The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (review)

The ambiguous title of Santner’s new study captures the project nicely: On the one hand, The Royal Remains claims that the historical transition from royal to popular sovereignty in European modernity did not dissolve the political theologies—and especially fantasies—previously assembled around the notion of the “king’s two bodies.” On the other hand, Santner traces these “modern afterlives of the king’s body” (ix) not primarily in imaginary projections of royal identity (although several modernist literary kings do make appearances), but through a focus on their displaced “leftovers” in politics, art, and literature. That is, the study develops “a theory of ‘the flesh’ as the sublime substance” (ix) that was managed by the doctrines and rituals surrounding the king’s twofold (“natural” and “political”) physiognomy, and pursues its precarious migration to the “people’s two bodies.” As Santner argues, “crucial features of modernity” are to be grasped only in terms of how royal sovereignty was transformed into the modern regime of biopolitics, as one concerned “not simply” with the “health of populations,” but with “the ‘sublime’ life-substance of the People” (xi–xii).

The claims assembled here can be unpacked by explicitly situating the study on the map of contemporary theory. Santner reassesses Ernst Kantorowicz’s famous analysis of the two-bodies doctrine by connecting it, via Roberto Esposito’s immunology, to Michel Foucault’s, Hannah Arendt’s, and Giorgio Agamben’s work on power in modern society, and recenters the resulting configuration in psychoanalytical terms. With Esposito, Santner backgrounds Foucault’s call for fully “beheading the king” by theorizing modern forms of power beyond the order of law, instead following those leads in Foucault’s own writings that conceptualize biopower through an agitation of “the law from within,” as “something like a chronic state of emergency” (9) in Agamben’s sense. With Esposito, Santner thus links sovereignty and biopolitics in the form of a “chiasmus” (21): whereas the horizon of the law is inescapable (which draws Foucault’s theory of power back into the orbit of the Lacanian symbolic), sovereignty itself is already a “biotechnical mutation” (21) in Esposito’s immunological paradigm, in which both the sovereign’s right to kill and biopower’s management of life find their overarching significance in a (virtually always deadly) dialectic of life preservation.

According to Santner, what is “still missing” from Esposito’s account is the “flesh”—or (Lacanian) “bit of the real” (18–19). As an “unbearable excess” (mentioned by Esposito himself), it is to account for the intensification of immunization’s violent dynamic in, ultimately, the Nazis’ “thanatopolitics” (19, 13): If the camps were charged with securing “the immunizing enclosure of the German national body,” that goal was accomplished only through genocide, shadowing the elevation of the “German national body” into “an extreme version of . . . ‘the People’s Two Bodies’” (27). As Santner patiently emphasizes in distinguishing his account from competing conceptualizations throughout the book, his central category of the “flesh” (or in Freud, the libido) is not to be confused with nature, but wins its (again, Lacanian) contours as the product of nature’s intertwining with the symbolic order. Defined as “the semiotic and somatic stresses” of (what Santner previously discussed as) “creaturely life,” the flesh thus characterizes “human existence” specifically, albeit in a way that “seems to push thinking in the direction of theology” (5), in that “our finitude itself suffers from a kind of intrinsic dysfunction” (82). While creaturely life is characterized by exposure also to “an ultimate lack of foundation” for the historical life forms “that distinguish human community” (5), precisely this exposure creates corresponding excess pressures for “the possibility of feeling libidinally implicated in the world” (122). Which is to say: the (proverbial) emperor is definitively naked, but this does not mean that modernity escapes a “political theological (or perhaps better, . . . biocratic)” constitution (xii), because “there is more political theology in...