Of Death and Dominion - The Existential Foundations of Governance

OF DEATH AND
DOMINION
Rethinking Theory
GENERAL EDITOR
Gary Saul Morson
C O N S U LT I N G E D I T O R S
Robert Alter
Frederick Crews
John M. Ellis
Caryl Emerson
OF DEATH AND
DOMINION
The Existential Foundations
of Governance
Mohammed A. Bamyeh
Northwestern University Press

Evanston, Illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2007 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2007. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bamyeh, Mohammed A.
Of death and dominion : the existential foundations of governance / Mohammed A. Bamyeh.
p. cm. — (Rethinking theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8101-2440-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8101-2440-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8101-2441-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8101-2441-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. Death—Political aspects. I. Title. II. Series.
JA71.B286 2007
320—dc22
2007023776
o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 3
Chapter 1
Consolations 7
Chapter 2
Imperium 30
Chapter 3
Preparations 47
Chapter 4
Forgetting 76
Last Words: Death and Difference 101
Notes 109
Bibliography 125
Index 131
Acknowledgments
First, to Randall, whose extensive comments on an earlier draft greatly enhanced

the clarity and coherence of my own thoughts. His unsparing but caring devotion
to the art of critique and engagement has been a constant source of intellectual
nourishment and personal growth over the years.
Gary Saul Morson’s warm support for this project has been humbling, and its
appearance owes much to his unwavering faith in its merits.
Thanks also go to Don Levine, whose stimulating invocation of Georg Sim-
mel, and his kind words of encouragement and theoretical probity gave me confi-
dence to continue and develop this project further.
There are many others whose role in my intellectual and personal life while I
worked concurrently on this theme and other related issues in social theory and
global life has been a source of great inspiration, even though they may not have
been intimately involved in its specific development. Of those, I would like to ex-
press indebtedness to Craig Calhoun, whose decent humanity and constant support
over the years gave me the energy and spirit needed to focus on ideas and on life,
to ignore that which was extraneous, distracting or lifeless in academic “life,” and
thus ultimately to see this as well as other projects to fruition. And for their irreplace-
able friendship and generosity, I would like to thank, as always and in no particular
order, Khaldoun Samman, Hisham Bizri, John Michael, Sharon Willis, Tom Dipiero,
Mary Layoun, Mazhar al-Zoby, Mohannad Ghawanmeh, and Mazen Halabi.
A few words of genuine appreciation are warranted about the relative freedom
from disciplinary bondage I found in certain academic environments, which al-
lowed me to develop further intellectually and personally. There were places where
I profited from a healthy combination of liberty and challenge, as in Macalester
College, where I spent four wonderful years, enjoying the fortune of having stellar
students and the freedom to mix genres and ideas in a way that would never have
been tolerated in more narrowly focused institutions. I found that it is precisely in
such an environment that when one writes, even about death, one may constantly
be infused with the life-defining vitality of integrated discovery, so that it becomes
finally possible to discover the healthy part of certain ideas that would, otherwise,
remain uncanny, distant, or intolerable.
vii
OF DEATH AND
DOMINION
Introduction
T oday, one may be tempted to say that there were times, long gone, in which
death loomed larger than life and that now, with medical science, technological op-
timism, the ethic of global progress, and so on, life looms larger than death: even
with terror and wars factored in, death has become remote and episodic, one might
be tempted to say. Yet at the same time, none has escaped the ultimate mastery of
death, which at every epoch manifests itself in new and unexpected facets. In an age
of disease and conformity, death appears as it always has: as the outer limit to all
power, all designs, all optimism, all heroism, all projects at transcending the given
limits of action. If political life includes projects and games oriented toward tran-
scendence, death, as a thoroughly nonpolitical, exterior, and uniform force, con-
tinues its eternal vigilance as the guarantor of forced exit from all levels of hier-
archy. The starting premise must then be that death is decisively and primarily the
opposite of power, not of life.
In this volume, I seek to offer a philosophical history of the constitutive role
of death in political consciousness. My general argument is that in some form or
another, the orientation toward death has had an unbroken grip on the founda-
tional character of the philosophy of governance. Obviously, this is not to say that
such an orientation is always explicit, or that it always takes the same form and
function, or that it possesses some universal and transhistorical consistency in the
manner of its incorporation into designs of political power. Rather, the twin ele-
mentary propositions that the will to power is a foundational element in political
life and that such a will is naturally and unfailingly conquered by death lead us to
expect the will to power to produce on a continuous basis ways to address this su-
periority of death. A simple resignation to fate is not a political act; as an act, it ex-
ists only outside of politics proper. When one abandons the fight, one moves away
from the tedious struggle of mortals for power, and thus away from political life as
such, and into more serene spheres of reflective life. To be party to games of power,
one cannot—however unconsciously—escape cognizance of all given restrictions
on power and transcendence.
Death thus acquires its foundational status to political life because it operates
as the upper and uniform limit to conceivable human hierarchies. But even if polit-
3
4 OF DEATH AND DOMINION
ical life is not oriented toward hierarchy, death remains at its unconscious center
for a different and more ancient reason. In the same way that human beings enter-
tain a sense of community through observing the commonality of their own fate
with that of others, they sense that death—as the most universal common—is the
ground of a universal community of which oneself is an ineluctable member. A per-
son thus becomes a political animal not simply because one does not live alone, as
Aristotle suggests when he describes the origins of politics in man. More primarily,
one becomes so because one does not die alone.
As one scrutinizes this commonality of fate, the political animal begins to con-
template ways to transcend the fate one shares with others. This is why the story
of civilization begins with Gilgamesh and no one else. And it is in this sense that
politics becomes no longer simply politics—that is, an art of negotiations, games,
tricks, and compromises among those who regard themselves to be equal to each
other and who have nothing else but each other to refer to. Rather, the orientation
toward death, however inarticulate, also propels into motion a move away from
politics proper and into governance. While like politics governance has its own rules
of play and arts of maneuver, governance is not politics in its communal sense. The
conceptual difference between politics and governance consists in the former be-
ing the arena of everyday negotiations aimed at dividing up the spoils among rela-
tive equals who either cannot ignore each other or cannot live without each other.
Governance, on the other hand, is the art of transcending that ordinary and eter-
nal political game of constant negotiations and adjustments. While the art of poli-
tics is oriented toward tangible benefits, the art of governance is oriented toward
more idealistic pursuits and ultimate ends. In this volume, the emphasis will there-
fore be on the trials and tribulations of governance proper in its relation to death
rather than on “politics” as such. The concern is primarily with how transcenden-
tal conceptions of power adjust to their recurrent encounter with the absolutely
unwavering law of mortality.
Of course, when we speak of restrictions on power, we need to make a dis-
tinction between immediate and ultimate ones. The focus of this volume is limited
to one of the ultimate restrictions, namely, mortality, one which seems to me least
explored yet foundational for cultures of governance everywhere. Yet, while fo-
cusing on a limited set of themes, I tried to maintain a broad, global, and compar-
ative perspective regarding the connection between governance and mortality.
This combination poses a number of methodological problems and requires the in-
vocation of ways to retain thematic focus rather than citing an endless list of ex-
amples from throughout the world and across times. Thus, rather than offering
what would amount to a complete but profitless overview of all ideologies of death,
I have restricted my outline to the general structure of universal tropes. This method
has the advantage of providing thematic summaries that seem to me most useful for
crystallizing the argument.
What, then, are those tropes? Essentially, they are various logics by which
Introduction 5
governance negotiates accommodations with mortality. It is tempting to chart

them out in terms of historical progression, and traces of that effort may indeed be
visible in this volume, which begins with the epic of Gilgamesh and the general
experience of the polis and moves on to the trials and tribulations involved in em-
pires, then on to those systems inscribed in salvation religions, and finally to mod-
ern systems of technocratic administration and mass society. While this construc-
tion may make it seem that the types of relation between the culture of governance
and the problem of mortality can be charted out in a genealogical fashion, it is a
mistake to think of tropes as simply sequential in nature. The historical narrative
does offer the advantage of clarifying the starting points and foundational bases of
each trope. But tropes, unlike those Foucauldian epistemes, do not describe only
specific historical situations.
In other words, the logical status of the four tropes outlined in the four chap-
ters of this volume stems not from the particularity of their respective moments in so-
cial, intellectual, or political history but from the singularity of the fundamental
problem to which they all respond. Therefore, it is possible to account for the shift
from one trope to another and also for their cohabitation of the same times or
spaces. That is because tropes do not change when the problem they address is
solved. Rather, they exist precisely in order to address problems that cannot be
solved. They save us from having to engage in the self-defeating act of giving di-
rect answers to unanswerable questions. Tropes, thus, allow us to navigate various
pathways around an eternal impasse.
The four tropes outlined as consolations, imperium, preparations, and forgetting at-
tempt to capture the broadest possible ideational range of mortality as it constitutes
the unconscious of governance. The progression shown from one age to another
marks not a Hegelian Aufhebung (sublation) of one political approach to death by
another. Rather, these tropes are chosen precisely because they also reflect ongo-
ing, synchronous modalities of entertaining death in the life of power. Power-as-
consolation for mortality corresponds to an ancient and continuing vision, which
becomes most clearly visible in imperial efforts to conquer death and time itself by
laying one’s grip on the entire spatiotemporal horizon known—conquering the
world with fame or triumph, and posterity with unmatchability or exemplariness.
One does not necessarily make a conscious selection between one or another of the
tropes discussed in the pages to follow. Rather, choosing the first trope, for in-
stance, may simply indicate that one has none of the resources required to play the
game prescribed by the second. Today, for example, we have both: those who have
the capacities of imperial life and those who have nothing but a little patrimony in
which their finitude can be consoled.
Yet, it clarifies the idea to present the four tropes as historically successive. It
must be kept in mind nonetheless that when one trope assumes ascendance, it is not
because it has overpowered a previous one. If tropes surmise the boundaries of log-
ical possibilities, and if logic itself is eternal, then nothing in it is liable to extinc-
tion—only to hibernation or inaudibility. The point, of course, needs to be proven

sociohistorically and not simply through arguments in pure logic. The fact that
every epoch houses noncommunicating orientations to political life is well known,
but less so is what to do with this discovery. Ernst Bloch once denounced the
Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen—the synchronic cohabitation of the same period
by logics belonging to different periods. Johannes Fabian, by contrast, denounced
evolutionary conceptions because they deny the normalcy of “coevalness”: the situ-
ation from which one is supposed to “evolve” is a feature of our own time, not of a
previous era.
In either case, it is undeniable that some tropes may be more operative at a
particular point in time, given material conditions and the available limits and pos-
sibilities. But that does not indicate that all other tropes would be dead then.
Rather, they are either inaudible for the time being, or they appear in the form of
traces and remnants under the mantle of overarching and dominant ideology,
which may appear to stand for the spirit of the times. The “old” is not aufgehoben, or
assimilated, into the “new” because the mental framework supporting one trope
cannot be folded into that of another. In other words, tropes is the name we give to
frameworks that are logically (but not historically) distinct.
Two further remarks are perhaps needed to better situate this project in terms
of contemporary methods, debates, and disciplines. First, this project maintains an
affinity to the more reflective, Simmelian tradition in sociological theory—im-
pressionistic yet attentive to the limits and possibilities of evidence. It should be
read in that spirit but primarily for its topic rather than for the sake of the method.
Second, it is consciously structured to be transcultural, although not in order to
serve the cause of “diversity” for its own sake. Rather, it seems to me that socio-
political theory cannot afford in this day and age to be anything less than truly
global and transcultural. That is precisely because it is “theory,” which is to say its
goal is to capture broad questions of existence. I hope it will become apparent, when
we ask such universal questions as those surrounding death, that the “West” is as
useless of an analytic concept as is the “East.” Death has unified reflective minds
here and there, every time such minds focused on common questions—here they
are those of transcendence and permanence—only to find themselves hitting the
same wall, everywhere.
Finally, a critique of the role of death in the cultures of governance is espe-
cially pressing today, precisely because it is easy to misapprehend such an unheroic,
consumption- and gratification-oriented postmodernity as a condition of true for-
getfulness of death. The claim occasions the infusion of political life by the forces
of technocracy and capitalism. However, nothing has happened that would struc-
turally remove the problem of death from the purview of power. For in general, it
is in the nature of the will to power to be on guard against that which, with tangible
proof and unparalleled confidence, reserves the final say over it.
1
Consolations
The Master as Slave
One of the earliest records of civilization recounts how, after crossing impossible
terrains, dense darkness, and deadly waters, Gilgamesh failed to persuade the gods
to revoke the mortal condition imposed on all life. He had to journey back to his
kingdom, resigned to an impending death. Upon his arrival, however, he experi-
ences a sudden shift in mood. Back home, amid the spreading shades of mortality,
Gilgamesh tempers the atmosphere of mourning with an eruptive consolation. This
epic, so centered around death, does not in fact end with death. Rather, it ends with
Gilgamesh inviting Urshanabi, his newly found ferryman and subject, to admire
the solid and splendid foundations of his master’s city. The city, so is implied, will
outlast its founder, its subsequent rulers, and, indeed, all of its citizens.
That is the only certainty Gilgamesh could bring back after his dreadful in-
sight into the irrevocable approach of his own extinction. Being a ruler, so it seems,
provides a set of earthly conditions which prop up one’s posture in the face of
death: power, in this case, is vested in a permanent construction designed to trick the
forces of finitude and abate their unimpeded procession through this world. The
epic of Gilgamesh thus seems to indicate that an early goal of governance, as ex-
pressed in a polis1 consciously carving an existence for itself out of an immense
expanse of chancy nature, involved constructing a method of survival beyond death.
The city itself seemed to be imagined as a sanctuary from which death may be kept
out. Gilgamesh himself saw death first only outside the walls of the city, and the
city itself became his last weapon against death when he failed to repeal it in the
venturesome world outside. Here, governance commences with observing mortal-
ity as the epitome of danger in the world.
In his founding text of existential philosophy, Martin Heidegger asserts that
Dasein itself is inseparable from manifestations of generalized fear.2 But this asser-
tion remains too abstract. It gives us an existence propelled by a “fear” for which
there is neither object (for example, death) nor subject (for example, governance).
If we were to approach the issue in a more sociological fashion, it would be imper-
7
ative to outline whether and how fear or sense of danger are connected to social
hierarchy, whether or not a feeling of threat to one’s existence is equally distributed
across time and space, and the variety of ways by which the fear orients one toward
political schemes of survival in particular. Gilgamesh, the two-thirds god, one-third
man, is significant for us here because he is the first mortal to suggest the unequal
social distribution of the propensity to fear death: the fear operates most intensely
at the summit of society.
The starting principle here must thus be the reverse of what G. W. F. Hegel
proposed as the genesis of the distinction between mastery and bondage. For
Hegel, the slave becomes a slave because he refuses to sacrifice himself in the
struggle with the master. The fear of death, therefore, is the first condition of the
slave mind.3 The story of Gilgamesh, however, is a story of a master, not his sub-
jects, dreading death. Neither is there any indication of such a dread by his savage
comrade Enkidu, who had died earlier and never ruled anyone. Gilgamesh’s return
back to the safety of a well-fortified city is an outcome of a lost battle for immor-
tality. There is indeed a decrease of the level of his mastery at that point—as he
loses the divine portion of himself—but he is the master at the end of the story just
as well, albeit a human one. From then on, he no longer seeks to rid himself of mor-
tality, but of fear, which had occasioned his humanization.
Contrary to Hegel, we are led to ask whether the master, then, fears death
even more than the slave, who refuses to sacrifice himself in a struggle for freedom.
The answer from the time of Gilgamesh seems to be yes, and if we leap five thou-
sand years forward, the answer is still yes, and indeed more emphatically so. A
prototype of this answer can be found in Leo Tolstoy’s Master and Man, in which
both the master and the bondman express themselves on the matter. The story de-
scribes a venturesome merchant and his servant caught on the road in the deadly
Russian winter. As the life force of both is gradually extracted from them by the
frozen nature, the servant succumbs to his death with contentment, while the mas-
ter struggles with all kinds of means to save both lives to the end. In his analysis of
this tale, Norbert Elias argued that the master’s behavior is typical of the enterpris-
ing spirit, which feels that it is always yet to accomplish its life’s goal. By contrast,
the fatalism of the servant is inseparable from his confidence that in death he will at-
tain his freedom.4 This attitude is a far cry from the slave morality of ressentiment, as
Friedrich Nietzsche describes it. The morality of Tolstoy’s bondman is oriented to-
ward himself and not the master. It has its eyes focused on one object only, which
is its freedom. It obtains it by doing nothing, simply allowing the chill of nature to
do its ordinary work and freeze into death its unfree being. The servant here has no
use for revenge, moral or otherwise, but only for freedom, which can neither be
granted by the master nor procured by the bondman’s own effort.
The fabled and often bewildering fatalism of many of those caught in bondage
may thus conceal an attitude other than simple surrender. For the bondman, free-
Consolations 9
dom arrives by necessity because it arrives with death, while for Gilgamesh as well
as for Tolstoy’s modern enterprising master, death can only be a diminution of pos-
sibilities, possibilities which are part of their self-definition as exceptional beings in
comparison to others. For such spirits, therefore, any deduction of these possibili-
ties is a tax on freedom. The master fears death most because he has most to lose.
His awareness of the pointlessness of a direct duel with death, then, is sublimated
into a devious trick of survival; he governs something which he deems more im-
mortal than himself. Gilgamesh is cognizant of that formula already, and the his-
tory of governance begins with that consolation.
Who needs this consolation? We shall see as we proceed to examine variations
of the same answer. Consolation is needed first and foremost by the one who loses
that which one regards as an inalienable aspect of self-constitution. Consolation re-
orients one’s task, so that it is no longer a battle with destiny over a claimed right
to interminable life. Instead, the task is reoriented toward perpetuating an inter-
pretation of one’s life as exceptional, or as the operative principle of a unique proj-
ect, or as a vehicle for creation. The need for consolation implies an emphatic dread
of the notion that life is merely a created object or instance and thus a cancelable
entity or moment. For the ancient master as well as for the modern enterprising
bourgeoisie, life becomes in this fashion its own fetish, to which one remains at-
tached with teeth and claws even when one has no idea why one wants to live.
This fetishism of life, so normalized and made into an everyday convention
by the bourgeoisie, is of a somewhat different character than the notion of life as
pondered by Gilgamesh, as will become apparent in subsequent discussions. But in
general, the fetish of life—that is to say, attachment to life without a clear sense of
life’s innate purpose—provides us with a transhistorical trope, which appears un-
der various names, guises, and contexts. Its most audible, but by no means only,
counterethic has been what may be called philosophies of detachment, expounded
throughout history by voluntary outcasts and ascetics. The greatest surviving one
of those is Buddhism, which I will come back to later on in commenting on the per-
sona of Prince Siddhartha. In this context, it is noteworthy that Buddhism outlined
the paradigm that offered one of the most comprehensive historical answers to
Gilgamesh’s request: death is caused not by the gods. Therefore, they are the wrong
addressees for your request for immortality. As Anaximander did in a different con-
text and using different language, Siddhartha discovered that death is caused by
birth. Birth essentially signifies the necessity of intrusion and desire by that which
is born, and it is those transgressions that seal its fate. It dies, Anaximander implies,
because it must pay the price of its necessary intrusion into that which is outside of
it. It dies, Siddhartha implies, because it desires to live.
In his fragment Anaximander offers no solution to the problem of death. By
contrast, the later elaboration of Buddhism gives rise to ritual approaches to the
problem. It is attachment to the world that presents death, along with suffering, as
an experience of conquered will or unfreedom. The reigning Buddhist concept of

freedom thus embraces the death instinct. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the equa-
tion is clear: desire and fear also exist after death, and in that sense, death is not the
other of life. One fears that which is latent in one’s essence, namely, enlightenment,
and is attracted to that which will make one suffer unbearably, namely, shiny ap-
pearances that never sufficiently nourish the hungry ghosts. One must therefore
embrace fear and reject desire.5 By contrast, for Gilgamesh, the historical antithe-
sis of Prince Siddhartha, the life instinct wins out. And precisely because of its tri-
umph, the master must endure this lingering, bitter taste of lack of freedom that had
been so exaggeratingly identified with the slave mind. Political history begins not
with Siddhartha—who actually abandons the palace—but with Gilgamesh, the
master whose freedom appears necessarily curtailed by the recognized and feared
boundaries of life. His ultimate attachment to governance represents the extrava-
gant claims of the life instinct.
Death and Hierarchy
The political translation of the notion that one’s life is exceptional is that life’s fun-
damental meaning lies in its hierarchical relation to other lives. It is only a simple
extension of this logic to the assertion that if one’s life is exceptional compared to
that of others, so must one’s death be. Thus already in ancient Mesopotamia, records
abound with portrayals of the magnanimous death of the king, whose tomb, al-
though on a much smaller scale than was to be carried out later on by the pharaohs,
was filled with treasures, provisions, and, during some periods, an entire retinue of
servants who were sacrificed to serve him in the afterlife.6 Such devices betray an
ancient fear not of death per se as much as fear of the meaning of death from the point
of view of the master: for him, death is fearsome because it entails a loss of hier-
archy. Since all are exposed to it, as Gilgamesh had already discovered, death is the
guarantor of equality par excellence. Gilgamesh’s trauma stems not simply from his
fear of his own fate but more precisely from his fear of the universality of that fate;
that is, his dilemma arises not out of a simple confrontation with death but out of
the realization that there exists one fate that is not open to hierarchical exemptions.
Egyptian civilization also went through the same process, when initially the
pharaohs and nobility of the Old Kingdom tried to insist that only they could be
resurrected and thus cheat death of its universalizing and equalizing claim. Yet this
scheme was vulnerable, and the point was not lost on the worshipper of Isis who
explicitly stated that death meant equality.7 In Mesopotamia, the attempt to con-
test the equalizing claim of death started earlier than anywhere else but was also
abandoned earlier. Ishtar’s Descent into the Netherworld registered this resignation
clearly; at each circle of the netherworld, Ishtar is stripped of an item of clothing.
Consolations 11
At the final circle, she is completely naked and is told of the netherworld’s laws by
which she would have to abide.8 This fate must have appeared especially debilitat-
ing, insofar as it conveys the understanding of death from the point of view of
someone who once had the power of life and death over others: the death of the
master is essentially a transformation from governing to being governed.
The tragedy of Ishtar’s descent is clearly inscribed in that she becomes equal
to all other mortals, subject to the same laws of the gods of the world of the dead.
But powerful sovereigns cannot be uniformly expected to simply resign themselves
to that dreadful possibility. We may even expect them to retaliate with rage at any
force that seems successful in subduing them. Some of the Egyptian Coffin Texts,
for example, show dead kings served by rather than serving the gods after their
death. In some texts, dead kings go further, devouring their ancestors, gods, and
their youngsters.9 In this way, not only do they escape the specter of equality in
death but in effect, they are elevated even higher, reversing a hierarchy they had
to maintain vis-à-vis the gods while they were alive.
This effort to construct an elaborate eschatology had the same sociological
disadvantage of all similarly abstract designs, namely, that the vulnerability of the
scheme to challenge tended to be proportional to the extent to which a specific so-
cial class claimed the special fate for itself to the exclusion of other social classes.
Thus, by their nature, such designs must over time broaden their social applicabil-
ity and become more egalitarian. We see evidence of that already in the democra-
tization of the concept of resurrection in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and prob-
ably even before. The Coffin Texts and the Egyptian Book of the Dead exhibit far
more egalitarian tendencies than the earlier Pyramid Texts. When salvation reli-
gions appeared on the scene, they could only improve on that record and offer even
more radically egalitarian claims with respect to the afterlife, completely dissociat-
ing fate after death from position in social hierarchy.
Thus, the eschatological effort by the masters of the world of the living to
continue their mastery into the world of the dead could not be sustained, as the
bondmen always managed to claim right of entry to every heaven constructed to
house to masters and in some designs even harbored the thought of excluding the
masters from heaven altogether, as in the biblical parable of the needle’s eye. Thus,
for Tolstoy’s servant, the point is self-evident. Unlike Ishtar’s “descent,” the servant’s
death can for him only indicate “ascent.” In death, he will rise to be equal to the mas-
ter, and that is freedom enough for him. In his fatalism, the servant expresses once
more an ancient trope that had made servitude bearable for so long, namely, that it
ends with death. One of the classic Islamic compendia of death, Kitab al-Aqibah of
Ibn al-Kharrat, clearly registers this attitude toward death on its first page, in which
the author praises God for introducing death into the world, as a device for break-
ing the power of the mighty and introducing humility into the human condition.10
On Judgment Day, when the record is clear and when there will be no possibility
of injustice, residents of both hell and paradise are invited to witness the slaughter
of Death, which then appears as a personified entity. Both communities are in-
formed at that point that the services of Death are no longer needed, since there
will be no change of status in God’s kingdom. Hence the public slaughter of Death,
which signifies the introduction of immortality to all in their respective stations.11
In roughly egalitarian societies, notions of mastery and bondage are by defi-
nition transitory. Under nomadic conditions, for example, social stratification
tends to be only poorly supported by makeshift institutions. Such institutions in
turn tend to be prone to challenge and being overrun in due time by the inherently
ungovernable nomad, who normally does not postpone justice until death.12 In the
pre-Islamic era, nomadic poets regularly ridiculed strivings for permanent promi-
nence, since from their vantage point death had only a material meaning: one
simply ended, being vanished like the perpetually abandoned encampments in no-
madic life. It is then to be expected that the first order of business of city-based civ-
ilization is to overcome the finality of death. Jean-Pierre Vernant argued that the
social rootedness of the dead and the elaborate funerary rites in Mesopotamian civ-
ilization gave order to the community, in sharp and ostensibly conscious contrast
to the formless flux of nomadism just outside of that civilization. For the city
dwellers of that civilization, social outsideness, which included death and not just
cultural and spatial markers, constituted a sign of absolute evil.13
Vernant’s assertion can be sociologically delimited further, however, because
neither all of antiquity nor even all analogous conditions of partially crystallized
notions of social hierarchy set death outside of life and regarded it as the other of
life. In other parts and points in ancient civilization we can find an attitude that lies
somewhere between the nomadic conception of material finitude and the absolute
dread of death epitomized by a social hierarchy for which Gilgamesh stood. In this
middle region, life and death entered into a communion and were understood to
complement each other, so that death provided life with what it lacked and life like-
wise reciprocated the same service to death.
The most general outline of this middle concept can be found in ancient
Greek mystery cults as well as in the Egyptian religion of the Middle Kingdom and
after. Egyptian eschatology eventually developed in the direction of conceiving of
death as little other than a passable barrier between two connected worlds, with the
living and the dead forming a single society.14 Extinction was still possible, of course,
and hinted at in the uncanny experience of death itself. Therefore adherence to
proper mortuary rites was essential in order to avoid extinction. But the ritual was
sufficient to guarantee the openness of the passage and lack of extinction, in the
same way that other kinds of rituals managed the order of life of the living. The
openness of the gates of the two connected worlds of the living and the dead to
each other was based precisely on the fact that they paralleled each other in being
governed by innumerable rituals that stood between the self and both phenomena.
Consolations 13
Unlike under nomadism, in Egyptian civilization one experienced nothing directly,

neither life nor death. Rather, ritualism mediated both one’s life and one’s death and
revealed one’s continuity across a barrier that everyone must cross.
The same is essentially true of the ancient mystery cults, even though there
was little in the way of a pagan theory of resurrection. This lack does not seem pro-
hibitive to the communion, perhaps because the mystery was meant to be experi-
enced rather than described. According to Walter Burkert, the dead also took part
in the mystery and were considered part of the equation, since death and life were
continuous rather than opposites: “In Cicero’s phrasing, at Eleusis it is shown ‘how
to live in joy, and how to die with better hopes.’ There is no attack on the joys of
the living, but the accent is indeed on the other side. The content of the promise is
anything but explicit, but it is made to sound serious.” 15
This continuity between life and death is more abundantly evident in images
of heaven circulating especially among ancient peasants in a wide range of circum-
stances ranging from ancient Egypt to pre-Columbian America. For example, the
image of heaven for the ancient Egyptian and Aztec peasant is remarkably similar,
testifying to the universality of visions of salvation under analogous social struc-
tures, hierarchical conceptions of civilization, and approaches to life and death me-
diated by extensive ritualism. Both peasants continued to work in their heaven but
now in fields free of pests and yielding bountiful harvests.16
This modest vision of heaven indicates that the difference between life and
afterlife had only to do with quality rather than essence. One’s essence and the
essence of life itself did not change by death. One did not enter into a leisurely par-
adise free of labor and production. Rather, heaven simply resolved practical prob-
lems of production and allowed labor to guarantee production. Indeed, from the
peasant point of view, the fundamental problem of life was that unlike the afterlife,
it was interpolated with too many accidental interventions (pests, weather, soil
condition, etc.) to guarantee a natural correspondence between labor expenditure
and production. The afterlife simply removed that which was accidental and thus
allowed the dead to go on with their work, unencumbered by extraneous hin-
drances that had unfairly deducted from the product of labor in life. Death, there-
fore, neither terminated life nor even made it idle. It only improved it.
The communion between life and death is perhaps nowhere more elaborately
structured as in Aztec civilization, which we will revisit in the context of various
discussions in this volume. A point that needs to be made here, however, concerns
how this communion was extended to all aspects of Aztec economy rather than re-
maining confined to peasant experiences or ordinary servitude. As is well known,
the rain god and the war god shared supremacy over the Aztec pantheon, in a way
closely paralleling the dual dependence of Aztec economy on agriculture and war.
It is also worth noting that the war god Uitzilopochtli was a near relation of the
hunting gods.17 The fundamental point had to do with the remarkable transparency
as well as the parallel that the Aztecs detected between life and death at all levels.
Far from being the opposite of life, death only complemented life, in the same
way that hunting and eventually war joined agriculture in a complementary system
and thus demonstrated at the most basic level that destruction must happen so that
there can be production. And the further, brave corollary which salvation religions
shied away from: if destruction must take place so that there can be production,
then production must by necessity lead to destruction, so that production can hap-
pen again. Neither production nor destruction is the point, in the same way that
neither life nor death is the point. The point is the cycle combining the two by ne-
cessity. Each comes out of the other and leads back into the other again; nothing
comes out of itself or produces itself. Thus we can understand, for example, why in
the Mayan Popol Vuh, the creation narrative of another pre-Columbian civilization,
the personified gods Earthquake and Mountain Builder are actually brothers with
similar moral qualities, although in this case the duality of production/destruction
is expressed at a more basic level than that of economy.
These various expressions of communion between life and death are typical
thus of attitudes to be found either at the lower echelons of society or where no-
tions of immutable hierarchy are not yet encoded, as they still were in the Aztec
Empire on the eve of the Spanish arrival. The central point is that the proclivity to
designate the meaning of death as the other of life has only been serviceable to the
aristocracy. Thus, it stands in contrast to attitudes toward death found at lower so-
cial levels as well as where notions of hierarchy are transient and yet to be fixed in
nonsubjective criteria. It stands in an even sharper contrast to nomadic attitudes,
which are registered, among other sources, in poetry, a few examples of which are
worth noting in this connection.
Since death clearly equalized both the thrifty and the squanderer, the no-
madic poet Tarafa was especially derisive of entrepreneurial designs informed by a
hierarchical understanding of life: “All you see is a couple heaps of dust, and on
them / slabs of granite, flat stones piled shoulder to shoulder.” Another poet, Imru
l-Qays, was heir to an unstable kingdom that had disappeared when wandering
tribes ceased to pay attention to their “king.” This king happened to be the poet’s
father. Yet Imru l-Qays openly expressed how burdensome his quest after the lost
kingdom was. The duty-bound political quest, which he inherited due to the even-
tual murder of his father, interfered with a poetic life oriented toward pleasure
rather than toward such socially and ontologically insupportable designs of stable
hierarchy.
In general, the typical nomadic outlook toward death reveals that in the ab-
sence of stable social hierarchies, the specter of natural death does not appear to be
particularly traumatizing. Zuhair Ibn Abi Sulma, one of the last of the great no-
madic poets of the pre-Islamic era, even seems weary of waiting for it: “I have seen
the Fates trample like a purblind camel; those they strike / they slay, those they miss
Consolations 15
are left to live on to dotage.” This conception of fate—random in everyday, uni-

form in the long run—is eventually lost on emergent sedentary civilization. For a
founding premise of civilization is to regulate randomness: to regulate the random-
ness of fate by notions of exemplariness and to transform the randomness of acquisi-
tion into permanent endowment. The nomad, by contrast, sees the randomness of
fate as indisputable proof that life itself is no more of an accident than any other ac-
cident that may terminate it, and the randomness of acquisition as liable to be an-
nulled by the equal randomness of loss.
In his Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade observed a universal “archaic”
concept of time, which regarded it not as cumulative or progressive but as funda-
mentally cyclic in nature. The implication of that theory is that in certain types of
societies, notions of loss and gain are not solely the property of human agency, that
is, loss and gain are revocable in due time by the work of nature alone. The prob-
lem of Eliade’s thesis is that because of its own embedment in linear history, it re-
stricts the cyclic type of consciousness to “archaic” societies. This assignment is
only likely to blur the sociological implications of the kind of vision associated with
cyclic notions of time. In a more sociological fashion, it would be more appropri-
ate to note that the cyclic view of time, insofar as it sets loss and gain largely out-
side of human agency,18 tends to be more of a property of nonstate (rather than
simply “archaic”) societies. Within horizons unbounded by the state, life is not con-
strued as a vehicle for correlating the passage of time with progressive accumula-
tion of that which is preservable.19 Only civilization preserves. For without preser-
vation it, too, is swallowed up by the shifting sands. Thus for most of its history,
civilization regarded itself not only as an exceptional accomplishment in the world
but moreover as a precarious exception.20 Fear of annihilation had been one of its
foundations. As it looked outside of itself, it only saw the reign of its others: nature,
nothingness, and threats populating the world from the gates to the ends of the
horizon.
In the world outside civilization, where Enkidu had lived until he encountered
Gilgamesh, freedom is connected to movement. The spatiotemporal dimensions of
this movement, in the ungoverned terrain and toward the open possibilities of fate,
provide a way of seeing that is free from worldly clutter. Civilization, by accumu-
lating objects and hierarchical contexts in its armory against fate, makes it difficult
for the citizen-as-an-audience to avoid continual bombardment by the ethic of per-
manence. The ideal expression of free will can occur only away from all this clutter,
for the cultivation of free will requires as pristine a view as possible, barrenness in
all directions, to the ends of sight. Obviously, this recipe includes the potential for
perishing on any fine day. But freedom, in its most radical form, requires openness
to death.
In the emptiness outside city walls, where not even the city is visible, nomadic
freedom reins in the discovery of one’s insignificance at a more fundamental level
than is possible in the city. The hierarchies of civilization confront one with the
requisites of maintaining them, or instruct one on the manner of self-control re-
quired for one to survive under them, or direct one toward mystical schemes of
avoidance, whereby one imagines within the self power of which one is actually
deprived outside of the self. Outside the city, in the world of the nomad, the expe-
rience of insignificance has no hierarchical contexts, and thus it requires no illu-
sions—unless one does not wish to be outside or one is an exile or a wayfarer who
only wishes to return home. Otherwise, one has nothing to do other than act on
free will where the world is most conducive to it: in the proximity to nothingness,
in the movement within a space of openness, in oblivion to death or, more pre-
cisely, in wandering with a reduced propensity to see death as a dramatic departure
from life. At the moment of absolute free will, there are no death and life instincts
battling each other continually; there is only movement. Death is not the other of
life; death rather lives in the everyday, its incidentalness being synonymous with its
inevitability.21 The more one departs from this setting and moves further into and
then within civilization, the less room one has to move at all and thus the less room
one has to even conceptualize what free will would be like. At the end, one begins
to confuse freedom of expression or action with freedom of the will.22
Death as Degradation
The first unconscious political act of civilization, thus, is a reduction of freedom.

Before any decree issues from the master, this reduction of freedom will have al-
ready commenced upon the confinement of one’s movement to the realm of possi-
bilities circumscribed by the life instinct. In other words, the first deduction of free-
dom occurs when death is deducted from life and set as its opposite. In different
ways, both Hegel and Nietzsche connected this loss of freedom to the constitution
of the slave mind. Gilgamesh, however, indicates that this tradition begins from
above. With Gilgamesh, the emergence of the notion of life as a set of possibilities
confined and defined by the horizon of death provides a lasting interpretation of
death as seen from the point of view of power. Here, death is a fall from power.
Creation mythologies abound with this perspective, especially when they are
concerned with the (otherwise unlikely) death of early gods. If we look at the pro-
longed process of creation described in the Mayan Popol Vuh, for example, we see
that creation, inasmuch as it is an act of empowerment, requires a simultaneous in-
troduction into the world of death as a means of disempowerment. Some of the early
“gods” of the Popol Vuh, such as Zipacna the Mountain Builder and his brother
Earthquake, work together to simultaneously build and destroy. Still before civiliza-
tion, their actions, along with those of their father, Seven Macaw, who ostensibly
inculcates self-magnification into them, become the reason for their death. They
Consolations 17
must be killed not because they are destructive—for destruction is a natural part of
any creation. Rather, the Popol Vuh states, specifically and explicitly, that they had
to be killed because their glory is self-bestowed. It could not be earned yet because
creation itself had not commenced successfully yet.
Violation of immemorial modesty thus is allowed only when the gods sustain
their creation rather than perpetually destroy it, as Cronus’s habit had been before
Zeus dethroned him violently.23 While the early gods, along with miscreants of all
shapes, inform civilization by their death about the virtue of modesty, civilization
learns only that the ideal of modesty is attained precisely in death since in civiliza-
tion, death has a meaning, and it is located at the end of a continuum whose oppo-
site end is unchained power. Thus, the death of the goddess Ishtar is nothing other
than a descent into equality:
[She went to] the house which those who enter cannot leave;
On the road where traveling is one-way only;
to the house where those who arrive are deprived of light,
where mould is their food, dust their bread,
They dwell in darkness, they never see light.
They are dressed like birds, with feathers,
while over the door and the doorbolts dust has settled . . .24
Compare this fate to Persephone’s capture by Hades in Greek mythology.

Persephone does not remain forever in the netherworld. Rather, following a com-
promise, she is allowed back on earth for part of the year so that her mother, Deme-
ter, could care for the harvest and then cease that care, leaving the land to “die” again
when Persephone descends to the underworld as she must every autumn. Thus
whereas Persephone’s fate is cyclic, that of Ishtar is linear. Persephone represents a
collective social fate tied to a cyclic vision of nature, whereas Ishtar represents a spe-
cial fate tied to mastery. Thus, it is Ishtar’s story that clarifies why the life instinct
must be chosen over the death instinct at all costs. Persephone still represents a vi-
sion of life and death as continuous and complementary. In Ishtar, however, the two
worlds are fully opposed, as it constructs fate in linear rather than cyclic terms. Even
if attachment to life in civilization implies some loss of freedom, Ishtar’s story im-
plies, one is still better off alive because the world of death is even less free than that of life.
Death is inferior to life not simply because it entails destitution—which one could
experience in life as well—but because it entails an absolute lack of freedom, more
so, indeed, than under slavery. The eternally dark house, whose imposing dusty door
opens only to accept newcomers but never to allow tenants to leave, strikes at the
heart of the political appeal of the death instinct as a possible venue for freedom.
But this solution is clearly a two-edged sword, for it confirms the status of
death as an agony for both the slave and the master. For the slave, death is an agony
because it takes away even more freedom. It does accomplish for the slave his re-
venge, but only when it is too late, only in a netherworld where revenge has no
bearing on recognition of the slave by the gods, the master, or even other slaves.
For the master, death becomes an agony because it takes away his freedom, all his
recognitions, prestigious and otherwise, and exposes him to the specter of equality.
In the imperial world of Rome, Marcus Aurelius is already cognizant of this fact. At
the height of his own power, the emperor notes in a somewhat melancholic tone
that death had, after all, leveled Alexander and his subordinates without distinc-
tion.25 This problem, as we know all too well, does not stay with civilization for
long; it is only a matter of time before hierarchies and surprises are introduced into
the world of the dead, a world which Ishtar and Gilgamesh had inadvertently over-
sold, in order to make up for the earlier deficiencies of means of worldly control at
the disposal of nascent civilization.
One could thus concretely delimit the existentialist point of view by tracing
the notion of death-as-decay to the specificities of the experience, model, and req-
uisites of governance. In his discussion of the notion of decay, Heidegger stresses
that decay is experienced as evidence against the existential prerogative of Dasein.
Yet, he emphasizes that this is particularly the case when Dasein understands itself
as an isolated subject and point of reference, from which it could distance itself.26
This distancing or alienation from the self, in turn, assumes the character of fear, a
fear of the approach from a far distance of that which is detrimental to being, yet
over which one has no power.27 Heidegger makes a distinction between Dasein and
the simply living (Das Nur-lebend)—ostensibly the animalistic—whereby only Da-
sein entertains departure from the world in the sense of extinction (Nichtmehrdasein).
This notion of extinction, in turn, is already prefigured in the attention to that
which is distant (i.e., death and its approach), thus alien, yet a property of Dasein.28
This means, essentially, that the character of being includes a nonrepresentable ele-
ment of extinction, which is responsible for its suffering from a permanent sense of
disconnection from that which belongs to it. In other words, this kind of suffering
consists of the perpetual experience throughout being of a fundamental lack.29 We
could apprehend this lack as an outcome of cognitive resistance to the conclusion
of being, which alone would provide being with a sense of completion.
One can obviously apprehend such notions in a less-mystical fashion. Again,
if we raise the more sociological question as to who is attentive to the problem of
decay, the answer must be drawn from that element of any social structure which
has the misfortune to see the possibility of its own decay and which then eases the
burden by universalizing its obsession with decay. It overcomes its alienation from its
own forthcoming decay not simply by identifying its death as the other of its life
but by identifying death itself as the property of others. It then has no reason to distance
itself from itself; rather, it distances itself precisely from those others, who become,
so to speak, “untouchable.” It resolves its alienation from itself by alienating itself
Consolations 19
from all that is not itself. It does not “project” alienation from the inside to the out-
side as one would with psychological repression; it simply forgets that the entire
battle had started out within itself, against itself.
But then there may seem to be another option, which is to actively reverse the
meaning of death-as-degradation, in effect, to ennoble death beyond measure. So-
cieties that have entertained this solution, such as the Aztecs, moved not simply
death as concept or idea but even more directly the act of dying to the center of rit-
ual life. Especially in sacrifice festivals involving all social classes, two moments of
elevation readily illustrate this point—one involving the sacrificer and the other
the sacrificed. First, social rank was signified in the order according to which each
class offered its sacrificial victims to the temple. The higher one’s rank was, the ear-
lier one could offer sacrifice. Second, it was believed that the sacrificial victim,
whether a slave, child, or enemy warrior, transformed into a god at the moment of
sacrifice.30 Thus, precisely at the same moment the master asserted his hierarchical
prerogative in being the first to offer death what it wants, he also reversed the
meaning of death from degradation to glory. Yet precisely because it monumental-
izes rather than naturalizes death, this solution too evidences the problem of degra-
dation as transparently as dread and untouchability do. Death here acquires mon-
umental qualities not dissimilar, albeit more broadly distributed in society, to what
the ancient Egyptian pharaohs of the Old Kingdom ascribed to it. They had as-
cribed glory and monumentalism to death because masters knew, after Gilgamesh’s
fruitless show of weakness, that they must confront death with the same assurance
they were expected to exhibit vis-à-vis all others and all things in life.
We are speaking here of sedentary rather than adventurous mastery, the kind
of mastery resting at a stable social pinnacle following the establishment of a per-
manent home, whereafter the master must think about permanence, ironically
while being farther away from daily peril—mastery, thus, as a position or experi-
ence of being permanently above and apart: above established society, apart from
that which it does not control outside of the gates,31 two ways through which it
forecloses any organic connection to a myriad of worlds of being. There can be
nothing that would dealienate it from this dual distance. For while the nomad’s dis-
tance was a natural phenomenon prefigured in the seemingly limitless expanse
within which one wandered, the stationary status of civilization made a sense of
distance appear as alienation because wandering was no longer part of its mode of
life; in essence, because it feared wandering. Al-Nabigha, one of the last great poets
of the pre-Islamic era, reveals this transformation eloquently, shaking off as he was
the last particles of sand from clothes of increasing finery. No longer infatuated
with nomadism, he endowed his poetry with a sedentary political purpose and
composed much of it as an application to the graces of the polis in which he had
been an intermittent resident. His most famous ode concludes with an apology to
the governor: “So here is my atonement, may it find a course / for its composer has
gone astray in the country.” Of the great pre-Islamic poets, only al-Nabigha, the
one with the most experience in sedentary civilization, expresses such a fear of be-
ing lost in the world outside of it, when other poets had experienced and even wel-
comed the naturalness of perishing. Indeed, the traditional nomadic ode began
with tearful reminiscences over a decayed site of earlier encampment, from which
a myriad of other thoughts followed in no particular order. I have explored that tra-
dition at length elsewhere. The relevant point here is that unlike the case with per-
manent encampments, cities, and kingdoms, the nomads confronted the phenom-
enon of decay directly, transforming the sad scene of the ruins into tragic beauty.
In a non-state-centered society, in a world of perpetual wandering, decay, and loss,
it was only transgenerational poetics, the thoughts inspired by the ruins, that were
immortalized.
The seminomadic, non-state-centered Dinka went a step further, but they too
still had no illusions about immortality. Lienhardt asserts that all believed that their
chief died a natural death, and the ritual of burying him alive did not save him from
death.32 It simply made his death invisible and thus allowed the chief to escape
degradation. The burial had to be requested by the chief and consented to by the
community, and it involved building a large chamber underground where the chief
resided until his death and from which he could still summon the elders of the tribe
for his last words of wisdom and prophecy. Metcalf and Huntington argue that the
humiliation of the Dinka political orders in modern times was signified by the fact
that their last two chiefs died aboveground in manifest weakness and vulnerabil-
ity—one in a hospital bed in a foreign land and the other gunned down by gov-
ernment agents in his village.33 The manifest involuntariness of their death thus
symbolically accentuated the vulnerability of the Dinka to larger forces in recent
history: their destiny would from then on be made more by others than by them-
selves—a fact made all the more tangible by the failure of the chiefs of the com-
munity to die without degradation, as they had managed to for so long.
The Substitution of Death
The foregoing examples show that dreading the universality of decay is a property
of mastery, which discovers that (1) since it cannot avoid death, its only survival
rests on collective memory of it; and (2) this collective memory must then take
stock not of how the master avoided death—which he did not—but rather of how
he avoided decay and thus proved his power over at least the signs of death. When
one moves into early state societies, the very expectation of permanence of the city
prefigures the attempt to overcome death itself, and thus we see the early associa-
tion between sovereigns who personify the political order they rule and divinities
which transcend the possibilities of this mortal world. The story of Gilgamesh
Consolations 21
makes that association precisely as it presents itself as a story of loss of such divine
attributes, so that Gilgamesh is exposed to mortality. It is a story of increasing hu-
manity in Gilgamesh, where the human portion of his being—only one-third by
the beginning of the epic—gradually takes over the godly majority of his consti-
tution. With every step of the victory of the human over the godly in him, the fear
of death builds up in him. The ascendance of the human coincides with the ascen-
dance of death.
This unpleasant correlation of the enhanced power of humanity is quickly
amended. Governance stages a retreat from the honest humanity of Gilgamesh;
whenever the governor could not be a god, he could at least be identified with one.
But this scheme, too, solves no problem, for if a god could die within Gilgamesh,
then a god could just as well die outside of him. If the god died within Gilgamesh
due to its struggle with humanity, then the self-standing god outside of him died due
to its struggle with other gods. Both Mesopotamian and Greek mythologies express
that struggle and its deadly consequences clearly. Older gods “die” violently in their
struggle with newer gods, whence they descend into the netherworld. Former gods
lose effectiveness and become phantoms roaming the dark world below due to the
work of the living gods in the world proper. And sometimes, they “die” for no rea-
son other than the death of the ruler associated with them.34
Through such associations, governance reveals a transhistorical problem that
it has never been able to overcome since Gilgamesh. Namely, the experience of per-
manent, transcribed apartness from the everyday introduces it to a level of tran-
scendence suitable only for mystics and philosophers, not for rulers with worldly
tasks and responsibilities. Governance’s own being does not justify itself by itself;
rather, its raison d’être comes from some form of association with another world of
being—god, collective spirit, national embodiment, movement of destiny, and so
on. From a critical perspective, these associations are usually thought of as devices
of legitimation. And of course they do fulfill that role, but I do not think it is suffi-
cient to reduce them to that function. For at a deeper level, forms of legitimation
can be seen to survive to the extent that they provide a credible scheme of systemic
immortality. These associations work insofar as they decouple the death of the ruler
from the death of the system, since the association makes rulers who display it
substitutable for one another.
A direct example of such an association is the king of the Shilluk, who was al-
ways seen as simply a vehicle through which the ancient king Nyikang ruled im-
memorially. The ritual of his installation, in fact, involves a mock battle, which rep-
resents the proximity of the ruler to danger and his triumph over it and a burning of
the effigy of Nyikang, which upon its destruction allows the entrance of Nyikang’s
spirit into the body of the new king.35 The same ancient king is thus symbolically
destroyed before each inauguration, but only to allow the new king to become al-
ready just as ancient at the moment he assumes office.
The scheme of ensuring the immortality of the system, rather than that of the
individual who happens to embody it momentarily, is well entrenched almost
everywhere today, although few systems express it as directly as the Shilluk do.
This scheme represents one of the more-successful adaptations by governance to
the problem of death. Almost invariably, it requires a notion of an exceptional foun-
dational phase, a phase in which those whom posterity comes to call “founders” of
grand systems may also have regarded themselves as exceptional and unrepeatable
individuals.36 There is certainly no shortage of examples here. From Alexander the
Great to Charles de Gaulle, history teems with figures who were convinced that
they could not be substituted for after their death. Yet when their careers are looked
upon more closely, such figures seem strangely adventurous and nonchalant in the
face of mortal danger. How is that recklessness to be reconciled with their supreme
sense of the unrepeatable exceptionalism of the life they seem to risk every day? It
is because they die, essentially, every day and rise up from the dead again in the morn-
ing. They experience their own death in the multitudinous death of their compa-
triots, whose death brings them immortality insofar as they die like all exceptional
figures do, namely, as collective representations of one another.
There is no point here in revisiting the infinite reservoir of heroic lore on this
score. In a narrower sense, what we are concerned with is the genealogy of this spe-
cific notion of substitutability. As an illustration, we might recall one early example
from the lore surrounding Alexander the Great. On his way to a decisive battle with
Darius’s forces, we are told, Alexander wanted to construct an oracle of his own
making in order to foretell the outcome. The oracle took the form of a mock duel
between two captains in his army, to one of whom he gave the name “Alexander”
and dressed himself, while the other was given the name “Darius” and dressed in
Persian regalia but not by Alexander. The outcome of the duel was in favor of the
substitute Alexander, thus serving as a good omen of the outcome of the battle to
come.37 But “Alexander” could have been “killed,” in which case Alexander would
live to fight another day.
There is evidence to suggest that Alexander’s game was not simply a pastime
and that it actually followed the dictates of a widespread ancient tradition. We
know that Mesopotamian royal traditions include the “substitute king” as a regular
feature designed to divert mortal danger from the real king. Bottéro shows that the
recourse to a substitute was called for when the king’s life was at risk at the “divina-
tory level,” for example, when an eclipse foretold a bad omen.38 Alexander’s inno-
vation thus can be seen as twofold. First, it is the extension of the concept of sub-
stitution to the level of material danger, that is, when one is about to encounter an
actual enemy rather than a cosmic force. By contrast, the Mesopotamian substitute
king deflected from the real king only danger coming from the heavens, that is, the
substitute took the blow from an otherworldly force that the king could not claim
to rule over—Gilgamesh already relinquished that claim, and no one in Meso-
Consolations 23
potamia ever reversed his judgment on that matter. Second, in Alexander’s case, the
substitute’s fate was open-ended, unlike that of his Mesopotamian counterpart,
whose mortal fate was uniformly foretold.
In order to appreciate what substitution actually signified, it may be worth-
while to contrast this ancient tradition with more-modern tropes of substitution of
royalty, such as Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. In Twain’s story, the prince
learns about the life of the pauper and vice versa when they exchange clothes and
then social locations. The point concerns not evading or foretelling fate but en-
lightenment through perspectivist exchange. Thus the prince and the pauper re-
main throughout conscious of their “true” identity, which no one else in society
knows, whereas the ancient tradition of substitution involved the substitute being
known to all as a substitute yet taken as the literal king for the duration of the omen
or oracle. In other words, the “body” of the king was also transferred to the substi-
tute, unlike in Twain’s story.
Twain’s story is far removed in its understanding of the goal of substitution not
only from the traditions of antiquity but also from a less-ancient European tradi-
tion that had sought to resolve the problem of decay of the king’s natural body by
endowing him with two bodies, a body natural and a body politic. The basic con-
ception, summed up in Ernst Kantorowicz’s pioneering study, was that whereas the
body natural had a soul and was open to decay and death, the body politic was im-
mortal and escaped all trappings of age and nature. Thus the English parliament
that executed the body natural of King Charles I in 1649 could argue that it had
committed no treasonous act, since it had done the deed in the name of the same
king’s body politic.39 Here the logic of substitution saves no particular king and
possesses no magical qualities; it is rather oriented toward timeless legal constancy,
which it can only imagine in embodied terms, and which can find no better host for
it than the king’s eternal body. Hence all kings substitute for each other perpetually,
and the problem of their death is solved—at least from the point of view of their
subjects and the law, if not from theirs.
At a more abstract level, Heidegger argued that death opened up the possi-
bility of substitution of one Dasein by another, or rather, the prospect of their mu-
tual ability to be represented. The point is premised on a vision of death as a trans-
formation of one’s essence into another essence, a vision contemplated when one
cannot yet apprehend that other essence. This impossibility of apprehension, Hei-
degger is quick to note, applies even to sacrifice to a cause exterior to Dasein. Risk-
ing one’s life to save that of another does not save any Dasein from ultimately hav-
ing to take up the question of its own death.40 Heidegger’s potentially useful insight
is lost, as usual, in mystical renditions of the notion of being. He makes no distinc-
tions among diverse negotiations between death and the notion of substitutability.
Such negotiations are diverse precisely to the extent that human relations, in which
they inhere, are hierarchical in nature.
Taking as signposts the times of Gilgamesh, Alexander, and late medieval Eu-
rope, we can identify at least four tropes through which the idea of substitution of-
fered itself as a guide for action by hierarchical systems. In the first trope, there is
what might be called exemplary love substitution. Gilgamesh knows that he will die
not simply because Enkidu dies before him but, at a more fundamental level, be-
cause he loves Enkidu. Here there is simply no other source for conceiving that the
fate of the half savage and that of the two-thirds god could indeed be analogous.
As partners in a voluntary capitulation of the individual boundaries of being, in ef-
fect an enlargement of those boundaries to include two souls, lovers become one
entity which can die only in totality—there is no independent fate after love. Gil-
gamesh himself says as much.41 Love here is nothing other than contamination,
deadly contamination with all that is earthly and, by definition, fatal.
The liaison between the two-thirds god and the uncivilized brute leads to a
compromise, where the two meet each other at the middle level of civilized but vul-
nerable humanity. The brute pays the first portion of the bill for this meeting of two
worlds and succumbs to death, yet still without much clamor or agony. Gilgamesh
proceeds to pay the remaining balance, which for him is everything except the city.
In either case, the bill has to be paid because neither Enkidu nor Gilgamesh could
substitute for the other. The death of Enkidu is not a sacrifice—the idea is not there
yet—and thus it does not annul the need for Gilgamesh to die. To the contrary, it
confirms that Gilgamesh will die as well. Enkidu’s death is no substitute for Gil-
gamesh’s, precisely because Enkidu is Gilgamesh. His fate is exemplary of that of
Gilgamesh not because Gilgamesh sees the death of Enkidu as the property of
Enkidu but as his own. He became too contaminated by attachment to remain god
or, stated otherwise, to remain capable of seeing from a distance. Substitution here
does indeed entail interchangeability of fate, but the circle of interchangeability is
closed. Gilgamesh seeks to flee from it in a night of thick darkness, but he cannot
burst out of the circle.
A second trope opens up this circle a bit, mainly by going one step in the op-
posite direction from love. Here, we see the introduction of what might be called
exemplary evil substitution. The idea here is not to conquer fate but to modify its
course to the extent possible. In other words, there is a retreat at this stage from
Gilgamesh’s impossible project. One of the functions of the Mesopotamian substi-
tute king’s tradition, Bottéro argues, was not to overcome but to transfer evil, not to
deceive the gods but to allow them to fulfill their wishes in a way that would not
harm the king or someone considered noble and superior. An interesting ritual in-
volved substituting a sick man with a goat: the two spend the night together in a
hole dug around the contours of the man to symbolize his death; the throat of the
goat is cut with a metal blade, while that of the man is exposed to the same motion
of a harmless wooden blade. This ritual is then followed by a period of artificial
mourning, similar to that following the slaughter of the substitute king. The king-
Consolations 25
dom mourns the “death” of the king, who had actually left the palace and gone into
hiding for the duration of the omen.42
The logic of substitution here follows explicitly the model of detachment,
even though it is still exemplary in nature. It is still not “sacrifice” in the narrow
sense, where an alternative is offered to the gods or the forces of evil. Fate, rather,
is given exactly what it wants; there is no point in trying to elude it. The goat is the
sick man, the substitute king is the real king, but not in the same sense that Enkidu
is Gilgamesh. All binaries of these unities are still interchangeable, but what is ex-
emplary is not the other in the circle. The exemplary is the process itself; one allows
evil (or fate) its victory, insofar as one is detached enough from the representation of
oneself that fate wants to consume. But at the same time, one is the representation
for the duration of evil.
This, then, is the age of ritual, when one survives by devising symbols designed
to make one periodically forget the vulnerabilities to which one is exposed, pre-
cisely by allowing one to forget who one is. In this case, substitution maintains power
because it forces it to identify with that over which it rules. And power identifies with
that which is below it, only because it wants to kill it, simulating thereby its own
death at the hands of fate, which rules, in turn, over power. Unlike Gilgamesh’s at-
tachment, the logic of substitution here is deadly only to the substitute, from whom
one is free to detach oneself, because in killing it, one has already fulfilled one’s
obligation to die. The ritual ends, life resumes.
The king’s two bodies tradition, which Kantorowicz assigned to late medieval
Europe and which anthropologists have detected elsewhere, introduces a third
variant on the logic of substitution. In ritual emphasis, the substitution here is equal
to the ancient substitute king tradition, but it concerns an exemplary legal substitu-
tion. What is substituted is not evil, which can no longer be allowed to come close
to power. Legal constancy here means that principles last only to the extent that
their guardians last. Therefore, those guardians themselves become eternal for le-
gal purposes, at the same time that they must die like everyone else. Yet their death
is essentially an exemplary substitution of one body natural for another, exemplary
to the extent that they allow the eternal body politic, which they both inhabit and
manifest, to live on.
In Alexander’s case, the ritual introduces a fourth variation on the theme of
substitution, a variation which surrenders the certainty of the ritual to indetermi-
nacy and places it more solidly in the context of material rather than celestial or le-
gal danger. The character of this substitution is fundamentally indicative rather than
exemplary. Its function is not to protect from death or to establish everlasting prin-
ciples but to ask whether one can transcend the existing confines to one’s power.
Thus, it provides a manual perfectly suitable for the age of conquest and empire,
which entirely reorients the role death plays in the thought of governance, as will
be examined in detail in the second chapter.
Between Philosophy and Sovereignty
One would expect that with the discovery of death as a specifically political agony,
one could solve the problem by simply moving away from those schemes of sur-
vival and substitution that are rooted in a political outlook to life. In a limited sense,
I would like to address two significant nonpolitical modalities, namely, the orienta-
tion toward the noncorporeal “life of the mind” and the orientation toward trans-
gressive fulfillment inherent in the notion of the detached, sovereign ego. Only a
broad sketch of the aspects of these orientations most tangential to governance is
possible and relevant here.
Gilgamesh’s consolation by governance for his discovery of death furnishes,
as discussed, the most obvious starting point in the genealogy of governance’s con-
nection to mortality. The philosophical project leads in the opposite direction,
where the discovery of mortality leads one away from governance. This is essen-
tially the story of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, whose discovery of aging, suffering,
and death from which his royal upbringing had shielded him commences his trans-
formation into the Buddha. Knowledge of the unpleasant facts of life here was cen-
sored only in the palace, and thus one only had to step outside of the realm of gov-
ernance to encounter the normativeness of death and decay. But Siddhartha’s
trajectory is the exact opposite of Gilgamesh’s. In Siddhartha’s case, the governor
becomes a philosopher and never returns to his earlier post. His rejection of the il-
lusions of governance lead to a gradual triumph of the divine over the human in
him, whereas for Gilgamesh it is the human that triumphs over the divine, creating
thereby a political animal. In Siddhartha’s case, the political in him dies with the
human—in fact, Siddhartha himself is there no longer at the end; there is only the
Enlightened One.
On the other hand, there is a significant similarity between Gilgamesh and
Siddhartha: both detect the deleterious effects of the world on life in what others ex-
perience. But they see those others from different perspectives. Gilgamesh’s love
for Enkidu makes him identify with him and thereby recognize the unity of their
fate. Siddhartha, by contrast, avoids any such identification, mainly because he ex-
plicitly links suffering to desire. In rejecting attachment, he finds emptiness. In a
more precise fashion, he longs for freeing himself not simply from the likes of
Enkidu or the specter of mortality but from causal relatedness in which the notion
of suffering is inscribed.43
Thus, both Siddhartha and Gilgamesh leave their respective palaces, but only
the latter returns to his and presumably dies in it. Only the latter could not free
himself from love. If we were to assess him from the perspective of the former, the
inability of Gilgamesh to free himself from immediate attachment makes his suf-
fering unavoidable. The implication here, shared by a wide range of philosophies
and spiritual movements other than Buddhism, is that one of the roles of philo-
Consolations 27
sophical activity is precisely to overcome death by means other than power. For the
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosophy is not only interchangeable with po-
litical power but is moreover likely to produce longer-lasting effects: “All the things
of the body, a river; all the things of the spirit, dream and delirium; [one’s] life a war-
fare and a sojourn in a strange land, [one’s] after-fame oblivion. What then can be
[one’s] escort through life? One thing and one thing only, Philosophy.”44
While philosophy here is offered as a worthier substitute for mortal efforts,
Socrates, living before the age of empire, asserts in Phaedo in a famous quotation
that philosophy must be seen rather as a worthy preparation for death: “Those who
apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own ac-
cord preparing themselves for death . . . they have actually been looking forward
to death all their lives.”45 Drawing on Aristotle, Synesius compares philosophical
mysticism, which leads to higher levels of learning and experience in an orderly
and gradual manner, favorably to what he regards as spasmodic oscillations of
Egyptian monks between moments of great exaltation and return to the mundane
earth.46 The point is to transcend earth not only ritually and at festive moments but
more permanently, that is, through a deliberate planning with which no earthly
authority can help, since that authority must by definition attend to the living.
The point of Socrates, also expressed by Epictetus in a different context, was
that “ordinary people” do not realize this death-oriented feature of the proper
philosophical activity. His communicative-educative project, however, presup-
poses a faith in the possibility of overturning the listlessness of those deemed ordi-
nary. For education here presumes that the philosopher lives as a potential in every
citizen, and Socrates wants the philosopher to overcome the ordinary, because in
his orientation toward death, only the philosopher could live properly. Gover-
nance therefore is more deficient than philosophy in preparing otherwise ordinary
people for death, because governance cannot transcend any given reality in the
same manner philosophy could. While Socrates himself makes no such conclusion,
one can say that this is the case especially in a democracy, when governance is com-
pelled to stand for ordinariness and remain close to earth. Philosophy has no such
obligation.
The point is brought out more clearly in lore surrounding the Hebrew Bible,
much of which concerns the trials and tribulations of governance. In one version of
an interesting story that apparently continued to circulate among nomads, who
recognized no governance but were aware of some aspects of embellished biblical
tradition, there is no ambiguity as to who is a more desirable character if one had
to choose—the governor or the philosopher. God, so the tale goes, wanted to es-
tablish governance in the land during the times of David. David, interestingly, was
only God’s second choice; the offer first went to Luqman, an ordinary sage with pe-
culiar nomadic qualities, who in fact had no experience in governing. To the con-
trary, he had been owned as a slave, albeit he was free by the time of the divine offer.
Luqman turned down the offer, clearly because he was wiser than David. David
took it up, then, but faltered in the task, committed sin by virtue of his office, and
was periodically in dire need of divine clemency and rectitude. Meanwhile, Luq-
man continued his nonchalant wanderings, his wisdom increasing in proportion to
his freedom from governance. The only authority he had was over his son. In other
words, his household was not the model for governance as it would be for Aristotle.
Rather, his household was the only field of governance that could coexist with the
requisites of sagacity.47
Luqman’s wisdom is conveyed as a set of instructions to his son—in a manner
similar to the structure of the Book of Proverbs. Much of the teaching is concerned
with death and finitude, and it is flavored with a world-rejecting attitude, a world in
which only wisdom is worth striving for. The non-state-centered lore surrounding
Luqman thus not only sets governance and wisdom clearly as mutually exclusive
routes in life but also asserts that the cultivation of wisdom requires an orientation to-
ward death, ostensibly in opposition to the orientation toward self-magnification,
which deludes one into forgetting the significance of death.
If we were to leap quickly into modern times, where Luqman no longer has
room to wander and where even his authority in his little household has been
usurped by all kinds of educative and nurturing claims of the large systems de-
scribed by Foucault, we find the philosopher with his back to the wall, alone and
haggard, still trying to survive by shrouding his very existence in a maze of secrecy.
Leo Strauss articulated and defended this state of existence, notably in the context
of his famous debate with Alexandre Kojève on philosophy and tyranny. Strauss ar-
gued that the distinction of the philosopher consisted in that he was more self-
sufficient than ordinary people. Unlike them, he stood in little need of love. For the
philosopher is saved from attachment to the world in which he exists by his at-
tachment to the realm of the eternal, which connects him to more fundamental and
meaningful modes of existence.48 The philosopher is different from, indeed supe-
rior to, Xenophon’s tyrant Hiero—the object of the debate—not simply because
he is connected to eternity in a more sure-footed way. Ostensibly because Hiero’s
power entrenches him in temporality, he needs love and yet, because of his power, can-
not verify its authenticity when he receives its expression from his bedmates. The
philosopher is freer because he is free from such bonds and the traumas associated
with them, free from the tiring struggle of mortals precisely because, like Luqman
(who made no claim to superiority), he is oriented toward “eternity”—that is to say,
he prefers, like Flaubert, the company of the dead to that of the living.
While Xenophon’s Hiero illustrates for Strauss that the intricate connections
between power, temporality, and love deprive power of the true and more verifiable
pleasures one would receive from one’s orientation toward eternity, it is difficult to
maintain that the cognitive horizons of power are necessarily always so confined.
Those leaders conscious of their originality and distinctive role in history have also
Consolations 29
rejected both love and the horizons of temporality. If we look at Napoléon, just as
one of the more obvious examples in an infinite line of adventurers, we see repeated
expressions of the need to be free from love—indeed, from all attachments—in or-
der to be able to do great things. But in this case, one can also detect a transforma-
tion. As a young man in 1791, with little hint of the glorious future awaiting him,
Napoléon notes in a rare sentimental moment that love, appearing to a man lost in
a foreign country, makes him feel powerless and immortal. Two years later, however,
there is a swift change of mind. Love, he notes then, is dangerous and confusing,
an imposition on freedom. He rarely wavers from that thought even after his final
downfall. In St. Helena, with little prospect of glory and plenty of time for medi-
tation, Napoléon goes even further, contemplating that being selfish and uncaring
is a lucky fate,49 since it positions one for great and otherwise inconceivable un-
dertakings.
Napoléon here is anything but another Hiero. Even before commencing his
career, he scarcely seeks love; rather, love comes to him. Love’s first seduction lies
in its total disempowerment of the one who accepts it, but the future emperor still
has no problem with that. He knows that this kind of powerlessness is different
from slavery because it is connected to immortality. There are no projects at that point, just
as Gilgamesh had no projects before discovering that the mortality of love serves
as an indication of general mortality. The transformation of Napoléon, which we
shall see more of in the next chapter, adds to Gilgamesh’s project something more
than a simple consolation, more than a demure return to the city. Since Napoléon
was neither god nor (to his expressed chagrin) a modern Alexander, nor (as he points
out explicitly as well) even a petty aristocrat, there was no reserved place in the
world for him to return to, other than the space allotted to the slave mind. Thus,
whereas Gilgamesh only needed to return to the city, Napoléon had to conquer it.
2
Imperium
The Logic of Absolute Prominence
France does not know my position well, and that is why she completely mis-
judges most of my acts. Five or six families are sharing the thrones of Europe,
and they are pained to see a Corsican taking a seat on one of them. I cannot
keep my place except by using force. I cannot accustom them to look upon
me as an equal except by keeping them under my yoke. . . . Among the an-
ciently established sovereigns, war aims never go beyond possession of a
province or a fortress. With me, the stake is always my existence and that of
the whole empire.1
For Napoléon, the equation was clear: glory is pursued not for the sake of superflu-
ous vanity but because it is synonymous with one’s station, which in turn is noth-
ing other than one’s reason for being. His emancipation cannot therefore be
possibly understood in terms of simple equality with the established master. He
knows that it is too late in the history of governance for equality, that equality it-
self is no more than a rhetorical farce. That is, in order to gain recognition, he must
be more accomplished than, rather than even with, the ancient master. For the his-
torical slave, the entire weight of history is stacked against him. The new master
must make up for his lack of authenticity, which his world is accustomed to grant
only in proportion to one’s history of prominence.
Such an equation introduces one of the trajectories of absolute prominence,
which the case of Napoléon clearly typifies.2 This trajectory is prevalent in post-
revolutionary times, when the crumbling of an old order leaves the stage of history
open for a moment. Who will occupy it? Someone who has no fear of death. To be
more precise, someone who has become saturated with death, drenched in blood
and carnage, desensitized to terror. In its very movement, the revolution explores
and reveals the prospect of universalizing exposure to terror. It is a new kind of ter-
ror, a product of the chaos following the declining capacity of the old despotic
order to generate terror in the usual and customary way. The legendary Hegelian
30
Imperium 31
interpreter Alexandre Kojève qualified this point, arguing that Robespierre’s (uni-
versal) terror was a specific feature of a bourgeoisie turned revolutionary. Accord-
ing to this view, the bourgeoisie, being neither master nor slave, must liberate itself
from itself, that is, from its servitude within the horizons of capital.3 Bourgeois self-
realization, therefore, takes not the form of battle (against specific others) but of
generalized terror. The value of terror here is that it introduces to the bourgeois the
element of death. Through that exercise, the bourgeois loses the fear of death and
becomes the master of his destiny.4
But this argument misses the true significance of terror as an essential pre-
requisite for the postrevolutionary trajectory, particularly inasmuch as the self-
understanding of governance is concerned. The terror is a property of a universal-
izing understanding of governance akin to the logic of empire, not that of a specific
social class at a particular point in time. One cannot understand Napoléon by ref-
erences to transformations in the bourgeois ethic of mortality. With Napoléon,
what is lost is not simply the fear of death but something even weightier: the fear
of terror itself. And he provides no shortage of what must be purposeful expressions
of emotional indifference to scenes of worldly horror. In 1799, he expresses little
passion as he describes in a letter to the Directorate how he drowned twelve thou-
sand enemy soldiers. In 1807, he inspects the slaughter after the battle of Eylau,
where he passively looks at thousands of corpses of soldiers and horses congesting
the small field.5 In 1812, as he watches the fires consuming the city of Smolensk, he
quotes a certain Roman emperor, in response to the expressed horror of one of his
officers: “The corpse of an enemy always smells sweet.” Describing the burning of
Moscow, the emperor becomes almost poetic: “Mountains of red rolling flames, like
immense waves of the sea, alternately bursting forth and lifting themselves to skies
of fire, and then sinking into the ocean of flames below. Oh, it was the most grand,
the most sublime, and the most terrifying sight the world ever beheld!”6
Yet for Napoléon, this was not unfocused terror, as Robespierre’s reign ap-
peared in retrospect. For Napoléon, terror is transferred to the outside, where the
identity of the enemy is clearer, where terror is useful because it adds to the world an
empire rather than simply preserves a regime. Here, terror assumes a heroic quality
anew: it is now an element of a battle against orders ready for battle rather than
against defenseless civilians. The entire world is a candidate for terror, but not a ter-
ror of the revolutionary variety. Revolutionary terror, even when confined in pur-
pose to regime preservation against profuse enemies, cannot be understood as orig-
inating anywhere else but in a generalized, irrepressible will to revenge. By contrast,
the terror occasioning Napoléon’s campaigns originates in the drive for recognition.
Thus, the terror is exported elsewhere but is conducted according to old and cus-
tomary rules regarding the proper manner of annihilating an adversary. In this way,
the terror becomes, once more, an aspect of the heroic ethic. The novelty of revo-
lutionary terror gives way to ancient tropes of heroic potential. But revolutionary
novelty remains, in that it confers that potential upon those who could never have
otherwise imagined that they are suitable candidates for heroic elevation.
Napoléon’s recollection of one incident shows clearly the delimitations im-
posed on terror precisely as it was expended elsewhere. Toward the end of his ca-
reer, in 1815, Napoléon recalled a scene from the Italian campaigns of 1796 to 1797,
which had clearly left an indelible impression on him:
We were alone, in the profound solitude of a beautiful moonlit night. Sud-

denly a dog leaped out from under the cloak of a corpse, came running to-
ward us, and almost immediately afterwards ran back to its shelter, howling
piteously. He licked his master’s face, ran back to us, and repeated this sev-
eral times: he was seeking help and revenge at the same time. I don’t know
whether it was the mood of the moment, or the place, or the time, or the ac-
tion in itself, or what—at any rate, it’s a fact that nothing I saw on any other
battlefield ever produced a like impression on me. I stopped involuntarily to
contemplate this spectacle. This man, I said to myself, has friends . . . and here
he lies, abandoned by all except his dog. . . . What a strange thing is man! how
mysterious are the workings of his sensibility! I had commanded in battles
that were to decide the fate of a whole army, and I had felt no emotion. I had
watched the execution of maneuvers that were bound to cost the lives of
many among us, and my eyes had remained dry. And suddenly I was shaken,
turned inside out, by a dog howling in pain!7
Who is the object of Napoléon’s sentiment here: the slain man? The devas-
tated dog? The terminated relation between the two? Distorted nature? His own
murderous self? The scene is complicated, and Napoléon himself does not under-
stand why he could never forget what should have been, in the context of all the
great affairs he had caused, a thoroughly forgettable sight. Yet here he is suddenly
under the sway of that which he cannot control, namely, strange emotions, at the
very moment of his great victory. It is clear that for a person like Napoléon, the fact
that the heroic quest will involve abundant death is clear and readily accepted, and
he says as much quite repeatedly. Thus, his sentiment cannot possibly be directed
at the simple fact of death. True, his actions cause death. But like Martin Luther,
that is his destiny and the very meaning of his existence; here he stands, he can do
no other. What is more profound in this image is what the dog reveals, since it is
only due to the activity of the dog that the corpse in question appears different than
other corpses in the battlefield—that is, as decontextualized expressions of death,
as death itself and no more. And death in itself is not frightening or even a cause for
remorse, especially from the point of view of the heroic ethic. What elicits the re-
morse and the trauma here is the severance of associations, the sense of abandon-
ment by comrades who should have died as well. For the heroic framework, mourn-
Imperium 33
ful death is just this death of associations, not that of persons. What is mournful is
the inability of the living to die properly. Here, death-as-abandonment is revealed
through something that must be outside of the heroic equation altogether, namely,
the surviving dog, who does not abandon the dead master.
The dog’s continuing fellowship reveals, furthermore, the real tragedy of the
master, which could not have escaped Napoléon. On the great battlefield, where
the heroic ethic is the only ethic and where death fires the engine of history, only
the dog exists outside of the heroic ethic and historical logic. And in being so, it re-
veals the failures of both. In his moment of triumph, Napoléon sees the degrada-
tion of all that which had been noble and thus sees the temporal insignificance of
his own effort. What he sees here is the master’s real tragedy, which is that in the
final analysis, he is recognized most faithfully by a dog. His death here reveals this
to have been the case throughout life. For Hegel, it will be recalled, a recognition
of this sort is ultimately tragic for the master, because it originates in a dependent
rather than equivalent and thus worthy consciousness.8 Throughout antiquity, this
equation is explicit. Marcus Aurelius, in spite of the overwhelming presence of
death in his Meditations, regards the ethic of noble recognition to be the one element
that distinguishes life from nonbeing: “We are born for fellowship; or is it not plain
that the inferior creatures are in the interests of the superior, the superior of one
another?”9
As is clear here, the notion of fellowship entails not indiscriminate universal-
ity but the equality and mutual dependency of those who can consider themselves
superior. In Hegelian terms, this superiority is the stuff of the independent, for-
itself consciousness which defines mastery. In the empire, mastery is no longer a
product of a tradition of confined citizenship as it is in the polis, but of imperial life
itself. That is, it is a product of the logic of expansion which opens up new and hith-
erto uncontemplated venues for, and types of, prominence. The logic of promi-
nence set in motion by imperial projects is never restricted to the emperor as such.
Rather, the drive toward superiority defines the will of the citizens on whose behalf
the empire rules, displays itself, and expands in the world. The seepage of this logic
from imperial display to social strata with claims to nobility redefines life itself.
One of the most thorough products of this reorientation is evident in the system-
atization of the genre of biography in Plutarch’s Lives project, which is explicitly
comparative in method.
In the case of Plutarch, the ethic of noble recognition generates guidelines for
the comparability of noble lives. Plutarch himself does not notice the originality of
such a project, for it seems to emanate from already established habits among the
nobles of the empire, who are already spending all their time comparing themselves
to one another. At one point, he notes that a citizen would not be satisfied to have
attained a certain power and fame among people in his district and would immedi-
ately begin to complain about not being part of the senatorial nobility. Once he is
a senator, he begins coveting a praetor’s office. As soon as he has that office, he be-
gins to feel inferior, for he is not yet a consul. The moment he reaches that new
height, he is despondent, because he is not the first to occupy that office but is oc-
cupying it only as a follower of someone else.10
This perpetually dissatisfied drive for prominence parallels the very activity of
the empire itself. Since the empire considers itself to be the world, it is therefore—
unlike the city-state or the enclave—unlimited and beyond parochial imagination.
The logic of tragedy is thus built into this effort at transcendence. When after ar-
duous labor one reaches the summit of the hierarchy of possible offices, one can
only see someone else’s flag having been planted there long before one’s own ar-
rival. The imperial logic of absolute prominence mandates thus that one reaches
beyond the simple occupation of an office, that one does something original, which
will place one above forerunners. Otherwise, history will forget one, and one’s whole
great existence will be passed over in silence.
The Rule over Death
The tragedy of the imperial gaze is that the view from the summit reveals more
clearly than it would from any other location the utter futility of the quest for im-
mortality. In fact, the empire is even more exposed to death than the little patri-
mony of Gilgamesh or the Greek city-state. For Gilgamesh, death is discovered only
outside city gates, in the serene howl of the great barbarian world in which the city
stands like an uncertain and exceptional accomplishment. The empire, by contrast,
rules over death. Since the empire is the world rather than an exception in it like the polis,
death is ubiquitous within the empire; it presides over plagues, executions, famines,
and the mass death of its triumphs. For the empire, death is thus far more present
than it is for the polis, where the political role of death was limited and often con-
fined to legitimating authority.11
In antiquity this reorganization of imperial life around death was most elabo-
rately expressed in Egypt, when the remarkable but brief “age of the pyramids” de-
fined the Fourth Dynasty, the first dynasty to be confident of its centralized hold
on power over the whole land. Most people are struck at the colossal scale and pre-
cision of those edifices built nearly five millennia ago; the great pyramid in Giza
alone contains more than six million tons of stone, cut into gigantic slabs of several
tons, each fitted within one-fiftieth of an inch. The staggering amount and preci-
sion of labor expended upon those immortal tombs is still obvious today. Yet what
is less so is why the age of the pyramids was so brief, that is, why the pyramids were
not replicated even as they set the stage for two millennia of civilization following
them. Explanations citing “practicality” can be challenged, and John A. Wilson
shows that “practicality” and “glory,” or symbolic and material uses, were not dis-
Imperium 35
tinguished so clearly from each other for the ancient Egyptians. He suggests rather
that the age of the pyramids fulfilled its purpose and did not need to be continued
once it accomplished what it set out to do, which was to ritually organize society.
Following that accomplishment, little was needed for centuries other than reiterat-
ing an already codified and organized culture.12
The organization of labor which the pyramids presupposed thus helped or-
ganize still precarious central power.13 Building cultural unity around empire re-
quired collective energy to be expended on a common project—yet the common
project had to be aimed at death. Empire first unites its domain on the basis of pro-
viding for life—common irrigation schemes, security, and so on. But then it dis-
covers that unity can be consolidated only when the common orientation toward
life is supplemented by an equally common orientation toward death. Both proj-
ects, then, it supervises.
From the imperial point of view, however, this duality affirms only the su-
premacy of death, not its equality with life. Everlasting death, whose magnificent
monuments cast their perennial shadows upon the country, accepts no equality with
fleeting life. By the time of Marcus Aurelius, the record is clear: “What a fraction of
infinite and gaping time has been assigned to every man; for very swiftly it vanishes
in the eternal; and what a fraction of the whole of matter, and what a fraction of the
whole of the life Spirit.”14 From the emperor’s vantage point, death is the clear vic-
tor in the final analysis. And he knows it because the imperial gaze reveals the in-
significance of glory more than can a gaze from below, for those below can see only
the blinding glitter of glory, while the emperor, looking at that in the world which
can most assuredly triumph over glory, sees death. It is the very logic of the empire
that had provided him with this lifelong propensity to look above, a propensity de-
scribed in Plutarch’s remarks on the dynamics of prominence in the empire.
Thus, it is exactly the empire’s accomplishments that disclose its ultimate fail-
ure in the face of death; now it both entertains death abundantly within its bosom
and, due to its cultivated propensity to guard against threats, develops an even
more acute dread of death than would have ever been the case without its con-
quests. As the empire contemplates this scene, the most unwelcome facet of death
infects it from within, adding to its saturation with its reality. It becomes the stage
for a host of apocalyptic religions prophesying the end of the world, pointing out
the futility of prominence, the pointlessness of vanity, and the virtue of orienting
one’s life toward death. This ethic is propounded from within the empire by those
it had vanquished, by its subalterns, who had already experienced apocalypse in
their own defeat and who take revenge against the empire by generalizing their de-
feat. The apocalyptic vision transforms one’s own defeat from a particular and in-
cidental affair into an omnipresent fate.15 Thereby, one’s own downfall assumes a
universal signification. And the empire itself, as we know all too well, comes to ac-
cept that signification.
But the empire had other alternatives at its disposal than simply surrendering
to slave morality’s infatuation with death-as-redemption. All its options, however,
move death to the center of its collective life rather than exile it into its periphery.
First, empire invited death into the very process of life in the hope that death,
which lived at its heart and haunted it everywhere it looked, might be assuaged by
symbolic reiteration. From the very inception of Egyptian civilization, we have
records of a royal sed festival, in which the pharaoh, before the thirtieth year of his
reign, is symbolically “buried” in the form of a statue and replaced by a theoretically
revivified, youthful version of himself. The idea was to recharge the pharaoh’s life
energy, depleted after so many years of governance. After thirty years of reign,
however, he was closer to death anyway, and thus the sed festival was thereafter
repeated at shorter intervals three or four years apart. Some pharaohs such as
Tutankhamen were rhetorically wished hundreds of thousands of sed festivals upon
ascending the throne, thus being reminded that the more glorious one is, the more
frequently he is expected to die.16
But no recorded empire moved further in the direction of inviting death into
the fundaments of its ritual life than that of the Aztecs. The famous traditional war
of flowers, which began to be practiced around the middle of the fifteenth century,
was no longer oriented at conquest but at sacrifice.17 This ritual war, where subject
tribes arranged symbolic wars with each other in order to capture sacrifice victims,
grew out of the fact that the earlier conquest-oriented wars had accomplished their
goal—there was no one left to conquer. Since sacrificial victims had been recruited
in those wars, the completeness of conquest and emergence of empire led to a sig-
nificant decrease in the number of sacrifice victims being offered, the gods in turn
seemingly becoming hungry and subsequently causing terrible famines which rav-
aged the empire. The logic seemed inescapable: life required death before it could
be. The sun itself was born of blood, and nothing other than sacrifice accounts for
its emergence from the jaws of dark void. Nonbeing preceded being, and nothing-
ness must receive an offering before it can allow things to experiment with being.
Life comes at a price, and death, which owns life, will take it back if the price is not
paid in perpetual installments.
The Aztecs, like other Mesoamericans, came upon that conceptualization of
existence before they emerged as an empire.18 But it was empire which tremen-
dously advanced the cause of death for them, precisely because empire itself—much
more so than the hunt, the harvest, or commerce—accentuated the role of an al-
ready existent propensity of the logic of sacrifice to be central to life. The willing-
ness of the Aztecs to follow through on that logic with daring precision, namely, by
venerating death without valorizing violence, is absolutely striking. Jacques Soustelle cap-
tures the idea well when he observes that “the Aztecs were unmoved by the scenes
of their blood-soaked temples, but they were horror-struck by the tortures that the
Spaniards brought with them from the land of the Inquisition.”19 And Tzvetan
Imperium 37
Todorov furthers the analogy by comparing sacrifice societies and massacre soci-
eties. The former are said to highlight the visibility of the sacrifice ritual and the
nobility of the victim, while the latter release a similar impulse without visibility—
the massacre is committed in faraway or peripheral regions, and its victims are ac-
tively despised by the perpetrators.20 What Todorov does not explore, however,
is how both are products of imperial logic, sacrifice being the property of an al-
ready established empire contemplating how to perpetuate in peace the services of
death to civilization, and massacre being the property of a less-developed, still-
expanding empire—that is, still more in need of actual than symbolic conquest.
Retreat from the Ideal
Only established empires concern us here because only when empire finally comes
to rest upon safe foundations does it begin to contemplate how to rule over the
massive death which now lives under its jurisdiction and yet defies its mastery. If
one solution is to move death to the center of imperial life, another is to retreat one
step from the concept of perfect mastery so that the blemishes upon the marble sur-
face of the empire’s self-portraiture, which remind of the coming demise of all
things noble, themselves become the source of sage, melancholic contemplation.
Marcus Aurelius articulates this transition clearly; the eye, by a certain plan of na-
ture, sees beauty in failures: the cracks in bread, the gapes in mature figs, the decay
in ripe olives, the bend in ears of corn, the wrinkles in the lion’s brow, the foam flow-
ing from the boar’s mouth.21 All these appearances contradict the classical sense of
the ideal as lodged in perfection. The deficient appearances in nature, however, are
attractive not inasmuch as they remind one of the gutter but insofar as they are dis-
played just one step away from perfection. In other words, they display themselves
as finished projects (like empire), but then they subtract from that project one
error, an error that must be visible to the eye. Through attraction, love, appetite, or
example, the eye then constructs a bridge of affinities between the two mortal
spheres: object and self.
The discovery that beauty resides just one step short of perfection correlates
thus with the discovery that perfection itself, which empire almost reaches when it
becomes an empire, requires absolute immobility: there are no more projects to un-
dertake after perfection. In other words, perfection is the image of death. It is diffi-
cult to see how such a notion could have emerged without world-scale imperial
conquests, that is, without the vantage point from the summit of the world from
which the empire finally glimpses the equation of perfection and death. The
struggle for offices described by Plutarch and the perpetual feeling of inadequacy
on the part of the nobles are essentially manifestations of this same logic. When an
absolute ceiling on prominence is revealed to the eye, as it invariably would be in
the practical world, the nobles begin to contemplate the virtuous nature of slight
imperfections. Those with sufficient foresight reject perfection altogether—in-
deed, they dread it—since they identify it with death. They come to forsake per-
fection altogether to the realm of death: only the Christian God, the lord of death
and apocalypse, is perfect.
The prominent historian of Roman hierarchy Géza Alföldy does indeed iden-
tify the decline of references to absolute individual prominence with the rise of
Christianity, which assigned that role to God, the redeemer, who thereby ended
earthly struggles for the status of the “first.”22 The more general philosophical ar-
gument of Hegel equates Christianity with such ideologies as Skepticism and Sto-
icism, all being products of the age of the slavery, an age dominated by the slave’s
fear of death. For Hegel, Christianity’s innovation is restricted to the replacement
of the earthly master by a divine one, who then allows slavery to become univer-
sal, since earthly masters are subject to him and not to each other’s recognition. The
struggle of the mortals for absolute prominence ends. Life becomes a long prepa-
ration for death, thus informing the trope to be examined in the third chapter of
this volume.
One has to be careful about similarities and differences in the structure of im-
perial perspectives, however. What empires share is a certain notion that the world
is or should be synonymous with them. Beyond that foundational notion, diversi-
ties in general outlooks abound. The very first point of perspectivist divergence has
to do the nature of that we call “world.” The Middle Kingdom, for example, dis-
played a remarkably different notion of the world than did the Roman Empire. The
Confucian perspective, in sharp contrast to the “slave ideologies,” emphasized the
notion of perfection, and indeed linked it to death as one would expect, but drew
a thoroughly different conclusion from the one Rome had to contend with. The
fundamental difference between these two imperial worlds insofar as the notion of
perfectibility was concerned was neither in the divine cult of the emperor nor alle-
gorized in the hierarchical structure of offices and the ensuing competition for
them. Rather, the key difference lay in the assignment of perfection to different time
dimensions. For the Stoics and especially for the Christians, it was to be in the future;
for the Confucians, it was already in the past.
Both dimensions, of course, are but different houses of death. The competi-
tion for prominence among the aristocracy unleashed in Rome paralleled its ex-
pansion and was thus inscribed in future-oriented projects, when the outcome was
not uniformly certain. In the Confucian world, by contrast, the competition for
prominence paralleled a preservationist, conservative effort, where the task was to
safeguard an already accomplished harmony. Ultimate virtue here had already hap-
pened, and all that was left for the monarch was to read history, seeking desperately
to derive virtue from the unmatchable example of the ancestors, that is, those who
had already demonstrated their virtue by founding the empire. The death of em-
Imperium 39
perors was central to the empire’s system of political ethics, since it provided a con-
tinuous supply of uncriticizable virtue. As one historian argues, only in death did
emperors transform from “fallible rulers into deified ancestors.”23 One of the most
important of the death ceremonies surrounding the Chinese emperor regarded the
assignment of his posthumous name, which further removed him from the minu-
tiae of his own reign and coupled his ancestral status with an almost celestial level
of inspiration and distance. Further, the death of the Chinese emperor provided
successors with an opportunity to demonstrate the legitimacy of their claim to gov-
ernance, through adhering to and then exceeding lengthy and elaborately struc-
tured rites of mourning.24
In the Confucian-influenced world, then, virtue as a sign of the right to govern
meant that otherwise imperfect rulers should spell out their status as successors to a
deified past. When the Yi house came to power in Korea in 1392, for example, it had
no better claim to legitimacy than the virtue of its ancestors.25 When the medieval
Japanese political philosopher Kitabatake Chikafusa defended the legitimacy of
the royal family, he again found no better argument than pointing out its unparal-
leled historical continuity 26 (rather than, say, its accomplishments). Yet this system,
too, is perennially exposed to the perils of imperfection and is forced to acknowl-
edge them, but not as examples of beauty, as Marcus Aurelius would. Here, imper-
fection lies in the structure of the time dimension, whereby the son is by definition
less virtuous than the father and can only seek to pay homage to that superior virtue
through filial piety. Yongjo, the legendary Yi monarch whose dismay at his son and
heir apparent led to the tragedy of the latter, had to repeatedly test the filial piety of
the son, whose gradual descent into madness directly corresponded to his perpetual
failure to meet the impossible standards of the past. In one instructive episode,
Yongjo reads his son a poem on the meaning of filial piety and awaits his son’s tears
as proof of his understanding of the meaning of his very existence:
Thick grows that tarragon.

It is not tarragon; it is only wormwood.
Alas for my father and mother,
Alas for all their trouble in bringing me up!
Thick grows that tarragon.
It is not tarragon; it is mugwort.
Alas for my father and mother,
Alas for all their toil in bringing me up!
“That the cup should be empty
Is a humiliation to the jar . . .”27
Imperfection here lies in the son, that is, in that which grows but fails to be-
come what the grower expects. The deviation from the expected is itself expected,
for the model of the ancestors is what one strives to emulate but to which one can
only be inferior. The problem here is in the degree of deviation; just as in the case of
later Rome, one is allowed—indeed, encouraged—to be just one step away from
perfection: the cup, into which the contents of the jar are poured, should become
full, and only in becoming full does it dutifully acknowledge the fundamental fact
of existence, namely, that jar and cup belong together, that they have no self-
enclosed meanings unto their own, that one is the source and the other the recip-
ient, that the jar’s dignity requires the cup to remain full. But the perpetual fact
of this equation is that the cup is never likely to replace the jar. This is the degree of
imperfection allowed.
Calamitous existence thus consists not in imperfection but in the emptiness of
the cup, since its emptiness confirms the absolute death of the jar. In the Confucian
world, this notion of one’s imperfection, deeply lodged in a conception of absolute
virtue attainable only in the past, becomes a guide for an ethic of duty toward the
past. In the Christian world, however, the deep past is where the story of imper-
fection itself begins, with original sin. This constitutive sin only confirms the im-
possibility of absolute worldly virtue—worldly existence itself being a state of fall,
existence outside of the Garden. Virtue, then, becomes a property of another world
toward which one gravitates in one’s movement toward death and return to God in
the future, and one’s perspective turns away from the death of the past.
From the Prosaic to the Brittle
The transformation of any polity into an empire is fundamentally a transformation

away from prosaic forms of governance into more regimented, solid, and ultimately
brittle structures. The basic principle here is simple: that which rises highest falls
down furthest. To this can be added another subsidiary but no less significant prin-
ciple: that which is vainglorious suffers degradation more traumatically than that
which discloses its perishable nature. Vanity is brittle because the slightest degra-
dation means its death. The prosaic, by contrast, is more flexible. Its mode of op-
eration is evident in Aristotle’s Politics, the textbook of the polis. In Politics, the best
system is described only partially in terms of procedures and structures, more foun-
dationally in terms of virtue. Virtue, for Aristotle, inheres in active human agents
and could manifest itself through a variety of structures and governance proce-
dures, from kingship to aristocracy to constitutional republic; virtue in the polis
was thus independent rather than an outgrowth of a particular structure or proce-
dure. In other words, it is linked more to behavior than to position, and the law is
prosaic precisely because it derives legitimacy from the worthiness of its issuer.
Imperial life changes that equation, as we see only shortly after Aristotle with
Alexander.28 The problem of vanity, which imperial life aggrandizes beyond mea-
Imperium 41
sure, makes death synonymous with any decline in stature. It is not coincidental that
with empire there is a marked decline in the genre of tragedy, which occasions pro-
saic political life and expresses the incidentalness and everyday rootedness of pro-
cesses of decline and error. In imperial cultures, by contrast, there is an increased dis-
sociation between heroism and tragedy. The imperial hero is too brittle to endure
diminution. In our times, one need only consider the unassailability and perfection
of the hero in many popular Hollywood films.29 Here, the intimate connectedness
of brittle and hard images of heroism corresponds to an age of modern empire.
To clarify the point, let us consider one example of a historical move into
brittleness associated with the appearance of empire on the scene. The career of
Alexander offers itself readily as a good case, since one can see clearly the transfor-
mation in his own self. While Alexander died before having fully articulated the im-
perial structure, his consciousness of the ideological requisites of the imperial proj-
ect is discernible.30 The story begins, as would become typical for successors and
Roman emperors alike, with an orientation toward the future. According to Plu-
tarch, Alexander’s birth completed for his father a sequence of three good omens:
Philip’s own victory in Potidea, Parmenion’s victory against the Illyrians, and the vic-
tory of Philip’s horse at the Olympic Games race.31 According to this tale, Alexan-
der’s brilliant future was indicated to the father on his birthday by the diviners,
whose prophecy was based on such an extraordinary coincidence of good fortunes.
The sequence of successes, though, does not seem arbitrary. It begins with the
father’s own triumph and leads to that of his general and then to that of his horse.
Everything the empire builder is in control of seems to be winning its particular
battle with destiny. Their collective march can be saved only by consolidation, that
is, by a move across temporal rather than simply spatial horizons. And here we en-
ter the realm of prophecy proper, the realm of the future. Alexander had just been
born, and thus his addition to a list of achievements against tangible enemies indi-
cates the genesis of imperial thinking: that which is won in space must be consoli-
dated across time. At that early point, of course, Alexander’s birth still signified
Philip’s own rather than an empire’s future; what we have is not yet the genesis of
empire, only of imperial thought.
Alexander’s own sense of imperial self was of course far from predetermined.
Three successive tales illustrate the transformations. Early in his career, having won
the allegiance of all of Greece, Alexander could still encounter a prosaic tradition
which was yet to offer him the respect he would extract by force at a later point.
The theme is evident in his famous encounter with the philosopher Diogenes, who
had singularly refrained from congratulating Alexander. Alexander himself, so the
story goes, had to fetch the philosopher, who was lying in the sun near his home.
Diogenes barely recognized the presence of Alexander or that of his entourage,
and when the latter asked him whether he needed anything, Diogenes simply re-
sponded that he would like Alexander to stand between him and the sun. Everyone
in Alexander’s company was puzzled or bemused, but only the great conqueror-
to-be derived the lesson: he would choose to be Diogenes, he told his companions,
had he not already been Alexander.32
A second story relates to a later point, after initial but incomplete victories
against the Persians. Alexander’s army was traveling in a barren terrain, with every-
one choking with thirst and no water in sight. Suddenly, some underlings showed
up with a few filled waterskins and offered the leader a helmetful, which he had to
reject, as he saw all his thirsty soldiers eyeing that same helmet. According to the
story, that sacrificial gesture elicited a great determination on the part of the sol-
diers to go on, “for whilst they had such a king they said they defied both weariness
and thirst, and looked upon themselves to be little less than immortal.”33 With that
kind of force behind him, the conqueror completes his mission.
The third story shows Alexander’s final transformation, when nothing known
was left to conquer and when he began to entertain the prospect of his own divin-
ity. One of the most vociferous challenges to such an extravagant claim came not
from subjected peoples but from within his own camp, notably from those close
enough to him to appreciate the scale of the fabrication. At that point, Alexander
was less tolerant of dissent and challenge, and Diogenes was certainly fortunate not
to have been around him then. Neither was he in the mood to entertain the affin-
ity of his fate to that of his underlings, as he reportedly did when he was traveling
inhospitable terrains in his pursuit of Darius. The story here relates his killing of
Clitus, who had challenged the conqueror’s increasing vanity and claim to divinity,
and was scandalized by the underlying necessity for Alexander to disown his own
father in the process. In this story, Alexander reportedly regretted killing Clitus in
his rage at being opposed when he was at the summit of the world, only to be com-
forted by the words of the elitist philosopher Anaxarchus, who exhorted him to re-
member “that all the actions of a conqueror are lawful and just.”34
The mode of transmutation from the prosaic to the brittle is clearly spelled out
in these three tales within one great career. In the early story of Diogenes, the ruler
reveals a secret wish to be a philosopher instead, as David is said to have envied
Luqman’s wisdom, whose cultivation required freedom from ruling. Diogenes here
is the only Greek to remain free of any obligation toward Alexander, the only
Greek, indeed, who is actively sought out by the young leader. Alexander’s very ex-
pression of the wish to be Diogenes may mean that it is too late for transformation,
that Alexander knows that he could only be Alexander, just as David had no choice
but to be David. But at that point, the thought of transformation is underwritten by
the indeterminacy of one’s fate: the interchangeability of lives points to an element
of uncertainty in one’s mission, perhaps even a lack of a sense of mission altogether.
Diogenes was enviable since, as Luqman appeared to David, he was more solid than
the sovereign ruler and, consequently, evidenced immortality in a way that the sov-
Imperium 43
ereign ruler did not. Ultimately, that is how the philosophical appears immortal
when the political seems transient, prosaic, and fundamentally mortal in nature.
When the battle begins, Diogenes stays behind in his carefree solitude. In the
vast expanses of western Asia, he fades into oblivion, replaced from view by
Alexander’s discernment of the abundant and necessary nature of death. Any no-
tion of immortality here is bound to arise out of behaviors that are the exact oppo-
site of Diogenes’: constant mobility, ceaseless action, relentless pursuit of adversity.
The sense of mission is intertwined with the prospect of death in a quest that had
begun under the cloud of uncertainty. When Alexander rejects the drink in the
drought-stricken land, his view of existence is still clouded with a notion of inter-
changeability of lives. However, the other lives here are not those of the likes of
Diogenes but those of his soldiers. If they have to die, he might die just as well;
when the soldiers realize that idea, they express their lack of fear of death. The eu-
phoric sense of collective immortality following the scene inculcates a more solid
notion of mission. Collectively they are immortal precisely because collectively
they can perish without a trace. Sense of immortality arises out of this total inter-
changeability of fate, so that not a single subject within the mission has to con-
template his own fate in separation from others. Besides, in the silent desert, where
death stares at them from all directions, there is nothing else to remind them of any
alternative projects.
This certainty provides them with an alternative sense of immortality to that
provided in the practice of philosophy. Here, they are immortal for no reason other
than that they can die in a fundamentally different fashion than other mortals.
Death is not the other nor a property of others; death is within them as a collec-
tive, they all die, in equal exchange of each other. There is no longer an opposition
between the realms of mortality and immortality, for two overlapping reasons, one
ancient, the other new. First, mortality is a nonevent, as it had been for Enkidu,35
who incidentally had died in the same landscape where Alexander and his army
were about to perish of thirst, hunger, and fatigue. The whole expedition is exposed
to all perils, outside of all gates of civilization, and could withstand the looming
specter of natural finitude only if it loses sight of death altogether. But then, sec-
ond, Alexander is not Enkidu, and the empire that rears its head in the distance as
the ultimate possibility of the expedition introduces novel thoughts about the mat-
ter of death, for the price of empire is ubiquitous death—more specifically, ubiqui-
tous death that is controlled by the conqueror. As mentioned earlier, one of the most
fundamental features of the transition into an empire is that death is moved inside
of it; death is housed within the empire rather than in the great uncivilized world
outside the gates. Like those of the netherworld, the gates of the empire open to
accept all newcomers but in principle are not designed to allow anyone to leave. In
this sense, the empire has the same existential structure as the house of death.
Of course, Alexander is not there yet, but he is on the way. His right to kill
Clitus is the first indication that he has arrived at empire. That right over life is an
extension of the right of conquest, as Anaxarchus makes clear to Alexander, and in
this sense it is a novel development. That killing at will is now a right exemplifies a
crucial element attendant to the genesis of imperial thinking. Underlying this kind
of right is a removal of any notion of interchangeability of fates; here, Alexander
could be neither Diogenes nor even the collective expression of soldiers and un-
derlings but a unique, original, and resolutely self-referential expression of tran-
scendence. His demonstrated power over the life and death of others has been
translated into a unique right, which flows directly from that power, rather than
from any traditional or customary law exogenous to or preceding him. He stands
above in solitude, there is nothing comparable to him; like Marquez’s patriarch of
later days, he looks at the dim world from his elevated window, only to realize that
he alone is the nation,36 that there is no nation, no peoplehood, no order, no civi-
lization that is not an expression of his exceptional will.
That this transcendental and lonely occupation is termed “brittle” stems from
the necessity of constant vigilance to ward off constant threat, real or imagined.
That Alexander must kill Clitus whereas earlier he could not kill Diogenes, even
though both had belittled him in equal measures, testifies to this transformation
into brittle orders. For a commentator like Kojève, Alexander’s ascendance repre-
sents a process that universalizes that which is particular. The empire, according to
this interpretation, becomes a universal extension of the particularity of the house-
hold, as Alexander “tends to transform the [pagan] State into his private property,
into a family patrimony, and to make the citizens of the State into his own subjects.”37
While this formulation may account in part for why the power over the life and
death of subordinates becomes a right extended from the model of the household,
it misses the true originality of the brittle structure. For such a structure is not an ex-
trapolation of the model of the household into that of empire but rather the regression
unto empire of the model of cosmic arbitrariness.
This regression operates in the following fashion. The brittle structure as-
sumes an element of bad faith, one feature which distinguishes it most from the pro-
saic. The emperor knows that he is not God and that the extensive form of gover-
nance he had brought about requires perpetual ceremonials of confirmation on a
grand scale. Plutarch asserts that Alexander did not think of himself as God, “but
merely used his claim to divinity as a means of maintaining among other people the
sense of his superiority.”38 But even before making that remarkable claim, Alexan-
der already has its seeds planted deep in the continuum of bad-faith acts which
accumulate until they lay the foundations of empire. At first, one of his initial vic-
tories results in Darius’s wife falling prisoner to him, but then she dies in captivity.
Alexander, we are told, deeply regretted her death for an interesting reason, namely,
because it deprived him of an opportunity to show his clemency by eventually re-
Imperium 45
leasing her.39 At that point, the game was still relatively simple, but it is a conscious
game nonetheless: the conqueror’s power over death can also be demonstrated by
his capacity to grant life. The death of those to whom he wanted to grant life is as
disempowering to him as the life of those whom he wanted to kill. In either case,
particular lives and deaths have no intrinsic meanings for the conqueror on the
march; they must be calculated aspects of a deliberate game of displays.
Thus, universalism and the divine claim mark only the last steps of bad faith,
the final additions to innumerable earlier such steps along the way to empire. It was
that accomplishment of Alexander that later empire builders were to look at with
awe and envy, as Napoléon expressed on the day following his own coronation in
1804: “I come too late, nothing great remains to be done. . . . Yes, I admit that I have
had a fine career, I have gone far. But what a difference with antiquity! Look at
Alexander: when he had conquered Asia and presented himself to the nations as the
son of Jupiter, the whole Orient believed him, except for Olympias, who knew bet-
ter, and except for Aristotle and a few Athenian pedants. Well, if I declared myself
the son of the Eternal Father, if I announced that I would give my thanks to Him in
that capacity, every fishwife would hoot when she saw me pass by. The masses are
too enlightened these days: nothing great can be done any more.”40
Napoléon’s expression of regret at not being able to reach Alexander-like
heights was to remain with him after his downfall. In 1818, Alexander was still his
ultimate model, exactly because of his spiritually opportunistic political method
and art of self-display, rather than the details of his campaigns. Napoléon’s com-
parisons between Alexander’s career and his own are usually explicit. Not only does
Napoléon approve of Alexander’s slaughter of those Greeks who had opposed him
for abandoning Greek customs, but he approves of his model of conquest by spiri-
tual flexibility rather than simple force. Had he himself stayed in the East, Napoléon
says, he would have done deeds similar to those of Alexander and founded an
empire by going to Mecca as a devout pilgrim rather than as a conqueror.41 Early in
his career, probably in Egypt, Napoléon explains this doctrine clearly: “By making
myself Catholic I brought the war in the Vendée to an end. By becoming a Moslem
I established myself in Egypt. By acting ultramontane I won the minds of the Ital-
ians. If I governed a nation of Jews, I should restore the temple of Solomon. Thus I
shall talk freedom in the free parts of Santo Domingo; I shall confirm slavery in
[Mauritius].”42
We owe Napoléon a great deal of gratitude for his extraordinary candor,
rarely shared by other empire builders. For him, the only unambiguous fact is that
empire is essentially a game of illusions. The problem, of course, is that the Age of
Enlightenment has made such a game more difficult to pursue than it had been at
any time since Alexander. After Napoléon, this difficulty was solved by a twin op-
eration. It entailed the creation of more-complicated games of illusion in mass
democracies and the enhancement of the sheer physical force at the disposal of sys-
tems of governance, which had reason to suspect that because of enlightenment,

systems of conscious illusion might not be sufficiently reliable. It is such difficulties
that are already evident in Napoléon’s complaint that things were much easier for
Alexander than for modern empire builders. He thus continually remembered his
time in the East as the most beautiful time of his life, precisely because “I found my-
self freed from the obstacles of an irksome civilization. . . . I [dreamed of] founding
a religion, marching into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my
hand the new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs. In my undertak-
ings I would have combined the experiences of the two worlds, exploiting for my
profit the theater of all history . . . [and renewed] contact with the old Europe.”43
In this sense, empire in modern times required a particular kind of populace.
Hence the charm of “the Orient,” which Alexander had already subjugated with his
own charm, where one could still play less-brittle games than would be required
within the “irksome civilization” of Europe. Yet the empire must adjust to enlight-
enment. Extravagant and abstract governance here must either devise ingenious
tricks in order to marginalize enlightened minds or wage an outright war on them,
just as Alexander did when he killed Clitus and Parmenion, the enlightened Greeks
who raged against his newly acquired claims and novelties. The dream of Napoléon
is essentially to keep for the empire a certain prosaic element, where he could rule
without force or opposition, where the spirit of the peoples finds its embodiment
in him, naturally and effortlessly. History, however, was only intermittently kind
enough to empires to provide them with such prosaic latitude.
3
Preparations
Destiny—The Uncanny Death
Napoléon’s spiritual opportunism, just like Alexander’s, typifies foundational mo-

ments of novel systems, when all resources at one’s disposal must be brought forth
to bear on the great and original task. Opportunism here is an unavoidable prop-
erty of greatness, since the kind of greatness that is associated with originality
stands above existent bounds, structures, and ethos. But how does one know that
one can afford such a level of transcendence of ordinary codes, roles, and obliga-
tions? Napoléon’s own answer is that the circumstances make the great man know
that he is born for the great task. The “guardian angel” of the nation, whom the
nation yearns for in times of crisis, is immanent in the nation. It harbors him in its
bosom. But does the nation know who he is? It does, the great conqueror implies,
when he knows who he is.1 One’s cognizance of one’s destiny is obviously only one
side of a dialectical equation, and this indispensable cognizance seems primary to
the other side, which Napoléon identifies as the “circumstances.” Napoléon reflects
that the success of such historical figures as Muhammad or Jesus cannot be ex-
plained simply in terms of their personalities, idiosyncrasies, or strength of con-
victions. Rather, their success had much to do with the readiness of their contem-
poraries to listen to new doctrines of divinity.
Destiny thus is a product of a dialectic between the subject and the object, or
between the innate nature of the “great man” and the exterior nature of the world
that invites him to exert his latent potential. Neither by itself is sufficient. The tragic
in the world rears its head when the grave circumstance is handled by mediocre
personalities who were not intended for it, or when the great man is shut out of
capacity to act upon the historical circumstance crying out for him. This problem
arises from too much adherence to procedural formalities, which are usually pat-
terned after the needs of a bygone era but which are ill equipped to deal with novel
great circumstances that, by definition, could not have been accounted for when
the existent structures were created. In Politics, Aristotle already implied that it is for
such reasons that structures had to give way on occasion to exceptional personali-
47
ties; the procedural virtues of the constitutional polis should not preclude being in-
terrupted by the virtue of a superior monarch, when such a person happens to be
on hand.
The dialectical operation between the great person and the great circum-
stance, thus, requires struggle against the perpetual failure of existent structures to
predict and allow such a dialectic to develop into full maturity. Charles de Gaulle,
who saw it as a “fact” that he “chanced to have been pre-ordained as the country’s
savior,” registered exactly that kind of complaint against existent structures of the
Fourth Republic, which he had to demolish because they restricted the capacity of
the historic man to respond to historical circumstances.2 For him, such structures
only ensured that men with exceptional qualities (e.g., de Gaulle) would “waste away
in impotence” at a time when all traditional political forces had failed to realize that
their country required nothing less than being saved. In this sense, de Gaulle ap-
proaches the type of political actor idealized in Max Weber’s classic essay, namely,
the man who approaches politics as a vocation, combining passion for his cause
with a strong sense of responsibility and an orientation toward ultimate ideals.3 Of
the requirements that Weber’s essay lists, however, what is missing here is the sense
of proportion, namely, that ingredient of the political calling which is the first to be
set aside when the magnitude of the task is presented as far greater than existing
structures could allow. The more exceptional the circumstances are, the more so
must be the savior.
De Gaulle, of course, was not Napoléon, even though both men adhered to the
same dialectical understanding of the notion of destiny. In many ways, de Gaulle’s
relation to Napoléon parallels the latter’s relation to Alexander. Each “great man”
looks at his historical model, only to realize that the current circumstances man-
date that he would be more limited than the model in his capacity to maneuver his
way into deserved greatness. Napoléon, as we have seen, envied Alexander because
the world of Napoléon did not allow the great man to proclaim his divinity as the
world of Alexander had allowed Alexander to do. This problem of perception of
lower possibilities could not be solved, regardless of the extent of Napoléon’s
accomplishments. De Gaulle, in looking at Napoléon, realized that the world of
de Gaulle no longer permitted comparable imperial grandeur—indeed, that it
mandated the surrender of the dearest of all of the old colonial conquests. Again, this
distance from the capacities of the model cannot be bridged, and de Gaulle can do
nothing great other than aggrandizing the space he is allowed to save, namely, the
country or the nation.
For him, therefore, the nation assumes a mythical proportion that Napoléon
never had to consider.4 Napoléon had little use for such background notions of mis-
sion as “country,” “nation,” or “people,” not just because the ages of nationalism or
democracy were yet to come. Such interrelated epochs came shortly thereafter,
when the great man, after Napoléon, could only hope to gain greatness not by tran-
Preparations 49
scending existent structures but by speaking for them. The inception of democratic
ideas in particular imposed clear limits on the possibilities of transcendence. Had
Napoléon managed to retain an empire, the world might have still experienced a
modicum of democracy, or at least an active civil society, but perhaps never the age
of nationalism. It is of course easy to point out that his administrative centralizing
measures laid down the institutional basis for nationalism in much of Europe, espe-
cially France and Germany. But such institutions were not meant to exist by them-
selves without imperial oversight. Only the involuntary withdrawal of the great
oversight, distinct in its capacity to see beyond the perspectivist limits of its times,
left them vulnerable to other social forces—namely, the rising ethic of account-
ability to constituents rather than to the exceptional leader.
In the case of de Gaulle, there is an apparent, if inarticulate, attempt to syn-
thesize the various trajectories of accountability in such a way as to allow destiny
to continue to play its magnificent part. In introducing the principle of direct elec-
tion of the president as one of the constitutional pillars of the Fifth Republic, he ar-
gued that that was the only way to ensure that the historic man would both see him-
self and be seen voluntarily by the nation as the legitimate savior. Direct election of
the president thus ensures a harmony of vision; the great man knows but does not
impose himself. His knowledge of himself, on the other hand, is incomplete with-
out its voluntary recognition by the nation. He clearly does not see himself as equal
to other men—and in this way de Gaulle’s vision of the great man is at odds with
the pretense of humble commonness of the president paraded in other contempo-
rary democracies. For de Gaulle, the savior must know that he is historically excep-
tional, that only he and no one else can accomplish the task for which he was born.
The only difference between this kind of contemporary greatness and that ex-
pressed by Napoléon is that it needs to be certified by the specific constituency
upon which it is about to act. For Napoléon, the great man is called for not by “the
people” but by a force that is at once more vague and less abstract—the “circum-
stances.” For both leaders, greatness both lies within the individual and is called
forth from outside of him; the only difference is the specification of the source of
the outside call (and by extension, the contraction of the realm within which ac-
tion defines greatness).
In specifying the source of the call, de Gaulle inadvertently adds to the notion
of democracy a function that had rarely been associated with it. The virtue of
democracy here does not emanate from an abstraction such as “freedom” but is la-
tent in its capacity to produce the historic man. In this way, democracy is but the
most recent of structures needed to produce greatness according to the dictates and
requirements of the age. Whatever the particular expressions of freedom associated
with democracy may be, they pale in comparison with the ultimate freedom it pro-
vides the elected patriarch. For upon being chosen by the entire nation, he is free
from bondage to specific parliamentary parties and interest groups, as had been the
case under the Fourth Republic. By electing the person who embodies its great
spirit, the nation also gives that person deserved freedom from the mortal admin-
istrative and parliamentary strictures it imposes on other functionaries. He is then
free to contemplate the nation’s immortal destiny, while his more accountable sub-
ordinates run its daily and mortal business.
The dialectical understanding of the notion of destiny offers one of the most obvi-
ous manifestations of a third transhistorical trope around which the relation of gov-
ernance to mortality is articulated, following those of polis and empire discussed in
the first two chapters, respectively. In this third trope, governance becomes neither
a consolation for nor a presidium over death but in essence a means of preparation
for it. A dialectic essentially means that one’s own initiative, however heroic and ex-
traordinary, can be only one component of a two-sided equation. The second part
is not in one’s hands. This part is what is called destiny. Governance here still pos-
sesses all the usual trappings of glory along with occasional hallucinations of im-
mortality, but everyone knows better: the experience of imperial proliferation and
infinite power, the attempt to conquer everything, only accentuates the specter of
death because death continues to singularly defy conquest. The battle with mor-
tality is lost at the edges and then within the very core of the empire. There is no
solution to the problem of death in civilization, and hence it is given over to God,
who stands above this world altogether. In this trope, governance is a preparation
for death, in the sense that governance begins to be assumed on behalf of God, the
lord of death and the ultimate master. But in general, governance can also be on
behalf of any abstract principle which possesses the same divine property of im-
mortality: eternal nations, collectives with everlasting or universal missions, world
ideas and world spirits. Governance here is no longer free to invent the world on
its own terms; it can only stand in for an already existent principle, a principle that
must be ancient, immemorial, or immortal. That such is its “destiny” means that it
has no choice in the matter, but also that it does not yet wish to experience that lack
of choice as an imposition or a sign of weakness.
In order to more fully appreciate the originality of this understanding of des-
tiny, we could compare it to the more negotiable conceptions of destiny in earlier
(or contemporary) “votive” religions. Examples of these religions include ancient
mystery cults and practices centering around the oracle everywhere. Historians of
religion usually compare votive religions to salvation religions, with the former be-
ing characterized by a contractual nature: a god must be concretely useful, and one
is closer to being a negotiating partner with him than a servant, as one would be in
salvation religions. The votive god is not infallible, and when he fails, he can be re-
placed by another, although this replacement does not constitute a rejection as
much as a search for a more reliable divine source of support.5 Votive religions thus
Preparations 51
are less interested in questions of ultimate destiny than in practical, everyday out-
comes, and thus they tend to be experimental in nature. Burkert shows that mys-
teries did not monopolize religious doctrine but were rather “options within the
multiplicity of pagan polytheism,” and it was accepted that they could disappoint
at times. Their existential domain was restricted: they involved neither faith in
overcoming death nor devaluation of life.6 Rather, they pertained to a search for a
higher source of support and advice in struggles that were primarily to be the re-
sponsibility of regular mortals. The destiny of those mortals was in their hands, and
the mystery, oracle, or votive offered only auxiliary and negotiable support for the
sovereign action of such mortals.
Under salvation regimes, by contrast, the dialectic of destiny foists upon mor-
tals an essential sense of subjective incompletion. The exterior force is stronger
than it is under votive regimes, is less open to negotiation, and cannot be rejected
regardless of its failure. There are no mysteries to unite one with whatever portion
of destiny may be hidden from oneself, only a promise of salvation after death.7
One is essentially separated from one’s source of destiny, and the unity with the
source cannot be experienced in life.
The solution to this problem of separation can take many forms. The most
prevalent one is to endow the various sources of the dialectic with a strong sense of
subjective unity: take all those effects which come from without and place them in-
side of one’s own being. This is the basis of one of the strongest protests leveled by
the Stoics against the Epicureans. For the Stoics, the irrationality of the Epicurean
atomistic theory of the universe stemmed from its highlighting the element of
chance in the world, whereby “destiny” simply appears as unprincipled operation
of chaos. Marcus Aurelius took this critique into an ethical dimension, protesting
that the principle of chance inherent to Epicureanism must be rejected because it
made it impossible for one to follow an ethical life based on unity and calmness.8
His reasoning against atomism thus addressed not principles of physics but rather
the ethical requirements of life. But for him that was a sufficiently effective critique.
As they prepared the grounds for Christianity, the Stoics sought a sense of rational
unity to the concept of life. Life’s destiny was identical with its ethical unity, even
though it was open to that dreaded chance and thus disunity on other grounds.
For Marcus Aurelius, therefore, one’s own unity must be grounded upon one’s
ability to make all ethical principles, which seem to come from without, an integral
part of the self. In the use of principles, he says, one must model oneself after the
boxer rather than the gladiator. For the boxer, his fist is always with him, while the
gladiator must rely on that which is not part of him, namely, his sword.9 While both
have strength in their own ways, the gladiator’s disadvantage lies in his lack of per-
petual unity with his source of strength, unlike the boxer, whose unity with his
source of strength means that he is always ready to employ it, as one should always
be ready to employ one’s principles. The gladiator, by contrast, exemplifies the

more common model of exteriority to the self of a source of principles and ethical
guidance. This exteriority, in turn, mandates a special effort at reintegration.
In Christianity, the separateness of oneself from the source of one’s destiny—
and by extension of one’s ethical principles—is actually magnified rather than re-
solved. Indeed, the emergence of Christianity can in part be traced to the consoli-
dation of the idea that the very attempt to integrate the self into somewhat exterior,
albeit negotiable, principles of being had in itself been the ground and reason for a
stricter separation. Such an attempt is now regarded as a secret, unfulfillable human
wish to become God. The primary failure in that effort, as the story of the original sin
makes abundantly clear, itself commences the separation, and sin becomes the eth-
ical character of such existence in separation from the source of one’s destiny.10 This
innovation must be regarded as one of Christianity’s greatest assaults on Stoicism,
which actually sought to reconcile the notion of destiny with some principle of
unity in the universe. In Christianity, the grand unity is moved in the direction
of worldly ethics, combining destiny with sin. Destiny and sin then exist by virtue
of each other. Sin marks the attempt to place the exterior source of destiny at one’s
disposal, while destiny marks the trajectory set in motion by sin. If one had suc-
ceeded in the attempt to unite oneself with destiny, after all, one would not be a sin-
ner. One would be God. The failure of the attempt means that the only God left,
namely, the one who had extricated himself from humanity, must be defined by
aloofness and aloneness. Since these qualities are described as products of an orig-
inal struggle induced by humankind’s refusal of a primeval “destiny,” they also im-
ply that such a God could rule only over sinners.
Fear and the Invisible
Nothing could sustain such a system whose rituals reinforce the separateness of the
two sides of destiny—subject and object—other than fear, sheer fear of crossing
the barrier and claiming that one, again, is in control. This, then, is a specific kind
of fear whose basis is severed dialectics. Here, the fear is no longer a fear of death in it-
self, since death in itself, with no additives, precludes no attempts to reconcile des-
tiny to one’s innate armory, as the boxer reconciles his strength to his physique
without need of exterior objects. In fact, death in itself can only be hospitable to
such unitary schemes, as mystical literature shows abundantly. Rather, fear under
ethos of salvation religions defines nothing less than the total otherness of the
other side of the equation of destiny: the exterior part of the equation cannot be in-
tegrated into the self; it disinvites every effort at approach, it is frightening. There
is a shift in the nature of the gods who control destiny, a shift of which traces could
be detected well before salvation religions, as far back as ancient Mesopotamia.
Preparations 53
Over a period of a thousand years, one can discern a transformation in the nature
of fear, especially through the netherworld gods, who went from being sad and
melancholic to terrifying and vengeful. Jean Bottéro, who detects this transforma-
tion, argues that it must be connected to the ceaseless activity of the netherworld
gods who, in spite of their “death,” continued to populate their kingdom with ever-
increasing souls through epidemics, catastrophes, and wars here on earth.11
The netherworld helps us apprehend the particular nature of the fear not so
much because that world simply housed death as much as because it became in-
creasingly inaccessible to the assimilative projects of civilization. The Mesopota-
mian traditions show gods over time becoming less friendly as death continued to
torment civilization. As paganism further yielded to abstract monotheism, gods be-
came less open to contractual relations with the worshippers, less “votive” in char-
acter, and more inclined to assert their prerogatives in terms of salvation. In other
words, the clauses of their “contracts” not only became far more general, they fur-
ther could be redeemed only after death rather than in the course of life.
At the same time, it is evident everywhere that the story of salvation religions
was not so straightforwardly evolutionary and that even today salvation religions
continue in practice to house within them significant votive elements.12 Insofar as
the question of death is concerned, the fundamental division in the history of reli-
gion rotates not around paganism versus monotheism but more strictly around the
degree of accessibility to the lords of the other side. This “accessibility” is usually
allegorized in terms of “vision” or, more accurately, the willingness of the dark lords
of death to respond to their seekers in the latter’s world, to make them “see”—that
is to say, their willingness to remove the walls between the worlds of the living and
the dead.
Since this unity is allegorized in the idea of the vision, the fundamental divi-
sion in religious history insofar as death is concerned is therefore between visibility
and invisibility. One of the best illustrations of this point is Akhenaton’s seminal
attempt to impose monotheism on ancient Egypt. Akhenaton lodged his monothe-
istic god concept squarely in the realm of the visible, namely, Aton the sun god, or
the most universal aid to visibility, and his great hymn in fact identifies night with
death. Significantly, of all the gods of the old Egyptian pantheon, Akhenaton re-
served his strongest antipathy toward the invisible Amun, who had sustained the
pagan pantheon. The emphasis on visibility is central to this first recorded mono-
theistic experiment in history—so much so, indeed, that in Akhenaton’s new city,
Akhetaten, temples for Aton were built without roofs so as not to impede the uni-
versal flow of the one god.
This same doctrine of absolute visibility arrives quickly at its conclusion re-
garding death. Solemnly and with one stroke, it eliminates the hallowed distinc-
tion that earlier generations had reserved for the realm of the dead; quarters of the
living in Akhetaten were decorated in the same manner previously reserved for
tombs,13 and in stark contrast to all other Egyptian cities, the urban plan for
Akhetaten included no provision for a city of the dead on the other side of the Nile.
The dead no longer resided in the West, where the sun set and where every night
the earth was covered with the blanket of death. Rather, they were buried on the
same side that housed the living.
The thesis that the notion of visibility was used as an allegory for conquering
the fear and uniting destiny across the worlds of life and death is even more appar-
ent as we compare not just ancient paganism and monotheism but also different
monotheisms on the issue, namely, those of Akhenaton and the later Abrahamic re-
ligions. The latter emphasized the opposite idea, namely, the invisibility of God. In
early Islam, Muhammad identified the weakness of the pagan objects of worship
precisely in their visibility, and the biblical commandment against engraved images
registered a similar complaint. In both cases, the purpose of the prohibition on vis-
ible representations of deity is commonly understood as an attempt to stamp out
competing gods, but the explanation given by the religions of the book themselves
is more interesting. That is, if divine qualities cannot by definition be approached
by humans, then the whole realm of the visible, which allegorizes the limits of what
is humanly reachable, could only pollute the very idea of divinity.
Put otherwise and in simple terms, the divide is concerned with whether reli-
gions should account for life (hence valorize visibility) or death (invisibility). The
question of visibility and invisibility is crucial here because it is ultimately a ques-
tion of what prospect of unity may be obtained with the external source of one’s
destiny here on earth.14 If the only god that matters is the only god that could man-
ifest himself to all creatures, as Akhenaton stated unequivocally, then he shines
with equal measure on the dead and the living and thereby unites existence. Unity
is forged at all levels—between self and exterior source of destiny, between various
distant selves exposed to the same visible god, and finally, between the living and
the dead. Thereafter the living in Akhetaten could build their houses as if they were
tombs, tombs as if they were houses. Fear is finally resolved, because the distances
between determinants of destiny that had furnished its foundations are smelted
with the elixir of visibility.
It was only natural, therefore, for that kind of fear to arise again every time
destiny was allocated as discrete portions, partially to the self and partially to God
or the equivalent principle. But destiny itself had no natural hold on the mind re-
gardless of the historical circumstance of one’s existence. Ancient gods simply
claimed what was rightfully theirs and had no apparent understanding of destiny.
The ethical space of the concept of destiny was then occupied in one part by es-
tablished notions of customary duty, which were seen to be innate to the social an-
imal. In another part it was occupied by the arts of divination, which brought the
diffuse supernatural realm to bear, where chance and unpredictability had to be
taken for all their worth. The worlds of duty and prophecy, which civilization even-
Preparations 55
tually integrated under the rubric of “destiny,” did not in fact always presume the
kind of interwoven dialectic which came to define destiny in salvation ethics. Des-
tiny rather emerged to indicate, generally, whatever property a fearsome god took
away forcibly from ungrateful creatures in retaliation for their failure to expel the
thought of being his sovereign equals from their innermost minds.
The salvation god could behave no other way, of course, because anyone who
possessed all the keys of destiny could also become that god’s equal. And since
there was no shortage of such claimants in the history of governance, a salvation
god had reason to be wary of such individuals. Alexander, when he conquered the
world, no longer had a fear of any god because he had become a god, since there
was no evidence that there was any source of destiny left that could be located
outside of his own inborn potential—the son of Jupiter, thus, and no longer the son
of Philip. Without fear, any successful conqueror could do the same. Napoléon
thought that he saw God’s game very clearly; according to Napoléon, God had to
invent the punishments of the otherworld because that world was insufficiently at-
tractive.15 God had to make up for the lack of luster of his unverifiable kingdom in
heaven, apparently in comparison to the prospect of achievable glory on earth.
Great conquerors usually had reason to suspect God, since they could always see
evidence not only that they were in charge of their own destiny but that they them-
selves were the external source of others’ destiny as well. In the meantime, God
could show nothing comparable to what they were doing, and thus God had to re-
sort to idle threats. Such threats worked only to the extent that they were believed.
Napoléon summed up his argument by favoring religions which highlighted re-
ward rather than punishment (for him, Islam was an example of the former). The
reason is that the principle of reward is more favorable to life, unlike punishment,
which is ostensibly redolent of the world of death. A conqueror is naturally more
attracted to life.
If understood in a dialectical context, fear presumes both a certain distance
from and a proximity to its object. The history of salvation thought is essentially a
history of increasing abstraction and distance in the concept of God. God may re-
main compassionate, loving, and prone to reward, but he becomes less compre-
hensible and accountable than he had been in the pagan world. Nietzsche notes
how, in comparison to the Christians, the ancient Hebrews had no qualms about
dragging God into their petty everyday squabbles, while his involvement became
less pedestrian as Christianity asserted itself. The “mysteries” of Catholicism offer
an even better example than the biblical text on this increasing distance of divin-
ity: far more than the pagan mysteries, they are defined by doctrine rather than
experience. And even as such, seen from the somber point of view of Reformation
rationality, they offered intolerable degradation of the concept of divinity.
This God then travels over time the path of transcendence already paved in the
age of empire, where the center of gravity of governance became equally abstract
to the millions of scattered, distant souls subjected to the empire’s indiscernible

logic. Such an environment is a harbinger of movements that seek to conquer their
generalized fear of empire by constructing an even more distant divinity, a divinity
which the empire itself must fear in its turn. The strategy of conquering fear is based
more on revenge against the object of fear than on assimilating it. When looking
at such moments of imperial extension, students of history encounter countless
revenge experiments of which ultimately one emerges with distinction. Invariably,
the victorious outlook emphasizes the humility of all, governance and populace
alike, in the face of an eventual death whose meaning, under salvation regimes,
must be judgment.
Yet, simultaneous with the emergence of those ideas we also find the opposite
orientation: the unceasing refusal to recognize a barrier to apprehending the ab-
stract substance of divinity, even though it is exactly that barrier which permits
God to enshrine the otherwise implausible idea that life can be nothing but a prepa-
ration for death. Thus, every great religion also harbors and acknowledges mysti-
cal currents which seek to cross that barrier, to connect to God in ways that may
seem, within the context of the same religion, to be blasphemous in their daring.
These trends thus actively seek the death of being and thereby annul the fear, whereas
their contemporaries only regard death as death of becoming, which they cannot yet
experience and therefore must fear. The anonymously authored Corpus Hermeticum,
which represents an early effort to bring the emergent idea of the Christian God in
Rome into harmony with the dictates of comprehending the abstract, and which
clearly represents an unofficial truth, proposes a typical mystical approach:
Unless you make yourself equal to god, you cannot understand god; like is
understood by like. Make yourself grow to immeasurable immensity, outleap
all body, outstrip all time, become eternity and you will understand god.
Having conceived that nothing is impossible to you, consider yourself im-
mortal and able to understand everything, all art, all learning, the temper of
every living thing. Go higher than every height and lower than every depth.
Collect in yourself all the sensations of what has been made, of fire and water,
dry and wet; be everywhere at once, on land, in the sea, in heaven; be not yet
born, be in the womb, be young, old, dead, beyond death. And when you
have understood all these at once—times, places, things, qualities, quanti-
ties—then you can understand god . . .16
This remarkably dialectical method of combining opposite thoughts is posited

here as a substitute for physical existence, which in the age of a transcendental God
begins to be experienced as a handicap on knowledge. The authors of the Corpus
Hermeticum, like most mystics, sublated distance from God, a distance which for
other believers gave faith the character of fear, into the kind of love that defined
Preparations 57
faith as the dissolution of their very existence. But in this case, this self-dissolution
and the attendant sacrifice of the given ego did not simply entail that one was a slave
to love, that is, to a being regarded to exist outside of the self. Rather, one dissolved
via a specific route which, more than passion, required reason and, more than love,
ordained knowledge. For the mystics, the specter of judgment, which kept other faith-
ful away, was subordinate to knowledge, which invited them closer to God. While
judgment required a relationship of inferiority and superiority, knowledge required
an orientation to some notion of equality (which Meister Eckhardt articulated so
eloquently). One knows only that to which one is identical.
This of course is a radical notion of “knowledge,” whereby one sacrifices one’s
given existence with each step along the road because knowledge involves inte-
gration into a larger-than-given existence. One does not “know” from a stationary
standpoint that one never leaves. Rather, knowledge here entails by necessity
transformation of being—and not simply a sophisticated art of interpretation à la
hermeneutics. One could not acquire knowledge without being transformed into
the identity of that which one wants to know. The proof of this principle is that
otherwise one’s given existence would have already proved itself a sufficient recep-
tacle for that knowledge. This is precisely why this approach must navigate its way
around fear, so that one’s being is emptied and then filled again from another loca-
tion of being.
This kind of knowledge thus means fearless death; more specifically, death
that is inattentive to judgment or, rather, death in a way that preempts judgment al-
together. Another way to put it: death as a substitute for judgment. In all their per-
mutations, mystical adventures seem to connect to an ancient trope of death, when
the bounds of governance were not yet detrimental to the meaning of death. But
there is something novel in mystical schemes that develop in the age when God not
only controls death but connects it to judgment and mandates that one actively
prepare for one’s death. The novelty here stems from the fact that that kind of
god is inherently less knowable than earlier ones, who had manifestly less interest
in judgment. If we look at Gilgamesh once more, for instance, we notice the exact-
ness of his composition: two-thirds god, one-third man. He is not “almost” god, nei-
ther is he “hardly” man. The mathematical precision of the composition of his be-
ing, which we may hypothesize to be a property of an archaic mind, is nonetheless
rarely encountered even in comparably ancient mythologies. There is something
interesting about a way of thinking that provides exact rather than indefinite char-
acterizations and formulas, as it is always a method of calibrating the precise con-
creteness of existence. The different worlds of being (god, human, animal, spirit, and
so on) are not simply exchangeable to the same mind as they are, for example, in
possession rituals. More important, they are precisely thinkable. “Metaphors” are em-
ployed insofar as they are capable of joining “reality” on an equal footing, rather
than employed as aids to comprehend an alien reality.17
Sociologically speaking, it is possible to suggest that the smallness of the social

group is one of the preconditions for orienting its ideology toward experiencing
everything in existence as concrete rather than dividing reality into concrete and
idealistic or metaphoric. If nomadic thought is avowedly materialistic, as I have ar-
gued elsewhere, it seems correlated to the fact that the nomadic social unit tends
to split into smaller wandering units as it grows in size rather than continue to move
and live together in ever larger groups. Thus, the nomads of pre-Islamic Arabia
were far less impressed than any other type of social group with the new abstract
theology of a salvation religion, whose views on life and death differed sharply
from theirs. In this connection, it is worth noting that something akin to that pro-
pensity to split rather than grow beyond a certain limit can be detected in the
ancient Mithraea mystery cults, whose confined size seemed fundamental for the
experience.18 But the more general principle concerns not strictly the size of the so-
cial group as much as the sociological preconditions of the propensity to highlight
the status of action and experience over contemplation and idealization. And these
preconditions involved the awareness of the group of its closed and self-selected
nature as well as a disinterest in universal social applicability of doctrine of any
kind. Thus, while mystery cults were in principle open and impossible to be ex-
communicated from, they were also closed societies defined by the action and
experience of the group rather than faith or credo.19
The kind of intimate, concretizable knowledge that had defined ancient mys-
tery cults and even later mystics became far less available to the normal faithful from
the official point of view of the judgmental, universal salvation god. By definition,
the salvation god resides at the furthest possible distance from the realm of con-
crete experience. For this reason, God becomes less thinkable paradoxically as
he becomes more omnipresent and omniscient. The ancient formula is reversed:
he knows, we do not. But since God is eternal, that is, requires no further transfor-
mation, he already knows all there is to know. He cannot die because he cannot
possibly know more than he already does. But also we cannot die, as both Heideg-
ger and Wittgenstein argue in different ways, because we cannot possibly experi-
ence death that is yet to happen.20 Our own immortality here is of course different
from that of God, since it is in fact based on perpetual ignorance rather than perfect
knowledge, as God’s is. Only the mystics seek to experience death through radical
knowledge. But all others, prisoners attentive to worldly structures, accept it as a
fact that they cannot possibly know what they cannot possibly experience. They
protect themselves from death by further distancing it from their thinking, which,
paradoxically, they accomplish by actively preparing for it. What kind of knowl-
edge do they need as they prepare for it? Not transformative knowledge, which
may lead to untimely death—the death of becoming; to the contrary, they seek the kind
of knowledge which immunizes against transformation—the death of being.
Preparations 59
Future as Past
In the fear of the death of being we can identify the existential basis of what Karl
Mannheim described as “conservative thought.” Here, conservative thought is
premised on the assumption that utopia is the property of the past rather than the
future, that all that which is great has already happened, that there is little for us to
do other than to preserve.21 In Sigmund Freud’s last articulation of psychoanalysis,
however, conservatism is posited at the most fundamental level of repressed in-
stincts, particularly those connected to death. For Freud, an instinct “is an urge inher-
ent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged
to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces.”22 Unlike Mannheim,
who views conservative thought within the constellation of social ideologies, Freud
derives the death instinct out of a principle of conservative organismic universality.
Its premise is that since instincts yearn for the repetition of an earlier state of satis-
faction, it would be contradictory to their nature had the goal of life been some-
thing that had never been attained. Change is imposed on the organism by outside
stimuli rather than chosen freely by the instincts. Thus, one develops “life instincts,”
clustered around pleasure, which allow one to adjust to such impositions. Simulta-
neously, the “death instincts” are kept in a state of repression, which nonetheless
never prevents them from continuing their work. The organism secretly wishes
death and return to inanimate nature, at the same time that it is forced to adhere to
the dictates of growth, change, and progress.
Freud’s answer to the question as to why death is not chosen outright and his
account for self-preservation add an interesting twist to this theory. All life wants
death, he asserts, but not death imposed by external forces. Rather, in preserving it-
self to the end and against all odds, the organism shows its determination to die in
its own manner.23 What it dreads more than its imposed growth is the imposed end of
that growth. It dislikes accidents and wishes for permanent principles, preferably
those principles that can at least be imagined to emanate from within its very
essence. The death instinct refuses to accept any accidental or malevolent concep-
tion of death. Rather, it strives for the kind of death that, in the words of Marcus
Aurelius, “is not merely Nature’s handiwork, but also her well-being.”24 The desired
death here assumes the character of an eternal return to health.
According to Freud, the organism prepares perpetually for its own death but
with a dogged sense of self-determination, however secret. If we take the notion of
destiny discussed earlier and explore it anew in this light, we can posit that the no-
tion of destiny eases the burden of death to the extent that it integrates external
stimuli into an innate nature, thereby allowing stimuli to appear undifferentiated
from one’s nature. Since it does not appear imposed, this kind of death corresponds
to one’s fundamental drive in life. The concept of karma, which is the closest equiv-
alent to “destiny” in the Hindu tradition, goes one step further in the direction of
avowed embracement of the death instinct. As articulated by Krishna in the Bha-
gavad Gita, karma entails a cultivated detachment from necessary, fated work. Only
this kind of detachment allows one to both accomplish one’s duty as prescribed by
external conditions, and retain the essential separateness of one’s being from such condi-
tions. Under the doctrine of karma, one responds to stimuli by allowing them to
pass through a translucent self, whose ideal death requires steadfast purity from
worldly contaminants. Under the doctrine of destiny, by contrast, one responds to
stimuli by processing them through an assimilative self, whose ideal death requires
dedication to its inexorably supplied poison.
In the history of social organization, the various designs of ruling that have
here been grouped under the rubric of “governance” are interesting insofar as they
appear as the kind of external stimuli having the greatest impact. Obviously, no-
tions of karma, destiny, and the like cannot be reduced to being direct outcomes of
the experiences of governance. But governance, by its very nature, introduces on-
going structures of demand and obligation. It is premised on replacing prosaic, vol-
untary social organization with rules that presuppose coercive capacity. Nothing in
the social body highlights external stimulation more than political life, particularly
when one has no choice but to pay attention to it. Out of this attention emerges
the notion that one must fuse one’s preparation for death into larger political proj-
ects. It is no accident that salvation religions also become state ideologies rather
than remain private in nature, as the preparation for death becomes a collective task
supervised by the state rather than by the autonomous individual. As the ultimate
social regulatory stimulus, the most profound usurpation by governance is that of
the individual right to prepare one’s death according to one’s own manner.
The usurpation of this right by governance is not usually accepted without
some consolation, which leaves to the self a modicum of internally generated self-
determination. As precursors to Christianity, the Stoics contemplated a “governing
self” as one of the constituents of being. The governing self was, namely, that por-
tion of being which was directly implicated in the substance of the divine in the
world. In a mixture of Neoplatonism and materialism, the Stoics saw God’s nature
to be of the same substance as that of the governing self. Man was not simply cre-
ated in God’s image as he would become in Christianity. Rather, God was imma-
nent in him. But the problem was that God also resided outside of the self and thus
failed to provide it with the kind of death it deserved, his own death. Thus the pro-
cesses of decay which afflicted the flesh and the spirit from without also worked to the
detriment of the governing self.25
But the view from the top does not necessarily have to coincide with this vi-
sion. Accomplishing political prominence was as it still is one of the main mecha-
nisms by which one can imagine having both mastered and fully obeyed one’s des-
tiny, by taking over the summit of worldly stimuli. Death, at that point, ceases to
Preparations 61
be worrisome, for at the summit, one no longer has any future. There is nothing
more to be done; one has reached the limits of one’s age. At that point, one no longer
looks at the future, one wants to become history. In 1816, following his final defeat,
Napoléon says as much. Every day from now on, he says, he feels more elevated
than lowered by his downfall. He says so precisely because he knows that his ca-
reer has ended for good. But that does not matter much, for two reasons: (1) “every
day strips me of my tyrant’s skin, of my murderousness and ferocity,” he says; and
(2) he already lives in indestructible memory, with a soul of marble, accomplishments
of granite.26
For the tyrant, the first reason is unimaginable without the second. In order to
be so content with being tamed, with being lowered into an ordinary mortal, he
must first become his own history. Unlike the present—error-prone, chaotic, am-
biguous, base, and clearly mortal—history is always already concluded. It is the
realm of immortality insofar as it is the realm of the ideal death, the kind of death
that one has arranged for oneself without resorting to exterior doctrines or the help
of priests. That marble is both a favorite metaphor as well as building material for
opulence points to a universal understanding of governance as the most successful
mode of connecting to immortality. One of the aides to Haile Selassie, for example,
mentioned that the emperor’s favorite stone, predictably marble, signified the im-
perial system’s requisite for absolute immobility in the face of mobile time. The sys-
tem began to collapse, according to the same source, only when it began to move,
in response to outside stimuli—in this case, the external pressures of global moder-
nity.27
The kind of death alluded to by Napoléon does not constitute a “return” to an
earlier state of satisfaction, as the Freudian drive would posit. Freud’s death drive is
individualistic, and the satisfaction it seeks is innate to its being. It describes less
the world of political transactions than a bourgeois ethic of individual sovereignty.
While the Freudian bourgeois self wants to return to an innate nature preceding so-
ciety, the grand political self wants to become the fountain to which others return.
One becomes history insofar as one is incomparable from the point of view of the
future. One begins to represent an earlier state of foundational bliss which one must
seek to revisit. Napoléon’s death, therefore, is the only kind of death proper to him:
foundational death. At an early point in his career, in fact, he advises that after his
death, he would like to be followed by an accountable civilian government rather
than a freely reigning military one.28 He seems to suggest thereby that since no
order in posterity could equal him in historical qualities, such orders should be
placed under the kinds of limits from which he himself, as a historical individual,
must be free. Such limits obviously have the added advantage of compelling pos-
terity to pay attention to a glorious past, since accountable posterity would by defi-
nition be less free to initiate its own historical project.
Napoléon is far from being unique in this line of thought. The spirit of gover-
nance of which he represents an eloquent model says the following: the governor
who follows the foundational phase is neither God nor a rebel against God and in
fact has nothing to do with God. One who subsequently occupies the summit of
power must be reined in like everyone else. Since there is no tangible force capable
of extracting modesty from him, one can only have the spirit of the dead hovering
perpetually over his head. Thus this governor is only a follower. His consolation is
not his future, which can only be customary and usual death, but his past: his roots
in the deep soil of tradition, of genealogy, or of an exceptional creative process that
has already happened. Thus, in the end, it could do no better than to repeat in its
own language the morality of Confucian rulership, with its ritualistic reiteration of
the superior virtue of ancestors. The ritualistic display of humility of a future pres-
ent whenever it faces the past constitutes the ultimate goal of a foundational proj-
ect insofar as it consciously aims to “become history.” What this system represents
is a permanent perspective in which the foundations, however imagined, are always
posited as the superior basis of the present.
This theme is both ancient and modern. In contemporary politics, we en-
counter it whenever a foundational project is contemplated anew, when the past is
no longer an object of veneration, and when its ruins are moved out of sight to
make room for a new foundation. The experience of Eastern-bloc socialism offers
a clear example of such a self-conscious foundational novelty, which led to a logic
of legitimation mandating equally self-conscious ceremonials surrounding death;
that Stalin was buried next to Lenin, that the latter’s tomb was retained as the more
monumental one, links up the present to a foundational phase, at the same time that
both the present and its foundations assume an imposing and distant character yet
offer tangible evidence of immortality.29 On the other side of the so-called iron cur-
tain, one sees the same story, albeit in a less-pronounced fashion, since the founda-
tional phase there was traced to the more-established story of nationalism. But even
here, the purpose of the game was obvious whenever a seemingly monumental
change was contemplated. De Gaulle was obsessed with the question of how to
make sure that his new republic—which he understood as a sum total of novel in-
stitutions, laws, and, implicitly but significantly, practices—would retain itself in let-
ter and spirit past the exceptional circumstances and leader that had brought it
about. His solution was to run for office himself under the new rules and govern in
such a way as to offer a model for successors to follow.30
In the context of modern life, characterized by capitalism, future orientation,
and the ethic of innovation, the preparatory function of the political is likely to take
the form advanced most clearly by de Gaulle, less clearly by other contemporary
leaders. The capitalist mode of life, to the extent that it fails to be arrested by stable
traditions, aggrandizes the notion of novel future. At the material level, this kind of
capitalism becomes inextricably implicated in the perpetual process that Schum-
peter describes in terms of creative destruction.31 This destructive/innovative drive
Preparations 63
has little respect for the authority of the past. Rather, its model is the here and now:
perpetual creation. When this logic finds its way into politics, one is likely to have
the kind of leaders who are attentive to what “history will say,” meaning of course
what the future will say. One sees that mode of thinking more clearly in orders of gov-
ernance that understand their mission as weightier than running an ordinary ad-
ministrative technocracy, such as in the United States. The attention to historical
judgment here by each administration is tied not to past models but to a project that
“history” will regard as a unique contribution to it.
This manner of preparation for death, which characterizes high modernity,
participated in even by those presidents who call themselves “conservative,” con-
trasts sharply with the modes of preparing for death that had characterized most
former variations of conservative thought. In modernity, the model emanates per-
petually from the present, in anticipation or hope that it will shine beyond the
death of the present. “History” will follow the present, as “history” is now per-
versely understood literally as the future. “History” will pass judgment on the pres-
ent because the only “history” that could pass that kind of judgment is yet to hap-
pen. Before modernity, the traditional model of conservative thought said the exact
opposite of all this: the model can only be a product of the past because unlike the
present, the past is eternal.
Consider, for instance, al-Farabi’s theory of the perfect state, which can be
considered as a prototype of that mode of thinking. The greatest political philoso-
pher of his times, al-Farabi (d. A.D. 950) distinguished himself as a political philoso-
pher by creating an original synthesis of Islamic and Hellenic philosophy, a syn-
thesis which he further flavored with measured mystical doses derived apparently
from Hindu sources. For al-Farabi, the first sovereign of the virtuous “city” (which
he apprehended as a universal state rather than as a polis) must combine twelve
qualities, whereas his successors need combine only half as many. The first sover-
eign must be physically perfect (which is connected to war); capable of discerning
the intention of others; endowed with excellent memory and superior inductive
capacity; articulate; a lover of knowledge and truth; averse to excessive pleasure;
naturally dignified; unconcerned with material self-enrichment; doggedly prone
to justice; and courageous in the application of his convictions.
Al-Farabi then proceeds to note the rarity of individuals who combine all such
qualities, all the more proof that whenever they exist, they must be regarded as
founders in their own right, even when they do not possess the added and ex-
tremely uncommon quality of visionary prophecy. The rarity of this combination
of qualities, like that of all ancient treasures, mandates that it should be preserved.
How? We can assure a proper preservationist inclination only if the successors to
the first sovereign possess a combination of six qualities appropriate for the task.
The follower must be wise; cognizant of and conforming to traditional customs;
innovative—when needed—through the art of analogy; capable of guiding people
into remembering the founder’s rules and into appreciating how new analogical
laws necessitated by novel circumstances are derived from the founder’s abstract
reservoir; and in good physical health.32
If we compare these two sets of requirements, we find that the only quality
that is explicitly sustained in both is physical acuity, which in al-Farabi’s mind was
also connected to military skill. But even in this respect, this quality retreats from
being the first requirement for the founder to the last for his successors. Obviously,
once established, the perfect state is a site of stability. More than anything else, the
followers need the types of skills that would allow them to comprehend, appreciate,
and adhere to the foundational tradition. Of course, the world of the successors is
not static and certainly does not lack for novelties, innovations, and developments
that could not have been foreseen by the founder. But since the superior qualities
of the founder also involved the capacity for induction from the minutest hints, he
could also be relied upon to have provided posterity with both a sufficiently ab-
stract system, from which it would deduce novel laws, and a model of induction,
which would allow it to do so by judiciously applying the arts of analogy. The trans-
historicity and universalism of this way of thinking is evident in various permuta-
tions. In modern constitutional disputes in a place like the United States, this an-
cient principle of the supremacy of the past occasionally rears its head under the
rubric of the “intentions of the founding fathers,” which would serve as guides for
adjudicating novelties not foreseen by them. For al-Farabi, the concept of analogy
is not merely legal in nature. Rather, it encompasses the entirety of organized polit-
ical life, in which notions of justice, prosperity, cosmology, and faith are integrated.
It is precisely this kind of integration that presupposes, for a Neoplatonist
thinker like al-Farabi, the pivotal role of vision, philosophy, and knowledge in gov-
ernance. Yet this knowledge is exercised most commonly not in the context of sys-
temic initiation but as reflective wisdom—the most essential quality of the most
common type of leaders, namely, successors. Every quality which is necessary for
governance but not possessed directly by the successors (e.g., justice, courage,
chastity, dignity, articulate speech, etc.) can be presumed to be latent in such suc-
cessors to the extent that their conservative wisdom operates as it should, namely,
through a synthesis of nemesis and analogy. All virtuous qualities, after the virtuous
foundation, are implicit in the continuing operation of that synthesis.
This formula thus provides for a universe that can comfortably accommodate
both stability and change. Written at a time when the Islamic world was enjoying
almost two centuries of seeming resolution of the problem of succession to the
prophet, it surprisingly parallels more-distant models written under similar condi-
tions of perceived stability of rules of succession. Thus, under an ideologically differ-
ent imperial system preceding al-Farabi by almost eight centuries and after the age
of Hadrian had restored stability following a succession of tumultuous reigns, the
most important political philosophy treatise to emerge from that period articulates
Preparations 65
rules of fellowship not very dissimilar from those of al-Farabi. The very first book
of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is thus little more than a long list of qualities that
the author had assimilated from his mentors, relatives, and tutors. He speaks only
after fully acknowledging his debt to the past, a past which expresses itself in every
positive attribute he could claim. There is no need for originality in the face of
death, especially since those who are already dead have provided all that is to be
provided and then dutifully died. The future needs no originality because it is al-
ready known: it is like the past, which, if it does not repeat itself exactly, repeats its
fundamental essence.33 The fundamental qualities required for one to come to terms
with that fact are themselves inherited from the father. More than initiative, such
qualities highlight passive acceptance of the world as it offers itself, with neither
indulgence nor abstinence.34 The world can sustain life only to the extent that life
is proper to it, that is, life that respects death. In this sense, preparation for death
requires one to refrain from regretting loss. Indeed, more proper to this kind of life
would be to regret undue gain. In other words, it requires being oriented toward an
ethic of sacrifice.
Sacrifice and the Sovereignty of the Soul
The logic of sacrifice offers a vantage point through which the whole logic of
“preparation” can be negotiated anew, so that one may escape the deadly circle in
which all others are entwined and become sovereign in one’s own way. The first ba-
sis of the ethic of sacrifice suggests of course the opposite. The discussion in this
section thus concerns how in its logicohistorical movement, the ethic of sacrifice
cannot fail but give rise to outbursts of sovereignty expressing the opposite idea of
the preparation trope, even though those outbursts frequently expressed them-
selves in the language of preparation.
The foregoing note from Marcus Aurelius suggests that one could sacrifice
with impunity the potential for personal glory, since that glory will never be the
property of the self—subsequent, dependent, and created as that self is. The prin-
ciple of change, which governs the universe, itself dictates modesty rather than
vanity—as it would at a later point when reinterpreted within the mores of ad-
vanced capitalism. For the principle of change does not necessarily presume that
discrete souls succeeded each other or that they are therefore agents of originality
in their own discrete right. Rather, it may also indicate that souls are interchangeable
and, as such, far from owning in any inalienable way the substance of discrete
agency. In the Meditations, nature uses material death to create new material things,
so that “the world may be ever fresh and young.”35 Within the everlasting current
of change, life is comparable to no more than an “opinion,”36 that is, it is merely a
subjective construct, which cannot be validated by the objective and exterior na-
ture of truth. Relinquishing excessive attachment to life, therefore, prepares one for
a more fundamental truth than could be provided by mere opinion.
Such a conception, so redolent of Platonic idealism, constitutes one of the
ways by which life is linked up to a general truth, one that is transcendent of yet
immanent in life. It is a way of thinking which is ultimately disrupted by the evo-
lution of the notion of discrete souls and subsequently the soul’s separation from
the substance of the divine. In Christianity, this innovation is condensed in the
story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. God here is an angry yet po-
tentially forgiving father who maintains an unbridgeable distance from his ungrate-
ful yet chosen creatures. For Norbert Elias, the story of Adam and Eve signifies the
emergence of an association between fear of death and feeling of guilt. Human-
kind’s loss of immortality is directly connected to its violation of the commandment
of the divine father.37 Here, mortality and guilt feeling are introduced to human-
kind in one entangled package.
Adam and Eve’s consolation is manifestly transient—reign on earth and the
promise of possible reactivation of their immortality in paradise at some indefinite
point in the future. Gilgamesh, as we know, is also consoled by governance, but no
one gives him any comparable promise. There is no one to give him that promise,
since he himself is god; he has no superiors equivalent to the God of Abraham and,
by extension, no commandment to violate. Gilgamesh has only fear, but not guilt.
One thing he shares with Adam and Eve, however, is his connection of mortality
to the separability of that which ought to be together (namely, himself and Enkidu).
Had that unity been sustained, there would have been no awareness of death. Gil-
gamesh’s sense of mortality comes to him by power of example, not commandment.
For him, it is the loss of Enkidu that inaugurates death, and not any ego-driven vio-
lation of exterior commandments. Death comes before death: the loss of that from
which one is inseparable means that one, as the loose and insufficient remainder of
past unity, cannot survive.
Thus here we have two paradigms of separateness, one exemplary, the other
command-driven. Only the latter produces guilt, and thus whatever consolation it
offers thereafter must remain unsatisfactory. Unlike Adam and Eve, Gilgamesh has
no debt to pay back, and thus his consolation by governance ends his story, even
though it does not diminish his fear, which is sublated into resignation to fate. This
trajectory from fear to resignation is not equally available to the guilt-driven con-
sciousness, which, however resigned to death it may be, must nonetheless prepare
for it by ongoing atonement for the violation which had precipitated mortality.
This cleavage between the two paradigms corresponds in intellectual history
to two basic conceptions of God, one immanent and the other transcendent, which
are frequently combined in single systems of thought.38 Mystics usually seek to sac-
rifice the soul not by bringing about its finitude but more precisely by exchanging
it for its home, from which it had been involuntarily separated. This of course is not
Preparations 67
“atonement” in the strict sense of the word but a programmatic design to exchange
lowly, mortal existence by bringing about the death of the soul responsible for it.
At each step of success at its reintegrative effort, the soul that is sacrificing itself
thereby also loses more interest in the world as it becomes larger than the world.
Here one accomplishes transcendence in an alternative sphere to governance. If in
the age of salvation governance stands for a regulated preparation for death, the
mystical effort preempts that regulation by placing death outside of the methodi-
cal range allowed and supervised by governance. It is no accident, therefore, that
mystics had been frequent apostates and martyrs at the scaffold of the state. On the
one hand, their conception of death as the essence of a universal journey back to
God was coterminous with one aspect of the state’s own interpretation of faith. On
the other hand, their ongoing project of intimacy with a soul grander than what the
state could mediate hardly compelled them to regard the state as the ultimate reg-
ulator of that journey on God’s behalf.
Thus the surprising effrontery of mystics condemned by the state. Al-Hallaj,
for example, claimed to the horror of his contemporaries that he was God. From a
mystical perspective, the claim was perfectly understandable, since God’s sover-
eignty meant that he had the capacity to speak through any individual he chose.39
The mystic who claims to be God is actually being modest, since he surrenders his
sovereignty over his soul more completely and much sooner than any other faith-
ful would. Meister Eckhardt points to the same logic when he argues that the soul’s
dissipation in the path of darkness is a requisite for its coming to terms with its di-
vine nature. Its inability to transcend itself means that it can be saved only by sur-
rendering itself. But this unconditional surrender is part of the strategy of the soul
to preserve itself from a world so perilous that it cannot even offer the soul the po-
tential for consolation alluded to in politically engaged life. The very failure of the
soul as such to become transcendent is all the more proof that it is inadequate for
the purpose behind its creation and thus that it deserves death.
The really significant sin for mystics thus is not original immodesty in the face
of God. Rather, it is failure to emerge from the prison of the soul, of given existence.
One continues to seek to become God not by violating his commandment but, to
the contrary, by ingratiating oneself to the source of command: by discerning God
everywhere in the world, giving up the world to God in bits and pieces, until God
is finally detected in the last source of sovereignty to be claimed. That is, God is fi-
nally proved as the substance of the soul itself. Does one become immortal thereby?
Yes indeed, but it is not the same one that had started the journey. The premise here
is that souls are exchangeable. They cannot be otherwise, not only because other-
wise they are certainly mortal but also because of a whole range of associated con-
cerns to which political life gives rise: souls are insufficient for their own good, too
weak to withstand a world in which the soul, as it is given to existence, must be con-
tent with subjugation.
The underlining notion of the exchangeability of souls, which mystics exem-

plify, is part of a large transhistorical trope of which one finds many secular varia-
tions. The notion of sacrifice to one’s kin, community, superiors, or even to modern
abstractions such as one’s country or nation, offers variations in which mystical no-
tions are implicated, albeit not in reference to God. The underlining principle, how-
ever, is the same: the given soul is not the locus of infinite sovereignty, and thus it
can be called upon to sacrifice itself for that which has sovereignty over it. But in
that sacrifice, the soul testifies to its insufficiency for its own good. In a world fore-
shadowed by mortality, the soul not only pays respect to anything that it regards
as immortal but also integrates itself into it, in the same way that mystics integrate
themselves into God. The usual integration contract in this case mandates the sac-
rifice of the mortal to the immortal.
Certain sociohistorical transformations add new twists to the logic of sacri-
fice. For mystics of salvation religions, the sacrifice was totally gratuitous from the
point of view of God, since the transcendental God had no use for the sacrifice.
Sacrifice was done entirely for the benefit of the soul, not God. However, in an
age typified by such ideas as democracy, popular participation, and instrumental
rationality, the notion of sacrifice undergoes certain transformations. First of all, it
must be manifestly useful. For example, in his outline of the principles of Utilitarian
philosophy, John Stuart Mill condemned heroic self-sacrifice, but only to the ex-
tent that it was “pointless,” that is, it did not contribute to increasing universal hap-
piness.40 Looked at another way, modern sacrifice requires the one who is offering
the self to imagine that one is thereby benefiting the higher realm to which one is of-
fering oneself. Interestingly, there is an associated shift here from sacrificing the
soul to sacrificing the self. The mystical soul, in comparison to the modernist self,
does not regard itself to be supreme until it is extinguished and replaced by the sub-
stance of the immortal in the universe. In contrast, the “self” as a mass product of
bourgeois society clings with teeth and claws to its sovereignty, precisely as it is be-
ing called upon to sacrifice itself for the sake of new collective habitats of the idea
of immortality—for example, “the nation” or other social and ideological struggles.
It can solve this contradiction only if it imagines that in sacrificing itself, it is at least
providing some benefit to that for whose sake it is being sacrificed. It is too autono-
mous to simply be sacrificed for free. In other words, the self, unlike the soul, sac-
rifices itself in order to offer immortality to its cause.
The “cause” belongs to the structure and meaning of the self. Even when it is
not offered up to be sacrificed, the self’s sense of sovereignty requires it to surround
itself with a large external cause, which becomes an extension of its otherwise mod-
est existence. Along similar lines, Norbert Elias once offered what seemed to be a
predictable conclusion, that death could be accepted to the extent that “life’s goal”
is seen to have been accomplished.41 More telling, however, would be to examine
how the self’s feeling of insufficiency evidences itself in the kind of causes it adopts:
Preparations 69
the more abstract and immortal they are, the more the self can be said to be tor-
mented by its feeling of insufficiency and mediocrity. On the other hand, this
mediocre self dies contentedly only when it proves its connection to immortality,
that is, when it nourishes the hungry soul of an otherwise mortal cause in the world.
Modernity offers, however, a second and generally less outspoken form of the
self, namely, the self whose death is an expression of its own power. This self takes
its selfhood to its logical conclusion: the self is not simply “autonomous” but rather
sovereign. As outlined by Georges Bataille, the sovereignty of life in general is testi-
fied for in the purposelessness of death. Sovereignty here has a specific meaning,
and death represents the summit of a whole range of “sovereign” activities. Such ac-
tivities constitute the nonutilitarian, non-commodity-oriented, purely gratuitous
aspects of civilization. They are activities that are pursued as ends in themselves—
for example, traditional wars, idle contemplation, artistic creation—rather than as
means to higher ends or profit. Truly sovereign life, for Georges Bataille, is thus the
kind of life freed from slavery to means-ends rationality and utilitarianism, a life in
which every act is its own sovereign end. If life is truly sovereign, then it will have
no fear of the ultimate conclusion of the logic of sovereignty: that death is also an
end in itself, that it signifies nothing and has no further meaning. In fact, it would
seem that ultimate sovereignty expresses itself in one’s freedom to give up one’s life
for no reason that is external to it, since responsiveness to such reason would only
mean that life is not truly sovereign.
The apparent nihilism in this radical conception of sovereignty is nonetheless
consistent with its logical basis in the individualist, separable, and irreducibly dis-
crete conception of the self. As such, it is at variance with the more politically and
communally oriented notions of sovereignty. In the political world, the very sov-
ereignty of systems presiding over society could only leave the self with autonomy.
Those living within the prison of autonomy may aggrandize themselves by linking
up to that which is manifestly larger than themselves, such as tradition which pre-
dates them or a grand quest that calls upon them from new horizons. Their response
to either call does not raise them above the level of autonomy; in fact, in confirms
and reinforces their at best autonomous existence. But it offers them an opportu-
nity to serve a cause connected to immortality. Under this kind of jurisdiction, one
prepares for one’s death by taking up the offer of autonomy. That is, one then po-
sitions one’s self, as it were, at the head of a bridge that may take it elsewhere, be-
yond itself, a bridge whose one end is autonomy and whose other end, unseen yet,
is possible sovereignty. But the bridge requires a toll, which must be paid in sacri-
fice whenever it is crossed.
The sovereign individual, by contrast, is itself the locus of the cause. Individual
sovereignty is demonstrated in the disregard it displays toward common regula-
tions, which others accept willingly. Sovereign individuals are, of course, tragic indi-
viduals, since they cannot survive in a thoroughly governed world. That is obviously
why individual sovereignty is immeasurably more difficult to pursue than either in-
dividual autonomy or political sovereignty of systems. Yet, the consolation of the
sovereign individuals is that they die in their own manner because they are in con-
trol of their life. It is the lesson that Napoléon learns early on in his career, when
he comments on the valiant death of one of his officers in battle. In his description,
Napoléon is less impressed by the cause to which the officer could be said to have
sacrificed himself than by the manner of his death. In fact, Napoléon does not even
comment on the cause at all but rather is inspired to compare two manners of dy-
ing: one in ordinary weakness, where one is made supplicant to priests and confes-
sors who prepare for one’s death according to established formulae, the other in full
vigor—here in battle—where one can die “exempted from the powerful effects of
calumny, envy, and all the hateful passions that almost exclusively seem to guide the
conduct of men.”42
This, then, is glorious death because it expresses the logic of sovereignty. But
there is an added dimension to it. In a dialectical fashion, it is glorious because it is
the kind of death that is contemptuous of ordinary death. The difference between
ordinary and glorious death is essentially the same as the difference between au-
tonomy and sovereignty. And these two, in turn, may be regarded as the modern
road signs intended to shorten the distance between the ancient positions of slav-
ery and mastery. Autonomous death ostensibly has more meaning than slave death,
because the priest, who exemplifies what the world has to offer in terms of prepa-
ration for death, presides over it and sublimates the weakness exposed in the pro-
cess of dying as passage into a realm of immortality. Sovereign death, by contrast,
is closer to mastery, as it expresses the highest level of sovereignty precisely due to
its gratuitous nature. It must be distinguished, of course, from the “heroic,” sacrifi-
cial death in which the self expects to be immortalized by survivors. Napoléon, as
we see, already hints that the heroic sacrificial death, to which an army commander
is accustomed, is not what is catching his attention here. What he is observing is
far more interesting, namely, death as a freedom expressed through gratuity—
which in principle is always avoidable, and not death as a fulfillment of a contract
with immortality, which in principle is obligatory.
If we wish to posit an innate source for this suicidal sovereignty, one possible
location immediately suggests itself in Freud’s death instinct. Of course, the death
instinct may also express itself in other acts that are injurious to the self but short of
death, though likewise they are affirmations of sovereignty. But if we follow Freud,
while such acts are apparitions of the unconscious plan to die in one’s own manner,
they cannot possibly be entirely gratuitous. True, they express contempt of the lim-
its imposed by civilization on individual freedom—that the individual should be
above the dictates of such civilization. But they also indicate that such displays of
“freedom” from ordinariness are not gratuitous, especially if it is true that their hid-
den purpose is death. For in this case death is not gratuitous: it has a purpose, and
that is to send the organism back into an original state of amorphous satisfaction.
Preparations 71
In this psychological conception, gratuitous sovereignty as such cannot exist,

even in sadism, which Freud regards not as an expression of sovereignty—much less
gratuity—but rather as an outcome of an unresolved struggle between the life and
death instincts. As a (projected) wish to injure, sadism is connected to the death
instinct. Yet as a product of the libido, it also belongs to the domain of the life in-
stinct.43 Here, death no longer works against life. In sadism, and by extension in
masochism as well, a symbiosis between life and death takes hold. Here, the game
of mastery and servitude is taken out of its historical, political, cultural, and eco-
nomic production sites and reproduced as a self-referential performance—that is to
say, performance to the self and its other self. The performance is synonymous with
pleasure, pleasure is synonymous with pain. The contradictions presupposed in the
opposite lexical, physical, and emotive spheres of life and death find here their dis-
tinct and—as seen from outside the performance—unfathomable synthesis.
That sovereignty is connected to pleasure is not a novel discovery, even
though, as we shall see soon, it is also connected to suffering. Pleasure here requires
pain that reaches, occasionally, the point of death. It is thus no accident that some-
one like Bataille, who understood his commitment to the sovereignty of life as
antinomic to the conformist autonomy which formed the parameters of bourgeois
respectability, was also fascinated with the socially marginal experiences of sadism.
One of his works was a commentary on the trial of Gilles de Rais, a medieval aris-
tocrat who was a serial murderer. Gilles de Rais’s contemporaries were fascinated
with his murderous sexual exploits, to which he fully confessed during his trial,
which he concluded with a humble, and apparently moving, request for divine for-
giveness. Surprisingly, Gilles de Rais garnered thereby far more crowd sympathy
than Joan of Arc, who had been executed about a century earlier. Bataille’s account
for the sympathy of the crowd locates it in the fact that the murderer represented
the crowd’s multifarious dimensions more completely than any other system could.
As an aristocrat who bathed in lowly blood, he combined the high and the low, like
everyone else in the crowd did at an ostensibly unconscious level.44
But Gilles de Rais was perhaps appealing for a different reason. He represented
a case of absolute sovereignty, in which his own social status was an ingredient. It
is unlikely that a lower-class individual with comparable deeds and demeanor
would have generated the same kind of empathy at that time. What Gilles de Rais
did was to extend a bit the range of sovereign activities already allotted to aristoc-
racy, to the point of sexual sadism, murder, and subsequent bathing in the blood of
victims. These atrocities were obviously gratuitous from the point of view of con-
temporaries, although they were clearly connected to pleasure. But in general, dis-
plays of gratuity were not only allowed to but further expected from the aristocracy.
Yet, such display, by definition, had to be public in nature. Its very publicity both
validated the sovereign nature of aristocratic life and imposed public limits on the
range of behaviors the aristocrat could exhibit by the nature of his status. Thus, the
public nature of aristocracy was in an important sense also a prison, as every public
action was prescribed according to rules and etiquette.45 Under such a system,
those who understood sovereignty as more than just the display of sovereignty had
to practice that understanding in a secluded private sphere. Only there was one free
from the rigid dictates of civilization attendant to one’s status. But this, of course,
is secret sovereignty that, once discovered, calls for punishment, even though it
may have been encouraged along by public demand for symbolic displays of sov-
ereignty.46 Crime, in this sense, is simply that portion of sovereignty that is possible
but not permitted.
But here, one has to make a careful distinction between secret sovereignty and
the secret of open sovereignty. Secret sovereignty is the conspiracy in the private
sphere against public regulations. It is part of a belief that one is by nature above
regulations and civilization, that one, in essence, deserves to be one’s own sover-
eign. Obviously, gratuitous murder is only the most extreme example of this idea;
it is not the common method of proving sovereignty even secretly and only to one-
self. But the essence of secret sovereignty resides in the necessity and irresistibility
of its affirmation. Secret sovereignty actually has no secrets other than that of its
very existence. It is punishable because it is seen as a danger to order. It, too, re-
gards itself as endangered. Thus, it seeks to remain inaudible in the larger world.
The secret of open sovereignty, by contrast, operates in the political world
proper. The classic rendition of it is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, whose
supreme sovereignty, when he chooses to invoke it, is regarded as higher than that
of the Messiah. The Grand Inquisitor’s long lecture on the secrets of sovereignty
condemns Jesus for his remarkable political ineptitude and recounts how the
church was consumed for generations in its effort to correct his mistakes. The world,
according to the Grand Inquisitor, is not fit for freedom. The secret is that people
must be made to imagine that they have freedom, but in reality they have no use
for it. Only the sovereign leader knows that, along with the other secrets of power,
none of which have anything to do with the possibility of salvation. The occasional
cruelty of the public sovereign leader does not stem from hatred toward those who
violate order, nor from any basic hunger for power, nor, to be sure, from passion for
the spiritual principles for which he publicly stands. Rather, it emanates from his
superior knowledge of the principles of sovereignty. These principles involve
knowing about human nature that which those subject to his sovereignty cannot or
do not wish to know. Man, he says, requires and respects secrecy, which he will-
ingly entrusts to interpretive authority—and fears nothing more than truth and
freedom.
It is this equation that makes followers not only submit to authority but ulti-
mately invest it with monopoly rights over death, the ultimate mystery. The Grand
Inquisitor possesses an exclusive right to kill, while the Messiah, by contrast, only
heals. The Messiah saves the world by healing and self-sacrifice, while the system
to which he gave rise saves the world by punishment and confession. It demands to
Preparations 73
know the secret thoughts and private sins of followers, but it keeps its own secrets
from them. The secret of open sovereignty consists in its knowledge of the psychic
fears of those subject to it.
Yet, in contrast to Gilles de Rais’s private sovereignty, the Grand Inquisitor’s
public sovereignty has little to do with any life instincts, notably pleasure. At the
close of his speech, the Grand Inquisitor confesses to the silent Messiah that he is
not happy, that the elites who know and control public sovereignty cannot possibly
be happy. Only the subjugated people, from whom freedom has been taken away
and exchanged for the illusion of freedom, are happy and content. The price of
knowing the secret of sovereignty, namely, that it is exclusively aware of the illu-
sory basis of collective moral ideals, is unhappy consciousness. That consciousness
knows that it has to use death because preparing its subjects for death is the basis
of the morality upon which it stands. Death is its instrument. But it itself has no
fear of death because it knows that the ultimate secret in the world is not death but
sovereignty, and that secret it already has in its pocket. What it does not possess is
capacity for pleasure. Indeed, it is its exclusive discovery of the secret that induces
its gloom.
Secret sovereignty, by contrast, derives pleasure from the very exclusiveness
of its secrecy. The secret it knows most is not that of sovereignty but of pleasure. It
controls not death but life, which becomes the object of its monopolistic effort, in
the same way that public sovereignty seeks to monopolize power over death. And
this orientation toward life essentially means that the effort at sovereignty is di-
rected at the self, not the world. From the point of view of private sovereignty,
death is the property of the world, not the sovereign self. The chastity and deco-
rum of civilization signify imposed lack of freedom and thus generalized death in
immobility of the soul.
Is it possible for public sovereignty to be as self-fulfilled as private sovereignty?
The Grand Inquisitor seems to offer an emphatic no for an answer, although he
does not seem to think in terms of comparison to private sovereignty, which he
must assume cannot possibly exist in his world. He is publicly sovereign, and his
authority is unquestioned. But since he had commenced his mission in an attempt
to save the world, the sovereignty he ultimately comes to acquire derives its legit-
imacy from that early effort. His unhappiness consists in that he remains commit-
ted to saving the world rather than himself. He cannot change the principles of his
original mission, even after discovering that the power one needs to acquire over
others in order to save them sets off in motion a self-enclosed game. The secret of
that game, as he learns over time, is that it precludes all other objectives, including
salvation.
The other obvious option he has after such a devastating discovery, of course,
is to forget about the world and contemplate his own remarkable originality in ar-
riving at that discovery. He moves from being a “Marxist,” so to speak, to being a
“Nietzschean.”47 Along similar lines, Shadia Drury suggests that this trajectory con-
stitutes an integral aspect of revolutionary history. Drury posits a duality of two
prototypes, a world-savior “people’s commissar” and a self-savior “superman.”48 The
commissar knows that in order to save humanity, he must be dead to all sentimen-
tal distractions along the way. He knows that the task is great, that it requires battle
and sacrifice. But once he succeeds in gaining the power he had been seeking, he
discovers a new insight. His very success proves to him his own exceptionalism,
since only he among his contemporaries has been able to realize his vision. He thus
begins to think that his distinct, historically exceptional self is above being sacri-
ficed for the sake of base humanity. He begins a transformation from a people’s
commissar into a superman. His goal ceases to be the salvation of others that had
originally motivated him. Rather, his goal becomes the journey itself, the continu-
ing life of power.
He, too, comes to know the secret of sovereignty. But his sense of exception-
alism leads him to contemplate immortality, a worthier and more realizable goal
than saving a humanity that, in any case, cannot be saved. In becoming an embod-
iment of his people, a representation of their collective spirit, a demonstration of
their historical potential, his exceptional self becomes as grand as the nation. In in-
gratiating himself into an immortal collective self, the leader becomes immortal.49
The salvation of his people is no longer his goal. This scheme succeeds to the ex-
tent that the people also forget the original mission and come to exchange the pro-
grammatic goal of human salvation with the heroic belief in the immortality of
their peoplehood.
Drury is probably right to suggest that postrevolutionary times are good
points to examine the emergence and consolidation of such a transformation. The
emergence and transformation of Napoléon after the French revolution illustrates
not simply a case of an opportunistic takeover during times of crisis by an ambitious
upstart. His legacy was also a product of a demand for an affirmation of authority
by a new kind of savior. His appropriateness for the task is evidenced in his own
transformation, which parallels those of the mood of his times. Early in 1791, dur-
ing the peak of revolutionary fervor, he compared great men to meteors, which
sacrificed themselves in lighting up their country. Later on in his career, there is an ob-
vious move away from such thoughts. Great men, then, offer themselves up fully
to their own destiny.50 In other words, they commence their movement into history by
a proclivity to sacrifice. In the process, they discover that every accomplishment
along the way elevates them further, revealing not the exceptionalism of their cause
but that of their own destiny. From that elevated perspective, they begin to see the
relativity of mortality. Everything passes away, Napoléon begins to observe, except
for a certain loud “noise,” introduced to the world by great men, after which it con-
tinues to reverberate in the world indefinitely.51 The production of that lasting noise
becomes his obsession. It becomes iniquitous for him to sacrifice himself. Rather, it
Preparations 75
becomes incumbent upon others to sacrifice themselves in order to allow that noise
to be generated.
Napoléon, of course, is far from being alone or even original here. Another ex-
ample suffices, perhaps, to illustrate the tenacity of that perspective of governance,
which sees it as the duty of the world to sacrifice itself for the sake of sovereign gov-
ernance, to the extent that governance regards itself as the only vehicle of immor-
tality that an otherwise mortal world has been able to generate. In the middle of the
Ethiopian famine that led to his downfall, Haile Selassie began to contemplate a
massive dams project, which might have alleviated the problem of recurrent famines
in the long run. The problem, of course, was that the project would have required
great reallocation of resources away from the ongoing famine. But in the words of
one of his associates, that diversion was perfectly justifiable, since the emperor
stood by his very nature above contemporaneity: “Were he to give ear to the whis-
pers and murmurs that it would be better to feed the hungry than to build dams . . .
well, the hungry, even if they are satiated at last, will eventually die, leaving behind
not a trace—neither of themselves, nor of the emperor.”52 Of course, Haile Selassie
was a casualty rather than a product of revolutionary times. And it may be said that
it was his excessive attention to posterity that accelerated his demise. Posterity, in
revolutionary times, could only be entrusted to novel faces and new saviors, not
immobile powers that only remind of death. For one to stand above history, one re-
quires exceptional times. They bring to the fore exceptional wills because only
those can see the potential to link up one’s insignificant self to the great transfor-
mation, to offer oneself up for sacrifice. If it triumphs and survives, it can then re-
turn to a grander or wiser self, and forget the interminable cause.
4
Forgetting
Isolation and Reparation
The trope of death most represented in modern governance reorients the notion of
sacrifice away from its association with tragedy. It further downplays heroism,
which frequently competes unfavorably with the technocratic element of gover-
nance. Some recent scholarship suggests that the decline of non-governance-
centered heroic genres, such as the epic since the seventeenth century, correlates
with the loss of aristocratic autonomy vis-à-vis the state. According to David
Quint, that kind of autonomy had been prefigured in the transhistorical preference
of the epic for individual, fallible, and tragic heroes like Achilles over kings like
Agamemnon.1 For Michel Foucault, the decline of knightly values of valor and in-
dividual skill can be traced to the inventions of such aids to governmentality as the
rifle, which highlighted discipline and obedience to general plans over and above
any other personal qualities of combatants.2 The technocratic today, in its absolute
sense, represents a forgetfulness of death as an engine of governmental behavior.
This is active forgetfulness in the sense that it is both the driving energy of a thor-
oughly administered society and the product of the ethics of modern capitalism,
which, in its orientation toward production and consumption rather than prudence
and saving, highlights life and forgets death. It is of course not the same capitalism
of Max Weber’s gloomy puritans, who were obsessed with death and salvation but
who end up unwittingly creating in the world a socioeconomy which, as Daniel
Bell and others protest, progressively rejects every notion of delayed gratification.
In such an age, the heroic impulse would be expected to wane in its dual
struggle with the mundane notion of life-as-instant-gratification, which capitalism
highlights, and the mechanized requisites of technocratic administration. Today,
however, the victory of technocracy and capitalism over the heroic is never com-
plete. Apparently docile souls of mass society commence now and then in new ways
the ancient project at immortality, which, because of the sheer scale of mass soci-
ety, cannot refer to projects originating and ending within individuated, so mani-
festly insignificant selves—atomized, lonely, and powerless. Especially in situations
76
Forgetting 77
where civil society has been crushed or made servile and attentive to the state, the
members of the herd begin to look for leaders who stand in for them and who, in
an atomized society, embody their only link to one another. One begins to see in of-
fice thus not historical heroes with a vision beyond their times but demagogues who,
like Louis Napoléon, represent the genesis of this move. For Karl Marx, this is ex-
actly how the success of one of the most opportunistic leaders of his times could be
understood, namely, under conditions in which ancient centers of power, having
been weakened, abandon the political scene to new social bases of power. In the
case of Louis Napoléon, such new bases include the atomized and uncooperative
lifestyle of the relatively rich peasants in the countryside.3 Their isolation from one
another itself calls forth the leader figure that would represent for them their only
connection to one another. Here we enter the age of isolation and reparation.
In the traditional theory of psychoanalysis, isolation is detected in primary life
experiences rather than in specific sociohistorical contexts. For Sigmund Freud, the
child’s ultimate and most suppressed trauma is that of its birth, its separation from
the mother, that is, its memory of life itself. Life, in other words, indicates a primary
experience of separation and, as such, provides the basis for the work of the death
instinct. Unlike the life instinct, which manifests and fulfills itself only intermit-
tently in experiences of pleasure, the death instinct does its work unobtrusively and
continuously. Even pleasure is placed at its service, since it collaborates with the
death instinct in protecting the organism against excess stimuli from the outside,4
thereby keeping the organism from dying according to designs exterior to it.
The self, thus, comes to value its separateness, but paradoxically only because
it secretly refuses to accept it. If the world outside of it is guilty of bringing it to life,
then such a world is a coconspirator in imposing isolation upon it and thus cannot
be trusted to undo it. Thus, the social atom can join this concrete world only at the
cost of suppressing its sense of distance from it, that is, its secret belief that it be-
longs in a better and more organically harmonious place, elsewhere. In the here and
now, it can do little other than conform to the superego, which allows it to pass its
time as it waits for death.
According to Norbert Elias, the problem of isolation is more sociological in
nature, although it still possesses universal structures. The feeling of loneliness
emerges out of one’s environment, not the deep reservoir of the psyche. One feels
lonely when one is living among those for whom one has no significance, or where
one cannot meet those one feels a need to connect to, or when the trauma of ear-
lier nonreciprocation of affinity causes a permanent withdrawal into the self.5
While the psychological concept highlights separation and the sociological
one loneliness, the two are similar in that they describe imposed experiences. Social
loneliness is already prefigured in the unchosen character of psychological and bio-
logical separation; it is thus a reminder of life. That life is dreadful expresses itself in
the effort to overcome loneliness not as it presents itself, that is, as a concrete con-
dition of being of no significance to others, or as an individual of no attachments,

or as someone who is afraid of coming close to others. Rather, the dread of life ex-
presses itself in the construction of imaginary and abstract links to intangible social
wholes, links from which one cannot be dismissed or excluded. Such links appear involun-
tary and objective. Thus, they relieve the individual from pragmatically linking up
to the world of life while simultaneously constructing links which substitute for the
insufferable autonomy of the lifeworld.
Those abstract links—for example, nationalism—express thus an idealized
conception of death. They presuppose a vast, complete, and sufficient enclosure, a
large heap of mortals in whose web one gains meaning by being essentially and or-
ganically impossible to dismiss. One may indeed remain lonely, but one is no longer
separate—a larger trauma is resolved thereby. That such imaginary associations do
their work without empirical manifestation parallels how the world of death exerts
its hold on the psyche—also the world of death can only be imagined, since we
cannot possibly experience it empirically. Both worlds are evidenced, in fact, by the
existence and death of others. Yet even so, their death may signify immortality far
more than cessation of existence—as is the case with the embodying leader who
stands in for our collective association in an atomized mass society. Everything the
leader represents is immortal, and the leader represents nothing other than a repar-
ative condensation of the nation’s myth of the affinities, intimacies, and mimeses
of its members. Sometimes the leader may even think of himself in that manner.
Kemal Atatürk, according to one psychological profile, represented precisely such
a “reparative” narcissism. In idealizing a group of others (i.e., the nation), which he
then perceives as an idealized extension of himself, his own grandiose self acquires
thereby more cohesion and stability than would be possible had its sources of self-
hood remained confined to itself.6
The psychological model as applied to Atatürk’s case may be highly ques-
tioned, and the point here does not concern its adequacy. The point concerns not
the personality or psychological profile of a specific leader but how such a leader is
imagined from below as a collective embodiment of the nation. The single citizen—
in this case facing the specter of demise of an old society along with its structures
of stability, intimacy, and meaning—idealizes in the sea of loss and chaos whatever
collective principle seems capable of offering similar solidities. Out of the ruins the
citizen can discern only the silhouette of an emergent leader, who then makes it
possible for the citizen to dispense with the specter of atomized dislocation at
once. Today, only in such contorted capacity does the heroic maintain room for it-
self in politics, where the rest of the space is occupied alternatively by the techno-
cratic and the hedonistic elements of life.
Here, we must confront a foundational question: Is there some basic skeletal,
universal structure that accounts for a recurrent proclivity, in our search for collec-
tive immortality, to condense social links, and sometimes even the very idea of so-
Forgetting 79
ciety, in the leader principle? We are closer to mysticism than to science here, but
perhaps an occasional proximity to a realm which promises to offer some insight
can be more enlightening than proximity to that which does not. In Heideggerian
philosophy, the construction of cognitive links to the world is inseparable from
the construction of understanding (Verstehen)—a concept about which German
philosophers have written many, unappreciated volumes. The notion of under-
standing is different from that inscribed in a simple sharing of information (Mit-
teilung). Rather, understanding presupposes existential relocation and a cultivation
of specific sensibilities, other than those involved in the simple reception of news.
Understanding, for Heidegger, emerges simultaneously with sensitivity to the
world. One of its most notable manners of operation is conscience. The basis of
this conscience is a “call” that seems to come from without—like Freud’s super-
ego—as a sublimation of the ambiguous “noise” of the everyday. In contrast to the
noise of the everyday, this call is mute, yet unambiguous. Conscience speaks always
in the mode of silence, calling from the distance those who want to be called back.7
Back to where? In all likelihood, those who receive the call do not know. That
is the essence of mystical thought, namely, the belief that the insufficiency of con-
crete existence calls for a rediscovery of that which lies behind it. And that which
lies behind cannot, by definition, be readily known, since given existence would
have otherwise been sufficient. But this structure is not necessarily confined to mys-
tical thought, although that is where the conclusion regarding the insufficiency of
existence becomes a guide to a life practice. The basic structure of the call, which
Heidegger assumes must be regarded as outside the given world (God is one name
for it), is connective. As a ground for conscience and as a genesis of understanding
formed by conscience, the call seems to come from within. On the other hand, it
also seems to come from without, from a sublime realm beyond that of ordinary
mortals.8 The call, therefore, has a dialectical structure, an objective and a subjec-
tive side, a mortal and an immortal sphere of production. Through assimilating the
call in a process of “understanding,” one connects oneself to that which has always
been immortal. One is thereby emancipated from the ambiguous noise of metro-
politan signals and mass society. Hearing sublime calls requires cultivating an ear
to that which has always been calm, modest, subtle, yet clear.
This trajectory of thought would imply that in order to cultivate this poten-
tial for hearing, one must not pay too much attention to this world. It is too dis-
tracting, too full of undifferentiated noise, too mortal. There is an apparent anti-
modern fear of mass society in this standpoint. This antimodernity is based on the
view that modernity replaces readily accessible organicities from the world with a
congestion of signs and sources of calling. These signs and sources, in turn, do not
allow the final destination of one’s conscience to be ascertained without an excep-
tional effort to eliminate extraneous clamor, which is what most of the modern
world is. The fundamental substance of conscience is hard-pressed to survive if
immersed thoroughly in such a world. The fuller the world becomes with metro-
politan signals and the manifestations of mass society, the more urgent becomes
the need to escape it for the sake of safeguarding the dialectics of conscience and
understanding.
Yet precisely at this juncture, when it is most needed, the escape itself be-
comes most difficult to undertake. One is trapped by noise, endless displays of
power and sovereignty, images of celebrity, ceaseless mass programming—in other
words, one can hardly hear the subsonic speech of eternity. One’s ear is damaged
because it cannot escape the clutter of mortals all around. One surrenders to the
world, exchanging thereby one’s prospective link to eternity through the dialectics
of conscience and understanding, to abstract links which take the one-way forms
of mass phenomena: celebrity, cacophony, exhibitionism, parades, patriotism; all
displays, processed as sensations rather than meanings.
Alternatively, this modern self adjusts to the assault of metropolitan life by
shutting itself off against all outside stimuli, as Georg Simmel argues, like a machine
overloaded with a volume of signals it is not equipped to process.9 It maintains a
certain isolation thereby, but it is not the kind of isolation that presupposes pro-
clivity for any sublime tasks. For Simmel, this kind of isolation is undertaken simply
for the sake of psychic self-protection. The self in the modern metropolis is on the
defensive and can hardly afford the thought of transcendence, for which it no
longer has the time, the energy, or even the skill. It walks down the congested street
as a spectator, seeing nothing. It can barely process one piece of information be-
fore another assaults the defenseless but increasingly indifferent gates of its sense
perception.
Both perspectives on the modern self—invaded with banality, protected by
timidity—are not at such great odds as it would first appear. Openness to the given
world, with all its signals, can also be seen as a mechanism of self-protection. If one
processes this world entirely as sensation rather than meaning, then one can be said
to be actually closed to it precisely because of one’s openness. One processes noth-
ing: accepts but does not understand. One’s connection to the world is reduced to
continually and simply verifying one’s sense of perception. Every moment the
world displays to the observing self a contract of belonging; every moment the self
signs it without reading. One is born into a nation, one’s continued belonging to
a nation requires no further elaboration, no understanding, no examination, no
reflection. Appearing self-evident, the world of ideas is treated at the same level as
a world of senses, as if both were the same cognitive machinery.
This type of modern self is thus perpetually afraid of drawing conclusions,
emasculated, and imitative. It is compelled to forget the immemorial struggle be-
tween mortality and immortality as the combined forces of technocracy and hedo-
nism, operating from different fronts, score more victories over the heroic impulse.
The dethronement of heroism may in part signal the end of the historical blood-
Forgetting 81
bath that had nourished it—death and sacrifice undertaken for the cause of im-
mortality. That accomplishment signifies the victory of life in its mortal sense. This
victory is exemplified by the rise of the hedonistic impulse and the politics of plea-
sure, whose emphatic connection is to the here and now and whose spirit is any-
thing but sacrificial. Instead of being invested in the leader, the narcissistic impulse
is woven back into a life conducted within the compass of consumption, gratifica-
tion, and exhibition.
The rise of the technocratic, on the other hand, is tied to a more profound ac-
complishment in political history. For Foucault, modern systems of control are typ-
ified by a new kind of power far more pervasive in society than ever before, yet
more silent and unseen. Jeremy Bentham’s famous panopticon stands as a metaphor
for this kind of control and also as the best representation of the ethics of tech-
nocracy: staid efficiency of control rather than bombastic display of power, super-
visory thoroughness rather than censorial impressionism, alignment with life and
correction rather than with death and example. This new power, perfectly suited
to a thoroughly administered mass society, ties itself to the principles of knowledge
and enlightenment and, as the early nineteenth-century parricide Pierre Rivière
notes, highlights the “feminine” in the world over the “masculine.” The modern
commentators on that classic crime, in which the mother was the first victim, note
that Rivière’s memoirs exemplify what the Enlightenment meant for adherents
of the old order: they saw it clearly not as progress, but as a replacement of the tra-
ditional, prosaic, and obvious authority represented by masculinity and especially
the figure of the father, with the more secret yet pervasive and thorough feminine
system of control, for which the mother stood primarily.10
The feminine in the world, for Rivière, became the new tyrant, more menacing
than the masculine, since it was more capable of deriving sympathy and thus less
likely to be challenged. In his own account of his multiple murders, Rivière brings
up not just the necessity of challenging the modern power of women in order to vin-
dicate his father, whom they had grieved. It is also evident that he regarded his chal-
lenge not as simple revenge, for in simple revenge, accomplishment of “duty” would
absolve the perpetrator of any further obligation. Rather, he saw his challenge as be-
longing to the ancient principles of sacrifice, in which the hero prepares for his own
death. Thus, he added to his initial list of victims, which had included just feminine
power as represented by his mother and sister, his younger brother, who in Rivière’s
mind neither had comparable power to the other two victims nor was a real culprit
in their conspiracies against the father. Rivière, who immediately gave himself up to
be executed after the crimes, stated that he decided to kill his brother as well not
only because he wanted to vindicate his father and die for him as Jesus died for hu-
manity but also because he wanted his father not to mourn him and to live free of re-
grets thereafter. Thus he came up with the ingenious solution of killing a son whom
the father actually loved, along with the women who had tormented him.11
This interpretation of the meaning of sacrifice is curious, and it is in fact nei-

ther prototypically ancient nor modern. In the first place, justice in the modern
world makes sacrifice absolutely necessary. A world dominated by technocratic in-
stitutions introduces a form of power that is pervasively tenacious and inescapable,
precisely because it is gentle and feminine. One can be aware of this secret, there-
fore, only if one is part of it or is opposed to it, but not if one is simply subject to
its seductive gentleness. If one were to oppose it, one could not combat this kind
of power on its own terms. One’s opposition must rather take a form that, in its vi-
olence, reveals that the new power’s only vulnerability is to masculine challenge.
This masculinity represents that which is manifestly strong, whose power is both
unconcealed and prone to be exercised in a prosaic or discontinuous manner—it
does not translate itself into a bureaucratic institution.
Yet, unlike the feminine that esteems winning the ultimate battle and thus
does not shy away from underhanded scheming and plotting, the masculine high-
lights the means above the ends. Especially now, it is more prone to sacrifice, so as
to point to the distance of the feminine principle of power from the glorious world
of death and to expose the unholy alliance of feminine power with the principle of
life. The dominance of effeminate technocracy requires that the logic of sacrifice
be pushed to its extreme; not gratuitous sacrifice, but unmourned sacrifice. In Pierre
Rivière’s otherwise deranged mind, this part of the murder, like everything else, is
premeditated and rationalized. His sacrifice can be complete not when he dies.
Rather, he learns one principle from technocracy, namely, that sacrifice, to the ex-
tent that it is needed, must be utilitarian rather than gratuitous.
In this case, the ethic of duty which propels the sacrifice has lost its oblivion to
consequences. If the object is to sacrifice oneself in order to restore justice, then
those who are left behind in order to enjoy this justice, from which they had been
deprived completely, must be capable of enjoying it fully. The masculine principle ac-
cepts no partial justice, no compromise, and thus it must here not only plan to sac-
rifice itself but also plan to erase itself from positive memory. In other words, those
vindicated by the sacrifice must see both the murder and the sacrifice of the murderer
as necessary for justice, rather than as contradictory components of its operation.
This logical conclusion can only be arrived at by a madman; all rational be-
ings living in the age of technocratic administration can withstand life to the ex-
tent that they learn the imperatives of compromising and diminishing their expec-
tations. But the kind of madness being addressed here expresses itself as an avowed
and uniquely meaningful response in a world furtively suffocated by a new kind of
power. In a certain sense, it exists at the extreme end of the psychic continuum
of paranoia.12 It is telling that the annals of psychoanalysis from its inception until
today teem with celebrated cases of paranoiacs, and Deleuze and Guattari make a
definite case regarding the affinity of capitalism in its modern form with certain
forms of paranoia in particular.13 Paranoiacs as they appear in the annals of psycho-
Forgetting 83
analysis invariably show a distinctly modern dynamic of perception, whereby one is

tormented by a feeling of relentless encroachment, even into one’s own body, by a
secret yet pervasive source of unfathomable and shifty power. For paranoiacs in gen-
eral, the mode of operation of this power is at odds with the modernist sense of in-
dividual autonomy (as Judge Schreber famously registered). In fact, this pervasive
power is noticed precisely because the individual now has a right to exist as such.
More so than the case of Pierre Rivière, the various grades of paranoia as it ex-
presses itself today cannot be understood apart from a fundamental tension that in-
heres in conceptions of modern power: on the one hand, individual empowerment
as an expression of the ethic of individual autonomy, on the other, external power as
the pervasive effects of rational, technocratic administration. Paranoia expresses
here a state of mind characterized by maximum attention to both. Thus paranoia
in its various gradations has enjoyed more objective reasons for existence in moder-
nity than ever before. Of course, what we call “paranoia” consists essentially of the
translation of the tension between sources of power into delusions. But the para-
noid self does so only because it takes its autonomy as seriously as it takes all man-
ifestations of the pervasive power directed at it from a central panopticon.
Paranoia is unthinkable without a sense of fundamental social separation,
coupled with ongoing intrusions of unwelcome sorts onto that separation. These
must be distinguished from mass hysterias and crowd phenomena, which likewise
became more magnified, even more murderous, under modernity. While mass hys-
teria enhances the solidarity of loosely connected individuals by creating and fo-
cusing collective energy on a common public enemy, paranoia in fact confirms the
disconnection of the individual from the mass. The paranoid in mass society is on
the defensive, precisely against the kind of massive unleashing of power whose po-
tential is evidenced nowhere better than in the conformity that defines the crowd.
In modern popular culture, the clash between the two appears in countless represen-
tations,14 where the paranoid discovers power by first treating oneself as being set
apart from the crowd, a perspective which allows the paranoid to see the danger
latent in the crowd, a danger which nevertheless emanates from an unseen source
of power above the crowd. The crowd is merely a manifestation of the threat, not
the source of the threat in itself. The source is hidden from view.
In such a society, everyone is paranoid. But unlike the clinical paranoiac we
know so well, the members of the crowd sublimate their paranoia by belonging,
whence the essential feeling of separateness which defines the paranoiac becomes
a collective property. Collective paranoia, cultivated by the crowd as a whole, is a
permanent requisite for its continuity. In an atomized society, nothing brings its
atoms together better than a sense of common danger. In cultivating this orienta-
tion toward external danger, it turns away from the power ruling over it. Modern
history provides no shortage of examples—in fact, it may seem to provide only ex-
amples of this dynamic, most notably in “liberal democratic” societies, no less. Any
chronicler of the format of “public debates” of, say, the last two or three decades in
a place such as the United States is likely to record a long series of discrete mani-
festations of eruptive mass hysterias rather than any sequence of cumulative “de-
bates” in the usual sense of the word.
The hysteria format is a far more fitting descriptor of what has become, in this
perfected mass society, the prevailing method of approaching public issues of all
kinds: the Iran hostage crisis, foreign invasions and wars of all kinds in the 1980s
and 1990s, the child abuse hysteria of the 1980s, the ongoing campaign against
smoking, the “war” against narcotics, the Y2K scare, the proliferation of the “zero
tolerance” concept, terrorism in the midst, and how in general debates over other-
wise simple issues easily and routinely become couched in apocalyptic language.15
More so than by logical sequence, these themes and campaigns are united by their
format as mass hysterias: eruptive, discontinuous, forgettable, and ultimately re-
placeable by other campaigns, not when they are “resolved” but when they finally
exhaust the most passive watching habits. The recurrent nature of the hysterical
format emanates from vulnerability of society at large to centralized manipulation
of information. This vulnerability, in turn, is coupled with the cultivated modes of
participation of the herd, informed as they are by superficial education, inaptitude
for systematic thinking, intellectual laziness, and valorization of “heroic” individ-
ual rescuers.
In this respect, one may want to ask a foundational question regarding the
reactive temper of the hysterical impulse: Apart from the reality of the danger, does
a feeling of endangerment serve a social purpose? We must keep in mind, of course,
that neither the individual paranoiac nor members of collective hysterias feel that
they are actively inventing the danger to them. Rather, the danger seems to come
from without, uninvited and unelectable. If one feels acute danger when the dan-
ger in fact is simply imagined, mediocre, or negotiable in reality, we can explain
that feeling in one of two ways. On the one hand, we can say it is a product of
simple ignorance. On the other hand, we can see that the feeling of danger is nec-
essary for maintaining individual or collective constitution and solidity, the kind of
solidity that requires perpetual combat against all that which is outside of it. The
two explanations, of course, do not exclude each other by necessity. It is often the
case that the kind of ignorance required for discerning the other as dangerous is
chosen ignorance, since actually existing threats would be expected to result in an
educative effort aimed at assessing the threat.16
The proclivity to manufacture threats, therefore, must be regarded as a subli-
mated feeling of the impossibility of survival. Technocratic administration high-
lights ordinary life, while the hedonistic impulse of capitalism highlights gratified
life. Both advise a straightforward forgetting of death as a solution to mortality. But
in an age of individuality and mass isolation, where the worst fear is lonely death,
one fears death more than ever before, precisely as one is being advised from all di-
Forgetting 85
rections to forget it. If everything works perfectly, one comes to fear what one has
forgotten. What is feared is not death per se but that which cannot be contem-
plated: that death possesses the same existential structure as life. If life is atomistic,
so is death. And if one secretly clings to a more essential meaning of life, a mean-
ing suppressed in the face of the dual assault of technocratic normalcy and con-
sumptive hedonism, death becomes even more traumatic: it will come amid no
conditions that allow one to discern its meaning.
In such an age, therefore, this kind of induced forgetting only leads to a dogged
effort to postpone death. This especially but not exclusively bourgeois project is
perhaps the basis of Freud’s assertion that the id secretly thinks that it is immortal
by its very nature or that it at least deserves to be so. Elias criticizes this notion by
pointing out its contradictory element: the id has no progressive consciousness of
space and time; it is immersed in the here and now. Therefore, it cannot possibly
entertain the compensatory concept of immortality.17 Here it might be added that
the very notion of immortality requires not just a discovery of the progressive na-
ture of time but moreover a continuous remembrance of that discovery. In a differ-
ent context, in fact, Freud himself argues that the essence of what we call “maturity”
is just this attentiveness to the progressive nature of time. For Freud, awareness of
the progressive nature of time does not simply introduce us to the idea of mortal-
ity. More important, “maturity” has a therapeutic function, since past traumas cease
to be experienced as the property of the present.18 Thus, a discovery which frees
one from eternal bondage to trauma ironically introduces one to the specter of
death. If in an age of hedonism one succeeds in suppressing both past and future,
one can be momentarily free from both past trauma and future mortality. Modern
society does provide the structure of administration and economy which encour-
ages forgetting not of the past but of the future, as the two are discovered together
in the same cognitive process.
But on this score there is an alternative to the process of forgetting and re-
membrance, hinted at in a different tradition of psychoanalysis. One of the main
interpreters of Carl Jung argues that the goal of psychoanalysis is the opposite of
what Freud had suggested. It is not to translate dream language into ego language
but the exact reverse. Only in so doing can we shift perspective away from the
“heroic basis of consciousness,” located in the individual, and move into the “poetic
basis of consciousness,” which ostensibly transcends the given conditions of indi-
vidual loneliness and separation.19 Obviously, the recipe here is to overcome not
traumas and not even mortality but rather the ego itself. If forgetting is necessary
in the modern world, then we can choose what we want to forget. Instead of for-
getting death, we would forget the ego itself. True, we would forget heroism, both
ancient and modern, but only because the thoroughly governed and administered
modern ego cannot possibly be a credible site of heroism. Thus, it must be dis-
suaded from all such thoughts, must be taught to look outside of itself—indeed, to
invite into the self what would otherwise be dreaded as an exterior threat and thus
an engine for the production of paranoia. If there is to be a cure for isolation, it can
be sought only at the price of removing one’s shields and giving up the heroic im-
pulse. Death is also forgotten in this equation as well but because the self, not time,
has been forgotten.
The Heroic
Modern life is thus impossible without some aspect of forgetting. The only deci-
sion is what to forget, which one can argue is ultimately an ideological rather than
psychological decision. In the psychological sense, forgetting is an adaptation or
response to some (universally distributed) fear or (individual) trauma. In the ideo-
logical sense, forgetting is situated in social matrices which determine the social
significance of life and, consequently, what is to be highlighted or downplayed
with respect to its meaning. We may want to compare the two routes through the
workings of one pivotal concept, namely, that of heroism. In psychological terms,
the heroic is latent in the ego-centered consciousness, and its workings are appar-
ent in one’s capacities for self-mastery and becoming emancipated from traumas. It
is also exemplified in the ego’s continuous effort to protect its autonomy from the
excessive influence of external stimulation. In ideological terms, by contrast, the
heroic is based and evidenced in immersion in the world. Here the heroic perpet-
ually processes stimuli not as threats from which one must be protected but as var-
ious invocations of an ethic of duty in the world.
In the psychological account, the first heroic act of the organism is sacrifice.
In order to protect the organism from an excess of external stimuli, the outer layer
dies and becomes hardened to the world, leaving on the surface only sense organs
with reduced capacity.20 The outer layer sacrifices itself to protect the organism, in
the same way that a hero sacrifices himself in a mountain pass to protect his com-
rades from an advancing enemy. The outer layer remains as a hardened armory af-
ter death, much as the hero remains as a hardened memory, a repeatable model of
collective protection. But while the hero must be replaced, when needed, by other
heroes who have been inspired by his model, the outer organismic layer is irre-
placeable, inasmuch as individuals themselves are unrepeatable. Thus, while social
heroism can be reenacted, requiring a perpetual readiness to reenact the will to sac-
rifice, the kind of heroic sacrifice that had saved the ego is singular. The ego’s heroic
credential consists in that it is a product of an innate sacrifice. If we were to pursue
this logic one step further, it would then appear that the very being of the ego is in-
distinguishable from a sense of entitlement to be sacrificed for.
That the ego walks about the world with a hardened armory does not neces-
sarily mean that such an armory is strictly biological in nature. The sociological
Forgetting 87
symbolic interactionist literature, for example, reproduces in a microsociological

sense the psychological emphasis on individual shields. Here, the shield is social in
nature, a kind of a mask that we all carry to represent a self in interactionist situa-
tions.21 Others see only the represented self, but is there anything hiding under-
neath the represented self? Or is the self innately empty, which is to say, is the mask
all that exists? Symbolic interactionism, in its emphasis on roles, etiquette, situa-
tions, and frames of behavior, and in its view of the self as display, seems to suggest
that the variety of shields one carries along in everyday social life indicate the ab-
sence of an essential self. Here, the reality principle produces a variety of masks,
but those masks hide nothing underneath. Their function is to make the self so-
cially presentable by hiding its fundamental emptiness.
This point is articulated in existentialist philosophy in a more emphatic way.
Heidegger argues that being in the world operates in, and is patterned after, the
modality of a shield (Gerüst).22 This perspective, as do the symbolic interactionist
and Freudian ones, articulates the self as keenly attentive to the world but only to
the world as a source of threat. Converging from three disciplinary perspectives
(philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology), they provide us with largely interchange-
able terms for outlining the self, which under conditions of modernity and atom-
ization appears less organically connected to community and more involved in
self-preservation.23 The heroic act here consists of the self’s orientation toward
defending itself against ubiquitous threats. Yet, if that same self is innately vacuous,
if it consists of nothing more than a shield, what is exactly being defended? Why
should this empty, forgetful self fashion itself as a being worthy of safeguarding? Is
the heroic self acting out of instinctual impulse, or is it roused by a faint memory of
what the original sacrifice had intended to keep safe in a state of pristine insulation?
Freudian psychoanalysis suggests that values deemed worthy emerge out of
the dialectics of external struggle rather than introspective investigation. The proto-
typical path begins with the child’s effort to protect itself in its struggle against
the father. Realizing the helplessness of that struggle, it protects itself by identify-
ing with the father, its erstwhile archenemy. The point here, of course, is not the
scientific merit of this theory but its grounding in the dialectics of struggle in gen-
eral. Identifying with an invincible nemesis, after all, is identifying with success. It is
an identification with an idea and an orientation rather than with a specific form of
existence or a substance of essence. In that sense, it is part of the psychological in-
terpretation of the heroic impulse, insofar as the self models itself after exterior ex-
amples of power and survival.
And in this sense, the struggle follows the opposite trajectory of the complex
with which we had commenced. We must remember that before Oedipus there was
Gilgamesh, and it was Gilgamesh who gave the first outline of what the heroic im-
pulse seeks to do. Gilgamesh, in identifying with Enkidu, actually identifies with fail-
ure. Gilgamesh models himself after an exterior example, which, in contrast to the
(child’s) identification with the invincible nemesis, promises only disempowerment

and the impossibility of survival. In not valuing his own heroic exploits as sufficient
indicators of incomparability, Gilgamesh actively locates himself more properly in
the tragic rather than heroic realm.24 Enkidu is not a nemesis but a friend, and be-
tween him and Gilgamesh there is no longer any struggle. Here, a more dangerous
equation begins to operate than the one involved in the identification with the suc-
cessful nemesis. The nemesis’s very success makes the world more predictable and
thus provides a clear model of how survival and power could be attained. The con-
cept of the friend, however, entails no clear trajectories of success or failure. The
friend is equally open to both. The friend’s future is indeterminate; the friendship
itself is a gamble. Unlike identification with inimical power, friendship, which es-
sentially means association with the prosaic rules of gambling, entails openness to
the prospect of tragedy.
In the age of atomized isolation, in which the experiences of friendship them-
selves become more fleeting, one would expect this openness to tragedy to become
likewise less pronounced. If we look at contemporary Hollywood and popular U.S.
culture for a portion of the evidence for this shift, we can easily see how tragedy is
usually not allowed to remain unresolved. Whenever present as the engine for a
story, tragedy is often treated as a transient affair to be overcome ultimately in the “tri-
umph of the human spirit” or some such reassuring chimera. This impetuous dread
of tragedy can certainly be understood as a product of an age of loneliness, where
the indeterminacy of human bonds is seen to produce a less predictable, reliable,
or even moral outcome than could be arrived at by the work of concepts and insti-
tutions exterior to those bonds: laws, procedures, “rights,” or decidedly single-handed
triumphs.25
In one sense, the rejection of the gamble inscribed in human bonds can be seen
as an aspect of the ethics of capitalism, which highlights success and inculcates a
fear of failure. In another sense, however, the rejection of the gamble can be traced
back to the character of modern democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his nuanced
assessment of American democracy, noted that under conditions of equality, the
aristocratically inspired notion of sacrifice disappears from the psychological pro-
clivity of the democratic individual.26 The democratic individual is rather a heroic
creator of the political system, which one sees to emanate from one’s own contri-
bution and to reflect one’s own image. In this sense, every individual in democracy
is a hero. Democratic culture ultimately gives rise to the heroizing of the ordi-
nary—a drive which Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno once attributed to the
Enlightenment.
In doing so, democratic culture provides the citizen with the tools to con-
template and imagine an expansive nature beyond one’s isolated, insignificant self.
The absence of natural hierarchies frees one from any notion of given limits to tran-
scendence. One’s self thus expands by identifying not with potentially tragic or in-
determinate friends, which can only diminish one’s deserved potential. That self
Forgetting 89
rather expands by its identification with fictional heroes, celebrities, the rich and
famous—none of whom possess, in an age of democracy, the character of invio-
lable and inaccessible aristocratic distance. It is thus these transformations—the
ethical foundations of modern capitalism, the mass character of modern democ-
racy, the loneliness of the modern crowd—that furnish the ground for the
individual-centered, psychological notion of heroism. The psychological notion
highlights the imperative of success; the expansion of the self; its atrophy, self-
standing, and immunity from an excess of outside stimulation; its capacity for
worldly self-fulfillment.
By contrast, the ideological interpretation of heroism is structured according
to an ethic of duty. The source of duty lies in ineluctable rules, which can nonethe-
less be maintained only if they invite initiative. Life is oriented toward the fulfill-
ment of duty, not success.27 The heroic element here consists in the view that the
soul itself is nothing but action. In an important sense, this view is similar to the
mystical notion of the soul, a notion which has been revived in modern times as an-
other response to conditions of loneliness. In many of its ancient as well as modern
permutations, the mystical view of life, according to one interpreter, regards life
not as immanent and necessary in the Platonic sense, nor as an expression of the
teleology of matter in the Aristotelian sense, nor as accidental in the Epicurean
sense. Life, rather, is fundamentally voluntary in nature.28 Action, not fate, deter-
mines the boundaries of possibilities. But in this way, this “mystical” view of life be-
comes a recipe for heroic effort which, insofar as it disregards the given limits of
existence, can also manifest itself as well in worldly orientation. And it is precisely
this idea that a thoroughly unmystical character such as Napoléon ultimately dis-
covers shortly before his death. Having contemplated suicide a few days earlier, the
former emperor comes to reject it. Life, he says, is worth living to the extent that it
is unpredictable, in other words, to the extent that tomorrow is not foretold.29 The
heroic here is made possible by the openness of life, not finality and stability of sta-
tion.30 Heroic duty is to this openness, not to the predictable in life or to given ex-
istence. That life does not know tomorrow, that is, it is vulnerable, mandates its ac-
tive and heroic nature. Unlike the psychological sense of heroic duty toward the
self, the ideological duty toward action entails vulnerability and openness to loss
and failure. It is no wonder, therefore, that in the age of technocracy and hedonism,
the ideological notion of heroism is replaced with the psychological one, which is
immeasurably safer for an administered world, a world which has no use for sacri-
fice and no comprehension of failure.
The Triumph of Life
According to the now famous “end of history” thesis, this reorientation toward life
is already predicted in Hegelian philosophy, which incidentally occasions the rise
and fall of Napoléon. For Hegel, the value of Napoléon consisted not so much in
his notion of exceptionalism or openness to the future highlighted here but in the
promise of the universal state latent in his victories, a state toward which history
moved in any case, a state that would end conflict and thus history itself. Hegel’s
interpreters, most prominently Alexandre Kojève and, more recently, Francis Fuku-
yama, have emphatically located the end of history in modern time and tended to
announce it with a sense of confidence and even exuberance not unequal to that of
Hegel himself. For them, this end is typified, more than anything else, by the tri-
umph of a mundane principle of life. For Fukuyama in particular, the end of history
is characterized by the final victory of desire over the other two drives of human
action, reason and thymos—the heroic drive for honor and status. For Fukuyama,
liberal democracy represents the ideal condition for the disproportionate libera-
tion of desire, which reverses the hierarchy posited by Niccolò Machiavelli and ad-
vocated by Friedrich Nietzsche, namely, that of thymos over desire and reason. At
the end of history, the pursuit of material gains takes precedence over the pursuit
of glory and subordinates reason itself to that pursuit.31
When we addresses this thesis today, it may be advisable to retrace our steps,
walk back to the end from where history was supposedly still happening, and see if
we feel any difference. For an elitist philosopher like Leo Strauss, who engaged the
end-of-history thesis from a distinct perspective, that thesis only distorted the real
problem of modern life. More specifically, the problem of modern life consisted,
indeed, just as Kojève saw it, of the triumph of lowly pursuits—safety and plea-
sure—over higher ancient virtues. Strauss, however, located the genesis of this
decline precisely in Machiavelli, who ironically may be guilty of highlighting the
quest for glory, as Fukuyama asserts. But for Strauss, that was not Machiavelli’s real
crime. Rather, it was highlighting action over contemplation as the fundamental rule of
the political world. For a philosopher so attuned to the immobile nobility of eter-
nity as was Strauss, action by its very nature initiated decline. To make matters
worse, this orientation toward action, which in the real world meant interminable
strife, did not occasion the growth of what would have at least brought it in line
with the ancient aristocratic virtues of honor and higher pursuit, which alone made
life worthy.32 Rather it was brought to a tyrannical halt in the philosophy of
Thomas Hobbes, where the quest for honor, like all sources of strife, appeared as a
source of evil.33
Humankind was thus prevented, via tyrannical measures, from taking the kind
of risks which would allow one to transcend both oneself and the suffocating tem-
porality of one’s concrete moment in history. One’s subsequent life had then no
more than animalistic pursuits allowed it: safety, profit, and pleasure. One’s eman-
cipation from the confines of given existence and the horizons of temporality is not
sought out in any effort at transcendence. In fact, one no longer knows the differ-
ence between transcendence and gratification. Finally, even that which for Hegel
Forgetting 91
makes one human, namely, negativity to the given (nature, servitude), begins to disap-
pear as nature is fully mastered in the technological age and as one is given recog-
nition and equality in the age of liberal democracy. Napoléon already notes that
development with respect to recognition. From the summit of power, he clearly
discerns that “equality” is much harder to suppress than “liberty.” Liberty, he says,
appeals only to a small number of those with minds more noble than ordinary, while
equality appeals to the masses.34
Napoléon, as we have already seen him express it, saw himself as having come
too late. That is, he enters history at the age of equality and the masses rather than
at the age of Alexander, which had allowed for an unusual level of transcendence.
Kojève resolutely states that Hegel was right to identify the end of history, thus, at
the battle of Jena. Everything that happened after that—the world wars, colonial-
ism and decolonization, the rise (and fall) of communism, are all derivatives: there
is nothing new being added to the substance of history’s end here. For what has
been experienced since then is nothing more than the “extension in space of the
universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon.”35 This
universalism finds its apogee in the United States, which, apparently without know-
ing it, had “already attained the final stage of Marxist ‘communism,’ “ evident in the
belief in the universal potential for cross-class mobility, in material bounty, and in
the insatiable proclivity toward material gratification as the defining theme of con-
sumer culture at large. From that vantage point, those former socialist societies that
had been governed by a seemingly antagonistic ideology were in reality moving all
along toward the same end of history: “The Russian and Chinese are only Americans
who are still poor but rapidly proceeding to get richer . . . the ‘American way of life’
[is] the type of life specific to the post-historical period, the actual presence of the
United States in the World [prefigures] the ‘eternal present’ future of all humanity.”36
This seemingly curious interpretation of American capitalism, which makes it
appear as nothing less than the apogee of Marxist “communism,” makes sense to the
extent that the system’s claim to democratic equality is taken at face value and is
furthermore coupled with material bounty experienced by the larger masses. But
what if what the masses experience is just the illusion of equality? That is not the fun-
damental problem from the end-of-history point of view. The problem is the end
of “Man properly so-called,” due to the end of all negativities that had defined his
humanity. In an age of the eternal present, happiness is replaced with contentment,
creativity with imitation. There is nothing left to conquer. There is no alienation
left—God himself is realized as just an idealized projection of Man—and thus no
source remains to nourish any further development of the spirit.
The United States of America, it must be kept in mind, had been imagined as
the land of the future of all humanity for a long time, even before this rash of theo-
ries. Tocqueville already stated a similar theme in a different way. For him, the prob-
lem was also that of the irreversible collapse of old aristocratic values and their re-
placement with democracy. That was to be a universal process, of which the United
States only happened to be the first fully mature example. Since there was no escape
from a universal future of equality, what remained to be done was to analyze the
consequences of equality. Tocqueville noted the dulling impact on the mind of the
principle of equality and its contribution to the inculcation of mass habits such as
instinctive patriotism, pragmatism, cheap imitation, conformity to public opinion,
and the tendency of ideas to be expressed in generalized formats. In spite of all these
symptoms of cultural decline that occasioned equality, Tocqueville was still far more
charitable toward the principle of equality than the end-of-history theorists were.
Freed from the manneristic rigidity of the aristocracy, the democratic citizen, for
Tocqueville, had little respect for the past and thus was free to be innovative to the
extent he wished. As is well known, Tocqueville saw the level of informal politics—
that is to say, civil society rather than democratic government—as the ideal habi-
tat for cultivating the human potentials offered by democracy as well as for com-
bating the despotic mass tendencies generated by democracy.
From the point of view of the end-of-history thesis, however, civil society is
not terribly interesting. While it may indeed counter some of the hegemonic as-
pects of mass democracy and administered society, it does not change the charac-
ter of humankind at the end of history. For if civil society offers room for freedom
and initiative, modern individuals no longer know what to do with such offers. In
the context of a society that offers one recognition and livelihood, nothing that
one could potentially wish to struggle for involves any risk to life. In such a society,
therefore, no struggle opens up the profundity of human existence, no conflict re-
veals the virtue of serious contemplation, no difference invokes a heroic ethic, no
tragedy exists beyond mundane salvation.
Furthermore, these limits on the exercise of negativity, which had defined the
humanity in humankind, are guarded by the supervisory ethics of the modern state.
As an outcome of a long, bloody history, this state takes it upon itself to end all
threats to life and tame the virulence of struggle within its domain. It is itself de-
fined, as Max Weber famously asserted, by its claim to the monopoly over the legit-
imate exercise of physical violence. The purview of modern governance is vindi-
cated and proved by its jurisdiction over death. Foucault notes that it is perhaps no
accident that suicide, one of the most puzzling—and frustrating—problems from
the point of view of a power so constituted, was one of the first issues to be taken
up by sociology in its early days.37 For inasmuch as suicide is an individual expres-
sion of larger social facts, as Émile Durkheim outlined the problem, it also expresses
more general failures of social power. From the point of view of the state, the prob-
lem is not simply that of an individual entitlement to such a level of sovereignty
epitomized in one’s right to kill oneself. Rather, suicide expresses a violation of the
modern state’s exclusive right to kill—whether juridically or at war.
If the modern state’s monopoly on violence defines the scope and legitimacy
of its power, then obviously all violence emanating from elsewhere in society is by
Forgetting 93
definition an expression of criminality, terror, pathology, or outright rebellion. But

certain trajectories of this same violence, according to some neo-Hegelian and
existentialist interpretations, define humanly worthy alternatives to the otherwise
bleak end-of-history existence. Kojève, for example, admired the survival of em-
blems of the samurai ethic in modern Japan, an ethic that offered an alternative end
of history to the American model. According to Kojève, what is fascinating about
modern, posthistoric Japanese culture is its abundance of gratuitous negativities—
gratuitous since in an age of total administration and recognition of equality, the
quest for honor entailed in such negativities has no social ground. Expressions of
this ethic involve the importance attached to snobbery, manners, and the heroic
status allotted to self-sacrifice, all of which are purely gratuitous in a society that
had ostensibly experienced the end of history since the imposition of general peace
within it, and isolation upon it, in the early 1600s. After that, the samurai war ethic,
which considered violence as the last—albeit logical—component in a chain of
honor, self-presentation, and intellect was sublimated into pervasive social norms
rather than prohibited outright by the state.
The actual sociohistorical tale is of course more complicated. For almost two
hundred years, internal peace in Tokugawa society had little impact on class lines,
which appeared impermeable and thus beholden to status symbolism that re-
inforced them. The end of the Tokugawa era and the dual commencement of mod-
ernization and imperial restoration in 1868 are translations of a profound disjunc-
tion between the hierarchies of honor and economy, which had been slowly pulling
apart over a century or so. The upheaval of 1868 in Japan was an expression of the
fact that classes which had the highest honor in the Tokugawa scheme of things,
such as the samurai, were becoming increasingly impoverished, while those that had
endured lowly social status, notably the merchants, were becoming the most pros-
perous class in the country.38 Thus, while the Meiji restoration deployed highly con-
servative rhetoric that appeased the samurai class, it could not save the old classes
of honor. If anything, it ultimately catapulted the new economic classes and their
erstwhile derided commerce into long-cherished prestige.
It is for such a reason that the triumph of the bourgeoisie in Japan does not
translate neatly into an enshrinement of the gratification ethic of life, as was the
case elsewhere. For here, the new classes move into power under the cloak of tra-
ditional discourse, covered with the sword of the ancient warrior. The transforma-
tion is far less bloody than the French or English revolutions, immeasurably less than
that of the American Civil War or the Russian or Chinese revolutions. In other
words, the absence of an excess of bloodshed indicates the complicated survival of
the heritage of the past in the bosom of the modern. The old classes do ultimately
dwindle out of existence, but not because anyone has combated their ethics. The
samurai, after all, never faced the equivalent of the bloody struggles against slavery
or feudalism elsewhere, which abolished an entire range of sociopolitical ethics. If
anything, the samurai appeared as the ethical pillars of a “restored” imperial system,
which had no reason to clash with the traditionalists who conferred legitimacy
upon it. But it was the same system that, for other reasons rotating around a sudden
perception of external threat, could acquire even further legitimacy by fully em-
bracing the cause of modern industrial and technocratic organization.
Seen from this perspective, what appears gratuitous in the culture is thus part
and parcel of a complex historical dialectic. There is no gratuity in the dialectic.
The end of “Man properly so-called,” therefore, cannot be mitigated by sheer vol-
untarism, as Georges Bataille sought to do when he reoriented human negativity
against civilization after nature had been tamed. For in this kind of voluntarism,
when one fights social restrictions on pleasure, one actually accepts more fully the
life orientation latent in modern capitalism, namely, that one resists all restrictions
against spontaneous, immediate gratification. One here has learned the lesson of
capitalism too well and, as such, has no problem with it. By its nature, neither has
capitalism, for that matter, any problem with the liberation of desire constituted as
proclivity to immediate gratification, which it can learn how to supply in due time,
just as it learned to supply fruits and vegetables out of season. There is no inherent
bias in capitalism against desire, “natural,” “untimely,” “inordinate,” or otherwise.
The liberation of voluntaristic hedonism wages war thus not on capitalism, as
some advocates of voluntarism heroically proclaim, but on the imperative of total
predictability and normalcy one is cultivated into in the thoroughly administered
society. It is thus an infantile form of rebellion that resides at the opposite end from
self-sacrifice, since nothing in it moves it against the life principle. It wants life, but
its own, as the individualist ethic instructs. In fact, it wants life so much that it has
forgotten both history and the entire realm of death. Thus, all that is left for it to
do is to reveal as much of itself as possible, since life, in mass society, is condemned
to invisibility unless exhibited. One’s hedonistic rebellion, therefore, attacks no
one: bourgeois life has the sustenance it wants, is too precious to be sacrificed in
struggle, is its own locus of sovereignty. What threatens it is not death but limits on
recognition entailed in the nature of mass society and the nonheroic routines of ad-
ministered society and ordinary politics. Its rebellion therefore takes the form of
exhibitionism. It rejects sacrifice to the extent that it does not contribute to its exhi-
bitionist cause and sees little virtue in contemplation, withdrawal, or even private
passions. The little it has within it has to be announced because its life, which is all
it has and all it can reflect upon, is otherwise so mediocre as to be proximate not
just to death but more abhorrently to nothingness.
Remembering in the Age of Forgetting
The fact that one ceases to pay attention to history, that one becomes a prisoner of
temporality, does not mean that history ends. There are two senses in which it can
Forgetting 95
be said to continue. The first is tied to the persistence of conflict, the second to the
persistence of perspective regarding history. In the first place, history continues as
conflict, pure and simple, which involves, as it always has, the potential for death
and sacrifice. This is the world of the periphery, where recognition of humanity is
yet to be granted and where, as Frantz Fanon argued, struggle plays a therapeutic
role.39 Through struggle, “the native” is finally released from his inferiority complex
and his servitude. In Fanon’s interpretation, the native’s struggle does not stem from
gratuitous adoption of ideologies that have no chance in the world.40 The native
does not exist in a Sartrean “bad faith”—that is, he refuses to recognize the know-
able implications of his actions.41 Fanon implies that the native needs struggle as he
needs sustenance, to the extent that it is constitutive of his emergent humanity, that
is, precisely to the extent that it is not gratuitous.
But in this context, one can say that this struggle is simply part of the univer-
sal move toward the end of history, when all slaves gain recognition, when all mas-
ters are dethroned, when all humans are fed, lose negativity, and are thereby de-
clawed. The existence of sacrificial conflict in the periphery does not contradict
history’s inexorable drive to end. What does contradict it, however, is the intro-
duction of a different caliber of conflict, which is brought about after recognition,
inaugurating thereby a new kind of strife in the world, one that is more tied to in-
stitutional life and symbolism. I have explored this theme elsewhere, with respect
to the emergence of new forms of imperialism, precisely at the point in which his-
tory is said to be ending in the global era.42 Conflict here is how power justifies its
continued existence in an otherwise self-organized world. This fact is evident in
that modern governments, especially those with recent imperial history, cling to
their substantial armory in an age when there are no true ideological enemies, when
everyone in the world voluntarily joins a common economic logic—albeit with mi-
nor local variations. A center of power here knows that the world no longer needs
its services, but it refuses to become extinct. Its continued exhibitionism, therefore,
becomes both the model and the incentive for the revenge of others. History here
does not end because differential power does not end, even when power no longer
possesses an inherent relation to any meaningfully integrated socioeconomic-
cultural system.
Some may say that this new face of power is an expression of the revival of the
quest for honor, liberated as it is from the bounds of desire (which now expresses
itself in the autonomous pursuit of economic gains and material gratification), and
reason (from which power is now disconnected due to its necessary isolation from
rational guidance, since that guidance would advise diminution of power). But this
is not thymos; the world is too mature for that today. Rather, it is a form of power
modeled after the exhibitionist tendencies and habits of the same modern society
from which it has emerged. Its closeness to democracy deprives it of any especially
elevated sense of honor, its liaison with despotism fills it with abrasive delirium, its
notion of glory is reduced to display and exhibition, its understanding of the world
is more conspiratorial than heroic. Above all, it has not the slightest compre-
hension of sacrifice, which, in its calculus of efficiency, it replaces with murderous
dispositions.
The other manner in which history can be said to continue is more tied to the
continuity of a perspective regarding history and our relation to it. Nietzsche ex-
pressed this point clearly, precisely as he was denouncing philosophy’s “anti-life”
bias, evident in its search for timeless essences. History is not a set of distant, ob-
jective facts or rules but a component of our current vision and thus part of the forces
of life. Nietzsche proceeded to distinguish among three types of history on the ba-
sis of how they would be useful to particular moments in life, namely, the monu-
mental, the antiquarian, and the critical. They pertain consequently to three types
of perspectives: to man “as a being who acts and strives, as a being who preserves
and reveres, as a being who suffers and seeks deliverance.”43 Each type relates thus
not to a specific individual or nation but to moments of life when one needs the aid
of a particular type of reflection. Thus, the monumental perspective is useful for
someone who needs to do something great now, the antiquarian perspective for the
one who must persist in familiarity and reverence of the old, and the critical per-
spective for one who is oppressed, who needs “a history that judges and condemns.”
These perspectives, therefore, can be adjudicated not on the basis of which is closer
to the “essence” or “truth” of history but solely on the basis of how they are used or
abused. The problem in the use of history, thus, is not so much in its falsification
but in its reduction to a single type and in not knowing which type one needs at a
particular moment: “The critic without need, the antiquarian without pity, the man
who recognizes greatness but cannot himself do great things . . . [like] plants, es-
tranged from their mother soil and degenerated into weeds.”44
Nietzsche does not of course speak of the needs of “leaders” in particular but
the needs of “life.” The problem of modern society, however, is that the concentra-
tion and pervasiveness of power meant that the needs of leadership can be made
frequently to appear as general needs of life. Does this mean that the followers, pre-
cisely to the extent that they follow before they think, must habitually act as de-
generate “weeds,” out of touch with what they need for their own life? Yes. Life, after
all, can either express its sovereignty through a perpetual readiness for sacrificing
itself or shy away from sacrifice and give itself over to a trustee who channels it into
collective meaning. The sovereignty of life, therefore, does not manifest itself in
democratic “freedom” of conforming to decorum and “public” opinion. Rather, it is
manifest in one’s refusal to impose a perspective upon life that is submissive either
to the requisites of leadership or the imagined will of the public.
For more than a century now, such sovereign individuals have come increas-
ingly under siege, nowhere more fully than in mass democracies, where the words
of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor have become even more pertinent than they were
Forgetting 97
during the Inquisition: “Today, people are more persuaded than ever that they have
perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at
our feet.” In an atmosphere teeming with vacuous collective self-congratulations—
nationalism, patriotism, public faith, mass democracy—sovereign life exists with
its back to the wall, suffocating from the stench of conformity, vulgarity, and re-
ceived opinion. It survives not through any spiritual reservoir that this age can of-
fer but by becoming deaf to it, by linking up, as Nietzsche states, with other time
dimensions where the spirit does not feel compelled to defend itself.45
If we were to follow Nietzsche’s typology, we would expect sovereign life to-
day to be most attached to the critical perspective of history. However, all three
perspectives can be said to be part of more general political logics: the critical per-
spective inseparable from revolutionary moments, the antiquarian tied to preser-
vative efforts occasioning experiments and moments seen to be unstable, and the
monumental tied to moments deemed worthy of being foundational. A few con-
cluding words about each will help point out how life at any juncture or moment
tricks history into going on, even when it seems too exhausted from the inter-
minable journey. For these perspectives on history, if we fully inhabit them situa-
tionally and as appropriate, reveal that life itself is as situational and unending as
history itself. In other words, a proper perspective on history reveals the insignifi-
cance of death—indeed, that the end of history is merely another name for the
death that, after all, we have never experienced.
One can cite thousands of examples to portray the workings of the monu-
mental perspective in the creation of the modern world. Napoléon, whose mind we
have already frequented and is thus familiar, scarcely fails to offer an elegant sum-
mary of this perspective. His true exposure to the monumental perspective, as we
have seen, begins when he is far away from what he regards to be a suffocating
European culture, where no such thoughts are possible. It is in the East, the land of
limitless possibilities, with its precious twin offers of ancient monumental exem-
plariness and present openness to world-historical missions, where he identifies the
seeds of universal culture yet to be made by the conqueror. His first real battle to
conquer Egypt takes place around the pyramids, a scene uniquely conducive to the
realization of the weight of time. Then as well as throughout his reign in the East,
the modern Napoléon seems ironically to be more cognizant of the magnitude of
its timelessness than his local, tradition-oriented Mamluk adversaries. His first act
spells out what should be inspiring; pointing to the pyramids, he implores his sol-
diers before the battle, “Forty centuries have their eyes upon you.”46
That forty centuries are your audience means here that your primary duty is to
them. It is to them that you are performing. Not to the leader, not even to France,
and certainly not to the yet-to-exist empire. History, in its monumental potential
that the pyramids so concretely bring into eternal presence, never ends. The mon-
ument calls for the continuation of monumental history. The battle here is loaded
with adventure and the potential for sacrifice. What is important is not to preserve
history or bring it back to life, and certainly not to venerate the dead pharaohs for
whom the pyramids were actually built. What is at stake here is monumentalism it-
self, which is above this moment, beyond given existence, an emblem of death mon-
umentalized as the only life worth living. Final failure in the monumental mission,
as we have seen in the case of Napoléon himself, in no way devalues the monumen-
tal perspective. For the essence of monumentalism is action, not outcome. Inasmuch
as it evidences the silent immobility of past glory, monumentalism proves the inad-
equacy of the present and, therefore, the primacy of action in it over preservation.
By its very nature, monumentalism reaches its conclusion in death, not ac-
complishment in life. It is an expression of ceaseless nervous energy, which refuses
given life insofar as past monumentalism perpetually reveals the mediocrity of such
life. And in revealing the mediocrity of given existence, the monument also spells
out a cumbersome secret: your life is not sovereign, it is under the sway of the mon-
ument. Only in fulfilling your obligation to the monument will you deserve your
own sovereignty, in your own time. Your sovereignty must be snatched away not
from the contemporary tyrant but from the tyranny of the eternal, which the mon-
ument reveals to you every time you cross its path.
The antiquarian perspective, by contrast, may seem at first to be impulsively
conservative, as it is tied to preservation and veneration. This is certainly one of its
predominant modes throughout history and the present. However, it is also an as-
pect of perceived instability, whence antiquarianism offers itself as a possible means
to bring a measure of constancy into the system. Charles de Gaulle, also a figure we
have encountered earlier, is a good example here. Not only did he regard himself
as a rightful savior of the nation but also, realizing that he, like all mortals, would
be gone possibly along with his vision, decided that he should save the nation once
and for all, since he was not likely to be repeatable. The problem of the political
system he had inherited, he contemplates in his memoirs, was its foundation on for-
getfulness. He detects this trait in a historically recurrent pattern of political crisis:
political parties, facing situations they cannot deal with, make a show of abdica-
tion to a strongman ( Joffre in 1914, Clemenceau in 1917, Pétain in 1940, and then
de Gaulle himself, twice since). Once the crisis is over, the parties come back, push-
ing the great man to the margin, and resume their old parochial game of power.
They can do so perpetually not only due to the tendency of the political scene for
factionalism but also by “exploiting the limitless capacity for forgetfulness of the
electoral clienteles.”47
We have already seen de Gaulle’s solution to this problem that, in retrospect,
makes little sense if seen from any perspective other than that of the antiquarian. If
the people are naturally forgetful, what is the point for the leader to provide them
with an example? Would they not forget that example just as well in due time? They
certainly will. The very need for the visionary leader, who alone does not forget,
Forgetting 99
itself proves the necessity of reminders. This is an ancient preoccupation, central

to both the Hebrew Bible and the Quran, where the recurrent forgetfulness of the
faithful calls for one prophet after another to be sent, until the Quran discovers the
principle of closure and solemnly announces God’s resolve to end the long succes-
sion of such reminders in Muhammad. One can resolve the forgetfulness of ordi-
nary mortals either by changing the nature of the institutions of governance so that
they become immune to popular forgetfulness or, better yet, by making the whole
nation into antiquarians.
Both are evident in the missions of the prophets, notably Muhammad, who
sought to conclude the process of reminding. But they are evident likewise in the
effort of de Gaulle himself, who both created the Fifth Republic and offered his own
leadership explicitly as the model of how it should be governed. That the second
part of this equation needed to be supplemented by the first testifies to the weak-
ness of the antiquarian impulse in modern society, whose infatuation with moder-
nity, progress, and innovation readily provides a daily nourishment of the tendency
to forget not merely the distant past but even yesterday. Of course, antiquarianism
is not manifest only in such efforts, and the rejection of de Gaulle does not in itself
signify a rejection of antiquarianism, merely his version of it. But in general, the anti-
quarian perspective requires careful educative cultivation, along with continuous
institutional safeguards, since in such a world as ours, it comes out of the most frag-
ile impulse. For antiquarianism expresses an aesthetic rather than a pragmatic union
of life and death, in a world which, thanks to its fetishizing of life and use value,
doubly sets apart life from death and pragmatism from aestheticism.
The critical perspective, by contrast, derives the energy to live from nothing
but sheer death itself. It does not seek to revere or reenact history but to revisit it for
inspiration whenever the world fails life, as it always does. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
Nietzsche suggests that antiquarianism is vulnerable. The teacher, Zarathustra says
to his attentive audience, must be rejected, for otherwise the student learns only to
worship idols, not how to immerse himself in the revelatory substance of the over-
man. The instructions end with the emphatic demand, “Dead are all gods: now we want
the overman to live.”48 In Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche reproduces a part of that speech
as an exemplary moment of Zarathustra’s project, he ends the speech before the
death of God and the survival of the overman. The new emphasis is placed rather
on an earlier part of the speech, when Zarathustra reveals what will happen when
he is finally rejected: “Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you
have all denied me will I return to you.”49
Here, there is a clear shift of emphasis from the overman to Zarathustra him-
self. If the overman defines the horizons of becoming, he requires that Zarathustra,
who is pointing to that horizon yet blocking the view by his very presence, disap-
pear from one’s field of vision. But when Zarathustra is gone, the lesson is finally
learned, and man is ready for the overman, man finds a little surprise waiting for him
at history’s end: history does not end, in the same way that the horizon cannot be
reached. Zarathustra comes back not to celebrate the coming of the overman but
with “different eyes” and a “different love” than he had employed in his earlier in-
carnation. He comes back to celebrate, more precisely, the land of the potential,
the existence of “man in the middle of his way between beast and overman.”50
But Zarathustra also comes back to answer the insult of forgetfulness. The op-
pressed, who require the critical perspective, also cultivate this forgetfulness be-
cause they cannot live otherwise, without denying that which is oppressing them
now but which they will come to need again once they are liberated from it. When
the Dionysian has reached supremacy, the Apollonian will return. When all values
are transcended as morals, they come back as aesthetics, relics, and play. When the
teacher is denied, he rises up from the dead. One of course may want to speculate
here as to whether this is the logic of the eternal return or whether it is connected
to cycles of rebellion and conformity in cultural life. And that may well be the case.
But there is a more fundamental point here regarding the logic of remembering and
forgetting, the symbiosis between life and death inherent in the logic of cycles. Per-
haps the cycle is meant for the student, for the masses, for the assembly, but not for
Zarathustra, who comes and goes in total sovereignty, or for the Übermensch, the form
of sovereign life that will replace the immobile solidity of the idols. Unlike modern
man, “man in the middle of his way” is mobile, but not through cyclical logic. His
change is only that of location, not spirit—location, that is, as needed to let life con-
template itself rather than forget itself and instead enshrine death as the unconscious
locus of a political project. Thus he goes up the mountain or back in time when his
soul needs to be preserved against the hegemonic logic of the times, destructive to
sovereign life as it is. Then he comes down from the mountain or back from history,
when sovereign life energizes his negativity to the world, once more.
Last Words:
Death and Difference
Ivantage
s death the opposite of life? Since all good answers profit from identifying the
point from which the answer issues, we could seek to answer this question
through a more primary question: Who regards death to be the opposite of life? A
historical survey will yield a complicated and varied view, but the common de-
nominator among all views is the regard of death as a state of difference from life, and
difference does not by necessity mean opposite. One would expect the experience
of difference to intensify as one ascends the ladder of power, since power can be es-
pecially verified in having a unique fate not open to any life in the world, and that
is successful resistance to reclamation by nonbeing.1
Difference is useful as a starting point in answering the question precisely be-
cause there is nothing in the concept of difference that should warrant treating it
as an absolute condition—contrary to much of what has been said about it in con-
temporary cultural criticism. The concept of difference is useful because there are
grades of difference, from the marginal, tangential, and neighborly to the existen-
tially oppositional. In this sense, existence is defined not so much by the radical
opposition between “life” and “death” as much as by that between preservation and
its impossibility. And even that more fundamental opposition is significant only to
the extent that it torments the mind. Power preserves the kind of order most suit-
able to its capabilities and prospects, and order likewise preserves the kind of power
responsible for bringing it about. But neither power nor order so constituted can
preserve each other without a triangulated affair with death, which stares silently
at both as it presents a proof of millennial proportions on the transience of all
being. Power supervises order, and its apologists argue it to be the very foundation
of order, yet order cannot sustain power indefinitely just by itself. In the final anal-
ysis, even when it really needs power, order in no case guarantees the immortality
of any specific power.
Death, therefore, had to be appeased and incorporated into games of gover-
nance in various ways, as we have seen throughout this volume. The tropes here
101
identified serve different agendas, modes of social organization, and ideological

outlooks, but they all seek to extract from the silent speech of death any hint at all
that death intends to do the opposite of what it seems to do, which is to equalize
the master and the slave and reveal the insufficiency of power and hierarchy as fun-
damental grounds of existence. In order to get death to say otherwise, power must
add a political meaning to the inert substance of the eternal speech of death, which
has never pronounced more than the simple yet enigmatic principle that death
exists only because life exists.
This elementary principle, in fact, is all that death means in nonstate societies,
and it constitutes the hallmark of the cyclic thought identified by Mircea Eliade.2
Since such societies are not structured to preserve anything other than their own
prosaic and decentered order, death is not the enemy of order, since order here is
not an outgrowth of power but of infinite little negotiations—that is, order in non-
state society is a product of politics, not governance. Governance, as we have seen,
could try to immunize itself against death only by presenting itself in a posture of
permanence and solidity—in essence, by mimicking the very character of death.
Governance does so because its understanding of death, which singularly defies its
mastery over the world, is that of an absolute opposite.
Thus comes to be the kind of governance that must present itself as an ideal-
ized image of death. Politics, by contrast, mimics life as indicated in the movement
of difference. It becomes crucial, therefore, to explore the possibilities of politics
so constituted, that is, non-governance-centered politics, which would be more in
tune with life indicated in the movement of differences rather than oppositions.
The description of such politics will require a different kind of study.3 What is more
pressing here is to establish the historical grounds for the movement from the logic
of difference to that of opposition, insofar as the death orientation of governance
is concerned.
The four universal tropes identified in the course of this volume reveal differ-
ent manners of moving from difference to opposition with regard to the question
of death. The trope of consolation, as allegorized by Gilgamesh, approaches dif-
ference as a question of “substitution.” Boundaries between beings are not clear or
inviolable, and that which is different can with the aid of certain rituals become the
self—in the same way that the !Kung hunter becomes the animal he is after. We have
seen in the first chapter various examples of logics of substitution. Sociologically,
the very notion of substitution presupposes the possibility of identification with an
empirical being, just as Gilgamesh identifies with Enkidu and only through that
identification discovers death.
More generally, the earthly pragmatism, empiricism, and oracle character of
all substitution rituals—which do not address large conceptual issues as much as
seek to solve pressing daily issues (the hunt, the battle looming in the horizon, how
to hide away from the omen, and so on)—typify the kind of governance closest to
Last Words 103
politics as a pragmatic orientation to everyday questions rather than large issues of

existence. This is still the world of the polis, which can either remain a polis or be-
come a harbinger of delusions of grandeur when, after reaching a certain solid for-
mation, one of its tyrants feels existentially suffocated by its navigable limits.
Hence we enter the (recurrent) age of empire, where difference becomes far
more abstract yet at the same time is internalized by empire. That is because for
empire the concept of difference describes very large constellations—for example,
the “world.” Difference, from the point of view of imperial thinking, concerns not
Enkidu or Socrates or some other highly focused and describable existential entity
but the whole outside world, which is defined as that which empire by its very
nature extends to occupy. Roman political thinkers, such as Polybius, clearly stated
perpetual expansion as the very essence of the empire.4 It was only in the age of
Hadrian that a notion of natural limits to expansion began to be contemplated.
Hadrian in fact represents the onset of sobriety into imperial thinking after a long
sequence of expansions and a number of tumultuous reigns.
But “sobriety” here, or more precisely the discovery of limits, essentially means
that the object of difference is relocated from the abstract realm to the internal realm. Ex-
pansion into the world outside of empire defines empire, which sees it in its nature
to expand to fill all the space that is available to it, which is the world. Once it dis-
covers a natural limit, it does not cease to be an empire but turns upon itself and
contemplates itself as an already attained world. In either case, the empire main-
tains its habit of thinking in large terms. It simply relocates the object of this large
thinking into its own bosom and begins to reflect on that accomplishment with the
somber tone we have seen in Marcus Aurelius.
With the trope of preparation, the question of difference is moved further
across the boundaries of time rather than space, on which empire had focused. It is
the otherworld that is yet to come, and it will come not because of our actions but
because of the exterior and even arbitrary will of God. Yet that otherworld is still a
world of difference rather than opposition because, like all differences, something
can be done to reclaim it for ourselves. (The opposite, in contrast to the different,
accepts no subjective effort, no labor, no sacrifice, and no bribe as a price of molli-
fying its complete otherness. It is not open to negotiation.)
In its ideal form, the logic of preparation should mean the abandonment of
this world for the otherworld, yet while continuing to do our work here and re-
fraining from suicide. But what is the otherworld? How do we know it is worth this
kind of preparation? Empire moves into new space beyond its massive acquisitions
by simply continuing to move. But when abstract thought is oriented toward time
rather than space, the vistas it confronts are not likely to be the same. From the
point of view of agency, the incongruity of time and space consists in that one
moves in space but is moved by time. Thus, when under the imperial trope gover-
nance simply kept wandering until it reached its limits and began to ponder itself
without reaching a conclusion, under the preparation trope governance could only
ponder itself as an embodiment of an already concluded idea. Hence governance
then could itself be justified to the extent that it stood for that idea and claimed to
prepare humanity for what it has never experienced. Unlike imperial governance,
salvation governance had no possibility of ever encountering the object of differ-
ence here on earth—empire explored space it could claim as it moved, while sal-
vation was caused by time, which moved salvation toward its destination.
At the point when more is demanded of it, namely, an account for the other-
world whose task it was to prepare for, the preparation trope splits into two tradi-
tions. The simplest way to chart out the split is along world religious doctrines: sal-
vation doctrines originating in East and South Asia versus those originating in the
ancient Middle East. These two traditions diverge not in highlighting the other-
world and preparation for it, on which they agree, but on the image of that other-
world.5 The Eastern and South Asian traditions describe a far more open-ended
finality of a metaphysical nature, a finality whose exact substance defies imagina-
tion and thus cannot be accurately described. It must be experienced, and the task
of the faithful, then, is to master a ritual corpus that would bring one to experience
for oneself what the doctrine outlines in cryptic and mysterious terms.
In contrast, Middle Eastern doctrines of finality have a clear vision of the
otherworld, so much so that Renaissance artists had absolutely no qualms about
plastering it in fine detail all over the interiors of countless churches. Even after the
antirepresentational austerity of puritanical movements, such as the Reformation
or Wahhabi iconoclasts, the faithful in Middle Eastern religions remained just as
beholden to the image of the otherworld as a basic paradise and hell duality, each
with clearly describable qualities. For at the most fundamental level, Middle East-
ern doctrines of salvation simply built the otherworld after the image of the expe-
rienced world. The rivers and orchards and plenitude of paradise did no more than
exaggerate earthly bounties, in the same way that the fires of hell exaggerate
earthly torments. Even the inhabitants of each are knowable existential entities,
since human society would simply regroup in the otherworld, albeit with eternal
equality within each realm.
What distinguishes these two traditions thus is whether death, as a solution to
the problem of inequality, would solve this problem over which it has sole jurisdic-
tion in knowable terms. The Middle Eastern formulas affirm knowability, as they de-
sign an otherworld by extrapolating from known earthly phenomena and experi-
ences. In doing so, they reveal that they have not moved far from the ancient
Osirian peasant paradise, which just gave the peasants a field immune from pests
and droughts in which they could continue their labor after death. The only “im-
provement” on that paradise introduced by the book religions was to deduct labor
from the equation. But in doing so, they truly confirmed the status of death as
Last Words 105
the absolute opposite of the mobility and action of life. Such a divergence has
something to say about the differential propensity to imagine the nonexistent in
terms of the existent (Middle Eastern religions) or the nonexistent on its own terms
(Eastern/South Asian religions). But it does not change the basic conceptual uni-
versal unity of the preparation trope—the conduct of life must be advised by the
requisites of an afterlife toward which life must move across the dimension of time.
The trope of forgetting, which basically represses the problem of death and
sublimates it into a myriad of outlets, entails another approach to the question of
difference. Forgetting, as discussed earlier, is the trope most likely to be prevalent
in a “life”-oriented society, in which life must push death back into the innermost
margins of its consciousness so that it can contemplate itself most fully. But it also
occasions a thoroughly administered society in which life exists only within a so-
cial mass and experiences itself in that context as atomistic. Difference here is both
abstracted and internalized by the supposedly sovereign modern individual, much
as empire experiences difference after it regards itself to have become completed. But
in this case, unlike empire, the object of abstraction and internalization is not the
space of the world, into which the atomistic self cannot expand and against which
it must in fact shield itself under the cloak of privacy. The abstracted and internal-
ized difference concerns rather the social mass which the individual atom both
inhabits and seeks to shut out.
The atom must abstract the mass because it cannot apprehend it empirically.
This lack of apprehension, paradoxically, is resolved in mass liberal democracy by
endowing the mass with the keys to authenticity and factuality—a psychic condi-
tion well captured in Alexis de Tocqueville’s comments on how an abstraction such
as “public opinion” becomes for the democratic citizen synonymous with truth. Yet
precisely because of that approach toward the veracity of the mass, the self must
also internalize the mass and see itself as an embodiment of it. In an important
sense, this internalization resolves both the self’s alienation from the otherwise
inconceivable mass and its sense of its own insignificance in comparison to it.
While the four tropes have been for heuristic purposes presented in terms of his-
torical outlines, they should nonetheless be apprehended as allegorical and trans-
historical, precisely because the objects of difference at which each stares have al-
ways maintained, each according to its own distinct manner, the interstices of the
social fabric. Thus, an appropriate conclusion to such a historical outline must re-
mind one of the cohabitation of the various tropes of the same time period—some-
thing akin to what Ernst Bloch misdiagnosed as Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen. A
hard distinction is not possible to make, for example, between expansive salvation
empires and expansive empires whose doctrine concerns something other than sal-
vation. But we can observe how behaviors emanating from two different tropes
advise the functioning of a salvation empire as it moves across both time and space
and in due time gets annihilated by both.
Similarly, today we find orientations toward small-scale politics, the world at
large, the otherworld, or the social mass characterizing political outlooks and
strategies cohabiting the same societies. What each outlook requires in order to
sustain itself is someone feeling its significance as an approach to life.6 The question
concerns what sort of perspectives and possibilities any lived reality throws in the
face of the living political animal as it contemplates how to die. One may wish to
see most displayed, as someone like Nietzsche certainly would, the kind of politics
that is appropriate for life rather than death.7 But a wish constitutes only a first ges-
ture, and before one can proceed any further, one must still unpuzzle why one has
been stressing a particular style of difference rather than another. Only then would
one possibly know the source of one’s drive in the specifics of one’s difference. Then
one may consciously choose a particular style of suffering existence, a style more
appropriate for one’s capacities for sociability and productivity.
There is nothing more disfiguring for existence than to have everything in the
wrong place, as we seem to have today: visionless mediocrities running empires,
great visionaries suffocating in isolated neighborhoods, otherworldly ascetics de-
termined to focus on this world, pathological demagogues winning offices that are
best run by colorless technocrats. On the other hand, this misplacement of capac-
ities is part and parcel of the history of governance, especially when governance
becomes understood as the only meaningful arena of politics. Yet what life re-
quires—as opposed to death—is politics, not governance. In other words, politics as an
immense marketplace where negotiations and haggling take place in a way that de-
fines the vitality of life itself, rather than governance as the embodiment of a larger
cultural spirit or governance as a savior of life in the first and last resort, even when
“life” has not asked to be saved—especially from its own movement.
Another way to highlight the difference between politics and governance, or
negotiations of power oriented toward life versus those oriented toward death,
consists in detecting the fundamental philosophical idea each presents us. Marcus
Aurelius, it will be recalled, thought that nature itself had implanted in us a propen-
sity to see beauty in slight imperfections. This unpublicized thought would have
been noted as a novelty from the point of view of the aristocracy of the empire. The
empire had by then already reached its limits, and it is curious that precisely at that
point we encounter such a discovery that “beauty” and “perfection” are actually sep-
arate concepts and that furthermore they do not define each other. If anything, per-
fection seems to be the opposite of beauty. Beauty, in approaching perfection yet
playfully deducting something from it, defines the dynamism of life, whereas the
perfect, precisely because it has become perfect, no longer moves or responds to
stimuli. And as such, perfection only mimicked death—indeed, it was death.
This astounding discovery could only have been attained by empire, when its
Last Words 107
controlled, blood-soaked drive toward world dominion is finally halted by factors

beyond control. It is then that empire discovers the impossibility of perfection and
resigns itself to contemplating a different virtue. And while empire does not orient
itself to life even then, it realizes from the summit as it ponders its own upcoming
death a truth which it nonetheless cannot use: the only politics that mortals have
ever managed to make serviceable to the cause of life is that which beautifies exis-
tence rather than governs it.
Notes
Chapter 1
1. For our purposes the polis should be understood as a universal type and not
simply a specific Greek institution. It is a territorially confined small system, usu-
ally (but not only) a city-state. The polis is oriented primarily to pragmatic ques-
tions of life and political negotiations. The defining features of its behavior high-
light more protection from the outside world than expansion into it, thus a sense
of measure and the absence of a sense of heroic mission or undue grandeur. These
features may of course be altered in the course of its history and given favorable cir-
cumstances, in which case the polis ceases to be such and becomes the foundation
of empire.
2. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag,
1993), sec. 30, p. 142.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1977), pp. 117–19.
4. Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 60–62.
5. See The Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam
Trungpa (Boulder, Col.: Shambhala, 1975), esp. pp. 46–47.
6. Jean Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, trans. Zainab
Bahrani and Marc van de Mieroop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
p. 279. The custom of sacrifice evidently belonged to an earlier, obscure tradition.
It was eventually abandoned, unlike other features of pomp in royal funerals.
7. In Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1987), p. 27.
8. For a more encompassing discussion, see ibid., p. 278. Bottéro observes
how different Ishtar’s fate is from later notions of inequality after death, expressed
for instance in Egyptian psychostasy or the Christian notion of individual judg-
ment.
9. In Khazal al-Majidi, Al-Din al-Masri (Beirut: Dar al-Jeel, n.d.) p. 209.
109
110 NOTES TO PAGES 11–17
10. Ibn al-Kharrat, Kitab al-Aqibah, ed. Abi Abdullah M. H. Ismael (Beirut:
Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1995), pp. 21–23.
11. Ibid., pp. 298–99.
12. For a good example, see the discussion of the experience of the nomadic
“kingdom” of Kinda in pre-Islamic Arabia in Mohammed Bamyeh, The Social Origins
of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),
chap. 2. Subsequent discussions here of nomadic poets are elaborated at length
throughout that same volume.
13. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma Zeitlin
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 79–80.
14. For lengthier discussions, see al-Majidi, Al-Din al-Masri, esp. p. 191.
15. See Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, pp. 21–24.
16. See Jacques Soustelle, Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest,
trans. Patrick O’Brian (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 107;
al-Majidi, Al-Din al- Masri, p. 217.
17. Soustelle, Daily Life of the Aztecs, pp. 52–53.
18. Worshippers of the pre-Columbian rain god Tlaloc must diminish their
labor in front of him: “Oh my lord, magician-prince, truly it is to you that the maize
belongs.” Reported by Sahagún in the Codex Florentino and cited in ibid., p. 103.
19. The fact that pre-Columbian state societies, such as the Aztecs or the
Maya, had cyclic calendars does not seem to me to contradict this observation. For
in such cases, the cycles were extended to the equivalent of lifetime blocs or alter-
natively to the equivalent of the notion of “centuries.” This extension does allow for
a notion of progressive time within larger cycles, much as “modern” calendars do.
In this sense, regardless of their overplayed cyclicality, notions of time that develop
in the age of the state possess a larger scheme of linearity than can be found in con-
ceptions of time prevailing among nonstate peoples.
20. This holds naturally not for everyone who lives in any civilization at any
point but more precisely for civilization insofar as it is constructed after the mas-
ter’s self-image.
21. It seems to me that this construction directly contradicts Heidegger’s ar-
gument that the Nonbeing (Nichtsein) is both a property of Being (Sein) and alien
from it—since it is not yet reality (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, sec. 48, p. 243). No-
madic lore is probably not the only source which shows that the distinction be-
tween the two is relative rather than absolute.
22. Nomadic lore teems with examples of statements decrying the contami-
nating effect upon morals and health of too much togetherness, especially with
sedentary societies. For a remarkable modern literary rendition of this trope, see
the novella Nazif al-Hajar by Ibrahim al-Koni (Beirut: Dar al-Tanwir, 1992).
23. Freud’s treatment of the issue of primal parricide in Totem and Taboo is con-
ducted on a different track. But it has one common denominator with the discus-
sions here, which is the foundation of civilization in a lesson on modesty.
Notes to Pages 17–26 111
24. Cited in Bottéro, Mesopotamia, p. 277.

25. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, ed. R. B. Rutherford, trans.
A. S. L. Farquharson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), VI: 24, p. 48.
26. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, sec. 38, p. 179.
27. Ibid., sec. 30, p. 140.
28. Ibid., sec. 47, p. 240–41. Heidegger compares the idea of extinction to
that of a simple end (Verenden), which characterizes the consciousness of the Nur-
Lebend.
29. Ibid., sec. 48, p. 242. In Heidegger’s words, “Ausstehen meint . . . Noch-
nichtbeisammensein des Zusammengehörigen.”
30. For more elaborate details, see Soustelle, Daily Life of Aztecs, pp. 68, 77.
31. In the Hebrew Book of Judges the judges literally sat at the gate of the
city, signifying the territorial limits of the law.
32. For details see R. G. Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the
Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961).
33. Metcalf and Huntington, p. 183.
34. Bottéro discusses a few examples. See Bottéro, Mesopotamia, esp. pp. 270–
71, no. 9.
35. See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948).
36. Nietzsche’s discussion of monumentalism in his essay on the uses and
abuses of history captures part of this story. My emphasis here is not yet on what
“history” makes of the subject (monumental founder) but how that subject ap-
proaches history. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History
for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).
37. Plutarch, The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, ed. Arthur Hugh Clough,
trans. John Dryden (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 823–24.
38. Bottéro, Mesopotamia, p. 145.
39. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theol-
ogy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 22.
40. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, sec. 47, p. 239–40. On the other hand, Hei-
degger suggests elsewhere that there is another level of being that transcends the
individuality of Dasein and links it up to others (Mitdasein). That level requires a
capacity to “listen” in a fundamental way (Hörchen)—as it were, to listen to the sub-
sonic speech of being. See sec. 34, pp. 162–63.
41. “Enkidu, whom I love deeply / . . . the fate of mankind has overtaken
him. / . . . how can I be silent, how can I be still? / My friend whom I love has turned
to clay. / Am I not like him?” The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Maureen Gallery Kovacs
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), tablet X, p. 85.
42. See Bottéro, Mesopotamia, pp. 142–43.
43. As we will see in a later chapter when we come to salvation religions, the
death of Jesus for love places him closer to the paradigm of attachment established
by Gilgamesh. His problematic connection to governance (and suffering), how-
ever, requires that he be addressed in a different context.
44. Antoninus, II: 17, p. 15.
45. Plato, Phaedo, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Hunting-
ton Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 46.
46. Burkert discusses this principle in the context of the emphasis of mystery
cults on experience rather than written doctrine. See Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults,
p. 69.
47. For a more extended treatment of the lore surrounding Luqman, see
Bamyeh, Social Origins of Islam, chap. 4.
48. See Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1963), pp. 211–17.
49. See Napoléon Bonaparte, The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection of His Written and
Spoken Words. ed. and trans. J. Christopher Herold (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1961), pp. 8, 10.
Chapter 2
1. Ibid., p. 241. Conversation recorded sometime after 1811.

2. Obviously, Napoléon’s family was not exactly at the bottom of the social
hierarchy, but the important point is that he regarded it as having been such.
3. The origin of this movement is a type of consciousness creating a master
without slave, a slave without a master, which is the bourgeois. See Alexandre
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 63.
4. Ibid., p. 69. A leading commentator, Shadia Drury, argues that Kojève’s
apparent embracement of revolutionary terror (including Stalin’s) is not congruous
with Hegel’s own aversion to it; see Shadia Drury, Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Post-
modern Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 36–37. However, Hegel high-
lights the necessity of facing terror (although not necessarily of the revolutionary
variety) on the path toward absolute freedom. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit,
pp. 355–63.
5. Bonaparte, The Mind of Napoleon, p. 204. The imperial bulletin that de-
scribed the inspection reported no reaction on the part of Napoléon. As if disqui-
eted by this silence, the editor apparently felt compelled to add, “A sight such as
this should inspire rulers with the love of peace and the hatred of war.”
6. Ibid., p. 205.
7. Ibid., pp. 205–6.
8. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, sec. 191–93, pp. 116–17.
9. Antoninus, V: 16, p. 39. This quotation echoes Aristotle’s dictum that
equality is for those who are equal.
10. Cited in Géza Alföldy, Die Rolle des Einzelnen in der Gesellschaft des Römischen
Kaiserreichs: Erwartungen und Wertmaßstaben (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsver-
lag, 1980), p. 33–34.
11. For an outline of the role of death in providing legitimacy, especially to a
new polis, see Claude Bérard, “Récupérer la mort du prince: héroïsation et forma-
tion de la cité,” in La Mort, les morts dans les sociétés anciennes, ed. Gherardo Gnoli and
Jean-Pierre Vernant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Maison des
sciences de l’Homme, 1982), pp. 89–105.
12. See John A. Wilson, The Burden of Egypt: An Interpretation of Ancient Egyptian
Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), esp. pp. 67–68.
13. The fact that the imposition was not opposed through revolt may have
something to do with not only the belief in the divinity of the king and sheer servi-
tude but also that it employed and provisioned excess labor during the flooding of
the Nile. This thesis was first elaborated by Reginald Englebach in Annales du Service
des Antiquités de l’Egypte, XLII (1943), cited in Wilson, Burden of Egypt, p. 83.
14. Antoninus, XII: 32, p. 117.
15. Nietzsche argues that this revenge constitutes the origins of the triumph
of slave morality. The discussion here, however, is more concerned with the emer-
gence of a particular orientation toward death as an inescapable element of the
logic of imperial conquest.
16. For a discussion of the role of this festival throughout the pharaonic pe-
riod, see Erik Hornung and Elisabeth Staehelin, Studien zum Sedfest (Aegyptiaca Hel-
vetica 1) (Geneva: Edition de Belles-Lettres, 1974).
17. For details on this as well as other Aztec war rituals, see Soustelle, Daily
Life of Aztecs, pp. 101, 206–11.
18. The genesis of the idea of sacrifice, as the Mayan Popol Vuh clarifies, is
connected to fire, which the god Tohil gives to humanity and in exchange for it re-
quires sacrifice. The more general underlying concept concerns, on the one hand,
the need to thank something other than labor for the capacity to survive and pro-
duce and, on the other hand, the need to protect against the propensity of humans
and unworthy gods and masters for self-magnification, which is the earliest moral
flaw to be denounced in the holy text. See Popul Vuh, trans. Dennis Tedlock (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).
19. Soustelle, Daily Life of Aztecs, p. 100. The aversion of the Maya to pure vi-
olence without a higher purpose is similar. In his commentary on the Popol Vuh,
Dennis Tedlock notes that the recorders of the book were more struck by the tor-
ture than by the death of their later lords at the hands of the Spaniards. See Popol
Vuh, p. 195.
20. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Harper and Row, 1984), pp. 143–45.
21. Antoninus, III: 2, p. 16.
22. Alföldy, Die Rolle des Einzelnen, pp. 47–48.
23. Evelyn S. Rawski, “The Imperial Way of Death: Ming and Ch’ing Emper-
ors and Death Ritual,” in Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, ed. James L.
Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, pp. 228–53 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1988), at p. 253.
24. For some descriptions of elaborate funerary rites and ceremonials sur-
rounding imperial death in China, see ibid., pp. 240–48.
25. JaHyun Kim Haboush, A Heritage of Kings: One Man’s Monarchy in the Confu-
cian World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 26–28.
26. Kitabatake Chikafusa, A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns: Jinno Shotoki of Kita-
batake Chikafusa, trans. H. Paul Varley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980),
pp. 7–8, 60–61. According to this view, historical interruptions in the virtuous line
do not in themselves undermine legitimacy, since they are bound to be corrected
in the due course of time. See p. 173.
27. Cit. in Haboush, Heritage of Kings, p. 279, no. 56.
28. Herodotus could still detect little fundamental juridical difference, apart
from scale and resources, between the Persian Empire and the Greek polis. The em-
pire was still capable of both justice and injustice to the extent that the character
of the same king was occasionally just and occasionally unjust. The Persian Empire
thus applied prosaic law and had not yet conceived of itself as the world. In fact, its
numerous and costly adventures prove only that it was conscious of the incom-
pleteness of its mission as an empire.
29. One may exempt from this tradition cultural productions from the 1970s
and beyond which glamorize an imperfect antihero. But these are usually opposi-
tional productions and are constructed in conscious defiance of the logic of domi-
nation and conformity propagated by empire.
30. Alexander fostered his own divine cult, even though it spread and took
root only gradually after his death. For a history of this process, see Fritz Taeger,
Charisma: Studien zur Geschichte des antiken Herrscherkultes, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1957), pp. 225–33.
31. Plutarch, Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, pp. 802–3.
32. Ibid., p. 810.
33. Ibid., p. 832.
34. Ibid., pp. 837–39.
35. The same view of death as part of a continuum along a spectrum of well-
being rather than as a fundamentally distinct event is also observed in many non-
state cultures. For a useful summary of the anthropological literature on the topic,
see Arthur M. Hocart, Social Origins (London: Watts, 1954), pp. 86–88.
36. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, trans. Gregory
Rabassa (New York: Avon, 1977), p. 66.
37. Kojève, Reading of Hegel, p. 62 (emphasis in original).
38. Plutarch, Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, p. 821.
39. Ibid., p. 822.

40. Bonaparte, Mind of Napoleon, p. 49.
41. Ibid., pp. 58–59.
42. Ibid., p. 79. Napoléon offers a qualifying note: “[But] I shall soften and
limit slavery wherever I maintain it and shall restore order and discipline wherever
I maintain freedom.”
43. Ibid., p. 48.
Chapter 3
1. Ibid., pp. 41–42.

2. Charles de Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor, trans. Terence Kil-
martin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), p. 306.
3. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed.
and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (1919; Reprint, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1946), pp. 77–128.
4. See, for example, Napoléon’s instructions to his nephew, in which the
young emperor in the making was told that any duties he may have to France came
only in second place, after those to Napoléon himself (Bonaparte, Mind of Napoleon,
pp. 7–8).
5. This orientation of votive religions is highlighted by Burkert in the con-
text of his discussion of mystery cults. See Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, pp. 12–15.
Hocart in Social Origins mentions an example of a Fijian chief who feigned illness
in order to test which god was true and thereafter consulted only the one who knew
that he was feigning. In other words, a god had to demonstrate his credentials
concretely, especially because there were always alternatives to him ready to do
business with the worshipper. In Tokugawa Religion, Robert Bellah charts a develop-
mental religious trajectory into Tokugawa notions of divinity. The fact that pre-
Tokugawa religion exemplified contractual elements with divinity is taken in Bellah’s
functionalist analysis as a sign of an earlier attitude incompatible with the existen-
tial foundations of capitalism described by Max Weber, which involved uncertainty
about one’s destiny under a god who was at once irreplaceable and unaccountable.
The comparison is certainly interesting in the context of the history of ideas. How-
ever, Bellah’s discounting of the likelihood of the “spirit of capitalism” arising in
conjunction with votive notions of divinity is not persuasive. See Robert Bellah,
Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
6. Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 114; see also pp. 28–29.
7. One must exempt here mystical and local cult trends within each salva-
tion religion, but those, as is well known, were often at odds with the defenders of
a doctrinal approach and the mainstream currents within salvation religions.
8. Antoninus, VI: 10, p. 45.

9. Ibid., XII: 9, p. 113.
10. James Carse argues that the best way to comprehend the significance of
the originality of the notion of sin is to compare it to the Hindu concept of karma.
Unlike sin, karma is based on accepting life as a separation from God, as one’s own
unalterable responsibility. Thus karma is acquired at birth, unlike sin, which is ac-
quired freely. See James P. Carse, Death and Existence: A Conceptual History of Human
Mortality (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1980), p. 129.
11. Bottéro, Mesopotamia, pp. 285–86.
12. The difficulties of the evolutionary argument illustrate further the reason
why the tropes outlined in this book must be regarded as allegorical rather than his-
torical. The survival of the votive within or parallel to mainstream salvation reli-
gious commitments has been pointed out not only by Michael T. Taussig but also
by others who study Santeria religion and the orishas in the New World, as well
as countryside vow rituals in the Middle East and elsewhere. Michael T. Taussig,
The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1980).
13. Erik Hornung, Akhenaten and the Religion of Light, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 99–100.
14. The “Great Hymn to the Aten” (attributed to Akhenaton himself) pre-
sents unity of the observed universe (including elements created by human beings)
as a function of universal visibility. Unity must be the law of the universe because
it is organically derived from visibility, the defining feature of Aton: “You create mil-
lions of forms from yourself alone—cities, towns and field, roads and river.” See
ibid., pp. 79–83.
16. Hermetica, p. 41.
17. I have explored this thought pattern at more length in the context of pre-
Islamic nomadic poetry. See Bamyeh, Social Origins of Islam, chap. 5.
18. Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 42.
19. Ibid., pp. 43–46. It seems plausible that it was precisely that emphasis on
experience and the concrete rather than doctrine which accounts for the dearth of
surviving literary records from the ancient mystery cults.
20. See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, sec. 38, p. 176; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tracta-
tus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1933), 6.4311.
21. Karl Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).
22. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Liveright, 1961), p. 30 (emphasis in original).
23. Ibid., p. 33.
24. Antoninus, II:12, p. 13.
25. Within such a framework, the death instinct could not be allowed to ex-
press itself as it wished, namely, to return to an earlier condition of harmony
through an autonomously selected path. Rather, it had to be expressed in the meta-
phor of prescribed travel: life as a journey back to God or, rather, life as a pilgrim-
age over a route trodden according to doctrine.
26. Bonaparte, Mind of Napoleon, pp. 273–74.
27. Cited in Ryszard Kapuschinski, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, trans.
William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand (New York: Vintage, 1989),
p. 146.
28. Bonaparte, Mind of Napoleon, p. 77. The statement is dated from 1800.
29. See Vladimir Macura, “La mort de l’Homme d’Etat: etiquette et rite,” in
Savoir mourir, ed. Christiane Montandon-Binet and Alain Montandon (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1993), p. 131.
30. De Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope, pp. 306–7.
31. See Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, trans. Redvers
Opie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 212–55.
32. Al-Farabi, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State, ed. Richard Walzer (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1985), pp. 246–53. Interestingly, al-Farabi does not presume that one individ-
ual would have all the qualities needed in the follower. He therefore contemplates
a system of collective leadership in which leaders with certain qualities would be
added on an equal footing to those deficient in them but superior in other needed
respects.
33. Antoninus, VII: 49, pp. 62–63. See also XI: 1, p. 101.
34. Ibid., I: 16, pp. 6–7.
35. Ibid., VII: 25, p. 60. This theme is variably articulated in the Meditations.
See also VI: 4, p. 44, VIII: 24, p. 72, and VIII: 58, p. 79. The universality of this
theme is evident in Aztec notions and practices of sacrifice, which essentially meant
birth and renewal. One of the most shocking of Aztec sacrifice rituals, the flaying of
the skin of the victim and the wearing of it by the priest, paralleled how the dead
earth announced its rebirth by making a new skin for itself at the beginning of the
rainy season. The dependence of life and death on each other is further noted in
cosmic regularities: Venus dies and is reborn at the appointed time each year, and
the sun itself could not have been born and would not sustain its own life without
blood and sacrifice. For further details, see Soustelle, Daily Life of Aztecs, pp. 96–106.
36. Antoninus, IV: 3, p. 24.
37. Elias, Loneliness of the Dying, p. 10.
38. In his conceptual history of death, James Carse argues that mystics, as op-
posed to Platonists, belong to the latter category, since their efforts presuppose an
abyss separating the soul from God, which they seek to cross. See Carse, Death and
Existence, p. 63. However, this argument seems to be too schematic, as many mys-
tics reconcile both notions. For example, the thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Ibn
Arabi said, “God has described Himself as the Exterior and the Interior and he has
manifested the world both as interior and exterior so that we may perceive God’s
internal aspects with our own interiority and the external aspects with our exteri-
ority.” Quoted in Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, Rumi and Sufism, trans. Simone Fattal
(Sausalito, Calif.: Post-Apollo Press, 1987), p. 129.
39. See Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (New York: Schocken,
1975), pp. 149–52.
40. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Samuel Gorovitz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1971), pp. 24–25.
41. Elias, Loneliness of the Dying, p. 62.
43. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 48.
44. See Georges Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais, trans. Richard Robinson (Los
Angeles: Amok, 1991), p. 58.
45. For a discussion of this point, see Simmel, “The Nobility,” in On Individu-
ality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1971), pp. 199–213.
46. Bataille suggests that Christianity, in introducing the ethic of forgiveness
so robustly employed by Gilles de Rais, entertains a “pressing demand for crime.”
See Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais, p. 12.
47. This of course is a reduction of the alternative possibilities which inhere
in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the massive literature on
both demonstrates their adaptability to different perspectives. I am only using the
comparison here as a shorthand. I hope the nuances will become clearer in the con-
text of discussions in the next chapter.
48. Drury, Alexandre Kojève, pp. 157–59.
49. In his study of the ceremonials surrounding the death of Stalin and Gott-
wald, Macura argues that the equation we = leader functions as a guarantor of the
leader’s immortality. See Macura, “La morte de l’Homme d’Etat,” pp. 127–28.
51. Ibid., p. 39.
52. Kapuschinski, Emperor, p. 131.
Chapter 4
1. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 10.
2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 163.
3. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire (New York: International Publishers,
1963), pp. 171–73.
4. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 57.

5. Elias, Loneliness of the Dying, pp. 64–65.
6. Vamik D. Volkan, “Narcissistic Personality Organization and Reparative
Leadership,” International Journal of Group Psychotherapy 30 (1980): 131–52, p. 139.
7. “Das Gewissen redet einzig und ständig im Modus des Schweigens,” Heidegger, Sein
und Zeit, sec. 56, p. 273 (emphasis in original). As for the call, we are told that
“Gerufen wird aus der Ferne in die Ferne. Vom Ruf getroffen wird, wer zurückge-
holt sein will,” sec. 55, p. 271.
8. “Der Ruf kommt aus mir und doch über mich,” ibid., sec. 57, p. 275 (em-
phasis in original).
9. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Individuality and Social Forms,
esp. pp. 329–33.
10. See esp. Jean-Pierre Peter and Jeanne Favret, “The Animal, the Madman,
and Death,” in I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother . . . ,
ed. Michel Foucault, trans. Frank Jellinek (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1975), pp. 191–93.
11. Rivière, “The Memoir,” in I, Pierre Rivière, ed. Michel Foucault, p. 106.
12. Santner argues that while Freud addresses the connection between capi-
talism and neurosis, he does not dwell on its distinct connection to paranoia, which
Santner explores. The point is certainly worth exploring further, although in the
context of the discussion here, the emphasis is more on the political organization
of modern society than on its economic organization. Eric L. Santner, My Own Pri-
vate Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton University Press, 1996).
13. Again, their emphasis is on economic rather than political macrostruc-
tures, although they see both to be connected. While their work concerns more
broadly schizophrenia, it is worth noting that the most important cases in their
book concern paranoiacs. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York:
Viking Press, 1977).
14. Classic examples include Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1978) and
Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936). More recent films, such as Enemy of the State (1998), The Fugi-
tive (1993), and The Truman Show (1998), or such TV productions as The X-Files and
Roswell, are driven by the suggestion that there is a good reason for heightened para-
noia, as it is the venue for “truth” in a thoroughly administered or “rational” world.
15. The list can go on interminably. One can also add ballot initiatives in some
states such as California which, thanks to its size, now serves as a laboratory for new
methods of forming public opinion in mass society. Almost always, those initiatives
take the form of eruptive discontinuity, and the voting public is usually bombarded
with dozens of them in any given election cycle. In a recent referendum, voters in
that state simultaneously approved, apparently without even noticing it, two con-
tradictory proposals regarding public financing of political campaigns.
16. Most prominent foreign policy makers in the United States in recent his-
tory had in fact dismal levels of global education, especially when the source of the
threat was weaker than the United States. The kind of education most highly val-
ued during that era was not detailed cultural analysis that required immersion in the
language, customs, and social history of the adversary. Rather, it was the kind of ed-
ucation that highlighted abstract modeling of universal behaviors. The fact that
Jeane Kirkpatrick was for many years the primary policy adviser for Central and
Latin America, even though she did not know the language of the region and had
never been there, was, as it still is, far from uncommon for prominent foreign policy
makers and advisers, and Paul Bremer’s reign in Iraq was simply the latest episode of
that tendency of eschewing those with “too much” knowledge, since they would
make action impossible. Too much knowledge, in fact, disqualifies one from such
posts. In a U.S. Senate hearing on a failed nomination for head of the CIA during
the Clinton administration, one senator offered what proved to be a more-than-
effective argument against the nominee: “too educated.” The statement, as one re-
porter sought to clarify to anyone who might be puzzled by it, was not meant as a
compliment.
17. Elias, Loneliness of the Dying, p. 36. The main point here concerns not the
veracity of psychoanalytic concepts such as the id but the orientation toward mor-
tality as partially viewed from the vantage point of psychoanalysis.
18. Sigmund Freud, “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence,”
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, ed.
James Strachey, pp. 157–85 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 166–67, n. 2.
19. James Hillman, “The Dream and the Underworld,” in Eranos Jahrbuch 1973
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), p. 285. See also C. G. Jung, Dreams, trans. R. F. C. Hull
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 62–65.
20. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 21–22. It must be emphasized here
that this is the prototype of other “sacrifices” that are less physiological in nature,
notably, the repressed drives which Freud asserts are placed under control so that
the ego can avoid being destroyed by external opposition.
21. In the sociology of social interaction, the classic renditions of this theme
are to be found in the works of Erving Goffman and George Herbert Mead.
22. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, sec. 38, p. 176.
23. The fact that such a self appears in these three perspectives as transhis-
torical makes for a nicely uniform, if highly misleading, outline. It is precisely in ur-
ban modernity that the bourgeoisie saw itself as the universal class as well as the in-
cubator of a transhistorical prototype of individuality, since the bourgeoisie saw
then all history to be gravitating toward the location it happened to be occupying.
24. I do not think that it is proper to regard him as a combination of the two,
that is, a “tragic hero,” since he does not seek his upcoming tragic fate. To the con-
trary, he is afraid of it and wants to avoid it.
25. The cultural history of modern nationalism displays likewise this pro-
pensity to overcome the ancient notion of unreclaimed tragedy. Quint shows that
appropriations of the epic genre in times of bourgeois-led nation building in
nineteenth-century Europe did not highlight the death of the hero as an end in it-
self but appended to that death a process of psychic healing represented by the
avenging victor, who represents the emergence of the nation. Quint argues effec-
tively that modern episodes of national rhetoric, such as the Gulf War of 1991,
which was referred to in many circles as a psychic healing from the trauma of the
war in Vietnam, are part of this propensity to found national history and national
meaning upon a capacity to reclaim tragedy. See Quint, Epic and Empire, pp. 358–61.
26. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper and Row,
1988), pp. 616–27.
27. In modern times, the various manifestations of the Samurai ethic are usu-
ally cited as the best examples of this trope. The seminal works of Ruth Benedict
and Ivan Morris, while criticizable (especially the former) for their excessive
schematism, offer useful framing arguments. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and
the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946); Ivan Morris,
The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1975). For an exploration of how that same ethic was transformed into a
basis of modern Japanese individualism, see Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai:
Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1995).
28. Carse, Death and Existence, p. 64; see also pp. 39–40.
30. This of course typifies the active rather than “traditional” hero, whose
duty is to maintain the status quo and restore fallen order rather than rearrange the
world in a new way and in his own unique manner. The discussion here concerns
the latter. The notion of duty incumbent upon the “traditional” hero is not struc-
tured so as to enlarge his existence or negotiate his relations to death. Rather, it
mainly allegorizes duty as a permanent orientation toward stability of a just order
of relations.
31. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press,
1992), esp. pp. 189–90.
32. Strauss, On Tyranny, p. 197.
33. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, (1936; reprint, Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1984), esp. pp. 44–58, 108–28.
35. Kojève, Reading of Hegel, p. 160 n. 6.
36. Ibid., p. 161 n. 6.
37. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 138–39.
38. This thesis is fully articulated in Robert Bellah’s Tokugawa Religion. Bellah’s
analysis is clear on this point, although it suffers from an excess of Parsonian struc-
turalism and is wedded to the thesis of the (universal equivalent of the) Protestant
ethic. Both unfortunately detract from Bellah’s otherwise elegant portrayal of the
transformations inherent in the logic of the Tokugawa era.
39. Embedded in the liberation rhetoric of his times, Fanon speaks more
specifically of violence in these terms rather than of general struggle. But it is vio-
lence that exposes the subaltern finally to his own humanity. Frantz Fanon, The
Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
40. Drury asserts that such a gratuity is purposeful in Sartre’s adoption of
Marxism (Alexandre Kojève, p. 76). If this is true, then Sartre in fact does not fully ap-
preciate what Fanon is doing, even as Sartre endorses Fanon’s revolutionary ideas.
41. For an outline of the notion of bad faith, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and
Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), pp. 47–
70. Sartre, of course, does not elaborate the point in terms of the native.
42. See Mohammed Bamyeh, The Ends of Globalization (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2000), chap. 2.
43. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,”
in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), p. 67.
44. Ibid., p. 72.
45. See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), III, sec. 8, p. 109.
47. De Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope, p. 308.
48. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Gift-Giving Virtue,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
A Book for All and None, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 79
(emphasis in original).
49. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vin-
tage, 1989), p. 220 (emphasis in original).
50. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 79.
Last Words
1. The mortuary rites of the Thai king, for example, involved him lying in
state wearing the same rich clothes he had worn in life, yet all valuables were re-
moved from his body right before cremation (Metcalf and Huntington, Celebrations
of Death, p. 137). Unlike his body, the symbols which had signified him as a king
could not be allowed to perish in the fire. Power is preserved especially against death,
which otherwise marks the vulnerability and transience of power.
2. As discussed earlier, Eliade located the social basis of this pattern of

thought in “primitive” cultures, although a more precise identification would locate
it in nonstate cultures. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of The Eternal Return (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1954).
3. Mohammed Bamyeh, Anarchy, the Soul of the World (in progress).
4. In a recent study, Hardt and Negri make an interesting comparison on this
score between Polybius and early traditions in American political thinking, which
saw perpetual expansion of the United States to be in its very nature. See Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2000), pp. 166–67.
5. For the sake of clarifying the point, this discussion is more schematic than
the case actually warrants. We encounter among many adherents of Middle East-
ern religions strong mystical trends that have unexpressed affinity to the other tra-
dition and vice versa. But the discussion concerns official orthodoxies most likely
to be associated with governmental systems rather than actual beliefs and practices
across cities and countrysides.
6. Another requirement is availability of conditions of possibility for its ex-
ercise. But this requirement concerns a different area of discussion than the one on
which the focus is here. Feelings of significance or lack thereof could, after all, be
independent of structural or objective conditions. The stress here is on the subjec-
tive sense of how one should approach the world rather than on what approach the
world makes possible. All tropes are possible at any time as different subjectivities
interpret existence differently, although they will certainly not be equally audible.
7. Certainly not to be confused with the “politics of life” or “politics in al-
liance with life,” which Foucault credits with enhancing power of governmentality
over society.
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Index
Abraham, 66 Bergman, Ingmar, 119n14

Achilles, 76 Bible, the, 11, 27–28, 54, 55, 99
Adam, 66 Bloch, Ernst, 6, 105
Adorno, Theodor, 88 Book of the Dead (Egyptian), 11
Agamemnon, 76 Book of the Dead (Tibetan), 10
Akhenaton, 53–54, 116n14 Bottéro, Jean, 22, 24, 53, 109n8
Akhetaten, 53–54 bourgeoisie, 8–9, 71, 112n3; and individual-
Alexander, 22–23; compared to Napoléon, ism, 61, 68, 85, 94; in Japan, 93; revolu-
29; death of, 18; as model, 48; and sub- tionary, 31, 120n23
stitution, 25; transcendence of, 40–46, Bremer, Paul, 120n16
55, 91, 114n30 Buddhism, 9, 26
Alföldy, Géza, 38, 113n10, 113n22 Burkert, Walter, 13, 51, 112n46, 115n5
alienation: from being, 110n21; from the
mass, 105; mastery as, 19; from self, California, 119n15
18–19 capital, 31
Amun, 53 capitalism, 62, 65, 76, 82, 84, 88–89, 91, 94,
Anaxarchus, 42, 44 115n5, 119n12
Anaximander, 9 Carse, James, 116n10, 117–18n38
anthropology, 25, 114n35 Catholicism, 55
Apollo, 100 Charles I, 23
Arabia, 58, 110n12 China, 38–39, 91, 93
aristocracy, 14, 37–38, 71, 76, 88–92, 106 Christianity, 38, 40, 51–52, 55–56, 60, 66,
Aristotle, 4, 27, 28, 40, 45, 47, 89, 112n9 109n8, 118n46
Atatürk, Kemal, 78 Cicero, 13
Aton, 53, 116n14 civil society, 49, 77, 92
Aufhebung (sublation), 5, 6 Clemenceau, Georges, 98
Aztecs, 13–14, 19, 36, 110n19, 117n35 Clitus, 42, 44
Coffin Texts, 11
bad faith, 44–45, 73, 95 communism, 91
Bataille, Georges, 69, 71, 94, 118n46 Confucianism, 38–40, 62
Bell, Daniel, 76 conservatism, 38, 59, 63–64, 98
Bellah, Robert, 115n5, 122n38 creation mythologies, 14, 16–17
Bentham, Jeremy, 81 Cronus, 17
131
132 INDEX
Darius, 22, 42, 44 given, 57, 67, 79, 89, 90, 98; and knowl-
David (King), 27–28, 42 edge, 79; of life, 36, 67; lonely, 28; and
de Gaulle, Charles, 22, 48–49, 62, 98–99 mystery, 51; and politics, 102–3, 106;
Deleuze, Gilles, 82, 119n13 profundity of, 92; and sacrifice, 68; unity
Demeter, 17 of, 54, 56–58; voluntary, 89, 100
democracy, 48–49, 68, 88–92, 95–97, 105 Existentialism, 7–8, 87, 93
de Rais, Gilles, 71, 73, 118n46 extinction, 12, 18, 111n28
desire, 9–10, 26, 90, 94–95. See also hedonism Eylau, 31
destiny, 9; bourgeois, 31; as dialectics, 47–49;
and greatness, 74; as national attribute, Fabian, Johannes, 6
50; and religious ideas, 51–55; as synthe- Fanon, Frantz, 95, 122nn39–40
sis, 59–60 Farabi, Abu Nasr Muhammad al-, 63–65,
detachment, philosophies of, 9, 25, 60 117n32
dialectics, 47–48, 50–52, 55–56, 70, 79–80, fatalism, 8–9, 11; and civilization, 15; in im-
87, 94 perial life, 35
Dinka, 20 fear: as aspect of civilization, 15, 19–20; and
Diogenes, 41–44 Dasein, 7; after death, 10; of death, 30–
Dionysian, 100 31, 38, 43, 59, 66, 69; of decay, 18; of
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 72, 96 empire, 56; and equality, 57; of failure,
Drury, Shadia, 74, 112n4 88; of freedom, 72; and humanity, 21; as
Durkheim, Émile, 92 severed dialectics, 52–55
feminine (power), 81–82
Eckhardt, Meister, 57, 67 fetishism, of life, 9, 99
Egypt (ancient), 10–13, 19, 27, 34–36, 53, Fiji, 115n5
109n8, 113n13 filial piety, 39
Egypt (modern), 45, 97 Flaubert, Gustave, 28
Eleusis, 13 Foucault, Michel, 5, 28, 76, 81, 92, 123n7
Eliade, Mircea, 15, 102 France, 30, 49, 91, 93, 97
Elias, Norbert, 8, 66, 68, 77, 85 freedom: from civilization, 46; after death, 17;
England, 23, 93 and democracy, 49–50; as embracing
Enkidu, 8, 15, 24, 26, 43, 66, 87–88, 102, 103, death, 10; from governance, 28, 42; gra-
111n41 tuitous, 70; as illusion, 72–73; from love,
Enlightenment, Age of, 45–46, 81, 88 28–29; of will, 15–16
Epic (genre), 76, 121n25 Freud, Sigmund, 59, 61, 70–71, 77, 79, 85,
Epictetus, 27 87, 110n23, 119n12, 120n20
Epicureans, 51, 89 Fukuyama, Francis, 90
eschatology, 11–12
eternal return, 100 Germany, 49
Ethiopia, 75 Gilgamesh: divinity of, 20–22, 57; and
Eve, 66 Enkidu, 15, 29, 87–88; epic of, 7–10, 12;
existence: of death, 78, 85; as destiny, 32; and as foundational idea, 4, 5, 16, 18, 26, 34,
difference, 101, 105; and empire, 34, 43; 66, 111–12n43; and substitution, 24–25,
end-of-history, 93; and ethics, 52; and 102; weakness of, 19
fear, 7–8, 59; as fellowship, 39–40, 43; Giza, 34
Index 133
Gottwald, Klement, 118n49 Illyrians, 41

Greece (ancient), 12, 17, 21, 41, 45, 109n1, Imru l-Qays, 14
114n28 individualism, 68–69, 76, 83–85, 87–89, 94,
Guattari, Félix, 82, 119n13 105
guilt, 66 Ishtar, 10–11, 17–18, 109n8
Isis, 10
Hades, 17. See also netherworld Islam, 11–12, 54–55, 63–64
Hadrian, 64, 103 Italy, 32
Haile Selassie, 61, 75
Hallaj, Mansur al-, 67 Japan, 39, 93, 121n27
Hardt, Michael, 123n4 Jena, 91
hedonism, 78, 80–81, 84–85, 89, 94. See also Jesus, 47, 72, 81, 111–12n43
desire Jews, 45, 55
Hegel, G.W. F.: Aufhebung, 5; on Christianity, Joan of Arc, 71
38; on history, 89–91, 93; interpretation Joffre, Joseph, 98
of, 30–31; master/slave dialectic, 8, 16, Judgment Day, 11–12; historical, 63; in salva-
33; on terror, 112n4 tion, 56–58, 109n8
Heidegger, Martin: on Dasein, 7, 110n21, Jung, Carl, 85
111n28, 111n40; on death, 58; on decay,
18; on shields, 87; on substitution, 23; Kantorowicz, Ernst, 23, 25
on understanding, 79 karma, 59–60, 116n10
Hellenic philosophy, 63 Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 120n16
hermeneutics, 57 Kitabatake Chikafusa, 39
Herodotus, 114n28 Kojève, Alexandre, 28, 31, 44, 90–91, 93,
heroism: and destiny, 50; and duty, 121n30; 112nn3–4
meanings of, 86–89; in modernity, 80, Korea, 39
82, 85, 92, 114n29; as reparation, 78; Krishna, 60
sacrificial, 70, 81, 96; and terror, 31–32; !Kung, 102
and tragedy, 41, 76, 121n25; utilitarian,
68. See also sacrifice Lang, Fritz, 119n14
Hiero, 28–29 legitimation, 21, 34, 39, 73, 92, 94, 113n11,
Hinduism, 63, 116n10 114n26
history, end of, 89–100 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 62
Hobbes, Thomas, 90 Lienhardt, R. Godfrey, 20
Hocart, Arthur, 115n5 Luqman (The Wise), 27–28, 42
Hollywood, 41, 88, 114n29 Luther, Martin, 32
Horkheimer, Max, 88
Huntington, Richard, 20 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 90
hysteria (mass), 83–84 madness, 82
Mamluks, 97
Ibn al-Kharrat, Abd al-Haqq, 11 Mannheim, Karl, 59
Ibn Arabi, Muhyiddin, 117–18n38 Marcus Aurelius, 18, 27, 33, 35, 37, 39, 51,
iconoclasts, 104 59, 65, 103, 106
id, 85 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 44
134 INDEX
Marx, Karl, 73, 77, 91, 118n47, 122n40 Oedipus, 87

masculine (power), 81–82 Olympias, 45
masochism, 71 Olympic Games (ancient), 41
massacre, 37 orishas, 116n12
maturity, 85 Osiris, 104
Mauritius, 45
Mayans, 14, 16, 110n19, 113n19 paganism, 13, 44, 51, 53–55
Mecca, 45 paradise, 12–13, 66, 104
Meiji restoration, 93 paranoia, 82–83, 85, 119nn12–14
Mesopotamia, 10, 12, 21–24, 52–53 Parmenion, 41, 46
Metcalf, Peter, 20 peasants, 13, 77, 104
Mill, John Stuart, 68 Persephone, 17
Mithraea, 58 Persia (ancient), 22, 42, 114n28
modernity, 63, 68–69, 79, 82–83, 94, 99 Pétain, Philippe, 98
monotheism, 53–54 Philip (of Macedon), 41, 55
Moscow, 31 philosophy, as means to overcome death,
Muhammad, 47, 54, 99 26–28, 42–43
mystery cults, 12–13, 50–51, 58, 116n19 Plato, 89, 117–18n38
mysticism, 16, 27, 52, 56–58, 66–68, 79, 89, Plutarch, 33, 35, 37, 41, 44
115n7, 117–18n38, 123n5 polis, 7, 14–15, 19–21, 103, 109n1; con-
trasted to empire, 33–34, 114n28; pro-
Nabigha, al-, 19–20 saic nature of, 40
Napoléon, 115n42, 115n4 (chap. 3); on Polybius, 103, 123n4
death, 70, 89–90; family of, 112n2; on Popol Vuh, 14, 16–17, 113n18
God, 55; on history, 97–98; on love, 29; Potidea, 41
on recognition, 30, 33, 91; on terror, 31– pre-Columbian America, 13–14
32, 112n5; on transcendence, 45–49, 61, psychoanalysis, 59, 77–78, 82–83, 85–87, 89
74–75 puritans, 76
Napoléon, Louis, 77 Pyramid Texts, 11
narcissism, 78, 81
nationalism, 48–49, 62, 78, 97, 121n25 Quint, David, 76, 121n25
Negri, Antonio, 123n4 Quran, the, 99
Neoplatonism, 60, 64, 66
netherworld, 10–11, 17–18, 21, 43, 53 recognition: democratic, 91–94; and love, 26;
neurosis, 119n12 of master, 33, 49; of slave, 18, 30–31, 95;
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 74, 106, 118n47; on glory, universal, 38
90; on history, 55, 96–97, 99, 111n36; on Reformation, the, 55, 104
ressentiment, 8; on slavery, 16, 113n15 Renaissance, the, 104
nihilism, 69 ressentiment, 8
nomads, 12, 16, 27, 58, 110nn21–22; poetry resurrection, 13
of, 14–15, 19–20, 110n12 ritual: as intermediary practice, 12–13, 104;
nonstate society, 15, 19–20, 28, 102, 110n19, organizing society through, 35–36, 62;
114n35 as substitution, 25, 102
Nyikang, 21 Rivière, Pierre, 81, 83
Index 135
Robespierre, Maximilien, 31, 91 Stoicism, 38, 51–52, 60

Rome, 18, 33–34, 38, 40–41, 56, 103 Strauss, Leo, 28, 90
Russia, 91 suicide, 70, 89, 92, 103
superego, 77, 79
sacrifice, 19, 24–25, 36–37, 72, 74, 76, 81, symbolic interaction, 87
113n18; and democracy, 88, 96; and he- Synesius, 27
donism, 94; heroic, 81–82, 86, 93, 96;
and knowledge, 56–57; and recognition, Tarafa (Ibn al-Abd), 14
95; royal, 109n6; of soul, 65–70. See also technocracy, 76, 78, 80–85, 89
heroism terror (revolutionary), 30–32
sadism, 71 Thailand, 122n1
salvation religions, 50–55, 104–6; and judg- thymos, 90, 95
ment, 56–58; and materialism, 58; and time, 15, 38–39, 41, 85–86, 105; and empire,
mysticism, 115n7, 116n12, 123n5; and 61, 103–4
sacrifice, 68, 73; and the state, 60 Tlaloc, 110n18
samurai, 93, 121n27 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 88, 91–92, 105
Santeria, 116n12 Todorov, Tzvetan, 36–37
Santner, Eric, 119n12 Tohil, 113n18
Santo Domingo, 45 Tokugawa, 93, 115n5, 122n38
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 95, 122n40 Tolstoy, Leo, 8–9, 11
schizophrenia, 119n13 tragedy, 47; as genre, 41, 76; individual, 69;
Schreber, Daniel Paul, 83 national, 121n25; transience of, 88, 92
Schumpeter, Joseph, 62 transcendence: in democracy, 88; of God, 55–
sed festival, 36 56; imperial, 34; of individualism, 85; of
Seven Macaw, 16 life, 66; in modernity, 80, 90; of morals,
Shilluk, 21–22 100; originality of, 47; as political act,
Siddhartha Gautama, 9–10, 26 3–4; spiritual, 67; transformation of, 48–
Simmel, Georg, 6, 80 49; as universal phenomenon, 6
sin: mystic, 67; original, 40, 52, 116n10; of tropes, 116n12, 123n6; definition of, 4–6
ruler, 28 Tutankhamen, 36
skepticism, 38 Twain, Mark, 23
Smolensk, 31
socialism, 62, 91 Uitzilopochtli, 13
social theory, 6 United States, 63–64, 84, 88, 91–93, 120n16,
sociology, 6; and concreteness, 58; of death, 123n4
11–12, 92; of decay, 18; and difference, Urshanabi, 7
102; of fear, 7–8; of interaction, 86–87; utilitarianism, 68–69
of loneliness, 77; and time, 15 utopia, 59
Socrates, 27, 103
Solomon, temple of, 45 Vendée, the, 45
Soustelle, Jacques, 36 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 12
Spain, conquest of the New World, 14, 36, Vietnam, 121n25
113n19 visibility, 53–54, 116n14
Stalin, Joseph, 62, 112n4, 118n49 votive religions, 50–51, 53, 115n5, 116n12
136 INDEX
Wahhabism, 104 Yi, 39

Weber, Max, 48, 76, 92, 115n5 Yongjo, 39
will to power, 3, 6
Wilson, John A., 34–35 Zarathustra, 99–100
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 58 Zeus, 17
Zipacna, 16
Xenophon, 28 Zuhair (Ibn Abi Sulma), 14
About the Author
Mohammed A. Bamyeh is a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

He is the author of The Ends of Globalization and The Social Origins of Islam: Mind, Econ-
omy, Discourse and the editor of Palestine America.

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OF DEATH AND

Gary Saul Morson

Northwestern University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Last Words: Death and Difference 101

First, to Randall, whose extensive comments on an earlier draft greatly enhanced

governance negotiates accommodations with mortality. It is tempting to chart

tion—only to hibernation or inaudibility. The point, of course, needs to be proven

The Master as Slave

an experience of conquered will or unfreedom. The reigning Buddhist concept of

Death and Hierarchy

Unlike under nomadism, in Egyptian civilization one experienced nothing directly,

are left to live on to dotage.” This conception of fate—random in everyday, uni-

The first unconscious political act of civilization, thus, is a reduction of freedom.

Compare this fate to Persephone’s capture by Hades in Greek mythology.

The Substitution of Death

Between Philosophy and Sovereignty

The Logic of Absolute Prominence

We were alone, in the profound solitude of a beautiful moonlit night. Sud-

The Rule over Death

Retreat from the Ideal

Thick grows that tarragon.

From the Prosaic to the Brittle

The transformation of any polity into an empire is fundamentally a transformation

tems of governance, which had reason to suspect that because of enlightenment,

Destiny—The Uncanny Death

Napoléon’s spiritual opportunism, just like Alexander’s, typifies foundational mo-

be ready to employ one’s principles. The gladiator, by contrast, exemplifies the

Fear and the Invisible

to the millions of scattered, distant souls subjected to the empire’s indiscernible

This remarkably dialectical method of combining opposite thoughts is posited

Sociologically speaking, it is possible to suggest that the smallness of the social

Sacrifice and the Sovereignty of the Soul

The underlining notion of the exchangeability of souls, which mystics exem-

In this psychological conception, gratuitous sovereignty as such cannot exist,

Isolation and Reparation

dition of being of no significance to others, or as an individual of no attachments,

This interpretation of the meaning of sacrifice is curious, and it is in fact nei-

analysis invariably show a distinctly modern dynamic of perception, whereby one is

symbolic interactionist literature, for example, reproduces in a microsociological

(child’s) identification with the invincible nemesis, promises only disempowerment

The Triumph of Life

definition an expression of criminality, terror, pathology, or outright rebellion. But

Remembering in the Age of Forgetting

itself proves the necessity of reminders. This is an ancient preoccupation, central

identified serve different agendas, modes of social organization, and ideological

politics as a pragmatic orientation to everyday questions rather than large issues of

controlled, blood-soaked drive toward world dominion is finally halted by factors

24. Cited in Bottéro, Mesopotamia, p. 277.

1. Ibid., p. 241. Conversation recorded sometime after 1811.

39. Ibid., p. 822.

1. Ibid., pp. 41–42.

8. Antoninus, VI: 10, p. 45.

4. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 57.

2. As discussed earlier, Eliade located the social basis of this pattern of

Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Translated by James H.

Volkan, Vamik D. “Narcissistic Personality Organization and Reparative Leader-

Abraham, 66 Bergman, Ingmar, 119n14

Gottwald, Klement, 118n49 Illyrians, 41

Marx, Karl, 73, 77, 91, 118n47, 122n40 Oedipus, 87

Robespierre, Maximilien, 31, 91 Stoicism, 38, 51–52, 60

Wahhabism, 104 Yi, 39

Mohammed A. Bamyeh is a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.