Wild Promises: On the Language "Leviathan"

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. One's 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 first 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 fiction: 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 fictive), this scene produces itself. The transition from a natural state of boundless egoism into a constitutionally regulated 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 self-destructive object of an experience that must be produced, if not everywhere and at all times, then certainly at various times and also in the present—Hobbes's own present—and 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 times—and 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 Hobbes's 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 is—at 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 other—including those others we include in our "we"—is for us a figure 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 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 Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done...