Volume 1

What is a Political Subject?

6 April 20236 April 2023By Gareth

Davide Tarizzo

* editing and publication by 17, instituto de estudios críticos

Volume 1, 2012

«Pour m’exprimer comme il me vient, rien n’est incompatible avec la vérité: on pisse, on crache dedans. C’est un lieu de passage, ou pour mieux dire, d’évacuation. […] La vérité est seduction d’abord, et pour vous couillonner. Pour ne pas s’y laisser prendre, il faut être fort.»
—Jacques Lacan

To answer this question, “what’s a political subject?”, we would need to grasp the precise meaning of the two small words it contains: political and subject. That’s the way philosophical analysis, since Socrates, would proceed. However, at least in this case, the opposite might be true. Hence, instead of asking what’s the political and what’s the subject, I will try to grasp from the very beginning the meaning of the whole: political subject. What is it? Maybe, once we find an answer to this question, it will be easier to find an answer to the other two.

As you will notice, the general framework of my approach comes directly from Lacan. For instance, what is a political subject? Taking seriously the Lacanian notion of the subject of enunciation, I would say that a political subject is simply a “we” –the subject of a political enunciation. In modern times, you don’t have to look far away in order to contemplate the rise and the pulsations of a subject of this kind. Who doesn’t remember the opening words of the American Constitution: «We, the people…»? Here’s an instance of political subject, of “we”, the people of the United States of America, which is by the way a political subject still perfectly alive, as everyone knows. Indeed, what I want to remark on immediately is that the political subject must not be confounded with the “constituent power”. The example of America gives me the opportunity of clarifying this point, which is of some importance.

Traditionally, from Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès to Carl Schmitt (including, more recently, Antonio Negri and others) the constituent power has been conceived as the political force, I dare say the mystical force, which hides behind any juridical outfit named State. From this point of view, the res publica is always a knot, wherein two strings are tied together: the political and the juridical (jus publicum). As Schmitt put it in his Verfassungslehre, the «constituent power is a political Will whose power or authority amounts to the capacity of taking the concrete, foundational decision about the species and the form of its own political existence».[1] I won’t analyze here this crucial reference to the Will, that represents the hard core of Schmitt’s decisionism. Rather, I’d like to underline that for him the constituent power is nothing but the condition of existence of a State, namely of a modern State. Without the constituent power there would be no State. And beyond the constituent power there is simply nothing. Therefore, what I was calling a political subject («We, the people») is always caught by Schmitt in the movement of a Constitution, which is the foundational act of a modern State and remains in his view the essential political act. One can’t go further and beyond this political act, which is the political act par excellence of the political subject par excellence: the people, the nation (the heart of any modern Nation-State). «The people, the nation, remains the primal cause of every political event».[2]

The history of the United States allows us to look well beyond the “constituent power”. Indeed, well before the Constitution, the American people, I would say America as such, was already born. With the Declaration of Independence, in 1776, a political subject was already in place and alive –so alive that it could bear a tremendous war of independence against one of the greatest powers on earth. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake (pace Schmitt) to describe this political subject as a “nation”, although it was certainly a “people”. In other words, we have to distinguish the people (populus) from the nation. In America, at the end of the 18th century, none would have thought of the thirteen States and former colonies in terms of “one nation”. None would have made this step forward before the Federalist Papers (Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison and so on) and the great public debate about federalism that spread all over the country in the aftermath of the long war against Great Britain. Yet, although America wasn’t a nation at that time, the American “people” were already a political subject, that is a subject of a political enunciation, which wasn’t the enunciation of a Constitution, but the enunciation of a Declaration. If one takes this for granted, all the mysteries and paradoxes of the constituent power –a power that would magically exist before the event (Constitution) that is supposed to define it– suddenly fade away, simply on account of the fact that a political subject doesn’t need to be the subject of a Constitution. A political subject, say, the subject of a Declaration, can be perfectly in order before and without being the subject of a Constitution. It will become eventually such a subject, even if it doesn’t need to. That’s why we can enlarge the set of our examples to include under the label of the political subject, not only the “nation”, but also the “people”, which is something quite different, or, to go further, the “class” (Marxism), the “race” (Social Darwinism), the “civil society” (Lockean Liberalism), the “multitude” (from Baruch de Spinoza to the remains of Italian operaismo), and so on.

The next questions are: how does a political subject emerge? By doing what? And above all: is it possible to create, to establish new political subjects in our times? Since I won’t be able to say anything meaningful now about the latter question, which would bring me to talk about Europe (and what we will hopefully call one day the European people), let’s move to the former and more basic question, which again is: how does a political subject emerge?

First of all, after my definition of the political subject as a subject of enunciation, you won’t be surprised by the following definition, which sounds like a mere consequence: any political act is a speech act. Human beings, as Lacan used to say, are speech beings (parlêtre), and the political speech is the one that ties us together into a single political body, into a single political community. So, it is thanks to speech that a political subject emerges and exists.

Now, speech acts, particularly in the field of politics, can differ a lot from each other. There are as many kinds of political subjects as there are kinds of political speech acts. Needless to say, talking about speech acts, I’m not thinking here of Austin’s and Searle’s theory, nor of Lacan’s theory of four discourses, which is quite interesting, in my view, but is also full of contradictions. Rather, I’m thinking about something else, a concept as plain as day, though usually neglected by philosophical and political thinking. The concept I have in mind is the following one: to speak, to be able to speak, forcefully implies that one is able to listen. Saying that, I’m not only stating that speech acts always imply listening, I’m saying much more than this: listening for others literally enables us to speak (before speaking, children have to get in touch with their mother… tongue). In that sense, listening is the very first speech act of our life, of our personal history. And, here’s the suggestion that I’d like to introduce: listening is also the first speech act of our public life, of our collective history, of our political existence. (Just a short parenthesis to emphasize that listening is, perhaps, the hidden core of Lacanian thought, the theory of the four discourses included. Indeed, Lacan himself described more than once the analytic discourse as a weird act, and a weird art, of listening. The big Other, defined by him as «the place of speech», is something that we can only listen for.)

What could it mean that listening is, or maybe was once upon a time the first of our political acts, fixing the borders of the first political subjects who inhabited our historical world? To figure out this kind of collective experience, we need to make a strong effort of imagination and try to visualize what could be, in ancient times, the experience of the “sacred”, which was the basis of any political authority and the source of any social bond. The experience of the sacred is that of something which remains separate from us, something that I would name the Unavailable. In latin, sacer, as many scholars have repeated over time, means: to be excluded from human affairs, to belong to another sphere of reality. One doesn’t need to step further and identify the sacred with the divine. What is really at stake in the sacred, or the Holy, is a sort of border, dividing in two the world where we live. On the one side one can see us, the living beings, the inhabitants of the visible world; on the other side one can only listen for something that still regards us but is invisible and has to be kept far from us. The authority, so to speak, of this border, the one who is called to survey and to administer it on behalf of the entire community, is the sacerdos (or anyone else apt to play this role).

What are the properties of the sacred, that is of the Unavailable? I will list briefly three of them.

  1. The sacred is meaningless in the literal sense (remember the mana and the way Claude Lévi-Strauss described it), yet it refers to something which lies at the core of collective life. The sacred has no definite meaning and that’s the reason why it is radically Unavailable: one cannot master nor handle its riddle. The only way to keep in touch with it is the listening, i.e. a sort of passive attention to whatever comes from the reverse side of the world.
  2. While being Unavailable, the sacred has to do with the most intimate and profound identity of the community as a whole (and of each of its members, too).
  3. This sacred identity leaves its prints in a kind of writing, that I would call the human hieroglyph (which literally means: a sacred engraving, or inscription).

A couple of examples will help me to explain what all these properties are about. The first comes from the Jewish tradition. As you might know, Judaism has a special predilection for matters related to the names of God, which are many and diverse. I’m not going into the details (that you will find, for instance, in Gershom Scholem’s books). I just want to point out that the most important and precious name of God, let’s say his proper name, I mean the tetragram (or Tetragrammaton), is the name that no one has the right to pronounce. That means not only that it is forbidden to pronounce the tetragram, but also that no one knows actually how to pronounce it. In other words, this name is a writing without pronounciation. It’s a writing that is impossible to grasp, to master. One cannot master the Master himself, the Lord of the World. One can only listen for him, trying to decipher His writing, without hearing His voice. Therefore, what is forbidden in the Jewish tradition is not to pronounce His name, as it is impossible to do so anyway. Rather, what is forbidden is to struggle against this very impossibility, which is at once the impossibility for human beings to grasp, to master their nature, their image, their being. Indeed, as you surely remember, the first book of the Torah told us that man is an image of God. «And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness» (Genesis 1:26). So, finally, at least in the Jewish tradition, the sacred Name of God is the writing of the Unavailable, which means above all that the man is Unavailable to himself. Sacred is the name of the human image that remains Unavailable to human beings. Sacred is our listening for ourselves.

A further example will be helpful. This time I will take it from the Roman tradition. Perhaps, you didn’t know this: the Romans were not Romans. Yet, none could deny it, they were for centuries a strong political subject, knocking at the door of neighbours with all their rituals of evocatio and devotio, by which, just before the final assault, the local deities were called out of the enemy cities and were kindly invited to expatriate to Rome, where they would have found a gracious hospitality. Such was the power of names, in ancient times. It was sufficient to call a deity or anything else by name to believe that it would have obeyed or reacted in some way to the call. So, how did the Romans manage to avoid that the same could be done against them, pronouncing the name of their guardian deities and forcing them to leave the city? The answer is: by keeping their real name, the real name of their city and the real name of their guardian deity, absolutely secret. Many ancient sources (from Plinius to Macrobius) give us some hints of this strange habit. Not even the Romans knew their secret name. With regard to it, Macrobius speaks of occultissimis sacris.[3] The name of Rome was a holy secret, sacred and hidden from all, to the point that, apparently, there was just one person who knew it, the pontifex maximus,who used to leave a written vestige of that name for the benefit of his successor, elected pontifex maximus only after the death of the former. Again, as in the Jewish world, we face here a particular structure, a particular way of shaping the identity of the political community, rooted in a name that had to be kept Unavailable, or sacred. As a result, this secret name was shadowed, in both cases, by a kind of Unavailable and separate writing. That hieroglyph, wherein was engraved an eclipse of meaning, was the nucleus of the political, collective identity.

Adopting once more a Lacanian definition, I would call this sort of political subject a “barred subject”, or a “split subject”, i.e. a subject divided from itself by the listening for something, namely by the listening for a writing, that hides and saves its identity, keeping it secluded. (In psychoanalysis this writing is usually called a “symptom”).

I chose these two examples in order to sketch briefly what follows: the passage from the sacred listening, conceived as the first political speech act, to another kind of speech act, that is the revealing of the sacred, which I would also term, on several accounts, the crisis of the sacred. The name of this crisis is Christianity –a name which is very meaningful, given that Christianism is all about naming and meaning. The revealed Name of God, as everybody knows, is the Name of the Father, the Name that revealed itself coming through the Son, thanks to his Incarnation, by which the Father meant Himself as a true Father. To do so, to reveal Himself, the Father had no choice. He had to send to earth his Son, the Messiah, that is the Christos. To reveal his Name, the Father had to pass, through the Son, the ancient border of the sacred, the border until then Unavailable between the Name and the identity, between the Writing and the meaning. Now, why is this family affair between the Father and the Son, an affair named Christianity, so important for us, if we seriously want to analyze the shaping and most of all the emergence of political subjects?

Let’s move back to my previous question: how does a political subject emerge? Well, the point is that this question made no sense before Christianity. As a matter of fact, while putting forth the question of political subject “emergence”, we are assuming the existence of a past time, where this novelty, this emergence had not yet occurred. However, this assumption of an alien past time wasn’t current before the Advent, before the news and the event that the Christos embodies. Before then, no collective identity was threatened by a past time to be abandoned, nor was, after all, the very idea of a “new” beginning conceivable. Instead, the collective identity was linked to a kind of absolute beginning, which I would rather call an “origin”, always located on the border of the sacred. This origin was like a holy riddle, an enigmatic writing etched in the reverse of the rituals, the myths and the overall symbolic order of the community, to which any idea of a break with the past was totally unknown. Therefore, at that time, there was no room for the “emergence” of a “new” beginning. Before Christianity, this emergence wasn’t an open pathway, period.

So, when we are asking “how does a political subject emerge?”, we are asking a Christian question. On this account, no one should be surprised by the fact that to this question we will always answer, more or less, in a Christian way: a political subject “emerges” by the act of naming, that is by revealing. This is true from St. Paul to Alain Badiou. This is the Truth that has been revealed by Christianism and has been revealed later on by all following revelations. This is the apocalyptic (i.e. the revealing) Truth from which we can hardly escape, still now, and this is the bridge that covers the huge gap between us and the Unavailable, between modern and ancient times.

One of the immediate effects of this apocalyptic event, that is the Christian naming and revealing of the Truth which from now on will replace the Unavailable, is the war about the true meaning of the name of God (i.e. the true meaning of the Truth). Let’s call it the war «in the Name of the Father». One can think of it as an endless war whose sparks are already burning in the Name itself.

In a sense, all the history of Christianity is a history of schisms and fighting revelations of the true meaning of the Name. Indeed, the structure of schism is what makes the ultimate difference between the ancient world and the Christian world. There was no schism in ancient times. Its conditions of possibility did not exist. For schism is possible only once the Unavailable becomes available and meaningful, so that one can handle it, give voice to its writing, and finally quarrel about its meaning. Therefore, if Christianism is a synonym of schism, as its history shows, it is not so simply because of historical contingencies. On the contrary, schism was contained from the beginning in the very structure of the Christian revelation. The Christian God is schismatic by itself.

Evidences of the schismatic and critical character of the Christian God can be found in one of the most dramatic text of our philosophical tradition, De Trinitate by St. Augustine. God is one, namely the Father of all creatures, but God is also three, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Why this schism in the heart of God? Just to give a hint of this millenary debate, and putting it roughly, if God is the Father, if naming and revealing him as a Father has a true meaning, God is the Father in saecula saeculorum and was the Father even before the Creation. In other words, if he is truly the Father, he must be the eternal Father, so that the Son too, the Christos, must be eternal and divine, sitting at his right in the plenitude of times. One God, two persons (personae), says St. Augustine. As everybody can easily perceive, this is nothing but the start of a critical inquiry into the depths of Truth which will soon become so critical that it will entail a radical critique, and a radical crisis, of the sacred. It is difficult, if not impossible, for St. Augustine, as it will be difficult for anyone else after him, to avoid, or at least to restrain, the unsteadiness of the true meaning of the Name of God. As Lacan sometimes said, the Truth corrupts us. From my point of view, by making that statement, he just wanted to remark that the Truth, and what I was calling the political act of naming and revealing, will never get the same stability of the political act of listening. Once we have crossed the border of the Unavailable, making it true and meaningful, it is the symbolic order, the very geometrical or topological framework of our speech being, that starts to tremble. As a result, we shift slowly into the “disease of civilization”, that is, into modernity.

Then, what is modernity? First of all, it’s a result of the apocalyptic event of Christianity; in fact, as the German word Neuzeit shows, modernity is by definition the emergence of a “new time”. Second, it’s a way to struggle against the trembling that Christianity causes in the structure of our collective life. Third, it’s a partial failure to accomplish that task. Needless to remind you of the successes of political secularization in modern times. Thanks to this process, we are speaking no more of religious subjects, but of political subjects in the true sense of the word, which is a modern sense. Modern times are the only “political” times strict sensu, that is a secular and mundane sense. Nevertheless, what’s wrong with modernity? I’ll make a couple of final remarks, not to answer, but rather to elaborate on this question.

To clarify my point of view in a few words, I would say that modernity is still Christian, too Christian. Modern politics is still Christian politics, as it is still a politics of Truth. To have a taste of this Truth, read any of the crucial political documents of modernity. You will always find the reference to some «self-evident truths», that are suddenly revealed to a «candid world» and are called by name: the name of a “new” political subject –for instance America, since I’m quoting here the Declaration of 1776, or France, or (although in a different mood) class, race, civil society, multitude, and so on. One doesn’t need at all to think of this kind of “new” political subject as a “nation” or “one people”. Even The Communist Manifesto is an act of Declaration by which a modern political subject enters into the historical arena. And even the “working class” is a true political event of modern times, with all the pros and cons of its Truth that each of us knows.

One of the first theories of the modern political subject has been given by Thomas Hobbes in his De cive. What I’m calling here a political subject is called by him a «civil Person». As Hobbes explains, there are natural persons, human beings, but there are also civil Persons, which are composed of more than one natural person. However, not every civil Person is a true political subject. To be so, the civil Person must embody at the same time the «supreme power» of the City, i.e. of the political community. Therein lies the difference between, say, a private company and the civil Person to which every other natural or civil Person must obey. Now, who is that civil Person of the City, that we could also call the political Person? What is its name? The answer is interesting, because it shows how the schismatic character of the Christian naming and revealing becomes the schismatic, almost rhizomatic, character of modern political subject, in spite of secularization.

Hobbes’ theory of political power, at least in 1642, is a kind of secularization of some paradoxes inherent in the theological Trinity. To begin with, this is a theory of generation. As the Father, the first person of the Trinity, gives birth to the second and third persons, being the Son and the Holy Spirit, so the first civil Person gives birth to the other two. In Hobbes’ view, this political Trinity hides behind the three possible forms of government. The Name of the first political person is the Name of the modern political God: the democratic «people», who, by saying “we” and turning into one single subject of enunciation, becomes something different from a mere «multitude» (which is on the contrary a gathering of «many» human beings). Once this God has named itself, Hobbes argues, it is possible to shift into two other names, into two other incarnations of that foundational “we”. Indeed, the «people», the first “we”, can «convey» (transferre) its political personality either to the «aristocracy» or to the «monarch». By doing so, however, the «people» will not exist anymore. For the «people» will fade away as a civil Person, giving birth to another civil Person. That’s why Hobbes can tell us that, in monarchy for instance, «the king is the people » (that means: the king is “we”, the king is the only one entitled to say “we”, the king is the only political personality on scene). Hence, as with the Christian God, there are finally three persons for one single God. The trembling stance of Christianity opens onto the trembling stance of the modern political subject. “We”, the democratic «people», is not able to fix its true meaning and to entrench its existence. As a result, for Hobbes, the best political option will not be the «people», but the only One able to fix and to restrain the critical meaning of the political “we” –an option which is not as democratic and popular as we could expect at first. The best political option will be, from Hobbes’ point of view, the monarch, the One really capable of establishing the unity and identity of the political subject, calling it by Name. His own Name.

What are the consequences of this modern naming and revealing, which at once is and is not the same as the Christian naming and revealing? I shall confine myself to three of them.

  1. If the Christian God was schismatic, I would say that the modern God, the democratic «people», is a bit more than this: it’s rhizomatic. For it is a God whose Name no one can divide from the people’s Voice. Therefore, every time a “new” Voice arises, the people immediately get a “new” Name. This is what Declaration is about. The modern people can bear witness of their existence only by voicing it, by saying aloud “we”, the people, are alive. After the listening for the Unavailable, the naming and revealing of the true Name of God, here’s then the third political speech act, the act that qualifies modernity: the declaring and voicing of the true Name of the people, by the people, for the people. As if someone else had stolen the true identity of these people, so that it was necessary to restore it, to claim it once again, by shouting it at the rest of the world whenever it is possible to do so. This strange and strong concurrence of the Name and the Voice is well known in psychoanalysis, where it enjoys a peculiar definition: paranoia. Following that definition, we could conclude that the modern God is not just schismatic, but rather paranoid by itself. (A suggestion that, in my opinion, Lacan would have peacefully accepted, albeit with some caveats.)
  2. But why? Why are the modern people entrapped in their Voice, which has always to be restored as their own Voice? Adopting Hobbes’ terminology, because that’s the only way they can avoid their sudden dissolution in a «multitude» without any civil personality. The danger, in fact, is always there. Hobbes himself stresses that the democratic «people», while not gathering in assembly, are not present to themselves. They cease to exist. And that’s precisely their big trouble. That’s why, for Hobbes, the «people» are so weak from a political point of view. For they have to struggle day by day with the shadow of the «multitude», that is the shadow of whithering away, of loosing any political or civil personality, falling in the black hole of the un-political.
  3. Thus, the modern God, the democratic «people», is a political subject haunted by the un-political. Modernity, Schmitt would have noticed, is the realm of a secret de-politicization of public life and political identities. I would even dare say, without being able to qualify my statement here, that every modern «people» defines, declares, voices its political personality precisely against the background of the unpolitical, shaping its identity only by finding, every time, a “new” way out of this inescapable danger. This is the motor of modern times. Or, at least, this is what makes modernity an earthquake all over the world, able to shake every political and collective personality, inside and outside the frontiers of our civilization. This is what G. W. F. Hegel described, by the way, as the «fury of destruction» typical of modern times. “We” have to voice untiringly who we are, because if we stop doing so, we are about to disappear. Politics, or «the political», is nothing but the technical definition that modernity has given of this paradox. Politics as such emerges only after that “we” are no more apt to live and to rest in our exodus from ourselves. It is the empty place where “we” mirrors our empty, though continuous, rhizomatic, paranoid, identification.

Politics, then, is how modernity terms the trembling of its collective personality, that is of “our” identity, always looking for its achievement. Now, without saying anything more about this, without even saying a single word on the Enlightenment (which for Michel Foucault, and for me too, is a synonym of modernity), and without saying anything else about the crucial question of Declaration, i.e. of the political speech act of declaring and voicing, I would like to end by turning abruptly to another question: what is psychoanalysis and what is its relation to politics?

Psychoanalysis, as Lacan conveyed, is a practice that aims at teaching something about us and our strange relation to ourselves. Saying “us”, I don’t mean human beings in general, nor mankind (which is, by the way, a specific and modern political notion). I mean just “us”: you and me, who are able to say “we” only against the background of our common history and our critical provenance. Psychoanalysis is about the Name of the Father, that represents those common roots, our Christian roots. And psychoanalysis is definitely about a «reduction» of that Name, schismatic if not paranoid, to something Unavailable. Following Lacan and using the notions that I’ve introduced here, I would say that psychoanalysis aims to bring back the Name of the Father, that is our “true” Name, to its origin, that is not a “true” origin, but a structural one: our invincible listening for ourselves. The technical definition of this listening, in psychoanalytical terms, is the “unconscious”. The puzzling writing of this listening, i.e. of the unconscious, is the “symptom”. So that we could also say that the unconscious and the symptom are, in modern times, the fossils of the ancient sacred. By working with these fossils, by digging them up, psychoanalysis brings us back to an experience that is prior to the Name of the Father and is able to free us, at least for a moment, from its trembling effect. (Maybe you remember Sigmund Freud’s passion for archaeology and his cabinet, full of little souvenirs of the ancient sacred coming from the past civilizations and echoing, apparently, the past of each of us.)

These are the main teachings of psychoanalysis, in my opinion. On the one side, there is something in ourselves that is stronger than Truth: our listening for what Lacan called the big Other, our exodus from ourselves, an exodus which is the most intimate core of our being. On the other side, the regime of Truth cannot put an end to this exodus, cannot erase this Unavailable relation to ourselves that we enact every day. Truth, as Lacan said, is nothing but «the sister of impotence».[4] On account of these teachings, can we imagine a new political subject, “new” to the point that it won’t be Christian anymore, “new” to the point that it won’t be “new” nor impotent anymore? Can we imagine politics beyond Truth, politics of the Unavailable? And what would be its hieroglyph nowadays? What could we listen for, as we listened once for the sacred? What would be the collective symptom, or the social fossil, of the sacred in our secular times?

Certainly, if something of the sort exists, we are already enacting the listening for it; nevertheless, we must not quarrel over its true meaning, because the overlapping of the sacred and the Truth is precisely what we should avoid at any cost. Thus, let me say just a word: sacred today is human “dignity”, a word without meaning, the last track of the Unavailable in our secular age. We are still waiting for a political subject that measures up to its riddle. Our task, as I understand it, is to find the way to bring it to existence, not by telling its Truth, nor by voicing its Name, but rather by performing its listening. Let’s call this performance a kind of subtractive, excentric evocatio.

«Excessere omnes adytis arisque relictis
di, quibus imperium hoc steterat»
[«Gone forth are all the gods by whose aid
this realm once stood; and they have forsaken
their shrines and altars»]
Virgil

Notes

01. Carl Schmitt, Verfassungsrechtliche, Berlin, Duncker und Humbolt, 1973, 8. II. 2.

02. Carl Schmitt, op. cit., 8. II. 2.

03. Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius, Saturnalia, USA, Loeb Classical Library, 2011, III, 9.1

04. Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XVII, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2006, ch. XII, p. 3.

Works Cited

  • Lacan, Jacques, Séminaire XVII, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.
  • Macrobius, Ambrosius T., Saturnalia, USA, Loeb Classical Library, 2011.
  • Schmitt, Carl, Verfassungsrechtliche, Berlin, Duncker und Humbolt, 1973.