Monarch and Real Hereby, all is actually said. The monarch functions as a pure signifier, a signifier-without-signified; his entire actuality (and authority) consists in his Name, and it is precisely for this reason that his physical reality is wholly arbitrary and could be left to the biological contingency of lineage. The monarch thus embodies the function of the Master-Signifier at its purest; it is the One of the Exception, the “irrational” protuberance of the social edifice which transforms the amorphous mass of people into a concrete totality of mores. By means of his ex-sistence of a pure signifier, he constitutes the Whole of the social fabric in its organic articulation [organische Gliederung] -- the irrational surplus as a condition of the rational totality, the excess of the pure signifier without signified as a condition of the organic Whole of signifier/signified: Taken without its monarch and the articulation of the whole which is the indispensable and direct concomitant of monarchy, the people is a formless mass and no longer a state. (Hegel) In other words, the monarch is not just a symbol of community, he is something decidedly more. Through him, in him, the community itself reaches its being-for-itself and thus realizes itself -- it is a paradoxical symbol by means of which the symbolized content actualizes itself. The monarch can accomplish this task only in so far as his authority is of a purely performative nature and not founded in his effective capacities. It is only his counsellors, the State bureaucracy in general, which are supposed to be chosen according to their respective capabilities and their fitness to do the required job. One thus maintains the GAP between State employees who must obtain their post hard effort, by proving themselves worthy of it, and the monarch himself as the point of pure authority of the signifier: “the multitude of individuals, the mass of people, is confronted with a Unique individual, the monarch -- they are the multitude, movement, fluidity; -- he is the immediacy, naturalness -- it is only he who is natural, that is to say, with him, nature took refuge; he is its last remainder, as a positive remainder -- the family of the prince is the only positive family -- all other families must be left behind -- other individuals have value only in so far as they are dispossessed, in so far as they have made themselves.” (Hegel) This coincidence of pure Culture (the empty signifier) with the leftover of Nature in the person of the king entails the paradox of the kings relationship towards law: strictly speaking, the king cannot break the law since his word immediately makes law; it is only against this background that Kants unconditional prohibition of the violent overthrow of the king obtains its rationale. In this sense, monarch functions as a personification of Wittgensteins sceptical paradox: we cannot say that his act violates the Rule, since it (re)defines it. All other subjects are marked by the gap forever separating their pathological reality, what they effectively are and do, from the ideal order of what they ought to be -- they never fully correspond to their Notion and, consequently, can be judged and measured by their (in)adequacy to it; whereas the monarch immediately IS the actuality of his own Notion. To resort to Kantian terms: the king is a Thing which acquired phenomenal existence, a point of short circuit between the noumenal order of freedom (moral law) and the level of phenomenal experience -- more precisely: although he is not it, we, the subjects, are obliged to act AS IF he is the Thing embodied. The paradox of the Hegelian monarch is thus that, in a sense, he is the point of madness of the social fabric; his social position is determined immediately by his lineage, by biology; he is the only one among individuals who already by his nature is what he (socially) is -- all others must invent themselves, elaborate the content of their being by their activity. As always, Saint-Just was right when, in his accusation against the king, he demanded his execution not because of any of his specific deeds but simply because he was king. From a radically republican point of view, the supreme crime consists in the very fact of being the king, not in what one does as a king. Here Hegel is far more ambiguous than it may seem. His conclusion is roughly as follows: in so far as a Master is indispensable in politics, we should not condescend to the common-sense reasoning which tells us that the Master should be at least as wise, brave and good as possible.... On the contrary, we should maintain the greatest possible gap between the Masters symbolic legitimation and the level of effective qualifications; localize the function of the Master to a place excluded from the Whole, reduce him to an agency of purely formal decision whereby it does not matter if he is effectively an idiot... At the very point where Hegel seems to praise monarchy, he carries out a kind of separation between S1 and a, between pure signifier and object. If the kings charismatic power of fascination depends on a concomitance of S1 and a -- on the illusion that the Master-Signifier covers, deep within itself, the precious object -- Hegel separates them and shows us, on the one hand, S1 in its imbecilic tautology of an empty name; and on the other, the object (the body of the monarch) as a pure excrement, a remainder appended to the Name. (see note 26 below) The crucial feature is thus that the Hegelian monarch FALLS OUT from the dialectical mediation of Nature and Spirit. He presents a point of the IMMEDIATE passage of one into the other, a paradoxical point at which the pure Name, the pure agency of the signifier, immediately clings to the last residue of positive naturalness…. … The Monarch is a strange body within the fabric of the State; he remains “unaccounted for” by rational mediation. However, precisely as such, he is the element through which rational totality constitutes itself. Herein lies the secret of the dialectical mediation of social elements by the States rational totality. This mediation can be brought about only by way of an irrational residue of non-mediated Nature – that is, the stupid biological fact of the monarchs body. … By his mere presence, the monarch serves as a reminder of the ultimate instability of the social fabric; of the fact that what we call society is the congelation of an original violence which can at any moment erupt again and pulverize the established order. The monarch is therefore simultaneously the point guaranteeing stability and consistency, and the embodiment of a radical negativity. 26. What is therefore crucial about the Hegelian monarch is that he cannot be reduced to a pure agency of nonsensical Master-Signifier: his status is simultaneously that of the Real. We should not be surprised, then, to find Hegel himself assigning the monarch a place in the series of the answers of the Real. In para. 279 of the Philosophy of Right, he deals with the difference between ancient aristocracy or democracy and modern monarchy: in aristocracy or democracy, the moment of the final, self-determining decision of the will is not yet explicitly posited as an organic moment immanent to the State; the pure performative point of decision, the So be it! which transforms an opinion into a states decision, has not yet acquired the form of subjectivity; the power of a pure unambiguous decision is therefore delegated to: a fatum, determining affairs from without. As a moment of the Idea, this decision had to come into existence, though rooted in something outside the circle of human freedom with which the state is concerned. Herein lies the origin of the need for deriving the last word on great events and important affairs of state from oracles, a divine sign (in the case of Socrates), the entrails of animals, the feeding and flight of birds, etc. It was when men had not yet plumbed the depths of self-consciousness or risen out of their undifferentiated unity of substance to their independence that they lacked strength to look within their own being for the final word. (G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, pp. 183-4) Oracles, entrails ... so many names for an answer supposedly written in the Real itself -- the status of the oracles is by definition that of a WRITING to be interpreted, to be integrated into our symbolic universe. The subjectivity of the monarch occupies this very place of the answers of the Real: instead of looking for the final word (the Master-Signifier) in a writing contained within the Real itself (entrails, feeding of birds...) it is the person of the monarch who assumes the act of transforming the opinion of his ministers into a states decision. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Verso, 2008 (second edition), pp.82-86 and note 26 (p.94).
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 17:52:51 +0000