Wild Promises: On the Language "Leviathan"

Werner Hamacher, Geoffrey A.,tr Hale

CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 4, Number 3, Winter 2004, pp. 215-245
(Article)

Published by Michigan State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2005.0019

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/179303

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Wild Promises
On the Language “Leviathan”

WERNER HAMACHER
Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, and New York University

Translated by Geoffrey Hale, State University of New York at Buffalo

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 dis-
cards 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 forma-
tion 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

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216 ● Wild Promises

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 con-
tract, 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 every-
where 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 pre-
cisely 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 gov-
ernment 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 conse-
quence, Hobbes arms himself with an example: “Let him therefore con-
sider with himselfe, when taking a journey, he arms himselfe, and seeks to
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We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 217

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 with him;
what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; and of his
fellow Citizens, when he locks his dores! and of his children, and servants,
when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his
actions, as I do by my words?” (Hobbes 1996, 89). Everyone who arms one-
self, guards oneself, secures oneself and one’s possessions against one’s
“fellow subjects,” one’s “fellow Citizens” and even against one’s children
with walls, doors, and locks, acts in principle on the basis of a suspicion of
robbery and murder. In principle, that is, in the sense that they can never be
weakened or opposed by the existence of laws and executive agents:
“Lawes, and publike Officers.” These security measures confirm only the
suspicion in principle that every other is virtually a murderer. The fear and
desire of murder define the whole structure of social commerce and must
therefore be described as the social passions that belong to nature—that is,
the indissoluble disposition of humanity—and that constitute the empiri-
cal transcendentals of all phenomena in the realm of human interaction.
“Natural right,” or jus naturale, is therefore a tautological construct
because it defines right as an irreducible power relation, authorized and
validated by nothing other than its own givenness, its nature. Natural right
is natural force. But since nature is the force upon which every force can
ultimately be based, natural right is also the force of the force to preserve
itself through its proper means—the force to preserve itself, thus, by means
of force. Hobbes can therefore explain definitively: “The Right of Nature,
which writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to
use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own
Nature; that is to say, of his own life; . . .” (Hobbes 1996, 91). If nature is the
power to preserve nature—and this is precisely what Hobbes’s circular
definition affirms—then nature can be reduced to no other power, be it
higher or otherwise, situated outside itself: it is the power of ratio and is as
such, in principle, in agreement with ratio divina—and thus nature cannot
be superseded, for there is no other power which could come after it that
would not at the same time also follow its rule. Whatever can nevertheless
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218 ● Wild Promises

become other than nature must emerge from nature and follow its laws, in
particular the legal constitution of nationally organized societies.
Therefore, it necessarily follows from the invariable givenness of the force
of nature that it must occupy the entire horizon of human behavior at all
times in history. We have, thus, always had to protect ourselves from
assaults against our lives; we do it now and cannot stop doing it: nature
thus commands us, through ourselves, to arm ourselves against ourselves.
Right and the natural law of self-preservation that follows from it is
therefore, in spite of all appearance to the contrary, a right and a law of
insufficiency. If nature is the power to preserve nature—“to use his own
power . . . for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own
Life”—then it is only because the danger of losing itself comes from itself.
What must preserve itself must do so against its own disappearance. Since
nature is subject to no higher power, this threat of disappearance must
come from itself; it, nature, must be antinature, from which and through
which it seeks to maintain itself. That nature must preserve itself means
that nature is not yet—or is never—natural enough to be merely nature.
Nature’s law of preservation, that it is nature only as nature-against-nature,
appears most distinctly in a formula Hobbes uses to counter presumed
opponents to his concept of nature. What might appear “strange,” Hobbes
concedes, is “that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to
invade, and destroy one another.” Nature, the foundation of all associa-
tions, is thus dissociated. But it does not merely dissociate people from one
another, who were not bound in a prior societas, it dissociates itself from
itself before all else in them, and is nothing other than this self-dissociation.
Only separated from itself in this way, only as nature-against-nature and
nature-invading-nature, can it relate to itself and preserve itself. If nature
must maintain itself in this way and must preserve itself from itself, if it can
resist its self-destruction only through a corresponding law of self-preser-
vation, then its structure, its essence, and its nature, the nature of nature, is
essentially a self-overcoming, a force that exceeds its force, continually pro-
duces itself as surplus, and participates in and against itself as hyperforce.
The law of self-preservation that Hobbes sees at work in nature and
that constitutes the nature of this nature is a law of self-augmentation and
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We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 219

self-overcoming. It does not bring about any “natural” homeostasis that

could balance the threats of hostile forces armed against one another and
ensure the survival of each one. Hobbes’s construction counters the
thought of such a balance of powers by arguing that even the weakest is
strong enough to kill the strongest (Hobbes 1996, 89), and is similar enough
to the strongest to parry the threat of death emanating from it. This equal-
ity—the only one that a nature bent on self-preservation knows—is an
equality of the ability to kill, and the balance that can be attained through
it (again, the only one of which nature is capable) is the permanent war of
all against all. But even if “the nature of War,” as Hobbes explains, “consis-
teth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto” (88–89),
this “state of nature, that is, of war” (Hobbes 1991, 119) is still a state of
“continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary,
poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 1996, 89). The balance of forces
in the natural state of war thus is not a solid double bind of self-preserva-
tion under the condition of self-destruction. It is a state of the continual
threat of murder, fear of death, and the mutual destruction of antagonistic
forces, the state of a cold war of nature against nature: the state of a con-
tinual fall in which it only sustains itself in order to be able to destroy itself,
and it must be able to destroy itself in order to preserve its ideality.
Insofar as Hobbes sees the obligation for self-destruction in the natural
right of self-preservation, he separates the principle of preservation rigor-
ously for the first time—most clearly in chapter 17 of Leviathan dealing with
the artificiality of the commonwealth—from the Aristotelian and stoic tra-
dition that saw in it the guarantee, at least in principle, of a homeostasis.
Human beings are not originally political beings for whom the relation to
others would be identical to the relation to one’s own life. For Hobbes,
however, people are not so much asocial beings as they are antisocial, as
long as everyone stands opposed to one’s potential death in every other.
The self-preservation of nature in mankind, then, cannot be achieved in
nature, because this principle is simultaneously its self-destruction and
that of nature as well. Hobbes’s insight turns the principle of preservation
that had dominated natural and social ontology, as well as major portions
of theology, for fifteen hundred years into a dilemma. Hobbes’s solution is
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220 ● Wild Promises

ingenious for the very reason that he resolves the dilemma by way of
dilemma: the difficulty is overcome, in a certain way, through its
intensification.
The state of nature is for Hobbes a state of mutual threat of all against
all. Since this threat is not only one of murder but of the permanent ten-
dency towards murder, and precisely for this reason itself lethal, the means
of threat—and this is Hobbes’s solution—must be concentrated, checked,
and defused at a single locus. Everyone receives these means with the very
freedoms that the principle of self-preservation protects. If the threat is to
be ended and social life to be possible, these freedoms must be abandoned
and transferred to an authority that guards the right of self-preservation
without using it as a right to harm others. This authority stands under an
imperative of preservation without assault, of security without annihila-
tion, and of life without murder. Since the Platonic-Aristotelean doctrine of
a life, originally and physei conceived as life with others and life from the life
of the other, cannot, from the disintegration of such a life and its opposi-
tion to another, account consistently for non-political life; and since a doc-
trine and praxis that would define life with others only as life against them
must define life aporetically as life against itself, as life-against-life, it is pos-
sible, both in theory and in practice, to dissolve the fusion between a life
conducted with others and one conducted against them, and to introduce a
critical distinction into the doctrine of natural right that supports this
fusion. In order to make possible a life that is consistent with itself, it is nec-
essary to distinguish between a life with others on the one hand and a life
against others on the other hand, and thus also to distinguish within the
‘with’ between a with and an against. Only along this path of differentiation
and separation between “with-others” and “against-others” is it possible to
isolate the destructive from the conservative forces of being-with-others,
and even convert them into forces of preservation. More precisely: only by
eliminating the against from the with can a consistent being-with-others
emerge for the first time. The creation—Hobbes says “generation”—of a
community is precisely this: the always originary creation of an always
originary community consistent within itself. For the definition of the
state of nature of society as a state of war does not only mean that nature is
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self-destructive; it also means that, under conditions of war, there is no

society that can preserve itself as society and that is, in this way, a society in
agreement with itself. The “commonwealth” as politically constituted soci-
ety would not emerge as the more complete society from a given less com-
plete one, but from bondlessness as the first bond.
The “covenant” that produces community is therefore precisely a cre-
atio ex nihilo:2 not through a superior authority, but only as the absolute
superiority of God’s creation, which Hobbes cites already in the first sen-
tence of his introduction (Hobbes 1996, 9), does the creation of the “Mortall
God” Leviathan (120) arise from a process based upon a nothing—a noth-
ing in social substance—and through which, not by the addition of an
already present something or by recourse to a transcendent material, but
rather solely through the separation from a nothing (through the elimina-
tion, namely, of the powers of destruction), a social something first
emerges as an ordered society. Through a not-nothing, just like the immor-
tal god, a mortal one is created. The principle of autocreation out of noth-
ing remedies the principal defects in the principle of self-preservation in
pure immanence. Society does not create society—autopoietically, accord-
ing to the Aristotelian model—but rather a nothing-of-society creates soci-
ety through the removal of its nothing. It does this, as Hobbes again
emphasizes in his introduction to Leviathan, in the same way God does:
through an act of language analogous to a “Fiat, or the Let us make man”
(10). And this act of social creation, the creation from language for another
language, is completed in a promise.
Savages promise. The “savage people”—not only “in many places” of
his contemporary “America,” but all over the known world—give each
other their word and with it their arms, their “natural” freedom, and their
preparedness for murder. They promise one another an order that, as the
order of the promise, ought also to be the stable order of communication,
of action (whether “practical” or “symbolic”), of commerce, of judicial
structures, and of political institutions and their means of reproduction.
Only as “savages”—whether in “America” or elsewhere—can they make
promises, and only in the fear of the wilderness of death, because, at the
time of their promising, there cannot be any order of the promise that
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222 ● Wild Promises

might protect them from the murder threatened by their rivals: what they
give must be a promise before any order in which this gift would be know-
able and recognizable as a promise and could be perceived and answered as
such. No promise would be necessary, if there were already a social, lin-
guistic, and symbolic order that could secure for the promise continual sta-
bility and unambiguous meaning.3 Savages can only make promises
without the possibility of having them understood as gifts, without any
established convention for the promise, and without the possibility that
anyone would know what a promise might be and whether what they give
under the name of a promise could be perceived and received as such. In the
uncertainty of whether there even are promises and whether they could be
intended and kept as such, these promises are not only those of savages,
they are savage, or wild, promises: nothing could guarantee that they would
not be broken, or even that they are seriously intended and understood;
everything could suggest that they are threats and attacks on the pride and
vanity of those to whom they are given. For whatever is said in the society
of the cold civil war (Hobbes’s bitter comments offer a painfully accurate
impression [Hobbes 1996, 110–13]) serves the diminution and social death
of those to whom it is addressed. Language is a weapon; and even the prom-
ise to lay down this weapon, even the self-disarming language, can be mur-
derous—for those who give their word as well as for those to whom it is
given—as long as this language of savagery is preserved within the civiliz-
ing promise.
The creation of a coherent order of communication cannot be a fiat out
of the promise, because it cannot build upon any order of promising that
would not lead into the incoherencies of language warfare. The promise,
producing both order and society, must thus satisfy two laws: it must be
given in view of a possible peace—thus of the elimination of every intent to
harm others—and it must therefore be given as a renunciation of the tools
of war. To make a promise must mean: to lay down one’s arms. Whenever
one gives one’s word, one must abandon one’s arms and thus also abandon
the natural right to everything one wishes.
That is the second law of nature in Hobbes, the explication of which
occupies nearly all of the decisive chapter 14 of Leviathan, and, together
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with the first law of nature as requisite self-preservation, founds all subse-
quent laws of nature as well as the laws of the state: “That a man be willing,
when others are so too, . . . To lay down his right to all things . . .” (Hobbes
1996, 92). Law is the laying down, the abandonment, and surrender of right,
and this surrender of the right of nature, which is simultaneously the sur-
render of nature and its state of war, lies in the divestiture of the freedom to
hinder others in the exercise of their freedom: “To lay downe a mans Right
to any thing, is to devest himselfe of the Liberty, of hindering another of the
benefit of his own Right to the same.” Only this divestiture of the freedoms
of language and action, insofar as it is the divestiture of the freedom of
mutual destruction, introduces the end of natural and linguistic warfare and
opens up the possibility for a coherent bond of communication that would
no longer tear itself apart. Whoever promises, therefore, gets rid of the
means of destruction in order, by means of this annihilation of the social
nihil, to create what preserves one in existence. Self-preservation cannot be
a simple persistence in existence: for, as natural, it is an existence against
itself, from which neither a perseverare nor a suum esse conservare can be
declared; self-preservation must be a “preservation of his own Nature” (91)
in the sense not only of a preeminent but also of an anticipatory concern for
a self, which cannot satisfy itself with mere perseverance, but rather pro-
poses proleptically something not yet given, and invents something not yet
in existence at that point: “preservation” of the self is its generation as arti-
fact. The emphasis that Hobbes places on the artificiality of social connec-
tions concerns—already in the very first sentence of the “Introduction” of
Leviathan—even nature. “Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and gov-
ernes the World),” he says there, is imitated by the “Art of man” in making
“an Artificial Animal.” “For by Art is created that great Leviathan called
Common-wealth, or State, (in latine Civitas) which is but an Artificiall Man
. . .” (9). But the question is, then, whether this creatio of the artificial per-
son called the state is brought about by a doing, and further, whether its cre-
ation can be an act or action, if every action under natural and thus artificial
conditions must already be an attack or a threat, and thus also destructive.
If, namely, self-preservation can only be the feigning of a self, and if consis-
tent societies as well as individual beings are constituted purely through the
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224 ● Wild Promises

abandonment of their natural rights, then the fundamental act of self-cre-

ation—thus self-preservation—can only be that paradoxical act whereby
the right to act is itself given up. That the act par excellence takes place in
the abandonment of action, and that the origin of community rests in the
cession of all individual acts is not simply the unspoken implication of
Hobbes’s construction of society, but he himself emphasizes it everywhere
in his text. The paradoxical sleight of hand that must be carried out in the
act of abandoning action is apparent in the “Liberty” of the subject of right,
which, Hobbes says, consists “in the act of our Submission.” While it is true
that there is “no Obligation on any man, which ariseth not from some Act
of his own,” it is also the case that the constitutive clause of consistent soci-
ety, “I Authorize all his Actions”—namely, all actions of the sovereign, be it a
commonwealth, parliament, or monarch—defines this act of freedom as an
abandonment of all acts. An act—and, as the founding phrase “I Authorize
all his Actions” makes clear, a speech act of self-preservation by self-cre-
ation—is always one in which the omission of an action and its yielding to
another are carried out. Only in this other is the act its own, for only in the
other is it the unified act of all, no longer antagonistic, no longer destruc-
tive, and no longer an act of civil war, but rather of universal and individual
self-preservation. Freedom is achieved only in this paradoxical act: that
“Liberty we deny our selves, by owning all the Actions (without exception)
of the Man, or Assembly we make our Soveraign” (150). We deny our selves
by owning . . . our Sovereign—one’s own act is expropriated, and only in this
way attributed to the self in general. It is the act of the renunciation of action
of all individuals for the benefit of the totality of individuals. As already in the
gesture of the constitution of sovereignty in Bodin, the ultra-sovereign act,
from which comes the sovereignty of the “Artificial Man” Leviathan for
Hobbes, lies in the immediate and continual eradication of this act. Unlike
Bodin, however, Hobbes sees this eradication as motivated by the sense that
the act, as an act of individuals, would be an act of destruction, and only by
abandoning its destructiveness does it gain the capability of preservation.
No longer oriented toward the other’s right, but toward one’s own, it estab-
lishes consistency through the (itself inconsistent) elimination of the
inconsistency of individual acts.
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The fundamental operation of self-preservation through self-creation

via negationis is thus not a positing; it is not a gift and it is not a transfer of
rights. “For he that renounceth, or passeth away his Right, giveth not to any
other man a Right which he had not before; because there is nothing to
which every man had not Right by Nature: but onely standeth out of his
way, that he may enjoy his own originall Right, without hindrance from
him . . .” (Hobbes 1996, 92). If, however, the promise in which this renun-
ciation, this revocation of rights of freedom occurs, not dedicatio, but abdi-
catio—if it is neither an affirmative nor a negative positing, but only an
ex-positing of the annihilation through word or deed—then it is, strictly
speaking, neither an act nor a speech act, but its deactivation, in which the
promise and the pact thus established are accomplished. Every promise not
only announces but also executes an abandonment of potential acts and
speech acts, and this execution does not occur as the fulfillment of an act,
which could only occur in the destruction of others and the obliteration of
one’s own self, but takes place as a renunciation of virtually every act and
speech act, and thus as speech de-activation. Every promise is a renuncia-
tion of speech, a privatio privationis in which language, in order to discharge
its destructive potential, abandons itself. What occurs in the speech act of
the promise is an act of denial, and thus a suspension of language that must
still precede the distinction between active and passive in order to ground
the possibility of juridically binding just acts and just speech acts that could
actively be carried out or passively suffered. Every speech act—because
none can function outside of established conventions or prescribed
statutes—is only possible on the basis of an exposition and displacement of
action. The atopical, autotopical locus of this de-positing of speech is the
promise. It founds an order of the self-coherent self by silencing the selves
in conflict. Every promise is a promise of silence, and must therefore end in
silence. Every act that is unified in itself and an act with others must be ori-
ented towards the removal of its destructive traits, and must therefore
occur as an action of its deactivation. What can be called consistent social
action—and its founding gesture defines the structure of action as such—is
the action of a nonaction. The fiat of the Leviathan’s creation comes from a
nonfiat. Only this divestiture of the act grants language that creatio ex nihilo
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226 ● Wild Promises

and, more precisely, ex nihilatione, which [Saint] Paul (Hobbes cites him
more than 50 times in Leviathan) attributes to faith and God, who “calleth
those things which be not as though they were” (Romans 4:17).
“A Promise is equivalent to a Covenant” (Hobbes 1996, 95); but since
this promise must in principle be everyone’s renunciation of their right to
everything within the horizon of their desires and passions, this renuncia-
tion would end then, if it were not contained within an absolute limit, in
universal self-destruction, in a mass suicide. Since this absolute limit can-
not be arbitrarily set by any given authority—there is no such authority in
a state of war—it must, in and as abdication, belong to the irreducible struc-
tural elements of the promise as such. Precisely when the promise is based
on nothing other than an abdication, its minimal conditions then include
the preservation of this speech and promise, the insistence and permanence
of this abdication itself, and accordingly the promise that exercises this
renunciation. If there is to be a divestiture of “natural” possibilities of
action, then this divestiture can only resist every further denuding. The
promise distinguishes itself before all other speech acts by two irreducible
and mutually determinant traits: it is the renunciation of every possibility
for action that could limit or harm the action of others—and thus also one’s
own (in this sense it is pure abstention, epoché), and it is, as this renuncia-
tion, the persistence of the promise in itself (in this sense it is the adherence
to the promise and the holding of the promise, the self-preservation of its
bearer and resistance to every destructive act that could be directed against
this preservation). Once a promise is given, it cannot be given up. More
precisely: once a possibility for action—and that is a possibility for death—
is renounced, this renunciation must imply the resistance to its own
destruction and to that of its bearer. From the logic of the universal renun-
ciation of the right to destruction—from the privatio privationis—it neces-
sarily follows that only one thing cannot become the object of renunciation:
the right of resistance. It is that right, as Hobbes says just before the discus-
sion of contractual promises and agreements, “which no man can be under-
stood by any words, or other signes, to have abandoned, or transferred. . . .
a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that assault him by
force, to take away his life” (93). Though this presentation relies upon pre-
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We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 227

existing natural rights, however, since these rights are the rights of mutual
destruction in war, the right of self-preservation can only be grasped prop-
erly if it is not thought as presupposition, but only as the implication of the
renunciation of those rights. Self-preservation is first the preservation of
the promise to renounce the use of rights of war in speech and action. But
since this preservation is not that of an established and instituted self, and
since it cannot emerge from spontaneous autocreation, it is essentially
resistance to the refusal of its destruction. Resistance is as much the resid-
ual of a fragile, substanceless life at odds with itself as it is the insistence of
the promise in which this life seeks to save itself by abandoning its rights.
It is thus the double form of bare language and bare existence, the revolt of
sheer existence in language that, contrary to what Hobbes thinks, is not
based upon a right, but first makes right possible—as the right of this resist-
ance, this preservation, and this rebellion.
The axiom, thus, is this: the promise is the resistance of linguistic exis-
tence to its destruction; hence, the promise is the first agreement of lan-
guage with itself as existent—as mutinous and insurgent.
This axiom of the resistant existence of language in the promise means
first: only after the promise does language emerge as one language—as a
coherent language common to many. It means further that it can only claim
its legitimacy because it is the axiom of axiomaticity—of being taken as
such, of irreducible credibility and fundamentality—of the word given in
promise. Hobbes oriented his reflections on the transition from the deadly
state of nature to the saving state of civic community around the transition
of the “Multitude” into a “Unity,” and credited the promise with combin-
ing the multiplicity of individuals into a unity that protects them from one
another and from external enemies. The promise establishes—it feigns,
invents, generates, and creates—the unity of community and the unity of
its language by deactivating the multiplicity of natural interests connected
to it. Only with the unity of a society constituted as the state does language
also gain a unity that can protect it from the conflicts of its multiplicity.
The task of fabricating one language and the unity of the community,
for Hobbes, is resolved by the invention of a fiction—the invention of
invention—of art, and, more precisely, of representation. Hobbes takes the
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228 ● Wild Promises

decisive artistic concept of the person from juridico-theological tradition

and entrusts the founding of a representative social unity to it. Even when he
speaks of a “Naturall Person,” whose words and actions are viewed as “his
own” (Hobbes 1996, 111), that person is an artifact that both gives way to
and hinders perspective, perception, and recognition; leads as much as it
misleads; and, above all, achieves what cannot “naturally” appear: the rep-
resentation of the place of another, speech and action for another, the pres-
entation not of oneself, but of a relation to another. The short history
Hobbes offers of the word person leaves no doubt about this: “The word
Person is latine: insteed whereof the Greeks have prósopon, which signifies
the Face, as Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of
a man, counterfeited on the Stage, and sometimes more particularly that
part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard: And from the
Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well
in Tribunalls, as Theaters. So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both
on the Stage and in common Conversation; and to Personate, is to Act, or
Represent himself, or an other; and he that acteth another, is said to beare
his Person, or act in his name; . . .” (112). To speak and act as anyone who
can be viewed as a person—as a persona in a drama, or as a juridical person
in political contexts—is to act for another, even if this other is one’s “own”
self. “He acteth another” means: he acts and plays another who is not pres-
ent, but “represented” in speech and action. Only by means of this repre-
sentational structure of the person is it possible for one (a person) “to beare
his Person”—not only the person of a single other, but the multiplicity of
other persons as well. The following quotation from Cicero’s De Oratore
(2:102), which Hobbes used earlier in his De Homine (Hobbes 1991, 83), sug-
gests that only the person is capable of being “borne” by other persons and,
for its part, able “to beare” a variety of other persons in order to combine
this plurality into a unity: “in which sence Cicero useth it where he saies,
Unus sutineo tres Personas; Mei, Adversarii, & Judicis, I beare three Persons;
my own, my Adversaries, and the Judges.” What he says here of the attor-
ney Cicero, that he “beares” his own person, that of his opponents, and the
judges, is a fortiori true of that one person who, in all of its functions, as
“representer, or Representative, a Lieutenant, a Vicar, an Attorney, a Deputy, a
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Procurator, an Actor, and the like” (Hobbes 1996, 112), collects and “beares”
in itself the multiplicity par excellence, the “Multitude” of natural individ-
uals. This One Person is the sovereign, constituted society, the common-
wealth, the state. Hobbes clarifies: “A Multitude of men, are made One
Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; so that it
be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular” (114).
Thus, it is not that the One Person “beares” a multiplicity, but, that through
its bearing of this multiplicity, it “makes” this multiplicity into one plural-
ity: the One Person is a figure of unification; and not only does a corporate
body, “the state,” represent the elements of the people unified within it, but
it first creates its unity as people [Volk]: representation is a process of cre-
ation. “For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Repre-
sented, that maketh the Person One. And it is the Representer that beareth
the Person, and but one Person: And Unity, cannot otherwise be under-
stood in Multitude” (114). If the One Person Leviathan first produces the
unity conceived within it—for “the Multitude naturally is not One, but
Many, they cannot be understood for one; but many Authors, of every thing
their Representative saith, or doth in their name”—this is because only
through it, the Leviathan, can the many first speak and, as speaking, act,
with one voice, even if it only be the voice of its majority.
The Leviathan is a language—it is the one language that unifies in the
promise and whose insistence is asserted in its claim to those who are sup-
posed to have given the promise. But since a noncontroversial, unequivo-
cal, and binding speech is impossible under natural conditions—“the
Multitude naturally is not One”—a noncontroversial, unequivocal, and
binding promising must also be impossible, regardless of whether it comes
from the “multitude” or from the individuals of whom it consists. The
unity of natural individuals as well can only be a postnatural fiction with
which leviathanic univocality generates its own presuppositions, teleolog-
ically oriented towards it, and with which it is legitimated post naturam
through a “consent”—which could not have existed before—“of every one
of that Multitude in particular,” who were neither able to speak nor prom-
ise as “every one” and not “in particular.” The One language of the One
person Leviathan, for Hobbes, can only be a mask—the One prósopon—that
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230 ● Wild Promises

is not worn in front of a face, but only suggests a face; does not disguise any
other unity or multiplicity, but makes such unities first thinkable; does not
emerge continually from any earlier language, but whose preexistence is
only belatedly presupposed. The language “Leviathan” is a prósopon, a
Persona, “disguise, or outward appearance,” that does not correspond to any
substance, prior intention, or unified meaning; it is a persona through
which no voice could sound, but only the howls of war, polyphonic rum-
bling, silence. The Leviathan—the community, the state, politics—is a mask
in front of nothing. A speech-mask before “natural” silence; a lieutenant of
the not-one, and Actor of disunited multiplicities. It “represents” inconsis-
tent multiplicities by generating a single, apparently consistent one, and
speaks “in their name” by lending them a name, language, and a face.
Hobbes thinks the figure of the Leviathan from the axiomatic positing of
the One as an underivable arithmetical foundation, and prosopopoeia as the
founding rhetorical gesture by which language and face are attributed to
one who has none. The combination of both leads to the one and common
language of homophonous promise to lay down all combative arms, and to
guard only the one and common protection in the person of the state
together with the right of self-preservation. The sovereign is the one and
founding prosopopoeia, the archprosopopoeia, in which the mathematical
ideality of the One becomes a person and the organized community
becomes the state. Its One does not designate, however, but creates,
through its marking, one—and only one—entity and the nameable multi-
plicity of all subentities schematized by it; and the just person Leviathan
does not speak for preexisting others, but produces them according to its
singular face. The Leviathan populates, but he also “personifies” a nothing:
he opposes it as a person, presents himself as a mask, and presents it
through his absolute exclusivity.
Hobbes distinguishes the use of speech from its misuse and character-
izes its politically most destructive form as mutual harm: “for seeing nature
hath armed living creatures, some with teeth, some with horns, and some
with hands, to grieve an enemy, it is but an abuse of Speech, to grieve him
with the tongue . . .” (Hobbes 1996, 26). Language is a weapon—like “teeth,”
“horns,” and “hands”—and its use, under natural conditions, leads to
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We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 231

disputes, war, and mutual destruction. Since conditions of nature are deter-
mined by the change and passage of time, it is time in language that brings
about the general state of war, and it is the temporality of language that
must effect its self-destruction: “Nay, the same man, in divers times, differs
from himselfe; and one time praiseth, that is, calleth Good, what another
time he dispraiseth, and calleth Evil: From whence arise Disputes,
Controversies, and at last War” (110–11). If time brings about self-differ-
ence, language war, and annihilation, the only resistance to it and its lethal
consequences lies in the creation of a language unified within itself and a
figure of linguistic—thus juridical and political—commonality that
removes all oppositionality from every being-together. The only language
against time and its differentiations that would not renounce all temporal
conditions is the language of the promise; the only figure of resistance to
permanent war is the one person in whom this promise becomes a political
institution. Individuals’ right to self-preservation and resistance finds its
counterpart in the institutionalized resistance of the sovereign person of
state. Insofar as this one and only artificial person may be “Procurator,”
“Lieutenant,” and representative for all those subsumed within it, it must
then, in principle, be a language independent from them. It must, at the
same time, as an artificial language created out of mathematical ideality
and rhetorical inventio, be precisely that natural language that must have
been renounced in the promise of everyone who makes use of it. It must, as
the one language of resistance to war, death, and destruction, be at the same
time itself the language of war, death, and destruction. The one language of
the one person can only fulfill its apotropaic function by reproducing what
is warded off in its intolerance to any other, either within itself or outside
of it, be it similar to itself or different from it. Its absoluteness excludes
every alternative and every opposition. To the extent that it is a creation
from nothing and against nothing, it is itself devastating.
The famous frontispiece of the 1651 edition of Leviathan depicts a
monarch literally as “the Representer that beareth the Person, and but one
Person” (Hobbes 1996, 114). He bears within himself a multiplicity of
human forms and makes them into one person whereby only he, not those
borne by him, presents his face—prósopon, persona—and his face is the only
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232 ● Wild Promises

part of him not composed of the bodies of others (xciii).4 The city and land-
scape around the impersonal—faceless and silent—figures whose collec-
tion and organization form the person of the sovereign is effectively devoid
of people. More forcefully than the iconographic presentation, however,
Hobbes’s text makes it clear that, outside of the “body politic” of the One
Person, there is nothing, and within it, only its expressionless elements.
The exclusivity of the sovereign—and of the sovereign promise—evacuates
the linguistic and political space. As personale, as a masked form, it stands
in and in front of a vacuum; as the only personal power, it even effects the
depersonalization of its own constituents. Its unity and singularity are thus
doubled: the absolute artifice of political life, and absolute wild savagery
that admits nothing other than itself. For this reason alone can its figure be
axiomatic and the axiom of political axiomaticity itself: since it founds
itself, it has no ground and must thus function as the ultimate and irre-
ducible authority of its credibility. It is a wild, that is, groundless invention
of political discipline and a reinvention of wilderness. The exclusivity of its
domination serves the security against the nihilism of the state of nature,
but this security raises endogenous nihilism to the principle of politics. The
Leviathan—the sovereign person as well as its language—is a fetish. He dis-
avows and confirms at the same time a nothing that is determined by him
as the antithesis to his own existence.
The right of resistance, for the natural individual as well as the collec-
tive person of the state, can, as Hobbes emphasizes again and again, never
be given up. It is that “which no man can be understood . . . to have aban-
doned”; “a man cannot lay down the right of resisting” (Hobbes 1996, 93).
If the agreement—the “covenant”—consists in “the mutuall transferring of
Right” (94), then this one right of resistance cannot enter into it, precisely
because it cannot be given up or handed over. It must form the insur-
mountable limit of every contract. If this right of resistance, namely, were
transferable, then the sheer linguistic existence, and with it the sole ground
for a social compact, could be transferred. Such a transfer would have to
result in self-contradiction and thus an intralinguistic state of war, which
would negate every agreement. If, on the other hand, the social contract is
precisely that form in which the inalienable existence of all individuals, and
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We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 233

with it the right of resistance, is instituted and stabilized, then the resist-
ance of existence must at the same time be a resistance to that resistance
that presents itself as the form of the state. The promise must be the trans-
fer of all rights of freedom to society—and must, however, at the same time,
as the bare existence of this promise, be resistance against society. The
promise can only found the stability of society as resistance to socializa-
tion; as the resistance of existence, it must oppose all socialization. The
promise that produces the social bond must be the insurmountable limit
within this bond. The greatest form of stabilization of linguistic existence
can only be inconsistent. This inconsistency of form—not only the form of
society and of the state, but moreover of every other form of linguistic insti-
tution as well—is the inconsistency of the promise itself that, as bare exis-
tence, is not yet consistency, and has neither a constant institutional form
nor a fixed content.
There is, therefore, an additional axiom: the existence of language in
the promise is the inconsistency of its fixed form. This means at the same
time that the promise itself is inconsistent within itself, insofar as it merely
projects the form of its stabilization and of its self-preservation, without
actually being able to realize it. Linguistic existence is insistent, but incon-
sistent. The axiom that the unity of language is already realized, or at
least anticipated, in the promise loses its principal credibility—it is
de-axiomated—as soon as the linguistic resistance of the individual arises
against the one axiomatic language “Leviathan” and denies credibility to
belief. Singularity means in each instance: I do not believe belief. The
“Leviathan” axiom must always be unbelievable. It is insistent, but, because
of its inconsistency, not simply assailable, but in principle (counter-
axiomatic, and anti-principle) already contested.
This inconsistency axiom takes at least three forms:
First, there is no agreement that could take place already within the
order of the same agreement. A promise is always an absolute beginning.
Every promise not immediately honored and every one that does not imme-
diately entail a symmetrical promise or an equivalent obligation by the con-
tracting party, is, in Hobbes’s formulation, “a word of the Future” (Hobbes
1996, 95). As such, while it is binding and can only be broken at the cost of
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234 ● Wild Promises

destabilizing multiple “symbolic” exchange relationships, it is only bind-

ing through “trust” (96) in its future fulfillment, and thus without any insti-
tutional security. If the fulfillment of the social contract is guaranteed by
means of force as derived from the “state of war,” the society thus formed
cannot be founded on the rights of freedom; it cannot be—contrary to
Hobbes’s postulate—a civitas that would protect against the “state of war.”
Every politics of the promise that threatens the use of force, thus every pol-
itics of threat, can only operate in terms of the maxim “only war prevents
war” and abandon to terror the protection it promises. Both Hobbes and
Locke, who relates his doctrine of “tacit consent” to Hobbes, had to remain
vulnerable to Hume’s contention that their theory of the “original con-
tract” was nothing other than a betrayal of the promise to force and power.5
However, if the means of force which should guarantee the keeping of
promises are the means of organized political society, then the political
contract that, by recourse to force and threats of force, perpetuates the war
it is intended to end is harmed in return. Precisely this extortion of the
promise’s fulfillment is unavoidable for Hobbes’s commonwealth:
“Covenants, without Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a
man at all” (Hobbes 1996, 117). If here, with a restorative rhyme rhetoric,
the “word” summons the support of the “Sword,” it becomes apparent that
for Hobbes a promise, especially one that grounds the state and society,
occurs not in the laying down of arms, but in their violently forced surren-
der. Only an armed contract is for him a social contract. It is the only thing
that can secure bare existence—but existence secured by force is, according
to his own premises, unprotected and insecure. Wherever security, guaran-
tee, or stabilization is desired, the bare linguistic existence of the promise
must be surrendered, and its reference or even assignation to the future
must be expunged. It cannot be, then, a “word of the Future,” but a fact of
immediate force.
The solution to the dilemma into which every promise leads thus can
only be expected of its future. Yet, as long as only a future “common Power,”
and thus only a yet-to-be-established social bond, can be expected to
guarantee the contractual promise as such by being it itself, neither the valid-
ity of nor the adherence to the promise can be ensured. The securing of
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We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 235

intention, semantics, and of the pragmatic situation; the securing of the sta-
tus of the given word is always only post verbum. That means: it is never pos-
sible by the word itself. The language of the promise and of the agreement
can only be the coming, as yet uncertain, the not yet and never entirely sta-
bilized, instituted, and institutionalized existence of language. The promise
moves ad infinitum towards the securing of its validity in the form of organ-
ized political society, and remains forever suspended on the threshold
between its fragile linguistic existence and its consistency. It remains only a
promise of the promise, resistant to a determinate self, resistant even to its
self-stabilization, the naked existence of speech before every instituted lan-
guage. In the aporias apparent in the phenomenological descriptions, and
in the securative norms of the promise, extending from Hobbes to speech-
act theory, it becomes clear that the promise is only this: the infinite stand-
ing down and standing before of language in that which it cannot yet be, and
perhaps never will be. In its infinite before, not only does the promise not
coincide with others—a corresponding intention, an announced
fulfillment, another promise, symmetrical to the first—it does not therefore
even coincide with itself. It convenes infinitely, and therefore never entirely.
The infinite is one of the forms of inconsistency. Every given word is hyper-
bolic: it irredeemably exceeds itself. Linguistic existence expressed in the
promise remains utterly incompatible with the security intended in the
concept of self-preservation that ought to be achieved in the promise, the
agreement, the contract. Not only is every promise therefore a wild prom-
ise, but each one inaugurates as an, in principle, an-archic transcendence, a
singular wilderness—and it inaugurates it precisely as an infinite and
indefinite relation to an other. (Hence, the endless and bewildering debates
about the connection between speech acts and intentions, between expres-
sions oriented towards the future and their fulfillment, about the guaran-
tees for the mutual obligations in contracts: they do not exist; they can only
be compelled as norms, postulated as ideas, or promised—for the future.)
A second variant of the promise’s inconsistency is legible in Hobbes’s
concept of the sovereign. Hobbes must concede that the agreement
that constitutes the state, whether or not it is supposed to be a reciprocal
promise of all of its members (or even a majority of them), can never be a
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236 ● Wild Promises

reciprocal promise between the subjects of the state and the state, their sov-
ereign. Hobbes leaves no doubt that this asymmetry does not result from
any arbitrary—or occasional—decision, but rather is a structural demand
of every contractual commitment. The sovereign state and its parliamen-
tary or personal authorities can never form contracts; they are the agree-
ment, the contract, the contractual promise itself. Since the state is never a
part of the whole, but always this whole itself, it knows no contractually
capable counterpart within its own limits that would not be a part of itself.
The union defined by the promise cannot enter into a mutually grounded
alliance with those bound by it, because it itself is already the alliance, and
an alliance between the union and what it unites would have to release both
from this bond and create instead a union of the disunited. Since the prom-
ise is an agreement in a unity without exception, this unity itself can be nei-
ther an object of nor participant in further agreements. The promise is
absolute. It is not capable of action, and it is, on pain of deadly injury to the
principle of preservation, inexpressible. The political absolutism thus
established no longer requires any recourse to political theology by grace of
God, because it arises more mathematico from the structure of unity: the
unity of the state bond is nothing other than the unity of the multiplicity
convened in the contract, and accordingly only the unity achieved in the
agreement itself is the sovereign. Since no unity—were it not to be divided
within itself—can enter into a contract with itself, the society conceived in
the state must be an ultimate, in itself irreflexive authority that cannot
entertain any reciprocal relation to those constituted under it. Whereas, in
the treaty of surrender that produces the one political body, the multiplic-
ity of individuals transfers its rights to one another and thus to the one
state, this one state cannot, for its part, abandon any of its rights to the mul-
tiplicity of its subjects without dissolving its unity. The sovereign is
absolute because it is one; but because it is one, it cannot belong to the state,
but can only be this state. That is the foundation, in set theory, of the “L’état,
c’est moi” of Louis XIV, and the basis for Hobbes’s insistence that the sover-
eign cannot break a social contract since it never entered into one (Hobbes
1996, 122). The sovereign represents it, and as its representative—as its per-
sona—cannot be subject to this contract; if it were, it would subject itself to
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We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 237

itself and, as such, no longer be one but many, and thus the chaos of war and
not the systematic order of law.
On the other hand, the sovereign, precisely because it is not subject to
any contractual party and therefore also not subjected to the state, can, in
its representation of the contract, only be the continual presence of civil
war and destruction. The statement, “L’état, c’est moi,” must thus be con-
tinued and clarified: “et moi, c’est la guerre.” Hobbes, more drastically than
any other political theorist, articulates the consequence of this assessment
of the unity that cannot be part of itself when he writes, in the chapter on
the right of the sovereign to punish its subjects: “For the Subjects did not
give the Souveraign that right/of subduing, hurting, or killing any man/;
but onely in laying down theirs, strengthned him to use his own, as he
should think fit, for the preservation of them all: so that it was not given,
but left to him, and him only; and . . . as entire, as in the condition of meer
Nature, and of warre of every one against his neighbour” (Hobbes 1996,
214). The sovereign did not have to lay down any of its rights to freedom
and war, none of its arms; it is not naked, but rather existence armed for
war. It is the state as the force of nature of absolute terror. Sovereign is not
the one who determines the state of exception or of emergency [Aus-
nahmezustand]; sovereign is the exception, and the state is this state of
exception in permanence.6 But in that way, the sovereign itself is the repre-
sentative of the state bond excepted from the bond of state, and since this
contract cannot exist without its representative, the state, in this political
set problem, must be excepted from the state, empty, null and void. If,
namely, the state in the form of the sovereign is not a part of the state, does
not belong to it, is not bound to it by any law or obligation, and is, thus, nei-
ther determined nor limited by anything, then all power of the state and in
the state—except for the sheer resistance to it—is just as illegal as it is ille-
gitimate, and the contract is void. The right of the state, in order to qualify
as just, would have to indicate another right; since, according to its prem-
ises, there can be no other which would account for its right, none can, in
principle, fulfill a claim of right that would exceed the conventional or pos-
itivist decree, or the equally arbitrary reliance upon norms, even if only reg-
ulative ones. Its structural inability to be part of itself while having to
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238 ● Wild Promises

operate as such a part displaces all positive statutes, regardless of whether

they are taken from “tradition” or “consensus” or the projection of
“ideals.” What remains is the resistance of a linguistic existence that has no
right and can therefore only demand it.
The social contract and the promise it is based upon appear in their
highest representative—the sovereign, the state, the Leviathan—as a figure
of inconsistency. But this figure is nevertheless no less real; it is even the ens
realissimum in the realm of finite existence. Hobbes, upon whom this figure
imposed itself from the despair of reason in the face of civil war with pre-
cisely the same force with which the idea of God for Descartes resulted
from the hyperbolic doubt of reason about its own being, calls the
Leviathan therefore a “Mortall God”: a God, thus, who is equipped with all
the predicates of the ens perfectissimum, with the exception of its own mor-
tality, since it cannot contain itself and thus cannot maintain or preserve
itself. Hobbes adds, in reference to the Book of Job, that it is the God of the
vain (Hobbes 1996, 221)—and thus suggests that Leviathan himself is vain,
mere appearance, and null. That might be a vanitas formula, but it can only
be one because it is first an analytical formula for the diagnosis of sovereign
political structures. In a less Old Testament and less baroque, more detailed
and more critical fashion, a similar diagnosis appears in the political theo-
ries of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. The state is the macroinstitute that con-
ducts national civil war or international class warfare, although the
administration of war can counter it at best with normative-moralist slo-
gans, but nothing, beyond the contested interests of capital and work, that
could guarantee it substance and permanence. As the organizational form
of war, the state is empty and itself an agent of the emptying out of what is
assembled within it. The future of democracy, which has thus far been
dependent upon it and will remain so for the foreseeable future, must be
determined in relation to the armed emptiness of its forms of sovereignty—
the sovereignty of representatives; the sovereignty of states, state alliances,
and institutes of justice; and the sovereignty of capital and its international
corporations.
Since the promise of all individuals to coalesce into a political body can
only be a wild promise, this political body must be dissipated, the political
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We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 239

universal torn apart, and the God Leviathan finite. If it is described here
with a word that Hobbes often uses, “inconsistent” (Hobbes 1996, 209), it
is not simply in the lax sense of “contradictory” and in the etymological
sense of what does not stand with itself and has no persistence in itself, but
also in the strict sense of the term in set theory: intolerable to itself and
exclusive of itself. The promise of sovereignty upon which the social con-
tract is ostensibly based cannot be guaranteed by any prior order of the
promise and cannot be bound by any existing compact; it must be free of
them and free of the promise itself. This freedom of the promise to begin
with itself and to establish an agreement of its own accord, independent of
other or prior contractual obligations, appears in Hobbes’s construction as
the agreement itself—the “Covenant,” and thus also the commonwealth,
the state, or its highest representative—that cannot surrender its rights,
cannot take part in the “Covenant,” can make no promises, and is bound to
no promise. The promise cannot be an object of the promise. And since it is
true that “a Promise is equivalent to a Covenant” (95), it is also true that:
the agreement is not an object of another agreement; and: the sovereign
state is not bound to the promise that constitutes it. Sovereignty—of the
promise and of the state thus founded—lies in the constancy of its form and
the infinite variability of its contents, which cannot include its form. The
promise that is the state is that absolutum that is exempted from itself. That
means, however, it cannot ever be checked, and can, at all times, cause ter-
ror, murder, and self-destruction. It can always be—and must always be
able to be—a threat, a declaration of war, or a crime, regardless of whether
it is freely given or given under duress. Yet if every promise—and the fun-
damental promise that produces constituted society above all—is in this
sense itself unconditional, sovereign, and, in principle, free with respect to
the promise, then it is exempted from itself, empty: “meer words.” It is a
“word of the Future,” a state of the future, not only in the sense that it is
anticipated and still to come, but also in that it never exists in any present
as anything other than an indication towards the future. In every promise,
“we” promise “ourselves” a “we,” and in every promise, each of the posi-
tions of the promise—the doubled “we,” the “us,” and the “promise”—
marks a void that can only be filled by the future, and that might just as
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240 ● Wild Promises

easily remain unfulfilled. Nevertheless, the promise exists—it is given,

gives itself, and insists—not as the reliable foundation of a political topos,
but rather as the a-topos of language, its society, and its politics. Thus, what
Bataille said about sovereignty is more true of the promise than of any
other linguistic form: “La souveraineté n’est RIEN.”7 It is, more precisely, the
resistant demarcation of a nothing as the absolute minimum of the politi-
cal that can be fixed in a demarcation.
A third version of the inconsistency of language and speech acts
becomes apparent in this minimum of political existence. It appears,
namely, in the subject that revolts against the social contract and its repre-
sentative sovereign. In Hobbes’s view of right, it is impossible to revoke the
enthroning of a sovereign, whether as monarch or parliament. The con-
tractual promise is irreversible; once established, right cannot be displaced,
because every subject constituted through the agreement as part of the
state and thus as a (as its) subject, would have to revoke itself and destroy
its own sovereignty. Hence: “if he that attempteth to depose his
Souvereign, be killed, or punished by him for such attempt, he is author of
his own punishment, as being by the Institution, Author of all his
Souvereign shall do” (Hobbes 1996, 122). Since every individual is the
author of what the sovereign does as representative, every act of the sover-
eign against his subjects is an act of this subject; and vice-versa: every act of
subjects against their sovereign is in turn exclusively an act of subjects
against themselves. The sovereign does not act; it represents. Every turn of
an actor against itself, be it real or only possible, is strictu sensu, in the coun-
terlogic of the subject as well as its ontology of right, impossible: “to do
injury to ones self, is impossible” (124). Hobbes’s apodictic sentence is an
unattributed quotation from the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics,
where Aristotle argues—as did Plato before him, and Thomas afterwards—
that violence against oneself can be viewed as injustice (1138a14). Since the
concepts of justice and injustice are always related to a third, and ultimately
also to the polis, whoever harms oneself can cause injustice not to oneself
but only to the political community in oneself. In the postulate that it is
impossible to do injustice to oneself, the self is thus determined as political
through and through and can only be viewed as a subject—that is, as
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We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 241

subject to rights. In this subject, defined entirely in terms of the power rela-
tions of the contract, there is no other, neither a natural other nor one of a
neighboring or future society. Hobbes, however, abandons—and must
abandon for the sake of the coherence of the system—the sphere of right as
the sphere of universal subjectivity, exposed in every individual precisely
where an attack on the life of the sovereign should be argued against. Here,
Hobbes says of the one who slays the sovereign: “he punisheth another, for
the actions committed by himselfe” (124). However concrete this sentence
might be, it is also false because it introduces “another” into a system of
omnipresent subjectivity of right and power, where there can emphatically
be no others. That Hobbes, in this decisive and in every sense capital
moment—that is, one concerning a capital offense—appeals to an other
may be explained in terms of the history of politics or of ideas that neutral-
ize this mistake in a broader context. But what is decisive here is that the
system of the political subjectivity of right—and thus of subjectivity as
such—is abandoned by its reliance upon an other that can in no way be con-
ceived as subject. In the beheaded sovereign, the commonwealth, the civi-
tas, the Leviathan itself would be decapitated, and an other Leviathan, an
other sovereign, and, a limine, a dead one, would be touched: an other who
must, upon pain of the collapse of politically just subjectivity, remain
unimaginable and unrepresentable. What the argument “he punisheth
another, for actions committed by himselfe” should exclude is evoked pre-
cisely as the existential threat of the political subject as such. In Hobbes’s
social contract, there can only be other subjects, but never anything other
than subjects: this other is nevertheless present, however, as the possibility
of either “natural” or violent death in the sovereign, as well as in each of its
subjects. The entire political system of subjectivity rests upon this possibil-
ity, experienced always as a threat because it is first used as such: upon the
threat, that is, of depoliticization, delegitimation, and desubjectivation.
For the purposes of politicization, legitimation, and subjectivation, this
threat seems indispensable because, “without the terrour of some Power,”
“Fear,” “the Sword” (117), the state cannot fulfill the functions of gratifi-
cation and preservation. But if the other becomes a threat, and thus an
instrument of self-constitution and self-preservation, the self constitutes
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242 ● Wild Promises

and preserves itself not so much against its other as from it: not self-
sufficient, and not, in itself, permanent, but con-stituted with an other that
cannot be a subject and, therefore, de-stituted, at every moment—and
something other than a moment—exposed to an other. The self, at the limit
of its confrontation with death, is not only being unto death, but rather from
its death.
The promise, every promise, is meant to be a political and temporal-
political act. In it, one is supposed to subject oneself to the word that binds
one with another and with their future. Only bound in this way, and by
virtue of the interweaving of the given word, can each of the two appear as
subject to their bond, and as subject to the act that brought about this bond
between them and the dimensions of their time. They can, thus, be subjects
only after the act and by virtue of the act; the act, in turn, can only be one of
subjects, not one without them. This indissoluble aporia of the promise—
having to occur without subjects and without acts, while nevertheless bind-
ing subjects—this aporia of the birth of a common language, of an
agreement and of a (even if minimal) political bond, like all aporias of cre-
ation, invention, of the new and yet-to-come, makes its structure most
clearly apparent in relation to the end of the promise. Promises are, unnec-
essarily, as Hobbes stresses, and in extreme cases, sealed with an oath. In
one passage, under the marginal heading “The End of an Oath,” he attrib-
utes the capacity of strengthening the power of the word to the oath: “The
Passion to be reckoned upon, is”—once again—“Fear” (Hobbes 1996, 99).
That is, the fear of the vengeance of an invisible power, the absolute power
of God in this case, if the promise is not kept and fulfilled. “Such was the
Heathen Form, Let Jupiter kill me else, as I kill this Beast. So is our forme, I
shall do thus, and thus, so help me God” (99). The oath is a self-condem-
nation, a curse concerning the possibility that the promise might not be
kept. In it, at the end of the promise, in either Christian or heathen form,
explicitly or silently, the swearer exposes himself to death; in it, he conjures
death as the ultimate guarantee of his promise, and in it, he promises him-
self death should he not be able to stand in for the life of his word. In the
end, the promise is always thus a contract with death against death. In it,
language exposes itself to the end of all speech; it exposes itself to its own
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We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 243

exposure. But if there is no language without the promise, and if every lan-
guage is in the first place the promise and announcement of a common lan-
guage, then this contract with the death of language belongs to the
irreducible structure of language as such—the contract with what cannot
enter into any agreement, the contact with what cannot be touched, and the
bond with what dissolves all bonds. Every promise touches this structural
taboo. If there is to be a contract between determinable pairs, then only if
this undeterminable other is touched by both and the act is deactivated as a
mere occurrence of contingency. In it, common language is stripped of its
subjectivity as well as of its normative or regulative forms: it is not perfor-
mative in the sense of the fulfillment of an assumed or conventional form
of action, but rather an opening up to possible forms, thus ad-formative; a
dissolution of sedimented forms, aformative; and, thirdly, a conjuring of
that impossibility of form that is the absence of language, afformative.
Because the promise, as the inauguration of all undefined language games,
already speaks itself into what is not yet and perhaps never will be lan-
guage: it speaks as invitation for and resistance to everything that is with-
out language, speechless. Stripped of all arms against others, its nakedness
itself is the ultimate and most powerful weapon of language. The language
in the promise is the bare speakable [das Sprechbare] that Benjamin called,
with Kant and Hölderlin, the bare impartable [das Mitteilbare]: discharged
of all predetermined forms, subjects, addressees, and contents—of all
arms—naked, and receptive to the old and oldest, the new and all others,
and also to none. This is what Hölderlin calls “the spirit of the eternally liv-
ing, unwritten wilderness” in his “Notes on Antigone.”8 Without this spirit,
there is no politics; with it, only a politics directed toward another. Either
one is a wild promise.

I
NOTES

1. See Hobbes 1996, 89.

2. Manfred Riedel has already made this observation in relation to the note “omnia facta
esse ex nihilo” from Hobbes’s “Appendix ad Lev.” See Reidel (1975, 182f.).
3. Jens Kulenkampff discusses this and related aporias in Hobbes’s construction in con-
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244 ● Wild Promises

nection with the relevant work of Tönnies, Oakeshott, Taylor, Warrender, Hood, and
Ilting in Kulenkampff (1983, 218ff.).
4. In his impressive study Thomas Hobbes: Visuelle Strategien, Horst Bredekamp develops
the political iconography of this composite body through an abundance of materials
and determinants, though he does not account for the structure and function of
Hobbes’s concept of the person (Bredekamp 1999).
5. See Hume 1987, 465ff.
6. The reference to Carl Schmitt’s apodictic definition of sovereignty in “Political
Theology,” “Sovereign is the one who determines the state of emergency” [Souverän ist,
wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet], can be related here to Walter Benjamin’s
comment in the seventh thesis of “Zum Begriff der Geschichte” that the “state of emer-
gency” [Ausnahmezustand] in which we live is the rule (Benjamin 1972, 697). Schmitt’s
cardinal mistake, which Benjamin would clearly have detected, lies in thinking sover-
eignty as a decision about the state of emergency, standing thus as much as an excep-
tion [Ausnahme] as over the exception. His lifelong preoccupation with Hobbes should
have taught him that the sovereign is never excepted from the exception and thus can-
not also have the power to master it. Schmitt’s entire construction serves as the neu-
tralization of precisely that exception that he claims to have discovered as the
fundamental concept of right. It is therefore, as Benjamin’s quotation marks signal,
merely the semblance of an exception. These comments should indicate just how much
more complex the structure of sovereignty is for the most radical political theorist of
early modernity, and should also suggest something about the “real state of emer-
gency” that is no less pressing today than it was at the time of Benjamin’s theses. (For
further connections, see Hamacher [1991] and its translation in Hamacher [1994]).
7. See Bataille (1976, 259).
8. See Hölderlin (1969, 784).

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Bredekamp, Horst. 1999. Thomas Hobbes: Visuelle Strategien. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
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———. 1996. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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