Wild Promises - On the Language 'Leviathan

8/13/2019 Wild Promises - On the Language 'Leviathan'

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Wild Promises

On the Language Leviathan

W E R N E R H A M A C H E R

Goethe-Universitt, Frankfurt am Main, and New York University

Translated by Geoffrey Hale, State University of New York at Buffalo

Whoever promises, lays down his arms.

He abandons them and hands them over to the one to whom he makes

a promise. Arms here are not only the technical means for attacking the

life and limb of another; these arms include also the borders of a country,

the walls of a house, clothes of a body. Whoever makes a promise is stripped

of the protective and aggressive instruments at his disposal, and even dis-

cards the tools of combat and protection that are his words, concepts, andlanguage. Ones clothes, prostheses, pretexts, and texts are given over into

the hands of another. Whoever has made a promise is naked.

This is the scene offered by the classical natural right theory of the

promise in its attempt to grasp the first contractual agreement, the forma-

tion of society, and the founding of the state. Hobbes articulates it most

explicitly, both in Leviathan and De Cive. Hobbes leaves no doubt that this

originary scene is that of a fiction: in it, national community is simulated,produced, and created; and in it (and it is for this reason that it can, in an

emphatic sense, be called fictive), this scene produces itself. The transition

from a natural state of boundless egoism into a constitutionally regulated


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society would be the transition from a state of war of all against all into a

state of legally regimented warfare bounded by the courses of commerce

and justice. This transition, and with it the initial scene of the social con-

tract, is a creation, if not from nothing, then out of the chaos of the mutual

destruction of all elements of living nature. And this chaos is the self-

destructive object of an experience that must be produced, if not every-

where and at all times, then certainly at various times and also in the

presentHobbess own presentand in a future he cannot exclude. It

may peradventure be thought, Hobbes writes in the chapter on The

Natural Condition of Mankind inLeviathan, there was never such a time,

nor condition of war as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all

the world: but there are many places where they live so now.1 Although the

state of nature is thus characterized as such a warr, as is of every man,

against every man (Hobbes 1996, 88), its universality is neither spatial nor

that of a certain historic or prehistoric period that would be situated pre-

cisely in a surveyable and epistemically controllable time frame. War takes

place as precivil and prenormative, not everywhere and at all times, butrather in pre-universal dispersion at many places and at many timesand

these many include also the present: there are many places, where they

live so now. And Hobbes continues, repeating again that there are many

places: for the savage people in many places ofAmerica, . . . have no gov-

ernment at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before

(89). Now and at this day live not only the savages of America in the

state of nature and of war, but also Hobbess contemporary and futureaddressees, well-versed in social, historical, and linguistic theory. We, here

and now, and at many, if not all places, are virtually the savage people,

and our behavior towards one another isat many, if not at all times

founded on the hypothetical suspicion of mutual threat to life and limb. We

savages fear one another and fear, at every contact with one another, death.

Every otherincluding those others we include in our weis for us a

figure of death.For the instruction of those contemporaries who contest this conse-

quence, Hobbes arms himself with an example: Let him therefore con-

sider with himselfe, when taking a journey, he arms himselfe, and seeks to

W i l d P r o m i s e s216


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go well accompanied! when going to sleep, he locks his dores! when even

in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knowes there bee Lawes,

and publike Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done with him;

what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; and of his

fellow Citizens, when he locks his dores! and of his children, and servants,

when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his

actions, as I do by my words? (Hobbes 1996, 89). Everyone who arms one-

self, guards oneself, secures oneself and ones possessions against ones

fellow subjects, ones fellow Citizens and even against ones children

with walls, doors, and locks, acts in principle on the basis of a suspicion of

robbery and murder. In principle, that is, in the sense that they can never be

weakened or opposed by the existence of laws and executive agents:

Lawes, and publike Officers. These security measures confirm only the

suspicion in principle that every other is virtually a murderer. The fear and

desire of murder define the whole structure of social commerce and must

therefore be described as the social passions that belong to naturethat is,

the indissoluble disposition of humanityand that constitute the empiri-cal transcendentals of all phenomena in the realm of human interaction.

Natural right, or jus naturale, is therefore a tautological construct

because it defines right as an irreducible power relation, authorized and

validated by nothing other than its own givenness, its nature. Natural right

is natural force. But since nature is the force upon which every force can

ultimately be based, natural right is also the force of the force to preserve

itself through its proper meansthe force to preserve itself, thus, by meansof force. Hobbes can therefore explain definitively: The Right of Nature,

which writers commonly callJus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to

use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own

Nature; that is to say, of his own life; . . . (Hobbes 1996, 91). If nature is the

power to preserve natureand this is precisely what Hobbess circular

definition affirmsthen nature can be reduced to no other power, be it

higher or otherwise, situated outside itself: it is the power of ratio and is assuch, in principle, in agreement with ratio divinaand thus nature cannot

be superseded, for there is no other power which could come after it that

would not at the same time also follow its rule. Whatever can nevertheless

W e r n e r H a m a c h e r 217


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become other than nature must emerge from nature and follow its laws, in

particular the legal constitution of nationally organized societies.

Therefore, it necessarily follows from the invariable givenness of the force

of nature that it must occupy the entire horizon of human behavior at all

times in history. We have, thus, always had to protect ourselves from

assaults against our lives; we do it now and cannot stop doing it: nature

thus commands us, through ourselves, to arm ourselves against ourselves.

Right and the natural law of self-preservation that follows from it is

therefore, in spite of all appearance to the contrary, a right and a law of

insufficiency. If nature is the power to preserve natureto use his own

power . . . for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own

Lifethen it is only because the danger of losing itself comes from itself.

What must preserve itself must do so against its own disappearance. Since

nature is subject to no higher power, this threat of disappearance must

come from itself; it, nature, must be antinature, from which and through

which it seeks to maintain itself. That nature must preserve itself means

that nature is not yetor is nevernatural enough to be merely nature.Natures law of preservation, that it is nature only as nature-against-nature,

appears most distinctly in a formula Hobbes uses to counter presumed

opponents to his concept of nature. What might appear strange, Hobbes

concedes, is that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to

invade, and destroy one another. Nature, the foundation of all associa-

tions, is thus dissociated. But it does not merely dissociate people from one

another, who were not bound in a prior societas, it dissociates itself fromitself before all else in them, and is nothing other than this self-dissociation.

Only separated from itself in this way, only as nature-against-nature and

nature-invading-nature, can it relate to itself and preserve itself. If nature

must maintain itself in this way and must preserve itself from itself, if it can

resist its self-destruction only through a corresponding law of self-preser-

vation, then its structure, its essence, and its nature, the nature of nature, is

essentially a self-overcoming, a force that exceeds its force, continually pro-duces itself as surplus, and participates in and against itself as hyperforce.

The law of self-preservation that Hobbes sees at work in nature and

that constitutes the nature of this nature is a law of self-augmentation and



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self-overcoming. It does not bring about any natural homeostasis that

could balance the threats of hostile forces armed against one another and

ensure the survival of each one. Hobbess construction counters the

thought of such a balance of powers by arguing that even the weakest is

strong enough to kill the strongest (Hobbes 1996, 89), and is similar enough

to the strongest to parry the threat of death emanating from it. This equal-

itythe only one that a nature bent on self-preservation knowsis an

equality of the ability to kill, and the balance that can be attained through

it (again, the only one of which nature is capable) is the permanent war of

all against all. But even if the nature of War, as Hobbes explains, consis-

teth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto (8889),

this state of nature, that is, of war (Hobbes 1991, 119) is still a state of

continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary,

poore, nasty, brutish, and short (Hobbes 1996, 89). The balance of forces

in the natural state of war thus is not a solid double bind of self-preserva-

tion under the condition of self-destruction. It is a state of the continual

threat of murder, fear of death, and the mutual destruction of antagonisticforces, the state of a cold war of nature against nature: the state of a con-

tinual fall in which it only sustains itself in order to be able to destroy itself,

and it must be able to destroy itself in order to preserve its ideality.

Insofar as Hobbes sees the obligation for self-destruction in the natural

right of self-preservation, he separates the principle of preservation rigor-

ously for the first timemost clearly in chapter 17 ofLeviathan dealing with

the artificiality of the commonwealthfrom the Aristotelian and stoic tra-dition that saw in it the guarantee, at least in principle, of a homeostasis.

Human beings are not originally political beings for whom the relation to

others would be identical to the relation to ones own life. For Hobbes,

however, people are not so much asocial beings as they are antisocial, as

long as everyone stands opposed to ones potential death in every other.

The self-preservation of nature in mankind, then, cannot be achieved in

nature, because this principle is simultaneously its self-destruction andthat of nature as well. Hobbess insight turns the principle of preservation

that had dominated natural and social ontology, as well as major portions

of theology, for fifteen hundred years into a dilemma. Hobbess solution is



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ingenious for the very reason that he resolves the dilemma by way of

dilemma: the difficulty is overcome, in a certain way, through its

intensification.

The state of nature is for Hobbes a state of mutual threat of all against

all. Since this threat is not only one of murder but of the permanent ten-

dency towards murder, and precisely for this reason itself lethal, the means

of threatand this is Hobbess solutionmust be concentrated, checked,

and defused at a single locus. Everyone receives these means with the very

freedoms that the principle of self-preservation protects. If the threat is to

be ended and social life to be possible, these freedoms must be abandoned

and transferred to an authority that guards the right of self-preservation

without using it as a right to harm others. This authority stands under an

imperative of preservation without assault, of security without annihila-

tion, and of life without murder. Since the Platonic-Aristotelean doctrine of

a life, originally andphysei conceived as life with others and lifefrom the life

of the other, cannot, from the disintegration of such a life and its opposi-

tion to another, account consistently for non-political life; and since a doc-trine and praxis that would define life with others only as life against them

must define life aporetically as life against itself, as life-against-life, it is pos-

sible, both in theory and in practice, to dissolve the fusion between a life

conducted with others and one conducted against them, and to introduce a

critical distinction into the doctrine of natural right that supports this

fusion. In order to make possible a life that is consistent with itself, it is nec-

essary to distinguish between a life with others on the one hand and a lifeagainst others on the other hand, and thus also to distinguish within the

with between a with and an against. Only along this path of differentiation

and separation between with-others and against-others is it possible to

isolate the destructive from the conservative forces of being-with-others,

and even convert them into forces of preservation. More precisely: only by

eliminating the against from the with can a consistent being-with-others

emerge for the first time. The creationHobbes says generationof acommunity is precisely this: the always originary creation of an always

originary community consistent within itself. For the definition of the

state of nature of society as a state of war does not only mean that nature is



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self-destructive; it also means that, under conditions of war, there is no

society that can preserve itself as society and that is, in this way, a society in

agreement with itself. The commonwealth as politically constituted soci-

ety would not emerge as the more complete society from a given less com-

plete one, but from bondlessness as the first bond.

The covenant that produces community is therefore precisely a cre-

atio ex nihilo:2 not through a superior authority, but only as the absolute

superiority of Gods creation, which Hobbes cites already in the first sen-

tence of his introduction (Hobbes 1996, 9), does the creation of the Mortall

God Leviathan (120) arise from a process based upon a nothinga noth-

ing in social substanceand through which, not by the addition of an

already present something or by recourse to a transcendent material, but

rather solely through the separation from a nothing (through the elimina-

tion, namely, of the powers of destruction), a social something first

emerges as an ordered society. Through a not-nothing, just like the immor-

tal god, a mortal one is created. The principle of autocreation out of noth-

ing remedies the principal defects in the principle of self-preservation inpure immanence. Society does not create societyautopoietically, accord-

ing to the Aristotelian modelbut rather a nothing-of-society creates soci-

ety through the removal of its nothing. It does this, as Hobbes again

emphasizes in his introduction to Leviathan, in the same way God does:

through an act of language analogous to a Fiat, or the Let us make man

(10). And this act of social creation, the creation from language for another

language, is completed in a promise.Savages promise. The savage peoplenot only in many places of

his contemporary America, but all over the known worldgive each

other their word and with it their arms, their natural freedom, and their

preparedness for murder. They promise one another an order that, as the

order of the promise, ought also to be the stable order of communication,

of action (whether practical or symbolic), of commerce, of judicial

structures, and of political institutions and their means of reproduction.Only as savageswhether in America or elsewherecan they make

promises, and only in the fear of the wilderness of death, because, at the

time of their promising, there cannot be any order of the promise that



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might protect them from the murder threatened by their rivals: what they

give must be a promise before any order in which this gift would be know-

able and recognizable as a promise and could be perceived and answered as

such. No promise would be necessary, if there were already a social, lin-

guistic, and symbolic order that could secure for the promise continual sta-

bility and unambiguous meaning.3 Savages can only make promises

without the possibility of having them understood as gifts, without any

established convention for the promise, and without the possibility that

anyone would know what a promise might be and whether what they give

under the name of a promise could be perceived and received as such. In the

uncertainty of whether there even are promises and whether they could be

intended and kept as such, these promises are not only those of savages,

they are savage, or wild, promises: nothing could guarantee that they would

not be broken, or even that they are seriously intended and understood;

everything could suggest that they are threats and attacks on the pride and

vanity of those to whom they are given. For whatever is said in the society

of the cold civil war (Hobbess bitter comments offer a painfully accurateimpression [Hobbes 1996, 11013]) serves the diminution and social death

of those to whom it is addressed. Language is a weapon; and even the prom-

ise to lay down this weapon, even the self-disarming language, can be mur-

derousfor those who give their word as well as for those to whom it is

givenas long as this language of savagery is preserved within the civiliz-

ing promise.

The creation of a coherent order of communication cannot be a fiat outof the promise, because it cannot build upon any order of promising that

would not lead into the incoherencies of language warfare. The promise,

producing both order and society, must thus satisfy two laws: it must be

given in view of a possible peacethus of the elimination of every intent to

harm othersand it must therefore be given as a renunciation of the tools

of war. To make a promise must mean: to lay down ones arms. Whenever

one gives ones word, one must abandon ones arms and thus also abandonthe natural right to everything one wishes.

That is the second law of nature in Hobbes, the explication of which

occupies nearly all of the decisive chapter 14 of Leviathan, and, together



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with the first law of nature as requisite self-preservation, founds all subse-

quent laws of nature as well as the laws of the state: That a man be willing,

when others are so too, . . . To lay down his right to all things . . . (Hobbes

1996, 92). Law is the laying down, the abandonment, and surrender of right,

and this surrender of the right of nature, which is simultaneously the sur-

render of nature and its state of war, lies in the divestiture of the freedom to

hinder others in the exercise of their freedom: To lay downe a mans Right

to any thing, is to devest himselfe of the Liberty, of hindering another of the

benefit of his own Right to the same. Only this divestiture of the freedoms

of language and action, insofar as it is the divestiture of the freedom of

mutual destruction, introduces the end of natural and linguistic warfare and

opens up the possibility for a coherent bond of communication that would

no longer tear itself apart. Whoever promises, therefore, gets rid of the

means of destruction in order, by means of this annihilation of the social

nihil, to create what preserves one in existence. Self-preservation cannot be

a simple persistence in existence: for, as natural, it is an existence against

itself, from which neither a perseverare nor a suum esse conservare can bedeclared; self-preservation must be a preservation of his own Nature (91)

in the sense not only of a preeminent but also of an anticipatory concern for

a self, which cannot satisfy itself with mere perseverance, but rather pro-

poses proleptically something not yet given, and invents something not yet

in existence at that point: preservation of the self is its generation as arti-

fact. The emphasis that Hobbes places on the artificiality of social connec-

tions concernsalready in the very first sentence of the Introduction ofLeviathaneven nature. Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and gov-

ernes the World), he says there, is imitated by the Art of man in making

an Artificial Animal. For by Art is created that great Leviathan called

Common-wealth, or State, (in latine Civitas) which is but an Artificiall Man

. . . (9). But the question is, then, whether this creatio of the artificial per-

son called the state is brought about by a doing, and further, whether its cre-

ation can be an act or action, if every action under natural and thus artificialconditions must already be an attack or a threat, and thus also destructive.

If, namely, self-preservation can only be the feigning of a self, and if consis-

tent societies as well as individual beings are constituted purely through the



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abandonment of their natural rights, then the fundamental act of self-cre-

ationthus self-preservationcan only be that paradoxical act whereby

the right to act is itself given up. That the act par excellence takes place in

the abandonment of action, and that the origin of community rests in the

cession of all individual acts is not simply the unspoken implication of

Hobbess construction of society, but he himself emphasizes it everywhere

in his text. The paradoxical sleight of hand that must be carried out in the

act of abandoning action is apparent in the Liberty of the subject of right,

which, Hobbes says, consists in the act of our Submission. While it is true

that there is no Obligation on any man, which ariseth not from some Act

of his own, it is also the case that the constitutive clause of consistent soci-

ety, I Authorize all his Actionsnamely, all actions of the sovereign, be it a

commonwealth, parliament, or monarchdefines this act of freedom as an

abandonment of all acts. An actand, as the founding phrase I Authorize

all his Actions makes clear, a speech act of self-preservation by self-cre-

ationis always one in which the omission of an action and its yielding to

another are carried out. Only in this other is the act its own, for only in theother is it the unified act of all, no longer antagonistic, no longer destruc-

tive, and no longer an act of civil war, but rather of universal and individual

self-preservation. Freedom is achieved only in this paradoxical act: that

Liberty we deny our selves, by owning all the Actions (without exception)

of the Man, or Assembly we make our Soveraign (150). We deny our selves

by owning . . . our Sovereignones own act is expropriated, and only in this

way attributed to the self in general. It is the act of the renunciation of actionof all individuals for the benefit of the totality of individuals. As already in the

gesture of the constitution of sovereignty in Bodin, the ultra-sovereign act,

from which comes the sovereignty of the Artificial Man Leviathan for

Hobbes, lies in the immediate and continual eradication of this act. Unlike

Bodin, however, Hobbes sees this eradication as motivated by the sense that

the act, as an act of individuals, would be an act of destruction, and only by

abandoning its destructiveness does it gain the capability of preservation.No longer oriented toward the others right, but toward ones own, it estab-

lishes consistency through the (itself inconsistent) elimination of the

inconsistency of individual acts.



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The fundamental operation of self-preservation through self-creation

via negationis is thus not a positing; it is not a gift and it is not a transfer of

rights. For he that renounceth, or passeth away his Right, giveth not to any

other man a Right which he had not before; because there is nothing to

which every man had not Right by Nature: but onely standeth out of his

way, that he may enjoy his own originall Right, without hindrance from

him . . . (Hobbes 1996, 92). If, however, the promise in which this renun-

ciation, this revocation of rights of freedom occurs, not dedicatio, but abdi-

catioif it is neither an affirmative nor a negative positing, but only an

ex-positing of the annihilation through word or deedthen it is, strictly

speaking, neither an act nor a speech act, but its deactivation, in which the

promise and the pact thus established are accomplished. Every promise not

only announces but also executes an abandonment of potential acts and

speech acts, and this execution does not occur as the fulfillment of an act,

which could only occur in the destruction of others and the obliteration of

ones own self, but takes place as a renunciation of virtually every act and

speech act, and thus as speech de-activation. Every promise is a renuncia-tion of speech, aprivatio privationis in which language, in order to discharge

its destructive potential, abandons itself. What occurs in the speech act of

the promise is an act of denial, and thus a suspension of language that must

still precede the distinction between active and passive in order to ground

the possibility of juridically binding just acts and just speech acts that could

actively be carried out or passively suffered. Every speech actbecause

none can function outside of established conventions or prescribedstatutesis only possible on the basis of an exposition and displacement of

action. The atopical, autotopical locus of this de-positing of speech is the

promise. It founds an order of the self-coherent self by silencing the selves

in conflict. Every promise is a promise of silence, and must therefore end in

silence. Every act that is unified in itself and an act with others must be ori-

ented towards the removal of its destructive traits, and must therefore

occur as an action of its deactivation. What can be called consistent socialactionand its founding gesture defines the structure of action as suchis

the action of a nonaction. The fiat of the Leviathans creation comes from a

nonfiat. Only this divestiture of the act grants language that creatio ex nihilo



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and, more precisely, ex nihilatione, which [Saint] Paul (Hobbes cites him

more than 50 times in Leviathan) attributes to faith and God, who calleth

those things which be not as though they were (Romans 4:17).

A Promise is equivalent to a Covenant (Hobbes 1996, 95); but since

this promise must in principle be everyones renunciation of their right to

everything within the horizon of their desires and passions, this renuncia-

tion would end then, if it were not contained within an absolute limit, in

universal self-destruction, in a mass suicide. Since this absolute limit can-

not be arbitrarily set by any given authoritythere is no such authority in

a state of warit must, in and as abdication, belong to the irreducible struc-

tural elements of the promise as such. Precisely when the promise is based

on nothing other than an abdication, its minimal conditions then include

thepreservation of this speech and promise, the insistence and permanence

of this abdication itself, and accordingly the promise that exercises this

renunciation. If there is to be a divestiture of natural possibilities of

action, then this divestiture can only resist every further denuding. The

promise distinguishes itself before all other speech acts by two irreducibleand mutually determinant traits: it is the renunciation of every possibility

for action that could limit or harm the action of othersand thus also ones

own (in this sense it is pure abstention, epoch), and it is, as this renuncia-

tion, the persistence of the promise in itself (in this sense it is the adherence

to the promise and the holding of the promise, the self-preservation of its

bearer and resistance to every destructive act that could be directed against

this preservation). Once a promise is given, it cannot be given up. Moreprecisely: once a possibility for actionand that is a possibility for death

is renounced, this renunciation must imply the resistance to its own

destruction and to that of its bearer. From the logic of the universal renun-

ciation of the right to destructionfrom the privatio privationisit neces-

sarily follows that only one thing cannot become the object of renunciation:

the right of resistance. It is that right, as Hobbes says just before the discus-

sion of contractual promises and agreements, which no man can be under-stood by any words, or other signes, to have abandoned, or transferred. . . .

a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that assault him by

force, to take away his life (93). Though this presentation relies upon pre-



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decisive artistic concept of the person from juridico-theological tradition

and entrusts the founding of a representative social unity to it. Even when he

speaks of a Naturall Person, whose words and actions are viewed as his

own (Hobbes 1996, 111), that person is an artifact that both gives way to

and hinders perspective, perception, and recognition; leads as much as it

misleads; and, above all, achieves what cannot naturally appear: the rep-

resentation of the place of another, speech and action for another, the pres-

entation not of oneself, but of a relation to another. The short history

Hobbes offers of the word person leaves no doubt about this: The word

Person is latine: insteed whereof the Greeks have prsopon, which signifies

theFace, as Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of

a man, counterfeited on the Stage, and sometimes more particularly that

part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard: And from the

Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well

in Tribunalls, as Theaters. So that aPerson, is the same that anActoris, both

on the Stage and in common Conversation; and to Personate, is to Act, or

Represent himself, or an other; and he that acteth another, is said to bearehis Person, or act in his name; . . . (112). To speak and act as anyone who

can be viewed as a personas a persona in a drama, or as a juridical person

in political contextsis to act for another, even if this other is ones own

self. He acteth another means: he acts and plays another who is not pres-

ent, but represented in speech and action. Only by means of this repre-

sentational structure of the person is it possible for one (a person) to beare

his Personnot only the person of a single other, but the multiplicity ofother persons as well. The following quotation from Ciceros De Oratore

(2:102), which Hobbes used earlier in hisDe Homine (Hobbes 1991, 83), sug-

gests that only theperson is capable of being borne by other persons and,

for its part, able to beare a variety of other persons in order to combine

this plurality into a unity: in which sence Cicero useth it where he saies,

Unus sutineo tres Personas; Mei, Adversarii, & Judicis, I beare three Persons;

my own, my Adversaries, and the Judges. What he says here of the attor-ney Cicero, that he beares his own person, that of his opponents, and the

judges, is a fortiori true of that one person who, in all of its functions, as

representer, or Representative, a Lieutenant, a Vicar, an Attorney, a Deputy, a


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Procurator, anActor, and the like (Hobbes 1996, 112), collects and beares

in itself the multiplicity par excellence, the Multitude of natural individ-

uals. This One Person is the sovereign, constituted society, the common-

wealth, the state. Hobbes clarifies: A Multitude of men, are made One

Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; so that it

be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular (114).

Thus, it is not that the One Person beares a multiplicity, but, that through

its bearing of this multiplicity, it makes this multiplicity into one plural-

ity: the One Person is a figure of unification; and not only does a corporate

body, the state, represent the elements of the people unified within it, but

it first creates its unity as people [Volk]: representation is a process of cre-

ation. For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Repre-

sented, that maketh the Person One. And it is the Representer that beareth

the Person, and but one Person: And Unity, cannot otherwise be under-

stood in Multitude (114). If the One Person Leviathan first produces the

unity conceived within itfor the Multitude naturally is not One, but

Many, they cannot be understood for one; but many Authors, of every thingtheir Representative saith, or doth in their namethis is because only

through it, the Leviathan, can the many first speak and, as speaking, act,

with one voice, even if it only be the voice of its majority.

The Leviathan is a languageit is the one language that unifies in the

promise and whose insistence is asserted in its claim to those who are sup-

posed to have given the promise. But since a noncontroversial, unequivo-

cal, and binding speech is impossible under natural conditionstheMultitude naturally is not Onea noncontroversial, unequivocal, and

binding promising must also be impossible, regardless of whether it comes

from the multitude or from the individuals of whom it consists. The

unity of natural individuals as well can only be a postnatural fiction with

which leviathanic univocality generates its own presuppositions, teleolog-

ically oriented towards it, and with which it is legitimated post naturam

through a consentwhich could not have existed beforeof every oneof that Multitude in particular, who were neither able to speak nor prom-

ise as every one and not in particular. The One language of the One

person Leviathan, for Hobbes, can only be a maskthe Oneprsoponthat



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is not worn in front of a face, but only suggests a face; does not disguise any

other unity or multiplicity, but makes such unities first thinkable; does not

emerge continually from any earlier language, but whose preexistence is

only belatedly presupposed. The language Leviathan is a prsopon, a

Persona, disguise, or outward appearance, that does not correspond to any

substance, prior intention, or unified meaning; it is a persona through

which no voice could sound, but only the howls of war, polyphonic rum-

bling, silence. The Leviathanthe community, the state, politicsis a mask

in front of nothing. A speech-mask before natural silence; a lieutenant of

the not-one, andActorof disunited multiplicities. It represents inconsis-

tent multiplicities by generating a single, apparently consistent one, and

speaks in their name by lending them a name, language, and a face.

Hobbes thinks the figure of the Leviathan from the axiomatic positing of

the One as an underivable arithmetical foundation, and prosopopoeia as the

founding rhetorical gesture by which language and face are attributed to

one who has none. The combination of both leads to the one and common

language of homophonous promise to lay down all combative arms, and toguard only the one and common protection in the person of the state

together with the right of self-preservation. The sovereign is the one and

founding prosopopoeia, the archprosopopoeia, in which the mathematical

ideality of the One becomes a person and the organized community

becomes the state. Its One does not designate, however, but creates,

through its marking, oneand only oneentity and the nameable multi-

plicity of all subentities schematized by it; and the just person Leviathandoes not speak for preexisting others, but produces them according to its

singular face. The Leviathan populates, but he also personifies a nothing:

he opposes it as a person, presents himself as a mask, and presents it

through his absolute exclusivity.

Hobbes distinguishes the use of speech from its misuse and character-

izes its politically most destructive form as mutual harm: for seeing nature

hath armed living creatures, some with teeth, some with horns, and somewith hands, to grieve an enemy, it is but an abuse of Speech, to grieve him

with the tongue . . . (Hobbes 1996, 26). Language is a weaponlike teeth,

horns, and handsand its use, under natural conditions, leads to



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disputes, war, and mutual destruction. Since conditions of nature are deter-

mined by the change and passage of time, it is time in language that brings

about the general state of war, and it is the temporality of language that

must effect its self-destruction: Nay, the same man, in divers times, differs

from himselfe; and one time praiseth, that is, calleth Good, what another

time he dispraiseth, and calleth Evil: From whence arise Disputes,

Controversies, and at last War (11011). If time brings about self-differ-

ence, language war, and annihilation, the only resistance to it and its lethal

consequences lies in the creation of a language unified within itself and a

figure of linguisticthus juridical and politicalcommonality that

removes all oppositionality from every being-together. The only language

against time and its differentiations that would not renounce all temporal

conditions is the language of the promise; the only figure of resistance to

permanent war is the one person in whom this promise becomes a political

institution. Individuals right to self-preservation and resistance finds its

counterpart in the institutionalized resistance of the sovereign person of

state. Insofar as this one and only artificial person may be Procurator,Lieutenant, and representative for all those subsumed within it, it must

then, in principle, be a language independent from them. It must, at the

same time, as an artificial language created out of mathematical ideality

and rhetorical inventio, be precisely that natural language that must have

been renounced in the promise of everyone who makes use of it. It must, as

the one language of resistance to war, death, and destruction, be at the same

time itself the language of war, death, and destruction. The one language ofthe one person can only fulfill its apotropaic function by reproducing what

is warded off in its intolerance to any other, either within itself or outside

of it, be it similar to itself or different from it. Its absoluteness excludes

every alternative and every opposition. To the extent that it is a creation

from nothing and against nothing, it is itself devastating.

The famous frontispiece of the 1651 edition of Leviathan depicts a

monarch literally as the Representer that beareth the Person, and but onePerson (Hobbes 1996, 114). He bears within himself a multiplicity of

human forms and makes them into one person whereby only he, not those

borne by him, presents his faceprsopon, personaand his face is the only



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part of him not composed of the bodies of others (xciii).4 The city and land-

scape around the impersonalfaceless and silentfigures whose collec-

tion and organization form the person of the sovereign is effectively devoid

of people. More forcefully than the iconographic presentation, however,

Hobbess text makes it clear that, outside of the body politic of the One

Person, there is nothing, and within it, only its expressionless elements.

The exclusivity of the sovereignand of the sovereign promiseevacuates

the linguistic and political space. As personale, as a masked form, it stands

in and in front of a vacuum; as the only personal power, it even effects the

depersonalization of its own constituents. Its unity and singularity are thus

doubled: the absolute artifice of political life, and absolute wild savagery

that admits nothing other than itself. For this reason alone can its figure be

axiomatic and the axiom of political axiomaticity itself: since it founds

itself, it has no ground and must thus function as the ultimate and irre-

ducible authority of its credibility. It is a wild, that is, groundless invention

of political discipline and a reinvention of wilderness. The exclusivity of its

domination serves the security against the nihilism of the state of nature,but this security raises endogenous nihilism to the principle of politics. The

Leviathanthe sovereign person as well as its languageis a fetish. He dis-

avows and confirms at the same time a nothing that is determined by him

as the antithesis to his own existence.

The right of resistance, for the natural individual as well as the collec-

tive person of the state, can, as Hobbes emphasizes again and again, never

be given up. It is that which no man can be understood . . . to have aban-doned; a man cannot lay down the right of resisting (Hobbes 1996, 93).

If the agreementthe covenantconsists in the mutuall transferring of

Right (94), then this one right of resistance cannot enter into it, precisely

because it cannot be given up or handed over. It must form the insur-

mountable limit of every contract. If this right of resistance, namely, were

transferable, then the sheer linguistic existence, and with it the sole ground

for a social compact, could be transferred. Such a transfer would have toresult in self-contradiction and thus an intralinguistic state of war, which

would negate every agreement. If, on the other hand, the social contract is

precisely that form in which the inalienable existence of all individuals, and



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with it the right of resistance, is instituted and stabilized, then the resist-

ance of existence must at the same time be a resistance to that resistance

that presents itself as the form of the state. The promise must be the trans-

fer of all rights of freedom to societyand must, however, at the same time,

as the bare existence of this promise, be resistance against society. The

promise can only found the stability of society as resistance to socializa-

tion; as the resistance of existence, it must oppose all socialization. The

promise that produces the social bond must be the insurmountable limit

within this bond. The greatest form of stabilization of linguistic existence

can only be inconsistent. This inconsistency of formnot only the form of

society and of the state, but moreover of every other form of linguistic insti-

tution as wellis the inconsistency of the promise itself that, as bare exis-

tence, is not yet consistency, and has neither a constant institutional form

nor a fixed content.

There is, therefore, an additional axiom: the existence of language in

the promise is the inconsistency of its fixed form. This means at the same

time that the promise itself is inconsistent within itself, insofar as it merelyprojects the form of its stabilization and of its self-preservation, without

actually being able to realize it. Linguistic existence is insistent, but incon-

sistent. The axiom that the unity of language is already realized, or at

least anticipated, in the promise loses its principal credibilityit is

de-axiomatedas soon as the linguistic resistance of the individual arises

against the one axiomatic language Leviathan and denies credibility to

belief. Singularity means in each instance: I do not believe belief. TheLeviathan axiom must always be unbelievable. It is insistent, but, because

of its inconsistency, not simply assailable, but in principle (counter-

axiomatic, and anti-principle) already contested.

This inconsistency axiom takes at least three forms:

First, there is no agreement that could take place already within the

order of the same agreement. A promise is always an absolute beginning.

Every promise not immediately honored and every one that does not imme-diately entail a symmetrical promise or an equivalent obligation by the con-

tracting party, is, in Hobbess formulation, a word of the Future (Hobbes

1996, 95). As such, while it is binding and can only be broken at the cost of



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destabilizing multiple symbolic exchange relationships, it is only bind-

ing through trust (96) in its future fulfillment, and thus without any insti-

tutional security. If the fulfillment of the social contract is guaranteed by

means of force as derived from the state of war, the society thus formed

cannot be founded on the rights of freedom; it cannot becontrary to

Hobbess postulatea civitas that would protect against the state of war.

Every politics of the promise that threatens the use of force, thus every pol-

itics of threat, can only operate in terms of the maxim only war prevents

war and abandon to terror the protection it promises. Both Hobbes and

Locke, who relates his doctrine of tacit consent to Hobbes, had to remain

vulnerable to Humes contention that their theory of the original con-

tract was nothing other than a betrayal of the promise to force and power.5

However, if the means of force which should guarantee the keeping of

promises are the means of organized political society, then the political

contract that, by recourse to force and threats of force, perpetuates the war

it is intended to end is harmed in return. Precisely this extortion of the

promises fulfillment is unavoidable for Hobbess commonwealth:Covenants, without Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a

man at all (Hobbes 1996, 117). If here, with a restorative rhyme rhetoric,

the word summons the support of the Sword, it becomes apparent that

for Hobbes a promise, especially one that grounds the state and society,

occurs not in the laying down of arms, but in their violently forced surren-

der. Only an armed contract is for him a social contract. It is the only thing

that can secure bare existencebut existence secured by force is, accordingto his own premises, unprotected and insecure. Wherever security, guaran-

tee, or stabilization is desired, the bare linguistic existence of the promise

must be surrendered, and its reference or even assignation to the future

must be expunged. It cannot be, then, a word of the Future, but a fact of

immediate force.

The solution to the dilemma into which every promise leads thus can

only be expected of its future. Yet, as long as only afuture common Power,and thus only a yet-to-be-established social bond, can be expected to

guarantee the contractual promise as such by beingit itself, neither the valid-

ity of nor the adherence to the promise can be ensured. The securing of



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intention, semantics, and of the pragmatic situation; the securing of the sta-

tus of the given word is always onlypost verbum. That means: it is never pos-

sible by the word itself. The language of the promise and of the agreement

can only be the coming, as yet uncertain, the not yet and never entirely sta-

bilized, instituted, and institutionalized existence of language. The promise

moves ad infinitum towards the securing of its validity in the form of organ-

ized political society, and remains forever suspended on the threshold

between its fragile linguistic existence and its consistency. It remains only a

promise of the promise, resistant to a determinate self, resistant even to its

self-stabilization, the naked existence of speech before every instituted lan-

guage. In the aporias apparent in the phenomenological descriptions, and

in the securative norms of the promise, extending from Hobbes to speech-

act theory, it becomes clear that the promise is only this: the infinite stand-

ing down and standing before of language in that which it cannot yet be, and

perhaps never will be. In its infinite before, not only does the promise not

coincide with othersa corresponding intention, an announced

fulfillment, another promise, symmetrical to the firstit does not thereforeeven coincide with itself. It convenes infinitely, and therefore never entirely.

The infinite is one of the forms of inconsistency. Every given word is hyper-

bolic: it irredeemably exceeds itself. Linguistic existence expressed in the

promise remains utterly incompatible with the security intended in the

concept of self-preservation that ought to be achieved in the promise, the

agreement, the contract. Not only is every promise therefore a wild prom-

ise, but each one inaugurates as an, in principle, an-archic transcendence, asingular wildernessand it inaugurates it precisely as an infinite and

indefinite relation to an other. (Hence, the endless and bewildering debates

about the connection between speech acts and intentions, between expres-

sions oriented towards the future and their fulfillment, about the guaran-

tees for the mutual obligations in contracts: they do not exist; they can only

be compelled as norms, postulated as ideas, or promisedfor the future.)

A second variant of the promises inconsistency is legible in Hobbessconcept of the sovereign. Hobbes must concede that the agreement

that constitutes the state, whether or not it is supposed to be a reciprocal

promise of all of its members (or even a majority of them), can never be a



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reciprocal promise between the subjects of the state and the state, their sov-

ereign. Hobbes leaves no doubt that this asymmetry does not result from

any arbitraryor occasionaldecision, but rather is a structural demand

of every contractual commitment. The sovereign state and its parliamen-

tary or personal authorities can never form contracts; they are the agree-

ment, the contract, the contractual promise itself. Since the state is never a

part of the whole, but always this whole itself, it knows no contractually

capable counterpart within its own limits that would not be a part of itself.

The union defined by the promise cannot enter into a mutually grounded

alliance with those bound by it, because it itself is already the alliance, and

an alliance between the union and what it unites would have to release both

from this bond and create instead a union of the disunited. Since the prom-

ise is an agreement in a unity without exception, this unity itself can be nei-

ther an object of nor participant in further agreements. The promise is

absolute. It is not capable of action, and it is, on pain of deadly injury to the

principle of preservation, inexpressible. The political absolutism thus

established no longer requires any recourse to political theology by grace ofGod, because it arises more mathematico from the structure of unity: the

unity of the state bond is nothing other than the unity of the multiplicity

convened in the contract, and accordingly only the unity achieved in the

agreement itself is the sovereign. Since no unitywere it not to be divided

within itselfcan enter into a contract with itself, the society conceived in

the state must be an ultimate, in itself irreflexive authority that cannot

entertain any reciprocal relation to those constituted under it. Whereas, inthe treaty of surrender that produces the one political body, the multiplic-

ity of individuals transfers its rights to one another and thus to the one

state, this one state cannot, for its part, abandon any of its rights to the mul-

tiplicity of its subjects without dissolving its unity. The sovereign is

absolute because it is one; but because it is one, it cannot belong to the state,

but can only be this state. That is the foundation, in set theory, of the Ltat,

cest moi of Louis XIV, and the basis for Hobbess insistence that the sover-eign cannot break a social contract since it never entered into one (Hobbes

1996, 122). The sovereign represents it, and as its representativeas itsper-

sonacannot be subject to this contract; if it were, it would subject itself to



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itself and, as such, no longer be one but many, and thus the chaos of war and

not the systematic order of law.

On the other hand, the sovereign, precisely because it is not subject to

any contractual party and therefore also not subjected to the state, can, in

its representation of the contract, only be the continual presence of civil

war and destruction. The statement, Ltat, cest moi, must thus be con-

tinued and clarified: et moi, cest la guerre. Hobbes, more drastically than

any other political theorist, articulates the consequence of this assessment

of the unity that cannot be part of itself when he writes, in the chapter on

the right of the sovereign to punish its subjects: For the Subjects did not

give the Souveraign that right/of subduing, hurting, or killing any man/;

but onely in laying down theirs, strengthned him to use his own, as he

should think fit, for the preservation of them all: so that it was not given,

but left to him, and him only; and . . . as entire, as in the condition of meer

Nature, and of warre of every one against his neighbour (Hobbes 1996,

214). The sovereign did not have to lay down any of its rights to freedom

and war, none of its arms; it is not naked, but rather existence armed forwar. It is the state as the force of nature of absolute terror. Sovereign is not

the one who determines the state of exception or of emergency [Aus-

nahmezustand]; sovereign is the exception, and the state is this state of

exception in permanence.6 But in that way, the sovereign itself is the repre-

sentative of the state bond exceptedfrom the bond of state, and since this

contract cannot exist without its representative, the state, in this political

set problem, must be excepted from the state, empty, null and void. If,namely, the state in the form of the sovereign is not a part of the state, does

not belong to it, is not bound to it by any law or obligation, and is, thus, nei-

ther determined nor limited by anything, then all power ofthe state and in

the stateexcept for the sheer resistance to itis just as illegal as it is ille-

gitimate, and the contract is void. The right of the state, in order to qualify

as just, would have to indicate another right; since, according to its prem-

ises, there can be no other which would account for its right, none can, inprinciple, fulfill a claim of right that would exceed the conventional or pos-

itivist decree, or the equally arbitrary reliance upon norms, even if only reg-

ulative ones. Its structural inability to be part of itself while having to



25/32

operate as such a part displaces all positive statutes, regardless of whether

they are taken from tradition or consensus or the projection of

ideals. What remains is the resistance of a linguistic existence that has no

right and can therefore only demand it.

The social contract and the promise it is based upon appear in their

highest representativethe sovereign, the state, the Leviathanas a figure

of inconsistency. But this figure is nevertheless no less real; it is even the ens

realissimum in the realm of finite existence. Hobbes, upon whom this figure

imposed itself from the despair of reason in the face of civil war with pre-

cisely the same force with which the idea of God for Descartes resulted

from the hyperbolic doubt of reason about its own being, calls the

Leviathan therefore a Mortall God: a God, thus, who is equipped with all

the predicates of the ens perfectissimum, with the exception of its own mor-

tality, since it cannot contain itself and thus cannot maintain or preserve

itself. Hobbes adds, in reference to the Book of Job, that it is the God of the

vain (Hobbes 1996, 221)and thus suggests that Leviathan himself is vain,

mere appearance, and null. That might be a vanitas formula, but it can onlybe one because it is first an analytical formula for the diagnosis of sovereign

political structures. In a less Old Testament and less baroque, more detailed

and more critical fashion, a similar diagnosis appears in the political theo-

ries of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. The state is the macroinstitute that con-

ducts national civil war or international class warfare, although the

administration of war can counter it at best with normative-moralist slo-

gans, but nothing, beyond the contested interests of capital and work, thatcould guarantee it substance and permanence. As the organizational form

of war, the state is empty and itself an agent of the emptying out of what is

assembled within it. The future of democracy, which has thus far been

dependent upon it and will remain so for the foreseeable future, must be

determined in relation to the armed emptiness of its forms of sovereignty

the sovereignty of representatives; the sovereignty of states, state alliances,

and institutes of justice; and the sovereignty of capital and its internationalcorporations.

Since the promise of all individuals to coalesce into a political body can

only be a wild promise, this political body must be dissipated, the political



26/32

universal torn apart, and the God Leviathan finite. If it is described here

with a word that Hobbes often uses, inconsistent (Hobbes 1996, 209), it

is not simply in the lax sense of contradictory and in the etymological

sense of what does not stand with itself and has no persistence in itself, but

also in the strict sense of the term in set theory: intolerable to itself and

exclusive of itself. The promise of sovereignty upon which the social con-

tract is ostensibly based cannot be guaranteed by any prior order of the

promise and cannot be bound by any existing compact; it must be free of

them and free of the promise itself. This freedom of the promise to begin

with itself and to establish an agreement of its own accord, independent of

other or prior contractual obligations, appears in Hobbess construction as

the agreement itselfthe Covenant, and thus also the commonwealth,

the state, or its highest representativethat cannot surrender its rights,

cannot take part in the Covenant, can make no promises, and is bound to

no promise. The promise cannot be an object of the promise. And since it is

true that a Promise is equivalent to a Covenant (95), it is also true that:

the agreement is not an object of another agreement; and: the sovereignstate is not bound to the promise that constitutes it. Sovereigntyof the

promise and of the state thus foundedlies in the constancy of its form and

the infinite variability of its contents, which cannot include its form. The

promise that is the state is that absolutum that is exempted from itself. That

means, however, it cannot ever be checked, and can, at all times, cause ter-

ror, murder, and self-destruction. It can always beand must always be

able to bea threat, a declaration of war, or a crime, regardless of whetherit is freely given or given under duress. Yet if every promiseand the fun-

damental promise that produces constituted society above allis in this

sense itself unconditional, sovereign, and, in principle, free with respect to

the promise, then it is exempted from itself, empty: meer words. It is a

word of the Future, a state of the future, not only in the sense that it is

anticipated and still to come, but also in that it never exists in any present

as anything other than an indication towards the future. In every promise,we promise ourselves a we, and in every promise, each of the posi-

tions of the promisethe doubled we, the us, and the promise

marks a void that can only be filled by the future, and that might just as



27/32

easily remain unfulfilled. Nevertheless, the promise existsit is given,

gives itself, and insistsnot as the reliable foundation of a political topos,

but rather as the a-topos of language, its society, and its politics. Thus, what

Bataille said about sovereignty is more true of the promise than of any

other linguistic form: La souverainet nest RIEN.7 It is, more precisely, the

resistant demarcation of a nothing as the absolute minimum of the politi-

cal that can be fixed in a demarcation.

A third version of the inconsistency of language and speech acts

becomes apparent in this minimum of political existence. It appears,

namely, in the subject that revolts against the social contract and its repre-

sentative sovereign. In Hobbess view of right, it is impossible to revoke the

enthroning of a sovereign, whether as monarch or parliament. The con-

tractual promise is irreversible; once established, right cannot be displaced,

because every subject constituted through the agreement as part of the

state and thus as a (as its) subject, would have to revoke itself and destroy

its own sovereignty. Hence: if he that attempteth to depose his

Souvereign, be killed, or punished by him for such attempt, he is author ofhis own punishment, as being by the Institution, Author of all his

Souvereign shall do (Hobbes 1996, 122). Since every individual is the

author of what the sovereign does as representative, every act of the sover-

eign against his subjects is an act of this subject; and vice-versa: every act of

subjects against their sovereign is in turn exclusively an act of subjects

against themselves. The sovereign does not act; it represents. Every turn of

an actor against itself, be it real or only possible, is strictu sensu, in the coun-terlogic of the subject as well as its ontology of right, impossible: to do

injury to ones self, is impossible (124). Hobbess apodictic sentence is an

unattributed quotation from the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics,

where Aristotle arguesas did Plato before him, and Thomas afterwards

that violence against oneself can be viewed as injustice (1138a14). Since the

concepts of justice and injustice are always related to a third, and ultimately

also to the polis, whoever harms oneself can cause injustice not to oneselfbut only to the political community in oneself. In the postulate that it is

impossible to do injustice to oneself, the self is thus determined as political

through and through and can only be viewed as a subjectthat is, as



28/32

subject to rights.In this subject, defined entirely in terms of the power rela-

tions of the contract, there is no other, neither a natural other nor one of a

neighboring or future society. Hobbes, however, abandonsand must

abandon for the sake of the coherence of the systemthe sphere of right as

the sphere of universal subjectivity, exposed in every individual precisely

where an attack on the life of the sovereign should be argued against. Here,

Hobbes says of the one who slays the sovereign: he punisheth another, for

the actions committed by himselfe (124). However concrete this sentence

might be, it is also false because it introduces another into a system of

omnipresent subjectivity of right and power, where there can emphatically

be no others. That Hobbes, in this decisive and in every sense capital

momentthat is, one concerning a capital offenseappeals to an other

may be explained in terms of the history of politics or of ideas that neutral-

ize this mistake in a broader context. But what is decisive here is that the

system of the political subjectivity of rightand thus of subjectivity as

suchis abandoned by its reliance upon an other that can in no way be con-

ceived as subject. In the beheaded sovereign, the commonwealth, the civi-tas, the Leviathan itself would be decapitated, and an otherLeviathan, an

othersovereign, and, a limine, a dead one, would be touched: an other who

must, upon pain of the collapse of politically just subjectivity, remain

unimaginable and unrepresentable. What the argument he punisheth

another, for actions committed by himselfe should exclude is evoked pre-

cisely as the existential threat of the political subject as such. In Hobbess

social contract, there can only be other subjects, but never anything otherthan subjects: this other is nevertheless present, however, as the possibility

of either natural or violent death in the sovereign, as well as in each of its

subjects. The entire political system of subjectivity rests upon this possibil-

ity, experienced always as a threat because it is first used as such: upon the

threat, that is, of depoliticization, delegitimation, and desubjectivation.

For the purposes of politicization, legitimation, and subjectivation, this

threat seems indispensable because, without the terrour of some Power,Fear, the Sword (117), the state cannot fulfill the functions of gratifi-

cation and preservation. But if the other becomes a threat, and thus an

instrument of self-constitution and self-preservation, the self constitutes



29/32

and preserves itself not so much against its other as from it: not self-

sufficient, and not, in itself, permanent, but con-stituted with an other that

cannot be a subject and, therefore, de-stituted, at every momentand

something other than a momentexposed to an other. The self, at the limit

of its confrontation with death, is not only being unto death, but ratherfrom

its death.

The promise, every promise, is meant to be a political and temporal-

political act. In it, one is supposed to subject oneself to the word that binds

one with another and with their future. Only bound in this way, and by

virtue of the interweaving of the given word, can each of the two appear as

subject to their bond, and as subject to the act that brought about this bond

between them and the dimensions of their time. They can, thus, be subjects

only afterthe act and by virtue ofthe act; the act, in turn, can only be one of

subjects, not one without them. This indissoluble aporia of the promise

having to occur without subjects and without acts, while nevertheless bind-

ing subjectsthis aporia of the birth of a common language, of an

agreement and of a (even if minimal) political bond, like all aporias of cre-ation, invention, of the new and yet-to-come, makes its structure most

clearly apparent in relation to the end of the promise. Promises are, unnec-

essarily, as Hobbes stresses, and in extreme cases, sealed with an oath. In

one passage, under the marginal heading The End of an Oath, he attrib-

utes the capacity of strengthening the power of the word to the oath: The

Passion to be reckoned upon, isonce againFear (Hobbes 1996, 99).

That is, the fear of the vengeance of an invisible power, the absolute powerof God in this case, if the promise is not kept and fulfilled. Such was the

Heathen Form, Let Jupiter kill me else, as I kill this Beast. So is our forme, I

shall do thus, and thus, so help me God (99). The oath is a self-condem-

nation, a curse concerning the possibility that the promise might not be

kept. In it, at the end of the promise, in either Christian or heathen form,

explicitly or silently, the swearer exposes himself to death; in it, he conjures

death as the ultimate guarantee of his promise, and in it, he promises him-self death should he not be able to stand in for the life of his word. In the

end, the promise is always thus a contract with death against death. In it,

language exposes itself to the end of all speech; it exposes itself to its own



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exposure. But if there is no language without the promise, and if every lan-

guage is in the first place the promise and announcement of a common lan-

guage, then this contract with the death of language belongs to the

irreducible structure of language as suchthe contract with what cannot

enter into any agreement, the contact with what cannot be touched, and the

bond with what dissolves all bonds. Every promise touches this structural

taboo. If there is to be a contract between determinable pairs, then only if

this undeterminable other is touched by both and the act is deactivated as a

mere occurrence of contingency. In it, common language is stripped of its

subjectivity as well as of its normative or regulative forms: it is not perfor-

mative in the sense of the fulfillment of an assumed or conventional form

of action, but rather an opening up to possible forms, thus ad-formative; a

dissolution of sedimented forms, aformative; and, thirdly, a conjuring of

that impossibility of form that is the absence of language, afformative.

Because the promise, as the inauguration of all undefined language games,

already speaks itself into what is not yet and perhaps never will be lan-

guage: it speaks as invitation forand resistance to everything that is with-out language, speechless. Stripped of all arms against others, its nakedness

itself is the ultimate and most powerful weapon of language. The language

in the promise is the bare speakable [das Sprechbare] that Benjamin called,

with Kant and Hlderlin, the bare impartable [das Mitteilbare]: discharged

of all predetermined forms, subjects, addressees, and contentsof all

armsnaked, and receptive to the old and oldest, the new and all others,

and also to none. This is what Hlderlin calls the spirit of the eternally liv-ing, unwritten wilderness in his Notes on Antigone.8 Without this spirit,

there is no politics; with it, only a politics directed toward another. Either

one is a wild promise.

I

N O T E S

1. See Hobbes 1996, 89.

2. Manfred Riedel has already made this observation in relation to the note omnia facta

esse ex nihilo from Hobbess Appendix ad Lev. See Reidel (1975, 182f.).

3. Jens Kulenkampff discusses this and related aporias in Hobbess construction in con-



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nection with the relevant work of Tnnies, Oakeshott, Taylor, Warrender, Hood, and

Ilting in Kulenkampff (1983, 218ff.).

4. In his impressive study Thomas Hobbes: Visuelle Strategien, Horst Bredekamp develops

the political iconography of this composite body through an abundance of materials

and determinants, though he does not account for the structure and function of

Hobbess concept of the person (Bredekamp 1999).

5. See Hume 1987, 465ff.

6. The reference to Carl Schmitts apodictic definition of sovereignty in Political

Theology, Sovereign is the one who determines the state of emergency [ Souvern ist,

wer ber den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet], can be related here to Walter Benjamins

comment in the seventh thesis of Zum Begriff der Geschichte that the state of emer-

gency [Ausnahmezustand] in which we live is the rule (Benjamin 1972, 697). Schmitts

cardinal mistake, which Benjamin would clearly have detected, lies in thinking sover-

eignty as a decision about the state of emergency, standing thus as much as an excep-

tion [Ausnahme] as overthe exception. His lifelong preoccupation with Hobbes should

have taught him that the sovereign is never excepted from the exception and thus can-

not also have the power to master it. Schmitts entire construction serves as the neu-

tralization of precisely that exception that he claims to have discovered as the

fundamental concept of right. It is therefore, as Benjamins quotation marks signal,

merely the semblance of an exception. These comments should indicate just how much

more complex the structure of sovereignty is for the most radical political theorist of

early modernity, and should also suggest something about the real state of emer-

gency that is no less pressing today than it was at the time of Benjamins theses. (For

further connections, see Hamacher [1991] and its translation in Hamacher [1994]).

7. See Bataille (1976, 259).

8. See Hlderlin (1969, 784).

R E F E R E N C E S

Bataille, Georges. 1976.La Souverainet. In Oeuvres Compltes, vol. 8. Paris: Gallimard.

Benjamin, Walter. 1972. Zum Begriff der Geschichte. In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1. Frankfurt

am Main: Suhrkamp.

Bredekamp, Horst. 1999. Thomas Hobbes: Visuelle Strategien. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Hamacher, Werner. 1994. Afformativ, Streik. In Was heit Darstellen?, edited by Christian L.

Hart Nibbrig. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt.

Hamacher, Werner. 1991. Afformative, Strike. Translated by Dana Hollander. Cardozo Law

Review 13, no. 4 (December).

Hobbes, Thomas. 1991. Man and CitizenDe Homine and De Cive. Edited by Bernard Gert.

Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

. 1996.Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hlderlin, Friedrich. 1969. Werke und Briefe. Vol. 2. Edited by F. Beiner and J. Schmidt.

Frankfurt: Insel.



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Hume, David. 1987. Of the Original Contract. In Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by

Eugene Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics.

Kulenkampff, Jens. 1983. Die Schpfung des Leviathan. Zeitschrift fr philosophische Forschung

37, vol. 2 .

Reidel, Manfred. 1975. Metaphysik und Metapolitik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.


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Wild Promises - On the Language 'Leviathan