11. On the Kingdom

France and Germany were, then, divided by the Reformation. Understanding such a statement evidently presupposes the clarification of some of the notions used here: Reformation, of course; the tracing of its division (we shall come back to this); but especially the question (at least in a first phase), What are the entities that the Reformation is tearing apart? Or, what is Germany, and what is France? We are not (not only . . .) aiming at a metaphysical and speculative determination of the essence of these two “nations,” but rather at this simple question, What exactly is the thing that finds itself torn up in this way? What is the reality and actuality of these two outfits whose politico-linguistic specificity one can vaguely sense? Or further, What are we talking about, exactly, when we are thus discussing “France” and “Germany”?

As far as Germany is concerned, let us leave the matter suspended for the moment. To say that we shall have to come back to it is understating it: the question of the “definition of Germany” reaches far into the analysis of the political constitution of Europe and of the European constitution of politics. Let us be patient. But, What is France? This matter seems simpler, at least from this angle. Indeed, what is divided by the Reformation, the entity in which the Reformation produces an effect of schism and splitting, seems easy “empirically” to determine: it is the kingdom of France, France as a monarchy. In the middle of the sixteenth century, this formation displays an observable and attested existence, and the mode of its division is war. The division of the kingdom by religious war is therefore what is taking place. Kingdom, religion: in order to define “France,” these are twin notions that we shall have to question.

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What is a kingdom? Let us propose a double nature for it: (1) a kingdom is a fragment of an empire; (2) a kingdom is a project for the reconstitution of the (theologico-political) unity of the theologico-political.

First of all, the fragment of an empire. When Romanity falls apart [se décompose], the two elements com-posing it are not falling together; it is the empire that collapses. The church holds up: it keeps going, taking in the newcomers. The invaders subject themselves to the church, pledge their allegiance, and are baptized. The fall of Rome is the fall of the Roman Empire. How does the empire fall down? It breaks apart, becomes dismantled and dislocated. It turns into fragmented kingdoms, which share out its space. The Roman world breaks up into places. It is the same breakup: the empire blows up into kingdoms, just as the world falls apart into places. They are dis-located, which is to say, dismembered in accordance with the topo-graphy and topo-nymy that made up the imperial space.⁹ This is what (post-imperial) royalty is, first of all: the regime of sovereignty re-de-termined and reconfigured upon a soil—neither a continent bordered by water, nor the deep land of ancestors (though they may of course also be buried there), but a circumscribed soil, with the royal domain [domaine royal] at its core. Royalty is set up as a unity of place, or the unity of place. This is one of its etymological values:

In order to understand the formation of rex and the verb regere we must start with this notion. . . . Regere fines means literally “trace out the limits by straight lines.” This is the operation carried out by the high priest before a temple or a town is built and it consists in the delimitation on a given terrain of a sacred plot of ground. . . . The tracing of these limits is carried out by the person invested with the highest powers, the rex.¹⁰

As is the domain, royalty is the tracing of sovereignty in space and in accordance with the limits of the place, of a soil circumscribed on its surface.¹¹ Whoever marks these boundaries is king. The formula that the French jurists made up about the king of France, “emperor within his realm” [empereur en son royaume] most explicitly conveys that this local fragmentation is indeed that of the empire.¹²

Then comes the reunification project. Quite a few mirages have surely entered the retrospective vision of the Greek polis as a unity. But it remains true that it knew nothing about the partitioning that we are discussing here—the theologico-political difference (of the theologico-political). This is not due to any homogeneous essence but simply to the fact that this division, a historical one, had not occurred yet. It is precisely Romanity that makes it happen: a new separation, of church and empire, follows the mode of existence of the polis (and the divisions that were its own). The politeia splits up into (imperial) sovereignty and (ecclesial) assembly. It is this scission—and the solidarity between the two complexes that it distinguishes and com-poses (the world and the commons)—that organizes and defines Romanity in its completion, and Romanity will ultimately turn this into its legacy. What are these two complexes? The world is strictly that which falls under the sway of the empire; and the commons, or common, is that which assembles itself, that which comes to the assembly, which is to say, the people. (Imperial) world and people (of God—because there is no assembly of the world): this is what Rome com-poses, what Rome (progressively) establishes and organizes as a composition, both a conjunction and a disjunction, an adjoining heterogeneity. Post-imperial kingship, which emerges after the breakup and supersedes Romanity after it is brought down, is a hypothesis reuniting these two agencies into a single regime. The kingdom comes to the fore as a new model for the unity of the ecclesio-imperial setup.¹³ But this reunion is dissymmetric. The kingdom is a fragment, an imperial splinter. And thus, the reunification that the church and the empire project into it is produced in an imperial mode. The kingdom is a projected reunification of sovereignty and assembly, but in the regime of sovereignty. Or, to put it into these questionable terms: while the kingdom is a synthesis of the theologico-political, it is a political synthesis of it.¹⁴ It is the desired unity of the common and the world, but in a piece or domain of the world—in a space of sovereignty.

This is what the privileged agency in this reunification expresses, since it is the church that holds on to its extension on the surface of the world, while the empire breaks up into kingdoms and the world into places. The church asserts this: through the articulation and progressive predominance of the theme of its Catholicity. Where then can the attempt at (theologico-political) reunification be carried out? Where can the local aspect of the land and the Catholicity of the church become one? At a determined point, where both regimes meet: in the person, the individuality, and the body (proper) of the king. The king is emperor, it has been said, but he is also an apostle. The signs of this double qualification are numerous.¹⁵ Among the more eloquent ones, there is the consecrated coronation [le sacre], of course, which transfers onto the person of the sovereign the ecclesial as well as the royal authority—royal because it is ecclesial. The king is sacred. The space of the (theologico-political) reunification is the body of the king, that is to say, the royal singularity, personality, individuality, inscribed in his physical uniqueness, which is marked by his power to cure sufferers of scrofula by his touch, the power of his body to heal a body. Why the body of the king and not his soul? Because the body signs and designates the uniqueness and the singularity of persons, within their circumscribed physical extension.¹⁶ What is consecrated is the individualism of the royal person, the unique and precise point where two essences meet; the site and de-termined agency of the theologico-political union. The body is what is sacred: the consecration (the sacrament of the consecration) is the condensation of the assembly in the person.¹⁷

But in reconstituting the unity of the theologico-political in the royal person, kingship seals the setup that was introduced earlier: in his body, the king unites sovereignty with ecclesiality, but he does so as the sovereign. The kingdom does intend to subject ecclesiality to the regime of sovereignty—to dominate and reign over it. If the kingdom is the dis-located legacy of the empire, and if the church is the agency of the assembly and of coming-to-a-common-being, one has to say that the kingdom is the project to reunite the theologico-political by the subjection of the common to sovereignty. “Subjection” is the determined appellation of this submission. The king’s subject is the commonality of what is submissive in relation to him—what is submissive inasmuch as it is common.

In this way, the reunion necessarily goes unfulfilled—forever projected. For the kingdom, indeed, as a piece, fragment, or splinter of the empire, is of the world—this world. The church, as a branch of the common, is transcendent and exterior to it. The kingdom project is to retrieve the common and repatriate it to the world. Now, the world is that for which there is no common being. The world is the space of sovereignty, united or dislocated. If the king wants commonality for the kingdom, as the kingdom, he is clashing with the world, which is resisting this. If he subjects the church, it is as the mark or figure of the common expelled from the world. The figure of the common can be traced out in the world: as the trace of a lack, an absence, or the border of a hole. The ecclesio-imperial union, which only the king carries, is indefinitely wished for and desired.

Facing this resistance, the king then pretends to communicate his essence, the unity produced in his body, to the whole kingdom: as a piece of the world, the kingdom escapes and resists this projection. Between the king and the kingdom, intermediate, projected, and suspended bodies are constituted: the nobility, which partakes of sovereignty (being the same by birth or by nature, able to elect the king from its midst), and the clergy, which partakes of ecclesiality (communicating with the king thanks to their dual sacred corporeity).¹⁸ Royalty aims at a reunification of the political unity that the separation of the church and the empire broke up, and this (desired and unfulfilled) reunion projects itself from the king’s body toward the kingdom, as intermediate bodies. This is how the kingdom acquires its projected and eerie structure: the body of the king is its head (its chief, its capital organ). The soil (domain) is its base, its support, and its locus, finding its expression in the idea of territory.¹⁹ Unity of command (archi-unity, mon-archy) and unity of place and competence—both capital and local. And between them—below the chief, above the soil—are the intermediate bodies, the makeup of the kingdom. But what is missing from this structure, which is unitary (on top) and dual (in the middle), is the absent third; it is there only as a surplus or an excrescence of being. The third is the hole, the void left by that which was excluded from the kingdom—the excluded and absent from the world, that is to say, commonality. The kingdom has no knowledge of the people, since the agency of the people, of the common—ecclesiality—is outside of the world (of which the kingdom is a part), or else deposited onto it, at a single (sacred) point where it meets it, in the person of the sovereign, who captures all the ecclesiality of this piece of the world, within which all the commonality of the kingdom is inscribed, caught, and captive. The kingdom does not know any people, only subjects—residual figures of the absent and subjected common.

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As Aristotle puts it, enough said about this—in this case, the imaginary. In actuality, we can give a name to this strange formation uniting sovereignty and assembly as sovereignty, and commonality with the world in the subjection of the world. This problematic or paradoxical unity of the kingdom is carried out as the state.²⁰ The kingdom joins the (subjected) church together with the heritage of the (broken) empire in the unity of the state. It is as a state that it claims to reunite the church and the splinter of empire, and it is as a state that it subjects the common to sovereignty, and it is as a state finally that it takes over and supersedes something that collapsing Romanity had carried. What is it? I propose that the kingdom, as the state, supersedes the beaten empire, as a moment (of the movement) of the universal.²¹ It is from the empire (and, by way of it, from the movement of the universal) that the kingdom gets a push or impulsion, which it transforms locally. To keep going, the expansion, held within the boundaries of the land, changes and undergoes a metamorphosis. What no longer grows throughout the extension of the world condenses and is densified in the fabric of society. The dismantling of the empire does not stop the process of expansion of the universal, but an “intensive expansion” follows its extensive one. The countless authoritative functions that were subsumed in the empire become homogeneous and organized in a unified whole.²² Henceforth, compressed within territorial boundaries, these functions cross-react and metaphorize one another. The state is the local condensation and the densification dynamic of the (dis-located) empire.

(In this one should call attention to the very use of the concept of state, and never deal with the state as an essence—or with anything else, no doubt, but especially not with the state. Properly speaking, there is no [being, essence, or state of the] state, but only, and always, there is statization. More than anything else, the state requires that we think of it as a process, as becoming-state, as the movement and generating of state formations. With the local condensation of the process of the universal, the transformation of the extension of the empire into an intensification of the regime of sovereignty, the French state, in each phase of its history, is the state of its statization. We are here describing one of its phases, the state of the kingdom, the [procedural] unification of the church and a splinter of empire in the heritage and the mode of imperiality.)

But what about the church, the church in its autonomy, in the way it is constituted since the Roman separation? What happens to it here? For it is the kingdom, the agency of sovereignty, heir of the empire, that spells out this project of a unity, as a state project—a process of statization. The uncertain fate of the church is the outcome of this very imbalance. The kingdom wants a state church.²³ Now the church is incessantly summoned and urged by the state to join it. Temptation besets the church, either to respond and lose its specificity and the unity of its body; or to refuse and let go of the world for which it answers and that it transcends. The church had been a double of the empire throughout the extent of its expansion; when the empire breaks up and condenses into the state, its double or alter ego—which, being the “empire of the world,” made its transcendent surge as the people of God necessary—now becomes detached. The church is then caught in an endless duality, a true double bind of its inclination to be: either it keeps the universality of its surface, and loses its double, which is its security; or it tightens into a local, territorial, and royal church, and loses the status of its universality. It either unseals itself from the theologico-political bond (which constitutes it, from birth), or it negates its being-Catholic.

That is why the kingdom keeps a dual element in its constitution. The church is not plainly within the state—even if the state wants it, and incorporates it on some accounts. The church is also the universal, worldwide, and Catholic floating object of the state’s desire, an object that is not circumscribed, compressed, or entirely caught within state borders. The church floats both inside and outside of the body of the state, like a migrant soul. Yet the division or ancient theologico-political difference intended to vanish in the unity of the state persists as a duality or organic duplicity. The state, the heir of the empire, constitutes itself in the regime of sovereignty. Indeed, it is the body of the kingdom, but its body politic. This body contains the soul, which is subjected and captive—the state is the sovereign subjection of the common. What is left, however, is the other body, which is spiritual, and it punctures the world—the episcopal, territorial, and royal church, which is nonetheless Catholic. The church and the state—they are not separated: their separation will be at issue only in 1905.²⁴ But church and state are not fused: the church is the double of the political body as spiritual or mystical body—a universal, migrant, and detached body. This is the double envelope, the double physics, and the double nature of the kingdom. There is the material body and the spiritual body, the political and the mystical one—secular arm and regular body.²⁵ This unity is circumscribed at its base, localized on the land; at midlevel, the two bodies graze, haunt, and respond to each other. Identity is achieved through the head. Louis XIV would be able to say it: he was, indeed, the identity of the state.²⁶