If an empire is sustained not merely by force but by consensus, and if a people is an order of love, then the maintenance of empire requires a rhetoric whose purpose is to delight and move its subjects in a common desire constitutive of the body political. St. Augustines analysis of imperial power thus becomes a critique of the organs of imperial discipline which manufacture and enforce that desire, flowing quite naturally to a criticism of Roman civil religion and its counterpart, the fabulous theology of the stage. By this means [the human leaders] bound [people] tighter, as it were, to the citizen community, so that they might bring them under control and keep them there by the same technique. Ontological tragedy, transcendental violence projected onto being by both cult and stage, then underwrites human tragedy and violence committed in the name of imperial glory. -- Michael Hanby, Democracy and Its Demons
Posted on: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 03:47:17 +0000
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