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Gamben S The Tate of Xception and The Odern Obin Ood: Homo Sacer

This document discusses how modern interpretations of Robin Hood differ significantly from medieval versions and focus more on contemporary political theories. It argues that recent Robin Hood films and TV shows from the last 20 years increasingly portray Robin Hood as a noble who loses his status and power but seeks to help the poor and challenge authority. This reflects a growing interest in exploring leadership, sovereignty, and the relationship between rulers and the people they govern. By placing Robin Hood in positions of power before he becomes an outlaw, modern works examine these political concepts through the lens of a pseudo-medieval setting.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
80 views22 pages

Gamben S The Tate of Xception and The Odern Obin Ood: Homo Sacer

This document discusses how modern interpretations of Robin Hood differ significantly from medieval versions and focus more on contemporary political theories. It argues that recent Robin Hood films and TV shows from the last 20 years increasingly portray Robin Hood as a noble who loses his status and power but seeks to help the poor and challenge authority. This reflects a growing interest in exploring leadership, sovereignty, and the relationship between rulers and the people they govern. By placing Robin Hood in positions of power before he becomes an outlaw, modern works examine these political concepts through the lens of a pseudo-medieval setting.

Uploaded by

Bobo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Agamben’s homo sacer, the ‘State of

Exception’, and the Modern Robin Hood

Valerie B. Johnson

T
he Robin Hood tradition, as expressed in mass-culture media in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is markedly different from the
tradition as it appears in the materials generated in the medieval and
early modern eras. The modern Robin Hood tradition is strongly influenced by
medievalism and draws heavily upon perceptions of the Middle Ages; however,
this preference for medievalism is consistently subsumed to contemporary
Anglo-American theories of personal freedoms, thus creating a strong contrast
between the medieval period as the modern Robin Hood tradition represents it
and the medieval period as it is represented in literature and history. However,
most modern audiences of the Robin Hood tradition do not have the specialized
knowledge to distinguish the medieval from the medievalism, and thus continue
to desire and create re-tellings of the tradition which address modern socio-
political concerns within a pseudo-medieval context. Likewise, modern political
theories and philosophies which appear to fit the Robin Hood tradition fail to
resonate with the historical realities of medieval England. This article will explore
the conditions under which the political theories of the state of exception and
the homo sacer, as developed and enunciated by the Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben, successfully function within the modern Robin Hood tradition;
the article will also seek to address the broader implications for these successes
within modern mass culture.
Modern interpretations of Robin Hood depend heavily upon the age of the
tradition, and the connections of the stories to a supposedly authentic medieval
golden era, in order to legitimate and justify the latest retelling of the story.
With very few exceptions, such as Daniel G. Hoffmann’s ‘A Little Geste’,1 the

1 
First published in Sewanee Review, 66 (1958), 633–48, Hoffmann’s ‘A Little Geste’ is

Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition, ed. by
Stephen Knight, Medieval Identities: Socio-Cultural Spaces, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 207–228
BREPOLS PUBLISHERS DOI 10.1484/M.MISCS-EB.1. 100458
208 Valerie B. Johnson

overwhelming majority of these stories are unquestionably mass-culture texts: texts


produced cheaply, in large quantities, with serious concern and contemplation
given to the profit margin before pen is ever set to paper. Quite often the modern
tradition of Robin Hood has proved not only to be a money-maker but the very
reason why projects are green-lighted: the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks film Robin
Hood would not have been given a budget of one million dollars if it were not
taking Robin Hood as its subject, and it is not coincidental that Warner Bros
chose Robin Hood as the topic of the first film shot entirely in Technicolor.2
Publicity-savvy stars like Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe have chosen Robin
Hood as the topic of blockbuster films with lavish sets and expansive budgets,
and in the last twenty years there has been a major Robin Hood production,
whether cinema or television, approximately every five years;3 mass-market novels
populate the literary landscape between film and television events. Stephen
Knight has noted that Robin Hood is consistently inconsistent, never static, and
always multiple, but with the increase in productions, filmed or written, it seems
that Anglo-American culture has found itself in ever-increasing need of Robin
Hood.4 And the Robin Hood of these modern productions is increasingly typed:
a nobleman fallen from grace and determined to do good during his period of
banishment and disgrace, one of Slavoj Žižek’s liberal communists of the modern
era.5 With the noble Robin Hood comes an increased emphasis on the political

a beautiful and odd poem, and has received very little critical attention. The poem’s popular-
culture profile is even lower.
2 
Stephen Knight reports that Fairbanks earned five million dollars from the film and that
101,000 people viewed the film in its first week of release at the New York Capitol Theatre;
Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell,
1994), p. 226. The massive success of Robin Hood in film, backed by memories of the immensely
popular De Koven and Smith musicals from a generation prior, undoubtedly influenced the
decision by Warner Brothers to film The Adventures of Robin Hood in expensive Technicolor.
3 
The films and television shows are listed in chronological order of production with the
name of the actor playing Robin Hood included: Robin of Sherwood (1984–86, television, with
Michael Praed and Jason Connery); Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, with Kevin Costner);
Robin Hood (1991, with Patrick Bergin); Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993, with Cary Elwes);
The New Adventures of Robin Hood (1997–99, television, with Matthew Porretta and John
Bradley); Robin Hood (2006–09, television, with Jonas Armstrong); Robin Hood (2010, with
Russell Crowe).
4 
Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study, pp. 7–8.
5 
Žižek’s liberal communist is a capitalist who gains meaning through the donation of his
wealth, which in turn ‘re-establishes balance — a kind of redistribution of wealth to the truly
needy — without falling into a fateful trap: the destructive logic of resentment and enforced
Agamben’s homo sacer and the Modern Robin Hood 209

machinations of the upper classes, an awareness of England as a nation, the


obligation of those who have towards those who have not, and the preoccupation
with freedoms both economic and personal, and other democratic values.6
But with these increased political elements comes an emphasis on social
responsibility and the opportunity for audiences to use the re-tellings as a vehicle
for critique, contemplation of modern politics — safely displaced into a pseudo-
medieval setting — and political practices, and ultimately a reclamation of the
tradition from the realm of childhood stories. The last twenty years have seen the
character pull away from the laughing rogues of the landmark films of 1922 and
1938, the stolid and paternal Richard Green television series in the 1950s, and the
happy fox of the 1973 Disney production. Instead, beginning in 1991, producers
and audiences find Patrick Bergin’s stressed landowner and Kevin Costner’s
slowly maturing Crusader more relevant, and though these two films are followed
by a brief laugh in the form of Cary Elwes’s comical noble, the trend towards
seriousness continues in Matthew Porretta’s vapid yet well-meaning woodland
lord, Jonas Armstrong’s hot-headed victim of post-traumatic stress disorder, and
Russell Crowe’s bleak, leather-clad Crusader. All these Robin Hoods are socially
situated to address and affect change, from the top down, of their story-societies
— the constructed societies within each individual text. They have power, at
least initially, and their fall from power, realization of responsibility, and quest
to return to power — while mirroring and practising their legitimate positions
in the illegitimate society of the greenwood — form the overarching plots of
these films and television programs. The foundations of these stories are power

statist redistribution of wealth which can only end in generalized misery’, which not only
invokes the spirit of the medievalistic modern Robin Hood but also provides a method by
which Robin can be both rich and poor, noble in birth and noble in spirit, an elite who has
credibility with the people; Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador,
2008), pp. 16–24 (at p. 23).
6 
Many mass-culture texts are generated for a generic American audience, due largely to
American dominance in various entertainment media. Even when materials are not generated
in America, producers always keep the huge American market share in mind: thus, though
franchises such as James Bond and Harry Potter (books, films, assorted merchandizing, etc.)
are written, cast, filmed, and marketed in Britain, the texts are adjusted for American audiences
in terms of language, content, and even perspective. Thus, with the Robin Hood tradition and
many other historical romances, an effort is made to conform the context of the story to the
audience’s contemporary understanding of what a nation is, regardless of what a nation was
not in the Middle Ages. Likewise, the obsession with ‘freedom’ displayed in films such as Mel
Gibson’s Braveheart (1995) is characteristic not of the Middle Ages but of late twentieth-
century Anglo-American culture.
210 Valerie B. Johnson

and the practice of power; in sum, the Robin Hood tradition has increasingly,
over the last twenty years, become preoccupied with sovereignty. Sovereignty is,
ultimately, the use of political power upon the bodies of subjects within a given
social context.7 Thus, the influences of the various Robin Hoods upon their
story-societies are fictive explorations and examinations of both leadership and
the impact a leader has upon the people he controls.
The increasing emphasis on Robin Hood’s class- and merit-based leadership
qualities further opens the tradition to closer scrutiny regarding matters of
sovereignty, particularly in the idealized pseudo-medieval context which film and
television producers and consumers currently favour. Robin Hood has always
been a sovereign figure within the tradition’s greenwood locus but the modern
trend of placing him in a leadership role prior to his outlawry has doubled his
leadership potential and has thus brought these issues of sovereignty, as yet
largely unquestioned, to the forefront of modern re-tellings. However, as an
outlaw within a nominally medieval setting, the Robin Hood figure cannot be
equated with a legitimate sovereign within a purely medieval context. From a
modern popular culture perspective, in which medieval settings are often used
and interpreted as a fantasy space instead of a historical place, the merging of
contemporary (modern) political structures with historical settings in romance
or fantasy novels is not only permissible, but desirable.8 And within this context
the theoretical framework of sovereignty and Foucaultian biopower developed
by Giorgio Agamben serves to highlight the particular insights that the modern
interpretation of Robin Hood contributes to the tradition.
Agamben’s theories do not conform exactly to the political and legal realities
of medieval England: medieval English governmental systems contain some
elements of Roman law, but the structures of English kingship, the ‘powers of
government [which] cannot be held by magistrates, but only exercised, if the prince
was to be accounted sovereign’,9 are ultimately different from the predominantly

7 
See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), particularly Agamben’s Introduction
(pp. 1–12), for Agamben’s own explanation and understanding of Michael Foucault’s theories
of biopolitics.
8 
Romance, science fiction, and fantasy are among the few genres experiencing growth in the
current economic climate. Motoko Rich, ‘Recession Fuels Readers’ Escapist Urges’, NYTimes.
com, 7 April 2009, <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/books/08roma.html?_r=2>
[accessed 29 July 2009].
9 
Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed.
and trans. by Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. xiv–xv.
Agamben’s homo sacer and the Modern Robin Hood 211

Roman models upon which Agamben bases his theories. Agamben’s work is
useful, however, because his presentation of the medieval sovereign, and concern
with individual rights and freedoms, shares remarkable similarities with the
representation of medieval English government in mass-market popular culture,
or ‘historical’ romance. This medievalistic representation of Robin Hood, and the
now-traditional setting in the reigns of Richard I and John, resonates ideologically
with the traditions of Roman law and other continental models of government
that Agamben finds so useful.10
Agamben’s work, when adjusted to the requirements of English historical
circumstances, may have the potential to provide insight into the means by which
the Robin Hood tradition has been transformed by medievalistic mass-culture
productions. Representations of government within the Robin Hood tradition
have been distinctly tinted with ideologies of romanticism and medievalism since
the publication of Ivanhoe in 1819,11 and have become particularly strong in
the wake of the 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood. With the Flynn film as the
standard by which all subsequent Robin Hood productions, whether cinematic
or literary, are measured,12 medievalism has irrevocably been laced into popular
culture’s most basic awareness of the tradition. Productions since the mid-1980s
either visually mimic the Flynn film — Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) is
particularly slavish in its devotion — or deliberately oppose it — Robin Hood:
Prince of Thieves (1991) is a notable example of this visual defiance — while
clinging with determination to the principles of freedom, personal liberty, and
class-based responsibility that the Flynn film made normative and integral to the
image of Robin Hood in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

10 
A note on terms: medievalism is defined by the Medieval Electronic Multimedia
Organization (MEMO) by Tom A. Shippey as ‘the study of responses to the Middle Ages at all
periods since a sense of mediaeval began to develop […] based on whatever has been or is thought
to have been recovered from the medieval centuries. The Middle Ages remain present, moreover,
in the modern consciousness, both through scholarship and through popular media such as film,
video games, poster art, TV series and comic strips’, <http://medievalelectronicmultimedia.
org/definitions.html> [accessed 29 July 2009]. MEMO and Studies in Medievalism are engaged
in the ongoing work of attempting to refine the scholastic terminology, and out of need for an
adjective, I have decided to use ‘medievalistic’.
11 
Arguably, this tinting occurred much earlier in the tradition, perhaps with the later
ballads, but Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe has generally been seen as the standard work from which
the theory of the Norman Yoke, skilfully discussed by Christopher Hill in Puritanism and
Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution in the 17th Century (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1958), firmly and irrevocably entered the Robin Hood tradition.
12 
See Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study, pp. 227–32.
212 Valerie B. Johnson

The impact a single, determined freedom fighter can have at the local, and
subsequently national, level is familiar in the Robin Hood tradition and has
become particularly prominent in the wake of the Flynn film. But, as Rodney
Hilton noted in 1958, Robin Hood’s ‘historical significance does not depend
on whether he was a real person or not’, and indeed if a historical Robin Hood
were ever to be located it would undoubtedly tarnish the modern tradition.13 But
medievalism requires that Robin Hood exist, and is hard-pressed to reconcile the
laughing rogue of Hollywood with Hilton’s further observation:
one of England’s most popular literary heroes is a man whose most endearing activities to
his public were the robbing and killing of landowners, in particular church landowners,
and the maintenance of guerrilla warfare against established authority represented by
the sheriff. A man who would now, of course, be described as a terrorist.14

Hilton’s observations, though quickly and skilfully challenged by James C. Holt,15


cannot be entirely discounted — particularly since parallels between Osama bin
Laden and Robin Hood have increasingly been made and unmade, most recently
by Michael Scheuer and Raymond Ibrahim, respectively.16 Ibrahim and Scheuer’s
(and possibly even bin Laden’s) views of Robin Hood are clearly very similar, if
not identical, and drawn from the medievalistic Robin Hood, the man who robs
from the rich to give to the poor, and fights for freedom and good King Richard
against the unjust and illegal tyrannies of bad Prince John. By challenging
the authority of the king and prince, and by establishing himself as the leader
of an alternative society, the Robin Hood figure that Ibrahim and Scheuer
have collectively pinpointed as an accurate parallel to bin Laden’s position has
been entered into the matrix of Agamben’s theories of the interaction between

13 
Rodney H. Hilton, ‘The Origins of Robin Hood’, Past and Present, 14 (1958), 30–44
(p. 30).
14 
Hilton, ‘The Origins of Robin Hood’, p. 30.
15 
James C. Holt, ‘The Origins and Audience of the Ballads of Robin Hood’, Past and
Present, 18 (1960), 89–110.
16 
Ibrahim concludes that Scheuer’s book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War
on Terror (Dulles: Brassey’s, 2004), has accepted Al-Qaeda’s propaganda, and that ‘Instead of
thinking of them as Robin Hoods, Francis of Assisis, or Thomas Jeffersons, or simply idealistic,
wayward children, it’s best to start seeing them as they see themselves: mujahidin — warriors
of Allah out to make Islam supreme, as they have been for some 1400 years’. Note that
Ibrahim has not challenged the validity of assigning bin Laden Robin Hood qualities, merely
shifting designation from freedom fighter to terrorist. Raymond Ibrahim, ‘Osama Bin Laden
as Robin Hood?’, AmericanThinker.com, 11 September 2008, <http://www.americanthinker.
com/2008/09/osama_bin_laden_as_robin_hood.html> [accessed 23 July 2009].
Agamben’s homo sacer and the Modern Robin Hood 213

sovereign and outlaw, the man at the head of law and order, and the man outside
the protection of the law. In sum, the modern medievalistic Robin Hood has
become a type of homo sacer.
The homo sacer, in Agamben’s terminology, is man living a paradox: he can be
killed but his death cannot have legal significance, either as sacrifice or as murder,
because in the eyes of the law the homo sacer is bare life, meat, and not a citizen.17
The homo sacer is a sacred man, but sacred in the sense meaning ‘accursed’,18
because he has been banned from participation in the juridical and cultural
systems of his nation,19 and thus his life and death have ceased to have meaning
for the state. Agamben is fond of saying that the homo sacer can be ‘killed but not
sacrificed’,20 that while the man in question may be physically killed, that death
cannot constitute murder because while biological death is physically identical
to murder, it is the state and the juridical order which classify those deaths as
murder, manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, and so forth. In the figure of
the accursed man, the homo sacer, the state has found the embodiment of the
power of the ban:21 the outlaw who has been ejected from his community and
no longer enjoys the protections of the law, and whose killing will bring no legal
consequences upon those who end his biological life.
Agamben notes that:
The ban is the force of simultaneous attraction and repulsion that ties together
the two poles of the sovereign exception: bare life and power, homo sacer and the
sovereign. Because of this alone can the ban signify both the insignia of sovereignty
[…] and expulsion from the community.22

Sovereign exception is the lynchpin of Agamben’s arguments, the simultaneous


logic, and paradox of sovereignty, and it is notable that for Agamben the
exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself,
gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first
constitutes itself as a rule. The particular ‘force’ of law consists in the capacity of
law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority.23

17 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 71–74.
18 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 78.
19 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 76–77.
20 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 71.
21 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 110.
22 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 110.
23 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 18.
214 Valerie B. Johnson

The figure of the sovereign, who is the embodiment of law in Roman legal
structures, must remove himself from the grip of the law in order to gain power
over it; that is, the sovereign’s power and force depends on his exemption from
the rule of law, and the law’s power derives from the sovereign (and his agents,
such as police) acting against the law, in exception to the law, in order to enforce
it. This paradox is what defines the sovereign and Agamben uses Hobbes to
further elaborate the distinction between power and life, arguing that ‘only bare
life is authentically political’, because sovereign power is not defined by a citizen’s
‘free renunciation of natural right but [rather] in the sovereign’s preservation of
his natural right to do anything to anyone’.24
Agamben specifically links the homo sacer to both the bandit and the figure of
the sovereign: the one outside the law, like Robin Hood, through criminal action
and subject to the punishments of the legal code, though having none of its
protections; the other a king, who, like police or soldiers in a state of war, enjoyed
immunity to specific elements of law so that he might create or enforce the law.
Both these figures exhibit what Agamben terms ‘threshold’, the liminal in-between,
the blurring of boundaries between legality and illegality, where everything is
legal at the same time that everything is illegal.25 The threshold blurring of the
distinctions between sovereign and bandit, a blurring which Agamben finds
in the homo sacer who exhibits traits of both sovereign and outlaw, ‘is neither
simple natural life nor social life but rather bare life or sacred life, [which] is the
always present and always operative presupposition of sovereignty’.26 Power and
rule depend upon indistinction; by this definition, the modern medievalistic
interpretation of Robin Hood, the noble and highly born outlaw who rules in the
greenwood and challenges the power of the legitimate sovereign, begins to blur
uncomfortably the category of outlaw with the contrasting category of sovereign.
This blurring is due in part to the nature of the ban: that which ‘has been
banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned
to the mercy of the one who abandons it — at once excluded and included,

24 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 106 (emphasis original).
25 
Agamben’s explanation of threshold, as particularly embodied by the werewolf, is worth
noting at length: ‘The life of the bandit, like that of the sacred man, is not a piece of animal
nature without any relation to law and the city. It is, rather, a threshold of indistinction and
of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the
bandit is the life of the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who
dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither’ (Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 105
(emphasis original)).
26 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 106.
Agamben’s homo sacer and the Modern Robin Hood 215

removed and at the same time captured’,27 creating a paradox in which the
outlaw or exile has been removed from juridical control and ejected from social
protection and yet at the same time is utterly at the mercy of those juridical and
social systems which have denied him a place and protection. This position is
extremely like that experienced by the sovereign, who must be outside the law in
order to control it:
and thus just as sovereign power’s first and immediate referent is, in this sense,
the life that may be killed but not sacrificed, and that has its paradigm in homo
sacer, so in the person of the sovereign, the werewolf, the wolf-man of man, dwells
permanently in the city.28

Agamben specifically links the werewolf to the Anglo-Saxon definition of outlaw,


and then further establishes a direct linkage between bandit and sovereign, via the
intermediary of the homo sacer who lives ‘in the city’, that is, in society.29 Through
this blurring of boundaries and the establishment of a threshold hero-figure who
is both sovereign and outlaw simultaneously, the Robin Hood of modern cinema
and other mass-culture media establishes exceptional behaviour as normative.
This modern Robin Hood is, functionally, a vigilante, one who respects and keeps
to the same laws which have cast him out: each retelling of the tales returns to the
themes of social justice, violence, and brotherhood. These are themes which many
other modern mass-culture stories, across multiple media, return to repeatedly.
Media which have a particular affiliation with these themes include superhero
comics, action and adventure films, and most prime-time American television.30
Many of these mass-culture texts use and re-use characters like Robin Hood,
depending upon audience acceptance of vigilante or criminal action as normal
and correct; for example, the massively profitable superhero comic book industry
has saturated all layers of Anglo-American pan-global culture.31 Robin Hood

27 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 110.
28 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 107.
29 
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 106.
30 
The need for critical analysis of mass-culture texts that deal intimately with violence and
popular conceptualizations of law and justice is not new, though the sheer numbers of texts
across multiple media would require studies like those undertaken by Janice A. Radway, Reading
the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1991).
31 
The superhero comic book industry includes business ventures and licensing in comic
books, films, animated cartoons, and branded merchandise whose products range from pencils
to cosmetics to clothing to electronics.
216 Valerie B. Johnson

is but a single example of the fictional construct of the citizen-outsider as hero,


the man who loves his country/society/world and is willing to step outside the
boundaries of conventional law in order to do what is right. Popular culture
‘hits’ like secret agent James Bond, or most mainstream comic book superheroes,
are also citizen-outsiders willing to violate the law to bring criminals to justice.
Additionally, the popularity and acceptance of these characters, from medieval
outlaw to ultra-modern agent of change, depends upon a disconnection from
legal and social reality: that good men may perform acts which are legally illegal
in order to sustain the power of the law.
This blurring, intended by a text’s creators and implemented by audience
acceptance, functions by shifting the narrative emphasis from law to morality.
Once this shift has occurred, morality is then figured as law — that is to say, legally
binding and also the result of long debate and deliberation. These assumptions
are part of the suspension of disbelief and secondary belief that J. R. R. Tolkien
identifies as characteristic of narrative world-building, and a necessary element of
story-telling.32 Tolkien calls the suspension of disbelief ‘involuntary’, a condition
particularly easily achieved if the author has skilfully manipulated his audience
by using as many ‘real world’ elements as possible in an effort to minimize the
disruption to the reader’s sensibility.33 Tolkien notes that:
it is found in practice that ‘the inner consistency of reality’ is more difficult to pro­
duce, the more unlike are the images and the rearrangements of primary material
to the actual arrangements of the Primary World. It is easier to produce this kind of
‘reality’ with more ‘sober’ material.34

That is, the stronger a story’s connection to what the audience accepts as reality, the
easier it is to slip the fantastical elements into the narrative. Here, the medievalistic
elements of the modern interpretations of the Robin Hood stories are vital
because they provide audiences with the sense that the tradition has always been
set during the reigns of Richard and John in the forest of Sherwood, that Robin
has always used a bow, and that he has always stolen from the rich to give to the
poor. With these elements in place, the suspension of disbelief is involuntarily

32 
J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, in Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, ed. by Verlyn Flieger and
Douglas A. Anderson (London: HarperCollins, 2008), pp. 27–84, 52. Flieger and Anderson
raise an excellent point in the Introduction to the edition, noting the difference between
Tolkien’s declaration that the suspension of disbelief is involuntary and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
judgment that the suspension is voluntary; I find Tolkien’s argument more persuasive.
33 
Tolkien, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, p. 52.
34 
Tolkien, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, p. 60.
Agamben’s homo sacer and the Modern Robin Hood 217

achieved in any given Robin Hood story; and any deviation from these basic
elements — such as Stephen Lawhead’s recent decision in his King Raven trilogy
to place Robin Hood in a Welsh context during the reign of William II Rufus
(1076–1100) — requires an extensive meta-textual justification, such as lengthy
author’s notes and introductions.
However, this suspension of disbelief has spilled outside the texts of individual
stories: modern audiences now see Robin Hood as uniformly heroic.35 The
outlawed criminal and his men, ejected from society and denied its protections,
commit crimes in the course of any greenwood tale and kill enemies and innocents
alike in the earliest stories.36 Yet audiences find this entertaining, and have done
so for centuries. This blurring between criminal and hero within the boundaries
of the text is a threshold as Agamben defines it (see note 25). The further blurring
between a figure deemed heroic within the context of a story and that same
figure’s textual heroism spilling out into non-narrative, non-textual, references
like proverbs is also a threshold. And it is this threshold which is a major narrative
impulse driving mass-culture products. The threshold between outlaw and hero,
between law and lawlessness, between necessity and action, finds a theoretical
echo in the state of exception.
Legal scholar Paul W. Kahn notes that :
The criminal, in modern America, is denied any political space. Even his execution
is not a positive, political act, for he cannot be sacrificed to the state. There is
nothing in him over which the sovereign can triumph. He has become Agamben’s
homo sacer: someone who can be killed but cannot be sacrificed.37

The implications for the perception of the status of the criminal — the real, non-
textual criminal — and the contrast in the treatment of a textual criminal — such
as Robin Hood — by the real-world public who disassociate criminality from

35 
The early ballads, literary references, and proverbs certainly do not paint a positive
picture of Robin Hood; recently, the only lingering remains of those early negative references
are proverbs (rarely used), and the occasional accusation that a politician is acting like Robin
Hood. Bill O’Reilly, the conservative political commentator on the US-based Fox News
television station, accused presidential candidate Barack Obama of being a ‘Robin Hood’, used
as a synonym for ‘socialist’, during the 2008 American presidential campaign.
36 
For example, the ‘litull page’ in ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’, killed ‘For ferd lest he wolde
tell’ (ll. 205–06), in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. by Stephen Knight and Thomas H.
Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1997).
37 
Paul W. Kahn, Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2008), p. 40.
218 Valerie B. Johnson

Robin Hood could indicate that vigilantism has become normative in certain
contexts and is no longer questioned. The Robin Hood of the early modern /
medieval ballads is hardly a homo sacer figure; Agamben’s theories of sacral
kingship do not reflect the historical reality of medieval Britain, both before and
after the official signing of the Magna Carta. But the medievalistic Robin Hood
tradition, the modern Robin Hood tradition, sees Magna Carta, and particularly
habeas corpus,38 as a major turning-point — the discussion of rights and freedoms
in the Flynn film alone is enough to have brought these issues to the forefront of
the tradition, and subsequent cinematic and literary repetitions have followed
the lead of a work produced in 1938.
This modern tradition forms Robin Hood very much as a homo sacer figure, a
man whose life cannot have meaning to the state because of his crimes against the
state, thus creating him as an outsider whose power is lesser than the sovereign’s
but capable of challenging it. His status as beloved freedom fighter means that
his death does have meaning and significance in the same extra-legal arena, the
greenwood, that he operates within during the story and in which he finds the
means and authority to challenge the legitimate king. The modern tradition
also rearranges Robin Hood’s medieval setting into a medievalistic setting, to
permit the outlaw to be a hero, to establish his kingdom in the greenwood and
legitimately challenge the king’s authority.39

38 
The Magna Carta, or Great Charter, was first signed at Runnymede in 1215, the result of
a vicious dispute between King John and his barons.  However, as the historian James C. Holt
observes in his magisterial Magna Carta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), ‘In
1215 Magna Carta was a failure. It was intended as a peace and it provoked war. It pretended to
state customary law and it promoted disagreement and contention. It was legally valid for no more
than three months, and even within that period its terms were never properly executed. Yet it was
revived in the re-issues of 1261, 1217, and 1225.  The last version became law, to be confirmed
and interpreted in Parliament and enforced in the courts of law’ (p. 1). This document is the basis
of English law, and later British and American systems of government as well. The principle of
habeus corpus, literally ‘we command that you have the body’, appeared in Chapters 39 and 40 of
the 1215 Charter, and was revised into a single chapter, 29, in the 1225 re-issue (Holt, Magna
Carta, p. 1, and nn. 1, 2). Holt further notes that habeus corpus ‘owes its continued existence to
the pietas of legislators and lawyers, for it is not now essential or often even relevant to the liberty
of the individual’ within the context of English law (Magna Carta, p. 2).
39 
‘It is no accident that Magna Carta occurred in the reign of John for it was only then
that the activity of the government was first fully recorded, and this in itself has ensured that
more of the record has survived’; Holt, Magna Carta, p. 30, which has fascinating implications
for the now-traditional setting of the Robin Hood material into the reigns of Richard and
John. Equally fascinating is the fact that few authors use government and law as anything but a
flimsy backdrop; Parke Godwin’s Sherwood (New York: Avon, 1991) and sequel Robin and the
Agamben’s homo sacer and the Modern Robin Hood 219

Such a legitimate challenge to the king — or the king’s agents, who are abusing
their authority — is key to not only the perception of the modern Robin Hood as
a hero but it also establishes what Agamben terms ‘the state of necessity’, a political
condition which is a precursor to the state of exception. Unlike the state of
exception, the state of necessity cannot have any juridical form or even be defined,
though it serves as the foundation for the exception.40 But if the state of necessity
is established through the cruelty of the king or the king’s agents — which every
Robin Hood film takes care to demonstrate, from the 1922 Fairbanks film to the
recent television series starring Jonas Armstrong — and thus shows that the only
way for the people to survive, indeed for them to maintain themselves at the level
of bare life, is for a homo sacer to stand up and defy the authorities.
Robin Hood must also always be sure to commit a crime at the same time,
to thus legitimate and maintain his outlaw condition, but always a crime linked
to his rightful defiance of wrongful authority, to paraphrase Stephen Knight.
Thus, he may kill a cruel tax collector or forester, damage property, defy direct
orders from an agent of the king, steal back some item that was wrongfully taken.
This crime must always be undertaken to provide a clear narrative excuse for his
outlawry, but also to demonstrate that Robin Hood has been forced to exercise
his right to resistance — to demonstrate, in effect, the state of necessity that
demands the existence of the outlaw who is ruling in the greenwood, a condition
which is itself a state of exception.
The term ‘state of exception’ is less a designation actively used within Anglo-
American juridical systems than a descriptive phrase employed by Agamben to
attempt to sketch the outlines of the ‘no-man’s land between public law and
political fact, and between the juridical order and life’.41 This no-man’s land is
explicitly a form of threshold, like the homo sacer, but the state of exception, though
highly theoretical, is expressed through practice: it is ‘state power’s immediate
response to the most extreme internal conflicts’.42 The state of exception is thus
largely a political definition with a legal foundation, regulated less by ideology
and more by consequences, and has been built into the constitutions and

King (New York: Avon, 1994) see Robin, frustrated by laws he does not understand being used
against him, become a lawyer — but Godwin deliberately sets his novels immediately after the
Conquest and at the turn of the twelfth century, and thus Robin’s work with the law becomes
the foundation for Magna Carta.
40 
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. by Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 1.
41 
Agamben, State of Exception, p. 1.
42 
Agamben, State of Exception, p. 2.
220 Valerie B. Johnson

regulations of the major Anglo-American and European powers.43 Because such a


wide swathe of globally significant governments have suspension clauses included
in their founding documents, politically aware citizens are likely to recognize
that the principle of exception occurs across many cultures and legal systems, and
therefore willingly accept differences from their own systems if the differences are
presented as foreign or historical.
In State of Exception, following Bodin’s example, Agamben recognizes
that legal theory cannot depend exclusively upon a single source, in this case
Roman law, and follows Bodin’s lead in an attempt to create a universal study
by ‘compar[ing] “all the laws of all, or the most famous, states and to select the
best variety”.’44 A person with a generalized awareness of his own legal system is
likely able to recognize at least superficial differences between his own system
and those of other nations and cultures. With that recognition of difference, the
universal theories of Bodin and Agamben will not specifically fit the particular
needs of every legal system or age, and the (theoretically) politically aware person
will instead use the universal theories as comparative tools for explication and
elaboration of their home systems.
Given that audiences of mass-culture texts are likely to have already internalized
the general Anglo-American ethical, moral, and legal standards which operate
in the popular culture products of those cultures, Agamben claims ‘the state of
exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem
of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where
inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other’.45
This indicates that the state of exception has the potential to be extremely
pervasive. The medievalistic Robin Hood tradition, whether filmed or written,
habitually establishes a state of necessity in order to create the state of exception in
which, and out of which, the story operates. Agamben notes, in the context of the
‘war on terror’, that the state of exception creates ‘a legal civil war that allows for
the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories

43 
In American law, the term most frequently used to describe the situation is ‘state of
emergency’, most often invoked during natural disasters to provide quick rescue and aid, and
also to permit the establishment of curfews and movement restrictions; in the United Kingdom,
‘martial law’ is the term preferred to describe the state of exception. Though the particulars
differ from one legal system to another, the general idea remains the same: a suspension of
normal operations and the imposition of different standards of behaviour and law. Agamben,
Homo Sacer, p. 10.
44 
Bodin, On Sovereignty, p. xvi.
45 
Agamben, State of Exception, p. 23.
Agamben’s homo sacer and the Modern Robin Hood 221

of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system’,46
which resonates strongly with the perception of the medievalistic Robin Hood
as a freedom fighter working to set the system right, robbing the thieving rich to
return money to the starving poor.
Agamben further claims that the ‘voluntary creation of a permanent state
of emergency […] has become one of the essential practices of contemporary
states, including the so-called democratic ones’,47 that the use of the exception
has become normative. The terminology of the exception is, however, difficult
enough to unravel in contemporary Anglo-American law, and it becomes
even more difficult to define the state of exception in medieval English law. In
a recent presentation, Paul Hyams noted that ‘few books went into medieval
courts, though plenty were written about the proceedings of those courts’,48 thus
indicating that common law and custom were the de facto governing principles of
medieval English culture, and that nearly every case could, potentially, present an
exception to custom. But the state of exception, as Agamben conceptualizes it,
is entirely constructed on the suspension of complex legal systems. Since Magna
Carta codified some pre-existing customs, that is, the common law that various
officials agreed upon, and did not include circumstances for its own suspension,
it is rather difficult to discuss the state of exception in terms of English medieval
law, particularly since the exception was not built into the foundation documents
of government in the same way that the American Constitution specifically
accounted for circumstances in which habeas corpus could legally be suspended.
The ahistorical and medievalistic Robin Hood stories here benefit from the
tendency of modern audiences to adapt traditional stories to modern concerns:
the medievalistic Robin Hood is concerned by the suspension of habeas corpus
and the possibility that he could be convicted in absentia, because his modern
audience is concerned by the potential loss of those rights; the medieval Robin
Hood and his medieval / early modern audience, however, would recognize
that his outlawry is as much sentence as it was a state of existence. Modern
audiences, for whom the state of exception is a possibility, have so repeatedly
and consistently unmoored the traditional stories from the legal realities of the
medieval period that attempting to analyse modern mass-culture Robin Hood
texts in the context of the medieval materials becomes at worst futile and at best

46 
Agamben, State of Exception, p. 2.
47 
Agamben, State of Exception, p. 2.
48 
Paul Hyams, ‘Literacy and Orality in the Age of the Legal Revolution’, presented in April
2009 at Law, Justice and Governance: New Views on Medieval Constitutionalism, a conference at
the University of Rochester organized by Richard W. Kaeuper.
222 Valerie B. Johnson

prob­lematic. Particularly in the last twenty years, the stories have come to be told
and retold in the context of contemporary politics and law, to the point that
in the 2006 television series Jonas Armstrong’s Robin quoted the Koran while
trying to explain why he had gone on Crusade.49
But it is also notable that these modern audiences who have perpetuated
the medievalistic Robin Hood tradition indeed have functionally canonized
elements of medievalism as medieval fact within the stories, have performed
a similar operation with regard to the use and abuse of the state of exception.
Agamben declares the state of exception’s legal status to be analogous to that
governing the right to resistance — that is:
Two theses are at odds here: One asserts that law must coincide with the norm, and
the other holds that the sphere of law exceeds the norm. But in the last analysis the
two positions agree in ruling out the existence of a sphere of human action that is
entirely removed from law.50

The state of exception is legally regulated from start to finish, but these legal
controls do not account for how citizens perceive individual cases, nor for how
history will judge them. An example that is particularly current for Anglo-
American audiences is the Bush administration’s redefinition of the term ‘enemy
combatant’ to mean:
an individual who was part of or supporting the Taliban or al Qaeda forces, or
associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its
coalition partners. This includes any person who committed a belligerent act or
has directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy armed forces.51

The strong backlash in world media, both within the United States and beyond its
borders, against the Bush administration’s decision to classify al-Qaeda and Taliban
fighters as unlawful combatants may draw on several sources, but a significant cause
appears to be a conflation of legality and morality. The majority of objections were
made on moral grounds, and did not address the legal right of the United States
to take this action. Morally, the decision may be wrong; legally, it was right. The
uncomfortable separation between morality and legality in the United States has

49 
‘Parent Hood’, series 1, episode 4 of Robin Hood, dir. by Richard Standeven (London:
Tiger Aspect, 2007) [on DVD].
50 
Agamben, State of Exception, p. 11.
51 
Combatant Status Review Tribunal Order, Memorandum for the Secretary of the Navy,
dated 1 July 2004. Available via the US Department of Defense’s web site, <http://www.
defenselink.mil/news/Jul2004/d20040707review.pdf> [accessed 30 July 2009].
Agamben’s homo sacer and the Modern Robin Hood 223

been demonstrated both by the American Supreme Court’s rulings on legislation


including the USA Patriot Act, and the existence of suspension clauses written into
the very fabric of the American Constitution, enactment of which the Supreme
Court and Congress have also traditionally upheld.
How, then, may Robin Hood incorporate the state of exception? Robin
Hood’s response to oppression should be legally permissible and within the
sphere of the law. However, an outlaw is by every definition and intention outside
the sphere of the law. Yet modern audiences perform a threefold exercise to
prevent cognitive dissonance when it comes to Robin Hood, a sequence which
applies to nearly every filmed Robin Hood from Flynn to Armstrong: first,
Robin is rendered an outlaw through some violation of law; secondly, the severity
of his crime is negated through circumstance and the excuse of necessity; and
thirdly, he is recast as a freedom fighter and the term ‘outlaw’ redefined to mean
more ‘rebel’ than ‘outcast’. Only the sheriff is left to insist that Robin Hood is in
fact a criminal, and his word is promptly invalidated through his office, personal
culpability in Robin’s outlawry, depiction as a stereotypical megalomaniac
villain, or all of the above. This is only sustainable as an ongoing story or feature
presentation if modern audiences have recast vigilante action as normative, that
is, if violation of the law for good and just reasons by a good and just individual is
not only permissible but expected of the hero of a piece of fiction.
The medievalistic Robin Hood, as product and producer of mass culture,
finds echoes in other genres which embrace and celebrate the citizen-outsider
taking actions into his own hands, either because the law has failed or because
he has been gifted with extraordinary powers and feels, as the Spider-man
franchise repeatedly reminds its audience, that ‘with great power comes great
responsibility’.52 These genres include, and are certainly not limited to, superhero
comic books and related films, as well as action adventure films; the impact of
comic books and action films upon modern culture is significant, though often
dismissed as inconsequential. These genres, along with other massively popular
but critically under-studied forms such as romance novels, are persistently
dismissed as simple entertainment, even by their creators, as ‘scorned literature’.
This term refers generally to the mass-culture texts that dominate American (and
to a certain extent global) popular culture, and specifically texts that are in the
words of Janice Radway ‘ridiculed by the media’,53 and thus also by family, friends,

52 
This phrase has been associated with the Spider-man character since his first appearance
in the Marvel Comics comic book Amazing Fantasy, 5 (August 1962).
53 
Radway, Reading the Romance, p. 54; see also Lydia Schurman and Deirdre Johnson,
224 Valerie B. Johnson

critics, and others, such as romance novels. In this form, like comic books, speed
of production, tendency towards repetition, and wide scope of distribution
contribute to critical and social disdain for texts that are consumed by significant
portions of the population. Garth Ennis, author of The Punisher (vol. 3, issues
1–12), collected in a trade edition as The Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank,54 notes
in a brief introduction to the collection that:
I know these are more sensitive times than the seventies, when the likes of Dirty
Harry, Death Wish and Big Frank [Frank Castle, alias the Punisher] himself were
let loose on the public psyche. I’m well aware we have to be more aware of the
consequences of our actions. No one knows better than I do that everything must be
viewed in its appropriate socio-political context. I can see why Frank’s little hobby
might be viewed as requiring some kind of justification. But only by morons.55

Welcome Back, Frank served as the basis of the story told in the 2004 film The
Punisher with Thomas Jane; where Welcome Back, Frank sought to revitalize
the character and return him to his roots as a street-level vigilante hero with an
obscenely large arsenal at his disposal, the film told an origin story, combining
the classic origin of the Punisher with Ennis’s more recent, and very popular,
tale. Ennis compares the comic book Punisher to mass-market cartoon slap-
stick violence, kung-fu films, and classic Westerns, and argues that in each case a
consumer does not bother to think about the:
alleged effects of depicting excess cruelty to a mass audience [… or] the plight of the
mentally ill in today’s too-fast-to-care society [because] You’re too busy laughing. Or
gasping. Or sitting in dumbstruck silence. Or saying ‘Hey, that was cool.’ Or maybe
just going ‘Whoa!’ […] Because it isn’t real. Because you’re being entertained.56

Ennis does have a point: cartoons, kung-fu films, Westerns, and comic books
are all perceived and dismissed as entertainment, with nothing more to offer
but thrills and a brief removal from the stress of real life. But what Ennis fails
to note is that when the reader or viewer has the ‘whoa!’ moment, he has been
successfully caught up in the text’s story world.

Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in
America (Westport: Greenwood, 2002).
54 
The series sought to reintroduce Marvel Comic’s character the Punisher (alias Frank
Castle) to a new generation of readers while bringing the character back to his roots as a ‘street-
level’ vigilante superhero.
55 
Garth Ennis, The Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank (New York: Marvel Comics, 2001), p. 4.
56 
Ennis, Welcome Back, Frank, p. 4.
Agamben’s homo sacer and the Modern Robin Hood 225

Tolkien contended that visual media, like theatre or film, are hostile to fantasy
because they provide such real figures for audiences to view and believe in,57 that
seeing an actor playing a character is inherently more convincing than reading
about it. But, logically, if visual media are so convincing in their presentation that
audiences easily believe the story is reality, then Ennis’s point about mass-culture
visual media is compromised. Welcome Back, Frank may not be ‘[j]ust a laugh, a
thrill, and plenty of sustained automatic weapons fire for your buck’ but Ennis is
right in claiming that it is also ‘[n]ot a complex analysis of the causes of crime, not
a portrait of one man’s tragic descent into murderous psychosis, not an in-depth
examination of the vigilante down the ages’.58
Instead, stories like this one portray the protagonist as a hero, and bring to
mind Hilton’s comment about Robin Hood, that a character revered for his law-
breaking would now be called a terrorist. Characters like the Punisher trouble
the simplicity of Hilton’s statement, and establish a fascinating parallel between
the comic book superhero or anti-hero and Robin Hood: that these men who
deliberately violate the law in order to do what is ‘right’ and protect the innocent,
characters whose very existence depends on, first, audience acceptance of a state
of necessity for their actions and then further acceptance of a state of exception
to render those actions permissible, have saturated mass popular culture to the
extent that everyone with access to a television, radio, comic book, or the Internet
is and continues to be exposed to characters whose actions within the state of
exception are deemed heroic and thus normative. The state of exception has
become normative as a precondition for heroic action, and thus if heroic action is
positive, so too must be the state of exception.
The basic elements of the archetypical superhero are very similar to the traits
consistently repeated in the modern Robin Hood tradition: a man, roused
from a normal life by extraordinary circumstances, discovers within himself
immense power (literal or metaphorical) and realizes that he must put that
power or ability to use for more than merely selfish purposes, though he always
remembers his origins and keeps his private pain close to himself as a reminder
of what he has suffered and what others will suffer if he does not continue in
his (self-imposed) mission to help those who cannot help themselves. There are
comic book characters which are directly based on Robin Hood, such as DC
Comics’ Oliver Queen alias Green Arrow; some which admire Robin Hood
and model themselves after him, such as Marvel Comic’s Clint Barton alias

57 
Tolkien, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, p. 61.
58 
Ennis, Welcome Back, Frank, p. 4.
226 Valerie B. Johnson

Hawkeye,59 and others whose physical skills and frustration with the failures
of the juridical system have driven them to vigilante action, such as the Batman
(DC Comics) and the Punisher (Marvel Comics). All these superheroes are
based, for the most part, on the mass-culture Robin Hood of the twentieth
century, and Green Arrow and Hawkeye have inescapable connections to the
visual and behavioural models, respectively, established in the Flynn film.
More specifically, without the use of the state of exception, contemporary
superhero fiction finds it difficult to exist within the consciousness of popular
culture. The very concept of the superhero is one of spectacle and an exceptional
biological existence, which creates the need for a suspension of normal laws and
social rules in order to permit the superhero to function as a heroic figure. Kahn
notes that ‘[t]errorism creates a disproportionate fear because it combines a
moderate physical threat to the society with the high drama of entertainment’,60
and both DC Comics and Marvel — the two major competitors in the superhero
comic book market — frequently return to the reaction of the ‘man on the street’
to superheroes and their battles, and use these reactions to fuel individual stories
and provide motivation, and introspection, for characters. Superhero fights
are terrifying to the man on the street, particularly within the story world, and
almost always feature massive property damage to significantly populated urban
centres; to the audience of the comic book itself, the spectacle is highly dramatic
and entertaining.
Marvel’s 2006 company-wide crossover event, ‘Civil War’, attempted to
combine the entertaining spectacle of superhero fights, the concerns of the
fictional and law-abiding man on the street for those who do not obey the law
in order to protect him or to attack him, and a partial exploration of real-world
awareness of what superheroes do — what vigilantes with extra-ordinary powers
and resources do — and how the fictional worlds in which superheroes exist can
barely withstand critical scrutiny, particularly when superheroes are members of
extra-national, national, and private teams of peace-keepers. The event proved
to be commercially successful and though it did not always provide satisfying
resolutions for individual characters, Marvel’s writers and illustrators are still
using ‘Civil War’ as a touchstone. The event’s popularity, and its existence as a

59 
Hawkeye greatly admires the Errol Flynn film, and makes specific reference to the movie
in ‘Lionheart of Avalon’ (pt 2 of 5) first published in The Avengers, 3:78 (New York: Marvel
Comics, 2004), pp.  9–10, an otherwise unremarkable story written by Chuck Austin and
illustrated by Oliver Coipel.
60 
Kahn, Sacred Violence, p. 9.
Agamben’s homo sacer and the Modern Robin Hood 227

‘world-changing’ fiction which looked closely at the legalities of superheroes and


acknowledged that such a popular genre suspends disbelief in both physics and
law, indicates that the state of exception is alive, well, and acknowledged in mass
culture.
The contemporary superhero is in many ways Robin Hood, stripped of
any pretence of medievalism and set in the immediate present tense, and that
comparison is largely possible because of the pervasive yet unacknowledged state
of exception within the multiple media of mass culture. The state of exception, the
threshold between law as it is written and law as it is enforced, is an in-between
zone that provides a mediation between the political necessity and biological life.
This threshold is exactly where literature stands as well, balancing on the cusp
between ideology and lived reality, and forming the mediation between idea and
body. Thus, literary characters and figures — figures who are written and also
written about — provide an ideal territory within which the issues inherent in
the concerns underlying Agamben’s state of exception may be safely examined.
However, literature ultimately does go out into the world, to change it and be
changed by it. Likewise, the characters and circumstances within these literary
explorations of the legal exception change with the times and to better meet the
desires of their changing audiences.
Robin Hood’s presence though hundreds of years of popular culture provides
a body of material from which patterns of cultures past and present may be
extrapolated. Since the tradition is a semi-unified body of material, it provides
an ideal context in which critics may observe the development of theories of
sovereignty, legality, the role of the hero as outsider, and the political state of
exception, from late medieval and early modern audiences to the present day.
Pre-eminent political theorists from Jean Bodin to Giorgio Agamben have been
forced to select and discard elements of various political systems in an effort to
develop universal theories of sovereignty and politics, and within the context of
the Robin Hood tradition it is possible to trace the applications of the conditions
which these theories seek to map within mass-culture productions.

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