Sunday, July 16, 2006
(5:52 PM) | John Emerson:
Werewolves and the State
In Society Must Be Protected (p. 53), Foucault writes
| The role of the legislator is not the role of the legislator or the philosopher who belongs to neither side, a figure of peace and armistices who occupies the position dreamed of by Solon and that Kant is still dreaming of.... |
Fontana and Bertani (p. 283) interpret this as referring to
| the 'median position of referee, judge, or universal witness' which has been that of philosophers from Solon to Kant. |
Solon stands here with Kant as the archetypal philosophical universalist and man of peace. But Solon's self image is not like that at all. He represented his mediation this way:
| That was why I stood out like a wolf at bay amidst a pack of hounds, defending myself against attacks from every side.... I set myself up as a barrier in the debatable land between two hostile parties. Linforth, IX and XI, p. 139; |
In the words of Anhalt (p. 134)
| Solon's simile recognizes the efficacy of the symbolic 'wolf', a kind of pharmakos or scapegoat, for the promotion of social cohesion, and gives the tradition a twist, for the poet takes the role upon himself. He transforms the wolf symbol into the hero necessary for the preservation of his society. |
In other words, the bringer of order (Solon) was like a wolfish outcast from civilization and eater of men, or perhaps a werewolf -- a pharmakos like Socrates in Derrida's Pharmakon of Plato. Perhaps this squares with Agamben's werewolf (Homo Sacer, p 107):
| The [temporary] transformation of the werewolf corresponds perfectly to the state of exception, during which (necessarily limited) time the city is dissolved and men enter into a zone in which they are no longer distinct from beasts. |
Agamben (p. 31) does cite Solon, but not the wolf metaphor:
| with the force of the nomos I have connected violence bian and justice Dikē (in Lindforth IX, p 135: "These things I accomplished with arbitrary action, bringing force to the support of the dictates of justice....") |
and also cites a werewolf passage which Anhalt has cited (p. 132):
| The story goes that whoever tastes of one bit of human entrails minced up with those of other victims is inevitable transformed into a wolf. Thus when the leader of the mob (dēmos), seeing the multitude devoted to his orders, does not know how to abstain from the blood of his tribe.... will it not then be necessary that he either be killed by his enemies or become a tyrant and be transformed from a man into a wolf? Republic 565d-e; Homo Sacer, p.108. |
So anyway: the werewolf is Solon (the founder of Western Civilization), Socrates, the tyrant, and the state of exception. Following David Gordon White you could also throw in Saint Christopher, Romulus and Remus, and the primal ancestors of the Turkish and Mongol hordes. Wolves symbolize the state of nature, tyranny, founding violence, restorative violence, rebellious violence, and anarchy.
As we know, government is the monopoly of legitimate violence -- even Weber knew that, though "legitimate" has no definable meaning in this phrase. All order is founded on violence, but you only want one founder, preferably in the distant past -- you really don't want lots of founders. They're just too bloody-minded and wolfish.
