The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

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  Figure 6. Lambert of St Omer, Liber Floridus, 1120, Image of the Antichrist seated on the Leviathan, Ghent University.

  the struggle. Then the righteous will prepare a messianic banquet, in the course

  of which they will eat the flesh of the two beasts. It is likely that Schmitt knew

  this eschatological tradition, to which he refers in a much later article, evoking

  the ‘Kabbalistic expectancy of the messianic banquet, in which the righteous

  will feed on the flesh of the dead Leviathan’ (Schmitt 1982, 142).

  14. Whether or not Hobbes knew this Talmudic tradition, it is certain that

  the eschatological perspective was perfectly familiar to him. Moreover, it was

  already implicit in the Christian tradition, where the Leviathan was associated

  with the Antichrist, whom the Church Fathers, beginning with Irenaeus, had

  identified with the ‘man of anomia’ from the celebrated eschatological excursus

  STASIS 285

  of Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians (2 Thess. 2: 1–12). The miniature

  from the Liber Floridus is only the figurative representation of this convergence

  between the Leviathan and the Antichrist, between the primordial monster and

  the end of time. But an eschatological theme traverses the entire third part of

  Leviathan, which, under the heading ‘Of a Christian Common-wealth’, con-

  tains a veritable treatise on the Kingdom of God, a treatise so embarrassing for

  Hobbes’s modern readers that they have often simply repressed it.

  Against the prevailing doctrine, which tended to interpret the New Testa-

  ment concept of the Basileia theou in a metaphorical direction, Hobbes force-

  fully asserts that in both the Old and the New Testament the Kingdom of God

  signifies a real political Kingdom, which (having been interrupted in Israel since

  the election of Saul) Christ will restore at the end of time:

  The Kingdome therefore of God, is a reall, not a metaphoricall Kingdome;

  and so taken, not onely in the Old Testament, but the New; when we say,

  For thine is the Kingdome, the Power, and Glory, it is to be understood of Gods

  Kingdome, by force of our Covenant, not by the Right of Gods Power; for

  such a Kingdome God alwaies hath; so that it were superfluous to say in our

  prayer, The Kingdome come, unless it be meant of the Restauration of that

  Kingdome of God by Christ, which by revolt of the Israelites had been inter-

  rupted in the election of Saul. Nor had it been proper to say, The Kingdome

  of Heaven is at hand; or to pray, Thy Kingdome come, if it had still continued.

  (Hobbes 1996, 283–4)

  That what is at issue here is a fully political concept and that eschatology in

  Hobbes has a concrete political significance is reaffirmed in chapter 38:

  Lastly, seeing it hath already been proved out of divers evident places of Scrip-

  ture, in the 35. Chapter of this book, that the Kingdom of God is a Civil Com-

  mon-wealth, where God himself is Soveraign, by vertue first of the Old, and since

  of the New Covenant, wherein he reigneth by his Vicar, or Lieutenant; the same

  places do therefore also prove, that after the comming again of our Saviour in

  his Majesty, and glory, to reign actually, and Eternally; the Kingdom of God is

  to be on Earth. (Hobbes 1996, 311)

  Naturally, the Kingdom of God on Earth will be realised, according to Hobbes, as

  according to Paul and the Scriptures, only at the moment of the second coming of

  Christ. Until then, the analyses of the preceding books of Leviathan remain valid.

  Nonetheless, it is impossible to read Hobbes’s theory of the State as if the third part

  of the book, which contains the principles of what he calls ‘Christian Politiques’

  (Hobbes 1996, 414), had not been written. Bernard Willms’s assertion according to

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  which ‘political theology is the shibboleth of Hobbes- Forschung’ (Willms 1970, 31), must be further specified in the sense that political theology appears in Hobbes in

  a decidedly eschatological perspective.

  In Leviathan, as has been correctly observed, Hobbes not only reduced

  Christian theology to prophecy and eschatology, but ‘prophetic authority has

  been projected into an eschatological future’. In this way, ‘his politics have taken

  on a messianic dimension, just as the messianism they entail is almost brutally

  political’ (Pocock 1989, 173–4). Indeed, what defines Hobbes’s theory is the fact

  that while the Kingdom of God and the profane Kingdom (the Leviathan) are

  perfectly autonomous, from the eschatological perspective they are somehow

  coordinated, since both take place on earth and the Leviathan will necessarily

  disappear when the Kingdom of God is realised politically in the world. The

  Kingdom of God—to adopt the title of one of Campanella’s treatises, which

  Hobbes could have known—is a veritable Monarchia Messiae: simultaneously

  the paradigm and the terminus of the profane monarchy.

  15. It is in this eschatological perspective that the enigmas of the frontis-

  piece can find their solution. If we look again at the image of the Leviathan,

  we observe that the tiny bodies that constitute the body of the colossus are

  curiously absent from his head, which contrasts with the ancient and modern

  iconographic parallels that Horst Bredekamp has proposed in his investigation

  of the frontispiece (Bredekamp 2003), where the tiny figures are concentrated

  precisely in the head.

  This seems to imply that the Leviathan is literally the ‘head’ of a body political

  that is formed by the people of the subjects, which, as we have seen, has no body of

  its own, but exists only in the body of the sovereign. But this image derives directly

  from the Pauline conception, present in many passages of the Letters, according

  to which Christ is the head ( kephalē) of the ekklēsia, that is, of the assembly of the faithful: ‘He [Christ] is the head of the body of the assembly [ hē kephalē tou sōmatos tēs ekklēsias]’ (Col. 1: 18); ‘Christ is the head from which the whole body, conjoined together and united through every articulation according to the operation of every

  limb, receives growth and edification’ (Eph. 4: 15–16); ‘The husband is head of the

  wife just as Christ is the head of the assembly, the body of which he is the saviour’

  (Eph. 5: 23); and, finally, Rom. 12: 5, where the image of the head is missing, but

  where it is said of the multitude of members of the community that ‘we, who are

  many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are parts of one another’.

  If our hypothesis is correct, the image from the frontispiece presents the re-

  lation between the Leviathan and the subjects as the profane counterpart of the

  STASIS 287

  relation between Christ and the ekklēsia. Yet this ‘cephalic’ image of the relation between Christ and the Church cannot be separated from the thesis of Pauline

  eschatology, according to which, at the end of time, when ‘the Son himself will

  also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him’, God

  ‘will be all in all [ panta en pasin]’ (1 Cor. 15: 28). This apparently pantheistic thesis acquires its properly political sense if we read it together with the cephalic conception of the relationship between Christ and the ekklēsia. In the current state, Christ is
the head of the body of the assembly; however, at the end of time, in the

  Kingdom of Heaven, there will no longer be any distinction between the head

  and the body, because God will be all in all.

  If we take seriously the Hobbesian assertion according to which the Kingdom

  of God should be understood not metaphorically but literally, this means that

  at the end of time the cephalic fiction of the Leviathan could be erased and the

  people discover its own body. The caesura that divides the body political—a body

  visible only in the optical fiction of the Leviathan, but in fact unreal—and the

  real, yet politically invisible multitude, will be bridged at the end in the perfect

  Church. But this also means that until then no real unity, no political body is

  actually possible: the body political can only dissolve itself into a multitude and

  the Leviathan can only live together up until the end with Behemoth—with the

  possibility of civil war.

  א It is curious that in the Gospel the multitude that surrounds Jesus is never pre-

  sented as a political entity (a people), but always in the terms of a crowd or a ‘mob’. In the New Testament, we thus find three terms for ‘people’: plēthos (in Latin, multitudo) 31 times; ochlos (in Latin, turba) 131 times; and laos (in Latin, plebs) 142 times (in the subsequent vocabulary of the Church, the latter will become a veritable technical term:

  the people of God as plebs Dei). What is missing is the term with political value— dēmos ( populus)—almost as if the messianic event had always already transformed the people into a multitudo or a formless mass. In an analogous manner, the constitution of the mortalis Deus in Hobbes’s city results in the simultaneous dissolution of the body political into a multitude. Hobbes’s political-theological thesis according to which until the second coming of Christ there can be no Kingdom of God on earth equivalent to a political

  Common-wealth, implies that until then the Church exists only potentially (‘the elect,

  who so long as they are in this world are only potentially a Church, which will not be in actuality until they are separated from the reprobate and gathered together on the day of

  judgement’ [Hobbes 1983, 17, 22: 268]).

  16. It is time to examine the New Testament text in which tradition has

  unanimously viewed the description of the eschatological conflict which imme-

  diately precedes the establishment of the Kingdom of God and without which

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  an understanding of Hobbes’s political thought would be incomplete: Paul’s

  Second Letter to the Thessalonians. In this Letter, Paul, speaking to the Thes-

  salonians of the Parousia of the Lord, describes the eschatological drama as a

  battle that sees on the one side the Messiah, and on the other the two characters

  whom he calls ‘the man of lawlessness’ ( ho anthrōpos tēs anomias) and ‘the one who restrains’ ( ho katechōn):

  Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come unless the apostasy

  comes first and the man of lawlessness [ ho anthrōpos tēs anomias], the son of de-

  struction, will have been revealed, the one who opposes and exalts himself above

  every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of

  God, declaring himself to be God. Do you not remember that I told you these

  things when I was still with you? And you know what is now restraining him,

  so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness

  [ mystērion tēs anomias, which the Vulgate translates as Mysterium iniquitatis] is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed. And

  then the lawless one [ anomos] will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy

  with the breath of his mouth. (2 Thess. 2: 3–8)

  When the Church had not yet closed its eschatological bureau, the identifica-

  tion of the two characters in question—‘the one who restrains’ and ‘the man of

  lawlessness’—had especially stimulated the hermeneutic acumen of the Church

  Fathers, from Irenaeus to Jerome and from Hippolytus to Tyconius and Augus-

  tine. While the second was unanimously identified with the Antichrist of the

  First Letter of John (1 John 2: 18), the first, following a tradition that Augustine

  treats extensively in De Civitate Dei, was identified with the Roman Empire. It

  is to this tradition that Schmitt, who sees in the doctrine of the katechōn the sole possibility of conceiving history from a Christian perspective, refers: ‘The belief

  that a restrainer holds back the end of the world’, he writes, ‘provides the only

  bridge between the notion of an eschatological paralysis of all human action and

  a great historical power like that of the Christian empire of the Germanic kings’

  (Schmitt 1973/2006, 29/60). And it is in this ‘katechontic’ tradition that he lo-

  cates Hobbes’s theory of the State.

  17. It is thus beyond doubt that in calling the Common-wealth by a name—

  Leviathan—which was at that time still a synonym for the Antichrist, Hobbes

  was conscious of situating his conception of the State in a decidedly eschato-

  logical perspective (the allusion, in the passage from De Cive cited just above,

  to a separation of the good from the reprobate in the Church, contains an im-

  plicit reference to the Second Letter to the Thessalonians). And precisely here

  STASIS 289

  the Schmittian interpretation of the Leviathan shows its insufficiency. It is no

  coincidence that in Leviathan, where we encounter more than fifty citations

  from the Pauline corpus, Hobbes never directly mentions the Second Letter to

  the Thessalonians. In Hobbes’s ‘Christian Politiques’ the State cannot in any way

  have the function of a power that restrains and holds back the end of time, and

  indeed is never presented in this perspective; on the contrary, as in the scriptural

  tradition that Hobbes perhaps ironically reclaims against a Church which seems

  to have forgotten it, the end of time can take place at any instant and the State

  not only does not act as a katechōn, but in fact coincides with the very eschato-

  logical beast which must be annihilated at the end of time.

  Schmitt’s thesis according to which political concepts are secularised theo-

  logical concepts is well known. This thesis must be further specified in the sense

  that what are secularised, today, are essentially eschatological concepts (consider

  the centrality of the concept of ‘crisis’, that is, of the fundamental terminus of

  Christian eschatology, the final judgement [Koselleck 2006]). In this sense, con-

  temporary politics is founded on a secularisation of eschatology. Nothing could

  be more foreign to Hobbes’s thought, which allows eschatology its concreteness

  and its particular position. It is not the confusion of the eschatological with

  the political that defines Hobbes’s politics, but a singular relation between two

  autonomous powers. The kingdom of the Leviathan and the kingdom of God

  are two politically autonomous realities, which must never be confused; yet they

  are eschatologically connected, in the sense that the first will necessarily have to

  disappear when the second is realised.

  Hobbes’s eschatology here exhibits a curious affinity with what Walter Benja-

  min articulates in the ‘Theologisch-politisches Fragment’. For Benjamin, too, the

  kingdom of God makes sense only as the esc
haton and not as an historical element

  (‘From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus’ [Benjamin

  2002, 305]). And for Benjamin, too, the sphere of profane politics is wholly auton-

  omous with respect to it. Nonetheless, neither for Benjamin nor for Hobbes, does

  profane politics have, with respect to the Kingdom, any ‘katechontic’ function: far

  from holding back its advent, it is, to the contrary, Benjamin writes, ‘a category of

  its most unobtrusive approach’ (Benjamin 2002, 305).

  By its nature, the Leviathan-State, which must ensure the ‘safety’ and ‘con-

  tentments of life’ of its subjects, is also what precipitates the end of time. The

  alternative that John Barclay articulated in his novel Argenis as the justification of absolutism (‘Either give the people back their freedom or assure the domestic

  tranquility’ [Koselleck 1988, 18]) necessarily remains unresolved. Hobbes knew

  the passage from the First Letter to the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 5: 3; the Letter is

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  cited in chapter 44 of Leviathan [see Hobbes 1996, 427]), in which ‘peace and

  security’ ( eirēnē kai asphaleia) coincide with the catastrophic advent of the day

  of the Lord (‘When they say, “There is peace and security,” then destruction will

  come upon them’). This is why Behemoth is inseparable from Leviathan and

  why, according to the Talmudic tradition that Schmitt evokes, at the end of time

  ‘Behemoth will, with its horns, pull Leviathan down and rend it, and Leviathan

  will, with its fins, pull Behemoth down and pierce it through’. Only at this point

  may the righteous be seated at their messianic banquet, freed forever from the

  bonds of the law:

  The Sages said: And is this a valid method of slaughter? Have we not learnt this

  in a Mishnah: ‘All may slaughter, and one may slaughter at all times, and with

  any instrument except with a scythe, or with a saw, or with teeth, because they

  cause pain as if by choking, or with a nail’? R. Abin b. Kahana said: The Holy

  One, blessed be He, said: ‘ A new Torah shall go forth from Me’. (Leviticus Rabbah

  1961, 13, 3: 167; cf. Strack and Billerbeck 1928, 1163; Drewer 1981, 152)

  It is perhaps owing to an irony of fate that Leviathan—this text so densely and