by Chen Jack W
temporal pleasures.
Denying the Imperial Body
It is striking that Taizong did not seek to continue this rather spectacular
tradition of imperial representation, particularly since the Tang dynastic
house claimed to be descendants of Laozi and consistently gave preference
to the Daoist religious factions at court. Instead Taizong—at least in the
first part of his reign—discouraged talk of immortality-seeking in his
court:
On the renwu day of the twelfth month [January 15, 628], the emperor said to his attending officials, “Affairs concerning spirits and immortals are, at their basis,
empty and false, and worthless are their reports. It was this that the First Em-
peror of Qin adored without measure, and so he was deceived by masters of eso-
teric techniques, thereupon dispatching young boys and girls in the thousands to
follow Xu Fu and enter the seas in search of herbs of immortality. The fangshi
wished to avoid the Qin’s cruel punishments and so remained abroad and did not
return. The First Emperor nevertheless waited for them by the sea, and died up-
on going back to Shaqiu. Han Wudi, in order to search for immortals, allowed
his daughter to be wed to a person of Daoist techniques.56 However, when the matter [of his powers or promises] were not evidenced, then Wudi had him executed. Based on these two affairs, spirits and immortals are not worth the bother
of foolish searches.”
十二月壬午，上謂侍臣曰：“神仙事本虛妄，空有其名。秦始皇非分
愛好，遂為方士所詐，乃遣童男女數千人隨徐福入海求仙藥，方士避
秦苛虐，因留不歸。始皇猶海側踟躕以待之，還至沙丘而死。漢武帝
—————
55. Shi ji, 117.3063.
56. This was Luan Da 欒大, who entered into Han Wudi’s service after the fangshi
Shaoweng 少翁 was exposed as a fake and executed. On Luan Da’s marriage to the Grand
Princess Wei, see Shi ji, 28.1391. On his subsequent execution, see Shi ji, 28.1395.
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On Sovereignty and Representation
73
為求仙，乃將女嫁道術人，事既無驗，便行誅戮。據此二事，神仙不
煩妄求也。”57
The thrust of Taizong’s comment is clear enough, though it is worth
pausing over a nuance in his criticism of the First Emperor and Han
Wudi. Taizong states that the First Emperor “adored without measure”
matters concerning tales of spirits and immortals, and he ends by dismiss-
ing matters related to this alterior world as “not worth the bother of fool-
ish searches.” What was perhaps worse than the pursuit of immortality
was the recklessness and immoderation with which the two emperors en-
gaged in it. That is, while Taizong would not condone the activity, he is
even more troubled by the lack of self-restraint and discipline evidenced
in the reigns of the First Emperor and Han Wudi.
The theme of self-moderation is bound up with the tropology of askē-
sis. I define askēsis as the disciplining of the body and its desires, a practice that arises out of the denial or negation of the ineluctable fact of corporeality.58 Transposed within the discourse of sovereignty, askēsis becomes
the idea that the sovereign should devote himself to the responsibilities of
governance, voiding himself of the temptations created by the wealth and
power at his command. The ruler who cannot control his private desires
neglects the public role of sovereignty, and thereby places the kingdom in
danger. Whereas the goal of auxetic representation was to ensure the pro-
longation of the body, ascetic representation sought to control or manage
the body. For Taizong, the central problem had to do with tyrannical ca-
pacities of the imperial body, with its propensities towards violence, and
worse, towards pleasure in violence. There was an economic aspect to
Taizong’s understanding of askēsis as well, one that took stock of the in-
verse relationship between the vast resources claimed by the single ruler
and those scant resources allotted to the multitudes that produced them
in the first place. An anecdote, found both in the Zhenguan zhengyao and
in the Zizhi tongjian, illustrates these various aspects:
—————
57. Jiu Tang shu, 2.33.
58. On the philological history of askēsis, see Dressler, Usage of άσκέω, pp. 11–24; and Hijmans, ΑΣΚΗΣΙΣ, pp. 54–91. For more theoretical treatments of the term, see Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, pp. 115–136; and Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 72–77.
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74
On Sovereignty and Representation
In the second year of the Zhenguan reign, the capital region was stricken with
drought, and locusts arose in great numbers. Taizong entered the imperial park
and looked at the crop. Seeing the locusts, he gathered up a handful and cursed,
saying, “The people take grain as their life, yet you eat it; this is a harm to the
common people. If the common people have faults, these reside in me, the One
Man. If you have intelligence, [you would know that] it is only proper to devour
my mind but not to harm the common people.” He was about to swallow them,
when officials around him hurriedly remonstrated, saying, “We fear that this will
cause illness; you cannot do this!” Taizong replied, “What I hope is to transfer
the calamity [to Ourself]; what illness could Our person avoid?” Thereupon, he
swallowed the locusts, and from that time, the locusts did not again cause disaster.
貞觀二年，京師旱，蝗蟲大起。太宗入苑視禾，見蝗蟲，掇數枚而咒
曰：“人以穀為命，而汝食之，是害于百姓。百姓有過，在予一人。
爾其有靈，但當蝕我心，無害百姓。”將吞之，左右遽諫曰，“恐成
疾，不可。”太宗曰：“所冀移災，朕躬何疾之避。”遂吞之，自是
蝗不復為災。59
Within an agrarian society, the sovereign had responsibility for the conti-
nuity of agricultural life, something that is threatened by the locust plague.
To return the world to its proper order, Taizong offers himself as a sacri-
fice to the locusts. There is an undeniable sense that the act has been
staged, as suggested by the non-agricultural setting of the imperial park,
Taizong’s melodramatic speech to the locusts, and the rote attempt of his
ministers to dissuade him from risking entomophagic harm. Yet the an-
ecdote points to a more serious argument about sovereignty, one that
thematizes appetite, body, and the relationship between ruler and empire.
To understand what is at stake, one must read the anecdote in terms of
its semiotic economy. Here, two points are critical. First, there is a paro-
nomastic troping between the terms for emperor ( huang 皇) and locust
( huang 蝗), whose pronunciation can both be transcribed as ghwang, following David Prager Branner’s transcription system for medieval Chi-
nese.60 In other words, the locust is, by virtue of its punning name, an im-
peri
al insect, the arthropodic double of the sovereign. Second, when
Taizong addresses the locusts, he offers his xin 心 (“mind”) for them to
—————
59. I use here the version in Zhenguan zhengyao, 8.30.237. See also Zizhi tongjian, 192.6053–54.
60. Compare Branner’s transcription to those in Pulleyblank, Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation, p. 132; and Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, p. 186.
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On Sovereignty and Representation
75
devour, rather than his body or his stomach (which would make more
sense in this story of eating and being eaten). The mind is not a wholly
corporeal thing, referring both to the material organ ( xinzang 心臟) and
the immaterial operations of thought and ideation ( sixiang 思想; yinian
意念). And perhaps most importantly, the mind serves as the figure of rulership in the political analogy of the body—that is, just as the sovereign
is the mind of the empire, the mind is sovereign of the body.61
This play of signifiers is what makes intelligible the logic of equivalence
and sacrificial exchange when the emperor offers his mind to his semiotic
double, the locust. The account is structured around three acts of tropic
exchange. First, we begin with the substitution between the people and
the grain, since the grain is the central means of subsistence for the people.
The locusts harm the people because they feast upon that which consti-
tutes the very life ( ming 命) of the people. Second, we have the substitu-
tion between the people and the sovereign. Taizong claims that the sover-
eign’s one body has responsibility for all other bodies, and that all faults of
the people are to be found in the “One Man” ( yiren 一人). In this way, he
acts as the singular representative for all the empire. Third, Taizong re-
stores the proper order of things by substituting himself for the grain that
the locusts are devouring. It is significant that this is a double exchange,
since Taizong not only assumes the part of the grain, but also displaces the
ravenous locust from the equation. In the very act of sacrificing his xin,
the sovereign of his body, Taizong asserts his emperorship ( huang) over
the insect that puns on his title.
With the last exchange, the circuit is closed and the locust plague is
lifted from the empire. The ending of the anecdote suggests that this is a
miracle tale: Taizong’s personal virtue is translated into efficacious action
through self-sacrifice. And undoubtedly, Wu Jing included this story in
the Zhenguan zhengyao with this purpose in mind. However, the rhetori-
cality of Taizong’s address to the locusts—and in particular, the way in
which it stages certain tropes of sovereignty—makes this something more
than a vehicle for propagating an image of Taizong as model ruler. The
locusts that eat the grain of the empire, and the emperor who eats the lo-
custs, indicate a pervading concern with appetite and the problem of its
—————
61. On the corporeal metaphor of the state, see Hale, Body Politic, pp. 18–47; and Hale,
“Analogy of the Body Politic,” pp. 67–70.
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76
On Sovereignty and Representation
governance. This is particularly troublesome because of the semiotic ech-
oes between emperor and locust, the punning suggestion that the emperor
who saves the empire by taking the plague into his own body is somehow
identified with the plague, or the plague with him.
Taizong’s concern with the imperial body emerges from a broader
question of the relationship between the public institution of the sover-
eign and his private self. To borrow a distinction made within Renais-
sance political thought, what concerns Taizong is the relationship be-
tween the body natural, or the private person of the ruler, and the body politic, or the symbolic body of the state represented by the ruler.62 From
Taizong’s perspective, the sovereign should be constituted wholly by his
public aspect, as he states in the following speech, made shortly after his
accession to the throne:
The ruler depends on the state, and the state depends on its people. Oppressing
the people to make them serve the ruler is like slicing one’s flesh to fill one’s
stomach. The stomach is full but the body destroyed; the ruler is wealthy but the
state is lost. Therefore the harm to the ruler does not come from outside, but of-
ten comes out from within the ruler’s own body. Now if the [ruler’s] desires are
abundant, then his expenditures will be expansive. If his expenditures are expan-
sive then his tax exactions will be heavy. If his tax exactions are heavy, then the
people will be sorrowful. If the people are sorrowful, then the state will be in peril.
If the state is in peril, then the ruler will be destroyed. We often think upon such matters, and thus dare not give free rein to our desires.
君依於國，國依於民。刻民以奉君，猶割肉以充腹，腹飽而身斃，君
富而國亡。故人君之患，不自外來，常由身出。夫欲盛則費廣，費廣
則賦重，賦重則民愁，民愁則國危，國危則君喪矣。朕常以此思之，
故不敢縱欲也。63
Taizong’s statement begins by delineating the interdependencies of the
people ( min 民) and the state ( guo 國), and of the state and the sovereign ( jun 君). If the sovereign does not realize that the people and sovereign
are united in the single body of the state, and he allows himself to satisfy
—————
62. This is the formulation analyzed in Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies. Related to this is the Hobbesian distinction between the “natural person” (one whose words and actions are considered his own) and the “feigned or artificial person” (one whose words and actions belong to, or are representative of, others). See Hobbes, Leviathan, XVI.101–105.
63. Zizhi tongjian, 192.6026.
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On Sovereignty and Representation
77
his own desires at the expense of the people, then the resulting exploita-
tion can be likened to self-cannibalism.
In referring to the sovereign’s person, Taizong uses the term shen 身, a
term that can be used to denote the person or self, but in this context,
may be best understood as the self as it is instantiated in one’s particular
body. This is a telling choice of terms, because while the shen may seem to
belong to the sovereign alone, Taizong wants to show how it actually de-
pends upon the sustenance-producing labors of the people. Taizong em-
ploys what we, as Western readers, would identify as synecdoche, as a
trope that substitutes part for whole within an organistic logic. He asserts
that the people are the very flesh ( rou 肉) of the body and the ruler is the
body’s stomach, and in this way, acknowledges how the ruler’s desires are
an inescapable part of his existence. The ruler is, after all,
the one person
in the empire who has the means to satiate whatever desires he might have
(which is why he can be confused with the locust that devours everything).
Yet to act as the stomach, rather than as the mind, is to place the emphasis
on the production of appetite, and not on the higher faculties of govern-
ance. Taizong’s worry is that the ruler who mistakes his shen as private
and autonomous will make the people labor and suffer in order to satisfy
his selfish needs.
This leads Taizong to a second discourse, that of economics. Turning
from synecdoche, Taizong constructs an argument based on metonymy,
on cause and effect, in which he demonstrates how the sovereign’s bodily
desires result in state expenditures, and the state expenditures lead to tax-
es upon the people, and the taxes translate into human misery. Again, re-
turning to the sovereign’s misprision of his shen as private, Taizong argues that the unrestricted indulgence of imperial desires cannot but lead to
popular suffering, because the imperial body is essentially bound to the
economic welfare of the empire, and moreover, because desires are intrin-
sic to human nature, the imperial body constitutes a continual threat to
the empire. The solution, then, is to refrain from acting upon desires:
“We often think upon such matters, and thus dare not give free rein to
our desires.”
This concluding line is a performance of imperial askēsis, one that both
admits selfish desire and deflects it, or rather, admits selfish desire in order
to deflect it. In a complex rhetorical performance that centers on the im-
perial body, Taizong ends by confessing the fact of desire and then rising
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On Sovereignty and Representation
above it, demonstrating that he possesses the moral self-discipline to avoid
personal and empire-wide disaster. Without the admission of his own de-
sire, Taizong might simply come across as a moralistic scold; by implicat-
ing himself in the potentiality of tyrannical misrule, he shows how he can
transcend his baser instincts in order to cleave to the ideals of virtuous
sovereignty.
