Ernst Kantorowicz Research Articles

The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama by Philip Lorenz (review)

Reviewed by: The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama by Philip Lorenz Matthew Scully Philip Lorenz. The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama. NY: Fordham U P, 2013. 288pages. Philip Lorenz’s The Tears of Sovereignty offers a comparative framework of sovereignty by focusing on this concept as represented on the English and Spanish stages in the works of William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca. Throughout his consideration, Lorenz amalgamates and deploys various theories of sovereignty, including those by Francisco Suárez, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida, in an effort to more fully grasp this elusive concept. The Tears of Sovereignty is an impressive study not only for its comprehensive range and lucid arguments but also for the structure of those arguments. Sovereignty poses a number of theoretical and methodological problems, for, as Lorenz notes, the concept “is nothing” in itself, yet at the same time, “works” and “continues to work itself out through its tropes” (200, 239, 162). Lorenz’s five chapters between the introduction and concluding “After-Image” proceed to consider five manifestations of these tropes: “Each chapter pursues the staging of a different sovereignty ‘event,’ from the concept’s collapse (‘tears’), through its reanimation (‘transplant’), resistance, transformation (cifras y estampas), and return (‘wrinkles’)” (25). As Lorenz argues, “Sovereignty is troped, or it is not at all,” and in his study he aims to follow its tropic movements (25). Lorenz’s opening chapter, “Breakdown: Analogy and Ontotheology in Richard II,” begins on what is perhaps the most familiar ground. Lorenz inaugurates his approach by engaging Ernst Kantorowicz’s foundational study of sovereignty, The King’s Two Bodies, and its example par excellence of Richard II. Rather than repeat Kantorowicz, however, Lorenz prefaces his reading of Richard II with a lengthy theoretical frame centered on the relation between analogy and ontology, especially in the context of medieval philosophy, in which analogy was understood “as a structure for conceiving of being itself” (36). Typical theorists of sovereignty and analogy emerge in this chapter, but Lorenz returns to Francisco Suárez’s work, a return that recurs throughout the study in what becomes one of the most compelling and productive engagements of Lorenz’s project. Suárez, prefiguring modern theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, “attempts to read sovereignty from its ontological base […] up. Analogy is one of the most important of these grounding structures” (41). Lorenz reads Richard II as a staging of the fall and reinterpretation of sovereignty by considering the play’s staging of the fall of analogy (41–58). By the play’s close, “Sovereignty […] is no longer located in one place or one body. Rather, it is dispersed – in mediation itself” (57). In other words, sovereignty ceases to be understood according to a vertical logic of analogy in which the king’s body draws its power and justification from its link with God. Instead, sovereignty is understood as radiating along horizontal lines, which in Lorenz’s reading implies that this concept gains its power “from an immanent source within creatures themselves” rather than a transcendental or divine source (58). [End Page 1238] As suggested by the following chapter, “Reanimation: The Logic of Transfer in Measure for Measure,” Lorenz’s arguments throughout the book are substantially interrelated. Measure for Measure provides Lorenz an example by which to see sovereignty’s logic of transfer, or “transplant,” in place of analogy. Without the transcendental, vertical organization of analogy, power emerges in Measure for Measure through metaphoric transfer, or substitution, of a body for the “absent sovereign” of the play (67). For Lorenz, the problem of Measure for Measure is one of embodiment, the lack of a sovereign body: “The body is always sovereignty’s pre-condition” (84). Sovereignty “desires to have the body that it is not” and realizes a sense of embodiment through the movement of metaphoric substitution of a body in place of its lack (90). In chapter three, “Resistance: Waiting for Power in Fuenteovejuna,” Lorenz offers a reading of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna and its representation of collective resistance to sovereign power that challenges the “transplant” solution elaborated by Measure for...

Jan Bernhard Meister. Der Körper des Princeps: Zur Problematik eines monarchischen Körpers ohne Monarchie.

In the Roman Empire, the emperor's body was omnipresent. In every city and military camp it manifested itself through honorific statues in marble, ivory, and precious materials. Jan Bernhard Meister's book, Der Körper des Princeps: Zur Problematik eines monarchischen Körpers ohne Monarchie focuses on how such imperial bodies were politically charged. As the subtitle indicates, his main interest is in whether, following Ernst Kantorowicz (The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology [1957]), the emperor's body could be seen as an incarnation of the Roman monarchy, which Augustus constituted as a restored republic. Unlike later Roman emperors and medieval monarchs, the principes of the first two centuries c.e. lacked regalia. Yet, there were attempts to set the emperors apart by their physical appearance, and this turned their bodies into carriers of political meaning. For instance, the first princeps Augustus, who died at 75, was represented as a serene and beautiful young man throughout the 41 years of his reign. This was a remarkable departure from the statues of republican politicians who were shown as wrinkled, bald, and toothless old men, though with capable and, occasionally, even youthful bodies. Yet, Meister does not pay much attention to iconographic change. Instead, he focuses on literary sources, which almost exclusively reflect the views of Rome's political elites

Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric: Selected Essays by Robert L. Benson (review)

Reviewed by: Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric: Selected Essays by Robert L. Benson E. Amanda McVitty Benson, Robert L., Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric: Selected Essays, ed. Loren J. Weber with Giles Constable and Richard H. Rouse, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2014; paperback; pp. 408; R.R.P. US$68.00; ISBN 9780268022341. Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric is a collection of unpublished writings left upon the sudden death of Robert L. Benson (1925–1996). Benson was a renowned historian of medieval canon law and the Holy Roman Empire, particularly under the Hohenstaufen dynasty. This collection includes articles in various stages of revision, as well as lectures and conference papers, selected and edited by Loren J. Weber, one of Benson’s last students, and collaborators Giles Constable and Richard H. Rouse. The editor and his collaborators are to be commended for the transparency with which they have addressed such issues as the uncertain dating and unfinished nature of some pieces and Benson’s incomplete or obscure notes. The ‘Editor’s Preface’ clearly explains why they have not reconstructed citations or updated the essays with newer scholarship to which Benson would not have had access. Benson was a student of Ernst Kantorowicz, whose theorisation of the king’s two bodies profoundly shaped current understandings of how medieval rulership was conceived of and performed. Kantorowicz’s influence is clear in Benson’s work, which centred on examining the ‘elaborate network of concepts [used] to justify, express, and conceal the awful realities of power’ and the ‘ways in which medieval men conceived the highest governing officers: emperor, king, pope, archbishop, bishops’ (p. 46). Benson had an enduring interest in the ways in which power was theorised and bestowed in acts of ecclesiastical and imperial election. Law, Rulership and Rhetoric comprises five sections, reflecting the main themes of Benson’s scholarship and his interdisciplinary approach to sources. These included decretals, capitularies, and chancery records as well as chronicles, religious texts, art, and poetry. Part I, ‘Thought and Culture’, considers the influence of classical Roman topoi in high medieval political and religious thought. Part II, ‘Art and Rulership’, explores images of imperial power in frescos, chalices, and manuscript illuminations. Part 3, ‘Medieval Rulership’, examines the rhetoric of kingship in early Germanic monarchies, [End Page 142] while Part 4 focuses specifically on Frederick Barbarossa and his relations with the papacy. Part 5, ‘Medieval History in Modern Perspective’, includes three historiographical pieces defending Kantorowicz against accusations of Nazism and a rumination on ‘The Medievalist as Hero’ in contemporary popular culture. The essays reflect Benson’s characteristic wit and clarity of style, which rendered his dense and precise scholarship highly readable. To take one example: ‘Urbs et orbis’ (pp. 3–19) examines the significance of this classical Roman topos in twelfth- and thirteenth-century political thought. It begins with an anecdote about Benson’s wife purchasing an upscale shopping bag, inside of which is inscribed the legend ‘urbu et orbi’. Scholars in Benson’s speciality areas will find much of value here. Of note are several lectures and unrevised articles from the 1980s that were probably intended for inclusion in Benson’s book on Frederick Barbarossa, left unfinished at his death. Complementing these is an important early piece, ‘Imperator oeconomus Ecclesiae: Notes on a Decretistic Theory of the Imperial Office’. This appeared in an unpublished 1955 festschrift but until now it was only accessible in typescript in the archives of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. More generally, the volume has plenty to offer political and legal historians and those interested in broader questions about medieval political culture and the semiotics of power. Finally, Benson’s witty, erudite, and sometimes poignant reflections on being a medieval historian in the modern world make this book an engaging read for any medievalist. E. Amanda McVitty Massey University Copyright © 2014 E. Amanda McVitty

The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama by Philip Lorenz (review)

Philip Lorenz. The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 379. $45.00. The central concept of this book hinges around a play on words in the title: specifically, a double entendre for the word tears, which can mean the product either of weeping or shredding of fabric. What is conveyed by this word play is at once a destruction and a nostalgia for what has been destroyed. So what we have here is a narrative--trendily postmodern, with an After-Image instead of a conclusion--but nonetheless a fairly teleological narrative of disintegration and reconstruction/restoration of the sovereign ruler. The pattern here is cyclical, as may be seen in the (mostly) alliterative titles for the chapters: Breakdown, Reanimation Resistance, Transformation, and Return. The author offers a unique take on Ernst Kantorowicz's famous formulation of the king's two bodies with the introduction of such complicating metaphors as organ transplant. The spice he adds to this updating of an old and familiar, but yummy, recipe consists of apparently farfetched but relevant cinematic allusions, such as to Pedro Almodovar's 1999 film All About My Mother. Combine this with a very au courant theoretical framework of a hodgepodge of European political philosophers, most notably Giorgio Agamben, and you have what is in the end a substantial, well-nuanced, and sophisticated comparative study of representations of sovereignty in early modern Spanish and English drama. The authors offered for consideration here are the familiar ones: William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderon de la Barca. And one potentially regrettable fact is that the plays discussed in each case are the same old worn-out canonical fare: Richard II, Measure for Measure, and The Winter's Tale for Shakespeare; Fuenteovejuna for Lope de Vega; and Life is a Dream for Calderon. But this is the rare book that actually manages to say something relatively new about each play. This is no small accomplishment, and the author is to be congratulated both for his incisive analysis of each of the works in question and for the creative ways in which he combines disparate elements from two distinct national dramatic traditions. Seldom has this reviewer seen so genuinely comparative a study as this one. The haunting the entire text of this book is the Jesuit theologian Francisco Suarez. I say phantom not because he is not there explicitly, but because he got burned--literally, or at least his work did, in a spectacular bonfire scene that opens this book. On December 1, 1613, almost exactly 400 years ago, King James I of England ordered a ritual burning of work Defensio fidei in front of Saint Paul's Cathedral As Lorenz so eloquently states, Suarez's book landed in England like a bomb, not only challenging Royalist claims that James's power was directly derived from God but also threatening to undermine the king's authority over the bodies and souls of his subjects (1-2). In essence, Defensio fidei was a casuistical defense of revolution and civil disobedience; it authorized the use of violent force, under certain circumstances, to resist and even overthrow a king. Basically, it justified regicide. For those erudite readers such as James who could understand enough Latin to grasp fully the implications of his argument, this was heady stuff indeed. One possible weakness of Lorenz's presentation is that by the time of King James's reign, Latin had already ceased to be so pervasive as it was in former eras. (Clear evidence of this appears in George Ruggle's contemporaneous play Ignoramus [1615], in which Latin is literally demonized by association with demonic possession.) There is probably a limit to how pervasive his ideas could really be if fewer and fewer people were able to read and comprehend them. But nonetheless, Lorenz is right to identify Suarez as the most important anti-sovereignty thinker of his era; and as such, he hovers over the text of this book like an avenging fury. …

Organic Metaphors in “De concordantia catholica” of Nicholas of Cusa

This article highlights the organic metaphors in “De concordantia catholica” of Nicholas of Cusa. Using these metaphors, he describes the functions of power, as well as the relations between pope and emperor and the relations between king and emperor; furthermore he wants to illustrate the crucial role of the concepts of “hierarchy” and “unity” inside the Church. In “De concordantia catholica” are found important examples of the transposition of the metaphor of corpus mysticum from the Church to the empire. Indeed, according to the theory of Ernst Kantorowicz, this metaphor expresses a deeply rooted vision of political theology and the passage from the ecclesiastical world to secular world.

What Does “Deconstructing Christianity” Want?

Kathleen Biddick questions the political-theological turn in contemporary political philosophy with its focus on efforts to “deconstruct Christianity.” She argues that the Christian institutional imaginary (inaugurated by Paul’s ekklesia and adumbrated by the medieval management of the Eucharistic Real Presence) is constitutive of incarnational theology. She traces how contemporary theorists such as Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben cleave this entanglement by relying on the secularizing model of political theology proposed by Ernst Kantorowicz in his classic, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957). They use Kantorowicz’s periodization to bracket off the body as an immune medieval historical form from the twelfth century. Biddick tells a tale of three bodies (corpora) to show the entangled combustibility of the Christian institutional imaginary and incarnational theology. Ranging from the newly fabricated corpus of the Talmud institutionalized by Rabbi Rashi of Troyes (1040-1105) to the Corpus Iuris Canonicis, confected among Christian schoolmen in the generation after Rashi’s death, to the composition of the first liturgy for the new feast, Corpus Christi (1246), and to the midrash of a young Torah student who combusted as he read the book of Ezekiel, she traces how these corpora collided and burst into flames in the mid-thirteenth century. These historical ashes question Agamben’s archaeology of glory and his vision of the Empty Throne. She concludes with a meditation on Paul Celan’s “aschen-glorie” and remembers that the Empty Throne is not empty, it is covered in ash.

Governmentality Meets Theology: ‘The King Reigns, but He Does Not Govern’

While this ‘extraordinary’ book appears as an intermezzo within the Homo Sacer series (Negri, 2008), it supports two fundamental theses with its own philological, epigraphic, liturgical and religious-historical research, and a close reading of figures such as Ernst Kantorowicz and Marcel Mauss. These theses concern political power first as an articulation of sovereign reign and economic government and, secondly, as constituted by acclamations and glorification. These can be approached theoretically through its author’s engagement with Michel Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality and with the Erik Peterson/Carl Schmitt debate on the closure of political theology. Agamben’s reformulation of power and his derivation of liberal governmentality from the theological oikonomia prove convincing. A renewed analytics of power and politics of resistance should be possible, however, without recourse to a project seeking to deactivate all profane powers including those of public bureaucracies.

Constitutional Thought and Practice in Early Sixteenth-Century France: Revisiting the Legacy of Ernst Kantorowicz

Constitutional Thought and Practice in Early Sixteenth-Century France: Revisiting the Legacy of Ernst Kantorowicz

Sacred Queens and Warrior Kings in the Royal Portraits of the Liber Testamentorum of Oviedo

The Liber Testamentorum, a twelfth-century cartulary produced by Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo, is distinctive for its elaborate cycle of miniatures depicting the kings and queens of Asturias and Castilla-León. Produced to influence and impress Queen Urraca, ruling Castilla-León in her own right at the time, they show kings with traditional insignia of power and military strength, and queens with objects associated with religious life and practice, like haloes, Psalters, and chalices. Interpreted in the light of the discussion of sacred kingship in Ernst Kantorowicz’s The Kings Two Bodies, this article suggests these images show not the king himself with two bodies, secular and spiritual, human and Christ-like, but rather the spiritual and secular functions literally divided between two bodies, those of the king and queen, with the king in change of protection and the queen responsible for prayer for the kingdom.

Fleshing out Political Theology: Santner's The Royal Remains

Fleshing out Political Theology:Santner's The Royal Remains Diego Rossello (bio) Eric Santner , The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. University of Chicago Press: 2011. US $19.89 (paper). US $81.09 (cloth). 259 pages. ISBN 13: 978-0-226-73536-8 Eric Santner's book is an engaging tour-de-force through the vestiges of divinely authorized royal authority in our allegedly secular, and post-monarchical, modern democratic culture. Skillfully combining insights from political theology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism and biopolitics, Santner suggests that, despite conventional wisdom, the royal remains in the new bearer of sovereignty: the people. At stake in Santner's account is the "flesh" that fattens monarchical authority, a type of excessive vibrant materiality that supplements and sustains the kingly body, and whose horizontal redistribution among citizens in a polity, furthered by democratic revolutions, becomes the object of a new science of the flesh. Santner finds sketches of this new science in biopolitics, particularly in the works by Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito, but he offers startling contributions of his own. Key to Santner's original account of the shift from monarchical power to popular sovereignty is Ernst Kantorowicz's idea of the king's two bodies. According to Kantorowicz's well-known argument, in medieval and early modern Europe the king was conceived as having a double body: a mortal, human body subject to illness, aging and decay; and a subtle, immaterial or mystical body, unaffected by time and mortality, that secures royal succession. Santner's insightful contribution is to read the mystical body of the king as evidence of a "too muchness" (30) of "sublime somatic materiality" (4) intrinsic to the king's constitutive role in the symbolic structure of a body politic. According to Santner, the "fleshy excess" (26) secreted by royal authority persists after, and is redistributed by, the advent of popular sovereignty, generating novel pressures and excitations on every individual bearer of sovereign power. Santner's idiosyncratic take on the shift from monarchy to biocracy productively challenges our conventional wisdom on what political modernity means, and sheds new light on the implications of processes of destitution—royal or other. Unlike standard accounts of secularization of Kantian and Weberian inspiration, Santner's path to modernity is not driven by moral progress, rationality or disenchantment. Rather, the strength of Santner's argument lies in mapping the metamorphosis and displacement of an enchanted royal materiality that, despite its elusiveness, is held to inform the very structure of our political life. Santner attunes us to this elusive materiality by reminding us that there is "more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought" (46). His suggestion is compelling. If we are persuaded by it there is no room for a gradual and incremental departure from a theologically inspired world. If the royal remains, political theology remains with it. Santner can therefore be read as agreeing with Carl Schmitt and Claude Lefort on the permanence of the theologicopolitical, even if he departs from them in crucial ways. Unlike Schmitt, Santner does not concentrate on the fleshy excess in the figure of the sovereign representative, whose decision on the exception is analogous to a miracle, but tracks its redistribution among every single member of the polity—who now bears a specific (and excessive) political weight. Unlike Lefort, in turn, the shift from monarchy to biocracy does not produce an empty space of power, a kind of constitutive lack in the realm of political representation. Instead, a formless excess of "'biopolitical' substance" (59) is produced, and gives shape to forms of creaturely life. Santner defines creaturely life as a dimension of ontological vulnerability produced by our "exposure to the radical contingency of the forms of life that constitute the space of meaning within which human life unfolds" (5, 6). The response to this exposure is a paradoxical overreaction: the attempt to immunize ourselves from vulnerability leads to a double exposure, and therefore to a fattening of the "flesh of creaturely life" (6). Thus, Santner's account of the demise of royal political authority is marked by a surplus or excess of somatic materiality, not (or not merely) by a...

Letters by Ernst Kantorowicz concerning Woldemar Uxkull and Stefan George

Letters by Ernst Kantorowicz concerning Woldemar Uxkull and Stefan George

“From a Daumier Drawing by a Process of Dehydration”

Around the turn of the next to last century, there was genre of writing attached to the historiographical turn of the late 1800s: the etat present in which the status of discipline, whether scientific studies, medieval studies, or oriental studies, would be assessed. Such efforts were in large part nationally defined, as in Maurice Wilmotte's L'Enseignement de la Philologie Romane Paris et en Allemagne (1883-1885), published in 1886, or the volume Histoire et historiens depuis cinquante ans, published in celebration of the progress of French historical studies in the fifty years since the founding of the Revue Historique in 1876. Well, fifty years is good round number, and, as it happens, it is just over fifty years since the death of Erich Auerbach, whose legacy in the U.S. included some of the people in this room: Steve Nichols, for example, as well as my own thesis advisor, William Calin. Auerbach at Yale after Pennsylvania State University, Henri Focillon at Yale where he founded the History of Art Department, Leo Spitzer at Johns Hopkins, Erwin Panofsky at Princeton, Alfred Adler at Brooklyn College, and Ernst Kantorowicz at Berkeley and then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, were, however, exceptions. Most of what passed for French or medieval studies in America in the decades after World War Il was more on the model of W. S. Merwin's description, in recent memoir entitled The Mays of Ventadorn (2002), of studying Old French in his senior year at Princeton: Our professor was French medievalist, stooped, hollow-cheeked, gray-skinned, emaciated, barely audible. To our youth he appeared to have arrived from Daumier drawing by process of dehydration. He gave the impression at all times of being the embodiment of his archaic subject, with nothing left over to be person. There were never more than three or four students. (12) Merwin's description puts us in mind of Nabokov's Pnin, who I am told was modeled in part on Romance Philology founder Yakov Malkiel, who taught at UC-Berkeley until the time of his death in 1998; or of Nabokov's Gaston Godin, the French teacher at the Beardsly College for Women in Lolita, a flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelor tapering upward to pair of narrow, not quite level shoulders and conical pear-head [...] devoid of any talent whatsoever, mediocre teacher, worthless scholar, glum repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language.... The desiccated philologist is genre, beginning with Robert Browning's A Grammarian's Funeral (1856)--Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, / Dead from the waist down--and reinforced by Anatole France's description of Paul Meyer and the journal Romania in Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard: [J]e me mis lire une revue qui, bien que menee par des jeunes gens, est excellente. Le ton en est rude, mais l'esprit zele. L'article que je lus passe en precision et en fermete tout ce qu'on faisait dans ma jeunesse. L'auteur de cet article, M. Paul Meyer, marque chaque faute d'un coup d'ongle incisif. That's the way it was in many quarters back in the 1950s--dehydrated, pale, dead from the waist down. Medieval literature was separate country, and the passport for entering it was certain kind of positivist philology whose aire often seemed to be nothing more than keeping others out. Despite the phenomenon of emigration after WW II, there was relatively little exchange between the U.S. and Germany or France. My one visit with Jean Frappier just before his death in 1974 was punctuated by his waving Peter Haidu's Aesthetic Distance in Chretien de Troyes (1968) in one hand and Lion Queue coupee (1972) in the other with the reminder that Americans exaggerate by mixing the dish rags with the bath towels. Before Hitler began to shake the great tree of German Mediaevistik and French medievisme in the 1930s, there was relatively little back and forth across the Atlantic, Joseph Bedier's semester at UC Berkeley in 1928 being great exception. …

Imagining Justice: Kantorowicz and Shakespeare

Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies is concerned with tracing the development, through the Middle Ages, of abstract concepts of the public good as separable from the monarch. Renaissance scholars, however, tend to read Kantorowicz as if English Renaissance drama collapses representations of the polity and public good into the monarch's sacred person. Renaissance equity, in particular, has recently been defined as the sacred monarch's prerogative, and has been confused with Carl Schmitt's sovereign decision on the exception. This essay argues by contrast that Renaissance thinkers saw equity as an enlargement of the law by fictions of intention for the public good, and that, accordingly, Renaissance drama invites audiences and citizens alike to engage in compassionate and equitable fiction-making by critiquing monarchical claims to sacred status.

Political Theology and Fiction in The King's Two Bodies

This essay argues that Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies is intended as a contribution to twentieth-century debates about political theology and that modern students of political theology can learn from Kantorowicz's association of political theology with legal fiction.

The King's Two Bodies Today

Ernst Kantorowicz's central image of the king's doubled body has been very influential, but his main concern, medieval constitutional history, has gone largely unnoticed. His long-term constitutional narrative has hardly been discussed, and his methodological endeavor—he once called it "constitutional semantics"—has not left much of an impression on medieval scholarship. Both—his narrative and his methodological endeavor—are far from being outdated.

The Proteus Cabinet, or ‘we are Here but not Here’

In the early nineteenth century, there were three stage illusions in which a magician could cause a person to disappear. In one of these, the Proteus Cabinet, participants would enter a box, and simply vanish. As the designers of the Proteus Cabinet said of them, they were ‘Here, but not Here’. My essay explores this concept in relation to contemporary border politics. The border is a place where you have to appear. To pass through, the border-crosser must simultaneously be both present and represented. That representation has historically taken the form of papers: passports, permits to travel, proofs of nationality, photographs, or verbal accounts of reasons for travel. More recently, this representation has been drawn from the body itself: fingerprints, retinal scans – what Agamben has called the ‘biometric tattoo’. Drawing on the ideas of Giorgio Agamben and Ernst Kantorowicz, and addressing this new concern with the body part as passport, I will argue that the disaggregation of representation and the subject of representation makes it impossible for the border-crosser to appear – the border becomes a machine of disappearance, and makes a person vanish in plain sight. Here, but not Here.

Geheimes Deutschland: Stefan George und die Brüder Stauffenberg by Manfred Riedel

MLR, I03. I, 2oo8 28i terested in the relationship of art and literature, in the history of publishing, in the emergence of the avant-garde, and inbibliophile presses. TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ROGER PAULIN Geheimes Deutschland: Stefan George und die Bruider Stauffenberg. By MANFRED RIEDEL. Cologne: Bohlau. 2006. 267 pp. E24.90. ISBN 978-3-4I2-07706-8. 'Geheimes Deutschland' ('Secret Germany' would hardly be an adequate translation) is a poem inStefan George's lastvolume of poetry,Das neueReich (1928). The term had been used before by members of theGeorge circle and by nineteenth-century exponents of theConservative Revolution. Its origins go back even further. Manfred Riedel illuminates the intellectual tradition towhich the term refers:George relent lessly rejectsGerman imperialism, definingGermany as a community of speakers of German, linked to other European peoples by a shared 'Hesperian' (abendldndisch) heritage (Riedel speaks of a 'Geheimes europiisches Deutschland'). At the core of this tradition stands a continuity of groups of friends (Dioscuri), ofwhich theGeorge circle provides numerous examples. Riedel argues that an integral part of this tra dition is the attempt by the brothers Stauffenberg to assassinate Hitler in I944. Understudied Gestapo records provide enough evidence for this refutation of Peter Hoffmann's claims in Stauffenberg und der 20. Juli 1944 (Munich: Beck, 1998) that George's influence on events a decade afterhis own death in 1933 was but tangential. With the possible exception of Eckhard Heftrich's Stefan George (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, I968), no other scholar has taken thepoet so seriously: poetry can help to predict historical processes, can be a form of, or at least a trigger for, individual or collective action, and itcan help us tounderstand those actions (pp. 25, 31, I38). H6lderlin's poetic visions of peace and reconciliation achieved through a mythical unity of friends are shown tobe fundamental toGeorge's 'political' ambition. Riedel does no less than redefine the relationship between George's resistance to supposedly inevitable historical processes (militarism, positivism), his productive interpretation of intellectual tradition, and themore immediate political potential of his poetry. Riedel points out, for example, that the prophet Jeremiah, central toGeorge's late work, was part of his people's tradition but also guilty of high treason. This provides a starting-point for a careful investigation into poems thatwarn against immediate political action but lead tomost decisive political acts. Riedel's narrative is also developed out of readings of other documents that have so far re ceived littleor no scholarly attention, including contributions to the circle's journal and yearbook and poems byKarl Wolfskehl, Alexander von Stauffenberg, and others. Riedel re-examines the role ofRudolf Fahrner, whose book on Gneisenau is seen as a manifesto of the resistance,with its insistence thatpolitical action is illegitimate if it isunsung. Riedel also shiftsattention tounderstudied aspects ofGeorge's biography: his unusual curiosity as well as the programmatic intimacy and modesty of his ap preciation of theyoung poetMaximin as divine apparition. Riedel shows theGeorge circle to be intellectually diverse yet always united by trustand friendship.He traces attempts after thewar byAlexander von Stauffenberg to contact Ernst Kantorowicz inBerkeley andWolfskehl inNew Zealand. The fact thatGeorge's thinkingis seen by some today as a precursor ofNational So cialism only emphasizes how deep thecaesura of theNazi erawas and how farremoved George's world is fromours. Riedel's book offers a bridge to thisworld. Allusions to contemporary issues (the dangers of political eschatology and of globalization) give evidence ofRiedel's ambition: he explicitly deplores the failure of theStauffenbergs' actions; in times of systems' intrusion on our individual liberty, the failed coup at 282 Reviews tempt is seen as a turning-point in the history of freedom. This is a remarkable and inspiring scholarly work whose central argument is certainly not 'academic'. DUKE UNIVERSITY CHRISTOPHE FRICKER 'Verwandt-Verwandelt': Nietzsche's Presence inRilke. By KATJABRUNKHORST. (Cur sus: Texte und Studien zur deutschen Literatur, 25) Munich: ludicium. 2oo6. 231 pp. E25. ISBN 978-3-89I29-476-5. Rilke's Poetics of Becoming. By BEN HUTCHINSON. Oxford: Legenda. 2006. ix+ 2I2 pp. ?48. ISBN 978-1-904350-53-8. The publication of twonew English-language studies on Rilke isawelcome indication of a revival of scholarly interest in this 'difficult'poet. Katja Brunkhorst makes...

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

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.

The Concept of the Apolitical: German Jewish Thought and Weimar Political Theology

Peter Eli Gordon The Concept of the Apolitical: German Jewish Thought and Weimar Political Theology INTRODUCTION: WEIMAR POLITICAL THEOLOGY RECENT YEARS HAVE SEEN CONSIDERABLE DEBATE OVER THE CONCERNS of political theology and the question as to how the concepts and cate­ gories that inform political association may have derived historically from, or logically depend upon, prior concepts of religion. Debates over this question are partly normative: Does politics require theology, in the sense that theological concepts furnish the only possible warrant for our political commitments? Or, by contrast, does politics only come into its own if theology is dismissed? But the debate is also historical: Did politics only emerge as a transformation or worldly application (“secular­ ization” in the precise sense) of terms originally operative in a theologi­ cal context (as Karl Lowith claimed)? Or does politics, especially in its modem form, only claim its legitimacy by virtue of its attempt (as Hans Blumenberg argued) to place modernity itself on entirely new founda­ tions? These debates may seem especially urgent today given the resur­ gence of political movements, both East and West, that claim to derive their legitimacy from religious principles: Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Islamic. But for intellectual reasons alone it seems worthwhile to revisit some of the foundational debates out of which the current discussion of political theology was bom .1 social research Vol 74 : No 3 : Fall 2007 855 It is difficult to isolate one discrete historical moment since the attendant themes have an ancient lineage that stretches at least as far back as Saint Augustine’s reflections on the harmony or potential strife between the earthly city and the city of God. It is well known, however, that political theology underwent a dramatic resurgence of attention in Weimar Germany in the years following World War One. In those debates certain names recur with great frequency: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Bloch, Ernst Kantorowicz.2 But in the specific context of Weimar political theology one name is almost never heard: Hannah Arendt. The question I would like to pose in this paper is admittedly strange because its form is negative: Why does Arendt’s conception of political life not conform to the terms of political theo­ logical debate? The beginnings of an answer—and a beginning is all I can attempt here—can only be found by revisiting some of the politi­ cal-theological alternatives that appeared on the scene during Arendt’s formative years in Weimar Germany. LEO STRAUSS AND THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL PROBLEM In 1962 the political philosopher Leo Strauss, now living in Hyde Park on the flanks of the University of Chicago, drafted a new preface to the English translation of his 1930 book, Die Religionskritik Spinozas. The pref­ ace begins by naming what Strauss considered the central problem of modern philosophy: “This study on Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise was written during the years 1925-28 in Germany,” Strauss writes. “The author was a young Jew born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grip of the theologico-political predicament” (Strauss, 1965:1). Just what was the theologico-political predicament? While the details or possible merits of Straussian doctrine will not be my focus here, a general characterization seems crucial especially if we wish better to understand the general history of German-Jewish thought over the last century.3 For present purposes, we should first recall that Strauss himself was born in 1899, just seven years before Hannah Arendt, whose centennial we honored this past year. Both were German 856 social research Jews steeped in classical and modern philosophy. And both found in Martin Heidegger an early inspiration for their own work, though it must also be noted that their initial phase of enthusiasm soon turned to disenchantment when Heidegger, like so many of his German contem­ poraries, moved to embrace National Socialism. Disenfranchised by their native government, both eventually sought refuge in the United States—Strauss in 1937, Arendt in 1941—where they took up teaching positions, at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research, and laid the foundations for two ofthe most enduring schools of political thought. A comparative study of these two...

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

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.