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of bare life in the juridico-political order. It is as if male citizens had to pay for
their participation in political life with an unconditional subjection to a power
of death, as if life were able to enter the city only in the double exception of
being capable of being killed and yet not sacrificed. Hence the situation of the
patria potestas at the limit of both the domus and the city: if classical politics is born through the separation of these two spheres, life that may be killed but not
sacrificed is the hinge on which each sphere is articulated and the threshold at
which the two spheres are joined in becoming indeterminate. Neither political
bios nor natural zoē, sacred life is the zone of indistinction in which zoē and bios constitute each other in including and excluding each other.
It has been rightly observed that the state is founded not as the expression of
a social tie but as an untying ( déliaison) that prohibits (Badiou, L’être, p. 125). We may now give a further sense to this claim. Déliaison is not to be understood as
the untying of a preexisting tie (which would probably have the form of a pact
or a contract). The tie itself originarily has the form of an untying or exception
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in which what is captured is at the same time excluded, and in which human
life is politicized only through an abandonment to an unconditional power of
death. The sovereign tie is more originary than the tie of the positive rule or the
tie of the social pact, but the sovereign tie is in truth only an untying. And what
this untying implies and produces—bare life, which dwells in the no-man’s-land
between the home and the city—is, from the point of view of sovereignty, the
originary political element.
5
Sovereign Body and Sacred Body
5.1. When Ernst Kantorowicz published The King’s Two Bodies: A Study
in Mediaeval Political Theology in the United States at the end of the
1950s, the book was received with great favor not only by medievalists but also
and above all by historians of the modern age and scholars of political science and
the theory of the state. The work was without doubt a masterpiece of its kind,
and the notion that it advanced of a “mystical” or “political body” of the sover-
eign certainly constituted (as Kantorowicz’s most brilliant pupil, R. E. Giesey,
observed years later) a “milestone in the history of the development of the mod-
ern state” (Giesey, Cérémonial, p. 9). Such unanimous favor in such a delicate area ought, however, to provoke some reflection.
In his preface, Kantorowicz himself notes that the book, which was born as
an inquiry into the medieval precedents of the juridical doctrine of the king’s
two bodies, had gone beyond the author’s first intention and had even trans-
formed itself—as the subtitle indicates—into a “study in mediaeval political
theology.” Kantorowicz, who had lived through and intensely participated in
the political affairs of Germany in the 1920s, fighting alongside the Nationalists
in the Spartacist Revolt in Berlin and the Republic of Councils in Munich,
could not have failed to intend the reference to the “political theology” under
whose insignia Schmitt had placed his own theory of sovereignty in 1922. Thir-
ty-five years later, after Nazism had marked an irreparable rupture in his life
as an assimilated Jew, Kantorowicz returned to interrogate, from a completely
different perspective, the “Myth of the State” that he had ardently shared in his
youth. In a significant disavowal, the preface warns: “It would go much too far
. . . to assume that the author felt tempted to investigate the emergence of some
of the idols of modern political religions merely on account of the horrifying
experience of our own time in which whole nations, the largest and the small-
est, fell prey to the weirdest dogmas and in which political theologisms became
genuine obsessions” ( King’s Two Bodies, p. viii). And with the same eloquent modesty, the author writes that he “cannot claim to have demonstrated in any
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completeness the problem of what has been called ‘The Myth of the State’”
(ibid., p. ix).
In this sense it has been possible to read the book, not without reason, as
one of our century’s great critical texts on the state and techniques of power. Yet
anyone who has followed the patient work of analysis that leads from the macabre
irony of Richard II and Plowden’s reports to a reconstruction of the formation of the doctrine of the king’s two bodies in medieval jurisprudence and theology cannot fail to wonder if the book really can indeed be read as only a demystification of
political theology. The fact of the matter is that while the political theology evoked
by Schmitt essentially frames a study of the absolute character of political power,
The King’s Two Bodies is instead exclusively concerned with the other, more innocuous feature that, according to Jean Bodin, defines sovereignty ( puissance absolue
et perpétuelle) — the perpetual nature of sovereignty, which allows the royal dignitas to survive the physical person of its bearer ( Le roi ne meurt jamais, “The king never dies”). Here “Christian political theology” was, by means of analogy with Christ’s
mystic body, directed solely toward the task of establishing the continuity of the
state’s corpus morale et politicum {moral and political body), without which no stable political organization could be conceived. And it is in this sense that “notwith-
standing . . . some similarities with disconnected pagan concepts, the king’s two
bodies is an offshoot of Christian theological thought and, consequently, stands as
a landmark of Christian political theology” ( King’s Two Bodies, p. 434).
5.2. Advancing this final thesis decisively, Kantorowicz evokes—but immedi-
ately sets aside—precisely the element that could have steered the genealogy of
the doctrine of the king’s two bodies in a less reassuring direction. Kantorowicz
connects the doctrine of the king’s two bodies with the other, darker mystery of
sovereign power: la puissance absolue. In chapter 7, describing the peculiar fu-
neral ceremonies of French kings in which a wax effigy of the sovereign, placed
on a lit d’honneur, occupied an important position and was fully treated as the king’s living person, Kantorowicz suggests that these ceremonies might well have
their origin in the apotheosis of Roman emperors. Here too, after the sovereign
dies, his wax imago, “treated like a sick man, lies on a bed; senators and matrons are lined up on either side; physicians pretend to feel the pulse of the image
and give it their medical aid until, after seven days, the effigy ‘dies’” ( King’s Two
Bodies, p. 427). According to Kantorowicz, however, the pagan precedent, while very similar, had not directly influenced the French ceremony. It was in any
case certain to Kantorowicz that the presence of the effigy was to be once again
placed in relation to the perpetuity of royal dignity, which “never dies.”
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That Kantorowicz’s exclusion of the Roman precedent was not a product of
negligence or oversight is shown by the attention which Giesey, with his teacher’s
full approval, gives to the matter in a book that can be considered a fitting com-
/>
pletion of The King’s Two Bodies, namely, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (1960). Giesey could not ignore the fact that a genetic connection
between imperial Roman consecratio and the French rite had been established by
such scholars as Elias Bickermann and the very eminent Julius Schlosser. Curi-
ously enough, Giesey nevertheless suspends judgment on the matter (“as far as
I am concerned,” he writes, “I prefer not to choose either of the two solutions”
[p. 128]) and instead resolutely confirms his teacher’s interpretation of the link
between the effigy and the perpetual character of sovereignty. There was an obvi-
ous reason for this choice: if the hypothesis of the pagan derivation of the image
ceremony had been taken into account, the Kantorowiczian thesis concerning
“Christian political theology” would have fallen by the wayside or would, at
least, have had to be reformulated more cautiously. But there was a different—
and more secret—reason, and that is that nothing in Roman consecratio allowed
one to place the emperor’s effigy in relation to what is sovereignty’s clearest fea-
ture, its perpetual nature. The macabre and grotesque rite in which an image was
first treated as a living person and then solemnly burned gestured instead toward
a darker and more uncertain zone, which we will now investigate, in which the
political body of the king seemed to approximate—and even to become indistin-
guishable from—the body of homo sacer, which can be killed but not sacrificed.
5.3. In 1929, a young scholar of classical antiquity, Elias Bickermann, pub-
lished an article titled “Roman Imperial Apotheosis” in the Archiv für Religion-
swissenschaft, which, in a short but detailed appendix, explicitly placed the pagan image ceremony ( fonus imaginarium) in relation to the funeral rites of English and French sovereigns. Both Kantorowicz and Giesey cite this study; Giesey
even declares, without hesitation, that his own work originated in a reading
of Bickermann’s article. Both Kantorowicz and Giesey remain silent, however,
about what was precisely the central point of Bickermann’s analysis.
Carefully reconstructing the rite of imperial consecration from both written
sources and coins, Bickermann had discerned the specific aporia contained in
this “funeral by image,” even if he had not grasped all of its consequences:
Every normal man is buried only once, just as he dies only once. In the age of
Antonius, however, the consecrated emperor is burned on the funeral pyre twice,
first in corpore and then in effigie. . . . The emperor’s corpse is solemnly, but not officially, burned, and his remains are deposited in the mausoleum. At this point
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public mourning usually ends. . . . But in Antonius Pius’s funeral, everything is
carried out contrary to usual practice. Here Iustitium (public mourning) begins
only after the burial of the bones, and the state funeral procession starts up once
the remains of the corpse already lie buried in the ground! And this funus publi-
cum, as we learn from Dio’s and Herodian’s reports of later consecrations, concerns the wax effigy made after the image of the deceased sovereign. . . . Dio reports as
an eyewitness that a slave uses a fan to keep flies away from the face of the doll.
Then Septimus Severus gives him a farewell kiss on the funeral pyre. Herodian
adds that the image of Septimus Severus is treated in the palace as a sick person
for seven days, with doctors’ visits, clinical reports, and diagnoses of death. All of
these accounts leave no doubt: the wax effigy, which is “in all things similar” to
the dead man, and which lies on the official bed wearing the dead man’s clothes,
is the emperor himself, whose life has been transferred to the wax doll by means
of this and perhaps other magical rites. (“Die römische Kaiserapotheose,” pp. 4–6)
Yet what is decisive for understanding the whole ritual is precisely the func-
tion and the nature of the image. Here Bickermann suggests a comparison that
makes it possible to situate the ceremony in a new perspective:
Parallels for such picture magic are numerous and can be found all over the world.
Here it suffices to cite an Italic example from the year 136. A quarter of a century
before the funeral of the effigy of Antonius Pius, the lex collegii culorum Dianae
et Antinonoi declares: Quisquis ex hoc collegio servus defunctus fuerit et corpus eius a domino iniquo sepulturae datum non . . . fuerit . . . , ei funus imaginarium fiet
[If a servant of this college dies and an impious master does not bury the body,
may a funus imaginarium be performed]. Here we find the same expression,
funus imaginarium, that the “Historia Augusta’’ uses to designate the funeral ceremony of Pertinax’s wax effigy at which Dio was present. In the lex collegii
as in other parallel cases, however, the image functions as a substitute for the
missing corpse; in the case of the imperial ceremony, it appears instead beside
the corpse, doubling the dead body without substituting for it. (Ibid., pp. 6–7)
In 1972, returning to the problem after more than 40 years, Bickermann
places the imaginary imperial funeral in relation to a rite required for the warrior
who, after having solemnly dedicated himself to the Manes gods before fighting,
does not die in battle ( Consecratio, p. 22). And it is here that the body of the sovereign and the body of homo sacer enter into a zone of indistinction in which
they can no longer be told apart.
5.4. For a long time now, scholars have approximated the figure of homo sacer
to that of the devotus who consecrates his own life to the gods of the underworld in order to save the city from a grave danger. Livy has left us a vivid, meticulous
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description of a devotio that took place in 340 bce during the battle of Veseris. The Roman army was about to be defeated by its Latin adversaries when the consul
Publius Decius Mus, who was commanding the legions alongside his colleague
Titus Manlius Torquatus, asked the pontifex to assist him in carrying out the rite:
The pontiff ordered him to put on the purple-bordered toga and, with his head
veiled and one hand thrust out from the toga and touching his chin, to stand
on a spear that was laid under his feet, and to say as follows: “Janus, Jupiter,
Father Mars, Quirinus, Bellona, Lares, divine Novensiles, divine Indigites,
you gods in whose power are both we and our enemies, and you, divine
Manes—I invoke and worship you, I beseech and crave your favor, that you
prosper the might and victory of the Roman People of the Quirites, and visit
the foes of the Roman People of the Quirites with fear, shuddering, and death.
As I have pronounced these words, even so in behalf of the republic of the
Roman People of the Quirites, and of the army, the legions, the auxiliaries of
the Roman People of the Quirites, do I consign and consecrate [ devoveo] the legions and auxiliaries of the enemy, together with myself, to the divine Manes
and to Earth. . . .” Then, having girded himself with the Gabinian cincture, he
rose up armed on his horse and plunged into the thick of the enemy. To both
armies he appeared more august than a man, as though sent from heaven to
expiate the anger of the gods. (Livy, Ab urbe condita libri, 8. 9. 4ff.) Here the ana
logy between devotus and homo sacer does not seem to go beyond the fact that both are in some way consecrated to death and belong to the
gods, even if (despite Livy’s parallel) not in the technical form of sacrifice. Yet
Livy contemplates a hypothesis that sheds significant light on this institution
and makes it possible to assimilate the life of the devotus more strictly to that of homo sacer:
It seems proper to add here that the consul, dictator, or praetor who consecrates
the legions of the enemy not only can consecrate himself but can also consecrate
any citizen whatsoever who belongs to a Roman legion. If the man who has been
consecrated dies, it is deemed that all is well; but if he does not die, then an
image [ signum] of him must be buried seven feet or more under the ground and a victim must be immolated in expiation. And no Roman magistrate may walk
over the ground in which the image has been buried. But if he has consecrated
himself, as Decius did, and if he does not die, he cannot perform any rite, either
public or private. (Ibid., 8. 9. 13)
Why does the survival of the devotee constitute such an embarrassing situa-
tion for the community that it forces it to perform a complex ritual whose sense
is so unclear? What is the status of the living body that seems no longer to be-
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long to the world of the living? In an exemplary study, Robert Schilling observes
that if the surviving devotee is excluded from both the profane world and the
sacred world, “this happens because this man is sacer. He cannot be given back
in any way to the profane world because it is precisely thanks to his consecration
that the entire community was able to be spared the wrath of the gods” (“Sacrum
et profanum,” p. 956). This is the perspective from which we must see the statue
that we have already encountered in the emperor’s funus imaginarium and that
seems to unite, in one constellation, the body of the sovereign and the body of
the devotee.
We know that the seven-foot-tall signum of which Livy speaks is none other
than the devotee’s “colossus,” which is to say, his double, which takes the place