Representation

You are currently browsing the archive for the Representation category.

Hobbes on monarchy

June 14, 2011 in Hobbes, Representation, Sovereignty | No comments

Louis XIV of France

In the second edition of De Cive (1647) doubts were casted on monarchy being the sole most appropriate political regime. After Cromwell’s boost, Hobbes’s dictum regarding the most suitable government seemed to shift towards a monarchic ideal since Leviathan.(1) Envy appeared as the greatest obstacle for most people in recognizing monarchy’s blessing and superiority. A sign of this superiority could be observed in the fact that power to wage war belonged only to the sovereign as well as all kinds of military actions.(2) Against those who kept belief in a traditional mixed monarchy, counterweighted by several other instances. he insisted in its spurious character.(3)

Following Hobbes’s theory of language, there was no reason for the classical distinction between corrupted and good governments; they just exemplify the particular opinion of individuals and their adherents.(4) The difference among possible regimes came down to whether the representative was a single person or a plurality, and Hobbes stressed how the condemnation of a monarchy for being a tyranny was a question of personal pleasure or displeasure rather than an objective statement.(5) The suitability of a government had to be judged according to its capacity in maintaining the highest good of the political system, its ability attaining and conserving peace, according to the first law of nature for private and public interests coincide in this political system.(6)

The possibility of there being a tyrant, in the use of that predicate, was banished since the annihilatio mundi had dissolved any stable link to reality. Hobbes’s construction deactivated such a line of judgment on the plain of consistence by means of a rearrangement of elements in the plane of construction. Sovereignty was not only legitimized, but the logical possibilities of being dismantled in political discourse were also precluded. He who denominated tyrant to a king was simply making a personal judgment with no relation to any actual state of the world. The king shall not be dethroned for no member of the commonwealth could assert what good and bad was, especially against the institution that established moral conduct.

Traditional forms of legitimation were being debunked or kept precariously by the struggles occurring during Hobbes’s productive period, -a modern rational legitimation was needed. The King had been the Head of the state, a process of abstraction involved the modern concept of sovereignty within a net of conceptions related to the legal order, rather than the mortal and frail figure of the king-person developed since the fifteenth century. The cover representation of Leviathan became the depiction of a foundation in which the king became, consistently with the post-Copernican noetic space, equated to the sun. All the individuals composing him conformed a procession directed towards the head of the sovereign, replacing, transferring, the ‘caput Christi’.(7)

We will have to wait more than a century to reproduce the situation lived by Hobbes on the Continent, after the king and sovereignty as, the principal attribute of the state, were rejoined. “They did not challenge the sovereignty in plain terms, and by that name, till they had slain the King…”(8) When the subject is king, the king becomes subject, -the individual is invested with sovereignty and the sovereign turned into an individual.

(1) In the preface of De Cive he admits, “…Monarchy is the most commodious government (which one thing alone I confesse in this whole book not to be demonstrated, but only probably stated) yet every where I expresly say, that in all king of Government whatsoever, there ought to be a supreme and equall power.” Nevertheless he later endeavours in demonstrating why monarchy is to be prefered, “Now that Monarchy of the foresaid forms, of Democracy, Aristocraty, and Monarchy, hath the preheminence, will best appear by comparing the conveniences and inconveniences arising in each of them,” Ibid. X, 3 also see Hobbes’ conclusion in ibid. X, 19.
(2) “But it is a manifest sign, that the most absolute Monarchy is the best state of government….” De Cive X, 17.
(3) “Only that fault, which was generally in the whole nation, which was, that they thought the government of England was not an absolute, but a mixed monarchy,” Behemoth III (M. VI, p. 306). After conceiving the instituton of the sovereign by covenant, Hobbes is able to attribute all authority to him. According to Bobbio his main target was the unity of the sovereign that assured the stability lost in England, he preferred unity to autonomy. Carl Schmitt sees the reunification of authority from the diverse instances as Hobbes’s principal concern, the concentration of the might disbanded in the feudal organization. “Für Hobbes kommt es darauf an, durch den Staat die Anarchie des feudalen, ständischen oder kirchlichen Widerstandrechts und den daraus fortwährend neu entbrennenden Bürgerkrieg zu überwinden un dem mittelalterlichen Pluralismus, den Herrschaftsansprüchen der Kirchen und anderer „indirekter“ Gewalten die rational Einheit einer eindeutigen, eines wirksamen Schutzes fähigen Macht und eines berechenbar funktionierenden Legalitätssystems entgegenzusetzen,“ C. Schmitt, op. cit., p. 113.
(4) “…so as we see these names betoken not as diverse kinde of Government, but the diverse opinions of the Subjects concerning him who hath the Supreme Power.” De Cive VII, 2.
(5) Leviathan II, 19, 2.
(6) “From whence it follows, that where the public and the private interest are most closely united, there is the public most advanced. Now in monarchy, the private interest is the same with the public. The riches, power, and honour of a monarch arise only from the riches, strength and reputation of his subjects,” Leviathan II, 19, 4.
(7) H. Brederkamp, Thomas Hobbes visuelle Strategien. Der Leviathan. Das Urbild des modernen Staates. Werkillustrationen und Portraits, Berlin, 1999.
(8) Behemoth, I, (M. VI, p. 197)

Tags: , , ,

Hobbes on representation and sovereignty

April 30, 2011 in Hobbes, Representation, Sovereignty | No comments

Neer, Eglon van der - Die Frau des Kandaules entdeckt den versteckten Gyges - 1675–80

Under a sovereign, according to the conception of actor and author, -a representational theory-, the king was the actor, but the people remained the authors.(1) Thus sovereignty was based on representation, on the institution, not on covenant, not on the obligation or constitution.(2) By the theory of obligation all individuals became subjects, the constitution is a mere hypothesis; the actual bond does maintain the allegiance necessary for the commonwealth to subsist by means of the covenant.

The definition of sovereign referred thus to the one instituted by the individuals in order to protect themselves, not to the constitutive body for it lacks any life-like feature. Sovereignty was an instrument of reason devised in order to maintain life, departing from the individual and returning to him, rendering him member of the commonwealth, -citizen. Power could be either directed towards the body, being therefore physical, involuntary, but it could also be exerted on the will, altering the grounds on which deliberation takes place. This was the aspect on which political power acted, forming voluntary deliberation.

(1) “…every subject is author of the actions of his sovereign…” Leviathan II, 18, 7.
(2) S. Goyard-Fabre, “La notion de souveraineté de Bodin à Hobbes,” Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p. 220.

Tags: ,

Hobbes on Bodin’s concept of sovereignty

April 26, 2011 in Hobbes, Methodology, Representation, Sovereignty | No comments

Jean Bodin

In Jean Bodin’s Six Livres de la République (1576) the foundations of the principle of sovereignty had been already established, propounding a justification for the French monarch. Hobbes abode Bodin’s characteristics of sovereignty, yet he did not adopt the underlying context on which Bodin developed them. Bodin still bounded the supreme power of the sovereign to divine and natural law. Laws had to contain a certain value, had to bare natural justice. In Hobbes natural law only acted igniting the sparkle of an order that, after being instituted, became independent. In Bodin, the fragmentation of power was maintained by insisting in the divine character of power, there was no actual human institution but a heavenly prerogative.

Bodin’s method also differed substantially from Hobbes’s deductivism. He sustained a humanist historical-comparative approach, accepting a naturalist stance of authority by which the source of power was an imitatio divina, evincing its godlike character. To Hobbes rather than a resemblance with God’s lordship because of the same model of submission, the analogy resided in the institution of a covenant, of a conventional agreement. Hobbes rejected both traditional political theology(1) and naturalism. The constitution of the commonwealth followed, according to Bodin, the aggregation of families, social unities, to the agrandissement and constitution of a state. In the same vein as Aristotle, the state was but the enlargement, a reproduction, of the family system, it appeared thus as natural. Within Hobbes’s system sovereignty was instituted, the state only surged after the convention among people wishing to escape the natural state, -it was artificial. Moreover, in the very state of nature, -a mental construct-, the actors are men, solitary wanderers;(2) nevertheless, Hobbes still retained most of the basic properties of majestas set by Bodin.(3)

Sovereignty was deemed to be perpetual; it ought to be eternal, but their constituents, men and assemblies of men are mortal. This essential fragility supposed the relapse into the state of nature unless a system of succession was proposed. The one provided by monarchy, based on the decision of a single man, was the more feasible and apt to prevent the dissolution of majestas. For when the spirit decays, the body tumbles extenuated.(4) The main cause of mortality was the disintegration motivated by individual passions and dissidence. The preference for absolute sovereignty to aristocracy precluded the danger of factions entangled in an argument reverting in civil war.(5) Thus the sovereign afforded and represented the endless disposition of the commonwealth and was necessary for the subsistence of the represented, both being interlocked.(6)

(1) L. Borot, “Le vocabulaire du contrat, du pacte et de l’alliance: quelques enjeux lexicaux”, Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p. 205.
(2) “…indem er die Monarchie zur blossen Erscheinungsform eines staatlichen Legalitätssystems machte, vernichtete er alle ihre traditionellen und legitimen Fundamente göttlichen Rechts. Er konnte seinen monarchistischen Glauben nur dadurch retten, daß er in einen grundsätzlichen Agnostizismus zurückzog.” C. Schmitt, op. cit., p. 126.
(3) J. Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République, VIII. It has also been argued some direct precedents of a theory of sovereignty in other state theoreticians. According to A. Black, Monarchy and Community. Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy 1430-1450, Cambridge, 1970, “Turrecremata thus to some extent anticipated what has been regarded as the specific achievement of Bodin, namely the elaboration of an abstract notion of sovereignty as necessary for all societies and as the only legitimate source of power,” p. 84.
(4) “The sovereignty is the soul of the commonwealth; which once departed from the body, the members do no more receive their motion from it.” Leviathan II, 21, 21.
(5) This is Hobbes’ dictum, “the greatest inconvenience that can happen to a commonwealth, is the aptitude to dissolve into civil war, and to this are monarchies much less subject, than any other governments.” Elements of Law II, 24, 8.
(6) “L’originalité des définitions données par Hobbes consiste ainsi à suggérer que le souverain est une sorte de tenancier perpétuel, indispensable pour la survie du propriétaire!” L. Jaume, “Le vocabulaire de la représentation politique de Hobbes a Kant”, Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p 237.

Tags: , , ,

Hobbes on the world and its perception

October 27, 2010 in Epistemology, Hobbes, Representation | No comments

According to Zarka, Hobbes was already situated in the divorce between reality and perception, of the adequatio of thought and world and its being expressed in language. The ‘age of representation’ could not reconcile those two separate series, objects and words.(1)

Il y a donc une subjectivité de la représentation sans sujet subjectif fondateur. On comprend ainsi que la Philosophia prima de Hobbes inaugurée par l’hypothèse annihilatoire ne parte ni du monde, ni du moi, mais de la représentation.(2)

The importance of representation bore the generation of an inner ply, an interiority,(3) conveying the annihilatio mundi, the fading of external reality, and the deterioration of the link with the ontological order, of the aforementioned relation between world and human understanding; a delicate position ensconced by God in Descartes, -condition of veracity of our thoughts. This independence of thought, in the sense of an elaboration of sensations, from the worldly order, implied the idea of a self-contained world and a chasm between subject and object.(4) The philosophia prima conformed a plane of construction that rested on a net of concepts fabricated by, and subservient on, the senses, on the effects of external bodies on them rather than on their absolute, metaphysical, existence. This relativization of the external world posited man and his sensations as its condition of assertability, of judgement. A natural philosophy that was based on individual perception and did not resort to any divine instance, assuming the adequation of the senses to the world, put forward a ‘post-sceptical metaphysics’,(5) a first philosophy based on the ordo cognoscendi rather than on the ordo essendi.
The external object produces sensation by direct contact with the body of the perceiver, either materially or through the effect of light. Hobbes maintained a mechanistic idea of sensation, -motion and direct pressure are the basis of sensation, acting on the senses-; sensation can be also analyzed, from the opposite side, as a passion of the subject. The object acquired an active role in the act of sensation and the mind becomes a passive recipient of those inputs.(6) It is by means of sensual perception that we can maintain an affirmative predicate about existence.

(1) “En ce sens la fondation politique d’un code juridique de l’Etat se substitue à l’ordre ontologique perdu. C’est donc sur le plan politique qu’il faudra chercher la réponse du problème posé sur le plan métaphysique par la séparation du discours et de l’être, ” Y.-Ch. Zarka, La Décision Métaphysique de Hobbes, Paris, 1999, p. 26. It is also very recommended, to document the roots of this notion, P. Alféri, Guillaume d’Ockham. Le singulier, Paris, 1989.
(2) Y.-Ch. Zarka, op. cit., p. 44.
(3) “par la réification imaginaire, on passe du phantasme au fantastique…” Y.-Ch. Zarka, “Le vocabulaire de l’apparaître: le champ sémantique de la notion de phantasma,” in Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), Hobbes et son vocabulaire, Paris, 1992, p. 29.
(4) “…the absence or destruction of things once imagined, doth not cause the absence or destruction of the imagination itself,” Elements of Law, I, 2, 8.
(5) R. Tuck, “Hobbes and Descartes”, G.A.J. Rogers and A. Ryan, Perspective on Thomas Hobbes, Oxford, 1990.
(6) “Originally all conceptions proceed from the actions of the thing itself, whereof it is the conception. Now when the action is present, the conception it produceth is called SENSE, and the thing by whose action the same is produced is called the OBJECT of sense.” Elements of Law, I, 2, 2. “…mens nihil aliud erit praeterquam motus in partibus quibusdam corporis organici.” Objectiones, objectio IV.

Tags: , , ,

Deleuze and virtual continuum

August 4, 2010 in Epistemology, Methodology, Representation | No comments

Found at The Topology of Deleuze’s Spatium by Louise Burchill

One of Gilles Deleuze’s major ontological categories is that of a virtual continuum which, much like Spinoza’s substance, presents two sides-pure extension and thought-or, rather, two powers: the power of being and the power of thinking. This virtual continuum receives a variety of designations throughout Deleuze’s corpus: “intensive spatium” in Difference and Repetition, “ideal or metaphysical surface” in The Logic of Sense, “plane of consistency” in A Thousand Plateaus (written with Félix Guattari) and “plane of immanence” in What is Philosophy? (equally coauthored with Guattari). While these diverse terms may be argued to accentuate different aspects of the continuum so designated, Deleuze’s characterization of the latter remains, nevertheless, fundamentally constant-such that, as one commentator puts it, the various “objects” in question (spatium, surface, plane of immanence or, again, hyperspace) are all rigorously homothetic. Such a continuum is, accordingly, consistently described as a pre-extensive, non-qualified “milieu” or “space-stratum” enveloping complexes of differential relations, pure intensities and singularities, with Deleuze seeking to determine in this way an impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field that, assembling the conditions of real-and not merely possible-experience, would neither resemble the corresponding empirical fields (with their correlation of a consciousness and its objects) nor amount to an undifferentiated “depth” or groundlessness (sans-fond indifférencié) identified as pure chaos.

Although I refer to the concepts ‘plain of consistency’ and ‘plane of immanence’, here they acquire a different signification. ‘Plain of consistency’ depicts the actual instantiations that are possible and performed within the given linguistic-cultural material; it refers to the language in its socially grounded form, used by any speaker of a given community. ‘Plane of immanence’, on the other hand, refers to the logic that allow the connections and linkages between the elements found at the plain, it is, in this sense, to ex-plain. These elements are the outcome of different arrangements, configurations, and sedimentation phases: the plane of immanence constitutes the condition of possibility of these configurations.

Tags: , ,

Sovereignty and the state – Individual and man

June 14, 2010 in Representation, Sovereignty, Uncategorized | No comments

My focus on the concept of sovereignty remains centered on the modern rational-legal form of authority. Sovereignty soon became the attribute of all acknowledged states and thus provided with a fundamental idea to the constitution, to the valid assertion, of political power. In certain occasion the arguments would also involve the state, in the sense that a modern plane of construction has combined these two concepts. State and sovereignty thus become interchangeable,(1) but sovereignty is a concrete figure belonging to the history of ideas, meanwhile the state refers to a wider array of features and historical events. Still the development of the idea of sovereignty affects profoundly to the content of state, sovereignty is deemed to rest as the foundation of the modern state.(2) The palpable crisis of sovereignty has been attributed to the crisis of state. The idea and the institution it supports enter in bankrupt simultaneously, demonstrating once more the importance of ideas in shaping the conditions of existence and these producing forms of legitimation, of general acceptance and attachment, attitudes.

We could recognize the state and sovereignty in the same relation as man and individual. State and man refer to wider spheres of knowledge, they are objects investigated by a multitude of disciplines (theory of administration, sociology of state, international relations; biology, economics, anthropology). On the other hand, both individual and sovereignty can be circumscribed to the history of ideas. They also shape our understanding of both man and state and they spread in the particular disciplines suffering certain mutations, but still their appearance is purely eidetical and their deployment textually traceable despite their inscription in practices.

(1) J. Hoffman, Sovereignty, Buckingham, 1998. N.G. Onuf, “Sovereignty: Outline of a Conceptual History”, Alternatives (16), 1991, pp. 425-46.
(2) “L’État moderne est un système juridique… Posé de cette manière, le problème de la date de naissance de l’État moderne n’est autre que le problème de la formation et de l’acceptation finale du concept de souveraineté.”A. Passerin d’Entrèves, La notion de l’État, Paris, 1969, p.123.

Tags: , , , ,