Incorruptible: Robespierre and Terror's Two Bodies

In his recent book The Royal Remains (2011), Eric Santner revisits a very old question: what remains of the King under the sovereignty of the People? It is Santner’s contention that the modern body politic can be understood as a ‘mutation’ of the peculiar political theological tradition of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’ famously reconstructed by Ernst Kantorowicz. To recall Kantorowicz’s influential argument, the medieval and renaissance figure of the King possesses not one but two bodies: a mortal body that perishes with the individual monarch and a mystical body politic which lives eternally. If Kantorowicz’s own view was that the public trial and execution of Louis XVI in 1793 succeeded in destroying both the King’s bodies – not merely the physical body of Louis Capet but also the divinely authorised body politic – Santner argues that something more complex took place in the transition from royal to popular sovereignty: ‘a figure whose sacral soma was seen to embody a “vertical” link to a locus of transcendence…comes to be dispersed “horizontally” among the “people” (p. xxi). For Santner, it even becomes possible to speak of the People’s ‘Two Bodies’ insofar as the modern body politic is blessed and plagued by a ‘surplus of immanence’ which is the fleshly remnant of the executed King. This paper seeks to re-visit the idea of the People’s Two Bodies – of a certain sublime excess over itself produced by the very immanence of popular sovereignty – with specific reference to the state of emergency that was the French Revolutionary Terror, 1793-4.

Contact: Ziad Elmarsafy or Matthew Campbell