My article “Doing (the) Nothing: Eric Santner and Giorgio Agamben on Suspending the Apparatus of Glory” was recently published on Epoche Magazine. My thanks to Timofei and John over there for continuing to support my work. Make sure to check out the other writings– it’s quite the archive of philosophy by now at issue #67! Here is an excerpt from section IV:

As creatures made up of spectral flesh, we feel more than just the pressure to uphold the norms of social life corresponding to our role and placement in it. We also feel the pressure of the void around which these norms orbit, “the lack of any ultimate grounding or authorization of those normative statuses,” and increasingly we feel the precarity and dispensability of our roles (84). But this void is terrifying. Exposed to it, our world threatens to fall apart. Santner calls formations of the flesh the ways in which this “ontological vulnerability” is covered up (92). The King covered this void in two ways: by veiling it (this is the immediate effect of the glorious body: to captivate) and by vouching for it (by backing whatever debt in the justification of society was outstanding). With the deposition of royal sovereignty, this function of veiling and vouching spreads itself across the whole fabric of the social, such that captivation and justification becomes an immanent practice, as we’ve seen. The “subject-matter” of the modern citizen-subject directly involves these formations of the flesh which labor over the legitimacy of those forms, for it is now the People’s body that must function “as glorious guarantor covering the missing link at the ‘anthropogenetic’ knotting of the somatic and the normative” (86).

Political economy thus pertains to the maintenance of the People’s Two Bodies: not just material life (the management of biological life and death) but also spectral life (the glory and spectacle of its symbolic, undead body). It inherits the duty to vouch for the normative order and its suture to the somatic, and thus to “redeem or indemnify” a lack at its origin (88). Biopolitics doesn’t just address man as species and population, but also in this dimension of flesh as the bearer of royal remains, for “the threshold of modernity is marked by the ‘massification’ of the physical-juridical flesh of the king, its dispersion into populations that for that very reason must be placed in the care of biopolitical administration” (89). Biopolitics, on this level, is the regime that justifies veils over the void and securitizes or funds them. Foucault even showed in his genealogical analyses that policing was originally conceived as, “the art of the state’s splendor as visible order and manifest force”: not just the maintenance of rule but the maintenance of glory (91). What appears to be “policing of empirical bodies and forces” conceals its liturgical dimension, for this often violent administration is also responsible for covering the void upon which social existence is built. Still, it is not just the police but every political subject who inherits responsibility for the People’s second body. All of us have a hand in it, for it is at stake in our own. This is what weighs upon us uncannily: the production and shaping of the glorious flesh of the social bond (99), the imperative to care for this “spectral flesh of the sovereign People” (86). To become more aware of these veilings and vouchings, especially as they have enmeshed our own flesh into unfreedom, is therefore a biopolitical task that is as critical as it is intimate. Continue reading!