Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins

Binding Violence

b i n di ng v iolence Literary Visions of Political Origins

Moira Fradinger

s ta nf ord uni v ersity press Stanford, California 2010

This book has been published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund, Yale University. Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. “Soldiers’ Rest” from Poems by Roque Dalton ©1984 by Roque Dalton. Reprinted with permission of Curbstone Press. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fradinger, Moira    Binding violence : literary visions of political origins / Moira Fradinger.       p. cm.    Includes bibliographical references and index.    isbn 978-0-8047-6330-1 (cloth : alk. paper)    1.  Violence in literature.  2.  Politics in literature.  3.  Politics and literature.  4.  Literature, Comparative.  I.  Title. pn56.v53f73 2010 809'.933552—dc22       2009029231 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/14 Minion.

A Anamaría Lascano y Raúl Fradinger A Erich y Sonia A John

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Literature, Violence, and Politics

3

Part I: Sophocles’ Antigone or The Invention of Politics: We the City Antigone and the Polis

33

The Most Modern of Tragedies: The Politics of Burial

46

Creon’s Edict: The Barbarians at Home

54

Dying Democratically: Antigone’s Ritual

68

Interlude Modern Tempo—Democratic Overture, State Finale

87

Part II: D. A. F. de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom or The Reinvention of Politics: We the People Sade’s Text and Sade’s Times

105

The Libertine Alliance: No Ordinary Pact in Times of War

118

Necrophiliac Cannibals: Dismembering “Nonpeople,” Membering “The People”

127

Domestic Consistency: Not Laws, but Order

137

Frame within the Frame: Riveting Voices and Gazes

148

Interlude Modern Sovereignty: Perversion of Democracy?

161

Contents

Part III: Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat or Sovereign Politics: We the Nation-State Vargas Llosa’s Appeal to History: Within and Beyond Latin America

185

Necropolitics I: From an “African Horde” to a Modern Country: Trujillo’s Body Politic and the Haitian Enemy

202

Necropolitics II: Rebonding the Nation: Trujillo’s Body Natural and the Specularity of Enmity

225

Epilogue The Force of Imagination

241

Notes Index

253 323

viii

Acknowledgments

In a world such as ours, where three-quarters of the population live in poverty or in the midst of war, writing about literature and violence—let alone writing—is a privilege. I am indebted to many people and institutions for having granted me that privilege, and to my parents, Anamaría and Raúl, above all for the efforts they made to grant their children the advantage of an education. The ideas suggested in this book are the result of so many partnerships that it is as difficult to do justice to them as it is to account for the times that led to their crystallization. Early work for this book was done under the auspices of Yale University’s intellectual community and with Yale’s financial support, for which I am most grateful. The book took its current shape partly during a postdoctoral Mellon fellowship at the Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania; it was completed during a sabbatical year granted to me by a Morse Fellowship at Yale University. I wish to express sincere gratitude to the editorial board of Stanford University Press: special thanks to Emily-Jane Cohen and Norris Pope for their warmth, support, and professionalism; to Sarah Crane Newman, John Feneron, and Martin Hanft for their extraordinary efficiency, kindness, and help in the production process. I am also most grateful to Marcel Hénaff and an anonymous reader who so generously offered comments on the manuscript. A Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund grant from Yale helped with publication costs; thanks, too, to Jon Butler and Emily Bakemeier, whose support at Yale has been vital throughout. I benefited from invaluable comments made by many readers at different stages of work. For their advice on my early work, I am grateful to Shoshana Felman, whose lessons in reading have been invaluable, and to Roberto González Echeverría, Michael Holquist, and Rolena Adorno. I must also express immense gratitude to Rosi Braidotti, who, in spite of not having been directly involved ix

Acknowledgments

with this book, long ago and far away gave me a clearer idea of the kind of scholar I wanted to become. I am short of words to thank Laura Wexler for all these years of reading, support, friendship, and intellectual conversation, which made so many things possible. To have Carol Jacobs as a close reader, mentor, and friend is a privilege and a joy I could not have imagined: I cannot thank her enough for her comments on this manuscript, her unmatched intellectual generosity, her friendship, and her readiness to help, even at the last minute. I could not have been more fortunate to have for an intellectual home Yale University’s inexhaustible intellectual community, and especially the Department of Comparative Literature, where collegiality makes all the difference. Thanks to David Quint, Dudley and Stephanie Andrew, Katie Trumpener, and Richard Maxwell for the intellectual conversation, support, and wonderful spirit of giving, to Ala Alryyes for the friendship but also for so many rides back home when I had too many books to carry on foot; to Peter Brooks, Francesco Casetti, Rainer Nägele, Barry McCrea, Alex Beecroft, Katerina Clark, Pericles Lewis, Henry Sussman, Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, and Haun Saussy, and to Victor Bers in the Classics Department for his wonderful seminar on Greek tragedy. Michael Denning, Nigel Alderman, Geetanjali Chanda, Maurice Samuels, Hazel Carby, Jean-Jacques Poucel, and Dale Martin have been inspiring intellectual companions and supportive friends throughout. Without Mary Jane Stevens’s assistance and friendship it would be hard for me to imagine Yale; thanks also for Angie Schrieber’s kindness and help. Geoffrey and Renée Hartman’s humorous and persistent message that I “should sometimes look at the good side of things” always made life so much easier; they, as well as Ben Kiernan and Dori Laub, have helped shape my thinking about genocide and representation. Many lines in this book stem from passionate discussions about politics, culture, and justice with three cherished friends at the Yale Law School whom I cannot thank enough; they made their homes a home for me. Owen Fiss and George Priest are the best of interlocutors, since they also inhabit my Argentine home; Paul Kahn, who always helps me think through the problem of violence, also invited me to his summer seminar in Germany on law and violence, an experience that had an impact on this book. I am short of words to acknowledge the intellectual inspiration and friendship of newer interlocutors: Fred Jameson’s questions made me reconsider several passages and several other problems for a future inquiry on violence: his intellectual vision, critical passion, and generosity of heart and mind are 

Acknowledgments

unparalleled. John Beverley encouraged me to publish this book after reading a summary of it. Thanks for Susan Willis’s wonderful insights and generosity; and to Ariel Dorfman, whose spirit of giving, political and literary writing, and limitless enthusiasm for life inspire me constantly. Special thanks to Gerry Prince for encouraging me to publish an earlier part of my work on Sade in French Forum (“Riveted by the Voice: The Sadean City at Silling,” French Forum . [Spring ]: –); thanks also to Shane Herron and Sol Peláez for publishing an earlier version of my thoughts on Antigone in Theory@Buffalo (“Violent Boundaries: Antigone’s Political Imagination,” Theory@Buffalo, Issue: Democracy and Violence [Spring ]). It is true that one always writes in a foreign language: our mother tongue is at first alien to us, and then one struggles with written language as something alien to the “native” oral idiom. Nonetheless, writing in a language that is not one’s mother’s tongue has entailed more hours of mourning for me: one mourns metaphors that have the sound of music in one’s mother tongue but do not make the least sense in English; one mourns those fictions that made reality livable while growing up and that one cannot imagine in a language other than that of one’s childhood; one misses tones, emphases, concepts, and ways of perceiving that have no translation. It would all have been impossible without the support of friends here, at home, or scattered all over the world. My biggest thanks to sisters in the United States—Nadia Altschul, Kamari Clarke, Sara Nadal-Melsió, and Ana Puga—who not only read my work critically but with whom I also share the travails of uprootedness within and beyond the academy; special thanks to Leo Lisi and Olivier Reid, who read the entire manuscript with incredible patience, critical insight, and eye for detail. Thanks for the friendship of Joel Tolman, Cecilia Enjuto-Ranjel, and Pedro García Caro, who also offered invaluable help for last minute problems; thanks for Erik Butler’s wicked sense of humor and expertise in classics; and to Elizabeth Tulis, Catherine Flynn, Sonya Collins, and Tobias Hetch for help at different stages with editing. Thanks to Marta Rivas and Jorge Santiago, and Julie and Krimo Bokreta for so many meals in Philadelphia, and to fellow travelers María Will­stedt, Masha Salazkina, Luca Caminati, Fernando Rosenberg, Amy Chazkel, Pepe Cárdenas, Kate Holland, Duncan Chesney, John Charles, Patricia Gherovici, Gustavo Klurfan, and Marc Caplan. Having lived in seven different countries means that “home” is mainly created by the friends one meets along the way. Shared nomadisms with friends of friends have been vital throughout: enormous gratitude goes to Seema xi

Acknowledgments

Kazi, Elizabeth Janz Mayer-Rieckh, Marcos Mariño, Araceli Varela, Ariel and Adria­na Méndez, Sylvia Pópoli, Sylvia Mitraud, Vladimir Flórez, Miguel Rojas, and Philippe Skolle; and a debt is owed to an old friend, Gustavo Guerrero, who long ago, in Caracas, showed me a different entrance to poetry through the modern Greeks. Buenos Aires, though, is still the city where the unfailing loyalty of old friends anchors and revivifies me. Thanks to Kuky Coria and Ma­ riano Plotkin for insisting that I take the plane to come to Yale; to Elena Alloé, Andrea Tolchinsky, Mirta Clara, Miriam Wlosko, and Debora Yanco for their constant help and wisdom; to Jorge Myers for always going out of his way to share his boundless knowledge; to Francisco Naishtat for his insightful reading of a chapter; to Pablo Kreimer and Gabriel Guralnik for their unbeatable sense of humor in the face of catastrophe; to Laura Klein, Silvia Chejter, Gerardo Gutman, Mercedes Etchemendi and Marcelo Ferrante, Eduardo Abbate, July Cháneton, Viviana Matta, Anahí Valent, Miguel Wald, Itatí Acuña, Judith Filc, and Peter Kahn for being there at crucial moments; and then there is my old debt to Pablo Pavesi, for helping me long ago to find my roots in literature. My family is inscribed in every single line written, book read, tear dropped, smile given, and scintilla of happiness or misery felt throughout this process. No words suffice to express my debt to this special circle that sustains, simply put, life itself. I am who I am thanks to them. I owe many of my intellectual and political passions to my parents, both of whom are also the most loyal supply of books, films, articles, and acid humor. I rely on my brother Erich and my sister Sonia as I do on no one else: they, along with Cecilia, Luis, Iván and Vera, Camila, and Agustín, make every last minute of every trip home precious. In Canada, it is Liz and Jack, Pamela, Peter, Stephanie, and Aidan, Ian, Addison, Nick, and Alex who make all the difference. And if John, who read, edited, and (rigorously) criticized all that I wrote, had not entered my life (and cooked so many meals), I would not be able to imagine how to look at life again. For my gratitude to his love, I could always try to find metaphors and metonymies, but this gratitude, like poetry, has no translation: haces añicos los miedos; luego me muestras los remolinos de mar donde esparcirlos para iniciar la ceremonia de la alquimia.

xii

Introduction

[H]umans are political animals because they are literary animals: not only in the Aristotelian sense of using language in order to discuss questions of justice, but also because we are confounded by the excess of words in relation to things.

—Jacques Rancière1

The question poses itself whether there are no other than violent means for regulating conflicting human interests.

—Walter Benjamin2

Literature, Violence, and Politics

“Binding violence”: at once a name for a violence that sutures frayed political borders, and a crisp formulation of the premise of this book. The literary visions under review here represent violence as binding a political community together when its borders are in crisis; violence, rather than political reason, is woven into and bound to the fragile determinations of political membership. The texts I examine offer us insights into the violent fabric of autonomous political life and its inextricable relation to the travails of imagination; imagination, in its turn, bears the imprint of violence. Benjamin’s concern about the possibility of a nonviolent regulation of conflict in his  “Critique of Violence” challenges us to ask whether we can summon the power of imagination for the task of reducing violence in human social interaction. The ways in which violence is inter-tissued into society speak to how we envision its possibility; any configuration of society depends on the successful avoidance of absolute violence—that is, the violence of extermination. Politics is one form of praxis that binds and is bound by violence; the literary imagination is another. I do not wish to make a metaphysical claim about violence as a constant of that elusive entity “human nature”—an entity that nonetheless underlies most intellectual efforts to imagine the possibility of human change.3 Rather, my reflections in this book are prompted by literary visions of the centrality of violence for determining the texture of politics and literature. As we inhabit a world permanently threatened by self-destruction, my interpretations are guided by the imperative of expanding our capacity to conceptualize the problem of violence, and to read politically not only literary texts but also the fictions that give meaning to violence in social life. I examine literary works as both embedded within and struggling against the political imagination of their times—a political imagination that both shapes and is shaped by political action. 

Introduction

Literary imagination, violence, and political life are the three axes that organize my readings of Sophocles’ Antigone (ca.  b.c.e.), D. A. F. de Sade’s  Days of Sodom (Cent vingt journées de Sodome, ), and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo, ). The readings in this book propose that the political imagination of these texts grants violence the role of instantiating a new political membership when the borders of a given political constituency have been thrown into crisis. Thus I call these texts fictions of political origins: they do not effect critiques of existing societies, as, for instance, the genre of political satire would do, but rather offer literary imaginings of the inauguration of political worlds out of a background of civic dissolution. In the texts I review, membership, which is probably the most properly political question for an autonomous polity, is not represented as predicated upon figures of reason, agreement, contract, or kinship. Nor is it predicated, in accord with the Freudian model, upon the task of mourning the murder of an all-powerful father, a mourning that would establish the law that binds a new community of brothers by prohibiting violence. Rather, a specific kind of violence, which I have chosen to name binding violence, clarifies the new borders of the autonomous collective. This violence does not subdue an enemy but exterminates it. It targets not the external invader or the enemy that belongs to a social category—a group already defined along the lines of gender, class, race, or ethnicity, for instance. It is a violence that targets an internal enemy carved out of a previous community of friends: it transforms the brother, the citizen, the daughter, the ancestor, into an enemy. As such, this enemy signifies a crisis of limits: as the figure of an interior transformed into an exterior, it preserves its interiority at the same time that it becomes foreign, assuming a liminal position that comes to define the outside and the inside. The creation and elimination of this enemy figures the temporary fantasy of a binding of the community. This book argues that the particular representation of the link between violence and membership in these fictions of political origins is a literary symptom of a formal foundational problem constitutive of an autonomous sphere of the political. Implicit in this argument is the notion that such literary symptoms may appear when political autonomy becomes the dominant imagination of a given era. In an autonomous political sphere, membership is not given, but it must be defined. If “we” give ourselves our own rules, who are “we”? While any given resolution of this question occurs within a specific historical situation, its internal formal paradox remains an enigma: if “we” govern, who would want 



Literature, Violence, and Politics

to be excluded from this “we” on the basis of consensus? In democratic theory, a democratic solution for the definition of the demos has yet to be found. In the texts under review, violence determines membership at the hour of political refoundation. I have read this representation of violence as an invitation to take seriously the call for a democratic imagination so as to face the paradoxes involved in all attempts to fix the limits of the autonomous demos. I argue that this “literary knowledge” can expand the range of names we use to account for violence. To a certain extent, my interpretative gesture methodologically hinges upon a political allegory. Nonetheless, I see the link between violence and membership as echoing the conflict that drives allegorical representation as such. If allegory is the tension between a desire for the closure of the gap between sign and reality and the realization that this gap is impossible to close, binding violence represents the desire for, and failure of, a similar closure in terms of the system we identify as an autonomous political community, which we can rephrase as the desire and impossibility to close the gap between the universal abstract ideal of equality (universal political membership) and its concrete determinations. Ultimately, these questions are bound to lead us to yet another problem, which will be directly raised in my reading of Antigone’s politics: if the borders of the demos were to be eliminated, and universal equality realized, would this mean the end of politics? Without claiming that these questions entirely account for the texts’ construction, this book argues that they speak to our political life and its ways of thinking through violence.

Politics The political life to which I refer is primarily a theoretical sphere, whose basic meaning is a vision of the collective; it stands in contrast to images of isolated human existence—for instance, hermetic life, or what at several stages in modern political theory is envisioned as a state of nature. Whether the collective is considered to be a fact of human existence or a relational fiction, it is determined, though not exhausted, by the imaginative articulation of the contingency of human interaction and its violent forms. All communal life entails such imaginative articulations; political life is a specific configuration of a collective’s relation to violence, to the most extreme expression of power. My readings in this book concern a historically bound imagining, widely shared in the “modern West,” of what political life should aim to achieve, or should rely on, in order to cope with the contingency of human interaction: 

Introduction

autonomy. The normative space of politics for the modern West—if not its definition proper—is a self-governed collective, whose members control their destiny in communal processes of negotiation. This ideal of an autonomous society—one of the meanings of modern sovereignty—is to be contrasted with that of a heteronomous society, in which communal decisions are imagined as being made by external or extrahuman agents, such as divine entities.4 I thus relate the texts that I examine in this book to a tradition whose ideal is popular sovereignty. This involves both popular decision-making and the setting of limits to the ever questioning self-instituting activity resulting from universal participation, a participation that radicalizes the contingency of political life. Modernity’s critics have shown us, however, how the setting of limits relates to a competing image of modern political sovereignty—namely, autonomy’s ghostly other, domination: both control over others and the setting of limits upon the influence of others. I wish to clarify my reference to the “West,” since I do not aim to establish any factual specificity of its geohistorical limits, so much as the operational extent of its “fiction,” strictly linked to the image of political autonomy and its dual conceptions of sovereignty. To identify the actual borders of the “West” is futile after five hundred years of European colonialism and amid the current globalizing phenomena. The “West” has always had porous borders, though culturally construed as having an identity on the basis of establishing its “other”—a Eurocentrism that has been thoroughly deconstructed throughout the twentieth century. I use the term “West” throughout the book for its practical convenience as it situates the texts under review in a political tradition of thought that became dominant within the geopolitical space of the European capitalist colonial powers born after the fall of feudalism. Within this tradition, the tension between autonomy and domination was displayed on a global scale, as “the West” was exported in response to capitalism’s increasing need for a universalism that could facilitate its expansion.5 Especially relevant for my overview is the fact that after the Renaissance, and particularly after , this tradition constructs its ancestry by recovering what it can and what it wants of ancient Greek democracy (the period between the eighth and fifth centuries b.c.e.), as the cornerstone of Western modernity’s political self-understanding. In this book, ancient democracy, particularly as discussed in my reading of Antigone, appears as the birth of politics according to the Western fiction. While I strongly agree with the argument that the fabrication of ancient Greece as ancestor to the West served European cultural and economic interests,6 I do not 



Literature, Violence, and Politics

engage in discussion about whether democracy actually started in Greece or whether the West comes indeed from Greece. Instead, I use this fictional political ancestry as a “generative grammar” that yields the images of autonomy and domination that articulate modernity’s political action, violence, and literary representation. In terms of its vision of community, the political imagination of autonomy most radically entails the principle of equality (whether in its ancient, or modern liberal and radical formulations) as the basis of a new political binding, and thus, of society’s unlimited capacity to judge its own foundational premises critically. Once bloodlines, kinship, or religious and aristocratic privilege cease to be legitimate binding principles, establishing differential participation in decision-making, the crucial question of how to articulate difference must be radically reimagined in a society of “equal and free rivals,” as the members of the newly inaugurated Greek democracy in ancient times considered themselves. One can say that the fundamental gesture of the Greek “invention of politics” was a movement of inclusion: an expansion of the sphere of public decision-making to all propertied male members of the demes.7 I follow Christoph Menke in identifying the signature of political modernity in the appropriation of the idea of equality.8 This meant then, as it does now, “the dissolution of all markers of certainty [generating] a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, and [. . .] of relations between self and other,” as Claude Lefort puts it (Democracy and Political Theory: ). For lack of a “natural” order, this kind of politics deals with contingency by way of structuring conflict. The violence of such structuring conflict is often seen as the struggle between constituted and constituting powers; its famous modern theoretical formulations range from the classic Marxist class-conflict to Walter Benjamin’s law-making and law-preserving violence, to Laclau’s and Mouffe’s “political antagonism,” to Rancière’s “disagreement,” to name but a few.9 Underlying all formulations lies the concept of a society that has granted itself the capacity to undo its institutions; thus some famous pronouncements about the “suicidal nature” of democracy, ranging from John Quincy Adams’s “there was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” to Jacques Derrida’s “democracy has always been suicidal.”10 A tragic predicament, one could say: to protect democracy against its others is to suspend its self-questioning, so that in preventing its suicide, we may assassinate it. The principle of equality inaugurates a particular anxiety in this type of political sphere: one of its central activities—if not the central one—is the resolu

Introduction

tion of its own definition of membership. This entails articulating equality and difference, rendering members equivalent to one another, not identical. Ideally, democracy’s inclusive principle posits that political virtue is human: no social determination, such as class, gender, or race, can limit participation. Logically speaking, the political space that opened up in ancient Greece would seemingly entail the dissolution of its own borders: the closure that signals the birth of the polis entails an exclusion that collides with democratic inclusiveness. Simply put, the binding together of the city as a distinct city goes against the principle of equality. However, popular sovereignty must have a people. The question that follows is: if the constitution of the demos cannot be consensual, then how are its decisions democratic? In Ian Shapiro’s words, “[Q]uestions relating to membership seem [. . .] prior to democratic decision-making, yet paradoxically they cry out for democratic resolution” (Democracy’s Edges: ); Alan Keenan fully expands this paradox into several formulations: to name but one, the conditions of autonomy’s permanent uncertainty rule out the possibility of full political autonomy, given that the definition of who and what the community is, can only be nonautonomous (Democracy in Question: ). An originary violence, or at least arbitrariness, insinuates itself here as establishing the demos, whose borders need not be only cleared but also defended at all times. We might summon here Michael Mann’s controversial thesis about modernity and a “dark side of democracy.”11 Another way to phrase this problem is to recall what Menke refers to as the dialectics of equality (Reflections of Equality: –). Modernity’s political imagination can be read in terms of the vicissitudes and questioning of the concept of equality. Equality’s internal mandate is equal treatment to every individual, but that depends on the existence of different individuals, and implies a limiting description of an “equal individual.” Insofar as it cannot be abstract, equality produces inequality: it depends on its other. In ancient times, social equality was not at stake, so the determinations of the only existing form of equality—political equality—were supported by social categories. The modern radicalization of equality, which began in the Renaissance but exploded in , brought the universalization of political equality (and set the conditions for the political demand for social equality), basing its support on the new category of “humanity.” This universalization made any of its concrete determinations necessarily a problem. Menke extracts from this modern experience two dominant versions of the politics of equality, phrasing them in terms of the opposition between Babeuf and Marx: the “utopian,” striving toward perfect 



Literature, Violence, and Politics

equality, and the “subversive,” demanding that existing social inequalities be addressed (ibid.: –). If I am allowed to modify Kant’s famous phrase, modernity finds in the dialectics of equality a “limit of political reason alone,” taking political reason to mean the deliberation with which democracy is usually associated.12 This is a limit that compels us to ponder whether there are specific forms of violence that emerge as a symptom of the failure of political reason to arbitrate what, from the point of view of equality, of a “political reason alone,” constitutes the arbitrary limits of equality. For lack of a democratic solution for membership, the political articulation of equality and difference might generate specific economies of violence in any given era. The “dark side” of an originary violence defines, in the fictions of political origins under review, the borders of the polis of Sophocles’ Creon and Antigone, of the society of equals of Sade’s libertines, and of the new nation of Vargas Llosa’s dictator. The chronological sequence of these texts follows a well-known Western narrative about the history of political autonomy. While most of Western history has not been democratic, these texts were written in times dominated by the democratic imagination. The Sophoclean tragedy belongs to the ancient Athenian experiment usually identified as the “invention of politics,” haunted nonetheless by the limitations it placed upon citizenship since Cleisthenes uncoupled it from kinship to link it to territorial residence. Athens experienced sequential crises in defining political membership: in Peter Riesenberg’s words, the definition of citizenship became the central institution of the Athenian constitution (Citizenship in the Western Tradition: ). Some six years before Antigone was staged, for instance, Pericles passed a law in – b.c.e. restricting citizenship to the offspring of Athenian parents; after the Peloponnesian War, oligarchs proposed restricting citizenship to three thousand on one occasion, and to “those who fought for this democracy” on another.13 The Sadean “friends in crime,” in turn, emerge during a time that has been called the “reinvention of politics,” and Vargas Llosa’s dictatorial nation is imagined in our times, labeled “the third wave” in the experiment of democracy.14 The “second birth” of democracy entailed the  universalization of equality based on the doctrine of human rights and the category of humanity. The “third wave” is the most recent of the vicissitudes of the universalization of equality, marked by the imperative “democratization” both of the European communist bloc and the globe: the last two decades of the twentieth century alone saw eighty-one countries across the five continents move from different forms of authoritarianism to democratic forms of government.15 The paradox 

Introduction

here is that the global rhetoric of universal democratization accompanies the increasing homogenization of culture and politics, resulting from the needs of capitalist development in our age of mediatization. On the one hand, democratic multiplicity is seen as the remedy to the twentieth century’s legacy of totalitarianism; on the other, the demise of the socialist alternative has resulted in the imperative of a global economic homogenization that equals democracy with liberalism and market economy, and labels all forms of opposition to the latter as “nondemocratic.” The spirit in the air can be found in formulations such as Shapiro’s “the democratic idea is close to non-negotiable in today’s world” (State of Democratic Theory: ), an ironic expression of our predicament, since negotiation is the lowest common denominator of democracy. To use Ignacio Ramonet’s felicitous phrase, we seem to inhabit an era of “pensée unique.”16 Paradoxical as this era is, I see this third wave as a “re-invention of democracy,” which debates the meaning of democracy after several failed incarnations in the last two centuries. While these three phases concern democratization, the first two open a public space in opposition to its absence in aristocratic regimes. In contrast, the absence in the third moment is different: a loss in meaning of certain forms of democratic participation within the confines of modern states. Contrary to the previous moments, the problem is not the absence of the political space of democracy but rather a distance between democratic ideals and their real manifestations (both in their social and liberal versions) in modern nation-state formations, and more recently, in processes of high control of participation related to the overpowering mediatization of society. This entails asking, for instance, if the articulation of social with political equality is unfinished business, still achievable within our (state) institutions—to recall Sade’s famous expression to his contemporaries, “yet another effort if you would become republican”—or if these institutions are inherently inadequate for that task. This is the loss of meaning that in my view propels contemporary thinkers to reread the democrats of the past, ranging from the ancient Greeks to philosophers such as Spinoza, and that contributes to the current evaluations of the limits and internal contradictions of both liberalism and Marxism, being carried out in an array of disciplines. At stake is perhaps not the “true” meaning of democracy but rather the meaning of our loss, which guides our need to reinvent democracy. Advancing some of the theoretical assumptions that I treat later on in this introduction, I wish to clarify that I read the texts studied here as symptoms emerging from times when democracy is reconfigured without claiming any 10



Literature, Violence, and Politics

historiographic unity. My study claims to be neither an empirically based historiography nor a philosophy of history. It does not argue that these three “waves” of democracy are identical or on any teleological continuum, or that these texts mean the same in the context of each of these historical waves. It argues that these texts share symptoms of political anxieties produced by explosions of the democratic imagination. The historical contextualization that I embark upon in each chapter has the methodological purpose of enabling me to read texts as symptoms of their times. Summoning historical context, which is inescapably a construction from the perspective of the present, in order to perform a symptomatic reading instead of a historiographic construction, is a way of avoiding the dilemma of being caught between a history that is either inaccessible or merely a projection of our contemporary situation. I emphasize the relation between the texts’ political imagination and a set of formal questions surrounding political autonomy brought about by democratization, though embodied in historically specific regimes of power and concrete forms of human interaction. Traces of a democratic imagination, and its anxieties about the relation between democracy and violence, appear in these texts almost as an “ideologeme,”17 which leads me to ask: how could these three explosions of democratic imagination not have left traces on any cultural production of these times? This hypothetical assumption might be, for an ideology upholding the “autonomy of aesthetics,” one of the sacrileges of political allegory; to become a materialist historical analysis proper, another volume of thorough archival research into the changing cultural and economic practices of these times would be needed. In this respect, one would even have to revise the standard periodization I have followed by alluding to the three phases above, a periodization that, like all periodizations, both enables and occludes historical analysis. For example, I believe that the hopes and some of the realities of the fleeting first half of the year  in revolutionary Russia could be included as one of these phases. The present book works more along the lines of what Cornelius Castoriadis named the “imaginary institution of society,” to be contrasted with its historical specificity at any given time.18 Texts produced in periods of high democratization can be read as symptoms of democracy’s anxieties about its relation to violence, democracy’s ghostly other.

Violence Violence in this book is considered in relation to an autonomous political life and the latter’s articulations of the demos’s abstract equality and its 11

Introduction

concrete limits. Autonomous political life sheds a tragic light onto its own violence; in my view, the birth of tragedy in ancient democratic Attica represents a particular shift in the interpretation of violence that corresponds to autonomous communities. A self-ruled collective cannot successfully figure violence only as an interruption of political life coming from its outside. I suspect that no society can embrace directly the knowledge of its own violence, other than in suicidal forms. Nonetheless, autonomous communities have less capacity to veil their own violence than heteronomous ones do. This relative lack of means for representing violence as external to society makes violence a starting point, much in the way that the notion of “radical evil” was the precondition of individual autonomy for Kant.19 Figurations of external violence as the cause of communal conflict are fictions too weak to help autonomous communities regulate internal conflict more than on a temporary basis—especially conflicts brought about by the demand for equality. If I start my reflection with an ancient Greek tragedy it is because I view its structuring conflict as a symbolic operation that accounts for the way in which autonomous political life assumes violence as part of its internal dynamics. Tragedy’s inscription of the failure of the polis is a ritualized symbolization of its violence. Whereas violence is a starting point for autonomous political life, modern societies most commonly imagine violence as a violation of life by or onto an other—that is, a rupturing of the self or of the other, both considered as already whole units. Another variation of this formulation is to consider violence as a rupture of language, that which interrupts communication with the other, or as a violation of reason, as an irrational or meaningless act. 20 In turn, the whole units that are thus ruptured, if they do not refer to an individual, tend to be symbolized (and encapsulated) through the code of social reason (the concepts of class, race, and gender—ethnicity being the latest accretion). The term “intersectionality” accounts for the inseparability of these social categories in socio-political analyses of violence, as well as for their interlocking with institutional structures of power (going from macrostructures such as state, empire, colony, to micropolitical processes such as self-discipline and governability). Studies of internal political violence tend to center either on a social reason or on its relation to the state; our nuclear age has factored in technology, suggesting an increase in the threshold of violence that we so much want to diminish.21 The above are well-established categories of social analysis that pinpoint mediated forms of violence, subsumed in the dialectics of the power and coun12



Literature, Violence, and Politics

terpower of sociopolitical domination. The literary texts in this study could also be read as representing violence through the lens of social reasons or the managerial form of the state. Consider Sade’s  “libertine society” as allegorical of a class alliance (the nobility, the church, and capital) extracting surplus value from its victims—in spite of the fact that they squander it more than invest it; or Vargas Llosa’s turn-of-the-twenty-first-century representation of dictatorship as a patriarchal pact among men. Nonetheless, my readings of the representations of violence in this book belong to a different tradition of thought, which does not take for granted the already formed unit of the self or of the social group. To borrow from Benjamin’s distinction in his “Critique of Violence” between a law-preserving and a law-making violence, one could say that while the violence understood as a rupture of the other helps preserve the (supremacy of) social formations that already exist, the violence represented in the texts under review points at its formative character. Violence here both ruptures and cements; it does not only break language but also re-creates it. This conceptual shift is akin to Freud’s famous formulation that the bonding of hate precedes that of love.22 Perhaps another way to express this conceptual shift is to recall Michel Foucault’s famous inversion of Carl von Clausewitz’s  dictum that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” For Foucault, “politics is the continuation of war by other means.”23 Clausewitz had in mind clashing symmetrical forces established prior to the event of their war—two nation states—that located the agency of violence if not fully outside, at least in the space between communities. In this conception violence ruptures an order. For Foucault, war precedes this order: it founds it. Foucault’s inversion transfers the agency of violence to the interstices that constitute and sustain communal life. Foucault’s archaeologies gave historical perspective to the philosophical tradition of unveiling the inextricable relation between violence and politics—of which modernity, always suspicious of its own dynamic, has long been aware.24 In this tradition, violence has its own “reasons”: to borrow from Hent de Vries, it is the means “through which the self, whether individual or collective, is constituted and maintained” (Violence, Identity and Self-Determination: ). In the texts studied here, binding violence, even if at first sight related to already constituted social categories, is, upon closer scrutiny, a violence of borders: it occurs at the point where the two otherwise opposed forms of modern sovereignty—autonomy and domination—collapse. This is a “radical” violence, in that it lies at the roots of political cohesiveness. Constitutive of politi13

Introduction

cal membership, it seals off the boundaries otherwise opened infinitely to the demands of equality. Political, “radical,” foundational violence tends either to be thought of as mediated by the terms of socioeconomic reason, or not thought of at all: I refer here to the opposition between the two dominant modern Western traditions of Marxism and liberalism. Marxism thinks of communal formation in terms of socioeconomic exclusions, hesitating to grant any autonomy to the political. Even when speculating about origins, in the progression from “naturally bonded” communities, like tribes, to politically bonded ones, there is an inevitable form of illegal appropriation of an excess of production, or of the means of production (that is, land), mostly through war, that gives a group its capacity to organize community—these are the histories of primitive accumulation of capital. Pierre Clastres famously asked whether we could judge the history of humanity according to the categories produced by the emergence of capitalism. The politics of equality that derive from the Marxist tradition, which Menke calls “subversive equality,” identify the socioeconomic groups harmed and excluded by domination, and advocate for their economic, political, legal, and cultural inclusion in (and subversion of) the modern political scene. The liberal tradition, in turn, seems to suffer from an “incapacity to conceptualize the frontier,” to use Chantal Mouffe’s expression.25 Conceptualizing the communal bond as a contract under rational consensus and deliberation, it obliterates violence from its imaginings of the formation of a community of equals. Especially when it invokes a historical construction of a contract, the liberal tradition takes for granted a pre-existing equality among members. Consider John Brenkman’s recent reminder of Arendt’s example: the Mayflower Compact in . Both authors see in the Compact “a nonviolent founding act” (Brenkman, Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: ); in On Revolution, Arendt argues for a new concept of power as a “combination of power, consociation, confederation” discovered in the earliest times of colonial history in North America ();26 Brenkman uses the example to criticize Agamben’s notion of a founding sovereignty as the power to kill “bare life.”27 The Mayflower Compact, Arendt argued, was signed by all of the British pilgrims aboard the ship that landed at Cape Cod because of an “insight into the elementary structure of joint enterprise as such” (). The pilgrims peacefully decided to avoid “mutinous speeches” and respect a founding agreement attending to common interests; they looked for a place to settle that had “already been cleared” by the Indians and “trusted their own power, unsupported by any means of violence, 14



Literature, Violence, and Politics

to combine themselves together into a civil Body Politick” (). Here, once we put aside the thorny issue that the inhabitants of the land were not “asked” to form part of the covenant (the land having been “purchased” in England), we must ask: how is this covenant “a founding act”? Is this not, rather, a document of convenience among an already self-selected group? This is a Puritan community self-selected not only because of their shared religious belief but also as a result of their shared status as persecuted believers expelled from England and as debtors to the London Company. As a community, this one cannot be more of an already bonded community; the view of a nonviolent foundational contract shows how the formation of community is taken for granted. In terms of the Marxist tradition, this is a view that fetishizes equality. In turn, foundational violence is the topic of much anthropological speculation (whether of a Marxist leaning or not), but mostly in reference to stateless societies or to premodern agrarian state societies, in which men have a certain control over the production of life. Two forms of ritual violence—rites of passage and sacrifices—are worthy of mention here given that the violence that inaugurates membership in all texts under review reconstructs funeral and kinship rites. Rites of passage exert violence to grant a person entrance into (and to enforce adherence to) an already constituted group. Speculation about sacrificial violence centers on determining whether it regulates relations between humans, gods, and nature, or relations among humans in the social world. Marcel Hénaff ’s recent account of sacrificial societies sees sacrifice appearing when the alliance with nature, typical of hunters and gatherers, has been transformed, in agro-pastoral societies, from reciprocity into hierarchy and debt; sacrifices would restore harmony with nature and the gods.28 This contrasts with accounts of sacrifice as a “scapegoat mechanism,” such as René Girard’s, in which sacrificial violence glues the community back together after a “sacrificial crisis” by ritually killing a surrogate victim—a scapegoat. For Girard, this violence preserves communities by solving a crisis in which systems of differentiation have collapsed and unstoppable mimetic rivalry has been unleashed. The sacrificial murder channels violence to save the community from self-destruction; the chosen victim is innocent, sacred, and an outsider or someone on the fringes of society, which is why the murder does not lead to revenge. The community’s violence against the scapegoat is a sign of fate, though nonetheless veiled with causal narratives that link violence and the victim.29 By contrast, the binding violence figured in the texts under review as establishing the limits of a political space thrown into crisis (by the threat of politi15

Introduction

cal equality) seems not to conform to any of the conceptualizations aforementioned. In terms of its object, this violence is neither inclusive nor sacrificial; nor is it necessarily encapsulated by any social category. It does not incorporate members into an already formed group, but produces the differential determinations that mark those to be excluded. It entails the nonsacrificial, extralegal death of victims who were not previously considered outsiders by the community, but rather have been transformed by the crisis from friends into enemies. These figures of enmity are carved out of the same social category that attempts their elimination: they are enemies created within those who were, or aspired to be, equals. The Sophoclean Creon rekills a citizen of Thebes; Vargas Llosa’s dictator, who is of Haitian ancestry, targets the Haitians in his territory; the Sadean libertines kill their daughters. In terms of the goal of this violence, its narrative is not a sacrifice that stops internal fighting or restores an order. It establishes what I call a structure of enmity inside the community that divides it by producing enemies whose elimination clarifies a pact among certain of its members each time the need for this clarification becomes urgent. It signifies the desire and failure to fix membership. Intracommunal crises of membership could be ritualized in practices of dissent—the plea of Antigone, I argue, is one such instance—but the fictions of political origins under review cancel the crises by establishing a purified, “safe” interior made up of equals. The goal of annihilation implicit in this violence distinguishes it from other types of violence whose aim is the hierarchical submission of the other. This is a violence that kills body and name both: it performs a “double killing.” To qualify this specific fratricidal violence perhaps we would need a new compound, such as “endocide”: it annihilates part of the very same group in crisis. The texts under review dramatize the double killing linked to boundary formation as taking place within very specific dynamics, which I call zones of exception. Here death is politicized through a peculiar operation: an inversion of the relation between transgression and norm. In this sense these zones signal an “evil of ” autonomous politics, to borrow from Alain Badiou’s phrase for his meditation on an “ethics of ” an event, instead of simply “ethics.”30 The logic of ordinary transgression—that is, of ordinary evil, and thus, of any “moral” precept—is incapable of accounting for this zone’s dynamics. In terms of any democratic logic, this evil of politics annihilates difference and transforms the threat of equality into the safety of identity. We may describe the exception pertaining to this zone with the paradigm of immunology. Long associated with 16



Literature, Violence, and Politics

images of communal safety, as Roberto Esposito reminds us in Immunitas, immunity implies being exempt from common law, and guarded from danger. An immune power exempt from law can claim to immunize the city from the danger of its dissolution by injecting a danger of enmity into the community that it itself can eliminate by virtue of its immunity.31 I choose the term “zone of exception” to echo a political and legal figure current today, that of a “state of exception” that all industrialized nations can declare in what are deemed times of national danger. The main characteristic of this figure in the state’s legal imagination is to link legality with illegality: the law legally suspends itself, in order to preserve itself. A lawless space is thus legally bound: its violence is rationalized by the rhetoric of constituency survival and temporarily tolerated by the legal institution. I slightly alter the expression “state of exception” with the word “zone” to indicate not a defensive but an instituting process that highlights no other rationale for this zone than the manufacturing of an arbitrary limit to the limitless principle of autonomous, equal, membership—in all texts under review a manufacturing figured as a manipulation of rituals. Because it is instituting, instead of defending what is already instituted, this zone is marked by the instability of any immune center of power, whose task is to establish community borders: its structure of enmity forever threatens the location of immune power, which is subjected to the same politicization of death with which it attempts to delimit boundaries. This “evil of politics” thus relates the processes through which political sovereignty is attained, not to the capacity of self-rule but to the capacity of deciding over membership by way of deciding over death. Although the cases under review echo representations of modern “state forms,” by the emergence of new political constituencies I want to emphasize a primary violence of belonging, regardless of the form in which this belonging organizes hierarchies among members, a violence whose result is to limit membership in the context of the demands of universal political equality. The question can be posed whether a mode of redrawing the concrete determinations of equality—that is, of re-establishing the definition of membership—lies underneath the rationale of most modern zones of exception.32 Does this figuration of a binding violence suggest an autonomy of “the political” beyond modern social categories? I agree that it is debatable whether there is an autonomous sphere of the political tout court, or whether this autonomy is not just another ideological representation of the modern division between civil society and the state. But it is also debatable whether things do 17

Introduction

not in fact go the other way round, to follow Clastres’s famous thesis, though at the risk of posing a chicken-and-egg dilemma: the very autonomy of the political is what generates all the struggles we see in terms of social categories.33 I settle for now on the “semiautonomy” that the political sphere acquired in post–World War II Marxist thought, or what is called structuralist Marxism.34 For it is necessary to expand the range of our categories for political self-instituting or self-perpetuating violence to include those forms of violence whose logic might not be exhausted by social categories. Here, it is not only a question of whether we should study phenomena such as the monopolization of power as having a logic of its own. I also want to follow an intellectual intuition that there is an economy of political violence related to the set of paradoxes that became visible with the invention of self-rule and equality’s negative dialectics. In this sense, I propose the term “binding violence” as a figure for a political limit-question, for a blind spot in traditions of political thought that obscures the conceptualization of political self-institution. Binding violence symptomatizes at once a failure to articulate equality and difference, a transformation of equality into identity, and a closure of the borders of a community of equals whose paradox is the inability to close its borders on the basis of consensus. We might call this an “endocide,” or an “anthropophagic reason,” or a “fratricidal cannibalism,” coming to assist the limits of political reason alone. Neither what anthropologists call a “warrior cannibalism” (eating the external enemy) nor a “funerary cannibalism” (eating the internal friends who are deceased, to bond emotionally with them), it is a mixture of both: it devours the former friends as if they were enemies. My contention is that this name for violence helps us to account for what gives form to the political space in the face of the contestation of its borders, appearing thus as a metaphor for the difficulty that the democratic imagination faces in conceptualizing a democratic way of constituting membership.

Literature The above considerations are an invitation to assign a place for literary texts and literary criticism in the debate on the modern political sphere, its violence, and its future. This invitation assumes an intimacy between literary and political imagination that deserves a brief theoretical and methodological comment. As the late twentieth century witnessed the demise of the Eastern European socialist bloc in  and the twenty-first century started in the “post-/” mode, 18



Literature, Violence, and Politics

the task of reimagining the political sphere has taken on a different urgency. A vast set of reflections that lie at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis understand the task of refashioning politics as an act of interpretation of its fictions, rather than as the traditional struggle for state power—a refashioning that revisits the first forms of democracy in the West. Although this imagination takes a different approach than the recent so-called return to the political,35 which centers on issues like the pliability of state borders, it does not abandon reflection on the state and forces of production but rather rethinks the role of imagination with regard to the latter. If we can conceive of politics as an act of interpretation, this, in turn, bears upon the question of literature and its relation to politics. My endeavor in this book belongs to the above crossroads; it is, in this sense, resolutely interdisciplinary.36 Modern ideologies of the separation between the private and the public spheres have forced critics to delineate the meaning of the conjunction “and” in the phrase “literature and politics.” For an ancient Athenian, the mystery would have consisted in separating these two realms—tragedy was at once ritual and politics, it did not express any autonomous field, such as “the literary.” The modern links between literature and politics have been conceptualized in terms of weaker and stronger forms of mediation. Weaker forms of mediation see the political investigation as an informative footnote to understand the literary construction of a text. Stronger forms of mediation, in turn, entail different degrees of overdetermination between the literary and the political; the materiality of the latter is usually understood as the development of the forces of production and a vision of political antagonism as class struggle. Consider how art has been seen as mechanically determined by a material development: for instance, studies have shown how technologies of sound have made certain film forms available for us. Consider, likewise, how art has been thought to allegorically (or homologically) re-present some version of the social sphere, a representation usually conceived through models of reflection, manifestation, symptom, and mirror, to mention prominent examples. These metaphors seek to relate two terms imagined as heterogeneous—economy and culture—hence the problems of articulating their connection. Unless, that is, we take representation to be the mediating term: the material base or infrastructure is only apprehensible through symbols. All these relational models conceive artworks as either reproducing ideology or directly producing it; along these lines art can be thought as prompting action in favor of social change.37 This study assumes strong forms of mediation between the literary and the 19

Introduction

political. Less interested in analyzing any textual “activism” than the thought process of the work of art, I see literature’s formal demands as refracting, digesting, distorting—in brief, transforming—the political imagination of an era. Literature has its own unsystematic, destabilizing “thought machine,” much in the way philosophical or scientific thought has its own poetics. To echo Freud’s influential model for interpretation, we might say that what dreams do with conscious life, through their work of condensation and displacement, may be compared to what literary texts do with the political imagination of a given era. We can think of political imagination as a mediator between the two incommensurable worlds of literature and material reality. The political imagination of an era results from a transaction between the ways in which forces of production create meanings and the ways in which they are given meaning. The meanings given to materiality take the form of (collective) fantasies both generated by and incarnated in practices, which stabilize the ever-changing world of material processes. Consider, for instance, how the biological production of the human labor force is continually resignified in systems of kinship, or how capitalist industrial production reuses patriarchal feudal arrangements, or, even at the most general level, how the always new, material, untransferable experience of pain can only be metaphorized through our existing symbolic reservoir. This is to say that because of the gap between experience and our means to apprehend it, “our reality” presents itself to us with the structure of fiction. Inseparable from the conventions through which we make sense of it, give it its consistency and coherence, reality results from the workings of fiction, even as it also always leaves a remainder of materiality that cannot be symbolized. To stress the “thought process” that art performs on the political imagination brings my thinking more in line with some of the models of “text as production” that I mentioned above—in particular, those that build on the tradition of crossing boundaries between the “clinical and critical,” to use Deleuze’s famous title,38 and that read cultural formations as “symptomatic.” According to this conception, art performs a type of “work” akin to the symbolic work performed by a symptom; its critical capacity lies in its determination by, but also its freedom from, its times. By pointing at some aspects of this tradition, I want to clarify that rather than pathologizing art (or for that matter, reality), this position is correlative to considering reality as having the structure of fiction. This is a tradition attentive to the legacy of the ancient materialist philosophers in the West, taken up, as is known, by modern materialism, and positing 20



Literature, Violence, and Politics

the separation of the material and the ideal as ideological. In fact, in referring to Marx’s concept of “commodity fetishism,” Jacques Lacan famously commented that the concept of the symptom had really been Marx’s invention.39 It is useful to recall how Greek etymology conveys the formative aspect of the symptom, depathologizing it: a symptom is the coincidence of things that “fall together,” which implies that things “come falling” from different sources to form a compound out of previously unrelated fragmentary pieces. Three images crystallize in this notion: the idea of an accident (an element of contingency that forms something new), the idea of a genesis (“falling together” as a consequential event), and the idea of a structure (“falling together” as the linking of heterogeneous elements). The symptom articulates genesis and structure, one could say, accidentally. The critical tradition, crossing boundaries with the clinical, understands symptomatic formations as offering meaningful compensatory mechanisms to stabilize the contingency inherent in human interaction. For instance, the psychoanalytic tradition thinks of the symptom as a compromise solution between conflicting desires and defenses against them (prohibitions), enabling the subject to tolerate its inadequacy vis-à-vis the world.40 Art in this conception is not a symptom of reality’s illness; rather, both reality and art are structured as a fictional solution to the “illness” (the inadequacy) of our human cohabitation. We can summon Fredric Jameson’s idea that art performs “a symbolic act” that works upon, and produces an imaginary solution to, an objective contradiction within a specific era.41 Symptomatic solutions as well as artistic works always contain, nonetheless, the seed of the new: a symptom is always in tension with its origins, pointing at its undoing or at its own critique. Here, a strategy for reading symptomatic formations involves what I see as four interlocking vectors: a structural reading (“zooming devices,” or, in literary parlance, close readings), a genetic reading (“distancing devices,” or contextual reading), a consideration of what remains unsignified, and, linked to the latter, a consideration of what we may call the sublimatory aspect of a symptomatic formation, pointing in the direction of its contingent creation. This means to retrieve both lost (repressed, forgotten) associative links and the very inscription of a loss of associative links in the text, which indicates its possible transformation into new utopian visions. Kindred acknowledgments of this transformative potential are the Frankfurt School’s insistent mention of the promesse de bonheur that Stendhal detected in art, or Jameson’s discussions of art’s “utopian or transcendent potential”: art’s symptomatic resolution of social antagonisms, working to preserve (stabilize con21

Introduction

tradictions of) an existing order, only functions by offering “a fantasy bribe” carrying the promise of liberation from an existing order.42 The utopian potential in a symptom hinges upon the work of sublimation, a notion that can be delinked from any idea of the sublime and thus help to clarify art’s temporality. In chemistry, sublimation implies a deviation from normal temporal course: it signals the change of a substance from gas to solid without passing through the liquid phase or from solid to gas without melting. The psychoanalytical tradition takes up the idea of transformation through a deviation that skips one of the normal steps, to account for one of the possible destinies of human drives. Sublimation offers a specific “knowledge” of what to do with drives: it skips the usual drives’ ends (sexual satisfaction, inversion, transformation into its opposite, and repression); it does not remain within the closed circuit of the drives (which is the ultimate end of drives), and instead appears as desexualization. For this clinical tradition all drives are inhibited in satisfaction: as humans we lack a genetic code indicating fixed objects of satisfaction, having to find substitutions that approximate our first (lost) experience of satisfaction. Sublimation’s compensatory mechanism for this loss is a deviation of the energy of drives away from finding and fixing an object of satisfaction; it works contrary to repression, which finds a substitute for that which is repressed. Sublimation bypasses both repression and sexual satisfaction, linking energy to symbolic work as such, instead of any specific representation. The mystery surrounding this circumvention occupies a heated debate in the psychoanalytic corpus. For our purposes here, I just want to suggest that sublimation as a mechanism seems to work by inscribing a double inhibition of the drive’s end (satisfaction): it works with the impossibility of finding an object, with its absence, rather than with its discovery. Sublimation thus puts in question the capacity of the entire symbolic system to find an object through representation. It creates the object, instead of substituting a past object with a new one, and thus unveils the contingent nature of any “found” object. Sublimation’s work with the form instead of the object, might be, from art’s perspective, what gives art its capacity for a political intervention. This intervention does not necessarily refer to any specific utopian content, but rather to the questioning of an order, by emphasizing the contingent nature of any creation (of any “found object”). Artistic sublimation is a laboratory of meaning where experiments in change happen, though not necessarily offering any “bonheur”—sometimes they take the thought of their times to its ultimate, woeful, consequences. 22



Literature, Violence, and Politics

To think of art as bearing this type of symptomatic reading means that art may be able to interpret the public sphere that gives birth to it. To Pierre Macherey’s expression “[L]iterature says what a period thinks of itself,” we may add that literature may say what a period does not necessarily acknowledge as its own thinking.43 The metaphor of smuggling, or of ventriloquism, is perhaps suitable here: art blurs clear identification of the source of its contents. Consider ancient Greek theater, which dramatizes the suppressed conflicts of the new polis in the parlance and dress of ancient princesses and kings. Art can orient us through the un-saids of an era, if we are attentive to tracing textual displacements and appropriations. For instance, tracing these discursive appropriations in Antigone can shift the emphasis on Antigone’s brother “qua blood relation” to her description of him as “not a slave”; in a slave-owning society like ancient Athens, this expands the brother’s signification into that of a citizen. In order to read art’s interpretation of its times, we need contextual work, or what I called above a genetic reading of symptomatic formations. There is no symptom without an interpreter’s desire to decipher it, which entails translating between heterogeneous systems of signification within a given period. When there is no translation, there is no desire to translate—or the interpreter identifies strongly with only one of the texts in question. Translation here means to decipher our own frames of interpretation by becoming cognizant of the language of the era that gave rise to the literary text, traces of which appear in the text. For instance, to read Vargas Llosa’s construction of Trujillo’s genocide against the Haitians in  only through the lens of our post- sensibility would not be the same as to read it considering the discourses of Trujillo’s organic intellectuals at the time. For the latter, both white European and black Haitian racial purity were facilitators of a political project, for which the fantasized problem was the Dominican “mestizo,” the true addressee of the message conveyed in the massacre. As I have said, this approach to context does not construct a historiography. It is also less attentive to the critical tradition that centers on the question of genre and, thus, to the periodization of the literary event (or how genre interacts with a given historical situation), than to how a literary event captures the imagination of its times. In this project, I have taken texts as “palimpsests,” preserving, erasing, or appropriating politically (that is, in a conflictive fashion) other synchronic texts, and thus thinking through what I construct as the imaginative horizon of an era. Inasmuch as it is an interpretative gesture, my contextualization is political. Rather than aiming at an otherwise impossible 23

Introduction

recuperation of the actual historical conditions of production of the text, this gesture expresses an interest in the past guided by a strong commitment to the present. Thus any recovery of context in this book should serve to illuminate my current concerns as a critic. All these considerations imply an intimately shared materiality between the spheres of art and politics—both the materiality of the body, of the forces of production, and of language, its signifying “illness.” We may use the Freudian concept of “anaclisis” (leaning on or against) as a metaphor for this intimacy. It describes a “supporting structure” connecting somatic energy and its psychic representation, an idea with which Freud conveys that pleasure is not initially autonomous but rather leans on biological functions, and only later acquires independence from them. Freud expresses here the simultaneous encounter between two forms of excess: a somatic excess of energy, supported by vital functions of organs, and an excess of words in the interaction with an other (a primary caretaker such as a parent or a nursemaid). This encounter gives rise to the limit concept of drive, sharing in somatic and psychic energy.44 The analogy I want to make here involves considering the “organ of language” as the shared vital source that supports both politics and literature, at least in their Western versions. Politics and literature would be two consequences of the excess latent in the organ of language—the excess of words with respect to that which exists—as it encounters the materiality of human productivity. I offer the metaphor of an anaclitic dependence of literature and politics on the excess of language because my point of reference is the specific form that these spheres of human life take in autonomous societies: they hinge on the contingency of polysemy. For even if, in the final analysis, one would want to restrict oneself to the reassuring principle that the literary text is only performing the master text of our idea of language—that is, that its only truth is that it only figures its own polysemy—this principle in itself, apart from being already political, is an image of literature contiguous with that dominant Western imagining of the ideal political life, which strives for a polysemy in the city. In fact, from its inception, the ancient Greek space of democracy launches polysemy as the only legitimizing discourse of the polis: it relies heavily on the literary instability of meaning, instead of forces such as destiny, accident, or external violence. To recall Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s phrase: “[T]he political (the city) belongs to a form of plastic art [. . .] fiction in the strict sense [. . . .] [T]he polis is the “beautiful formation” that has spontaneously sprung from the “genius of a people” (the Greek genius)” ().45 24

Literature, Violence, and Politics



The ancient city is a form, a beautiful form, “fiction in the strict sense.”46 Art and politics, thus, anaclitically “lean on” the polysemy of the organ of language. The excess of words generates in both spheres the struggle for meaning, the tension between creating and preserving an order. By identifying the literary dimension in the political, the texts in this study expose politics as guided by fictions. Their “politics” is to denaturalize the self-legitimizing claims of the political about its own activity. Here I take to heart Jacques Rancière’s suggestion that humans are political animals because they are literary animals [. . .] first, because we have the power to put into circulation more words, “useless” and unnecessary words, words that exceed the function of rigid designation; secondly, because this fundamental ability to proliferate words is unceasingly contested by those who claim to “speak correctly”—that is, by the masters of designation and classification who, by virtue of wanting to retain their status and power, flat-out deny this capacity to speak. (Panagia, “Dissenting Words”: )

We may also expand Rancière’s proposal that “humans are political because they are literary”: humans are literary insofar as they are in “political” relations—“political” understood as an autonomous public sphere that must take into account the irruption of the other into the sphere of power. Interlocution underlies the artistic and the political realms, so that literary texts, as discursive acts, are contiguous with that questioning of order inherent in democratic interlocution.

Summary of Chapters Following the Western “fable of origins” of the democratic imagination, I begin my interrogation in ancient Athens, with Sophocles’ Antigone, in Part I. I suggest the tragedy points at continuities between ancient and modern selfunderstandings of the political; I heed the spirit of Arendt’s reminder that “the Greek polis will continue to exist at the bottom of our political existence [. . .] for as long as we use the word ‘politics.’ ”47 It may come as no surprise, then, to learn how George Steiner documents in his seminal book Antigones () that the tragedy of Antigone has been adapted and rewritten more often than any other tragedy in modernity.48 The past decades have seen an intense scholarly debate that interrogates Antigone’s linking of ethics, aesthetics, and desire to politics. Lacanian psychoanalysis sees in Antigone’s deed the ethical act par excellence; feminists see her as a symbol for women’s (equal) rights or for 25

Introduction

women’s (different) ethics; at the crossroads of psychoanalysis and feminism Judith Butler has recently seen her as questioning the constrains of patriarchal systems of kinship.49 In turn, French historians of antiquity see tragedy as one of the ancient democratic institutions. Inspired by these trends, I read Antigone as a vision of the invention of politics that puts two political logics in conflict over the expulsion of a community member at the moment of the city’s reconstruction. While Creon’s exclusive logic—an incipient version of a modern state’s above-the-law zone of power—binds the polis through rekilling Polynices, Antigone’s inclusive logic—figured in her funeral rite—democratically questions the legitimacy of Creon’s redefinition of community. I depart from both the Hegelian tradition that sees the tragic clash between the prepolitical and the political spheres, and from recent interpretations that insist on discussing Antigone’s relation to the city in terms of her representing religion, womanhood, or tradition. I read the tragedy as dramatizing two different political logics with regard to the undecidable question of the limits of the political constituency. In “Antigone and the Polis” I start by arguing that the tragedy can speak to our modern political imagination if we paradoxically set it back in the context of Greek democracy rather than in that of modernity’s social categories. The link between democracy and the tragedy is analyzed further in “The Most Modern of Tragedies: The Politics of Burial,” in which I argue that the absence of intervening gods places the funeral rite in the realm of political autonomy, confronting two forms of political speech—a ritual and an edict. In “Creon’s Edict: The Barbarians at Home” I examine how Creon resignifies the dead brother as an internal enemy and shifts the basis of Athenian equality from equivalence to identity. In “Dying Democratically: Antigone’s Ritual” I examine how Antigone embodies Athenian brotherhood, how her funeral rite expresses equality, and how her death is a cipher for the problem that any limitations on membership present to the logic of democratic equality. In the Interlude between the first and second parts, entitled “Modern Tempo— Democratic Overture, State Finale,” I draw conclusions about Antigone’s political lessons for modernity. I briefly trace modern solutions for membership in the form of consensual contracts that dislodge violence, rendering it the province of nature or uncivilized barbarism. The  “re-invention of politics,” in Sade’s times, enacts a vast crisis of membership that interrogates consensual visions of society and makes imperative the task of imagining, as the ancients had, a society of equals—this time within the horizon of universal equality. 26



Literature, Violence, and Politics

Part II examines Sade’s  Days of Sodom as embedded in the anxieties that produced the “second birth” of democracy during the French Revolution. I depart from canonical readings that make Sade either an infamy or a catalog of liberating (sexual or linguistic) transgression. Performing a political reading of the book’s “libertine society,” I contend that Sade’s text is not structured in accordance with a logic of transgression. Rather, the transformation of transgression into norm structures the political fiction that frames the text: a pact among four friends against the backdrop of an all-out war. In dialogue with the eighteenth-century political imagination, Sade’s is a “society of equals” that has eliminated violence among its own, while not delegating or renouncing it, but unleashing it against those whom it has transformed into its nonequals. A cohesive bond emerges through the organized extermination this time not just of one of its previous members (as occurred with Polynices) but of the majority of its previous constituency. I begin by situating Sade in revolutionary France, in “Sade’s Text and Sade’s Times,” and examine the initial contract that frames the book in “The Libertine Alliance: No Ordinary Pact in Times of War.” I argue that its rite of membership (a marriage pact) operates against exchange, which is why it survives in the midst of the destruction of all bonds in the Castle of Silling, where the orgy takes place. I follow with an exploration of how the alliance secures its bonding. In “Necrophiliac Cannibals: Dismembering “Non-people,” Membering “The People,” I look at the libertine endocannibal rite of communion and suggest that necrophilia and cannibalism, which I call “perversions of power,” appear to be the only perversions in the castle. Order within the cannibal rite is preserved with two disparate sets of rules to prevent these perversions from turning upon the libertines: I examine these in “Domestic Consistency: Not Laws, but Order.” Finally, in “Frame within the Frame: Riveting Voices and Gazes,” I examine how voice and gaze also serve as bonding strategies within the castle. In the Interlude between Parts II and III, entitled “Modern Sovereignty: Perversion of Democracy?” I suggest parallels between perversion, the castle’s structure of political exception, and an aspect of modern political sovereignty that is usually thought of as a zone of power above the law, which I see as potentially unleashing annihilating violence to “solve” a crisis of membership. The question for modernity is whether this zone of exception is a mechanism gone wrong—Creon’s “mistake”—or rather intrinsic to its foundations—Sade’s castle. Here, I propose to look at these questions from the vantage point of a literary genre that, in my view, emerged with the reinvention of politics on 27

Introduction

both sides of the Atlantic, though it has been mostly studied in its manifestations across the Americas: the “dictator novel,” which exposes the clash between democratic (called “civilized”) and nondemocratic (“barbaric”) forces in the constitution of the newly independent American states. Part III looks at the latest entry in the tradition of dictator novels in Latin America: Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat. One could say that the Sadean castle was a vision of historical realities to come: states of exception that, instead of remaining temporary, become permanent. One such vision appears in Vargas Llosa’s historical novel about Trujillo’s reign in the Dominican Republic (–). Creon and the Sadeanites almost seem to materialize in a dictator who redesigns membership with an actual genocide and a permanent state of exception, coded in the guise of saving the nation from chaos. I depart from the dominant view that dictator novels explore and denounce absolute personal power and argue that Vargas Llosa’s text shows not the power of a man, but the executive power that lies in the structure of an exception to the law. The novel meditates on the foundations of power, relating it to the language of “reasons of state,” a language that emerged in modern times out of the republican language of politics. I argue against the “fetishizing” critical gestures that either interpret these fictional dictators as specific to Latin America or as the literary heirs of Spanish or Arab “mighty males” who resist Roman law. Rather than resisting Roman law, this imagination represents its heritage. I begin by looking at Vargas Llosa’s political relation to the text of history in “Vargas Llosa’s Appeal to History: Within and Beyond Latin America,” and, borrowing from Achille Mbembe’s term,50 identify a “necropolitical” logic at the novel’s center (Chapters  and ). Analyzing the first target of the necropolitics at stake in “Necropolitics I: From an “African Horde” to a Modern Country: Trujillo’s Body Politic and the Haitian Enemy,” I interpret Trujillo’s genocide of Haitian immigrants in  as his binding of a political constituency through the transformation of the Haitians into “life that can be killed” with impunity—that is, outside legal and communal rites, to follow Agamben’s formulation in his Homo Sacer. Under the heading “Anatomy of a Regime: The Permanent State of Exception and the Dominican Enemy” in this chapter, I consider the dictator’s background of civic dissolution as granting meaning to his mission of “salvation”—namely, the production of the internal enemies to be eliminated. In “Necropolitics II: Rebonding the Nation: Trujillo’s Body Natural and the Specularity of Enmity” I study the transformation of Trujillo himself into “life that may be killed.” Finally, under the heading “Urania’s Bond: 28



Literature, Violence, and Politics

Violence and Law, History and Fiction, Pain and Truth,” in this chapter I explore a democratic female voice that addresses history and the law, and that reveals the law’s internal contradiction exposing its origins in violence. In this book, I have aimed at a “poetics of politics” by interrogating literary visions of what has been called, since ancient times, the “art of politics”—with Aristotle, the logic of friendship in the city, sustained by the language of its agent, the politikon zōon, or man as a political animal (Politics: a).51 The ancient Greeks differentiated man from other animals on the basis of his capacity, rooted in language, to live in an association concerned not only with the experience of pleasure and displeasure but also with ideas of justice. Their imaginative horizon was the embryo of the universal equality that in modernity became a dominant ideal. Foucault famously inverted the ancient political formula for modernity, though in his formula equality is not at the center: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question” (History of Sexuality, vol. I: ).52 While Foucault’s historical investigation produced the concept of “biopolitics” to refer to modernity’s politicization of life and death, my work relates the politicization of death to an imaginative failure to confront the political and social demand of equality. Binding Violence goes back to ancient Greece to trace the complement to the biopolitical link: a necropolitical link, already present in the Greek imagination of tragedy, a politicization of death that dramatizes perhaps the most properly political question formulated by the democratic imagination—namely, the problem of membership.

29

PART I

Sophocles’ Antigone or The Invention of Politics: We the City

What shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were some kind of solution.

—C. P. Cavafy, Alexandria/Greece, 

The dead die only when they’ve been forgotten.

—Kóstas Ouránis, Athens 

How was the reason of Greece able to bear the contradictions of its tragedy? And substitute, for a moment there—while also thinking of the fear and pity Aristotle speaks of, for instance—“passion” for “reason.”

—Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe1

In the Greece of the fifth century it was tragedy [. . .] that was the democratic institution par excellence.

—Pierre Vidal-Naquet2



Antigone and the Polis

“Do you not realize that the evils of our enemies [ekhthrôn] are coming upon our own people [philous]?”Antigone asks her sister when Ismene first appears on stage (l. ).1 It is a question she will raise for her spectators and readers for centuries to come. “What worse evil is yet to follow upon evils?” (l. ) Creon asks at the end of the play, realizing that his attempt to solve the Theban crisis has only brought “death upon death” (l. ). Antigone’s concern hinges upon an embodiment of enmity: she warns that the evils that belong to enemies, or evils that might be wished upon the enemies, are now affecting her own. But Antigone’s words refer not to the foreign invader or enemy in war—polemios. Her words refer to the enemy who previously had been a friend and now is transformed into an enemy within the city—ekhthros.2 Might the inquiry into how, why, and by whom this transformation was carried out illuminate not only Creon’s bewilderment but also the mysterious insistence with which this tragedy—and the genre of tragedy—resurfaces time and again and across the globe in modern times? Might we find in that inquiry the tragedy of “an evil” of politics? Antigone warns Ismene of the “evils” introduced into the city precisely at the moment of its reconstruction. The play’s opening is a drama of bloody political beginnings, framed by the anxiety of civic fragmentation. The war between Thebes and Argos has ended, and the devastated city needs a new order. Antigone’s warring brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, have killed each other in hand-to-hand combat. Their uncle Creon’s first act as the new king is to lessen fears of civic fragmentation with a decree that Polynices be left unburied, as a punishment for having attacked the city, and that Eteocles be buried with all honors for having defended it. The decree threatens with death anyone who dares defy it, and a sequence of deaths ensues. After she decides to bury Polynices, Antigone is condemned to be entombed alive. She hangs from a noose 33

Sophocles’ Antigone

fashioned from her veil. Antigone’s betrothed, Haemon, kills himself at the site of his beloved’s death when he fails to kill his father, Creon. Creon’s wife, Eurydice, commits suicide after hearing the news of her son’s death. The play ends as Creon’s “breathing corpse” (l. ) is heard singing unintelligibly. “Death upon death” paves the roads of Thebes as it plods from one war into another. Although both wars are fratricidal in nature, they differ in one respect: the first war, only remembered on stage, happens outside the city and kills a foreign army; the second one instead belongs in the city and kills members of its own community. At the center of the two wars is one individual, an insider throughout, who first leads the foreign army against the city and is then reintroduced as a “traitor” to Thebes by Creon’s decree. The war has always been an internal conflict: while Polynices’ appeal for help from a foreign army takes the war between brothers outside the gates of Thebes, Creon’s undoing of Polynices’ funeral rite brings the war back home. Polynices, the mythical bearer of the apparent problem in question—equal power between brothers—will be killed twice: his already dead body is symbolically “rekilled” (Tiresias’ words, l. ) by Creon’s edict. Not even Creon’s last-minute repentance and attempt to perform Polynices’ funeral rites will undo the deadly contamination. The denial of funeral rites that opens the drama is a repeated scene: it links Polynices and Antigone to the laws of the new city, and symbolically, Creon to the siblings. On the one hand, Antigone, whose spirit “perished long since” (l. ), will be sent to “dwell not among the living, not among the dead” (l. ) but to remain unburied in a cave. No character can redress this second denial of burial, which will leave the corpse of Sophocles’ Antigone free to contaminate twenty-five hundred years of Western literary and political imagination. On the other hand, the one who has denied burial, Creon, sees himself as having been killed more than once. After hearing that both his son and his wife are dead, he addresses Hades: “[Y]ou have killed a dead man over again” (l. ). Creon’s undoing and redoing of funeral rituals have removed death from the sphere of the oikos (home) to place it at the center of his political reconstruction of the city. Was Creon’s political use of Polynices’ corpse the “evil” that Antigone was referring to? Why would the transgression of a culturally sanctioned form of burial have such dangerous consequences? What could the lack of burial have meant in Athens, where disposal of corpses changed often over time, reflecting social, political, and structural changes? Was it about the history of Athens’s denials of specific burials, such as that of Themistocles? Or was it about defining the city’s dead and alive?3 34

Antigone and the Polis

The play’s obsession with funeral rites does not, I suggest, just concern Creon’s rule or transgression of rites. It exposes the problem of the city’s imaginary origins, of the first political conflict proper in an autonomous polis—namely, an impossible, though inevitable, struggle over the identity of the city’s dead and, by extension, of its living members. Burial is a passage connecting and limiting the inside and outside of life and, as such, of a community. But how can a community decide peacefully (or contractually, as modernity would express it) on the limits that establish its inside and outside? Is this decision democratically possible? Can we read Creon’s “killing twice”—that is, not just the violence of domination but also the violence of extermination—as a symptom of an unbearable anxiety over the problem of membership? My questions stem from reading the genre of tragedy as one of the symbolic operations that enabled fifth-century Athenians to represent for themselves the contradictions inherent in the transition from an ancient, nondemocratic regime to their new, revolutionary, democratic invention. Putting Antigone in dialogue with the internal dynamics of the ancient Greek political space shifts the focus away from modern criticism of the tragedy, which is still inflected by the Hegelian program for tragedy as a conflict between two equally ethical systems of law (the prepolitical and the political).4 Critics debate which system of law each character represents and whether the opposition between them can be resolved. The answers to these modern concerns lie in the five series of dichotomies that were best summarized by George Steiner as “the dialectics of intimacy and exposure, of the ‘housed’ and the most public” (Antigones: ):5 family and state, young and old, death and life, woman and man, singular and universal, and divine and human laws. Unceasingly, critics encourage us to associate Antigone with “family, the young, the dead, women, singularity and divine law.”6 I follow here Karl Reinhardt’s now classic suspicion (in his lectures at Oxford in ) that all these oppositions probably say more about nineteenthcentury German drama than they do about Greek drama.7 Put otherwise, if Aristotle thought that tragedy purged the audience of the emotions aroused by the play, modern criticism purges (perhaps even purifies) the tragedy of the Athenians.8 Antigone becomes indeed like Heraclitus’ Delphic oracle, which “neither speaks nor conceals”—to some extent this could be said of the entire corpus of extant Greek tragedies, given how radically “other” the Greek cosmology remains for us still today. To face this otherness, modern criticism domesticates the play by disregarding its war frame and injecting the drama 35

Sophocles’ Antigone

with a certain positivity: critics assume that these dichotomies are identifiable (it would seem that there indeed is a clearly discrete family and state, or that there indeed is a woman and a man, as we understand them in modernity), and that Antigone has always been on one side of the dichotomy (the family, the gods, or justice), while Creon has always been on the other. One would want to recall here that the equation between family (blood relationship) and city (community) dominated antiquity.9 Indeed, Creon equates both spheres throughout the play: to foster discipline in the family is tantamount to doing “his duty in the city” (l. ); just as he will not obey his son (l. ), he thinks he should not obey the city (l. ); just as his son should be loyal to him as his father, he should be loyal to him as a king (l. ). As I hope to show, Antigone and Creon trespass boundaries in a similar way. Likewise, Sophocles’ starting point is the absolute corruption of the royal “family” of Labdacus. The identity of each of the family’s members is undecidable; often gender is uncertain as well: is Antigone’s womanhood defined by the (female) duty to bury a brother, in spite of her manly defiance of authority? Where does the equation between Antigone and womankind leave Ismene, who does not bury her brother and chooses to survive by conforming to Greek ideals of female submission to authority? Most important, when critics read “the family” or “the woman” in the play as having an essential existence that predates, and remains unchanged by, the exceptional political conflict with which the play opens, they miss the point that it is precisely this political conflict that produces the characters, and thus the conflict we need to read. The “positivity” injected into the play by critics makes the ancients speak to specific categories born after the creation of the modern states and the emergence of liberal democracy; Antigone’s society did not have a state, its democracy was not liberal. The problem Antigone thinks through perhaps is only apparent to those dedicated to conceptualizing radical democracy after Marx—not to those who take for granted the state and its relation to democracy.10 To revisit some of Antigone’s questions, I want to highlight here the specter of civic dissolution that frames the play—an overlooked scenario of the dismantling of community. In this sense, mine is a gesture more akin to those who align tragedy with ritual, myth, and the city. Consider, for instance, Girard’s insistence that the important aspect of Oedipus the King is the plague rather than Oedipus’ incest and parricide, or Jean-Pierre Vernant’s stressing of the links between tragedy and both the legal language of democratic courts and the rituals of sacrifice, passage, hunting, and scapegoating.11 36

Antigone and the Polis

Antagonistic, rather than agonistic in nature, the tragic conflict in question does not present two different ethics, genders, ages, characters, or personalities but rather two imaginative horizons—and two political logics—for a community at war over the limits of its constituency. Creon’s agency is the cipher of a political question that could only become problematic with the advent of direct democracy, when membership and sovereignty became one and the same issue for the first time in ancient Greek history, making it possible to deliberate publicly about the exclusions and expansions required to constitute a “popular sovereign.” From the very first scene, we are exposed to a kind of making and remaking of the communal sphere that also contains the seeds of its possible destruction. Creon’s exclusionary force aims at defining the constituency of the new city; Antigone’s inclusionary force emerges to show the contingency of this definition, if not to define her version of a “popular sovereign” altogether differently. Polynices’ mythical plea for a limit to Eteocles’ accumulation of power is radicalized by Antigone: if the brothers had equal rights, who established when a brother ceased to be a brother, and how? To counter the anxiety of fragmentation and seal off the community as an identifiable political entity, Creon’s starting point is to instrumentalize Polynices—in a tactic that can be read as an aspect of what Andrew Brown has called “Creon’s modernity” (). Antigone’s starting point is instead to recover Polynices’ irreducible difference. In modern terms, their difference lies in their political solution—their tolerance—for the city’s natural lack of unity. Creon’s vision is that of a political community imaginatively instituted as a totality (an abstraction in need of representative authority); Antigone’s vision is that of a community inherently lacking in totality, hers is a consciousness of community division and participation, reaffirmed by the uniqueness of each of its members, the real locus of popular sovereignty, never reducible to any totality. To put it in terms of the modern concept of equality, this is the tension between conceiving of equality as identity (based on sameness) or as equivalence (based on difference). I thus relocate Antigone within the ancient sphere of democracy, calling upon some of the text’s political conditions of production as well as upon the mysterious success of Antigone’s performance in fifth-century Athens, to open up new dialogues between the tragedy’s political imagination and our own. Like any reconstruction of context, mine is an interpretative gesture like tragedy itself. As a historical form, tragedy also meditates on what is “lost in translation” in its adaptation of ancient myths to the new political experiment of 37

Sophocles’ Antigone

fifth-century Athens. I align my (tragic) interpretation of context with that of the “new democratic school,” which sees continuities between ancient tragedy and ancient, as well as modern, political thought and practice.12 I suggest that what was at stake and on stage for the ancients is also at stake for us, though we veil it: rather than modern social dichotomies in conflict, the tragedy stages a political paradox, which modernity reformulated as it appropriated for itself the principle of equality. Antigone exposes a constitutive question for the ancient revolutionary invention of democracy, a question that invariably resurfaces regardless of how often it is suppressed: who constituted the body politic, and by which rituals was this determination made? Insofar as our horizon is democratic, this is our question, too—a question that the modern liberal imagination about democracy decides not to resolve by assuming an always already constituted “society of equals.” The liberal restriction on the concept of equality as “equal right to freedom” perpetuates the problem: democracy is always bound to ask who those with equal rights to freedom will be. What should we remember, then, about the relationship between tragedy and its context, and in particular between Antigone and its context? Democracy and tragedy are contemporaneous Greek inventions, but the relationship between the two is not straightforwardly available for literary interpretation. Antigone was written and staged sometime between  and , at the peak of Pericles’ democratic government and some twenty years after the historical landmark of Efialtes’ democratic reforms, which took many crimes out of the jurisdiction of the oligarchic court of the Areopagus and assigned them to courts with juries of citizens.13 Based on a reference made by Aristophanes in his Life of Sophocles, some think that the play’s success led the people of Athens to choose Sophocles to command the expedition against Samos in –. Others argue that Antig­ one was performed just after Sophocles returned from the campaign against Samos.14 Sophocles’ military service is not in itself surprising; during the years of democracy, all Athenian citizens were engaged with the polis and the empire at some stage in their lives. The question of why a playwright would have been elected to a military position usually reserved for the oligarchy and the political leaders, and the question of the possible relationship between that decision and Antigone’s success, are more difficult to answer. Was the play in any way a meditation on civic virtue or war? Was the tragedy referring to the problem of empire or to current political events? For the most part, modern classicists read the political context as a footnote 38

Antigone and the Polis

to the tragedy, and proceed to read in Creon an allegory of the state, albeit gone awry. Antigone in turn is seen as having no part in politics, but rather colliding with politics as a representative of tradition or religion. Some classicists nonetheless feel compelled to make more precise historical comments. In his influential Sophoclean Tragedy (), Cecil Maurice Bowra argued that in light of its popular success, one would have expected the tragedy to have glorified the achievements of Athenian democracy. Not finding any “political propaganda, contemporary allusions, [or] appeal to patriotism” (), he concluded that Sophocles’ election to military office had nothing to do with his Antigone and that “what might be called the political issue” in the play is an incident between gods and men (ibid.). However, if the classicist demand is that the tragedy should contain direct allusions to politics, this demand speaks to the genre neither as classically defined nor as historically interpreted. Bowra’s reading of the “exalted detachment” in Antigone resonates with what Aristotle in his Poetics reminds us about the conventions of drama: his notion of mimesis places an emphasis on distance.15 Representation makes man capable of feeling sensations that are afflicting, horrible, unbearable—“as, for instance, the vision of the most vile of animals or of cadavers” (Poetics: b). Aristotle indicates which representations might be pleasurable in tragedy, in terms of a measure of tolerance for “cadavers,” but he does not explain why certain representations are simply disgusting. Nor does he offer a specific example of a collective’s tolerance for its own cadavers. Aristotle clarifies that the spectators must experience a certain sympathetic proximity to the drama in order for fear to arise among them: “[F]ear [is occasioned] by that of one like ourselves” (ibid.: a). But “disgusting” representations, and thus tragedy’s economy of distance, can be interpreted as produced by the ancient political space. Both Bowra’s expectation that Antigone would have contained allusions to the contemporary situation and Aristotle’s enigmatic limits to tragic representation take on a different urgency when we consider Herodotus’ historical explanation of the Athenians’ intolerance for the representation of their own misfortunes (oikéia kaká). In The Persian Wars, the historian states that Phrynicus’ tragic representation of the fall of the city of Miletus was banned by law, because it was unbearable for the Athenians: The Athenians showed themselves beyond measure afflicted at the fall of Miletus, in many ways expressing their sympathy, and especially by their treatment of Phrynichus. For when this poet brought upon the stage his drama, The Capture of Miletus,

39

Sophocles’ Antigone the whole theatre burst into tears, and the people sentenced him to pay a fine of a thousand drachmas, for recalling to them their own misfortunes [oikéia kaká].16 They likewise made a law, that no one should ever again exhibit that piece. (Book VI: , my emphasis)

Phrynicus’ tragedy, now lost, represented the Athenians’ own recent war defeat. The use of the adjective “familiar” (oikéia) to qualify a civic rather than a family misfortune reminds us of the ancient equation of community and blood-relationships that I mentioned earlier. Commenting precisely on this identification, Nicole Loraux draws the conclusion that the tragedians must have learned Phrynicus’ lesson very well: time, theme, and proximity of events were strictly controlled. In the fourth century, Isocrates went a step further, formulating the law by which the only crimes to be represented in Athens should be “crimes originally pertaining to ‘other cities’” (De l’amnistie: , my translation). The only exception to this was the representation of the defeat of others, as in Aeschylus’ The Persians. While what was considered a collective misfortune involved war or crime, the representation of those actions (drama) that recalled the suffering (pathos) of the (civic) family was displaced into mythical time and space. Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests that it was this political prohibition that gave birth to the theatrical “consciousness of fiction” in Athens.17 The Dionysian festivals were not a carnivalesque entertainment, then, but a civic symptomatic work of self-interpretation. Tragic distance allowed for the political agonies (forbidden from public remembrance) to return in the form of ancient myths on the safely ritualized space of the stage, providing a vehicle for catharsis in the city. Tragedy was a means not only of forgetting but also of remembering—an interpretation of political history, another Greek invention. Moses Finley imagines the Athenians departing from the theater “solemnly saying to their friends, in whatever was the contemporary idiomatic equivalent, ‘It makes you think’ ” (Ancient Greeks: ). Tragedy was part and parcel of the democratic institutions the Greeks were inventing; if the assembly provided the space for debate and decision, tragedy provided the space for symbolizing the irruption of politics and reflecting on it.18 Thus it is precisely because of tragedy’s link to the political invention of democracy that Antigone could never have contained any of the direct contemporary allusions that Bowra expected when commenting on Antigone’s historical success. To shed light on the play, we may consider asking what the inventors of tragedy could (or could not) tolerate as interpretations of themselves. Finley’s physiological metaphor gives us the other side of Herodotus’ historical record of censorship: 40

Antigone and the Polis [If] there is a tie with the democratic atmosphere of fifth century Athens, it must be sought [. . .] in the way the dramatists were encouraged [. . .] to explore the human soul, and in the tolerance shown under circumstances in which that particular quality is not what one might have expected. Festival conditions imposed definite limits on the artists [. . .] in their choice of themes, even in the structure [. . .] but [they] could probe with astonishing latitude and freedom into the traditional myths and beliefs, and into fresh problems society was throwing up, such as the new Socratic emphasis on reason, or the humanity of slaves, or the responsibilities and corruption of power. (Ibid.: , my emphasis)

Antigone must have offered its audience an alternative “digestive system” for the excess they could not tolerate in the public sphere. As it turns out, Finley’s digestive metaphor fits well with the anthropological investigations that link the birth of tragedy to totemic digestion. Following the trail of both tragedy’s etymology—“the song for the goat”—and tragedy’s ritualistic origins, scholars like Walter Burkert have found tragedy’s ancestry in the lament for the sacrifice of a goat in honor of Dionysus, a communal eating commemorated so ferociously in the cannibalistic scenes that Euripides, in his Bacchae (–), chose for his account of the entrance of Dionysus in the city. We can follow the trail further, picking up a lead from Theophrastus’ book On Piety. Some scholars suggest that Euripides’ tearing to pieces (sparagmos) of Pentheus is the original cannibalistic scene that evolved from human into animal sacrifice in Greece.19 Is it possible that this remote scene informing the origins of tragedy—a cannibalistic feast of eating their own—might be connected to democracy’s fundamental problem, defining who its own are, in more powerful ways than we suspect? That tragedy may have roots in cannibalistic rites is to some degree confirmed by Dennis Hughes’s research into human sacrifice in ancient Greece, in which he shows the lack of human sacrifice in the Homeric poems in contrast to the “sudden burgeoning” of the practice on the tragic stage in the fifth century (Human Sacrifice: ). Was the unprecedented tragic staging of human sacrifice related to the difficulties of the new political invention? We may never find out whether it was Antigone that led to Sophocles’ military appointment. But we may imagine how it served the healthy space of the city by “throwing up” on stage the undigested (contaminating?) fears, anxieties, and changes generated by the new experiment of democracy, whose two-hundred-year-long stability was partly predicated upon a specific regulation of its “politics of representation.” The latter entailed an extreme vigilance—and, one 41

Sophocles’ Antigone

could say, an extreme intolerance—toward both political and ideological representation in order to guard the city against the lurking phantom of fragmentation. This ancient political community radically disbelieved in, or better said, had no notion of, political representation, contrary to what we are used to in our modern representative democracies.20 This was consistent with the democratic critique of tyranny as the illegitimate and violent usurpation of power for personal use, which might have been at least one of the “serious subject[s]” that Aristotle says tragedy imitates (Poetics: b). The political remedy for the lust for power was a system of rotation of power by lot so as to prevent any accumulation of power or claims to the permanent prerogative to represent. The closest to our notion of “representation” would have been that offered by a certain type of “magistrate” (most prominently one with expertise in war—that is, the strate-goi, or generals) chosen not by lot but by “elections”—which for the Greeks were not a democratic but an aristocratic principle. Before its meetings, the main decision-making organ—the Athenian Assembly, attended by all adult male citizens, assisted by the Council—pronounced a curse against any individual who aspired “to become a tyrant or to join in restoring a tyrant.”21 If one can imagine it, each and every male within the propertied population (approximately  percent) “ran the risk” of being selected for office and had the chance to become president of the Assembly for one day or a member of the Council (a kind of “executive power” of the Assembly) for one year.22 The fragmentation and rotation of administrative posts and popular jury courts prevented the creation of a political elite within the (elitist) Athenian constituency. No one was immune from public judgment and condemnation—not even the Assembly itself. The latter was checked by laws that protected good decisionmaking, including the penalty of ostracism and, later, in the fourth century, the indictment of decrees, the graphê paranomôn, which could be implemented by a vote of the Assembly against itself.23 The Athenians’ distrust of political representation was intimately woven into the discourse of democracy as an ideology of antityrannicism. For Raaflaub, it operated as “the glue” that held the Greeks together24 from the fall of tyranny in the late sixth century onward: it played a “perhaps indispensable role in providing the citizens with a contrast against which they defined their shared civic identity and virtues.”25 Athens was the “rule of law,” not the “rule of men.” But the politics of equality made freedom checked-by-law stand in tenuous balance with sovereignty: how free was the community to change its 42

Antigone and the Polis

laws, and which constituency was allowed to make the changes without risking a fall into an illegitimate, tyrannical exercise of power? The politics of freedom were at permanent risk of colliding with the politics of equal participation. To complicate matters further, Athens did not have a public coercive apparatus to enforce the law; that was left to private hands. Indeed, Athens was based neither on tribal kinship nor on the apparatus of a state to regulate its outbursts of violence.26 The law then had to be highly consensual or refer to ancestral custom; the politics of equality needed homogeneity. The specter of an external enemy provided by the imperialistic enterprises of Athens was not sufficient to ensure the internal unity that would prevent the fragmentation of direct democracy from degenerating into civil war—or stasis, as the Greeks called it. For Finley stasis was the “chronic evil in Greek society”: it made “the dividing-line between politics and sedition [. . .] a thin one in classical Greece” (Ancient Greeks: , ). We can recall here that Aristotle later would refer to the desire of men for equality as leading to sedition (Politics: ).27 The problem was how to regulate violence in a society of equals—that is, without a sector of society that monopolized it. The tension between tyranny, stasis, and democracy appears on the stage of Antigone. The extreme vigilance toward political representation was complemented by the particular exclusion of certain representations as a way of regulating both civic memory and identity to reduce the risk of stasis. The fifth century begins and ends with restrictions on collective practices of remembrance, especially the remembrance of war. The fine levied against Phrynicus opens the century; the amnesty declared by the returning democrats after the dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants (–) to forbid the remembrance of the civil war closes it. So strong was the need to forgive and forget the dictatorship that the first democrat who attempted to remember the Tyrants was sentenced to death without trial by the “moderate Arquinos,” himself a returning democrat. Although Plutarch also associates the fining of Phrynicus with the decree of amnesty, Loraux argues that there was a difference between the fine and the decree: amnesty became not so much an issue of the perils of instilling remembrance in memory—Phrynicus’ error—but an issue of prohibiting “a remembrance against” (De l’amnistie: –)—that is, of regulating vengeance. What is interesting about this particular democratic economy of mourning, in terms of my reconstruction of context, is that both in the case of the fining and of the decree, it involves the resignification of figures of enmity: it bans the representation of military defeat (the external enemy as more powerful) 43

Sophocles’ Antigone

and of vengeful remembrances (the internal enemy as always present). Athens had a “politics of friendship”: while the ghost of tyranny was invoked in every discourse as the ever-present danger, time and again democracy’s economy of forgetting concrete enemies was insisted upon both by the greatest leaders of Athenian democracy and by its opponents. Opponents argued against the politics of amnesty because it left enemies wandering the city. Thus we can read Plato’s later complaint in The Republic that “in a democracy you must have seen how men condemned to death or exile stay on and go about in public [. . . .] There is so much tolerance . . .” (Book VIII: ). But for the democrats, we might surmise that in order to sustain the permanent division that the new politics of debate generated, it must have been necessary to distinguish between dissent and enmity, perhaps making an effort to confine the latter outside of, and always inferior to, Athenian practice. The Athenians preferred the language of medicine to that of politics to describe inimical political conflict. The city needed a “healthy” balanced order; the only imaginable break within the unitary order was the formation of dual factions. The splintering into a multiplicity of adversarial groups was not an option. In a dual conflict, at least the city could imagine itself “united in conflict.”28 Health was compared to isonomia and sickness to monarchia: political conflict was portrayed as an “epidemic” affecting the whole city; lack of political virtue was a “plague” upon the city (Plato, Protagoras d). The tensions between amnesty, enmity, and dissent, I suggest, also appear on the “sickened” stage of Antigone. Were Antigone’s “evils of our enemies coming to our own” those ghosts of sickness against which Athens imagined itself as a healthy city, ghosts that were purged by the staging of the polluted house of Labdacus in Thebes? Was the undoing of a ritual the remaking of the fratricidal civil war? Sophocles’ choice of a ritual gone astray as the source of the Theban “sickness” makes the link to the city even more decisive. For rituals are the social institutions that regulate antagonistic social forces, which, if in contact, could unleash contamination and consequently the collapse of identity. The ritualistic origins of tragedy have been well documented;29 suffice it to remember here that the symbolic effect of tragedy is similar to that of rituals. Like tragedy, ritual dramatizes: it acts out real conflicts, drawing upon concrete, organized actions or roles. Like tragedy, ritual is a “working through” of social conflict; it is a “social drama” providing a catharsis to restore the well-being of a community after death, change, or illness.30 44

Antigone and the Polis

We can think of the ritualistic operation in Antigone in two ways. At the formal level, ritual purges afflictions within a regulated space and time; at the thematic level, it links those limits to representations of that which was excluded from the imagination of a “healthy” polis. One could say that the play allegorizes on stage what it does to the audience. While it purges the audience of pity and fear, the play allegorizes the purging of the political from its contaminating excesses. Safely ritualizing the very undoing of ritual, Antigone has the audience experience what the polis forbade, and thus “makes them think,” I suggest, less about the possibility of a human moral than about the possibility of the polis itself. In the Greek Attic space of the fifth century, this meant achieving a balance between stasis, enmity, tyranny, amnesty, dissent, and democracy. But what can we make of the safe undoing not just of “any ritual” but of a very particular one: a funeral ritual? Funerals are markers of membership. Sophocles may have succeeded in having his spectators not only bear the representation of their own corpses, in the guise of Theban corpses, but also face a crucial question for the history of democracy—namely, the link with its own generative violence. The ultimate subtext of Antigone’s question to Ismene and to us concerns who the members of the polis really were. Was Antigone unmasking the deaths needed to preserve the limits of democracy’s constituency? Wherein resided the sovereignty to limit equality?

45



The Most Modern of Tragedies: The Politics of Burial

My previous questions are relevant to the play’s dynamics only if we keep in sight a structural parallel to the lack of burials, a parallel that strengthens the link between the tragedy and its city, and also our modernity: no gods come to repair or to protest Creon’s disturbance of the community. The interference with the dead is left to human autonomous agency—to politics proper—to mend. Thus Seth Bernadete suggests that Creon “politicizes the burial” and Cornelius Castoriadis that Antigone “more than all the others, [is] the tragedy of the democracy”; Antigone may well be, in its extreme secularity, the most “modern” of all extant tragedies—or the most modern and at the same time the most Greek.1 It is less a question of doubting that Antigone can be read as a divine tragedy, as it so often is, than one of seeing that the most important dramatic conflict of the play may not be the opposition between men and gods.2 Just what sort of conflict flares up between gods and humans is already a matter of interpretation, for the gods play a vanishing act. The divine is relocated to the realm of the dead, who have, in turn, been displaced to a zone of human contention. In Antigone, characters invoke the gods only in defense of different social orders. Rather than an opposition, there is a continuum between the divine and the human, which only breaks at the non-negotiable point of death where the gods fade away. The tragedy lies in the space of political autonomy, where humans bear the weight of decisions with no guarantee but their own judgment. One is indeed tempted to read the fifth-century Athenian political space in this particular respect as “modern,” insofar as, compared with the later Christian emphasis on the decisive link between this life and an afterlife, the Athenian political and religious spheres bore a certain mutual indifference. The gods, in any case, lacked interest in human death. As the goddess Artemis says to the dying Hippolytus: “Farewell, I must not look upon the dead. My eye 46

The Most Modern of Tragedies

must not be polluted by the last gaspings for breath. I see you are near this.”3 In literary treatments, the Greek gods, fearing contamination, tend to run away. The gods were involved in pleasant things; it was the “daimons,” or “fortune” or “lot” that had a relationship to death. Athens’s was a polis religion that integrated males into the groups where they belonged; gods also integrated the male social groups with each other and into nature. The comparison here has to be made in terms of gender: it was to the women that the most mystical “cult religions” were ascribed. Not surprisingly, these religions had cults outside the polis, allowing women to escape from the city and into madness and mania. The Greeks did not have “a church authority” to establish rituals of worship. Their civic religion integrated rituals and expressions of religious piety to the polis, but in no known case did the Delphic oracle prescribe political action (it only retrospectively explained a failure). The Greeks issued laws and edicts in the names of men, not gods—and the violation of these laws was a crime, not a sacrilege.4 Vidal-Naquet’s reminder of the inscription at Dreros is telling: Of course, too, when they wrote laws [. . .] they placed these laws under the sign of the gods, either by the mere mention (gods) or by this or that formula which we still do not understand, like the “May God be kind [?]” of Dreros, but what comes immediately afterward is separated from the world of the gods: “Thus has the city decided.”5

The gods themselves lived in a “society”—a community almost in a political sense, not so different from that of men, since they were not eternal but merely immortal. They were latecomers to the order of the universe and they also obeyed higher powers—namely, the primordial, unpersonified cosmic elements that formed the universe: Chaos, Gaia, Eros, Nux, Ouranos, and Okeanos. Neither all-powerful nor omniscient, gods were vulnerable to conflict among themselves. As Vernant reminds us, they could not upset the order of the divine cosmos.6 In linking the polis to mythology, Castoriadis points out that chance defined the world of the gods as much as that of humans and qualifies chance as “political”: “[T]he first known political drawing of lots took place between Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades after their victory over the Titans; for them it was a way of determining the division of their respective areas of domination. If Zeus is master of the universe it is by chance: he drew the heavens” (“Athenian Democracy”: ). With political lots being drawn in heaven as on earth, the dividing line between gods and men was only mortality. It is tempting to wonder to what extent these religious ideas contributed to the emergence of the Greek idea of political autonomy. 47

Sophocles’ Antigone

In turn, the cultural context of tragedy—the festival of the Great Dionysia, under the patronage of Dionysus7—was not only a religious but also, and what is most important, a civic rite. Financed in the same way as war, partly by the public treasury and partly by the wealthy, set in public space with the same institutional norms as the assemblies or the popular tribunals, the festival was filled with both sacrificial religious rituals and rituals that concerned the city and its wars. War orphans who had been raised by the city and had reached adulthood were presented to the audience, outstanding citizens were honored, ambassadors were received, prisoners were released, tributes from the colonies were brought, the city’s own youth danced in army regalia.8 We slide from the religious into the political even more smoothly in the very text of Antigone with Sophocles’ focus on the impure house of Labdacus and his revision of the myth in order to stage it in the theater of the polis. Impurity was also a symbol of an absolute and intolerable breakdown of political order.9 Sophocles transforms the legendary dispute between Thebes and Argos over the return of enemy soldiers’ corpses—a conflict between two warrior kings— into a dispute between the king and his niece—that is, a dispute internal to Thebes. Antigone ceases to be the legendary image of religious piety, the dutiful daughter of Oedipus at Colonus, and becomes a stubborn rebel against royal authority. Her life does not resolve itself happily in marriage; in contrast to earlier versions of the myth, she is saved neither by Haemon, later to bear his child, nor by Theseus, the greatest of Athenian heroes and a son of gods. Not only has Sophocles removed Antigone from the categories of wifehood and motherhood but he has also invented the circumstances of Antigone’s death and recast the presentation of Polynices’ treason as nothing more than Creon’s allegation. In his Seven against Thebes, Aeschylus has Antigone say that Polynices had been wronged; thus he answers “wrong with wrong,” bearing a shield carved with the words “I am justice.” Euripides’ famous dialogue between the quarreling brothers in The Phoenician Women has Eteocles say that he “worships” power and will not yield it to his brother without a fight, even though Eteocles does not dispute Polynices’ claim to justice; Euripides’ version of Antigone (now lost) has Dionysus avert the calamity and allow Antigone to marry Haemon.10 But it is the absence of the gods on stage that probably makes the play the most secular work in the Sophoclean corpus. While almost all the characters mention the gods to endow their own actions with legitimacy, there is no personification of an archaic god, nor any clearly identifiable divine actions. Consider either the tragic personification of Dionysus in Euripides’ The Bacchae, 48

The Most Modern of Tragedies

coming to punish Pentheus, or the gods’ legendary interventions in favor of proper burial in the Homeric epic.11 Even the religious words of the priest, whose sacrificial rites are “unrevealing” (l. ), suggest that the gods are neither concerned with Creon’s actions nor willing to perform the punishment directly. Rather, Creon’s punishment will be the action of the Furies of the underworld: “[T]hese [deeds] are not your concern, not that of the gods above [. . .] For this there are savage spirits of punishment lying in wait for you, the Furies of Hades” (ll. –). The Furies—as well as the “folly of speech” (l. )—afflict Antigone, too. But the gods have “furies” also. Furies are more ancient than the Olympian gods; they originate in the oldest known form of Hellenic speech. E. R. Dodds has suggested that these more ancient Furies are a “psychic intervention,” a state of mind, with the moral function of administering vengeance in order to enforce the allotment assigned to each member of the community.12 He even refers to these same lines of Antigone to argue against the idea that the Furies are the vengeful dead, proposing rather that they represent the will of the living “to punish the violation of the natural apportionment,” in this case Creon’s violation (, fn. ).13 Indeed, it is only living members of the community that accuse Creon. The highest concentration of references to the gods is found in the six odes sung by the chorus of elders. Yet, this mythical material does not directly affect the action of the play. The most commonly held opinion is that the chorus represents the “common people” who would be in the audience watching the drama; more recently, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood links the drama to its original roots by arguing that the odes were the remnants of ritual performances to Dionysus.14 Most discussed is the Ode to Man, which appears immediately after Creon’s edict and Antigone’s action, after we learn that the play’s central conflict is human. The ode addresses not only the creativity of men on earth but also a higher, more ancient, power than the gods themselves—“The oldest of the gods, Earth the immortal”—which man manages to “wear away, turning the soil with the brood of horses, as year after year the ploughs move to and fro” (l. ). The ode lists human “wonders” (deinos l. )—and yet, the worshiping of gods does not belong to this list; rather, as Charles Segal notes, the ode’s themes are “the unmasterable violence within man or man’s helplessness before the gods.”15 This has made Antigone a point of reference for the “modernism” of the Periclean era.16 The gods are mentioned only in relation to the city. Man’s “inventive craft” (tekhnas l. –) and his capacity to 49

Sophocles’ Antigone

combine honoring the “laws of land and the right of oaths sworn by the gods” (ll. –) make of him a good citizen. The Greek text in line  does not position “the gods” as subject of the clause; it suggests that to be a good citizen man must either reconcile human and divine justice, or keep his word, because not to do so would be impious. His craft and honoring of divine laws may “drive him to good or to evil” (l. ), though it is worth noting that good and evil are also defined in relation to the polis: good drives a man “to a lofty city,” whereas evil leaves him “city-less” (l. ). And lastly, “[F]rom death alone he will procure no refuge; but he has devised escapes from baffling sicknesses” (ll. –). The language of this ode highlights evil not as a religious or moral problem but as that which is excluded from the Greek political space. It further suggests that while man is incapable of dealing with death, he is capable of dealing with illnesses—a trope for political conflict. Death is an antagonistic, not agonistic, factor distinguishing gods from men. Death defines what it is to be human; the funeral ritual is not a negotiation with the gods. It is for humans to define who is “human enough” to be buried within the community. Whenever the gods are mentioned in Antigone, a human agent comes forward to aid the audience in interpretation. Consider the following example: in the first line of the play, when we hear Antigone’s reference to a religious realm, we are confronted with an ambiguity—it is not clear if the agent of “evil” is the impure house of Labdacus or a god: “Sister [. . .] do you know of any evil among those which stem from Oedipus, that Zeus is not bringing to pass for us, while we still live?” (ll. –). The Greek is imprecise; Zeus is the subject of the sentence but Oedipus is said to be the origin of evils.17 While it is not clear whether the father or the god is to blame, Antigone soon tells Ismene that the new evil is Creon’s “edict” (l. ). She defies her uncle’s edict precisely because the proclamation’s evil is of human origin: “[It] was not Zeus who proclaimed that edict” (l. ). Zeus is just a formulaic witness, as Creon himself says to the elders: “[L]et Zeus who sees all things always, be my witness” (l. ). There has been some speculation about the extent to which the gods intervene when the agency of an individual is unclear. On closer scrutiny, I believe what is at stake in these scenes is not the power of the gods but the characters’ failure to understand a logic of action that does not fall within the logic of the dominant political power. In this respect, the two episodes in which Antigone appears to have sprinkled dust on Polynices’ corpse are among the most debated in the play. After her first trip she leaves no trace of her steps, and during 50

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her second trip a whirlwind of dust covers her unseen return to the site where Polynices’ corpse lies. The mystery here is the nature of Antigone’s action, which, as Carol Jacobs puts it, “neither buries nor fails to bury” the corpse.18 Some critics give credence to the characters’ suspicion that the gods are “acting,” arguing that Sophocles is alerting the audience to the presence of the divine.19 Those who suspect this presence—in the first scene, the chorus of elders (ll. –), in the second scene, the guards—base their suspicions on a telling piece of evidence: Antigone’s agency cannot be seen. In the first scene Antigone has left no “human” trace.20 But the problem might lie in the kind of traces that are expected. To Creon’s question about “what man” could have possibly dared to do this, the guard responds that he cannot know: “[T]here was no stroke made by a pickaxe, no impression of a mattock. The ground was hard and dry, unbroken and unmarked by cartwheels; there was no sign who the culprit had been” (ll. –, my emphasis). The expected human traces are tools—a cart track, a pickaxe, or a mattock—but the culprit carried none of these. These tools belong to a political order: they are used mainly to plow the earth, they are implements allowed at funeral sites according to Greek custom. Women were not allowed to travel by night to the tombs without a cart and a lamp.21 Antigone’s trip does not mark the earth as man does. Thus it cannot be understood by the guards, who have eyes only for what has been coded by authority. To the lack of traces, Brown adds the lack of noise: Antigone acts in silence (). Antigone’s second trip to the corpse is protected by “a whirlwind raised from the earth, a dust-storm” (l. ). The storm allows her to reach the site unseen by the guards: “We shut our eyes to keep out the god-sent plague. And when, after a long time, this had cleared, the girl was seen” (ll. –, my emphasis). The guards’ lack of vision is significant because this dust storm does not manage to cover the corpse. Either there was in fact no dust storm or it was not a powerful one. If the storm was not so fierce, the guards fail to see Antig­ one because they have “shut their eyes.” With irony, Hogan writes, “Antigone brought her own dust!” (), and he suggests that “the gods of Sophocles do work in mysterious ways, often quite obscure to man” (). Jacobs, in search of Antigone’s ethics, reads both the storm and Antigone as performing the burial and the lack of burial of Polynices’ corpse (). Because this act cannot be apprehended through the guards’ logic of dichotomy—either the body is buried or it is unburied—for Jacobs, the ethical act is bound to remain unseen. The characters in these two passages—the elders and the guards—have 51

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something in common: they blindly obey the authority of the king. They are thus prevented from seeing actions that do not fit their order. Or they do not want to see, in which case we need to ask whether these male characters are not, in a way, rebelling against their duty. Rather than the presence of the gods, the passages register man’s failure—a failure either of reading or of performance of duty. Neither Antigone nor Creon relies on the gods for help. Both invoke divinities to justify their actions, yet both also exercise a freedom of action uninflected by godly influence. In the end, the question of why the gods would protect Antigone, yet abandon her, is as unavoidable as it is unsolvable. Linguistic references to autonomy appear throughout the play, with an astounding number of compounds beginning with the word “auto”: self-chosen, self-referred.22 While in the six other Sophoclean plays such words number nineteen in total, in Antigone they occur fifteen times; the compounds refer either to the family “of their own kin” or to the killings committed “by their own hands.” Creon believes that the gods cannot have “honored a wicked corpse” (l. ). Although not impious, he “knows very well that no man has the power to pollute the gods” (l. ). In the end, he blames neither the gods nor any other man: “It was I, it was I who killed you, I, truth to tell” (l. –). And while Creon’s freedom is not a subject of his speech, his practice of it suggests both the very Athenian freedom to proclaim an edict, and the very Spartan freedom to impose it upon his people. In his extreme secularity, Creon is a bit “too modern,” to echo Brown again (). Bertolt Brecht thought that the tragedy had no allusions whatsoever to the gods.23 After comparing how often Antigone mentions the gods (four times) to how often she mentions Polynices (nine times), Brown even asks whether Antigone’s actions can be called religious at all (). Even if Antigone’s “autonomos” refers not to killing but to abiding by the unwritten laws, sometimes qualified as “divine,” Antigone never explains the phrase “divine law”: its meaning changes several times, from signifying “the things that gods honor” (l. ) to “due observance of propriety and custom” (l. ).24 And while Antigone admits her lack of knowledge about the laws’ origin (l. ), in most ancient Greek political speeches unwritten laws are those laws that the community takes for granted. Thus, I suggest that we shift the interpretative emphasis on the opposition between “divine versus human law” (gods versus men) to the opposition between two forms of political speech and what we might make of them: the ritual 52

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and the edict. Antigone’s laws differ from Creon’s not because hers are godly but because they have not been pronounced by one single authority. Antigone’s is the rule of law; Creon’s is the rule of men. Both characters expose two disparate forms of regulating internal violence. That which is holy to Antigone is a human matter: carving culture (the ritual) into nature (death). Since he does not attempt to gain immortality for himself, Creon does not trample on the gods, and in one sense his concern is not so different from Antigone’s: they both deem it necessary to protect the community from fragmentation and violence. They differ, more importantly, with regard to what they consider to be the location of sovereignty. Put otherwise, they differ not on what “the human” is, but on who should decide which individuals are humans and which are not—they disagree, in other words, about whose dead matter the community should accept as its own and whose not. At stake in the funeral rite is a “working through” of the limits of the constituency. The rite humanizes dead matter by negotiating a unique place for it within the community, giving it a name that incorporates it as a dead member—“really dead,” in that it will not return to the living world but will remain irreplaceable for the community. The ritual’s working through these limits is thus public speech: it is made collectively at the same time that it makes the collective. As such, it is the community’s effort to grant members their unique, differentiated positions within the polis. Creon’s fight over a ritual is a fight over the unwritten binding symbols that ensure the community’s survival and continuity. Creon reconstructs Thebes on the basis of a violent exclusion: his unmaking of a funeral ritual erases what grants Polynices a place among equals: his difference, his name. Polynices is thus “disappeared” only to be “reappeared” politically: this is the gist of Creon’s political ritual. As Claude Rivière puts it, a political ritual is an “act in the sense of that which institutes” (): it gives a new political order the air “of the unquestionable, indubitable, necessary to the social survival” ().25 Rivière associates these rites with the rites of passage in that they institute and legitimize an arbitrary limit that divides the social order. We may ask if an aspect of the play’s “modernity” is not actually coded in this act of political disappearance and reappearance that marks new arbitrary limits to institute community, a manipulation of corpses so familiar to us that the Antigones who bury their dead never cease to crop up in modern political theaters—on stage and off. We should examine Creon’s politicization of death more closely.



53



Creon’s Edict: The Barbarians at Home

Creon thinks of a remedy with a sickness in mind: stasis. His attack on funeral rites aims at “curing” the city of the poison of civil war—a bloodshed of the Thebans’ own making: “[E]ach miserably slaying his own kin, with hands raised against one another brought about their mutual death” (l. ). What inaugurates the play is not, as is usually interpreted, Antigone’s entrance into the palace at dawn in search of Ismene or her first off-stage effort to dust the corpse of her brother,1 but, rather, the conditions of possibility that frame Antigone’s actions. Between the end of the war and Antigone’s entrance into the palace, radical changes have occurred in Thebes: Creon’s potion for purification from internal chaos has made its way into the city in the form of a decree, almost as if the latter were an actor itself. Creon’s vision is of the “common” good: he wants to “strengthen the city” (l. ), “a whole city” (l. ). But Creon’s carving of a symbolic difference—an identity boundary—between the polluted dead brothers in order to stop the contamination from their war paradoxically reproduces that war. Almost an ancient version of what today some call a “politicide,” it leaves alive only Ismene—a witness.2 Freezing the time of war in a political ritual,3 Creon’s edict can only regulate internal violence with a war machine turned inward that devours the city’s own at the hour of the city’s reconstruction of its limits. Wherein lies the exact power of this edict? How does it link Creon to the polis—or to “the state,” which, for modern criticism, he purportedly represents? Creon’s decision to safeguard the political body is usually read as integral to his “modernity.” At times the edict is read as a symbol of Creon’s alienation from religion, at other times as the equivalent of a (good) state law, as the historical practice of funeral orations in Athens, or as a decree not unlike those the Athenian assembly would issue.4 In this respect, the edict is an emblem of reason, the common good, and universality—an emblem of what today is con54

Creon’s Edict

sidered the state that enforces the law of democracy, that protects democracy. At other times the edict is read as an excessively tyrannical punishment for a traitor to the common good, an avatar of destiny for which Creon, the “stupid” politician (Tiresias, l. ), is punished. In all cases, the equation is between Creon and the ancient city-state or the modern state. Nonetheless, a closer look at the structure of the edict shows that its force, and thus its “modernity,” might lie elsewhere: the edict is in fact a threshold to city or state law rather than a law itself—it locates Creon in a blind spot within the city’s or the state’s rationality. Its form places it both above the law and as a source of law; its function and message transport into the city a radical innovation in terms of its political regulation of violence. We can start by looking at the form. An “edict” (e-dictum: out + said) is an oral proclamation, and thus indicates singularity. Creon’s edict is not properly nomos (law) that has already been communally sanctioned, but kerugma (proclamation, l. ): it is prokerosu (pronounced), announced outwardly as a decision. The chorus asks: “What plan is he putting in motion [. . .] sending notice by means of a proclamation to us all?” (ll. –). Creon’s “I have now [. . .] made proclamation” (l. ) stands in contrast to the Athenian ideal of a good ruler as the one who is not above the law. Creon’s previous lines borrow from that ideal: a good ruler has “to rule well and to submit willingly to being ruled” (l. ); he is a point of flow or conduit for the law that “rubs” him: he has to “be seen practised in rule and law giving” (ll. –), which in Greek reads in the passive “being rubbed in or on the law” (entribés). But Creon’s proclamation is not the communal law “that rubs him”; rather, it is the law’s exception: “But as for his brother . . .” (l. ) is the specific case, produced by contingent events that the edict singles out. Performative and hybrid in nature, the edict is foundational: it is neither inside nor outside of community laws. It does not derive from an existing law to be applied in the specific case but rather suspends the universal validity of both the laws of funeral rites and of treason. It is neither democratic nor antidemocratic but both. Issued in truly antioligarchic fashion, it fulfills the democratic demand that the law be public and available for everyone to know.5 Despite its democratic veneer, the edict resists the democratic allotment of power insofar as its dictum and source of legitimation must not be discussed by anyone: “[T]he penalty for anyone who does any of these things is murder” (l. ). Creon’s edict is comparable in its function to a modern decree: as ancient as it is modern, an edict is a decision having the force of law. Its outcome is as 55

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unpredictable as the situation to which it responds: its proper terrain is that of undecidability. The edict, in other words, resists the law as it paradoxically establishes it; it is the collapse of law and fact into a decision. In modern terms, it is pronounced by an executive authority with exceptional powers in response to what are deemed exceptional times. Legally equivalent to a decree (de +cernere: decide), the edict signals not the state’s universality, not “the law,” but rather the kernel of singularity it protects. Engulfed in the legality of the state, the edict’s decisive power lies hidden and independent from it, ready to emerge when needed, laying bare the seed of violence that supports the state’s universality. Its “rationale” is most often grounded in the easily conjured imaginings of communal danger; if its content concerns the totality of the community, what is usually in danger is its fantasized unity—a rhetorical unity, that is, that the state is in charge of providing for its constituency. As I have highlighted, at stake in the tragedy are civic fragmentation and unity. A closer look at the letter of the edict reveals that its exceptional form corresponds also to an exceptional, foundational, message. The edict constructs a new (fantasy of) unity against the city’s postwar anxiety of dissolution around a new figure of the enemy: this is neither the external Argive enemy, nor the traitor cast out of Attica, nor the amnestied enemy of democracy. It is a permanently lurking enemy that redraws at once the exterior and interior of the city. The audience hears two versions of the edict, which assign different meanings to the corpses of the Labdacide brothers and their relation to the city. While Antigone has been read as obsessed with the “singularity” of Polynices and Creon with the “universality” of a law of treason, the edict shows how both characters speak simultaneously to the singularity of the corpses and the universality of (different) laws—treason and burial. While Creon treats the two singular corpses differently in terms of Greek political honor and dishonor, Antigone worries that the two singular corpses are treated differently in terms of Greek laws of burial. Both Creon and Antigone are concerned with the inclusion of the dead brothers in the city; only Creon has placed one brother at the city’s limits, neither inside nor outside. Creon draws attention to the unburied corpse’s location at the city’s walls— everyone sees how it rots in the open: Eteocles, who died fighting for this city, having won every distinction in battle, is to be laid in a tomb, and all the offerings are to be paid which come to the noblest of the dead below. But as for his brother Polynices, who, on his return from exile, was

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Creon’s Edict prepared utterly to destroy his ancestral land and the gods of his race with fire; who was prepared to feed on kindred blood and reduce other kindred to slavery; as for this man, [. . .] no one shall give him burial honors or lament him, and that instead his body shall be left unburied to be devoured by birds and dogs and mangled in men’s sight. (ll. –, my emphasis)

For Antigone, there are two sets of “eyes.” While the birds of prey gaze upon the corpse, Creon gazes upon the city in search of the disobedient ones, for whom he prepares an unusual violence: the death penalty:6 Eteocles, they say, he [Creon] has laid beneath the earth with due observance of propriety and custom, to be honored by the dead below. But as for the wretched corpse of Polynices [. . .] no one may lay him in a tomb or mourn for him: they must leave him unwept, unburied, a delightful treasure-house for the birds which will gaze upon him as their welcome prey. [. . .] “[T]he penalty laid down for anyone who does any of these things is murder by public stoning in the city. (ll. –, my emphasis)

While critics observe that Creon’s edict either attacks tradition (which would be the crime for which he is punished) or defends it (which would be restoring order after the war by punishing a traitor), in reality it does neither and both at the same time: on the one hand, Creon reveres the rite for Eteocles, and at the same time he rejects it for Polynices; on the other hand, he reveres the law of treason and at the same time he transgresses it. Burial was of utmost importance for the Greeks, though treason was too. The penalty for treason, according to Xenophon, was confiscation of property and prohibition of burial in Attica. It could be applied to the dead, who, once found guilty, could risk being dug up and their bones cast into exile. Thus was the case of Phrynikhos in , or that of the Alcmaeonidae, whose ancestors were dug up and banished, accused of sacrilege along with the living (Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book I: ). Nonetheless, burial was not allowed in Attica, but not denied: friends or family would bury the exiled outside of Attica, but never leave a corpse unburied.7 It is not only the case here that Creon prevents friends and family from burying the corpse outside Attica. It is rather that Creon suspends this law: the corpse is not outside the city walls, it is at the city walls, guarded by its militia. Creon’s edict thus upsets not only the laws of burial but those of treason too: Polynices is treated neither like all citizens, nor like all traitors. Because the exceptionality of Creon’s edict has eluded modern criticism, the significance of this gesture has also been missed: Creon does not attack or defend tradition but rather establishes who benefits from it, by suspending its universal valid57

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ity. Creon’s intervention targets membership, not tradition. To a certain extent, lacking a stable identity, the edict is “not one,” although its internal contradiction is not dialectical. The edict is not subsumed in any synthetic higher legal unit but remains at the level of the decisions that determine where, when, and for whom sanctions are valid. In this respect, the edict’s suspension of law is a figure for the violence in the city, in modern terms more akin to our “reasons of state” than to our “laws of state.” The edict’s simultaneous reverence for and disturbance of tradition inverts the relation between transgression and norm: the sovereign Creon can enforce what was a transgression in the city—lack of burial, exposure of a rotting body in Thebes—as the norm in the specific case he commands. While the burial that cannot be performed is that of a specific, exceptional body, the prohibition against acting according to the traditional norms of the community targets, not surprisingly, membership: “[No] one shall give him burial honors.” Like his edict, Creon is above the law; his inversions have paved the way for his resignification of crime—leaving the body “unwept, unburied”—as duty. This inversion is also figured by a disarrangement in location. Creon puts Polynices’ corpse in the open air and Antigone’s living body underground. As Tiresias says, Creon has “thrust below one of those above, arrogantly lodging a living creature in a tomb, and [. . .] kept here one of those below, a corpse dispossessed, dishonored, impure” (ll. –). In turn, his legitimating discourse also signals his “normative” inversions: he proclaims his power in the name of the kinship he will destroy. It is not the gods, nor his survival of war, that grants him legitimacy: he possesses royal power “by closeness of kinship to the dead” (l. , my emphasis). In Greek, the dead are plural in number and masculine in gender (ton ōlôlotôn); they are Creon’s two nephews.8 The exceptionality of the edict, its inversion of transgression and norm, transforms the attack on Polynices into something other than the simple “exclusion” of a brother: Polynices’ exclusion from burial rites will in fact constitute the signature of his inclusion as an enemy of the new city. Not only does Antigone want Polynices back; Creon does too. Critics who see in Creon’s edict only a tragic “political mistake” read Creon as a politician who, in Jacques Lacan’s words, wishes “happiness for the greatest number” but misses “that politics is for the living, not for the dead.”9 Yet, as I have mentioned, politics in Greece was indeed inclusive of the dead, especially when it concerned enmity. This is not the only element that is overlooked in this reading: the most important clause in Creon’s edict does not concern the corpse of Polynices, 58

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whom Creon could have cast out of Attica, but the fact that his corpse is to be “mangled in men’s sight”: as Segal puts it, Creon is “more explicit about the visual impact: the citizens are to ‘look upon the body […] outraged.’”10 Creon indeed targets the living: his edict transforms the rotting Polynices into a new figure of the enemy—an internal enemy. Creon thus divides the community between loyalists (Creon’s friends, who abide by his edict) and traitors (Creon’s enemies, who disobey). For all that has been said about Antigone’s burial of her brother as an attempt at the sublimation/symbolization of his decomposing matter, Creon’s edict is also an effort at symbolization: the rotting corpse now signifies the ever-present internal “enemy” to Thebes through which Creon will justify his hierarchy. Creon’s exceptional power will “prevent” the spawning of further enemies. This operation redefines citizenship in terms of loyalty to an exceptional authority: the “equals” are now not equivalent but, rather, identical. That the corpse in question is one of their own—not that of an outsider—is essential to the operation of inclusion/expulsion. This explains Creon’s emphasis: “He was prepared to destroy his land and the gods of his race, to feed on kindred blood and reduce other kindred to slavery” (ll. –, my emphasis). Creon accurately perceives the source of his exceptionality: had the enemy been an outsider he could not have justified the emergence of an internal division, the reparation of which requires the “cure” of his sovereign power. Creon’s carving out of an enemy is performed inside the community. Polynices goes from the inside to the outside to the inside again: because he is one of their own, he can be perceived as an enemy—otherwise he would just be “an inferior barbarian,” not an equal. The play insinuates here not only the real meaning of an enemy (an equal within the community, whose image can at times be projected onto an invader) but also the dependence of Creon’s kind of power on this figure. One could say that Creon in fact transforms Polynices into an ancient version of what we have come to identify, after Benjamin, as “bare life”: the link between law-making and law-preserving violence. Agamben’s research traces this modern figure back to ancient Rome: it is the homo sacer, “a life that can be killed with impunity, since it has lost the protection of all legal, communal and religious rites.”11 For Agamben we can find here the origin of one of modernity’s forms of sovereignty. In this political sphere that normalizes “bare life” through the sovereign exception, a sovereign power, not the law, decides on life.12 Agamben does not find “bare life” in Greek laws because, for the Greeks, only the dead body had the “unity” that is similar to what we call “life”: 59

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soma. But this is precisely where Creon is so “modern”: his decision falls upon a dead body (Polynices) and one of the “living dead” (Antigone); it falls upon “life” in the ancient Greek sense. Creon’s dead Polynices may be the precursor of Agamben’s Roman homo sacer: his corpse has the Greek unity of “life” and echoes modern “bare life” in that it has lost all ritual and legal protections. Polynices’ location at the limit of the city is the correlative to Creon’s being at the limit of the law. This, in turn, figures the limit-terrain on which the difficult decisions concerning membership are displayed. Was this the real meaning of Antigone’s warning? The extent to which Creon’s edict is a revolutionary change in the community cannot be overemphasized: the war is now at home. Creon attacks the citizens in the name of their own “defense.”13 Because the edict has resignified the enemy, anyone within the city who defies authority can now become an enemy (as could, by extension, the name of any dead citizen reconsidered as a traitor). Antigone’s warning about the “evil of the enemies” in the city proves so true that all relations within the city—not among cities—are now marked by the (tragic) choice “to be or not to be” on the enemy front. Polynices as enemy will eventually “disappear,” eaten by birds, but this war machinery, once installed, will need to spawn enemies constantly. As Antigone becomes the enemy of Creon’s city, she transforms Ismene into both her enemy and also “an enemy to the dead” (l. ); Haemon, and later the entire city, become inimical to Creon (l. ). I surmise that the edict’s introduction of an internal enemy explains the overwhelming reference in the play to the loss of a precious Athenian value: reason. At once defending and transgressing tradition, the edict uses political terms that will be acknowledged (for example, “dead,” “brothers,” “enemies,” and “funeral rites”) but demands that they be emptied of their customary meaning. In the struggle for signs, Creon unveils the “lack in signification” of the real, laying bare the construction of a ritual. The exposure of the “traitor’s” corpse is also the exposure of the corpse of ritual. In the face of such a disarrangement of the symbolic order, it is not surprising that all the characters in the play, not only the women, will suffer, in their acts of obedience or disobedience, some temporary or permanent state of foolishness, folly, or senselessness.14 Not even the guards know “the right or wrong” involved in reporting the attempted burial. They insult each other, and when they finally listen to one of their number they are confused by fear: “[We] could neither contradict him nor tell how we could prosper if we complied. What he said was that the deed 60

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must be reported” (ll. –). Nor can Tiresias, the seer, understand his “unrevealing rites” (l. ): “I heard the unfamiliar noise of birds shrieking in evil and unintelligible frenzy” (l. ); “[n]or does any bird scream out intelligible cries, for they have consumed a stream of dead man’s blood” (–, my emphasis). Both Antigone and Creon are “infected” with the illness as well. For Tiresias, Creon is ill: “You are infected with that malady” (ll. –, my emphasis). For Creon, the sick one is Antigone: “Is she not afflicted with that malady” (ll. –). Antigone, in turn, accuses Creon of “foolishness” (l. ); Ismene accuses Antigone of “go[ing] in folly” (l. ) after “a quest for the impossible” (l. ); Creon says that both sisters are crazy: “[O]ne of these girls has just shown herself insane, and the other has been so since birth” (l. ); Haemon’s reason has been “destroyed” (l. ); and finally Creon is charged with having lost his reason: for Tiresias’ “stubbornness merits charges of stupidity” (l. ); for Haemon, Creon does not have “understanding” (l. ), he is “empty of sense” (l. ). For the city, as the guard puts it in the end, this “folly is the worst of evil” (l. ). The edict’s disarrangement of meaning has nonetheless laid bare, if not the content of the laws (of ritual, of treason), a meaningful script of violence. Creon’s political script of enmity is the edict’s regimentation of an inverted and agonizing commemoration of the war between brothers. It is almost an aesthetics of politics: the corpse has not been cast out of the city but lies at its walls; guards have been sent not to the battlefield but to watch an unburied corpse; the denial of funeral rites has become not a punishment but a military exercise. Because the real content of Creon’s script is the regulation of violence through a militarization of politics, from Haemon’s Athenian point of view, his father “when spread open, [is] always seen to be empty” (l. );15 he speaks “empty decrees” (l. ), ruling over an empty city, “doing well as monarch of a desert” (l. ). Creon’s is the “emptiness” of a specular logic of enmity that binds the city in unity against an enemy that everyone must perceive as an internal danger. Only predicated on the imperative of survival, this vision of government is akin to what today we might call a paradigm of security, whose logic is to transform politics into matters of survival. Creon is described by the chorus as having the “power to apply any law, both for the dead and for us who live” (l. ), “sealing men’s mouths with fear” (l. ). His politics include the other only in terms of command and obedience. And indeed, what first concerns 61

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Creon as king are the seeds of disobedience before his edict—“even formerly there were men in the city who objected to this edict and muttered against me” (l. ). For Creon, the greater evil is not being “city-less,” as the second ode in the play has it, but disobedience: “[It] is this that destroys cities, this that makes houses desolate, this that breaks up allied ranks in rout” (l. ). Insofar as the edict touches everyone in Thebes, its logic of obedience undoes the dichotomy of a straightforward identification of Antigone with political resistance and of Creon with authority. Whereas the chorus imagines that no one will disobey, for “no one is so foolish as to desire death” (l. ), we see signs of diso­bedience from the beginning: the men who object to Creon’s edict before Creon becomes a king; the elders who refuse to guard the unburied body; the guard who brings the news that there has been either disobedience or negligence in guarding the body; the elders again who hint at their dislike when they suggest that the dusting of the body might have been the work of the gods; the guard who finally brings Antigone. Only after these hints of disobedience do we witness Antigone’s rebellion, Ismene’s momentary alliance with her, Haemon’s fight with his father, the city’s rumor of Antigone’s glory, the priest’s omen, and finally, Eurydice’s condemnation of Creon and her subsequent suicide. The verb “to obey” appears in three forms in the play: the middle voice, closest to our use of “obey” [peithesthai], the extremity of “being under the yoke, being forced,” and the flexibility of “listening, being persuaded, trusting.” At the beginning of the play we often find the characters being persuaded by or trusting the law. Ismene addresses Antigone using the roots for “listen” and “persuade” (l. ); Creon says to the elders that they should not “side with those not trusting these orders” (l. : peitho stem), and that Antigone has been “not trusting” of the law (l. : peitho stem). Being “under the yoke” of the edict is reserved for Antigone and Creon. Antigone is disobedient to the point of risking her life. The Greek text is unclear whether she chooses or is compelled to please “those below”; she is “pleasing those whom [she is] bound to please” (l. ). For her, obligation has become desirable. Creon starts by complaining that his enemies are not under his yoke (ll. –), but he himself soon falls under the yoke of his edict, not being able to undo it.16 Creon’s protego ergo obligo binds the whole city anew: no character in the play can be understood as beyond the edict’s purview. Creon envisions the city as a totality identified with and protected by a representative authority. But such delegation of authority within the community depends upon a fantasy of 62

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civic dissolution generated by an internal enemy, against which the city can be protected. Creon’s idea of a possible, unified, purified community, paradoxically derives from an internal structure of enmity. Polynices’ function in this structure is to establish the limit between the exterior and the interior. Polynices is “in between,” neither outside nor inside the city, yet defining both. Creon’s construction of an internal enemy frees from tribal lineage the definition of the “interior”: it is not the genos that will define loyalty and thus regulate violence but rather the political division between enemies and friends. His construction is independent of the community, which has taken no part in defining the limits to its interior: Creon monopolizes the power (and the violence) to decide about membership, which is why he seems to represent modern state governance. As familiar as they might look to us, these ideas were alien to Athens, which had no state organization and thus no internal monopoly of violence; Athens’s internal distinction was not between the polis and the people, but between the polis and its past. Part of the difficulty in imagining Athens in modernity lies in that it was neither a stateless tribal society nor a state.17 As a “state,” Athens was so rudimentary that scholars fiercely debate whether it can be considered as such. Moshe Berent even considers that Athens was “pushed” toward “inventing politics” precisely because it lacked both kinship (pre-existing stratification) and a state apparatus—thus the permanent threat of its stasis, which Berent best imagines as the clash of “temporary organized groups of citizens.”18 Consider a city, as in fifth-century Athens, where conflicts were not necessarily defined by kinship divisions; all citizens were or could be armed; there was no standing army (with the exception of the navy or during tyrannies); there was no professionalized bureaucracy in charge of the administration of public affairs; and, what is more important, as Finley was among the first to notice, there was no police to enforce the law. Only a few magistrates publicly owned a small number of slaves; policing was done privately through self-defense, family, friends, or, in the case of stasis, with the help of foreign armies, as in Antigone. For all the stark division between citizens and slaves, slaves were not controlled by “the state” but privately; Athens had only chattel slavery, and it was up to the individual owner (and his friends in case of need) to subdue his slaves. Taxation was imposed only on the rich, who were also expected to perform military service. Legal cases were brought to popular courts by volunteers—that is, by untrained citizens.19 Unable to enforce public policy, the Assembly insisted on consensus (homonoia, or “same-mindedness”) and customary law. And given 63

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that citizenship, not kinship, defined access to profit and honor, the main reasons for strife amounted precisely to defining who the citizens were. The governing model of protection under obligation was nonetheless already in place when Antigone saw the stage, but it was not Athenian: it came from Sparta, Athens’s foremost rival, a phantasmagoric point of reference against which Athens forever defined its democratic politics. Antigone refers to Creon not as a “tyrant” but as a “general” (a strategos l. ), and indeed his political liturgy echoes Sparta’s enforced obedience to a governing military elite. 20 The real sisterhood of Athens and Sparta lay in their being the only cities in the Greek world to have avoided sedition over a period of almost two hundred years. Their mysterious achievement was realized through two opposing forms of government. Sparta was ruled by the “Equals” (the homoioi), a warrior class. In contrast to Athens, where after Cleisthenes it was impossible to be an Athenian and live in servitude,  percent of the Spartan population was enslaved: they were the helots, the local Greek population that Sparta had conquered when they secured Messenia, and who were obliged to give half of their work output to the city.21 This drove Sparta to organize a standing army, with professional soldiers, dedicated not to foreign conquest but to maintaining internal order. Unlike Athenian slaves, Spartan slaves revolted because of their ethnic and political solidarity: they were “state serfs” or “community slaves,” considered a permanent internal threat to the ruling class. Perhaps it suffices to mention that, according to Plutarch, though much debated among scholars today, the Spartans even had an initiation rite—the crypteia—for young boys in their military training, which entailed being sent out once a year to the bush to hunt down and kill helots without punishment for homicide or sacrilege.22 Sparta was consumed by fear of the helots, a fear that was at the center of their rule. Finley describes Sparta as “lacking in vision and possessing mental inflexibility,” as plagued with suspicion even among the leaders, as the most closed and xenophobic of the Greek cities, and as “more hollow than any contemporary could reasonably have guessed” (Ancient Greeks: ). Unlike in Athens, Spartan laws were passed down orally. And ironically, unlike in Athens, because their citizens were so few, Spartan women were highly educated and controlled their properties: this was thought to foster the mothering of strong future Spartans. Athens, instead, boasted of having two faces: war and politics, the empire and the polis, the city facing outward and inward. Inside the city, Athenians praised self-government without military intervention. As Pericles would say in his funeral oration: “[T]here is a great difference between us and our op64

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ponents, in our attitude towards military security. Here are some examples: our city is open to the world, and we have no periodical deportations in order to prevent people from discovering secrets which might be of military advantage to the enemy. This is because we rely, not on secret weapons, but on our own real courage and loyalty” (Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book II: ). In contrast to Sparta’s internal divisions, Athens was undivided in its self-representation. The rivalry between Athens and Sparta echoes that between Polynices and Eteocles, and subsequently between Antigone and Creon, Haemon and Creon, and Antigone and Ismene. Siding with Eteocles’ refusal to hand over power, Creon’s inflexibility, suspicion, and hollowness conjure up Sparta’s government. We can now read Creon anew, as a figure of military power turned inward, a figure completely alien to political ideology, though familiar to the political imagination of Athenian democracy. For Creon does not really fit any of the images of sovereignty with which he is commonly associated: a tyrant, an oligarch, a lawful statesman, or even a basileus—a hereditary king. His sovereignty lies elsewhere. He presents himself as a basileus, but that figure had disappeared very early in the history of Greek politics (by the Archaic period) and, according to Thucydides and Herodotus, had always possessed restricted powers. Sarah Morris argues that despite the Greeks’ flirtation with autonomous rulers in practice and rhetoric, myth and tragedy, there is no evidence that anything like absolute hereditary power ever existed among them.23 For democratic ideology, this kingly figure was associated with tyranny, which in turn was often confused with oligarchy. As I have mentioned, tyranny recurred in speeches as democracy’s internal enemy: Athenian citizens were instructed that it was a “civic duty to fight would-be tyrants when and in whatever shape they might appear.”24 Tyrannicide was heroized. Josiah Ober proposes that tyrant killing was a therapeutic stasis for the city.25 Tyrants characteristically established their rule by illegitimate violence, operated to maximize their personal gain. They were concerned about their safety and “were known to be suspicious of the best citizens, kill men without trial, rape women, subvert ancestral custom, and behave arrogantly and abusively” (Raaflaub, “Stick and Glue”: ). Creon indeed behaves somewhat like a tyrant, especially in his subversion of custom. But unlike tyrants, he has royal blood and is not swept into power by a faction of the populace seeking to replace an oligarchy. Yet Creon does not qualify as an oligarch, given his tyrannical characteristics: oligarchs were a class of nobles who claimed legitimacy through both blood and land and governed with a 65

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council (boule) representative of the privileged class. Lastly, Creon is not exactly a statesman—neither in the Greek sense nor in the modern one: even if his rhetoric is that of the common good, his location with respect to city laws or state universality is that of an exception—as I have argued, his edict suspends the law—his rule is not “rule of law” but “rule of man.” Puzzlingly, Creon at once seems to embody all and none of these traits: he is and he is not a tyrant, a king, an oligarch, a military man, and a statesman. In terms of Athenian democratic ideology, we can speculate that he was a conglomerate of all that Athens was defending herself against: unforgiving vengeance, factionalism (leading to stasis), the oligarchic monopoly of power. Creon in fact obliterates the very idea of politics that democratic Athens had invented. For Creon, politics is “war by other means.” Seen in the light of Foucault’s famous inversion of Clausewitz’s formula on modernity’s new forms of power, Creon, to recall Brown’s phrase again, is just “too modern.” For us moderns, Creon’s attempt to represent the city as a discrete unit makes him look like a statesman. But that is not, I believe, the real reason why he speaks so clearly to us. From his exceptional location with respect to the law, Creon links the rhetoric of the common good to the creation of an internal enemy. He thus performs a political intervention that escapes the democratic imagination—namely, the violent, nondemocratic delimitation of the city’s new constituency. To the “popular sovereign” of the ancient demos, he proclaims autonomy’s ghostly other: control, a different type of sovereignty. Weaving together Creon’s exceptional location and message with the fiction of looming civic chaos, we can see Creon’s tyrannical force as the figure of a limiting function that exposes a foundational problem for democratic logic. The key issue to consider here is not so much how the play meditates on the tyrannical power of this figure but rather on the sovereign’s structural location and function in terms of the Greek invention of politics. Creon’s sovereignty is framed by a fiction of political disaster that gives rise to his narrative about the need for unity. He emerges as a response to fear: his denial of burial is a denial of political reason—it is, we could say, a “reason of state,” a concept familiar to moderns but that in fact goes as far back as ancient Greece.26 This is the “reason” with which the always “un-reasonable” (arbitrary) borders of a political community might be decided, for lack of a “reason of democracy” that could define the city limits otherwise. Might this “reason of state” be the same as the “reason for the state to emerge” that the political philosophers of the Renaissance would later identify when, in 66

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justifying the emergence of the state, they used precisely the same narrative frame of civic dissolution? Creon shows how the internal, exceptional tension of a “reason of state” resides in the fact that its total liberty of means contradicts the total determinacy of its end. Its categorical imperative is to preserve power, though its liberty about how to preserve it is total. Creon’s supreme value is his survival as the authority within the city. It would be useless to find a “right or wrong”—an ethics—in this logic of sovereign politics: Creon’s edict itself shows that what is right and what is wrong are contained and violated both in the same proposition. Creon is not “morally wrong”: his logic, strictly linked to the survival of a specific, exceptional nucleus of power within the community, necessitates the creation of a rhetoric of right and wrong—the good and the bad brother—insofar as it arrogates the representation of the whole city and not only of itself. His power can survive only if it codifies its own survival with the rhetoric of the survival of all. Creon’s medical rhetoric, following the Greek custom, could echo the modern paradigm of immunobiology: to claim the protection (against dissolution) of the body politic at the price of introducing inimical forces in its interior. In this context, we can read Antigone’s defense of the funeral rite anew. Was Creon’s structure of enmity—his “joining in hatred”—what prompted Antig­ one’s famous response: “not to join in hatred but in love” (l. )? Was she issuing a warning about the introduction of a structural, exceptional enmity within the city that could have no compatibility with the “popular sovereign” of her democratic Athens? In our modern coding, can we read her warning as the incompatibility between the logic intrinsic to democracy and the logic intrinsic to the state?

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Dying Democratically: Antigone’s Ritual

Antigone is as passionate as Creon about the funeral rite. And likewise with the establishment of a clear line between friends and enemies. Nonetheless, her passions are usually read as the emblem of what Creon’s are not. She is either a champion of the “old ways” (tradition, religion, the realm of the dead, the family, womanhood), standing firm in the face of Creon’s “modernity.” Or conversely she is all that is “new” (in particular a woman’s claim to the public realm), undermined by Creon’s traditional power. Almost a fiction of historical progress, however, the temporal narrative of “old” and “new” proves difficult to sustain. Creon’s exceptional decree has rendered everything simultaneously “new” and “old” at Thebes. Caught in the dynamics of Creon’s exception, Antigone is as exceptional as he is: neither fully inside nor outside of kinship, politically neither a woman nor a man, Antigone is produced by and speaks to the exception of Creon’s edict. Could she be what she is without Creon’s edict?1 To borrow from Badiou’s formulation for an ethics of the truths, Antigone has allowed the event of Creon’s action to “convoke her to become a subject,” showing not just any ethics but an “ethics of politics”—a faithfulness to the event, in Greek terms, a faithfulness to the polis.2 We need only to hear how Antigone tells Ismene in the very first scene that the edict is “for her”: “[S]ister [. . .] such is the edict which the good Creon has pronounced for you and for me—for me, I tell you” (ll. –, emphasis in Brown’s translation). Antigone will demand that Ismene, too, position herself politically with regard to the edict—“for you,” she adds. The edict that politically divided the two dead brothers will politically divide the two living sisters. Antigone enters the public space, and while Ismene stays within the house, Ismene’s is also a calculation of power. Claiming that those who rule are “stronger” (ll. –), she sees “no means” to defy the citizens (l. ). She decides to honor not burial but gendered conventions by asking Antigone for “secrecy” (l. ) about 68

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her wish to bury their brother. Antigone decidedly rejects Ismene and her codes: “Oh, proclaim it aloud! I shall hate you much more for your silence” (ll. –). In the very first scene, Ismene goes from being autadelphos with Antigone (born of the same womb) to being an enemy.3 As “modern” as is Creon, Antigone cannot respond according to traditional gender and kinship arrangements because these are no longer in place. The debated issue of Antigone’s paradoxical “sisterhood,” “womanhood,” and “incestuous” love for her brother—in other words, the paradox of her gender and sexuality—needs to be read within the only sphere where she is consistent: her public performance. But insofar as Creon’s structure of enmity has radically changed the city and qualified her entrance into the polis, we need to ask what Antigone’s “defense of tradition” means. Antigone’s entrance into the political sphere can only be the enactment of a political utterance that takes Creon to task. In the following pages, the “tradition” that she defends will embody the radical ideals of the Athenian invention of politics: while Creon appears Spartan, Antigone will appear unmistakably Athenian. The manner in which Antigone carries out her first ritual act thwarts any attempt to situate her within a traditional kinship role. For the ancient Greeks, traditional womanhood meant wifehood, motherhood, and certain duties such as taking care of some aspects of funeral rites. But a woman was not expected to perform funeral rites if it meant defying male authority and risking her life. And while an ordinary Greek would have felt obliged to bury his relatives, the Greeks were not religious enough to risk their lives for the sake of a burial, much less a burial considered as an offering to the gods. Greek gods did not provide any guarantee of reward in the afterlife that would have justified requiring death of their votaries.4 In Greek custom, funeral rites began with the prothesis, the preparation of the body at home.5 Women over sixty years old or closely related to the dead were in charge of washing the body and wailing, tearing their hair, and pounding their heads and chests. But by the time Antigone saw the stage, Athenian democracy had severely restricted women’s lamentations as well as their role in the ekphora, the procession that carried the body to the grave on the third day. In Periclean times, women could not mourn in public; they had to follow at the back, dressed according to specific new regulations, and had to leave the tomb before the men. Loraux connects the democratic enclosure of female pain within the house to the democratic prohibitions on remembering catastrophes and on taking revenge. Indeed, democracy excluded women more than any 69

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other previous regime.6 As a woman closely related to the deceased, Antigone would have been in charge of the lamentations and the washing of the body in the house. Indeed, she “washes, dresses and pours libations at his grave” (l. ). But Polynices’ grave is not at home: Antigone mourns but carries out all the male funerary tasks too. She leaves the house by night, and not in a cart as she should; she tries to perform the funeral rite in its entirety, not only washing but sprinkling earth on the body as well. As Bernadete puts it, “Antigone transforms the ordinariness of burying into something much more akin to the risking of one’s life in a battle.”7 Antigone’s manly risk also reveals her rejection of the two essential female duties toward the polis: marriage and motherhood. For Antigone, these female duties are starkly opposed to politics. In the famous passage that Goethe, and so many others, wanted to eliminate,8 Antigone, before dying, declares “[N]ever, if I had been the mother of children or if my husband had been mouldering in death, would I have taken on this task in defiance of the citizens” (ll. –). An odd, even intolerable idea for modern critics, it was probably a very Athenian one: marital relations were instrumental rather than having a loving end. A husband did not belong romantically to his wife, and their offspring were given away as citizens. Women’s reproductive function was unknown, and they were seen only as a receptacle of the male “imprint”: sons were the property of the father, not of the mother. For mothers, husband and children were as Antigone describes them: easily replaceable (ll. –).9 Consider Pericles in his funeral oration recommending women who had lost sons in war to take comfort in giving away new sons to the city.10 Likewise, consider Herodotus’ account (Book : ) of Intaphrenes’ wife, who is given the choice to save her husband, son, or brother, and asks King Darius to spare her brother’s life: “I may have another husband and other children when these are gone. But as my father and my mother are no more, it is impossible that I should have another brother.” Darius, greatly pleased, spares her brother and her eldest son.11 Antigone will not give her offspring to the city. Her “womanhood” is neither a sign of familial generation, nor a sign of the hierarchies and inequalities involved in the institutions of marriage and parenthood. As her name indicates, Antigone is “antigeneration,” as well as “instead of a parent” (as Mark Griffith translates)—placing herself in opposition to, and in compensation for, her ancestors as well as her future offspring.12 Only Ismene exhibits a true concern for future generations, as she identifies the rite of marriage as a way for Antigone to escape the Labdacide fate. 70

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What can we make of the only female role left to Antigone, namely her sisterhood? Just as she is inconsistent with traditional Greek ideas of womanhood, so too is Antigone inconsistent with the principles of sisterly love. As much as she loves one brother, Antigone hates her sister (l. ). For all that has been said about Antigone’s incestuous love for Polynices, she begins by using the same word (autadelphos—of the same womb) to describe her relationship to her sister. But Ismene soon becomes Antigone’s enemy: Antigone’s love for those of the “same womb” is conditioned upon loyalty. Her concern for her brother is as specific as is the edict. By the end of the play, in a much debated line,13 Tiresias hints that many “mangled bodies have received their funeral rites from dogs or wild beasts, or from some winged bird which has brought an impure smell to the city with its hearth” (ll. –). Tiresias is concerned about all bodies: he warns Creon that in “exchange for the corpses” (l. , plural in the original) being left unburied, Creon will have to yield corpses of his own. While it is argued that Antigone is concerned with the universal law of burial, in fact, she will ask only for one burial. Critics within the Hegelian tradition conclude that Antigone represents the uniqueness of a sister’s bond to a brother, which is, if not the raison d’être of the play itself, at least the source of some of its sublimity.14 Nonetheless, Antigone’s “exclusive” love for Polynices is presented to us only after Creon’s edict has rejected her brother as a traitor: her love and her burial act are contingent on the radical change at Thebes, which has made her enter an exclusively male sphere to speak an exclusively male language. For the Greek imagination there is a crucial difference that distinguishes Polynices’ corpse from all the others outside of Thebes: it is a mark of belonging, for he is not an Argive—he is one of their own. We may want to inquire, then, to what extent her love is sisterly. Is she not rather displaying the brotherhood that bound a fifth-century Athenian male citizen to other male citizens with love—philia? Is Antigone’s burial rite not a limit marking the inside and outside of the city? We can go further: to what extent is her love the very Athenian practice of amnesty? To what extent is her brother’s irreplaceability an emblem for a political praxis of irreplaceability—the praxis that Athenians invented, democracy itself? A political praxis, that is, relying on equivalence—not identity. Never referring to herself as a woman to explain her deed, Antigone distinguishes herself instead by using the political vocabulary of a male citizen. She performs the “most glorious of deeds” (l. ); she deserves to “win golden honour” (l. ); she strives to win a “glorious reputation” (l. ). Glory was a quality attributed to soldiers, commanders, and citizens, not women or slaves: 71

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the glory of a woman was to have no glory—not to be spoken about, as Pericles recommended in his funeral oration—while the only women who were heroized as soldiers were those who had died in childbirth. Antigone’s risking of her own life—short of giving birth and dying—is the behavior of a patriotic soldier: she will continue as long as her “strength” allows (l. ); she will not be caught “betraying” her brother (l. ); she will not suffer an “ignoble death” (l. ); and last but not least, she makes her word worthy of public attention by addressing in her speech “the citizens of her fatherland” (l. ) and the “wealthy men of the city” (l. ).15 But I believe that the most important detail of Antigone’s language in referring to Polynices, surprisingly neglected by critics, is her reply to Creon’s accusation that, by burying Polynices, she levels Eteocles “in honor with his enemy” (l. ). Antigone warns Creon that “[it] was a brother who died, not a slave” (l. , my emphasis). With outstanding clarity Antigone now positions herself inside the city, as the semantic field of “brother” expands dramatically: being a “nonslave” in the Athenian context makes her brother a citizen. Were we to follow Antigone in her “sisterly” love, would we not most likely have heard her contrasting Polynices with any other citizen who was not her brother? Antigone instead contrasts Polynices with a different class altogether—a non-political class, a part of the oikos, which was composed, as we know, of slaves and women. The radical contrast between citizens and slaves in Athens cannot be overemphasized. According to Vidal-Naquet, slaves were not even a “class,” in that they did not articulate demands: “[P]olitical action by Athenian slaves was inconceivable.”16 Unlike in other cities (such as Sparta), where they were summoned for battle, slaves in Athens had only one real political function: to make possible a distinction between slaves and citizens and thus contribute to the Athenian definition of a political constituency. Perhaps the epitome of this differentiation can be fully grasped in reference to a very dear topic for the modern imagination about democracy: the legality of its violence—in this case, torture. The dividing line between a citizen and a slave went well beyond the slave’s lack of a political voice: slaves could be legally tortured. While a citizen’s body was inviolate, slaves could be impaled, thrown into pits, or exposed without objection.17 This contrast is all the more stark if we keep in mind that slavery was not a product of heri­ tage. As much as civil and external war were permanent threats to democracy, the possible enslavement of Athenian males was the permanent threat to the stability of their citizenship. Nothing like a solid justification of slavery existed,18 other than its being a consequence of the laws of war, one of the central (if not 72

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the central) activities of the city. Slavery and citizenship were almost two sides of the same coin: a coin that for any citizen might flip at any given time during his patriotic service in war. To recall Heraclitus’ famous words: “[W]ar is the father of all things, it is war that has shown who are gods and who are men, it is war that has created freemen and slaves.”19 Piracy and international trade were the other two sources of slaves. Slavery was so crucial to the Athenian imagination about citizenship that while comedies register episodes in which women take charge or where private property is questioned (see, for example, Aristophanes), there is no extant tragedy or comedy that imagines slaves in power. To recall Finley’s classic hypothesis, it seems as though “one aspect of Greek history is the advance, hand in hand, of freedom and slavery”; according to Vidal-Naquet, “[T]he classic example, from the sixth century, is Chios, the city where democratic institutions first appeared and where, according to Theopompus, slaves were first acquired from abroad.”20 Nobody in Greece questioned slavery—not the tragic poets, not the Sophists, not even the utopians. As Lewis Mumford put it, “[It] was easier for the Greek utopians to conceive of abolishing marriage or private property than of ridding utopia of slavery, class domination and war” (quoted in Vidal-Naquet, Black Hunter: ). That democracy fed on distinctions between slaves and citizens has been well documented; that this is relevant to Antigone’s ritual has not. We can read her inclusive operation as equivalent to the ancient democratic demarcation between citizens and slaves, showing their interdependence. Joining the “male club” of Athenian democracy,21 Antigone will not question the dividing line between slaves and citizens. Just as she will not demand the burial of all the foreign corpses that lie at Thebes’s entrance, she is not concerned about the corpse of a slave. For her, Polynices is a citizen of Thebes and, as such, even if he were a public enemy, even if not in Attica, he deserves burial. Both Creon and Antigone appear to establish a political constituency. The difference lies in how they do it and which constituency they define. Antigone will let the hand of community—war and rituals—define constituency. One could even suggest that Antigone’s “leveling Polynices in honor” refers precisely to not having survived and thus risked being taken as a war captive-slave. In this sense, Antigone defends Polynices’ historical struggle, not his blood. Antigone’s allegedly female “nature not to join in hatred but in love” (l. ) may now be reconsidered. This line has been read as both feminine and illogical. Its lack of logic would be apparent in Antigone’s wish to reconcile two brothers who hated each other. However, Antigone’s concern is the “evil” of Cre73

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on’s logic, which applies a treatment hitherto reserved for enemies to friends: Creon joins the city in hatred. To Creon’s unifying logic of enmity, Antigone’s unifying logic speaks of philia—love. This love is not Eros, a god who appears only in the fourth choral song, right after Haemon’s fight with Creon over the fate of Antigone. According to most translations, this love is not Antigone’s but rather Haemon’s love for Antigone.22 Eros’ irrational power controlled men to the point of destruction. The word philia, in contrast, is constructive and can mean anything from love of one’s own relatives to love of political allies (Brown, Antigone: ).23 It is a relational term referring to those linked by reciprocal duties of all kinds and, significantly for our discussion, philos stands in stark contrast to ekhthros (enemy). And, if this were not enough as an antidote to modern romantic interpretations of love, we should also be cautious when we read Antigone’s love as “female love”: the gender of Greek love was predominantly male—it was love for the city and among the citizens.24 Philia was the foundation of political order: contrary to ancient Rome, where the family was the primary sociopolitical unit, the Greek city relied on the social institution of male same-sex “unions of friends”—an institution of aristocratic lineage, like the ancient hetaery.25 While the family was a hierarchical order headed by the father of the household, the male unions of friends were based on equal rights for their members. Representations in literature, funeral orations, and historical documents of excess, hatred, pain, and mourning are mostly associated with the feminine sphere and excluded from the polis—and in this sense, we could see Creon’s excessive hatred as a sign of femininity, which will indeed end up excluded, as all femininity was. Antigone’s love instead has the political consistency of her male language: it is citizen love. She responds to Creon’s politics with the Athenian political logic of friendship: this meant amnesty in the case of Polynices. And in reality, Antigone’s language—the “glorious deeds and reputation, golden honors, noble deaths”—is the language that democracy borrowed from oligarchy. Pericles praises the citizens for possessing all the values that Antigone displays: courage, freedom, honor, not shrinking in the face of death. Antigone’s spirit is not only like her father’s but like that of Athens itself: the chorus says of Antigone what Pericles says of the city in the midst of war. Consider these two strikingly similar quotations: [Chorus speaking of Antigone]: Clearly the girl has a fierce spirit, inherited from a fierce father. She does not know how to yield to misfortune. (ll. –, my emphasis)

74

Dying Democratically [Pericles speaking of Athens]: [Y]ou know that the city has the greatest name among all men because she never yields to misfortune. (Thucydides II: , my emphasis)

And if Antigone and Athens are comparable, it might be useful to remember that Athens, in turn, compares to another female who is, like Antigone, “no ordinary female”:26 the patron divinity of Athens, Athena, is a virgin who is armed and fights like a man, who has no part in sexual reproduction and who was born out of Zeus’ male head. I have argued that Antigone’s words identify her as a citizen. But her ritual acts have the imprint of her politics, too, linking her citizenship both to Polynices’ irreplaceability and to democracy. I turn now to suggest that the symbolic, legal, and performative aspects of Antigone’s funeral ritual can be read as continuous with what Athens praised the most—the legality of their democratic invention. The symbolic aspect of rituals expresses the boundaries of the group and the exclusion of others.27 Almost paralleling Creon’s anxiety about his city’s fragmentation, Antigone’s concern is the “sickness” that defiles altars and hearths (ll. –) brought about by the return of Polynices’ unburied, expelled, repressed corpse. Antigone’s response to counter this sickness, is not, as critics consider it, the same sickness—an “incestuous” gesture that blurs limits.28 Rather, her response is to set a limit to the contamination brought about by the Labdacide transgressions of all the unwritten limits (rituals) of society—incest, parricide, fratricide, suicide, and now burial. In contrast to Creon, Antigone sees only Polynices’ irreplaceability—limiting his instrumentalization: “[As] my mother and father are hidden in the house of Hades, no brother could ever be born again. Such was the law by which I singled you out for honor” (ll. –). This irreplaceability is a crucial feature of Antigone’s politics—it goes beyond what is usually understood as Antigone’s private, traditional, ethical understanding of the laws of kinship and death. Individual uniqueness is inextricably linked to the logic of any proposal for political equality, if it is not indeed the essence of its principle, insofar as this principle is understood as equivalence, instead of sameness. Insofar as everyone is irreplaceably different, everyone’s word is equally valuable and not susceptible to any kind of political representation. Such was the case in Athens, where neither blood relations nor coercion were means for individuals to be heard at the Assembly. This was the revolutionary principle of the (male) Athenian Assembly: the radical nature of 75

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ancient democratic equality was that every member of the political community was made equally valuable merely by virtue of being included as a member of the community. Antigone’s defense of her brother does not fit any logic of possession, representation, or identification. And indeed, Antigone does not even let Creon politically represent the dead Eteocles: when he suggests that it is in Eteocles’ view that Polynices “is disloyal” (l. ), Antigone reminds Creon that Polynices’ alleged political illegitimacy is Creon’s arbitrary doing: “the dead man [Eteocles] will not bear out that claim” (l. , my emphasis). Antigone’s logic demands that the dead be equally buried, for they are equally irreproducible, unrepresentable, irreducible members of the community.29 She defends the mythical plight of Polynices for an equal distribution of political power, and arranges her constituency in amnesty. Legally speaking, the funeral rite is the edict’s exact opposite. Not only is the rite a law, its legitimization is communal, not individual—deliberative, we could almost say, insofar as it results from social negotiations through time. The laws of ritual—“meaningless” commands—contain the anthropological aspect of the legality that binds a community: they are apparently the most ancient of unwritten codes, more ancient than the gods or any religion; over time they have become tradition and written codes of legislation.30 While Creon abrogates absolute autonomy to create an edict, not even consulting the elders to draft it, Antigone defends the communal laws that are “unwritten and unfailing rules” (l. ) and whose legitimation is not individual: “[T]hese laws, who knows when they first appeared?” (l. ). As Ehrenberg notes, philia, the force that guides Antigone, is precisely one of the forces that define these unwritten laws, drawing together people and polity.31 Performatively, the ritual is more than a “theater.” It also recalls one of the most essential components of ancient Greek democracy: participation. The performative aspect of ritual takes its actors out of the ordinary world and transports them into another one, in order to participate in that world, rather than to imitate it, so that they bring it about: they write together the history of a community with their rituals. Creon’s edict deprives the community of participation; Antigone’s rite attempts to restore her own, and her community’s, participation. With the above in mind, I surmise that Antigone’s defense of “traditional” ritual can be read as a defense of the political tradition that the Athenians were trying to establish. Her ritual seeks the restoration of the kind of politics that was inextricable from a practice (a performance) of equal participation in rites 76

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of public speech. The unwritten laws of ritual bind Antigone just as the unwritten laws of ancient democracy bind its citizens. Just as ancient democracy is a practice of amnesty, the funeral ritual limits war by declaring amnesty for the dead. The principle of justice informing Polynices’ fight for equal distribution of power, as well as Antigone’s defense of equality—both the equivalence of the two dead corpses and the equivalence of her speech in the city—symbolizes the ideal of a radically democratic public space. In fact, Athenian democratic ideas show a surprising resonance with what I have read in Antigone’s ritual and language. I suggest that this might be why Sophocles chose the funeral rite as a source of conflict: not only is a rite a practice of public speech par excellence, but in the particular case of Athens, funeral rites and orations were an occasion for a celebration of democracy as a way of life. As far back as – b.c.e., Athenian public burial practice was unique among the Greeks,32 in that it used the occasion of the unwritten laws of funeral rituals to assert the series of unwritten democratic laws they had invented. We know of Pericles’ use of funeral orations to celebrate how in Athens each man is “his rightful lord and owner of his own person.”33 In Loraux’s words, funeral orations had “a strange osmotic relation” with the democratic city (Invention of Athens: ). If anything defined Greek direct democracy, it was the idea of equal participation under the rule of law: tyrant rule (the “rule of men”) was for foreigners. As the Spartan Demaratus says to Persian king Xerxes, the Greeks “though they be freemen, they are not in all respects free; Law is the master whom they own; and this master they fear more than thy subjects fear thee” (Herodotus, Book VII: ). The Athenians were immersed in community decision-making as a praxis to such an extent that their experience of democracy must have differed enormously from ours. Democracy took pains to debate how each citizen’s “degree of participation should be fixed” (Strömholm: , emphasis in the original).34 In each individual resided the responsibility to participate, to know his rights and duties and not to exceed them with hubristic behavior. There was no higher authority than those actors who, according to the rule of law, performed democracy. Each of the forty-one yearly democratic assemblies opened with the public ritual of the herald’s call for an equal participation of all the citizens: “[W]hat man has good advice to give to the polis and wishes to make it known?”35 Democracy’s laws were unwritten in that democracy hardly had a language of its own. Like Antigone’s unwritten laws, democracy’s laws were a set of ac77

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tions—ritual actions. Loraux concludes that the price that Greek democracy paid to maintain its two-hundred-year equilibrium was its “aphasia.”36 Democracy was what the Greeks practiced, rather than theorized. If oligarchic political participation had been a “ritualized affirmation of inequality,”37 democracy brought a ritually affirmed equality: Plato’s Gorgias criticizes politicians like Pericles, Themistocles, and Cimon, comparing them to a baker, a cook, and a shopkeeper (b).38 Indeed no statement could be truer with regard to democracy’s political actors: they were largely peasants, shopkeepers and craftsmen, alongside the educated upper classes (Finley, Politics in the Ancient World: ). Political virtue was thought to be a common good. In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates states that for government debates the men who give advice “may be [. . .] rich or poor, of good family or none [. . .] without any technical qualifications” (d):39 democratic political virtue cannot be defined exactly because it is that in which every man must have a share (ibid.: ). Because it is learnable through punishment and education (ibid.: –), political virtue is like the Greek language that all Athenians spoke: even the most wicked possess it. The metaphor of language effectively expresses the two major (negative) pillars of Athenian democracy: lack of secrecy and of inherited privilege. Yet there was another price that this egalitarianism had to pay. Because Athens lacked tribal or state mechanisms to enforce the Assembly’s laws, the constituency was dependant on unanimity to pass its laws, which thus resulted in a certain inflexibility toward changing the existing, customary laws. The stability of laws versus the freedom of decrees worried even the most avid defenders of democracy. So much so that after the restoration of democracy in , a law was passed forbidding decrees from taking precedence over the law: as Ilias Arnaoutoglou translates it: “[It] is not permitted to make a law for an individual if it does not extend to all Athenian citizens and if it is not voted by six thousand people in a secret vote.”40 As I have noted, the Assembly could apply the mechanisms of ostracism and indictment of bad decrees against itself if it found Solon’s foundational laws had not been protected. Against Creon’s “ritualized affirmation of inequality,” Antigone’s act is a “ritualized affirmation of equality.” It is precisely this contiguity among Antig­ one, her ritual, and the rituals of Athenian democracy that allow us to examine anew why she appears as a woman and not as a soldier or a male citizen. While Antigone’s actions resonate with democracy, Creon’s resonate with those of democracy’s opponents.41 For the latter, democracy made “equivalent” the high and low members of the polis and was unable to discern the true nature of 78

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justice. While Creon faults Antigone for “leveling in honor” (l. ) the brothers, considering that “the good [. . .] receive the same portion as the wicked” (l. ), the most serious charge against democracy in Plato’s Republic is that it “assigns a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike!” (Book VIII: c, my emphasis).42 In his speech at the Assembly of Sparta, Alcibiades calls democracy an “acknowledged folly,” a prevailing “license,”43 and Creon blames Antigone for being “insane since birth” (l. ). And Isocrates perhaps makes all of the above even clearer: [T]here are two equalities; one allots the same to every one and the other what is appropriate to each [. . . .] [In] the good old days the Athenians rejected as unjust the equality which considers the good and the bad worthy of the same rights, and chose that which honors each according to his worth. (Quoted in Jones, “Athenian Democracy”: , my emphasis)

For the opponents of democracy, democracy’s foolish lack of “one” justice, like Antigone’s theatrical mask, had a gender: it was like women. We can recall again Plato’s Republic (Book VIII: –): democracy is like the brightly colored things (ibid.: a) most liked by people like women and children who judge by appearances; democracy’s diversity is “a garment of many colors, embroidered with all kinds of hues” (ibid.: b). Democracy is, in other words, a government for women and children—two of the groups whom democracy ironically excluded—always mentioned in speeches, given roles in the arts, but never granted any rights. Indeed, Creon’s discourse is permeated with references to Antigone’s gender that associate femininity with a threat to his power. To Haemon he clarifies: “[We] must on no account be beaten by a woman. Better to fall from power, if fall we must, before a man; and at least we would not be called women’s inferiors.” (l. ). I am less concerned here with assessing the extent to which Sophocles’ enigmatic Antigone might offer a new model for “womanhood” for the Greeks, or for us—a concern at the center of recent criticism on the play—than with assessing the extent to which Antigone’s puzzling gendered performance speaks to the nature and paradoxes of the Athenian political invention. If we can read in her blurring of gender a sign of democracy, we can then summarize the previous web of significations as follows. For Creon, Antigone embodies “the folly of democracy”—its irreverence, lack of differentiation, irrationality, lack of justice, and, thus, its “femininity.” For the city, she embodies a male soldier-citizen who loyally and courageously defends the unwritten ritualized practices that constituted “the Athenian way of life” at its most valorized site: a funeral. Like all 79

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citizens of Athens, she risks her life and deserves the “golden honor” (l. ) of those who defend the radical ideals of “equaling the unequals” (Plato), of freedom of speech, self-government, rule of law, popular sovereignty and philia. We arrive then at a last, troubling question. If we can suggest that Antigone’s speech and action embodied the ideals of Athenian democracy, why would Sophocles decide to kill the democrat? Were her violations of authority, of gender, and of life also posing a thorny question, a still more intolerable one, for her democratic community? Unanimously taken to be a suicide, Antigone’s death is nonetheless so mysterious that our previous considerations lead us to surmise that they leave room to think otherwise; I align my speculations with Loraux’s and Françoise Duroux’s research.44 Read as a suicide, Antigone’s death enhances the tragic nature of Creon’s action: her “autonomous” choice of suicide does not grant Creon time to change his mind and save her, thus provoking his downfall. But Antigone’s death strangely stands out from all others in the play, as well as from the corpus of extant tragedies. Firstly, her death does not conform to the pattern of women’s deaths in the tragic corpus; secondly, she is neither granted burial rites nor dies at her own hand, like the others. Loraux observes that the compound in Greek for a “murder at one’s own hands” [autokheir] refers to all the dead in the play, who kill themselves at their own hands, except for Antigone (“La main d’Antigone”: ). As is the case with Polynices’ death, Antigone’s “first” death happens before the play begins: her “spirit perished long since” (l. ). Antigone’s second death, on stage, is surrounded by references to her womanhood, recalling the similarity, in Greek religious practice, between rites of marriage, which mourn the death of a virgin, and rites of burial.45 Ismene asks Creon if he “will kill the bride of [his] own son?” (l. ). Creon, in turn, has urged Haemon to “let her find a husband in Hades” (l. ). When Antigone is facing death, her own references lead us to believe she will die as a woman—in ancient Greek terms, either as a virgin or a wife. Her words about marriage become explicit and profuse: no “wedding procession” is hers, no “bridal song” has been sung for her. Acheron is a “bridegroom,” her brother has destroyed her in a “fatal marriage,” the tomb is a “bridal chamber,” she goes into it “unwedded,” deprived of a “bridal bed,” having had no “portion of marriage or the raising of children” (passages from ll. –; –; –). Her burial will look like a failed rite of marriage, not producing the death of a virgin that would be reborn as a wife.46 80

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So if she dies as a woman, does she die as a wife or virgin? Loraux shows that the death of virgins in tragedy was usually bloody sacrifice: virgins did not kill themselves but were killed; in turn, the death of wives was typically an off-stage suicide by hanging, or by the sword in the case of mothers.47 Antigone is a virgin who, unlike all other tragic sacrificial virgins, is not killed violently on stage. She dies like the wife she is not, and her wifelike suicide is not like Eurydice’s: it lacks the agency of autokheir. She is found lifeless, hanging from a noose made of her veil. As a virgin, she is not killed by anyone’s hands; as a wife, she does not use her own hands to kill herself. Loraux qualifies “the striking exception of the virgin Antigone” as “a mixture of a very female suicide and something like a sacrifice outside the norm” (Tragic Ways: ). In “La main d’Antigone,” Loraux concludes that Antigone’s death has no agent, its gender is unclear, and her “being dead” (être mort) does not even merit a compound beginning with auto (self): Antigone has been effaced as a subject within an impure genos that only seeks to return to itself (). Nonetheless, Antigone has displayed nothing but autonomy throughout the play: why would she discard it now? Death by hanging was a dishonor, an unheroic, desperate, hopeless, death—the most dishonorable of all forms of suicide, the last recourse in tragedy reserved only for women, devoid of male courage.48 Unless one reads Antigone’s funeral rite as incestuous, it is hard to understand why Antigone, the honorable democrat who has risked her life, would see honor in “choosing” a death that, in this case, does not even “have hands.” But if we read Antigone’s rite as her democratic attempt to end incestuous pollution, we can shift attention away from her alleged “suicide” and toward Creon’s involvement. For Creon is quick to undo his pollution as he declares that “my hands are clean as regards this girl” (l. ). We might then ask: is the “absence” of Antigone’s hands in the scenario of her death, the sign of an anomalous murder, the murder of a (male) democrat, who is not in combat but engaged in the “feminine” practice of democratic dissent? Creon does not perform the murder, but he does issue the death sentence, replacing public stoning with burial alive in order to avoid contamination. Not that Creon believes that a man can pollute the gods; rather, this might be thought of in terms of his avoiding public shame. In a confusing statement, he gives Antigone a puzzling “choice”: “whether she wishes to die or to remain buried alive in that grim abode” (ll. –). It is not clear how Antigone could live while entombed: the choice is rather between two forms of ignoble death. Duroux observes that Antigone indeed refers to this lack of choice as her lot: 81

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she uses, for the first and last time in the play, the word thémis (referring to her lot or the proper order of things) instead of the other terms for “law” that she uses throughout—dikè and nomoi (referring to either the specific legal decision of one particular case or the general law).49 And indeed it all looks like what Anton J. L. van Hooff describes as being “forced into a free death,” a phrase he employs when referring to the suicides in ancient Greece and Rome that were commanded by kings. He mentions fifty-eight Greek cases and adds that there is no mythical legitimation for these: the three cases he describes in detail are all women who die by hanging themselves or by offering their necks (From Autothanasia to Suicide: –). King Creon forces Antigone into a “free death”: his words have agency to commit murder, though in the cleanliness of secrecy. Neither a legitimate sacrificial virgin, nor a legitimately suicidal wife suffering the death of husband or offspring, Antigone is rather an illegitimate victim “forced into a free death” who tests the conventions of the genre. Her death is as exceptional as Creon’s exceptional decree. She will have no burial: she has been sent to “dwell not among the living, not among the dead” (l. ). Her body will not be brought to the stage with Haemon’s, to be mourned by Creon in repentance. She will remain in an impure place for the city, as Polynices does, whose funeral ritual is only half complete—his body is already “torn by dogs” (l. ), and the funeral rite that Creon ultimately attempts is not the purification of a body but of “what was left” (l. ) of it. Can we qualify Antigone’s death as, in fact, a political death, a death pertaining to the polis and not the battlefield? In other words, the kind of death that could result from a “reason of state”? Like Polynices, Antigone has her defenders: through Haemon we know that “the community of this city of Thebes says no” (l. ) to Creon. They do not think that Antigone is “sick” with the malady of honoring an enemy. Although, on her way to death, Antigone calls upon all the city’s “fine rich sons” (l. ), “noble sons of Thebes,” to “look on her” (l. ), the city defends her in words but does not save her. The enigma of how and why Antigone dies bears upon the question: to what, exactly, does the city say “no”? Was her political stand too radical for the “noble sons of Thebes” also? I surmise that Creon and the city stand, in this respect, secretly linked and defined by the death of what Antigone represents: her death is not only Creon’s tragedy but also the city’s. They both arrive too late, they both let her die. In this sense I must propose a final, speculative interrogation. Is the key to understanding Antigone’s complexity, shown in the paradox of her gender and subsequently in the mystery of her death, the fact that she presents a problem 82

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for the (always fantasized) political unity of oligarchy and democracy alike—a problem for which the ancients had no solution, thus the tragic aspect of the ancient invention of politics? Put another way, Antigone’s call for uniqueness, irreplaceability, and equality, may be the cipher questioning, still today, any political fantasy of unity, insofar as this fantasy relies on the binding of identity. She sheds light on the tragic collision between this fantasy, which attempts to resolve the political anxiety of fragmentation and the contingency of political life by limiting membership, and the radical nature of the proposal for equality that was born in ancient Athens. Creon proposes one such form of binding: a phantasmagoric political unity based on a representative authority—a “state”—whose function is the establishment of limits. Creon carries out this function by creating an always-already-present internal enemy of that unity, whom he needs to expel “for the city’s sake.” The internal nature of this enemy and the manner of his elimination, instrumentalized politically to define limits, do not figure only the exceptional nature of Creon’s power. They also figure the formal problem presented to democratic logic in regard to the undecidability of its constitutive limits. As Loraux reminds us, the political subject who imagines itself in ancient Greece is the city, not the individual: Athens was ándres pólis, usually translated as “we the city” or “men are the city.”50 We know that the ancient democratic space was built on unquestionable divisions between men, the most insurmountable of which—that between citizens and slaves—even Antigone seems to respect; equality was political, not social. But was Antigone’s inclusionary politics an intolerable problem even for the proposal of political equality, which depended on the definition of the city? The indeterminacy in Antigone’s complexity is the indeterminacy of democracy’s limits: any attempt at their determination entails the risk of democracy’s other—violence. We might surmise that, killed as a woman democrat by the opponents of democracy, Antigone was also strangled as a radical democrat by the invisible veils of the democratic city. Antigone dies not only as the “womanly” embodiment of democracy but also as the utopian horizon of democracy that questions in principle all the exclusions that give birth to the fantasy of a unified constituency. Antigone extends Athenian egalitarian principles to an intolerable extreme, asking its audience the fundamental question of democracy—and thus a question that points to its fracture: can democracy democratically determine the members of its own constituency? She unveils the repressed violence of the nondemocratic resolution of constituency boundaries and thus reveals the foundational link between violence and the political form of “we the 83

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city.” Antigone’s warning is about the logic of internal war implicit in the suture of political unity. She is the voice of those who are rendered politically dead in order to enable the fantasy of a political bond that might counter the anxiety of fragmentation. It is usually said that ancient democracy, like Antigone, “died” or “committed suicide.” Scholars refer to the oligarchic coup, backed by Sparta, that resulted in the Assembly voting in  to dissolve itself—voting to “commit suicide.” In analyzing the class determinations that led to this decision, G. E. M. de Ste. Croix concludes that democracy did not commit suicide. Rather, it was murdered.51 The voting Assembly indeed recalls Hooff ’s expression “forced into a free death”—just as Antigone was “forced into a free death” by both King Creon and the noble sons of Thebes, as part of their search for unity.

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The dream degenerates so easily into nightmare.

—George Seferis, Athens, 

Modern Tempo— Democratic Overture, State Finale

I have suggested that one of the most intricate questions Antigone poses to us is whether the unity of the polis is ultimately compatible with the Athenian invention of democratic equality. Antigone’s corpse disseminates through twenty-five hundred years of literary history, a tragedy more unsettling than the confrontation between the values of the prepolitical and the political implied in the modern teleology identified by Hegel and affirmed by many others. The scene that disturbs us does not follow any teleological arrow of progress; it is a contradiction internal to the logic of modernity, appropriated from the ancients but without the possibility of applying ancient solutions to its dilemma. Antigone stages a mythical vision of one of the tragic aporias of ancient politics: from the point of view of its logic, democratic equality opposes any binding of membership, but the demos needs to be bound in order to establish its own destiny. Modernity has radicalized this aporia: the social reasons that enabled the ancients to bind the demos, by providing concrete determinations to equality, have lost their legitimacy. Our modern challenge is different: can we imagine a sense of political belonging uncontaminated by democracy’s other—a violence that seals the polity’s borders? These questions concern the connection between a politics of equality and its other, the violence brought in to establish equality’s concrete determinations, as manifested in so many historical crises of membership. The birth of democracy involved a restrictive politics of equality—democracy was born hand in hand with slavery and with empire; it resulted from a series of legal reforms (exceptional decrees) advanced by specific leaders (Solon, Cleisthenes, Efialtes) whose decisions drew the limits of the new “demos.” These decisions were contested in times of membership crisis, such as the era in which Antig­ one saw the stage. In addition to the permanent “citizenship anxiety” of the ancient Athenians regarding possible enslavement through war, there was now 87

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an alarming increase in court cases demanding citizenship and an influx of foreigners that blurred city boundaries. Pericles passed new laws restricting membership in order to limit the damage that many saw arising as a result of petitions for citizenship brought by foreigners and freed slaves. Famous among those laws, and a clear example of the paradoxes brought about by democratic membership, was the – regulation that the mother of a citizen had to be a citizen herself—a puzzling legal notion since Athenian women, defined legally merely as “women of Attica,” did not have citizenship.1 Democratic crises of membership and their costs in human life have shaped the history of democracy’s re-emergence in Western modernity. At the present time, “globalization” introduces new types of membership crises. As an example, we might mention recent debates coded in the language of human rights, as phenomena such as massive refugee camps and forced displacements of peoples demand new thinking about defining the rights of “humans.” Consider, for instance, the efforts of international law to universalize human rights, and the critique from across the ideological spectrum that the definition of “human” in the phrase “human rights” continues to be, in spite of two hundred years of ongoing struggles for its redefinition, as much an abstraction as is the term “equality.” For some critics the definition of “the human” hides its concrete determination in the “citizen”—that is, in the person whose rights are attached to the nation-state. Others argue that rights granted to “humanity”—to those who do not have nations—become the rights of victims (Arendt’s famous formulation is “the rights of those who do not have rights”). Or else, that rights are not just granted, but rather won through struggle and must be associated with a concept of duty.2 The dilemmas posed by the definition of “human rights” echo those posed by the universality of democracy’s logic of equality, which collides, then as now, with equality’s determinations—with the sense of belonging to a political unity that determines access to privilege. For the ancients, this unity was the “city,” for moderns “the state,” and nowadays, larger units such as the “European community,” if we are not referring to more specific problems such as those presented by groups defined according to gender, class, or ethnicity. At stake is whether the ideal of democracy was then, and is now, consistent with the idea “of a condition of belonging,” as Agamben puts it: “any identity to vindicate or bond for which to seek recognition.”3 We might ask whether our imaginative efforts should not be oriented toward new ways of envisioning identity without positing it against an other, so that the markers of difference need not lead to violence. Perhaps another way to address this problem is to ask 88

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if there is any compatibility between the principle of democracy and the political organ of the state itself, an entity conceived in modern times as the only “civilized” governance (and guarantor of identity), even while it subsumes the contradiction of a protection of particularities under the guise of an aspiration to universality. Antigone thinks through ancient versions of these questions. They differ from ours in that restricted equality went publicly unquestioned. The ancient tragic play speaks to us not so much in terms of the clash between tradition and innovation as in terms of two antagonistic but interlocked “innovations” that modernity reinscribes insistently as its own traditions. These political innovations entailed, on the one hand, the rule of law—the logic of equality—and, on the other, its political exception—the logic of equality’s determinations, a power above the law, but no longer divine. Their dependence on each other becomes fully visible once the Greek invention enters the modern political imagination—whence all modern formulations of the inseparability of “documents of culture from documents of barbarism,” to recall Benjamin’s famous formulation.4 Ancient tragedy testifies, with horror, to this interdependence, in a vision granted us once the politics of equality emerges as the imaginative horizon for democracy. Each of Antigone’s antagonistic characters takes a radically different stance vis-à-vis the new historical experience of uncertainty that questions what unites the autonomous polis. Here one should not forget that equality signals an exclusively political space: it dismantles bloodlines, tribal ancestry, and kinship as communal binding regulations. The Athenian democratic polis is an artificial creation of Cleisthenes’ laws, which gave equal representation in politics to all “tribes.” The fictional background of war in the tragedy dramatizes the lack of a “natural” bond; indeed, neither the brotherhood (understood either in terms of bloodline or Athenian citizenship) nor the father’s command (Oedipus in the myth or the religious sphere of rule above the law) could grant the stability or “authenticity” of a pact between Polynices and Eteocles. To counter the anxiety of civic fragmentation brought about by the new equivalence among the city’s citizens (not slaves), echoed on Polynices’ shield of justice, Antigone and Creon attempt to bind the citizens anew, by obsessively distinguishing ekhthroi (enemies who had been friends) from philoi (friends), but proposing irreconcilable ways of communal belonging. Creon posits a common internal enemy, while Antigone posits a common language; Creon understands equality as identity, Antigone understands it as equivalence. They 89

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point in the direction of conflicting, future horizons: particular states versus universal citizenship. Creon solves political dismemberment with its straightforward prohibition. He binds the polity by asking its members to identify with a specific cause: the elimination of an enemy within the community that will purify it. Enemies for Creon are those who are not bound by sameness; loyalty is the yardstick by which he makes everyone identical. Creon’s binding strategy involves a decision about an enemy—about the concrete determination that signals sameness. Thus, the enemy and the sovereign are inseparable as binding instruments. Creon’s location depends on the enemy, which he will keep alive as the threat of chaos lurking in the city. Creon’s internal enemy can become, in fact, any member of the community who can be identified with the threat of chaos. Creon’s power is thus turned against the community in order to protect the community from its own “sickness”: an immunity logic, to extrapolate Roberto Esposito’s phrase describing modernity.5 From Creon’s point of view, as long as his exception can arbitrate the life and death of internal enemies in the name of political unity, the community will not only preserve a sense of unity; it will also be “safe” from exposure to that “corpse of ritual” (represented by the unmaking of the funeral rite and the corpse of Polynices) that shows the lack of commonality and its possible consequence of war. The specularity of this logic is evident: Creon is as much an internal enemy to the community as is the internal enemy that he designates. The stability that the community thus achieves is predicated upon the violence of its internal division: on the one side stand the citizens, on the other a citizen above the law, a sovereign ruler representing the abstract unification of the citizens in the face of the terrifying prospect of a war of all against all. To follow the thread of medical metaphors, we have gone from an immunity logic to the state as a sort of “autoimmune disease.” By prohibiting dismemberment, Creon introduces another type of dismemberment in the city: he interiorizes and encapsulates the exterior threat of dissolution. The radical difference between Antigone and Creon vis-à-vis the problem of fragmentation lies in the attempt to suture it: while Creon, armed with fear, sets out to negate the lack of unity within the city, Antigone, armed only with her own mortality, sets out to imagine coexistence by accepting the void of any “natural” political constituency and binding the constituency with what belongs to no one in particular: death and language. Death is the touchstone by which she makes everyone equivalent; enemies, for Antigone, are those not bound by equivalence (bound by war and thus slavery). The concrete deter90

Modern Tempo

minations of equality must be deliberative: a negotiation, a ritual—we are to assume this negotiation is permanently contingent. Antigone’s vision is to stabilize the lurking fragmentation not by prohibiting it but by actually ritualizing dissolution, fragmentation, antagonism, in practices that articulate equality and dissent. I speculate that this might bear upon the centrality of agonistic and antagonistic struggle in Greek culture in general: consider not only the rituals of the tragic contests but also of the Olympic Games—another ritual entertainment in which the death of the players was at stake.6 Antigone’s move means not the disappearance of the war between city brothers but rather, a symbolic work that I propose is akin to sublimation: Antigone’s “love” transforms enmity into dissent. With her ritual, she reinscribes enmity in a different form so that it is not enmity that disappears but the violence of annihilation. To this effect, Antigone sees the brothers treated according to what they share, not according to what divides them, precisely because her starting point is that they will be forever divided. Nothing bonds them like language and death. This was the democratic imagination of her times. Plato’s “baker, cook and shopkeeper,” and also Isocrates’ “good and bad,” unjustly worthy of the same rights, not only dismantled oligarchy and kinship in matters of community decision-making but also, and more important, in its last, most radical instance, planted the seeds for the questioning of any idea of closure—of identity—based on the opposition to an enemy. No commonality brought the Athenians to the Assembly but their belief in the irreplaceable participation of each and every citizen in decision-making. Equality entailed not only a social leveling but also the location of commonality in the shared fate, rather than fear, of death and language. Two imaginative horizons for equality, which are still with us, appear here: equivalence and sameness. They are correlative to the disjunction between an enemy and a language. I stress a difference in caliber between Creon’s and Antigone’s solutions, which express respectively an emphasis on what today we could name the imaginary (the other, the image, the enemy) and the symbolic (the Other, language, death). Creon’s stance is a desire for closure to counter fragmentation; Antigone’s is a desire for contingency to counter the violence inherent in closure. Embedded in this antagonism lies the desire for or rejection of political representability. We can also think of the ancient terms of this tragic antagonism: the distinction between “two equalities” formulated by Isocrates, one that “allots the same to every one” and another that allots “what is appropriate to each.” The “same 91

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to every one” was the democratic shared good of language—that is, political virtue; to “each what is appropriate to each” established an unequal verticality and thus the necessity of deciding what was appropriate for all others. The Sophoclean stage puts these two logics in conflict over membership. Antigone is a cipher for the overlapping juncture at which both logics show the same internal contradiction: both entail decisions concerning who benefits from equality or who makes decisions regarding it. If equality means the democratic “same to every one,” then the problem is how to define who “everyone” is—is there any justifiable limit? In turn, if equality is the hierarchical “what is appropriate to each,” democracy puts in contention the question of “who defines what is appropriate to each.” The tension between these two forms of equality is the tension between two forms of sovereignty (in the activity of the Assembly, also codified as the tension between laws and decrees). In other words, the tension between, on the one hand, the logic of the irreplaceability of each and every one and, on the other, the logic of the irreplaceability of the city-state—that is, the representability of its citizens by one power. In modern political terms, Creon’s solution is the paradigm of security bound up in the logic of immunity: the protection of life against an internal enmity, which can be displaced onto an “external threat” in a symbolic operation aiming to erase the traces of an originary, founding violence. This paradigm entails a sovereign limitation of borders and representation of the city. Its political imagination is based on the logic of survival and the utopia of purifying the community of war through the annihilation of enmity; its paradoxical result is the perpetuation of this war through the permanent reproduction of enmity. We may suggest that Antigone’s paradigm is that of politics proper. Its political imagination is the logic of equality in its ritualization of enmity into different figures of dissent; its paradoxes are embedded in the history of the tension between an imperative for democratic expansion and its restriction, guided so far by the need for equality to be concretely determined. Each paradigm designs a different sense of belonging: either a commonality granted by an abstraction (the city), to which everyone relates through (enforced) identification, or a commonality granted by an equivalence of singularities. Each paradigm depends on a different “binding”: either a war machine installed in the city’s interior, ready to emerge when clarification of membership is needed, or the “thin line” between politics and civil war that provides the borders for rituals of dissent. At the center of all these oppositions lies the question not of the elimina92

Modern Tempo

tion of violence but of the role allocated to violence in the regulation of conflict. Or, better put, the question of whether these logics can function without necessarily involving each other. For all these oppositions codify what may be the ultimate political problem, namely, how to deal with the revolution that differentiated the praxis of politics from simple domination—such as in the great ancient agrarian states—or from disorganized revolt. In other words, how to (and if to) bind a community that has allowed the irruption of the other into the sphere of power—hitherto in ancient Greece a sphere reserved for a select quota of royal members. Political praxis in itself is the unveiling of the constitutive fragmentation of the city, “the void” of community, that for lack of bloodline bonding, necessitates new coded interactions to articulate equality and difference. Creon’s “to each what is appropriate” is the moment of closure that makes equality concrete; Antigone’s “the same to everyone” is the principle by which any closure remains in the realm of undecidable contentions. Modernity has seen many formulations of these antagonistic scenarios; not even in those few historical occasions when social equality was given concrete determination, has it been easy to preserve the contentious space of ritualized enmity that keeps democracy’s politics of indeterminacy alive. It is appropriate to recall here Rancière’s recent return to the Greeks to depict the political sphere as a deadly “disagreement” between the force of order and the force of its interpretation, due to opposing visions of the same situation by two parties who do not understand that they are talking about the same things, or do not consider each other to have an equal right to talk about the same things. One party thinks that the other does not speak but rather produces unintelligible sounds (Creon of Antigone); the other party takes for granted a position of equality in speech in order to hear and to be heard (Antigone wanting to be heard). For Rancière the first party is “the police”—a “nonpejorative” term to refer not to discipline but to “the configuration of an order” (Disagreements ), which constitutes the force that decides who speaks, what is audible speech, what is just noise, and what is visible and invisible. The second party is “the political,” which is a force of equal speech that can question the “police” by asking to be heard in equal terms with all speaking beings. Rancière associates the latter with the historical breakthrough of ancient Greek democracy.7 Sophocles’ insight into the “disagreement” about membership was his dramatic interrogation of the “thin line between politics and war” that, for Finley, bisected the Greek world. Modernity often recalls this thin line: Clausewitz’s “war is politics by other means” or Foucault’s “politics is war by other means.” 93

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Sophocles left the two citizens who exposed “the disagreement,” as two rotting, unburied, contaminating corpses. The introduction of the other into the sphere of order—that is, the emergence of politics—needed then, as it does now, a new imagination about the role of violence within the politics of equivalence. Since the return of the ancient Greeks to the European imagination in the Renaissance, or perhaps since the time of the first European enlightenment in the twelfth century, the birds of history have spread the rotting corpses of Polynices and Antigone throughout Europe (and later the Americas, Africa, and Asia through and against the historical forces of colonial empires). Creon and Antig­ one were, after all, “a bit too modern.” Significantly, it is possible to observe the two principles I have read in Antigone and Creon re-emerging as “two (European) modernities” right after the fall of the feudal order: one that can be aligned with the democratic impetus in the humanist thought of the Renaissance and later with the advent of the French Revolution, the other with the ideology of governance in the first philosophical formulations about the origins of society and the emergence of the state and, after , with the avatars of counter-revolution in all its forms. European modernity brings back the ancient political ideal of autonomy, in that no divine entity, no natural family or human incarnation of God will legitimize political unity. The responsibility for politics—and hence the responsibility for its violence—falls back on the community. A long philosophical tradition exposing the tension between the two modernities, whose roots start as early as with the sixteenth-century Spanish natural law School of Salamanca, will speculate for centuries to come on the origins of political autonomy, taking up some version of a legal model—“a social contract”—and consequently converting violence into the law’s “other.” As is well known, modernity has long associated Antigone’s claim with the school of natural law, which in fact goes as far back as the ancient Stoics. Modernity sees its rebirth in linking canonical law to politics. At Salamanca, figures such as Francisco de Vitoria, Martín de Azpilcueta, Domingo de Soto, and Bartolomé Carranza had set the tone by exploring the links between canonical and natural rights. The school’s most radical thinker, Francisco Suárez, wrote as early as  a vehement defense of popular sovereignty and of the idea of contract, dissociating sovereignty from the “divine” power of kings: The Defense of the Catholic Faith against the Errors of the Anglican Sect (Defensio fidei Catholicae et Apostolicae adversus Anglicanae sectae errores). In order to avoid any return to the feudal belief in natural inequality, early moderns endeavored to imagine 94

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society as the result of an exclusively political intervention, much as the ancient democratic city was a political invention. But early modernity does not imagine the legal model of a political invention without violence; it imagines the contract against a background of war that would be tamable by governance. As we know, early modern secularization confronts the remnants of medieval theology within the sphere of governance, a confrontation in which, according to some, the latter eclipsed the former, leading to the modern predominance of a political theology over secularization.8 Philosophers at the time (with a few exceptions, such as Suárez and Spinoza, and later Locke) envisioned different forms of a “transfer of sovereignty” from community to government, always in the context of the looming threat of civic dissolution—much like the fictional Theban war in the background of Antigone. At times it would seem that, without the imaginative frame of civic dissolution, modern theories of political origins cannot uphold their edifice. The first “realists” to imagine the origins of the state, Bodin and Machiavelli, as well as those later theorists more properly identified as “contractualist” thinkers, Hobbes and Rousseau at their lead (though not Locke), work within an imaginative horizon of war, for the most part coinciding with a historical background of the civil and religious wars brought about by the fall of the feudal order and the antagonist currents against or for its return. The taming of this horizon of war is seen as progress; its agent is the modern state. Violence, in fact, frames the legitimating narratives for the historical expression of political sovereignty in European modernity—the creation of the state—to such an extent that it will also be the cornerstone of the state’s definition. For it is precisely the role of violence that distinguishes this type of modern sovereignty from all others: the state is, to recall Weber’s famous formula, the organ that successfully claims the legitimate monopoly of violence within a territory (with the rhetoric of the enforcement of the law as the peaceful force of civilization), a concept alien to the ancient Athenians.9 But here a paradox is posed for modern jurists and political philosophers: the existence of an encapsulated, legitimate, violence in a rule of law, ready to be unleashed in the name of law. When the state is considered legitimate (emerging out of consensual contract), its violence cannot be explained;10 when the state is seen as just an organ of violence, aimed at the unification of the social body atomized by violence, its violence is explained (as an antidote to civic dissolution) but its legitimation is left in the dark. The Renaissance explains the state monopoly of violence as a logic of survival (reasons of state); the Enlightenment legitimates 95

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the state as conquering violence with the “legal contract.” At the heart of all the arguments for modernity as a political theology lies perhaps this paradox, or better said, this “mystery”: a violence that alternatively cannot be explained or will not be legitimized. The idea of the state leaves us with either religious mystery or secular progress; as has been noted, it is gothic rather than tragic. For the “realist” early moderns, the state is the necessary one and indivisible power, to follow Bodin’s original formulation in his Six livres de la République (),11 that protects the community from its own suicidal violence. Bodin’s model for this power is the Father of Roman Law, who, as is known, had the power to decide over the life and death of his children. In this narrative of survival, whose aim is society’s autoimmunization, the violence that threatens community is absorbed by the supreme power of the state and its “reasons.” The state stands above all other sectors of feudal society, such as the church; indeed, according to the argument that modernity is a political theology, the state becomes a secular version of the church. This very same narrative of survival is taken up less than a century later by the contractualists, with the thesis of an originary “state of war” or “state of nature” in need of eradication—an either natural or provoked, but always absolute absence of civilized society, most brilliantly summarized in the now-famous Hobbesian formula Homo hominis lupus in dissolutio civitatis: to prevent man from being “a wolf to men,” men create a “contract.”12 An era begins for the West, whereby the notion of a social contract imposes a shift in the thinking about communal violence: when it does not remain in the realm of the mysterious, violence is gradually “othered,” considered a prepolitical fact, a trait of uncivilized “hordes” that can be overcome through the teleological civilizing force of progress represented by the state. This othering of violence does not displace it onto extrasocial entities but rather onto other visions of community that are either not European or not state-organized: for instance, nonstate societies begin to be seen as “primitive,” in correlation with the observations made during the first forays of European colonial greed.13 The modern othering of violence rests on two assumptions about violence. On the one hand, the stateless “state of nature” is seen as marked by, or reaching, a point of noncivility that threatens the very existence of humankind. On the other hand, this initial violence is seen as a phase overcome by an irreversible process of civilization marked by the emergence of an indivisible power that counters dangerous disseminations of power. It can be said, perhaps, that this othering is one of the effects of a new type of political autonomy, increas96

Modern Tempo

ingly reliant on the concept of the rational individual and the gradual state administration of life, in this respect contrary to the autonomy of the ancient city: again, what Antigone thinks tragically, modern political philosophy harmonizes. If autonomy for the ancients meant the rule of law (equality) and not of man, for the moderns it now means the rule of the state, a monopoly on violence freed from the rule of other feudal oppressors, such as the church. One could certainly map modern European political theory in terms of all the permutations that the modern vision of a “contract” and its differing forms of “othering” violence underwent: for this is certainly no ordinary contract. Whereas the legal meaning of this term implies that two parties engage in an “exchange,” the modern political contract falls short of its legal model, both in its early formulations and in the period immediately preceding the French Revolution. I want to recall briefly what perhaps were its most relevant versions in Europe for centuries to come, both instantiations that assign different locations to violence and civic fragmentation: those of Hobbes and Rousseau, the latter being a response to the former. Both imagine a “cure” for violence: either an autoimmunization against it or its surgical extirpation. The Hobbesian contract is everything but an exchange. It is rather a renunciation by all individuals of their own (“natural”) violence, but not in order to expel violence completely from society. Rather, the renounced violence remains within the city, to the advantage of the entity that concentrates it, thus remaining external to the contract: this entity reserves the contractual right to “do anything” to individuals for the sake of their protection. As we know, this is Hobbes’s immortal image of that seven-headed biblical sea monster, the “Leviathan,” a “mortal God.” Its function is to prohibit dissolution, just as Creon does, by commanding (or allowing) only one type of association: an obligation of men to the state. The representative authority in charge of the wolf-man’s protection from all other wolf-men becomes the only wolf (among men) allowed to lurk permanently in the city, ready to attack if the contract is broken. Thus the Hobbesian scheme cancels out the war of all against all by preserving it, encapsulating it, inside the city: he who attacks inside the city will be attacked by the city’s representative. The scheme immunizes the city, as it were, by inoculating it with a version of its own war sickness. Whether the individuals’ renunciation of violence and the state’s prohibition of association were considered a result of a voluntary or forced contract between the people and the “multitude in one” represented by the Leviathan (and, as is known, in Hobbes this remains obscure), they functioned to explain and legitimize the 97

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historical emergence of the modern state as containing a zone of exceptional power above the law that was deemed to protect the community from dissolution and self-destruction. It is a sacrificial contract: if there is an exchange at all, it is the individuals’ sacrifice of their lives, of their own access to violence, in return for protection. But if man is naturally violent, we are left in the dark as to why this would be man’s wish or need. The paradox of this sacrificial contract lies in that the entity that protects is the same entity that can decide over the individual’s life. Although it is gradually veiled by liberal thought, this sacrificial paradigm will remain central to our modern imagination about how to navigate the “thin line” between civil war and politics. Political sacrifice, instead of the rule of law, appears as a “binding substance” to explain the allegiance to a political community and the meaning of membership. The century that follows Hobbes and precedes (and prepares for) the French Revolution will be haunted by the question of origins and the Hobbesian solution. We can recall Rousseau’s formulation about “the act by which a people is a people”: “The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution.”14 Rousseau’s starting point is not the war against all so much as a total absence of society due to the solitude of all: as we know, he responds to the “realist” (historicist) school that precedes him by exiting through the door of “logic.” He speaks not of fact, but of right: in the beginnings, men are not even associated through the Hobbesian war, they are simply isolated. The violence of war is a time-bound phenomenon created not by man’s nature but by social development. It must be surmounted. Rousseau’s contract eliminates the absolute need for the Hobbesian third party that regulates the contractors’ capacity to kill each other, but paradoxically it eliminates the second party, too: the multitude of individuals will not be represented in One (Hobbes) but will become One, for they establish a contract not with a second or third party but with themselves. The people coincide absolutely with the sovereign: the contract is the act by which the people are constituted as a people. There are no two parties: there is a constitution of one party, the popular sovereign. Rousseau posits the need to eliminate particular interests and make individual interests coincide with the general interest of the common will. Because there is a petitio principii here—namely, that the particular and the general interest exist—the only way to make these speak and coincide is to eliminate all 98

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factions, classes, and social groups that would express particular interests and silence the general one. The expression of social groups threatens a regression to the domination of some particular interests over the rest—that is, to war: each isolated individual can make his interest coincide with the general will and become a part of the sovereign only if his interest is not associated with a faction. Groups and classes dissolved, the individual who makes a contract with the sovereign makes a contract with himself, since the individual and general will are the same. As we know, for the individual interest to reveal itself as the same as the general one, Rousseau appeals not to overt violence but to a more subtle one: discipline, education. The latter vaguely echoes the solution that the Athenians thought would prevent stasis: self-restraint, paideia, customary law. Whether the war frame is seen as natural or socially produced, in both Hobbes and Rousseau the philosophical vision for a possible community relies on the imagination of the sovereign as One that manages to expel violence. The fear of fragmentation through war is overpowering: society has to be bound back together as One, whether with the figure of “the people” or “the sovereign.” With the exception of Spinoza’s political writings, the ancient principle of irrepresentability, which was Antigone’s fight, loses prominence until the event of , whose absolute imperative is to “reinvent the political.” Politically,  brings back the memory of the ancients as part of a struggle to fashion legitimating narratives, even while radicalizing ancient equality. The radicality that shapes this reinvention of the political is twofold: not only could all humanity now be incorporated in the demos, but also all institutions of society could thus be put in question, including the family. I am speaking of course in terms of a utopian horizon: not only has this project never materialized, it also has encountered serious opponents in the West over the last two centuries—not to mention the challenges posed by the legacies of colonialism. French revolutionaries politically and artistically look back to Greece and Rome for inspiration. Unsurprisingly from the point of view of the reading I have proposed, Antigone takes on an unprecedented celebrity in Europe after : it becomes “talismanic to the European spirit.”15 It is no coincidence, then, that Furet chooses to call the revolution the “absolutely trustworthy Antigone of the new era.”16 France developed a veritable “cult of antiquity”:17 the revolutionaries sided either with Athens or Sparta, praising the civic virtue of Athenians or the society of The Equals in Sparta. While Rousseau warned them all that they were not “Romans or Spartans, not even Athenians” (quoted in Vidal-Naquet: ), it is not difficult to guess that Desmoulins chose Athens as a 99

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beacon and that those who led the formation of the new republic—Saint-Just and Robespierre—identified it with Sparta. In dialogue with the contractualist visions that permeate the Enlightenment, the new imagination of  posits a society of equals as the creative product of reason, the new man as the citizen, and the new polis as the contract among individuals, rather than the aristocratic old metaphor of the body and its parts. Underlying this newness is the absolute universalization of the principle of political equality, until then seen in only a few, limited incarnations.18 Contrary to the revolution’s critics (for example, Burke), the revolutionaries of  took up the challenge involved in the abstract thesis of natural rights. Equality cannot stop at any of its embodiments; it must overcome them: the seeds of Trotsky’s  thoughts on the permanent revolution appear already in . The revolution is condemned to permanency, it “is defined by the fact that it always has to go further” (Menke: 154).19 The dramatic irruption of the sansculottes into the sphere of power, especially during the years –, and the organization of the dictatorship of public safety, radically begin to redefine the concept and boundaries of the “people.” The tug of war between the revolutionary concept of equality and its concrete determinations becomes a defining scene of modern politics, as the political struggle begins to define equal rights and their new subject “man.” The proliferation of terms such as “man,” “men,” “every man,” “all men,” “humanity,” “all citizens,” “each citizen” in the political and philosophical writings at the times paves the road for the first article of the  Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”) and initiates two centuries of their redefinitions—ranging from such instances as the nineteenth-century Marxist critique of equal rights as bourgeois law, the nationalization of rights, and the Bolshevik  Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People, to the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights with its Article —“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”). Gradually and in formal terms across Europe and its former colonies, slaves, free blacks, the unpropertied poor and women leave the ranks of the nonequals or their existence in between humans and animals, to enter “humanity.”20 No one subject to the revolutionary reinvention of politics can now justifiably be deprived of rights—unless, that is, the justification for exclusion transforms a human into a nonhuman. Because equality starts to be based on the category of “humanity” (a term that appears in France at least as early as , whereas “human rights” seems to appear in ),21 one could say that 100

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its only possible logical limit is the creation of “nonhumans”—in other words, humans whose essence is never to achieve full humanity. Consider, for instance, the rise of the discourse of biological essentialism. It might be the case that the modern universalization of equality entails a different process of “othering” than that of the ancient Greek tradition of labeling the peoples at “the edges of the world”—all non-Greeks—as “barbarians.” The latter were not exactly nonhuman. Their definition depended on what we might call an antiessentialist notion: the barbarians were inferior to the Greeks because they did not speak Greek or they did not have Greek modes of economic production, both learnable traits. Of note are the descriptions of “barbarians” in Herodotus’ Histories and Strabo of Amasia’s Geography. Consider also David Weber’s argument that not even the earliest modern colonial enterprises, in their branding of Amerindians as “savages,” were guided by an imagination of immutable nonhumanity: the Spaniards’ categorization of “savage” was initially used for Indians they had not yet conquered, and were thus not yet Christianized.22 We might speculate here that another aspect of what Foucault called the modern emergence of biopolitics, at the time of the Industrial Revolution and, we add, concomitant to the ever-increasing universalization of equality, might be the creation of human figures endowed with nonhumanity—not belonging to the supernatural world, but rather to disposable human life. Since the “equals” now cannot make equality concrete without contradicting the principle of universal equality that guides them, the determination of equality might need to fall not onto “human inferiors” but increasingly onto figures that lie in liminal spaces between the human and animal realm, between life and death. It is in the context of the  reinvention of the political that I offer a reading of a text embedded in the revolution and engaged in responding to its political paradoxes and anxieties: Sade’s  Days of Sodom (). As I did with Antigone, I interrogate Sade’s text in relation to the questions about the makings of a new political community, with which Sade’s revolutionary times were obsessed. My juxtaposing gesture accompanies the many philosophical speculations that attempt to think through the paradoxes of modernity with a genealogical intuition that turns to the ancients in the search for the incipient forms of our modernity. Creon’s political manipulation of the corpse of an equal is radicalized in Sade’s creation of a society of equals in the modern, gothic, Castle of Silling. Two well-known theses among those speculations juxtapose the literature of the ancient Greeks precisely with Sade’s texts—though not with the  Days of Sodom. Both theses explore the paradoxes of two discourses that guided the 101

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Enlightenment and the Revolution: those of reason and ethics. They do it in part through the ob-scene23 fabric of Sade’s text. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment ([] ), Adorno and Horkheimer engage in a radical critique of modern reason by pointing at reason’s perversion into “instrumental reason.” They inquire into the possibility of saving the libertarian ideals of the Enlightenment’s reason from its fall into barbarism: they juxtapose two literary texts as examples of this perversion in two subsequent “excursus”: Homer’s Odyssey and Sade’s Juliette. In turn, Lacan juxtaposed Sade’s libertine aristocrats and the princess Antigone in his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (–) to save ethics from its perversion into both (Sadean) instrumentalization and the discourse of the “ethics of the (common) good” (Creon’s). Lacan never acknowledges Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s book, though his thesis undoubtedly resonates with their gesture. Distortions of both reason and ethics, these authors argue, achieve exactly the opposite of their original mission: reason does not liberate but dominates, ethics does not relate to the other but instrumentalizes or eliminates it. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s inquiry leads to a different regime for knowledge production—art—and Lacan’s inquiry explores the possibility of an “ethics of desire.” In both cases, Sade functions as the epitome of a modern “perverse” resolution of the contradictions opened up as far back as the ancient Greeks and their politics. Sade’s text seems to occupy with respect to the discourses of the Enlightenment, the place that tragedy occupied with respect to the ancient polis, exposing its internal contradictions. Along this line of inquiry, I juxtapose Sade’s text to Sophocles’ and suggest another modern distortion through the former: the obscene side of the contractual political reason that “others” violence. To the “othering” of violence, Sade’s text responds with a vengeance: neither reason nor rule of law, but violence, is the cement of all new bonding among equals. Sade’s “othering” of violence is of an altogether different caliber: without ousting violence to the “state of nature,” Sade’s society of equals neither renounces it nor delegates it to a representative power. It eliminates violence from its contract by inflicting it onto other humans that have been transformed into nonequals and moved to a liminal space in between the society of equals and its outside. Thus, the nonviolent contract is sustained by the violence exercised against those placed at its limits. This radicalization of violence is Sade’s response to the radicalization of equality: if equality means that everyone has the right to do everything, Sade includes the right to killing; if equality is based on humanity, Sade produces the nonhumans that define the equals’ humanity. 102

PART II

D. A. F. de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom or The Reinvention of Politics: We the People

That intelligence at the rim of panic that was his alone.

—André Breton, Paris 

Here and there deep pools of blood Here and there impetuous fires Sport for those who mean to live.

—Paul Éluard, Paris 

Two centuries ahead of time and on a reduced scale, Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom—which, in reality, rebellion does not demand. The history and the tragedy of our times really begin with him.

—Albert Camus1

You traverse the nineteenth century with a grenade of truth in hand and explode at your arrival at our times.

—Octavio Paz2



Sade’s Text and Sade’s Times

“You are already dead” (Déjà mortes au monde):1 this is how the four Sadean libertines refer to their victims when they pronounce the rules of their new society at the Castle of Silling. Paradoxically (or so it would seem), part of the population participates in the new libertine society of equals only insofar as they have already been symbolically killed. Those “already dead to the world” inaugurate a new world—Sade’s Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome (ou L’École du libertinage)—and presage our own. Both Camus and Paz situate Sade in the twentieth century, a century after his death: our history and tragedy start with Sade; his grenade explodes on us. As our contemporary, Sade is part of the reservoir of meanings with which we envision our modernity: his status in the Western literary, political, philosophical, and even clinical imagination has become mythical, as has Antigone’s. Like Antigone, Sade’s text is a political vision that can be read as unveiling the primordial question of membership. Silling figures the exceptional event that establishes membership: its binding violence separates those who live—the equals—from those who die—the nonequals. Like Creon’s Thebes, Sade’s castle revolves around the “twice-killed,” whose political deaths bind the newly instantiated “society of equals.” A book that has been immortalized as the most scandalous catalogue of sexual perversion in Western literary history,  Days of Sodom is, as I would like to recount it, the story of a secret political bonding framed by war.2 At the end of Louis XIV’s rule, the kingdom is immersed in war. After pondering the subject for six years, four libertine friends-in-crime suddenly come up with an idea to “strengthen their ties” [resserrer leurs liens] ( []): each of them will marry the daughter of another, but remain in possession of his own daughter. To each, equal property and equal rights. The Duc de Blangis and his brother the bishop summon Curval, the judge, and Durcet, the financier. They bring their daughters: Constance, Julie, Aline, and Adelaïde. The friends celebrate their pact with 105

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secret orgies and then plan “the singular revels [singulière partie de débauches] whereof we are going to give an account” ( []). They decide to look for four female narrators who will provide them with stories each day of the four months they will spend in the Castle of Silling, the property of Durcet. Madames Duclos, La Martaine, Champville, and La Desgranges are selected for their skill in storytelling and their libertine lifestyles. They look also for four “fuckers” [fouteurs], four cooks, and four duennas. From across France,  female and  male subjects are kidnapped, sixteen of whom—eight of each sex—are selected to become victims of their pleasures. During the last days of October, they set out to the German Black Forest, where the castle is located. They bribe the villagers of the nearest town not to allow anyone to come close to the castle, which in any case is isolated by mountains and precipices. Upon arrival, the libertines wall up all the castle’s doors and windows. They proclaim a set of regulations to the castle’s subjects and plan that each month will be devoted to the narration of  “passions” classified according to their level of complexity: simple, complex, criminal, and murderous. By the end of their stay, a total of six hundred perversions will have been narrated.3 Each day the libertines gather for dinner and then, from six to ten in the evening, listen to stories. They can perform in public only those acts that have been exemplified in a story; they have a secret chamber for the actions that have not yet been narrated. The libertines hear the “passions,” discuss them, and then put them into action. As the days go by, the wives and the victims are subjected to increasing levels of violence, leading to a true poetics of exhaustion that ends in the torturous killing of thirty of the castle’s members. The last twenty killings come after the first of March, when the four libertines decide to extend their stay for twenty more days because the snow has not yet melted. The narrator provides the reader with a list of the creatures “sacrificed” up to that point (ten victims), and proceeds with another list of the next twenty subjects “dispatched” at the rate of one per day (–), as if the killing machine had spun out of control. The final count reads: “Massacred prior to the st of March, in the course of the orgies—. Massacred after the st of March—. Survived and came back—. Total—” (). Among the sixteen “survivors” are the four libertines, the four narrators, the four fouteurs, the three cooks, and one victim wife, Julie. Sade’s “most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began, a book the likes of which are met with neither amongst the ancients nor amongst us moderns,” as Sade’s narrator would have it (), has been oddly neglected 106

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by critics.4 Still, the text is unanimously recognized by those critics to be as exceptional as the narrator presents it. In her influential book Sade: A Sudden Abyss, Annie Lebrun dedicates a whole chapter to what she calls the critics’ “strange omission”: critics laud Sade’s two most celebrated stories of vice and virtue, Justine and Juliette, both written after the revolution, but virtually ignore the journey to Silling. They recognize it as “the basis of Sade’s work,” without realizing the implications of this recognition: It would seem, then, that each time The One Hundred and Twenty Days is rec­ ognized as an exception of fundamental importance in Sade’s work, the act of recognition is immediately befogged by a systematically superimposed reappearance of each author’s own thematic bias: literature for Jean Paulhan, the “sacred” for Bataille, and for Philippe Roger, “writing” itself. (, my emphasis)5

Lebrun exempts the successive editors of Sade’s works—Heine, Lely, and Pauvert—from this charge; they were the first to notice the exceptional nature of the  Days. If Sade is always an exception, both in the history of the eighteenth-century “libertine novel” and in postrevolutionary literature tout court,  Days is a mise en abyme of this exception—its history, the history of its reception, and its form are all extraordinary. From a literary perspective, Sade in fact signals the historical end of the libertine genre: as Michel Delon studies it, the genre evolves from images and daydreams of secret, aristocratic, lustful bodily encounters to Sade’s rendering of these encounters as commercial, arbitrary, bloodily violent, and fatal. Changing characters, plots, and scenarios, Sade exposes that implicit in the genre were (in Delon’s words) “social exploitation, perversion, and the death drive.”6 The history of the manuscript itself is exceptional. Sade wrote it in thirtyseven days while in La Bastille, in , and lost it during the revolution. For him, too, the manuscript was exceptional. As he wrote to Gaufridy in , the loss of those pages had made him shed “tears of blood”: “I shall never be able to describe to you my despair at their loss, for me it is irreparable” (Lely, ed., Sade: Correspondance: ).7 The manuscript landed in the estate of the family of Villeneuve-Trans, and it was recovered only in  when Iwan Bloch, a German medical doctor, published it as the “most instructive catalogue of sexual pathologies ever written.”8 The critical neglect of this book may relate to the manuscript’s fate: it is because of this fate that Lebrun pardons Pierre Klossowski’s chronological 107

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confusion about the text (); or perhaps to what readers report as the book’s unbearable physical effect. Lebrun, again: “[E]verything begins physically, even if properly decorous criticism would have us think otherwise. [. . .] No one has ever entered Silling Castle normally. No sooner does one think to go in than one seems to lose one’s balance on a missing step, never to regain it” (). Georges Bataille had already warned in his Literature and Evil that “[n]obody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome without feeling sick, the sickest is he who is sexually excited by the book.”9 Lacan, in turn, qualified Sade’s “experimental literature” as an “injury” to humanity: “an assault on one’s sensibility [. . .] of a kind that is literally stupefying; one loses one’s bearings; an approach to a centre of incandescence or an absolute zero that is physically unbearable [. . .] an experiment that through its action cuts the subject loose from his psycho-social moorings” (The Ethics: ). Indeed, Sade’s narrator aggressively seeks a unique physical effect on the reader— mostly formulated as his desire to have the reader “come” alive—the English pun is appropriate: “[We] are going to enable you to live [vous faire vivre], good reader” ( []). The narrator asks the reader to find something that will “inflame” his senses “to the point of costing [him] some fuck [coûter du foutre]” ( []). When the critic, recovering from this “sickness,” tries to comment on the journey to Silling, he subsumes the book under the rubric of “outrageous transgression” in which modern critics have canonized the rest of Sade’s work, or takes recourse to the notion of “Sade’s scandal,” which “posed a question so grave that to answer it and to fall short of answering it completely was as much as an entire century could achieve,” in Jean Paulhan’s words.10 Maurice Blanchot, who thought Sade’s work was the most scandalous ever written, could not refrain from “discreetly” asking “all Sade’s publishers present and future: when dealing with Sade, at least [to] have respect for the scandal.”11 Successive waves of criticism have read the scandal as Sade’s “transgression,” often performing a moral reading rather than placing his works in dialogue with his historical context or with the internal dynamics of his books. Critics thus assess Sade’s “deviation” from the norm along the lines of the “ordinary evil” of individual crime. Falling into a veritable cliché monument: sadism,12 these readings tend to see the “always-already transgressive Sadean subject” representing alternatively the bulwark of transgressive freedom or coercion—be it legal, moral, ethical, linguistic, religious, or social.13 Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critics successively engage in either condemning or 108

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celebrating this transgression. Some critics have even taken the two opposing positions in their work, oscillating between “Sade’s negativity” and “Sade’s joy”—notably Foucault and Klossowski.14 The history of Sade’s “transgressive rubric” goes back to his times: having arrested and sentenced him several times, the ancien régime finally manages to imprison him from  to ; the revolution confiscated his work upon publication and in  arrested him as a “suspect.” Subsequently he narrowly escaped the guillotine; the Empire locked him up in  and in  transferred him to the Charenton insane asylum where he remained until his death in .15 During the nineteenth century, Sade was either a monster or a clandestine poetic inspiration. In his History of the French Revolution, Jules Michelet places Sade among the monsters of the ancien régime. In , Charles Nodier writes: “I retain of these monstrous depravities a vague impression of amazement and horror.”16 Poets, on the other hand, glorified Sade: Sainte Beuve considered Byron and Sade to be equally inspiring for their contemporaries, the first visible and the second “clandestine, but not too clandestine”; for Swinburne, Sade “saw the bottom of men and gods”; Baudelaire insisted that “one must always come back to Sade [. . .] in order to explain evil.”17 In the early twentieth century Sade’s “transgression” was canonized as revolutionary: in  the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire edited a collection of Sade’s writings and placed him among the “freest spirits of our times”—a man who passed “unknown in the nineteenth century but who could easily dominate the twentieth.”18 The surrealists admired Sade. Heine proclaimed “respect” for Sade in his  preface to Lely’s edition of Sade’s works (xv), while Lely himself was obsessed with restoring Sade’s dignity and Pauvert went to court in  for defending the publication of an unexpurgated edition of Sade’s complete works.19 The modernist recovery of Sade is not surprising. The attack on representation, the zeal for fragmentation, the analytic dissection of the natural world, the dismemberment of the body, or to put it in Apollinaire’s terms, “the study of an object the way a surgeon studies a corpse,” appear prominently in the highly analytic, quasi-scientific Sadean dissection of form, mutilation of bodies, and machinelike production of corpses.20 Modernists saw in Sade the release of energy they were looking for in the collision of the archaic and the modern. Post–World War II criticism condemned Sade’s “transgression” as an “attack” upon freedom and as a metaphor for totalitarian coercion. As early as , the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer produced a biography of the marquis 109

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that linked his ideas with Nazism. Raymond Queneau read in Sade’s text a “hallucinatory precursor of the world ruled by the Gestapo” and with a denunciatory tone warned that his “philosophies end in charnel houses.”21 More cautious, Roger Shattuck does not advocate forbidding Sade’s texts but labels them as “potential poison, polluting to our moral and intellectual environment” (). A poststructuralist poetics of the Sadean text, even if it avoids ethical readings in its conviction that Sade is nothing but the signifying combination of his texts, falls back into a celebratory mode, placing Sade’s works among the ranks of admirably transgressive writing. The most-often cited reference is the  issue of the Tel Quel group, in which all critics identify Sade’s “need to say it all”—what Blanchot called “the main impropriety” [l’inconvenance majeure]— as the unforgivable transgression.22 Only Michel Tort warns of a certaine naïveté in this celebration of linguistic transgression: Sade himself explains that it is necessary to “say everything” to implicate the reader in his texts. For Tort, the Sadean text is “bare,” it represents the intolerable naked “body” of discourse; perhaps other books are sustained by the convention of not saying what Sade says. With few exceptions, the Tel Quel group saw “the Sadean effect” (Tort) as a loss of reference, a strategy of repetition and exhaustion of language. The most recent critics add the figure of “excess” to that of transgression: Hénaff ’s influential article “The Encyclopaedia of Excess” (reprinted in Allison, Roberts and Weiss, eds.: –) set the tone. Tort’s warning had a predecessor. Georges Bataille had always been alert against an apologetic celebration of “the most subversive man ever” [l’homme le plus subversif qui ait paru]: to admire Sade’s transgression was to “sweeten his thought” [édulcor[er] sa pensée].23 Bataille saw in the glorification of Sade a reaffirmation of the mores that reigned outside of Sade’s text as normal. He praised the common reader’s horror in approaching Sade, more than the critic’s naïveté, which for Bataille did not capture Sade’s unbearable paradox: to affirm life by destroying it. As Jean Paulhan once put it, “[S]adism per se is too readily pronounced. There is much more than mere sadism in Sade” [Sadisme est trop vite dit. Il y a bien plus que du sadisme dans Sade] (Scritti: , my translation). To read this “plus” in Sade’s “foundational work,” dispensing with all celebration or condemnation of his alleged transgressions, I want to go back to the opening scenario of the book: the frame of a social bond—a contract, conceived as an alliance. I will separate the text from the ranks of “ordinary evil,” a concept that 110

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is linked to a normative perspective (the transgression of the law), to examine it instead as bearing the logic of transgression-as-norm. Sade’s text enacts the passage from ordinary to radical evil: rather than transgress, the text “thinks” a foundational operation of power that inverts the relation between transgression and norm. This inversion, figured by the orgy at the Castle of Silling, is in dialogue with the haunting question in eighteenth-century France about the foundations of a new society of equals: it speaks more of the violence that renegotiates a pact of political membership, rather than of the catalogue of sexual (or linguistic) perversions that modern criticism saw in it. For such a political reading of Sade’s text, a preliminary critical gesture is needed: the removal of Sade from the locus of moral or literary “monstrosity” and his reinsertion in the “monstrous” times and imagination of the French Revolution. One cannot overemphasize the extent to which Sade’s text belongs to an epoch obsessed not only with origins but also with enacting them: transgression was the norm while Sade was writing. To imagine this “norm” we need only peruse collections of remarks made by the agents of the revolution, such as Vansittart’s Voices of the Revolution, or read historical accounts of “the Terror,” such as Mayer’s The Furies.24 Revolutionary violence meant that “the cemeteries, not the prisons, must be filled” (Jean-Baptiste Carrier, quoted in Vansittart, Voices of the Revolution: ). Bloody death was expected everywhere; as Camille Desmoulins would put it, “[T]oday a miracle has occurred in Paris. A man died in his bed” (quoted in ibid.: ). Medieval punitive dismemberments turned into the “theatrical ritual of the guillotine” (Mayer, The Furies: ). For the masses, the guillotine was the “salutary terror” promulgated in Marat’s doctrine of vengeance. Marat’s “I represent the fury of the People” took the Parisian streets: [It] was not uncommon for prisoners to be cut to pieces “in order to prolong their agonies and amuse the spectators, delighted in the spectacle of the victims’ atrocious convulsions and wails of agony” [. . . .] Mme de Lamballe was brutally killed and decapitated: her head fixed on the point of the pike, it was carried, in ominous procession, to the Temple allegedly to force the king and the queen to see with their own eyes “how the people wreak vengeance on their tyrants.” In the heat of the moment it was widely rumoured that the princess had been stripped bare, dismembered, and eviscerated. (Ibid.: )

While “conspiracy” was the main trope of radicals, for conservatives, revolutionary France was full of “monsters, scoundrels, barbarians and cannibals unleashed by the breakdown of traditional social bonds [. . . .] [T]his new family 111

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[brought] with it the morals, the character, and the genius of the monster which conceived them.”25 Sade was, like all his contemporaries, one of those “cannibals of the times,” perhaps distinguished by the “supreme consciousness,” to use Klossowski’s expression, that made him look revolutionary violence fearlessly in the face. For Sade, these times were a bloodbath that the republic would not be able to overcome. In a letter to Gaufridy from prison, he writes that seeing eighteen hundred men guillotined in thirty-five days “hurt me more than had any imaginable Bastille before that” (in Lely, ed., Correspondance, letter of  January  (), my translation). What perhaps best expresses “the times” is to note that these massacres now form entries in new studies about genocide. Thus, Adam Jones (admitting that this judgment might not be universally shared) pronounces the revolutionary defeat of the 93 Vendée royalist uprising as a “classic campaign of root-and-branch genocide”: “Carrier pledged to purge the Vendean peasantry ‘absolutely and totally’ [. . . .] Turreau declared that ‘the race of brigands’ was to be ‘exterminated to the last,’ including the children who were ‘just as dangerous’ as the adults.”26 While the meaning of transgression in Sade’s times is unclear, it is also unclear what it could have meant to write in or about such times. Before the revolution, Paris had already become a Babylon, a “perverted capital” whose unbridled libertinisms were described with outrage in contemporary writings, such as Mercier’s Tableau de Paris (), and Fougeret de Monbron’s La capitale des Gaules, ou la Nouvelle Babylone (). Writing, pornography, and politics were condensed on paper; for the belle-lettristes the revolution had to be a revolution in language; the war, a war with words. Rivarol’s indictment of the national assembly was aesthetic: in his view, the revolution had sinned against language (Darnton, “Facts of Literary Life”: ). La Harpe’s Du fanatisme dans la langue révolutionnaire (), against which Sade polemicizes in his Idée sur le roman (), indicted the language of revolutionary times as “perverted,” full of “aberrations,” “abominable,” “fanatical,” “an unheard-of scandal in the universe, and absolutely inexplicable other than by divine vengeance” (quoted in Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class: , my emphasis).27 Sade’s “scandalous” rhetoric shares the “scandalous” spirit of his times. An avid reader of political pamphlets, Sade appropriates the excessive phrases that evoke both the tortures of feudal power and the frenetic revolutionary passions. His political insert in Philosophie dans le boudoir ()—“Yet another effort, Frenchmen, if you would become republicans”28—echoes the slogans that flooded Paris: “to be truly Republican, each citizen must experience and bring 112

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about in himself a revolution equal to the one which has changed France”; “revolutionary means outside of all forms and all rules” (quoted in Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class: –).29 But most important, Sade’s “yet another effort” echoes none other than the radical interpretation of the new revolutionary political equality: political equality had to be “perfect” (take, for instance, Babeuf ’s position); like the revolution itself, it was always impelled to go beyond any of its political embodiments. The utopian trend of the revolution defined it as “always already” beyond itself; likewise, Sade’s Philosophie sees the new republic as in “eternal movement,” as matter is also in incessant movement. The era lacked appropriate diction. On the night of the king’s execution, Mercier writes: “What I saw that night I cannot truly describe. A novelist himself would be unable to get within distance of it” (quoted in Vansittart, Voices of the Revolution: ). Sade finds a proper diction for what he calls “this age of iron” only in the English gothic depictions of hell: [This kind of fiction was] the inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which all of Europe has suffered. For anyone familiar with the full range of misfortunes wherewith evildoers can beset mankind, the novel became as difficult to write, as monotonous to read. There was not a man alive who had not experienced in the short span of four or five years more misfortunes than the most celebrated novelist could portray in a century. Thus, to compose works of interest, one had to call upon the aid of hell itself. (Idée sur le roman)30

Some critics have linked Sade’s new language with the ideologemes of the revolution, alternatively making Sade a speaker for or against the revolution.31 Jean-Paul Sartre, on the other hand, places Sade between the old and new regimes, speaking the libertarian language of the revolution and using “the concept-tools of his period” but defending his rights as an aristocrat; Michel Delon sees his Sade thermidorien “expressing the oldest privileges in the vocabulary of the rights of man.”32 Like his text, Sade is a figure of exception, both inside and outside the revolution. This image is consistent with the ironic ambivalence Sade himself felt in times of revolution: “Who am I at present? An aristocrat or a democrat? You may tell me, Lawyer, for I myself do not know.”33 In “The Main Impropriety,” Blanchot asks whether Sade and the revolutionaries were exchangeable as writers (). They all shared in excess, despite their political oppositions: [W]as it Sade or Saint-Just who wrote: “Nothing resembles virtue so much as a great crime? [. . .] In times of anarchy virtue espouses crime [. . . .]” “Arm virtue

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Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom with the dexterity of crime, against crime.”? All we need to do, in a spirit of frankness, is substitute “violence” for “dexterity” . . . and we have the essence of Sade. ()

Blanchot quotes a surprising text linking Sade to the revolutionaries, written by Villers in : It is said that when Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just, Collot, their ministers, were fatigued by deaths and condemnations, when their hearts of bronze felt any remorse, and at the sight of so many arrests that they had to sign, their pen escaped their fingers, they would go read some pages of Justine, and they returned to sign. (Sade et Restif , my translation)

The quotations we could add to this list are profuse: was it Sade or Saint-Just who wrote: “When savages are cruel, they take the first step towards civilisation”? (quoted in Vansittart, Voices of the Revolution: ). Was it Sade or Robespierre who wrote: “All is legal to Virtue, in order to conquer Vice”; “there are times in all revolutions when the mere fact of being alive is a crime”? (quoted in ibid.: ) “Terror is nothing other than justice, [. . .] [B]reak the enemies of liberty with terror, and you will be justified as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.” (Quoted in Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class: )

Aristocrat and rebel, Sade becomes “political” from the moment he is first imprisoned at Vincennes, only to gradually create a rhetoric akin to the most radical language of the revolution. His obsessions with radical political equality, the relativity of justice, and the injustice of state laws run throughout his stories in his attempt to indict the new state power.34 These obsessions gradually transform him into a critic of both the old and the new regimes, or at least a performer of these critiques—his taste for theatricality is never to be underestimated. Lebrun refuses, thus, to align Sade exclusively with or against the revolution: for her, Sade’s famous “Yet another effort” is a plea to go beyond the “cruel idea” that lies in the “spirit of the Revolution,” the abstract chimera that only the state has the prerogative to kill. One can read Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom as a direct indictment of the state: “Cruel laws, arbitrary, imperious laws can likewise every century assassinate millions of individuals and we, feeble and wretched creatures, we are not allowed to sacrifice a single being to our vengeance or our caprice!” (). Disappointed with the revolution’s “double language,” in a footnote to his Juliette, he indicts both Jacobins and anti114

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Jacobins for reproducing old vicious circles: That the Jacobins of the Revolution were willing to bring down the altars of a god who spoke their language is unbelievable. Even more surprising are those who hate the Jacobins and who want to wipe them out, since they act in the name of a God who speaks like the Jacobins. If this is not where the most extreme [le nec plus ultra] of human extravagances lies, I ask you to tell me immediately where it lies. (Lely, ed., Tome : , my translation)

For Sade, the revolution will have just “too many laws, so few civil institutions” (quoted in Blanchot, Sade et Restif: –, my translation). In times of freedom (–) and as a citoyen (citizen) he becomes an official at La Section de Piques and proclaims his Idée sur le mode de la sanction des lois (“Ideas about How Laws Should Be Sanctioned,” ), in which he denounces the assembly as a composite of public servants who make laws according to their whims and interests, forming a new caste endowed with repressive force to impart their ideas “with bayonets.” Sade proposes a direct democracy, quoting the Greeks— Solon—and urging the people not to delegate sovereignty by voluntarily submitting to the will of others. Freedom is a farce if there are still prisons; the state must be destroyed or kept in its purest form: anarchy.35 Sade’s radicalization of revolutionary equality will take the state to task by redefining what equal access and rights mean: radical equality means also equal access to violence. In the same way I have read Antigone as revealing aspects of the Athenian invention of politics, I will read Sade’s  Days of Sodom as absorbing and refracting some of the dilemmas of the French “reinvention of the political.” The “political” in Sade does not refer to a specific form of government, but rather to the formation of a political space fueled by violence. The advocates of a “poetics” of the Sadean text complain about the alleged “Sade politician,” because they think only in terms of a particular politics or political system.36 But, with Lebrun again, Sade points at “the machinery of power” underlying all political systems imagined during the era of the reinvention of politics.37 The French reinvention of the political was haunted by the question of social origins—that “theoretical abyss of political life,” to use Althusser’s expression.38 Not just any origins: the question was to imagine the origins of the most solid social contract possible. The Sadean solution to that theoretical “abyss” is a cannibal feast of violence that seals off the membership of a “society of equals,” granting everyone equal rights to violence while, paradoxically, purging the society of enmity. Silling poses the question of how to secure a bond 115

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among equals when their contract does not oblige them to renounce or delegate violence. To Hobbes, Sade might say that there is no reason to renounce individual violence; to Rousseau, he could say that violence is the only common language the “general will” will ever speak, for it is the only shared human nature we possess. In fact, to all contractualist philosophers who had imagined society without violence, Sade seems to say that a solid pact among equals is sealed only with blood. Like Rousseau’s and Hobbes’s visions of political beginnings, Sade’s is predicated upon no ordinary pact. In an uncanny way, the Sadean pact will unveil what subtends the contractual imagination by collapsing into one the absolutist sovereign of the Leviathan and the popular sovereign of Rousseau’s ideal society. Sade’s castle instantiates the limits of a “popular sovereign” whose radical political equality grants all its members the access to violence that would be the prerogative of the absolutist sovereign—it is as if the “people” and the “state” finally coincided. This radical political equality will be sustained only with the homogenization of the equals and the production of the nonequals.39 While the notion of exception is unavoidable in order to place Sade’s text in terms of its history and reception, it is also a crucial notion for a political reading of Sade’s text. For Sade, all novels are “fashioned from the most uncommon [les plus singulières] adventures which men experience in the course of their lives.”40 A representation of the “most singular” is at the heart of Silling: while the book’s form is exceptional, while it lies at the “basis” of Sade’s later work, its form also speaks to the meaning of exception. As in Antigone, the initial war that frames the (libertine) city plays a crucial role: it transforms the libertine “sexual” exception into a political one. The experiment in the castle is the creation of a new world, transpiring in the terrain of political decision-making proper, delinked from any ethics. Formally speaking, the book appears as a “system of exceptions,” located in a zone of exception: the castle that emerges from the collapse of an order. Each of the six hundred “passions” that form its core is exceptional; the reader is explicitly urged to look for their singularity. Within the narrative frame, the stories are represented as oral performances, their oral nature representing their singularity as impenetrable to the reader. While the libertine order results from the libertines’ singular decisions, the narrative order consists of two systems that run in different directions: a disciplined enacted narration in public and its opposite in the secret chambers. None of the “laws” that regulate the castle apply universally. The narrative figures of exception are located everywhere: 116

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the decisions of the libertines, the secret chambers, the voice of the storytellers, and even the “three-levelled” narrative repetition that Sollers, as well as all the Tel Quel group, viewed as one of the Sadean strategies of transgression par excellence. For these three levels of repetition only express the idea that repetition is difference—that is, the idea of the impossibility of exact sameness of the repeated act. When the libertines “repeat” a story, they alternatively hear the story, or discuss its content, or enact it: at stake in each is the singularity of the experience since each time a different “body” altogether is involved. Rather than figuring transgression, this text resists the very idea of transgression—it “thinks through” the exception by which power transforms transgression into norm, and it links this transformation to the sealing of a social pact. Violence, in this transformation, becomes political: just as in Antigone, this violence does not dominate, it rather annihilates. If for Saint-Just “the ship of the Revolution can reach safe haven only from a sea reddened by torrents of blood” (quoted in Vansittart, Voices of the Revolution: ), the libertines reach the safe haven of Silling’s new society by politicizing bloodshed as duty. Silling’s version of Creon’s modernity is its capacity to “kill twice” in an organized manner, as if it were an “exercise in community building.”41 In the following pages, Sade’s text will appear as an experiment with the corpses that grant existence to a political bond among equals.

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The Libertine Alliance: No Ordinary Pact in Times of War

Genesis: in the beginning is the libertine Word—it is the word of an alliance. A “Sadianite”1 order emerges out of a peculiar spoken transaction described swiftly on the first pages of the book. In the midst of exceptionally chaotic times, the libertines make an extraordinary decision, ritualized by unusual ceremonies and sealed in unconventional ways. The nature of this transaction and the conditions of its emergence are “the act by which the people at Silling become a people”; the libertine association that results from it is its sovereign body. Contrary to what the critical canon on Sade has argued, the allied Sadianites at Silling do not operate in solitude as sovereign individuals, and their association is not a self-destructive one: during the -day orgy at the castle they forge an enduring bond with one another.2 At the end of the orgy the Sadianites return to Paris, with the hope of starting all over again. Theirs is not solitude, but a “political solitude,” which we can translate as the prevalence of the logic of identity over equivalence: the libertines unite as One. Exceptional decisions correspond to exceptional times. It is worth examining the background of war against which the libertine association achieves the purity of its unity, for it is war that taints its birth. The long introduction that preambles the “singular revels” () establishes the conditions for a new order upon the bloody soil of Louis XIV’s fallen regime. The “extensive wars” () into which the kingdom has plunged have furnished everyone with the secrets of wealth accumulation. Nobles and crooks alike are “bloodsuckers” [sangsues] ( []), who reduce others to misery in order to accumulate “mysterious [obscures] fortunes” ( []). Class and moral distinctions are blurred. Noblesse n’oblige pas. For all their airs of “gentlemen of the highest note” [grands seigneurs] ( []), the four libertines gathered at the Castle of Silling match the lower classes in their methods: “[T]he nobility neglected no opportunities to take this road to wealth” (). Nobles transformed into wealthy sangsues, this 118

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metaphorical thirst for blood anticipates the bleeding to come in the book’s chronicle of death. The birth of the Sadianite city will transform the four nobles from financial bloodsuckers into real ones; their accumulation of wealth will become an ingestion of flesh; the bloodshed of the kingdom that they escape will be repeated at the castle, but this time it will seal their alliance. Rather than seeing this frame as the well-known (and oft-commented upon) libertine gesture of unveiling the “dark side” of nobility’s peccadilloes, I want to highlight the narrative frame of political dissolution that leads the libertines to Silling. The historical fiction that the narrator provides on the first page of the book functions, like the fratricidal war in Antigone, to make imperative the restoration (or creation) of order. As Creon does in Thebes, the libertines inaugurate a new world. At first sight, it seems safe to agree with the narrator’s comment that this order is indeed “the most impure” ever written (). Nonetheless, its impurity depends on a kernel of purity: the libertine association has been purified of all enmity. Creon, too, “purifies” Thebes from the enemy, encapsulating the enemy in the city’s interior. But whereas Creon’s fiction of purity disguises violence under the politics of the general good, the libertines reveal, like the Sophoclean Tiresias, how the drive for a “purified” and cohesive social order borrows its potency from the impure energy of war. Only that, unlike Tiresias, the libertines embrace it. The Sadean restoration of order does not conceal the violence of the war that it carries into the new city. At Silling the libertines lay bare Creon’s truth: if there is to be one order, no hands can be kept clean. Clausewitz’s formula is inverted in the Sadianite city, just as it was in Creon’s Thebes. The formation of the castle’s polis requires war by other means; the libertines will form an immune center from which they contaminate the commune with their violence. Silling is inaugurated in opposition to the world of laws: it unmasks the violent origin of the legalistic, contractual model with which eighteenth-century philosophers wanted to cleanse the origins of society from violence. The Sadianites instantiate their pact before the arrival of the legal institution of “the Chambre de Justice” () and “in an age when [crime] was not by any means probed and punished the way it is nowadays” ().3 The first Sadianite act is a decision, rather than a law. The city at Silling, neither a state of law nor a state of war, bears the sign of this exception; Silling’s hybridity is a metaphor for the impossibility of separating law from violence. The libertine decision to form an alliance comes violently; the libertines are struck by a coup of political imagination: “[T]he Duc, I say, suddenly [tout 119

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d’un coup] conceived the idea of a triple alliance” () []). The Duc and his brother, the bishop, quickly communicate their idea to their friends, Curval and Durcet, to “strengthen their ties by means of alliances in which the debauchery [has] by far a heavier part than any of the other motives that ordinarily serve as a basis for such bonds” (, my emphasis). At the level of language, the original Sadianite social unit borrows its basic terms from the register of war: the libertines are allied in their acts of pillage.4 Contrary to the advantages of exchange, an alliance responds to the question of war, and it does so with war. To recall Pierre Clastres’s words, a society needs allies only because it has enemies: “[W]ar as an institution determines alliance as a tactic. The strategy is the same for all communities: to preserve in their autonomous being, to conserve themselves as what they are, undivided We’s.”5 It is striking to note the extent to which a book that has been immortalized for its obscene, sexual language is in fact permeated by the vocabulary of war. Silling has been designed to protect the libertines from both the enemy outside and the enemy inside; it is “a besieged citadel, without leaving the least entrance to an enemy, the least egress to a deserter” (, my emphasis). The libertines are “barricaded” in relation to the outside and the inside: “[T]hey barricaded themselves to such an extent there was no longer any trace left of where the exits had been; and then they settled down comfortably inside” (). The interior space of the castle is walled up; to escape one would have to be a “bird or a devil” (). The fortress not only protects the libertines from the external enemy but also allows them to conduct a domestic war against their victims. The secret chambers are for the combats tête à tête (), and the orgies take place in le champ de bataille des combats projetés, “battlefield of projected combats” (): the English translation somewhat misses the military language in rendering these two phrases as “secluded contests” () and “lists for the projected jousts” (). The libertines’ “discharge” while protected in the secret chambers is their “victory” (); the victims are instructed to expect death at any moment. As in a battle, they should understand that they are in this world to die: they should accept their fate with “courage,” blind obedience to orders being their only virtue (). As for the libertines, they project their attacks pre-emptively against an already defeated enemy on the castle’s battlefields. Sade’s war-machine in the castle is total; its most vivid incarnation is perhaps the machinery of the “man of hell” who indulges in the last passion in the book and who is cited four times during the orgy, standing in for all four lib120

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ertines.6 Critics inexplicably lose track of the war language in their fascination with the wounding dizziness—or with the figures of individual despots or free men. Content to understand Sade’s war as being against morality or language, these critics indict the readers’ enlightened horror for blindness to the text and turn a blind eye on the structural import of the internal war dynamizing the castle.7 True to the historical origins of his own noble class—the nobility of his libertines—Sade recovers its originary language: its military esprit du corps. True also to his times, the nobility of the feudal order—its icons, prestige, duty, and service with arms—has not yet disappeared. The castle is its symbol. Only these feudal military lords have turned the war toward the inside, not the outside, of the fortress, not to fight against a foreign invader but to seal a “democratic” pact with no hierarchies among its members. “All this talk is meaningless. I see only the enemy,” Danton would say as minister of justice during the crucial months of the revolution.8 Sade could have said the same; at the castle, the libertines see only the internal enemies. Far from the prepolitical “natural state of war” that Hobbes imagined leading to a political order, or the Rousseauist “natural state of innocence,” Sade sees the war as a political datum: it produces alliances and springs from alliances. “Natural” man is always already political, and this means a man bonded by an alliance or in bondage to an alliance in the midst of war.9 But, if the enemies are inside the castle, how does the alliance preserve its unity? Anchored on the shores of modernity, the state of war at Silling produces a mysterious outcome: an “undivided We,” to use Clastres’s expression. As if it were a centripetal force in the book, the libertines’ “undivided We” launch the war on all other bonds, while remaining indestructible. The libertine bond proves so strong that it survives the libertine’s own dictum that “no blood attachment is sacred in the view of people like ourselves” (). Throughout the “most impure tale” ever written, there is not a single episode that comes close to questioning the purity of the libertine alliance. Ironically, it turns out that, as Žižek puts it, “[P]erversion is always a socially constructive attitude.”10 Short of legality in a warlike zone, the libertines nonetheless use the contractual language in vogue. They start with a no-less-exceptional rite—a rite that seals new bonds par excellence: marriage. Just as the funeral at Thebes negotiates membership, the marriage at Silling does too; just as Antigone is obsessed with purifying rituals (burial and marriage) and their political manipulation (Creon’s edict), the orgy at Silling is saturated with ritualistic obligation. And, just as Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s social contracts were no ordinary contracts, 121

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this is no ordinary marriage. Rather than a rite of exchange, it is a rite of accumulation; rather than being sanctioned by laws, it is sanctioned by murder. The Duc proposes the ritual because he knows of Curval’s desire to have his daughter: “You want Julie for your wife,” said he to Curval, “I give her to you unhesitatingly and put but one condition to the match: that you’ll not be jealous when, although your wife, she continues to show me the same complaisance she always has in the past; what is more [et de plus] I’d have you lend your voice to mine in persuading our good Durcet to give me his daughter Constance.” ( [])

In contrast to a kinship rite of exchange that restricts the rights of access to certain members of a society in order to grant access to others, the libertine marriage extends the friends’ original power. The rite inaugurates the alliance by erasing distinctions between generations and family bonds; it establishes that the daughters become wives and the fathers become husbands without changing their status as daughters and fathers, respectively. As Chasseguet-Smirgel puts it, it seems as though we should “associate historical ruptures [. . .] with the confusion between sexes and generation particular to perversion, as if the hope for a new social and political reality went hand in hand with an attempt at destroying sexual reality.”11 Fathers and husbands are now distinguishable only by convention: this rite of marriage allows all of the men to be both at once and, consequently, to possess all the available female bodies. The libertines all benefit, for “each of our four characters thus found himself husband to four wives” ()—the English translation elides the phrase ainsi liés (“thus bonded”) that appears in the original sentence in French. With kinship differentiations blurred, we are exclusively in the realm of politics. As if the social sphere also grows out of the original act of an unregulated accumulation of wealth—as if Sade were a precursor not only of Freud but of Marx as well12—the libertine negotiation increases the assets of each member; it opens a terrain of common property, never to be challenged, and closes off the circle of friends who will enjoy it. If one would still want to locate transgression in this text, one must understand it in terms of a transgression against this pact—that is, through the restoration of private property, a body inaccessible to the other friends, an event in which one of the libertines decides to forbid the others access to his daughter, wife, or victim. Transgressing the pact would mean a monopolization of power that would exclude at least one of the libertines from the shared property. But this never happens at the castle. 122

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While critics emphasize the libertines’ individual solitude, the introductory narrative frame establishes the libertines’ sharing practices by outlining the circulation of their common collection of bodies. The women are left out of the alliance; they will be what Barthes called the “pariah class” in his ethnographic classification of Silling.13 The arrested circulation of women inverts the relation between transgression and norm, suspending the laws of exchange and redesigning social differentiations according to an exclusively political distinction between “friends and enemies,” or “members and nonmembers.” As the rite of marriage, expelled from kinship, is transformed into politics, it makes laws undecidable: the libertines concede and preserve their rights at the same time—concede en conservant ses droits (). The libertines become husbands but are also fathers; the daughters are also wives. The suspension of differentiating laws makes Silling what Clastres called “a society against exchange”: “[In] the exchange of women, a group gains women but loses just as many, while in the war for women, the victorious group wins women without losing any” (The Archeology of Violence: ).14 This is not just a “parodic” version of the contractualist imagination in vogue.15 In fact, to paraphrase Delon, Sade’s usage of the discourses of his times always goes beyond pastiche or parody.16 Rather, the alliance against exchange unveils the extraordinary features concealed beneath the legalistic model of the origin of society. It points at the lack of exchange in both Hobbes’s vision, in which the sovereign is outside of the contract, and in Rousseau’s vision, where the popular sovereign contracts with itself. It suggests that any (Hobbesian) “delegation” of violence to a sovereign body is the latter’s usurpation of violence. It takes up and “resolves” the most insurmountable problem for Rousseau’s “social contract.” Rousseau’s dreamed society of equals was attainable only with the confluence of the general and particular wills. In his words, “[If] the object is to give the State consistency, bring the two extremes as near to each other as possible; allow neither rich men nor beggars.”17 The libertine alliance indeed offers a “contract” in which general will and particular interest coincide absolutely. But this is not just that the libertines all want the same thing: each other’s daughters and their own too. In a sense, the whole book can be read as an unveiling of the mechanisms through which the contract makes the general will coincide with the particular one, through which the alliance gains its consistency, and which I will comment on in the chapters that follow. What the “contract” only superficially masks is one of those mechanisms: the little secret of la débauche. Usually taking Silling’s consistency as a fait ac123

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compli, critics examine it at the descriptive level. They do not relate it to the fiction of the order’s origins or to the violent mechanisms of its consolidation. Barthes, greatly influenced by structuralist conceptions of society as the outcome of exchange, provides the best example of a descriptive “ethnography of the Sadean village” (Sade, Fourier, Loyola: ).18 Echoing what Zygmunt Bauman has called modernity’s “gardening metaphor,”19 Barthes’s “autarchic Sadianites” are “ruled by a great notion of order” (Sade, Fourier, Loyola: –). The stratification of power divides the city into two classes of individuals, with no movement from one class to the other. There are the libertines, and then the rest—their bureaucrats, aides, cooks, maids, subjects, and, finally, the wives. Barthes’s emphasis on the Sadianite “grammar” of exchange (sodomized and sodomizer, whipper and whipped, all can be interchanged) stumbles upon the problem of the nonexchangeable division into masters and victims. To account for this division, he singles out three elements outside of the otherwise universal exchangeability at the Sadean village: torture, murder, and speech. Abandoning the threads of murder and torture, Barthes underlines speech as the exclusive prerogative of libertines and the sign of class division at Silling: “[A]side from murder, there is but one trait the libertines themselves possess and never share in any form whatsoever: speech. The master is he who speaks” (ibid.: ). Murder is couched in the subordinate clause “aside from murder,” and torture is left in a parenthetical phrase: “[In] Sadean grammar there are no reservations regarding any function whatsoever (with the exception of torture)” (ibid.: ). However, the elements that Barthes excepts from his grammar are central to the castle. The Sadianites imagine their alliance as grounded in the torture and murder to which the story of the libertine alliance allocates “by far a heavier part” [bien plus de part] ( []). This also explains the paradox that the libertines are not really interested in speech, unless it develops into (tormenting) action. The debauchery by which the alliance is finally sealed is no less exceptional than the times of war that prompt the decision to form an alliance or than the marriage rite that establishes its operational basis. “Ordinarily,” we are told, debauchery would not have such a “heavy part as a basis for such bonds.” Exceptionally, la débauche serves to affirm the libertine bond, even before their departure for the Black Forest. The libertines celebrate their initial pact at the property of the Duc in Bourbonnais, with dinners four times a week, for which they start kidnapping and killing victims; they establish a common fund for the orgies, and each of the 124

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libertines takes a turn administering the funds for six months (4 []). While formulating the transaction, the Duc specifies two conditions: no losses for the members of the rite—that is, the preservation of everyone’s desires—and the “plus” of the friend’s complicity: “and what is more, I’d have you lend your voice to mine” [et, de plus que vous vous joindrez à moi] ( []). Why this “plus”? The first sharing between the Duc and Curval already resists the principle of exchange; it marks the necessity of complicity from then onward. Only the glue of complicity can speak to the “coup de grâce” with which the libertines “solve” the problem of particular interests: they set out to eliminate those who have particular interests. The libertines are the rich in Rousseau’s nightmare, those who solve the problem posed by the “beggars” with extermination. This “coup de grâce” is the exceptional orgy at Silling that, through bloodshed, will give Rousseau’s state “consistency.” Sade’s equivalent of Rousseau’s beggars disappear but not because they are able to join the general will (through education or violence)—they are literally eliminated as “nonpeople” by “the people.”20 This extraordinary murderous initiation is the reason why the libertines’ transaction requires the “plus” (the extra) of complicity, persuasion, and secrecy. Klossowski notes that the Sadean characters can appeal only to persuasion because theirs is a unique gesture that is not given to universalization.21 Seen through the light of their exceptional alliance, their uniqueness matches their political solitude: it is the access to violence that cannot become part of a universal exchange. Murder remains on their side. In the rare moments during an orgy when one of the characters feels like breaking the established order, he is persuaded by the friends in crime to imitate their respect for the contract on the basis of comradeship [au moins par complaisance] ( []), not out of obedience to the regulations. One could argue that between the French term complaisance and the English translation “comradeship” lies the distance between pleasure and politics. Yet, the English translation here serves us well, for it also signals that the group formation implies the “plus” of pleasure derived from loyalty. The connection between the contract and the elements that Barthes leaves aside becomes more evident once they get to the castle. Their membership contract will be reinscribed permanently: marriage rites will be reperformed every Saturday morning. On the third day, we are given the complete week-byweek schedule for the marriages. No marriage serves a reproductive function; the only child that is conceived during the orgies is “torn” out of her mother’s 125

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womb and killed ( [429]). Even the marriage performed between two victims serves only to establish time and again the libertine right of prima noctes: no deflowerment is performed by the bride’s “husband.” The libertines also use the rite to manipulate gender by changing dress codes, and control bodies by arranging their usage in the rituals, always confirming that the rite reinstates the division between those who decide and those who do not. But the choice of Saturday morning for the ritual performance still reveals more than one might suspect. Underlying the weekly ritualistic surplus of complicity is the decisive glue for the society’s “consistency”: the concealment of shared, murderous, secrets. The rite of marriage is performed every Saturday morning because each Saturday evening is reserved for the secret punishments of the victims in the underground chapel vault of the castle. The ceremony in the morning reminds the libertines that they are “together” in this enterprise. Marriages and wives have a veiling function: after deflowerment, the libertines will use them as a “cloak” under which to hide their secrets. As the Duc says to Curval: “I want her to veil, to cover an infinite number of little secret debauches the cloak of marriage wonderfully conceals” [que le manteau de l’hymen enve­ loppe à merveille] ( []). As a “cloak,” the rite of marriage lends virginal purity to the activities of the libertines while it conceals the “dirty little secrets”22 of the débauche performed after the ritual ceremony to strengthen their bond. It is through these bloody orgies that “[u]pon their return to Paris, our four friends’ association became only the firmer” [plus stable] (, my emphasis, []). This is the ob-scene of the contractualist imagination that the libertines set to unveil. As Danton would say, the organization of the September Massacres during the revolution aimed only at achieving fidelity in the group: “I wanted the young men of Paris to reach Champagne bespattered with the blood that would guarantee us their fidelity.”23 Danton’s reasoning, and the libertines’ practice, was later immortalized by “Russia’s Sade,” Fyodor Dostoevsky, and his character Stavrogin in Demons: Here you’re counting off on your fingers what forces make up a circle? All this officialdom and sentimentality—it’s good glue, but there’s one thing better still: get four members of a circle to bump off a fifth [. . .] and with this shed blood you’ll immediately tie them together in a single knot. They’ll become your slaves, they won’t dare rebel or call you to accounts.24

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Necrophiliac Cannibals: Dismembering “Nonpeople,” Membering “The People”

The final death toll at the castle yields only one survivor among the enemiesvictims: Julie, daughter of the Duc and wife of Curval, who has turned collaborator. Murder has secured the “strength” and “stability” of the libertine alliance, the “consistency” that Rousseau wanted for the state, the “fidelity” that Danton wanted for his group. What binds the libertines is not only possessing but also burning, chopping, mutilating, flaying (and eating) the bodies they have procured. The prerogative of speech that Barthes singles out as the trait of Sadianite power redraws the lines between life and death: in the Sadianite village, he who speaks is he who kills. The sovereign Sadianite society of equals—with the libertine ideals of “freedom,” “desire,” “transgression”—can thrive only through its ability to dispose of the life of its others. Only that at Silling these others are insiders to the castle, thus their annihilation stands for a redefinition of membership. The Sadianite enterprise at Silling hinges not on the violence of subjugation but on the violence of annihilation. Perhaps that is the real reason why Silling is most often associated with the modern, not with the feudal world—even if the feudal, military nobility encloses itself in the castle. Much has been said about the introduction of the financier Durcet as part of the group, forming a hybrid of eras at Silling and giving its annihilation a “capitalist” coloring. But what concerns me here is not so much the economic aspect of Silling’s accumulation of capital (bodies in this case), as the binding mission of its violence, which facilitates this accumulation. As Creon does in Antigone, the libertines politicize death, rekilling their already dead victims. The gist of the enterprise that will finally seal the libertine alliance in “fidelity and consistency” is the status they grant their victims in their inaugural decree: “[Y]ou are already dead to the world” (). The “nonequals” to the society of equals are, like the mutilated body of the storyteller Mme. Desgranges, “anticipated corpses” (). 127

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That the libertines have gathered at the castle to enjoy the feast of already dead subjects drastically shifts the interpretation of Sadianite “perversion” from sexual to political perversion. As we will see, despite the claims to singularity from both the literary libertines and the critics in their interpretations of the unique gesture of sexual perversion, the libertines share not only the bodies but also two common “passions”—the only true “perversions” in this book: necrophilia and cannibalism. Sadianite destruction will cause the victims to disintegrate into flesh and the flesh into meat for its consumption as the “six hundred different plates” ( [61]) that will be prepared, first symbolically, later literally. Encased together by the formal frame of the initial pact, necrophilia and cannibalism show a socially constructive zeal. Necrophiliacs mutilate the dead; cannibals eat the mutilated pieces in a socially binding rite. The castle turns out to be a gothic version of an “endocannibal rite,” as anthropologists name the practice whereby a community eats some of its own people. Before examining these passions in the context of the libertine alliance, we should look first at who will be mutilated and eaten, since even if unnoticed by critics, the victims are the castle’s own. Contrary to what happens in other exotic locations outside Europe depicted in Sade’s texts, at Silling the libertine cannibals eat only their own victims. Just as Creon chooses to double-kill a member of his own family/polity, the libertines choose their victims not only from their own country but also from their own social class, and their own flesh and blood: these are French, they are nobles or bourgeois, and in some cases, the libertines’ own daughters. Silling offers us an astonishingly familiar account of the modern intracommunal “manufacturing of difference” that facilitates genocidal annihilation by rendering “neighbors” (instead of invaders) “different” before extermination.1 “Modern” here does not mean that this violence did not exist before modernity, but rather that modernity made it a problem, with the doctrines of natural law based on the category of “humanity.” The account of the nature of the castle’s victims has received little critical attention; but the narrator himself suggests, when providing a brief description of the victims’ preliminary kidnapping, that “it might not be inappropriate at this point to insert a word on this subject.” Even if “the story of how these selections were made [. . .] is not our foremost concern,” it is an important one: the narrator considers that nothing that serves “to shed light” on the extraordinary events at the castle “can be judged irrelevant” [comme hors-d’oeuvre] ( [33]). The English rendering elides the feeding metaphor: this selection is the “appetizer” to the main orgy-meal. 128

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It is uncanny to read now how the Sadianites in  told a story about how to produce bare life “ready to be killed,” in the Sadianite frame, ready to be ingested. First there are the steps toward symbolic death, each and every one strikingly familiar to us, two centuries later: kidnapping, selecting, stationing, exiling, and enclosing the victims.2 The Duc’s speech to the new “population” of the castle concludes this symbolic killing.3 The “chained beings” [êtres enchaînés] are doomed—[destinés] []—by the masters: You are beyond the borders of France in the depths of an uninhabitable forest, high amongst naked mountains; the paths that brought you here were destroyed behind you as you advanced along them. You are enclosed in an impregnable citadel; no one on earth knows you are here, you are beyond the reach of your friends, of your kin: insofar as the world is concerned, you are already dead, and if yet you breathe, ’tis by our pleasure, and for it only. (–, my emphasis)

“The paths were destroyed” [ont été rompus]. At the end of the book, the reader is offered a summary of the procedures sketched in the introduction, in the story—their story—that Duclos tells the libertines about “the man of infernal caprice” (), who initiates his orgies by kidnapping and stationing victims. Once kidnapped from all over the country, his victims are stationed in a convent until they are ripe for torture and execution. These victims are referred to as vegetative matter: “[As] it is collected, the material is sent to a country convent over which he has absolute control, and there, in that nursery, the girls ripen, and from it he selects the fifteen objects for his debauch, which is regularly executed every fortnight” (). The English translation transforms en pépinière [] (“seedbed”) into a “nursery.” “Men of infernal caprices,” the libertines follow a principle of selection that manufactures difference: beautiful, virgin nobility. Male and female subjects “not superior to the class of bourgeoisie, and what from these upper classes not both very virtuous and wholly virgin and impeccably beautiful, would be refused” (). Ten months later, at one of the Duc’s properties, the libertines “examine the state of the goods” (). Then the chosen victims are secured in a convent until they are ready to leave to the castle (). In the meantime, the victims who have not been chosen for the castle are used in orgies. When these finish, females are sent into prostitution and males are sold to a Turk corsair so that there is “no longer any trace left” (): they are made to “disappear” (). “No traces left” [Toutes les traces rompues] (241 [40]): paths and traces, both signs of mobility, are both rompus. Now mobility is in libertine hands: the next 129

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step for the victims is deportation. The victims of Silling are, like the girl in Duclos’s story about the Marquis de Mesanges, “removed” [dépaysée] ( []): “left without country.” Ironically, the Marquis’s name is mes-anges (“my angels”)—as in Madame Duclos’s four libertine “angels.” The victims have been uprooted from their families, now to be uprooted from their country and the world at large; their new world in the castle is in reality a loss of all worlds. Exile means fragmentation of human bonds. Bonding and fragmentation of bonds are set up against each other: the victims’ dismemberment enables the libertines’ “membering” of their society. The breaking of bonds does not end with deportation; the victims’ enclosure “in an impregnable citadel” () will determine that the victims cannot even reconstruct bonds among themselves. Atropos has cut all the threads of life. The breaking of the victims’ bonds culminates in psychological dissection. An exile of the self follows the physical exile. Inversely mirroring the libertine recuperation of memory through storytelling, the memory of the victims is abolished. The victims are ordered to undergo abnegation in order to “receive” a new memory by “listening” to libertine desires, which will be the victims’ only laws (). From humans to (half-alive) ears: that is the transformation the victims undergo to have a role in the new society. Not surprisingly, the libertine script for the victims’ new “selves” employs the language of war. Like sentinels, the victims have to imagine, guess, and predict all the libertines’ caprices, glances, expressions, gestures (). They are instructed to expect imminent death () and courageously embrace it: “[If], unhappily, some amongst you succumb to our passions’ intemperance, let her adjust bravely to her fate” (). Their only “virtue” is to be “blindly” obedient (). The reader is invited to imagine a world of the half-dead where resistance can barely be articulated; there are only cries of pain, shame, supplication, sadness, repugnance, and suffering. By the time they have reached the castle, the victims have practically lost their capacity for speech. If one still wants, in the spirit of the Tel Quel group’s “poetics” of Sade, to find the “blank space” where language fails in the narrative, one must locate it in the victims’ eviction from language. Their only real hope is collaboration with the alliance. The only victim that the narrator describes as “interesting” and that eventually survives, is interesting not merely because she is the only daughter of the nobility—the Duc’s—but because she is political: [T]here was [. . .] another creature in the company who was beginning to make herself very amiable and to attract considerable attention; we are referring to Julie.

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Necrophiliac Cannibals She was already announcing signs of imagination, debauchery, and of libertinage. Astute enough [assez politique] to sense that she stood in need of protection, clever [fausse] enough to caress those very persons for whom perhaps she did not at heart have a very great fondness, she contrived to become Duclos’s friend. ( [224])

Assez politique: Julie is “political enough” to realize that her only possible strategy is to ally herself with the libertines “at whatever the price” (). After befriending the storyteller Duclos, she gradually crosses over to the masters’ side. As time progresses, Julie runs from one sofa to another to receive orders, “executing these on the spot” [sur-le-champ] ( []). On the th of February Julie wins the battle; she is ordered to go with the storytellers to replace the duennas who will be sacrificed (). Aside from Julie’s acts, there are only a few episodes of resistance, which could be narrated in only one page and unavoidably end in ridicule or death. Only one of the victims, Adélaïde, realizes what “was necessarily to follow the fatal beginning” (), but she can do nothing. Some victims protest the accusations against them, but to no avail (). Aline tries to avoid being burned with hot water (). Sophie grieves over her mother’s death and begs for respect, but she is punished; Zelmire prays and asks to be killed when threatened; Narcisse forgets the regulations and is punished, and sometimes at night Adélaïde and Sophie console each other. Two couples rebel: Sophie and Celadon are punished when caught enjoying each other; Augustine and one of the subaltern fouteurs plan an uprising, but the latter is murdered in a “sacrifice” that calms the “faint but definite rebellious stirring amongst the subaltern fuckers” (). The reader has only one more source from which to infer the victims’ resistance: le livre fatal, the only writing that the libertines perform, a record of the faults committed and punishments given each Saturday. Just as police records account for political revolts, the victims’ resistance has found its small historical record. The reader has no access to its details, but is led to imagine that the book records the names of those who forget bodily discipline, a forgetfulness which is the victims’ only true locus of resistance, before repetition imposes total discipline. This is not, however, how the critics that argue for a “poetics” of the Sadean text tend to interpret resistance, which is seen as language’s resistance to “say it all” and is represented by the dying body.4 This interpretation is supported by the view that the ultimate Sadean fantasy is to imagine the victims as “young bodies [. . .] well-fed, well-formed and in some phantasmatic sense indestruct131

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ible.”5 Forever strong (in the libertine imagination) while being tortured, the victims would only resist abuse by dying, and their death would stand against the Sadean fantasy and for language’s impossibility to say it all. Yet, is the libertine fantasy that the victims are indestructible? As I have argued, from the perspective of the libertines, death is a facilitator, rather than an impediment: it is the “already dead” status of the victims that allows for the libertine enterprise—the victims have already been rompus. The second, physical death of a victim does not mean anything other than the need always to increase the number of victims, a minor inconvenience for the libertines, who, once they have finished their killing, return to Paris to start all over again. Moreover, the libertines purposely feed the half-dead victims. As with everything at Silling, the role of food is exceptional: while it has been observed that the victims, or the “poor” in the Sadean text, are usually poorly fed, food being a marker of social distinction,6 Silling is the only Sadean enclave that copiously feeds its victims. The libertines not only supply specific food for coprophagic experimentation (coprophagia being the eating of feces), but also restore their victims’ energy for further bodily exploitation. After a bloodletting, for instance, the libertines will feed the victim to restore her health or will not allow the episode to have serious consequences, the victims being given bandages to cover their wounds and stop the bleeding.7 In turn, special care is assigned to the pregnant Constance so that her pregnancy progresses, and the child can be killed at the end of the orgy (). As the second part of the book concludes, when it seems there cannot be more extreme maltreatment of the victims, “as the friends are to sport with [four of] them for another two months, they are treated circumspectly” (). Thus, there is an active libertine production of victim bodily endurance, rather than its fantasy. As if writing a manual for torture, the libertines in reality expect their victims to die their second death (for they are already symbolically dead) in libertine hands. They thus allow their victims to “live” for only as long as they are useful for libertine experimentation.8 The libertines hesitate neither in killing the victims nor in telling stories about their deaths, especially in the final three sections of the book. Sade’s take on beauty and bodily completeness is precisely to “unveil” it, to expose and revel in the fragmentation and putrefaction that lies beneath beauty. Beauty exists to be attacked, it is funeste (“fatal”) []. The fantasy of the victims’ eternal endurance belongs more to the readers in their attempt to counter the effect of fragmentation of the text. The liber132

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tines aim to disintegrate the dead other, while the reader might need more urgently to “integrate” the narrative, to glue together the fragments of the Sadean “anti-gestalt” of the bleeding, tortured, sliced victim. The fantasy of the victim’s resistance could belong to the accomplice, or narrator-spectator, rather than the murderer. In this respect, the fantasy could function as protection or denial—or both. The symbolic death of the victims prepares Silling for an absolute resignification of life and death; the libertines aim at “metamorphosing a dozen creatures into lumps of clay” [en mottes de terre] ([], my emphasis). Like the “plants in seedbeds” that the “man of hell” cultivates, the bodies at the castle will serve the libertines, as Klossowski puts it, in their “experimental right to conduct forbidden experiments.”9 For the libertines, the bodies are cells, microscopic pieces of living matter available for manipulation—just “a bit of semen” [un peu de foutre], as Curval says to his daughter ( [303]). As the victims’ life in the castle is reduced to elemental organic functions, a “metamorphosis” of the bodies gradually takes place. At first the slicing is metaphorical: a body is used as either a mouth, an anus, a breast, or a vagina. Then there is “actual” dismemberment echoing the victims’ social dislocation. The fragmentation of their bones matches their fragmented kinship, their severed tongues match their lack of speech, their gouged-out eyes match their lack of vision outside the castle. Crucial to this process are the machines, from old literary topoi like the “iron lady” to modern inventions.10 Mutilation is indeed a libertine “passion,” as Duclos reminds us with the story of the commandeur des Carrières, who requires women mutilated either by Nature, by libertinage, or by the effects of the law: “one-eyed or blind, lame, hunchbacked, legless cripples, or missing an arm or two, or toothless, or mutilated in their limbs, or whipped and branded or clearly marked by some other act of justice” (). The mutilated body of Madame Desgranges, “this mutilated tit, those three vanished fingers, this short leg that causes her to limp, that mouth destitute of teeth” () most vividly “stimulates” the libertines. We can now return to the point we made at the beginning: “sexual” perversions at Silling can be completely reconsidered. Silling does not involve people but rather beings in between life and death: breathing corpses, flesh soon to become meat.11 If there are any sexual perversions in this book, these can only be read as a form of necrophilia (the castle being a “necropolis” itself) and a form of endocannibalism, the two great overarching frames of the entire enterprise at Silling—both best condensed in coprophagia. 133

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Because the libertines engage with half-dead rather than fully living subjects, the signifying field of the sexual expands to murder, orality, incorporation, and digestion. The “passion” of necrophilia first appears in storytelling on the twenty-fourth day with the story of a man who likes to be buried. From then on, the cases of necrophilia increase in complexity, progressing from the sight of someone dying (hanged, decapitated, burned, or dismembered) to the killing and mutilation of corpses. But necrophilia metaphorically frames the two ends of the cannibalistic consumption. It engages both the “already dead” body before the meal and the body that has been transformed into excrement. It compounds the first, symbolic death of the victim, and the second, material death into which the digestive system transforms the living matter of the body. Cannibalism, in turn, does not appear as a “passion” until the th of January.12 Interestingly enough, it appears before it is heard during the stories of the day, disrupting the ordered relationship between “passions” and stories and unveiling “passions” that subtend the public order. Curval has bled Sophie and made a boudin with her blood for the morning breakfast (); the next day, the stories include episodes in which body parts are consumed while the victims are still alive. Nonetheless, the narrative frames the six hundred passions from the start as meals that the libertines have gathered to hear-eat, and that they invite the reader to share: “[T]he magnificent banquet: six hundred different plates offer themselves to your appetite” (). The reader is asked if he would “eat them all” () and encouraged to choose while perceiving the difference among all of the dishes—“a difference does exist [. . .] however slight it may be” (). The meals are equal, all made of the same “dead matter”: “As the same profusion reigned at every meal, to have described one is to have described them all” (). Sex offers the distinctive spice, the decorative scenario, that distinguishes the different meats: the postures, the combinations, and so forth. Indeed, sex has little to offer the libertines’ bond. It is in this light that one can interpret the overwhelming presence of the “passion” of coprophagia, which generates bewilderment in critics and editors. Even Gilbert Lely found this detail to be a “gratuitous supremacy,” an “abuse” that hurt verisimilitude (Vie ).13 Coprophagia is the circle that links the libertines’ mouth to their anus—what they ingest, they expel only to digest again. It repeats the libertine “metamorphosing” (murder) of life: they metamorphose, through the digestive system, the already metamorphosed matter over which they experiment. Excrement is subject to experimentation throughout 134

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the book, for it lends itself to supreme manipulation—thus, supreme metamorphoses. But this doubling of metamorphosis condenses the major aim of the libertine enterprise at Silling. Coprophagia is the epitome of the libertines’ bonding strategy: the libertines have gathered to eat inert matter. Necrophilia and cannibalism become one in coprophagia; eating the already dead bodies is comparable to eating their excrement. Coprophagia condenses appropriation, incorporation, expulsion, and annihilation into one process. We can detect the condensation of coprophagia and necrophilia in an often-quoted passage about a libertine’s enjoyment of the defecation of a woman who has been sentenced to death. The woman’s anguish at the knowledge of her imminent death suffuses her excrement, which becomes a veritable “chef d’oeuvre” for a libertine: This philosophical jurist told me that his friend would deal only with women scheduled to be executed. [. . .] However, he does not carnally enjoy them, or rather he requires nothing of them but that they exhibit their buttocks and shit before his eyes; for taste of shit, he maintains, there is nothing to equal what one gets from a woman who has just heard the death penalty pronounced against her. [. . .]; he reserves his fuck for the climax, and releases it at last when before his delighted gaze the condemned person expires. ()

Cannibalism and necrophilia are thus two perversions that question the “uniqueness” of the Sadianites’ gestures—described by Klossowski as the perverse impossibility of sharing.14 They are “socially constructive” perversions: they frame the everyday communion in which the libertine society engages by mutilating and eating the already dead bodies that they all share. Consumption, as Barthes said, has a restorative function—though these particular “slices” of meat are missing in his description of the Sadianites’ meals. Cannibal consumption restores a bond. In the midst of the castle’s war, the internal enemy is eaten communally and the cannibalizing Sadianites gain strength from the enemy’s fragmentation. In his now legendary Psychopathia Sexualis (), Richard Krafft-Ebing, who coined the term “sadism,” puts necrophilia under the rubric “mutilation”—not enjoyment—of corpses. What necrophiliacs enjoy is cutting bodies, dismembering them. Cannibals engage in the same activity: dismemberment of human bodies, social bodies. Krafft-Ebing notes that a lack of resistance from the victim defines the pleasure of dismemberment: In certain cases there may be nothing more than the possibility that unbridled desire sees in the idea of death no obstacle to its satisfaction [. . . .] [It] is probable

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Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom that the lifeless condition itself forms the stimulus for the perverse individual. It is possible that the corpse—a human form absolutely without will—satisfies an abnormal desire, in that the object of desire is seen to be capable of absolute subjugation, without possibility of resistance.15 ()

More than sexual perversions, necrophilia and cannibalism are “perversions of power”: they portray the absolute defeat of the bodies that fuel the libertine alliance. They are an inextricable part of the Sadianite attempt to annihilate difference. At Silling, noncitizens are those who can be cannibalized and mutilated: “the small population” [le petit peuple] ( []) on which the libertines establish “all the vexation, all the injustice one could imagine, certain in the belief that the more harshly their tyranny was exercised, the greater the sum of pleasures they would derive from their privileged situation” (). A perversion of power, a “privileged situation” that instantiates a bond among equals, the cannibalistic-necrophiliac enterprise tightens the political alliance by engulfing all difference. The victims of the “totemic” feast resemble sacrificial victims, only that they are sacrificed not to the gods but to the libertine bond. But, if the initial Sadianite pact and its ritualization are marked by the perversion of exchange, the perversion of generations, and the perversion of power, how does the alliance then prevent these perversions from turning upon its members?

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Domestic Consistency: Not Laws, but Order

Once the social pact is made and the bodies that can fasten it are procured, the libertines need to carry out the consolidation of the alliance in an orderly fashion. As the Bishop says to Curval, “[We] need to put an order to all this, else we would not be in safety here” (). The English rendition of this sentence adds to the French original “keep a hand upon yourself, my dear fellow” (), pointing to a crucial feature of “order” in the castle: it addresses not only the victims’ but the libertines’ behavior as well. But order and safety at the castle cannot be predicated upon any legality, in the universal sense that the philo­ sophes, contemporary to Sade, were thinking about it. Fixated on interpreting Sade’s as a world of transgression, critics note Sade’s excessively disciplined realm but fail to account for it. For this discipline is not the outcome of the law. Law at its best stands for exchange, which the Sadianites eliminate—not only by exterminating those who are the “nonpeople” but also by preventing difference among themselves from thwarting the alliance. As I have argued, Silling is a world set against exchange: its regulation is perhaps best described using Macherey’s expression: an “order of disorder.” Although for Macherey this order refers to Silling as a regulated world only in a general sense,1 the specificity of this “order” is to mediate relations in two directions: between the libertines and their victims, and within the alliance. Just as Sade’s text absorbs the language of Rousseau’s “contract,” it also subsumes the debate in vogue at the time between positive and natural law:2 the castle’s “order” regulates its violence by avoiding the domain of general laws and establishing instead two disparate regulatory mechanisms that cannot be reduced to each other. The first consists of a series of “regulations” [règlements] for the victims proclaimed in the “welcoming” sermon. These regulations are “positive” in that they are singular libertine decisions. The second mechanism is what I

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want to call a “notion” of order that regulates relations among the libertines and bears the traits of an ideology. Here the libertine decisions have been rendered “natural” and thus belong in the realm of necessity. The two mechanisms coexist, but are applied to two different populations—the regulations for the victims, and the “notion” of order for the libertines. The text thus renders the terms of the legal debate irrelevant: law is positive or natural according to who obeys it. In this sense, the two “systems of laws” annul each other. Thus, following the castle’s suspension of exchange, the “order of disorder” now suspends all grounds for a universal law, be they founded on convention or nature, making the castle a truly exceptional zone.

Sadianite “Regulations”: Disciplinary Whims Simply another dividing line between equals and nonequals, the regulations allow libertine whims to become disciplinary commands for the victims. While the girls and the wives “shall be subject to these regulations” (), the libertines “decide, arrange, convene, judge convenient, dispose” the content of the regulations. Whereas for the victims the phrases mostly read in the imperative mode (“[It] is strictly forbidden to”), for the libertines these phrases are in the conditional mode (“If, during this breakfast, the friends are moved to . . .”). Not even the ritualistic arrangements of space and time, announced by the neutral pronoun on or the future tense of the indicative mode, function like universal laws at Silling: these “arrangements” () imply two different codes of punishments. For the victims, transgression can entail a death penalty, for the libertines, only a monetary fine. The difference in punishments obliges us to consider, once again, transgressions in the castle: the question is “the subject who can transgress.” Because they risk punishment, it is the victims who can transgress orders. Because they cannot be punished, the libertines cannot transgress. On the one hand, the libertines don’t risk anything or, at most, they risk only paying a fine, but money is what the libertines have—“to such people, treasure means exceedingly little” (). Moreover, and in the spirit of the initial pact, the fine does not entail any loss but rather a (capitalist) investment: “With regard to these fines, they shall all be specially employed, upon the return to France, for the initial expenses incidental to a new party” (). On the other hand, the regulations match the libertines’ desires, so how could they transgress them? The extent to which these rules are transgressed by them depends on whether the libertines’ desires 138

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change at a given moment. This often is the case with Curval, but he is not punished: instead, he is permanently persuaded to follow the rules au moins par complaisance []. Implacable for the victims, the regulations result from the libertine inconsistency of living “the moment” (). Under this system anything can happen at any time to any victim. The fluctuations of the regulations show the extent to which the victims dwell in a state that makes law and fact collapse: there is no knowledge that can predict what may happen to them. Regulations are changed according to “the need that exists for them” (); victims are added to the punishment lists whenever the libertines realize that they don’t have enough people to punish. At times victims are entrapped so that they appear to deserve punishment, a method that by the end of the first part of the book becomes systematic. At times victims are “miraculously” spared death because the libertines decide they want to enjoy them “before taking the final step” (). Indeed, the “loss of one’s balance,” to recall Lacan’s phrase for the readers’ experience, could not be truer for the victims. The castle’s unpredictability of everyday life resembles the dynamics of the “everything is possible” that Arendt thought best described a concentration camp, a description that Agamben develops for the case of contemporary camplike political spaces in which the law is suspended and “an apparently anodyne place (such as the Hotel Arcade near the Paris airport) delimits instead a space . . . in which the fact that atrocities may or may not be committed does not depend on the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police that act temporarily as sovereign.”3 Once again, Sade is our contemporary. To the absolute unpredictability of the victims’ lives, the text opposes the absolute predictability of the libertines’ lives. The libertines cannot transgress because they “need to” transgress. In tandem with its elimination of a world of exchange, the alliance makes desire coincide with duty. This is the outcome of the inversion of the relation between transgression and norm: ordinary evil becomes radical evil. Each particular crime (whim) becomes the norm of crime. As Lacan was the first to argue, this can be seen as “the Kantian” aspect of Sadean law:4 this norm entails the reverse of the empty norm of Kantian duty in that it is not autonomous; it posits a specific content and a clear source— the order of Nature—for the norm.5 Nature and her specific “order” mediate so that all individual wills are homogenized into “natural law”—general will, general necessity—to which the libertines relate with absolute obedience. We may consider Sade’s inversion as the necessary complement to Arendt’s and 139

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Agamben’s thoughts on our world’s camplike structures: for a political space to become a camp, the “everything is possible” in the victims’ lives would need the correlative of the perpetrators’ perception that “everything is necessary.”

Sadianite “Nature” and the Fortunes of Servitude Critics often note how the Sadean libertines corroborate their existence before the suffering of the other.6 But nobody accounts for the mysterious ways in which, as I have suggested before, the libertines follow the proverb “Wolves are safe in their own company” [Jamais entre eux ne se mangent les loups].7 It is indeed striking that the libertines carry out this self-confirming torture of the other while avoiding torture of the friends—in spite of the fact that their “ethics” (duty) of desire encourages each of them to exercise despotism against all. A duty that is formulated in the new vocabulary of equality: everyone has the right to enjoy, in whatever manner and regardless of the consequences, of the body of others.8 As some years later the Declaration of the Rights of Man will command in article four, ensuring rights to everyone as long as those rights do not injure any member of the society, the castle allows all to enjoy their rights without hurting the other. While the society of equals cannot transgress any of its own regulations, neither can its members turn against each other. And that is because, for all the inscription of “singular libertine caprices” in the book, libertine desire has been homogenized: they all know what to desire. This is the real meaning of “solitude” at the castle: a “political solitude” that homogenizes everyone into the same; equality turned the most perfect version of absolute identity. As if it were an “ideology” in Althusser’s sense,9 a specific transcript about an “order of Nature” differentiates the libertines from the “other that can/must suffer” to reassure their homogeneity. We are reminded here of Menke’s notes about homogeneity as an ideal of the times: the eighteenth century saw it in the “virtuous republic” of ancient times; the radical Babeuf imagined a “republic of equals” in which everyone wanted the same public good (–). The libertine “order of Nature” manages to regulate internal desire, as well as enmity, eliminating “freedom” from the libertine dissertations and replacing it with a discourse of homogeneous servitude. It is, we could say, Rousseau’s “fourth law”: not a political, civil, or criminal law, but morality, custom, habit “graven on the hearts of the citizens,” as Rousseau would have it, that is conducive to the general will.10 After all, Silling is all about education, just as Émile 140

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was. Achieved through patient libertine training, the script molds individual wills into the general libertine will. Silling establishes the fraternity of the group as the only guarantee of equality. Because fraternity, loyalty, “state consistency” define the inside and outside of the group, any rupture in their bond threatens the libertines’ equality. This calls for the annihilation of internal difference: democracy at Silling is predicated upon sameness; all free libertines amount to One. Difference functions to define the borders of the group. While each criminal desire becomes the duty to perform it for the safety of those who are equal, all libertine desires coincide with the established order so that general and particular wills are one and the same. The narrative that encloses the victims now closes itself upon the libertines too. The paradox of the (libertine) freedom from others is that freedom from coercion can be effective only for the select group who enslaves others. In other words, negative freedom is predicated only upon positive freedom: but this positivity can only desire homogeneous identity in order to be protective. This is Sade’s “free” enslavement, whether one interprets their “Nature” as a higher authority to which the libertines respond, or as a metaphor that expresses the libertines’ self-rule. The libertines’ unbounded desires—their dictum that “nothing constrains libertinage”—are only an expression of the infinite “freedom to obey” the Nature that homogenizes their will into universal necessity. What, then, is Nature’s script for the equals? In contrast to the precivic order that both Rousseau and Hobbes had imagined, the order of Nature has a specific political content—in Macherey’s words, it “can be reduced to pure power relations.”11 The libertine depiction of Nature is in fact almost an antinature. While nature is always other to itself, at the castle it is also a strange, silent, invisible, indifferent, unthinkable force. This is the only way to understand the surprising absence of an exuberant, “physical” image of nature. Nature is described only once in the book, significantly with the same coldness that Sade attributed to all state legislation, and mentioned twice in passing.12 Nature’s cold and unreachable mountains first appear surrounding the castle upon the society’s arrival. The other two brief references to nature bring back the motif of coldness: on the fourteenth day and at the end of the four months, it is still snowing. The route to the castle is “a tortuous road that, without a guide, would be absolutely impracticable” (). The mountain they have to scale is full of precipices and narrow paths, and the top of the mountain is split in two by a crevice sixty yards wide; the crevice needs a bridge, which once destroyed 141

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makes it impossible to go down the mountain again. Only birds can reach the castle’s plain: “[T]here is not on this entire earth a single being, of no matter what species you may imagine, capable of gaining this small plot of level land” (–). The seeming exuberance of nature’s eternal movement is paradoxically figured in the coldness and slowness of snow, in the immobility of mountains, creating an indifferent power, appropriately described by Klossowski as the abstraction of a “destructive principle.”13 The only terms that Nature understands are those of power; morally, she is indifferent: “[W]hat the devil difference can it make to Nature whether there are one, ten, twenty, five hundred more or fewer human beings on earth?” () says Curval. Like the Sadean narrative, she is a system of “singular whims” (), such as the inequalities she has created between the poor and the rich. Nature’s political system differentiating between strong and weak is a replica of the castle’s system of power, never to be transgressed. The libertines are always engaged in “restoring or protecting” () the inequality that Nature has designed. With her political script, Nature interpellates the libertines: the libertines refer to her as “wanting,” “demanding” that her order be re-established. By rhetorically identifying with Nature’s commands and desires, the libertines negotiate authority among them; before Nature’s laws—before “the law”—they are all equal. The libertines cease to speak, while the “desiring Nature” speaks through their desires. In fact, one could ask whether the only real action in this book is precisely enacting Nature’s command to divide equals from nonequals. Much in the way that the libertines impose their whims on the victims as a necessity, Nature imposes on the libertines unintelligible commands that transform the libertines’ “I decide” into “it is necessary that I decide.” Deleuze notes how Sade’s world has eliminated the other and, thus, the realm of the possible: [It] is striking to see in Sade’s work to what extent victims and accomplices, with their necessary reversibility, are not at all grasped as Others [. . . .] The fundamental misinterpretation of perversion [. . .] consists in bringing perversion to bear upon certain offenses committed against Others [. . . .] The world of the pervert is a world without Others, and thus a world without the possible. [. . .] All perversion is an “Other-cide” and an “altrucide,” and therefore a murder of the possible.14

Deleuze’s “Other” means not only “the other being” but also the other within the subject, the one who is another to himself insofar as he is a subject of language. This is why Deleuze can say that Sade’s world is not only an “other-cide” but also an “altrucide”; it has eliminated the world of the possible altogether. 142

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Sadianite desire is invariably expressed in the mode of the imperative; as Dur­ cet expresses it: “[O]ur senses, nothing else, must guide all our actions in life, because only their voice is truly imperious” (, my emphasis). Desire is not a possibility, inscribed in the logic of transgression, but a duty. Whether Nature is the Supreme Being in Wickedness, a representation of the problem of Evil, an impersonal force of eternal movement, as Klossowski suggests,15 or a transcendental law that equalizes everyone, her order is invariably unquestioned: “All these matters depend upon our constitutions, our organs, upon the manner whereby they are affected, and it is no more in our power [et nous ne sommes pas plus les maîtres, ] to change our tastes in this connection than it is in our power to alter the form of our bodies” (, my emphasis). The French original, missed in the English translation, almost anticipates Freud’s famous phrase about the ego: “not a master in his own house.”16 The lack of mastery is another name for the libertine impossibility of transgression: the libertines decide not to resist Nature’s power. In fact, the only possible crime at Silling is to resist Nature’s orders: in the word of Duclos’s client, “[T]he single crime that exists in this world is to refuse oneself anything that might produce a discharge” (, my emphasis).17 There is not one episode of refusal in the book. The “law of desire” is valid in any case, any circumstance—it could read “[A]lways obey those desires that protect the alliance, regardless of their consequence.” The Sadean twist is not just to obey desire but always to obey it: the elimination of time transforms desire into duty. Thus resistance is abolished: for the victims, it is impossible to resist; for the libertines, it is necessary not to resist. The Duc, the most powerful of them all, considers that before Nature he is nothing but “a machine which she runs as she likes” (). The idea of a combat “on equal terms, would have sent him fleeing to the ends of the earth” (). When proclaiming the regulations, he compares himself to a “mite in front of an elephant” (). At times, the libertines’ ambivalence with respect to Nature can be read as resistance.18 Nature can be that “strange” (bizarre [7]) mother, who is responsible for the way in which the libertines’ human mothers have abandoned them “in a world beset with dangers” (). The libertines wish they could “outrage her” by burning the planet: “[H]ave I not longed to be able to assail the sun, snatch it out of the universe, make a general darkness, or use that star to burn the world! Oh, that would be a crime, oh yes, and not a little misdemeanor such as are all the ones we perform” ().19 But hatred and impotence are conducive only to a quick consideration of the stakes: resisting would be to 143

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risk death; any relic of heroism is discarded. The libertines survive by allying themselves with power, much in the way the victim Julie has allied herself with the libertines, transforming the script of power into their desire, the possibility of resistance into idiocy, their servitude to Nature into an ethic, their ends into means for Nature’s pleasure. They view themselves as part of the greater, eternal movement of Nature—in other words, as instruments. As agents of Nature the libertines can “lend Nature a strong right arm” (). To resist Nature is not only a crime, but also “idiotic,” as the Duc summarizes: These instincts were given me by Nature, and it would be to irritate her were I to resist them; if she gave me bad ones, that is because they were necessary to her designs. I am in her hands but a machine which she runs as she likes, and not one of my crimes does not serve her; the more she urges me to commit them, the more of them she needs; I should be a fool to resist her. (, my emphasis)

Just as the libertines command the victims to obey them blindly, they consider “the single way of serving Nature is blindly to respond to her desires [. . .] depending upon what is necessary to her design” (, my emphasis).20 Willingness to serve [envie de servir, ] eliminates guilt, responsibility, and judgment. Not the free revolutionary transgressors that criticism has so much wanted to identify, the libertines now appear as guiltless contented serfs bearing Nature’s absolute command for satisfaction: “[T]he one commandment she engraves deep in our hearts is to satisfy ourselves at no matter whose expense” (). Nature is an entity “supposed to enjoy,” employing the libertines as a means of “her pleasure alone [. . . .] [S]he brought us into the light, with the sole object of satisfying her brutal lubricity” (). The closure of the realm of the possible opens up a world of infinite duty that has managed to purge all remnants of subjectivity. Apathy and excess are the only possible strategies to cope with Nature’s command to satisfaction; their subjective difference—feelings and bodily pleasure—vanishes into the coldness of Nature as the libertines achieve an absolute coincidence between Nature’s mechanical laws and their desires. We arrive at the final point of their homogenization into “equal instruments” of Nature: the making of the “manmachine.”21 Both excess and apathy have been extensively commented on by critics;22 I only want to connect these two points to the erasure of difference that homogenizes the alliance. If the goal is to make one homogeneous body out of four libertines working in accord with the infinite duty toward the pre-established 144

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order of Nature, it is the machinelike cycle of excess leading to apathy and leading again to excess that most effectively empties the body of singular desires. “The appetite is restored by eating”: this is the proverb with which the libertines refer to their philosophy that the “more horrors one commits, the more of them one desires” (). While for critics “excess” usually refers to the very logic of desire’s inherent impossibility of total satisfaction—this is, of course, after Freud—in the case of Sade it is more related to the abandonment of desire and its replacement by duty. Desires are “incessantly inflamed and never satisfied” (), but it is this incessant flame that leads to insensitivity. Phrases like “yet more”—encore plus—and “never enough” abound: as Curval puts it, “It seems to me one never sufficiently exploits the possible” (). This excess is also qualitative: “[T]he more pleasure you seek in the depths of crime, the more frightful the crime must be” (). The engine of excess leads, as Curval says, to the “end” point of apathy: “an excess leads to another; the imagination, always insatiable, soon leads us to the end [au dernier terme]” ( []). Apathy in turn allows for the continuation of excess in crime (). This is the only solution to the tension between Nature’s implacable demand for satisfaction and the impossibility of fulfilling her order. Satisfaction is displaced onto the creation of the misery of others, which is a version of desire’s endless command: the others are an inexhaustible source of possible murders.23 The goal is to achieve the “effortlessness, ease, detachment” of a mature libertine (). Libertine repetition here takes on an additional meaning: sensitivity, shame, and fear are eliminated as early as childhood, as children “grow used to the most ferocious spectacles” () and later tame their feelings through constant training. At the castle, tests of resistance and control are imposed on the body until it is numbed. Significantly, the libertines impose drinking their bodies to numbness each day: “[He who] spends a single day without retiring dead drunk to bed, shall be fined ten thousand francs” (). There is not a day during the orgy at Silling when the libertines go to bed sober; some days the narrator decides there is nothing much to tell, for “half the customary exercises were forgotten, at dinner Messieurs appeared to be in a daze” (). Sometimes they cannot tell when their sensations begin or end: “ ‘President, your prick’s stiff,’ the Duc said. ‘Do you think so?’ Curval replied [. . . .] ‘I’m so accustomed to that particular state of affairs that I rarely [jamais/never] notice when it ends or when it begins’” (– [], my emphasis). It turns out that the real difference between a true crime and the minutia that their orgy performs, is their

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capacity to feel the crime. But they can only feel the impossible crime: “[A]ssail the sun [. . .] or use that star to burn the world” (), “dismember Nature and unhinge the universe” (). As the pleasure of the perfect crime is left in the realm of the impossible, the rest of the crimes “you cease any longer to feel” (). At the end of the journey through libertinage, which is also the beginning of a new narrative, the libertines have become “men-machines” that run on the fuel of excess. They not only describe their bodies as machines, they also fully explain the bodily machinery’s inner workings: Those little murmurs you hear [. . .] are caused by my extremely sensitive nervous system [l’extrême sensibilité de l’organisation]; the objects which excite our passions create such a lively commotion in the electrically charged fluid that flows in our nerves, the shock received by the animal spirits composing this fluid is of such a degree of violence, that the entire mechanism [toute la machine] is rattled by these effects. ( [])

At the end of the book the reader is told the story of a man who has been cited three times before, and whom I have mentioned twice already: “the man of hell.” His infernal nature is his machinelike nature: every fifteen days he kidnaps fifteen victims and locks them up; then he throws them into fifteen different “horrendous torture devices” but does not turn the devices on until the fifteenth victim has been placed in the corresponding machine: “Everything is ready, all the tortures are in motion, and they proceed simultaneously, amidst much noise” (). A torture assembly line, it is orchestrated by the man who is “exceedingly wealthy, a very powerful lord, very harsh, very cruel” (to which the English translation adds a phrase: “his heart is of stone,” ). Incorporated into the eternal, cold, lawlike movement of nature, this is the man whose desire has vanished into duty, who will return to Paris to begin anew yet another orgy. The libertines have almost followed Rousseau’s guidelines: moral education to make the general will speak. Cold as Nature, purged of all the differences that could emerge through feeling, the libertines act as One with Nature’s laws and as One sovereign body among themselves; their desire is the vast homogeneous machinery of the Great Movement of Nature.24 Like Creon, they are the instruments of the superior idea in whose service they act: while Creon identified with the good of the country, while some revolutionaries would identify with the good of the republic, the libertines identify with the good order of Nature. 146

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The order has purified the alliance of internal enmity and established the victims as the impurity that needs to be eliminated. No transgression, resistance, doubt, or disobedience intervenes. The cannibal totemic feast is performed in orderly fashion by a necrophiliac machinery that regulates violence through the profane sacrifice of its chosen nonequals.

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Frame within the Frame: Riveting Voices and Gazes

Is it of any significance for the violent social binding at Silling that most of libertine violence takes place in two restrictively framed scenarios: one under the public eye and enveloped in mesmerizing storytelling, the other behind closed doors and in absolute secrecy? As if summoned for a daily assembly, from five to ten in the evening the population at Silling attends a theatrical production where the storyteller of the month, perched upon a “throne,” narrates the “passions” to her attentive audience while the victims are on hand for action: “[S]teps led down from the throne, upon them were to sit the objects of debauchery brought in to soothe any sensory irritation provoked by the recitals” (). Only after listening do the libertines enact the passions in public. Hidden from the gaze of others, by contrast, are the secret chambers where the libertines can perform the passions that have not yet been narrated in public and thus, cannot yet be seen. The narrative frame of the libertine cannibal assembly line is framed by two more narrative layers, in tune with Silling’s world against exchange: the voice and the gaze. Cannibal ingestion is active aggression and at the same time passive communion, erasing the difference between the other—who is ingested— and the anthropophagite. Mirroring this active/passive orality is the active/passive pair of voice and gaze as the medium through which Nature’s concrete commands are externalized, delivered, and transmitted to the libertines. In the manner of a “black-box” (whose circuitry need not be known to understand its function) the public gathering receives the input of sound and controls the gaze, metamorphosing them into political force. Through the black box flows a chain of fluctuating command: Nature becomes the flesh of a voice that transmits the orders to the libertines; in turn, they transmit her orders to their victims. And, while Nature controls their visibility, they, in turn, control the visibility of all actions inside the castle. There is not one text that the libertines 148

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read or write throughout the book, not one written rule—except the already mentioned livre fatal (“fatal book”), a catalog within the book’s catalogue. The frames of the voice and gaze at Silling are equivalent in importance to the cannibal necrophiliac assembly line. I have analyzed elsewhere the frame of the voice; I summarize here my argument, to proceed with a reading of the frame of the gaze.1 The critical neglect of the motif of orality2 is inversely proportional to the latter’s presence in the book: orality dominates the narrative to such an extent that one could even say that this, and not repetition, is the text’s principal texture. The entire narrative is based as much on cannibal ingestion as on the scenario of listening: the libertines gather to enjoy this “most precious” pleasure because it communicates “the liveliest impressions” (). Neither the female gender of the storytellers, who have rejected contemporary notions of femininity,3 nor the educational or mnemonic qualities of their storytelling can explain why the libertines do not read or write. Theirs is not a “linguistic” pleasure “of words.”4 Rather, what is at stake in this scenario is the “organ” of the ear and the “body” of the voice. Etymology, though at times deceptive, has something to offer in this case: in Latin, “obedience” derives from “hearing”—oboedire is audire.5 Orality conveys a despotic, communal experience—previous to making any value or political judgments—insofar as it requires the presence of all participants, subduing them in time and space. This requirement makes orality the ultimate expression of singularity and of immediacy. The ear, in turn, is the ultimate figure of obedience: it cannot resist. Incapable of closing off voluntarily, the ear is defenseless before the penetration of the voice. All participants gathered at Silling’s public assembly are thus linked by a shared aural experience that can be ultimately read as a scenario of communal obedience—not obedience to any specific law, but to the source of the founding law. The physicality of obedience takes center stage at the hour of beginnings: those who belong to Silling are those who hear—and thus obey. The storytellers are the “point of emission” for the founding command to hear—that is, the command to enter Silling every evening. The reader, in turn, will be excluded from this bond: he cannot hear, he can only read; thus he does not and cannot belong to the castle. Orality represents a point of closure that epitomizes the libertine passion for totality; it is one more marker of the group’s borders.6 Just as the “order of disorder” suspends the law, the scenario of hearing suspends linguistic meaning: contrary to the spoken word, the voice is unbound energy that resists meaning. The libertine passions are the direct voice of na149

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ture; the mystery of the connection transpires at the despotic juncture of voice and flesh experienced only by those present at the founding hour.7 The voice is the vehicle that transports nature through the invisible channel between the throat of the storyteller and the ears of the libertines. Its impact is represented as material, direct, and pure, from one organ to the other—mouth to ear and ear to heart. Nothing mediates between the libertines and the voice of the storytellers: the “pure” impact of this voice dramatizes the absolute lack of freedom that organizes the primordial bond at the castle. Just as the victims cannot resist the libertines, the libertines cannot resist the impact of the storytellers’ voice. The immediacy of this voice offers a metaphor for the direct equivalence between the libertines’ desires and the general will that unites them: they are all one, with nature, and with the alliance. The wholesomeness produced by the voice is an erasure of subjectivity, it works toward the elimination of differences and contrary to the work of interpretation. The only otherness that the presence of the voice posits is the second figuration of communal obedience: the voice is either an object of satisfaction promising completeness, or the source of insurmountable authority—the voice of an other. While the voice runs counter to the articulated word, its point of emission runs counter to its wholeness. Because voices suspend the difference between the source and the medium of command, and because the ear cannot resist them, the “other”—that is, their source—has a peculiar authority, undecidably coming “from God or from the devil” (Dolar: ), a kind of pharmakon, in Derrida’s sense. In literary representations they indicate both harmony and the terror of the alien other: their good or evil is subsumed in their irresistible power. Their force is to bind; they appear at the moment of creation or reaffirmation of a social covenant epitomizing the law in its pure form, before it commands anything other than the mandate to comply (ibid.: ).8 The oral nature of the enterprise at Silling is part of the narrative frame of bonding, a frame within a frame, like the necrophiliac contract. At the foundational hour of the Sadianite alliance, everyday re-enacted in the castle’s theatrical assembly, the omnipresent voice of Silling is the materialization of the command to bond. Like the killings and tortures the libertines perform, like the cannibal feasts and the assembly lines of fragmentation, like the libertine notion of a necessary order of Nature, the voice, in between language and nonlanguage, rivets together the still lawless city. The victims are silenced, the libertines are silent—the libertines hold the power over speech precisely because they don’t speak. The libertines insult, blaspheme, shout, and above all, they 150

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assert, affirm, and secure their philosophical truths, as Pauvert once noted.9 Theirs are performative utterances that create the world at Silling; if there is any dialogue at all it turns out to be a monologue to and among themselves, who are all interchangeable in their homogeneity. The scenario that prevails is that of listening to the physicality of the voice: at the zone of exception in the Castle of Silling, everyone just hears, and thus obeys. What, then, of the gaze? The eyes are not as defenseless as the ears—we can close our eyes to resist vision. But, in the castle, eyes are closed by force. Most of libertine action transpires in the public assembly, but the Sadianites have a secret space and time in which stories fall silent. The “tête-à-tête combat” is hidden within the hidden castle, hidden from the eyes of the public and from the ears of the listeners. Like the voice, the chamber mirrors the inaccessibility of the castle. A version of the castle itself, the chamber is located at Silling’s extremity: “One could walk from this semicircular room directly to a chamber which formed the end of this part of the living quarters” (). A version of the famous Sadean “boudoir, it [is] soundproof and secluded, but very warm within, very dark during the day, and its purpose [is] for private interviews and secluded contests [combats tête à tête] or for certain other secret delights which will be unveiled in the sequel” (). The secrets are never articulated in language, they yield only inarticulate screams. As part of the scenario of obedience, the veiled chambers signal the libertines’ total control over the line between visibility and invisibility; like the marriage contract, they cloak secret action. But why would the libertines require this secrecy if the Sadianite city is already under their control? The chamber has been read as a topos of the ineffable. To quote Hénaff, it is a “blank space within the text” (): “[W]hat Sade did not see is that language itself is the locus of prohibition. Sade’s assumption was that no such transgression, however perverse, was unspeakable. The barrier was perceived as existing in the imagination rather than in linguistic structure itself ” (–). In this view, Sade’s secret chamber represents his failure to “say it all”; it is the narrative “symptom” of resistance, the body’s ultimate impossibility of entering language. But was Sade’s tout dire the yearning for the transparency that was in vogue at the time of the French Revolution?10 In terms of the readers’ experience, transparency is not a feature of the Sadean castle, whose aurality casts a veil of opacity over transparency. The accessibility of experience that transparency would give the reader is granted only to the libertines. Sade’s “all” might be best 151

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found in action—as always, once again, Sade recovers the body. Lebrun, for instance, points in this direction when she associates Sade’s “all” with a theatrical strategy: it is Sade’s wish to show how to do and undo order: Sade [does not play] with the unrepresentable or the inexpressible, as our modern rhetoricians have sought to make us believe. It is exactly the opposite that Sade wants [. . .] in order to unearth endlessly sights that are as arbitrary as they are ephemeral, making us see at the same time the nothingness in which they appear and disappear [. . . .] Sade never stops staging the spectacular process of collapse.11

In turn, Macherey sees the strategy of Sade’s “all” as the basic narrative structure of delay with which Sade minutely calculates what to say and what not to say.12 And indeed, in his zeal to control his narrative, Sade also described his own excesses in the margins and at the end of several sections: “I have been too explicit, not sufficiently reticent, about the chapel activities at the beginning; must not elaborate on them until after the stories in which they are mentioned” (). Critics have neglected how the narrative plan is predicated upon its own type of exclusion—it sets out not to say it all: there are no tales of virtue at Silling. The catalog just reveals the “all” that French society was keen on keeping secret: [F]riend-reader [. . .] fancy, now, that all pleasure-taking either sanctioned by good manners or enjoined by that fool you speak of incessantly, of whom you know nothing and whom you call Nature; fancy, I say, that all these modes of taking pleasure will be expressly excluded from this anthology, or that whenever per adventure you do indeed encounter them here, they will always be [. . .] colored by some infamy. (–, my emphasis)

While the narrative is built on all these exclusions—of the reader, of the victims, of scenes of virtue—the Sadianite “all” is actually the exhaustion of the word that can obstruct action. Sade’s “all” is best read as the “all done,” and not just “all said.” When things are done—that is, “enjoyed”—they have been said. Philippe Mengue’s observation is here useful: “Only enjoyment [jouissance] needs to be expressed, and when it is, there is no more to be said” (, my translation).13 But to read the “all” of language as what can be fulfilled only in action is to enter Sade’s political world: words in the castle are decisions. Sade’s tout est dit (“everything has been said”) indicts the incompleteness of a word that has no action, and propels the necessity to carry out what is said, rather than the necessity to express action in language. Curval clarifies the point: “There are but 152

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two or three crimes to perform in this world, and then, once done, there’s no more to be said [tout est dit]” ( []). For the libertines, the ultimate tout est dit is, of course, the burial of those corpses that give them consistency: “[T]heir bodies are buried, and there’s an end to it [et tout est dit] until the next fortnight comes round” ( [], my emphasis). The English rendition misses in both sentences the French expression “Everything is said—tout est dit.” With this in mind, the chamber, like the storytelling, becomes one of those “laboratories” in which the libertine order takes effect: it is part of the “testing” that the libertines perform on bodies. The “black box” of the chamber may not have an order but has a border; it draws an orifice that is not the mouth or the ear. Eliminating the last possibility of a place for “ordinary evil” at the castle, the border of the chamber sucks in all the action that is not “permitted” for orgies in the public room; all that is left out of the public room can be untimely, inarticulately performed in the chamber, as long as the chambers’ borders are respected. The secret chamber signals the utmost impossibility of transgression in the castle. The chamber provides a legitimate place, a space included in the city in the form of its exclusion, where the illegitimate becomes the norm. On day twenty-four the narrator gives us the raison d’être of the secrecy: [T]hese gentlemen [. . .] were giving themselves over to tricks which have not so far been embodied in story, hence to unsanctioned deeds, and in so doing they were acting in formal violation of the regulations [. . .] but, you know, when an entire society commits the same faults, they are commonly pardoned.” (, my emphasis)

The secret chamber thus belongs to the internal dynamics of the power structure at Silling, protecting the public order. It epitomizes the castle’s structure of exception. Its orifice functions in two ways: while the secret “cleans” the public room of “dirty” action, as days go by and horror increases, it slowly re-enters the city translated into its aural-order. The narrative structure of delay functions as a disjointed double narration that runs along parallel rails but in two opposite directions. The reader follows the delayed exposure of the catalog of passions, but the libertines have two orders—in public they follow the order of the storytellers and the reader, in secret they determine the order of acts to be done. The secret chamber reveals the exceptional place where the libertines (as well as the author, not the narrator or the reader) are both outside and inside the narrative, outside and inside the city, yet setting its terms. Nevertheless, a question remains: why should this transformation of transgression into the norm remain in secret, even to the members of the alliance? Even if it is difficult to believe that the chamber hides any secret terrifying, 153

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unimaginable act of violence, there is still the question of whether the chamber hides anything at all. For we should be hesitant to link the secret chamber to any question of (veiled) knowledge—and consequently to speak of any eroticism in Sade.14 The libertines “know,” as the Duc reminds us in talking to Curval, “all that’s to be known” (). Because they know, the events in the secret chamber “rarely created any stir, or, at best, a few chuckles” (). For the libertines, the secret is totally disconnected from any mystery. The reader, too, will eventually know it “all” with the final chapter of murderous passions. A great “notion of continuity” is delineated here between what happens in the public and in the secret spaces. The difference between the torture chamber and the secret chamber is relevant here, since what happens in the former gradually discloses, illuminates, and articulates the events in the latter. The explicitness of the end of the book—where all possible secrets have disappeared—is difficult to read. For the courageous spirit, the description of the torture and murder of Augustine on pages –, one of the few fully narrated tortures among the last  criminal passions, is sufficient reminder that Sade has a repertoire of words and images to buttress Bataille’s claim that nobody can finish the book “without feeling sick.” His sources probably exceed the tortures of the ancien régime: the narratives of martyrdom of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and the rec­ ords of the Spanish Inquisition might have played a role in Sade’s belief in truth through pain.15 What the reader misses in the secret chamber is not the idea of what happens, but the texture of an exception—the singular “where, how, and with whom” of the moment. But is it meaningful that everyone at the castle misses the “exceptional moment of action”? What could compromise the structure of power at Silling? We might want to examine the single thing that the libertines keep out of sight: as the narrative plan excludes virtuous tales, the chamber excludes other, more uncomfortable tales. Durcet’s response to Duclos, who is about to tell the audience one of Durcet’s secret passions, hints at this exclusion: “But my modesty . . . oh dear! Before these little girls, do you mean you intend to disclose all my turpitude to their innocent hearing?” (). Everyone laughs at the irony of the “little girls” [jeunes filles] as the eyes that could embarrass him. Nonetheless, Durcet points at something that he prefers to leave unarticulated: the feeling of shame. A second episode illuminates what is at stake in Durcet’s question. Testing Curval’s ability to discharge for a third time on the seventeenth day, the Duc challenges him and Curval insists on one condition: that he be permitted to do 154

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whatever he wants, but in the secret chamber. But the alliance wants evidence and sets conditions: “that Duclos would have to be witness to the goings on” (). The secret chamber hides the possibility of Curval’s impotence. “The secret is, unfortunately, only too well kept/safe/sure/certain”: this is a possible translation of a sentence that in French reads Le secret n’est malheureusement que trop sûr (). Wainhouse’s and Seaver’s English translation reads: “The thing is, unhappily, only too well known” (). “The thing” refers to the libertine taste for crime, but I have wanted to use the semantic field of the words secret and sûr in French in order to suggest the connections among secrecy, safety, and power. The secret of the secret is that it avoids a visible rupture in power—in other words, it creates a mythology of power. Whatever happens in the chamber is secondary to the fact that its “hymen” protects the libertines from the catastrophic scene of impotence while in action. The secret does not so much signal failure in language as it signals the ability to protect the libertines from the failure of the only thing that matters: the body, the action. And since in the chambers there are “combats,” if myth will prevail, action has to be heroic. Secrecy is the hymen of the gaze: it reveals the role of sight and shame in the structure of power that has suspended the law. Because individual guilt cannot be part of a scenario where transgression is impossible, shame, the recognition of oneself as impotent in the other’s eyes, is the only remnant of subjectivity and, as such, the only limit to power. Whereas guilt results from internalized consciousness, shame depends on vision: as such it is more related to the breaking of an image. The castle’s power will prevail as long as the image of its power remains intact: it is a realm of power that depends on aesthetics, rather than ethics. This is the true meaning of the veiling tranquility (safety) of all the secrets at Silling: the castle, the torture, and the secret chambers. The castle is chosen for its isolated location—“as if silence, distance, and stillness were libertinage’s potent vehicles” (). The torture chambers are vaults in the “bowels” of the earth, down three hundred stairs in the basements of the castle, “closed by triple doors of iron” (). The vaults’ tranquility and safety are the libertine home: [W]hat tranquility! To what degree might not the villain be reassured who brought his victim there! [. . .] He was out of France, in a safe province, in the depths of an uninhabitable forest, within this forest in a redoubt which [. . .] only the birds of the air could approach, and he was in the depths of the earth’s entrails. () (The English translation elides the phrase il était chez lui (“he was at home” [, my emphasis].)

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More homey is the secret cabinet, which is closed not only to the eyes of the reader but also to the narrator and other members of the society—and why not?—nature’s eyes. If mother nature were present (Duclos watching Curval’s ejaculation), she could perhaps discover, not an accomplice, but one more victim. Now we can venture to understand the ultimate importance of this secret tranquility in terms of its political function at Silling’s bonding orgy: if impotence can be safely veiled among the secrets of the castle, it can be now safely displaced onto the enemy that defines the difference between the members and nonmembers of the alliance. Those who do not belong are those whose impotence can be seen. In true Sadianite fashion, in the true mythology of war, the scene of impotence will be left for the other—this time the libertine writer will render impotent not only the victims but also the narrator. The narrator’s aspirations, like those of the libertines who want to kill the sun, are always beyond the means at hand. Nature is now located in the writer, and the narrator and reader are impotent bystanders. In a narrative that has excluded the reader from its aurality, the secret chamber is the epitome of exclusion because it excludes the narrator too. At first, the narrator tries to convince the reader that he protects “the laws of the tale.” His intent is not to “do our tale a disservice” () and follow the libertine plan of gradually unveiling the action. Meanwhile, the narrator keeps asking for “a little patience, friend reader, and we shall soon hide nothing from your inquisitive gaze” (). Trying to protect himself from the possibly angry reader, he admits a feeling of impotence: We are in despair, for here we are once again forced [. . .] to make a little detour: yes, we must for the time being omit those lubricious corrections, but our readers will not hold it against us; they appreciate our inability to give them satisfaction at present. (–)

Finally, on the twenty-fifth day, the narrator confesses, for the first time and in the first person, that it has always been impossible for him to see: “I have never been able [il m’a toujours été impossible] to discover what went on in those infernal closets” ( []). The narrator is a puppet of the writer, who throughout the book leaves records in italics at the margins of the text: “Remember to be more guarded in the beginning, and more gradually to disclose what is to be clarified here” (, written under the title of the Tenth Day). This annotation is applicable 156

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throughout the book. Markers of the narrator’s impotence are telling from the start. Right from the first day, the narrator can only guess: “It is only too likely they showered more outrages than caresses [upon them]” (). On the sixth day, Durcet takes Adélaïde “to a certain place” to perform “something less than absolutely clear or palatable” (). The narrator often prefers to “leave it to the reader to picture what was said and done” (); he just does “not know why it happened or how” that Thérèse was harmed (), or what “precisely [they] did” to make Aline scream from the inside of the chamber (). When the libertines exchange ideas on how to go further in their excess, the narrator is not invited to imagine: “As these gentlemen said no more that might shed light on the thing, we have no way of knowing just what Durcet did mean” (). By exposing the narrator’s impotence, the writer breaks the complicity between narrator and reader, and between the narrator and the libertines. The alliance is closed off, the reader is abandoned by his Virgil and wanders lost in hell. He is told that he is not part of the comradeship of those in power because he does not share in their secrets. While aurality already made the castle inaccessible to the reader, the narrator’s impotence makes the reader’s rebellion impossible. In this scheme, nothing can endanger the libertine alliance. To create secrecy is to be able to frame the perception of impotence and to normativize transgression by concealing the secret of power—its impotence. Impotence can be thus safely transferred to the always-already needed, defeated, internal enemy that feeds the alliance. To think of secrecy is always to think of the power of secrecy: the secret chamber is a structural component to the alliance’s self-preservation, like the blood sucked away from the tortures therein performed. The orgy at Silling depends entirely on secrecy—on those thick impermeable veils of the imaginary order that prevent any vision of the other—not on transparency: it starts from the secret operation of the kidnapping of victims and continues to be veiled in secrecy until the very end, when the libertines are still deciding the last killings in secret: “Nothing is said to the six women in the kitchen; Messieurs decide to do away with the three scullery maids, who are well worth toying over” (). These secrets are “only too well known.” In 1639 Gabriel Naudé, a seventeenth century doctor and libertine philosopher, argued that the secret of absolute power is that it needs secrecy. Naudé’s attempt to make a “theory of the political secrets and of the coup d’état,” as Cavaillé puts it,16 locates the origin of the state in a violent and decisive action, such as a coup. His intention was 157

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to denounce the lack of courage of intellectuals to confront the violence of politics. The text unveils the violence that preserves power, but, in true libertine fashion, it defends it as well. Naudé’s text makes the “secret of state” public while asserting the structural necessity of the secrecy of power. Naudé does not transgress but appeals to a “conscience” of the nature of power. Sade’s book aims at a similar gesture. To quote Sade himself: “Are there crimes in politics? Let us be courageous and admit, on the contrary, that crime is one of politics’ major devices. Was it not through numerous murders that Rome became the mistress of the world? Is it not through numerous murders that France is free today?” (quoted in Lebrun 172). The Castle might well be a treatise about the “primitive accumulation” of death on which a politically sovereign body is born.

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We hear black graves and black abysses howl, and rivers clotted with thick blood.

—Kóstas Várnalis, Athens, 



Modern Sovereignty: Perversion of Democracy?

Sticky and bloody is the glue with which the Sadianites hold fast their infallible society of equals. It is true that we can pose questions only to the Sadianites, who, as has often been observed, always elude us. I have suggested that one of the most intricate questions to emerge from the castle is that of the relationship between violence and the borders of community at a historic time when the bearer of equality became “humanity.” Since the Sadianites are a body of equals, we might rephrase Silling’s question as that of the relation between violence and the concrete determinations of the era’s new type of equality. It might seem that the Sadean text concerns only a destroyed community, and the critical canon on Sade indeed insists that Sade’s “only” passion is destruction. But the castle’s destruction is embedded in a dialectic of construction. Bataille had insisted on the Sadean paradox of affirming life by destroying it; the castle shows us how the life that is destroyed feeds a kernel of life protected from destruction. The purest of bonds at the castle presents us a modern vision of the most solid, most stable, most secure social contract. At a time when the discourse of purity permeates political action, when society is an ideal constructed by reason, the castle’s bond appears to be the ultimate expression of “the incorruptible”: a democratic utopian union that achieves the modern dream of purity of enmity. The libertine alliance is the most purified political friendship; its equality the most utopian, its homogeneity the most complete. It has not ousted, but rather used, its own violence to its advantage by displacing it onto “others,” exclusively created as its destination. This vision might be nothing other than the nightmarish phantasmagoria of a “perverse” aristocrat jailed at the time of a revolutionary crisis in membership, were it not for the modern historical record of “socially constructive” genocidal practices, to use Gourevitch’s expression,1 that invoke purity of one kind or another. I am inclined to suggest that the Sadean text can become so mythical for us—so much so that it even names the “pathologies” of moder161

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nity—because it encapsulates the tensions between the impurities of violence and the purity of a “rational” social contract—between (impure) violence and (pure) law. It expresses the point of utmost contact between violence and the creation of law. Sade’s pact of violence unveils the contract against exchange that subtends the fictions of all contracts of exchange. The castle presents a fantasy of an incorruptible contract—one that will not end in civil war. The threat of fragmentation structures this vision, as it did also for the political philosophers of the Enlightenment, who searched for infallible contracts against scarcity and war. Like the contracts devised during the Enlightenment, the Sadianites’ is no ordinary contract. It proposes itself as the best palliative against death, by controlling all death, which actually means producing it. At Thebes, Creon is haunted by fratricidal war, and he controls the city by producing an internal enemy and killing him. At Silling, the Sadianites operate with the same immunological logic. The production of the “already dead enemy,” against whom the libertines direct their violence, results in a clear marking of the difference between the members and the nonmembers, and in a mechanism that ensures that no member can become a nonmember. This production of death will allow the Sadianites to instantiate the purity of their contract: their bond is not just “linked” to this production, it is the outcome of this production. The Sadianites take Creon’s incipient steps toward an immunity logic to their extreme. The libertine equals are the ultimate “immune center” around which the “commune” gathers. The difference between the immune Sadianites and the “commune” is insurmountable. If the ancient Athenians defined citizens as “nonslaves” and granted only the latter access to violence—slaves were not even summoned for war as they were in Sparta—the Sadianite enterprise marks in the same stark manner the difference between wolves and nonwolves. The Sadianites are granted human status through the inviolability of their bodies: the nonpeople at the castle, like the Greek slaves, are those who can be tortured, dismembered, and (if needed) exterminated. While the critical consensus that has built up around Sade’s work insists that the extraordinarily strong libertine body is the only narrative motif in Sade’s text, we can now trace back the birth of those extraordinary bodies to the castle, where the libertine alliance allows for their nourishment. Symbolized by the impenetrability of the castle itself and of the secret chamber, the inviolability of the libertine bodies is first and foremost the inviolability of the social body—constructed through the libertine cannibalistic/necrophiliac feast of communion. 162

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By producing the nonequals, the libertines at the castle become the equals. Sovereign to others, the libertines are democrats among themselves. And direct democrats at that: no transcendent power represents them, they have not delegated their violence to anyone, power among them is not embodied in any one of them. This sovereignty can be sustained only if the libertines avoid becoming “nonequal,” for which they have to suppress their singularity. Singularity is reserved for the “other”: being different means being nonequal and being nonequal entails being the bearer of death. The particular trait that makes the libertines immune lies not in their individual nature, but rather in a shared refusal to enter into relations of exchange. The libertines thus exemplify the dream of becoming “one”—one people, one body, one ideology, one nature, one desire, one duty—by being immune to exchange. Among immunized wolves, the command is to bond. Along with the experimental fragmentation and incorporation that they engage in at Silling, the Sadianites combine contemporary theories of sovereignty to unveil the dream they conceal: an “indivisible power.” As in Bodin’s concept of the state, the sovereign Sadianites seize power by force, not by contract; like Machiavelli’s prince, they are guided by their reasons of state; as in Hobbes’s Leviathan, the sovereign body remains outside of any contract, reserving for itself the right to do anything to anyone; like Rousseau’s popular sovereign, their individual wills merge in the general will, as they made a contract with themselves. Hobbes’s sovereign and Rousseau’s popular sovereign find themselves not so distant in Sade’s political agglutination of the four democratic friends into One. Modern (Sadianite) sovereignty is One, and the castle honors this principle: it does not differentiate between being embodied in a kingly presence or in a popular sovereign of equals, for the libertine bond embodies both. What about the fate of Rousseau’s “beggars,” without whom the invulnerable center could not be sustained? That the indivisible power of the Sadianites can become cohesive only by expelling difference is yet one more way to express the most famous of Sadianite paradoxes: the castle’s elimination of difference is a testament to the production of difference. But this otherness that sustains the Sadianites is not an imaginary “other”—it is nothing but the forced embodiment of the fancied emergency of their own dissolution. It is not death—the death of unity—that can be eliminated, once it has been acknowledged, just as law cannot be eliminated. Death can only be the subject of an illusion of deferment, of displacement—that is, it can only be “veiled.” The others thus uncannily and 163

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effectively regulate the equals’ violence by providing a veil, by mediating between the equals and death. The tortured body veiling death is ritualistically sacrificed, but at the castle there are no gods to appease. There is only that modern fear of the void out of which modernity claims to have emerged, that catastrophic threat of dissolution, that ghost of lawlessness, the risk of man becoming wolf to man, and a corresponding “fetish” as the magical amulet to prevent catastrophe: the fetish of an impossible (or unwanted) political cohesion. The castle’s monstrous consumption of bodies inspires critics to envision this text as the warlike processes of material accumulation and exploitation leading to the first industrial revolution. Consider, for instance, Michel Delon’s reading of Sade as a “Thermidorian,” placing Sade’s freedom to kill as a response to the freedom guiding the new economic principles of his time: bourgeois private property and exploitation of the labor force. Likewise Hénaff stresses the echoes of capitalism throughout his book, and Casilli exclusively concentrates on Sade’s “industrial” factory.2 Sade’s times saw the massive death tolls that, by the beginning of the nineteenth century and as the British empire monopolized the world market, fed the tables of incipient capitalists in Europe as they transitioned from mercantile to industrial capitalism. This increased after the development of sweatshops between  and , though a long history of lethal exploitation, which did not escape the marquis’s imagination, had preceded that development—three centuries of colonization with systems such as the Spanish encomienda or the slave plantation economies that would work human arms and legs to death only to buy replacements. While I agree that Sade’s text can be read in terms of this economic dynamic, I have been more concerned with the castle’s audible echoes of the political mandate to imagine an “act by which a people is a people,” to recall again Rousseau, during the revolutionary democratic moment of . I have placed at the core of the castle’s imagination a dialectics that defines membership at a foundational, antidemocratic hour of social bonding. Silling’s exceptional violence grants political identity to an entity capable of performing functions that we identify with a sphere of political action characteristic of the modern state: the definition of its territory and its “people”—otherwise rationally or contractually undefinable. The castle’s immunity can be read as an exceptional function, one that escapes the democratic imagination and establishes the concrete determinations of equality, thus binding the constituency and territory of a body of equals. This function stands for a “perversion”—that is, an inversion, of democracy’s new universal command to equality. 164

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I am tempted to suggest here that the scandal of this text, the way in which Sade is our contemporary, is to invite us into an exploration of the links between what we understand as Sadean perversion and the modern political sphere that resists the universal imperative of equality. More precisely, I refer to the link between the structure of Sadean perversion and the political exception latent within the structure of the modern state, which I suggest is unleashed at moments of political constitution—that is, at “suturing” moments that give (re) birth to political identity. Are there common traits between the political exception that I associate with membership negotiation, and the logic of Sadean perversion? I suggest, further, that this might refashion how we think of “perversion”: perhaps the true meaning of Sadean perversion is not its extraordinary “sexual practice,” but its extralegal “power practice.” In other words, extending the field of reference of perversion from the sexual to the political allows us to consider the structure organizing individual perversion as the translation of a historically situated objective political structure into the realm of private experience. Put otherwise, the “unique” gesture of sexual perversion finds an analogy in (or might be produced by) “immune” gestures of power transpiring in the modern political scene, as it faces the public irruption of the other into the sphere of power—that is, as it faces universal equality. We can take recourse to different languages to express these comparisons: on the one hand, the clinical language in which Sade first became famous, and on the other, the political language of state sovereignty that relies on structures such as states of exception. In fact, my suggestion would be to think of the former as a “subjectivizing” expression of the latter. As we saw, the castle’s politics are predicated on a series of inversions, and in its common usage, “perversion” is about inversions too: inverting means or ends, reverting the (normal) direction of something—in other words, turning against a norm of some kind. In clinical parlance, perverse inversions in human behavior are a possibility for any subject; arguably, it was the invention of psychoanalysis that gave “citizenship” (to use Lacan’s phrasing) to perverse inversions by acknowledging the possibility that specific childhood psychological developments may lead to perverse psychic structures. In her book Creativity and Perversion, ChasseguetSmirgel even makes the case for universalizing perversion as a human capacity to create new norms by erasing the established world of differentiations.3 This “universal” capacity for perversion is grounded indeed in the idea of inversion with which Freud started his writings about clinical perversions. Both in his seminal “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” () and later in “Instincts 165

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and Their Vicissitudes” (), Freud conceives of the perverse symptom as the inversion of the aim of the drive, either in the form of “the turning around upon the subject” or “the turning around into its opposite.” Freud will remain faithful to these descriptions about the economy of drives, but once he concentrates on the dynamics of the Oedipal complex, sexuation, and desire, he relates perverse inversions to a particular defensive mechanism vis-à-vis the subject’s realization of the Other (that is, of another speaking subject’s desire). For the child, the realization of the mother’s desire is the end of the long process of breaking away from the imaginary mother-child dyad that began with weaning. This culmination is the child’s realization that he may not be the only object of his mother’s desire; it is the moment of the symbolization of law, of lack—or in Lacanian terms, the symbolization of the Name of the Father. This moment signals the child’s passage from being the imaginary replenishment of the mother to entering the symbolic (circuits of exchange of law and language). But the child does not inevitably enter these circuits of exchange; his psychic reaction to losing the unity between mother and child may be to refuse exchange. This refusal leads to the development of a perverse structure by way of the splitting of the ego: while one part acknowledges the loss (castration, the mother’s desire, mortality, law, exchange), another part disavows it. To recall an oft-used formula, the perverse subject “knows, but behaves as if he did not know.” He has recognized lack but needs to veil it; in Lacanian terms, this entails a certain failure to symbolize lack. The perverse veiling of lack is achieved with an “artistic” solution, a specific defense against the reality of the other’s desire: the creation of a fetish. The fetish functions to complete the mother, to deny the consequences of desire. With these defenses, the pervert enters not into the dynamics of desire, of exchange (that is, of accepting desire as the desire of the Other, of accepting the law of speaking subjects) but rather into competition with that very same law, trying to impose his own version of a law. It is not that the pervert denies reality tout court: he refuses only to accept the implications of the mother’s desire—this would mean her, as well as his own, lack—and creates a world in which he can suspend the law: he does not have to accept the law’s consequences. He is an exception to the law; he decides when the general law applies, and to whom—certainly not to him. He transgresses the law (of desire) only to impose the validity of his own version of the law: his transgression is not defiance within the law (transgression as in neurosis), but opposition between two “laws.” He becomes a living law, in an “all or nothing” 166

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fight with the Other, whereby the father (the Other) is seen not as a representative of the law but as another law against whom the pervert needs to impose his own law: it is a fight of rivals under the witnessing eyes of the mother, who can testify to the winner. The pervert’s “legal exception” is thus his reaction to the catastrophic rupture of a previous sense of unity—we could say to the irruption of the other into the sphere of the pervert’s power (over this mother). To the event of “politics”—family politics—the pervert responds with an “antipolitics.” The above may be considered as a (subjective) microversion of the political dynamics transpiring at the Castle of Silling. As we have seen, the Sadianites operate with two laws, one for the victims and another one for the libertines. To defend themselves from the irruption of the other into the sphere of their power, the Sadianites invert the relation between transgression and norm and transform transgression into the norm for their world. With this inversion they achieve the perverse split that creates a zone of exemption inside the community: a zone of no possible transgression, of no lack, set against the world of lack, the world of the victims. With the transference of lack onto the victims, the libertine bond becomes an indestructible fetish—this, of course, epitomizes all the fetishistic representations that are usually identified as part of the castle, and of Sade’s texts at large. The victims inhabit the world of laws, of the possible transgression, that the fetishistic libertine bond refuses; not coincidentally, Barthes had called the others at the castle “the subjects per se.” Insofar as it veils a lack among the libertines, their fetishistic bond is at the same time the living proof of a world of lack. The world this side of lack, the libertine alliance, is a world of no differences, which Chasseguet-Smirgel rightly associates with the dynamics of the world of experimentation: a world that refuses the differentiations between the sexes and between the generations. Everyone is exchangeable on one side or the other of the dividing line but not between sides. But the cost is the loss of subjectivity for those who veil lack: insofar as they are the “living law,” the libertines become instruments for its execution. In the language of modern political sovereignty, the castle may serve as a mediating term in the construction of an analogy between perversion and an aspect of the modern configuration of sovereignty. That is to say, we can consider the perverse structure described above, both in its psychoanalytic and its Sadean versions, as one of the possible forms in which the objective violence of the modern configuration of sovereign power might have been translated into new forms of subjectivity. We may use the political vocabulary related to a specific aspect of the state to think through the analogy with perverse 167

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structures: the modern state harbors a “perverse” nucleus, as it were, a zone of power sharing in the structure of perversion that can invert the relationship between transgression and norm to regulate violence in order to counter the always-already present “fancied emergency” of its dissolution. Perhaps its best description was recently offered by Susan Buck-Morss: “a wild zone of power, by its very structure impossible to domesticate that all modern sovereignties, be they democratic or not, harbor as a blind spot, a zone in which power is above the law and thus, at least potentially, a terrain of terror.”4 If the “fancied emergency” of state dissolution is perceived as the political irruption of the other, is the function of this wild (“perverse”) zone of power to establish a particularly modern regulation of disruptions in membership? Is this nucleus of power a modern resistance to the event of politics, a modern “antipolitics” that, by exempting itself from the law, unleashes the annihilation of difference, documented as modern “genocidal capacities,” in order to regulate who can enter the political sphere? In the event of the imperative of universal membership, we can surmise that this center of power entails an inversion of equality, an antipolitics that creates “nonpeople” in order to concretely determine the abstract category of “humanity.” In the absence of a fully democratic imagination to define membership—both socially and politically—this task may be taken up by the perversion of politics that in modernity is best embodied by the wild zone of power within the state. Here one need not only think of the “madness” (or the unreason) of the “reasons” of state, a language that fully developed out of republican politics and with the emergence of the modern state.5 The structure of the modern state harbors another curious legal figure that sets itself against exchange and whose origins, according to Agamben’s inquiry in his book State of Exception,6 are in the French Revolution rather than in the absolutist tradition. As Agamben states, this figure is known in the Anglo-Saxon tradition by the terms “fancied emergency,” “martial law,” and “emergency powers,” in the French and Italian traditions as état de siège and stato d’assedio, respectively, and in the German tradition as Ausnahmezustand—state of exception (). The use of this legal instrument starts in Sade’s times, with a decree of  July , establishing the differences between a state of peace, a state of war, and a “state of siege”—the last being a state in which civil and police authority are transferred to the military. In the year VIII, an article in the constitution allows for its own suspension in the case of internal threat to the security of the state. In general, an “emergency decree” is declared by an agent of sovereign power at a criti168

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cal civic moment of imagined dissolution. It is exceptional, since it depends on the perception of a threat, and there is no possibility of regulating how to determine a threat in advance. Thus the threat can be any perception of the other—whatever other—in the sphere of an established power. To defend itself from this scenario of threatening fragmentation, the modern state in a state of exception splits the law: the law is acknowledged and preserved in spirit but (momentarily) suspended. Without the application of the law, the city lives in a legal state of illegality whereby all the normal provisions that protect civic life have been lifted and anything can happen to anyone, until it is decided that order and safety have been restored. As in the world of the perverse, as in the Castle of Silling, in the state of exception the “law” becomes a set of temporary norms left to the discretionary hands of the agent of power—the agent is the law. This zone “exempted from the law” is where its agents can be said to become “living law”; in being the law, instead of being subjected to it, like the pervert, they try to annul the normal gap between the law and its application.7 This moment of a withdrawal from exchange represents the link between law and violence, between a norm and a body that incarnates the norm. With this legal figure the state acts as the agent linking legality and illegality; all differences between legislative, executive, and juridical powers are erased in this zone of indistinction in which the only law that remains is the living law of the agent who embodies the law. Agamben’s book ends by suggesting that the state of exception belongs to the very paradigm of the law: the law needs the space of lawlessness where the law can be applied; he then poses the question whether we can undo this specific link between violence and law. To avert the smuggling in of ontology, one needs to be attentive here both to the historicity implicit in the act of a decree of exception, always responding to contingency—a consciousness of a threat to power, that is, of its temporal, historical nature—and to the historicity of the emergence, at the end of the eighteenth century, of this type of legal binding of violence. I am suggesting that the dynamics of the state of exception, whether seen through the prism of the state or of the law, might be the zone of negotiation for what pure law (reason) or its opposite (chaos) cannot negotiate: new membership in the event of a democratic crisis of membership. In other words, the state of exception might stand in for our lacunae in democratic imagination. It is only possible to see the zone of exception as a “perversion” of politics against a certain idea of the norm of politics. Sade’s times witnessed the emergence, hand in hand, of the new normative ideal of democratic equality and 169

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the new legal figures of exception. On the one hand, like ancient democratic Athens, Sade’s times dramatically expand the demos, as the sansculottes are the first in a long line of political actors to begin redefining the concept and boundaries of the “people.” In the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, equality demands universality—ideal models drift toward purity of principles: freedom is “for everyone” “to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights” (Article ). On the other hand, Sade’s times also saw the beginning of paradoxical and drastic closures in membership. As the Sadianites at the castle had defined freedom for everyone by specifying who composed that “everyone,” the (bourgeois) Declaration defined its own people, too. To put it in Marxist terms, equality was just a fetish hiding objective inequality. More revolutionary bloodshed was unleashed: Olympe de Gouges addressed women’s membership with her  question “Man, can you be just?” only to be guillotined—a crisis in membership so threatening that it would take  years for the women’s vote to be approved in France, in . The debate over slavery also proved so serious that it could not be solved by the “rational” principles of any revolutionary elite. It was rather resolved by the irruption of a slave revolution in the colony of Saint-Domingue. By setting plantations on fire, the rebels threatened France with losing the colony to Britain; these were the rebels who would later create the first independent black republic in the world—Haiti. The abolitionist lawyer Léger Félicité Sonthonax was forced to issue a decree abolishing slavery in situ and de facto. The decree was confirmed by the French Assembly only once it was “fait accompli.” The revolution of the “black Jacobins,” as C. L. R. James famously called them, obtained in  the abolition of slavery that the Revolutionary Assembly had not granted on the rational principles of “universal” equality.8 These times even saw the radical questioning of the nation-state: Anacharsis Cloots denounced how the Declaration of the Rights of Man depended on the idea of the nation-state. Cloots, like Sade, came from the aristocracy. Moved by the  events, he had changed his name to Anacharsis, the Scythian hero of a novel set in Greece. He was proclaimed a citizen in  and called himself “humankind’s orator”: in a famous address to the National Convention in  he defended a declaration of universal rights arguing that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was not about man but rather about “the rights of the French.” No frontiers were valid for Cloots: “[An] organization that calls itself sovereign seriously wounds humanity; sovereignty resides in the 170

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entirety of humanity, not in nations[;] to have no enemies, we should have no neighbours.”9 Every bourgeois closure of membership in Sade’s times had its revolutionary Antigone to contest it; but Sade’s castle was gothic, rather than tragic. As  radicalized the ancient principles of equality, Sade radicalized Creon’s immunity logic to respond to “the Antigone of the revolution.” Unlike the tragic Creon, the Sadianites emerge from the castle stronger than ever, cannibalizing the  “reinvention” of democracy for the sake of their unity. Like his contemporaries, Sade follows the “cult of antiquity,” but he does not choose the democratic Athenians—rather he chooses the Greek materialists and the most severe, untragic figures of absolute sovereignty—the Roman caesars, especially Nero.10 Identity wins over equivalence: no Antigone can stand up in the castle, no corpse is left recognizable, no sovereign regrets his exception. At the castle, the possibility of politics is put in doubt—and, thereby, the very possibility of literature as a practice of freedom is radically questioned.11 One wonders if Camus’s warning that “the history and tragedy of our times really begin with Sade” did not refer precisely to the way that politics—and literature—could become “endangered species.” As if in parallel lines, the unceasing unrest leading to the equalitarian expansion of the demos since Sade’s times up to the present, has also witnessed an unprecedented recourse to forms of government that are based on exceptional powers. Hunt suggests that the rise of nationalism (as well as of ideological uses of biology) in the nineteenth century greatly threatened the expansion of the human rights discourse.12 The historical record seems to indicate that for modern capitalist nations it has been impossible to govern exclusively according to the paradigm of the law; the appeal to its suspension as a tool of government is increasingly prominent at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Post– World War II Western theorists of all political persuasions warn of the atomic era’s peculiar management of violence; yet it is worth recalling the increasing militarization of the globe ever since the end of the nineteenth century, defined by Michael Geyer as “the tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence” ().13 In , Clinton Rossiter argued that emergency powers were “a rule and not an exception”; in , Arendt called our world a “world civil war”; recently Agamben considered the “state of exception as paradigm of government” (taking his cue from Walter Benjamin’s  thesis on the state of exception as the rule).14 Agamben’s impressive twelvepage (–) account of states of exception in Western industrial democracies 171

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illustrates cases that go from the perceived emergencies of war or internal political unrest, to economic instability. Switzerland, a case worthy of mention, granted its federal council unlimited powers, in , to guarantee its security and neutrality, notwithstanding its withdrawal from participation in the Great War. This case is most interesting in that it gives rise to juridical justifications for the legal measure of exception that include not only the perceived need of “securing the independence of the country against the foreign invader, maintaining order in the interior” but also the “covering over the void of law” and, most extraordinarily, an alleged “right of necessity inherent in the very existence of the state” (, my emphasis). That the existence of the modern state could be theorized in terms of a provision for a state of exception makes us pause: the wild zone of power, to use Buck-Morss’s expression again, appears now not as a mechanism gone wrong (Creon’s tragedy) but rather as a foundational one (Sade’s castle). If this is a perversion embedded in the way industrial modernization has imagined the governance of society—a perversion of power within the state—then our questions about modernity need to be reconsidered.15 It is often argued that modernization is an “unfinished project,” having failed as yet to provide the promised universal welfare—equal suffrage, equal access to property, equal access to health or educational care, and more, depending on the sociopolitical emphasis. Nonetheless, we can pose the question otherwise: is this project “unfinished,” or are its limitations intrinsic to its manifestation in the modern nation-state as a form of governance? Another way to put it is to ask whether the state is essentially at odds with the universal impulse of democracy. Is the state of exception intrinsic to the existence of the modern state or just its unruly excess? To make this more concrete, we can take any of the social categories of exclusion—gender, race, and so forth—and ask: was their exclusion a sign of imperfect modernization, or was it an essential part of it? Is the logic of identity irremediably at odds with the logic of equivalence on which the Western horizon for politics rests? Across the Atlantic, Sade’s times also reinvent politics—and literature. I want to draw attention here to the “dictator novel,” a modern subgenre of the novel identified by critics as “native” to Latin America and as emerging at these times. I wish to explore the hypothesis that this genre is a product of the Western postrevolutionary upheaval and the emergence of new nations after the fall of both the feudal and the colonial orders: it is in strong dialogue with the French 172

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and American reinventions of politics and the questions about modernity that I have been posing above. In this respect, I speculate that it is a transatlantic genre, though so far studied as pertaining only to Latin America. One has to envision here the events of  not as “French” but rather as “Atlantic”—if not world events. The corridor of political ideas went both ways across the Atlantic: while the black Jacobins that secured the independence of Haiti in  proved decisive for the revolutionary debate about universal rights in Paris, the French revolutionaries provided fertile images for revolutionaries throughout the Latin American colonial territories, at a time when imperial sovereignty was collapsing irreversibly. Not the least important of those images was that of a contract. The extensive dismantling of the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and British colonial systems in continental America had long been in the making, given the frequent insurrections throughout the long eighteenth century: the Maya revolts of , , and , the Comuneros of Paraguay from  to , Atahualpa in  and Túpac Amaru II in  in Perú, Makandal in Haiti in , the Quito riots of , the Comuneros of Bogotá in , Tiradentes in  in Brazil, to name but the few best-known examples.16 To this turbulence now were added European upheavals, for instance Napoleon’s  invasion of Spain. And, much as the Caracas Spanish colonial authorities named the Parisian Jacobins “the French evil” [el mal francés], the Creole elite began to see the events of Saint-Domingue as “the Haitian evil.”17 But the continental American reinvention of politics entailed a complexity that the French scene did not have: Creoles fought on two fronts—both against the local anciens régimes and the colonial metropolises (as well as, soon thereafter, in the case of the Latin American region, against the new imperial greed of Britain). Because the Creole elite who led the war of independence could not propose a return to monarchy, as did Europe, the new politics was even more radically “new.” Negotiating new membership was crucial—though in most cases independence from Europe generated only a transference of sovereignty from European masters to their Creole heirs. The radically new political situation, however, made the problem of the foundation of power a central concern for the Creole elite; in this respect it recalls the early modern European problem of the emergence of the state. It was not only a question of debunking the old but, for lack of past references, of finding a legitimacy for the new.18 This was more crucially felt in South America, where Creoles had the perception that the Anglo-American revolution had not broken from English traditions and cul173

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ture, whereas their radical rupture from Spain had forced them into a theoretical void and a reality of civil war. As Natalio Botana puts it, this “new world” was destined to be “a pure creation, without roots, immersed in solitude.”19 Although they followed closely the events of the liberal revolution in Spain, South Americans turned to France in search of new models of legitimation. The new political covenant was the rational ideal of a democratic republic; very few circles defended the establishment of parliamentary monarchies. Constitutions in many new nations had an Anglo-Saxon imprint, but the imaginative horizon of the “Latin” Creole elites was decidedly French in its adoption of symbols, language, and festivities: to borrow from Breenot’s and Rodríguez’s succinct formulation on the case of Venezuela, the itinerary was from “the French sans-culottes to the Venezuelan sans-chemise.”20 With respect to Europe, Spanish America (and we could add the United States here) occupies a singular place at this time. As François-Xavier Guerra notes, “[W]hen all of Europe had fallen back to monarchical, even absolutist, regimes, only the Hispanic-American countries continued being republics and having constitutions with modern liberties” ().21 This cluster of modern republican elites, whose rational models for the nation translated into formal freedoms, was in sharp contrast to the remnants of colonial (feudal) structures of power and clashed with the reality of civil wars that dismembered the region after the wars of independence. How to form a new “people” if those who believed in the “people” as a source of legitimation were the minority elite? How to initiate the “republican tradition” with imported models that could speak only to this elite? Historically, the elite appealed to different representational fictions, delinked from vast sectors of society, about how the people were to be defined and where their legitimation lay, sometimes finding it in political parties and sometimes investing a man with the people’s sovereignty. There is a now almost mythical phrase in the cultural reservoir of the hemispheric elite that perhaps best summarizes their quest for an ideal republican model, and the foreign (mostly French) influence on this quest: civilización o barbarie, civilization or barbarism. The political career of this phrase was launched by Argentine writer and president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (–), who used it to subtitle his  text: Facundo: Civilización y barbarie en las pampas argentinas. Sarmiento’s influence cannot be overestimated: he became not only one of the “founding fathers” of what is now Argentina, but arguably also one of the founding fathers of Latin American letters and thought.22 The extent to which Sarmiento’s rhetorical use of the phrase “civili174

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zation or barbarism” has shaped American continental thought, political praxis and rhetoric, and literary imagination, has been the subject of many volumes: it became a veritable matrix of identification after independence. Unsurprisingly, this modern contrast between civilization and barbarism came from across the shores of the Atlantic, from the French Enlightenment—though, as we know, its real Western pedigree dates back to the ancient Greeks, who called those who did not speak Greek “barbarians.” The word “civilization” seems to have appeared in France in the eighteenth century: Bruce Mazlish traces it to Victor Riqueti Mirabeau (father of the revolutionary) who used it in  to refer to the nobility’s refinement. Soon it became common currency in the context of the colonies to differentiate Europeans from “natives.”23 It is in this sense that Sarmiento appropriates the term, though with some local twists. To use Sarmiento’s words, the question after independence was “to be or not to be savages”—ser o no ser salvajes.24 Sarmiento’s generation sees “barbarism” in a return to monarchy, to colonial (feudal) forms of power, and “civilization” in the republic that either guarantees individual rights and limitations to absolute power, or that, in Rousseau’s style, educates citizens for the common good. Like the word “civilization,” the inclusive parameters of membership are European: white and male is a cohort universally included, whereas women, Indians, and Afro-Americans will receive different consideration in each new independent nation at different times throughout the two centuries to come. What is most interesting for my purposes here, is that the subtext of the opposition between civilization and barbarism is not only a narrative about those who would be excluded as “savages,” but also, and most important, about an anxiety of civic dissolution, similar to that which appears in the narratives I have thus far discussed. The wars of independence led to a series of ferocious civil wars throughout the nineteenth century, preceding the final consolidation of nation-states. The elite had perceived the threat of dismemberment right from the very beginning of the reception of the Haitian and French revolutions in the continent: according to Guerra, the press of the times shows a specific “American” reception of the revolutionary news that obsesses about the danger of total social disintegration—anarchy.25 This was exacerbated when it was compared with the previous perception of a linguistic and cultural cohesion given by empire. Once the Spanish empire collapses, local warlords—caudillos—emerge, warring with each other for local supremacy. Their military power had been in most cases important in the wars against Spain, and in many battles actually essential. They were linked to property structures inher175

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ited from the colony and had the capacity to harangue their own militias—la montonera—among the popular classes, forging different types of alliances and loyalties with sectors of the three Americas (white, Indian, and black).26 Both the main war leaders of independence and the “lettered city”—the urban liberal Creole intelligentsia that inherited colonial power27—saw the ferocity of their civil wars as a return to colonial times or a road toward total anarchy, preventing the formation of the unified nation. Caudillo wars were “American barbarism.” Although critics interpret the elite’s fear as a fear of the power of caudillos, this fear is also of what caudillos more profoundly come to signify, in my view, at this time: a lack of city, a lack of association, we could say, a lack of “social contract”—the specific social contract of the nation-state—invariably linked to a lack of “civilization” and of economic progress, right up to the twentieth century “boom” in Latin American literature. One could say that the literary elite captures and translates the “barbarism” of the lack of contract with a figure that will persist across countless Latin American essays and literary works from now on: “solitude.” This is America’s “horrifying solitude” of Bolívar’s  Letter from Jamaica; it is the “silent solitude” of Sarmiento’s gauchos and caudillos—whom Sir Walter Scott had called “Christian savages”—in the first chapter of his Facundo. It is the solitude of the disunited republics in José Vasconcelos’s  The Cosmic Race; it is the solitude of the pampas in Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s  X-ray of the Pampa; it is the solitude of Octavio Paz’s  The Labyrinth of Solitude; it is the “one hundred years of solitude” that shape Gabriel García Márquez’s  town of Macondo—the same solitude, too, with which he chose to title his Nobel Prize speech in : “The Solitude of Latin America.” It is the same solitude with which Latin American literature will be identified in the international market after the “boom.” The “barbarism” of the lack of a (liberal) contract permeates Sarmiento’s  almost mythical Facundo. A book that is considered a keystone for Latin American literature, albeit a category with still blurry borders, Facundo is probably a foundational text for the literary imagination of the continent tout court. It also enters in dialogue with the literature of North America—for instance, with Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (). It is foundational not only in terms of a literary myth of origins. It also laid out a now mythical grid for the elite’s understanding of their postcolonial and neocolonial political reality and shaped many of the themes that Latin (and Anglo) Americans would explore obsessively in decades to come, both in literary and nonliterary genres. Thus it became the predecessor of literary forms that developed throughout 176

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the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at the regional level. But most important for my purpose here, Facundo is an embryonic “dictator novel”—arguably the first example of this “Latin American” genre. The now -year-old genre of the dictator novel permeates the Latin American literary imagination.28 Perhaps the quickest way to appreciate it is with two anecdotes. When Gabriel García Márquez was asked to account for the constant presence of this genre, he ventured the thesis that “the dictator is the only mythological character that Latin America has produced.”29 For his part, when Honduran poet Roberto Sosa was asked in  about the presence of testimonial literature in his country, another dominant genre in Latin America, Sosa instead expressed regret that his country does not have a dictator novel: “By the way, we could use a dictator novel. The reign of a Honduran dictator named Tiburcio Carías Andino who governed the country for sixteen years, has never been the subject of a novel. Novels have been written about dictators in every other Latin American country.”30 In a region where the question “Why does my country not have a dictator novel?” can be posed, there has been surprisingly little speculation about the presence of this “myth.” One of the most convincing of these speculations, to my mind, came from Peruvian Marxist intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui, who thought that the civil wars after independence from Spain had prevented the formation of a strong bourgeoisie that would allow for the dominance of such literary figures as the “individual” or the “citizen.”31 Yet, while structures of power in postcolonial Latin America unquestionably influence the development of the dictator novel, the genre can neither be considered unique to the region nor be understood as being concerned with uniquely Latin American politics. As I suggested earlier, while the critical canon has established the genre as “specific” to “Latin America,” I believe that this critical appraisal is due to the fact that dictator novels have been studied only (and very incipiently, at that) in the corpus of Latin American novels—and this, in turn, is an effect of their association with the international market phenomenon of the “boom” writers—names such as García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, all of whom produced a dictator novel at some point in their careers.32 I suggest that dictator novels can be thought of as quasi-mythical signifying machines for the Western political imagination tout court, much in the way that the other texts in this book operate. Thus far I have emphasized how these texts link the constitution of a social contract and violence and I have read 177

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them with the background of the emergence of the democratic imagination in mind; without the latter, literary reflections on foundational violence could be read, for instance, as meditations on ontological power. Dictator novels dramatize the foundational violence that I have linked to the definition of membership in the postrevolutionary context of the second birth of democracy. I see dictator novels as a response to the world event of the French and American revolutions, rather than as the isolated creation of a specific region in the West. I do not think that Latin Americans have invented a “mythical character” in the figure of a dictator, but rather that this figure looms as a symptom of the upheaval and paradoxes in the Western postrevolutionary political imaginary. The rhetorical power of the figure of the dictator in these novels can be compared to that of the figure of the tyrant invoked by the ancient Athenians in order to identify themselves as democrats. It can also be related to how certain legal figures, such as “constitutional dictatorship,” loom large not only in our juridical imaginary. The revolution’s demand for universal equality—and the West’s imaginary identification with it—are at the center of the genre’s intense preoccupation with the concentration of power that the postrevolutionary West prefers to imagine as alien to its social contract. Latin American literature reflects on this problem mostly by fictionalizing historical dictatorial regimes, much in the way that the French postrevolutionary times fictionalized national history in order to deal with the political anxieties of the new distribution of power. This is to say that dictator novels work through the links between violence and the social contract by viewing them from the vantage point of the historically determined American concern with the foundations of state power. In this respect, a study of the literary reflection on dictatorship throughout the continent is yet to come. It would be fitting here to find out the European forms of this reflection as well; one could compare, for instance, how Napoleon, arguably the first modern, enlightened dictator, looms throughout nineteenth-century literature in France, Russia, or Italy, to how another Napoleonic figure emerging on this side of the Atlantic out of the turmoil of the Haitian revolution—King Henri Christophe, crowned emperor of Haiti in —looms throughout Caribbean literature.33 Consider Maurice Samuels’s recent exploration of the representation of the past as spectacle in postrevolutionary France, and how “Napoleon takes the stage” () in the twenty-nine new plays about him that were immensely popular for a history-hungry audience in . Napoleon appears first as a “shadow,” his explicit representation forbidden during the Restoration for fear that it would threaten the regime in power, and 178

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after , as a way to “work through” the anxieties generated by the revolution.34 A similar study is necessary of the Anglo-American recurrence of figures of sovereignty related to dictatorial power and to the region’s obsession with trial literature (and film) and its own figure for sovereignty in the legal institution—the judge.35 Fully engaging the revolutionary imagination of a social contract, Sarmiento’s Facundo provides the original frame for the political debates that dictator novels would later embrace. A book at the crossroads of literature, sociology, political theory, and political programs for the foundation of the “one and indivisible” Argentine nation (), Facundo is Sarmiento’s liberal response to the popular and highly controversial reign of Juan Manuel de Rosas (–), the caudillo who governed Buenos Aires from  to . Granted extraordinary powers, Rosas bears the title of “the Restorer of the Laws and Institutions.” The title that Mary Mann gave to her translation of parts of the book into English in  is fitting to Sarmiento’s quest: “Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; or Civilization and Barbarism.” The literary imagination of the times insists on Rosas’s government—consider two other contemporary foundational texts, José Mármol’s Amalia (), and Esteban Echeverría’s The Slaughterhouse (). Rosas confronts a civil war, but arguably achieves the unification—albeit temporary—of the nation by ruthlessly exterminating his enemies. Demonized as a monster against democracy by his liberal enemies, Rosas was revered by his followers as a nation-builder who forged alliances with the popular classes— even compared at times to George Washington.36 Sarmiento vehemently attacks the “barbarism” he sees in Rosas, by giving an account of the life of another all-powerful caudillo, Juan Facundo Quiroga (–), whose assassination Sarmiento attributes to Rosas. Nicknamed by friends and enemies alike “the tiger of the plains” [el tigre de los llanos], Quiroga is for Sarmiento a “primitive” version of Rosas. Quiroga is a “beast of a man” [hombre bestia ()] with “a stabbing gaze” (): a barbaric force of nature, he was “born to command” () with his knowledge of human emotions. But Quiroga is “not cruel, he is only a barbarian”: Rosas, “the wolf cub” [el lobezno ()], on the other hand, is never enraged. Rosas is Quiroga’s barbaric force enveloped by the cruelty of reason, the terror of cold calculation. If Quiroga is the passion for evil, Rosas is “evil without passion” (). In Rosas, Quiroga has been absorbed by the city, which has its “tiger,” its “wolf ”—its “Leviathan,” as historian John Lynch calls him—ruling the city from the inside instead of attacking it from the outside.37 179

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The eradication of Rosas’s urban tyranny is for Sarmiento the task that the city is called to perform in order to usher in the democratic republic. This would free the social contract from the feudal, colonial order, the plains from isolation, the territory from civic dissolution. As Natalio Botana puts it, the book “has a theory of civil war, a theory of the classical polis which resonates with echoes of the Enlightenment, from Montesquieu to Rousseau; a theory of modern republicanism inspired by Tocqueville, and finally, a theory of the ‘other society,’ the land ignored by colonial society which the wars of independence brought to the fore.”38 For Sarmiento, Buenos Aires is “a whole city of revolutionaries” where the “Social Contract flies from hand to hand” (). But Buenos Aires is summoned to a peculiar task: it has to achieve what France did not. Sarmiento blames the failure of France to deliver democracy on the “paradoxes of the Social Contract” (): “Buenos Aires will realize what France could not, what the British aristocracy did not want, what the despotism of Europe misses” (). But the union of the nation proposed by parliamentary liberals will have to confront what they perceive as a brute force coming from the “barbaric Americans”—gauchos, Indians, blacks, led by caudillos who will not respect “the contract” (). Sarmiento compares Rosas’s terror in Buenos Aires to Robespierre’s in France, but Rosas fares worse in his account: [T]he terror in France in  was not a means, but an effect. Robespierre did not guillotine nobles and priests to create a reputation for himself [. . . .] He was an austere, severe soul who thought that all of France’s aristocratic limbs had to be amputated in order to cement the revolution. “Our names,” said Danton “will go down in posterity as execrable, but we will have saved the Republic.” Terror among us is an invention of government to choke all conscience, all city spirit and to force men to recognize as a thinking brain the foot oppressing their throat. ()

For Sarmiento, Rosas is good only for war; his political program is “without disguise: He who is not with me is my enemy” (). But throughout the book Sarmiento grapples with a question: Was it possible to unify the nation without the “wolf cub”? Was the “contract” possible without Rosas’s terror? Grudgingly Sarmiento admits: “[T]ime will consolidate the work of unitary organization that the crime had initiated” (): [Do] not think that Rosas has failed to develop the Republic that he tears apart. No: he is a great and powerful instrument of Providence, who does everything that the future of the nation needs [. . . .] There existed before him and before Quiroga the Federalist spirit in the provinces [. . . .] [He] extinguishes them and organizes for his own benefit the Unitarist spirit that Rivadavia wanted for the benefit of all.

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Modern Sovereignty Today all those little caudillos in the provinces, demoted, degraded, stand fearful of displeasing him [. . . .] The idea of the Unitarians has materialized; only the tyrant is unnecessary. The day a good government is established, it will find the local resistance defeated and everything at the disposition of the UNION. (, capital letters in the original)

The dictator novel is born hand in hand with the “Social Contract” that “flies” in the city, and under the shadow of the Hobbesian imagination. As it is plagued by the anxiety of civic dissolution, by caudillos and gauchos, Facundo is plagued by almost all imaginable figures of Western sovereignty. Sarmiento’s meditations range from the ancient Roman father to the Roman dictator, to the Venetian Council of Ten in the s, to Robespierre and the modern dictator Napoleon, among countless other sovereigns. The Latin American strain of dictator novels takes up the historical incarnations of this type of power, developing its figures from the caudillo of the nineteenth century to the dictator of the twentieth century, and from the mythical figure of an all-powerful man to the more human “postboom” figures of the seventies.39 The local literary ancestors of these figures can be traced to the accounts of the Spanish conquest and its leaders—Columbus, Cortés, Alvarado, Pizarro, Lope de Aguirre—in the Chronicles of the Indies. Américo Castro suggested that their ancestral line goes as far back as the poems about the Arabic presence in Spain; González Echevarría adds the Visigothic kingdoms, insofar as the latter resisted the influence of Roman Law.40 For the most part, dictator novels have been read as what Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias once termed the “novel of combat, of testimony, of denunciation.”41 The novels are seen either as denunciations of real-life dictators in the region (or a composite of them all), or explorations into the (im)possibility of absolute power. Dictators, in turn, are seen as metaphors for the regional failure of modernization, framed in Sarmiento’s discursive opposition of civilización o barbarie. The critical intervention of these novels is read as the call to finish the “unfinished project of modernity,” for which, as Sarmiento said of Rosas, the “tyrants are unnecessary.” The above interpretation relies, though, on the vision of modernity as a social contract that can oust violence. If violence can be ousted by the modern state, the tyrant is read as an anomaly, a monstrous individual, much as Sade’s critical canon first understood him as a monster. Instead, I propose to read dictator novels as working through the meaning and function of a particularly modern structure of power. Like tragedy in the Athenian polis, like Sade’s text 181

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in revolutionary France, the dictator novel meditates on the paradoxes hidden within the ideologies of social contract that permeate the reinvention of politics. Dictator novels lie at the crossroads of the violent historical foundations of the nation-states after independence and the ideal models of nation-building with which the elites imagined nations free of violence. They are foundational fictions of binding violence—almost the complementary opposite to what Doris Sommer has identified as foundational fictions of “binding love,” where the erotics of marriage stands for nation building.42 Dictator novels meditate on the links between sovereignty, violence, law, and political identity. The violence of the social contract will appear here as part and parcel of modernization rather than as its failure. Following John Kraniauskas’s formulation, “[T]he Latin American dictator novel might be the only literary genre that takes and reflects upon the state form as a historical object and subject” (, my emphasis and translation).43 More precisely, I suggest that it reflects upon an exceptional war machine unleashed at moments of membership renegotiation. It is in this context that I explore in the following pages the latest instance of the dictator novel in Latin America: Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo, ). Whereas Sophocles’ Thebes and Sade’s Silling were tragic or gothic visions of political bonds, Vargas Llosa’s “goat” (dictator) takes us through the singular journey of history to show us a structurally parallel vision of “binding violence” at the heart of the political sphere. And perhaps more significantly, the novel’s concentration on the state is also a testament to our current debates around the state’s transformations: whether in the form of “Empire” or in the form of its demise, the debates on the state have become a symptom of our concern with the possibility of radicalizing democracy.44

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PART III Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat or Sovereign Politics: We the Nation-State

The dead grow more intractable every day. Once they were obedient These days they grow ironic, ask questions It seems to me they realize that more and more they are the majority!

—Roque Dalton, El Salvador, 

One wakes up hearing cannons in the morning full of planes it would seem it is revolution but it is the tyrant’s birthday.

—Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaragua, 

Trujillo is not a man. He is a political force [. . .] A cosmic force.1 I didn’t want to present Trujillo as a grotesque monster or brutal clown, as is usual in Latin American literature [. . .] I wanted a realist treatment of a human being who became a monster [. . . .]

—Vargas Llosa2



Vargas Llosa’s Appeal to History: Within and Beyond Latin America

“It was true, there were no ties like blood” (), Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo thinks when talking to his right-hand man, Chief of Intelligence Johnny Abbes, the man in charge of letting the people know what kind of blood Trujillo trusts. “Nothing bonded like blood” reads the sentence in the original Spanish: [N]ada ataba tanto como la sangre ().1 More than the blood of family bonds, it is the blood spilled in the name of the republic that bonds: “For the sake of this country I have stained these [hands] with blood” (), says Trujillo to his friend Simon Gittleman at lunch. More powerful than bloodlines or rational contracts, the spilling of blood that binds the dictator and his people in an intimate communion ties together the three stories that Vargas Llosa narrates in The Feast of the Goat, offering a “total vision” of how Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina’s dictatorial regime ( August – May ) changed the Dominican Republic forever. The feast of blood creates the bonds that become the nation’s political fabric; the feast is the exception that negotiates in blood the borders of the political constituency. Page after page, seen from all possible angles, from that of the dictator to that of his assassins, the novel insists, as Urania’s aunt Adelina says, “[W]ell, that’s what politics is, you make your way over corpses” (). An account of the historical “Era of Trujillo,”2 the novel is composed of three intertwined stories: the last day of Trujillo’s life, the conspiracy to kill him, and the odyssey of one of his victims, Urania Cabral, one of the very few entirely fictional characters in the novel. Urania is the daughter of Agustín Cabral, one of Trujillo’s top legal assistants and the president of the senate at the time of Trujillo’s death.3 She is now a forty-nine-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer living in New York and advises institutions like the World Bank. She returns to the island after an absence of thirty-five years to reveal to her family—her handicapped father, her aunt Adelina, her two cousins Manolita and Lucindita, and 185

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her little niece Marianita—how both her body and the body politic of the nation were violated by Trujillo. Two weeks before Trujillo’s assassination, Urania, at age fourteen, mysteriously escaped the island and went to study in Michigan. In the United States, she has become an expert on the Trujillo era through what she calls her “perverse hobby” of reading (); when she meets her family, she displays her knowledge of, and her questions about, “what really happened” in those times. The family listens until she explains why for thirty-five years she has never wanted to communicate with her father. In his absolute despair at his inexplicable fall from Trujillo’s grace, her father had accepted the advice of Trujillo’s pimp on how to regain the dictator’s trust: offer Urania as a token of loyalty. Invited to a party at Trujillo’s Mahogany House, Urania unsuspectingly departs toward the scene of her rape. She endures Trujillo’s seduction, impotence, and finally manual rape. After being taken to the city, she is helped by a nun at her school to escape the island. As she tells her family, she has chosen not to forget or forgive. Along with Urania’s geographic return, the reader is presented with two temporal returns: the story of the last day of Trujillo’s life and of the plot to assassinate him. Vargas Llosa recounts Trujillo’s last day from the dictator’s perspective, with flashbacks within flashbacks giving an overview of the thirty years of his regime. It is  May . Trujillo starts at dawn with his daily workout and grooming; his first appointment is with his chief of intelligence, the cruelest man in the regime, Colonel Johnny Abbes. Trujillo then meets with Cabral’s colleague, Senator Henry Chirinos (one of the few semifictional characters), who reports the paralysis of the economy. News of the decay of the regime accompanies Trujillo’s physical decay: he suffers from impotence as well as from a prostate infection that makes him incontinent. At noon, while having lunch with his loyal friend, the former marine Simon Gittleman, Trujillo gives an account of his most difficult decision: the massacre of the Haitians in . At five, he strategizes with his puppet president, Joaquín Balaguer, about the regime’s impending collapse. He takes his daily walk with his cohorts; he chastises the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, José René “Pupo” Román, at the air base for a pipe leak; last, he starts his journey to the Mahogany House, where he plans to spend the night with a mistress. A few minutes later, on the highway, his car is sprayed with bullets, and he is shot to death. The third story takes the point of view of the conspirators and narrates the hours before the assassination and the events in its aftermath. The reader follows the personal lives and thoughts of the seven men who kill Trujillo and 186

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learns of a vast network of others implicated in the conspiracy. The killers in three different vehicles anxiously lie in wait for Trujillo’s car; most of them have a personal motive for revenge. They are Lieutenant Amadito García Guerrero, a member of Trujillo’s personal guard; Antonio de La Maza, the only one who knows everyone implicated in the conspiracy, is the “spider at the center of a labyrinth of threads” (); the devout Catholic Salvador Estrella Sadhalá; Antonio Imbert, involved in the clandestine rebel movement “ de Junio”; Pedro Livio Cedeño, Huáscar Tejeda, and Fifí Pastoriza. Among the numerous highranking conspirators is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Pupo Román, who agrees to summon a military-civilian junta upon seeing Trujillo’s dead body. Once Trujillo is hit, the killers put the corpse in the trunk of the car and start to search for Pupo Román, who has failed them—he is caught and dies in the most abject torture, having betrayed his fellow conspirators. Trujillo’s son, Ramfis, starts a savage hunt and kills almost all of them. President Balaguer swiftly positions himself as the savior after chaos, making pacts to lead the country into democracy. After six months, the two survivors of the conspiracy—Luis Amiama and Antonio Imbert—emerge from hiding to be honored as heroes who saved the country. Framed by Urania’s tale of ruptured kinship, which opens and closes the novel, the book reveals another peculiar rupture at its very center. The book’s twenty-four chapters and the three stories run parallel to each other and in an orderly fashion until the exact middle of the book, when, with chapter twelve, the pattern breaks: at the novel’s “midday,” as it were, Trujillo’s assassination bisects the novel. Reviewers note how the narrative sequence loses its tightness as the narrative threads recede amid the aftermath of Trujillo’s death and the transition to democracy led by Balaguer. The day of Trujillo’s death is in turn divided in two, this time by a massacre that Trujillo perpetrates. In chapter eleven, while at lunch, the dictator recounts the  genocide in which he decided to slaughter an estimated twelve to thirty thousand illegal Haitian immigrants. Back to back, chapters eleven and twelve offer us the violent demise of two seemingly disparate political agents intimately linked through “necropolitics,” to use Achille Mbembe’s suggestive term for a kind of modern sovereignty that hinges upon the death of the other, insofar as the other is “always already” perceived as a threat.4 At “midnight” in the novel, in chapter twenty-four, we read of a symbolic reproduction of this pattern in sexual terms: Urania finally delivers the story of Trujillo’s sexual “killing” of her womanhood, by raping her 187

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while she was still a teenager; the now-powerful lawyer “kills” Trujillo’s manhood by unmasking his impotence with her story. Necrocannibal politics: a series of totemic meals surrounds all killings. Trujillo recounts his massacre of the Haitians at lunch in his presidential palace in front of twenty guests at the very same table where his massacred body will be exposed the next day; the conspirators gather to eat a barbecued calf before killing the dictator; Urania recounts her story at the dinner table with all the women of her family. The necropolitics links, at the exact center of the novel, the most powerless and the most powerful as part of a structure of enmity whose two polar opposites alternatively embody figures inimical to the fantasized unity of the nation. The Feast of the Goat comes as a late addition to the boom of dictator novels written by Vargas Llosa’s “fellow travelers” in the s—Roa Bastos, for instance, or the magical realists García Márquez and Carpentier. Unlike the last two, Vargas Llosa chooses realism instead of “magical realism”; his novel is embedded, both regionally and globally, in a very different context than that of the s. Regionally speaking, the dictatorial regimes that dominated the continent until the late s, regimes that increasingly became the enforcers of neoliberal market economics, have all fallen. Vargas Llosa writes in the context of the continental recovery from dictatorship, often called the “transition to democracy,” an ongoing process of varied nature in different countries in terms of their emphasis on reform or rupture with previous military regimes. In the case of South America, the earliest transition occurred in Ecuador in , followed by Vargas Llosa’s native Perú in , Bolivia in , Argentina in , Uruguay in , Brazil in , Chile in , and Paraguay in . A similar process of “democratization” has been seen throughout the so-called global south as eighty-one authoritarian governments across the five continents have opted for electoral systems.5 On the one hand, in Latin America this is a transition marked by a return to a high level of participatory politics, manifested in vigorous new social movements (mobilizing the landless in Brazil, the unemployed in Argentina, the indigenous coca farmers in Bolivia, and the Zapatistas in Mexico), and also in the revival of some forms of the left and of populism, all of which contest the meaning of this “transition,” denouncing new hidden dictatorial forms of power. On the other hand, this transition to democracy is marked by a different entrance into a neoliberal economy, led not by the heavy hand of dictators but 188

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rather by the overwhelmingly present rhetoric of democracy oddly coupled with an unprecedented unilateralism of power. The global discourse engineered in transnational centers of economic power, but adhered to by most of the local economic elites, without question equates the meaning of democracy with the national liberalization and deregulation of markets. A veritable pensée unique, to recall Ramonet’s phrase, this discourse aims at such a level of hegemony that transnational and local elites frequently endorse it with armed violence. The collision and the link between democratic discourses and armed violence have become increasingly evident as the unilaterality of power increases on economic, political, and military fronts. Vargas Llosa’s Latin America has been a pioneer experiment for this new concentration of power; it is the region that first experienced unilateral strikes of violence coupled with a democratic rhetoric. Militarily speaking, the precedent for current unilateral violent strikes at the global level was the U.S. invasion of Panama in , severely condemned by both the OAS and the United Nations.6 Politically, this new global concentration of power is enhanced by the demise of two major forces of opposition: the Eastern European socialist bloc in  and the Non-Aligned Movement of Third World countries, which took on political force in the Bandung conference in  and whose agenda was against siding with either of the two poles of the Cold War.7 Economically speaking, capital monopolization has reached an intensity unprecedented in the history of capitalism, as multinational corporations continue to merge and new patterns of economic exclusion emerge, this time not following the traditional racial, ethnic, or gender lines.8 The accompanying rhetoric of this multileveled unilaterality of power is democratic “equality.” The same global centers of power that before the s supported dictatorships in the global south in order to impose liberalization of markets are now spreading the same liberalization through equating civilization with democracy and democracy with free markets. The rhetoric of this ideology is “the end of history,” as formulated famously in  by Francis Fukuyama, and its replacement with a binary opposition coded in moral-religious terms as a war between “good” (or freedom) and “evil” (or tyranny). Vargas Llosa’s native Perú is a microversion of the above.9 Vargas Llosa writes The Feast of the Goat after a decisive decade both for him and for the life of his country. In  Vargas Llosa devastatingly lost the presidential race to Alberto Fujimori, the story of which he wrote in his memoirs A Fish in the Water (El pez en el agua, ).10 Vargas Llosa had represented the “lettered city”—the white liberal elite (and now its neoliberal politics, rhetorically democratic)— 189

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and spent twenty times more on advertising than his opponent. The son of a modest Japanese immigrant family, Fujimori had successfully rallied the support of the poorer, rural, and indigenous areas by campaigning for the political recognition of those areas—that is, advocating democracy for the population that had been forgotten for centuries. But soon after his democratic success, Fujimori introduced free-market reforms and staged what was called “an autocoup”: he dissolved the congress in order to have a “freer hand” to perform neoliberal economic reforms and to lead a “dirty war” against the leftist guerrilla groups Sendero Luminoso and Túpac Amaru. Re-elected democratically, his reign lasted until . In , a truth commission began to investigate disappearances in Peru during the period –. Fujimori’s infamous chief of intelligence, Vladimiro Montesinos, nicknamed “Fujimori’s Rasputin,” was arrested in  and by  had been convicted for corruption and crimes against humanity in some of the seventy trials against him. Fujimori was arrested in Chile and extradited to Perú where his trial began in December ; on  April , Fujimori was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for human rights abuses.11 Vargas Llosa responds to our world and to his country by writing a historical dictator novel. The genre is as much haunted by the polarities of “the sovereign” and the “popular sovereign” as is his world. While intellectuals, politicians, and social movements sometimes refer to our world as a “global state of war,” or a “global state of exception,” the centers of global economic power label as “undemocratic” those who oppose their unilateral violence orchestrated to liberalize markets.12 For the global elite centers, “not democratic” seems to play a rhetorical function that I cannot but associate with the role that tyranny played in ancient democratic Greek rhetoric: it is less related to any “reality” than to the legitimation of power. In this context, a denunciation of dictatorial power such as in Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat cannot but be multilayered with significance. The author’s denunciation implies the question: what kind of concentration of power is at stake in the novel? Reading Vargas Llosa’s writing on Trujillo as just the history of a dictatorship misses that the discourse and practice of dictatorial power, even if mutated in form, is of an overwhelming currency today. Is the history of Trujillo and his infamous chief of intelligence, Johnny Abbes, a version of the recent history of Fujimori and his infamous chief of intelligence, Vladimiro Montesinos? Or is it a version of what Fujimori’s wild zone of power represents, which is what Trujillo also represented in the s with his anticommu190

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nist politics? Or is it even a version of what Urania’s literary job represents for the region: the pensée unique of global financial institutions such as the World Bank? In other words, is the dictator a figure for the concentration of power of the so-called third industrial revolution, whose world system of transnational markets necessitates the ever-expanding market and thus criminalizes all resistance to it, from democratically elected governments to new types of guerrilla warfare? Is it a figure for the dynamics of power in our “global state of exception”? Vargas Llosa chooses history to address the present; in order to explore his address we need to look closely at the author’s political relation to the text of history. Vargas Llosa has starkly differentiated himself from his fellow-travelers, the writers of the Latin American boom who mythologized or satirized the images of “barbarism” that the nineteenth-century caudillos represented. The boom writers unfailingly constructed and debunked in one stroke all absolutist myths, almost as if they were performing the Freudian imperative to kill the mythical “father of the primitive horde,” and assigning the genre the historical task of leaping out of myth and kick-starting the engine of history. Dictator novels of the s were seen as blurring the limits between author and dictator, emphasizing the power of literature, and not of the dictator, to tell the story (with figures like the “writer-scriptor”), and exposing literature’s own construction through different types of texts (including historical documents). We can summon here the three most prominent accounts of dictatorship, all published in , and part of an incomplete Pan-American artistic project planned by Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa himself: Alejo Carpentier’s Reasons of State (El recurso del método), García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca), and Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme (Yo el Supremo).13 All of these novels center on a mythical dictator: García Márquez’s Patriarca is of an uncountable age—between  and  years old and born “without male contribution” [sin concurso de varón]; Roa Bastos’s Supremo is a halfalive, half-dead “Supreme incarnation of the race”; and Carpentier’s Primer Magistrado is a composite of “Machado, Guzmán Blanco, Cipriano Castro, Estrada Cabrera, Trujillo and Porfirio Díaz.”14 The debunked dictators become “humanized” at the verge of decrepitude, realizing the failures and solitude of power. Vargas Llosa follows every gesture of this tradition and, to some critics’ admiration and to some others’ dismay, he can also be read as “humanizing” Trujillo by showing his decrepitude and allowing the reader to “enter” his 191

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mind.15 Nonetheless, unlike its predecessors, Vargas Llosa’s dictator is historically recognizable down to the last detail. It is true that, prior to Vargas Llosa’s novel, there was a “total novel” about Trujillo—The Feast of King Acab (La fiesta del Rey Acab, ), written by Chilean author Enrique Lafourcade, and a “historical dictator-novel”—Roa Bastos’s I, The Supreme. However, Lafourcade’s novel is a farcical version of the dictator, César Alejandro Carrillo Acab, who has been compared to Alfred Jarry’s Père Ubu.16 In turn, like Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos engages with a specific dictator: Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who governed Paraguay from  to . Both Trujillo and Dr. Francia have been mystified as bulwarks of their countries’ independence. Like Roa Bastos, Vargas Llosa wrote after reading historical documents—two hundred books about Trujillo, three and a half years of research, and eight months spent in the Dominican Republic in .17 Roa Bastos’s narrator alludes to the layers of documents in the final note of I, The Supreme: “Unlike ordinary texts, this one was read first and written later. Instead of saying and writing something new, it merely faithfully copies what has already been said and composed by others.”18 Nevertheless, Roa Bastos’s narrative techniques present a timeless atmosphere covering the dictator in an aura of legendary power, so much so that neither the reader nor the dictator himself knows whether he is dead or alive.19 Nothing is farcical, satirical (at least not in the literary sense), legendary, or “magical realist” in Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo. Not wanting to “invent anything that could have never happened within the coordinates of the times,” 20 Vargas Llosa is faithful to his well-known novelistic technique: “to lie while knowing the truth” [mentir con conocimiento de causa].21 His realist choice echoes yet another realist tradition, this time in political philosophy: Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo is at times Hobbesian and at all times decidedly Machiavellian. It is not the first time that Vargas Llosa combines history with his obsession with authoritarian power. In fact, The Feast of the Goat seems to complete what appears, in retrospect, to be a trilogy, preceded by two other “total” novels about historical state violence: Vargas Llosa’s first attempt to fictionalize a dictatorship was Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral, ), followed by his first novel on a non-Peruvian theme, The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo, ).22 Set during the so-called ochenio (eight years of regime, –) of General Odría in Perú, Conversation in the Cathedral portrays the moral corruption bred by Odría’s regime, rather than the dictator himself, who appears in only one line in the whole book. In turn, 192

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The War of the End of the World fictionalizes Os Sertões, Euclides da Cunha’s  classic account of the – war between the rural followers of the messianic leader Antonio Conselheiro in northeast Brazil and the country’s republican army. The two works link the foundational narrative of Brazil’s newly constituted Primeira República to a genocidal episode. Of the three novels, The Feast of the Goat represents the culmination of Vargas Llosa’s penchant for a total novel that “competes with reality on equal terms.”23 So much so that rather than being read as a “historical novel” it was first read as history tout court. In the Dominican Republic, Vargas Llosa was accused both of falsifying the “real history” and of plagiarizing existing documentary narratives about Trujillo’s fall. Some searched for historical mistakes in the novel. Dominican historian Bernardo de la Vega published a list of thirtyeight errors and publicly proclaimed the fiction of Urania “a deviation from history.”24 Others asked the author to publish in future editions a list of his sources and notes correcting his “misinformation.” During the presentation of the novel at the Jaragua Hotel, the scenes in which Trujillo cries in humiliation were seen as the nonsensical invention of someone who never lived that era.25 In the face of death threats, Vargas Llosa had to be protected by security guards while promoting the book in Santo Domingo. Both trujillistas and families of the conspirators complained about Vargas Llosa’s alleged “distortion” of reality. The families of Antonio de la Maza and G. Estrella Sahdalá sent letters to the author. The Dominican newspaper El Nacional wrote that “the lies of the novel” were so many that Vargas Llosa deserved “a beating [una paliza] so that he would never be able to write again.”26 The accusation of plagiarism referred mainly to two books to which the novel is greatly indebted—Robert Crassweller’s Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator (), and Bernard Diederich’s journalistic investigation of Trujillo’s murder, Trujillo: The Death of the Dictator ().27 Furthermore, for some readers, the intrusion of the fictional character of Urania was offensive, since most of the characters are real, and some of them still alive. For other literary critics, Vargas Llosa’s sin was the opposite: an “excess of historical chronicle.”28 For Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez, the novel is the best kind of literature precisely because it narrates the past as if it “were happening again,” but it cannot be confused with history: There are entire libraries dedicated to the rise and fall of the Generalísimo Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina [. . .] but whoever ventures into Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel [. . .] could do without them, because this book is the prodigious distillation

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Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat of all that knowledge [. . . .] In Santo Domingo, they continue to throw in his face his lack of respect for some political figures that are still alive, without realizing that the effectiveness of any novel—historical or not—is in direct relation with its freedom.” (La Nación [Buenos Aires],  April , my translation)

To a certain extent, all historical novels are bound to produce some of these ambiguities because of their participation in the discourse of history. Nonetheless, to read the novel as if it were an account of the historical Trujillo involves an understanding of history as an objective representation of the past. Gewecke (“La fiesta”: ) interprets the author himself doing this and points to the author’s ambivalence or “double strategy” in his presentation of the novel in the Dominican Republic. Vargas Llosa stressed his faithfulness to historical documentation but at the same time insisted on the poetic truth of his work. However, rather than expressing the author’s belief in objective history, Vargas Llosa’s words can be seen as conveying the impossibility of separating the two discourses, and granting a poetic effect to this impossibility. Invoking but exceeding historical narration, the novel’s “history-effect” establishes both a literary and a political relation to the text of history. Rather than seeing Vargas Llosa’s historical strategy as promoting the concept that history is a work of “great men” and that the past can be brought back (ibid.: ), I see in the introduction of the fictional history-teller Urania a question about the possibility and purpose of narrating dictatorship in our times. For Vargas Llosa, literature helps in the making of critical citizens, or to use his wording, “politically incorrect citizens.”29 In trying to “make sense” of history, Vargas Llosa politicizes it in two ways. First, by offering his “total vision” of Trujillo’s regime for circulation among readers, Vargas Llosa counters a fundamental trait of historically existing dictatorships, which is to fragment systems of exchange in order to operate in secrecy. But secondly and most important, in the story of Urania, who travels from the past to warn the present generation about “what really happened,” Vargas Llosa narrates from a double temporal perspective, reminding us that history is a perspective from the present and that the present always makes use of what it considers past. Urania’s conversation with history throughout the novel insists on her disturbing message: “Were these different times? she thinks. ‘They were and they weren’t’ [. . . .] ‘Something from those times is still in the air’” (). “Something is still in the air” in the Dominican Republic for the reviewers of the novel: Roger Reynoso summarizes it as “times of post-trujillismo, neotrujillismo, late trujillismo, retro-trujillismo, museum-like trujillistas, ex-tru194

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jillistas and trujillistas forever.”30 In , Neil Larsen wrote an article entitled “How to Narrate the Trujillato?” (“¿Cómo narrar el Trujillato?”), observing the hold of “neo-trujillistas” on Trujillo’s spectral image, which he describes as “a nightmare among the living.”31 Analyzing Trujillo’s effects on the Dominican literary scene, Larsen points to a “lack of a definitive and well-developed narrative and artistic portrait of Trujillo’s times” (). According to him, while all Dominican literature since the s alluded to Trujillo, the allusions remained fragmented or anecdotal, lacking a representation that would reveal “this process of collective historicization” (). Writers resisted historicizing the regime by “fetishizing” () the dictator as a force of pure “[e]vil or madness, a nineteenth century tyrant” () that appears as an “exception [. . .] the repetition of past barbarism” ().32 In turn, Manuel Rueda’s Dominican anthology of novels and short stories about Trujillo () singles out one novel out of eleven (Haffe Serulle’s Las tinieblas del dictador [The Dictator’s Gloom], ) and two short stories also out of eleven (Georgilio Mella Chavier’s “Laudín” and León David’s “El dictador”) that present the dictator and not the effects of dictatorship.33 According to Sharon Keefe Ugalde, most of the Dominicans opted to describe effects instead of a total vision: “The most logical explanation is that there is still a lot of blood that has not yet dried” (). Vargas Llosa may have contributed to the process of the “collective historicization” allegedly needed on Dominican soil precisely by avoiding looking at Trujillo from the perspective of the past—by avoiding the fetishization of the dictator about which Larsen complained. Indeed, this was the opinion of many of those present at the author’s presentation of the novel on Dominican soil. As José Israel Cuello put it, the debate prompted by the novel “contributed to the necessary ventilation of the wounded parts of the Dominican soul that await a cure that only the oxygen of knowledge can dry out” (in Gewecke, “La fiesta”: , my translation). The novel historicizes the dictator by seeing him from the perspective of the present, instead of granting him mysterious (inexplicable) magical powers. Vargas Llosa’s “antifetishization” might be conscious. As he says, he “edited” the regime not “to present Trujillo as a monster”: “In the text I saw myself obliged to tone down [atenuar] the cruelty and the criminal excesses of the regime because they would not have been credible to the reader.”34 But for Vargas Llosa, what “is still in the air” goes well beyond the Dominican Republic and its particular history; it has a universal reach. He has repeatedly said in interviews that “what happened in the Dominican Republic is exclusive neither to the country nor to the person of Trujillo.”35 With this novel 195

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he has written “about all Latin American dictators [. . .] about all dictatorships. About what dictatorship is [. . . .] Writing about Trujillo, I have been writing about Fujimori, about Somoza, Pérez Jiménez, Pinochet, and about other dictators that are alive and kicking, unfortunately.”36 For the author, Trujillo is also comparable to the new “species” of democratically elected leaders such as Fujimori in Perú (–), Chávez in Venezuela (–present), and Menem in Argentina (–), distinguished by having a “legal origin [to] justify [their] political existence before the international community.”37 Not even Mexico is exempt from Vargas Llosa’s charges. Referring to the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), he has called it a “perfect dictatorship” (Desafíos a la libertad: –).38 Interestingly, Galíndez had named Trujillo’s regime a “fully modern dictatorship” for keeping parliament in full activity, producing a vast number of laws, and presenting a facade of legality to the international community.39 But, even further, the author has also extended his insights into the phenomenon of power beyond the region, as well as beyond dictatorial regimes: “The universal phenomenon of dictatorship is above the right or left wing [. . . .] [E]ven in the most ancient and consolidated democracies, from time to time, there is always a dictatorial bias”; “[T]he true history of humanity is not the history of democracy but of histories like Trujillo’s.”40 For reviewer Michael Moses, the novel “transcends every ideology and historical period”: “What sets The Feast of the Goat apart from the other great Latin American dictator novels of García Márquez and Carpentier (works that conclude optimistically and, in good socialist fashion, in anticipation that the age of the tyrant is at last coming to an end) is its chilling sense that the past will continue to haunt both the present and the future.”41 As Vargas Llosa’s (and his reviewers’) claims about universal phenomena increase, Trujillo encompasses a variety of possibilities that at first sight are hard to place together. We need then to take seriously the novel’s claim to an articulation of past and present, in order to resist ontological claims about “the nature of power.” We need to examine what in this Trujillo is the structure, rather than the person, in order to account for what enables Vargas Llosa to equate figures as disparate as his Dominican Trujillo and the Argentine Menem; what in his Trujillo transcends all ideologies and might even be compatible with some of the very workings of modern democracies. This implies exploring whether Trujillo’s “universality,” which would transcend the (Western) rhetoric of “civilization or barbarism,” is not a problematic core, a “barbaric center” at 196

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the heart of a specifically modern vision of the “civilized” political space. In other words, Vargas Llosa’s defetishization of Trujillo may have transformed the dictator into a “barbaric” nucleus within the structure of the modern state, which uncovers the modern as “barbaric,” instead of presenting just a modern failure to tame the barbaric. Some reviewers and critics have seen the novel as exposing a structural problem, but rather than analyzing it, they mystify it either as the “major mystery” of all dictatorships—namely, the people’s complicity with tyranny—or as “universal human nature” in relation to the exercise of power.42 Sabine Köllmann, for example, points at the prevalence of themes like hybris, revenge, retribution, and “other archaic impulses” and, following what the author himself, and most reviewers, have also said about the novel, concludes that the novel explores the “devastating effect of totalitarianism on the individual [. . .] and its long-lasting impact on society.”43 Michael Moses sees in Urania’s endless questions about the “inexplicable” servility of the country Vargas Llosa’s “dialogue with liberalism,” which gives him “an insight that was sometimes entertained, but ultimately evaded or ‘dialectically’ overcome in the narratives of his leftwing literary contemporaries: The dictator is the creation of the masses. They are mutually dependent and cannot exist without each other” (“Big Daddy”). Urania’s critical voice (the author’s voice), echoed by reviewers, is obsessed with complicity, even if she constantly opts for an uncritical answer or for a conservative theory of power that moralizes or psychologizes it. She repeatedly asks her father indignantly if her people were “masochists” (), in other words, if they “wanted” oppression. The above readings are ontological visions of power. It suffices to recall here that the Western adage that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” looks suspicious when its “universality” is backed by examples that come only from a limited history of the West. Time and again, the Roman caesars are cited as sources by authors of dictator novels, and The Feast of the Goat is no exception—we even see Trujillo reading Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis? The proverb that power corrupts, however, might not be as meaningful in non-Roman societies, where vengeance might be the only system to regulate violence. In turn, reading the novel’s theories of “voluntary servitude,” to recall Étienne de la Boétie’s famous title, misses that the “total world” of the novel shows repeatedly that servitude was either forced or not seen as servitude. It does not account either for the author’s choice to focus on Trujillo’s power and give such limited space to the various insurgencies against Trujillo during the course of his regime. 197

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Consider, for instance, the mysterious and notable absence of rebel, writer, and later president-elect Juan Bosch, who from the very beginning raised his voice against the general.44 A close look at the necropolitical link between the most powerful and the most powerless that I identified earlier at the heart of the novel, throws a different light on Vargas Llosa’s historicization of Trujillo. To recall Kraniauskas’s observation, dictator novels seem to meditate not on abstract or ontological power but rather on a specific configuration of modern power. I suggested earlier that dictator novels may be read as a symptom emerging in the context of the revolutionary imagination of equality, as a meditation on the tension between universal equality and membership definition for the constitution of the modern political space. We may consider fictional dictators the flesh that envelops a skeleton of power hidden within the closet of the Western modern state, a dictatorial function that rises when the threat of universal equality is revived. Vargas Llosa not only defetishizes Trujillo with his literary realism; he also historicizes the dictator by granting Trujillo himself a historical vision about his own justifications for his refoundation of the state. Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo sees himself as facing the threat of civic dissolution that in the novel even echoes the ripples of the most modern revolution of all: the Haitian threat of black equality. Taking history seriously is neither to unveil the “mystery” of complicity nor to meditate on an essential human “nature.” Neither is it to argue that the author endorses “irrationality” as the ultimate cause for violence. 45 Vargas Llosa’s reinsertion of Trujillo in history does not simply identify a series of what in the author’s eyes are more or less palatable replicants of Trujillo—the new emerging dictators in the region or famous dictators in the West. Rather, it identifies precisely the opposite: a “logic” of political violence, a distinct language of politics as “reasons of state” that emerged in modern times out of the republican language of politics and that entailed a peculiar regulation of violence in the event of politics: a language that expresses the historical emergence of a modern ideology of order, which in the novel is also portrayed as emerging historically, out of the perception of civic dissolution. Vargas Llosa’s historical Trujillo speaks this political language. I want to follow here the Freudian insight that the pathological provides access to the normal. Untamed by law during his entire reign, Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo is the exception to the law become permanent. The magnitude and continuity in the time of Trujillo’s exception shed light on the norm of an otherwise obscured structure of power, on its specific function and violence. 198

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In the necropolitical center of the novel, Vargas Llosa explores not the power of one man but the power that lies in the structure of an exception to the law. Trujillo is structurally located in a zone of indetermination between law and violence, which, from the perspective of the law, is the “wild zone” of power unveiling a split within the law. From the perspective of the state, it produces decisions having the force of law, wrapped in the fictions of survival (“reasons of state”) that protect any power able to identify a threat to its existence (be it a head of state, a prison warden, a corporation, or a city officer who decides on the fate of an illegal immigrant on account of defending “national identity”). This logic of survival might be considered representative of power’s consciousness of its historical nature; that is, these “reasons” respond to the ultimate threat of time—embodied in the presence of the threatening other. Vargas Llosa’s historical Trujillo dwells in this space: in the historical despair of the exception of sovereign power, assailed by the consciousness of its rise and fall. Like the Sadianites, he survives by displacing death onto the other, for which he needs to produce it. His location is against exchange; his politics, necropolitics. He not only illuminates the dynamics of this exclusively political violence but also what might be its ultimate function in modern state structures: to preserve an arbitrary power over life that correlates with the undecidable nature of what appears to be its ultimate object—the negotiation of political constituency. This constituency is permanently in negotiation, and in democratic formations necessarily so, but at foundational moments, when communal boundaries are thrown into crisis, the “reasons” of sovereign power substitute for lack of the reason of a contract, and offer the fantasy of unity in the face of civic dissolution. In other words, they offer the modern ideological equation between state order and civilization. It is noteworthy that Vargas Llosa has long been attracted to the question of individual sovereignty as delineated by Georges Bataille.46 Vargas Llosa interprets Bataille’s concept of sovereignty as the unleashing of la bestia (“the beast”) inside man (Desafíos a la libertad: ): “In doing violence against the Good (putting in danger the laws of the city) man conquers sovereignty” (Contra viento y marea, II: ). For Vargas Llosa, as for Bataille, literature is a privileged outlet to unleash “the beast” without putting the social at risk, thus enhancing Bataille’s “hypermorality.”47 To a certain extent, in this novel Vargas Llosa synthesizes his fascination with individual and state sovereignty. His text thus provides an implicit critique of what the author reads in Bataille. The latter’s sovereign subject is inscribed in the logic of transgression. Vargas Llosa instead 199

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locates the sovereign as well as his subjects beyond the logic of transgression, in the logic of political exception—that is, when transgression becomes the norm. The text’s novelty is to show a violence that belongs to the “internal coherence” of a state of exception through which a ruling class rebuilds its political community against the fiction of its fragmentation—or against the democratic threat of the contingency of its power. Vargas Llosa’s “universalizing” of Trujillo historicizes a lethal core within the normative Western conception of the state, which is as much part of its foundations as of our current global village and its own global version of a state of exception. This lethal core is probably even more visible today, now that the hopes of establishing a welfare state have been dashed across much of the “global south.” My reading goes against what I believe are “fetishizing” critical gestures: Vargas Llosa’s “Trujillo” is neither specific to a Latin American context, nor the heir of the Visigothic, Spanish, or Arab “mighty males” who resist Roman Law. Rather than a resistance to Roman Law, Trujillo’s language represents its heritage. It is the European language of sovereignty that, once granted power over life and death, “saves” the body politic. This is the language that resonates with the often debated doctrines of political theology; the language of those concepts borrowed from Roman Law by early modern theories of state sovereignty. Consider, for instance, the “dictator” and the “paterfamilias” (both concepts appearing especially in Bodin’s formulation of state power). Although the Roman republic was governed by the consulate and the Plebeian Tribunae, in times of political crisis it restored power to an “administrative dictator” [rei gerundae causa] appointed by one consul with the consent of the senate. This dictator was an exceptional magistrate who could exercise unlimited power to save the republic in seasons of emergency (or even to hold elections, celebrate games, or deal with external war), and for a temporary period of time (usually six months, although, as we know, Julius Caesar appointed himself dictator for life). The supreme power of the paterfamilias granted the father notoriously severe rights, for which it is hard to find equivalences in the ancient world. Take for instance the right to expose newborn infants to death with impunity if he so wished: vitae necisque potestas.48 Within this tradition, Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo might speak to the regional specificity of a postrevolutionary, continental American concern with the foundations of power that echo early-modern European foundations. But it also speaks to its haunting presence in our world. As Sophocles revealed of Creon’s power, as Sade revealed of the Sadianites, 200

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Vargas Llosa reveals the internal instability of this exceptional zone of power: the place of the sovereign depends on the threat to its existence. Trujillo’s zone of power confers existence to a unified political entity only by dividing it: by producing a structure of enmity to organize the community. Because this zone of power has been “unbound” by the laws of the community, only the permanent threat of the iconic figure of the internal enemy can grant meaning to it, allowing the sovereign to emerge as a savior. More than in the previous texts, in The Feast of the Goat, this structure of internal enmity is represented as dependent on the production of death, feeding on the imaginary polarity of enemies placed at the structure’s two extremes: the most powerful and the least powerful, both at the risk of becoming life ready to be killed.

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Necropolitics I: From an “African Horde” to a Modern Country Trujillo’s Body Politic and the Haitian Enemy

Before Trujillo’s assassination, recounted in Chapter , we read in the preceding chapter of his massacre of the Haitians. In the novel, the tale of the Haitian genocide divides the dictator’s day in half. In real life, the massacre also established a clear before-and-after in the Trujillo era. Trujillo’s second re-election was compromised and, from then on, he had to govern through puppet presidents.1 Vargas Llosa makes the Haitian genocide the most crucial test for the dictator. Over lunch, Trujillo’s loyal friend, former instructor and former marine Simon Gittleman, asks: “A question, Excellency [. . .] Of all the steps to make this country great, which was the most difficult?” (). Simon’s question concerns foundations: the “making of the country.”2 In the midst of twenty silent guests, Trujillo gives the date of what would become known as “the Holocaust of the Caribbean”: “I can answer your question, Simon [. . . .]: the second of October , in Dajabón” (). On that day, Trujillo argues, he saved the country: “For this country I have stained these [hands] with blood [. . .] [to] keep the blacks from colonizing us again. There were tens of thousands of them, and they were everywhere [. . .] the Dominican Republic would not exist today. The entire island would be Haiti, as it was in . The handful of white survivors would be serving the blacks. That was my most difficult decision in thirty years of government, Simon” (, my emphasis).3 Like the Sophoclean Creon and the Sadean libertines, Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo Molina—“the Chief, the Generalissimo, the Benefactor, the Father of the New Nation, His Excellency” ()4—is served by a fiction of war, that in his eyes calls for an order. Thanks to Trujillo, “that backward little African country” [ese paisito africano] ( []), “a tribe, a mob [una horda, ], a caricature became a Republic” (). Of all of Trujillo’s deadly decisions, Vargas Llosa places Trujillo’s narrative of survival at the center of the dictator’s rhetoric and of the novel. Trujillo’s deci202

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sion was “absolutely necessary [indispensable, ] for the good of the country” (). Trujillo’s solution not to disappear is to make innocent others disappear: “[We ended] a problem that might have wiped us out [. . . .] It’s true, some innocent people died. But we Dominicans recovered our sovereignty (, my emphasis).5 Urania remembers her father’s words warning her about a Haitian cultural and linguistic invasion, which threatened the Dominican Western, Christian, and Hispanic civilization (): “History, at least, will recognize that he has created a modern country and put the Haitians in their place. [. . .] Didn’t he save the Republic from being prostituted a second time by that marauding neighbor? What do five, ten, twenty thousand Haitians matter when it’s a question of saving an entire people?” (). The lives sacrificed were those of impoverished, defenseless, scattered Haitian peasants living on the Dominican side of the border—scarcely a threat to the safety of the nation. Trujillo’s discourse is, nonetheless, that of a “reason of state,” which, for lack of rationality, has to fall into the phantasmatic imagery of survival to ground the logical impossibility of its goal—in this case, making distinctions about purity of culture or blood. As a reason of survival, its real addressee is the domestic community. As we will see, Trujillo’s movement to genocide aims at creating not only the fiction of a Hispanic nation free of African blood but also the distinction between enemies and friends within the Dominican Republic. For the novel shows how the real threat to Trujillo is not a conflict between states. Trujillo’s choice to massacre the Haitians is a cipher for the role that reasons of state play in the resolution of an intrastate conflict: the construction of “a people.” Political sovereignty is prior to any interstate conflict: it is not based upon independence from the neighbors, in this case Haiti. Rather, this independence conceals the creation of a sovereign body within the community—its representative—whose status as independent from other internal communal powers allows it to define the constitution of a unified political body. A close look at the symbolic import of the Haitians helps us to elucidate Vargas Llosa’s construction of the massacre as a defining moment for the dictator. Historians debate the factors that unleashed the genocide and cautiously explain it as a historical revenge against Haiti.6 The latter is indeed part of Vargas Llosa’s records. While galloping along the border, Trujillo conveniently “examine[s] the past,” remembering the first devastating Haitian arrival on Dominican soil in : “I recalled the slaughter in the church of Moca. The burning of Santiago. The march to Haiti by Dessalines and Cristóbal, with nine 203

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hundred prominent men from Moca, who died along the way or were given as slaves to the Haitian military” (). What Trujillo tells his friend Simon—“like in , all the island would be Haiti” ()—is grounded in historical documentation. Cabral tells his daughter that it had been the second time in history. Haiti had indeed already called into question the survival of the Dominican ruling class, as the “Haitian evil” had been a threat to the ruling class all over the Americas. Seeking the unification of the island to protect their war for independence, the Haitian revolutionaries had sent Dessalines to occupy the Spanish part of Hispaniola from  to ; with the same intent, the Haitians colonized the eastern part of the island from  to . According to Dominican historians, the popular classes welcomed the invaders, unlike the ruling class, whose agenda was to protect its plantations. The Haitian “black Jacobins” tried to enforce modernization with economic reforms, such as the abolition of slavery, the confiscation of all church property, and the denial of white land ownership.7 In this respect, the Dominican Creole elite was exceptional among Latin American elites in the nineteenth century: its historical task was to gain not one but two independencies—from Spain and Haiti both. This drew a tortuous itinerary for the consolidation of national identity, in which Haiti played no small part. Once the territory was declared independent from Haiti in , it was handed back to Spain by its first president, Santana. The final independence from Spain happened in , with help from Haiti, and under the leadership of the now heroized generals of Haitian blood, with whom Trujillo identified too: Ulises Heureaux and Gregorio Luperón. The official celebration of independence, however, refers to  and not to the events of , a national tradition obscuring the Haitian involvement in the establishment of the republic. The historical and symbolic role of the Haitians thus presents a complex cluster of ideas: Haitian blood is a sign of equality in its most radical version; Haitian rebels are instrumental in the republic’s final independence, but at the same time represent a threat to the Dominican Creole elite. By the time Trujillo took power, the two nations had been at relative peace for almost one hundred years. To control the Dominican exiles who could plot against him from Haiti, Trujillo developed excellent relations with Haiti.8 Dominican historian Bernardo Vega reports that there was no anti-Haitian publication during the first six years of Trujillo’s regime (Trujillo y Haití: ); Dominican intellectuals began to demonstrate a fondness, though tinged with condescension, for their neighbors. As Moscoso Puello commented ironically, “Lately [. . .] I have 204

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a marked predilection for Haitian mythology. I don’t know if this might be atavism. But it so happens that Ogoun Badagris, papá Legba, Damballa Oueddo, Wangol, are becoming exceedingly familiar to me, and I find the sacrifice of the goat the most natural thing in the world” (quoted in ibid.: ). The only problematic area, the border, had been settled by the U.S. occupation (–), and the treaty was waiting to be signed in . The ratification of the final version of the treaty in , however, collided with Trujillo’s need to renegotiate his political constituency. The novel gives us a hidden text for the centrality of the genocide in terms of Trujillo’s transformation of “a backward little African country” () into a unified “Republic” (). Haitians embody the perfect target for Trujillo in that they can be construed as a threat to internal unity. This is not because they are the foreign enemy. Rather, they represent an internal enemy, an inexhaustible, ineradicable enemy, insofar as they lie in the sphere of blood: Haitians and Dominicans share African ancestry. Haitians are inside every Dominican’s veins;9 their African blood lurks inside both the leaders of independence and every citizen of the republic. They represent not only “impurity” but also the most radical, dangerous threat to the power of the state: African blood, Haitian blood, signifies universal equality. Forever present, the “African country” inside the country poses the question of the Dominican Republic’s political existence in terms of the distinction between two brothers who are virtually indistinguishable—a distinction, that is, that can only be made in the realm of politics, if it is to be made at all. The African brothers are two equal brothers; the Haitians are the best representation of this equality. The only “reason” that can perform this otherwise impossible separation of Haitian blood from Dominican blood is a “reason of state.” Trujillo’s only target at hand for this “reason,” in lieu of the impossible target of the whole population of the island, are the actual Haitian nationals on Dominican soil. Thus, to renegotiate his constituency, Trujillo constructs the fiction of an exceptional pollution, a crisis into which only an arbitrary decision can intervene against the enemy that threatens “Hispanic” blood with equality. Inherited through the miscegenation of slaves and Spaniards, the little “African country” lies so thoroughly inside the body politic that it lies inside the real and literary bodies of Trujillo. The man who restores independence to the republic not only has Haitian blood on his mother’s side but also wears a ring encrusted with a precious stone that, according to legend, a Haitian witch doctor gave him so he would be protected from the enemy ().10 Haitian blood 205

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was warrior blood—to quote Incháustegui Cabral: “By the way, in order to be strong in Santo Domingo you have to have a good amount of Haitian blood in the veins: Luperón, Heureaux, Trujillo” (quoted in Vega, Trujillo y Haití: ). In real life, while signing the final agreement on the border with Haitian president Sténio Vincent in March , Trujillo boasted: “I am proud to declare before my fellow citizens and the world that a high proportion of African blood runs through my veins” (quoted in ibid.: ). In the novel, he boasts of forcing the aristocracy “to lick the ground for a descendant of slaves” (), just as the Haitians had forced the Hispanic elite to do in . Trujillo also replaces the Hispanic ballroom dances, typical of the elite clubs, with music that until then “respectable people said [. . .] was music for blacks and Indians” (): the merengue, an Afro-Caribbean rhythm that some argue originated in Haiti.11 But, for the very same reason that African blood is the warrior blood of universal equality, it is also the only warrior of equal stature to threaten Trujillo. One could even say that Haiti’s equality functions as the utopian alternative against which the modern nation-state closes its frontiers. In real life, Trujillo’s intellectuals were indeed concerned about the impurity of Dominican blood in political terms. As Américo Lugo would put it, a country of mulatos had very little “political skill” (aptitud política, quoted in Vega, Trujillo y Haití: ), and, as had been proposed throughout the Americas by the elites of the times, the only solution was thought to be the “new blood” of white immigration. The problem was not so much framed in the positivistic terminology of a “superior” race: Vega’s compilation of quotations in his Trujillo y Haití (chapter ) expresses praise for the homogeneity of both blacks and whites, alternatively looking to Europe or to Haiti as models of powerful racial unity. Intellectuals agree only on one point: “The Dominican mestizo [. . .] is an inferior type” (Bonó, quoted in ibid.: ). Blood, then, underwrites the question of political unity; it becomes the battlefield on which equality will become identity, instead of equivalence. For Trujillo, the die was cast: as we know, the state always represents an existing order, and its particular, rather than universal, interests. The purity that could grant political identity was that of the Dominican ruling class, which had always been Hispanic. Black for them meant “barbaric African.” Urania’s cousin, Lucindita, does not marry a wealthy doctor, because he was “dark-skinned, they said his mother was Haitian. I’m not prejudiced, but suppose my child was a throwback and came out black as coal?” ().12 It was not a question then of praising the black race as a model but of telling the Dominican audience that a part of itself, a part of the 206

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Dominicans, a “brother” from the same mother Haiti, embodied in the impoverished brother at the frontier, had to be “whitened”—eradicated. Mestizos were contaminated with the black virus of universal equality. Vargas Llosa records how Trujillo starts whitening himself, with his daily grooming routine: he secretly powders his face to disguise the “dark tinge” of his maternal ancestors (). Since the country was an extension of his body, Trujillo’s whitening of his own skin found a parallel in his legal attempts to “de-Africanize” the republic and to “Dominicanize” the border with Haiti. In  he unsuccessfully attempted a general deportation of Haitians. In  he issued laws of registration for all foreigners, and from  to , he passed laws forcing immigrants who were not Caucasoid or American Indians to pay an impossible fee of $ to $ to remain in the Dominican Republic (Balaguer, La Isla al revés: ). Later, Trujillo’s strategy included white European immigration: he encouraged Spanish republican exiles to land on the island, and at a time when the whole world was closing its doors to Jews escaping Germany, these refugees were able to settle near the border with Haiti. In  he would do the same, receiving Hungarians escaping from communism. These Europeans were to “improve” the racial composition of the country (as well as Trujillo’s international image).13 At the border, the mix was seen as an intolerable situation. According to historians and observers at the time, a “new type of person” altogether, a type of “doubtful nationality” known as rayano (ibid.: ), was developing in the area, where “the Spanish language was beginning to give way before the peasant Creole from the West.”14 Worthy, perhaps, of inclusion in novels, a real-life anecdote, not narrated in Vargas Llosa’s book, expresses the confusion concisely: Rafael Mencía Lister remembers that, even in , in Santiago city, near the border with Haiti, his family would receive commercial letters from France “with the incredible postal address of ‘Santiago, République Dominicaine, Afrique.’ I cannot figure out how these letters arrived to their destination” (my emphasis).15 Bloodlines, then, are an exceptional, fantasized confusion allowing Trujillo to construct the fiction of a present danger calling for a political intervention to “clarify” the boundaries of a new political pact, granting identity to one group by identifying and exterminating the other. The remaining problem for Trujillo is to actually elaborate a mark that can identify the “enemy,” and a narrative that can transform it into life ready to be killed. Like Polynices and the Sadianite victims, the Haitians will be killed twice. Whereas Creon transforms Polynices into “carrion for birds” and the Sadean libertines “metamorphose” their victims, 207

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Trujillo makes the Haitians become “insects.” Trujillo locates himself, symbolically and literally, at the border that needs clarification. He sends his collaborators for a report and they come back with an almost apocalyptic vision: The situation is more serious than you were told, Excellency. Thousands upon thousands of them, working on plantations, in empty fields, in settlements. They have displaced Dominican laborers [. . . .] Instead of Spanish, all you hear are the African grunts of Creole [. . . .] Voodoo, santería, and African superstitions are uprooting the Catholic religion, like language and race […]. Pre-Christian savagery is taking over the country of Diego Colón, Juan Pablo Duarte, and Trujillo. Haitian sorcerers have more influence than priests, and medicine men [curanderos, ], more than pharmacists and physicians [. . . .] [T]hey appropriate our sovereignty. […] And our women too. [. . .] Gangs of criminals cross the Masacre River as if there were no customs, checkpoints, or patrols [. . . .] The bands demolish villages and farms like swarms of locusts [. . . .] Imagine a hydra of countless heads, your Excellency. That region is no longer ours [. . . .] [It] now forms part of Haitian barbarism. (–)

In the very first chapter, Urania remembers her father telling her how “the Chief found a small country barbarized by wars among the caudillos [. . .] losing its identity, invaded by its starving, ferocious neighbors [who] imposed their African savagery” (). The Haitian immigrants are reported either as many-headed hydras or as locusts who stage an invasion against innocent Dominican peasants. As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker remind us, the many-headed hydra was a common symbol used by New World colonizers to express “disorder and resistance, a powerful threat to the building of state, empire, and capitalism” ().16 In the report, the Haitian invader is a massive threat to the state: “[It] settles, takes over, displaces, uproots, influences, takes away, robs, razes, invades, perverts, wades, rapes, ruins.” It is a vision of ferocious and hungry animals closing in on their prey, making the place “boil” with the Dantesque heat of their presence: “The towns were all teeming with Haitians” [hervían de haitianos] ( []). Medical metaphors describe the political chaos: a “plague,” “a gangrene [that] had moved very high” (). Defenseless, marginalized immigrants, the Haitians are not killed like humans, nor like invaders, nor like voodoo victims, nor like Christian offerings to any divine law, but in a manner outside of all communal rituals. Not having even a language—they speak only “Creole growls”—they are “pre-Christian savages” against whom Dominicans define themselves. In real life, Balaguer would compare the situation to a literary tale, only with a different ending: un208

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able to tell jokes like the courtesans of the Decameron in the outskirts of Florence when the plague was taking over the city, the Dominicans had to make a decision (quoted in García, La Matanza de los Haitianos: ). Trujillo makes the invasion “happen” for him: it “is” indeed waiting “for a statesman with vision, one whose hand would not tremble” (). For among the Dominicans, nobody decides on anything: “The Army did not do anything? [. . .] The Army does what the Chief orders, Simon, you know that. [. . .] The plague was spreading and no one did anything” (). As Cabral had put it, “Great ills demand great remedies!” (). The moment of the exceptional decision comes at an exceptional place itself, a fiesta on  October in Dajabón.17 With a glass of Carlos I brandy in his hand, Trujillo greets different groups at the reception. The chief of the armed forces enters abruptly with news of a gang of Haitians slipping across the border, and Trujillo loses his patience: “It is the straw that broke the camel’s back” [es la gota que desborda el vaso] ( []). Raising “his thin piercing voice to a hysterical pitch” (), he orders the extermination of all illegal Haitians except for those on the sugar plantations ().18 The officers at the party react with either “surprise or savage joy” (), and Trujillo proceeds by ordering enjoyment: “Let the party continue. Enjoy yourselves!” (). The real addressees of the order to enjoy, given right after an order to the head of the regiment to imprison an officer for his dirty attire, are the military who have to pursue the Haitians, and enjoy. Neither a law nor its absence, Trujillo’s order of extermination is, like Creon’s edict and the Sadianites’ proclamation of death, a decision. The limit nature of the decision is insinuated in the Spanish metaphor (equivalent to the English “straw that broke the camel’s back”) of the glass overflowing—la gota que desborda el vaso (literally, the drop that makes the glass overflow []). Vargas Llosa chooses not the word that in Spanish refers to the spilling of liquid—rebasar—but the word that refers to the surpassing of a border—desbordar. The overflow of borders is redressed with the command to re-establish them. The rise in Trujillo’s voice signals the suspension of law: Trujillo’s men hear his voice and obey without resistance, responding with a confusing noise of their own—“voices buzzing like wasps” (). Trujillo and his men become nothing more than instruments. Self-aggrandizing, Trujillo compares his situation to Truman’s dilemma: “Ask your former President Truman how he felt when he gave the order to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then you’ll know what I felt that night in Dajabón” (). But this reference leaves both his and Truman’s feelings in the dark. At the hour of the decisive 209

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political act of killing, Trujillo, like Truman, inhabits a zone of exception where he is an instrument in service of the “good” of the country; he becomes his hands, which “never trembled” (). For all the savagery constructed around them, the Haitians prove so difficult to distinguish from the Dominicans—they are so “Dominican”—that at the geographical border, only a linguistic detail can carve an inscription into otherwise illegible bloodlines. Exceptional political distinctions call for a structure that can contain an exception analogous to the political one—language. What a sovereign decision is to law, a letter is to language: both decision and letter operate in the undecidable threshold between the legal and illegal, the legible and illegible. The decisive letter that manufactured the Haitian difference was the letter r. One can compare this manufacturing of difference to the fetishistic trait that the Sadianites impose on their victims (virtue). Historians and witnesses testify that on the nights of the killing, “[E]veryone was asked to say the Spanish word perejil, and those who pronounced it pelegil were damned as Haitians and cut down without further ado” (Crassweller, Trujillo: ). Castor (Le Massacre de ) adds another fatal word: “The Haitian cannot pronounce correctly the words ‘perejil’ and ‘cotorrito’ [. . . .] This order would have been given by the military man Frappier, born Dominican and of German descent” ().19 Trujillo’s friend, Simon, cannot believe it: “Is it true about the parsley, Your Excellency, that to distinguish Dominicans from Haitians you made all blacks say perejil? And the ones who couldn’t pronounce it properly had their heads cut off?” (). Trujillo shrugs his shoulders; this is a terrain of decisions, not reasons. Agamben reminds us of the biblical example of the Shibboleth/Sibboleth in Judges :: “There is a case in which the linguistic example’s decisive character and ultimate indistinguishability from the exception show an unmistakable involvement with the power of life and death.”20 The reference is to the Gileadites, who made the Ephraimites say Sibboleth, a word they could not pronounce well, in order to identify them for execution. A Dominican “Shibboleth,” the word perejil functioned as a political passport into life or death. Trujillo’s command is successful, not so much because the extermination is achieved, but mostly because it manages to address his own political constituency, not the Haitians’. While the report prior to the genocide portrays only the Haitians as “animals,” the report on the massacres justifies the intervention of the army, addressing the real issue for Trujillo—that it is the Dominicans who need discipline: “Everybody began to hunt down the Haitians. Campesinos, merchants, and officials [. . .] hung them and beat them to death. They burned 210

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them sometimes. In many places the Army had to intervene to stop the excesses. There was a lot of resentment against them” (, my emphasis). The army thus “had to” confront both the Haitian “animals” and the “resentful,” “excessive” Dominican peasants. The officers carefully disguised their intervention by using machetes and not firearms to pretend that it was not they who killed, but the members of “a spontaneous peasant movement” (). So the army constructs the episode both as a Haitian invasion and, at the same time, a Dominican peasant revolt in need of disciplinary action. Barbarism breeds barbarism: the Haitian massacre is not a question of civilization against barbarism, nor of the Haitians’ legality or illegality. It is a question of how Trujillo binds anew his political constituency by exterminating a brother, a neighbor—the Haitian ancestor, the Dominican-Haitian. Like Poly­ nices and the Sadean victims, the Haitians are chosen because they can be easily constructed as an internal enemy that justifies the sovereign’s function. They dwell on Dominican soil and both metaphorically and literally inside Dominican blood. They are the omnipresent warrior for universal equality borrowed from biology and history: the renewed ghost of universal equality that the “black Jacobins” set forever in the modern constitution of all American states. Crassweller would write in his account of the massacre that “these scenes were engraved forever in the memory of many Dominicans, as if summoned by Doré out of Dante” (); in the novel, Urania remembers the message vividly. For the real addressees of Trujillo’s message are the Dominicans. As Enzensberger reminds us, an external enemy only conjures up an internal one: “The only thing that is feared [. . .] is the threat to the rule which emanates from the subjects themselves.”21 The Haitians, who are either dead or too poor to really invade, who have been defeated already before being exterminated, cannot obey. The lesson is for the only ones who can obey—the Dominicans—who need to know who the sovereign is and who his friends are, for in Trujillo’s government, “[F]riends and enemies do not mix” ().

Anatomy of a Regime: The Permanent State of Exception and the Dominican Enemy To separate friends from enemies, the novel’s portrayal of the genocidal whirlwind against the Haitians reveals the core of Trujillo’s mission to bind the country—that is, to “save” it not only from the “plague” but also from what he constructs as civic dissolution tout court. Vargas Llosa does not spare Trujillo 211

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in any single chapter of the fictions of chaos that provide a constant backdrop to his rule. The binding violence unleashed against the Haitians is repeated against local warlords. As Trujillo tells Antonio de la Maza, member of a powerful regional warlord family: “I’ve put an end to the power of the regional caudillos, including the De la Mazas. Enough shooting. We have to rebuild the country” (). To immunize the nation from caudillo wars, Trujillo follows the oldest tradition in modern politics: he inoculates the seed of war in the city by concentrating all wars in his own hands. For the people, as Tony Imbert puts it in the novel, the “Goat was the savior of the Nation, the man who ended the caudillo wars, did away with the threat of the new invasion from Haiti, called a halt to a humiliating dependency on the United States [. . . .] [He gave] this country the most powerful Armed Forces in the Caribbean” ().22 And, as if reality exceeded fiction, in real life Trujillo ended up saving Santo Domingo: an almost Machiavellian touch of natural fortune helped Trujillo start from scratch. Not even a month had passed since Trujillo took his oath as president on  August  when on  September the hurricane San Zenón “wiped out the capital city,” as Sadhalá recalls (). The storm killed ,, wounded ,, left , homeless, and destroyed , public buildings. In the novel, Urania’s father remembers how Trujillo reconstructed the city as the modern and prosperous metropolis Ciudad Trujillo (). At the center of the cyclone, as if he were the eye of the storm, controlling the disaster from the only point of stillness, Trujillo’s hand and voice thus emerge to rescue the city from “barbaric” nature and warlords. The fantasy of a civil collapse is a crucial part of his location at the immune center of the storm, much in the same way that this fantasy was crucial for the theorists of modern sovereignty—Bodin, Machiavelli, and Hobbes—and much in the same way as it was crucial for the Creole elites of the new American states after the wars of independence. That this fantasy is predicated upon the belief in a savior, almost in a religious sense, in the spirit of the remnants of theology in modern secular politics, is best staged in Trujillo’s most intimate conversation with Balaguer. It is a conversation between two giants. Trujillo treats Balaguer as an equal: he sees in him something “inhuman” (). It is the only moment in the novel when Vargas Llosa allows his Trujillo to hesitate. Trujillo recalls Balaguer’s speech “God and Trujillo: A Realistic Interpretation” on the nation’s survival thanks to him, and he asks Balaguer: “Do you still believe that God delegated to me the responsibility of saving this country?” (); “Why was I chosen?” (). For all of Trujillo’s doubts, Balaguer is unequivocal: “It is not 212

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possible to be an atheist [. . . .] Not if one has a vocation for public service and engages in politics” (). The question is what kind of politics demands such an unquestioning conviction. In real life, San Zenón helped Trujillo start his project precisely on an immune terrain: on a legal suspension of law—a state of exception. Historian and opponent Jesús de Galíndez, later assassinated by Trujillo, reports that the natural disaster was useful “for suspending constitutional guarantees at the right moment. Some even say that among the bodies cremated without identification in the Plaza Colombina might have been several political prisoners who disappeared forever at that time” (Era of Trujillo: ). Almost in passing, Galíndez adds that once Trujillo brought “peace” and “absolute order” to a country “characterized by repeated rebellions and civil wars [. . .] the only unexplained deaths are those of a political character” (ibid.: –). While Galíndez claims that this was the only historical moment during which a state of emergency was declared, given that later “it was not necessary” (ibid.: ), Vargas Llosa shows through flashbacks into Trujillo’s thirty years of power that “it was not necessary” because his state of exception was never really lifted. Unquestioning belief in salvation depends on unquestionable belief in political dissolution. In order to remain its savior, Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo is in permanent need of refounding his body politic. If the imagined danger of extinction were absent, Trujillo’s saving mission would have no basis; thus, for the sovereign to retain power, he must produce a life-threatening enemy. Motivated neither by greed nor corruption, as has been suggested by reviewers, the dictator is galvanized by this apocalyptic inimical machinery that preserves his location against exchange and organizes his island as a state of exception become permanent. Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo, insofar as he embodies a function within a structure, is only fully understood through his preemptive capacity to produce enemies according to the needs of power. He could “smell the traitors out [husmear, ] before they even knew they were going to betray him” (, my emphasis), a capacity he acquired during his training with the U.S. Marines and that now enables him to behave in politics “like a Marine” (). We almost tire of reading of Trujillo’s deciding who can live and who must die, at home and abroad. The internal enemy proves intractable, and in the end unbeatable: not only is a change in sovereignty due sooner or later but it is this enemy that justifies the immunity of this type of sovereignty. This is a war not among tribes, but within the tribe. As Enzensberger puts it, it is not that for the sovereign “everyone can 213

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become a traitor [. . .] everyone must become a traitor” (Politics and Crime: ). The killing of the Haitians means that every Dominican, in Trujillo’s eyes, can and must “become a Haitian”; everyone can and must be ready to be killed. The “becoming Haitian” of every Dominican is the black color of universal equality against which Trujillo’s “whitening” is erected. This is the ultimate meaning of the intractable internal enemy. Johnny Abbes summarizes it all to Lieutenant Amadito García Guerrero after asking him to prove his loyalty to Trujillo by killing a man. What is at stake “is not to allow the enemy within to raise his head [. . . .] ‘Because as long as the enemy within is weak and disunited, it does not matter what the foreign enemy does [. . . .] In fact, it unites Dominicans like a fist around the Boss’ ” (, my emphasis). The special blood of the enemy within has, for Trujillo, an exceptional productivity: cement of a bonding, it unifies the Dominicans, so they can face the external enemy. Political cohesion is predicated not upon defeating an external enemy but upon the dissolution of the multitude into One. Thus, while Trujillo is alive, nobody on the island will be fully safe; not even Trujillo’s best friends: Trujillo kills his comrade, General Vázquez Rivera, “that magnificent giant [. . .]—a Marine damn it—who had always served him loyally” (). Not even the foreign borders will be respected, for his is an “absolutely” sovereign state. As is known, national sovereignty is incompatible with international law. Vargas Llosa records José Almoina’s shooting in Mexico (), Jesús de Galíndez’s kidnapping in New York (), and the near killing of Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt in Caracas ().23 Chief of Intelligence Johnny Abbes had operated swiftly in Cuba, México, Guatemala, New York, Costa Rica, and Venezuela (). As if recording the death toll to enter the dream of modernity, Trujillo’s pimp reminds Cabral of Trujillo’s great job: “Never resting [. . .] [c]onstantly making decisions that determine the life and death of three million Dominicans. In order to bring us into the twentieth century” (, my emphasis). Ciudad Trujillo is thus “made wary by fear and servility,” its soul “shrinking” in terror (). Urania conveys Vargas Llosa’s obsession with the mystery of “the surrender of body, soul and conscience by millions of Dominicans to a single man” (). A Hobbesian mystery, we could say: the mystery of the first formulation of the social contract as a “renunciation” of violence. Urania cannot decide if “this inexplicable servility” was because of “cowardice” () or “masochism” (). Nonetheless, this can only be a mystery if the social is seen as a contract made on the basis of the rational capacity of an autonomous subject—or else if a history of resistance 214

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is not accounted for. While the novel pays scarce attention to resistance against Trujillo during his regime, it masterfully reconstructs how Trujillo’s need to produce enemies almost transforms the island into that “everything is possible” of a camplike structure. For Costa Rican jurist Fernando Fournier: Everything, truly and literally, absolutely everything was possible in the Dominican Republic. It was possible to be woken up at three in the morning and be deported in pajamas. It was possible, following an anonymous denunciation or a personal vengeance, to be submitted to the most refined tortures, maybe just because of a comment made in passing, like for instance, that life might have become again something precious. There were electric chairs to extract confessions with electric discharges, cigarettes put out on the skin, women raped before their husbands’ eyes, tanks full of pestilent water where prisoners were submerged to their mouth during hours or whole days, ponds that contained sharks in which prisoners were thrown in the presence of Rafael Trujillo junior and his friends; casements constructed expressly for viewing the tortures, rodeos with hunting dogs prepared to cut off with a bite the genital organs of the victims, and concentration camps on distant islands where there was, so to speak, nothing to eat.24

As if the structure of the Sadean Castle of Silling had been historically taken to its realization, the text invites the reader to imagine that what rules is not law but, in Galíndez’s words, “the will of the Benefactor” (La Era de Trujillo: ). Embodying at once the Machiavellian prince who knows the lesser evil, the Hobbesian Leviathan that can dispel the state of dissolution of the city, and the Schmittian sovereign who decides on the exception, Trujillo concentrates all violence immunizing the wolf-men by becoming the only wolf-man of man living in the city. Nowhere in the novel is this better conveyed than in the conversation in which Trujillo explains to Balaguer the difference between their two functions in the political sphere. Trujillo acts where the law withdraws; Balaguer acts within the law: You, President Balaguer, are lucky to be concerned only with the best part of politics [. . .] Laws, reforms, diplomatic negotiations, social transformations [. . . .] But governing has a dirty side without which what you do would be impossible. What about order? Stability? Security? [. . .] [D]on’t tell me you don’t know how peace is achieved. With how much sacrifice and how much blood. Be grateful that I have allowed you to see the other side, and devote yourself to the good, while I, Abbes, Lieutenant Peña Rivera and others kept the country quiet, so you could write your poems and your speeches. (, my emphasis)

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The wording with which Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo separates his field of action from that of the law is worthy of note: the lawyer and poet Balaguer can act because he is permitted “to turn a blind eye”—in Spanish, mirar al otro lado, literally “to look to the other side.” Both “sides” illuminate the structure of the political state as split between a legal order and that which allows for its existence. As for the “permissions” for its existence, the law has nothing to say; it turns a blind eye. Vargas Llosa has Trujillo’s faithful lawyers, also writers— Agustín Cabral and Henry Chirinos—legally encode Trujillo’s realm of action by giving “the appearance of juridical necessity [fuerza jurídica] to the most arbitrary decisions of the Executive or refuting, with devastating [demoledora] logic, every proposal that Trujillo disapproved of ” (): the wording in Spanish is the “force” of legality and the “demolishing” logic of Trujillo’s refusals. Peace, order, stability, and security are not the result of laws but of the law’s looking away. For order to exist, there has to be a lawful lack of law. In real life, the legal facade was so well orchestrated by Trujillo that Galíndez chose Trujillo’s regime as the prototype of the new legalistic, “nonideological” dictatorship.25 It is thus not enough to read in this literary Trujillo the personal concentration of power of a generic “dictator” or a “tyrant.” The exceptional place that Trujillo occupies is structural; Trujillo is able to decide upon life without legal mediation, not because he is “barbaric,” but because his place is barbaric; it is a place from which the law has legally withdrawn. Perhaps the most telling way in which Vargas Llosa points at the structure, and not only at the person of Trujillo, is in his description of what happens after Trujillo dies. Without the “Boss,” the lawyer Balaguer is forced to look at this side of things in search of his legitimation. He first turns to Trujillo’s son, Ramfis, commander-in-chief of the armed forces: “General, if you don’t want power, help me to exercise it” (). But when Ramfis leaves the country, Balaguer has to face Trujillo’s brothers, who one morning brutally enter Balaguer’s office with twenty-seven armed men and ask him to resign. Looking away from the law, Balaguer invites Trujillo’s brothers to look with him out the window into the shoreline: He walked to the window and pointed to the ocean. It was a brilliant morning. Facing the coastline one could see very clearly, gleaming in the sun, the silhouettes of three American warships. Their names were not visible, but one certainly could admire the long cannons on the Little Rock, a cruiser equipped with missiles, and on the aircraft carriers Valley Forge and Franklin D. Roosevelt, all aimed at the city. ()

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For Balaguer, the morning is radiant—it is his triumph. The names of the ships cannot be seen but their actual weapons can. The law withdraws from the scene and unveils the guns: it is only the writer who can recall the names, the rules, the laws at the quiet of his desk. Balaguer’s new regime survives with the same split structure, the same “confused dualism”: “A civil government led by Balaguer [. . .] and a military and police power, headed by Ramfis [. . .] with the same impunity as when the Chief was alive” (). It is the same triumph that thirty years before had taken Trujillo to power. In his Holocausto en el Caribe (–), Aquino García narrates the real-life anecdote of Colonel Cutts—Trujillo’s former chief during the U.S. invasion and later a special envoy from the Department of State sent to dissuade Trujillo from taking power by staging a coup. Cutts meets with Trujillo at the Haitian border. It is another episode at a border whose metaphorical value could have been material for Vargas Llosa’s novel. Trujillo is not dissuaded; Cutts looks at his guards’ machine guns and asks, “Do you have a lot of those?” “Enough,” Trujillo responds. “Well, go ahead, I believe everything is going to be all right,” Cutts calculates. We might add that the violent triumph of the split structure of governance that sustains the victories of Balaguer and Trujillo might entail the same “order” of displaced violence that had led centuries before to the violent triumph of the emerging modern empires of the Atlantic. These empires managed to displace the violence of zones of exception onto their colonial plantations, for instance on the island of Hispaniola, in order to maintain at home the rhetoric of the “contract” that would tame all violence, and postulate the doctrine of the natural rights of all humans. This “order” of displaced violence succinctly appears summarized in the quotation that Aimé Césaire adds in his  Discourse on Colonialism: “[F]rom a certain Carl Siger, author of an Essai sur la colonisation (Paris, ): The new countries offer a vast field for individual violent activities, which, in the metropolitan countries, would run up against certain prejudices, and which, in the colonies, have greater freedom to develop and, consequently, to affirm their worth. Thus to a certain extent the colonies can serve as a safety valve for modern society” ().26 Today we are, perhaps, not far from what I would call an “economy of displacements” of violence, taking place at the urban level, as global financial centers preserve their rule of law while their peripheries both in the North and in the South dwell in the exceptional daily violence of economic exclusion in their megaslums, ghettoes, shanty towns, shack settlements.27 217

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The Internal “Logic” of a Lack of Law, or Political Exception Silling’s “other-cide” and “altrucide” are magnified to the detail in The Feast of the Goat. The novel thinks through a state of exception and the “logic” of its violence to the minutia: systems of exchange are replaced by the creation of icons—the icons of the enemy—and the instruments of the voice and the gaze. Like Creon and the Sadianites, Trujillo sets out to destroy funeral and kinship rituals while he orchestrates his world with voices and gazes, and respects only the rules of alliance—political enmity and friendship. A suspension of law is first and foremost the lifting of the legal protection of life from violence. If extended to all “law-bound” systems that protect life, what is suspended is the symbolic order, which unifies the community by establishing a world of shared, predictable meanings offering a sense of future, a fabric of continuity necessary to social life. Trujillo’s targeting of symbolic nets not only eliminates resistance but also produces a world of such unpredictability that Urania’s niece, Marianita, can summarize it with a universal literary reference: it is Kafkaesque—“It’s just that it seems so incredible, Aunt Urania. Like something in The Trial, the Orson Welles movie they showed in the Cinema Club. Anthony Perkins is tried and executed, and he never finds out why” (). Like Creon and the Sadianites, Trujillo shoots at funeral and kinship rites. A scene in the novel provides the perfect condensation of both cases in one: the loyalty test of Trujillo’s men. When the still-inexpert Lieutenant Amadito asks Chief of Intelligence Johnny Abbes where they will bury the man he was just forced to kill, Abbes replies: “They’ll throw him in the ocean [. . . .] [It] is the advantage of these rocks [. . .] [f]ull of sharks, waiting. They eat them in seconds. It’s really something to see. They leave no trace. Sure, rapid, and clean, too” (). Not only do the sharks and the waters leave no trace of the corpse, but the cliff is also impossible to recognize: Amadito could not reconstruct the route toward the rocks (). As Polynices was carrion for birds, Trujillo’s victims provide carrion for sharks. Yet the full meaning of Amadito’s loyalty test lies not in the elimination of funeral rites, but of those of kinship. Johnny Abbes makes sure that Amadito knows whom he has killed: “[H]ow easy it would be if you could do these things without knowing who was involved [. . .] the younger brother of your ex-girlfriend, I believe. Luisa Gil, wasn’t it?” (). Amadito remembers “the night when his world crumbled,” for he knew that he had entered Trujillo’s 218

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circle: Luisa never could have forgiven him, neither could he (). Spilled blood seals stronger loyalties than bloodlines. Fuel for Urania’s storytelling, Trujillo’s rending of kinship obsesses Vargas Llosa throughout the novel. Trujillo’s twofold strategy is, in true patriarchal fashion, addressed to bonding and exchanging among men. For patriarchy to function, a pact among men has to be established—whatever role the women will be assigned within it. Trujillo perverts the pact with an inversion: women will not be exchanged but accumulated by him, men will be forbidden to bond but with him. To that end, Trujillo devises two interventions: an “exquisite and secret” game to produce “perpetual insecurity” () among his men, and the right to use his men’s women—not so much for his pleasure, but rather to prevent male bonding tout court. Trujillo’s “exquisite game” keeps his men “busy protecting their backs from the knives of enemies who were, in public, their friends” (). With no reason and no warning, Trujillo changes life destinies, unpredictably drawing men in and out of his circle, swiftly dispossessing them of jobs, bank accounts, houses, even throwing them into jail, until they understand that their life depends on their bond with Trujillo. Vargas Llosa, as always, is faithful to the historical record; Enzensberger notes that Trujillo’s “constant brusque shifts [were] as much arbitrary as systematic” ().28 To this intrigue, Trujillo adds his “use” of women to expropriate any vestige of power that his men might extract from patriarchy; as Urania understands, Trujillo could not care about women as women because he had them all (). Urania is haunted by the image of Don Froilán, Trujillo’s secretary of state, whom Trujillo would send out on diplomatic missions while his glamorous wife had to offer her services to the “Boss”; “Crassweller himself mentioned it” ().29 Senator Chirinos had told Urania in New York, not recognizing who she was, that at a party Trujillo had boasted to his exclusively male audience about the women who had given him “the energy to straighten out the country [enderezarlo]” (my translation), especially Froilán’s wife, who had been “the best of all” (). Froilán, “white as a sheet,” had had to celebrate Trujillo’s speech “heroically” (). The story with which the book opens and closes—that of Urania and her father—epitomizes Trujillo’s two strategies. Told from Cabral’s point of view, the story is the dissolution of male bonds. The quotation by Ortega y Gasset, which he carries in his notebook and reads the day he has fallen, summarizes well the precariousness of the life that he, as well as all of Trujillo’s collaborators, lives: “Nothing that a man has been, is, or will be, is something he has been, is, or 219

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will be forever; rather, it is something he became one day and will stop being the next” (). Why Trujillo has “wipe[d] out his existence overnight” () is a mystery both to Cabral and to his closest circle. Cabral will never know what exactly happened, for in fact, there is nothing to know. Wrongly accused of misusing public funds, Cabral will undergo one of Trujillo’s “baths of reality,” for he had succumbed to the “idiocy of believing himself safe” (). And not even Trujillo knows if this is a wise measure: “Had it been frivolous to put an efficient servant like Cabral to the test at this difficult time for the regime? Perhaps” (). From her point of view, perhaps more than the tale of a rape, Urania’s story concerns the loss of the promise of a father. When Urania realizes that her beloved father has agreed to send her to Trujillo’s Mahogany House, she decides never to forgive him. With acrimony, Urania concludes that his fall “was worse for him than if they had killed the person he loved best” (). To narrate ruptured kinship, Urania’s theme is rape: the rape of Trujillo’s collaborators’ wives; the rape of the girl in her school, Rosalía Perdomo, by Trujillo’s son; her own rape; and her father’s fall, which is another kind of violation. Urania stands for Ciudad Trujillo’s women, and conversely, Ciudad Trujillo is a woman; abandoned by fathers and husbands who occupy themselves with Trujillo, raped by Trujillo, the women’s fate is the fate of the city. In fact, Urania’s very “unfortunate” () name pertains only in Ciudad Trujillo; in the United States, where she now lives, nobody calls her Urania. She is “Uri, Miss Cabral, Mrs. Cabral, Doctor Cabral” (). Urania’s name—in Spanish the female gender of the word for uranium, uranio—is to the flesh and blood woman what the name “Ciudad Trujillo” is to the political city. The narrator reveals from the start that Urania’s parents “had not done her a favor”: “[H]er name suggested a planet, a mineral”—anything but the slender woman she was (). Her “ridiculous” name was “inflicted” on her at birth ()—an injury soon compared to another christening. Another father, “the father of the fatherland,” renames the old city of Santo Domingo “Ciudad Trujillo,” inflicting the same kind of wound that Urania’s parents had inflicted on her: “Urania! As absurd as insulting old Santo Domingo de Guzmán by calling it Ciudad Trujillo. Could that have been her father’s idea too?” ().30 Through Urania’s monologue, we know that virgin daughters are taken by their own fathers to Trujillo’s bed and that wives are visited by Trujillo in person. Urania wonders if her mother was also visited by Trujillo before Urania was born; might she be also Trujillo’s child? (). Urania’s rape points toward 220

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incest, and her account of her father toward his having become Trujillo’s “partner.” He never remarries after the death of his wife, not out of loyalty to Urania but to Trujillo: “To prove to him that nothing or no one was more important in the life of Agustín Cabral” (). What has happened between Cabral, Trujillo, and Urania is the radical shift in kinship by which city bonds have been dissolved but violently rebound to the (body) of the leader-state. The arrested circulation of women among men (the perversion of traditional patriarchy) has made Trujillo the “owner” of women, the (incestuous) “father” of the children of the nation, and the “husband” of the men of the nation (his mother, “Mamá Julia,” is the “mother” of the nation). He is not only the Padre de la Patria Nueva (“father of the new fatherland”), a common metaphor used by sovereigns, or for that matter, the real father of an estimated forty children—a “sire of thoroughbreds” (). He also extends his fatherhood to all the children of the country () by becoming a compadre with peasants and workers, offering money in collective baptisms of a hundred children once a week. In each Dominican house a plaque reads “In this house, Trujillo is the Chief ” (). Tellingly, Enzensberger notes that Trujillo’s twenty-five years in power were officially named “the silver anniversary of Trujillo with his fatherland” (Las Casas y Trujillo: ). The country is Trujillo’s wife, or, to use his terms, his “harem”; he sees his men like “women in a harem competing to be the favorite” (). For Trujillo, Cabral is not, as Balaguer interprets, “suicidal” after his fall () but rather behaves “like a woman in love abandoned by her man” (). Trujillo himself at times takes feminized romantic roles. Manuel Alfonso tells Cabral that the “Boss” is “hurt by him” because Cabral has “grown colder”: “You know the Chief. He likes gestures. [. . . He] never refused the challenges of love” (). No bond expresses this homosocial pact better than that between Trujillo and Chief of Intelligence Johnny Abbes, who is allowed to see Trujillo “at any hour of the day or night at the National Palace or his private residence and be received immediately” (). Abbes has killed so many that he tells Cabral: “I can’t have friends [. . . .] “[My] friends and enemies are the friends and enemies of the regime” (). His only friend is his wife, a woman to whom Trujillo does not feel attracted, and whom Johnny Abbes does not love—thus, a safe bond that does not come between him and the “Boss.” There can be no betrayal between them; as Trujillo says to him mockingly, “I am [. . .] the only one who does not hate you or dream about killing you. We are married till death do us part” (, my emphasis). 221

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Thus, no other bonds count but the ones Trujillo redesigns around his presence. The subtext of the Hobbesian imagination is taken to its extreme: city dissolution is prohibited, but community is also prohibited unless it takes the state for its goal. In the absence of law, as in Silling, what glues Trujillo’s community to him are voices and gazes. The same “brutal, cacophonous symphony” that torments Urania on the streets from the moment she sets foot in Santo Domingo () has tormented Trujillo’s men, in the form of his voice, during his regime. The pitch of his voice and the intensity of his gaze are irresistible: their force is both physical and psychic. Vargas Llosa alternates verbs such as “perforate, scrape, tear apart, scare, annihilate” to describe Trujillo’s gaze. Echoing the literary tradition that goes back to the “stabbing gaze” of Sarmiento’s “barbaric Facundo,” Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo has a “knifelike gaze” () that “no one could endure”; it can do inhuman things, traverse consciousness and read people’s thoughts, desires, and yearnings, “stripping them naked” (). With his “poking eyes,” Trujillo performs a “visual inquisition” (). Like his gaze, his high-pitched voice “paralyzes” his interlocutors (). One by one, all his men are subjugated by Trujillo’s bodily weapons. Lieutenant Amadito laughs at the talk of the power of Trujillo’s gaze and voice, but it suffices him to enter Trujillo’s office to feel “electrified” () and begin to tremble and sweat as Trujillo’s gaze scrutinizes his uniform (). Antonio de la Maza, the most fierce and arrogant of all his men, who had fought against Trujillo in the hills in , remembers, twenty-eight years later, “that highpitched cutting voice [. . .] those penetrating eyes whose gaze he—with all his pride—could not endure” (). Determined to kill Trujillo after his brother’s murder, Antonio is only a meter away from the dictator but “incapable of acting on his desire”: “It was something more subtle and indefinable than fear: it was the numbing of determination, reason, and free will, which this man [. . .] with his thin high-pitched voice and hypnotist’s eyes, imposed on Dominicans” (, my emphasis). Antonio leaves Trujillo’s office with the sensation of having been absent, hypnotized, emptied of himself: “Had that been him?” (). The same had happened to General Pupo Román, another man of courage (), and to Urania at Trujillo’s house: “That gaze emptied me, left me a hollow skin. I was no longer myself ” (). Trujillo does with his gaze what he has not been able to do otherwise: “His eyes froze her. She could not move. Trujillo’s eyes ran over her, [. . .] and glared at her again [y volvió a fulminarla]” ( []). As much as Trujillo’s eyes and voice paralyze the other, Trujillo’s narrative voice enacts the elimination of the other. Trujillo neither doubts nor enters into 222

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dialogues; his is a world of necessity with no other as interlocutor. Trujillo’s monologic discourse is plagued with rhetorical questions that he immediately abandons or that confirm information he already has.31 And when the shadow of a doubt appears, he speculates to himself: “Was that the reason the ex marine had mentioned the name of someone who was out of favor with the regime, as every Dominican who read The Public Forum knew? Well, perhaps Simon Gittleman didn’t read El Caribe” (). As I have said, the only moment when Vargas Llosa decides to put Trujillo in anxious, self-reflecting doubt concerns his relation to the higher command from whom he has received his mission, for whom he is an instrument. This is a moment of “weakness, to which he never succumbed” (); Trujillo surrenders before the possibility that this knowledge lies outside of him, in Balaguer, whom he supposes knows how and why Trujillo’s life has been made into an instrument of politics. Balaguer can make sense of political arbitrariness only by projecting agency somewhere else. Like the Sadean libertines who see themselves as instruments of Nature, Trujillo and Balaguer transform themselves into instruments of God. The rest of humanity becomes an instrument of their politics. The sphere of the political manifested in the state of exception thus appears to entail utter instrumentalization of human life. Now we can reread the servile behavior that troubles Urania and understand how so many characters in the novel seem to exist in a twilight zone between life and death. They have been emptied of themselves, much in the way that General Pupo Román is a “voodoo zombie,” unable to make a decision in the crucial hours after Trujillo’s death: “The immense fear [. . .] had kept him ‘mounted’—the term used for those who were drained of themselves and occupied by spirits in Voodoo ceremonies” (). Urania walks around the city led by “her steps, not her will” (); she has been turned into a “desert” by the regime (). Cabral’s social nonexistence has turned into a cerebral hemorrhage that “brought him a living death” (); Balaguer is “without his own light, like the moon, illuminated by Trujillo, the sun” (); after killing Luisa’s brother, Amadito is an “ambulatory despair”: “While the Goat lived, he would not” (). Antonio Imbert feels that the idea of killing Trujillo possesses him like a “hermit crab” (); Antonio de la Maza realizes that Trujillo has “been destroying him gradually for so many years” (). And in the workplace, everybody fears Trujillo’s death threats: “That’s why my managers, administrators, accountants, engineers, veterinarians, foremen, et cetera, et cetera [. . .] don’t steal from me either. [. . . That’s] why the enterprises 223

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[have turned] the Dominican Republic into a modern, prosperous country” (). Before the absolute threat of civic dissolution, violence, and terror rebind the city, the permanent state of exception yields an “efficient example” of the development from “that little African horde” to a “Republic.” Trujillo indeed echoes the legendary Freudian terrible father of the primitive horde, as much as he echoes Hobbes’s wolf-man of men, the Leviathan.32 As in the Freudian myth, he possesses all women and dominates his sons. The Freudian myth concentrates on the killing of the father so that a society of exchange is born. But the novel reads before the scene of the myth, into the advent of the horde, concentrating on the rise of the all-powerful father that stops the fratricidal war of the horde and changes the nature of the war, as he lurks behind the city walls while binding it. The primordial act by which “the horde is a horde” is not exchange, but rather its suspension; its cohesion resulted from binding violence instead of binding law. This terrible father, this wolf-man, who restrains the Freudian sons, the Hobbesian “wolf-men of men,” depends on being permanently threatened by the sons, the wolf-men, he restrains: the structure of enmity that organizes his power is a game toward and within death. While he is a potential enemy to everyone, everyone is his potential enemy. Thus Trujillo must also “become a Haitian.” But, as the novel shows, that his killing results in the Freudian advent of the law, in a renunciation of the wolf-men’s violence, is just one more of our modern fictions: nothing in it is necessary.

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Necropolitics II: Rebonding the Nation Trujillo’s Body Natural and the Specularity of Enmity

On  May , Trujillo meets his death. His assassination mirrors his extermination of the Haitians. In chapter , Trujillo kills the Haitians and founds his nation; in chapter , the conspirators kill Trujillo and found Balaguer’s new nation. As a political body, Trujillo is killed the way he killed, by extralegal means. His sovereignty lies, to paraphrase Agamben, in his ability to constitute not only others, but also himself as life ready to be killed.1 Thus Trujillo’s body stands in relation to his people as his people stand vis-à-vis him: Trujillo must become “a Haitian.” Just as Trujillo “saved” the nation from “the Haitian plague,” the conspiracy will “save” it again—this time by animalizing Trujillo. Salvador Sadhalá, the only Catholic member of the conspiracy, dubs Trujillo “the Beast” after reading in Thomas Aquinas that “God looks with favor upon the physical elimination of the Beast if a people is freed thereby” (). His “church will pardon him”: “[S]taining his hands with blood would wash away the blood that the ‘Beast’ was spilling in his homeland” (). Despite reviewers’ claims to the contrary, the rendition of Trujillo’s assassination in The Feast of the Goat is far from the “humanizing gesture” that emphasizes the sovereign’s vulnerability in the dictator-novels of the s. Whatever humanity can be seen in the portrayal of Trujillo’s decline, the moment of his utmost fragility does not reveal a “private” humanity. His utmost “fragility” is his susceptibility to the exceptional violence that organizes the (public) zone of his power; even in the intimacy of his impotence, he manages to terrorize his last victim, Urania, who decades later still trembles at the thought of him. Unlike Carpentier’s, Roa Bastos’s, and García Márquez’s dictators, whose deaths are natural and private, Trujillo dies a public death. Like Antigone and Polynices, like all the victims at Silling, like all of Trujillo’s victims, Trujillo’s body is withdrawn from humanity by its being “already dead” to political violence. 2 In-

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deed, Trujillo’s narrative voice insists on “constituting” him as a body that can be killed politically: he is not like other Latin American dictators—“Batista, or that pig Pérez Jiménez, or that hypocrite Rojas Pinilla, or even the slick-haired General Perón. He was not going to spend his last years as a retired statesman overseas” (). Balaguer clarifies: “The world may see Trujillo dead, but not a fugitive like Batista, an escapee like Pérez Jiménez, or a prisoner like Rojas Pinilla. The Dominican statesman follows a different ethic and comes from a different lineage” ().3 When President Eisenhower sends a diplomatic mission to Santo Domingo asking Trujillo to cede power, Trujillo complains that he has been confused with those other leaders: “They’ll only get me out when I am dead” (). In the same way the conspiracy, which is the more literal embodiment of the internal enemy in the novel, must murder Trujillo in an act of political exception, rather than of ritual sacrifice or legal proceeding. When General “Pupo” Román, chief of the armed forces, hears that the conspirators want an orderly transition to democracy, he warns them that no normal sanctions, such as petitions for resignation and exile, can be expected: “Abduct him, ask him to resign? [. . .] You’ve got the wrong country and the wrong man, compadre [. . . .] You have to kill him” (). At several moments the killing of Trujillo has the aura of sacrifice and suggests a communal moment of ritualized transgression. The epigraph at the beginning of the novel lends the murder the aura of a festivity: it is a quotation from the merengue Mataron al Chivo (“They’ve Killed the Goat”): “The people celebrate with great joy the party of the goat, the thirtieth of May.”4 The party at which Trujillo decided to kill the Haitians is now the party at which the people kill Trujillo. Trujillo’s power made “voodoo zombies” of his “Haitianized” collaborators; now the collaborators perform on Trujillo the Haitian voodoo “sacrifice of the goat.” On the day of the murder, a conspirators’ feast presages the sacrificial feast at which “the Goat” will be killed. Some of the men gather at Juan Tomás Díaz’s finca to barbecue a calf (). Vargas Llosa even has Trujillo imagine that he interrupts the feast and finds faces of terror or joy, prophesying perhaps the success or failure of the assassination. Nonetheless, the “totemic meal” that anticipates his assassination does not take place in a religious setting but in a political one: the officers of this rite are not priests but political warriors; and far from a celebration, the murder is a tragedy for those involved. It is the tragedy of the political sacrifice of a goat, uncannily reminding us that political rites derive from religion. The symbol of 226

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the goat, in fact, signals political leadership in the Bible: “Goats lead the flock [. . .] and therefore political leaders and powerful kings are called goats.”5 The feast turns out to be bloody indeed. Because they act within the sphere of political exception, the conspirators will also fail to be treated as common criminals, punishable by common law. While two survivors in the conspiracy are glorified (they receive medals as heroes six months after the event), the remaining members are all brutally tortured and killed by Trujillo’s son. The catastrophe that awaits the killers is best foretold by Salvador’s experience at the scene of the murder. In the turmoil of the shootout, Salvador, thinking that he is being attacked by Trujillo’s men, shoots his coconspirator Pedro Livio: “It was as if the earth had opened up, as if, from the bottom of the abyss, he could hear the sound of the Evil One laughing at him” (). The destruction of Livio’s body augurs the fate of the conspirators: like the fate of the Haitians and of Trujillo, theirs will be written on their bodies. Vargas Llosa describes at length the “rapid descent into sub-humanity” (), as their existence in jail is reduced to “bare life.” The tortures they suffer are not inflicted to extract information from them but simply as revenge wrought by Ramfis, who tells Pupo Román: “You have nothing to tell me. I know everything. Now you are only paying for your betrayal of Papa” (). Because what matters is only to kill him in a zone of political exception, and as if his torture had not been extralegal enough, when Román is about to die, Ramfis shoots: “I won’t let him die a natural death” (). Vargas Llosa chooses a cartography of the body to illustrate the extent to which Trujillo’s body and death belong in this exceptional political field. This cartography foregrounds the “internal” nature of the enemy, juxtaposing the sovereign’s body with his political constituency. Trujillo’s ill body prefigures the conspiracy, as the intimate circle of collaborators that kill him is a literal incarnation of the internal enemy.6 Both the enemy inside his body and the killers suggest the “intimacy” of the enemy constructed by the sovereign. Trujillo’s body will become the enemy inside the nation, but it will also be inhabited by a true “enemy inside.” As when he whitened both his face and the Haitian border, Trujillo’s body is his countrymen and the countrymen are his body­—the original image illustrating Hobbes’s  Leviathan. Trujillo’s physicality, allegorizing the political body of his community, is played out alternatively in the control (or lack thereof) that Trujillo exercises over his own physical functions. Trujillo’s bodily control resembles the control he has over the country, and his loss of it coincides with the decay of his regime 227

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in the last two years of his life. The main metaphor for Trujillo’s control is his command over an otherwise uncontrollable bodily fluid: sweat. Vargas Llosa deploys the myth that Trujillo would wear wool uniforms with velvet tricorns in the heat of the summer, without a trace of sweat on his brow (). Suggesting the impossibility of seeing Trujillo as just a human body, Vargas Llosa decides not to grant Trujillo a loss of control even when alone in his room: Trujillo then gives “permission to his body to perspire” (). His control also extends to all aspects of his physical life: his younger collaborators, not in perfect physical shape like their boss, cannot keep up with his pace. Even after drinking till dawn, Trujillo can recover with only four hours of sleep. The cleaning and care of his body and attire, as well as his punctuality, are impeccable—they are his “only religion” (). Correspondingly, the appearance of public institutions, as well as that of his collaborators, is subject to the same care. No one is allowed to mar the cleanliness of the city (and indeed Santo Domingo became known as the “cleanest” city in Latin America). Upon discovering that in front of the Armed Forces headquarters there are broken sewage pipes—a discovery that can be read as a public lack of control over waste fluids—he is ready to punish the culprit with life imprisonment (). In contrast to this body in control, Trujillo’s later lack of physical control coincides with the regime’s collapse. By , Trujillo’s collaborators refer to the regime as a “suffocating body, in need of oxygen” (), suffering the terrible “stress” brought about by continental as well as internal opposition: Fidel Castro, Figueres, Muñoz Marín, and Betancourt, along with the internal dissidence of the Movimiento  de Junio, the Church, and Washington ().7 Like the glorious days of his regime, Trujillo’s body has found its limits. He cannot sleep more than two or three hours a night and is assailed by nightmares (). On his last day of life, a nightmare portends his murder: “He woke up, paralyzed by a sense of catastrophe. He blinked in the dark, immobilized, imprisoned in a spider web, about to be devoured by a hairy insect covered with eyes. At last, he managed to stretch his hand toward the bedside table, where he kept the revolver and the loaded submachine gun” (). Before killing the Haitians, he had described them as threatening insects; now an insect has taken possession of his dreams. Trapped in a spider web, the metaphor later used to describe the conspiracy, Trujillo is about to die. Just as he had conquered the minds and dreams of his people, now his mind and dreams are conquered. He wakes up to his revolver, foreshadowing what will happen when he is shot on the road and he tries to reach for his revolver, to no avail. 228

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Trujillo’s waking hours have gone astray, too. Inversely mirroring the command that he has over his sweat, other bodily fluids have slipped from his control. Two enemies dwell in the sexual organ that conventionally symbolizes power. Famous for his sexual prowess, he now prays for God’s help to combat his impotence. More humiliating still, given that it can be seen in public, Trujillo suffers from a prostate infection that makes him incontinent. The only way to address this humiliation is to have a collaborator sit close by, ready to “accidentally” pour a glass of water on him, in case he wets himself (). As if summarizing the allegorical meaning of Trujillo’s illnesses, Vargas Llosa has the dictator speak of his incontinence with significant wording: the leak is a veritable “enemy within.” “This was not an enemy he could defeat like the hundreds, thousands, he had confronted and defeated over the years, buying them, intimidating them, killing them. This lived inside him, flesh of his own flesh, blood of his own blood. It was destroying him at precisely the time he needed to be stronger and healthier than ever” (, my emphasis). Just as Haitian blood runs in the veins of the country, Trujillo’s enemies run through his bodily fluids, threatening his life and the life of the nation. True to the logic of the sovereign, these enemies are not only internal but produced by the sovereign—“flesh of his own flesh, blood of his own blood.” This is a pregnant metaphor for the operational logic of this kind of political sovereignty: Trujillo can become the enemy to his nation only because his location as a sovereign binds him to the body politic by producing enemies within it. The sovereign’s autoimmune and necropolitical strategy—his injection of enmity—allows him to produce and control the deaths that will bind political borders.

Urania’s Bond: Violence and Law, History and Fiction, Pain and Truth In chapter , the last hour of the novel, Urania, the lawyer, symbolically reproduces the killing of the dictator’s physical body at a (totemic) dinner with all the women of her family. She tells the story of how, at the sight of his impotence, the dictator breaks down in tears and utters a desperate speech about his failure. Unlike the Sadean narrator, who protects the libertines in secret chambers, Vargas Llosa unveils Trujillo’s secret enemy, flesh of his own flesh, projected onto the alleged culprit—Urania. But, having entered the secret chambers of Trujillo’s castle and witnessed the impotence of power—a matter “for 229

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laughter,” as she says ()—Urania cannot laugh. Nor can the writer. Urania’s knowledge is her death sentence. Thirty-five years later, as she remembers Trujillo’s eyes, Urania feels the same terror: “I am forty-nine years old, and again, I start trembling. I have been trembling for thirty-five years since that moment” (). The lawyer’s body, and the body of the law that it stands for, have been fractured forever by Trujillo’s sovereignty—by the law’s zone of exception. At the heart of Urania’s body of law, there is an indelible imprint of violence. And indeed, violence proves central to Urania’s mission. For Urania is not so much a female character as she is yet one more figure for bonding, woven in a cluster of ideas linking history and fiction, truth, and pain, and violence and the law. Critics unanimously read in Urania a female figure for testimony, for the writing of history, for the transmission of knowledge. Her storytelling reconstructs symbolic systems of exchange, as she reveals her mystery and presents her vision of Trujillo’s regime. She has come with the desire of an address: “Maybe she’ll want to rebuild somehow the connection with these remnants of her family” (). To a certain extent, her mission meets a redemptive end when she finds an audience: her twenty-year-old niece, with whom she promises to keep in contact after her return to New York. As she reconstructs bonds with the family and country, she warns the youth about the sequels of the dictatorship—an almost utopian recovery of literature for redemptive politics. Urania’s redemptive voice is a metaphor for a “truth” and “mission” of writing, and in this respect, it fosters a bond. But against the critical consensus, I would argue that Urania’s voice, and consequently her figure for bonding, also stands in close relation to the violence that gives life to it. This violence grants Urania’s voice the complexity of the tragic: it tells about the impossibility of telling, the message of an irreparable loss, perhaps recalling Antigone’s death thousands of years before. The doubleness of this figure of fiction, law, truth, and writing not only expresses the tension in the author’s recourse to “a knowledgeable lie” as the means of storytelling. It also reveals the tension between the ideal of the law that Urania represents and the violence of its source: the rape. If Urania’s voice allows for a bond, that bond, like all others in the novel, is stained with blood. The author’s choice to make a raped virgin girl, now a sexless woman, the storyteller, condenses the complexity of this problem. On the one hand, a raped virgin as a figure for fiction signifies the impossibility of recovering experience. This refers not only to experience as such, but also to the particular experience of rape, and to the particular portrayal of rape in the novel. Fiction in this 230

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sense displaces the problem of truth onto the problem of truth effects—that is, credibility. The crime of rape tests the legal paradigm of visible evidence as proof for condemnation. Rape raises questions about the regulatory definitions that establish its legitimate existence, or the legitimate evidence to “prove” the event. In real life, the lack of agreement as to what exactly constitutes “rape,” or how one can account for it, results, more often than not, in the invisibility of its experience—put otherwise, its visibility is more dependent on the visibility of serious damage than on the narrative. Rape stands as a test of narrative credibility: the real question is often posed not necessarily as to who is guilty, but rather whose story one is to believe in order to adjudicate guilt, responsibility, and justice. Rape thus presents the problem of truth in terms of a struggle of competing narratives of “what really happened.” It is often the case that victim and perpetrator directly oppose each other in their accounts of the events, and thus, to determine the truth becomes a question of the rhetorical ability, cultural and class legitimation—“symbolic capital,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s famous phrase—of the speaker.8 On the other hand, the construction of Urania’s character as a victim who, never recovering from rape, loses her sexuality and becomes an expert on Trujillo’s regime, as well as a point of emission of its history, suggests that Vargas Llosa’s source of fiction as “a knowledgeable lie” relies on historical documentation, and the source of (Urania’s) documentation depends on (her) violation. This construction is thus the antithesis of what is insinuated by the subject of rape: it signals the possibility of the recovery of the past—a possibility fraught with violence, much as the issue of credibility after a rape is established with struggle. As Urania’s experience of a traumatized young female, forced to emigrate alone, fades away from her narrative voice, it is the text of history that takes over in her speech. To recall the research by Page duBois, mentioned before, this representation is one more version of the Western reliance on torture and pain to obtain the truth.9 Once brutalized, Urania is “ready” to be a source for the “truth” of what happened during the regime: she becomes a flat selfexplanatory mind through whom history speaks, standing in for the writer. She is, thus, another Western figure for the (gendered) legitimation of truth through pain, and thus for the legitimation of bonding through this kind of truth. She links law, memory, truth, and violence as parts of her redemptive mission. Like Trujillo’s stable social contract, Urania’s truth is figured as a product of violence; like all of Trujillo’s victims, she is an outcome of the violence of political exception—that is, in some sense, she has become a “Haitian.” 231

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Urania’s loss is tragic in that it is irreparable. Both the fact of having been raped and the singularity of how she was raped foreground the problem of the recovery of the past: it happens without witnesses thirty-five years ago; she loses her virginity; her innocence does not allow her to understand; it will only be her word against that of the rest. And in spite of having depicted Urania’s active defense—her acting as if she were absent from the event at the moment of the attack—Vargas Llosa has her reconstruct the rape as a complete victimization that led her to lose not only her virginity but also herself (). The tissue (of continuity) that Urania loses has particular significance insofar as it cannot be recovered by any means other than artifice. As Urania’s rape breaks her hymen, it breaks her and the “normalcy” of her life narrative. Urania was until then “a normal healthy girl” (). Formally, this is shown in the narrative pattern of her story that breaks off, mirroring Urania’s fate: after chapter , when Urania’s father tells her that Trujillo has invited her to a party, the sequence of chapters is broken and the reader is presented with six more chapters of Trujillo’s story and murder, losing sight of Urania as she goes off to Trujillo’s house, only to regain her story in the closing chapter. While the broken hymen stands for an irreparable loss, both of life and of narrative, Urania’s understanding also fails to grasp the whole of her experience, then and now. At age fourteen she is “as pure as a lily” (). Aunt Adelina and Manolita insist on knowing if she realized what was happening (), but Urania, speaking to herself, emphasizes how she was “still a girl, when being a girl meant being totally innocent about certain things that had to do with desire, instincts, power” (). To underscore her lack of understanding, Vargas Llosa infantilizes Urania to the extreme: she still sleeps with a “blue spread with Walt Disney characters” (). Although Urania knows now that fourteen is a “deceptive age. They had stopped being children but were not yet women” (),10 Vargas Llosa has her reconstruct her image back then as decidedly childlike and unprepared. She believes that the onset of menstruation, just four months before, came at an abnormally early age: “Three or four months before that, I had my first period [. . . .] It came early, it seems” (, my translation). Her father also sees her as “still a child” (). And even if Manuel Alfonso, Trujillo’s pimp, tries to see a “woman” in her while talking to Urania’s father—“You think she is a little girl, you did not realize she had become a young woman ()—the Spanish original in this sentence reads mujercita, which translates as “little woman” instead of “young woman,” making Urania childish again. Unsuspecting as the “little woman” she is, while getting ready for the “party” she cannot 232

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worry about anything other than “lighter” things—“[W]hat would she wear, Papa?, which shoes?” (). During the rape, Urania plays and, ultimately, feels dead. She is portrayed first as “playing dead,” as if she were not resisting, or better said, as if she were resisting by obeying. As Urania irritates Trujillo—“That’s enough playing dead, beautiful” ()—she erases her feelings () until the moment of rape, which she experiences as “if she were dying” (). It is not only this episode but also its consequences that make it a locus of irreparable loss. She can never reconstruct her sexual and emotional life with any man: “Papa and His Excellency turned me into a desert” (). Not even telling the story to her family will help her recover: she goes back to her hotel to pack her suitcase: “She feels empty—again” (). While the rape in Urania’s reconstruction of the experience signifies a complete loss, Urania’s encounter with the only one of her victimizers who is alive, her father, also speaks to the absolute impossibility of recovering the past. At the end of the first chapter, when Urania arrives at her father’s house, the door opens “with a long groan” () to the wounds of the past. As she wonders if her father can hear her, the door of her father’s house narratively leads to the second chapter, which is not about Urania’s father but about Trujillo; Trujillo’s voice gathers strength as Urania’s father grows speechless. Urania begins a rhetorical and furiously vengeful “dialogue” with her incapacitated father. Reversing roles, now it is her father who is paralyzed, as she was when she was raped. She addresses him with harsh sarcasm, scorn, indignation, doubt, and always with a sense of loss: “It’s a shame we can’t have a conversation. You could clarify so many things for me” (); “We’d try to understand it, together” (). Totally mute, Urania’s father has become a “limited, impoverished brain, moving in slow motion” (), almost mirroring the physical inability of the other “father,” Trujillo. In a veritable version of what it might be like for a victim to encounter her victimizer, Urania’s encounter with her father only confirms that for the perpetrator there will be no recovery. Urania’s questions remain floating in the air. As if to confirm that the truth of the past is irrecoverable, she has returned to the island knowing that her father cannot answer. For Urania’s questions to her father do not really concern her rape, about which he obviously knows, or his participation in the regime, about which Urania has read for years in the United States. Behind Urania’s barrage of questions looms one real question, insofar as it has no answer, for it emerges too late. Anticipating it, on her way to her father’s house, Urania asks 233

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herself whose idea it was to name her Urania (): “Too late to find out, my girl; your mother was in heaven and your father condemned to a living death. You will never know” (), she thinks while walking. What she truly wishes to know is whose daughter she is: “I would have liked for you to tell me if His Excellency also took my mother to bed [. . . .] [D]id you allow it? Resign yourself to it? Use it for your career?” (). Lucindita tells Urania that her father has “recognized her very well”: he might not be able to talk “but knows who comes in” (). The verb reconocer, literally to “recognize” or “identify something known,” is commonly used in Spanish to refer to a father’s acknowledgment of paternity. Urania’s father might have recognized her as his child, but whether he was her biological father remains unknown to her. Pater semper incertus est: on the question of fathers, as on the question of politics, Urania is left only with fiction. The figure of Urania is a tragic whirl—void of answers. Any claim to objective truth has to fall into the realm of credibility. Even the episode of her rape is represented in myriad versions, all aiming to construct “what really happened.” For Urania’s father, the invitation to Trujillo’s house is perhaps Trujillo’s “way of letting [him] know that everything is not lost” (). For Trujillo’s pimp, Manuel Alfonso, the invitation will be “the experience of her life”: Urania is very “fortunate” and “privileged” (). For Trujillo, it will be the night of his humiliation. For Urania’s cousin Manolita, Urania’s naïveté is difficult to believe: “[B]ut if you thought it was strange, didn’t you say anything to Manuel Alfonso about it?” (). For Aunt Adelina, this might be Urania’s bad dream: “Didn’t you just dream that Manuel Alfonso did anything for him? [. . .] Agustín would have told Aníbal and me right away” (); “Are you trying to say that Manuel Alfonso proposed to your father that, that . . . ?” (). As she cannot finish the sentence, Urania asserts that she says “what happened [. . . .] If you don’t want to hear it, I’ll stop talking and leave” (). And, as to the question of origins par excellence—the impossibility of accuracy in what concerns paternity—Urania lets fiction take over. She invents a possible story to fill the gap between her desire to know and her father’s inability to answer whether Trujillo had sex with her mother. After kissing a photograph of her late mother, she imagines Trujillo knocking at the door when her father is away, and her mother instructing the maid: “Tell him Señora de Cabral does not receive visitors when Agustín is not at home. Go on, tell him” (). While this fiction may begin to console Urania, Vargas Llosa juxtaposes, in Urania, the tragedy of the impossibility of knowledge with the redemption of 234

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nonfiction: Urania speaks the text of written history. The same episode I mentioned above about Urania’s “fictional” mother is a good example. Urania needs only new names and dates; she has read that in real life Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s wife rejected Trujillo when he visited her while her husband was at work. It was the beginning of the era and those rejections were still possible. Urania then tells the story of how the couple left the country, and offers a judgment: Mr. Henríquez Ureña’s decision was admirable, for it prevented him from becoming what her father had become.11 Urania’s historical text seems to redress the tragedy of her loss, of her uncertainty about a father, and of a father’s betrayal. Urania, as she tells her father, is a reader: “[My] apartment in Manhattan is full of books […] [l]aw, economy, history. But in my bedroom, only Dominican books [….] Can you guess the period? The Trujillo Era [….] I have become an expert on Trujillo. Instead of playing bridge or golf [. . .] my hobby has been finding out what happened during those years” (). Urania’s voice results from an ironic twist that undermines the importance that the novel previously gives to the experience of women during the regime: Urania’s experience as a lonely teenager abroad is effaced by the “lettered city” of books. She is a “mind” that will speak historical knowledge, a point of emission for the author’s voice. Urania is thus the metaphor for the truth of the written text of history, albeit obtained through violence. And, as the woman in her fades away, she becomes a composite version of Trujillo and Balaguer: a complete spin-off of Trujillo’s circle of violence. Once again, her name is suggestive: in Spanish it is pronounced almost the same as the word huraña12—withdrawn, unsociable. And, indeed, her life is so much her work and her studies that one can read in her the same passion for relentless work as could be found in Trujillo. Like Trujillo, she is a product of a U.S. institution (an Ivy League university, in this case), she never takes holidays, and rarely wastes her time. The description of her daily routine echoes that followed by Trujillo. Like the dictator, she starts the day by exercising, then follows with a succession of work interviews, reports, discussions, research projects; her life is “exhausting” and “every hour is accounted for” (). She then walks after work if the weather allows. Like Trujillo, to make the right decisions, she has to have “her five senses always alert, in a state of concentration that leaves her drained” (). As Trujillo used to be the man in perfect control, Urania is that woman in perfect control: “determined, disciplined mind, impervious to discouragement, [. . .] the fortress admired and envied by others” (). Cold and unemotional, she never allows herself to fall into sentimentality: she envies her 235

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family’s humanity, which she cannot feel (). Time and again, she thinks: “What do you feel, Urania? Bitterness? Melancholy? Sadness? The old anger reborn? The worst thing is that I don’t think I feel anything” (). Urania feels only fear—like Trujillo—and it is always the same fear—of Trujillo. Like Trujillo, she does not have any doubts, except for one: a doubt equivalent to that of the sovereign and that of the author. Urania wonders whether she should tell her story: “What are you doing here?” (); “Why do you insist on talking about this? What is the point?” (). Equivalent to Trujillo’s self-doubt when asking Balaguer about his mission, this is a doubt about her raison d’être: storytelling. As Trujillo’s question is the sovereign’s question—“Why do I have to govern?”—Urania’s is the author’s question: “Why do I have to write?” But not only Trujillo is at the heart of Urania. Urania is a figure for the law as are Chirinos and Balaguer. She shares with Balaguer the same rejection of sex—Balaguer has the reputation of being “a lay priest” (). Urania’s sexuality has forever remained linked to Trujillo; she has never wanted to see a therapist for she has always considered her rejection of men a “character trait,” like her intelligence, her solitude, and her passion for work (). A Canadian suitor in the bank had called her “an iceberg” (). Meanwhile nobody knows of women, or for that matter, men, in Balaguer’s life (). Urania works as a lawyer in New York, but she is not a human rights lawyer. As Balaguer governs in the “confused duality” of a legal government backed by the U.S. Army, Urania’s workplaces carry their own, similarly dual, confusing weight in the region: the legal department of the World Bank, and a legal firm that advises investors who “dare risk their money anywhere in the world” (). The World Bank’s historical mission may be stated as an aid to developing countries with the goal of reducing poverty: the rhetoric, as is the law’s rhetoric, is beneficent. But as much as at the heart of Urania’s body of law there is the imprint of violence, the bank’s history signifies another type of violence for regional readers that echoes the statement of its president, Eugene Black, issued in : “Economic aid should be the principal means by which the West maintains its political and economic dynamic in the underdeveloped world.”13 And in fact, the bank’s regional intervention has been questioned. In terms of its organization, the bank is considered undemocratic: voting power is dependent on the wealth of shareholders, the largest shareholder in the bank being the United States and its president being a U.S. citizen; its meetings are held in Washington two years out of three. In terms of its economic interventions, the bank is considered by its detractors to have increased—instead of decreased—poverty, as a result of 236

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the unpayable interest rates that generate vicious debt circles that poor countries can never get out of.14 In the world of the novel, Urania’s bank is closer than anything else to being one more version of the historical intervention of the United States in the region, summed up by the very figure of Trujillo—who acts and thinks in politics “like a Marine.” Urania turns out to be a cluster of ideas that link law, testimony, historical narrative, and violence. Her thrust to rebond (with) the nation stems from her experience of violence and is surrounded by symbols of violence. Perhaps nowhere is this more explicit than in the question of whether Urania’s mission has been enough to cure the woman and the city. In other words, whether her tale has offered an alternative. Less than a page before the end of the novel we read a telling passage. After having told what really happened to her, Urania feels tormented: “Are you going to feel free of all the incubi that have sucked your soul? Of course not. It was a weakness” (), she thinks, as Trujillo thought when confessing his own personal doubts to Balaguer. Immediately after this hopelessness, another thought that “sometimes is a cure for depression” () comes to her mind. Significantly, Urania is not consoled by the power of the law, of fiction, of testimony, or of history, but rather by their opposite—or, seen from another angle, their source. Urania finds solace remembering how, when Trujillo’s chief of intelligence, Johnny Abbes, exiled in Haiti, caused problems for then-president Duvalier, the latter indeed found a solution: twenty Tonton Macoutes.15 “Ten minutes, that’s all. They killed Johnny Abbes, they killed Johnny Abbes’s wife, they killed Johnny Abbes’s two young children, they killed Johnny Abbes’s two servants, and they also killed Johnny Abbes’s chickens, rabbits, and dogs. Then they set fire to the house and left” (). Papa Doc solved it in ten minutes. Another woman watched the scene traumatized: she is Urania’s colleague at the World Bank and she will need therapy to recover in Washington. Anchored at the heart of Urania’s law, violence sometimes cures her depression. She relishes the repeated memory of killings, of the violent skill of the Tonton Macoutes that she imagines as the “remedy” to violence. Is the uplifting hope that Vargas Llosa confers on Urania’s writing in the last line of the novel—“[If] Marianita writes to me, I will answer all her letters” ()— enough to counter this circle of violence? Marianita’s writing is a vague promise of a different future. Nonetheless, Urania’s present is steeped in violence; hers is a tragic reinstatement of the figure of binding violence. The “fiesta” in the book’s title, and that runs throughout its pages—Trujillo’s feast with the Haitians, Trujillo’s feast with Urania, the people’s feast with Tru237

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jillo’s corpse—is not a series of carnivalesque reversals of power but one more metaphor for the wild zone of power this side of the law. The sacrificial metaphor—the sacrifice of innocent Haitians, the sacrifice of Urania’s virginity, the sacrifice of Trujillo’s body—points at the vulnerability of life in this zone. No realistic symmetry links these deaths; rather, they are linked by their structural position as targets of a type of violence that can reach anyone at the hour of political definitions of membership. Trujillo and the conspirators, as well as Urania and the Haitians, are in that wild zone of power—that “fiesta”—that stands in for our lack in democratic imagination. Antigone had warned her audience that the evils of the enemies were coming; the Sadianites warned us how far the evils can be taken; Urania warns us that the evils have not gone. Times have and have not changed.

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I speak of an approaching poem.

—Alejandra Pizarnik, Buenos Aires, 



The Force of Imagination

In , the indefatigable twenty-five-hundred-year-young Antigone crosses the Atlantic to confront none other than dictator “Creon Molina,” a replica of Trujillo Molina, in Luis Rafael Sánchez’s Puerto Rican tragedy The Passion According to Antígona Pérez (La pasión según Antígona Pérez). Imprisoned in a basement, Sánchez’s Antígona speaks to the dictator as she waits to be killed. She is the “eternal idea of freedom” against dictatorial power and carries the banner of the two Tavárez brothers whom she has buried: they are not her blood relatives but two “subversive” leaders of a left-wing movement. She embodies, thus, the two sides of the demands of modern equality: political but also social, to recall Menke’s categories, the “utopian” (Babeuf) and the “subversive” (Marx). Antígona sees her death as a “sacrifice for this bitter America”; Creon Molina does not repent or grieve.1 A product of the post–World War II revolutionary turmoil throughout Latin America, Antígona Pérez is only one of the multiple names that the Sophoclean princess borrows for her itinerant undead presence in modernity throughout Europe and its former colonies across the globe. It did not take her long to land in the American continent, once she started navigating the ripples of the transoceanic event of the French Revolution: as early as June  she landed in the South American revolutionary port of Buenos Aires,2 where Juan Cruz Varela staged her plea for political equality in his tragedy Argia.3 Those were the times of the last two great anticolonial battles in Spanish America: Junín ( August ) and Ayacucho ( December ). Almost two hundred years later, as Vargas Llosa finishes his story about Trujillo in The Feast of the Goat, his compatriot, Peruvian poet José Watanabe, writes his Antígona, told from Ismene’s point of view. It is the year : both compatriots allude to the same aftermath of Perú’s dirty war between Fujimori’s armed forces and the leftwing guerrilla groups Sendero Luminoso and Túpac Amaru. 241

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Not even a decade into the twenty-first century has passed and new rewritings of the drama continue to put on stage the tensions between social and political equality, adding to the vast number of twentieth-century versions across the globe. Consider here just a few: in , Mac Wellman’s Antigone premiered in New York and Jorge Huertas’s Antígona, linaje de hembras in Argentina. In , Conall Morrison set his Antigone in the Middle East on an Irish stage and Effat Yehya and Amel Fadji took the princess to Egypt to meet the legendary Scheherazade in their Once upon a Time. In , Seamus Heaney published his The Burial at Thebes; in , Archivio Zeta sent their Antigones to Italy; in , Patricia Ariza’s double Antígona appeared in Colombia.4 The undead Antigone is here to stay, as her question—“[S]ister, do you not realize that the evils of our enemies are coming upon our own?”—continues to rattle stages and theatergoers into the twenty-first century. I have read the tragic antagonism between Antigone and Creon—an approach I believe might be applicable to the genre of tragedy at large—in terms of the crisis of membership unleashed by the invention of political equality, whose signature is the irruption of the other into the sphere of power. I have taken this to be the foundational political question for autonomous polities, as the radical contingency that unsettles any determination of membership instantiates a new impossibility to justify any exclusions from the polity and cries out for a democratic solution upon which the very nature of democracy as a system of governance ultimately hinges. Antigone’s and Polynices’ ongoing reappearance on the fictional and real-life theaters of modernity (especially those of our “century of genocide”5) may point to our inability to confront the indeterminacy of membership, our difficulty in imagining a democratic solution for membership in the context of the revolutionary demand for equality, a version of our political imagination about justice. Equality’s other does not necessarily show the intrinsic impossibility of a utopian project, but rather calls for a radical imaginative effort for a symbolic articulation between equality and difference that reconfigures all our notions of identity. This reconfiguration cannot stop at “a philosophical project”—the decentering of the subject characteristic of postmodern philosophy—but also has to involve our material conditions of existence. It could not be otherwise, since major reconfigurations stem from the dialectical pressure that our material existence and our imagination exert over each other. I do not believe it is a coincidence that Antigone’s plight is first and foremost material—a fact neglected by criticism. One could say that at the core of the drama that celebrates the human praxis of politics 242

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lies the urgency of the contaminating threat to the living posed by a decomposing corpse desecrated by politics;6 this dramatization of the centrality of matter for human political organization might account, in my eyes, for the global reach of the play much better than any of the modern bourgeois inventions of the “universal values” supposedly found in the play. What we do to a human corpse speaks of the meaning we assign to our humanity. For the young Athenian Antigone, social equality was not an issue, and political equality had its limits: the burial of slaves was not her concern, and Polynices was not a slave. The ancient solution to the problem of membership ceased to be available for the moderns. The modern contribution to the ancient invention of equality—to Antigone’s order of contingency—was to radicalize it by shifting from restrictive to universal political and social equality. We might consider that in response to this radicalization, modernity also radicalized Creon’s (immunological) closure of membership, by shifting from direct democracy to the governance of the state’s monopolization of violence, thereby arresting the development of an imagination that would ease the tension between democratic equality and a political sense of belonging. I have read Creon’s strategy as the question of whether the Athenian political reason—their division between political and social equality—was enough to establish the limits of political equality. Here one could note that the often commented upon female presence on the ancient tragic stage might also be tragedy’s reflection on the insufficiency of social categories to solve the problem. The historical record tells us that, in fact, Athens often found herself at pains to define political equality, at times taking arbitrary measures that did not necessarily follow from their vision of democratic reason. I have suggested that Creon’s symbolic move is the cipher of this complexity: within the democratic imagination, the decision about how to close off membership in times of crisis is so intractable that it is dramatized as the transformation of one of the equals into a nonequal—an enemy. Logically speaking, whereas the social reason might not be enough to justify a limitation in equality, the reason of war certainly is: an enemy is definitely not a friend—neither a social inferior nor an opponent. Those who are enemies can never be considered equals within the community; they are not dissenters, they threaten survival. In this way, the reason of war—the “reason of state,” we would say today—is introduced into the city, standing in for a democratic solution to membership. But war as a tool for governing inside the city has grave consequences for the democratic imagination. It transforms equality into identity: the internal enemy is the figure 243

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against which the community is asked to identify, and consequently for whose elimination it must stand. The paradigm of immunity represented by the enemy inside the city inoculates democracy’s own ghost against itself: an enemy inside stirs the ghost of civic dissolution lurking behind the equalitarian imagination. In the tragedy, the threat of dissolution is projected at the beginning of the play, informing the reasons for Creon’s wish to unify the city again. But the real threat, first to Eteocles’ and then to Creon’s power, is democracy’s equality. In fact, the threat of civic dissolution is intrinsic to the logic of democracy per se: democracy puts its own grounding permanently in contention, so that the democratic imagination of self-rule is assailed by the haunting nightmare of its self-destruction. The emergence of an embodied internal enemy may stand for a symbolic failure to deal with the needed articulation of political equivalence without provoking the fear of civic dissolution. The “friend become enemy” is a symptom responding to the democratic anxiety of dissolution: on his body this anxiety is projected, and on his elimination a solution to dismemberment is fantasized. This injection of enmity operates to immunize the democratic city against its own anxiety but at the cost of going against its democratic principles. To prevent its suicide, the democratic city is assassinated. The tragedy of the creation and extermination of the internal enemy lies in that this process instills violence to bind membership. Antigone’s and Polynices’ unburied corpses (“disappeared,” we say today, in that the modern politicization of death entails denial of burial for bodies nowhere to be found) have suffered the violence that is linked to the membership crisis. Antigone is not left unburied simply because she is a woman (inferior) and rebel; Polynices is not left unburied only because he is a traitor. The excess of violence that undoes the burial—that politicizes death—is a sign of a political failure both to rationalize the friends’ inequality and to grant them equivalence. The rationalization of the siblings as social inferiors would collide with the founding principle of equivalence; in turn, the siblings’ dissidence, which demands full equivalence, collides with the city’s need to close off membership—at some point—and form a political unit. In the failure of both the reason of social inequality and the reason of political equality, there is only room to see the siblings as internal enemies. At the hour of the city’s reconstruction, the immunity logic that introduced war into the city transforms the violence mediated by narratives of domination or exploitation into a violence of annihilation.

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Modernity systematized the rhetoric of natural rights and eliminated the ancient (and medieval) justifications for concrete determinations of equality that resulted in “natural” forms of political and social inequality. Both from the point of view of a utopian demand (of principles) and of a subversive demand (against the existing inequalities of specific groups), the imaginary horizon of modernity aims toward the universalization of a politics of equivalence, not of identity, as a form of justice. The two modern literary reflections that I have explored—Sade’s  Days of Sodom and Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat—can be considered to be symptoms of the Western second and third waves of democracy, which construct the category of “humanity” as the bearer of political and social equality. The problem of membership here takes on a different urgency. If we are all equals because we are all humans, then the logical limit to equality would not only entail the dissolution of political borders such as nationality or citizenship but also would only be applicable to that which is “nonhuman.” Early modernity witnesses the birth of significantly coincidental phenomena: the systematization of the doctrine of natural rights and the first flexings of the European colonial enterprise. As the school of Salamanca in Spain puts together canonical and civil law to sketch natural rights, it is also Spain that embarks on devising the first primitive forms of “othering” across the Atlantic, a practice that would later develop into a variety of refined strategies of complete dehumanization and become standardized with the deployment of European capitalist colonialism. Both Sade’s Castle of Silling and Trujillo’s nation, in Vargas Llosa’s portrayal, dramatize the political definition of membership through the construction of the absolute other to humanity. Figures of the nonhuman emerge from the interstices of the human: bare life, the plague, the Haitian, the Beast. The feast of necrocannibal politics that eliminates these new forms of enemy flesh, of bare life carved out from the city’s interstices, will draw the limits of the constituency thrown into crisis at the outburst of universal equality. While Sade embraces the violence of annihilation to close off membership, Vargas Llosa denounces it without questioning its roots. Their texts take to its ultimate consequences the dramatic shift from Antigone’s order of contingency to Creon’s order of necessity: a shift from a politics of equivalence to a politics of survival that can consider equality only through sameness, homogeneity, and adhesion. They are gothic, or realist, rather than tragic, symbolizations of binding violence.

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I am tempted to suggest that the creation of “bare life,” or the political transformation of the human into figures of the nonhuman, is one of the possible modern symptoms of the slide from equality as equivalence to equality as identity. The texts I reviewed dramatize the creation of nonhuman forms of human life falling outside of all ritual forms of equality. In fact, as I have already suggested, we can construct a genealogical fiction here. Creon’s politicization of the dead Polynices is the precursor of the modern politicization of “bare life”: stripped of the political capacity that defined a life worth living, his motionless body was lacking-in-politics but an instrument of politics. As such, we can compare this corpse to the “bare life” stripped of legal and political protection and obligation in modern times. Going a step back in time with respect to the figure of homo sacer that Agamben finds in ancient Rome, this suggests that this type of “life in death” has a role to play in the undecidability of membership brought about by the birth of the ancient politics of equivalence. The peculiar progression in the three texts that leads from the threat of civic dissolution to the formation of a bond by way of traversing a ritual disruption that creates bare life, exposes the traces of the undead resulting from the politicization of death that seals off the city borders. This politicization of the dead figures a specific form of communal binding violence, an exceptional machinery that, powered by human blood, solves membership in the guise of protecting communal life. The paradigm announced in these fictions, with the spectral background of war and a necrocannibal politics that “makes a people a people,” points in the direction of a certain genocidal capacity at the hour of political belonging, a genocidal capacity that is perhaps one of the modern exercises in community-building. I have tried to think through the workings of literary imagination what seems to be one of the modern excrescences of violence, leaping out of the dialectic between the violence of institutionalized power versus the violence of insurgency. I gave this excrescence of violence the name of “binding violence”; with it I have tried to suggest a “limit of political reason alone” in the West. My premise has been that the literary text can open visionary doors to unveil what other social discourses may not yet have articulated. There is much writing about the violence inscribed in the circle of domination—the circle whereby violence creates, enforces, and contests laws. That circle of violence is mediated by rituals, symbolic nets, institutions, and the institutional game of power relations. The enemy targeted by the violence of social domination is the “social inferior” to be exploited economically or sexually; the one targeted 246

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by the violence of political domination is the political equal to be defeated in war, whether between states or for the power of the state, as in insurgent forces within a given territory. But the violence of social or political domination does not necessarily lead to annihilation. In the texts I have reviewed in this book, violence is an excrescence growing out of the former circles of domination, and relating to membership; its target falls at the edges of social categories and of the political power struggle for institutional domination. This violence falls upon an enemy constructed within the social body when a clarification of its borders is needed: the neighbor, the brother, the sister, s/he who should be a logical, political, and social equal; s/he who is part of our Western history of the categories of friendship, brotherhood, fraternity (sisterhood, one day) in the polis. It is the friend whose difference is manufactured in times of crisis to be placed in a liminal space, between the outside and inside, in order to differentiate the interior and the exterior whose borders have been thrown into crisis. It is the friend become enemy who reminds us how a given political fraternity was built on foundational violence. The texts I reviewed are embedded in the imagination of a political space that conceives of its borders as an artifice: democracy’s borders are always in crisis. I have suggested that the intolerance to this politics of equivalence, the anxiety produced by the constant need to negotiate its grounds, may yield forms of violence that fall outside those we know as institutionally mediated. The violence that undoes symbolic mediations such as a rite of burial, or that manufactures bare life intracommunally, might speak to our failure to confront, to this day, the permanent undoing of borders that is intrinsic to the dynamics of democratic contention. In Agamben’s research it is suggested that bare life is the originary site of sovereignty in the West. Is it possible that this deadly form of sovereignty may respond to the problem of membership, or may have become visible once the politics of equality made membership a problem? Is it possible that the denial of burial, the “making disappear” of the other—forms of necropolitics—are related to the creation of the nonhumans against which the “universally equals” define their identity? I am suggesting that this political production of death may be the practice of killing in place of inscribing the other as an equal. The reification of difference as the other, the impure, the insect, the barbaric, the savage, observed throughout modernity, but especially in genocidal episodes, may be a symptom of a failure to articulate the full consequences of our narrative of universal equivalence. The creation of zones of exception, in turn, may be hidden laboratories where membership is 247

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decided in times of crisis. Modern genocidal tides may be the moments when membership is being renegotiated, either inside a territory or, by displacement, through a war conducted by a nation on a foreign territory. This discussion suggests that we might look at moments of redefining state membership in order to grasp genocidal mechanisms. Consequently, given that membership is in permanent negotiation, we might be alerted to a “genocidal continuum” going gradually from invisible genocidal mechanisms in place in everyday life, to the building up of the visible mechanisms with which we have been familiarized throughout the twentieth century. Emerging through close analysis of literary texts, my questions are, nonetheless, determined by the historical and political standpoint from which I write. The current phenomena of “globalization” bring their own crises of membership, crises with deep roots in the past. Perhaps the first such crisis of globalization in modern times was brought about by the discrepancy between colonialism and the rise of the doctrine of natural rights in the Renaissance, a discrepancy that may still be the subtext of current phenomena such as the oddly simultaneous fortification and dismantling of state borders in the face of global migrations. The current crisis of membership has been unleashed by the acceleration of the interdependence of the global population coupled with new patterns of financial capital accumulation of such magnitude that it is difficult to see how it might be reinvested (the environmental exhaustion of the earth being just one of the hindrances at stake for this surplus). The question to be posed here is whether current forms of violence are linked to new forms of membership crisis—as international efforts increase to defend human rights, genocidal tides, refugee camps, and conflictive immigration floods seem to intensify across the landscape of the “global village.”7 The current globalizing dynamic is both about how capital flows across national borders and how the latter differs from how people flow across borders. The patterns of these flows are contradictory: globalization fosters and restricts at once massive migrations, as it juxtaposes, for instance, the revolution in communications among peoples with the mobility of capital toward the regions where cheaper labor can be found. One of the consequences is that the state’s age-old mission of defining membership and territory takes a new format, easing the “globalization” of the educated elite minorities of the globe and restricting the flow of the drastically increased unskilled population—almost two-thirds of the total world population—across national borders. As the skilled labor force becomes more cosmopolitan, the unskilled labor force is 248

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either thrust into illegal forms of migration or into remaining (or migrating) where capital can establish itself with the greatest profit—that is, with dehumanizing working conditions bordering on new forms of slavery (for example, maquiladoras at the Mexican border, sweatshops in Thailand). It has even been argued that this new division of peoples is creating a global minority elite completely independent of the nation-state. One could say that it is almost as if we witnessed the emergence of a “transnational global state of equals” and the reaffirmation of national states of unequals—the state effecting the dividing line between the international elite of equals and the national subequals. In talking about European legislation, Žižek puts it thus: “The truth of globalization [is] the construction of new walls safeguarding prosperous Europe from the immigrant flood.”8 Étienne Balibar observes a paradoxical correlation between the globalization of the economy and the decrease in the political participation of foreigners in today’s national polities; Iain Chambers suggests that “something new [is] emerging, a definitive sharpening in the rhetoric and tools of border control: perhaps also the symptom of a certain, nervous recognition of the exhaustion of the liberal repertoire to absorb and annul the stranger.”9 Equality continues to be based on the nation-state; small concentrationary structures keep emerging across the globe to determine who is included in the global village, as refugees and immigrants attempt entrance at every edge of the world. According to the Jesuit Refugee Service, Europe has constructed  detention centers across its borders, where immigrants coming from the “global south” are kept in inhuman conditions, either for unlimited periods of time or for up to eighteen months until deportation.10 This takes place not only along the expected line of south to north but also along the lines of the new configuration of metropoles and peripheries intrasouth and intranorth. There is, I believe, an excrescence of violence implied in the proliferation of “wild” zones of power designed as detention centers to restrict the flow of people, as there is also an excrescence of violence in new figures of the nonhuman, of categories of nonpeople for whom mandates for universal equality do not apply. This does not only happen in concentrationary structures at the borders; zones of economic exception within state territory observe similar dynamics. It is not, as many believe, that the state is absent in ceding terrain to global capital in these areas. What is really at stake is a “hyperpresence” of the state: the state suspends the application of its laws for a certain type of workforce so that foreign capital bolsters productivity in labor-intensive factories with no tariffs, quotas, or restrictions to trade and no legal protection for workers. The state 249

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shows its raw military force protecting foreign capital operations and enforcing its population to comply with their conditions. Consider here also the new category coined by Bertrand Ogilvie: the “disposable man” (l’homme jetable).11 This is that vast mass of unutilizable starving labor force that can neither enter, nor is placed outside of, market circuits and that gradually populates the megacities of the world in areas categorized as megaslums. These people inhabit another “in between” (the market and the nonmarket) space, which redraws the limits of those entitled with “human rights.” Like the unprotected workers in the free trade zone, the disposable men hold “inhuman rights,” if I can play with the signifying ambivalence of this phrase: their “right” to inhumanity allows others their right to humanity. The struggles of scholars and activists to come to terms with this new configuration has led, in the last decade, to a strong imaginative effort to envision a truly international law, renewed versions of cosmopolitanism, a different content for human rights, and a different sense of belonging—not one based on an abstraction (the city, the state, the union, the “people”), but on singularity. In the academic milieu, consider for instance the rethinking of such terms as “the multitude” as a way to imagine a new democracy. In contrast to the state, which subsumes singularity into identity, the multitude is thought to rescue singularity, as formulated in recent books such as Hardt’s and Negri’s Multitude (), Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude (), and Agamben’s The Coming Community ().12 For these authors, what is at stake is not a (fantasized) “people,” but rather a multiplicity of unrepresentable subjects who speak for themselves and cannot be subsumed under any representative authority.13 In this sense, the (philosophical) “multitude” rescues here the vision of equality as equivalence that I suggested was already present in the undead voice of Antigone incessantly returning to us. Some of these authors present stronger claims linking the multitude and democracy, as in Hardt’s and Negri’s account of the changes brought about by the hegemonization of immaterial labor, which would generate a multitude not only united by a desire for democracy but also “mak[ing] democracy possible for the first time” (). In other authors the desire for new forms of democracy takes the form of a question, an address, a plea. In Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship the “democracy to come” would imply a new “experience of friendship,” uprooted from the determinations of (male) brotherhood that have sealed its destiny in the Western imaginary and conducive to a hospitality to the singular other that goes beyond citizenship.14 In their Nuevas reflexiones sobre la revolución de nuestro 250

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tiempo, Laclau and Mouffe plead for a radical democracy, arguing for forms of struggle that actively embrace the contingency of political life. The result is, in Žižek’s terms, “the first political ethics of the real.”15 In Droit de cité, Balibar brings up no other than Sade’s now-mythical phrase for modernity—Français encore un effort . . .—in order to call for new forms of life that would allow for a different sense of identity and civility, for a “traveling in identity,” for distancing mechanisms that would grant us the ability to identify and disidentify at the same time. In order to conceptualize both the conflicts of identity and how we might take distance from them, Balibar summons the example of art: “Are we capable of becoming artists of identity? Maybe we would need here small theaters, street theaters [. . .] and we would need to invent a theater on a world scale” (, my translation).16 I join these writers in desiring a reinvention of democracy and in summoning up the power of art. In this book, I hope to have brought literary visions to bear upon the debates about the present and future of our political space. At stake is the question of whether we can take seriously the full consequences of the proposal for equality initiated by the ancients, and radicalized in our desire for universal equality—social, and political. To echo Benjamin’s  “Critique of Violence” again, the question is whether we can envision a political space that articulates difference and equality with means other than violence. The challenge ahead is that of imagination: it will depend on how our literary ability responds to our political desire.

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Introduction . Davide Panagia, “Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière,” Diacritics . (): . . Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, New York: Schocken Books, : . . Georges Sorel’s  observation that problems concerning violence “still remain very obscure” holds true today (see Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ); in his own Reflections on Violence (London: Verso, ), John Keane complains of the same obscurity with respect to violence; for recent interdisciplinary studies bringing to bear on Sorel’s observations, see: Manfred Steger and Nancy Lind, Violence and Its Alternatives, New York: St. Martin’s Press, ; Jennifer Turpin and Lester Kurtz, The Web of Violence: From Interpersonal to Global, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ; Eduardo González Calleja, La violencia en la política, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, ; Hent De Vries and Samuel Weber, Violence, Identity and Self-Determination, Stanford: Stanford UP, ; Catherine Besteman, Violence: A Reader, New York: NYU Press, . . See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Cambridge: MIT Press, ; World in Fragments, Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis, Stanford: Stanford UP, ; Figures of the Thinkable, trans. H. Arnold, Stanford: Stanford UP, . . I agree with Samir Amin’s analysis in Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, ) that criticism of this fiction “is meaningless if it does not acknowledge that capitalism has created a real objective need for universalism” (xi)—two kinds of universalism: universal laws for all societies and a universal human project. Amin distinguishes Europe before the Renaissance (peripheral to the Arab world) from Europe after the Renaissance, when it becomes dominant and excludes the world to the south of the Mediterranean (). Perry Anderson traces a similar shift

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Notes in dominance, occurring in feudalism: “[The distinction between East and West] starts with the emergence of feudalism, in that historical era when the classical relationship of regions within the Roman Empire—advanced East and backward West—began for the first time to be reversed” (Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, London: Verso, : –). . See Amin, Eurocentrism; and Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, London: Vintage, . . The term corresponds to Cleisthenes’ reorganization of ancient tribes in Attica into townships (– b.c.e.): he called this redistribution of power isonomia, later named “democracy.” See Pierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Cleisthenes the Athenian, New Jersey: Humanities Press, . . Christoph Menke, Reflections of Equality, Stanford: Stanford UP, . . See Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”: –; Jacques Rancière, Disagreements: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics, London: New Left Books, ; Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, . . See Adams’s letter to John Taylor, -- (Works, ed. Charles Francis Adams, Little Brown, , vol. : ); Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascal-Anne Brault, Stanford: Stanford UP, : . . Michael Mann argues that as the demos began to be equivalent to the nation, and settler democracies had to produce a citizen body, the borders of modern demes have been cleared with the violence of “murderous cleansing [that] has been moving across the world as it has modernized and democratized” (The Dark Side of Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ). The last two decades have seen a re-emergence of a vast literature about democracy’s paradoxes and relation to violence. See Ian Shapiro’s and Casiano Hacker-Cordon’s volume on membership: Democracy’s Edges, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ; for a possible way out of the problem, see also Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory, Princeton: Princeton UP, ; for the position that the problem is inescapable, see Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso, ; see Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question, Stanford: Stanford UP, , for an analysis of “democratic openness in a time of political closure”; see also John Keane, Violence and Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ; Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, London: Verso, ; Daniel Ross, Violent Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, . For an exploration of the limits of democracy when it is embedded in the philosophical and political tenets of liberalism, see Paul Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place, Princeton: Princeton UP, , and Legitimacy and History: Self-Government in American Constitutional Theory, New Haven: Yale UP, ; Ileana Rodríguez, Liberalism at Its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text, Pittsburgh: Univer-

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sity of Pittsburgh Press, ; Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham: Duke UP, ; Peter Osborne, ed., Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism, London: Verso, ; David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, . . See Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone [], trans. Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, . . See Lévêque’s and Vidal-Naquet’s Cleisthenes; Philip Brook Manville, The Origin of Citizenship in Ancient Athens, Princeton: Princeton UP, ; Peter Riesenberg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, : –. . For the “re-invention” of politics, see François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, New York: Cambridge UP, : –; for “the third wave,” see Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, . A similar punctuation of time appears in citizenship studies: see Riesenberg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition, for the difference between “first citizenship” (restricted and ancient, though dominating politics until ) and “second citizenship” (potentially universal since  onward). . For statistics, see the UN Human Development Reports of  and  (on democratization and human rights). . See Ramonet’s editorial of January  for Le Monde diplomatique. . See Julia Kristeva’s discussion of a semiotic signifying unit of analysis that has wide and varied social circulation at the time of the text’s production and that condenses the dominant thought of an era, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature, trans. L. Roudiez, New York: Columbia UP, : – . See also Fredric Jameson’s discussion in The Political Unconscious, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, : –. . See Castoriadis’s contrast between a primary instituting activity and the institution of society in “Primal Institutions of Society and Second-order Institutions,” in Figures of the Thinkable: –. . See Kant’s meditation in Religion; see also the collection edited by Joan Copjec on this topic: Radical Evil, London: Verso, . . Exemplary here are Hannah Arendt’s views about violence as a failure of power, destroying power rather than creating it. See The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., ; On Violence, London: Harcourt Brace and Co., . Hent de Vries’s and Weber’s collections, as well as Steger’s and Lind’s, discuss this position at length. . See Paul Virilio’s meditations on technological war in Pure War, New York: Semiotext(e), ; and Strategy of Deception, London and New York: Verso, . . Freud exempted only the mother-child relation from this insight. See his

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Notes  essay “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” and also his  “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, , vols. : –; : –, respectively. . See Carl von Clausewitz, On War [], trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton: Princeton UP, . See also Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, –, trans. David Macey, New York: Picador, . . We can invoke here Foucault’s famous  lecture about the three modern masters of this suspicion, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” in Cahiers de Royaumont, Éditions de Minuit, VII Colloque philosophique international de Royaumont, July , vol. : –. Examples of this long tradition are F. Nietzsche’s  Beyond Good and Evil, and  Genealogy of Morals; Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (in Reflections); Freud’s  “Civilization and Its Discontents”; Sorel’s  Reflections on Violence; Michel Maffesoli’s and Alain Pessin’s La violence fondatrice, Paris: Éditions du Champ Urbain, ; Derrida’s “Force of Law,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, New York: Routledge, ; Michel Foucault’s Crime and Punishment, ed. Drucilla Cornell, New York: Random House, ; and René Girard’s, Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, . . See Mouffe, Democratic Paradox: . For an introduction to the paradoxes of liberalism in terms of its relation to violence, see Paul Kahn, Putting Liberalism in its Place, Princeton: Princeton UP, ; for an analysis of the limits of liberalism’s claim to universality and the violence implied in this claim (and its subsequent politics), see Ileana Rodríguez, Liberalism at Its Limits, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, . . See Brenkman, The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy, Princeton: Prince­ ton UP, : –. Brenkman exemplifies the nonviolent covenant as “the primal scenes of democratic citizenship” with already founded communities, such as that of the ancient Greek democrats (whose primal scene was rather the exclusion of women and slaves), American slave-owners and patriots (whose primal scene was the exclusion of Indians and slaves), and so forth. For Arendt’s argument, see On Revolution, New York: Penguin Books, : “Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis,” –. My thanks to Jon Butler, professor of religious studies at Yale University, for helping me understand the history of the Mayflower Compact. . See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford UP, . . See Marcel Hénaff, “L’âge du sacrifice” and “La logique de la dette,” in his Le Prix de la vérité: le don, l’argent, la philosophie, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, : –. . See Girard, Violence and the Sacred; see also the debate with Walter Burk-

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ert and Jonathan Smith, Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, Stanford: Stanford UP, . . See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso, . . Roberto Esposito’s study of the concept in such disparate fields as the theory of law, science, theology, and anthropology associates its textual field of signification with modernity’s configuration of governance. See his Immunitas: Protezione e negazione della vita, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, . . Other “zones” of exception might not be primordially related to membership: consider the festivities of carnival. In turn, zones of exception that redraw political membership might be found in punitive state apparatuses from prison systems, to detention camps, to the always shady areas of border cities and towns. . Pierre Clastres, “Marxist Anthropology,” in Anthropology of Violence, New York: Semiotext(e), [] : –. . I am referring mainly to the vast theoretical corpus spawned by the confluence of Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis, starting with the influential works of Louis Althusser; see Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, [] , For Marx, London: Verso, [] ; Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, London: Verso, [] . . See the recent debates of “the new French thought” led by Luc Ferry, Alain Renault, Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, and Gilles Lipovetsky. For an introduction, see Mark Lilla, ed., New French Thought: Political Philosophy, Princeton: Prince­ ton UP, . . I have been inspired by the work of contemporary philosophers such as Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, Fredric Jameson, Étienne Balibar, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito; I follow also the questions posed by Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Clastres, as well as those that pertain to psychoanalysis. For a comment on the differences and similarities among some of these and other political philosophers, see Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, London: Verso, , Part II, The Split Universality: –. . See Jameson’s first chapter in Political Unconscious for an overview of the degrees of overdetermination in different theories of interpretation; see also his Marxism and Form, Princeton: Princeton UP, ; and Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of Aesthetics, London: Wiley-Blackwell, . See Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ) for the problem these theories present to any conception of subjectivity. For modern theories of art as promoting social change, one can start as far back as Friedrich Schiller’s formulation of “aesthetic education” in On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Oxford: Clarendon, . See Jacques Rancière’s comment in “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments

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Notes of Autonomy and Heteronomy,” New Left Review  (March ): –; see John Mackay’s introduction to Inscription and Modernity, Bloomington: Indiana UP, : –. See also the Brechtian tradition of didactic theater, or its “southern” counterpart, Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, New York: Theater Communications Group, . See Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, New York: Hill and Wang, , esp. the article “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting.” . Gilles Deleuze, Essays: The Clinical and Critical, London: Verso, . . Jacques Lacan, RSI, published in Ornicar , Paris: . . Psychoanalysis formulates many psychic functions as also having the structure of symptoms and thus enabling life—father, woman, the ego, and the subject itself can all be seen as compromise solutions; for the father as symptom, see Lacan’s Seminar RSI (esp. the lesson on //, Ornicar?  [Paris, ]:–); for the analyst as symptom, see Seminar  Le sinthome (esp. the lesson on //, first published in Ornicar?  [Paris, ]: –); for woman as symptom, see RSI, Ornicar? – (Paris, ) and Séminaire XX (–) “Encore,” Paris: Seuil, . . See Jameson, “On Interpretation,” in Political Unconscious (esp. –). . See Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” in Signatures of the Visible, London: Routledge, : –. . Pierre Macherey, The Object of Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, : . . The classic example in the clinical canon to show this encounter is the organ of the mouth and the mother’s breast: the mouth supports the life-preserving function of feeding, and the somatic excess—pleasure of sucking—resulting from contact with the mother. Freud first uses the concept in his  “Three Essays for a Theory of Sexuality.” . Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, . . Consider twentieth-century formulations of politics as fiction, for example in Benjamin’s “aestheticization of politics” as part of a specific political project in Europe (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, : –); Badiou’s “funerary fiction of the political” as the fiction of modern political communities bound by a representative authority (Peut-on penser la politique? Paris: Seuil, ); Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” as the crafting of nationhood (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, ). . “Introduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations: . Continuities appear in unexpected sources: consider the  UN Development Report’s two epigraphs in ch.  about inequality: Margaret Thatcher is quoted as having said in  that the powerful advocate for greater equality “because of an undistinguished combination

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of envy and bourgeois guilt”; a quote by Plato follows: “there should exist among citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth, for both are the productive of great evil.” . George Steiner, Antigones, New York: Oxford UP, . . See Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, New York: Columbia UP, . . See Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture . (): –. . Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C.Reeve, Cambridge: Hackett Pub., . . Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books, .

Part I: Sophocles’ Antigone or The Invention of Politics . Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative,” Glyph  (): . . Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Politics: Ancient and Modern, Cambridge: Polity Press, : .

Antigone and the Polis . Sophocles, Antigone, trans. and ed. Andrew Brown, Wiltshire, UK: Aris and Phillips, . All subsequent quotations are from this edition, unless otherwise specified. . For an analysis of this and other aspects of the politics of hate in ancient Greece, see David Konstan, “Anger, Hatred and Genocide in Ancient Greece,” Common Knowledge . (): –; for the distinction between the military and the personal enemy, Konstan quotes the ancient grammarian Ammonius, “[E]khthros is a former friend while a polemios is someone who advances toward one under arms” (). . See the illuminating study of graves in antiquity by Ian Morris, Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, . On Themistocles’ lack of burial, see Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Chicago: Britannica Great Books, , Book : . Themistocles died in exile in Persian territory after having been accused of treason; his family members were denied the right to bring him back to Athens. . Hegel took up the theme of antithetical opposites in order to theorize the possibilities for speculative thinking, thus paving the way for the dichotomic interpretation of tragedy and of this tragedy in particular. According to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (“The Caesura of the Speculative,” Glyph  []: –), this movement continued through Nietzsche, Freud, and even Heidegger. Hegel’s in-

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Notes fluential interpretation of the play situates the antithesis in the ethical order, which he divided into two kinds of equally ethical laws: the laws of the family, the gods, and womankind, and those of the state, the community, and mankind. The latter deal with culture; the former deal with nature, adding consciousness (mediation) to the otherwise unmediated natural processes of destruction that cannot be integrated into the community. The family’s ethical duty is toward the dead, for the citizen does not belong to the family (Phenomenology, Number , trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, , Part IV A: –). Thus, women’s ethical assignment is to “[keep] away from the dead this dishonoring of him by unconscious appetites and abstract entities” (ibid., Number : ), while the task of man is the making of the community. The feminine has an intuitive, divine awareness of the ethical; the community exists only through its interference with the family—womankind—which is the “everlasting irony of the community,” posing forever the problem of her integration (ibid., Number : ). The two ethical orders, because they are partial, collide in war. Government prevents them from growing independently from the whole. Hegel’s reading has often been interpreted as what Th. C. W. Oudemans and A. P. M. H. Lardinois call “a harmonizing point of view” (see their Tragic Ambiguity, Leiden: E. J. Brill, : –). This reading implies that the collision of the two ethics ends in a reconciliation of state and family in an absolutely just world. Nonetheless, the one-sidedness of each ethical position points more in the direction of what Hegel viewed as the tragic nature of all action, which to be effective must remain partial. Hegel’s view signals the internal contradiction, or the fissure, inherent in each of the opposites at war, suggesting the impossibility of a reconciliation. Lacoue-Labarthe’s deconstruction of the Hegelian reading (“The Caesura of the Speculative”) argues that tragedy represents the limits of Hegelian speculative logic, rather than its possibility. . George Steiner, Antigones, New York: Oxford UP, . . Orlando Patterson sees not one but “two tragedies of Antigone”: a divine and a social tragedy; see Freedom in the Making of the Western Culture, New York: Basic Books, , vol. : ch. , esp. –. Feminist interpretations see Antigone within the frame of the feminist debate on equality versus difference. For an introduction to this debate, see Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, Cambridge: Polity Press, . Within this debate, Antigone is appropriated by feminists in a double way, either as a symbol for a woman’s right to enter the sphere of the public (thus representing equality for women), or as a glorification of a traditional assignment of gender roles that subsumes women under an ethics of care and the family (thus representing the plea for women’s difference and gendered rights). In her influential “Antigone’s Daughters,” (Democracy . []: –), Jean Elshtain interprets Antigone as “giving voice to familial and social imperatives and duties” (). Against Elshtain’s appropriation of Antigone for a conservative feminist agenda,

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Mary Dietz’s “Citizenship with a Feminist Face: The Problem with Maternal Thinking” (Political Theory . []: –) argues that Antigone represents the woman citizen who embodies the feminist dictum that “the personal is political” (). See also Valerie Hartouni’s article “Antigone’s Dilemma: A Problem in Political Membership,” Hypatia . (): –. In her Antigone’s Claim, Judith Butler argues that Antigone is a symbol for kinship relations suppressed by patriarchal arrangements and their mandate against incest and for “compulsory heterosexuality” for women (on this, see Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience,” Signs . []: –). For a feminist philosophical re-reading of the Hegelian frame see Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, ; for philosophical engagements with Irigary and Sarah Kofman on Antigone, see Tina Chanter, “Tragic Dislocations: Antigone’s Modern Theatrics,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies . (Spring ): –, and Carol Jacobs, “Dusting Antigone,” MLN  (): –. . See Karl Reinhardt, Sophocles, New York: Harper and Row, : –. Similarly, Nicole Loraux complains about contemporary feminist interpretations: “[O]ne has to accept it: it is very unlikely that the Greek women, on their way back from the graveyard, would have invaded the agora of their cities to express their claims, or, as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, to demand justice [. . . .] I base this less upon the fact that there is no historical evidence on this matter [. . .] than upon the structural impossibility of such a hypothesis” (Les mères en deuil, Paris: Seuil, : , my translation). . See Lacoue-Labarthe, “Caesura of the Speculative,” for his complaint about a “philosophical exploitation” of tragedy’s cathartic effect that provided dialectics with “a theory [. . .] where death in general [. . .] is able to contemplate ‘itself,’ reflect ‘itself,’ and interiorize ‘itself ’” (). . See, for instance, Loraux, “Oikeios polemos: La guerra nella famiglia,” Studi Storici  (): –; or Martin Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion, Oxford: Clarendon Press, : . . I refer here to such political philosophers as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: New Left Books, ); Fredric Jameson (Marxism and Form, Princeton: Princeton UP, ); Étienne Balibar (Philosophy of Marx, London: Verso, ); Jacques Derrida (Spectres of Marx, New York: Routledge, ); Nancy Fraser (Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ); Slavoj Žižek (The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, ); and Antonio Negri (Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, ). . See René Girard, “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, , and Violence and

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Notes the Sacred, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, ; Mark R. Anspach, ed., Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, Stanford: Stanford UP, ; Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal‑Naquet, Œdipe et ses mythes, Brussels: Éditions complexe, , and Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, New York: Zone Books, . . See Patrick J. Deneen’s review of several of the works of this school in Political Theory . (June ): –. See, for example, Peter Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press, , The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken, Princeton: Princeton UP, , Corrupting the Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture and Political Theory, Princeton: Princeton UP, ; Peter Euben, John Wallach, and Josiah Ober, eds., Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstitution of American Democracy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, ; Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule, Princeton: Princeton UP, ; Christopher Rocco, Tragedy and Enlightenment: Athenian Political Thought and the Dilemmas of Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, . See also Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, Democracia y literatura en la Atenas clásica, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, : ch. : –. . Although most classicists situate the staging in –, I expand the historical reference following Blake Tyrrell and Larry Bennett, Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, : –. . Sophocles’ civic life did not end there: he was a chief financial officer for the empire in – and a senior constitutional counselor of the Board of Safety in , when the democrats faced the defeat of their army in Sicily. He was still a counselor in the Assembly of , which voted its own abolition, an obscure oligarchic attempt to dismantle democracy. See, for example, Plutarch, Lives, “Pericles,” trans. Sir Thomas North, Oxford: Blackwell, : ; C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, : ; Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book III:  and Book IV: ; Jennifer Roberts, Athens on Trial, Princeton: Princeton UP, . For the argument that Sophocles wrote the play after coming back from Samos, and in relation to the role of funeral rites after a war, see Tyrrell and Bennett, Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone. . Aristotle, Poetics, trans. W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater, New York: Random House, . . The Greek is added in Loraux’s version of Herodotus’ quotation, to identify the “family” and the “city”; see her “De l’amnistie et son contraire,” in Yosef Yerushalmi et al., Usages de l’oublie, Paris: Seuil, :  and n. . See Herodotus, The Persian Wars, in The Greek Historians, ed. Godolphin Francis, New York: Random House, , vol. . . See Vernant’s thesis in Myth and Tragedy: ; see also Tyrrell and Bennet, Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone: ; and Loraux, “De L’amnistie”: .

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. See Moses Finley, The Ancient Greeks, New York: Viking Press, . Peter Euben makes of tragedy a democratic institution in its own right, helping to maintain isonomia, inculcating civic virtue, and providing a space for the city to reflect on political choices it had made (Greek Tragedy: –). Josiah Ober and Barry Strauss analyze the similarities between the Assembly and the theater in their article “Drama, Political Rhetoric and the Discourse of Athenian Democracy” in John J. Winkler and Froma Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do with Dionisus?, Princeton: Prince­ ton UP, : –. Dora Pozzi (“The Polis in Crisis,” in Dora Pozzi and John Wickersham, eds., Myth and the Polis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, : –) situates the theater in between the Assembly and the temples of the gods, as a place of negotiation between the constitutive myths of Athens and those that threatened its stability. Pozzi assigns a fully political role to the theater only by the end of the fifth century, when the polis was in crisis, at the time of the expedition into (and defeat in) Sicily (), and it “turned upon itself critically in the theatre” (ibid.: ). . For the relation between animal sacrifice and tragedy, see Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, Berke­ ley: University of California Press, ; Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, Stanford: Stanford UP, ; for the relationship between Greek sacrifice and cannibalism, see Burkert’s comment on Theophrastus’ thesis on cannibalism in Violent Origins: ; and Dennis Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece, London: Routledge, : . . For a comparison with our times, see Moses Finley, Democracy: Ancient and Modern, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, ; see also Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary,” in his World in Fragments, Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis, Stanford: Stanford UP, : –. . Loraux, “Reflections on the Greek City,” in City-States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. Kurt Raaflaub, Anthony Molho, and Julia Emlen, Stuttgart: F. S. Verlag, : : see also Raaflaub, “Stick and Glue: The Function of Tyranny in Fifth-Century Athenian Democracy,” in Kathryn Morgan, ed., Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and Its Discontents, Austin: University of Texas Press, : –. . The civil service that kept the minimal government machinery going came out of the drawing of lots and was paid a small per diem. The annual offices and the Council of  “were chosen by lot and restricted to one or two one-year terms, with the exception of the board of ten generals and such small ad hoc commissions as embassies to another state” (Finley, Ancient Greeks: ). No one could be elected more than twice, and not in successive years. For a detailed description of the workings of Athenian democracy, see Arnold W. Gomme, More Essays in Greek History and Literature, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, . For a detailed analysis of the

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Notes alleged failure of Athenian democracy after the defeat of the Peloponnesian War, see William G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, Toronto: McGraw-Hill, : –. For an analysis of the population, see Julián Gallego, La democracia en tiempos de tragedia, Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila Editores, : ; M. H. Hansen, Demography and Democracy, The Number of Athenian Citizens in the Fourth Century, Herning: Systime, . The conservative estimate is a total of twenty-five thousand adult males. By , Pericles had restricted Athens’s constituency, granting citizenship to children of legitimate marriages between citizens (this was already documented by Plutarch, Lives, “Pericles”: ). For Athens’s exclusion of the army, women, foreigners, and slaves from city affairs, see Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, New York: Shaw and Saller, ; Patterson, Freedom in the Making, vol. I, part II; Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, London: Vintage, ; Vidal-Naquet, Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, . . Any citizen could take to court another citizen for proposing an “unlawful law,” and the Assembly had to judge itself for having approved an unlawful law. The oft-cited examples are the th Decree, banning the schools of philosophy without approval of the Assembly, which was indicted by a thousand-member jury because it conflicted with Solon’s law securing free association and with the rd Decree of amnesty toward the defeated participants in an oligarchic coup. There are thirtynine examples recorded between  and , summarized by M. H. Hansen in “The Public Action against Unconstitutional Proposals,” Classical Studies  (): –. . Raaflaub, “Stick and Glue,” . . Ibid., . . See the debate in Moshe Berent, “In Search of the Greek State: A Rejoinder to M. H. Hansen,” Polis . (): –; Hansen, “Was the Polis a State of a Stateless Society?” in Even More Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis, ed. Thomas H. Nielsen, Stuttgart: Copenhagen Polis Center, : –; see also Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, Oxford: Oxford UP, : –. . Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C.Reeve, Cambridge: Hackett, . . See Loraux, “Reflections on the Greek City”: –, for the difficulty of conceiving conflict as healthy. Medical terms comparing an unhealthy body with a state in internal war appear often in Plato. See, for instance, his Republic, Book VIII: e, c. For a detailed analysis of these metaphors, see Giusseppe Cambiano, “Pathologie et analogie politique,” and Mario Vegetti, “Metafora politica e immagine del corpo negli scritti Ippocratici,” in Formes de pensée dans la colection Hippocratique, Actes du ème colloque international hippocratique de Lausanne, , Droz, : –, –, respectively.

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. See, for instance, Arthur Pickard‑Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, nd ed., rev. by J. Gould and D. M. Lewis, London: Oxford UP, ; Marcel Detienne and Jean‑Paul Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, trans. P. Wissing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ; Richard Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City‑State, New York: Oxford UP, ; Winkler and Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do with Dionysos?; P. E. Easterling, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, New York: Cambridge UP, ; Vernant and Vidal‑Naquet, Myth and Tragedy; Christiane Sourvinou‑Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion, New York: Lexington Books, . . See Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual, Berkeley: University of California Press, ; Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, , Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, : –, The Rites of Passage, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . See also Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge, ; Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society, Chicago: Aldine, ; Marc Augé, Pouvoirs de vie, pouvoirs de mort: Introduction à une anthro­ pologie de la repression, Paris: Flammarion, . See also Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston: Beacon Press, , for a comparison between ritual and play.

The Most Modern of Tragedies . See Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Athenian Democracy: False and True Questions,” in Pierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Cleisthenes the Athenian, New Jersey: Humanities Press, : , and “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, Oxford: Oxford UP, : –. See Seth Bernadete, Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophocles’ Antigone, South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, : ; Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, London: Zone Books, : –; for a discussion of the often cited idea that Antigone is both modern and Greek at once, see Tina Chanter’s engagement with Sarah Kofman in “Tragic Dislocations: Antigone’s Modern Theatrics,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies . (Spring ): –. . For a recent argument that recuperates tragedy mainly as a “religious exploration,” see Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion, New York: Lexington Books, . For a few examples among the vast classical tradition that locates the conflict between human laws and the gods, see C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, ; John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, Oxford: Oxford UP, ; Marsh McCall, “Divine and Human Ac-

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Notes tion in Sophocles: The Two Burials of the Antigone,” Yale Classical Studies  (): –; David Seale, Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . . See Jon Mikalson, Athenian Popular Religion, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, : . For Artemis’ example, see James Hogan, A Commentary on the Plays of Sophocles, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, : . Not only does the goddess want nothing to do with death but she also reveals her vulnerability to pollution. Pollution was not caused by gods, but by “vengeful spirits,” in which case attention was paid to the institutionalization of prohibitions that would prevent the pollution. . See Moses Finley’s analysis in The Legacy of Greece, Oxford: Clarendon Press, : –. . See Vidal-Naquet’s “Democracy: A Greek Invention,” in Lévêque and VidalNaquet, Cleisthenes, the Athenian: . . Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, New York, Zone Books, : . . The question of why tragedy was staged in a festival exclusively devoted to Dionysus, the god of excess, of confusion between the boundaries of reality and illusion, continues to puzzle critics: excess seems to be punished in tragedy. Vernant suggests that, springing from the invention of democracy, tragedy blurs the boundaries between illusion and reality, past and present, women and men, and gods and men, much as Dionysus himself embodied these indistinctions (see Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal‑Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, New York: Zone Books, : ; see also Vernant’s “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” in Charles Singleton, ed., Interpretations, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, : . . See, for instance, Peter Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press, : ; Moses Finley, The Ancient Greeks, New York: Viking Press, : ; Nancy Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women, Cornell: Cornell UP, . . For the question of whether impurity is a purely physical disorder or involves the divine order, see Vernant’s discussion of Mouliner in Myth and Tragedy. For the link between impurity and social disorder, see Mary Douglas’s seminal work, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge, [] . . For an account of the obscurities of the legend and of Sophocles’ likely invention, see Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, : ch. ; Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, New York: Braziller, , vol. I: –; M. Grant and J. Hazel, Gods and Mortals in Classical Mythology, Springfield, MA: G. and C. Merriam Company, :

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–; Mark Griffith, trans., Antigone / Sophocles, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, : –. For the argument that Sophocles’ choice is a representation of how the new democracy encroached on religion and family, which were the values of its oligarchic past, see, for example, Page duBois, “Antigone and the Feminist Critic,” Genre . (): –; Josh Beer, Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy, London: Praeger, : –. The problem with considering Antigone as emblematic of a vanishing religious and oligarchic tradition is that the oligarchic order was far from vanishing, as scholars have shown in their accounts of the dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants from  to  and in their analyses of the social class and class struggle in the Periclean era: see Moses Finley, The Ancient Greeks; Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of the Western Culture, New York: Basic Books, ; and Jennifer Roberts, Athens on Trial, Princeton: Princeton UP, . See also G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP [] . . In his Sophoclean Tragedy, Bowra compared Creon to Pentheus in the Bacchae because of the punishment both kings receive. But, whereas Euripides brings the god to the stage, Sophocles is even ambiguous as to who will perform the punishment. See Whitehorne’s comments on Homer in his “The Background to Polynices’ Disinterment and Reburial,” Greece and Rome . (): –. . E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley: University of California Press, . . See Brown’s comment in Sophocles, Antigone, trans. and ed. Andrew Brown, Wiltshire, UK: Aris and Phillips, : , and that of Hogan (Commentary: ), arguing that this intervention is equivalent to atê (delusion), which is not the gods themselves but rather an instrument or state of mind that allows action. . See Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion. . Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, : . . See, for instance, Patterson, Freedom in the Making of the Western Culture: –; and Victor Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, : esp. –, –. . Literally, the sentence could read: “Zeus fulfills the evils that come from Oedipus.” In Brown’s translation Zeus is a conduit, and the true source appears to be Oedipus; in Reginald Gibbons’s and Charles Segal’s translation (Oxford: Oxford UP, ), we read “[Do] you know one evil left to us by Oedipus, our father, that has not been brought down on the two of us by Zeus?”; in Myatt’s translation (Shrewsbury: Thormynd Press, ), Zeus is made the central figure: “[Do] you see how Zeus fulfils in us while we live the woes of Oedipus?” . See Carol Jacobs “Dusting Antigone,” MLN  (): ; also in Skirting the Ethical, Stanford: Stanford UP, : –.

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Notes . Hogan calls this the “awe and wonder” school (); see McCall, “Divine and Human Action”: –, for the argument in favor of godly intervention. Against the latter, see A. T. von S. Bradshaw, “The Watchman Scenes in the Antigone,” Classical Review  (): –; and the discussion in Brown, Antigone: –. . Ignacio Errandonea (Tragedias: Antígona, Electra, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, , vol. : Introducción –) argues that this first trip happens in the night, before Antigone arrives to the palace in search of Ismene at dawn: would we be expected to believe that her traces remain from night to dawn? . See Donna Kurtz and John Boardman, Greek Burial Customs, London: Thames and Hudson, . . In her article “La main d’Antigone” (Métis  []: –), Loraux gives us a complete analysis of their occurrence: three times the word refers to Antig­ one’s own kin (both Ismene and Polynices—autadelphos—l. , , ), one to her mother (autogennètos—l. ), one to her self-willed temper (autognôtos—l. ), one to the two brothers (autoktoneô—l. ), one to her own decision for death (autonomos—l. ), one to the self-destruction of the unyielding (autopremnos—l. ), two to Oedipus’ own self-punishment (autourgos and autophôros—l. –), five to the action of killing by one own’s hands (autokheir—l. , , , , ). Loraux adds the noun authadia in reference to Creon’s rekilling the dead (l. ). . See “Antigone,” in Dictionnaire des mythes littéraires, ed. Pierre Brunel, Paris: Éditions du Rocher, : –. . In Karl Reinhardt’s words, Antigone’s unwritten laws just express her desires: “[It] does not entail any command of ‘Thou shalt’ unless that command also comes from the voice of her own nature [….] Is that too simple for us? That is Greek religion” (Sophocles, New York: Harper and Row, : ). For Myatt the Greek “ethos” meant nothing abstract but concrete customs that maintained the community and were a gift of the gods (). . Claude Rivière, Les liturgiques politiques, Paris: PUF,  (my translation).

Creon’s Edict . See Ignacio Errandonea’s defense of this thesis (Tragedias: Antígona, Electra, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, : –. . To enrich the definition of “genocide” I use this word that has been coined recently in the field of “genocide studies”: it applies to the killing of members of a political group. See, for example, Barbara Harf and Ted Gurr, “Toward an Empirical Theory of Genocides and Politicides: Identification and Measurement of Cases since ,” International Studies Quarterly  (): –. As is known, the word

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“genocide” refers to the killing of members of an ethnic group. It is modern in usage, though, as Leo Kuper put it, “[T]he word is new but the concept is ancient” (Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, Penguin: : ). Etymologically, the word “genocide” means to kill (cide) one’s “kin, kind, race” (genos), and the play can be said to show this. The lack of burial that triggers the sequence of deaths in the play is a standard practice in modern genocide: the issue at stake is to eliminate people qua people (for an extensive set of examples, see Totten, Parsons, and Charny, eds., A Century of Genocide, ; Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, London: Routledge, ; Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, New Haven: Yale UP, ). Most current studies in the field start their inquiry on genocide with antiquity; references about the fifth century b.c.e. include the famous Melian Conference in Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Chicago: Britannica Great Books, , Book V: –, in which the Athenians explain to the Melians that at stake is not simply their enslavement but rather the “safety” of their city, the annihilation of the entire polis. The episode ends with “the Melians surrendered at the discretion of the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves” (Book V: , Britannica Great Books, University of Chicago, : ). Some scholars agree that the difference between ancient and modern genocidal practices lies in that the former were discursively legitimized by anger and revenge against a wrong-doing instead of merely by (modern) “hate”: see David Konstan’s “Anger, Hatred and Genocide in Ancient Greece,” Common Knowledge . (): –. The genre of tragedy is associated more and more with a writing of war. In the July–August  double issue of the French Magazine Littéraire (Paris) devoted to Écrire la guerre (Writing War), Gilles Costaz collects a series of articles that refer back to ancient Greece and the “theatre of fratricidal wars,” and begins his discussion of “Le théâtre de la guerre” (“The Theatre of War”) by asserting that “with Aeschylus [. . .] theater begins a tough relation with war” (p.  my translation). . Creon’s kingship itself is confusing in relation to the passage of time: at the beginning of the play he has assumed kingship the night before; at the end of the play, it seems that Creon has been a king for longer than just one night. Brown (in Sophocles, Antigone, trans. and ed. Andrew Brown, Wiltshire, UK: Aris and Phillips, : ) finds some evidence in lines – for this belief: the messenger speaks of Creon’s reversal of fortune as if he had ruled for more than one day. . The speech in which Creon announces the edict is often compared to Pericles’ funeral oration. Although Pericles mentions “enemies and friends,” the enemies are outside Athens, and if he praises the courage of the fallen men in war to strike down the enemy and relinquish everything else (Thucydides, The Pelopon-

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Notes nesian War, Book II: –: –), this did not refer to the members of the community but to the excess of luxury and “wealth.” See, for further reference, Victor Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ; also C. G. Thomas, “Sophocles, Pericles and Creon,” Classical World  (–): –. . Stig Strömholm, A Short History of Legal Thinking in the West, Stockholm: Norstedts, : –. Greek cities moved from aristocracy to other forms of government by making laws public by promulgation; in oligarchic communities the law was a “professional secret” () within the ruling class. . Death for the Greeks was usually imposed by powers beyond the reach of man—gods, fortune, lot, sickness, war, or a public trial. An edict that could threaten the citizens with the death penalty must have had a strong impact in the Greek audience: the Greeks seem to have preferred exile as the penalty for their own kin and death sentences only through trial. Only the Peloponnesian War brought widespread discussions about capital punishment (Thomas Martin, Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times, New Haven: Yale UP, : ch. ). I am not considering its aftermath, when there were obvious exceptions, such as the case of Socrates (Anaxagoras was exiled, as was Thucydides). See Moses Finley, The Ancient Greeks, New York: Viking Press, : ch. . . For treason and burial cases, see Douglas MacDowell, The Law in Classical Athens, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, : ; and J. E. G. Whitehorne, “The Background to Polynices’ Disinterment and Reburial,” Greece and Rome . (): . Even if the ethics of funeral rites remain a matter of controversy among historians, it is generally agreed that traitors would be denied burial on native soil and left in a place where their bodies could not cause pollution. James Hogan adds that after a war, Greek military custom regularly allowed “for a truce to remove the dead,” so that the relatives could bury their corpses (A Commentary on the Plays of Sophocles, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, : ). The Sophoclean corpus, however unclear the matter is historically, makes clear Sophocles’ position: even his traitorous Ajax deserves proper burial. . Finley observes that democrats claimed neither divine guidance, nor revelation, nor “royal blood” as a source of legitimation of power: his example is Solon of Athens (The Legacy of Greece, Oxford: Clarendon Press, : ). This associates Creon with oligarchy, not with tyranny, which also lacked an external authority or sanction, and rather found it in “the people.” . See, for instance, Jacques Lacan’s analysis of Creon in his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, New York: W. W. Norton, : –. . Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, : . . Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford UP, : .

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. In his “Critique of Violence” (in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, New York: Schocken Books, ), Walter Benjamin uses the term “bare life” or “mere life” and only specifies that it is the “bearer of guilt.” In light of Benjamin’s use of the Freudian corpus, “bare life” might be interpreted as “the subject.” In his Homo Sacer, Agamben argues that the sovereign exception and the production of “bare life” structure modern law and power. “Bare life” becomes the hidden center of modern politics when the  habeas corpus formula, instead of alluding to freedom and rights in the ancient or feudal sense, makes only the human body the bearer of freedom and rights, making the body the center of political conflict. . For the Athenians, the army led the empire, not the city. Serving the army was not compulsory for citizens: soldiers were paid by their generals, who mostly belonged to the nobility. The army was a citizen’s militia, composed of the very same citizens who discussed politics in the Assembly. Only ten generals were in charge of the army, and those ten positions were exempt from the democratic procedures of rotation of power in that they were elected (not by lot) and their re-election could be extended indefinitely. The Athenians managed city business without the intervention of the army, even preventing the army from becoming a monolithic power. Pericles stresses that “as a matter of fact our united force was never yet encountered by any enemy, because we have at once to attend to our marine and to dispatch our citizens by land upon a hundred different services” (Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book II: : ). See Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, : ch. , or The Ancient Greeks: ch. . . Some feminist critics have identified the lack of intelligibility in the play as the play’s staging of the “moral madness” of real-life women living under patriarchal societies. Annie Pritchard argues that the ambiguities in Antigone express an ethical paradox for a woman in patriarchal societies: when she is woman (Ismene) she cannot be ethical; when she is ethical (Antigone) she cannot be a woman (she defies authority) (“Antigone’s Mirrors: Reflections on Moral Madness,” Signs . (): –). Nonetheless, this disregards not only that everyone in the play is “mad” but also that it is only from Creon’s point of view that Antigone could be “morally mad.” . For Brown the metaphor of emptiness suggests the writing of the law. The procedure for erasing a law in ancient Greece followed the pattern of writing on top of what had been written and some tablets “when opened are found to contain no writing” (Antigone: ). . Critics often say that Creon is the only character in Greek tragedy who is given the chance to change the course of fate. It has also been argued that Creon does change. For Patrick Guyomard (La jouissance du tragique, Paris: Aubier, ), only Tiresias resolves the impasse in which Antigone and Creon find themselves, and since Creon ends up listening to Tiresias, change and transmission are on Creon’s side. Nonetheless, it should be noted that he fails to react in time—that is, to

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Notes “disobey” the one decision impinging on him. Instead of undoing the two parts of his edict so that the corpse may be buried in the proper way and Antigone saved, he barely manages to undo the lack of a burial. In spite of asking the servants to perform the burial while he frees Antigone, he ends up going with them to Polynices’ body, as if he were the only one who could undo his edict. Only after the rites are finished does he arrive at Antigone’s tomb, too late. . It is even doubted if Archaic Greece was ever a tribal society. See, for in­ stance, D. Roussel. Tribu et cité: études sur les groupes sociaux dans les cités grecques aux époques archaïque et classique, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, . . See Moshe Berent, “Stasis, or the Greek Invention of Politics,” History of Political Thought . (): . . See Finley, Politics in the Ancient World; Andrew Lintott, Violence, Civil Strife and Revolution in the Classical City, London: Croom Helm, ; Virginia Hunter, Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Lawsuits, Princeton: Princeton UP, ; Berent, “Stasis.” . For most critics Creon is a “tyrant.” Nonetheless, I agree with Steiner’s identification of Creon’s diction as that of a military man: “Creon’s register and its context are, very precisely, those of war” (George Steiner, Antigones, New York: Oxford UP, : ). A tyrant for the Greeks was not necessarily a bad leader, but rather a leader supported by a faction of the “people,” contrary to an oligarch. Whitman insinuates the association with Sparta: “No Athenian [. . .] could grant a point to a man who behaved like a tyrant and talked like an oligarch, however he sometimes prefaced his real sentiments with fine-sounding doctrines about the stability of the state. The famous stability of the Spartan government meant repression, control from above, and suspicion; and in this kind of stability Creon is fully versed” (Cedric Hubbell Whitman, Sophocles: A Study of Heroic Humanism, Cambridge: Harvard UP, : ). . Sparta’s subjects (captives in forced labor working the land) were divided into the helots and the perioeci, who retained personal freedom but delegated to the government decisions in military and foreign affairs. The latter (the “Equals”) had an armed camp of citizens trained from childhood in military skills: “They were free from (indeed barred from) all other vocational interests and activities, living a barrack life, always ready to take the field in strength against any foe, whether helots or outsider” (Finley, Ancient Greeks: ). See also G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP [] . . See Plutarch, Lives, “Lycurgus,” trans. Sir Thomas North, Oxford: Blackwell, : ; or Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “The Black Hunter and the Origin of the Athenian Ephebeia,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society  (). . See Morris’s article “Imaginary Kings: Alternatives to Monarchy in Early

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Greece” for her complete argument on how “the Greeks never had real kings yet imagined them incessantly” (), in Kathryn Morgan, ed., Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and Its Discontents, Austin: University of Texas Press, : –. . Kurt Raaflaub, “Stick and Glue: The Function of Tyranny in Fifth-Century Athenian Democracy,” in Kathryn Morgan, ed., Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and Its Discontents, Austin: University of Texas Press, . . See his “Tyrant Killing as Therapeutic Stasis: A Political Debate in Images and Texts,” in Morgan, ed., Popular Tyranny: –. . Since Machiavelli, a “reason of State” is a narrative of survival: “When it is a question of saving the Fatherland, one should not stop for a moment to consider whether something is lawful or unlawful, gentle or cruel, laudable or shameful” (Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, trans. with intro. and notes by Leslie J. Walker, London: Routledge and Paul, [] , III: ). For the ancient Greek appearances of this idea, see, for instance, Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book V: –; Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve, Cambridge: Hackett Pub., : Book ; Euripides’ The Phoenician Women and Eteocles’ speech in defense of his power: “for if one must do evil, then it is good to do it for the sake of authority; but otherwise one ought to act rightly,” David Green and Richmond Lattimore, eds., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, : , lines –.

Dying Democratically . Seth Bernadete asks the same type of question in his Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophocles’ Antigone, South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, : . . Alain Badiou thinks of ethics in the plural: “Ethics does not exist. There is only the ethic-of (of politics, of love, of science, of art)” (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso, : ). Badiou defines this as being truthful to particularity: “[To] be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking (although all thought is a practice, a putting to test) the situation ‘according to’ the event. And this of course—since the event was excluded by all the regular laws of the situation—compels the subject to invent a new way of being and acting in the situation” (–). For a thorough analysis of Antigone’s ethics as “moral agency” determined by her exceptionality, and responding to contingency and context, see Helene Foley’s “Antigone as Moral Agent,” in Female Acts, Princeton: Princeton UP, : –. . In fact, the only character who truly remains in the silence of the intimate, traditional Greek female space of the oikos is, significantly, the only mother in the play: Eurydice, whose words we know only through a messenger. . Sophocles, Antigone, trans. and ed. Andrew Brown, Wiltshire, UK: Aris and Phillips, : .

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Notes . For detailed descriptions, see Donna Kurtz and John Boardman, Greek Burial Customs, London: Thames and Hudson, . . See Nicole Loraux’s Les mères en deuil, Paris: Seuil, : , my translation; Kurtz and Boardman, Greek Burial Customs. . Seth Bernadete, Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophocles’ Antigone, South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, : . . Whitman writes: “[A] more disillusioning passage could hardly be imagined, but fortunately it can be safely expunged as spurious. No more glaring example of an actor’s interpolation exists in ancient tragedy [. . . .] [O]nce this passage is removed, the scene is intelligible and not in the least out of character” (Cedric Hubbell Whitman, Sophocles: A Study of Heroic Humanism, Cambridge: Harvard UP, : ). For Goethe’s famous comment, see Conversations de Goethe avec Eckermann, Paris: Gallimard, : . . For a detailed reading of this passage, and the thesis that it explains Antig­ one’s contextual ethics, see Helene Foley, “Antigone as Moral Agent,” in Female Acts, Princeton: Princeton UP, : –. For the erasure of the mother in Athens, see Loraux, Les mères. See Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, London: Zone Books, : –, for the uses of marriage to produce legitimate sons that resembled the father. . Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Chicago: Britannica Great Books, , Book II: : . . Herodotus, The Persian Wars, in The Greek Historians, ed. Godolphin Francis, New York: Random House, . . While the more common translation is that of Robert Graves—“in place of a mother”—Griffith adds “in return for birth,” “instead of a parent,” and “instead of procreation,” noting that Antigone’s name is rare and was probably invented to fit her role. See Mark Griffith, trans., Sophocles’ Antigone, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, , : n. . Stathis Gourgouris analyses the etymology in detail to conclude that the name means both an opposition of kinship to the polis and to kinship (a disruptive desire for a sibling); see Does Literature Think? Literature for an Antimythical Era, Stanford: Stanford UP, : . . Some interpret it as the corpses of the war between Argos and Thebes, some others as the lack of burial of the corpses from other cities; see Brown, Antigone: . . See, for example, George Steiner, Antigones, New York: Oxford UP, : –. See Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, New York: Columbia UP, , for the argument that Antigone’s love disturbs traditional incest rules. . For a similar interpretation, see J. Warren and Ann M. Lane, “The Politics of Antigone” (in Peter Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, Berkeley: Uni-

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versity of California Press, : –). The conflict is considered a recapitulation of the Homeric struggle between Achilles and Agamemnon over who is the kinglier man; Antigone “attempts to bury her brother in the spirit of a war comrade and condemns her uncle’s corruption in the spirit of a political equal” (). The authors question the usefulness of distinctions between male and female for analyzing Antigone: she is “a Homeric hero or citizen soldier [. . .] in the defence of the body of her slain friend against possible despoilment by the enemy” (). In turn, Butler concludes that Antigone comes to occupy all male—not female—family positions in Sophocles’ version of the myth (see Antigone’s Claim: –). . Vidal-Naquet, Black Hunter. . See Page duBois, Torture and Truth, London: Routledge, . See her argument that slaves were essential to the definition of political freedom in the Greek world in her Slaves and Other Objects, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . For an exhaustive account of the judicial punishments and tortures that the Greeks imagined and practiced, see Monnique Halm-Tisserant, Réalités et imaginaire des supplices en Grèce ancienne, Paris: Les Belles Letres, ; her ch.  deals exclusively with the tortures reserved to slaves (–). . For the controversy of Aristotle’s “justification” of slavery, see Politics, Book I and II: Trevor Saunder’s translation (Oxford UP, ) has a detailed commentary of the controversy. . Quoted in Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary,” in World in Fragments, Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis, Stanford: Stanford UP, : . See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, ; Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, London: Vintage, ; Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of the Western Culture, New York: Basic Books, ; Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, Cambridge: Harvard UP, : . . See Moses Finley, “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?” in Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge: Heffer and Sons, : ; see Vidal-Naquet, Black Hunter: –. . Vidal-Naquet’s expression, in Black Hunter: . . There is some debate over the meaning of lines – in this ode and its possible reference to Antigone’s love, instead of Haemon’s love. For criticism inspired in Lacan’s interpretation of Antigone, this ode would signal the passage from philia to eros in Antigone’s relation to her brother and to her act of burial; see, for instance, Charles Shepherson, “The Atrocity of Desire: Of Love and Beauty in Lacan’s Antigone,” Umbra  () –. Nonetheless, according to Griffith, the lines that primarily would read “Victorious is the allure shining in the eyes of the

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Notes ready young bride” dubiously refer to Antigone’s desire. Griffith gives a myriad of other interpretations that range from “desire’s victory is plainly visible” to “the lover’s desire (for the beloved)” or “the beloved’s allure affecting the lover,” and so forth. See Griffith, Sophocles / Antigone: . . For the complexities of this term, which go as far as suggesting that it need not imply any friendliness at all, see Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, : –. In the case of Antigone, the disparate interpretations of the word philia are exemplified already in this line: “[T]he evils of our enemies are coming upon our own people” (l. ). For Hogan and Goldhill, “our own people” (philos) stresses the political division between “friends and enemies” (James Hogan, A Commentary on the Plays of Sophocles, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, : ); Brown and Knox suggest that the word philos refers here only to Polynices (Brown, Antigone: ). But if we think of Polynices as a public enemy, both the connotation of relative and political ally should be condensed in the interpretation. Much has been said concerning philia as the love for those “most dear and near,” in the case of Antigone, for those of the same womb. In the words of John D. B. Hamilton, hers is “genos talk . . . the origin of kinship amity is in the womb” (“Antigone: Kinship, Justice and the Polis,” in Pozzi and Wickersham, Myth and the Polis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, : –). This explains neither Antigone’s enmity for Ismene, nor her rejection for those of her own womb. . See Loraux, Les mères. . See Horst Hutter’s Politics as Friendship: The Origins of Classical Notions of Politics in the Theory and Practice of Friendship (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, ) for Greek theories of friendship, the relations between philia and eros, and a study of the institution of “hetaery,” which, dating back to Homeric times, adapted to various constitutional forms of the Greek city and played a major role in the polis throughout Greek history. For a recent consideration of the ideology of reciprocity at the basis at the heart of Athenian political friendship, see Malcolm Schofield, Saving the City, London: Routledge, : –. For studies on the practice of (male) friendship in relation to the city, see also Gabriel Herman, Ritualized Friendship and the Greek City, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, . . Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, . . See Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual, Berkeley: University of California Press, : . . See, for instance, Froma Zeitlin, “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama,” in John J. Winkler and Froma Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do with Dionisus?, Princeton: Princeton UP, : . . Reaching similar conclusions, though responding to the question of ethics, Carol Jacobs finds Antigone’s distinct ethics in the figure for motherhood that she becomes in dusting the corpse, which is neither “an act of production nor of iden-

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tification”: at the burial site, Antigone takes the place of a mother who engenders “the unreproduceable” (“Dusting Antigone,” MLN  []: ). . See Maurice Bloch, Ritual, History and Power: Selected Papers in Anthropology, London: Athlone Press, ; Vernant, Myth and Society: ; Burkert, Structure and History; Frits Staal, Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras, and the Human Sciences, New York: P. Lang, . Some scholars see rituals as predating language: for Burkert they are rooted in the survival techniques of a group; Staal sees linguistic syntax as derived from ritual syntax, which can be compared to Chomsky’s idea of a “generative grammar.” . Victor Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, : . One century later, Aristotle defined unwritten laws as natural justice: “It is this that Sophocles’ Antigone clearly means when she says that the burial of Polynices was a just act in spite of the prohibitions: she means that it was just by nature” (Rhetoric I..I, in Aristotle, “Rhetoric” and “Poetics,” trans. W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater, New York: Random House, ). . Blake Tyrrell and Larry Bennett, Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, : . . Tyrrell and Bennett cite Thucydides’ thirty-fourth chapter in his second book as the authoritative description of public funerals in Athens; see their Introduction for a discussion on their importance (ibid.: –). Pericles’ Funeral Orations are the most famous funeral speeches defending the unique spirit of a democracy in which power is in the hands of the “whole people,” for each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well, and a man who takes no interest in politics is not just a man who minds his own business but a useless man. Pericles stresses the way in which Athenians submit their decisions on policy to deliberation and discussion and consider that happiness depends on being free, on abiding by unwritten law, sharing, and giving; on practicing tolerance and self-governance (Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book II: –: –). For a compelling analysis of Athens and funeral rites, see Loraux, Invention of Athens; Christoph Clairmont, Patrios Nomos: Public Burial in Athens during the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC, Oxford: B.A.R., . . Stig Strömholm, A Short History of Legal Thinking in the West, Stockholm: Norstedts, : , emphasis in the original. . Finley, The Legacy of Greece, Oxford: Clarendon Press, : . . This “aphasia” is crudely displayed in that there was little variation in vocabulary between oligarchs and democrats. For an illuminating interpretation of the use by oligarchs and democrats of the words “ancestral constitution,” “founding fathers,” “democratic law,” and their relation to the community’s need to negotiate between its ruptures and continuities, see Finley’s opening lecture at Cambridge University, //, Democracy Ancient and Modern, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, . A. H.

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Notes M. Jones asserts that no theory of democracy survives from the Greeks. It is rather through its critics and orators that we can reconstruct its experience (see “The Athenian Democracy and Its Critics,” Cambridge Historical Journal  (): –). Josiah Ober argues the same in his Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule, Princeton: Princeton UP, : . See also Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern; and Loraux, Invention of Athens. On the other hand, Cynthia Farrar sets out to prove the opposite in her book The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Athens, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, . Her argument builds on the political thought of those whom she considers the three democratic theorists of classical Athens: Protagoras, Democritus, and Thucydides. . Barrington Moore, quoted in Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, : . . Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton: Princeton UP, . . Ibid. . See Ilias Arnaoutoglou, Ancient Greek Laws, London: Routledge, : . See J. M. Kelly’s first chapter in his A Short History of Western Legal Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, . For a brief account on procedures that show how, contrary to the modern understanding of the law, the Greek understanding was averse to effecting changes to existing laws. . Josiah Ober’s Political Dissent provides the major arguments against democracy in ancient Athens (“The Old Oligarch,” Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle) to sustain that “the Western tradition of formal political theorizing originated in the work of an informal, intellectual, and aristocratic community of Athenian readers and writers” who were all hostile to democracy (). . Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton: Princeton UP, . . Jennifer Roberts, Athens on Trial, Princeton: Princeton UP, : –. . Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, Cambridge: Harvard UP, , and “La Main d’Antigone,” Métis  (); Françoise Duroux, Antigone encore, Paris: Côté-femmes éditions, . For Antigone’s enigma as “death wish,” see Kate Hamburger, “From Sophocles to Sartre,” in Studies on the Text of Sophocles, ed. Roger David Dawe, Leiden: Briel, : –. Hamburger uses Anouilh’s version of the tragedy, esp. Creon’s line “Polynices was only a pretext.” . See Aphrodite Avagianou, Sacred Marriage in the Rituals of Greek Religion, Bern: Peter Lang, ; Rush Rehm, Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, ; Richard Seaford, “The Tragic Wedding,” Journal of Hellenistic Studies  (): –. . Warren and Ann Lane argue that marriage has been brought up by everyone in the play but Antigone: “[T]he very belatedness of Antigone’s admission of

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these conjugal longings highlights the emotional distance that has grown between her and Haemon with the unfolding of her city’s civic crisis” (“The Politics of Antig­ one”: , n. ).Tyrrell and Bennett (Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone: , and ch. ) connect the rites of burial and marriage according to Greek custom (death of a body, death of a virgin). . See Loraux, Tragic Ways. The two other female murders in extant tragedies are of wives who are bloodily killed: Clytemnestra is stabbed to death by her son, and Megara is thrown into the fire by her husband. See also Loraux (ibid.: –) for an analysis of Clytemnestra. See Elise Garrison, Groaning Tears: Ethical and Dramatic Aspects of Suicide in Greek Tragedy (Leiden: Brill, ), for a debate over Loraux’s findings. . For an extensive account on practices of ancient suicide, see Anton J. L. van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-killing in Classical Antiquity, London: Routledge, . See also Loraux’s Tragic Ways, and “La Main d’Antigone” for the Greek shame of suicide and the tradition of cutting the hands of those who committed suicide as punishment (–). . See Duroux, Antigone encore: –. . See both the Introduction and Loraux’s article “Reflections on the Greek City,” in City-States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. Kurt Raaflaub, Anthony Molho, and Julia Emlen, Stuttgart: F. S. Verlag, : –. . G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP [] .

Interlude: Modern Tempo . See Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, : –; for new considerations on the distinction between citizens and noncitizens in Athens, see Philip Brook Manville, The Origin of Citizenship in Ancient Athens, Princeton: Princeton UP, ; and Edward Cohen, The Athenian Nation, Princeton: Princeton UP, . . The debate over the need to struggle for rights was already present at the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in ; for instance, Mahatma Gandhi wrote to the United Nations that “the only rights man has are those which enable him to do his duty”: any right that is not obtained, is just a usurpation. And it was revitalized after Arendt’s questioning of the concept in her The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., : –. See this debate in Rancière’s “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,” South Atlantic Quarterly .– (Summer ): –. . Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, : –.

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Notes . Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, : . . See his Immunitas, Protezione e Negazione della Vita, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, . . Of interest here is Mihai Spariosu’s God of Many Names: Play, Poetry and Power in Hellenic Thought from Homer to Aristotle, Durham: Duke UP, . . Interestingly, critics have observed how the dialogues in Antigone are permeated by different interpretations of the very same word. See Karl Reinhardt’s comment on the words “dishonor,” “pious,” “friend,” “foe,” and “love” in Sophocles, New York: Harper and Row, : –; or Page duBois’s comment on the word nomos in “Antigone and the Feminist Critic,” Genre . (): –. For Rancière’s argument, see Disagreements: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . . In the early twentieth century the debate can be summarized in the opposition between Max Weber’s famous formulation of a “disenchantment of the world,” in his work on the spirit of capitalism, and Carl Schmitt’s idea that modern politics is a secularized version of older theological concepts (see his  Political Theology). In the s the debate was reinvigorated in Germany among Hans Blumberg (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, ), Karl Löwith (Meaning in History, ), and later Odo Marquard (Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie, ). . Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, New York: Oxford UP, : . . In her Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge: MIT Press, : –), Susan Buck-Morss develops this paradox: its classic example is the case in which state violence is exercised in mass democracies against a massive demonstration in favor of the interests of the people whom the state is supposed to represent; the state shows not to “be” the people and to have another law than that of the people, revealing instead how it has the power to define what is legal, and who the people represented are. . In English, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from Six Books on the Commonwealth, ed. and trans. Julian H. Franklin, New York: Cambridge UP, . Niccolò Machiavelli, writing before Bodin, had granted this type of state power complete independence from ethics or divine laws, with his concept of the “reason of State.” See esp. The Prince [–] (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, ), and Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio [] (Discourses, trans. with intro. and notes by Leslie J. Walker, London: Routledge and Paul, ). For Bodin and Machiavelli the sovereign power within the state, guided by its own autonomous rules of self-preservation, must decide whether the moral law should be broken in case of political emergency. Nonetheless, Bodin’s formulation of the state’s puissance souveraine

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(sovereign power) to unify a divided civil body, still leaves room for the ruler to abide by divine laws and all previous covenants that he has made with his people. . The most influential theories of contract are developed in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (), John Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government (), and JeanJacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (), three works that follow the first contractualist formulations in Grotius’s De jure bellis ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, ). . As Pierre Clastres notes, the emergence of the state “brought about the great typological division between Savage and Civilized man; it created the unbridgeable gulf whereby everything was changed, for, on the other side, Time became History” (Society against the State, London: Zone Books, : ). The passage from “primitive” to “civilized” societies—what French anthropologist Jean William Lapierre calls the political power deriving from “social innovation,” or the power to create new social relations by altering communal regulations—is imagined as the result of a historical law (instead of a product of power) leading to progress or superiority—it is the destiny of all society since the time of the Greeks. For Lapierre’s argument, see Le pouvoir politique, Paris: PUF, . . The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole, London: , I, VI: . . George Steiner, Antigones, New York: Oxford UP, : . . François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, New York: Cambridge UP, . . See Harold Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (); and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Politics Ancient and Modern, Cambridge: Polity Press, . . A possible “genealogy” of modern European radical equalitarian thought might start with “The Levellers” and “The Diggers” in England in the seventeenth century, followed by the Jacobin Constitution of , Babeuf ’s Conspiracy of the Equals in , the workers’ communist groups in  and , Marx’s and Engels’s  Communist Manifesto and the  Revolution, and the  Paris Commune. . Christoph Menke, Reflections of Equality, Stanford: Stanford UP, : . . Women were the last group to be understood as fully rational, thus capable of political life, but I am also referring here for instance to the eighteenth-century debates whether Africans were closer to apes or to men (the “ape debate”—see, for instance, Angelie Sens, “Dutch Debates on Overseas Man and His World,” in Bod Moore and Henk Van Nierop, eds., Colonial Empires Compared, Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing, : –). . For the emergence of a discourse of “human rights” in the eighteenth century and its avatars until , see Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, New York: Norton, . The dates I cite appear in the Introduction (–); Hunt traces the

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Notes juxtaposition of the discourse of human rights with that of human pity and sentimentality. I thank Ala Alryyes for helping me understand this debate. . See David Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment, New Haven: Yale UP, . . I exploit the etymology of the Latin prefix “ob” to stress that the text’s location is “outside of the main scene” or “against, in opposition, facing, in front of, in view of, on account of ” another scene (see for example, the Oxford English Dictionary).

Part II: D. A. F. Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom . Albert Camus, L’homme révolté, Paris: Gallimard,: . English ed.: The Rebel, New York: Vintage Books, : . . From the poem “El prisionero” (“The Prisoner”) that Octavio Paz wrote in . See Paz, Un más allá erótico: Sade, Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, : –; my translation of atraviesas el siglo diecinueve con una granada de verdad en la mano/ y estallas al llegar a nuestra época.

Sade’s Text and Sade’s Times . Gilbert Lely’s established edition, Oeuvres complètes: édition définitive, Paris: Au Cercle du libre precieux, , vol. : . There is no mention of the word “world” in the standard English translation by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver,  Days of Sodom, New York: Grove Press, : . All subsequent quotations in French and English are from the same editions unless otherwise specified. Bracketed page numbers indicate Lely’s edition. . I use the words “story,” “text,” and “book” in order to avoid the word “novel.” Unless one refers to Bakhtin’s definition of the novel, it is unclear whether the book belongs to the genre of the novel. Roland Barthes made the point coining the term “metonymic violence” to account for Sade’s mixture of styles (see his Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Paris: Seuil, : ). . The actual manuscript includes only an introduction and a narrative of the first month; the next three months are sketched but not narrated. . This kind of superlative phrasing was in vogue—take, for instance, Burke’s comment on the revolution as “the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world,” or Hebbel’s comment on Antigone as “a masterpiece of masterpieces next to which there is nothing that can be set either old or new.” See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. Pollock, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, : ; Hebbel is quoted in George Steiner, Antigones, New York: Oxford UP, : . . Annie Lebrun, Sade, A Sudden Abyss, San Francisco: City Lights Books, .

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Castillo Durante qualifies it as la clef de voûte de l’édifice sadien (“the keystone of the Sadean edifice”) in his Sade ou l’ombre des lumières, New York: Peter Lang, : , my translation. . See Michel Delon,”La fin du libertinage?,” in Du genre libertin au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Jean-François Perrin and Philip Stewart, Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, : –, my translation. . Marquis de Sade, Letters from Prison, trans. and Intro. by Richard Seaver, New York: Arcade Publishing, : ; see also Correspondance: –, ed. Gilbert Lely, Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, . Sade lost six hundred volumes of his library along with furniture during the week of  July . He blamed his wife for not having been there to rescue his affairs. He had been temporarily transported to Charenton asylum. His grief over the loss of his manuscript is so famous that Peter Weiss, in his play Marat/Sade: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (New York: Pocket Books, ), has Sade tell Marat about it: “Long ago I abandoned my masterpiece/ a roll of paper thirty yards long/ which I filled completely with minute handwriting/ in my dungeon years ago/ It vanished when the Bastille fell/ it vanished as everything written/” (). . Bloch, who published also a study on Sade (Der Marquis de Sade und seine Zeit, Berlin: Barsdorf, ), found in Sade a perfect illustration of the “deviant” forms of sexuality documented by Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis (twelve editions from  to ). . Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, New York: Marion Boyars, : . . Jean Paulhan, “The Marquis de Sade and His Accomplice,” in The Marquis de Sade, The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, ed. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, New York: Grove Press: : . Twentieth-century criticism refers to Sade as the absolute scandal: “[He] pursued a monstrous dream of revenge” (Camus, The Rebel: ); “[O]ne can acknowledge that in no other literature, at no other time, has there been such a scandalous body of work” (Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, New York: W.W. Norton, : ); “[T]he outrage is immeasurable, as great as the unredeemed evil” (Marcel Hénaff, Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, : ). Sade’s “encyclopedia of excess” is “the most insane and inadmissible” (Hénaff in David Allison, Mark Roberts, and Allen Weiss, Sade and the Narrative of Transgression, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, : ). . Maurice Blanchot, Sade et Restif de la Bretonne, Paris: Le Regard Littéraire, : . . Durante, Sade ou l’ombre des lumières, . For Sade as the symbol of modernity’s stereotyping, see Durante’s “Stéréotype et subversion de la parole dévote” (ibid.): –, and his Du stéréotype à la littérature, Montréal: XYZ éditeur, .

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Notes . In allusion to Althusser, Allison, Roberts, and Weiss coin the expression “always already transgressive” in their Introduction (Sade and the Narrative of Transgression: –). . For Foucault, Sade was first a bastion of liberty. Later on he changed views: “I am against the absolute sacralization of Sade [. . . .] Sade formulated an eroticism that corresponds to a disciplinarian society [. . . .] [He] bores us, he is a disciplinarian, a sergeant of sex” (“Sade: Sergent du sexe,” Cinématographe,  [–]: , my translation). For Pierre Klossowski, transgression was inherent to Sade’s work in his Tel Quel article (), but later in his book Sade, My Neighbour (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, : –) he argues that Sade performs a critique of perverse transgression. . In , Sade was arrested at the office of his publisher, where police found copies of his two novels, Justine and Juliette. He was imprisoned in Ste. Pélagie and Bicêtre until  and then sent to Charenton. For the most recent accounts of Sade’s life, see the six new biographies: Maurice Lever, Sade: A Biography, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ; L. L. Bongie, Sade: A Biographical Essay, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ; Francine Du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, New York: Simon and Schuster, ; Donald Thomas, The Marquis de Sade: A New Biography, New York: Citadel, ; Neil Schaeffer, The Marquis de Sade: A Life, New York: Knopf, ; Ronald Hayman, Marquis de Sade: The Genius of Passion, New York: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, . . Jules Michelet is quoted in Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, New York: St. Martin’s Press, : . Nodier is quoted in Hénaff, Sade: . . All three quotations cited in Lawrence Lynch, The Marquis de Sade, Boston: Twayne Publishers, : . Lynch provides an account of Sade’s reception in the nineteenth century; Fourier, Flaubert, Swinburne, Baudelaire, and Verlaine are singled out as those who received Sade’s work positively. Baudelaire’s famous quotation appears in his “Projets et notes diverses,” in Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Seuil, : . . See Guillaume Apolinaire, Introduction to L’oeuvre du Marquis de Sade: pages choisies, comprenant des morceaux inédits et des lettres publiées pour la première fois, tirées des Archives de la Comédie-Française, Paris: Bibliothèque des Curieux, . . In his first Manifeste du surréalisme (), André Breton included Sade among its precursors; in his second Manifeste () he praises Sade’s integrity; in , he includes in his collection of poems “L’Air de l’eau” a poem to Sade. (See Manifeste du surréalisme: poisson soluble, Paris, Éditions du Sagittaire, ; see also Les Manifestes du surréalisme, Paris: Saggitaire [] ; and L’Air de l’eau, Paris, Éditions “Cahiers d’Art” [].) Lely wrote a poem to Sade and reputedly left a place at his table for him. See Lynch, The Marquis de Sade: –. Shattuck

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(Forbidden Knowledge: ch. ) provides a complete account of Sade’s reception in the twentieth century; a shorter account of Sade’s reception among surrealists appears in Dora Bienaimé’s preface to Jean Paulhan’s French-Italian edition of Scritti inediti sull’opera di Sade, Ravenna: Longo Editore, : –. . See Guillaume Apollinaire, Les peintres cubistes [], ed. L. C. Breunig and J. CL. Chevalier, Paris: Hermann, . . Quoted in Deepak Narang Sawhney, ed., Must We Burn Sade? New York: Humanity Books, : , n. . . The contributors to the issue were Pierre Klossowski, Philippe Sollers, Roland Barthes, Michel Tort, and Hubert Damish. Sollers identifies “a three levelled narration” that transgresses language in its repetition, narrating thrice the same content: the storytellers’ tale, the narrator’s account, and the masters’ philosophical discourse. A sign of a writing of desire, for Sollers this goes beyond representation. Barthes, and later Blanchot, argue that the loss of referentiality is a result of the claim that nothing has to remain outside of language; for Klossowski the linguistic repetition of a transgressive act is the negative of the institutionalized word; for Damish, Sade’s transgression of language lies in that Sade affirms that if everything has not been said, then nothing has been said. Klossowski changed position from taking transgression as “an inherent necessity of Sade’s experience” (in Tel Quel) to noting Sade’s attempt to delink transgression from censorship and ultimately to eliminate the experience of transgression altogether in the figure of apathetic repetition of the act. Nonetheless, eliminating transgression from the act made Klossowski relocate Sade’s transgression once again in language, in what he called Sade’s “foreclusion of language by language”—the real transgression was to have tried to talk about the “act outside of language” through language. See Tel Quel  (Winter ). Along these lines is also Philippe Roger’s Sade: la philosophie dans le pressoir, Paris: Grasset, . In turn, Barthes calls Sade’s transgression a “criminal contamination” of the erotic and rhetoric and argues that Sade turns the “impossibilities of the referent into the possibilities of the discourse” (Sade, Fourier, Loyola: –). He formalizes Sade’s erotic language into the “posture” as a minimal unit (an action and a body point of application), the “operations” as a higher unit and the “grammar” that has two rules of action: exhaustion (no free energy), and reciprocity (everyone can revert the figure and exchange places—with exception of tortures). “Sade’s ‘main impropriety’” is Blanchot’s title in the  issue of Yale French Studies  (): –. Blanchot argues that Sade’s “everything that must be said [. . .] goes even further” (), to what the end lines of Sade’s Justine advocate: “[H]owever much men shudder, philosophy must say everything” (); it is not only a question of going beyond all barriers in language, but in critical reason as well. Negativity must not stop, it must be in a state of permanent insurrection, aiming at that moment of absence of laws that is pure destruction and in which

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Notes man attains his sovereignty, higher than that of nature since nature never has a consciousness of this power of destruction (). For a development of Blanchot’s position, see his Lautréamont et Sade, Paris: Minuit, . . Bataille, L’Érotisme (Paris: Minuit, : , my translation). The English reads: “To admire Sade is to diminish the force of his ideas” (Erotism, San Francisco: City Lights Books, : ). . Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, New Jersey: Princeton UP, ; Peter Vansittart, Voices of the Revolution, London: Collins, . . Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, : , my emphasis. . Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, London: Routledge, : –. . See Roger Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la Révolution française, Paris: Seuil, ; R. Darnton, “The Facts of Literary Life in th Century France,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Keith Michael Baker, Chicago: Pergamon Press, , vol. . For an account of how politics was transformed into a politics of language, see Furet, Penser la Révolution francaise, Paris: Gallimard, ; Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class. . “Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains,” in Œuvres, ed. J. J. Pauvert, Paris: Éditions Pauvert, , vol. : . In English, in Seaver and Wainhouse, eds., Marquis de Sade: . All subsequent quotes from Philosophy in the Bedroom are from the same edition; French page reference follows the translation in square brackets. . See also Delon, “L’invention sadienne et les pamphlets révolutionaires ,” in C. Jacot Grapa, N. Jacques-Lefèvre, Y. Séité, et C. Trevisan, eds., Le travail des Lumières, Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, : –. . The essay appears in English as “Reflections on the Novel,” in Wainhouse and Seaver, eds.,  Days of Sodom: ; reprinted in Lely’s edition as a preface to the story “Les crimes de l’amour,” vol. : –. . Claude Lefort thinks Sade was on the side of the revolution but stops speculation there: “He renders the distinction obscure; its terms can no longer be grasped. We, the readers, are deprived of the image of a ‘good society.’ We are incited to reject ideology of any kind whatsoever, as we glimpse the abyss that ideology covers over. But I do not want to say any more for fear of attributing to Sade a new moralism; and I would much rather preserve his enigmas” (Writing: The Political Test, Durham: Duke UP, : ). Klossowski also stops short in speculating, though he aligns Sade as an aristocrat outraged by the decapitation of the king, forever accusing the revolution of being condemned to crime to sustain itself (see “Sade and the Revolution,” in Sade, My Neighbor). Perhaps the best rendering of a

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“dialogue” is the drama that Peter Weiss composed in  (Marat/Sade). Marat is the revolution: “I can’t breathe/ There is a rioting mob inside me/ Simone/ I am the Revolution” (); Sade is depicted as an individualist, who saw the need for the revolution but complained that the outburst of revenge had become a dull, inhuman, technocratic withering of the individual man: “When I lay in the Bastille [. . .] I created in my mind/ monstrous representatives of a dying class/ who could only exercise their power/ in spectacularly staged orgies [. . . .] In a criminal society/ I dug the criminal out of myself/ [. . . .] [At] first I saw in the Revolution [. . .] an orgy greater than all my dreams [. . . .] And then in the next few months [. . .] all the meaning drained out of this revenge [. . . .]/ [It] had become mechanical” (–). There is an ongoing debate to clarify whether Sadean fictional characters should be read as representatives of the aristocracy against the French Revolution or of the new capitalist times. I agree with Hénaff ’s argument that one can read in Sade all systems of power, from the medieval military castle to the mechanistic world of capitalism. . See Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, New York: Vintage Books, : ; see Delon, “Sade Thermidorien,” in Sade, écrire la crise, Paris: Belfond, : –. . Letter to Gaufridy, December , in Lely, Correspondance:  (my translation). . As early as in the story Aline et Valcour (Brussels: J.-J.Gay, ), written in La Bastille in , Sade will begin to use the topic of travel to show the relativity of laws. The couple of Sainville et Léonore visits the socialist island of Tamoé, ruled by Zamé, and its opposite, the anthropophage kingdom of Butua. For Lely, Tamoé suggests a new spirit of the laws that stands in comparison with Montesquieu’s work (Gilbert Lely, Vie du Marquis de Sade,  vols., Paris: Cercle du livre précieux, : ). The Philosophie dans le boudoir travels from America to Africa, from Africa to Asia, from Asia to Europe and even throughout the ages, from antiquity to modernity, in an impressive display of “customs” from all over the globe. . See the full text in “Opuscules politiques,” in Pauvert, ed., Oeuvres, vol. : –. For a compilation of some of Sade’s political opinions, see Blanchot, Sade et Restif: –. The reference to anarchy appears in almost all of his works after . See also an analysis of the political pamphlets in Julie Hayes, “Aristocrate ou Démocrate? Vous me le direz: Sade’s Political Pamphlets,” Eighteenth Century Studies . (): –. . Roger, for example, devotes long pages of his Sade to refute the possibility that Sade could ever think in political terms, blaming Breton, Bataille, Klossowski, and de Beauvoir, for “having yielded to the temptation of giving a political credo to Sade” (, my translation). It is nonetheless telling that Roger admits that Sade’s apolitisme (apoliticism) is not revolutionary but “radical, [he] only demands the

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Notes impossible” (, my translation)—a credo that became, of course, a revolutionary slogan during the  Paris uprising. . See Lebrun, Sade: . She refers to Aline et Valcour and states that the two apparently different political systems sketched in the book, the despotic island of Maâcoro and the happy paradise of Tamoé, “essentially derive from the exercise of force” (). Even the anarchist character exercises power as do the others. While for other critics this is just one more of Sade’s incongruencies, for Lebrun this shows how Sade “cuts away at the very roots of ideology, allowing his reader a hitherto inconceivable political freedom: he offers the reader a means of operating in the world of politics just as he does in the world of desire” (). . Louis Althusser, Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, London, NLB, . . From Hobbes to Rousseau, all Enlightenment thinkers are present both in Sade’s library and works. For his library at his Castle of La Coste, see Bibliothèque Sade, Tome II, ed. Maurice Lever, Paris: Fayard, ; Alain Mothu, “Les lectures ‘nécessaires’ du Marquis de Sade,” La Lettre Clandestine, University de Paris . (); Jean Leduc, “Les sources de l’athéisme et de l’immoralisme du marquis de Sade,” Studies on Voltaire  (Genève, ): –. Leduc compiles some quotations about Enlightenment philosophers: Juliette thinks “like Hobbes and like Montesquieu”; in Justine we read: “[T]he fairness or unfairness of an act, says Hobbes, depends only on the judgment of the person who committed it”; Montesquieu is, for the cannibal Minski in Juliette’s story, un demi-philosophe that propagates a sophism with “his idea of eternal justice” (); Rousseau is politically unpardonable: “[T]ell me, I beg you, who on earth is such an imbecile as to claim, in spite of indisputable evidence to the contrary, that all men are born equal in rights and strength!” (, all quotations are my translation). A direct refutation of Hobbes appears in Zamé’s words against the delegation of power and renunciation of individual freedom in Aline et Valcour (in Œuvres, ed. J. J. Pauvert, vol. : –), and in Justine: “All men are born isolated [. . .] struggling to maintain either their rights or achieve their ambition, the legislator comes up and says to them: Cease thus to fight; if each were to retreat a little, calm would be restored. [. . .] I maintain that two species of individuals cannot and ought not submit to it, ever; those who feel they are the stronger have no need to give up anything in order to be happy, and those who find themselves the weaker also find themselves giving up infinitely more than what is assured them” (). Pierre SaintAmand places Sade straightforwardly in discussion with the Enlightenment: “Sade is the anti-Montesquieu of the Enlightenment” (“Hostile Enlightenment,” in JeanJoseph Goux and Philip R. Wood, eds., Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought, California: Stanford UP, : ). See his The Laws of Hostility, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, , in which he argues that the Enlightenment thinkers covered up society’s violence, considering it prepolitical.

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. “Reflections on the Novel”: ; Idée sur le roman, Lely, Oeuvres complètes, vol. : . . I borrow the expression from Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, : .

The Libertine Alliance . I am borrowing Barthes’s expression in Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Paris: Seuil, : . . Joan Dejean summarizes the canonical vision of Silling as self-destructive: “Sade situates his novel just after the apex of the French monarchy in a decidedly post-feudal atmosphere in which nobles and financiers conspire to bring down the monarchy in order to create a paradise doomed to self-destruction” (Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade, Princeton: Princeton UP, : ). The emphasis on the individual sovereign runs through Georges Bataille’s writings, but it is a common denominator of all criticism of Sade after World War II. . Justice, as it would appear at the times for instance in Montesquieu’s “spirit of the laws,” is ruled out from the beginning at Silling, and it will never appear in the book. Justice is either aligned with libertinage—Madame Duclos’s client enjoys women mutilated both by the hand of libertinage and by the hand of justice ()—or disregarded, in the Duc’s dictum: “[W]ere it just [. . .] it would surely fail to give us an erection” (). . For Sade, man never leaves the original state of war. After discarding all kinds of bonds that civilization praises, Dolmancé says in the Philosophie dans le boudoir (in Œuvres, ed. J. J. Pauvert, Paris: Éditions Pauvert, , vol. : ): “[A]re we not all born solitary, isolated? I say more: are we not come into the world all enemies, the one of the other, all in a state of perpetual and reciprocal warfare? [–]). In Justine (ibid.) the discussion about the social pact results in the abandonment of any idea of happiness within it, thus the absolute preference for a return to “a state of perpetual warfare” (), the only arrangement “to which we are really adapted” (que nous convienne réellement,  []), for men are born envious and cruel, “wishing to have everything and surrender nothing” (voulant tout avoir et ne rien céder, ibid.). English translation from Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver,  Days of Sodom, New York: Grove Press, ); all subsequent translations from Justine from the same edition; French page reference indicated in square brackets. . Pierre Clastres, The Archeology of Violence, Semiotexte, New York: Columbia UP, : –. . “The nobleman who indulges in this final passion we shall designate as the infernal caprice or [. . .] as the hell passion” (). He is a complex war machinery

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Notes in an isolated villa out of Paris; he kidnaps, stations, encloses, tortures, and kills his fifteen victims in a cycle that repeats with no end. . Take, for instance, the usual interpretation of the libertines’ enclosure in the castle, which is summed up by Barthes as having “a dual function; first, of course, to isolate, to shelter vice from the world’s punitive attempts; yet libertine solitude is not merely a precaution of a practical nature; it is a quality of existence, a sensual pleasure of being” (Sade, Fourier, Loyola: ). Barthes refers to sentences like this: “I am at the world’s end, away from all the eyes, and where no creature can get to me” (ibid.: n. .).The association between “all the eyes” and justice does not agree with the war frame set in the introduction to the book. Sade’s characters are persecuted not by justice but by war. I have found, nonetheless, two interesting appreciations of the war in the Castle of Silling, though both referring to the description of the castle as a fortress and not to the libertine social pact. Marcel Hénaff takes the castle to be an expression of the feudal fortress (Hénaff, Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, : –). DeJean sees Sade’s castle as the ultimate expression of the Classical Age in France and in particular as the perfection of systems of defense (fortresses) that Louis XIV’s advisor, Vauban, designed for the kingdom. For DeJean, Sade is, in his absolute system of narrative control, the literary “realization of Vauban’s dream” (Literary Fortifications: ). DeJean had already studied the libertine narrative strategy of the seventeenth century as a defensive writing from (a desired) persecution (see her Libertine Strategies, Columbus: Ohio State UP, ). Sade appears as the culmination of this writing trend with the invention of the absolutely perfect fortress, Silling, and DeJean puts Sade in dialogue with the times that correspond to the historical fiction he creates—the turn of the eighteenth century and not its end, when Sade is writing. I would be more inclined, nonetheless, to situate Sade’s dialogue with his own times. In this sense, a possible correlation should be pointed at: the Parisian armées révolutionnaires (“the people’s armies”) of the year . The libertine alliance bears some traits of this type of organization, only they are not sansculottes trying to protect a new society by exterminating counter-revolutionaries, but nobles trying to establish their own new society. In The People’s Armies (New Haven: Yale UP, ), Richard Cobb explains that these popular armies were also seen by conservatives as sangsues (“bloodthirsty hooligans”); they acted in the midst of anarchy; in some towns they were “virtually free to act as they pleased, like oriental satraps,” heralding the république des pauvres and exercising sovereign power (). . Quoted in Peter Vansittart, Voices of the Revolution, London: Collins, : . . For all the critical insistence on Sade’s solitary libertines, alliance among the strong is so pervasive in Sade that one cannot avoid it in any of his works. As Camus put it, “[E]very ethic based on solitude implies the exercise of power” (The Rebel, New York: Vintage Books, : ). Justine’s discussion of the pact is almost

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identical to the alliance at Silling; the bandit chieftain Coeur-de-fer, explains: “[If] I do not use a dagger on my comrades in order to appropriate their shares, it is because, thereupon finding myself all alone, I would deprive myself of the means which assure me the fortune I expect to have with their help” (). . Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, London: Verso, : . Following Lacan in “Kant avec Sade,” Žižek argues that the perverse does not question the order established by him and hence does not commit an act of social subversion (see esp. his chapter “Why Perversion Is Not Subversion,” –). . Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, New York: Norton and Company, : . . See Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation” to explain the capitalist’s fortune, in the last chapter of Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: Vintage Books, , vol. I: –. . Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Paris: Seuil, : . . Against Levi-Straussian, Marxist, and naturalist anthropological theories of violence, Clastres argues in The Archeology of Violence that “the constant problem of the primitive community is not: whom will we trade with? but: how can we maintain our independence? The Savage’s point of view on exchange is simple: it is a necessary evil” (). Exchange is only a strategy to make alliances that will result in a stronger position in the war for social independence from external enemies. For Clastres the machinery of external war allows primitive societies to fight against the formation of the state—that is, against becoming a divided political body with masters and slaves, at war among themselves. See esp. –. . See, for instance, Hénaff ’s “Non Contractual Exchange,” in Sade: –. . Michel Delon, “Sade Thermidorien,” in Sade, écrire la crise, Paris: Belfond, : . . Quoted in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, [] : . . For the full description of this order, see Sade, Fourier, Loyola: –. . See Bauman’s “The Duty to Remember—But What?,” in Kaye and Strath, eds., Enlightenment and Genocide, Contradictions of Modernity, Brussels: Peter Lang, : –. Bauman’s “gardening metaphor”—medicine and architecture are also suitable—expresses what he deems a characteristically modern order-making zeal that transforms every modern project into an unfinished one, perpetually in revision toward total order. . Sade’s Justine poses the issue almost in Rousseau’s terms: since the general and individual interests are always in contradiction, the solution is warfare: let the strong and the weak ally in separate groups avoiding the loss implied in the social contract (Pauvert, Œuvres, vol. : –). Perhaps the most influential essay arguing that Sade asks how to reconcile the individual with the general will, or with author-

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Notes ity, was written by Simone de Beauvoir: “Faut-il brûler Sade?,” originally published in Les Temps modernes (–), reprinted in Wainhouse’s and Seaver’s edition of  Days. Beauvoir leaves the question open: Sade “forces us to re-examine thoroughly the basic problem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation between man and man” (Wainhouse and Seaver,  Days of Sodom: ). . See Pierre Klossowski, “Sade’s Critique of the Pervert,” in Sade, My Neighbor, Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, : –. . Žižek’s expression refers to society’s well-known secrets—kept “outside of the scene.” See his The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, , esp. “Love Thy Neighbor? No Thanks!” (–), in which he discusses why public law is insufficient to give consistency to the social, which needs the phantasmatic support of myths that keep the community united in the identification with an illegal pleasure that implies a suspension of the public law. . Quoted in Vansittart, Voices of the Revolution: . . The annotated edition by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (Demons, New York: Vintage Books, : –) cites the activities of Nechaev’s society as being among Dostoevsky’s sources and notes the historical event of the murder of Ivanov by Alexei Kuznetsov, a member of Nechaev’s society. Kuznetsov wrote in his memoir that the murder was not necessary but that the society needs “to better weld us together with blood” ().

Necrophiliac Cannibals . I am using Alexander Hinton’s term “manufacturing difference” from his “Under the Shade of Pol Pot’s Umbrella: Mandala, Myth and Politics in the Cambodian Genocide,” in Thomas Singer, ed., The Vision Thing: Myth, Politics and Psyche in the World, London: Routledge, : –. . A similar version of the procedures at Silling reappears in Sade’s first version of Justine, when sixteen victims are taken to the monastery led by the four Benedictine monks, and once “subtracted from the universe forever” are given the regulations by which they understand they have come there to die (Pauvert, ed., Œuvres, Paris: Éditions Pauvert, , vol. : , my translation). Yet another version appears in the second version of Justine (), somewhat modified, since the monks are six and the victims are forty-eight in number. Gilbert Lely suggests that Sade wanted to reconstruct his lost  Days (Gilbert Lely, Vie du Marquis de Sade,  vols., Paris: Cercle du livre précieux, , vol. ?: –). . The speech is addressed only to les femmes (), while we know that the victims are composed of both sexes: the “already dead” are feminized bodies. . See, for instance, Marcel Hénaff, Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, : –.

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. See Joan Copjec, Radical Evil, London: Verso, : xviii. . See Beatrice Fink, “Sade and Cannibalism,” L’Esprit Créateur  (Winter ): –; Béatrice Bomel-Rainelli, “L’alimentation chez Sade,” Dix-Huitième Siècle  (): –. . Bleeding is such a confusing “treatment” that on the th of February it even appears as a “life saver” for Aline, who has been hanged: “[S]he is hanged, then quickly cut down [. . . .] Durcet opens her veins, this treatment restores her to life; the next day she appears none the worse for wear” (). . A paragraph in Justine could not be more explicit as to decisions on victims’ resistance. Gernande threatens Thérèse: “[Y]ou will be bled three times a day, I want to see how long you can survive the treatment. ’Tis an experiment I have been all afire to make, you know; my thanks to you for furnishing me the means” (). . See Pierre Klossowski, “Nature as a Destructive Principle,” in The Marquis de Sade, The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, ed. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, New York: Grove Press: : . . The story of the “man of hell” shows the process of metamorphosis as a complex procedure in between a slaughterhouse and a meat packing plant. Carole Martin interprets the topos of the machine as a metaphor for the combinatory assembly of the text; see her “L’enfer et la machine à coudre,” in Debaisieux et Verdier, eds., Violence et fiction jusqu’à la Révolution, Tübingen: Narr, : –. . In The Sadean Woman, Angela Carter reads flesh as meat, while considering the cannibal character Minski in Juliette. She concludes that this is the “assertion of the abyss between master and victim” (), though refers to it only as an intersubjective dynamic. . Cannibalism appears in virtually every one of Sade’s fictional works, either mentioned in passing when referring to a legalized practice in other societies or incarnated in a character, like Saint-Fond or, esp., Minski in Juliette. Sade uses the word anthropophages also in his personal letters to refer to his political times or his enemies. To Gaufridy, in May , he also writes of his in-laws: “[O]ne can never imagine what [. . .] cannibalistic [anthropophage] practices those people have devised against me” (Lely, Juliette: , emphasis in the original, my translation). For Joan DeJean, cannibalism is equivalent to the narrative technique of bricolage: “[T]he narrator dreams of having his future readers strip his book of its “flesh,” pick its bones, and consume it bit by bit” (Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade, Princeton: Princeton UP, : ). . Lely, Vie: . Jane Gallop sees in this “abuse” the sign of Sade’s perversity in that it maintains the improper in its place (Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, : ); DeJean sees in it the fight of calculation against the excess of waste (Literary Fortifications: ); Hénaff sees it as a capitalist allegory: everything, even waste, is useful

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Notes (see Sade: –; for a dialogue with our current mode of “globalized industrial economy,” see Antonio Casilli, La fabbrica libertina de Sade e il sistema industriale, Roma: Manifestolibri, . . See Klossowski, Sade, My Neighbor, Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, : –. . There is only one example that Krafft-Ebing gives of cannibalism, under the heading of “Anthropophagi” (Psychopathia Sexualis, New York: Arcade Publishing, [] : ), and this consists in thirst for human blood after killing.

Domestic Consistency . See Pierre Macherey, “Sade and the Order of Disorder,” in The Object of Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, : –. . The debate revolves around the law as convention or the law as an expression of a transcendental order, be it nature, God, or Reason; the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are considered the heyday of this debate. For an introductory summary, see Stig Strömholm, A Short History of Legal Thinking in the West, Stockholm: Norstedts, : chs.  and , and J. M. Kelly, A Short History of Western Legal Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, : chs.  and . . In The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., : ), Hannah Arendt defines the camp as “the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified”; Agamben considers its contemporary relevance in “What Is a Camp,” in Means without Ends, Notes on Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, : –. . See Jacques Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” in Écrits, Paris: Seuil, ; and Slavoj Žižek, “Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple,” Lacanian Ink  (): –. The argument centers around seeing Sade’s imperative as the “truth of Kant,” which in reality means more to see Sade as Kantian than Kant as Sadean. While the Kantian categorical imperative commands duty beyond all pathological desires (objects), the Sadean narrative of desire produces its truth in that it makes the abstraction of duty take concrete forms with singular (“pathological,” in Kantian jargon) desires, which it elevates to the imperative of duty. The difference is that the Sadean subject is not autonomous in the Kantian sense: it becomes an instrument of this duty (of the Other’s jouissance, in Lacanian jargon) instead of giving himself (and assuming responsibility for) the categorical imperative of universal law. For a full development of this argument, see also Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psycho­ analysis, New York: W.W. Norton, , and Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, : –. For Žižek’s reflection on the “truth” of the public law as the universalization of crime, centered on an analysis of tautologies such as “the law is the law” or “God is God,” see his “On the One,” in For They Know Not What They Do, London: Verso, : –.

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. I capitalize the word “nature” throughout this chapter to indicate the libertine notion of a higher power. . See Pierre Klossowski, Sade, My Neighbor, Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, ; Leo Bersani, “Merde Alors,” Stanford Italian Review  (Fall ): –. . Dolmancé, in La philosophie dans le boudoir, in Œuvres, ed. J. J. Pauvert, Paris: Éditions Pauvert, , vol. :  [Seaver and Wainhouse, eds., ]. When Justine asks Sylvestre why libertines do not devour one another, he responds that it is useful for their preservation to maintain the “solidity of their association” (see Justine, in ibid., vol. : –). . This is the defense of democratic freedom in Philosophy in the Bedroom: a natural “despotism” of all against all, which should be enabled by the state. The practices of prostitution, rape, incest, and sodomy are discussed as the only things that the government must regulate, in the manner of providing houses to exercise them, instead of prohibiting them, if the republic wants to be “free.” . In Althusser’s terms, ideology is an interpellation constitutive of subjectivity, providing a representation of the subject’s imaginary relation to its real conditions of existence, while having the effect of constructing the subject’s “freedom” to submit to its subjection (Althusser exploits the double sense of the word “subject”). For the history of the term, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, Verso: London, ; or Žižek, ed., Mapping Ideology, London: Verso, . . See Rousseau’s Social Contract, ed. S. Dunn, New Haven: Yale UP, , II. XII: . . Macherey, “Sade and the Order of Disorder”: . . The best expression of state coldness in Sade’s corpus is perhaps the political pamphlet in La philosophie dans le boudoir, “Français, encore un effort . . . ,” and vol. IV of Juliette. There is a collection of quotations in Maurice Blanchot, “L’insurrection,” in Sade et Restif de la Bretonne, Paris: Le Regard Littéraire, : –. . Klossowski, “Nature as a Destructive Principle,” in  Days of Sodom and Other Writings, ed. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver and, New York: Grove Press: : –. . Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, New York: Columbia UP, : . . See Klossowski’s analysis of the development of the figure of Nature in Sade’s work, both in his article “Nature as a Destructive Principle” and in his book Sade My Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, . . The phrase appears for the first time in his essay “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis” (, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, , vol. : –). . An exemplary version of this assertion can be read in the short poem “La vérité,” which Sade wrote in La Bastille circa . It was found among the papers

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Notes of La Mettrie, and Lely considered it so intrinsically Sadean that he thought that if it had been the only document saved from all his work we would have still received the core of Sade’s thought. Footnote  of the poem reads as follows: “And how could we be guilty when we simply obey the impressions of nature? Men, and laws, which are the creation of men, can consider us so, but not nature. Only in resisting her could we be guilty in her eyes. Such is the only possible crime—the only from which we should abstain” (Pauvert, ed., Œuvres, vol. : ; my translation). Formulations of how not to resist nature abound in Juliette and Justine: “[If] there is a crime in my eyes, it is the opposition of your resistance or your sophisms that you would present to what I inspire in you” (Justine, in ibid., vol. : ; my translation). . This ambivalence is most clearly expressed in the words of Sade’s character Almani in Juliette (Lely, Juliette, vol. : –). Almani compares nature to his mother, whom he abhors, but he gives in and imitates her evil. . Bataille and Deleuze have argued that Sadean impotence is the discourse of a victim, not of a torturer. Both authors identify this discourse not in relation to nature’s commands but to the details with which Sade manages to describe torture, no doubt a debatable position in light of post- research done on the formations of victims’ discourses. For Sade’s “victim’s discourse,” see Georges Bataille, L’Érotisme, Paris: Minuit, : –; Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, New York: Zone Books, : –. . The servitude of man to nature is constant throughout Sade’s work. The poem “La vérité,” mentioned above, condenses this doctrine and constructs nature as a subject supposed to gain pleasure through man as a means. See Pauvert, ed., Œuvres, vol. : –. . L’Homme machine (La Salle, IL: Open Court, ) is the title of the treatise in which Julien Offray de La Mettrie, one of Sade’s preferred materialists, exposes his système du matérialisme. His book uncannily corresponds with Sade’s text; Sade mentiones La Mettrie in Juliette (in Pauvert, ed., Œuvres, vol. : , vol. :  and ). See Marcel Hénaff, “The Overthrow of the Lyric Body,” in Sade: –; and H. A. Glaser, “L’Homme machine de La Mettrie et la machine sexuelle de Sade,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century [Hull, England]  (): . . For “excess,” see esp. Hénaff ’s “The Encyclopaedia of Excess,” in Sade: –. Excess is here treated as a solution to Sade’s claim to “say everything”—a solution that nonetheless fails because of the intromission of violence. For “apathy,” see Klossowski’s argument that it critiques the possibility of transgression, in Sade My Neighbor: –; see also Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade, Paris: Editions de Minuit, ; Bataille, L’Érotisme: –. For Blanchot and Bataille, apathy is the basis of Sadean cruelty and sovereignty. As Sade defines it, apathy connotes the lack of sensibility that makes for the exemplar libertine.

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. See Joan Copjec’s introduction to Radical Evil, London: Verso, , for Pier Paolo Passolini’s comment on this in his Saló: “‘The act of the sodomite is the most absolute, in the mortality implied, for the human race. To which the second [libertine] answers: There’s something still more monstrous: the act of the executioner.’ ‘True, but the sodomite’s act can be repeated thousands of times,’ the first rejoins. The second will not be outdone: ‘A way can be found to repeat the executioner’s.’ [. . .] Six million and more” (xviii). In the book, the strongest discussion about satisfaction happens between the Duc and Durcet on the eighth day. For the Duc, the castle offers the libertines total happiness because they can achieve total satisfaction. Durcet disagrees by linking happiness not to satisfaction but to desire, which he argues consists of breaking obstacles to get what they lack (). But after this defense, Durcet presents the pleasure of comparison as the best of pleasures: the pleasure of having what the others don’t have—“It is from the sight of him who does not in the least enjoy what I enjoy, and who suffers, that comes the charm of being able to say to oneself: ‘I am therefore happier than he. Wherever men may be found equal [. . .] happiness shall never exist’” (). Durcet places the origin of desire in lack, though the lack of the other, of which they need the spectacle. . Susan Neiman’s interpretation of Sade’s evil coincides with what we have been saying about the hidden transcript of nature. She argues that for all that Sade insisted on rupture, it was harmony with the world that Sade’s system constructed (Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton UP, : ). I agree if we consider the violence of harmony—that is, the elimination of difference.

Frame within the Frame . See my “Riveted by The Voice: The Sadean City at Silling,” French Forum . (Spring ): –. . The two exceptions I have found are O’Reilly’s article “Desire in Sade’s Les  journées de Sodome,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century  (): –; and Lucienne Frappier-Mazur’s ch. , “Le texte hétérogène,” in her Sade et l’écriture de l’orgie: pouvoir et parodie dans l’histoire de Juliette, Paris: Nathan, : –. . Annie Lebrun suggests that these women are Sade’s visions of the future of society “freed” of normative values. They are Sade’s radically new forms; Sade’s male forms were still too realistic (A Sudden Abyss, San Francisco: City Lights Books: : ). Marcel Hénaff summarizes the debate about female narrative skills in Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, : –. I have seen them as survivor-accomplices who fend off death with words, much like characters in the medieval or oriental framed narrative tra-

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Notes dition—the latter a tradition much in vogue, and in which Sade was well versed (it probably started in –, when Antoine Galland translated the Arabian One Thousand and One Nights, thus creating a fashion that even the philosophers imitated—consider Voltaire’s Zadig, which Sade admired as a “pure masterpiece,” in his Idée sur le roman, and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. . Philippe Roger, Sade, la philosophie dans le pressoir, Paris: Grasset, :  (my translation) . Joan Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano, Madrid: Gredos, : –. . I diverge from the view that Sade’s text is an open, inviting experience for the reader to follow the story and “pick and choose” his passion. See, for instance, Joan DeJean’s engagement of Roger’s thesis, though DeJean is more cautious: while still arguing that the text is open for the reader (to rip apart), she nonetheless suggests that the reader is included as long as the narrative can totally control what he reads (Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade, Princeton: Princeton UP, : –). . Nature “speaks” to the Sadean characters in most of Sade’s works. In Justine we have a passage dramatizing nature’s oral commands when she “hears” that her crimes are punished by laws: “Idiots she would reply to us, sleep, eat, and fearlessly commit whatever crimes you like whenever you like: every one of those alleged infamies pleases me, and I would have them all, since it is I who inspire them in you” (). Eleven lines follow with the “orders” that nature gives to Clément. To my knowledge, there are very few exceptions to this direct relation with nature in Sade’s works. See, for instance, the Pope Braschi’s system in Juliette, which disturbs the notion of this connection—in good libertine inconstancy, only to partly contradict itself (Juliette, in The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, ed. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, New York: Grove Press: : ). . Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice,” in Slavoj Žižek, ed., Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, Durham, NC: Duke UP, : –. . Even the storytellers’ speech is controlled by libertine laws: “‘Just one word, Duclos,’ said the Duc, who then queried the storyteller in an indirect language which enabled her to make lawful reply” (). Pauvert remarks that it is assertions, and not speech, for the most part contradictory and leading to no system, that one can find on each and every page of what he called the sadiana (, my translation). When the libertines don’t assert their “truths,” they shout or give orders; they do not doubt or engage in dialogue, which would imply that they enter in a universal law of exchange. . Arguably, Rousseau’s Confessions are the best literary example of this yearning for transparency. For examples of such discourse, see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Cul-

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ture and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, ; Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, . . “Sade and the Theater,” in Deepak Narang Sawhney, ed., Must we Burn Sade? New York: Humanity Books, : . See also Lebrun’s ch.  in Sade, A Sudden Abyss. See also Roland Barthes’s Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Paris: Seuil, ; and Hénaff ’s ch.  in Sade for arguments about Sade’s theatricality as the “perverse” impulse to say everything. See Martin Puchner, “Sade’s Theatrical Passions” for a historical analysis in the Yale Journal of Criticism  (Spring ): –. . See Macherey’s “Narrative (What Can I Know?),” in The Object of Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, : –. . Mengue analyzes the exhaustion of the “drive circuit” (tour de la pulsion) that Sade makes explicit with his insistent narration of the “details” of each passion. This discursive tour would be equivalent to the realization of the passion in action. See his “Un récit qui fait dans le détail,” in L’ordre Sadien: loi et narration dans la philosophie de Sade, Paris: Editions Kimé, : –. Mengue follows Deleuze’s observations about Sade’s need for the violence of demonstrations. See Deleuze’s “The Language of Sade and Masoch,” in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, New York: Zone Books, : –. . For different reasons, Barthes argues the same: “It is completely improperly, that our society speaks of Sade’s eroticism [. . . .] The difference arises not because Sadian eroticism is criminal and ours harmless, but because the former is assertive, combinatory, whereas ours is suggestive, metaphorical” (Sade, Fourier, Loyola: –). . For an account of the influence of the Terror in Sade’s texts, see Lucienne Frappier-Mazur’s “A Turning Point in the Sadean Novel: The Terror,” in Deepak Narang Sawheny, ed., Must We Burn Sade?, New York: Humanity Books, : – . . See Cavaillé’s paper “Gabriel Naudé: Les considérations politiques sur les coups d’État: une simulation libertine du secret politique,” Antony McKenna and P. F. Moreau, eds., Libertinage et philosophie au XVIIe Siècle, Publications de L’Université de Saint-Étienne, : Tome : –.

Interlude: Modern Sovereignty . Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, : . . Michel Delon, “Sade Thermidorien,” in Sade, écrire la crise, Paris: Belfond, : –; Antonio Casilli, La fabbrica libertina de Sade e il sistema industriale,

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Notes Roma: Manifestolibri, ; Marcel Hénaff, Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . . See Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel’s Creativity and Perversion, New York: Norton and Company, , also “Perversion and the Universal Law,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis  (): –, and “Reflexions on the Connexions between Perversion and Sadism,” ibid.  (): –. . Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge: MIT Press, . . For a historical account, see Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics, –, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, . . Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . . In all Western constitutional states emergency decrees suspend constitutional rights in cases of security threat to the state, and the president, as the head of the executive power, then acquires extraordinary faculties. All attempts to democratize state sovereignty fail with the implementation of this figure. Morgenthau summarizes it in his Politics among Nations (New York: Knoft, ) as the need for “the exercise of political authority” (), citing presidents Lincoln, Wilson, and the two Roosevelts. In the United States emergency is named “clear and present danger,” defined by the executive power; the constitution’s clause about “war powers and military intervention” also grants special powers to the sovereign to lead military intervention abroad without a formal declaration of war from the Congress (see William Burnham, Introduction to the Law and Legal System of the United States, St. Paul, MN: Thomson West, : –; ; and Margaret Loretto Fennell, Acts of Congress Applicable in Time of Emergency, U.S. Public Affairs Bulletin no. , Washington DC, ). For the legality of the figure of a “state of emergency,” see, for instance, John Ely, “Suppose Congress Wanted a War: Powers Act that Worked,” Columbia Law Review . (); Claudio Grossman, “A Framework for the Examination of States of Emergency under the American Convention of Human Rights,” American University Journal of International Law and Policy . (); Jules Lobel, “Emergency Power and the Decline of Liberalism,” Yale Law Journal  (): –; A. Radin, “Martial Law and the State of Siege,” California Law Review  (): –; E. Harris, “Living with the Enemy: Terrorism and the Limits of Constitutionalism,” Columbia Law Review  (); Louis Fisher, Is War Power a Political Question?, Huntington, NY: Novinka Books, ; Karl DeRouen, Jr., Politics, Economics, and Presidential Use of Force and Decision Making, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, . . C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, New York: Vintage, [] . See also Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the

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New World, New York: Belknap Press, , and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, –, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ; David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, Bloomington: Indiana UP, ; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press, . . See the discourses in M. A. Goldstein, Social and Political Thought of the French Revolution: An Anthology of Original Texts, New York: Peter Lang, . . See Jean Leduc, “Les sources de l’athéisme et de l’immoralisme du marquis de Sade,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century  (Genève, ): –. . Slavoj Žižek finds an Antigone in Sade’s Juliette: they are both beyond the “common good” (see “The Jew and Antigone,” in The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, : –). . Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, New York: Norton, : –. The Marxist critiques to the discourse of equality (starting with Marx’s  “On the Jewish Question,” trans. Helen Lederer, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, OH, ) are not so much against equality but rather against a bourgeois notion of equality, based on the rights of the individual and the protection of private property. See, for instance, Allen Buchanan, Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, . . See Michael Geyer, “The Militarization of Europe: –,” in The Militarization of the Western World, ed. John Gillis, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, : –. The collection covers militarization from  to , punctuating periods of “aggressive rhetoric and passive behavior” or vice versa, to use Michael Mann’s expression (quoted on page ). . See Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies, New York: Harcourt Brace, ; Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, New York: Viking, ; Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, : –. . I clarify once again that I claim no historiography: “modernity” and “modernization” indicate here only an awareness of the changing landscape in political and economic imagination that can be placed as far back as the early Renaissance (following Giovanni Arrighi’s model in The Long Twentieth Century, London: Verso, ) but which I take here as the beginnings of the industrial and scientific revolutions surrounding the universalization of political equality after . Modernization is an uneven process and has shown that it coexists with nonmodern social forms; I focus on its imaginary instituting of the horizon of universal equality. . For comparative charts of Indian, slave, and peasant revolts from  to , see John Coatsworth, “Patrones de rebelión rural en América Latina,” in

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Notes Friedrich Katz, ed., Revuelta, rebelión y revolución, Mexico D.F.: Ediciones Era, : –. . See Alejandro E. Gómez, “La Revolución haitiana y la tierra firme hispana,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos  () (available at http://nuevomundo.revues. org/document.html). See also D. B. Gaspar and D. P. Geggus, A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, Bloomington: Indiana UP, ; Carmen López Bohórquez, “L’ambivalente présence d’Haïti dans l’indépendence du Venezuela,” Outre-mers: revue d’histoire, Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-mer, : –. . See Nicolas Guilhot’s argument that the problem of foundations is the early modern European question, whereas the problem of limiting sovereign power is the postrevolutionary European problem (The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order, New York: Columbia UP, ). . Natalio Botana, La tradición republicana: Alberdi, Sarmiento y las ideas políticas de su tiempo, Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, : . . See Anne-Marie Breenot and David Chacón Rodríguez, “Du sans-culotte français au sans-chemise vénézuélien. Étude d’un itinéraire de la Carmagnole,” in Cahiers des Amériques Latines, L’Amérique Latine face à la révolution française  (Paris, ): –; see also François-Xavier Guerra and Antonio Annino, eds., Inventando la nación: Iberoamérica siglo XIX, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, . . See Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas, Madrid: Mapfre, . . For an excellent collection on Sarmiento, see Tulio Halperín Donghi, Iván Jaksić, Gwen Kirkpatrik, and Francine Masiello, eds. Sarmiento: Author of a Nation, Berkeley: University of California Press, . . See Bruce Mazlish, Civilization and Its Contents, Stanford: Stanford UP, ; and Stuart Wolf, “French Civilization and Ethnicity in the Napoleonic Empire,” Past and Present  (): –. . Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo, Civilización y barbarie en las pampas argentinas, Buenos Aires: Stockcero [] : . All subsequent quotations are from this edition unless otherwise specified. All translations are mine. . See Guerra, Modernidad e independencia: . . For a history of caudillismo, see John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, –, Oxford: Oxford UP, .  I am using Ángel Rama’s famous expression in his The Lettered City (La ciudad letrada), trans. J. C. Chasteen, Durham: Duke UP, . . See Adriana Sandoval, Los dictadores y la dictadura en la novela hispanoamericana (México: UNAM, ); Roberto González Echevarría, The Voice of the Masters, Austin: Texas UP, :  and nn.  and , –; Ángel Rama, Los

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dictadores latinoamericanos, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ; Conrado Zuluaga, Novelas del dictador, dictadores de novela, Bogotá: C. Valencia Editores, ; Paul Verdevoye, ed., “Caudillos,” “caciques” et dictateurs dans le roman hispanoaméricain, Paris: Éditions hispaniques, ; Julio Calviño: Novela del dictador en hispanoamérica, Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica: Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, ; Carlos Pacheco, Narrativa de la dictadura y crítica literaria, Caracas: Fundación Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, ; Juan Carlos García, El dictador en la literatura hispanoamericana, Santiago de Chile: Mosquito Comunicaciones, . See Giuseppe Bellini’s El tema de la dictadura en la narrativa del mundo hispánico (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, ) for an updated overview. I have not found overviews that include one forgotten novel that, I believe, belongs to the corpus: Hector A. Murena’s Polispuercón, Buenos Aires: Sud­ americana, . . See his interview “El otoño del patriarca,” in La soledad de América Latina: Escritos sobre arte y literatura –, La Habana: Editorial de Arte y Literatura, : . . “Nos hace falta, por cierto, una novela del dictador. Nunca ha sido novelada la vida de la administración de un dictador hondureño que se llamaba Tiburcio Carías Andino, quien gobernó el país durante dieciséis años. En cada uno de estos países hispanoamericanos ha habido dictadores que han sido novelados” (English version is my translation). http://www.andes.missouri.edu/andes/Cronicas/ewh_ sosa.html. . See  ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, Lima: Biblioteca Amanta, . The thesis resurfaces in the reviews of Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat: see Rodolfo Rabanal’s review in La Nación [Buenos Aires],  July : www. lanacion.com.ar; or David Gallagher, The Times Literary Supplement,  June : . . For an account of the Latin American “boom” as a market phenomenon, see David Viñas, Más allá del boom: literatura y mercado, México: Marcha, ; Alejandro Herrero Olaizola, “Consuming Aesthetics: Seix Barral and José Donoso in the Field of Latin American Literary Production,” MLN ., Hispanic Issue (March ): –; José Donoso, Historia personal del Boom, Barcelona: Seix Barral, . . Most cited are Aimé Césaire’s  La Tragédie du Roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe), Alejo Carpentier’s  El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World), and Derek Walcott’s  Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes. . Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past, Ithaca: Cornell UP : –. . I have in mind the fictionalization of figures such as Abraham Lincoln; or novels such as Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men () or William Faulkner’s

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Notes Absalom, Absalom! (), and, more recently, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (). In this respect, of interest here are compilations about literature and democracy in the United States, such as Patrick Deneen, Democracy’s Fiction: Politics and Literature in America, Rowman and Littlefield, . . See, for instance, Pedro de Angelis’s essay in Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo, The Argentina Reader, Durham, NC: Duke UP, : –. . See John Lynch’s Argentine Caudillo: Juan Manuel de Rosas, Wilmington, DE: Latin American Silhouettes SR Books, ; ch.  (–) is entitled “Leviathan.” . See Botana, “Sarmiento and Political Order: Liberty, Power, and Virtue,” in Sarmiento: . . See an account of this evolution in Bellini, El tema de la dictadura; Bel­ lini starts with a Spanish novel with Latin American allusions—Tirano Banderas (Ramón del Valle Inclán, )—and ends by considering the works of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas and Mexican writer Homero Aridjis. . See González Echevarría, who takes up Américo Castro’s thesis, in The Voice: . . Quoted in Bellini, El tema de la dictadura: , my translation. Asturias wrote one of the most acclaimed dictator-novels, El Señor Presidente ([] ). The quotation is in his preface to the novel by Jaime Díaz Rozzotto, Le Général des caraïbes, Paris: . . In her incisive study of nineteenth-century Latin American novels, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, Berkeley: University of California Press, , Doris Sommer finds in romantic fictions of love and marriage national representations of nonviolent consolidation of the nation by the mid-century, when the Creole elites found themselves in the imperative to “husband the land” (), perhaps best formulated by Argentine politician and writer Juan Bautista Alberdi’s  slogan “to govern is to populate.” Interestingly enough, Sommer suggests there is a return of soldier-citizen figures, in contrast to loving men, when new imperialisms threaten national alliances (). . See “Para una lectura política de El Señor Presidente: Notas sobre el ‘maldoblestar’ textual,” in Miguel Ángel Asturias: El Señor Presidente, ed. Gerald Martin, Barcelona: Colección Archivos, Galaxia Gutenberg, ALLCA XX, : –. The original reads: “La novela de la dictadura latinoamericana [. . .] quizás sea el único género literario que toma y reflexiona sobre la forma estatal como objeto y sujeto histórico” (). . The debates center on whether “globalization” renders state sovereignty obsolete; see, for example, Marlene Wind, Sovereignty and European Integration: Towards a Post-Hobbesian Order, New York: Palgrave, ; Hideaki Shinoda, Re-examining Sovereignty: From Classical Theory to the Global Age, Houndmills, UK/New

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York: St. Martin’s, ; Robert Jackson, ed., Sovereignty at the Millennium, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, ; G. A. Wood and L. S. Leland, Jr., eds., State and Sovereignty: Is the State in Retreat? Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press, ; Thom Kuehls, Beyond Sovereign Territory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ; Marianne Heiberg, ed., Subduing Sovereignty: Sovereignty and the Right to Intervene, London: Pinter, ; Joseph Camilleri and Jim Falk, eds., The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmentary World, Aldershot, Hants., UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, . At stake is the interpretation of the parallel movement of global capital flows and fortification of state borders across the globe as well as policing and militarization of life. Nonetheless, the attention is placed mostly in the sovereignty of a state vis-à-vis other states, obscuring unresolved problems of the state’s sovereignty within the community—that is, of the state’s ultimate independence of any other social power.

Part III: Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat . Quoted in Bernard Diederich’s Trujillo: The Death of the Dictator, Princeton: Marcus Weiner Publishers, : . Originally from La Nación [Santo Domingo], my emphasis. . Interview with Maya Jaggi for The Guardian, Friday,  March .

Vargas Llosa’s Appeal to History . La fiesta del chivo, México: Alfaguara, ; The Feast of the Goat, trans. Edith Grossman, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, . All quotations in English are from this edition; bracketed glosses in Spanish are mine. . This phrase was originally established by the regime: “All official documents of the Dominican Republic must be dated, as decreed by Law N.  of April , , with special reference to the year of the “Era of Trujillo” which began on August , ” (Jesús de Galíndez, The Era of Trujillo, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, : ). . One of Trujillo’s closest collaborators was indeed named Cabral, though Fermín, instead of Agustín. Agustín Cabral resembles the historical Fermín—he is a man of law that stood by Trujillo from the beginning and had to pass several tests of loyalty throughout his thirty years of service. Urania resembles all the daughters that were given to Trujillo for his sexual use as a token of his collaborators’ loyalty; see Galíndez, Era of Trujillo; and Robert Crassweller, Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator, New York: Macmillan Company, : –. . See “Necropolitics,” Public Culture . (): –. . See The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America, Advances and Set-

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Notes backs, ed. Frances Hagopian and Scott P. Mainwaring, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ; for a world assessment of this “third wave,” see Larry Diamond, “Is the Third Wave of Democratization Over?” : http://kellogg.nd.edu/publications/workingpapers/WPS/.pdf. . See Nehal Bhuta, “A Global State of Exception?: The United States and World Order,” Constellations . (); see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture . (), for what he names an unprecedented “commodification of violence,” added to (imperial) unilaterality, which constructs war machines that can be either state operated or purely market driven. . For the history of the NAM, see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, New York: New Press, . The NAM was functional until the late s; in  the Group of Fifteen was created, but its main agenda had become neoliberal. . For a conservative analysis of the growing inequality in the case of the Latin American region, see the report by the Inter-American Bank, Outsiders? The Changing Patterns of Exclusion in Latin America and the Caribbean, Washington: IDB, IPES, . See the human development reports by the UNDP for a comprehensive view of what is reported as globalization’s “clear trend” toward rising inequality. For data comparing the decades from  to , see the  report; some of the more recent reports offer mixed data about improvement and some show alarming figures. In the  report International Cooperation at a Crossroads: Aid, Trade and Security in an Unequal World, we read that a child born in Zambia today has less chance of surviving past age thirty than did a child born in England in  (). The report debunks the myth that poverty is being reduced by specifying that the latter corresponds to the success of East Asia, but that across the world, several regions are suffering staggering recesses (in sub-Saharan Africa,  million more people lived in poverty in  than in ). The  report Globalization with a Human Face (ch. ) exposes economic integration as dividing “the haves from the have nots”: there are countries that enjoy the benefits of global markets and those that are shut out, including some ironic facts like countries that are integrated in the global trade but are completely left behind (sub-Saharan Africa has a higher export to GDP ratio than Latin America). The report shows how the gap between rich and poor widens and patterns of megaconcentration of capital are produced: the assets of the three richest people in the world combined amount to more than the GNP of all forty-eight least developed countries, and the assets of the two hundred richest people on earth amount to the combined income of  percent of the world’s people; in  the wealthiest  percent of the world’s people had thirty times the income of the poorest  percent—in , seventy-four times the income. For the latter figure, the World Bank’s World Development Report in  gives the following figures: in  the richest twenty countries had a per capita GPD eighteen times higher than in the poorest twenty countries; in  it was

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thirty-seven times higher. For a global account of the creation of the third world and the three industrial revolutions, see Leften Stavros Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age, New York: William and Morrow, . . See Ileana Rodríguez, Liberalism at Its Limits, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, , for an incisive analysis of other cases in Latin America, such as Guatemala, Colombia, and Mexico. . Contrary to some accounts, Vargas Llosa did not “almost win” the election: Fujimori ended the second round with  percent of the votes, against Vargas Llosa’s  percent. In  Fujimori was re-elected with  percent of the votes. See Fernando Tuesta Soldevilla, Perú Político en Cifras, Lima: Fundación Friedrich Ebert, Tercera Edición, . . The report of the truth commission can be read at www.ictj.org. See declassified documents on Montesinos at George Washington University’s site, http:// www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB/. See also the film by Ellen Perry: “The Fall of Fujimori” (, advertised as “when democracy and terrorism collide,” and reviewed as paralleling the current U.S. “war on terror” [http://www. falloffujimori.com/.], and the documentary “State of Fear” by Pamela Yates (; recently translated into Quechua). For a novel about Montesinos, see Linda Davies, Into the Fire (Great Britain: Twenty First Century Publishers, ); see also a biography of Fujimori in English by Japanese writer Rei Kimura, Alberto Fujimori of Peru: The President who Dared to Dream, Great Britain: Eyelevel Books, ). . The obvious current construct to recall here is the “global war on terror,” already yielding volumes of writing (to this effect, see Jean-Claude Paye, Global War on Liberty, New York:Telos Press, ; also Bhuta, “A Global State of Exception?” The predecessor to mention is Samuel Huntington’s article “Clash of Civilizations,” in , later turned into a book. I nonetheless refer mostly to previously cited authors Arendt and Agamben, as well as both to political works (such as Michael Hardt’s and Toni Negri’s Empire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, ) or Noam Chomsky’s Rogue States (Cambridge, MA: South East End Press, )) and deconstructive philosophy such as Jacques Derrida’s Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascal-Anne Brault, Stanford: Stanford UP, . . Michael Moses gives the date : “[T]wo of ‘Gabo’s’ most illustrious companions, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and his Mexican counterpart Carlos Fuentes, met in a London pub to hatch a grand literary enterprise. Together they projected an ambitious artistic project tentatively titled “Los padres de las patrias” (The Fathers of the Nations) [. . . .] To this collective undertaking a number of the foremost contemporary Latin American writers were each to contribute a novel about a dictator from their respective countries: Fuentes was to write about Santa Ana, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier about Gerardo Machado, the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos about José Rodríguez de Francia, and the Argentine Ju-

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Notes lio Cortázar about Evita Perón.” See Michael Valdez Moses, “Big Daddy: The Dictator Novel and the Liberation of Latin America,” Reason Online, August : www. reason.com//cr.mm.big.shtml. See also Adriana Sandoval, Los dictadores y la dictadura en la novela hispanoamericana (México: UNAM, : ). The same story is narrated by Gabriel García Márquez in an interview reprinted in La Soledad de América Latina, Escritos sobre arte y literatura –, La Habana, Cuba: Editorial Arte y Literatura, : . . Quoted in Bernard Fouques, “La autopsia del poder según Roa Bastos, Carpentier y García Márquez,” Cuadernos Americanos .I (enero–febrero ): . Gerardo Machado ruled Cuba from  to ; Antonio Guzmán Blanco ruled Venezuela from  to ,  to , and  to ; Cipriano Castro ruled Venezuela from  to ; Manuel Estrada Cabrera ruled Guatemala from  to ; Porfirio Díaz ruled México from  to  and from  to . . See Frauke Geweke, “La fiesta del chivo de Mario Vargas Llosa: Perspectivas de recepción de una novela de éxito,” Iberoamericana (Nueva Época) . (): ; Sabine Köllmann, Vargas Llosa’s Fiction: The Demons of Politics, Oxford: Peter Lang, : –; Victor Fuentes, “¿La fiesta del chivo o la del mercado editorial?: Sobre la última novela de Mario Vargas Llosa,” Ventana abierta: Revista latina de literatura, arte y cultura . (): –. . Lafourcade treats the dictator as a stereotype of the decadence of the ruling class; see Adriana Sandoval, “Fantasías satíricas: El gran Burundún-Burundá ha muerto y la fiesta del Rey Acab,” in Los Dictadores: –. Two other novels about Trujillo could belong to the corpus of dictator-novels: Haffe Serrulle’s Las tinieblas del dictador, México: Casagrande Editores, ; and Diógenes Valdez’s Retrato de dinosaurios en la era de Trujillo, Santo Domingo: Edita-Libros, . Serrulle’s is a magical realist novel covering a span of time from the Spanish conquest to Trujillo’s regime. Valdez’s uses Trujillo as the context for a plot of love and intrigue. One could also include here some verses of Pablo Neruda’s Canto general (in the stanza “Las satrapías”) and later in Canción de gesta, though of course not within the subgenre. . Interview with Aurelia Dobles, for Revista Diaria de La Nación, Viva [San José de Costa Rica],  May : www.nacion.co.cr/viva. . I, the Supreme, trans. Helen Lane, New York: Dalkey Archive Press, : . See also Roa Bastos’s own comment in his “Algunos núcleos generadores de un texto narrativo,” Escritura  (); David Foster, The Myth of Paraguay in the Fiction of Augusto Roa Bastos, Chapell Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ; and Roberto González Echevarría, The Voice of the Masters, Austin: Texas UP, : –. . See Roa Bastos’s “Algunos núcleos generadores.” . See the review of the book in La Tercera [Chile],  May : www.latercera.cl/diario.

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. See his reflection in “El arte de mentir,” in Contra viento y marea, Barcelona: Seix Barral, : –. . For an overview of Vargas Llosa’s work until , see Sara Castro-Klarén, Mario Vargas Llosa: análisis introductorio, Lima: Latinoamericana Editores, , and Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, ; José Miguel Oviedo, Mario Vargas Llosa: la invención de una realidad, Barcelona: Seix Barral, ; Efraín Kristal, The Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Vargas Llosa, Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, . . See his comments about García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in his García Márquez: historia de un deicidio, Barcelona: Seix Barral, : . . See the reference to Vega in Alastair Reid’s review in “When the Era Was an Era,” New York Review of Books . ( November ): . . See references to the imputations against the author in Frauke Gewecke “La fiesta del chivo de Mario Vargas Llosa: perspectivas de recepción de una novela de éxito,” Iberoamericana I. (): –, esp.  and , n. . All references to this article in the following pages are my translation. . Quoted in Clarín [Buenos Aires],  May : www.clarin.com.ar. . Diederich said to the Miami Herald that he would take the case to court; the Dominican press also complained that Vargas Llosa plagiarized a report written by Lipe Collado, El foro público en la Era de Trujillo, about the section in El Caribe newspaper that was the vehicle of gossip and lies during the times of Trujillo (see Enrique Serbeto in a review for Arena: www.excelsior.com.mx/// cuadro.htm). In a review in Clarín (Buenos Aires),  October : www.clarin. com.ar, Hinde Pomeraniec wrote that Vargas Llosa was also accused of plagiarizing the novel written by Chilean author Enrique Lafourcade (La fiesta del Rey Acab, ). Vargas Llosa called these accusations “absurd”: “My book is a novel, not a historical book [… .] It is absurd that a historical fact becomes an author’s property right” (La Nación [Buenos Aires],  September : www.lanacion.com.ar). . See, for instance, the interview in Radio El Espectador, Uruguay,  May ; the note by Pedro Conde in Letras Dominicanas (http://members.es.tripod. de/cielonaranja/pedroconde.htm); or the interview with Aurelia Dobles, Revista Diaria de la Nación, Viva [San José de Costa Rica],  May : www.nacion.co.cr/ viva. See also Gewecke, “La fiesta”: –. . See, for example, his lecture at Monterrey Technological Institute: “Literatura y política: dos visiones de mundo,”  May : http://www.sistema.itesm.mx/ va/catedra/conferencias/confvargas.htm. . “En tiempos de pos trujillismo, neo trujillismo, tardo trujillismo, retro trujillismo, trujillistas museografiados, ex trujillistas y trujillistas de siempre” (my translation, El Siglo: www.elsiglo.net/cultura//.htm). For a concise version of the novel’s reception in the Dominican Republic, see Gewecke, “La fiesta”: –.

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Notes . Neil Larsen, “¿Cómo narrar el Trujillato?” Revista Iberoamericana (Número Especial sobre la literatura dominicana en el Siglo XX) . (enero–marzo ): –. . For Larsen the best accounts of the regime are Juan Isidro Jimenes Grullón’s Una gestapo en América (A Gestapo in America, ); and Marcio Veloz Maggiolo’s De abril en adelante (as of April ). For an interpretation of the latter, see Sharon Keefe Ugalde, “Veloz Maggiolo y la narrativa de dictador/dictadura: perspectivas dominicanas e innovaciones,” Revista Iberoamericana .(enero–marzo ): –. . See Manuel Rueda, “Presencia del dictador en la narrativa dominicana,” El Dictador en la novela latinoamericana, Ponencias de un seminario realizado los días , ,  de octubre de , Santo Domingo: Voluntariado de Casas Reales. See also Ugalde, “Veloz Maggiolo”: . . Interviews: New York Times Magazine,  November : ; Clarín [Buenos Aires],  May . . See the interview in the San Francisco Chronicle,  November : http:// www.sfgate.com/. See also the interview with Enrique Krauze: “La seducción del poder,” Letras Libres  (): –. . Interview with Sanjuana Martinez for Babab, www.babab.com/no/vargas_llosa.htm. See also Página  [Buenos Aires],  May : www.pagina.com. ar. The author’s reference to “live dictators” might include Fidel Castro. . Página  [Buenos Aires],  May : www.pagina.com.ar. . Desafíos a la Libertad, Madrid: Ediciones El País, . . See Galíndez, Era of Trujillo: chs. –. . Página  [Buenos Aires],  May : www.pagina.com.ar; second quotation in Raymond L. Williams, Vargas Llosa: La otra historia de un deicidio, México: Taurus, : . . Moses, “Big Daddy.” . See a list of reviews in Sabine Köllmann, “La fiesta del chivo: cambio y continuidad en la obra de Mario Vargas Llosa,” Iberoamericana . [Berlín, Alemania] (): –. . Sabine Köllmann, Vargas Llosa’s Fiction and the Demons of Politics, Oxford/ New York: P. Lang, :  n.  and . . Juan Bosch (–) was the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic after Trujillo’s assassination in . He founded the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) in  and the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) in . He went into exile in  and wrote many books against Trujillo. Bosch was elected as president on  December , running as the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) candidate. He took office on  February ; he was ousted seven months later by a military coup.

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. Efraín Kristal sees the author’s work divided into a socialist phase, in which violence was ascribed to social injustice, and a neoliberal phase, in which violence is ascribed to fanaticism, utopian thinking, and irrationality (Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, ). See also Williams, Vargas Llosa. . Vargas Llosa has written prefaces to the Spanish translations of some of Bataille’s works. See, for instance, Vargas Llosa’s account of Bataille’s theory in “Bataille o el rescate del mal,” Contra Viento y Marea, II: –, or his comment in “Sobre Bataille: Respuesta a García Ponce,” ibid.: –. . Bataille, Literature and Evil, New York: Marion Boyars, : ix. Peter Elmore interprets Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo in the context of the author’s fascination with Bataille: Trujillo is the individual “Evil”—the “beast” inside the human. See Elmore’s “Los males del poder y los poderes del mal” (“The Evils of Power and the Powers of Evil”): “For Vargas Llosa, attentive reader of Bataille, Evil [. . .] is an energy and a presence that obeys elementary and irrational drives, but that possesses its own logic and rigor (my translation; see the review at www.desco.org.pe/qh/edtelmo. htm.) . In his Studies in Roman Law, William Harris asserts that “neither the WestAfrican Tallensi nor the Rajputs of Mewar, though their notions of fatherhood were somewhat authoritarian, came close to the Roman system. The nearest parallel known to me is in Deuteronomic Israel, where parents were permitted to bring about the stoning to death of errant sons.” (“The Roman Father’s Power of Life and Death,” in Roger Bagnall and William Harris, Studies in Roman Law, Leiden: E. J. Brill, : ; see also nn.  and ). For the figure of the “dictator” in the late republic in the form of the senatusconsultum ultimum, see Fernández Prieto Marta, “El Senatusconsultum ultimum,” in Estudios de Derecho Romano en memoria de Benito M. Reimundo Yanes, Burgos: Universidad de Burgos, , Tomo I: –.

Necropolitics I . Jesús de Galíndez, The Era of Trujillo, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, : –. . I have found only one review that includes a comment on this conversation between Trujillo and his loyal friend: David Gallagher in the Times Literary Supplement,  June : . Gallagher’s racist bias, nonetheless, relates the modern phenomenon of genocide to “Hispanic ethnicity” and reads Simon’s question as an inquiry into Trujillo’s pride: “His capacity for rationalization is infinite, as is his, very Hispanic, capacity to make the vilest atrocities seem legal and reasonable. When asked by a fawning American hanger-on which act he is most proud of, he characteristically points to his decision to slaughter thousands of migrant work-

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Notes ers from Haiti in . He claims that, as well as raping Dominican women, the Haitians were infiltrating the Dominican Republic in order to invade it [. . . .]” (my emphasis). . See Miguel Aquino García, Holocausto en el Caribe: Perfiles de una tiranía sin precedentes, La matanza de haitianos por Trujillo, Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, . There is little agreement as to the numbers killed in the massacre or how many days or weeks it lasted. The most frequently cited dates are from  to  October , but some accounts testify that the massacre continued for at least a month and a half. According to Bernardo Vega (Trujillo y Haití, Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, , vol. II: ), the massacre started on  September and slowed down only when Trujillo gave the order to stop on  October. The estimates of deaths run from twelve thousand to thirty thousand; by that time ( census) there were , Haitian nationals in the Dominican Republic. Haiti demanded the mediation of a joint commission to investigate the facts, constituted by the governments of Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. The two countries agreed upon the payment by the Dominican government of an indemnification of $, as well as the investigation of the perpetrators. In March , the Dominican government announced that sixteen persons had been sentenced to thirty years in prison for the murder of  Haitians and  Dominicans (Galíndez, Era of Trujillo: –). According to Rafael Mencía Lister (Trujillo y su época, Santo Domingo: Taller, : ), Trujillo even estimated, in conversation with close friends, and just days before his death, while foreseeing he was going to die, that the number of Haitians killed must have been thirty thousand. The documentation on the episode is vast; for an initial overview, see also Juan Manuel García, La matanza de haitianos, Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa and Omega, ; Luis Julián Perez, Santo Domingo frente al destino, Santo Domingo: Taller, ; Richard Lee Turits “A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed: The  Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic,” Hispanic American Historical Review . (): –; Suzy Castor, Le Massacre de  et les relations haitiano-dominicaines, Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Centre de Recherche et Formation Économique et Sociale pour le Développement, ; Joaquín Balaguer, La isla al revés: Haití y el destino dominicano, Santo Domingo, República Dominicana: Librería Dominicana, . . Galíndez collects all the titles by which Trujillo was addressed: “His Excellency Generalissimo Doctor, Honorable President of the Republic (when he is such), Father of the New Fatherland, Benefactor of the Fatherland, Restorer of the Financial Independence of the Republic. [. . .] Occasionally [. . .] First Worker of the Republic, or First Teacher, or First Journalist” (Era of Trujillo: ). . In real life, Trujillo’s puppet president, Balaguer, justified the killing in  as a question of survival: “The Dominican Republic was, then, doomed to disappear absorbed by Haiti, a race more prolific and homogeneous than ours. A few

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more decades [lustros] and the country would have been irremediably Haitianized. Danna G. Munro, of the inter-American affairs committee, describes that tremendous situation in a document that all America should know: ‘Here we have a wave of color [una ola de color] that advances and will swallow irremediably the Dominican Republic.’ Trujillo constitutes an indispensable necessity because he guarantees our survival as a Catholic and Christian nation [. . . .] But what must be clarified is that the Dominican people cannot do without his direction while the problem with Haiti remains unsolved” (letter reprinted in García, La matanza de haitianos: – ). In Santo Domingo Frente al Destino, Luis Julián Perez asks if the conflict with Haiti had not reached a point where it “really” endangered the Dominican state (). Perez states that during the months previous to his death, Trujillo would go to towns and gather the young to tell them his motives for his decision—it had been a question of resolving a situation of vital importance to the republic (). . At the Ministry of Foreign Relations there is a secret room for the files referring to Haiti. When Galíndez wrote his book The Era of Trujillo, the key to the room was in the possession of the chief clerk (). In La matanza de los haitianos, Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa and Omega, , García quotes at least ten different hypotheses of scholars and witnesses in explaining Trujillo’s sudden decision: () his interest in being re-“elected” (); () the news that his secret agents in Haiti had been eliminated (); () a conspiracy to topple the Haitian president, Stenio Vincent (); () a petition that he received during a party from his personal female agent in the area, Ms. Isabel Mayer, to end the thefts on her land (); () the story he heard about a Haitian who had wanted to dance with his woman (); () a strategy to produce a violent reaction from Haiti that would justify an invasion (); () an old revenge on the Haitians for the Dominican massacres of – (); () a last-minute action because Trujillo’s plan to invade Haiti had failed (), a premeditated provocation to enter into war with Haiti (); () a plan to get rid of the economic burden that illegal Haitian immigrants were to the government (); and () a foreseeable episode within the program of “dominicanization” of the frontier, a consequence of the new armed service sent to regularize the situation at the border (). Vega provides a compilation of reasons emphasizing the “whitening” of the frontier, and enumerates what he thinks are the false reasons, such as a conspiracy and invasion of Haiti, or the revenge for Haiti’s hosting Dominican exiles (see Trujillo y Haití, vol. II: –). . The problem of “neighborhood” between Haiti and the Dominican Republic went back to the confrontation between the Spaniards and the French settlers in the west. After Haiti’s independence from France, in , the problem of the doctrine of the “unification of the island” became a class issue. See María Elena Muñoz, Las relaciones domínico-haitianas: geopolítica y migración. Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa & Omega, : –; and Vega (Trujillo y Haití, vol. I: ch. ) for the argument

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Notes that only the ruling class in the Dominican Republic rejected the Haitian invasion. From  to , the year of the definitive treaty prior to Trujillo, the two republics engaged in violent incidents along the border. Only during the U.S. invasion is a definitive line drawn between the two countries. Trujillo finds the situation fairly well resolved; he revises the last treaty of  and hosts two meetings with Haitian authorities to end the problem once and for all in April , signing the final treaty. See Vega, Trujillo y Haití, vol. I: –. . See Vega, Trujillo y Haití, vol. I: –. Vega argues that the situation dramatically changed when the United States withdrew from Haiti. . An estimated  percent of the population have African ancestry (Oxford Encyclopedia of World History, ). By all accounts, the differentiating factor between the two neighbors is culture rather than blood, though Haiti is more consistently black and the Dominican Republic is more consistently mulata. Haitians in the Dominican Republic outnumber any other foreign presence—the  census yielded a number of Haitians five times larger than the next largest foreign presence in the country (Puerto Ricans) (see Muñoz, Las relaciones domínico-haitianas: ). For recent appraisals of Haitian immigration, see Rubén Silié, Orlando Inoa, and Arnold Antonin, La República Dominicana y Haití frente al futuro, Santo Domingo: Flacso, ; see also Muñoz. The anti-Haitian prejudice is oriented by a sense of national identity propelled by various political interests (see Muñoz, Las relaciones domínico-haitianas; Vega, Trujillo y Haití; and Balaguer, La Isla al revés). . Trujillo’s grandmother, Erciná Chevalier, was Haitian. Trujillo was born and raised in San Cristóbal, a town where a high percentage of the population descends from slaves and where Haitians are taken to work in sugar fields. Trujillo’s first job was on a sugar plantation, where he shared tasks with Haitians. In  the press revealed that he had ten illegal Haitian workers as slaves on one of his farms—he threatened to deport them if they objected to not being paid. See Vega, Trujillo y Haití, vol. I: . . A Caribbean rhythm of African and Latin roots, the dance was considered low class by the Dominican elite: “Trujillo has imposed the merengue—this dance seems to originate in the Haitian carabine—[. . . .] [He] has imposed it as a must [como una trágala] on the honest Dominican society that abominates it. In Santo Domingo, before Trujillo, Spanish and ballroom dances were the norm” (Bustamante, “Una satrapía en el Caribe”: ). Its origins are disputed between Dominicans and Haitians, though they are often related to: (a) the way in which chained slaves would walk in the sugar plantations, or (b) a party at which a Haitian revolutionary without a leg tried to dance but could only make the steps that are now the merengue. . For a collection of quotations in popular culture and literature against Hai-

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tian culture and blacks, see Vega, Trujillo y Haití, vol. I: –. Luis Julián Pérez, Santo Domingo frente al destino, Santo Domingo: Taller, : , comments that Benjamin Green wrote in  that it was common to hear a Dominican mulatto say, “I am black, but a white black. Even if I have a black complexion, my heart is white” (my translation). . A concise and clear version of this policy for the frontier, called dominica­ nización fronteriza or nacionalización fronteriza (dominicanization or nationalization of the frontier), can be read in the anonymous document reprinted in García’s La Matanza de los Haitianos. The program had already started in the nineteenth century with Heureaux, but only Trujillo developed it. The solutions proposed against the overflow of Haitians in the frontier are either to develop the area, or to develop Haiti, or to create a new state. See also the summary in Balaguer, La isla al revés: –: Trujillo wanted to create agricultural colonies, send white European immigrants, build schools and Catholic churches, send missionaries to combat the practice of Vodou, and eliminate Haitian money. For a recent assessment of the success of Trujillo’s policies and statistics, see Domingo Lilon, “La política de in­ migración del Dictador Trujillo,” Historia y Comunicación Social  (): –. . Robert Crasweller, Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator, New York: Macmillan Company, : –. . Lister, Trujillo y su época, Tomo I: . The president of the Deputee Chamber had even made an allusion to Hitler’s doctrine of the necessity of a “vital space” for the country (quoted in Jean Ghasmann Bisainthe, Perfil de dos naciones en la española, Santo Domingo: Micromer Impresos, : –). . See Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston: Beacon Press, . . Most historians give an account of the legendary party at the house of Isabel Mayer, a fervent follower of Trujillo. See García, La matanza de los haitianos: –, for different versions of what really happened: whether it was a woman who asked Trujillo to give an end to the problem; whether he was offended by the entrance of a Haitian; whether it was the report that Vargas Llosa chooses for his rendering of the decisive moment; whether Trujillo stamped on the floor, or pounded a fist on the table; whether he said, “[T]his will have an end,” “[T]his is the last straw,” or “[T]his will be arranged.” . Sugar mills were not touched because they were mostly property of the United States. See Vega, Trujillo y Haití, vol. I. . Among the novels that also narrate the episode, see Freddy Prestol’s El Masacre se pasa a pie (Santo Domingo, República Dominicana: Taller, ), Jacques Stéphen Alexis’s Compère Général Soleil (Paris, Gallimard , translated into English as General Sun, My Brother, and into Spanish as El Compadre General Sol);

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Notes René Philoctète’s Le peuple des terres mêlées (Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Editions H. Des­ champs,, translated into English as Massacre River, and into Spanish as Perejil); Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of the Bones (New York, NY: Soho Press,). . Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford UP, : . . See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Politics and Crime, New York: Seabury Press, : –. . This was the narrative of Trujillo’s organic intellectuals. In an anonymous essay reprinted in García’s La matanza de los haitianos and apparently written by José Almoina, “La Frontera de la República Dominicana con Haití,” we read: “[T]he Dominican State began its manhood [varonía], which it had not known before [. . . .] Until Dr. Trujillo Molina came to power, what had been the fate of the Republic? A permanent field of hatred, a bloody civil war scenario (n. , p. ) [. . . .] The Dominican Republic had not yet started to be a sovereign and independent State () [. . . .] The President Trujillo has to be considered as the founder of a sovereign State, independent and free, in normal and full exercise of its destiny” (). Joaquín Balaguer refers to Trujillo’s foundation of “the base for the emergence of the new society” () as follows: “It is fair to recognize, nonetheless, that Trujillo was a transformer and that of his hands a new Dominican society came about. With him, a socio-political phenomenon, similar to a certain extent to what Toynbee calls the ‘acceleration of history,’ was initiated” (Joaquín Balaguer, Memorias de un cortesano de la “Era de Trujillo,” Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, : ). . By the time Galíndez wrote La Era de Trujillo, there had been four international scandals: Sergio Bencosme murdered in New York, Mauricio Baéz in La Havana, Andrés Requena in New York, and Manuel Hernández Santana in La Havana (–). Galíndez was killed for having written his book; Almoina for having published Una satrapía en el Caribe under the pseudonym Gregorio Bustamante. The last straw that put the Organization of American States against Trujillo was his attempt to murder the Venezuelan president, Rómulo Betancourt, in . . Quoted in Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Las Casas y Trujillo, Cuadernos de la Revista Casa de las Américas , La Habana, Noviembre : –, my emphasis. All citations in this chapter are my translation. . Galíndez describes it as follows: “[I]ts essential difference and characteristic are the adoption of a formal structure similar to that of the Western democracies. There is a constitution; periodic elections are held; the government is divided into the three classical powers [. . .] a detailed declaration of human rights is proclaimed. The structure of the government is inspired by the constitution of the United States, and the declaration of human rights is inspired by its French counterpart of ” (La Era de Trujillo: ). All of Trujillo’s puppet presidents were elected, but in fraudulent elections. His first puppet president was Jacinto Peynado,

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elected in ; the second was Jesús Troncoso de la Concha, elected in ; the third was his brother, Héctor Trujillo, elected in . The last was Balaguer, elected in . . Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press, . . See Mike Davis’s recent study, Planet of Slums, London: Verso, . . In real life, Trujillo’s collaborators would have signed their resignation without a specific date on the day they took their position in the government, so that he could add a date when he deemed it appropriate: “[It] was not unusual that deputies, ministers and generals would learn of their ‘resignation’ through the newspapers. His most faithful adulators saw themselves fired from one day to the next or arrested at their work desk and sent to prison after long years of loyal service and without the least reason [. . . .] [I]nsecurity was total” (Enzensberger, Las Casas y Trujillo: –). See also Galíndez, La Era de Trujillo: –. . Crassweller documents (–, ) how Trujillo had appointed special men to recruit a number of women per week at the presidential palace. Trujillo would choose those who would then be told the time and place where they had to meet with him. Vargas Llosa’s reference to Trujillo’s use of women in the novel is, generally speaking, faithful to historical facts. . According to Galíndez, in real life, Senator Mario Fermín Cabral had proposed “a campaign to grant the name of Trujillo to the capital of the Republic” (); the law was passed on  January . . I do not read this as what Silva Cáceres sees as diálogo interior (internal dialogue, quoted in José Miguel Oviedo, Mario Vargas Llosa: La invención de una realidad, Barcelona: Seix Barral, S.A., : ) when commenting on Vargas Llosa’s narrative technique, because Trujillo’s voice closes off the others in his monologue. For an example of diálogo interior, see ibid.; it is clear that the questions that appear in these dialogues are open to doubt. . Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, , vol. XIII: –.

Necropolitics II . Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford UP, : . . In Carpentier’s novel the episode of the dictator’s escape outside of all established legal procedures comes close to delimiting the space of the political in the terms here discussed. See Carpentier’s El recurso del método, México: Siglo XXI, : –. Taking a different angle, in “La autopsia del poder según Roa Bastos, Carpentier y García Márquez,” Bernard Fouques compares the space between death

317

Notes and life that the dictators inhabit to the literary world of these novels, “a middle space that is neither the real nor the fictional world,” and that represents a “nonplace” starting history, where the desire for utopia is born and literature is seen at work (Cuadernos Americanos . (enero–febrero ): , my translation). . Juan Domingo Perón (–) ruled Argentina from  to , and was re-elected in  after his return from exile in Spain. When a military coup ousted him in  he took refuge for some months in the Dominican Republic before finally fleeing to Spain. Fulgencio Batista (–) dominated Cuba from  until , when Fidel Castro forced him into exile. Marcos Pérez Jiménez (–) dominated Venezuela from  to ; he was first deported, later convicted of misuse of public funds, jailed, and finally exiled in Spain. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (–) was the military president of Colombia from  to , when he was ousted and stripped temporarily of his civil rights. . For the English lyrics, see Bernard Diederich, Trujillo: The Death of the Dictator, Princeton: Marcus Weiner Publishers, : ix–x. I quote the lines without their “encore”: “They’ve killed the goat on the highway/ Let me see/ They’ve killed the goat and they won’t let me see/ The people celebrate with great joy the party of the goat the thirtieth of May/ let’s laugh/ let’s dance/let’s enjoy/ The thirtieth of May/ day of liberty/ They’ve killed Chapita on the highway/ let’s shout/ in this way they’ve killed Chapita and won’t let me see.” The Spanish version has an extra line: the mother shouts that they won’t let her see the corpse: “Mataron al Chivo en la carretera/ déjenmelo ver/ mataron al Chivo y no me lo dejaron ver/ el pueblo cele­ bra con mucho entusiasmo/ la fiesta del Chivo el  de mayo/ vamos a reír, vamos a bailar, vamos a gozar/ el  de mayo día de la libertad/ matan a Chapita en la carre­ tera/ la mamá gritaba de esta manera/ matan a Chapita y no me lo dejaron ver.” . Taken from the entry “Goat,” in John Mckenzie’s Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Macmillan Publishing, : ). The references in the Bible are Ezk : ; : ; Dn : ; Zc : . . All of Trujillo’s murderers are literally “inside” the regime, they are trujillistas (): Amado García Guerrero is one of Trujillo’s personal military aids, Antonio de la Maza has for twenty years managed Trujillo’s sawmill in Restauración, Antonio Imbert is one of Trujillo’s factory managers and former governor of Puerto Plata, Salvador Estrella Sadhalá is a road contractor in one of Trujillo’s companies, Pedro Livio Cedeño is a former army officer, Roberto Pastoriza and Huáscar Tejeda are engineers working in Trujillo’s companies. Modesto Díaz is the leader of Truji­ llo’s Partido Dominicano, his brother Juan Tomás Díaz, an army officer, and Pupo Román, Trujillo’s chief of armed forces and husband of one of his nieces. . Castro’s  takeover of power proposed a socialist alternative; after , Figueres turned Costa Rica into a model for democracy, opposing dictatorial regimes by giving shelter to their exiles; Muñoz Marín was the first elected governor

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of Puerto Rico in  and organized the Popular Democratic Power; Betancourt, founder of the first radical mass political party in Venezuela, was twice president (–; –) and leader of the democratic forces of his country. . For a collection of essays on the literary representation of this problem, see L. Higgins and B. Silver, Rape and Representation, New York: Columbia UP, . For a formulation in political and legal terms, see Catharine Mackinnon’s “Feminism, Marxism and the State: Toward a Feminist Jurisprudence,” Signs  (): –. For an analysis based on the United States, see Sabine Sielke, Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, –, Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton UP, . For an analysis of legal questions of truth and fiction, see Frances Ferguson’s “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” Representations  (): –. For an analysis of how the language of legal institutions and courtrooms re-enforces myths about rape and shapes gendered performances in talking about rape, see Susan Ehrlich, Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent, London: Routledge, . . See the connection between memory and pain that Nietzsche famously established in his  Genealogy of Morals; for Page duBois’s research on Greek slaves and torture, see Torture and Truth, London: Routledge, . . The Spanish word used here is señoritas, equivalent to “misses.” It is an oldfashioned way of referring to the moment when girls menstruate for the first time and become señoritas. . Consider the phonetic similarity of both names in Spanish: Urania’s and Ureña’s, separated phonetically only by the vowels “a” and “e.” . Phonetically, in Spanish the h is mute and the letter ñ produces a sound similar to an n with the vowel i. Thus it is easy to pronounce similarly “Urania” and huraña. . Quoted in Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, New York: New Press, : . . See Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, New York: Norton, ; Samir Amin, Obsolescent Capitalism, London: Zed Books, ; Michel Aglietta and André Orlean, La violencia de la moneda, México: Siglo XXI, ; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford UP, . . The Tonton Macoutes were the secret police Papa Doc created in  after he declared himself Haitian president for life. Granted automatic amnesty by Papa Doc for any crime they committed, they operated only in zones of exception.

Epilogue . Luis Rafael Sánchez, La pasión según Antígona Pérez, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cultural, [] . . Antigone lands in the New York theater scene only in , as the first Greek

319

Notes tragedy to be staged in commercial theaters in the United States. The play is not a rewriting but only an adaptation of the original. See Karelisa Hartigan, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, New York: Greenwood Press, : . 3. Varela’s 1824 Argia is not directly inspired in Sophocles’ version but in Vittorio Alfieri’s 1783 Antigone, which in turn draws from Statius’ version of the Attic Antigone in his epic Thebaid. 4. I have compiled a list of Antigone’s post–World War II travels in my “Nomadic Antigone,” prologue to Feminist Interpretations of Antigone, ed. Fanny Söderbäck, New York: SUNY Press, forthcoming. 5. I borrow from the titles A Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views, ed. Samuel Totten, William Parsons, and Israel Charny, London: Routledge, ; and Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation, Princeton: Princeton UP, . 6. I follow Charles Segal’s beautiful formulation: “The play which contains one of the most stunning exaltations of human achievement in Greek poetry has the desecration of a human being at the center of its plot” (Tragedy and Civilization, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, : ). 7. Volumes on the relation between globalization and violence are beginning to appear. See, for instance, K. Worcester’s edited collection Violence and Politics: Globalization’s Paradox, London: Routledge, . 8. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso, : . 9. See Balibar’s Droit de cité: culture et politique en démocratie, Paris: PUF, : ; see Iain Chambers’s “Borders and the Boundaries of Democracy,” New Formations  (): . 10. United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, World Refugee Survey—European Union,  June , available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/ docid/fda.html [accessed  September ]. 11. Bertrand Ogilvie, “Violence et représentation: la production de l’homme jetable,” Lignes  (). 12. Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin, ; Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ; Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, Semiotext(e): Cambridge, . 13. See, for instance, Antonio Negri’s definition of the multitude: “The multitude is the name of an immanence. The multitude is a whole of singularities. On these premises we can immediately begin to trace an ontological definition of what is left of reality once the concept of the people is freed from transcendence. [. . .] Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel have, each for his own part and in different ways, produced a concept of the people starting from sovereign transcendence: in those

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authors’ view the multitude was chaos and war. The thought of modernity operates in a twofold manner on these grounds: on the one hand, it abstracts the multiplicity of singularities and, in a transcendental manner, unifies it in the concept of the people; on the other hand, it dissolves the whole of singularities (that constitute the multitude) into a mass of individuals [. . . .] On the contrary, the theory of the multitude requires that the subjects speak for themselves, and that what is dealt with are unrepresentable singularities rather than individual proprietors.” http://www. generation-online.org/t/approximations.htm (originally published as “Pour une definition ontologique de la multitude,” Multitudes  (): –. 14. See Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, London: Verso, . 15. See Ernesto Laclau, Nuevas reflexiones sobre la revolución de nuestro tiempo, Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión,  (published in English by Verso, ). See Žižek’s appendix “Más allá del análisis del discurso,” –. 16. Étienne Balibar, Droit de cité, culture et politique en démocratie, Paris: PUF, .



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 Days of Sodom: assembly in, , – , ; and capitalism, ; chamber in, , –, , , , –, , ; and community, , , , ; contract as alliance in, , , –, –; and democracy, , ; and equality, , , , –; exchange in, , –, –, , –; exceptional history of, ; and fantasy, –, ; gaze in, , –, , –; inversion in, , –, –, , ; and law, , , , , , –, –, , –, , , , –, ; and membership, , , , , , , , , , ; necropolitics in, ; and polis, , , ; political borders in, , , , , ; as political solitude, , , ; and rights, , , , , ; rites in, , –, ; rituals in, –, , , , ; Sadean Law, ; and slavery, , ; and state , , ; storytellers in, , , , –, ; symbolic death in, , –; as symptom, , ; torture in, , , , –, , , , ; voice in, , –; war in, , , , –, , , , , ; women in, , –, , . See also Exception; Inversion; Perversion; Transgression; Sade; State of exception

Index

Adams, John Quincy,  Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer,  Aeschylus, ,  Agamben, Giorgio: and “bare life,” , – , , ; The Coming Community, , ; Homo Sacer, , –, , , ; and state of exception, –; State of Exception, –; and Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo as sovereign, ; “What Is a camp,” – Alcibiades,  Althusser, Louis, ,  Antigone: bare life in, –; and burial, , –, , , –, , , –, , , , , –, –; and citizen(ship), , , –, , –, –, , –, ; civic dissolution in, , , –, –, –, ; criticism of (Hegelian tradition), , , ; equality in, , , , , , , –, , , –; feminist readings of, –; and Greek gods, –, , , , ; and inversion of norm, , ; membership in, , , , , ,, , , , , , –, ; modern adaptation of, –; and ritual, , –, , , –, , , , –, –, , –, ; Sade and, , –, , , ; and slavery, , , –, , –, ; and state of exception, ; Sophocles, life of, –,

323

Index , –; and (female) suicide, , , , –, ; transgression in, –, , , ; and utopia, , , ; and war, –, , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , . See also Antigone; Slavery; Transgression; Violence; War; Women Antigone: and constituency, , , , –, ; Creon and, , –, , , , –, , , –, –, –, ; death of, , –, ; Eteocles and, , ; The Feast of the Goat and, , , ; furies and, ; hands of, –; inclusive logic of, , , , ; Ismene and, , , , , , –; and law, , , , , –; as modern, , ; Polynices and, , , , –, , –, –, ; and ritual, , , –, , ; Sade and, ; and slavery, –. See also Antigone; Women Arendt, Hannah, , , , –,  Aristophanes, ,  Aristotle, ; Poetics, , ; Politics, ,  Artemis, – Asturias, Miguel Ángel,  Athenian Assembly, , , , , ; and death of democracy, ; versus political representation, ; versus society of The Equals in Sparta, –; versus tragedy,  Babeuf, Gracchus, –, , ,  Badiou, Alain, ,  Balaguer, Joaquín, , –; in The Feast of the Goat, –, –, –, , , –, – Balibar, Étienne, ,  Bare life, ; in ancient Greece, –; and nonhuman, –; in Sade, ; in Vargas Llosa, . See also Agamben; Antigone; Sovereign(ty) Barthes, Roland, , –, , ,  Bataille, Georges, , , , , –

324

Bauman, Zygmunt,  Benjamin, Walter, , , , , , ,  Berent, Moshe,  Bernadete, Seth, ,  Blanchot, Maurice, , , – Bodin, Jean, , , , ,  Bolívar, Simón,  Bonaparte, Napoléon, , –,  Bosch, Juan,  Botana, Natalio, ,  Bowra, Cecil Maurice, – Brecht, Bertolt,  Brenkman, John,  Brown, Andrew, , –, , ,  Buck-Morss, Susan, , . See also Wild zone of power Burkert, Walter,  Butler, Judith,  Camus, Albert, ,  Cannibalism: anthropology of, ; endocannibalism, , , ; and The Feast of the Goat, ; in Greek tragedy, ; necrocannibal politics, –; in Sade, , –, , , –, , –, , . See also Coprophagia; Necrophilia; Perversion Capitalism, , , ; Clastres and, ; colonialism, , , ; development of, ; globalization, –; primitive accumulation of capital, ; Sade and, , , , , ; symbolic capital, . See also Violence Carpentier, Alejo, , , , ,  Casilli, Antonio,  Castoriadis, Cornelius, , ,  Caudillo, –, –, , , . See also War Césaire, Aimé,  Chambers, Iain,  Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, , ,  Citizen/citizenship: in ancient Greece, , , , , –, –, –, , –, , ; in Antigone, , , –, , –, –, , –, ;

Index Cleisthenes and, , , , ; Derrida on, ; and Revolution of , , –, ; Rousseau on, , ; Sade and, , ; Sade as, ; Vargas Llosa on, . See also  Days of Sodom; Antigone; Declaration of the Rights of Man Civilization: and barbarism, –, , –, ; Bruce Mazlish on, ; and free markets, ; and law, ; and state order,  Clastres, Pierre, , , –,  Clausewitz, Carl von, , , ,  Cleisthenes, the Athenian, , , , . See also Citizen/citizenship Cloots, Anacharsis, – Community: Antigone and, , , , , –, ; Creon and, , –, –, , –, –, –, –, , , ; early modernity and, –; enemies in, –, –; European, , ; The Feast of the Goat and, –, , , , ; community-building and genocide, , ; Hobbes and Rousseau on, ; international, ; political, , , , , , , ; Puritan, ; Sade and, , , ,  Contract: as alliance in Sade, , , –, –; against exchange, ; Hobbes and Rousseau on, –, ; membership and, , ; and liberal thought, ; Sade and Contractualist thinkers, , , –, , , ; and war, –, , ; Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo and, , , . See also  Days of Sodom; Exchange; Rousseau; Social contract; War Coprophragia, –. See also Perversion Cosmopolitanism, –,  Crassweller, Robert, , ,  Creon: Antigone’s death and, –; and borders of the polis, , –, ; and community, , –, –, , –, –, –, –, , , ;

decree of, , , ; edict of, , , , –, , , ; enemy and, , –, –, , , , –, –; and exclusion, , , ; and gods, –; Hobbes and, ; and immunity, ; and inequality, ; as king, , , ; “killed twice,” , ; as military figure, –; as modern, , , –, , , , ; modern classicists and, –, , –; and “reason of state,” ; Sade and, , , , , , –, , , ; and stasis, , , , ; as Spartan, ; as statesman, –; and transgression of rituals, , , , –, ; Trujillo and, , –, , ; as tyrant, –; and women, . See also Antigone; Eteocles; Immunology; Law; Polynices; Violence Danton, Georges, ,  Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, , , – Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People (),  Deleuze, Gilles, , – Delon, Michel, , , ,  Democracy: Athenian, , , , –, , , –, , ; constitutive limits of, , ; dark side of, –; direct, , , , , ; and equality, –, , –, –, ; Greek, –, , , , ; Latin American transition to, –; liberal, , , ; oligarchy and, , , ; Pericles and, , , –, ; Pericles’ funeral oration and, –, –; popular sovereign(ty), , , –, , , , , , ; radical, , ; (re)invention of, ,  ,, , ; “second birth” of, , , ; and stasis, , , , , , , ; suicidal nature of, ; “third wave” of, –, ; and tyranny, –, , ; and utopia, , ; and violence, , , , , . See also Democratic imagination; Demos; Equality

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Index Democratic imagination, , , , , ; and Antigone, ; and dictator novel, –; and The Feast of the Goat, ; Sade and, ,  Demos, , , , , , , – Derrida, Jacques, , ,  Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, – Dictator novel: Asturias on, ; Facundo as, , ; García Márquez on, ; social contract and, –; Sosa on, ; Spanish American, , , , , ; Western political imagination and, –, –, –, –; and war, . See also The Feast of the Goat Dodds, E. R.,  Dominican Republic: Africa, –, ; Dominicans as internal enemies, ; Haiti and, –, ; history of, –, –; literature of, ; and “mestizo,” , ; Trujillo and, , –, ; See also Haiti DuBois, Page,  Duroux, Françoise, , – Ehrenberg, Victor,  Enlightenment, –, –, , ,  Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, , , ,  Equality:  universalization of, –, –, , –, , , ; in ancient Athens, , –, –, ; Antigone and, , , , , , , –, , , –; demand for, , , , , –, ; democracy and, –, , –, –, ; and difference, , , , ; Foucault on, ; and Haiti, , –; as identity or equivalence, , , , , , , ; inversion of, ; Isocrates on, –; and liberal tradition, –, ; and Marxist tradition, –, ; and membership, –; natural inequality, , , ; Menke on, –, , ; Plato’s Republic and, ;

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principle of, , ; radical equality in Sade, , , –; restrictive, , ; Sade and, , , , –; as threat, –; universal abstract ideal of, , , , , ; utopian versus subversive, –, , . See also Antigone; Democracy; Democratic Imagination; Demos; Marxism; Membership; Sovereign(ty) Esposito, Roberto, ,  Eteocles: Antigone and, , ; Creon and, , ; Euripides’, ; funeral rites of, ; Polynices and, , ,  Euripides, , – Eurydice, ,  Exception: Creon’s edict as, –, –, , , ; Antigone as, , ; and Dominican elite, ; Hobbes and, – ; Sade as, ; Sade’s castle as, , , , , –, –, –; Sade’s food as, ; Sade’s libertine alliance as, –; state of, , –,; Trujillo’s death as, –; Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo as, –, –; Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo’s regime as, ; zone of, –. See also Perversion; State; State of exception Exchange: alliance against, ; and Hobbesian contract, –; Sade against, , -, -, , -; and psychoanalysis, , ; state against, ; Trujillo against, , , . See also  Days of Sodom; Contract; Ritual; Rousseau; Social contract The Feast of the Goat: and civic dissolution, , –, –, , ; and democratic imagination, ; and inversion, ; law in, , –, , , –, –, –; and membership, , ; and nation, , , , , , , ; necropolitics in, , ; –, ; political borders in, , , , , –, ,

Index , ; reception of, –, , ; reception in Dominican Republic, , –; ritual in, , ; and Roman law, ; and sovereign(ty), , ; and state, –, , –; state of exception in, , –, –, ; and utopia, , ; Vargas Llosa on, –; and violence, –, –, –; and war, , –, . See also Trujillo Molina; Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo Fetishism: of commodity, ; of dictators, , ; of equality, , ; and Haitian genocide, ; and perversion, ; in Sade’s castle, , ; and Trujillo, , –. See also Freud; Marxism; Perversion Finley, Moses, –, , –, , ,  Fournier, Fernando,  Foucault, Michel, , , ; inversion of Carl von Clausewitz, , ,  Frankfurt School,  Freud, Sigmund: and anaclisis, –; and clinical perversions, –, ; and drive, ; and excess, ; and fetishism, –; and mourning, ; and primitive horde, ; Sade as precursor of, , , ; and terrible father, , ; Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo and, , . See also Fetishism; Perversion; Sade; Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo Fuentes, Carlos, ,  Fujimori, Alberto, –, ,  Fukuyama, Francis,  Furet, François,  Galíndez, Jesús de, , , , ,  García, Aquino,  García Márquez, Gabriel, , , , , ,  Genocide: in Brazil, ; “century of genocide,” ; “community-building” and, , ; community and, , , –; of Haitians, , , , –,

, –;  Vendée uprising, ; Sade and, . See also The Feast of the Goat; Haiti; Trujillo Molina; Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo; War Girard, René, ,  Globalization, , – Gouges, Olympe de,  Griffith, Mark,  Guerra, François-Xavier, – Haiti: Black Jacobins of, , , , ; Haitian Revolution, , , , , –; as other, ; Revolution of  and, ; and Trujillo, , , , , –, ; Trujillo’s Haitian genocide, , , –, –, , –; Trujillo as Haitian, , , ; Urania as Haitian, . See also Dominican Republic; The Feast of the Goat; Genocide; Jacobins; Revolution of ; Trujillo Molina; Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri,  Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,  Haemon, , , , , , , , ,  Hénaff, Marcel, , , ,  Heraclitus, ,  Herodotus, –, , , ,  Hobbes, Thomas: and contract, –; and dictator novel, ; Sade and, , –, , ; and sovereign, , , , ; Trujillo and, , , , , , , . See also Contract; Exchange; Exception; Sade; Social contract; Sovereign(ty) Hogan, James,  Hooff, Anton J. L. van, ,  Hughes, Dennis,  Humanity, –, , ,––, , , , ; Cloots on, ; crimes against, ; inhuman, , –; nonhuman, –, –. See also Bare life; Declaration of the Rights of Man; Rights Hunt, Lynn, 

327

Index Immunology: of Athenian Assembly, ; Creon and autoimmunity, ; paradigm of, ; and power, , , , , , , , . See also Creon; Esposito, Roberto Inversion: and Creon, , ; and antipolitics, ; in The Feast of the Goat, ; Foucault’s inversion of Carl von Clausewitz, , ; in psychoanalysis, , –; in Sade, , –, –, , ; of transgression into norm, , , , . See also Freud; Perversion; Transgression Ismene: Antigone and, , , , , , –; as Antigone’s enemy, –, , , ; Creon and, ; and female submission, ; modern adaptations of Antigone and,  Isocrates, , , – Jacobins: Black Jacobins, , , , ; Sade, –. See also Haiti Jacobs, Carol,  James, C. L. R.,  Jameson, Fredric, – Kant, Immanuel, , ; Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade,”  Keefe Ugalde, Sharon,  Keenan, Alan,  Klossowski, Pierre, , , , , , , – Krafft-Ebing, Richard, –. See also Necrophilia Kraniauskas, John, ,  Lacan, Jacques, , , , , , – Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe, , – Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe,  Lafourcade, Enrique,  Larsen, Neil,  Law: in ancient Athens, –, , , , , –, , ; Antigone and,

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, , , , –; Creon and, , , –, , , ; decree versus, ; democracy’s laws in ancient Athens, –; dikè and nomoi, ; divine versus human, , ; exception to, , –; Freudian advent of, ; Lacan and, –; law-making and law-preserving violence, , , ; nature’s law in Sade, , –, ; nomos versus kerugma, ; paideia, ; Pericles and, ; Roman law, , , , ; School of Salamanca, , ; in Sparta, ; suspension of, , –, , , , , , ; Sade and, , , , , –, –, –, , , , –, ; Sade on, – ; Trujillo and, , –, , , –; Urania and, –, –. See also  Days of Sodom; The Feast of the Goat; Perversion; Roman law; State of exception; Transgression; Violence Lebrun, Annie, –, –, ,  Lefort, Claude,  Lely, Gilbert, ,  Liberal thought: Creole elite and, , –; exhaustion of, ; liberal revolution in Spain, ; Marxism and, , ; neoliberal thought, –; Vargas Llosa and, –, . See also Ramonet, Ignacio; Vargas Llosa Locke, John,  Loraux, Nicole. , , , –, –,  Lugo, Américo,  Macherey, Pierre, , , ,  Machiavelli, Niccolò, , ; Trujillo as, , , . See also The Feast of the Goat Mann, Michael,  Mariátegui, José Carlos,  Marxism: class-conflict, ; commodity fetishism, ; and equality, –, , , , ; and fetishization of equality, ; Lacan and, ; and liberal thought, , ; Mariátegui and, ;

Index and radical democracy, ; in Sade, ; structuralist, . See also Equality; Fetishism; Liberal thought Mazlich, Bruce,  Mbembe, Achille, ,  Membership: Antigone and, , , , , ,, , , , , –, –, ; and crisis, –, , –, –; dictator novel and, , ; equality and, –, , ; globalization and, ; political, , , , , –, ; , , ; Revolution of  and, , , , –; Sade and, , , , , , , , , , ; and structure of enmity, ; universal, ; and violence, –, , –, , , , , , , , , ; and women, . See also  Days of Sodom; Antigone; Equality; The Feast of the Goat; Politics; Violence Mencía Lister, Rafael,  Mengue, Philippe,  Menke, Christoph, –, , . See also Equality Morris, Sarah,  Mouffe, Chantal,  Nation: Argentina, –; Dominican Republic, , ; globalization, ; Haiti, –; industrialized, ; Latin America, –; modern capitalist, ; nation-building, ; nation-state, , , , –, , , , , , -, ; Trujillo’s, , , , , , ,  Naudé, Gabriel, – Necrophilia, , , –, , , , . See also Krafft-Ebing; Necropolitics; Perversion Necropolitics: as denial of burial, ; in The Feast of the Goat, , ; in Greek tragedy, ; Mbembe’s definition of, , ; necrocannibal politics, , –; Sade and, ; –, . See also  Days of Sodom; The Feast of the Goat; Mbembe, Achille; Politics; Violence

Neoliberalism, –. See also Liberal thought Ober, Josiah,  Ogilvie, Bertrand,  Paulhan, Jean, ,  Paz, Octavio, ,  Pericles, , , –, ; funeral oration of, –, –; Periclean era, , ; Plato on, . See also Democracy Perversion: and creativity, , ; of democracy, , ; and ethics, ; misinterpretation of, ; of power, , , –, –, –; in Freud, –; of patriarchy, ; and political exception, , –; of reason, ; and sexual perversion in Sade, , . See also Cannibalism; Coprophagia; Inversion; Necrophilia; Transgression Phrynicus, –,  Plato, ; Gorgias, ; Protagoras, , ; The Republic, , – Plutarch, ,  Polis: Antigone and, , , , ; Athenian, , , , , , ; autonomous versus heteronomous, , ; and autonomy, , ; Creon and, , , , –; and Revolution of , ; Sade and, , , ; Sophocles and,  Politics, allegory of, , ; antipolitics, –; and autonomy, , –, , , , , ; and community, , , , , , , ; and equality, , , , , , –, –; fictions of political origins, , , ; invention of, , , , ; membership, –, , –, , ; perversion of, –; political life, –, –, , , ; reason of, ; reinvention of, , –, –, , ; Sadean political solitude, , , ; and sovereignty, , , , , , , ; sphere of, -, –, , , –, , , , , –; and

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Index unity, –, , , ; and virtue, , . See also Exception; Necropolitics; Polis; Political imagination Political imagination, , –, , , ; in Antigone, , , , , , , –; in dictator novel, –; in The Feast of the Goat, ; fictions of political origins, , , ; Sade and, , , –. See also Democratic imagination; Politics Polynices: Antigone and, , , , –, , –, –, ; claim to justice, , ; Creon and, –, , , –, , , , , ; as enemy, –, , ; Eteocles and, , , ; funeral rites of, –, , , , , ; as killed twice, , , , ; in modern imagination, ,  Quiroga, Juan Facundo, –. See also Rosas; Sarmiento Raaflaub, Kurt, ,  Ramonet, Ignacio, and Pensée unique, , , . See also Liberal Thought; Vargas Llosa Rancière, Jacques, , , – Rape, , –, – Reason of state: and Antigone, ; Carpentier’s Reasons of State, ; and Creon, , –; as logic of survival, , , ; and Sade, ; and state of exception, ; and Trujillo, , –, , . See also Creon; The Feast of the Goat; Violence; War Reinhardt, Karl,  Renaissance, , , –, –,  Revolution of , , , , , , , , ; French revolutionaries, , ; and Haitian Revolution, , , , , , –; and slavery, ; and Spanish American wars of independence, –; and women, . See also Citizen/citizenship; Equality; Haiti; Membership; Slavery; Utopia

330

Riesenberg, Peter,  Rights: contractual, ; declarations of, ; equal, , , , , ; human, , , , , , ; individual, ; natural, , , , , –, ; Sade and, , , , , ; universal, ; of victims, ; of women, , . See also Citizen/ citizenship; Declaration of the Rights of Man Ritual: Agamben on, ; and assassination of Trujillo, ; binding, ; cannibalistic, ; civic, ; (endo)cannibal, , ; of exchange versus of accumulation, ; funeral rite in Antigone, , –, , , –, , , , –, –, , –, , , –; funeral rite in The Feast of the Goat, ; initiation, ; kinship, , ; of marriage in Antigone, , ; of passage, , ; of public speech, –; religious, ; sacrificial, ; Sade and, –, , , , ; symbolic aspects of, ; tragedy as, , , –; Trujillo and, , . See also  Days of Sodom; Antigone; The Feast of the Goat Rivière, Claude,  Roa Bastos, Augusto, , , ,  Roman law, , , , . See also The Feast of the Goat; Law Rosas, Juan Manuel de, and Sarmiento, – Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Émile, –; popular sovereign, –; precivic order, ; Sade and, , , , , ; Sarmiento on, , ; and social contract, , –, , –, ; and state, , . See also Citizen/ citizenship; Sade; Social contract; Sovereign(ty) Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de: as citizen, ; Correspondances, , ; Dostoevsky

Index as, ; and eighteenth-century libertines, ; Hobbes and, , –, , ; and Jacobins, –; Juliette, , –; Justine, ; and Marxism, ; nineteenth-century reception of, ; Philosophy in the Bedroom, , ; poststructuralist criticism of, , – , ; post–World War II criticism of, –, ; as precursor of Freud, , , ; Rousseau and, , , , , ; and state, –; twentiethcentury reception of, . See also  Days of Sodom St. Croix, G. E. M. de,  Samuels, Maurice,  Sánchez, Luis Rafael,  Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, –, –, . See also Rosas Schmitt, Carl,  School of Salamanca, –, . See also Law; Social contract Segal, Charles, ,  Shapiro, Ian, ,  Siege, see War Slavery: Antigone and, , , –, , –, ; in Athenian society, –, –, –, ; new forms of, ; and plantation economy, ; and Revolution of , , ; Sade and, , ; slave revolution in Saint-Domingue, , –; in Spartan society, , ; Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo and, –. See also Antigone; Revolution of  Social contract: and dictator novel, –, –; and The Feast of the Goat, , ; and Latin America, , –; Rousseau on, , –, , –, ; and Sade, –; School of Salamanca and, . See also Citizen/ citizenship; Contract; Rousseau Sommer, Doris,  Sonthonax, Léger-Félicité,  Sophocles: life of, –, , –. See also Antigone

Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane,  Sovereign(ty): Antigone and, ; and bare life, , , ; Bataille on, ; Cloots on, –; Creon and, , –; and dictator novel, –, ; and equality, , , ; in The Feast of the Goat, , ; Hobbes’s “sovereign,” , , , ; imperial sovereignty, ; in Latin America, –, , ; modern, , , , –, , ; popular, , , , , –; Rousseau’s “popular sovereign,” –, , , ; Sade and, –, , , , , , , , ; Schmitt and, ; Suárez on popular sovereignty, –; Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo and, , – , –, , , , . See also Agamben; Bare life; Hobbes; Politics; Rousseau; Sade; Vargas Llosa; Violence Sparta, , –, , , , –, . See also Antigone; Athenian Assembly; Creon; Law; Slavery; Women Spinoza, Baruch, , ,  State: American, , ; borders, , , –; city-state, , ; early moderns and, –, ; and Enlightenment, –; in The Feast of the Goat, –, , –; and globalization, –; and law, , ; and membership, –; modern, , , , , , , , –, –, , , –; of nature, , , ; political dissolution and, –, , –, –; reason of, , ; Rousseau and State consistency, , , , ; Sade and, –, , , ; Weber and, ; welfare state, . See also Nation; State of exception State of exception, , , , , –, –; global, , ; versus “zone of exception,” –. See also  Days of Sodom; Agamben; Antigone; Exception; The Feast of the Goat; Zone of exception Steiner, George, , 

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Index Strabo of Amasia,  Strömholm, Stig,  Structure of enmity, –, –, , , , , ; enemy within, , , ,  Symptom: art and, , –, –, ; dictator novel as, , ; in The Feast of the Goat, , ; fictions of political origins as, ; figures of the non-human, –; Greek etymology of, ; in psychoanalysis, –, ; sublimation and, ; Sade as, ; Sade’s secret chamber as, ; symptomatic formation, , ; tragic festivals as, ; violence as, , , , , ,  Themistocles, ,  Theophrastus,  Thucydides, , –, – Tiresias, , , , ,,  Tort, Michel,  Torture: Athenian society and, ; in The Feast of the Goat, , , ; sacrifice in Sade, ; in Sade, , , , –, , , ; secret chamber in Sade, ; torture chamber in Sade, –; and truth, . See also Dubois, Page Transgression: in Antigone, –, , ; canonical reading of Sade, , –, , ; and norm in Antigone, ; and norm in Sade, –, , , –, –, , , , , ; in Sade, , , ; and Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo, . See also Freud; Inversion; Perversion Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leónidas: and European immigration, ; fictions about, , ; Haiti and, –, ; Jesús de Galíndez on, , –. See also Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo Universal Declaration of Human Rights (), 

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Utopia: and Antigone, , , ; Babeuf and, , ; equality and, –, – ; and The Feast of the Goat, , ; Greek utopians, ; Revolution of  and, , ; Sade and, ; symptom and, – Vargas Llosa, Mario: Bataille’s concept of sovereignty and, –; Conversation in the Cathedral, ; and dictator novels, , –; on dictatorship, –; A Fish in the Water, ; on history and authoritarian power, –; and knowledgeable lie, ; and liberal thought, –, ; on literature, ; as presidential candidate, ; on violence, , , –; The War of the End of the World, . See also The Feast of the Goat; Trujillo Molina; Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo: body of, , , –, ; as Creon, , –, , ; death, –; and Dominican Republic, , –, ; against exchange, , , ; and Freud, , ; and Facundo, ; and genocide, , , , –, , ; and Haiti, , , , ; as Haitian, , , ; as Hobbesian, , , , , , , ; as Machiavellian, , , ; as Sadianite, , –, , , , , ; slavery and, –; sovereign(ty) and, , –, –, , , , ; torture and, ; Truman and, –; Urania and, –. See also The Feast of the Goat; Trujillo Molina Vega, Bernardo de la, , ,  Vernant, Jean-Pierre, , ,  Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, , –,  Vincent, Sténio,  Violence: in ancient Athens, , , , ; Antigone and, , –, ; binding violence, –, , –, –,

Index , , , ,, , , , –; colonialism and, ; Creon and, , –, , , , , ; as democracy’s other, , , , , ; and dictator novels, ; and equality, ; excrescence of, , , ; external, , ; foundational, –, –, , ; internal, , , , ; law and, –, , , , ; lawmaking and law-preserving, , , ; membership and, –, , –, , , , , , , , , ; originary, , ; “othering” of, –,, –; and politics, , , , , –, ; and political sovereignty in modern Europe, –, ; post–World War II Western theorists on, –; radicalization of, in Sade, , , ; revolutionary, –; sacrificial, ; and Sade’s “society of equals,” , –, –; and social contracts, –, , , , –, –, ; and state of exception, , ; suicidal, , ; torture, , ; Urania and, –, –, –; Vargas Llosa on, , , –. See also Reason of state; State of exception; War Virno, Paolo,  Vries, Hent de,  War: Antigone and, –, , , , , , , , , , –, ; Arendt on, ; and Athens, , –, , ; caudillo wars, , ; Carl von Clausewitz on, , ; “contractualist” philosophy on, –, , ; early modernity and, ; end of Cold War, ; in The Feast of the Goat, , – , ; Finley on, ; First World War, ; Foucault on, , ; fratricidal war in Antigone, , , , ; Fujimori

and, , ; and genocide, –; “global state of war,” ; Haiti’s war for independence, ; Latin American dictator novel and, ; Marxism and, ; Peloponnesian war, ; Phrynicus’ The Persian Wars, –; reason of war (reason of state), –; Sade and, , , , –, , , , , ; Sarmiento and, –; SpanishAmerican wars of independence, –, , ; stasis (civil war), , , , , , –, ; state of, , , , ; Theban War, ; Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, , , ; Vargas Llosas’s The War of the End of the World, –; Weber, Max, . See also  Days of Sodom; Antigone; The Feast of the Goat; Genocide; Violence Wild zone of power, , , , , , . See also Buck-Morss, Susan Women: in ancient Athens, , , , – , ; Antigone’s death as a woman, –, , ; criticism in Antigone, –, ; ancient democracy and, , ; equality and, , ; in The Feast of the Goat, –, –, , –, –; and funeral rites in ancient Greece, –, ; and the oikos, –; in Sade, , –, , ; sisterhood, , , ; in Sparta, ; womanhood in Antigone, , , –, , ; women’s death in ancient Greece,  World Bank (Eugene Black), , – Xenophon,  Žižek, Slavoj, , ,  Zone of exception, –, , , , , , , , , –. See also Exception; State; State of exception

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