More on Kantorowicz

Here's august's follow-on entries to our discussion of The King's Two Bodies. They're interspersed with the demands of jury duty... I'm working on a response (and have been plowing through the text...)

august:

I have fifteen minutes before I have to dash off to (gasp) jury duty, which should give me lots of reading time but very little internet time. Which is too bad, because I'm finding I have enormous amounts to say. You've raised important issues about the book (I particularly want to come to the weakness of the king vis-a-vis the King -- the capitalization being the most economic way of distinguishing the two). I also want to talk about my own research. But because I have fifteen minutes, I'm just going to talk about the conference I went to over the weekend. It concerned the Wutai complex of mountains, an area long associated with Manjusri , who supposedly gained enlightentment there.

I'm thinking about the area because, among other things, eighteenth-century Chinese emperors claimed to be reincarnations of Manjusri. This image probably appealed to Buddhist constituencies of the empire, and it also appears to have faciliated a number of rituals meant to bring long life to the imperial house.

Several quick points. First, there was nothing like a trinitarian, or even dualist, way of dealing with this image of the emperor. In other images, emperors would be depicted as Confucian Literati, and wearing that hat they would write scripts denouncing Buddhism. There was a simultaneity of imperial roles that did not require each role to be commensurate with the others. Contrast the examples provided, where king and King have a complex relationship within a single man, rather tragically so in the case of Richard II.

The obvious answer is that the King's Two Bodies is based on centuries of theological bickering over the trinity - but I think it says something else about the corporealness of the images Kantorowicz shows us. Power is naturalized in bodies, and the metaphor of the body is a central means of making different claims of sovereignty --- over oneself, over rival claimants, and over the body politic.

Mt. Wutai is also interesting because it is a tricky little zone of sovereignty. There are different Buddhist sects with temple complexes there, and the Dalai Lama turns out to have been an important figure. The area was exceptional in the empire -- it was firmly located within China proper, yet the monks representing the area had to obey certain diplomatic niceties usual reserved for distant monarchs (I could explain these ceremonies, but it's a long story). In short, the complex was a little bit like an Indian reservation -- a kink in what one might otherwise think of as a seemless web of sovereignty.

I've been wondering about such kinks. In the U.S., of course, the Trail of Tears was one way we worked out such things. In Kantorowicz, I'm wondering ways different visions of the King's Two Bodies might have been articulated in space.

Very quickly on the weakness of the king (as opposed to the King): I was reading an essay by Lawrence Wechsler (worth checking out -- it's about a historian of the Law of War who serves as a consultant to both the war crimes trial of the former Yugoslavia and to a production of Shakespeare). It's in his collection Vermeer in Bosnia. One of the points is that there was a complicated medieval law of war -- basically a chivaric code -- that did not break down until the crusades, and that remained as a remembered ideal long after. I think there was a tangential point to be made about regicide -- that in the French Revolution, killing the king and queen was less shocking than putting them on trial, which simply seemed not possible, some conjuring of law akin to Gonzales trying to talk about habeas corpus -- you just get a look on your face like -- hunh?

At any rate, these bodies, zones, territories, etc. were thought to make up a polity. That seems to me fully as mystic a fiction as any of the Christological images of the King on Ottonian bibles. "Sovereignty" is itself a tricky term in the way it simultaneously implies the person of the monarch, the borders of an area, and the collective governance of that area. Communicating such complicated relationships in an image (itself rather laden with metaphor) seems to me the work of the King's Two Bodies.

I'm going to try to find time later this afternoon to respond more directly to the points you raised, and also to say a little more about my own work. I'm amazed at how robust this work is, how much it gets me thinking every time I pick it up.

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August's Second Response:
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Anyway, all I was saying was that the king barely exists as long as there's a King around, so Richard II, stripped of being King, hasn't got a lot left.

You asked about my own academic interests. I work on the rebuilding of a city that was destroyed in an enormous (Christianity-inspired) rebellion. The religious nature of the rebellion meant that those rebuilding the city were especially concerned with religious issues. I'm particularly interested in the reestablishment of state ritual practices.

Chinese officials were required by law to make offerings to a set pantheon of gods and moral exemplars. Imperial statutes dictated the list of figures venerated, the items presented as offerings, the ranks of officials taking part, and the liturgy of the ceremonies. These rituals changed over the course of the nineteenth century.

I argue that shifts in ritual practice demonstrate an expansion of political participation in the following ways:

1. More people deliberate and have a voice in what gods and exemplars should receive offerings

2. More people (and in particular, more people who are not officials) take part in the rituals

3. More and more gods and exemplars are included in the imperial pantheon.

This last point is key. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the emperor is the embodiment of the state -- the strength of the state is said to rest on his personal virtue, and this view is enacted and reproduced in ritual. In the wake of the rebellion I study, thousands and thousands of people who died defending the dynasty get incorporated into the state cult of rituals. As a result, key areas of the city that I study are devoted to the care of the souls of these dead figures. The strength of the state now appears to rely on their actions and virtues, rather than those of the emperor.

They are not yet citizens, but the rituals and language employed would later be used by republican governments to express the idea of nation -- citizen as opposed to ruler-subject.

In broader terms, I argue that the nineteenth century was an age of utopian visions in China -- that contending groups advocated different ideas about the polity. In each case, the polity rested on a particular way of looking at the cosmos. The relationship between cosmos and polity was displayed and enacted in ritual, hence the particular importance of ritual practices to the running of the state. The shifts I identify were not simply a transition from empire to nation-state, but rather creative improvisation of new alternatives, roads not taken that have been ignored by folks more interested in the fall of the dynasty or the rise of nationalism.

I'm particularly interested in how ritual (and other, Kantorowicz-like, representations) has power in a given place -- how particular groups might make local use of images or practices that seem to have a national audience. In the case of the King's Two Bodies, a similar set of questions might include: does the idea show up in, for example, the construction of buildings. Do different groups favor different interpretations of the relationship between King and king?

You are right that we both have contemporary concerns as well. Democracy seems to me to be under threat from a failure of imagination as much as a failure of institutions. People don't seem to get (or do get, and are powerless to do anything about) what, for example, Gitmo means as an exercise of sovereignty.

Gotta go again. Sorry this is choppy. Hope you can follow. I'm finding I have a lot to say -- feel free to chime in with whatever. I hope later on to dig a little deeper into K's text.

talk to you soon.