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The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. By Eric L. Santner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. xxiv + 259. Paper $25. ISBN 978-0226735368.
The ambiguous title of Santner's new study captures the project nicely: On the one hand, The Royal Remains claims that the historical transition from royal to popular sovereignty in European modernity did not dissolve the political theologies-and especially fantasies-previously assembled around the notion of the "king's two bodies." On the other hand, Santner traces these "modern afterlives of the king's body" (ix) not primarily in imaginary projections of royal identity (although several modernist literary kings do make appearances), but through a focus on their displaced "leftovers" in politics, art, and literature. That is, the study develops "a theory of 'the flesh' as the sublime substance" (ix) that was managed by the doctrines and rituals surrounding the king's twofold ("natural" and "political") physiognomy, and pursues its precarious migration to the "people's two bodies." As Santner argues, "crucial features of modernity" are to be grasped only in terms of how royal sovereignty was transformed into the modern regime of biopolitics, as one concerned "not simply" with the "health of populations," but with "the 'sublime' life-substance of the People" (xi-xii).
The claims assembled here can be unpacked by explicitly situating the study on the map of contemporary theory. Santner reassesses Ernst Kantorowicz's famous analysis of the two-bodies doctrine by connecting it, via Roberto Esposito's immunology, to Michel Foucault's, Hannah Arendt's, and Giorgio Agamben's work on power in modern society, and recenters the resulting configuration in psychoanalytical terms. With Esposito, Santner backgrounds Foucault's call for fully "beheading the king" by theorizing modern forms of power beyond the order of law, instead...