The King's Two Buckets- Kantorowicz, Richard II, And Fiscal Trauerspiel

8/11/2019 The King's Two Buckets- Kantorowicz, Richard II, And Fiscal Trauerspiel

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original intention. Such as it now stands, this study may be taken among otherthings as an attempt to understand and, if possible, demonstrate how, by whatmeans and methods, certain axioms of the political theology which mutatis mutan-diswas to remain valid until the 20th-century, began to be developed during thelater Middle Ages. It would go much too far, however, to assume that the author felt

tempted to investigate the emergence of some of the idols of modern political reli-gions merely on account of the horrifying experience of our own time in which

whole nations, the largest and the smallest, fell prey to the weirdest dogmas and inwhich political theologisms became genuine obsessions defying in many cases therudiments of human and political reason. Admittedly, the author was not unawareof the later aberrations; in fact, he became the more conscious of certain ideologi-cal gossamers the more he expanded and deepened his knowledge of the earlydevelopment. It seems necessary, however, to stress the fact that considerations ofthat kind belonged to afterthoughts, resulting from the present investigation andnot causing it or determining its course. The fascination emanating as usual fromthe historical material itself prevailed over any desire of practical or moral applica-

tion and, needless to say, preceded any afterthought.2

Kantorowicz here alludes clearly enough to the connection between Schmit-tian political theology and Nazism while at the same time insisting that hisown work constitutes a merely adventitious response to Schmitt. The linesbetween medieval political theology and the modern, Schmittian versionoccurred to him, he claims, only retrospectively, after the labor of historicalinvestigation had followed its own path. The Kings Two Bodies, Kantorowiczinsists, drags no political moral in tow and began with no polemical intent.

Yet Kantorowiczs refusal to engage directly with Schmitt constitutes,

paradoxically, his very mode of engagement. Abjuring critique, Kantorowiczmakes scholarly neutrality and historical empiricism his weapons of choiceagainst Schmitts highly partisan brand of theorizing. Declaring, in a politi-cally charged if merely implicit way, his allegiance with British empiricism asagainst German idealism, Kantorowicz insists that The Kings Two Bodiesdevel-oped organically, like a living thing, following the logic of historical materi-als that led it in directions unanticipated by its author. Underlying thisconceit is an essentially Burkean equation between empirical method andevolutionary constitutionalism on the one hand, and (Schmittian) theoryand tyranny on the other.3 Or if Burke seems too distant a point of reference,the English constitutional historian F. W. Maitland would have provided amore proximate (and openly acknowledged) inspiration.

Moreover, Kantorowicz performs the very distinction between politicalhistory and political theology by refusing to claim intellectual or authorialsovereignty over the materials he collects. Insisting that his study intends tomake problems visible rather than to solve them (xx), he goes on to remark:Only hesitatingly and rarely did the author find it necessary to draw conclu-sions or indicate how the various topics discussed in these pages should begeared with each other; but the reader will find it easy enough to draw his

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own conclusions and himself combine the cogwheels, an operation facilitatedby very numerous cross-references and a full index (xxi). To solve problemsand draw conclusions is the intellectuals counterpart to the Entscheidungordecision of the Schmittian sovereign. Kantorowicz surrenders this power to

the reader in a gesture at once democratic and bureaucratic.This methodologicalpris de positionengages with matters of form as well.

When Kantorowicz employs the phrase ideological gossamers to describethe fascist deformation of political theology, I take this as a pointed refer-ence to Schmitt: specifically, to Schmitts predilection for brief (Kantorowiczwould probably say slight), almost essayistic writings. Against the thin gos-samer of Schmitts Political Theology, Kantorowicz will set the bulky, magiste-rial form of The Kings Two Bodies. Against Schmitts vaporous theorizing,Kantorowicz will counterpoise his scholarly thoroughness. The very size ofKantorowiczs tome, the corpulence of what we might call its body natural,

invests it with a gravity intended to tilt the scales against Schmitt.This rhetorical figure leads me to a first, perhaps seemingly whimsical,

connection with Shakespeares Richard II. When, in the famous depositionscene, Richard engages in a literal tug-of-war with Bolingbroke over thecrown, he famously declares:

Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown.

Here, cousin. On this side my hand, and on that side thine.

Now is this golden crown like a deep well

That owes two buckets filling one another,

The emptier ever dancing in the air,The other down, unseen, and full of water.

That bucket down and full of tears am I,

Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high. (4.1.17279)4

Here, we might say, the kings two bodies have been replaced by the kingstwo buckets, as the seemingly horizontal opposition of forces between thekinsmen Richard and Bolingbroke is shown to be mediated by a vertical,gravitational pull. Richards creaturely body, a mournful bucket filled withtears, is not pushed down by the victorious Bolingbroke but rather pulls its

empty, seemingly weightless opponent up by means of its own descent.Richards rhetorical jujitsu, admirably explicated by Harry Berger, offers akind of model for Kantorowicz, whose victorious bucket will be filled withfootnotes rather than tears.5 The oddly baroque conceit of the crown as awell with two contesting buckets nicely emblematizes a later struggle overthe very concept of sovereignty waged between Kantorowicz and Schmitt.

Kantorowiczs subtitle, A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, opens up aseries of debts and divergences with respect to Schmitt. The fiction of theKings two bodies, which ultimately assumes a purely secular form, derives in

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Schmittian fashion from theological conceptionsin this case, of Christsdouble nature and his role as divine mediator. And yet the finally metaphor-ical relation between politics and theology works to very different ends inKantorowicz. Schmitt focuses on the decision as the politico-juridical coun-

terpart to the divine miracle. As its etymology suggests, the Entscheidungordecision is an act of separation or sunderingof the state of emergencyfrom ordinary conditions, of the sovereign from the rule of law, and of deci-sion from juridical norm, in a way that resembles the slicing or cutting of thedivine miracle through the continuum of the natural order.6 The corporatistfiction of the kings two bodies, by contrast, is meant to smooth over thepotential disruption in sovereignty caused by the physical death of themonarch. It effects not separation but continuity: of reign to kingly reign,and of monarch to the constitutional body of which he forms the head.Although the juridical antecedents to the doctrine of the kings two bodies

could be given an absolutist spin, as in the case of Frederick II, in England ittended to bind the king to the rule of law and the consultation of Parliament.

Kantorowicz pointedly juxtaposes his chapters on Frederick II and Henryof Bracton precisely to highlight the distinction between Continental andEnglish cases. Particularly telling is his treatment of the fiscthe landsbelonging to the crown. While their inalienable status was used primarily indefense of royal property against private claims, the crown lands simultane-ously limited royal prerogative, since the same inalienability prevented theking himself from selling them. The crown lands became bona nullius, the

property of no one and hence of the realm itself, for which the king servedmerely as temporary custodian (186). Observes Kantorowicz:

It is significant that during the constitutional struggles of the thirteenth and four-teenth centuries, the baronial objections were always centered on the fiscal-domanialsphere, including the prerogative rights attached to it, whereas the strictly feudalsphereincluding feudal aids and other rights exercised by the king as a personalliege lordremained, on the whole, unchallenged. Within the orbit of publicaffairs, however, and especially public finances, the barons could venture to controlthe king, to bind him to a council of their own choice, and thus to demonstratethat things of public concern no longer touched the king alone but touched all,the king as well as the whole community of the realm. (191)

Not incidentally, the charges against Richard II abounded in crimes againstthe Crown (369)a repeated focus of Shakespeares play as well. Preparingto fight his Irish war in 1.4, Richard announces to his favorites:

We will ourself in person to this war,

And for our coffers with too great a court

And liberal largess are grown somewhat light,

We are enforced to farm our royal realm,

The revenue whereof shall furnish us



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For our affairs in hand. If that come short,

Our substitutes at home shall have blank charters,

Whereto, when they shall know what men are rich,

They shall subscribe them for large sums of gold,

And send them after to supply our wants;

For we will make for Ireland presently. (1.4.4151)

Richard will balance his books not only by leasing out the crown lands butalso by appropriating Bolingbrokes inheritance after the death of John ofGaunt. Richard will take from Bolingbroke his plate, his goods, his money,and his lands (2.1.211) to fill and weigh down his own light coffers, therebyanticipating, in a fiscal key, the figure of the two buckets in the depositionscene.7

Richards plan to tax both his nobles and his commons, like his leasingof crown lands, touches on an interesting theme in Kantorowicz, who tracesroyal taxation from, originally, a response to a casus necessitas or publicemergency such as external invasion through its evolution into a routine . . .undisguised annual recurrence of financial requests (28485). Redefiningnecessitasfrom an external threat to the ordinary budgetary needs of admin-istration, Kantorowicz offers a kind of anti-Schmittian parable in which thesovereigns power to decide states of emergency cedes to bureaucratic regu-larity and continuity long before the modern era. Here the narrative of TheKings Two Bodiesseems implicitly to invert Schmitts vector of influence run-ning from the theological to the political, since the increasing bureaucratiza-

tion of both church and state in the Middle Ages demands a God who doesnot intervene via miracle but rather governs in more predictable fashion:a chairman God who acts only in consultation with his corporate board. Itis only a few steps from here to Edward Cokes declaration that the politicbody hath no soul, for it is framed by the policy of man.8 God has nowretreated into a kind of deistic corner while the bureaucratic mechanism ofthe state runs itself under a regular, continuous, and uninterrupted temporal-ity. That economic mechanisms play a crucial role here would be especiallyunnerving to Schmitt.

Kantorowiczs narrative implicitly endorses corporative-bureaucratic struc-tures for their capacity to bind sovereignty to the public interest. And inconjunction with this, his very form of presentation mimics the bureaucraticreport: a seemingly neutral compendium of data whose recommendationscan be ferreted out only with difficulty. When he speaks of how the varioustopics in his book are geared with each other and states that the reader willfind it easy . . . to combine the cogwheels (xxi), he presents his work asabstract mechanism, a device that is operated rather than merely readindeed, one that passively requiresan external operator in the form of an aca-demic readership in order to work at all. Kantorowiczs book is (in fact, aspires



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to be) a machine adapted to the corporative-bureaucratic structures ofacademia, which form its necessary environment and condition of existencethe very opposite of Schmitts unexpected bolts from the blue. In Kantorowiczswork, massive historical footnotes bind and ballast theoretical pronounce-

ment in the same way that corporative structures of government bind thesovereignty of the monarch. Perhaps Kantorowicz borrows his taste formechanical metaphors in part from Shakespeares King Richard, who notonly elaborates the conceit of the two buckets but also compares himself atlength to a clock. Not coincidentally, it is when his sovereignty collapses thatRichard gains full access to this figurative register. After his summonedangels fail to arrive, Richard is left only with machinesindeed, imagineshimself as mechanism.

In a brilliant recent essay, the Spanish critic Znon Luis-Martnez demon-strates that Richard II, rather than Hamlet, is Shakespeares purest experi-

ment in the genre of Trauerspiel.9And it is as Trauerspiel, I would argue, thatShakespeares play conducts its anticipatory critique of Schmittian sovereignty.Walter Benjamins classic study responds to Schmitt by positing the tyrantfigure of Trauerspielas, precisely, indecisive: buffeted by his creaturely pas-sions, the tyrant finds himself unable to wield his own sovereign power, isupended by the courtly intriguer, and therefore often finds himself in theseemingly antithetical role of martyr.10 Such, in skeleton form, is the plotstructure of Richard IIif one can even speak of plot in a dramatic genredevoted to ostentatious speeches of mourning rather than coherent dra-

matic action.As Samuel Weber points out, the failure of the sovereign decision inTrauerspielresults not merely from the personal shortcomings of the tyrantbut from the very structure of a cosmos in which the heavens have with-drawn behind a veil, leaving the characters of Trauerspielto occupy a purelynatural, creaturely world.11 Writes Weber: The sovereign is incapable ofmaking a decision, because a decision, in the strict sense, is not possible in aworld that leaves no space for heterogeneity: the inauthentic, natural his-tory of the Baroque allows for no interruption or radical suspension of itsperennial interruptions (1415). Shakespeares King Richard imagines that

as sovereign he maintains access to a heterogeneous, transcendent realmthat legions of heavenly angels will flock to his rescue against Bolingbroke.In effect he invokes not the decision but its theological paradigm: the miracle.But he soon comes to learn, the hard way, the lessons spelled out by Ben-jamin: The level of the state of creation, the terrain on which the Trauer-spielis enacted, also unmistakably exercises a determining influence on thesovereign. However highly he is enthroned over subject and state, his statusis confined to the world of creation; he is the lord of creatures, but heremains a creature (85). Or as the Duke of York puts it: Comforts in heaven,



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and we are on the earth, / Where nothing lives but crosses, cares, and grief(2.2.7879).

Richard is torn, in effect, between his transcendental claims and hismerely creaturely statusbetween the upward tug of his theological politics

and the downward, gravitational pull of his natural body. Thus it is that thefigure of the two buckets captures the essential, contradictory movement ofthe play as Trauerspiel. To this Benjaminian template I would simply add thefact that two forces tend to drag Richard downward: not only his creaturelybeing but also the crown itself, which does not belong to Richard as his per-sonal property but has become at least in part the possession of the realm.The claims of the nobles with respect to Richards violation of thefiscuscom-plement the gravitational pull of the creaturely, binding Richard to the willof the commonwealth as well as to the natural terrain of the earth. Thusdoes Shakespeare inflect the Trauerspielor German mourning play with a

specifically English, constitutional strain. Richard II embodies a novel dra-matic genre: fiscal Trauerspiel, which in its form as well as its content capturesand undoes the decisional power of the Schmittian sovereign. It remainedfor Kantorowicz to describe the workings of this new genre without evernaming it as such.

All of this makes for a tidy picturea bit too tidy, in fact, since my por-trait of a thoroughgoingly constitutionalist Kantorowicz is somewhat over-simplified. For one thing, his reading of Bracton emphasizes the latters

dialectical conception of a kingship at once infra et supra legem, belowand abovethe law, and thus only ambiguously constrained by it.12 In addition,and more disturbingly, claims about the kings supralegal status seem to beKantorowiczs invention, with no real supporting evidence in Bracton.13 Ifthe Bracton chapter is intended to supply a contrast with that on Frederick II,then, it may also fall prey to the residual appeal of Fredericks absolutism.

The dialectical conception of kingship in the Bracton chapter gives riseto claims that the kings restriction alone produces also, and justifies, hisexaltation (155). Needless to say, asserts Kantorowicz, the kings statusabove the Law was itself perfectly legal and guaranteed by the Law (149).

What is especially interesting about such pronouncements (apart from theirapparently invented character) is the fact that they startlingly resemble someof Schmitts most central formulations about the state of exception. In histract Political Theology, Schmitt emphasizes that the capacity to suspend theconstitution in states of emergency was guaranteed by the constitution of theWeimar republic itself, and that, more broadly, sovereignty is always a powerto suspend the law that is itself enshrined in law.14 Indeed, Giorgio Agam-bens influential exposition of Schmitt in Homo Sacerfocuses on precisely thisparadoxical topology of the legal and extralegal.15 Kantorowiczs ambiguous



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flirtation with medieval absolutism, then, finds a counterpart in moments of aseemingly conciliatory attraction to his supposed ideological antagonist or(in Schmitts terms) enemy.16

I do not wish to claim that such moments upend the fundamental posi-

tion of the chapter on Bracton. In the end, despite all tergiversating, Kan-torowicz repeatedly insists that the kings power is subject to, and limited by,the law. Indeed, it is difficult to grasp in any concrete way what the kingssupralegal status is supposed to amount to beyond the principal itself, whichleads one to suspect that the whole thing is a kind of empty flourish. Never-theless, some wavering infects Kantorowiczs constitutionalist stand fromtime to time. That stand is of so thoroughgoingly conservative a character inany case that it should not be surprising to find it mixed with occasionalrightist leanings. Kantorowiczs position cannot in the end be reduced to areassuringly self-identical or consistent one.

I have been arguing in this essay that Kantorowiczs intellectual sovereigntyis of a paradoxical sort: it argues and refutes by pretending not to argue orrefute. It amasses intellectual authority by seeming to abjure it, and this tac-tic has not a little in common with that of Shakespeares Richard II, whogains poetic strength through the loss of political power. It has even becomesomething of a critical commonplace to claim that Richard, driven by anobscure sense of guilt, collaborates in his own destruction.17Whatever thepsychological merits of such a reading, they are finally grounded in thegenre of Trauerspieland its typically indecisive tyrants. But this indecisive-

ness also, I would suggest, provides a model for Kantorowiczs intellectualwavering. Shakespeares play is, in the end, far more than a convenient doc-trinal specimen for Kantorowicz; it is a compendium of intellectual strate-gies and (it must be said) symptoms. Richard offers Kantorowicz a mirror formagistrates, a reflective model of sovereignty on which the latter can descantat length.

Buta final turnif what I am arguing for is a poetic element to Kan-torowiczs seemingly dispassionate, even bureaucratic tome, then we findourselves once again in a dilemma. For what The Kings Two Bodiesseemed toreject was not merely its authors earlier rightist beliefs but the whole poetic-

mythical ideal of history writing embodied in the Frederick biography, anideal imbibed during Kantorowiczs youthful sojourn with the Stefan Georgecircle.18A poeticizing mode of history, whatever its postmodern credentialsmight seem today, had a deeply compromised pedigree in Kantorowiczscase. David Norbrook shrewdly describes Kantorowiczs reading of Richard IIas an elegy for that old poetry of power which for Kantorowicz has beenlost in his adaption to a different political world.19

Granting that this may well be true, I would also suggest that the poet-ics of Richard IIdepart in significant ways from those of Frederick II (and



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Kantorowiczs biography thereof). Richard is himself an elegist for his ownlost sovereignty, but this does not prevent him from unleashing a stingingintellectual critique of kingship, even while constraining its terms. To putthis differently: Richards self-elegy can also be seen as mourning or Trauerin

the Benjaminian sense, with very different political and poetic implications. Iwould suggest that Kantorowicz walks a fine line between elegy and Trauer,between a sorrow that wishes to recapture and a sorrow that dissects, betweenreactionary nostalgia and constitutional critique, and that this is perhapsone source of his continuing fascination.

Notes

1. Alain Boureau, Kantorowicz: Stories of an Historian, ed. Stephen G. Nichols andGabrielle M. Spiegel (Baltimore, 2001); Victoria Kahn, Political Theology andFiction in The Kings Two Bodies, in this issue; Anselm Haverkamp, Richard II,Bracton, and the End of Political Theology, Law and Literature 16, no. 3(2004): 31326.

2. Ernst Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology(1957; reprint, Princeton, NJ, 1997), xvii. Subsequent page references will begiven in the text.

3. There is a distinctly Burkean lilt, for instance, to Kantorowiczs insistence thatto accept domination by an abstract idea has never been a weakness of Eng-

land; ibid., 147.4. All quotations of the play are taken from William Shakespeare: The Complete

Works, ed. Stanley Wells et al. (New York, 1987).5. Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley,

1990), 4773.6. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans.

George Schwab (Chicago, 2006), 6, 10, 1213, 3031, 36 passim.7. The plays fiscal hydraulics reemerge in act 2, scene 2, when Bagot expresses

fear of the wavering commons; for their love / Lies in their purses, and whosoempties them / By so much fills their hearts with deadly hate (2.2.12931).

8. Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies, 15, citing Edward Coke, Reports6:10a.

9. Znon Luis-Martnez, Historical Drama as TrauerspielRichard IIand After,ELH75 (2008): 673705.10. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (Lon-

don, 1977), 7074.11. Samuel Weber, Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl

Schmitt, diacritics22, no. 34 (FallWinter 1992): 519.12. Kantorwicz describes Bractons method as dialectical on 158 of The Kings

Two Bodies.13. See Ewart Lewis, King Above Law? Quod Principi Placuit in Bracton, Specu-

lum39, no. 2 (1964): 24069. David Norbooks important essay, The EmperorsNew Body? Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of Shakespeare



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Criticism, Textual Practice10, no. 2 (1996): 32957, points out other distortionsin Kantorowiczs study and contests the notion of a clean break between the

younger author of the biography of Frederick II and the later, chastened, moreapparently democratic Kantorowicz.

14. On article 48 of the German constitution, see Schmitt, Political Theology, 1112.

On 7, Schmitt observes of the sovereign that although he stands outside thenormally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it.

15. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. DanielHeller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA, 1998), esp. 1529.

16. On the friend-enemy distinction, see Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,trans. George Schwab (Chicago, 1996).

17. Richard Wheeler, Shakespeares Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn andCounter-Turn(Berkeley, 1981), 159.

18. See Norbrook, The Emperors New Body? 33038.19. Ibid., 341.


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The King's Two Buckets- Kantorowicz, Richard II, And Fiscal Trauerspiel