DOCUMENT
UFD025
Vincent Garton
Leviathan Rots
Gazing into the occult nightmare of Leviathan, Vincent
Garton calls for an unconditional retheorisation that
moves beyond both the restoration of the state and its
neocameralist multiplication
1. The King of the Proud
Nothing on earth is its equal—a creature without
fear. It looks down on all that are haughty; it is king
over all that are proud.
—Job 41:33–34
Abraham Bosse’s frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s
Leviathan is one of the most famous images in
the history of philosophy. It shows the enormous
figure of the ‘mortall God’, the blurry aggregate of
the faces of all the various men and women of the
commonwealth, as a collective sovereign towering
as one over the countryside. The picture is striking,
yet it leaves unanswered a crucial question: Why,
exactly, did Hobbes choose to call this enormous
beast ‘Leviathan’? Hobbes himself, of course, gives
an answer: ‘the great power of [man’s] Governour
[…] I compared to Leviathan, taking that comparison
out of the two last verses of the one and fortieth of
Job; where God having set forth the great power of
Leviathan, called him King of the Proud.’1 But this
is curiously perfunctory. The image of the ‘one and
fortieth of Job’ is not at all as reassuring as Bosse’s—
which already seems scary enough. In the Book of
Job, Leviathan is a horrific creature. Armoured with
plated shields, snarling with ‘fearsome teeth’, ‘its
snorting throws out flashes of light; its eyes are like
the rays of dawn. Flames stream from its mouth;
sparks of fire shoot out. […] It makes the depths
churn like a boiling caldron’ (Job 41:20–21, 31).
Hobbes obscures this frightening image even as he
Carl Schmitt, who fancied himself—with more than
a grain of justification—the Hobbes of the twentieth century, proposed to solve the contradiction
in an esoteric piece of iconographic research, The
Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes.
For Schmitt, the problem was simple: Hobbes had
picked the wrong image. With more than an overtone
of anti-Semitism—he was, at least in public, by this
point in 1938 a devoted acolyte of the Nazi regime—
Schmitt complains that the pre-existence of the
scriptural, Jewish image of the Leviathan, supposedly entirely other than the rigorous Hobbesian construction of the symbol, defeated Hobbes’s purposes.
Leviathan, Schmitt states, ‘evokes […] dreadful Asiatic
myths of an all-demanding Moloch or an all-trampling
Golem. According to cabbalistic views, the leviathan
is thought of as a huge animal with which the Jewish
God plays daily for a few hours’.2 This parade of
‘Asiatic’ horribles could only be construed as entirely
opposite to Hobbes’s intentions; as the apex image of
the modern state, Hobbes used it ‘without horror and
without reverence’, an entirely rational and un-‘cabbalistic’ construction.3 Poor Hobbes, however, was
2. C. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas
Hobbes, tr. G. Schwab and E. Hilfstein (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 1996), 57.
1. T. Hobbes, Leviathan, XXVIII.
3. Ibid., 95.
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cites it. Emblazoned as it is in the title of work, however, for any reader who is scripturally aware—as
indeed Hobbes’s readers were—it lurks irrepressibly
in the background of the text. Chained between the
lines, its thrashing echoes across Hobbes’s relentless argumentation.
overwhelmed: just a few years after Leviathan’s appearance, we are told, Spinoza the liberal Jew perceived at once the contradictions, and forced the
‘barely visible crack’ open, ‘sapping the leviathan’s
vitality from within’ and opening the ‘telling inroad of
modern liberalism’.4
thought; it points to a problem inherent to the practice of politics. For in Hobbes’s political theology,
we enter—to use his own phrase—a ‘kingdom of
darkness’.
It is a darkness that overwhelms not just Hobbes,
but modern politics as such.
2. The Enthusiast
Everything under heaven belongs to me.
—Job 41:11
The term ‘catastrophe’ in the general sense in which
we use it today originates in the prophetic upheaval
of the Hobbesian era, the English Civil War. Perhaps
the earliest surviving usage is to be found in a short
Fifth-Monarchist pamphlet of 1654 entitled, appropriately, The Grand Catastrophe: here, the ‘grand
catastrophe’ is identified with God’s ‘resolve […]
to change the forme of Government from what it
was now […] unto what it was better’.5 The historical significance of this obscure text far exceeds the
content of its arguments. It stands, chronologically, at the head of an entire ‘catastrophic’ literature
of the later seventeenth century that purported to
divine the significance of the ongoing motions of
politics according to the movements of the heavens. In the 1680s we find the Catastrophe Mundi, or,
Europe’s many mutations of the mathematician and
astrologer John Holwell beside the similarly titled
Catastrophe Mundi, or Merlin Reviv’d of the magician, associate of John Dee, and former Civil War
propagandist William Lilly, each offering its occult
prognoses of the impending arrival of a new order
of the European states.6
Liberal political theory is not, today,
an anti-Hobbesian construct:
the construction of any state on a
constitutional basis depends on
certain Hobbesian assumptions
Let us begin by offering to be more generous to
Hobbes than Schmitt was. Liberal political theory is not, today, an anti-Hobbesian construct: the
construction of any state on a constitutional basis
depends on certain Hobbesian assumptions, the
assumptions of a social contract theory. Together
with Machiavelli’s Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan offers
a descriptive analysis that was central to the birth
of political science, and it is an analysis with staying power precisely because of the force of its representation of the state form in abstract.
If the occult stands at the historical root of the
concept of catastrophe, however, there is also
something peculiarly catastrophic about the occult. The term disaster, after all, is equally astrological: dis-aster, the falling constellation—‘the stars
down to earth’. The association between turmoil in
heaven and earth is in itself hardly specific to the
Western occult tradition, of course: this is the heart
Yet Schmitt is correct in one respect. The quality of
Leviathan as religious symbol—the terror of its image in Job, its subjugation as a plaything of God—is
of decisive importance not just for the immediate
trajectory of Hobbes’s political theory, as Schmitt
5. ‘Johannes Cornubiensis’, The Grand Catastrophe, or the
change of Government, being a word about the last turne of
these times (1654), 2.
6. J. Holwell, Catastrophe Mundi, or, Europe’s many mutations
until the year 1701… (1682); W. Lilly, Catastrophe Mundi: or, Merlin Reviv’d, in a Discourse of Prophecies and Predictions (1683).
4. Ibid., 57.
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Schmitt’s fable puts Hobbes in an unenviable position: while rescuing Hobbes’s thought from the
supposed problems of his symbol and restoring it,
Schmitt undermines both the extent of his influence
and the depth of his imagery. Liberal political theory, going back to Spinoza, is construed as something radically anti-Hobbesian, a cancer perverting
Leviathan from within that metastasised almost
immediately after Hobbes’s formulation of the concept. If there is a moment of salvation for Schmitt,
it is merely that ‘on the thought processes of total
technology the leviathan can no longer make a sinister impression’—this manifest failure of the symbol
will, at last, free Hobbes from the ‘dreadful Asiatic
myths’, finally permitting the sober application of his
theory to the Hobbesian age of modern politics.
of astrology as such, reaching back to the ancient
magi of Babylon, repeated equally on the other side
of the world in the Chinese notion of the ‘mandate
of heaven’ or ‘heaven’s command’, tianming, 天命,
which locates the underlying order of the labyrinth
of the political in the will of heaven made manifest
as fate.7 But where tianming posits a transcendent
order, it is ostensibly in the modern West—beginning in the Hobbesian moment and extended in
the relentless naturalisation of ‘catastrophe’ in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, firstly after the
great Lisbon earthquake, and then in the geological
theory of catastrophism—that the occult reality of
‘catastrophe’ assumes the aspect of something truly
monstrous, a figure of absolute exteriority, of heterotopic nightmare.
Hobbes’s text is not just wracked by,
but is founded on a psychotic intolerance of the ‘Enthusiasts’, the ‘theomancers’, the ‘prophets’
Hobbes’s answer to the problem was simple—at
first sight, at least. Thought must be controlled at
its very roots, in its ulterior basis in myth. The very
possibility of the theomantic short-circuit around
Leviathan must be stamped out; all human disagreements must be evaporated first into the determinate text of scripture, and ultimately into the orthodoxy pronounced in the commands of the Persona
Civitatis, the aggregate ‘Person of the Commonwealth’. He puts the point most sharply in an earlier part of the book, while discussing the universal
basis of the pagan commonwealths: ‘Sometimes,’
he says, the ‘insignificant Speeches of Mad-men
[were] supposed to be possessed with a divine
Spirit; which Possession they called Enthusiasme;
and these kinds of foretelling events, were accounted Theomancy […] And therefore the first Founders,
and Legislators of Common-wealths […] have in all
places taken care, First, to imprint in their minds a
beliefe, that those precepts which they gave concerning Religion, might not be thought to proceed
from their own device.’9
And so back to Hobbes himself. To the modern reader,
the serious political theorist, it seems almost embarrassing that nearly half of Leviathan is made up of its
treatment of theology in Parts III and IV, with its discussion of the ‘kingdom of darknesse’ and its sprawling digressions on prophecies and scriptural esoterica,
demons, witchcraft, and miracles. Yet Hobbes’s text
is not just wracked by, but is founded on a psychotic intolerance of the ‘Enthusiasts’, the ‘theomancers’,
the ‘prophets’, those men and women throughout human history who have claimed that God could speak
through them; who have claimed, more radically, to
see beyond politics directly into the occult circuitry of
which all human affairs are merely the simulated emanation.8 From Hobbes’s perspective, the catastrophic
occultist stands in the gloom of the outside, looming
as a spectre of militant opposition to the suspension
of catastrophe by the state, welling up from the residues of reality the state has failed to overcome.
7. On the differences in Chinese and Western conceptions of
technics and time, see Y. Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016); A. Greenspan,
Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (London: Hurst & Company, 2014).
If the modern liberal disdains the kind of supercilious totalitarianism implied in this solution—and of
course, for Hobbes, in a Christian commonwealth
this is not a matter of spreading lies in the form of
8. My argument owes much to Takuya Okada’s ‘Thomas Hobbes
on Christian Religion in the Context of the English Civil War: His
Use of the Bible in Leviathan’ (unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of Tokyo, 2016).
9. Hobbes, Leviathan, XII.
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Over and over, Leviathan returns to the need to
suppress the Enthusiast in all its guises: in chapter
7, chapter 8, chapter 12, chapter 32, chapter 34….
Casting his gaze over the vista of ruin wrought in
seventeenth-century England by the enthusiastic
sects, Hobbes could see all too well that this figure
was the single most dangerous vulnerability of the
commonwealth. Leviathan may be a terrible beast,
a plated colossus impregnable to any human weapon, churning whirlpools of slaughter with its belly as
it breathes the fire of reason from its mouth. Yet
above Leviathan there stands God, transcendent
mystery—and to lay claim to the voice of God himself leaves Leviathan among the detritus of the transcended. Schmitt was precisely correct in seeing
the Jewish image of Leviathan as making it a ‘plaything of God’, then; but he was disastrously wrong in
assuming that this is a problem exterior to Hobbes’s
theory. This paranoia is central to Hobbes himself.
‘Everything under Heaven belongs to me’—yet not
Heaven itself….
of Hobbes’s ‘Platonism’. Following Plato, Strauss
argued, Hobbes desires a ‘completely passionless,
purely rational political philosophy’, yet he wishes
also a ‘norm […] applicable under all circumstances, under the most unfavourable circumstances, in
the extreme cases’ (the case, we may add, of the
Enthusiast). And so his norm enters, despite itself,
into ‘accord with the passions’; it must become radically anti-Platonist.12 Finally, pretending to transcend
the Enthusiast, the commonwealth itself becomes a
‘demonic machine’, a tremendous enthusiasm mobilised against every other, all themselves constituted
as enthusiasms relative to it.13
In an ordered society, the insectoid
buzz of heterodoxy must always and
already appear as a nightmare
The process, of course, operates just as much in the
opposite direction. The sect tends to become like a
state. This is the sociological tendency described in
Max Weber’s theory of the routinisation of charisma,
the processes of mediation that transform the compact charismatic community that adheres around a
leader ‘completely outside everyday social organisation’ into an extensive and bureaucratised institutional church:14 from the early Christians to the Catholic
Church; from the immediacy of the original Raëlian
UFO cult, where the revelations of the literally alien
Outside were made manifest directly to the faithful,
to the bureaucracy of the latter-day Raëlians, with
its increasing regulation of access to the divine.15
The same idea is found equally in the genealogy of
the state itself, in Rousseau’s figure of the Legislator,
that promethean silhouette at the origin of every
state whose genius projects its entire constitutional
course—is this not the figure of a prophet?16 Can
there be an orthodoxy that is more than an overgrown heterodoxy? Can there be a heterodoxy that
does not assume the position of an orthodoxy?
The whole endeavour of human politics seems little
There is, however, a curious quality, a deep dissatisfaction, lurking in Hobbes’s mythic solution of the
problem—on its own terms, and not just those of an
exterior moralism. If the commonwealth installs itself
as the king of the proud, the avatar of God, how
does it not itself become sectarian? To maintain itself, the state must neuter or eliminate ‘every religion
that exalts itself to be its judge’; but in doing so, the
state must itself assume the aspect of a ‘definite
form of religion’, becoming the fount of truth.11 So
far, so good, perhaps, as long as the commonwealth
can monopolise the thought of its members—but
in the emergency where it cannot, things soon take
on a rather different appearance. The more sharply it is confronted by the prophets of catastrophe,
the more ruthlessly sectarian it must become, dividing the good and the evil, denouncing its enemies
with furious vitriol. The Persona Civitatis becomes
caught in the very matrix of the religious paranoia
it denounces, as it shrieks the ill omens betokened
by its opponents. It is precisely this contradiction
that Leo Strauss articulated through the paradox
12. L. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and
Its Genesis [1936], tr. E .Sinclair (Chicago and London, 1952), 150.
13. On Leviathan as infernal machine, see P. Springborg, ‘Hobbes
and Schmitt on the name and nature of Leviathan revisited’, in
Johan Tralau (ed.), Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt: The Politics of Order and Myth (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 39–58.
14. M. Weber, The Theory of Economic and Social Organization,
tr. A. M. Henderson and T. Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 367.
15. See S. J. Palmer, Aliens Adored: Raël’s UFO Religion (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 101.
16. J.-J. Rousseau, Of the Social Contract, Book II, Chapter 7. As
Schmitt recognises, the gaze of the Legislator lurks at the root of
every constitution: C. Schmitt, Dictatorship: From the Origin of the
Modern Concept of Sovereignty to the Proletarian Class Struggle,
tr. M. Hoelzl and G. Ward (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 109–10.
10. T. Hobbes, Behemoth: or, the Long Parliament, Dialogue I.
11. F. Nietzsche, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Untimely Meditations.
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pagan myths, but of upholding the truth of scripture
itself—she may see Hobbes’s point better when
confronted by the reality of the civil war in the context of which he was writing. His later retrospective,
Behemoth, sketched the problem in gruesome detail.
The English Civil War had its roots in the proliferation
of swarming sects with infinite ‘names and peculiar
doctrines’, incubating chambers spawning ‘enemies
which arose against his Majesty from the private
interpretation of the Scripture, exposed to every
man’s scanning in his mother-tongue’.10 On the surface, this is a limited point about a specific historical episode; but in its shadow lies the nightmare
of society itself. For radically, in an ordered society,
the insectoid buzz of heterodoxy must always and
already appear as a nightmare. The liberal who proclaims against Hobbes the doctrine of free speech
will often prove just as susceptible to the terror: for
the state, there must always be a limit to thought.
more than the current alternating between the two,
the state flipping across the cycles of history, oscillating endlessly between sect and church.
complaint. ‘Governments are made out of people,’
Land states, ‘and they will eat well’. The question,
then, is this: ‘How can the sovereign power be prevented—or at least dissuaded—from devouring society?’18 For Schmitt, the question was of similar dimensions: How is the independence of ‘the political’
from the aesthetic, the economic, from all the other
‘various relatively independent endeavours of human
thought and action’, to be maintained?19
3. The Despot and the Patchwork
Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down
its tongue with a rope? … Will traders barter for it?
Will they divide it up among the merchants?
—Job 41:1, 6
Two competing responses have arisen
to the manifest terror of Leviathan—a
revivalist and an antagonist response
Two competing responses have arisen to the manifest terror of Leviathan. They are, respectively, a
revivalist and an antagonist response. The revivalist response is best characterised by Schmitt,
who mourns the fall of ‘the “mortal god” […] from
his throne’: in the pluralistic society, he complains,
‘the parties slaughter the powerful Leviathan and
slice pieces from the flesh of his body’.17 Gripped
by processes outside the control of the state, the
world has decayed from the Hobbesian ideal—so
we are told. Yet it is precisely this degeneracy that
lets us see, with crystal clarity, the enduring wisdom of the sage of Malmesbury, and behoves us to
restore Leviathan’s ruined throne. Shorn of his inconvenient imagery, Hobbes must be revived. In his
essay on the ‘Dark Enlightenment’, Nick Land has—
seemingly unknowingly—repeated this Schmittian
If revivalist Hobbesianism proves foreclosed, the
political theorist may feel led to an antagonist
18. N. Land, ‘The Dark Enlightenment’, <http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/>.
19. C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, tr. George Schwab
(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2007), 25.
20. Hobbes, Leviathan, XXXI.
17. C. Schmitt, ‘Staatsethik und pluralistischer Staat’, quoted in J.
McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics
as Technology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 276.
21. C. Schmitt, ‘Weiterentwicklung des totalen Staats in
Deutschland’ (1933).
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In the end, Hobbes shows us that it cannot be
maintained. Precisely like Schmitt, like the ‘Dark
Enlightenment’, Hobbes wanted a sovereign as restrained as necessary for a stable society: it would
deal not with ‘sciences Mathematicall’, for instance,
but strictly with law and ethics, maintaining merely
the covenant that is the essential ground of any civil
society.20 But to be sustained even in the most radical state of exception, in conditions of overwhelming
catastrophe, the commonwealth’s domination must
expand irrepressibly from the radical root of human
thought into every circle of existence. It must ‘devour society’. This was the root of Hobbes’s byzantine obsession with the occult, the delirious loops
that trapped him in the ‘kingdom of darkness’: even
the most restrained of states cannot tolerate the
existential opposition of the Enthusiast, and as sectarian exceptions and negative glitches flood the
body of Leviathan, the shields over its body must
lock down, and the monster must transform into its
terrible mode of siege, switching from Bosse to Job
as it becomes a creature of fire and blood. Schmitt,
just prior to the dawn of the Third Reich, tried to
distinguish the ‘qualitative totalitarianism’ necessary for the sustenance of the state, which he drew
from Hegel, from the ‘quantitative totalitarianism’
of intervention in every sphere of human life.21 The
distinction failed. Once threatened, Leviathan must
warp everything around itself in order to maintain
its existence—all thought, all ideology, all behaviour.
Politics must get a grip—whatever the cost.
The character of the state—not just in the architecture of Hobbes’s theory, but as such—is precisely
that of a demonic machine. The impasse of enthusiasm is not simply an intellectual failing on Hobbes’s
part, then; we cannot dissociate, as Schmitt attempted, the rational sovereign of Bosse’s image
from the esoteric Leviathan of Job 41. To sustain
itself in the most extreme of conditions, the rational
sovereign must become entirely, furiously, irrational. This impasse is inherent to the state form itself.
Hobbes’s enduring insight lies precisely in his ability,
at the very origins of the modern state, to formulate
its paradoxes so decisively.
The Relative Enthusiast must install,
by sociological inevitability, a state.
The mask of the anti-Hobbesian is
ripped off—and the despot as God
stares out from beneath
necessarily their own. But the moment of maturity is endlessly deferred, the exception in which a
dictatorship is established yawns into eternity: political education turns into grim authoritarianism. It
assumes the character of the sect. This, then, locates exactly the problem of the Relative Enthusiast.
Just as the state must assume the aspect of sectarianism to stamp out the sects that challenge it,
the Enthusiast who wishes to demolish the state by
appeal to the transcendent becomes, in power, the
king of the proud, since she herself has now taken
the mantle of mediator between God and the profane, and must suppress the theomantic short circuit
that reaches over her head. The Relative Enthusiast
must install, by sociological inevitability, a state. The
mask of the anti-Hobbesian is ripped off—and the
despot as God stares out from beneath.
Ripping up Leviathan is harder than it seems.
Perhaps we will be better served by another vehicle that Land has mobilised to restrain the power
of Leviathan—at least on the level of its extensive
territoriality. This is the neo-Westphalian theory of
the patchwork. Derived from the neoreactionary
thinker Curtis Yarvin, the patchwork presents an image of endless fission, ‘a global spiderweb of tens,
even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries’, each with its own internal, ‘neocameralist’ sovereign.25 This image should
not be dismissed as ‘fascist’. It reprises a tradition of
Western political thought that reaches back across
the doctrine of cuius regio to the very origins of nationalism in the medieval French reaction against
the universalist pretences of the Emperor; in its substance, it is clearly antagonistic to the universality
of the fascist state with its insatiable thirst for conquest and death.
This may seem like an issue peculiar to Rousseau
himself, but the problem can be generalised. Radical
democrats in power have ever devoted themselves
to the task of political education: for them as for
Rousseau, civilised man has become corrupt, and
the state must be mobilised to restore them to a
purer state—the Montagnards and the Leninists
each identified perverse and ghoulish tendencies of
a corrupted humanity that needed ruthlessly to be
stamped out. The reality of popular desire exceeds
22. For an explicit case for radicalism against Hobbes, see, for
instance, J. Gilbert, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (London: Pluto, 2014). Gilbert
has elsewhere posited this explicitly against Land, accepting Land’s dichotomy between Hobbesian reaction and anti-Hobbesian radicalism. See also Gilles Châtelet’s denunciation
of Hobbes’s ‘social physics’ and its neoliberal legacy, in To Live
and Think Like Pigs (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2014).
23. I. Hont, ‘Adam Smith’s history of law and government as political theory’, in R. Bourke and R. Geuss (eds), Political Judgement
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 131–71: 148.
24. Rousseau to Mirabeau, 26 July 1767, in J.-J. Rousseau, V.
Gourevitch (ed), The Social Contract and Other Later Political
Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 270.
25. ‘Mencius Moldbug’ (Curtis Yarvin), ‘Patchwork: A Positive Vision (Part 1)’, <http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.
de/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1.html>.
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response to Hobbes. Land himself posits this alternative when he suggests that neoreaction is
‘recognizably Hobbesian […] devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular
expression’: if Hobbes is too frightening, perhaps
we should turn to Rousseau.22 Superficially, this may
seem like an obvious choice: after all, is Rousseau
not the very opposite of Hobbes, believing mankind
to be inherently good, praising the state of nature,
condemning human artifice? For the historian of political thought, however, the dichotomy quickly falls
apart. Rousseau’s underlying ‘Hobbism’ has been a
perennial topic of note: Rousseau, like Hobbes, believes that ‘before the social contract there could
be neither government nor courts’;23 Rousseau, like
Hobbes, sees the natural condition of civilised man
as the war of all against all. In his infamous letter to
Mirabeau, Rousseau made this explicit. The underlying issue of all political thought, ‘the great problem of
Politics’, he states, is ‘to find a form of Government
that might place the law above man’. But ‘if unfortunately this form cannot be found, and I frankly admit
that I believe that it cannot be […] I would wish the
despot could be God. I see no tolerable mean between the most austere Democracy and the most
perfect Hobbism’—and democracy, for Rousseau,
can only ever be a government of the superhuman.24
systematic political theory of the state […] one that
is an alternative to the social contract tradition’.
Where Hobbes writes in a period of decay and collapse yet assumes the role of the philosopher of the
commonwealth triumphant, Nietzsche writes in a
time of overwhelming bureaucratisation, at the apex
of Hegelian Staatswissenschaft, yet becomes the
philosopher of the state’s decay.27 Meanwhile, in a
brief passage of his The Thirst for Annihilation, Land,
too—despite his later turn to Hobbes—points out
the essential novelty of Nietzsche’s political theory.
For Nietzsche, he says, the state does not merely suspend within its territory the primal war of all
against all, as it does in Hobbes and all the theorists
who follow him. Rather, ‘even in his earliest writings
Nietzsche is explicit […] that the polis—along with
its telic integration—is a consequence of pre-political militarism’: it is not the regulatory end, but the
vessel and conduit of war ‘in its uninhibited and extravagant root’.28
We must turn from a patchwork of
states to the infectious patchwork
within the state
The stratified state itself seethes with
viral conflict between its strata—on
this, Nietzsche aligns with Marx
If we are to escape from the conceptual Hobbesian
antinomy, from the crushing unity of the nominally
anti-Hobbesian radicalism of many on the left and
the explicit reassertion of Leviathan on the right, we
could do worse than to return to Land’s early work,
and begin anew with Nietzsche. For Nietzsche,
states are an epiphenomenon, conduits instantiated merely as moments of a great flow of intensities.
The state is not a determinate contract, established,
as for Hobbes or Rousseau, through agreement
implicit or explicit, once and ideally for all eternity—
the ‘Covenant of every man with every man’.29 In
its origins, it is instead the contingent and violent
imposition of force by a ‘conquering horde’, a military caste ‘raised […] pyramidally upon the lowest,
broadest, slavish stratum’.30 The stratified state itself seethes with viral conflict between its strata—
on this, Nietzsche aligns with Marx. ‘There is no
4. The Swarm of the Future
Who can strip off its outer coat? Who can penetrate
its double coat of armour?
—Job 41:13
Nietzsche was the first radically anti-Hobbesian
political philosopher. This all-important point has
been made, independently, from two very different perspectives. In his book Nietzsche’s Great
Politics, the intellectual historian Hugo Drochon has
argued systematically that ‘Nietzsche does offer a
27. H. Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2016), 51.
28. N. Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and
Virulent Nihilism (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 105.
29. Hobbes, Leviathan, XVII.
30. Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, 10; Nietzsche, ‘The
Greek State’, quoted in Land, Thirst for Annihilation, 105.
26. See note 33 below.
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Yet patchwork remains, despite itself, peculiarly
ambivalent. It is obsessed with the state: creating new states, cutting up states, states on top of
states…. At an elementary level, however, it seems
that competition between states must favour states
themselves, and for this we have many great proofs
throughout history—the emergence of the truly
protofascist Qin Empire from the fissiparous warring Chinese states; the rise of Alexander’s empire
from the Greek poleis; the birth of raison d’état in
Renaissance Italian city-states. (At least part of this
tendency has been formulated rigorously by Peter
Turchin.)26 To truly move beyond Leviathan in all its
universalising terror requires not the multiplication
of Leviathans, at which point we are already within
the Hobbesian trap, encouraging the monster in its
sectarianism, provoking the pathologies that have
led to imperium. It requires a radical ambivalence to
the state as such—an uncompromising identification with those processes today of mass production
and mass flows of politics that overwhelm and obsolesce the state itself. States, of course, decay. It
is something altogether more radical to posit that
the state form itself will decay. We must turn from
a patchwork of states to the infectious patchwork
within the state, a recursive dissolution that leaves
not a network of states, but an endless flux in
which the state itself disintegrates into the very war
that sustains it. For this conception, we must turn
to Nietzsche.
hope of a nation without war, or a people without
conquest.’31 The most ‘transparent’ state is not the
modern constitutional democracy, then: it is ancient
Sparta, which each year declared war upon its own
subjects. Tangled unavoidably in the war that forms
the condition and basis of its existence, the state is
subjected to a ‘zone of impotence’, penetrated by an
‘insurrectionary flow of mobilisation [it] converts and
diverts without being able to control and define’.32
remains nothing around which it is necessary to
route. Catastrophe, once exteriorised, now extends
into the state itself; ‘the net itself is infected’ and
the body of Leviathan rots with spectacular diseases.34 In this context, the relative enthusiasm of the
traditional sect into which the Hobbesian state itself digresses is juxtaposed to an absolute, swarmachinic enthusiasm that is not merely opposed to
the state, but ruthlessly indifferent, even ironical, a
subjectivity beyond political comprehension pulsing
transcendental heterodoxy: not a force of destruction motivated by a feeling of the transcendent, but
a force of obsolescence in total communion with
war.35 Nietzsche himself conceived of his work as
a religious intervention—it is a ‘tremendous asset’,
he stated in a letter, ‘to be read like the Bible’.36 But
it was an intervention far beyond anything that had
come before.
It is an escalating system-failure that
crashes Hobbes’s political theology,
pointing to the obsolescence of the
state form itself
It is always tempting to perform yet another restoration of Hobbes, whether explicit as in the
‘Dark Enlightenment’, or occulted as in the Left’s
straight-Enlightenment nostalgia for the many mutations of social contract theory. All of these accept
as friend or enemy the Hobbesian commonwealth
as a site of order and interiority in which the catastrophic outside is suspended: they thus repeat the
trajectory of the Relative Enthusiast. This image itself is Hobbesian, and Schmitt’s revivalism lurks in
the very distinction between enemy and friend; the
counterhegemonic project constructs mirror-empires in place of moving beyond imperium itself.
The terminal development of technocapitalism as it
overwhelms the state compels the theorist to take
a more radically opposite view. That Leviathan can
no longer make a ‘sinister impression’ in an age of
For the human political subject, this neo-Heraclitean
conception is far more ruinous than that of Hobbes:
with the very possibility of a social contract or covenant demolished, the state returns radically to its basis in slavery. Yet this very reduction liberates, renders inhuman, the figure of the Enthusiast, which
now reaches beyond the circuit of sectarian politics.
In Hobbes’s theory, the state must block the road to
the occult and catastrophic heart of reality; what is
more, it must assume this task with paranoiac obsession, since if it fails, society and history themselves will collapse, endless competing sects erupting from the decaying body politic. In Nietzsche’s
atheology, by contrast, the state is nothing so important: it is itself an insurrectionary feature of war,
disposable and contingent. At its terminus there
34. S. Plant and N. Land, ‘Cyberpositive’ [1994], in R. Mackay and
A. Avanessian (eds), #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader
(Falmouth and Berlin: Urbanomic/Merve, 2014), 303–13.
31. Katastromancer, ‘On Impossibility’. urcC, <https://urcc.
space/circuit/?katastromancer/Sequence%20I-I>.
35. The figure of the Absolute Enthusiast is also foreshadowed
in Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s reading of the sectarian: see
J.B. Mohaghegh, Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four
Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2015), Part IV: ‘Sectarian’.
32. S. Metcalf, ‘Killing Time’, Abstract Culture 2:1 (Ccru), <http://
www.ccru.net/swarm2/2_killing.htm>.
33. S. Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–
1700 (Chichester: Wiley, second edition, 2012), 21; P. Turchin,
‘A theory for the formation of large empires’, Journal of Global
History 4:2 (2009), 191–217.
36. Nietzsche to Paul Duessen, 26 November 1888 (No. 1159).
My translation.
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This alternative conception of the origins of the
state has now found considerable empirical support in recent historiography. We may cite here,
for instance, Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s observation
that many of the states of early modern Asia were
formed ‘through the mediation of migratory elites’
circulating across the continent, or Peter Turchin’s
quantitatively informed ‘mirror-empire’ theory, which
explains the process of ‘imperiogenesis’ as an escalating arms race between nomad and settler populations.33 In each case, the high-minded pretensions of
the state to transcendence as the ‘king of the proud’
and avatar of God are collapsed into its transcended
reality as a secondary circuit of the grand flux of
war—better, it remains the avatar of God, but War
is God.
‘total technology’ is not the mere ‘failure of a symbol’
that frees Hobbes from the disastrous weight of his
symbology, the moment that lets the modern reader
at long last ‘across the centuries reach out: Thomas
Hobbes, now you do not teach in vain!’37 It is an
escalating system-failure that crashes Hobbes’s
political theology, pointing to the obsolescence of
the state form itself, the self-overcoming of the
Hobbesian era.
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Against Leviathan’s grip on humanity, its suppression
of heterodoxies, the reality of the fluid and globalised
Earth, with its expanding spaces of negativity, its intensifying excesses and flows of mobilisation, and
its opportunities for exit, calls us towards a higher
register, to formulate an Anti-Leviathan: an enthusiasm that will be absolute, not relative, comfortable
in its disjuncture, a theoretical orientation that is not
dependent on a praxis of repetition of hegemony,
but is open and expectant towards the processes
that are ripping up the Leviathan—divesting it of its
oceanic pretences, and drowning it in the expansive
flux of the deep, green sea….
37. Schmitt, Leviathan in the State Theory, 86.
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