The stowaways of fiction

"From a symbol of perpetual dignitas, the metaphor of the body politic then becomes the cipher of the absolute and superhuman character of sovereignty", wrote Giorgio Agamben in Homo sacer. From Leviathan onwards, can we revisit the dispute over secularization, particularly in light of the controversy between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson? This is the first question to be addressed in this session. The esoteric interpretation of the image raises the question of the monster in politics, but also of how to unmask it. The analysis begins again with the conceptual character of the Fool in chapter 15 of Leviathan, whom we define with Céline Spector as a free rider, a stowaway in the political system, whose role is to confront the unreason of political fictions.

Contents

• The composite face, sign of the State: instituting the figurative
• A look back at the "secularization quarrel" (Jean-Claude Monod)
• Ernst Kantorowicz, Elias Bickerman and Roman imperial apotheosis
• "From a symbol of perpetual dignitas, the metaphor of the body politic then becomes the cipher of the absolute and superhuman character of sovereignty" (Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer)
• The king, the beast and the Roman law formula vitae necisque potestas (Yan Thomas)
• Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson: secularized theological concepts, theologized political concepts
• Carl Schmitt in search of Führung : The Leviathan in Thomas Hobbes' Doctrine of the State. Meaning and failure of a political symbol (1938)
• Leviathan's two deaths: as a great man and as a machine
• What if Leviathan had the wrong monster? Behemoth and the nomos of the Earth
• "This is an entirely esoteric book", by Benito Cereno
• Suddenly unveiling the hidden side of the state can only be done between oneself and others
• "To show naked what they strive every day to veil with a thousand kinds of artifice" (Gabriel Naudé, Considérations politiques sur les coups d'état, 1639)
• The task of the intellectual is "to name things, to cleanse the mind, to get rid of dead words, worn-out concepts, outdated ways of thinking..." (Jean-Richard Bloch to Curzio Malaparte, November 20, 1931)
• The Foole 's irruption in chapter 15 of Leviathan : the unstable moment
• To say that the people are represented is to believe that they pre-exist the political process
• "It raises the question of whether injustice, once the fear of God has been put aside (for the same Fool has said in his heart thatthere is no God) is not sometimes compatible with the reason that dictates to each man his own good."
• The intruder is a "conceptual character" (Gilles Deleuze)
• The free rider, stowaway of the political system (Céline Spector, Éloges de l'injustice. La philosophie face à la déraison, Paris, 2016)
• Facing violent reasoners head-on