Fragment of the Sovereign as Hermaphrodite: Time, History, and the Exception in Le Ballet de Madame

Abstract

The fragment in Le Ballet de Madame (1615) is the Androgyne ballet in which a young Louis XIII on the verge of his majority performs the role of a Hermaphrodite. The analysis reveals the complex iconography of this role with respect to the recent erasure of his succession to kingship after the death of Henri IV in 1610. The presence to social memory of the king's unmourned corpse is relived in the Hermaphrodite figure, which is also a phoenix. But, this is only possible through the sexual imbroglio of the incorporation of the patriarch's body in that of his successor, a veritable figure of melancholy in psychoanalytic terms. Hence, the hermaphrodite fragment proves important to the political imaginary of absolutism in that we can perceive that the body natural of the king is brought to the fore at the expense of the body politic. The analysis is carried forth through the study of a series of contemporary texts devoted to this ballet and the theoretical background provided by twentieth-century interpretations of baroque power: Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Georgio Agamben. The king as Hermaphrodite shows the bare life of sovereignty and the embodiment of the exception, which is Carl Schmidt's answer to Benjamin's notion of allegory. Hence, the essay brings extensive historical research into dialogue with contemporary theory at the level of the analysis of theatricality as a mode of symbolic action.