Facing the Leviathan
1. The visual event

Iconographic analysis of the mystery of the profaned host depicted by Paolo Uccello in the Urbino predella (1467-1468) raises questions about the staging of Eucharistic theater, the status of the emblem, and the reversibility of political fiction: between the beast and the sovereign, between the savages of the New World and the enslavement of the Old World. But the question remains: why is it necessary, at certain moments, to make visible, why should thought sometimes come to a standstill in images? The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), an event in thought that is also a visual event, is where our thinking comes to a halt. So here we are again, faced with the monster: is it going to devour us or incorporate us? And why can't Hobbes think of the state without creating an image of it? With Louis Marin, the analysis considers the stakes involved in the very form of the frontispiece, showing the inscription of an illegible name on the front of the book. Then, with Quentin Skinner, it examines the modalities of visual eloquence in Hobbes's various treatises - which include republican criticism and cannibalistic power.

Contents

• Why is it necessary, at certain moments, to make visible?
• The history of images as the history of fixed assets, "When thought suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions" (Walter Benjamin)
• Returning to déjà-vu in images: staring into the tyrant's face
• Political iconology and the art of emblems: André Alciat's Emblemata (1531)
• What is an emblem for Alciat? "A particular species of epigram", i.e. "an object taken from history or nature likely to receive an ingenious meaning"
• The reversibility of political fiction: the king's two bodies andhabeas corpus
• Iconology, iconoclasm, iconoclash (Bruno Latour): the destruction of Louis XV's equestrian statue according to Louis-Sébastien Mercier, "everything was hollow, power and statue"
• Back to the Eucharistic society from the Altarpiece of the Seven Sacraments painted in 1445 by Flemish artist Rogier Van der Weyden: social system, spatial system, regime of the visible
• Urbino, altarpiece of the high altar of the church of Corpus Domini, John of Ghent (1473-1474): Jesus distributing the Eucharist to the Apostles
• Making theological fiction visible: The Miracle of the Profaned Host, predella of the altarpiece, Paolo Uccello (1467-1468)
• Six scenes, one film: the Parisian precedent of the Miracle des Billettes (Pierre Francastel, Revue archéologique, 1952)
• A "Eucharistic theater in which medieval Jews are enlisted for doctrinal illustration" (Jean-Louis Schefer, L'hostie profanée. Histoire d'une fiction théologique, Paris, 2007)
• Le monstre politique, génération fictionnelle (Dom Calvet, Dissertation sur les revenants en corps, les excommuniés et les vampires..., Paris, 1751)
• Political pathology as an imbalance of substance between body and soul
• The exacerbation of symbolic marking in the images of the ritual murder of Simon of Trent (1475), contrasted with "this hope of the 'movement' of resemblances, this blurring of similarities" (Jean-Louis Schefer) in the Urbino predella
• Le souverain, bête de Cène (return to the dream of Louis VII, Grandes Chroniques de France, BnF, ms fr. 2813)
• Savages of the New World, enslavement of the Old World: the mobility of engravings from Las Casas' Brève relation de la destruction des Indes (1598) and the ubiquity of barbarism
• Here we are again, faced with the monster: Leviathan (1651): will it devour or incorporate us? And why can't Thomas Hobbes think of the state without creating an image of it?
• Event of thought, visual event: Thomas Hobbes "inscribes our felicity in the very anxiety of our desiring lives" (Luc Foisneau, Hobbes. La vie inquiète, Paris, 2016)
• A big beast stands guard, but it is we ourselves who, by obeying it, give it the means to guard us
• The frontispiece is a screen: "the face and main entrance of a large building that is presented head-on to the eyes of the spectators" (Furetière)
• The challenges of Louis Marin's frontispiece: showing the inscription of an illegible name
• Hobbes the humanist: the 1629 translation of Thucydides' Eight Books of the Peloponnesian War and its frontispiece
• Visual eloquence, the deliberation of the Spartan aristoi and the harangue to Athenian citizens
• "A democracy, in fact, is nothing more than an aristocracy of orators, interrupted sometimes by the temporary monarchy of a single orator" (Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Natural and Political Law, 1640)
• When the dictator is dictated to by the mob he subjugates: understanding Hobbes by identifying what he is fighting against (Quentin Skinner, Hobbes et la critique républicaine, Paris, 2008)
• What remains of freedom in the grip of arbitrariness
• The three fields on the frontispiece of De Cive (1642): heaven, empire and liberty
• The state of nature and freedom, where "anyone can by right rob and kill others": manhunt and the return of cannibals
• The curtain highlights the fact that not everything has been shown yet: the performance is not over