Anatomy of glory

Abstract

Is the insistence on lauds an archaism ? From the beginning of the ^13th century, royal praises refer to a theological-political matrix that no longer applies, since it confuses the reign with the priesthood. Following Giorgio Agamben's analysis, we propose to call this threshold of indistinction between the juridical and the religious, where liturgy, ceremonies, insignia and acclamations mingle, glory. Far from merely designating a chronological anteriority in the history of power, glory remains ever-present insofar as power remains that " object worthy of acclamation " thought by Pierre Legendre - and this is why the Middle Ages can state " the anthropological truth of European modernity ". If the mystery of the office is that of its efficacy, it is indeed this liturgical enigma that needs to be defined through political fictions. The Canossa penance (1077), a crucial test of the conflict between the empire and the papacy, lends itself to this type of historiographical analysis. Here, we propose a re-reading of the event, based on the quarrels of memory and conflicts of interpretation (following in particular the proposals of Johannes Fried). A ritualization of a prior negotiation filtered through Carolingian theorization of a Christian triumph of humility, Canossa is also, as Stefan Weinfurter has shown, an experience of disenchantment.

Contents

• Anamnesis, reprise, liturgy
• " This god, too, is not about to die. He always recognizes his own   : the gloomy end of Bouvines Sunday (1973)
• Philippe Auguste " in very bad company " (Bernard Guenée, quoted by Felipe Brandi, " Connaissance historique et usages politiques du passé. Considérations autour de l'épilogue du Dimanche de Bouvines de Georges Duby ", Cahiers du CRH, 2009)
• Duby and the inadequacy of history
• " If we take the author's aims seriously, however, it has to be said that this book by Kantorowicz has nothing more to tell us " (Otto Gerhard Oexle, L'historisme en débat. De Nietzsche à Kantorowicz, French translation, Paris, 2001)
• Marc Bloch, Ernst Kantorowicz and the fascination of power : parallel lives
• Contexts, fictions and experiences (Alain Boureau, Kantorowicz. Histoires d'un historien, Paris, 1991)
• Is the insistence on lauds an archaism ? " More than a chronologically earlier stage, we must think here of an ever-operating threshold of indistinction, where the juridical and the religious become perfectly indistinguishable " (Giorgio Agamben, Le règne et la gloire, transd. franç., Paris, 2008)
• Why does power need this " immense accumulation of spectacles " (Guy Debord) ?
• Le mystère de l'office est le mystère de l'efficacité (Giorgio Agamben , Opus dei , Paris, 2012)
• Identifying the enigma of theoretical fictions and novelistic inventions
• " We are not so much witnessing the flow of information as a pure spectacle, sacralized information, ritually unreadable " (DonDeLillo, Cosmopolis, 2003 )
• The fall of the course of experience : " Who, today, knows how to unearth the proverb that will get him out of trouble ? " (Walter Benjamin, " Experience and poverty ", 1933)
• Are we separated from this liturgical regime by which power gives itself as " an object worthy of acclamation " ? (Pierre Legendre, preface to Ernst Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae. Une étude des acclamations liturgiques et du culte souverain au Moyen Âge, French translation, Paris, 2004)
• Thinking about the theoretical value of the Middle Ages : " the Middle Ages enunciated the anthropological truth of the foundations of European modernity " (Pierre Legendre, " Death, power, speech. Ernst Kantorowicz au travail de la fiction et du politique ", in Sur la question dogmatique en Occident, Paris, 1994)
• The cutting edge of writing and the poisonous heart of things : " what must be found through the whiteness and inertia of death is not the lost quiver of life, but the meticulous unfolding of truth " (Michel Foucault, Le beau danger [1969]
• Trust in the powers of imbalance : " We are inexhaustible in experiences " (Henri Michaux, Passages, Paris, 1950)
• A rhythmic but heterogeneous history of afterglow and resurgence (Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Les aventures de la liberté. Une histoire souterraine du ^XIXe siècle en France, Paris, 2016)
• Gang nach Canossa, from Bismarck (1872) to Henri IV (1077)
• Investing, depositing, annihilating : competition between two claims to the universal
• A long history of the availability of a humiliating memory (Harald Zimmermann)
• The Sonderweg in European history (Pierre Monnet)
• Reversing memories and inventing myth (Johannes Fried, Canossa. Entlarvung einer Legende. Eine Streitschrift, Berlin, 2012)
• Canossa, or the ritualization of a prior negotiation ? (Benoît Grévin, " Polémique de la "Mémorique" ", Francia, 2015)
• The power of ritual and the Christian triumph of humility
• A precedent : the penitence of Theodosius through the Carolingian filter (Mayke de Jong, The penitential State. Authority and atonement in the age of Louis the Pious, 814-840, Cambridge, 2009)
• Canossa or the political experience of disenchantment (Stefan Weinfurter, Canossa. Die Entzauberung der Welt, Munich, 2006)
• The Gregorian chiasmus : " under the pope, princeps and verus imperator, the hierarchical apparatus of the Roman Church - notwithstanding important aspects of Constitutionalism - manifested a tendency to become the perfect prototype of an absolute, rational monarchy founded on a mystical basis, while at the same time the State increasingly tended to become a quasi-church and, in other respects, a mystical monarchy founded on a rational basis " (Ernst Kantorowicz, " Mysteries of the State. Un concept absolutiste et ses origines médiévales [1955], translated into French in Mourir pour la patrie, Paris, 1984)