Facing Leviathan
3. Morphology and history

The lecture relaunches on Christian forms of incorporation, based on various case studies (the feminine principle of Franciscan government sicut mater, the Virgin of Mercy and the bosom of Abraham, as examples of the sexual indecision of Christian anthropology). On the figurative level, the organicist metaphor of the king's portrait obviously stems from this. But in the Hobbesian case, the "fictitious person" of the sovereign institutes rather an artificialist metaphor: from the instituting multitude, Leviathan makes the instituted people, in which the individuals who compose it recognize themselves. By following the transformations of these composite forms, notably through the French acclimatization of the Leviathan figure in portraits of the king in the ^17th and 18th^centuries , we further question the reversibility of political fictions in parodic or subversive forms.

Contents

• When Francis of Assisi dreams of himself as a mother hen
• "The chicks are the brothers who have multiplied in number and grace and whom Francis' virtue is not enough to defend against the restlessness of men and the contradiction of tongues (Ps, 30, 21)"
• Babylonian dispersion: curse or rescue?
• Renouncing power, institutionalizing charisma
• Sicut mater, "as mother": the feminine principle and government (Jacques Dalarun, Gouverner c'est servir. Essai de démocratie médiévale, Paris, 2012)
• Marian incorporation: the Virgin of Mercy
• Abraham's bosom, the father figure and the maternal function: religion as "the father's need for protection" (Freud)
• Within sinuosities: the four meanings of sinus
• In contrast to Leviathan, "the fantasy of matricial indivision is attenuated and displaced: it is transferred to the exterior of the body and expressed through textile mediation" (Jérôme Baschet, Le sein du père. Abraham et la paternité dans l'Occident médiéval, Paris, 2000)
• Troubles dans le genre: remarks on the sexual indecision of Christian anthropology
• Seizing once again the explosive force of the act of image: a brief history of organicist metaphor (Gianluca Briguglia, Il corpo vivente dello Stato. Una metafora politica, Milan 2006)
• When the prince's armor holds up a mirror (Diane Bodard, on Giorgio Vasari's 1534 portrait of Duke Alexander de' Medici)
• What the image doesn't show: the soul of the body
• From organicist to artificialist metaphor: Hobbes's "fictitious person" (after Lucien Jaume)
• From the instituting multitude, Leviathan creates the instituted people, in which the individuals who institute it recognize themselves
• "The people is therefore the absolutely present which, as such, can never be present and therefore can only be represented" (Giorgio Agamben, La guerre civile: pour une théorie politique de la stasis, Paris, 2015)
• The state is aghost instituted in the figural
• "This institution of representation makes it possible to make a body, provided we no longer consider the "political body" from the "mystical body" of the republic, which had incarnation as its transcendental condition" (Philippe Crignon)
• The image of Leviathan is not just the mark or emblem of the state, but its sign
• "It comes to be the motor of action, and this through habituation or shock, which represent the two possibilities by which the image puts pressure on those who look at it" (Horst Haverkamp, Théorie de l'acte d'image, Paris, 2015)
• History of composite forms: Arcimboldo and the "energy of displacement" (Roland Barthes)
• Vertumne as political panegyric: the image heralds the golden age when abundance abolishes the constraints of nature
• "Composing the Body politic" (Dario Gamboni): Uncle Sam composes the face of the melting pot (Grant Hamilton, 1898)
• From Napoleon to George W. Bush, the reversal of political fiction
• Mao Zedong and Andy Warhol: when the face takes the place of the anonymous crowd (Hans Belting, Faces. A history of the face, Paris, 2017)
• The French acclimatization of Leviathan in Le corps politique ou les éléments de la loi morale et civile (1652): a "heroic, royal, solar and vigilante" Leviathan (Yann Lignereux, Les rois imaginaires. A visual history of monarchy from Charles VIII to Louis XIV, Rennes, 2016)
• Imagining the face of the State: Louis XIV in coronation costume by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1701) as a vanishing point
• When political vision leaves forbidden: "... he remained short, speechless and without ears; he was long enough without being able to recover" (Saint-Simon, Mémoires)
• Leviathan is the mortal god who prophesies the automation of power relationships, the politics of things through the government of numbers
• Tacitus, Annales, V, 10: Fingunt simul creduntque : "they fictionalize and at the same time believe in their fictions"