that makes law), when it is not reduced to merely the power to negotiate with
the law. The only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus
between violence and law. And only beginning from the space thus opened will
it be possible to pose the question of a possible use of law after the deactivation
of the device that, in the state of exception, tied it to life. We will then have be-
fore us a “pure” law, in the sense in which Benjamin speaks of a “pure” language
and a “pure” violence. To a word that does not bind, that neither commands
nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure
means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end. And, between
the two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis that the
powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception.
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HOMO SACER II, 2
STASIS
Civil War as a
Political Paradigm
TRANSLATED BY NICHOLAS HERON
Contents
Foreword
251
1. Stasis
253
2. Leviathan and Behemoth
265
Bibliography
291
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Foreword
The two texts published here reproduce, with slight variations and additions,
two seminars on civil war given at Princeton University in October 2001. It is up
to readers to determine to what extent the theses advanced here—which iden-
tify the fundamental threshold of politicisation in the West in civil war and the
constitutive element of the modern State in ‘ademia’ (that is, in the absence of a
people)—still apply, or whether, to the contrary, the passage into the dimension
of global civil war has altered their meaning in an essential manner.
251
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1
Stasis
1.It is generally acknowledged that a theory of civil war is completely lacking
today, yet this absence does not seem to concern jurists and political sci-
entists too much. Roman Schnur, who formulated this diagnosis as early as the
1980s, nonetheless added that the dis regard of civil war went hand in hand with
the advance of global civil war (Schnur 1983, 121, 156). At thirty years’ distance,
this observation has lost none of its topicality: while the very possibility of distin-
guishing a war between States and an internecine war appears today to have dis-
appeared, specialists continue to carefully avoid any hint at a theory of civil war.
It is true that in recent years, owing to the upsurge of wars impossible to define
as international, publications concerning so-called ‘internal wars’ have multiplied
(above all, in the United States); even in these instances, however, the analysis
was geared not toward an interpretation of the phenomenon, but—in accordance
with a practice ever more widespread—toward the conditions under which an
international intervention becomes possible. The paradigm of consensus, which
today dominates both political action and theory, seems incompatible with the se-
rious investigation of a phenomenon that is at least as old as Western democracy.
א There exists, today, both a ‘polemology’, a theory of war, and an ‘irenology’, a
theory of peace, but there is no ‘stasiology’, no theory of civil war. We have already mentioned how, according to Schnur, this absence could be related to the advance of global
civil war. The concept of ‘global civil war’ was introduced contemporaneously in 1963
in Hannah Arendt’s book On Revolution (in which the Second World War was defined
as ‘a kind of civil war raging all over the earth’ [Arendt 1963, 8]) and in Carl Schmitt’s Theorie des Partisanen (Schmitt 2007), a book dedicated to the figure that marks the end of the conception of war of the Jus publicum Europaeum, which was grounded on the
possibility of clearly distinguishing between war and peace, soldiers and civilians, enemies and criminals. Whatever date one wishes to trace this end back to, it is certain that today the state of war in the traditional sense has virtually disappeared. Even the Gulf War, the last conflict that still had the appearance of a war between States, was fought without the warring States declaring the state of war (which for some States, such as Italy, would have been unconstitutional). The generalisation of a model of war which cannot be defined as
253
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HOMO SACER II, 2
an international conflict, yet which lacks the traditional features of civil war, has led some scholars to speak of ‘uncivil wars’, which, unlike civil wars, appear to be directed not toward the control and transformation of the political system, but toward the maximisation
of disorder (Snow 1996). The attention which scholars dedicated to these wars in the 1990s ultimately could not lead to a theory of civil war, but only to a doctrine of management,
that is, of the administration, manipulation and internationalisation of internal conflicts.
2. One possible reason for the lack of interest in civil war was the increasing
popularity of the concept of revolution (at least, up until the end of the 1960s),
which was often substituted for civil war, yet without ever coinciding with it. It was
Hannah Arendt who, in her book On Revolution, unreservedly formulated the the-
sis of the heterogeneity between the two phenomena. ‘[R]evolutions’, she writes,
are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the
problem of beginning [ . . . ] Modern revolutions have little in common with
the mutatio rerum of Roman history or the stasis, the civil strife which disturbed the Greek polis. We cannot equate them with Plato’s metabolai, the quasi- natural
transformation of one form of government into another, or with Polybius’s po-
liteiōn anakyklōsis, the appointed recurring cycle into which human affairs are
bound by reason of their always being driven to extremes. Antiquity was well
acquainted with political change and the violence that went with change, but
neither of them appeared to it to bring about something new. (Arendt 1963, 13–14)
Although it is likely that the difference between the two concepts is in fact purely
nominal, it is certain that the concentration of attention on the concept of revo-
lution (which for some reason seemed more respectable than that of stasis, even
to a scholar as unprejudiced as Arendt), has contributed to the marginal isation
of studies on civil war.
3. A theory of civil war is not among the possible objectives of this text. In-
stead, I will restrict myself to examining the topic as it appears within Western
political thought at two moments in its history: in the testimonies of the philos-
ophers and historians of Ancient Greece and in the thought of Thomas Hobbes.
The two examples have not been selected by chance: I would like to suggest that
they represent the two faces, so to speak, of a single political paradigm, which
manifests itself, on the one hand, through the assertion of the necessity of civil war,
and on the other, through the assertion of the necessity of its exclusion. That the
paradigm is, in truth, single, means that the two opposed necessities maintain a se-
cret solidarity between them. And it is this secret solidarity that I will seek to grasp.
An analysis of the problem of civil war (or stasis) in classical Greece can only
begin with the studies of Nicole Loraux, who dedicated a series of articles and es-
STASIS 255
says to this theme, which were collected in 1997 in the volume La Cité divisée—
the volume to which she used to refer as mon livre par excellence. As in the life of artists, so too in the life of scholars there are mysteries. Thus I was never able to
successfully explain to myself why Loraux never included in the volume an essay
written in 1986 for a lecture in Rome entitled ‘La guerre dans la famille’, which
is perhaps the most important of all the studies she dedicated to the problem
of stasis. The circumstance is all the more inexplicable given that she decided to publish the essay in an issue of the journal Clio dedicated to guerres civiles in the same year as the book, almost as if she were aware—but this would be a truly singular motivation—that the thesis defended in the essay went decidedly further
in terms of originality and radicality than the already acute thesis advanced in
the book. I will attempt, in any case, to summarise the essay’s findings in order
then to attempt to locate what Feuerbach called the Entwicklungsfähigkeit, the
‘capacity for development’ that they contain.
4. Other French scholars—allow me to mention at least two classics, Gustave
Glotz and Fustel de Coulanges, and in their wake, Jean-Pierre Vernant—had
underscored the importance of stasis in the Greek polis prior to Nicole Loraux.
The novelty of Loraux’s approach is that she immediately situates the problem
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