Mikhail Iampolsky

ИЗУЧАЯ НАРРАТИВЫ ИСТОРИИ КУЛЬТУРЫ: ОТ СИМВОЛИЧЕСКОГО В ТЕЛЕСНОМ К РЕПРЕЗЕНТАТИВНОСТИ ПРОСТРАНСТВА*

Сакральное тело - ордалии и меты.

The recent scholarly project of Mikhail Iampolsky analyses metamorphoses of Power in Europe of the 17th and the 18th centuries. The first part focuses on a traditional, medieval notion of power. The establishment of a sacred monarchy in Europe in the 8'h century changed a status of a king, whose body acquired a sacred dimension. The use of the anointment previously reserved only for priests played an important role in the fusion of Imperium and Sacerdotum in one body and opened a dramatic period of a struggle between ecclesiastic and secular powers. Anointment infused a kind of mystical, "liturgical" symbolism into the body of a sovereign, a quality that in modern times is usually defined as charisma. Ernst Kantorowicz characterized this mysticalsymbolism as "object-centered mystery" because of its specific relation to the materiality of the body, of its "realism".

Bodily signs specifically in the Trial by God (Dei judicium) or ordeals (ordalium) embodied this symbolic power. In ordeal the God marked the innocent or the guilty by an ambiguous bodily sign. This bodily symbolism was based on a principle of spatial contiguity. The power of a magical body presumed a direct touch (that ensured a healing magic of a famous 'Royal Touch' in the French monarchy). In touch the transcendental and the material were paradoxically united. Symbol in such a context was based on an obscure materiality of a signified (bodily mark). According to Paul Ricoeur such symbolism presumes a special kind of intentionality "which through the material stain, the deviation in space, the experience of burden, points to a certain situation of man in the Sacred; this situation, aimed at through the first [material] meaning, is precisely stained, sinful, guilty being. The literal and obvious meaning, therefore, points beyond itself to something which is like a stain, like a deviation, like a burden". As a result symbols are usually opaque, based on analogy and derive their depth, their profundity from this opaqueness and analogy.

The body of the monarch in medieval tradition, according to many legends, is marked by a sign (similar to the sign of the ordeals) - lily, cross or by special hairy birthmarks - referring to bestiality, the state of sacred furor. These bodily signs marked the sovereign as 'transgressive' almost monstrous creatures that exist in human community but are not submitted to its laws. Christ's stigmata belongs to the same kind of symbols. The bodily symbol itself is not inscribed into any definite textual strata. It is located in the uncertain realm between the exterior and the interior, between the world of living and the world of dead. It is a sign of manifestation of a force itself. It explains a very important role of royal entrees in the city that imitated the imperial Roman ceremony of the adventus, when the entry of the emperor into the city manifested the presence of god in it - deus praesens. The sign of power emerges, it traverses a city and is effective only thanks to an immediate and tangible presence, touch, physical appearance. Thus, power based on bodily symbolism was manifested mainly during special ceremonial occasions and was relatively inoperative between them. This is why direct presence of a king in battles during the war was of such a particular importance. A battle is equivalent to the God's trial and can't be won without the bearer of the magical power physically present.

By the mid 1600ies French monarchy eliminated royal ceremonial procession traversing the city as well as direct royal presence in battles. This change of ritual expressed an obvious decline of royal bodily symbolism during in the 17th century. This decline was partly related to a crisis of the analogical thinking and the crisis of medieval ontology in general. Analogy was always theologically suspicious because it instituted a link between the divine and the earthly. However analogy was preserved as a way to avoid a total separation of the transcendental from the worldly. The power of analogy was based on a scholastic distinction between the equivocal and the univocal predication of being. The analogy was located between the equivocal and the univocal and allowed a non-uniform distribution of certain qualities an-long different subjects. From a scholastic point of view, analogy founded a notion of different stages of perfection and of the hierarchical ontology of the universe. Degrees of perfection in medieval onto- theology allowed only analogical unification of all elements of the universe, which was otherwise permeated by the idea of difference Already Dante in his De monarchia based the distinction and mutual independence of the secular and the ecclesiastical powers on n distinction of different analogical series in which they are included (For the Emperor: man - mortal - earthly blessedness (nature) etc. For the Pope: man - immortal - heavenly beatitude (grace), etc.) Already in Dante independence of both series was a sign of , a deficiency of analogical hierarchies that resisted their unification Iw an analogy of a higher rank.

A coming crisis of symbolism was determined by the principle of analogy itself. Analogy has destroyed tile anthropomorphism of the imitation of God and has gradually transformed God into an abstraction, and finally into Law. A metaphor of a King as of an animated law - lex animata - acquired all its meaning when the crisis of a physical symbolism became evident. The King was gradually transformed from a magical incarnation of power, from a thaumaturgy < into an incarnation of an abstraction - divine law. Constitution an absolute monarchy, from legal point of view, could be described as a transition from the dominance of a local, customary law toward a dominance of a natural or general law incarnated in a figure of a king. God was now dispatched into unreachable transcendence and distanced from the world. Marcel Gauchet (after Max Weber) < aptly defined this new condition as a "disenchantment of the world". "Physical" symbolism that permeated the body of the sovereign was now mostly extinguished. The distancing (already presumed by the principle of analogy) opened a new public sphere of curiosity, theatricality and appearances. The sovereign body and its symbolic double - dignitas - was separated from the realm of physical symbolism and entered into the realm of representation. Power is gradually transferred from the body of the king to its representation. Norbert Elias analyzed this process of distancing in his classical studies. Distancing and monopolization of power in absolute monarchies introduced a principle of a distant power (potentia) acting through its representative, in which it is transfermed into a practical power of actions and decisions (potestas). Potentia (sometimes associated with the power of 'law') is similar to the Cartesian causa efficiens. It maintains the order of the universe from the outside of this world. This law-oriented potentia is now contrasted to a magical, physical power of a "thaumturgic" body of' the king. At the same time a new understanding of the law as of relation is emerging (later this understanding will be codified by Montesquieu, who defined laws as "necessary relations that derive from the nature of things"). This relation is not simply formal, it is a relation of forces controlled by the law. Law as a control over antagonist forces had a counterpart in the developing science of fortifications (Vauban and others). The decline of unrestricted violence in the 17th century reflected the new function of tile royal power that was losing its immediacy of action and was mostly transformed into a representation. Tile king's portrait, or the king-actor replaced a charismatic, sovereign body. A charismatic body manifested its power in the middle of the people (mostly in processions of battles), the royal political representation confronts the people (transformed into a mass of spectators) as a spectacle. Physical presence of a royal body gives place to its absence, to a remote substitute. This process is reflected in a decay of royal ceremonies and its replacement by a court theater. Medieval Dignitas is replaced by a courtly Majeste. Hence, political theology gives its way to a perplexed political aesthetics.

Power as a spectacle is necessarily organized as a spatial structure. It appropriates the structure of subjectivity supported by a linear perspective, and as Foucault has shown, creates an ambiguity: the body of power (King) is simultaneously associated with the subject of vision and the main object of representation. Representational structure desubstantivizes this body and transforms it into a structural function. Power now is no more in a body but in a place, which is structurally defined. This representational revolution reflects a collapse
of a medieval ontology (that hierarchically distributed Being in space) and the emergence of a homogeneous, "univocal" space, which center
is randomly decreed. The distribution of the bodies in such a space follows the rule of a "nomadic nomos", of a "crowned anarchy" (Deleuze), i.e. of a purely artificial principle of rational structural
organization of a representation (the center of this space is randomly
selected as a location of a point of view).

This new structure of society, initiated by the representational revolution, inaugurated an epoch of appearances and of the "ontic logos" (Charles Taylor). Pascal has dissected this new situation in < terms of the "effect of appearance", the "power" of appearance. The new political culture is based on self-presentation of the members of society that are reflecting, mimicking each other. The "mimetic theory" of society (Marivaux, Dubos, Adam Smith) was a product of these new tendencies.

Representational being of the political is pregnant with complicated issues. Representational space based on the principle of a linear perspective has an extremely limited possibility to inscribe Truth, the Absolute. The only axis that doesn't distort objects is a line that unites a point of view with a vanishing point of the perspective. Even Versaille - with its symmetrical composition and emphasized central axes - produces distortions and illusions as soon as a spectator starts to move in the park. The project thoroughly analyzes paradoxes and difficulties of a political space grounded into the subjectivity of a viewer. Mimesis is inscribed into the space of illusions as a practice radically separated from the realm of truth and confined to the domain of appearances. The anomaly of the mimetic attitude is revealed in its relation to a geometrically constructed space of Reason. The representational practice of the 17th century was oriented toward Forms and Reason presumably ruling over mimetic phantasmata and keeping them under control. The combination of the rational Form and of the free Fantasy is manifested in Figures. The division between Reason and Fantasy, truth and illusion was crystallized in a division between two spaces of the baroque theater - a space of visible forms - and the space of figuration which is located off stage. The new function of the Sovereign in this representational situation is to break an infinite chain of distorting mimetic copies and to introduce the absolute into the ever-growing realm of social mimicry. This role of a lawgiver of meaning is prescribed to the monarch by Hobbes, but is also evident in some works by Boileau and Moliere among other. An association of Louis XIV with the sun reflects the same functon of a giver of forms and meaning. "Je viens rendre aux objects la forme", - tells Louis in the "Ballet de la nuit". This function of a guarantor of meaning of words and of the correspondence of appearance to essence was never wholly fulfilled. The failure to fulfill it testifies to a deep cultural and representational crisis already manifest at the end of the 17th century. Moliere's Amphytrion transforms an old plot about doubles into a comedy of a non-distinction between God and men, sovereigns and imposters, appearance and essence.

The second part of the current project takes the analysis of the crisis of mimetism further. The sovereign here figures not only as a giver and controller of meanings, but also as a main figure governing over social mimicry (i.e. over the overproduction of appearances) and finally as a main producer of it. Diderot in Le Neveu de Rameau excluded the King from a general mimetic madness only to claim at the end that even the King is not immune to it. The failure of the king to regulate mimesis shows to what extent the regulative function of Reason is shaky even during the period of Enlightenment. This collapse of reason opens an unrestricted possibility to emotional empathy and to an utopia of reformation of vices through sympathy. For instance, in "L'ole des esclaves" by Marivaux, "bad" aristocrats are reformed by a forced identification (exchange of roles) with their servants. This kind of social therapy is based on the principle of mirroring one-self in the other. However this play of identifications has no Absolute Third, no outside position that can stop and control the process. This absence of the Absolute Third, according to Rene Girard, finally leads to violence. Freud has shown how this situation of a circular desire leads to a final non-distinction between the Ideal-1 and the Ego, between individuals in a crowd.

The crisis of the culture of appearances and of the universal mimicry has called forth a virulent anti-mimetic reaction, in particular in Diderot (and his theorization of the art of acting) and in Rousseau with his condemnation of theater. Diderot claimed the necessity for an actor to be one's own spectator. The same is true for the king that can preserve his control over the mimicking society only by being at the same time an actor and a distant spectator, i.e. by participating in and being excluded from society. Hegel, who will speak about the "self-alienated spirit", will theorize this situation later. Before Hegel it was already described by Kant as a separation of the transcendental I from the Ego.

The situation of the subject looking at himself as an object doesn't exhaust the complexity of a new representational situation. The Cartesian subject himself is no more a simple point of view inscribed in the geometry of a linear perspective. As a subject of empathic relation he transgresses his own boundaries and becomes an expanding subject, whose proximity to God is postulated exactly by this unlimited, infinite expansion (also fundamental for Kantian sublime or for systems of deism). This expanding subject finds his expression in a newly developed art of panoramas and a new sensibility in relation to nature (the discovery of the infinite seashore is a good example of it).

An expanding subject is a new menace for a sovereign, whose presence is now often experienced only as an obstacle that obstructs direct relations between God and Men. The new expanding space is a product of geometrical rationality and of ecstatic leaps of an empathizing subject out of himself. But finally it is transformed into an expanding emptiness repressing all mimicry and reducing figures to nothing. The new revolutionary space is exactly the void of an expanding subjectivity that loses itself in a self-imposed transcendentality.

The theatricalization of the political takes place in the 17th century. By the end of the 18th century, under the direct influence of Rousseau, this theatrical space was no more a space of a court theater, but rather a space of ancient festivals transcending all distinctions between actors and spectators. Rousseau was eager to preserve a public space, but he wanted to eliminate from it all mimetic element that he considered as a greedy expansion of the Self. He even related this mimetic expansion to wars. The equalization of all participants was, according to him, one of the ways to repress social mimicry. There is no need of imitation between the equals. Equality could however be established only among "natural" individuals, united in their universality. German Bildung (for instance in Humboldt) was the same way toward universality able to repress mimicry grounded in the accidental, non-essential. Universality, which in previous times was considered as a property of a sovereign, is now prescribed to all members of society. Rousseau defines the universal as primarily non- rational. Rational conceptual universality emerges only with the loss of a natural equality. The only imitation that is familiar to a "natural
man" is an imitation of Nature, which is a depositary of all possible abstractions but in an embodied form. Social contract becomes possible, according to Rousseau, thanks to a similarity between equal members of society whose individuality was purified, effaced and whose natural, essential core was discovered in this purification. Schelling later was talking about "unchangeable Self" that participates in the contract. The magical moment of conclusion of a social contract is a moment of dissolution of individuals in a totality. Similarly a mimetic moment in acting is also a moment of loss of a Self, but this loss of a Self, which is experienced by any actor, leads to a mimetic transformation of oneself into another. Rousseau defined this situation as a "loss of a Man". Social contract is possible only when social mimicry and theatrical imitation are replaced by a circle of a mutual imitation of equal and similar natural men. In this utopian situation everybody sees in everybody only the manifestation of universality. This imitation without difference is a strange theater of social contract in which society is created as a non-contradictory totality. Popular festivals serve as models to this ideal mimicry, here everybody is equal to everybody. During such festivals nature informs society by an equality proper to it. Rousseau based his vision of society on the concept of "general will" elaborated by Malebranche. For Malebranche "general will" is a principle of a divine manifestation in nature that is necessary to support virtues. Rousseau relocates this concept from nature to society. The new social theater is admissible for Rousseau only if it follows the model of nature, i.e. only if the center of a mimetic space remains unoccupied. Instead of a sovereign body in the center it unfolds around a non-mimetic emptiness in which law and an imaginary totality are emerging as ruling abstractions. In his Letter to d'Alembert Rousseau wrote about popular festivals organized around "nothingness". The time of a theatrical representation of the political is now partially over. Rousseau doesn't recognize representation as integral part of social organization. The new structure of a social space described by Rousseau doesn't leave any place for a sovereign, whose physical body was already reduced to a status of an actor in a theater of power and who was gradually replaced by an abstraction of law. There was a new emerging space of revolutionary iconoclasm. Now the very principle of representation was banished, and this new taboo played an important role in the elimination of monarchy as such. The empty place in the center of a public space is a place when the imaginary is transformed into the symbolic; and this empty space is occupied by death. Revolutionary empty tombs - cenotaphs - are excellent emblems of this space. The current project analyzes in detail the antecedents of the empty antimimetic space - in religious illuminism, in the phenomenon of mystical enthusiasm that served to Kant as an epitome of the French Revolution. Enthusiasm is connected to the notion of the sublime and is based on the same iconoclastic structure. This emptiness is inseparably linked with the feeling of sacred terror and finally with the whole practice of a revolutionary terror. An empty space is only half-objective; its existence is related to deep interior affects. The imaginary social space after Rousseau is a strange topological construction in which interiority is connected to public spectacles.

Society was perceived now as a public space with the empty center occupied by a law. This space doesn't know any inequality and was constituted according to the rules of the Universal Reason. But outside this ideal space of a general will there is another one - a space of exclusion. It was inhabited by counterrevolutionary "monsters". The first ideal space was immune to terror, but the second one, the space of exclusion, was transformed into a pandemonium of unrestricted terror. The first space is antimimetic, the second is mimetic par excellence. The ideal space acquires its form only in opposition to the space of exclusion, and the terror becomes a force externally determining its existence. The space of universality and indistinction can be created only through the elimination of all manifestations of particularism. Revolutionaries who were called to eliminate enemies inside, in order to access to the realm of rational and virtuous unanimity, interiorized this distinction between two opposite spaces. Saint-Just paradoxically speaks about his voluntary self exclusion from the realm of General Will in order to execute terror inside the realm of exclusion. He perceives the defense of the ideality as a heroic self-sacrifice. The absolute ideal of the sublime space of virtue unmistankingly resurrects the idea of Deity - of the Robespierre's Supreme Being. An Absolute generates an Absolute. A sphere of the Absolute is marked by immaterial purity that doesn't tolerate imperfection of materiality. Supreme Freedom eventually is a freedom from material existence of human bodies. Later Hegel wrote about an equivalence between the absolute freedom, negativity and death. Individuals are eliminated as obstacles on a way to the Absolute. In this sense the cult of the Supreme Being is an indirect spiritualization of Terror.

Power (before the emergence of the modern State in the 19th century) was based on magical symbolism and analogy. In the late 17th century it is separated from a physical body of the sovereign and is inscribed in a specular theatrical structure. This structure ideally allows the transformation of the multitude into totality and generates an abstraction of general will. This centered totality is nothing else than a structural, depersonalized model of monarchy that doesn't need any monarch for the exercise of a centralized state's power. The emergence of a structurally organized state power has marginalized theology as a political philosophy of the Middle Ages and has secularized political theology by transforming it to a new political theory. God itself lost its importance and was replaced by an abstract deity of deistic cults. This process of secularization, rationalization and gradual degradation of the old symbolism was defined by Carl Schmitt as neutralization. Neutralization is an elimination of the transcendental from the world; it is inseparable from the emergence of the modern political realm. This process and its consequences are analyzed in the third part of my enterprise . Schmitt claimed that even Hobbesian Leviathan (State) is simply a secularized version of a Calvinist God. Max Weber was talking about a bureaucratization and routinization of charisma. However neutralization starts a process of a secondary symbolization. It happens because reality is always more complex than any rational scheme that may be applied to it. The recalcitrant elements, which defy Reason, are preserved into a kind of symbolic limbo rebellious to the power of rationality. France was particularly rich in these symbolic remnants because of its historical Catholicism. Secondary symbols make a real irruption during the French Revolution inundated by allegories, emblems and permeated by a spirit of new irrationalism (illuminism, spiritualism, magnetism
etc). New symbolism was usually non-Christian, but pseudo-Greek or Roman.

The process of secularization defined even the sense of history. Secularized history took a form of a linear progress (which is a
rationalized version of Christian vision of history), but another one - cyclical and catastrophic vision of history - was preserved in the same underground storage of "prejudices". These two coexisting models of histories were often associated with the survival of pagan gods and their resurrection under the disguise of the astrological symbols during the Renaissance (Warburg, Saxl and others). In Renaissance there was an obvious doubling of time: people equally are inscribed into a Christian eschatological history and are dependent on pagan gods of astrology. Revolution as a term, even at the beginning of the French Revolution, was still pointing to a cyclical time of permanently occurring restorations and destructions and finally to the astrological temporality.

The depositary of rejected non-rationalized representations is a source of fear verging on panic. The fear of witches penetrates into a European culture roughly at the same time as pagan deities of astrology. Witches are at the beginning of a witch craze interpreted as the resurrected embodiments of Diana or Hecate. The whole pantheon of horror provoking monsters thus accompanies the most rational culture of Enlightenment. These monsters are creatures of exclusion and singularity opposed to generic creatures of universality that populate the world of a strict Enlightenment. Monsters violated rational rules of generation, they were considered to be the deformed copies of the unrestrained imagination rather than of a biological father. Therefore they represented a threat to a rational causality. They incarnated an idea of a signifier emancipated from a signified. This distortion of "natural" link between the two sides of a sign characterizes the allegory that gradually acquired a dominant position in the culture of the baroque. The baroque cultivated allegories usually marked by a melancholic spirit of decay, exclusion and temporal displacement. Walter Benjamin has pointed at deep relations between pagan gods in allegories and ruins. In certain cases, according to Benjamin, allegories could be reanimated (when their abstractness reaches a point of an extreme tension) and start to incarnate an ultimate horror. It happened for instance with Satan during the Reformation, when an allegorical figure of evil was suddenly transformed into a "living" character. The same process in a secularized form takes place at the time of the French revolution in melodramas, where evil was embodied in bigger than life figures of demonic villains. The figure of the king at the same period undergoes
the same transformation from the allegory of an absolute power into the terrifying figure of evil.

Allegory had a privileged relation with the representation of power partially because it is usually assembled from different heterogeneous parts. And this monstrous non-organic character of an allegory reflects a character of the state as an artificial assemblage of different political, social, religious and ethnic bodies. Hobbes' Leviathan is such an allegorical "machine" of power - an allegory of a modern state as a
monster. It is related to an organic symbolic body of the old "divine" sovereign like a ruin of a dead statue to a living organism. This is why the quest for organic unity of a newly created revolutionary nation enters into a radical conflict with the composite character of the allegories of power. A real body of the king is at a certain moment perceived as such a composite artificial allegory that should be eliminated as an ultimate obstacle on a way toward absolute unity.

The reading of the king's body in terms of an allegory contradicts an influential tradition of understanding of this body as an emblem of people's unity. Joseph de Maistre, for instance, claimed that the composite character of the nation is transcended only when this body is fused into an organic unity of the king's body. In such terms - nation is a heterogeneous artificial assemblage, and the king - it's redeemer into an organic unity. Even Hegel claimed that the nation as abstraction needs a face of a sovereign to acquire reality. Without such a face the people remain, according to him, only an amorphous mass. Allegorical reading of the monarchic body radically reverses these relations. Now it's no longer a monarch that incorporates the organic unity of the commonwealth, but contrariwise by his own allegorical artificiality he obstructs the constitution of this unity.

A new model of a democratic representation was gradually coined. It was no more a personification, an incarnation in one figure, but (as a member of the Convention Jean-Louis Seconds formulated
it) the new political representation should imitate a polyp - which is at the same time an animal and an "individual people" (un peuple animal et individuel). The abstraction of the Nation should now be represented not by a king but by Robespierre's Supreme Being that preserved all characteristics of a politico-theological abstraction. The composite allegorical being doesn't correspond to the task of unification because of an increasing process of a homogenization of the society itself. This homogenization is carried into effect thanks to a growing exclusion of every heterogeneous element. The organicity is achieved by exclusion, first of all, of the monarch himself - a figure above the social body, a monstrous allegory and mimetic mirror of power.

The trial of Louis XVI was a dramatic attempt to dissociate the society from the king. This dissociation expulsed the king outside the community, i. e. the communal law and thus excluded the king from the system of French jurisprudence. However the king was generally considered as a constituting and not a representative power. It meant that France itself was deriving its existence (its "face") from the king and thus was not able to prosecute him for a break in a contract of representation. Finally Robespierre tried to justify the execution of the king as a simple murder on the account of ill(, Nation. Saint-Just claimed that the only way to deal with the king r. to look at him as at the external enemy. The execution of Louis XVI had a clear savor of the murder that it never lost. It could be "justified" only in terms of exception and sacrality. The ambiguity of this event corresponded quite well to the ambiguity of the sacred itself. Latin Sacer equally defines the divine and the most ahirm .v,pci of a person who is sacrificed. The sacred aspect of the supreme sacrifice revealed monstrosity of the figure of exclusion -- of a murdered king.

The fight between the defenders of the king and his persecutors focused on the interpretation of the execution. For king's supporters it was primarily a sacrifice, for his detractors - an event without any symbolic significance. The revolutionaries planned the execution as a final blow to monarchic symbolism. Louis XVI, however tried to transform his own beheading into a Christological gesture of a redeeming martyrdom. He was consciously copying the behavior of Charles I who succeeded to present his death as a sacrifice. In spite of all the efforts Louis acted rather as a pharmakos - a purifying sacrifice that absorbs into oneself all dirt, sins, wickedness without any chance of his or her own redemption.

The failure to transform an execution into a sacrifice is grounded in a new status of a sovereign body. First of all it's due to a general collapse of symbolism of this body, but also to an impossibility to imitate Christ's sacrifice whose meaning was exactly to stop all sacrifices forever, i. e. to be the last and inimitable sacrifice. The transfiguration of the sovereign body has already happened when it was transformed into a pure representation of one's own image - a "portrait of a portrait", according to Louis Marin. Monarchic power is already an "effect of figuration" - a result of transfiguration of a body into an image. Christ and the king are figures - both "leave" their body in an excess of a figurative disembodiment. However both figures are fundamentally different to a point of the absolute non- similarity (Pascal). Paradoxically, only when the king is not surrounded by an aura of figuration that generates his power, similarity between him and the Man of Sorrows is unmistakably revealed, i.e. the king reveals his similarity to Christ only when he is no more a king.

The failure of the sacrifice also manifests the failure of a mechanism of a discarnation that produces figures. The body of the king preserves its materiality in spite of all manipulations applied to it. This materiality takes form of the so called "corps d'effroi" - allegorical composite monsters - or of simple bestiality. The beast that usually represented the king in popular imagery was a pig. These representations included the whole bunch of motifs associated with hogs in popular mythology - impotence (castration), gluttony, leprosy etc. Many of these motifs were usually applied to another group of excluded individuals - the Jews. The weird contamination of anti-monarchic imagery with the anti-Semitic one - is one of the most striking features of a discourse desecrating the monarchy. The association of the king with a pig and a Jew made any possibility of sacrificial model unrealistic and doomed Louis to remain homo sacer - a simple and unredeemable pharmakon. The sovereign's transgressiveness had no more relations to a symbolic dimension of a constituent power, but was confined to the domain of bestiality. During the Revolution, animals were often used for a profanation of the sacred, of the symbolical. Finally this role of the desecration is prescribed to the incarnation of the symbolic par excellence. The king made animal destroyed the foundation of his own symbolic power. In such a situation an execution of the king-hog was nothing else than a gesture of foundation of a new symbolic order, of a new society and of a new state.

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