself to something which is like a stain, like a deviation, like

a burden" As a result symbols are usually opaque, based on analogy

and derive their depth, their profundity from this opaqueness and

analogy.

The body of the monarch in medieval tradition, according to many

legends, is marked by a sign (similar to the sign of the ordeals) —

lily, cross or by special hairy birthmarks — referring to bestiality,

the state of sacred furor. These bodily signs marked the sovereign as

transgressive almost monstrous creatures that exist in human

community but are not submitted to its laws. Christ's stigmata belongs

to the same kind of symbols. The bodily symbol itself is not inscribed

into any definite textual strata. It is located in the uncertain realm

between the exterior and the interior, between the world of living

796 М. Ямпольский. Физиология символического

and the world of dead. It is a sign of manifestation of a force itself.

It explains a very important role of royal entrees in the city that

imitated the imperial Roman ceremony of the adventus, when the

entry of the emperor into the city manifested the presence of god in

it — deus praesens. The sign of power emerges, it traverses a city

and is effective only thanks to an immediate and tangible presence,

touch, physical appearance. Thus, power based on bodily symbolism

was manifested mainly during special ceremonial occasions and was

relatively inoperative between them. This is why direct presence of a

king in battles during the war was of such a particular importance.

A battle is equivalent to the God's trial and can't be won without

the bearer of the magical power physically present.

By mid 1600s French monarchy eliminated royal ceremonial

procession traversing the city as well as direct royal presence in battles.

This change of ritual expressed an obvious decline of royal bodily

symbolism during in the 17

century. This decline was partly related

to a crisis of the analogical thinking and the crisis of medieval ontology

in general. Analogy was always theologically suspicious because it

instituted a link between the divine and the earthly. However analogy

was preserved as a way to avoid a total separation of the transcendental

from the worldly. The power of analogy was based on a scholastic

distinction between the equivocal and the univocal predication of being.

The analogy was located between the equivocal and the univocal and

allowed a non-uniform distribution of certain qualities among

different subjects. From a scholastic point of view, analogy founded

a notion of different stages of perfection and of the hierarchical

ontology of the universe. Degrees of perfection in medieval onto-

theology allowed only analogical unification of all elements of the

universe, which was otherwise permeated by the idea of difference.

Already Dante in his De monarchia based the distinction and mutual

independence of the secular and the ecclesiastical powers on a

distinction of different analogical series in which they are included

(For the Emperor: man — mortal — earthly blessedness (nature) etc.

For the Pope: man — immortal — heavenly beatitude (grace), etc.)

Already in Dante independence of both series was a sign of a

deficiency of analogical hierarchies that resisted their unification by

an analogy of a higher rank.

A coming crisis of symbolism was determined by the principle

of analogy itself. Analogy has destroyed the anthropomorphism of

the imitation of God and has gradually transformed God into an

abstraction, and finally into Law. A metaphor of a King as of an

animated law

—

lex animata — acquired all its meaning when the crisis

of a physical symbolism became evident. The King was gradually

transformed from a magical incarnation of power, from a thaumaturge

into an incarnation of an abstraction — divine law. Constitution of

an absolute monarchy, from legal point of view, could be described

as a transition from the dominance of a local, customary law toward

a dominance of a natural or general law incarnated in a figure of a

Summary 797

king. God was now dispatched into uncacheable transcendency and

distanced from the world. Marcel Gauchet (after Max Weber)

defined this new condition as a "disenchantment of the world"

"Physical" symbolism that permeated the body of the sovereign was

now mostly extinguished. The distancing (already presumed by the

principle of analogy) opened a new public sphere of curiosity,

theatricality and appearances. The sovereign body and its symbolic

double — dignitas — was separated from the realm of physical

symbolism and entered into the realm of representation. Power is

gradually transferred from the body of the king to its representation.

Norbert Elias analyzed this process of distancing in his classical

studies. Distancing and monopolization of power in absolute

monarchies introduced a principle of a distant power (potentia) acting

through its representative, in which it is transformed into a practical

power of actions and decisions (potestas). Potentia (sometimes

associated with the power of law) is similar to the Cartesian causa

efficiens. It maintains the order of the universe from the outside of

this world. This law-oriented potentia is now contrasted to a magical,

physical power of a "thaumaturgic" body of the king. At the same

time a new understanding of the law as of relation is emerging (later

this understanding will be codified by Montesquieu, who defined laws

as "necessary relations that derive from the nature of things"). This

relation is not simply formal, it is a relation of forces controlled by

the law. Law as a control over antagonist forces had a counterpart

in the developing science of fortifications (Vauban and others). The

decline of unrestricted violence in the 17

century reflected the new

function of the royal power that was losing its immediacy of action

and was mostly transformed into a representation. The king's portrait,

or the king-actor replaced a charismatic, sovereign body. A

charismatic body manifested its power in the middle of the people

(mostly in processions or battles), the royal political representation

confronts the people (transformed into a mass of spectators) as a

spectacle. Physical presence of a royal body gives place to its absence,

to a remote substitute. This process is reflected in a decay of royal

ceremonies and its replacement by a court theater. Medieval Dignitas

is replaced by a courtly Majeste. Political theology gives away to

political aesthetics.

Power as a spectacle is necessarily organized as a spatial structure.

It appropriates the structure of subjectivity supported by a linear

perspective, and as Foucault has shown, creates an ambiguity: the

body of power (King) is simultaneously associated with the subject

of vision and the main object of the representation. Representational

structure desubstantivizes this body and transforms it into a structural

function. Power now is no more in a body but in a place, which is

structurally defined. This representational revolution reflects a collapse

of a medieval ontology (that hierarchically distributed Being in space)

and the emergence of a homogeneous, "univocal" space, which center

is randomly decreed. The distribution of the bodies in such a space

798 М. Ямпольский. Физиология символического

follows the rule of a "nomadic nomos", of a "crowned anarchy"

(Deleuze), i. e. of a purely artificial principle of rational structural

organization of a representation (the center of this space is randomly

selected as a location of a point of view).

This new structure of society, initiated by the representational

revolution, inaugurated an epoch of appearances and of the "ontic

logos" (Charles Taylor). Pascal has dissected this new situation in

terms of the "effect of appearance", the "power" of appearance. The

new political culture is based on self-presentation of the members of

society that are reflecting, mimicking each other. The "mimetic

theory" of society (Marivaux, Dubos, Adam Smith) was a product

of these new tendencies.

Representational being of the political is pregnant with

complicated issues. Representational space based on the principle

of a linear perspective has an extremely limited possibility to inscribe

Truth, the Absolute. The only axis that doesn't distort objects is a

line that unites a point of view with a vanishing point of the

perspective. Even Versaille — with its symmetrical composition and

emphasized central axes — produces distortions and illusions as soon

as a spectator starts to move in the park. The book thoroughly

analyzes paradoxes and difficulties of a political space grounded into

the subjectivity of a viewer. Mimesis is inscribed into the space of

illusions as a practice radically separated from the realm of truth

and confined to the domain of appearances. The anomaly of the

mimetic attitude is revealed in its relation to a geometrically

constructed space of Reason.The representational practice of the

17th century was oriented toward Forms and Reason presumably

ruling over mimetic phantasmata and keeping them under control.

The combination of the rational Form and of the free Fantasy is

manifested in Figures. The division between Reason and Fantasy,

truth and illusion was crystallized in a division between two spaces

of the baroque theater — a space of visible forms — and the space

of figuration which is located off stage. The new function of the

Sovereign in this representational situation is to break an infinite

chain of distorting mimetic copies and to introduce the absolute

into the ever-growing realm of social mimicry. This role of a

lawgiver of meaning is prescribed to the monarch by Hobbes, but

is also evident in some works by Boileau and Molinre among other.

An association of Louis XIV with the sun reflects the same function

of a giver of forms and meaning. "Je viens rendre aux objets la

forme", — tells Louis in the "Ballet de la nuit" This function of a

guarantor of meaning of words and of the correspondence of

appearance to essence was never wholly fulfilled. The failure to fulfill

it testifies to a deep cultural and representational crisis already

manifest at the end of the 17

century. Moliere's Amphytrion

transforms an old plot about doubles into a comedy of a non-

distinction between God and men, sovereigns and imposters,

appearance and essence.

Summary

799

The second part of the book takes the analysis of the crisis of

mimetism further. The sovereign here figures not only as a giver and

controller of meanings, but also as a main figure governing over social

mimicry (i.e. over the overproduction of appearances) and finally as

a main producer of it. Diderot in Le Neveu de Rameau excluded the

King from a general mimetic madness only to claim at the end that

even the King is not immune to it. The failure of the king to regulate

mimesis shows to what extent the regulative function of Reason is

shaky even during the period of Enlightenment. This collapse of

reason opens an unrestricted possibility to emotional empathy and

to an Utopia of reformation of vices through sympathy. For instance,

in "L'ole des esc laves" by Marivaux, "bad" aristocrats are reformed

by a forced identification (exchange of roles) with their servants. This

kind of social therapy is based on the principle of mirroring one-self

in the other. However this play of identifications has no Absolute

Third, no outside position that can stop and control the process. This

absence of the Absolute Third, according to Renti Girard, finally leads

to violence. Freud has shown how this situation of a circular desire

leads to a final non-distinction between the Ideal-1 and the Ego,

between individuals in a crowd.

The crisis of the culture of appearances and of the universal

mimicry has called forth a virulent anti-mimetic reaction, in particular

in Diderot (and his theorization of the art of acting) and in Rousseau

with his condemnation of theater. Diderot claimed the necessity for

an actor to be one's own spectator. The same is true for the king

that can preserve his control over the mimicking society only by being

at the same time an actor and a distant spectator, i.e. by participating

in and being excluded from society. Hegel, who will speak about the

"self-alienated spirit", will theorize this situation later. Before Hegel

it was already described by Kant as a separation of the transcendental

I from the Ego.

The situation of the subject looking at himself as an object doesn't

exhaust the complexity of a new representational situation. The

Cartesian subject himself is no more a simple point of view inscribed

in the geometry of a linear perspective. As a subject of empathic

relation he transgresses his own boundaries and becomes an expanding

subject, whose proximity to God is postulated exactly by this

unlimited, infinite expansion (also fundamental for Kantian sublime

or for systems of deism). This expanding subject finds his expression

in a newly developed art of panoramas and a new sensibility in

relation to nature (the discovery of the infinite seashore is a good

example of it).

An expanding subject is a new menace for a sovereign, whose

presence is now often experienced only as an obstacle that obstructs

direct relations between God and Men. The new expanding space

is a product of geometrical rationality and of ecstatic leaps of an

empathizing subject out of himself. But finally it is transformed

into an expanding emptiness repressing all mimicry and reducing

800 М. Ямпольский. Физиология символического

figures to nothing. The new revolutionary space is exactly the void

of an expanding subjectivity that loses itself in a self-imposed

transcendentality.

The theatricalization of the political takes place in the 17

century.

By the end of the 18

century, under the direct influence of Rousseau,

this theatrical space was no more a space of a court theater, but rather

a space of ancient festivals transcending all distinctions between actors

and spectators. Rousseau was eager to preserve a public space, but

he wanted to eliminate from it all mimetic element that he considered

as a greedy expansion of the Self. He even related this mimetic

expansion to wars. The equalization of all participants was, according

to him, one of the ways to repress social mimicry. There is no need

of imitation between the equals. Equality could however be

established only among "natural" individuals, united in their

universality. German Bildung (for instance in Humboldt) was the

same way toward universality able to repress mimicry grounded in

the accidental, non-essential. Universality, which in previous times

was considered as a property of a sovereign, is now prescribed to all

members of society. Rousseau defines the universal as primarily non-

rational. Rational conceptual universality emerges only with the loss

of a natural equality. The only imitation that is familiar to a "natural

man" is an imitation of Nature, which is a depositary of all possible

abstractions but in an embodied form. Social contract becomes

possible, according to Rousseau, thanks to a similarity between equal

members of society whose individuality was purified, effaced and

whose natural, essential core was discovered in this purification.

Schelling later was talking about "unchangeable Self' that participates

in the contract. The magical moment of conclusion of a social contract

is a moment of dissolution of individuals in a totality. Similarly a

mimetic moment in acting is also a moment of loss of a Self, but

this loss of a Self, which is experienced by any actor, leads to a

mimetic transformation of oneself into another. Rousseau defined

this situation as a "loss of a Man" Social contract is possible only

when social mimicry and theatrical imitation are replaced by a circle

of a mutual imitation of equal and similar natural men. In this Utopian

situation everybody sees in everybody only the manifestation of

universality. This imitation without difference is a strange theater of

social contract in which society is created as a non-contradictory

totality. Popular festivals serve as models to this ideal mimicry, here

everybody is equal to everybody. During such festivals nature informs

society by an equality proper to it. Rousseau based his vision of

society on the concept of "general will" elaborated by Malebranche.

For Malebranche "general will" is a principle of a divine manifestation

in nature that is necessary to support virtues. Rousseau "relocates this

concept from nature to society. The new social theater is admissible

for Rousseau only if it follows the model of nature, i. e. only if the

center of a mimetic space remains unoccupied. Instead of a sovereign

body in the center it unfolds around a non-mimetic emptiness, in

Summary

801

which law and an imaginary totality are emerging as ruling

abstractions. In his Letter to d'Alembert Rousseau wrote about popular

festivals organized around "nothingness" The time of a theatrical

representation of the political is now partially over. Rousseau doesn't

recognize representation as integral part of social organization. The

new structure of a social space described by Rousseau doesn't leave

any place for a sovereign, whose physical body was already reduced

to a status of an actor in a theater of power and who was gradually

replaced by an abstraction of law. There was a new emerging space

of revolutionary iconoclasm. Now the very principle of representation

was banished, and this new taboo played an important role in the

elimination of monarchy as such. The empty place in the center of

a public space is a place when the imaginary is transformed into the

symbolic; and this empty space is occupied by death. Revolutionary

empty tombs — cenotaphs — are excellent emblems of this space.

The book analyzes in detail the antecedents of the empty antimimetic

space — in religious illuminism, in the phenomenon of mystical

enthusiasm that served to Kant as an epitome of the French

Revolution. Enthusiasm is connected to the notion of the sublime and

is based on the same iconoclastic structure. This emptiness is

inseparably linked with the feeling of sacred terror and finally with

the whole practice of a revolutionary terror. An empty space is only

half-objective; its existence is related to deep interior affects. The

imaginary social space after Rousseau is a strange topological

construction in which interiority is connected to public spectacles.

Society was perceived now as a public space with the empty center

occupied by a law. This space doesn't know any inequality and was

constituted according to the rules of the Universal Reason. But outside

this ideal space of a general will there is another one — a space of

exclusion. It was inhabited by counterrevolutionary "monsters" The

first ideal space was immune to terror, but the second one, the space

of exclusion, was transformed into a pandemonium of unrestricted

terror. The first space is antimimetic, the second is mimetic par

excellence. The ideal space acquires its form only in opposition to

the space of exclusion, and the terror becomes a force externally

determining its existence. The space of universality and indistinction

can be created only through the elimination of all manifestations of

particularism. Revolutionaries who were called to eliminate enemies

inside, in order to access to the realm of rational and virtuous

unanimity, interiorized this distinction between two opposite spaces.

Saint-Just paradoxically speaks about his voluntary self exclusion from

the realm of General Will in order to execute terror inside the realm

of exclusion. He perceives the defense of the ideality as a heroic

self-sacrifice. The absolute ideal of the sublime space of virtue

unmistankingly resurrects the idea of Deity — of the Robespierre's

Supreme Being. An Absolute generates an Absolute. A sphere of

the Absolute is marked by immaterial purity that doesn't tolerate

imperfection of materiality. Supreme Freedom eventually is a freedom

802 М. Ямпольский. Физиология символического

from material existence of human bodies. Later Hegel wrote about

an equivalence between the absolute freedom, negativity and death.

Individuals are eliminated as obstacles on a way to the Absolute. In

this sense the cult of the Supreme Being is an indirect spiritualization

of Terror.

Power (before the emergence of the modern State in the 19th

century) was based on magical symbolism and analogy. In the late

century it is separated from a physical body of the sovereign and

is inscribed in a specular theatrical structure. This structure ideally

allows the transformation of the multitude into totality and generates

an abstraction of general will. This centered totality is nothing else

than a structural, depersonalized model of monarchy that doesn't need

any monarch for the exercise of a centralized state's power. The

emergence of a structurally organized state power has marginalized

theology as a political philosophy of the Middle Ages and has

secularized political theology by transforming it to a new political

theory. God itself lost its importance and was replaced by an abstract

deity of deistic cults. This process of secularization, rationalization

and gradual degradation of the old symbolism was defined by Carl

Schmitt as neutralization. Neutralization is an elimination of the

transcendental from the world; it is inseparable from the emergence

of the modern political realm. This process and its consequences are

analyzed in the third part of the book. Schmitt claimed that even

Hobbesian Leviathan (State) is simply a secularized version of a

Calvinist God. Max Weber was talking about a bureaucratization and

routinization of charisma. However neutralization starts a process

of a secondary symbolization. It happens because reality is always more

complex than any rational scheme that may be applied to it. The

recalcitrant elements, which defy Reason, are preserved into a kind

of symbolic limbo rebellious to the power of rationality. France was

particularly rich in these symbolic remnants because of its historical

Catholicism. Secondary symbols make a real irruption during the

French Revolution inundated by allegories, emblems and permeated

by a spirit of new irrationalism (illuminism, spiritualism, magnetism

etc). New symbolism was usually non-Christian, but pseudo-Greek

or Roman.

The process of secularization defined even the sense of history.

Secularized history took a form of a linear progress (which is a

ratiftnalized version of Christian vision of history), but another one

— cyclical and catastrophic vision of history — was preserved in the

same underground storage of "prejudices" These two coexisting

models of histories were often associated with the survival of pagan

gods and their resurrection under the disguise of the astrological

symbols during the Renaissance (Warburg, Saxl and others). In

Renaissance there was an obvious doubling of time: people equally

are inscribed into a Christian eschatological history and are dependent

on pagan gods of astrology. Revolution as a term, even at the beginning

of the French Revolution, was still pointing to a cyclical time of

Summary 803

permanently occurring restorations and destructions and finally to

the astrological temporality.

The depositary of rejected non-rationalized representations is a

source of fear verging on panic. The fear of witches penetrates into

a European culture roughly at the same time as pagan deities of

astrology. Witches are at the beginning of a witch craze interpreted

as the resurrected embodiments of Diana or Hecate. The whole

pantheon of horror provoking monsters thus accompanies the most

rational culture of Enlightenment. These monsters are creatures of

exclusion and singularity opposed to generic creatures of universality

that populate the world of a strict Enlightenment. Monsters violated

rational rules of generation, they were considered to be the deformed

copies of the unrestrained imagination rather than of a biological

father. Therefore they represented a threat to a rational causality. They

incarnated an idea of a signifier emancipated from a signified. This

distortion of "natural" link between the two sides of a sign

characterizes the allegory that gradually acquired a dominant position

in the culture of the baroque. The baroque cultivated allegories usually

marked by a melancholic spirit of decay, exclusion and temporal

displacement. Walter Benjamin has pointed at deep relations between

pagan gods in allegories and ruins. In certain cases, according to

Benjamin, allegories could be reanimated (when their abstractness

reaches a point of an extreme tension) and start to incarnate an

ultimate horror. It happened for instance with Satan during the

Reformation, when an allegorical figure of evil was suddenly

transformed into a "living" character. The same process in a

secularized form takes place at the time of the French revolution in

melodramas, where evil was embodied in bigger than life figures of

demonic villains. The figure of the king at the same period undergoes

the same transformation from the allegory of an absolute power into

the terrifying figure of evil.

Allegory had a privileged relation with the representation of power

partially because it is usually assembled from different heterogeneous

parts. And this monstrous non-organic character of an allegory reflects

a character of the state as an artificial assemblage of different political,

social, religious and ethnic bodies. Hobbes' Leviathan is such an

allegorical "machine" of power — an allegory of a modern state as a

monster. It is related to an organic symbolic body of the old "divine"

sovereign like a ruin of a dead statue to a living organism. This is

why the quest for organic unity of a newly created revolutionary

nation enters into a radical conflict with the composite character of

the allegories of power. A real body of the king is at a certain moment

perceived as such a composite artificial allegory that should be

eliminated as an ultimate obstacle on a way toward absolute unity.

The reading of the king's body in terms of an allegory contradicts

an influential tradition of understanding of this body as an emblem

of people's unity. Joseph de Maistre, for instance, claimed that the

composite character of the nation is transcended only when this body