The War of Leviathan and Behemoth: Civil War, Hobbes, and Messianic Politics in an Exposition of Giorgio Agamben's "Stasis"

 The current state of global politics is "civil war", where a state of war has all but ceased to exist within global conflicts. The United States has not had a legal war since World War Two, with every subsequent action as a policing. The Korean War was a Western driven civil war between Koreans. Americans entered into the Vietnam War to sustain a civil war between Vietnamese. Intervention in a range of conflicts - from Nicaragua to Yugoslavia - involved an intervention on the side of one faction within a state of internal civil war. Even wars like the Gulf War, Afghanistan and Gulf War II, which ostensibly were wars between states, were never considered as such. America did not enter into a state of war, but claimed the need to police an internal dispute within the global household of nation-states. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a "second world" of politically unified states, the United States emerged as a hyper-power over the affairs of all nations. With the "end of history" and the cessation of all political questions, the future of conflict was a household activity, an economic affair.  Thus Saddam's crime was not a dispute between the United States and Iraq, over some territorial claim or abuse of citizens, but a global intervention over oil trade. Kuwait was not considered a state, so much as a member of the "global community", a neologism which blurs together the political and household-economic. Even Russia's intervention into Ukraine was not a war, but a police action. Conflict seems unable to become a war, unable to transition from one state of affairs into another. Instead, the two seem to consistently blur together. Thus civil war is the paradigm to understand this current state of affairs.

The Civil War (Stasis in Greek) is a moment of indistinction within a political community between what is proper to politics and what remains outside in the home. The war - which belongs properly to the polis - becomes a familial affair, a stand-still conflict within blood kinship [stasis emphylos]. Civil war is a phenomenon that originates from within the family, where the city transforms familial relationships into political ones, a war of brothers against brothers. And at the same time, the political forms a new fraternity, where political allies transform into new brothers. The civil war reveals the gap between household and the city, between the economic and the political, and how one transfers into another. Patriarchal mythologies not withstanding, it's unclear at what point a collection of households recognize the gap between them and constitute it as the political. Civil war becomes a means of realizing and reconstituting these bonds through their indistinction. For if the political is the zone outside the household, which absorbs households within its bonds, where then does the civil war take place, since the political is brought into the household and, simultaneously, blood relationships are fictitiously reconstituted in political faction. The civil war is a threshold concept:

"The stasis - this is our hypothesis - takes place neither in the oikos nor in the polis, neither in the family nor in the city; rather it constitutes a zone of indifference between the unpolitical space of the family and the political space of the city. In transgressing this threshold, the oikos is politicised; conversely the polis is 'economised', that is , it is  reduced to an oikos" (16)

The civil war is the apparatus that constitutes the relationship between the family and the city, even as the same fall in together. Yet this happening is not a bug, not an accident of collapse or misunderstanding, but a feature. The civil war becomes a central means through which the polis and oikos become distinct, yet interrelated. Hence it becomes important that all citizens, when there is a state of stasis, choose a side and fight. Solon's Law punished those who failed to become partisan with atimia (dishonor), which removed their citizenship. The civil war becomes the supremely political act and, in failure to participate, the former citizen is stripped of his political rights, banished to the home, no different than a slave. Additionally, Athenian law prescribed that at the conclusion of a civil war, reconciliation was mandatory. All citizens, now reconstituted as such, must forget what took place. More properly this oath of "amnesty" [amnestia] - of forgetting - was not so much a demand for ignorance, so much as prohibiting the public use of bad memories. A citizen was bound to refuse to resume the conflict of the civil war once it was over, in a way similar to the requirement of all citizens to pick a side. The Ancient Greek idea - where civil war was mandatory and must be put aside at its conclusion - has been completely inverted for moderns. Civil war must now become impossible, yet if/when it occurs, the modern must never cease to recall the events of civil war.

Ancient Greece had achieved an equilibrium, unique among most nations, between this process of politicization and economization. The cyclical movement became a metaphysical ground in an almost Heraclitean way - the constant pulling apart through Hate and coming together of Love. However this paradigm, where the civil war is what mysteriously links yet distinguishes the political from the economic in the moment of indistinction, has become constipated in modern political theory. The civil war continues to erupt throughout the world, yet it has no potential to resolve. The impossible possibility of "never again" continues to appear without acknowledgement, and the effort to maintain permanent remembrance means an inability for nations to ever reconstitute themselves. Unlike the Greeks, this metaphysical cut threatens to absorb the entire world in a never-ending war that has no distinct significance. If it was a war, the killing would be military combat; if it is domestic, the killing would be murder. All deaths are now simultaneously war and murder, yet neither. 

For Agamben, it's for this reason that the War on Terror has become a dominant paradigm in the world. The Terrorist is both enemy combatant and civilian murderer, yet neither. No law applies, and thus this depoliticized subject has not the rights of citizen or soldier. The result is a camp, a zone of detainment that is both under political authority yet exiled outside of it. Whether it's the camps for Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and other undesirables in Dachau, the Japanese in American internment camps, Terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, or Australian unvaccinated in quarantine camps, all of these are genetically related phenomena. They are zones to deal with the figure of the one caught amidst civil war that does not cease to exist from one set of authorities (blood kinship dissolving between brothers) and reconstitute in another (the refraternization of former partisans). There seems no way out of this zone of indistinction, this global civil war, that has no ability to end.

Therefore it's precisely at the threshold between the Ancients and the Moderns that the theory of civil war receives another crucial analysis. In the early modern period,  the collapse of Christendom unleashed a century of civil war around confessional differences. Whether the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch War for Independence, the English Civil Wars, or the Thirty Years War, all resulted in new efforts to reconstitute a polity utterly divided. It was the English confessional war, however, that revealed the true nature of this social collapse. Unlike the other major European conflicts, which often divided between Rome and Reformer, England's confessional war split down the middle among Protestants. The conflict was not simply against popery (which was an accusation leveled against insufficiently reformed Protestants), but a radical moment of indistinction between spiritual and temporal powers. Why Medieval Christendom distinguished between the civil authority of the prince and the spiritual authority of the pope, these were united (in theory) as a seamless whole. Strife over authority, where earlier kings claimed a spiritual potency and later popes claimed temporal supremacy, reached its zenith in the Reformation. The dogmatic content of Luther (which many Roman hierarchs found amenable) was not ultimately significant for the historical conflict of the Reformation. Rather, it reached a melting-point which the Investiture Controversy, the Babylonian Captivity, and the Conciliarist movement had failed to sustain. This essay will not relitigate the entire history of the Reformation. However, its aftershocks, manifest in a century of civil war, were a threshold towards modern political theory. 

Hobbes attempted to solve this crisis on novel, but extremely scandalous, terms. Contrary to Strauss and Schmitt, who sees in Hobbes' Leviathan an esoteric account of his own atheism, Agamben argues Hobbes was entirely anti-esoteric. And as much as Quentin Skinner's historicization gave a much richer account of Hobbes' education and thought-world, it's hard to believe someone as infamous as Hobbes, who flirted with a materialist metaphysics of God and put forward an extreme form of absolutism that did not depend on royal lineage, would hide at the point of his atheism. The work of Jeffrey Collins has also helpfully shown how Leviathan was received well among the Independents in Cromwell's court. Thus, Leviathan should be read on its own terms as Hobbes presents them, with its symbols and concepts as Hobbes develops them within the matrix of early modern thought. Additionally, Leviathan must be read as a whole, which includes the second half which focuses strictly on ecclesiological questions. Hobbes was not a secularist, interested in Newtonian mechanized statism that flourished in the twentieth century. Rather, as Schmitt rightly noted in his book on Leviathan, Hobbes represented a threshold between medieval and modern, where the automaton of the Leviathan possessed living and organic qualities. Far prior to any strict division between the organic-living-subject and the mechanical-dead-object, Hobbes held the two together as integrally related. Thus, Hobbes' description of human biology as similar to air-pumps and water wheels is not only to mechanize man but to humanize machine.

However, the most striking element to Leviathan is its frontispiece. Hobbes had specifically designed it as a symbolic representation of the work. Thus Agamben devotes much of his analysis to understanding it. The sovereign stands at the center of the piece, constituted with many faces. In the original, these faces stared outwards, but a later version all find themselves staring up at the face of the sovereign. In the sovereign's hands are a crozier and a sword, representing spiritual and temporal power within the hands of the state. All of these are fairly standard observations, but Agamben brings out some of the stranger aspects. The Sovereign claims absolute political power, yet he stands outside of the city, menacing it. Additionally, the Sovereign holds the crozier in the left hand and the sword in the right hand. This reversed the traditional iconography, where the spiritual power was most proper and temporal a product of sin. God's right-hand worked through the Church, whereas his left-hand (his improper power) worked through coercive restraint. This reversal itself is scandalous, but it begs the question: why did Hobbes name this mortal god "Leviathan"? A serpentine water-born creature, often identified with satan and the forces of darkness, why would Hobbes claim this ominous figure for the majestic force that prevented the State of Nature? And, again, why is the Sovereign stands outside a city that is nearly empty?

Agamben cites the rich scholarship of Noel Malcolm to explain the relationship between the faces of the constituents and the sovereign. Rather than disaggregated individuals absorbed, as if souls trapped within the body of the sovereign, Malcolm relates Hobbes' vision to new inventions in optical illusion. Hobbes was interested in new inventions that created a unified face out of a kaleidoscope of many different faces. The sovereign's face is, from various perspectives, a whole variety of different faces. It is perhaps the case that Hobbes believed representation - with the sovereign as The People of the political community - was illusion. It was this threshold of political constitution which formed a political "people" out of the pre-/post-political "multitude", who existed in the State of Nature. However, once the multitude formed a people to constitute a state (whether monarchic, aristocratic, or democratic) they resumed their multitudinous state within the protection of the sovereign. It was this multitude that, if agitated and stirred to rebellion, which could plunge a kingdom into chaos, where the masses of individuals wage war against The People represented in the sovereign. To end the civil war, the multitude must once again resolve this return to the State of Nature. With a "war of all against all" - reducing life to being nasty, brutish, and short - a People must reconstitute a stable form of sovereignty and dissolve again into the multitude, which may again wage war. The cycle continues, but it is precisely the exogenous element of the non-political "multitude" which government must restrain within itself, though it can never resolve it.

To return to the question of the empty city, Agamben notes that the only figures that exist in the frontispiece are guards and plague-doctors. Like plague victims, the multitude must remain excluded through a quarantine, banished from the city. Yet it is precisely through their exclusion (which Agamben notes is a form of belonging; ex-clusio as a form of capture) that the multitude are held under political power. One is banished from the city, but subjected to its most extreme power. Thus in the Hobbesian vision: it is the multitude captured within the city's politics, held in check by military guards and the bio politics of plague doctors, whereas The People remain within the Leviathan, outside the City, looming over it. The Sovereign is above the politics, which it establishes, and the non-political households remained trapped beneath its authority through their exclusion. The People is none other than the Sovereign, which as a single royal prince or an assembly of citizens, possesses a unified power. However the People cannot belong to politics. Therefore, the permanent state of civil war, which has become our norm, appears in this confusion. The People can never be represented except as an illusion, and the power of the state based upon this illusion must be used to subjugate the multitude which threaten to plunge the state back into a state of nature. But the power the Sovereign has assumed is a monopoly of violence, the very freedom in the state of nature. Thus the paradox emerges: the sovereign is nothing other than the institutionalization of the state-of-nature.

This paradox has haunted all modern nationalist politics, from the French Revolution onwards. The People is the constituent power which establishes the state and its politics. Yet as constituent sovereign, it can't belong to the constituted powers of government which exist at its behest. Thus The People can't belong, but remain outside or hidden, to the form of national government they produce. Instead, The People can only be represented. Yet, as Hobbes knew, this was itself an optical illusion. The core of the modern democratic nation-state is nothing other than a void. The state-of-nature becomes a simultaneous myth of past and future, a nightmare out of which man emerged and a nightmare which man may return to in the explosion of civil war. Rather than the Hellenic cycle, the Hobbesian sovereign puts an end to it through a complete collapse. Every state remains in a permanent state-of-nature, a civil war that remains at the core of the sovereign's government.

It's here the core question returns: why the demonic figure of Leviathan? Hobbes' placement of the sovereign outside of the city flows also from the obscuration of his body. Where is the sovereign standing? The likely option is that the sovereign's body is submerged in water, befitting the aquatic origins. But this too is not original, but draws on medieval iconography. It is the antichrist who is an enthroned prince, standing or seated upon the satanic serpent within the chaotic waters. He too bears the sword, but (like the Hobbesian sovereign) in his right (proper) hand. At the same time, Hobbes was fully committed to the political significance of Christ's Kingdom of God. Christ would not govern through delegated priestly authorities, but directly over a city. Yet that Kingdom, with its body the Church, was not present. This here reveals the key to Hobbes' politics and his political theology. It's worth quoting Agamben at length:

"If we take seriously the Hobbesian assertion according to which the Kingdom of God should be understood not metaphorically but literally, this means that at the end of time the cephalic fiction of the Leviathan could be erased ad the people discover its own body. The caesura that divides the body political - a body visible only in the optical fiction of the Leviathan, but in fact unreal - and the real, yet politically invisible multitude, will be bridged at the end in the perfect Church. But this also means that until then no real unity, no political body is actually possible: the body political can only dissolve itself into a multitude and the Leviathan can only live together up until the end with Behemoth - with the possibility of civil war." (63)

This analysis explains, in part, the radical scandal Hobbes unleashed. For the "monster of Malmesbury", the Church does not exist, or only exists in potential, and thus the Kingdom of God is radically invisible from the contemporary world of politics. The messianic kingdom is not represented in a priesthood, which had become a Behemoth in the Presbyterian clergy which agitated against the royal sovereign. The Kingdom of God can't be represented at all, and thus all churches cannot claim any spiritual authority to themselves. Rather than an atheistic ploy against religion, Hobbes should be taken seriously as a radical, if eccentric, Christian which would not receive any half-measures about the coming Kingdom. Politics as it was, as well as all efforts to reconstitute Christendom, cannot be realized. The unified spiritual and temporal authority of the state does not, thus, serve a truly positive function. It is not the katechon, the one which restrains evil and the coming of the Antichrist. Rather, the state precisely exhibits the characteristics of Antichrist. Here Hobbes - maybe unintentionally - opens up the possibility of a messianic politics:

"The kingdom of the Leviathan and the kingdom of God are two politically autonomous realities, which must never be confused; yet they are eschatologically connected, in the sense that the first will necessarily have to disappear when the second is realised." (67)

For Agamben, this taps into a similar tradition as Walter Benjamin. Drawing on the imagery of the saints, at the end of time, feasting upon the Leviathan, so too would the coming community, the new politics, the Kingdom of God, draw sustenance from the state which no longer rules. The only solution to the conditions of global civil war, where all distinctions are confused, is to recognize the roots from which it emerge. The Greek distinctions of political and economic - translated somewhat into the connected distinction between spiritual and temporal power in Christendom - have reached a point of complete chaos and confusion. There's no possibility of return. Instead, the hope must be found in the political theology of a Hobbes, which saw the radical separation between the Leviathan and the Kingdom of God. It means the machine, which constantly produces its own demise, must cease. There's no hope that democratic politics will produce the same kind of stand-still which Hellens and Medieval Christians achieved. Instead, democracy only intensifies the crisis, resulting in the complete politicization of the household and the complete economization of the city. Crisis will continually paper over the ambiguity of The People's simultaneous dominance and exclusion, manifest most fully in the turbulent multitude under the guard of soldiers and doctors. It is global governance under the auspices of NATO and WHO, as the normative governance of nation-states become paralyzed. Instead, hope must emerge from an end, where the Christ slays the Antichrist-Leviathan with the breath of his mouth. It is the hope beyond nation or state.