of which, to be sure, is that here the tiny men that form the Leviathan’s body
are turned not toward the head of the sovereign as in the book, but toward the
reader, that is, toward the sovereign for whom the manuscript was intended
(Fig. 2). In this sense, there is not really a contrast between the two frontis-
pieces, because in both cases the subjects direct their gaze toward the sovereign
(in one image the other is actually present). In the highest part of the emblem,
where the sword and the crosier which the Leviathan holds in his hands meet,
we read a citation in Latin from Job 41: 24: Non est potestas super terram quae
comparetur ei. This comes from the last part of the book, when God, in order
to silence any remonstrance on Job’s part, describes to him the two terrible
primordial beasts: Behemoth (in the Jewish tradition represented as a gigantic
bull) and the marine monster Leviathan. The description of Leviathan insists
on his terrifying force. In the Vulgate that Hobbes seems to follow:
Canst thou draw out the Leviathan with a hook, or canst thou tie his tongue
with a cord? [ . . . ] / In his neck strength shall dwell, and want goeth before
his face. [ . . . ] / His heart shall be as hard as a stone and as firm as a smith’s
anvil. / When he shall rise him up the angels shall fear and being affrighted
shall purify themselves. / When a sword shall lay at him it shall not be able to
hold, nor a spear, nor a breastplate, / for he shall esteem iron as straw and brass
as rotten wood. [ . . . ] / He shall make the deep sea to boil like a pot and shall
make it as when ointments boil. / A path shall shine after him; he shall esteem
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the deep as growing old. / There is no power upon earth that can be compared
with him who was made to fear no-one. / He beholdeth every high thing; he
is king over all the children of pride [ Non est super terram potestas quae compa-
retur ei, qui factus est ut nullum timeret. / Omne sublime videt; ipse est rex super universos filios superbiae]. (Vulgate Bible 2011, 140–5)
In chapter 28 of the book, Hobbes explicitly refers to this biblical passage, writ-
ing of having compared the great power of the sovereign, to whom pride and
other passions have forced men to submit themselves,
to Leviathan, taking the comparison out of the two last verses of the one and
fortieth of Job; where God having set forth the great power of Leviathan, calleth him King of the Proud. There is nothing, saith he, on earth, to be compared to him.
He is made so as not to be afraid. Hee seeth every high thing below him; and is King
of all the children of pride. (Hobbes 1996, 221)
We will return to the particular eschatological significance of these animals, both
in the Jewish and in the Christian traditions.
Immediately below the Latin citation, which constitutes in some way the im-
presa of the emblem (in the emblematic tradition, in which the frontispiece is in-
scribed, the image is always accompanied by a motto or impresa), we see a gigantic
figure whose torso—the sole visible part of the body—is formed by a multitude of
tiny human figures, in accordance with the Hobbesian doctrine of the covenant
which unites the multitude ‘in one and the same person’ (Hobbes 1996, 120). The
colossus wears a crown on his head, and holds a sword, the symbol of temporal
power, in his right hand, and a crosier, the symbol of spiritual (or, as Hobbes pre-
fers to say, ‘ecclesiasticall’) power, in his left. Hans Barion has observed that the
image is symmetrically inverse with respect to the medieval representations of the
Church, in which the right hand holds the crosier and the left the sword.
In the foreground, in such a way as to cover the rest of the colossus’s body,
a rolling landscape, scattered with villages, leads to the image of a city, in which
we clearly recognise the cathedral (on the left side, corresponding to the crosier)
and the fortress (on the right side, corresponding to the sword).
The lower part of the frontispiece, which a kind of ledge separates from the
higher part, contains, in correspondence with each of the colossus’s arms, a se-
quence of tiny emblems, five per side, which refer to temporal power (a fortress,
a crown, a cannon, a panoply of flags and a battle) and to ecclesiastical power
(a church, a mitre, the thunderbolt of excommunication, symbols of logical
syllogisms and a kind of council). Between them hangs the stage curtain with
the book’s title.
STASIS 271
3. An interpretation of the emblem must begin with the figure of the
Leviathan-colossus. Scholars have so constantly focused on its significance as a
symbol of the State that they have failed to pose some obvious questions con-
cerning, for example, its position. Where is the Leviathan situated with respect
to the other elements that compose the image?
In an exemplary study, Reinhard Brandt has attempted to sketch the part
of the colossus’s body that is hidden from view, following the proportions of
the Vitruvian canon (supposing, that is to say, that the head corresponds to an
eighth of the entire body) (Brandt 1982, 211–12; Fig. 3). The result is a human
Figure 3. Reinhard Brandt, design imposed on the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan, 1651.
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HOMO SACER II, 2
figure whose feet appear to float on exactly the point of the frontispiece where
the name ‘Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury’ is written. I say ‘float’ because it is
unclear on what they rest, whether on land or on water. If we suppose, as seems
likely, that beyond the rolling landscape is the sea, this would accord perfectly
with the fact that, in the biblical tradition, whereas Behemoth is a terrestrial ani-
mal, Leviathan is a marine one, a kind of enormous fish or whale—even though
it is impossible ‘to draw it out with a hook’. (John Bramhall, who suggests, in
his spiteful polemic with Hobbes, that the Leviathan of the book—‘neither flesh
nor fish [ . . . ] a mixture of a god and a man and a fish’—is Hobbes himself, also
asserts that ‘the true literall Leviathan is the whale-fish’ [Bramhall 1977, 459].)
Schmitt’s hypothesis, according to which the Behemoth–Leviathan opposition
would correspond to the fundamental geopolitical opposition between land and
sea, thus finds a confirmation in the frontispiece.
What is decisive, in any case, beyond the opposition between land and sea,
is the surprising fact that the ‘mortal God’, ‘the Artificiall Man called Com-
mon-wealth or State’ (as Hobbes defines him in the introduction), does not
dwell within the city, but outside it. His place is exterior not only with respect
to the walls of the city, but also with respect to its territory, in a no-man’s-land
or in the sea; in any case, not within the city. The Common-wealth—the body
political—does not coincide with the physical body of the city. It is this anoma-
lous situation that we will have to understand.
4. Another anomaly of the emblem, no less enigmatic than the preceding
and in all likelihood connected with it, is the fact that the city, with the excep-
tion of some armed guards and two very special figures situate
d close to the
cathedral with whom we will soon be concerned, is completely devoid of its
inhabitants. The streets are perfectly empty, the city is uninhabited: no one lives
there. One possible explanation is that the population of the city has been fully
transferred to the body of the Leviathan; this, however, would imply that it is
not only the sovereign who has no place in the city, but that this is the case for
the people as well.
The political emblem of the frontispiece thus contains enigmas and riddles
that we will seek to resolve. Why does the Leviathan not dwell in the city? And
why is the city uninhabited? Before attempting to respond to these questions,
it will be worthwhile examining the findings of another study that calls into
question the very consistency of the Artificiall Man ‘called Common-wealth
or State’.
STASIS 273
5. In his essay on the frontispiece of Leviathan, Noel Malcolm has drawn
attention to a passage from the ‘Answer to Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert’,
which Hobbes wrote during the same period in which he worked on Leviathan.
Hobbes, whose works include two treatises on optics (the Tractatus de refractione
of 1640 and the First Draught of the Optiques of 1646), describes here an optical device that was apparently fashionable at that moment:
I believe (Sir) you have seene a curious kind of perspective, where, he that lookes
through a short hollow pipe, upon a picture conteyning diverse figures, sees none
of those that are there paynted, but some one person made up of their partes,
conveighed to the eye by the artificiall cutting of a glasse. (Qtd in Malcolm 1998,
125; figs 4–5)
The fact that the Leviathan was an artefact, comparable, as Hobbes suggests in
the introduction, to ‘ Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and
wheeles as doth a watch)’ (Hobbes 1996, 9), was perfectly well known; what Mal-
colm’s study suggests, however, is that what is in question here is not a mechanical
contraption, but an optical device. The gigantic body of the Leviathan formed
by innumerable tiny figures is not a reality, however artificial, but an optical il-
lusion—‘a meer phantasme’, as Bramhall polemically defines it (Bramhall 1977,
459). And yet, in accordance with the increasing prestige that optics was acquir-
ing in those years, the artifice is effective because it grants unity to a multiplicity.
A passage from Richard Fanshawe’s Epistle Dedicatory for his translation of
Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Pastor Fido (1647), which Hobbes probably knew,
seems to confirm that precisely a contraption of this kind might be the source of
the emblem of his Leviathan:
Your highnesse may have seen at Paris a Picture (it is in the Cabinet of the great
Chancellor there) so admirably design’d, that, presenting to the common beholders a multitude of little faces (the famous Ancestors of that Noble Man); at the same
time, to him that looks through a Perspective (kept there for that purpose) there
appears onely a single portrait in great of the Chancellor himself; the painter thereby intimating [ . . . ] by a more subtile Philosophy [ . . . ] how the Body Politick is composed of many naturall ones; and how each of these, intire in it self, and consisting of head, eyes, hands, and the like, is a head, an eye, or a hand in the other:
as also, that mens Privates cannot be preserved, if the Publick be destroyed. (Qtd in Malcolm 1998, 126)
The unification of the multitude of citizens in a single person is something like
a perspectival illusion; political representation is only an optical representation
(but no less effective on account of this).
Figures 4 and (opposite) 5. Jean-François Niceron, La Perspective curieuse, ou Magie artificielle des effets merveilleux de l’optique, par la vision directe, la catoptrique, par la réflexion des miroirs plats, cylindriques et coniques, la dioptrique, par la réfraction des crystaux, Paris, 1638/1663, tables 48–9, via UCL Library, London.
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6. The enigma that the emblem poses to the reader is that of a city devoid
of its inhabitants and that of a State situated outside its geographical borders.
In Hobbes’s political thought, what could correspond to this apparent puzzle?
It is Hobbes himself who suggests a response in his De Cive when, in distin-
guishing between ‘people’ ( populus) and ‘multitude’ ( multitudo), he defines one of his fundamental theorems as a ‘paradox’ ( paradoxum). ‘The people’, he writes, is something single [unum quid ], which has one will and to whom one action can be attributed. None of these can be said of the multitude. The people
reigns in every city [Populus in omni civitate regnat]; even in a monarchy the people commands, for the people wills by the will of one man. The citizens, that is, the subjects, are the multitude. In a democracy and an aristocracy, the citizens are the multitude; but the council is the people [curia est populus].
And in a monarchy, the subjects are the multitude, and (although this is a paradox [ quamquam paradoxum sit]), the king is the people [rex est populus].
Common men, and others who do not notice these things, always speak of
a great number of men, that is, of the city [civitate], as the people; they say that the city rebels against the king (which is impossible), and that the people will and nill what troublesome and murmuring subjects will and nill; under
the pretext of the people, they rouse the citizens against the city, that is, the multitude against the people. (Hobbes 1983, 190)
Let us seek to reflect on this paradox. It simultaneously implies a caesura ( multitudo/
populus: the multitude of citizens is not the people) and an identification ( rex est populus). The people is sovereign on the condition of dividing itself, of splitting itself into a ‘multitude’ and a ‘people’. But how can the only real thing—the multitude
of natural bodies, which so fascinated Hobbes (on 15 April 1651, after having just
completed Leviathan, he writes: ‘I return to my interrupted Speculation of Bodies
Naturall’ [Hobbes 1996, 491])—become one person alone? And what becomes of
the multitude of natural bodies once it has been unified in the king?
א Pufendorf stresses the fact that the Hobbesian axiom is a paradox in his
commentary:
For a people or city is something single [ unum quid ], which has one will and to
which a single action can be attributed, neither of which can be said of a multitude
of subjects [ . . . ] even if the statement which follows, namely, that ‘the people
rules in every city’ [ populus in omni civitate regnat], ends up being an empty
affectation. For the people signifies either the whole city, or else the multitude of
subjects. In the first sense, the statement that ‘the people, that is, the city, rules
in every city’ is tautological; in the second sense, the statement that ‘the people,
that is, the citizens as distinguished from the king, rule in every city’ is false. In
STASIS 277
place of his next statement, that ‘in monarchies the people commands, for the
people wills by the will of one man’, it would have been simpler to have said that
in a monarchy the city is held to have willed what the monarch willed. Nor is
the old paradox, ‘The king is the people’ [ Rex est populus], to be explained in any other sense. (Pufendorf 1934, I: 673)
From the perspective of a jurist such as Pufendorf, the paradox is thus resolved by inter-
&nbs
p; preting it as a fictio iuris. In Hobbes, on the other hand, it preserves all its crudity: the sovereign is truly the people, because he is constituted—even if by virtue of an optical
illusion—by the body of the subjects.
7. The response to these questions is to be found in chapter 7 of De Cive
where Hobbes asserts in no uncertain terms that at the very instant that the
people chooses the sovereign it dissolves itself into a confused multitude. This
happens not only in a monarchy, where as soon as the king has been chosen ‘the
people is no longer one person, but a dissolved multitude [ populus non amplius
est persona una, sed dissoluta multitudo], since it was a person only by virtue of the sovereign power [ summi imperii], which it has now transferred to him’ (Hobbes
1983, 7, 11: 155); but even in a democracy or an aristocracy, where ‘as soon as has
the council been constituted, the people simultaneously dissolves [ ea electa, pop-
ulus simul dissolvitur]’ (Hobbes 1983, 7, 9: 154).
The sense of the paradox remains incomprehensible if we do not reflect on
the status of this dissoluta multitudo, which obliges us to rethink the Hobbes-
ian political system from scratch. The people—the body political—exists only
instantaneously at the point in which it appoints ‘one Man, or Assembly of
men, to beare their Person’ (Hobbes 1996, 120); but this point coincides with its
vanishing into a ‘dissolved multitude’. The body political is thus an impossible
concept, which lives only in the tension between the multitude and the popu-
lus-rex: it is always already in the act of dissolving itself in the constitution of the sovereign; the latter, on the other hand, is only an ‘Artificiall person’ (Hobbes
1996, 111), whose unity is the effect of an optical contraption or a mask.
Perhaps the fundamental concept of Hobbes’s thought is that of ‘body’. His
entire philosophy is a meditation de corpore (and this makes him a Baroque
thinker, if the Baroque can be defined as the union of a body and a veil), pro-
vided that we specify, as Hobbes does in The Elements of Law (2, 27, 9), that the people has no body of its own: ‘that the people is a distinct body from him or
them that have the sovereignty over them, is an error’ (Hobbes 1969, 174).
The Omnibus Homo Sacer Page 41
