A Face Decomposed

Within the alchem­ical legal doc­trine of royal circles, the doub­ling of the heir to the throne’s body as the expres­sion of the nation’s future health requires, as Ian Jack has noted, that the utmost com­pos­ure be dis­played.¹ Serenity should not des­cend from time­less alti­tudes, for were it to do so, the dark­ness of becom­ing would engulf the nation. Fic­tion though it be, the break­down of com­pos­ure that occurred as Charles Wind­sor encountered polit­ics in the raw may nev­er­the­less stand to sig­nify the truth of a change in the field of socio-​legal composition.

The loss of com­pos­i­tion oper­ates as the ever-​present hori­zon of crisis for those sub­ject­ive the­or­ies of nat­ural right which seek to invest the com­pos­i­tional power ground­ing the state’s norm­at­ive order either dir­ectly in the sov­er­eign (divine right), or through the neces­sary fic­tion of the state of nature (e.g. Hobbes), in free indi­vidu­als ali­en­at­ing this right to the com­mon sov­er­eign who then acts as the com­mon meas­ure – the struc­ture by which things shall be com­posed. To view the world through the prism of such a fic­tion is to be forever haunted by decom­pos­i­tion, that is, by the undead: ‘For the sov­er­eign is the pub­lic soul…which expir­ing, the mem­bers are gov­erned by it no more than by a car­cass’.²

Oscar Guardiola-​Rivera draws our atten­tion to Spinoza’s own haunt­ing,³ early one morn­ing in 1644, by the ‘image of a black scabby Brazilian’ and won­ders how this phant­asm might stand for a cer­tain blind spot in legal the­or­ies of the time with regard to colo­nial abuses. Might we pur­sue this phant­asm and sug­gest that here we already see Spinoza, pre-​consciously, being pushed away from the Hob­be­sian explan­at­ory mech­an­ism which would char­ac­ter­ise his earlier polit­ical work on nat­ural right, the Theological-​political treat­ise (1670)? For by his death in 1677, Spinoza’s unfin­ished Polit­ical Treat­ise dis­closes a refusal by Spinoza to except any facet what­so­ever from the face of nat­ural right.

The per­sist­ent cri­tique which has dogged onto­lo­gical uni­vo­city, that noth­ing can escape the One, at the least may turn to Spinoza’s think­ing for a coun­ter­blast to cer­tain the­or­ies of plurivocal being: namely, that it is not a vir­tue of a the­ory that it can explain everything solely by pul­ver­ising it into dust and then recon­sti­t­ut­ing it accord­ing to its own bland order. Through the bring­ing even of the anarchic power of nat­ural right into the very state itself,⁴ Spinoza embraces the dynam­ism of social com­pos­i­tion and offers up a vis­ion of the socio-​political field as the mater­ial from which, with the tool of life, a joy­ous city can be built. Decom­pos­i­tion is raised to the per­fec­tion of com­pos­i­tion and holds no fear for the vir­tu­ous. For the flux of the socio-​political field is now under­stood as the means and not neces­sar­ily the hindrance of well-​being.

Within this meta­physic, the task of the law­yer in the widest sense becomes that of topo­lo­gical archi­tect: nat­ural right as the face of the whole uni­verse is to be worked ‘like clay in the hands of a pot­ter’⁵ so that the sur­face of the city becomes a dynamic iura com­munia – the right of each is not sum­mated as the right of the one sov­er­eign as in Hobbes. No. The face of the city is con­sti­tuted so as to aug­ment the power or right of each of its sub­spaces – the right of each is empowered by the com­ing together of all.

But the toll Spinoza exacts is the con­stant accept­ance of imman­ent decom­pos­i­tion, lest it come to us without warn­ing in the dark­ness of a Decem­ber night, clat­ter­ing at the win­dow, try­ing to break open the door.

This entry was posted on 12 December 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Critical Legal Theory, Political Philosophy. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.