The Impossibility of the Body Politic in Leviathan: The Agambenian Interpretation of Hobbes's Metaphor

Abstract

The concept of the State as a body has been frequent in the history of political thought. One of the authors who has made particular use of it was Thomas Hobbes, who compares the State with an artificial body or man. This metaphor is analyzed by Giorgio Agamben, who in Stasis states the impossibility of the body politic in Leviathan.
Comparing how the metaphor appears in Hobbes’s Leviathan with Agamben’s interpretation, we will analyze in what sense the body politic is impossible and in what sense the key to the impossibility of the body politic is based on the distinction that Agamben finds in Hobbes between the disunited multitude (pre-covenant) and dissolved multitude (post-covenant). To do this, we will place ourselves within the field of conceptual metaphor, we will analyze the use of the metaphor of the body politic in Leviathan and we will address Agamben’s reading of metaphor based on the interrelation between the concepts of war, sovereignty, disunited multitude and dissolute multitude. Finally, we will confront the Hobbesian use and the interpretation by Agamben. We will focus on Agamben’s Stasis and Hobbes’s Leviathan, with some mentions of De Cive.