Conway

 In order to understand the way in which the people disappear, leaving only the objects of biopolitical intervention, one must break down Hobbes’s process by which a sovereign is authorized. The sovereign, for Hobbes, is an artificial person. He distinguishes between an artificial person and a natural person by the attributability of words or actions. A natural person is someone whose words can only be attributed to them. An artificial person is one who represents the words and actions of another. Hobbes provides a succinct depiction of who can be an authorizing figure. “Of persons artificial, some have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent. And then the person is the actor, and he that owneth his words and actions is the AUTHOR, in which case the actor acteth by authority” (Hobbes 1994, 101). To “personate is to act or represent himself or another.” Inanimate objects can, in fact, be personated – like an overseer of an estate or a manager of weapons. They can be authorized to act on behalf of those entities.

There is an exception, however, “things inanimate cannot be authors, nor therefore give authority to actors” (Hobbes 1994, 102-103). Crucially, Hobbes presents a list of those who are inadequate and cannot authorize. “Likewise, children, fools and madmen that have no use of reason may be personated by guardians or curators can be no authors” (Hobbes 1994, 103). The very gesture that constitutes the presence and power of the fleeting united multitude is the same one that produces the exception. The movement that identifies the elements that come together in the disunited multitude, with its constituent potentiality, is the same movement that establishes an autarchy. In chapter XXVI law is described as a “command” put forth by the author, but enforced with the sword of the actor, the sovereign (Hobbes 1994, 176-177). The sovereign is the person of the united multitude. Hobbes is keen to remind his reader, however, that this “unity” is the result of the “unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented,” and it is this that “maketh the person one” (104). What, then, is the status of these non-authorizing bodies, who supposedly do not hold the quill that pens their own condition?

Their status is one of perpetual paradox. Hobbes writes, “Over natural fools, children, or madmen there is no law, no more than over brute beasts; nor are they capable of the title of just or unjust, because they had never power to make any covenant” (177). This position of transferred authorization to an adequate subject gets further complicated when one accounts for Hobbes’ definition of the right to prevent one’s own bodily harm. In chapter XXVI Hobbes lays down his basis for the sovereign’s right to punish – which is relinquished in the state of nature and yet retained in the person of the sovereign himself. Though the members of the disunited multitude relinquish their right to punish, they have not relinquished their right to defense. Hobbes writes that “no man is bound by covenant not to resist violence; and consequently, it cannot be intended that he gave any right to another to lay violent hands upon his person” (203). However, in their entrance into the commonwealth, “every man hath given away the right of defending another” (204). Authorship is transferable for those deemed inadequate, but the right to defense is explicitly not. And it is necessary to remember that “harm” to those who have revolted is not done by the right of punishment, but rather by the right of war (205). This is the condition of the homo sacer. It is a life that is simultaneously outside the law, but subject to destruction nonetheless. Even more fascinatingly, if our reading of Hobbes is correct, the establishing of this exception surrounding “fools” and “madmen,” occurs ontologically prior to the unification of the multitude as it disappears into the people-king of the sovereign. Therefore, even if we grant Negri the grace to say constituent power is not automatically in the hands of sovereignty, the exclusion necessary to make the constituent gesture possible produces both the conditions and the object of the state of exception. It is in this way that constituent power is an absence, it is an absence of the eternally excluded (yet nonetheless included) party – those who are not “adequate.”

This same tenuous thread is present in the presentation of constituent power Negri found in Rousseau. Negri correctly laments that Rousseau’s concept of the general will has produced a “muddled web of definitions” (Negri 1999, 204-205). One has to wade through, carefully, the distinctions Rousseau makes between Sovereign/State and Citizen/Subject in order to grasp the way in which the force of the general will moves through his political ontology. Negri argues that it is this muddle that produces a series of juridical documents, like the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, which would constitute the “skeleton of constituent power” (204).

Foucault, in a lecture at the Collège de France in 1978, tells his listeners that the introduction of the general will into “political science” does not eliminate the problem of sovereignty, but makes it “more acute than ever” (Foucault 2007, 143). Agamben’s reading of Rousseau coincides, in a very particular sense, with Negri’s. Agamben sees in Rousseau’s general will an attempt to naturalize legislative activity. Agamben writes this:

The sovereignty of the law, to which Rousseau refers, imitates and reproduces the structure of the providential government of the world. Just as in Malebranche, for Rousseau the general will, the law, subjugates men only in order to make them freer, and in immutably governing their actions does nothing but express their nature. And just as in letting oneself be governed by God they do nothing but let their own nature take its course, so the indivisible sovereignty of the Law guarantees the coincidence of the governing and the governed.

(Agamben 2011, 277)

The law that subjugates in order to let nature “take its course” is inseparable from the discourse on natural inequality that is occurring throughout Rousseau’s work.

In order to delve into this, though, a brief articulation of the political ontology of the general will is needed. The “public person” of governance in Rousseau is split into two. The first being the sovereign, which is the active element and, because it is the recipient of the general will, has lawgiving power. The second is the state, which is passive in its reception of lawgiving power. Individual persons, “the associates,” are broken down into two parts as well (Rousseau 2011, 165). The active component being the citizen – which participates in sovereign power through the general will, and is its vital base. The passive component is the subject, which is regulated by the state through the reception of punishment. The subject is the object of law-preserving violence.

The actualization and protection of the general will is the primary function of sovereignty for Rousseau, which is what makes it indivisible. The realization of this will though, and the social question it posits, when understood through Agamben’s argument that the law enables the human to “express their nature”, returns us to the question of the constituent exception and the autarchy of the political human being. In his discourse on inequality, Rousseau prods his reader with a question. “Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?” (Rousseau 2011, 53). Rousseau sees in the problem of social inequality a deeper danger than the mere squalor of proletarian or lumpenproletarian existence. The human being risks losing its perfectability. In losing this theodicy of perfection, the human being is no longer able to truly express its nature. However, inequality is “practically nonexistent in the state of nature” (Rousseau 92, 2011). The problem of natural inequality and social inequality is only possible in a world of property and law. Rousseau argues this:

[I]t follows that inequality in status, authorized by positive right alone, is contrary to natural right whenever it is not combined in the same proportion with physical inequality: a distinction that is sufficient to determine what one should think in this regard about the sort of inequality that reigns among all civilized people, for it is obviously contrary to the law of nature.

(Rousseau 2011, 91)

This distinction between natural inequality and political/moral inequality is crucial, though. The problem is that social inequality can produce or—worse—be conflated with natural inequality. Natural inequality is established by “bodily strength” and “qualities of the mind or soul” (45). Moral/political inequalities are privileges enjoyed at the explicit expense of others.

The lamentable despotism of moral inequality is that it can result in a world where it is acceptable for “an imbecile to lead a wise man” (92). The role of the sovereign, and the protection of the general will can be understood in a different way with these concepts in mind. The autarchic structure of the human being is maintained by the general will as it is expressed through the sovereign. Moral equality must replace natural equality, so that natural inequality becomes intelligible. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which Negri believes to be among the first expressions of this constituent power, echoes this sentiment in the very first article. “Men are born free and equal with respect to their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can only be founded on public utility.” The autarchic structure of the human, inherent in constituent power, demands regulation by the state because of the risk of degeneration. The Person, as a participant in the general will, carries their bare life in the passage of that will to the Sovereign, who, through the State, maintains the dividing line between natural and moral inequality.

Constituent power is the exception in force. It is not just the condition that makes it possible, as Agamben tactfully argues, for a sovereign to declare a state of exception. Constituent power, in order to even come into force, has to attest to an absence of those elements of human existence that make it possible. The Multitude of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri is only an adequate subject in that it gives inadequacy its name, and casts it away (while retaining it in its exception). The question of constituent power always asks us the question of who constitutes the constituent subject. No matter how one answers, the trap of the sovereign exception is laid. It is in this way, without intending to be polemical, that one can call constituent power, properly speaking, a theory of able-ism.

Conclusion: The Marionette with(out) Qualities

After 20 years, Agamben would finally end his investigation into the figure of the homo sacer, the protagonist of his research. In The Use of Bodies, Agamben makes a blunt attestation about the consequences of the route that political ontology took, from Aristotle to Arendt. “Political life is necessarily an autarchic life” (Agamben 2015a, 198). Because this term has floated throughout this investigation of Agamben, it is now time to discuss it. Autarchy is a founding principle of politics because the human being, set aside for their production of a polity, is an exceptional, special, being. The species-being of the human being that has dominated reactionary and revolutionary politics alike, must be neutralized. However, to do this, the apparatus of disability must be rendered inoperative. It must cease to make these metaphysical distinctions, to divide life. Disability is an apparatus of distinction that makes possible the special being of the human being. The human being, as the master of potency, throws itself into its own violence by making of the world an image of realizable power.

So long as the human being is an exceptional entity that sits at a threshold defined by its capacities, the reduction of life to bare existence will continue because life will always be separated from the form it takes.

Though the Homo Sacer investigation ended in 2014, one could argue there is a “secret” appendix hidden in a small book written several years later. It is a monograph on the tale of Pinocchio. While one might be hesitant to shift from political and philosophical insights over to the realm of the literary, it is important to remember precisely where Agamben has always situated his own work. “I am perhaps not a philosopher but a poet, just as, conversely, many works that are thought to be literary instead rightfully belong to philosophy” (Agamben 2024, 87). This book on Pinocchio is a literary text that rightfully belongs to philosophy. However, more specifically, it belongs to the trajectory of Homo Sacer. Agamben follows the young(?) marionette as he takes on, and flees from, the predicates that made him a boy. Agamben sees in this intransigent puppet without strings a surface upon which the most violent of presuppositions about the human are projected:

Pinocchio will thus be a paradigm of the human condition, because—even if it is not clear who is to hold the strings that make him move and whether there truly are these strings—he is condemned, as his adventures eloquently show, to be always inferior and superior to himself, never to reach a secure identity.

(Agamben 2023, 56)

Pinocchio is always inferior and superior to himself, neither boy nor marionette. He will always be in that zone of tension, unable to reach an identity. This is precisely the condition of the human being that the exception of politics has laid out. Disability, as an apparatus, terrorizes and simultaneously secures the exception of the political animal we call “humanity.” The human, always striving and toiling with the apparatuses that capture it, remains draped in its inhumanity.