Wild Promises: On the Language "Leviathan"

Hamacher, Werner. Hale, Geoffrey A.,tr.

CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 4, Number 3, Winter 2004, pp. 215-245 (Article) Published by Michigan State University Press DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2005.0019

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Wild Promises
On the Language Leviathan

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

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

Whoever promises, lays down his arms. He abandons them and hands them over to the one to whom he makes a promise. Arms here are not only the technical means for attacking the life and limb of another; these arms include also the borders of a country, the walls of a house, clothes of a body. Whoever makes a promise is stripped of the protective and aggressive instruments at his disposal, and even discards the tools of combat and protection that are his words, concepts, and language. Ones clothes, prostheses, pretexts, and texts are given over into the hands of another. Whoever has made a promise is naked. This is the scene offered by the classical natural right theory of the promise in its attempt to grasp the rst contractual agreement, the formation of society, and the founding of the state. Hobbes articulates it most explicitly, both in Leviathan and De Cive. Hobbes leaves no doubt that this originary scene is that of a ction: in it, national community is simulated, produced, and created; and in it (and it is for this reason that it can, in an emphatic sense, be called ctive), this scene produces itself. The transition from a natural state of boundless egoism into a constitutionally regulated
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society would be the transition from a state of war of all against all into a state of legally regimented warfare bounded by the courses of commerce and justice. This transition, and with it the initial scene of the social contract, is a creation, if not from nothing, then out of the chaos of the mutual destruction of all elements of living nature. And this chaos is the selfdestructive object of an experience that must be produced, if not everywhere and at all times, then certainly at various times and also in the presentHobbess own presentand in a future he cannot exclude. It may peradventure be thought, Hobbes writes in the chapter on The Natural Condition of Mankind in Leviathan, there was never such a time, nor condition of war as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places where they live so now.1 Although the state of nature is thus characterized as such a warr, as is of every man, against every man (Hobbes 1996, 88), its universality is neither spatial nor that of a certain historic or prehistoric period that would be situated precisely in a surveyable and epistemically controllable time frame. War takes place as precivil and prenormative, not everywhere and at all times, but rather in pre-universal dispersion at many places and at many timesand these many include also the present: there are many places, where they live so now. And Hobbes continues, repeating again that there are many places: for the savage people in many places of America, . . . have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before (89). Now and at this day live not only the savages of America in the state of nature and of war, but also Hobbess contemporary and future addressees, well-versed in social, historical, and linguistic theory. We, here and now, and at many, if not all places, are virtually the savage people, and our behavior towards one another isat many, if not at all times founded on the hypothetical suspicion of mutual threat to life and limb. We savages fear one another and fear, at every contact with one another, death. Every otherincluding those others we include in our weis for us a gure of death. For the instruction of those contemporaries who contest this consequence, Hobbes arms himself with an example: Let him therefore consider with himselfe, when taking a journey, he arms himselfe, and seeks to

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go well accompanied! when going to sleep, he locks his dores! when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knowes there bee Lawes, and publike Ofcers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done with him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; and of his fellow Citizens, when he locks his dores! and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? (Hobbes 1996, 89). Everyone who arms oneself, guards oneself, secures oneself and ones possessions against ones fellow subjects, ones fellow Citizens and even against ones children with walls, doors, and locks, acts in principle on the basis of a suspicion of robbery and murder. In principle, that is, in the sense that they can never be weakened or opposed by the existence of laws and executive agents: Lawes, and publike Ofcers. These security measures conrm only the suspicion in principle that every other is virtually a murderer. The fear and desire of murder dene the whole structure of social commerce and must therefore be described as the social passions that belong to naturethat is, the indissoluble disposition of humanityand that constitute the empirical transcendentals of all phenomena in the realm of human interaction. Natural right, or jus naturale, is therefore a tautological construct because it denes right as an irreducible power relation, authorized and validated by nothing other than its own givenness, its nature. Natural right is natural force. But since nature is the force upon which every force can ultimately be based, natural right is also the force of the force to preserve itself through its proper meansthe force to preserve itself, thus, by means of force. Hobbes can therefore explain denitively: The Right of Nature, which writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own life; . . . (Hobbes 1996, 91). If nature is the power to preserve natureand this is precisely what Hobbess circular denition afrmsthen nature can be reduced to no other power, be it higher or otherwise, situated outside itself: it is the power of ratio and is as such, in principle, in agreement with ratio divinaand thus nature cannot be superseded, for there is no other power which could come after it that would not at the same time also follow its rule. Whatever can nevertheless

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become other than nature must emerge from nature and follow its laws, in particular the legal constitution of nationally organized societies. Therefore, it necessarily follows from the invariable givenness of the force of nature that it must occupy the entire horizon of human behavior at all times in history. We have, thus, always had to protect ourselves from assaults against our lives; we do it now and cannot stop doing it: nature thus commands us, through ourselves, to arm ourselves against ourselves. Right and the natural law of self-preservation that follows from it is therefore, in spite of all appearance to the contrary, a right and a law of insufciency. If nature is the power to preserve natureto use his own power . . . for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Lifethen it is only because the danger of losing itself comes from itself. What must preserve itself must do so against its own disappearance. Since nature is subject to no higher power, this threat of disappearance must come from itself; it, nature, must be antinature, from which and through which it seeks to maintain itself. That nature must preserve itself means that nature is not yetor is nevernatural enough to be merely nature. Natures law of preservation, that it is nature only as nature-against-nature, appears most distinctly in a formula Hobbes uses to counter presumed opponents to his concept of nature. What might appear strange, Hobbes concedes, is that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another. Nature, the foundation of all associations, is thus dissociated. But it does not merely dissociate people from one another, who were not bound in a prior societas, it dissociates itself from itself before all else in them, and is nothing other than this self-dissociation. Only separated from itself in this way, only as nature-against-nature and nature-invading-nature, can it relate to itself and preserve itself. If nature must maintain itself in this way and must preserve itself from itself, if it can resist its self-destruction only through a corresponding law of self-preservation, then its structure, its essence, and its nature, the nature of nature, is essentially a self-overcoming, a force that exceeds its force, continually produces itself as surplus, and participates in and against itself as hyperforce. The law of self-preservation that Hobbes sees at work in nature and that constitutes the nature of this nature is a law of self-augmentation and

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self-overcoming. It does not bring about any natural homeostasis that could balance the threats of hostile forces armed against one another and ensure the survival of each one. Hobbess construction counters the thought of such a balance of powers by arguing that even the weakest is strong enough to kill the strongest (Hobbes 1996, 89), and is similar enough to the strongest to parry the threat of death emanating from it. This equalitythe only one that a nature bent on self-preservation knowsis an equality of the ability to kill, and the balance that can be attained through it (again, the only one of which nature is capable) is the permanent war of all against all. But even if the nature of War, as Hobbes explains, consisteth not in actuall ghting; but in the known disposition thereto (8889), this state of nature, that is, of war (Hobbes 1991, 119) is still a state of continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short (Hobbes 1996, 89). The balance of forces in the natural state of war thus is not a solid double bind of self-preservation under the condition of self-destruction. It is a state of the continual threat of murder, fear of death, and the mutual destruction of antagonistic forces, the state of a cold war of nature against nature: the state of a continual fall in which it only sustains itself in order to be able to destroy itself, and it must be able to destroy itself in order to preserve its ideality. Insofar as Hobbes sees the obligation for self-destruction in the natural right of self-preservation, he separates the principle of preservation rigorously for the rst timemost clearly in chapter 17 of Leviathan dealing with the articiality of the commonwealthfrom the Aristotelian and stoic tradition that saw in it the guarantee, at least in principle, of a homeostasis. Human beings are not originally political beings for whom the relation to others would be identical to the relation to ones own life. For Hobbes, however, people are not so much asocial beings as they are antisocial, as long as everyone stands opposed to ones potential death in every other. The self-preservation of nature in mankind, then, cannot be achieved in nature, because this principle is simultaneously its self-destruction and that of nature as well. Hobbess insight turns the principle of preservation that had dominated natural and social ontology, as well as major portions of theology, for fteen hundred years into a dilemma. Hobbess solution is

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ingenious for the very reason that he resolves the dilemma by way of dilemma: the difculty is overcome, in a certain way, through its intensication. The state of nature is for Hobbes a state of mutual threat of all against all. Since this threat is not only one of murder but of the permanent tendency towards murder, and precisely for this reason itself lethal, the means of threatand this is Hobbess solutionmust be concentrated, checked, and defused at a single locus. Everyone receives these means with the very freedoms that the principle of self-preservation protects. If the threat is to be ended and social life to be possible, these freedoms must be abandoned and transferred to an authority that guards the right of self-preservation without using it as a right to harm others. This authority stands under an imperative of preservation without assault, of security without annihilation, and of life without murder. Since the Platonic-Aristotelean doctrine of a life, originally and physei conceived as life with others and life from the life of the other, cannot, from the disintegration of such a life and its opposition to another, account consistently for non-political life; and since a doctrine and praxis that would dene life with others only as life against them must dene life aporetically as life against itself, as life-against-life, it is possible, both in theory and in practice, to dissolve the fusion between a life conducted with others and one conducted against them, and to introduce a critical distinction into the doctrine of natural right that supports this fusion. In order to make possible a life that is consistent with itself, it is necessary to distinguish between a life with others on the one hand and a life against others on the other hand, and thus also to distinguish within the with between a with and an against. Only along this path of differentiation and separation between with-others and against-others is it possible to isolate the destructive from the conservative forces of being-with-others, and even convert them into forces of preservation. More precisely: only by eliminating the against from the with can a consistent being-with-others emerge for the rst time. The creationHobbes says generationof a community is precisely this: the always originary creation of an always originary community consistent within itself. For the denition of the state of nature of society as a state of war does not only mean that nature is

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self-destructive; it also means that, under conditions of war, there is no society that can preserve itself as society and that is, in this way, a society in agreement with itself. The commonwealth as politically constituted society would not emerge as the more complete society from a given less complete one, but from bondlessness as the rst bond. The covenant that produces community is therefore precisely a creatio ex nihilo:2 not through a superior authority, but only as the absolute superiority of Gods creation, which Hobbes cites already in the rst sentence of his introduction (Hobbes 1996, 9), does the creation of the Mortall God Leviathan (120) arise from a process based upon a nothinga nothing in social substanceand through which, not by the addition of an already present something or by recourse to a transcendent material, but rather solely through the separation from a nothing (through the elimination, namely, of the powers of destruction), a social something rst emerges as an ordered society. Through a not-nothing, just like the immortal god, a mortal one is created. The principle of autocreation out of nothing remedies the principal defects in the principle of self-preservation in pure immanence. Society does not create societyautopoietically, according to the Aristotelian modelbut rather a nothing-of-society creates society through the removal of its nothing. It does this, as Hobbes again emphasizes in his introduction to Leviathan, in the same way God does: through an act of language analogous to a Fiat, or the Let us make man (10). And this act of social creation, the creation from language for another language, is completed in a promise. Savages promise. The savage peoplenot only in many places of his contemporary America, but all over the known worldgive each other their word and with it their arms, their natural freedom, and their preparedness for murder. They promise one another an order that, as the order of the promise, ought also to be the stable order of communication, of action (whether practical or symbolic), of commerce, of judicial structures, and of political institutions and their means of reproduction. Only as savageswhether in America or elsewherecan they make promises, and only in the fear of the wilderness of death, because, at the time of their promising, there cannot be any order of the promise that

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might protect them from the murder threatened by their rivals: what they give must be a promise before any order in which this gift would be knowable and recognizable as a promise and could be perceived and answered as such. No promise would be necessary, if there were already a social, linguistic, and symbolic order that could secure for the promise continual stability and unambiguous meaning.3 Savages can only make promises without the possibility of having them understood as gifts, without any established convention for the promise, and without the possibility that anyone would know what a promise might be and whether what they give under the name of a promise could be perceived and received as such. In the uncertainty of whether there even are promises and whether they could be intended and kept as such, these promises are not only those of savages, they are savage, or wild, promises: nothing could guarantee that they would not be broken, or even that they are seriously intended and understood; everything could suggest that they are threats and attacks on the pride and vanity of those to whom they are given. For whatever is said in the society of the cold civil war (Hobbess bitter comments offer a painfully accurate impression [Hobbes 1996, 11013]) serves the diminution and social death of those to whom it is addressed. Language is a weapon; and even the promise to lay down this weapon, even the self-disarming language, can be murderousfor those who give their word as well as for those to whom it is givenas long as this language of savagery is preserved within the civilizing promise. The creation of a coherent order of communication cannot be a at out of the promise, because it cannot build upon any order of promising that would not lead into the incoherencies of language warfare. The promise, producing both order and society, must thus satisfy two laws: it must be given in view of a possible peacethus of the elimination of every intent to harm othersand it must therefore be given as a renunciation of the tools of war. To make a promise must mean: to lay down ones arms. Whenever one gives ones word, one must abandon ones arms and thus also abandon the natural right to everything one wishes. That is the second law of nature in Hobbes, the explication of which occupies nearly all of the decisive chapter 14 of Leviathan, and, together

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with the rst law of nature as requisite self-preservation, founds all subsequent laws of nature as well as the laws of the state: That a man be willing, when others are so too, . . . To lay down his right to all things . . . (Hobbes 1996, 92). Law is the laying down, the abandonment, and surrender of right, and this surrender of the right of nature, which is simultaneously the surrender of nature and its state of war, lies in the divestiture of the freedom to hinder others in the exercise of their freedom: To lay downe a mans Right to any thing, is to devest himselfe of the Liberty, of hindering another of the benet of his own Right to the same. Only this divestiture of the freedoms of language and action, insofar as it is the divestiture of the freedom of mutual destruction, introduces the end of natural and linguistic warfare and opens up the possibility for a coherent bond of communication that would no longer tear itself apart. Whoever promises, therefore, gets rid of the means of destruction in order, by means of this annihilation of the social nihil, to create what preserves one in existence. Self-preservation cannot be a simple persistence in existence: for, as natural, it is an existence against itself, from which neither a perseverare nor a suum esse conservare can be declared; self-preservation must be a preservation of his own Nature (91) in the sense not only of a preeminent but also of an anticipatory concern for a self, which cannot satisfy itself with mere perseverance, but rather proposes proleptically something not yet given, and invents something not yet in existence at that point: preservation of the self is its generation as artifact. The emphasis that Hobbes places on the articiality of social connections concernsalready in the very rst sentence of the Introduction of Leviathaneven nature. Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World), he says there, is imitated by the Art of man in making an Articial Animal. For by Art is created that great Leviathan called Common-wealth, or State, (in latine Civitas) which is but an Articiall Man . . . (9). But the question is, then, whether this creatio of the articial person called the state is brought about by a doing, and further, whether its creation can be an act or action, if every action under natural and thus articial conditions must already be an attack or a threat, and thus also destructive. If, namely, self-preservation can only be the feigning of a self, and if consistent societies as well as individual beings are constituted purely through the

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abandonment of their natural rights, then the fundamental act of self-creationthus self-preservationcan only be that paradoxical act whereby the right to act is itself given up. That the act par excellence takes place in the abandonment of action, and that the origin of community rests in the cession of all individual acts is not simply the unspoken implication of Hobbess construction of society, but he himself emphasizes it everywhere in his text. The paradoxical sleight of hand that must be carried out in the act of abandoning action is apparent in the Liberty of the subject of right, which, Hobbes says, consists in the act of our Submission. While it is true that there is no Obligation on any man, which ariseth not from some Act of his own, it is also the case that the constitutive clause of consistent society, I Authorize all his Actionsnamely, all actions of the sovereign, be it a commonwealth, parliament, or monarchdenes this act of freedom as an abandonment of all acts. An actand, as the founding phrase I Authorize all his Actions makes clear, a speech act of self-preservation by self-creationis always one in which the omission of an action and its yielding to another are carried out. Only in this other is the act its own, for only in the other is it the unied act of all, no longer antagonistic, no longer destructive, and no longer an act of civil war, but rather of universal and individual self-preservation. Freedom is achieved only in this paradoxical act: that Liberty we deny our selves, by owning all the Actions (without exception) of the Man, or Assembly we make our Soveraign (150). We deny our selves by owning . . . our Sovereignones own act is expropriated, and only in this way attributed to the self in general. It is the act of the renunciation of action of all individuals for the benet of the totality of individuals. As already in the gesture of the constitution of sovereignty in Bodin, the ultra-sovereign act, from which comes the sovereignty of the Articial Man Leviathan for Hobbes, lies in the immediate and continual eradication of this act. Unlike Bodin, however, Hobbes sees this eradication as motivated by the sense that the act, as an act of individuals, would be an act of destruction, and only by abandoning its destructiveness does it gain the capability of preservation. No longer oriented toward the others right, but toward ones own, it establishes consistency through the (itself inconsistent) elimination of the inconsistency of individual acts.

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The fundamental operation of self-preservation through self-creation via negationis is thus not a positing; it is not a gift and it is not a transfer of rights. For he that renounceth, or passeth away his Right, giveth not to any other man a Right which he had not before; because there is nothing to which every man had not Right by Nature: but onely standeth out of his way, that he may enjoy his own originall Right, without hindrance from him . . . (Hobbes 1996, 92). If, however, the promise in which this renunciation, this revocation of rights of freedom occurs, not dedicatio, but abdicatioif it is neither an afrmative nor a negative positing, but only an ex-positing of the annihilation through word or deedthen it is, strictly speaking, neither an act nor a speech act, but its deactivation, in which the promise and the pact thus established are accomplished. Every promise not only announces but also executes an abandonment of potential acts and speech acts, and this execution does not occur as the fulllment of an act, which could only occur in the destruction of others and the obliteration of ones own self, but takes place as a renunciation of virtually every act and speech act, and thus as speech de-activation. Every promise is a renunciation of speech, a privatio privationis in which language, in order to discharge its destructive potential, abandons itself. What occurs in the speech act of the promise is an act of denial, and thus a suspension of language that must still precede the distinction between active and passive in order to ground the possibility of juridically binding just acts and just speech acts that could actively be carried out or passively suffered. Every speech actbecause none can function outside of established conventions or prescribed statutesis only possible on the basis of an exposition and displacement of action. The atopical, autotopical locus of this de-positing of speech is the promise. It founds an order of the self-coherent self by silencing the selves in conict. Every promise is a promise of silence, and must therefore end in silence. Every act that is unied in itself and an act with others must be oriented towards the removal of its destructive traits, and must therefore occur as an action of its deactivation. What can be called consistent social actionand its founding gesture denes the structure of action as suchis the action of a nonaction. The at of the Leviathans creation comes from a nonat. Only this divestiture of the act grants language that creatio ex nihilo

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and, more precisely, ex nihilatione, which [Saint] Paul (Hobbes cites him more than 50 times in Leviathan) attributes to faith and God, who calleth those things which be not as though they were (Romans 4:17). A Promise is equivalent to a Covenant (Hobbes 1996, 95); but since this promise must in principle be everyones renunciation of their right to everything within the horizon of their desires and passions, this renunciation would end then, if it were not contained within an absolute limit, in universal self-destruction, in a mass suicide. Since this absolute limit cannot be arbitrarily set by any given authoritythere is no such authority in a state of warit must, in and as abdication, belong to the irreducible structural elements of the promise as such. Precisely when the promise is based on nothing other than an abdication, its minimal conditions then include the preservation of this speech and promise, the insistence and permanence of this abdication itself, and accordingly the promise that exercises this renunciation. If there is to be a divestiture of natural possibilities of action, then this divestiture can only resist every further denuding. The promise distinguishes itself before all other speech acts by two irreducible and mutually determinant traits: it is the renunciation of every possibility for action that could limit or harm the action of othersand thus also ones own (in this sense it is pure abstention, epoch), and it is, as this renunciation, the persistence of the promise in itself (in this sense it is the adherence to the promise and the holding of the promise, the self-preservation of its bearer and resistance to every destructive act that could be directed against this preservation). Once a promise is given, it cannot be given up. More precisely: once a possibility for actionand that is a possibility for death is renounced, this renunciation must imply the resistance to its own destruction and to that of its bearer. From the logic of the universal renunciation of the right to destructionfrom the privatio privationisit necessarily follows that only one thing cannot become the object of renunciation: the right of resistance. It is that right, as Hobbes says just before the discussion of contractual promises and agreements, which no man can be understood by any words, or other signes, to have abandoned, or transferred. . . . a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that assault him by force, to take away his life (93). Though this presentation relies upon pre-

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existing natural rights, however, since these rights are the rights of mutual destruction in war, the right of self-preservation can only be grasped properly if it is not thought as presupposition, but only as the implication of the renunciation of those rights. Self-preservation is rst the preservation of the promise to renounce the use of rights of war in speech and action. But since this preservation is not that of an established and instituted self, and since it cannot emerge from spontaneous autocreation, it is essentially resistance to the refusal of its destruction. Resistance is as much the residual of a fragile, substanceless life at odds with itself as it is the insistence of the promise in which this life seeks to save itself by abandoning its rights. It is thus the double form of bare language and bare existence, the revolt of sheer existence in language that, contrary to what Hobbes thinks, is not based upon a right, but rst makes right possibleas the right of this resistance, this preservation, and this rebellion. The axiom, thus, is this: the promise is the resistance of linguistic existence to its destruction; hence, the promise is the rst agreement of language with itself as existentas mutinous and insurgent. This axiom of the resistant existence of language in the promise means rst: only after the promise does language emerge as one languageas a coherent language common to many. It means further that it can only claim its legitimacy because it is the axiom of axiomaticityof being taken as such, of irreducible credibility and fundamentalityof the word given in promise. Hobbes oriented his reections on the transition from the deadly state of nature to the saving state of civic community around the transition of the Multitude into a Unity, and credited the promise with combining the multiplicity of individuals into a unity that protects them from one another and from external enemies. The promise establishesit feigns, invents, generates, and createsthe unity of community and the unity of its language by deactivating the multiplicity of natural interests connected to it. Only with the unity of a society constituted as the state does language also gain a unity that can protect it from the conicts of its multiplicity. The task of fabricating one language and the unity of the community, for Hobbes, is resolved by the invention of a ctionthe invention of inventionof art, and, more precisely, of representation. Hobbes takes the

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decisive artistic concept of the person from juridico-theological tradition and entrusts the founding of a representative social unity to it. Even when he speaks of a Naturall Person, whose words and actions are viewed as his own (Hobbes 1996, 111), that person is an artifact that both gives way to and hinders perspective, perception, and recognition; leads as much as it misleads; and, above all, achieves what cannot naturally appear: the representation of the place of another, speech and action for another, the presentation not of oneself, but of a relation to another. The short history Hobbes offers of the word person leaves no doubt about this: The word Person is latine: insteed whereof the Greeks have prsopon, which signies the Face, as Persona in latine signies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage, and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard: And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters. So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation; and to Personate, is to Act, or Represent himself, or an other; and he that acteth another, is said to beare his Person, or act in his name; . . . (112). To speak and act as anyone who can be viewed as a personas a persona in a drama, or as a juridical person in political contextsis to act for another, even if this other is ones own self. He acteth another means: he acts and plays another who is not present, but represented in speech and action. Only by means of this representational structure of the person is it possible for one (a person) to beare his Personnot only the person of a single other, but the multiplicity of other persons as well. The following quotation from Ciceros De Oratore (2:102), which Hobbes used earlier in his De Homine (Hobbes 1991, 83), suggests that only the person is capable of being borne by other persons and, for its part, able to beare a variety of other persons in order to combine this plurality into a unity: in which sence Cicero useth it where he saies, Unus sutineo tres Personas; Mei, Adversarii, & Judicis, I beare three Persons; my own, my Adversaries, and the Judges. What he says here of the attorney Cicero, that he beares his own person, that of his opponents, and the judges, is a fortiori true of that one person who, in all of its functions, as representer, or Representative, a Lieutenant, a Vicar, an Attorney, a Deputy, a

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Procurator, an Actor, and the like (Hobbes 1996, 112), collects and beares in itself the multiplicity par excellence, the Multitude of natural individuals. This One Person is the sovereign, constituted society, the commonwealth, the state. Hobbes claries: A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular (114). Thus, it is not that the One Person beares a multiplicity, but, that through its bearing of this multiplicity, it makes this multiplicity into one plurality: the One Person is a gure of unication; and not only does a corporate body, the state, represent the elements of the people unied within it, but it rst creates its unity as people [Volk]: representation is a process of creation. For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One. And it is the Representer that beareth the Person, and but one Person: And Unity, cannot otherwise be understood in Multitude (114). If the One Person Leviathan rst produces the unity conceived within itfor the Multitude naturally is not One, but Many, they cannot be understood for one; but many Authors, of every thing their Representative saith, or doth in their namethis is because only through it, the Leviathan, can the many rst speak and, as speaking, act, with one voice, even if it only be the voice of its majority. The Leviathan is a languageit is the one language that unies in the promise and whose insistence is asserted in its claim to those who are supposed to have given the promise. But since a noncontroversial, unequivocal, and binding speech is impossible under natural conditionsthe Multitude naturally is not Onea noncontroversial, unequivocal, and binding promising must also be impossible, regardless of whether it comes from the multitude or from the individuals of whom it consists. The unity of natural individuals as well can only be a postnatural ction with which leviathanic univocality generates its own presuppositions, teleologically oriented towards it, and with which it is legitimated post naturam through a consentwhich could not have existed beforeof every one of that Multitude in particular, who were neither able to speak nor promise as every one and not in particular. The One language of the One person Leviathan, for Hobbes, can only be a maskthe One prsoponthat

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is not worn in front of a face, but only suggests a face; does not disguise any other unity or multiplicity, but makes such unities rst thinkable; does not emerge continually from any earlier language, but whose preexistence is only belatedly presupposed. The language Leviathan is a prsopon, a Persona, disguise, or outward appearance, that does not correspond to any substance, prior intention, or unied meaning; it is a persona through which no voice could sound, but only the howls of war, polyphonic rumbling, silence. The Leviathanthe community, the state, politicsis a mask in front of nothing. A speech-mask before natural silence; a lieutenant of the not-one, and Actor of disunited multiplicities. It represents inconsistent multiplicities by generating a single, apparently consistent one, and speaks in their name by lending them a name, language, and a face. Hobbes thinks the gure of the Leviathan from the axiomatic positing of the One as an underivable arithmetical foundation, and prosopopoeia as the founding rhetorical gesture by which language and face are attributed to one who has none. The combination of both leads to the one and common language of homophonous promise to lay down all combative arms, and to guard only the one and common protection in the person of the state together with the right of self-preservation. The sovereign is the one and founding prosopopoeia, the archprosopopoeia, in which the mathematical ideality of the One becomes a person and the organized community becomes the state. Its One does not designate, however, but creates, through its marking, oneand only oneentity and the nameable multiplicity of all subentities schematized by it; and the just person Leviathan does not speak for preexisting others, but produces them according to its singular face. The Leviathan populates, but he also personies a nothing: he opposes it as a person, presents himself as a mask, and presents it through his absolute exclusivity. Hobbes distinguishes the use of speech from its misuse and characterizes its politically most destructive form as mutual harm: for seeing nature hath armed living creatures, some with teeth, some with horns, and some with hands, to grieve an enemy, it is but an abuse of Speech, to grieve him with the tongue . . . (Hobbes 1996, 26). Language is a weaponlike teeth, horns, and handsand its use, under natural conditions, leads to

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disputes, war, and mutual destruction. Since conditions of nature are determined by the change and passage of time, it is time in language that brings about the general state of war, and it is the temporality of language that must effect its self-destruction: Nay, the same man, in divers times, differs from himselfe; and one time praiseth, that is, calleth Good, what another time he dispraiseth, and calleth Evil: From whence arise Disputes, Controversies, and at last War (11011). If time brings about self-difference, language war, and annihilation, the only resistance to it and its lethal consequences lies in the creation of a language unied within itself and a gure of linguisticthus juridical and politicalcommonality that removes all oppositionality from every being-together. The only language against time and its differentiations that would not renounce all temporal conditions is the language of the promise; the only gure of resistance to permanent war is the one person in whom this promise becomes a political institution. Individuals right to self-preservation and resistance nds its counterpart in the institutionalized resistance of the sovereign person of state. Insofar as this one and only articial person may be Procurator, Lieutenant, and representative for all those subsumed within it, it must then, in principle, be a language independent from them. It must, at the same time, as an articial language created out of mathematical ideality and rhetorical inventio, be precisely that natural language that must have been renounced in the promise of everyone who makes use of it. It must, as the one language of resistance to war, death, and destruction, be at the same time itself the language of war, death, and destruction. The one language of the one person can only fulll its apotropaic function by reproducing what is warded off in its intolerance to any other, either within itself or outside of it, be it similar to itself or different from it. Its absoluteness excludes every alternative and every opposition. To the extent that it is a creation from nothing and against nothing, it is itself devastating. The famous frontispiece of the 1651 edition of Leviathan depicts a monarch literally as the Representer that beareth the Person, and but one Person (Hobbes 1996, 114). He bears within himself a multiplicity of human forms and makes them into one person whereby only he, not those borne by him, presents his faceprsopon, personaand his face is the only

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part of him not composed of the bodies of others (xciii).4 The city and landscape around the impersonalfaceless and silentgures whose collection and organization form the person of the sovereign is effectively devoid of people. More forcefully than the iconographic presentation, however, Hobbess text makes it clear that, outside of the body politic of the One Person, there is nothing, and within it, only its expressionless elements. The exclusivity of the sovereignand of the sovereign promiseevacuates the linguistic and political space. As personale, as a masked form, it stands in and in front of a vacuum; as the only personal power, it even effects the depersonalization of its own constituents. Its unity and singularity are thus doubled: the absolute artice of political life, and absolute wild savagery that admits nothing other than itself. For this reason alone can its gure be axiomatic and the axiom of political axiomaticity itself: since it founds itself, it has no ground and must thus function as the ultimate and irreducible authority of its credibility. It is a wild, that is, groundless invention of political discipline and a reinvention of wilderness. The exclusivity of its domination serves the security against the nihilism of the state of nature, but this security raises endogenous nihilism to the principle of politics. The Leviathanthe sovereign person as well as its languageis a fetish. He disavows and conrms at the same time a nothing that is determined by him as the antithesis to his own existence. The right of resistance, for the natural individual as well as the collective person of the state, can, as Hobbes emphasizes again and again, never be given up. It is that which no man can be understood . . . to have abandoned; a man cannot lay down the right of resisting (Hobbes 1996, 93). If the agreementthe covenantconsists in the mutuall transferring of Right (94), then this one right of resistance cannot enter into it, precisely because it cannot be given up or handed over. It must form the insurmountable limit of every contract. If this right of resistance, namely, were transferable, then the sheer linguistic existence, and with it the sole ground for a social compact, could be transferred. Such a transfer would have to result in self-contradiction and thus an intralinguistic state of war, which would negate every agreement. If, on the other hand, the social contract is precisely that form in which the inalienable existence of all individuals, and

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with it the right of resistance, is instituted and stabilized, then the resistance of existence must at the same time be a resistance to that resistance that presents itself as the form of the state. The promise must be the transfer of all rights of freedom to societyand must, however, at the same time, as the bare existence of this promise, be resistance against society. The promise can only found the stability of society as resistance to socialization; as the resistance of existence, it must oppose all socialization. The promise that produces the social bond must be the insurmountable limit within this bond. The greatest form of stabilization of linguistic existence can only be inconsistent. This inconsistency of formnot only the form of society and of the state, but moreover of every other form of linguistic institution as wellis the inconsistency of the promise itself that, as bare existence, is not yet consistency, and has neither a constant institutional form nor a xed content. There is, therefore, an additional axiom: the existence of language in the promise is the inconsistency of its xed form. This means at the same time that the promise itself is inconsistent within itself, insofar as it merely projects the form of its stabilization and of its self-preservation, without actually being able to realize it. Linguistic existence is insistent, but inconsistent. The axiom that the unity of language is already realized, or at least anticipated, in the promise loses its principal credibilityit is de-axiomatedas soon as the linguistic resistance of the individual arises against the one axiomatic language Leviathan and denies credibility to belief. Singularity means in each instance: I do not believe belief. The Leviathan axiom must always be unbelievable. It is insistent, but, because of its inconsistency, not simply assailable, but in principle (counteraxiomatic, and anti-principle) already contested. This inconsistency axiom takes at least three forms: First, there is no agreement that could take place already within the order of the same agreement. A promise is always an absolute beginning. Every promise not immediately honored and every one that does not immediately entail a symmetrical promise or an equivalent obligation by the contracting party, is, in Hobbess formulation, a word of the Future (Hobbes 1996, 95). As such, while it is binding and can only be broken at the cost of

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destabilizing multiple symbolic exchange relationships, it is only binding through trust (96) in its future fulllment, and thus without any institutional security. If the fulllment of the social contract is guaranteed by means of force as derived from the state of war, the society thus formed cannot be founded on the rights of freedom; it cannot becontrary to Hobbess postulatea civitas that would protect against the state of war. Every politics of the promise that threatens the use of force, thus every politics of threat, can only operate in terms of the maxim only war prevents war and abandon to terror the protection it promises. Both Hobbes and Locke, who relates his doctrine of tacit consent to Hobbes, had to remain vulnerable to Humes contention that their theory of the original contract was nothing other than a betrayal of the promise to force and power.5 However, if the means of force which should guarantee the keeping of promises are the means of organized political society, then the political contract that, by recourse to force and threats of force, perpetuates the war it is intended to end is harmed in return. Precisely this extortion of the promises fulllment is unavoidable for Hobbess commonwealth: Covenants, without Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all (Hobbes 1996, 117). If here, with a restorative rhyme rhetoric, the word summons the support of the Sword, it becomes apparent that for Hobbes a promise, especially one that grounds the state and society, occurs not in the laying down of arms, but in their violently forced surrender. Only an armed contract is for him a social contract. It is the only thing that can secure bare existencebut existence secured by force is, according to his own premises, unprotected and insecure. Wherever security, guarantee, or stabilization is desired, the bare linguistic existence of the promise must be surrendered, and its reference or even assignation to the future must be expunged. It cannot be, then, a word of the Future, but a fact of immediate force. The solution to the dilemma into which every promise leads thus can only be expected of its future. Yet, as long as only a future common Power, and thus only a yet-to-be-established social bond, can be expected to guarantee the contractual promise as such by being it itself, neither the validity of nor the adherence to the promise can be ensured. The securing of

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intention, semantics, and of the pragmatic situation; the securing of the status of the given word is always only post verbum. That means: it is never possible by the word itself. The language of the promise and of the agreement can only be the coming, as yet uncertain, the not yet and never entirely stabilized, instituted, and institutionalized existence of language. The promise moves ad innitum towards the securing of its validity in the form of organized political society, and remains forever suspended on the threshold between its fragile linguistic existence and its consistency. It remains only a promise of the promise, resistant to a determinate self, resistant even to its self-stabilization, the naked existence of speech before every instituted language. In the aporias apparent in the phenomenological descriptions, and in the securative norms of the promise, extending from Hobbes to speechact theory, it becomes clear that the promise is only this: the innite standing down and standing before of language in that which it cannot yet be, and perhaps never will be. In its innite before, not only does the promise not coincide with othersa corresponding intention, an announced fulllment, another promise, symmetrical to the rstit does not therefore even coincide with itself. It convenes innitely, and therefore never entirely. The innite is one of the forms of inconsistency. Every given word is hyperbolic: it irredeemably exceeds itself. Linguistic existence expressed in the promise remains utterly incompatible with the security intended in the concept of self-preservation that ought to be achieved in the promise, the agreement, the contract. Not only is every promise therefore a wild promise, but each one inaugurates as an, in principle, an-archic transcendence, a singular wildernessand it inaugurates it precisely as an innite and indenite relation to an other. (Hence, the endless and bewildering debates about the connection between speech acts and intentions, between expressions oriented towards the future and their fulllment, about the guarantees for the mutual obligations in contracts: they do not exist; they can only be compelled as norms, postulated as ideas, or promisedfor the future.) A second variant of the promises inconsistency is legible in Hobbess concept of the sovereign. Hobbes must concede that the agreement that constitutes the state, whether or not it is supposed to be a reciprocal promise of all of its members (or even a majority of them), can never be a

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reciprocal promise between the subjects of the state and the state, their sovereign. Hobbes leaves no doubt that this asymmetry does not result from any arbitraryor occasionaldecision, but rather is a structural demand of every contractual commitment. The sovereign state and its parliamentary or personal authorities can never form contracts; they are the agreement, the contract, the contractual promise itself. Since the state is never a part of the whole, but always this whole itself, it knows no contractually capable counterpart within its own limits that would not be a part of itself. The union dened by the promise cannot enter into a mutually grounded alliance with those bound by it, because it itself is already the alliance, and an alliance between the union and what it unites would have to release both from this bond and create instead a union of the disunited. Since the promise is an agreement in a unity without exception, this unity itself can be neither an object of nor participant in further agreements. The promise is absolute. It is not capable of action, and it is, on pain of deadly injury to the principle of preservation, inexpressible. The political absolutism thus established no longer requires any recourse to political theology by grace of God, because it arises more mathematico from the structure of unity: the unity of the state bond is nothing other than the unity of the multiplicity convened in the contract, and accordingly only the unity achieved in the agreement itself is the sovereign. Since no unitywere it not to be divided within itselfcan enter into a contract with itself, the society conceived in the state must be an ultimate, in itself irreexive authority that cannot entertain any reciprocal relation to those constituted under it. Whereas, in the treaty of surrender that produces the one political body, the multiplicity of individuals transfers its rights to one another and thus to the one state, this one state cannot, for its part, abandon any of its rights to the multiplicity of its subjects without dissolving its unity. The sovereign is absolute because it is one; but because it is one, it cannot belong to the state, but can only be this state. That is the foundation, in set theory, of the Ltat, cest moi of Louis XIV, and the basis for Hobbess insistence that the sovereign cannot break a social contract since it never entered into one (Hobbes 1996, 122). The sovereign represents it, and as its representativeas its personacannot be subject to this contract; if it were, it would subject itself to

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itself and, as such, no longer be one but many, and thus the chaos of war and not the systematic order of law. On the other hand, the sovereign, precisely because it is not subject to any contractual party and therefore also not subjected to the state, can, in its representation of the contract, only be the continual presence of civil war and destruction. The statement, Ltat, cest moi, must thus be continued and claried: et moi, cest la guerre. Hobbes, more drastically than any other political theorist, articulates the consequence of this assessment of the unity that cannot be part of itself when he writes, in the chapter on the right of the sovereign to punish its subjects: For the Subjects did not give the Souveraign that right/of subduing, hurting, or killing any man/; but onely in laying down theirs, strengthned him to use his own, as he should think t, for the preservation of them all: so that it was not given, but left to him, and him only; and . . . as entire, as in the condition of meer Nature, and of warre of every one against his neighbour (Hobbes 1996, 214). The sovereign did not have to lay down any of its rights to freedom and war, none of its arms; it is not naked, but rather existence armed for war. It is the state as the force of nature of absolute terror. Sovereign is not the one who determines the state of exception or of emergency [Ausnahmezustand]; sovereign is the exception, and the state is this state of exception in permanence.6 But in that way, the sovereign itself is the representative of the state bond excepted from the bond of state, and since this contract cannot exist without its representative, the state, in this political set problem, must be excepted from the state, empty, null and void. If, namely, the state in the form of the sovereign is not a part of the state, does not belong to it, is not bound to it by any law or obligation, and is, thus, neither determined nor limited by anything, then all power of the state and in the stateexcept for the sheer resistance to itis just as illegal as it is illegitimate, and the contract is void. The right of the state, in order to qualify as just, would have to indicate another right; since, according to its premises, there can be no other which would account for its right, none can, in principle, fulll a claim of right that would exceed the conventional or positivist decree, or the equally arbitrary reliance upon norms, even if only regulative ones. Its structural inability to be part of itself while having to

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operate as such a part displaces all positive statutes, regardless of whether they are taken from tradition or consensus or the projection of ideals. What remains is the resistance of a linguistic existence that has no right and can therefore only demand it. The social contract and the promise it is based upon appear in their highest representativethe sovereign, the state, the Leviathanas a gure of inconsistency. But this gure is nevertheless no less real; it is even the ens realissimum in the realm of nite existence. Hobbes, upon whom this gure imposed itself from the despair of reason in the face of civil war with precisely the same force with which the idea of God for Descartes resulted from the hyperbolic doubt of reason about its own being, calls the Leviathan therefore a Mortall God: a God, thus, who is equipped with all the predicates of the ens perfectissimum, with the exception of its own mortality, since it cannot contain itself and thus cannot maintain or preserve itself. Hobbes adds, in reference to the Book of Job, that it is the God of the vain (Hobbes 1996, 221)and thus suggests that Leviathan himself is vain, mere appearance, and null. That might be a vanitas formula, but it can only be one because it is rst an analytical formula for the diagnosis of sovereign political structures. In a less Old Testament and less baroque, more detailed and more critical fashion, a similar diagnosis appears in the political theories of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. The state is the macroinstitute that conducts national civil war or international class warfare, although the administration of war can counter it at best with normative-moralist slogans, but nothing, beyond the contested interests of capital and work, that could guarantee it substance and permanence. As the organizational form of war, the state is empty and itself an agent of the emptying out of what is assembled within it. The future of democracy, which has thus far been dependent upon it and will remain so for the foreseeable future, must be determined in relation to the armed emptiness of its forms of sovereignty the sovereignty of representatives; the sovereignty of states, state alliances, and institutes of justice; and the sovereignty of capital and its international corporations. Since the promise of all individuals to coalesce into a political body can only be a wild promise, this political body must be dissipated, the political

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universal torn apart, and the God Leviathan nite. If it is described here with a word that Hobbes often uses, inconsistent (Hobbes 1996, 209), it is not simply in the lax sense of contradictory and in the etymological sense of what does not stand with itself and has no persistence in itself, but also in the strict sense of the term in set theory: intolerable to itself and exclusive of itself. The promise of sovereignty upon which the social contract is ostensibly based cannot be guaranteed by any prior order of the promise and cannot be bound by any existing compact; it must be free of them and free of the promise itself. This freedom of the promise to begin with itself and to establish an agreement of its own accord, independent of other or prior contractual obligations, appears in Hobbess construction as the agreement itselfthe Covenant, and thus also the commonwealth, the state, or its highest representativethat cannot surrender its rights, cannot take part in the Covenant, can make no promises, and is bound to no promise. The promise cannot be an object of the promise. And since it is true that a Promise is equivalent to a Covenant (95), it is also true that: the agreement is not an object of another agreement; and: the sovereign state is not bound to the promise that constitutes it. Sovereigntyof the promise and of the state thus foundedlies in the constancy of its form and the innite variability of its contents, which cannot include its form. The promise that is the state is that absolutum that is exempted from itself. That means, however, it cannot ever be checked, and can, at all times, cause terror, murder, and self-destruction. It can always beand must always be able to bea threat, a declaration of war, or a crime, regardless of whether it is freely given or given under duress. Yet if every promiseand the fundamental promise that produces constituted society above allis in this sense itself unconditional, sovereign, and, in principle, free with respect to the promise, then it is exempted from itself, empty: meer words. It is a word of the Future, a state of the future, not only in the sense that it is anticipated and still to come, but also in that it never exists in any present as anything other than an indication towards the future. In every promise, we promise ourselves a we, and in every promise, each of the positions of the promisethe doubled we, the us, and the promise marks a void that can only be lled by the future, and that might just as

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easily remain unfullled. Nevertheless, the promise existsit is given, gives itself, and insistsnot as the reliable foundation of a political topos, but rather as the a-topos of language, its society, and its politics. Thus, what Bataille said about sovereignty is more true of the promise than of any other linguistic form: La souverainet nest RIEN.7 It is, more precisely, the resistant demarcation of a nothing as the absolute minimum of the political that can be xed in a demarcation. A third version of the inconsistency of language and speech acts becomes apparent in this minimum of political existence. It appears, namely, in the subject that revolts against the social contract and its representative sovereign. In Hobbess view of right, it is impossible to revoke the enthroning of a sovereign, whether as monarch or parliament. The contractual promise is irreversible; once established, right cannot be displaced, because every subject constituted through the agreement as part of the state and thus as a (as its) subject, would have to revoke itself and destroy its own sovereignty. Hence: if he that attempteth to depose his Souvereign, be killed, or punished by him for such attempt, he is author of his own punishment, as being by the Institution, Author of all his Souvereign shall do (Hobbes 1996, 122). Since every individual is the author of what the sovereign does as representative, every act of the sovereign against his subjects is an act of this subject; and vice-versa: every act of subjects against their sovereign is in turn exclusively an act of subjects against themselves. The sovereign does not act; it represents. Every turn of an actor against itself, be it real or only possible, is strictu sensu, in the counterlogic of the subject as well as its ontology of right, impossible: to do injury to ones self, is impossible (124). Hobbess apodictic sentence is an unattributed quotation from the fth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle arguesas did Plato before him, and Thomas afterwards that violence against oneself can be viewed as injustice (1138a14). Since the concepts of justice and injustice are always related to a third, and ultimately also to the polis, whoever harms oneself can cause injustice not to oneself but only to the political community in oneself. In the postulate that it is impossible to do injustice to oneself, the self is thus determined as political through and through and can only be viewed as a subjectthat is, as

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subject to rights. In this subject, dened entirely in terms of the power relations of the contract, there is no other, neither a natural other nor one of a neighboring or future society. Hobbes, however, abandonsand must abandon for the sake of the coherence of the systemthe sphere of right as the sphere of universal subjectivity, exposed in every individual precisely where an attack on the life of the sovereign should be argued against. Here, Hobbes says of the one who slays the sovereign: he punisheth another, for the actions committed by himselfe (124). However concrete this sentence might be, it is also false because it introduces another into a system of omnipresent subjectivity of right and power, where there can emphatically be no others. That Hobbes, in this decisive and in every sense capital momentthat is, one concerning a capital offenseappeals to an other may be explained in terms of the history of politics or of ideas that neutralize this mistake in a broader context. But what is decisive here is that the system of the political subjectivity of rightand thus of subjectivity as suchis abandoned by its reliance upon an other that can in no way be conceived as subject. In the beheaded sovereign, the commonwealth, the civitas, the Leviathan itself would be decapitated, and an other Leviathan, an other sovereign, and, a limine, a dead one, would be touched: an other who must, upon pain of the collapse of politically just subjectivity, remain unimaginable and unrepresentable. What the argument he punisheth another, for actions committed by himselfe should exclude is evoked precisely as the existential threat of the political subject as such. In Hobbess social contract, there can only be other subjects, but never anything other than subjects: this other is nevertheless present, however, as the possibility of either natural or violent death in the sovereign, as well as in each of its subjects. The entire political system of subjectivity rests upon this possibility, experienced always as a threat because it is rst used as such: upon the threat, that is, of depoliticization, delegitimation, and desubjectivation. For the purposes of politicization, legitimation, and subjectivation, this threat seems indispensable because, without the terrour of some Power, Fear, the Sword (117), the state cannot fulll the functions of gratication and preservation. But if the other becomes a threat, and thus an instrument of self-constitution and self-preservation, the self constitutes

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and preserves itself not so much against its other as from it: not selfsufcient, and not, in itself, permanent, but con-stituted with an other that cannot be a subject and, therefore, de-stituted, at every momentand something other than a momentexposed to an other. The self, at the limit of its confrontation with death, is not only being unto death, but rather from its death. The promise, every promise, is meant to be a political and temporalpolitical act. In it, one is supposed to subject oneself to the word that binds one with another and with their future. Only bound in this way, and by virtue of the interweaving of the given word, can each of the two appear as subject to their bond, and as subject to the act that brought about this bond between them and the dimensions of their time. They can, thus, be subjects only after the act and by virtue of the act; the act, in turn, can only be one of subjects, not one without them. This indissoluble aporia of the promise having to occur without subjects and without acts, while nevertheless binding subjectsthis aporia of the birth of a common language, of an agreement and of a (even if minimal) political bond, like all aporias of creation, invention, of the new and yet-to-come, makes its structure most clearly apparent in relation to the end of the promise. Promises are, unnecessarily, as Hobbes stresses, and in extreme cases, sealed with an oath. In one passage, under the marginal heading The End of an Oath, he attributes the capacity of strengthening the power of the word to the oath: The Passion to be reckoned upon, isonce againFear (Hobbes 1996, 99). That is, the fear of the vengeance of an invisible power, the absolute power of God in this case, if the promise is not kept and fullled. Such was the Heathen Form, Let Jupiter kill me else, as I kill this Beast. So is our forme, I shall do thus, and thus, so help me God (99). The oath is a self-condemnation, a curse concerning the possibility that the promise might not be kept. In it, at the end of the promise, in either Christian or heathen form, explicitly or silently, the swearer exposes himself to death; in it, he conjures death as the ultimate guarantee of his promise, and in it, he promises himself death should he not be able to stand in for the life of his word. In the end, the promise is always thus a contract with death against death. In it, language exposes itself to the end of all speech; it exposes itself to its own

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exposure. But if there is no language without the promise, and if every language is in the rst place the promise and announcement of a common language, then this contract with the death of language belongs to the irreducible structure of language as suchthe contract with what cannot enter into any agreement, the contact with what cannot be touched, and the bond with what dissolves all bonds. Every promise touches this structural taboo. If there is to be a contract between determinable pairs, then only if this undeterminable other is touched by both and the act is deactivated as a mere occurrence of contingency. In it, common language is stripped of its subjectivity as well as of its normative or regulative forms: it is not performative in the sense of the fulllment of an assumed or conventional form of action, but rather an opening up to possible forms, thus ad-formative; a dissolution of sedimented forms, aformative; and, thirdly, a conjuring of that impossibility of form that is the absence of language, afformative. Because the promise, as the inauguration of all undened language games, already speaks itself into what is not yet and perhaps never will be language: it speaks as invitation for and resistance to everything that is without language, speechless. Stripped of all arms against others, its nakedness itself is the ultimate and most powerful weapon of language. The language in the promise is the bare speakable [das Sprechbare] that Benjamin called, with Kant and Hlderlin, the bare impartable [das Mitteilbare]: discharged of all predetermined forms, subjects, addressees, and contentsof all armsnaked, and receptive to the old and oldest, the new and all others, and also to none. This is what Hlderlin calls the spirit of the eternally living, unwritten wilderness in his Notes on Antigone.8 Without this spirit, there is no politics; with it, only a politics directed toward another. Either one is a wild promise.

I
NOTES
1. 2. 3. See Hobbes 1996, 89. Manfred Riedel has already made this observation in relation to the note omnia facta esse ex nihilo from Hobbess Appendix ad Lev. See Reidel (1975, 182f.). Jens Kulenkampff discusses this and related aporias in Hobbess construction in con-

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4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

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