Signatures move and displace concepts and signs from one field to another (in

this case, from sacred to profane, and vice versa) without redefining them
semantically. Many pseudoconcepts belonging to the philosophical tradition
are, in this sense, signatures that, like the “secret indexes” of which Benjamin
speaks, carry out a vital and determinate strategic function, giving a lasting
orientation to the interpretation of signs. Insofar as they connect different
times and fields, signatures operate, as it were, as pure historical elements.
Foucault’s archaeology and Nietzsche’s genealogy (and, in a different sense,
even Derrida’s deconstruction and Benjamin’s theory of dialectical images) are
sciences of signatures, which run parallel to the history of ideas and concepts,
and should not be confused with them. If we are not able to perceive
signatures and follow the displacement and movements they operate in the
tradition of ideas, the mere history of concepts can, at times, end up being
entirely insufficient.
—Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory1

The author would like to thank both Daniel Spaulding and Dāna Papachristou for their invaluable
feedback.
1
Giorgio Agamben, The Power and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and
Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (with Matteo Mandarini) (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2011), 4.
I offer here an account of the state that is neither historical nor empirical. This is because my
approach is indifferent to any concrete state of affairs. The reason for this method is to avoid
the reformism and other rationalizations furnished to legitimize the transformation of the
state from one shape to another. Therefore, I refrain from engaging any who debate where to
draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate exercises of state power. Recourse to a
philosophical method further allows me to pose a different problem: how are different states
all a symptom of the same disease?
Philosophically considering the state this way prevents state power before it takes
root. This is not to say that the state ever ceases to be a problem. The lure of state power has
existed as a virtual potential at every moment of humanity. As many anthropologists have
long held, the state is not a product of evolution, as in a higher step that necessarily emerges
as a solution to increased social complexity, material abundance, or technological advance-
ments.2 Even the most anti-authoritarian non-state societies are stalked by a menacing image
of the state, even if they have never seen one—in fact, for them, it is this conceptual
knowledge of the problem of the state that is necessary to put in place measures that ward off
its emergence.3 Philosophy, then, is what provides a virtual concept of the state that allows it
to be preempted at every turn, especially in those instances that have not yet come into being.
The method I employ is an an-arkhḗ-ology. It should not be confused with Michel
Foucault’s archaeology. His archaeological method stopped too short, focusing squarely on
the transcendental foundations of knowledge as crystallized in the archive.4 A more thorough
inquiry into the archive reveals it to be but one concept of a whole constellation whose center
of gravity is its arkhḗ (ᾰ̓ρχή). Broadly meaning both “origin” and “order,” pre-Socratics like
Anaximander used arkhḗ to posit a primary substance from which everything springs forth.5
The term serves as a sort of foundational riddle for state-builders who construct ever-more
arcane hallways dedicated to onto-theology: what is the original something from which our
world arises?

2
See Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Roberty
Hurley and Abe Stein (New York: Zone Books, 1990), and David Graeber and David Wengrow, The
Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
3
Anticipation-warding off is one of the concepts behind Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
nomadology plateaus in A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987). For an anthropological account, see the chapter on “The Evolution of
Egalitarian Society” in Charles Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian
Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 171-196.
4
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1972).
5
Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 119-
129.
Plato poses an arkhḗ as both metaphysical ground and axiomatic starting point, a principle to
which nothing prior exists.6 Aristotle outlines it in a rather encyclopedic fashion at the
beginning of Book 5 of his Metaphysics, providing a 6-point definition, whereby:

'BEGINNING' [arkhḗ] means (1) that part of a thing from which one would start first,
e.g., a line or a road has a beginning in either of the contrary directions. (2) That from
which each thing would best be originated, e.g., even in learning we must sometimes
begin not from the first point and the beginning of the subject, but from the point from
which we should learn most easily. (4) That from which, as an immanent part, a thing
first comes to be, e.g., as the keel of a ship and the foundation of a house, while in
animals some suppose the heart, others the brain, others some other part, to be of this
nature. (4) That from which, not as an immanent part, a thing first comes to be, and
from which the movement or the change naturally first begins, as a child comes from
its father and its mother, and a fight from abusive language. (5) That at whose will that
which is moved is moved and that which changes, e.g., the magistracies in cities, and
oligarchies and monarchies and tyrannies, are called arkhai, and so are the arts, and of
these especially the architectonic arts. (6) That from which a thing can first be
known,—this also is called the beginning of the thing, e.g., the hypotheses are the
beginnings of demonstrations. (Causes are spoken of in an equal number of senses; for
all causes are beginnings.)7

The larger project of which this text is a part takes all dimensions of the term to express a
shared vision. But the fifth meaning Aristotle outlines, which is tied to political authority, is
paramount. That is because arkhḗ carries forward mythic traces of the Myceneans, for whom
an árkhōn (ἄρχων) was a magistrate who ruled over the city, and whose authority was monu-
mentalized in the civic buildings, arkheîon (ἀρχεῖον), and the official documents housed in
them (from which we finally arrive at the “archive”). Hence the words “monarch” and
“patriarchy,” which refer to modes of ruling over others—as well as “architecture” and “hier-
archy,” which furnish authority with the means for the administration of people and things.
Arkhḗ thus binds together (1) the metaphysical principle of a substratum or divine founding
event with (2) the commanding authority of rulers and their rules. As an an-arkhḗ-ology, I
rigorously track the virtual potentials of the state as embodied in its foundational arkhḗ and
it many symptoms, to hasten its withering away.

A first approximation to an-arkhḗ-ology has been richly developed by anarchists. In

anarchism’s classical period of the 19th century, they identified three archenemies in the
church, state, and capital. This put the anarchists in close proximity to socialists and other

6
Plato, Republic, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2004), 511b; Plato,
Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1995),
245c-d.
7
Aristotle, Metaphysica, trans. W.D. Ross, Volume III of The Works of Aristotle (Oxford: Claredon
Press, 1908), 1012b-1213a.
utopians, who were riding the modernist push to bring a better world into existence. Usually
forgotten, then, are the anti-social elements that did not blueprint a better future, such as the
Russian nihilists or the regicides, who adopted a fiercely negative orientation to end mon-
archist rule—refusing to suggest anything to replace the empty throne. By our time,
anarchism now questions all forms of authority, such as classism, gender, sexuality, racism,
anti-Blackness, colonialism, eco-devastation, and ableism. Yet in the field of philosophy,
anarchism is regularly treated as an extreme liberalism and conversations thus devolve into
odd debates over possessive individualism, non-domination, and pacifist ethics. Even worse,
anarchists themselves often revert to consent, consensus, and shared rule—all of which are
based on the liberal arkhḗ of the contract. While the impulse to question all authority is
crucial, an an-arkhḗ must push past the stop-overs to which anarchists retreat for comfort.8
A similar challenge emerges in discourses of democracy. At the core of democracy is
the arkhḗ of the krátos (κρᾰ́τος) of the dêmos (δῆμος), which is commonly supported through
republicanism and popular sovereignty. The target of an an-arkhḗ-ological investigation is
how the dêmos is made into a dēmokratíā (δημοκρᾰτῐ́ᾱ), locating how the violent might that
defines the state—krátos—is woven into social life. As such, “the dominion” of “the people” is
used as the ground upon which state rule most often secures its legitimacy. Dêmos can stand
for a territory, the people, or even a people’s assembly. What appeals to the statutory power
of “the people” miss is that the constitution of the dêmos is itself an act of state (krátos), on
which their claims rest.
It would be a mistake to imagine these words as holding fixed meaning over time.
Each term is but a constellation within a “sematic field,” whose sense can only be understood
through the patterns it establishes with other terms.9 Law (nómos, νόμος), justice (díkē, δῐ́κη),
and power (krátos, κρᾰ́τος) all shift, and can be understood only through inter-relation.10
Jean-Pierre Vernant turns to Greek tragic theater as a demonstration of this understanding.
He points to the period of 534-530 B.C.E., when popular tribunals are instituted in Athens to
judge contests in tragedy: a shift away from informal noble arbitration of culture to a
contemporaneous transformation in a system of popular justice that established the city as
city, ruled through formal law.11 Tragedy thus becomes the means through which problems
of law are elaborated socially, tensions are teased out, and the connection between laws
(nómoi) and justice (díkē) is forged.12

8
This is not meant to minimize the crucial work of sexual violence advocates. In fact, it is meant to
confirm a belief held by many of them: that consent does not go far enough. Just as anti-
discrimination laws individualize harm, necessarily bracketing out larger systemic issues, feminist
philosophers such as Carole Pateman have long identified how the sexual contract equates to
contractual sexual submission.
9
See page 273 of Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Greek Tragedies: Problems of Interpretation,” in Richard
Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy, (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1972), 273-289.
10
Ibid, 275.
11
Ibid, 278-279.
12
Ibid, 279.
 Antigone remains an exemplary tragic playing out of the tensions of law. The conven-
tional distinction is between humans making their own laws (nómoi) in opposition to that of
non-human nature (phúsis, φῠ́σῐς), but a crucial turning point arrives as Antigone denies her
uncle Creon’s authority as chief of state.13 Before long, three different forms of nómos are
visible, each grounded in a different sense of díkē: the laws Creon issues on behalf of the
popular tribunals of the city, Antigone’s evocation of a justice of the underworld, and Zeus’s
(humanly) incomprehensible rules of tragedy as recited by the chorus, in which “nothing good
happens for humanity without some admixture of misfortune.”14 The point of tragedy is not
to resolve any of these contradictions. Rather, Antigone reveals a deeper challenge grinding
away beneath: that the problems of the law are also problems of the family, and that although
women are excluded from being political beings, they prove to be the only decisive figures in
tragic matters of law.15 The putative irrationality of women had been used to keep them
captive within the house, reduced to human filiative stock captured in war or traded for the
sealing of the bonds between families in “the exchange of women.” 16 The centrality of the
excluded-woman will only be amplified with the rise of oikonomíā (οἰκονομῐ́ᾱ), in which the
administration of the household (oikos, οἶκος) mutates into the science of society now known
as economics.
Perhaps Jean-Pierre Vernant’s most central claim about the Greeks arises from the
abstract concept of isonomíā. With this, he argues that the Greeks of antiquity transitioned
from the metaphysics of mythology that underwrote monarchy to a democratic pólis ruled
by the citizen,

a coherent system, governed by numerical relations and correspondences that

permitted the citizens to declare themselves "the same," to enter into relations of
mutual equality, symmetry, and reciprocity, and together to form a unified cosmos.
The polis was seen as a homogeneous whole, without hierarchy, without rank,
without differentiation. Arche was no longer concentrated in a single figure at the apex
of the social structure, but was distributed equally throughout the entire realm of
public life, in that common space where the city had its center, its meson [intermediate
space]. Sovereignty passed from one group to another, from one individual to another,
in a regular cycle, so that command and obedience, rather than being opposed to each
other as two absolutes, became the two inseparable aspects of one reversible
relationship.17

13
Ibid, 280; Antigone, 449-461.
14
Ibid, 281.
15
Ibid, 282.
16
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John
Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
17
Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, 101.
Perhaps this is the birth of “politics,” emerging both in concept and word from this new pólis.
Its attributes were identified by Vernant as a new form of relation, one built on “mutual
equality, symmetry, and reciprocity” that allowed citizens to simultaneously inhabit the
position of commander and subservient. This is a transformation in geometry from the citadel
of the Acropolis to a secularized physical space that was common, public, and egalitarian,
“symmetrically organized about a center correspond[ing] to certain images of the social
order.”18
While Vernant holds that democracy arrives after a journey out of myth to physics, it
is equally clear that such a shift does not undo the arkhḗ of state power, but only reassembles
it on firmer ground. The task is laid out even more clearly in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics.
In this book, Aristotle is concerned with addressing the question of science’s arkhḗ, its first
principles. This leads him to the analogy of an army in retreat, with the arkhḗ appearing from
soldiers in the grip of fear—“stopped by first one man making a stand and then another, until
the original formation has been restored”—almost as if the fleeing soldiers were a chaotic sub-
stance that could be made to obey the commanding officer’s arkhḗ one-by-one, until full order
is restored.19 The implication is that the positing of a grounding substance (ousia, hypokei-
menon, hypostasis, or subiectum), even something as seemingly egalitarian as a dêmos, also
calls into existence a matching arkhḗ that rules over it.
There have been sophisticated attempts to defend an anarchist conception of demo-
cracy. Jacques Rancière argues that the constitutive act requires a “division of the sensible,”
through which he describes how every pólis draws a boundary between those whose speech
is entertained, such as citizens, and those who lack the standing to be heard, such as slaves,
women, foreigners, or beasts.20 Within the already-sensible, only “policing” occurs, which he
specifies as the administration or distribution of people and things.21 “Politics” only appears
in the insurgent act of demanding the “part who has no part” of the sensible.22 This is appealing
to many anarchists because, like Jacques Derrida or Stathis Gourgouris, he presents
democracy as constantly under deconstruction in an ongoing struggle to live up to its own
axiom of equality. Yet Deleuze and Guattari argue, in contrast, that the heart of every state
pumps to the rhythm at which it adds and subtracts axioms (with social democrats adding
protections and libertarians stripping them away in the movement of re- and de-territorial-
ization). In the final analysis, then, democracy cannot remain standing in the face of an-arkhḗ-
ology. Even the endless self-questioning of what constitutes a dêmos entailed in the most
ambitious forms of democracy is not enough.23 It goes without saying that many democracies
have considered a small selection of privileged men with common interests to be worthy of
constituting a dêmos. Yet democracy’s universalist assumptions are no less nefarious: its
ongoing deconstruction reveals how, even when democracy contains a plurality, it remains
in the shadow of a supremely flexible arkhḗ whose krátic strength is derived from its ability
to accommodate everything and nothing.

18
Ibid, 126-127.
19
Aristotle, Analytica Posteriora, trans. G.R.G. Mure, Volume 1 of The Works of Aristotle (Oxford:
Claredon Press, 1926), 100a. Also see Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From
Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 39-40.
20
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
21
Ibid, Chapter 2, “Wrong: Politics and Policing.”
22
Ibid, Chapters 1 and 4, “The Beginning of Politics” and “From Archipolitics to Metapolitics.”
23
The *deh/da of Proto-Indo-European *deh-mos and the Mycenean Greek da-mo means “to divide”
or “a part,” making the partage of the dêmos intrinsic to the very notion of a people.
 The closest previous thought has come to ungrounding politics is in the thought of
Reiner Schürmann. He pursues a thoroughly an-archic thought that deconstructs both the
commanding and commencing sides of arkhḗ (and the Roman principium) that take “science,”
“God,” or “a vision of the world” to authorize the principles of the “authority of God or the
magisterium of the Church,” “the authority of Conscience,” “authority of Reason,” “the social
Instinct,” “historical Progress,” “Civilization,” or “Business.”24 There are numerous moments
when this deconstruction has interrupted history by introducing action characterized by an
“absence of any principle of legitimization,” namely, “the citizens’ unions in North America
around 1776, the ‘popular societies’ in Paris between 1789 and 1793, the Commune of 1871,
the soviets of 1905 and 1917, the Democracy of Councils in Germany in 1918.”25
Crucial to Schürmann is how each of these introduced a caesura that suspended the
operations of the arkhḗ, preventing authority from rushing immediately in to fill its place. In
this sense, his argues that classical anarchists are still trapped in images of thought that turn
back into arkhḗ (Bakunin: “the substitution of Science for the domination of man by man”;
Proudhon: “spontaneous life,” “passion,” “the revolt of life against science”).26 Yet Schürmann
does not leave thought just the task of metaphysical ground-clearing, as if thinking alone
could make arkhḗ unthinkable. In channeling the spirit of anarchism, he praises the above-
noted revolutionary events, lauding them for having “invaded the political field and for brief
lapses, before one ontic origin could replace another,” which “set action free.” 27 These
moments constitute an interval, a space where the arkhḗ of the previous epoch has loosened
and a new one has not yet established itself. The anarchy of thought is manifest within each
interregnum as it unfolds. Such refusal is exercised in modes of thought and action that only
exist during the suspension of all arkhaí: an anarchy whose powers reside in affirming the
rupture.28

My preference is for structuralist thinkers, for whom an allegiance to materialism is inesca-

pable. Details from the past overflow nearly every page. But I am an unreliable narrator of
history. For as Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet contend in their dialogues, history is too
deeply intertwined with state thought.29 History carries with it “a whole race of judges” who
rule over history like a court where Pure Reason or Pure Faith carry the day. 30 Deleuze and
Parnet’s immediate target is state philosophy, which proceeds slowly through the accumula-

24
Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 90; 91.
25
Ibid, 91.
26
Ibid, 6; 292.
27
Ibid, 91.
28
Michele Garau, “Without Why: The Existential A Priori of Destituent Action,” Ill Will, October
2021, https://illwill.com/without-why.
29
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1-14.
30
Ibid, 9.
tion of dull commentaries, effectively censoring anything too original.31 This intersects with
Schürmann’s anarchic method, which takes as its point of departure a refusal of the historical
mode of philosophy’s reduction of thinking to a series of footnotes on previous works.
Beneath history, Deleuze and Parnet find a superior materialism. Its material substance
is becomings that are too wild and too abstract to live up to history’s forensic need to get the
facts right.32 This alternative thought is embodied by nomads, to whom anthropologist Pierre
Clastres dedicated his “history of people without a history,” Society Against the State.33
Nomad thought travels at absolute speed, only skimming the surface of concrete states of
affairs, to avoid getting bogged down in them. This does not mean that such thought must
outrun its enemies—“one must be like a taxi, queue, line of flight, traffic jam, bottleneck, green
and red lights, slightly paranoid, brushes with the police.”34 Its absolute speed glides between
abstract differentials, finding those inflection points that allow one to synthesize different
relationships (“with women, plants, animals and metals…”) than those that are codified by the
state.35 These relationships allow the nomad to find it purest expression in a permanent engine
of change, the war machine, whose primary task is “to shake the model of the state
apparatus.”36
After clarifying that, it can be more plainly stated the point of this project is to
contribute to the nomadic war machine’s arsenal in its attack on the state. Hence, I can now
explain the uneasy inclusion of archconservative Georges Dumézil.37 The centrality of
Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna to this project (as well as other structuralist accounts of state
thought) is like Karl Marx’s use of the classical economists in Capital or Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari’s approach to Freud in Anti-Oedipus. The former helps launch “a critique of
political economy,” the latter serves as “the Martin Luther and Adam Smith of psychiatry”
— both of which provide metaphysical sketches of the reactionary forces one is up against.38
To put it bluntly, I do not invite Dumézil (or the Greeks and Romans of Antiquity, for that
matter) into the text as a friend, but as an adversary.

31
Ibid, 12-16.
32
Ibid, 30-32; 37.
33
Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1987).
34
Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 32.
35
Ibid, 32.
36
Ibid, 32.
37
Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of
Sovereignty, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
38
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Helen R. Lane, and Mark
Seem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 271.
‐ ‐
The abstract lines that nomad thought uses to trace the state do not follow a single unbroken
evolutionary development. “The state was not formed in progressive stages,” Deleuze and
Guattari contend, “it appears fully armed, a master stroke executed all at once; the primordial
Urstaat, the eternal model of everything the State wants to be and desires.” 39 Rather than
offering a developmental model with stages of development, I instead follow arkhḗ-ological
types that persist across time. In the parlance of Deleuze, the arkhḗ is what every state
virtually insists on, independent of the contingencies of any given situation. One should not
take any particular arkhḗ as more advanced than any other, only that they are deformations
of the same abstract concepts that subsist beneath all state forms.

What follows are the first steps in a longer inquiry into the figures of the sovereign. It begins
with the terrible magician-king, whose presence is repressed by the mechanical operations of
procedural democracy. This is not to say that he hides much below the surface, as his epithets
are just as common today as ever: excessive, brash, violent, mad, ruthless, cruel, and irrational.
It would be a fatal mistake to affirm his opposite, however, as if the restoration of order,
measured action, fairness, impartiality, or generosity were a more legitimate exercise of
power. The magician-king and jurist-priests are complementary doubles. Even when they are
in relative conflict, they do so as dialectical antinomies that ultimately reinforce the absolute
power of the state.40 The greatest contribution of additional work on arkhḗ may be found
through unexpected admixtures of the two poles, in which faith in the virtues proves fatal.

39
Ibid, 271.
40
See the chapter on the death-state in Eugene Holland, Nomad Citizenship (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
 οἰκο νομῐ́ᾱ

41
Lubidinem dominandi in Sallust, The Catilinarian Conspiracy, 2.2, Perseus Digital Library,
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0123%3Achapter%3
D2 and Augustine of Hippo, De Civitate Dei, 1 pr, The Latin Library,
https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/augustine/civ1.shtml; Cupidine dominandi in Cornelius Tacitus,
Annales, 1.10, Perseus Digital Library,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0077%3Abook%3D1
%3Achapter%3D10.
1.0.0 To imagine having the hair of a swine brings about dangers that are violent and of the
sort to which this animal is liable, I mean, the swine. But to have the hair of a horse signifies
slavery and labor [even] for those who are well-born. And, moreover, for slaves it puts them
into bondage. For a horse's mane is typically bound.

—Artemidorus, Interpretation of Dreams, 1.2042

1.0.1 There are as many forms of bondage as there have been social formations. Yet com-
parative work between slave societies, feudal serf societies, and other class societies remains
imperative. Max Weber famously stated that “the ancient plantation consumed slaves the way
a modern blast furnace consumes coal.”43 The scale of slavery in the Roman Empire appears
to have been massive, likely demanding the capture or importation of 250,000 slaves per
year—a number extrapolated from a tax Augustus passed to support the vigiles in firefighting,
apprehending thieves, capturing fugitive slaves, and putting down riots.44 Therefore “no
slavery, no state” remains an essential phrase for understanding governance, especially if we
take it to mean not just chattel slavery but the various form of bondage that reduce people to
draft animals.45
The work of Moses Finley remains canonical, even as subsequent scholars have filled
out a competing historical record and disputed many of his conclusions. He outlined analytic
criteria for distinguishing various “societies with slaves” from “slave societies” utterly
dependent on slavery.46 This leads him to the audacious claim that there have only been five
genuine slave societies: classical Greek and Rome, the colonial Caribbean and Brazil, and the
American South.47 What remains in dispute is whether slavery needs to be studied as socially
embedded, or if it is a transcultural phenomenon with analytic categories that confidently cut
across all cases. Economic historians are more inclined to take slavery as a set of material
conditions that are not limited to a handful of cases. For instance, David M. Lewis has argued
that within the Eastern Mediterranean alone, Sparta, Crete, Attica, Iron Age Israel, eight to
seventh century B.C.E. Assyria, seventh to fifth century B.C.E. Babylonia, the Persian Empire,

42
Page 73 of "Text and Translation," in Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica: Text, Translation, and
Commentary by Daniel E. Harris-McCoy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 44-407.
43
Max Weber, The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, translated by R.I. Frank (London and
New York: Verso Press, 2013), 398.
44
Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book LV, 31, Loeb Classical Library,
https://www.loebclassics.com/view/dio_cassius-roman_history/1914/pb_LCL083.475.
xml?readMode=recto; Walter Scheidel, “The Roman Slave Supply,” in Keith Bradley and Paul
Cartledge, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 287–310
45
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2017), 156.
46
Moses I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: The Viking Press, 1980), 79.
47
Ibid, 9.
and Punic Carthage were all slave societies.48 Further comparative work includes the
Sarmatians from second through fourth century C.E., eighteenth to nineteenth century
Northwest Coast Native Americans, the Sokoto Caliphate in the nineteenth century, and
nineteenth century Dahomey, to name a few.49 From the perspective of that world, the
Romans were so accustomed to slavery that encountering a society without it was rare, and
thus, remarkable.50
Although it did not invent it, the state ensured that over three-quarters of humans lived
in bondage as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century.51 “Little more than two
centuries ago, personal bondage was the prevailing form of labor in most of the world”: a
stunning image of the ubiquity of subjugation that led Seymour Drescher to argue that
“freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.”52

1.0.2 Consider this: the eighteenth century was a highpoint for the trans-Atlantic slave
trade, with almost eighty thousand Africans annually submitted to the life, death, and terror
of the hold of slave ships. Many Native Americans engaged in slavery, a practice they
extended to Europeans after they arrived. The triangle trade meant that slaves far outnum-
bered free peoples in many parts of the Americas. The same held true for parts of Africa,
whose system of slavery was not always as severe but included so many millions that there
was always an ample supply to be spread across the Islamic and New worlds. The Ottoman
Empire practiced its own form of slavery; throughout their empire, they employed an
extensive tributary tax system imposed on all non-Muslims called haraç—a word that has
been revived to describe the extractive violence of International Monetary Fund structural
adjustment schemes. Most Russians were serfs, living in bondage to owners who bought, sold,
whipped, and conscripted them. And across Asia, such as in India, there were millions of
farmworker slaves while many peasants endured rigid debt bondage.53
Many imagine that everything has changed; that freedom has overtaken enslavement,
liberty bondage, and reason superstition. But both wars of conquest and overtures of peace
are motivated by the same realization: “that men as well as animals can be domesticated.”54

48
David M. Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, C.800-146 BC
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
49
Noel Lenski, “Framing the Question: What Is a Slave Society?” in Noel Lenski and Catherine M.
Cameron, eds., What is a Slave Society?: The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 15-57.
50
Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, trans. John Bostock, Perseus Digital Library,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D6%
3Achapter%3D24.
51
The details of which are outlined further below in section 1.0.2. Adam Hochschild, Bury the
Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Boston and New York: Mariner
Books, 2006), 2.
52
Seymour Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic
Slavery (London: MacMillan Press, 1999), 158.
53
Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 2.
54
V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (London: Watts & Company, 1936), 134.
Why defeat an enemy when they can be made to work? This is a discovery essential to ancient
industry on par with the domestication of animals. This comes to define a form of violence
inherent in all states. The blood of the bond, sealed through terror, burned directly onto the
flesh.
Such naked violence is exemplified in Southeast Asian padi states, empires built from
rice. In The Art of Not Being Governed and subsequently Against the Grain, anarchist
academic James C. Scott describes the advent of such a state.55 Setting the scene, Scott details
the alluvial plains where he says that the simplest states formed in fertile valleys. The key to
Scott’s account is his political economy of their emergence, which emphasizes the mass
cultivation of rice. Among the many aspects of the padi state specific to Southeast Asia, there
are two more general characteristics that contribute to a broader definition of statecraft: first,
captivity, the result of a heavy reliance on forced labor secured through raiding and trading;
and second, projectivity, whereby visibility is power through the ability to act at a distance.
Abstracting these characteristics from what is historically specific to padi states in Southeast
Asia, it becomes clear that the first basic process of governance is not cultivation but conquest.

1.0.3 If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of Black America, it is not because of an
antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because
Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that
were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited
access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.

—Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route56

1.1.0 The words “nexa” and “nectier” are used in the original [of Cicero’s Republic]. And at
the first glance, the passage, connecting it with the well known custom of keeping debtors in
chains, as well as the memorable occasion which produced this insurrectionary movement,
would appear to declare, that all kinds of bondage for debt were abolished in future. In early
periods, whoever was unable to pay his debts, was adjudged by a decree of the prætor, to
discharge them in personal services: for which purpose his person was delivered to his
creditor; whose slave in every sense of the word he thus became, until the debt was
discharged. A debtor thus situated was termed “addictus” or sentenced. Livy, vi. 36., relates
“that those against whom judgments had been given, (addictos) were led out daily in herds
from the Forum, to the mansions of the patricians, which were filled with enchained debtors:
and that wherever a patrician dwelt, there was a private prison.” That all debtors were subject
to actual bonds, appears from every indebted person under voluntary judgment, being called
“nexus,” meaning linked or chained; and probably when judgment was passed, debtors were
delivered in that condition to the creditors. But “nexus” changed its meaning, as the word
“bond” has done in our language, where we bind ourselves only with forms. The urgent

55
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
56
Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 6.
necessity of the plebeians, arising out of the exactions of the patricians, obliged them to
borrow money at usury; and upon such occasions, for money weighed out to him “per æs et
libram,” before witnesses, the borrower pledged his person and liberty to the lender as
security for the debt. This voluntary act, which was equivalent to a modern confession of
judgment, constituted the debtor a “nexus;” before the period of payment had expired, at
which time only he was liable to fetters. Upon the occasion of the insurrection mentioned in
the passage; a young man of respectable plebeian family, C. Publilius, surrendered himself to
Papirius, a patrician usurer, in the place of his father who had failed to redeem himself from
his “nexus.” Rejecting the infamous propositions made to him, Papirius caused him to be
cruelly scourged. This transaction having roused the people, the senate was obliged to consent
to the liberation of all persons who had become “nexi” by their voluntary act, and to order the
practice to be discontinued in future.

—GW Featherstonhaugh, The Republic of Cicero57

1.1.1 In Roman Antiquity, incurring and discharging debt obligations is not just an issue of
material exchange. The ritual of nexum followed the formal procedure of par aes et libram
(“with bronze and balance”), a transfer of property that required five witnesses and a libripens
(the ceremonial scale-holder). “This is probably best viewed not as a relationship between two
individuals, as we would today,” Peter Meijes Tiersma argues, “but rather as a passage of one
person into the status of debtor.”58 The reason he gives is that:

the will of the debtor and creditor had little to do with the matter: one person who
injured another could by this act become a debtor. The debtor was seen as the bonds-
man of the creditor, indicating that the essence of nexum was not that the creditor had
certain rights as against the debtor, but that the debtor entered into a particular status.
This status did not end when he paid his obligation to the creditor, since it was not in
essence a relationship with the creditor.59

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that ritual of par aes et libram created a unilateral
incorporeal ontological transformation in the debtor. The debtor passes from one social class
through an official speech act, akin to the ruling declarations of a sovereign or judge, while
the creditor remains the same.
A less formal means of debt available to citizens was stipulatio. Viva voce a creditor
would ask a question that concluded with spondesne, such as estertium decem miliamihi dari
spondesne? “do you promise to give me ten thousand sesterces?”, followed by the debtor’s
response of spondeo (“I promise”).60 The ritual evolved to allow synonyms like promittere,

57
Footnote on page 106 of G.W. Featherstonhaugh’s translation of Marcus Tulius Cicero, The
Republic of Cicero (New York: G. & C. Carvill, 1829), 106.
58
Peter Meijes Tiersma, “Rites of Passage: Legal ritual in Roman law and anthropological analogues,”
Journal of Legal History 9 (1988), 13.
59
Ibid, 13.
60
Ibid, 8.
and later, the question-and-answer format was replaced by intent.61

1.1.2 In the presence of five witnesses the libripens weighs out to the borrower the correspon-
ding amount of raw metal, and the lender at the same time declares in solemn words that the
borrower is now in his debt (dare damnas esto). The borrower is now under an obligation to
repay. He is said to be 'nexus' to his creditor, i.e. he has directly pledged his own person for
repayment of the loan, and thus stands already in precisely the same position as a judgment
debtor. […]
Execution proceeds directly with inexorable rigour against the person of the debtor. He
falls into the power of his creditor, who may bind him and cast him into chains. After having
thrice publicly invited some one to come forward and release him, the creditor may—in
default of any one appearing, and after the lapse of sixty days—regard the debtor as his slave,
and may either kill him or sell him ‘trans Tiberim,’ i.e. into a foreign country, say, Etruria. If
several creditors have claims upon one and the same debtor, the law allows them to cut the
debtor into pieces, and provides that a mistake in the division shall in no wise prejudice their
rights. […]
The rigour of the private law finds its counterpart in the rigour of the family power.
Within his family the paterfamilias is an absolute sovereign; he has power over the life and
liberty of any member of the household. The only external checks on the exercise of his legal
rights are furnished, not by the law, but by religion and custom.
—Rudolph Sohm, The Institutes of Roman Law62

1.2.0 “The freedom of some could not be imagined without the servitude of others” in
Antiquity, Austin and Vidal-Niquet note of the Greeks, explaining that the two “were not
thought of as contradictory, but as complementary and interdependent.”63 In this way, com-
manding slaves was not just a luxury, but an expected part of everyday life for a Greek citizen.
With the character of an Athenian helping set up a new colony in Crete, Plato suggests in his
Laws that every citizen should be afforded “as far as possible, with a sufficient number of
suitable slaves who can help him in what he has to do.”64 And in Aristophanes’ comedy in
which women take over government and pass sweeping social reforms, the Greek utopian
imagination wishes up a world of ‘everything for everyone’ that does away with the rich and
poor, by equally distributing slaves among them.65

61
Ibid, 8.
62
Rudolph Sohm, The Institutes of Roman Law, trans. James Crawford Ledlie, 4th edition (Oxford:
Claredon Press, 1892), §10, 26-27.
63
M.M. Austin and P. Vidal-Naquet, Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece: An
Introduction, trans. M.M. Austin (London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1986), 19.
64
Plato, Laws, 777b-e, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Internet Classics Archive,
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/laws.6.vi.html.
65
Aristophanes, Women in Congress, 590-605, trans. Amanda Krauss and Jess Miner,
http://www.women-in-congress.com/.
1.2.1 Slavery, however, is more than being the property of another. The “property” approach
to slavery goes like this: “slavery is the fact that one man is the property or possession of
another.”66 Implied in the definition is an economic account of slavery as a system of forced
labor. This is echoed by Aristotle when he called the slave “a tool with a soul” and when Varro
contrasts “talking tools” with inarticulate cattle and mute vehicles as essentials for agri-
culture.67 Both are true: punishing fieldwork and the murderous labor of mining has often
been secured through slavery, and slaves were subject to being sold as commodities. And
there is little dispute that slavery was the engine that powered the Greeks, Romans, and other
“great” civilizations. But this is as far as those steeped in modern economics can see. “High
status,” Dimitris Kyrtatas writes, “did not depend on profit maximization but rather on honor
maximization.”68
Classical economics enters political discussion in the 5th century B.C.E.69 For the next
half-millennium, all major schools of Greek thought will develop their own treatises. Unlike
modern societies, economics was not taken to be an isolated sphere obeying its own laws,
unified around independent concepts for study.70 Their economics was fully social-embed-
ded, organized around a shifting set of concerns. Karl Polanyi names four: reciprocity,
redistribution, trade-based exchange, and managing the household.71 Generalizing further, to
the extent to which “economics” was a concern, it was not about wealth-generation but
proper consumption. In one writer’s estimate, Xenophon’s Economics contains “astonishingly
little” about production and “too much about an orderly way of living.”72
Slavery and patriarchy were written into the earliest writing on economics. The cus-
tomary rules found in these texts were based on an “uncritical acceptance of enslavement and
the subjection of women”; they expressed a preference for “a valorization of self-sufficiency
of the household (autarky) and a degree of scorn about market trading.” 73 Xenophon further
attests to the slave’s abject status when he suggests that they be treated as domesticated
animals.74 Taking the comparison with domestic animals one step further, Aristotle says that

66
H.J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1900), 7.
67
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1161b, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd edition (Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1999), 131; Varro, On Agriculture, 1.17, Loeb Classical Library,
https://www.loebclassics.com/view/varro-agriculture/1934/pb_LCL283.225.xml?readMode=recto
68
Dimitris J. Kyrtatas, “Slavery and Economy in the Greek World,” in Keith Bradley and Paul
Cartledge, eds. The Cambridge World History of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 96; my emphasis.
69
“Dotan Leshem, “What Did the Ancient Greeks Mean by Oikonomia?,” Journal of Economic
Perspectives 30:1 (2016), 227.
70
Austin and Vidal-Niquet, Economic and Social History, 7-8.
71
Ibid, 8.
72
Kyrtatas, “Slavery and Economy,” 96.
73
Leshem, “What did the Ancient Greeks?,” 228.
74
Economics 13.9 and 13 broadly, in Xenophon, Xenophon in Seven Volumes, vol. 4, trans. E.C.
Marchant and O.J. Todd, Perseus Digital Library,
some people are by their very nature slaves: their soul demanding it, their body benefitting
from it.75

1.2.2 Addressed to male citizens, economics texts took the term literally (oíko-nomíā, οἰκο-
νομῐ́ᾱ), outlining values and practical principles for running agricultural estates. The house is
more than just the structure of the dwelling (dómos, δόμος; domus), even though its name
carries with it the dominating power of a master (kūŕ ios, κῡ́ρῐος; dominus). The household
here stands in for lines of filial descent based around a house—such as the extended
Alcmaeónidae génos, gens Julii, or House of Medici—with a master’s wife, children, slaves,
and property projecting like spokes from his centralized power. Moreover, as a mere
appendage of the house, slaves lacked a personal identity, confirmed by Philostratus’s descrip-
tion of those “who had neither name of his own, nor parentage, nor city, nor inheritance”—
those for whom “not a name is supplied anywhere.”76
To put an even finer point on it by rendering it in Latin, economics began as theory
for guiding the practice of domination.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Xen.+Ec.+13&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.
01.0212.
75
Politics 1.1254a-b in Aristotle, Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 21, trans. H. Rackam, Perseus Digital
Library,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Aristot.+Pol.+1.1254a&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%
3A1999.01.0058,
76
Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, 8.7.xii, trans. F.C. Conybeare, Livius,
https://www.livius.org/sources/content/philostratus-life-of-apollonius/philostratus-life-of-
apollonius-8.7.xi-xvi/.
1.3.0 The terrible tyranny of the state arrives in a flash of lightning.77 It is not a mundane
institution just as any other but something far worse, something “too terrible, sudden, convin-
cing, and ‘other’” to be anticipated, let alone repelled.78 Its founders come from some heavenly
realm, memorialized as radiant gods whose bodies shine “with such an intense brilliance that
no human eye can bear it.”79 The splendor of these beings makes it so they are visible to
mortals only by allowing a sliver of their majesty to shine through as a mist, a bird, a star, or
a rainbow.80 Even then, spectators are struck with thámbos, stunning them into terrified
reverence. There is the story of Anchises, who, upon seeing Aphrodite’s “neck and lovely
eyes,” reacts with utter terror—and is later blinded by one of her thunderbolts.81
The thunderbolt embodies an essential sovereign function of dazzling—to “fascinate,
terrorize, and immobilize.”82 In this sense, the paradigmatic dazzler is not Aphrodite but the
one-eyed night sky gods who use their omnipotent power as magician-emperors to wield
supernatural otherworldly powers that dazzle through strength and will—attacking, inspired,
unpredictable, frenzied, swift, violent, terrible, demanding, totalitarian, and warlike. 83 They
are chaotic agents of disorder, such as the Luperci, who move with the dizzying speed of
celeritas, warlike Romulus, thundering Jupiter, defender of light Ahura Mazdāh, god of
victory *Wôdhanaz-Odhinn, the shining Lug, and one-eyed Horatius Cocles.

1.4.0 The ancient Greeks were connoisseurs of fear. The Greek language offered wide-
ranging terminology to calibrate different shades and effects: déos, straightforward terror,
fear, or apprehension;84 phóbos, fear that impels panic and battle rout; ekplektos, shock that
strikes one dumb. Fear can be krúoeis, chilling, freezing, numbing; or smerdaléos, a huge and
terrifying adjective—in origin it appears to have been a dreadful sound, such as the crushing
of bones or gnashing of teeth, and is used of the thunder of Zeus. Fear turns warriors green,

77
B2§17 of Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 58.
78
Ibid, B2§17, 58.
79
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991), 44. It may be worth noting that the goddess Demeter denounced her dazzling thámbos
when Persephone was stolen from her by Hades, and worked as a slave nurturer in Eleusina,
supposedly leading to a great famine as she was the mother earth goddess. The author would like to
thank Dāna Papachristou for this suggestion.
80
Ibid, 44-45.
81
181 of Hymn 5 to Aphrodite, in Homer, The Homeric Hymns, trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis, 2nd
edition (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 47.
82
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, trans.
David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 68.
83
Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna.
84
Déos is also closely related to a wonderous or cowardly reaction of overwhelming astonishment;
and ekplektos, to be taken by surprise.
jabbers their teeth, trembles their limbs. It can be deinós, dread or awe-inspiring, a term used
frequently of gods, and a feeble echo of which is captured in our dinosaur—the dread lizard.

—Caroline Alexander, “The Dread Gorgon: The Head of Medusa, in Myth and in Memory”85

1.4.1 Crucial to slavery is the institution of the overseer (ēpítropos, ἐπίτροπος). Slaves
worked in all sorts of jobs in Antiquity, as farmers, slaves, miners, blacksmiths, sex workers,
merchants, bankers, doctors, gladiators, city administrators, or even tax inspectors.86 But the
overseer role is reserved for an elite class of slaves given the role of commanding others.
Ēpítropos appears throughout Greek writing on economics. Antisthenes, the author of the
first economics, penned a guide on them. Evangelus, Pericles’s overseer, excels in the
oīkonomia of “accounting, storing reserves, calculating expenses, estimating and organizing
budgets.”87 And in Xenophon’s Economics, the success of overseers depends on their ability
to command (arkhēin) as well as to distribute.88

1.4.2 There is not a single epic warrior who has not trembled on some occasion. This does
not mean that he forever merits the title of tresas. Of course he quaked with fear. And then,
always, in the end he overcame himself, all the stronger because of this instant of terror. Or
to put it another way, fear can be transcended, but without fear there is no epic. There is not
a single great warrior who has not one day felt terror quake throughout his whole being, as if
fear were the hero’s qualifying test. […] The coward, then, is afraid (Paris, Thersites, and Dolon
when he confronts Diomedes), but so is the man of valor. To be more precise: so is the bravest
of men, as if true courage were revealed in the capacity to experience terror, all the better to
vanquish it.

—Nicole Loraux, “The Warrior’s Fear and Trembling,” The Experiences of Tiresias89

1.4.3 Power is exercised simply by this play of light; it is exercised by the glance from center
to periphery, which can, at every moment, observe, judge, record, and punish at the first
gesture, the first attitude, the first distraction. This power needs no instrument; its sole
support is sight and light.
[…] The power is without materiality; it has no need of all that symbolic armature of
sovereign power; it does not need to hold the scepter in its hand or wield the sword to punish;

85
Caroline Alexander, “The Dread Gorgon: The head of Medusa, in Myth and in Memory,” Lapham’s
Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 3 (2017), 187-192.
86
Jean Andreau and Raymond Descat, The Slave in Greece and Rome, trans. Marion Leopold
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 73. Scholars are also divided over whether the
historical record evinces “sacred prostitution,” whereby slaves would be bound to temple for the
purpose of engaging in sex as part of fertility rites or other sacred ceremonies.
87
Ibid, 79.
88
Xenophon, Economics, 13.2 and 13.12.
89
Nicole Loraux, The Experiences of Tiresias: The Feminine and the Greek Man, trans. Paula
Wissing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 77-78.
it does not need to intervene like a bolt of lightning in the manner of the sovereign. This
power belongs rather to the realm of the sun, of never-ending light; it is the non-material
illumination that falls equally on all those on whom it is exercised.

—Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power.90

1.4.4 Each mythical sovereign commands a visual power so potent that it freezes humans
magically at a distance; they arrive in a flash of lightning chronicled in myths about the luster
of their glory.91 Their warlike power is not the result of a battle well-fought; they miraculously
turn around defeats in the last-minute way of their divine intervention (deus ex machina, apò
mēkhanês theós).92 The accompanying bolts visually objectify a small shard of their dazzling
power, which, even as momentary streaks of light, remain so potent that they leave mortals
incapacitated, blind, or dead. Such lightning’s electric energy stands in more generally for the
divine power of images, through which dazzlers possess an appearance so stunning that it
radiates awe, compels obedience, and rains down death.
The sky gods of the night also find ways to appropriate the power of daylight. Consider
their triumph over the deadliest Gorgon, Medusa. Understanding its dazzling power, Zeus
takes the image of the Gorgon to be held as aegis to serve as “a thing of dread, crowned on
every side with Panic all around,” its dazzling appearance so full of awe and terror as to cause
an enemy’s troops to freeze or flee.93 But aigís (αἰγῐ́ς) is also the word for a rushing windstorm;
Zeus’s holding of it expresses how he holds up the heavens and the sky. The Gorgons
themselves embody the chaos of the night as formless, indistinct figures of confusion.94
(Therefore, it would be unbearable to view them—their faces are death itself, a death so
complete it carries no image.) Their gaze reveals something about light itself held in the phrase
“to see is to be seen,” a principle the dazzling sovereign makes into a weapon whereby what
can be seen can be killed. Put more simply: visibility means death. To lock eyes with such a
deadly face of horror does not simply provoke fright or even blindness, but renders one
permanently frozen in stone—lifeless, buried in objecthood.
The appropriation of light explains why one-eyed gods often command the power of
the sun. It is because the sun is “who oversees and overhears all things,” as seen in Helios
serving as the eye of Zeus or Hvarə-xšaēta as the eye of Ahura Mazdāh.95 Such eyes do not
simply view or listen, they oversee and overhear. The implication being that the sun acts as
an informant to the gods, and as such, the sun comes to symbolically represent a type of
sovereign power: the beating rays of the sun are the muscle that oversees the enforcement of
oaths and contracts, demonstrating how visibility is wielded as a weapon of sovereign might

90
Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973, trans. Graham
Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 77.
91
Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, vol. 1, trans. Philip Krapp (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 177-179.
92
Ibid, 187,
93
5.739-743 of Homer, The Iliad, trans. Caroline Alexander (New York: Harper-Collins, 2006), 113.
94
“In the Mirror of Medusa” in Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, 144.
95
Homer, The Iliad, 3.277, 62.
and compels praise as the source of life.96
For the Roman nobiles, everything that appears is good and everything that is good
appears. Light binds things to power. It does not render everything visible through a principle
of general transparency. Here, the visual is as precious as it is powerful—to be seen is to be
significant. This makes its gaze greedy, making it ruthlessly discriminating and one-sided.
Appearance is accumulated and hoarded. Representation is never afforded to the unworthy,
whose irrelevance can easily be determined on sight alone.
There is also the deathly glare of a black sun. Its devastating power is felt but not seen.
For instance, Perseus’s use of “the dread darkness of night” embodied in Hades’s invisibility
helm proves essential for completing his quest to decapitate Medusa.97 It has been fetishized
by occultists, who often adorned it with Nazi symbols. Such devotion speaks volumes about
the sovereign appeal of the sun, its ability to entrance.
No matter the approach, the flash always serves one sovereign purpose: to captivate.
While associated with conquest, the flash reveals a different story of subjugation than
subjection at sword’s point. Although appearing behind the façade of a warrior, it is the work
of a magician-king who intrudes before the outbreak of hostilities or after a battle seems lost.
It is the modality of power that undertakes action at a distance. The fight: the war of
appearances.

1.4.5 Being blasted by a thunderbolt is good for slaves because those who are blasted by a
thunderbolt no longer have masters nor do they toil, and bright clothes are placed on them
just as on those who are freed, and men associate with them as if they were honored by Zeus,
just as they also associate with freedmen who have been honored by their masters.

—Artemidorus, Interpretation of Dreams, 2.9

96
David H. Sick, “Mit(h)ra(s) and the Myths of the Sun,” Numen, vol. 51, no. 4 (2004), 432-467.
97
227 of “The Shield” in Hesiod, The Shield, Catalogue of Women, and Other Fragments, vol. 2, trans.
Glenn Most (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 19.
98
Jacques Derrida, “Teleology and Architectonic: The Neutralization of the Event,” in Rogues: Two
Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005), 137-139; Thesis 12 of Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman (Detroit:
Red and Black Press, 1970).
1.5.0 Probolḗ (προβολή) / provolí (προβολή) means projection, or more literally, “putting
forward.” In its original sense, it is lunging forward with a spear or cavalry as a weapon for
defense or a thing raised up as a defense (such as screen or bulwark). Additional uses include
conceptual projection, such as the sacred emanation of the Holy Spirit from God in Christian-
ity, visual projection of a light or film, especially onto a screen; physical jutting out, as in a
rock or an anatomical protrusion; and the legal presentation of a case or a political candidate
to the Assembly; it has also been adopted by Freudians.

1.5.1 State projectivity can be illustrated by means of a light bulb.99 The example comes
from Javanese culture, in which the bulb has four essential characteristics: first, power exists
independently of its possible users and thus does not require belief; second, power is
homogeneous and of uniform type, emerging from the same source, and is identical regardless
of user; third, power exists as a fixed and limited quantity, so a rise in power in one place
reduces it in another; and fourth, power is not a question of legitimacy but instead establishes
what is good or evil.100 For us, there are two important attributes revealed by its glow: first,
how light dims and fuzzes as it travels farther from its source; and second, that there is no
clear edge to the light, but rather a continuous gradient that fades to black.
The proboletic state space of padi states, which James C Scott describes in terms of
friction, has a similar shape and decay because it thrives in mild, unbroken terrain and suffers
under more severe conditions.101 Usually arising in valleys, padi states only control land that
is easily traversed, either by oxcart or fast waterways, where the “light” of influence can
spread without interruption. Physical obstacles, such as sharp changes in elevation or the
difficult terrain of swamps and thick vegetation, slow down or even obstruct sovereign influ-
ence and thus act as a fetter to its political control. Therefore, the projectivity of padi states is
often described by how quickly distance is spanned, in “three rice-cookings” or “two cigarette-
smokings,” rather than by its geometric measurement, ten feet or ten miles.102
Distance not only impedes the flow of goods but also drives an alternating cycle of
military occupation and retreat, such as the seasonal friction that comes with monsoon season
or the permanent friction of mountains that harbor escaped slaves. In Burma, for instance,
military campaigns have been fought from November to February only for the kingdom to
shrink to a quarter or an eighth of its size as roads become impassable in May through
October.103 Trying to work against this alternating cycle, colonial states often fight protracted
wars with distance-demolishing technologies but usually see their gains washed away during
the wet season nonetheless.104 So, when padi states are locked in battle against the earth, its
enemies develop strategies that take advantage of frictions that keep them at a distance from
state rule.
99
Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 59.
100
Benedict Anderson, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,” in Culture and Politics in Indonesia,
ed. Claire Holt (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1972), 1-70.
101
Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 43-50.
102
Ibid, 48.
103
Ibid, 61.
104
Ibid, 62.
 A Burmese proverb, “Yes, a soil, but no people. A soil without people is but a
wilderness,” is not a republican ideal but a quiet acknowledgment that a people are always
suspended in a state of captivity.105 Dispelling a common misunderstanding, this adage clari-
fies that labor is the basic element of padi state political order and not arable land. Of course,
land must be conquered and controlled, but labor-power is the source of power for two func-
tions essential to padi states: wealth, as the fruit of laborer’s work is taken as tribute, and
security, as the workers are made to defend the resource-intensive infrastructure needed for
rice cultivation. And for this reason, the foremost indicator of a padi state’s power is its ability
to capture and maintain slaves, which eventually leads to slave majorities or super-majorities
in many padi states, as well as to slaves being such a common commodity that they serve as
the medium of exchange. Yet this labor-power does not come voluntarily from workers hired
or invited, it is bled from slaves captured through war or trading.
The implication of captivity for our understanding of governance is that it requires a
constant application of force, else the source of its power disappears back into the hills. State
conquest thus tends to avoid salt-the-earth wars of annihilation because humans are its most
precious resource. Their lives are most valuable when preserved and should not be left on the
battlefield, dead or mutilated. Because labor-power fuels the padi state, its power grows and
recedes with the forces of capture and escape and not innovations in production. As a result,
its hunger for slaves is never satisfied. The result is that wars are not rare bloody events locked
away deep in the annals of the state but a continuous set of moments in a campaign compelled
by the endless need for new labor.
In summary, Scott’s political economy of the padi state suggests that it exists through
herculean might. Either an ongoing hunt keeps humanity in chains in a feat of strength, or
they break free. But even in this battle of forces, there are many who escape: there are people
who establish rhythms that work against the routine ebb and flow of state governance while
others adopt elusive ways of life that make them too costly for the state to pursue. Yet the
permanence of their escape is established less by evasion than by distance, as the light bulb
analogy demonstrates: they use spatial separation to evade its grasp.

1.5.2 What if the general orientation of the state can remain the same—conquest, enslave-
ment, command—even with shifting material conditions? Then the state is not just a system
of organization but something deeper. Purely material accounts of states leave little room for
remarks on the magic of the state. Missing from James C. Scott’s account of the padi state, for
instance, is a careful reading not of grain and soil but of the sedimented cultural codes
circulated as chronicles of gods, founding heroes, the genesis of heaven and earth, and the
splitting of day and night.
Clifford Geertz further argues for the importance of understanding the cultural found-
ations of the state, which he does through three Balinese notions: the doctrine of the
exemplary center, the concept of sinking status, and the expressive conception of politics.106
The third holds that “the principal instrumentalities of rule lie less in the techniques of

105
Ibid, 70.
106
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 331.
administration than in the arts of the theatre.”107
Referencing Robert Heine-Geldern, Geertz explains the doctrine of the exemplary
center as following from a court-and-capital theory whereby an image “of the universe on a
smaller scale” stands for the whole political order.108 More than a mirror or metaphor of a
social order (“not just the nucleus, the engine, or the pivot of the state: it is the state”), the
ritual life of the court is the supernatural sky that holds up the whole world—a world that
reflects the court’s excellence back to itself.109
The concept of sinking status is the consequence of the Balinese dying-fire view of
history.110 Such a view does not take gradual decline to be predestined, but merely a result of
chance.111 It demands a certain type of response: neither a reversal of the path of history nor
its celebration, but the immediate reenactment of the cultural practices found in creation
myths. Ritual here functions as an “aesthetic correction” of the present via the past. 112 In
drawing directly from the emanating brilliance of Gelgel—the location of a founding myth
for the Javanese court, an arkhḗ Geertz equates to that of the “Founding Fathers” of the United
States, whence the colonizing origin tale of “The Madjapahit Conquest” that both explained
and justified relations of command and obedience—ritual looks to “re-create, to some degree,
the radiant image of civilization the classic state had embodied and postclassic history had
obscured.”113
Balinese politics help illuminate the aesthetic dimension of politics, whereby delving
into the hidden structure of the symbolic renders better results than measuring more material
things.114 The political life of Balinese culture always pointed toward:

spectacle, toward ceremony, toward the public dramatization of the ruling obsessions
of Balinese culture: social inequality and status pride. It was a theatre-state in which
the kings and princes were the impresarios, the priests the directors, the peasantry the
supporting cast, stage crew, and audience. The stupendous cremations, teeth-filings,
temple dedications, the pilgrimages and blood sacrifices, mobilizing hundreds, even
thousands of people and great quantities of wealth, were not means to political ends,
they were the ends themselves, they were what the state was for. Court ceremonialism
was the driving force of court politics. Mass ritual was not a device to shore up the
state; the state was a device for the enactment of mass ritual. To govern was not so

107
Ibid, 331.
108
Ibid, 332.
109
Ibid, 332.
110
Ibid, 334.
111
Ibid, 334.
112
Ibid, 334.
113
Ibid, 332-334.
114
It is worth nothing that Jacques Lacan orthogonally adopts “the symbolic” from Claude Lévi-
Strauss’s “symbolism” (Lucien Scubla, “Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and the Symbolic Order,” Revue de
MAUSS vol. 37, no. 1 [2011], XV). Their shared quest was to replace the religious with the symbolic.
And even if neither fully succeeded, Lévi-Strauss’s kinship maps and canonical formula of myth and
Lacan’s schemas offer rigorous theories for analyzing everything from the sacred rites of kings to the
social death of slaves.
 much to choose as to perform. Ceremony was not form but substance. Power served
pomp, not pomp power.115

The consequence for the Balinese was a dispersion of power. Rather than accumulating it in
clear hierarchy or a single ruling class, power formed a supralocal “extended field of highly
dissimilar political ties, thickening into nodes of varying size and solidity at strategic points
on the landscape and then thinning out again to connect, in a marvelously convoluted way,
virtually everything with everything else.”116

1.5.3 Attracted to mythologies of sovereign power across a wide range of cultures and
motivated by a structuralist impulse, Georges Dumézil argued that the two figures of
sovereignty nearly always appear in myth to operate independently from the other. 117 Such
myths are not the antithesis of truth to be dispelled with reason; rather, the birth of reason
was written with the same pen that declared sovereign glory. As Marcel Detienne points out,
the Indo-Iranian word Ṛta not only means truth but also liturgical prayer, the power of
returning dawn, order that results from the cult of the gods, and law. 118 Truth (Alētheia)
arrives in Parmenides, not as the product of cognition or dialogue, but from a strange setting
sun that ‘illuminates’ truth: “a chariot journey guided by the daughters of the Sun, a way
reserved for the man who knows, a path that leads to the gates of Day and Night, a goddess
who reveals true knowledge.”119
No wonder the Nicomachean Ethics and The Republic draw out the analogy between
statecraft and navigation; with roots in religious practice, mythological accounts of
sovereignty follow from Durkheim’s suggestion that “spirits, demons, genies, gods of every
rank” form “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force” whereby “none possesses it entirely
and all share in it” because the force “is so independent of the particular subjects embodying
it that it both preexists and survives them.”120 For instance, cosmogonies regarding the
ordering of the world address the riddles of the world in a Machiavellian vein, asking who is
“the prince that presides over its present arrangement”? 121 In turn, myth provides answers in
the form of avatars of sovereignty left behind by each successive generation of divinities that
claim dominion over the universe (anassein, basileuein) until one gained supreme power over
them all (dynasteía).122 It is no surprise that fascists continue to excavate these myths in a
search for cultural resources in revanchist struggles for ethnic authority.

115
Ibid, 335.
116
Ibid, 336.
117
Dumézil, Matra-Varuna.
118
Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone
Books, 1999), 35.
119
Ibid, 36.
120
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: The
Free Press, 1995), 148; 140.
121
Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, 113.
122
Ibid, 114.
 ḗ

123
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), 292.
1.6.0 Slavery and bondage cannot be properly understood in purely economic terms. Labor
was a disgrace to most in the ancient world. Not only was hard work beneath them, it provi-
ded none of the edifying characteristics the Protestants would attribute to labor. Moreover,
“because slavery in antiquity was grounded in ideological rather than economic considera-
tions,” John Bodel writes, “slave labor was endemic in Roman culture—and was bound to be
so, regardless of its profitability.”124 In fact, the central importance of slaves for many Romans
had little to do with work.125 Slaves were status symbols.126
Many elements of bondage remain inscrutable unless we look to how societies are held
together symbolically through status. From Aristotle to Cicero, slaves remained virtually
invisible. In a status society where appearances were more important than material substance,
they were treated as pieces of human machinery. Good Romans were forbidden to dress
themselves and were trained from youth to ignore the presence of slaves, who dissolved into
the background of the most intimate moments of their master’s lives, including sex.127 Their
ubiquity gave rise to anxieties over eavesdropping, as most masters overlooked them.

1.6.1 What does it mean for slaves to suffer “social death”? Those quoting Patterson identify
three characteristics in his writing about the slave’s social death: generalized loss of honor,
natal alienation, and gratuitous violence.128 The first can be understood most starkly in status
societies that subordinate economics to separate social concerns. The third, gratuitous vio-
lence, follows from the bondsman’s desire to make the metaphysical distinction between him
and his slave real through excess: excess symbolization written on the body through tattoos,
brands, and scars, excess power through cruel treatment that goes beyond what is effective
for achieving their aims, and excess violence that tries to make the metaphysical separation
between master and slave true through overkill.
Natal alienation deserves more investigation, as the name mistakenly gives the
impression that it is limited to birth or even filiation. In a technical sense, it means that slaves
are formally barred from holding anything that could be symbolically coded; hence prohibit-
tions against marriage and the fact that any children born of slaves are the property of the
estate. Slavery can be further rendered in terms of libidinal economy, especially in the original
sense of oíkos as the management of relations within a colonial estate.
Orlando Patterson presents a sociological theory of social death whereby “slavery is
the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”129
Natal alienation entails a loss of all social ties that one can claim by virtue of birth, namely,

124
John Bodel, “Slave labour and Roman society,” in Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge, eds., The
Cambridge World History of Slavery, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 313-314.
125
Ibid, 313.
126
Ibid, 313.
127
Jonathan Edmondson, “Slavery and the Roman Family,” in Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge, eds.,
The Cambridge World History of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 346.
128
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 1982), 10; 5.
129
Ibid, 13.
membership in a family, nation, or people. This loss is important in regard to autochthonic
belonging, as in legal (or other) membership based on a connection to lands people call their
own. Slavery begins when one ceases belonging “to any formally recognized community.”130
The full extent of social death does not come from a lack of belonging, but rather from the
“lack of a lack,” to put it in Lacanian terms. Quoting James Curtis Ballagh, Patterson notes that
the “distinguishing mark” that defines slavery is not “loss of liberty, political or civil, but the
perpetuity and almost absolute character of that loss.”131 Social death does not arrive through
the revocation of the slave’s ability to forge legitimized relationships, but rather through the
permanence of that loss across past, present, and future. Moreover, the only ties a slave is
afforded are those that begin and end with their master. And without the master, the slave
does not exist. So as a practical matter of domination, social death renders slaves socially
powerless, having lost any recognized ties that might offer grounds for limiting a master’s
power over them.132

1.6.2 At least in theory, the only relation the slave is allowed to have to others is that of an
absolute stranger. The formalization of citizenship in early Greece and Rome included the
abolition of debt-slavery, which came with a guarantee that no citizen would be made into a
slave. Additionally, the slave trade ensured that slaves were spatially dispossessed from their
homes, guaranteeing the permanence of the break from all social ties. The consequence is a
doctrine of the period: the slave is “always a stranger, but never a slave in his own city,” or
even more simply, “every slave is a stranger, every stranger is a slave.”133
The consequence is a permanent loss, which distinguishes slavery from other forms of
bondage. For instance, sharecroppers or serfs may be subject to dishonor, deprivation,
violence, and coercion. Yet, as Peter Hunt argues, “they still possess an acknowledged family
and often a village or community of some sort.”134 For those searching for conceptual vocabu-
lary, we can thus distinguish between “bound peasants” and “disastrously alienated people.”
Unlike other peoples who are exploited for their labor, the socially dead cannot form a full
social class capable of forming a shared consciousness.135

1.6.3 Productivist accounts risk occluding the full social significance of bondage. Certain
orthodox Marxists, for instance, hold that societies can be defined by nothing more than the
type of production undertaken, relying simply on the material tools of political economy for
determining how those societies emerge and transform. Scott’s materialism is a cousin to this
Marxism—though his anarchism is an attempt to explicitly depart from Marxism—especially
as production remains central to his analysis. To put it starkly, James C. Scott depicts hill

130
Ibid, 6.
131
Ibid, 9; my emphasis.
132
Ibid, 4-6.
133
Andreau and Descat, quoting Henri Levi-Bruhl in The Slave in Greece and Rome, 42.
134
Peter Hunt, “Slaves or Serfs?: Patterson on the Thetes and Helots of Ancient Greece,” in On
Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death, edited by John Bodel and Walter Scheidel (New
York: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 58.
135
Austin and Vidal-Niquet, Economic and Social History, 22-23.
people as ‘state-effects’ and draws a picture of peasants painted by the strokes of state
production, which therefore defines both padi states and their escapees according to compar-
able modes of production that merely contrast. The centrality of production is clear, as Scott
dedicates whole chapters to hill people’s high-altitude crop cultivation and slash-and-burn
‘swidden’ agriculture techniques. He finds that these forms of production are what allow them
to maintain a lifestyle that makes capture difficult and undesirable.
Production need not be the centerpiece of a way of life. In fact, those who practice the
‘art of not being governed’ offer an image of existence that displaces analysis centered on a
mode of production. This is because the power that emerges from outside the state is not
organized in terms of production. If anything, the people who exist exterior to the state, such
as hunter-gatherers, anticipate every attempt to turn production into a mode of life and ward
off all of them.136 While possibly counter-intuitive from the perspective of a society obsessed
with production, in these societies, people find that the plentitude of the earth provides more
than enough productive capacity to sustain life.137
Circulation and not production defines their existence, and production emerges only
as the kernel of state thought and is actively suppressed (as outlined by the ‘alliance theory’
of Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Elemental Structures of Kinship). When the state does arrive,
it does not appear in parts through a slow advance in technology but invades in the flash of
an instant. Even the state cannot eliminate the anticipation and prevention of production. It
instead channels and mobilizes this anti-production to ward off all modes of production but
one: its own. Therefore, the state does not appear after an evolutionary leap that builds upon
prior modes of production; rather, it arrives the moment that production is made a mode. It
can then be said that all societies are organized by how they manage their internal lines of
escape (as a “mode of anticipation”), while only states are organized according to production.
Hill people’s farming techniques offer a glimpse into the operations of anti-production.
Their slash-and-burn agriculture intentionally looks unappealing as a mode of production, as
it gives the appearance of recklessness that jeopardizes the stability of wet-rice cultivation
that is essential to building the power of the padi state. As a type of anti-production, slash-
and-burn agriculture illustrates how hill life sustains itself and prevents state production by
simultaneously warding off state formation and providing a means of subsistence. This
approach extends further than farming techniques. According to Marcel Mauss, common to
the American Northwest and Northeast Asia is that “slaves are put to death, precious oils
burnt, copper objects cast into the sea, and even the houses of princes set on fire” both as a
sacrifice to a higher power (“the true owners of the things and possessions of this world “) as
well as to display power, wealth, and lack of self-interest . 138 In sum, they make destruction
into a way of life.

136
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 428-429.
137
Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society,” in Stone Age Economics (Chicago and New
York: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), 1-39.
138
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian
Cunnison (London: Cohen & West, 1966), 20-21.
1.7.0 To be harnessed to a cart as if one of the four-footed beasts foretells slavery and toil
and disease, even if someone who is very illustrious and who lives a luxurious life should
observe the dream.

—Artemidorus, Interpretation of Dreams, 3.18

1.7.1 The knife of culture cuts even deeper—instead of mutilating bodies to put them to
work, nonsedentary peoples tend to forge social bonds through collective cruelty. The preva-
lence of tattoos, scarification, and other permanent markings of the body are not the result of
flights of fancy, as they are today. As display, they do not mark individuality but its opposite:
membership. “Worked skin, scarified earth—and this is one and the same mark,” with
inscription binding the cosmos to the body.139 The ritual of violence is its most dramatic in
the original initiation ceremony, but as seen in archaistic orders like the Italian Mafia Cosa
Nostra, once in, there is no getting out. That is not to say they are always feared: as the privi-
leged sign of belonging, marking ceremonies are excitedly anticipated. The mark stands for a
permanent bond that is irreversible but also must forever be repaid in blood. Even when
membership is rigid, the function of the system of cruelty is not for the group to turn in on
itself but to provoke connections with others through circulation and exchange.140 The body
acquires a “second skin” that serves as the physical evidence of an injunction that restrains
members of a social group from immediately consuming everything they come to possess,
which in turn drives them to forge relations with others.141 Such coding bans direct
appropriation of the means of life that one helped secure, forcing that old game of alliances
whereby other lines of filiation are consummated through trade, marriage, and other means—
the practice behind the phrase “things create bonds between souls.”142
This social technology does not reside exclusively within non-state society, however,
for the state recognizes the power of this terrible alphabet and thus appropriates coding to
transform circulation into a mode of production. It extends the torturous marking to slaves,
who bear marks from whipping as well as branding, only to spare the rod for those workers
(whose bodies are mutilated enough by drudgery) better motivated by howling commands
from above, the marks of which are left as psychic wounds inside the body.143 It is this
terrifying call that Althusser uses in the model of state power he calls “interpellation,” the
Voice of an infinitely powerful other whose demanding hail compels thought and action.144

139
Pierre Clastres, Chronique des indiens Guayaki (Paris: Libraire Plon, 1972), 144.
140
Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and
Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge, 2002).
141
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1998), 105-106;
147-148; 195; 226-227.
142
Mauss, The Gift, 17.
143
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 202-217; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 425-
426.
144
Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capital: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,
trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London and New York: Verso, 2014); Judith Butler, “‘Conscience Doth Make
It is more than mere coincidence that ‘the subject’ of recent curiosity was cast in the mold of
the subject of bondage, whose very subjectivity exists as an effect of subordination to a
sovereign.

1.8.0 As Dumézil notes, the predicates for sovereigns and their actions are not normative
judgments about their likability but expressions of a particular mode of sovereignty. Authori-
tarian sovereigns are thus ‘terrible,’ ‘horrible,’ ‘merciless’ destroyers while juridically minded
sovereigns are ‘kind,’ ‘benevolent,’ ‘loving’ creators. An editorial tone is therefore unavoidable
when describing aspects of predatory states as ‘terrible’ and ‘cruel’ or pacific states as ‘just’ and
‘forgiving,’ but the underlying intention is to single out particular modes of violence rather
than indicating preference.
State production therefore changes the function of code from a direct code branded
into the flesh of the body to the written decree, which broadcasts the voice of the despot far
and wide. Regarding writing, Lévi-Strauss writes that “the one phenomenon which has
invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political
system, that is to say, of a large number of individuals into a hierarchy of castes and classes.”145
This evidence leads him to think that writing favors the exploitation rather than enlighten-
ment of humanity. If writing did emerge in the service of science or the arts, it did so only
secondarily, more often than not as a way of reinforcing, justifying, or concealing its primary
function as a means of exploitation.146

1.8.1 Writing eliminates the group ritual of inscription in which the whole community
would establish the gaze of authority by festively watching a tattooing. The written word
instead marshals a legion of bureaucrats who interpret the absent voice of the despot under
the threat of death. These are the same words that initiate spectacles of punishment, with the
sovereign voice returning through public speech to make common the whipping, stoning,
mutilation, or burning consequence of legal judgment. The publicity of these acts is necessary
for large empires, which impose their own web of social obligations on top of a wide variety
of customary laws (the monetary equivalence of the Code of Ur-Nammu, the lex talionis of
the Hammurabi Code, Roman dura lex sed lex, or the social equivalence of Sharia). Such
overcoding is not the simple process of replacing old taboos with new sovereign decrees, then,
but a two-step operation: first, seizure—the capturing of groups that operate according to
differing codes; and second, superimposition—the introduction of a single unified common

Subjects of Us All’: Althusser’s Subjection,” in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 106-131.
145
Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 292.
146
Ibid, 292. Deleuze and Guattari attempt to provide a “universal history” of writing, which
acknowledges the contributions of figures like Jacques Derrida (or Lacan), while also limiting their
theories to the so-called “despotic” social formation. By contrast, they also demote Lévi-Strauss’s
exchangism to a secondary operation, arguing that the mark is primary. For a more through
comparative account of these questions, consult James Martell, “Derrida and Deleuze as Tattooed
Savages,” in J. Martell and E. Larsen, eds. Tattooed Bodies, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 329-
350.
denominator on top of divergent lines of filiation and affiliation, reorienting varied group
obligations upward in infinite debt to the sovereign. This is why linguistic imperialism is such
a common feature in colonizing projects.
Royal tongues serve a completely different status than the codes with which they
come in contact, engaging in a form of conquest through documentation, formalization, and
ingestion. If ethnographic codes operate much like biological codes and chemical signals, the
use of written language commands them from a higher layer, prying free their content and
substance for redeployment in service to the crown.147 Pages and pages of government
documents then quickly eclipse all other forms of writing, and with them, legions of
bureaucrats flourish to manage them. The bureaucrat relates to the graphic (gráphō, γρᾰ́φω)
of writing and arithmetic as tools of the state, but also references that place where the archive
(of the arkhḗ) is kept; not as a collection of documents but as a systemization of governance
and a way of interaction. That is to say: a method for the state to reproduce itself through the
word. Historian of science Peter Galison estimates that the number of classified documents
generated by the United States government is at least five to ten times larger than everything
that ends up in the nation’s libraries.148

1.8.2 To truly understand overcoding is to realize that the written word stands on the
ground created by non-state peoples rather than liquidating their whole way of life.
Moreover, it is not even a foreign occupying force that can be kicked out, returning things to
how they were—that is precisely the damning predicament of post-colonialism crystallized
in Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. The many codes not eliminated by overcoding are
deterritorialized and mostly recaptured to constitute the intermediary milieu that is the state.
Described diagrammatically: the state is a grand irrigation system built by transecting separate
codes that had previously been held apart.
Fortunately, the process of overcoding is never total and thus gives way to escape. The
emperor does not directly appropriate flows but captures them at a distance. Due to this
spatial separation, the primitive capture exercised by the predatory state frees a large quantity
of flows that can be turned back against it. Deleuze and Guattari describe this process:

the overcoding of the archaic state itself makes possible and gives rise to new flows
that escape from it. The state does not create large-scale works without a flow of
independent labor escaping its bureaucracy (notably in the mines and in metallurgy).
It does not create the monetary form of the tax without flows of money escaping, and
nourishing or bringing into being other powers (notably in commerce and banking).
And above all, it does not create a system of public property without a flow of private
appropriation growing up beside it, then beginning to pass beyond its grasp; this
private property does not itself issue from the archaic system but is constituted on the
margins, all the more necessary and inevitably, slipping through the net of
overcoding.149

147
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 62.
148
Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 31 (fall 2001), 229-230.
149
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 449; translation modified.
1.8.3 While the ‘trinity formula’ of labor, capital, and land—or really, profit, tax, and rent—
constitutes a three-headed apparatus of capture for the state, it cannot account for all of the
escaping flows. A whole array of flows leak from overcoding: some evade capture, like inde-
pendent labor, escaped money, and private appropriation; others are mutant flows of free
activity, alternative exchange, and strange territories; while the most overwhelming lines of
escape have nothing to do with work, money, or land at all.
1.9.0 Spinoza famously asks, “why do some people fight for their servitude as if it were their
salvation?”

1.9.1 In Greece, some skilled slaves were allowed to live on their own, which gave some a
chance for manumission in the form of commercial transactions whereby one could buy one’s
freedom for a sum.150 Agricultural slaves and miners, by contrast, were simply worked to
death.151
Offering a Roman point of view, Seneca suggests in his Epistles that slavery should be
treated with humanitas.152 One should not mistake this for empathy, but rather, an attempt
to secure the slave’s docility by defusing tension between master and slave.153 The Romans
often entrusted slaves with “a piece of land, livestock, a rental building, a shop, a workshop, a
warehouse, slaves, or money,” which they would manage for the prosperity of their master.154
As a motivational scheme for labor, many slaves worked diligently in the hopes that they
would be both manumitted and granted a portion of that business. In a paraphrase of Cicero,
historians note how Romans themselves knew that “conferring freedom was above all a
means to sustain and maintain slavery as a system, one result being the benefit to the slave-
owner of the future services of a grateful freedman.” 155 The master, of course, could exploit
this motivation, but only until the time of manumission. Whereas the slave’s work produced
wealth for another, what they received in turn was in the form of a gift from their master.

1.9.2 Georges Dumézil outlines the characteristics of the sovereign magician-king, a great
enchanter who rules at a distance.156 (Indo-European mythology provides a clear entry point
for considering the role of magic in sovereign conquest. Romulus, for example, twice risks
defeat after founding Rome. To ensure success, Romulus invokes Jupiter, and after each vic-
tory, he founds a cult and erects a temple in thanks to Jupiter.157 Romulus does not invoke
Mars, as would a true warrior chief. Rather, by invoking Jupiter, the god of the state, Romulus
is brought victory in two aspects: Jupiter as divine protector of regnum by arms, and Jupiter
the great magician who performs “a sovereign conjuring trick” of breaking the morale of the
enemy.158 Combining these two specifications of Jupiter, we know that magically equipped
states capture by arms and by magic.
150
Kyrtatas, “Slave and Economy,” 107-108.
151
Ibid, 108.
152
47.1-17 of Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, Volume 1-3, Perseus Digital Library,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Sen.+Ep.+47&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.
01.0080.
153
Keith Bradley, “Seneca and Slavery,” in John G. Fitch, ed., Seneca, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press), 339-342.
154
Andreau and Descat, The Slave in Greece and Rome, 90-91.
155
Keith Bradley, “The Bitter Chain of Slavery,” Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 41 (2015), 161.
156
Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 146.
157
Ibid, 53-54.
158
Ibid, 55.
1.10.0 War does not have be undertaken directly by the state. This why the magician-king’s
greatest illusion is war, as it is the result of his most masterful conjuring trick. For in the world
beyond states, war often operates as an anti-state force for dissolving a king’s great stockpiles
as well as fragmenting sovereign power through dispersion.159 And even when war is
appropriated by the state, it is used to shatter the power of its enemy. The original warrior is
an outsider whose knows nothing about ruling the state, only how to destroy it. War can even
be a secondary effect of a way of life built around dispersing power, which makes autonomy
not conflict the crucial component of the resulting centrifugal logic.160

1.10.1 As much as war may be a supplementary dimension of non-state peoples’ existence, it

always looms on the horizon as war becomes necessary when they encounter a state or the
city.161 Understood most radically—and contrary to Dumézil’s conservative assertion that
warriors are a key feature of sovereign states—warriors embody a way of life that is income-
mensurate to sovereignty in its final instance. The consequence is that states always have a
tenuous relationship with the military, as warriors must be thoroughly institution-alized, and
even then, they can always act as one of the primary forces of revolution. This is one reason
why officers so quickly retreat from the front lines, as they undertake the categorically
separate tasks of command and control: shorthand for directing others to kill from a “safe”
distance.162

1.10.2 Another name for Varuṇa and other magician-kings who seize their enemy from the
outside is “The Binder.” It is this binding that specifies the connection between their use of
arms and magic. War may be chaotic, but sovereign wars of conquest are not without rules;
and the specific set of obligations that the sovereign levies in war is the nexum of debt-
bondage.163 In contrast to pacts, which are made between equal-and-willing parties, the bond
is a knot tied with force. The power of bonds then comes from both arms and magic, and the
substance of those bonds is a shifting economy of repayment for hostility, the cost of a life, or
any other means to bind and subjugate.164 The bond is cast by dazzling sovereigns—for
instance, the one-eyed gods who raise their spears, not to fight, but to paralyze the enemy
with fright.165 The resulting stupor continues far past the battle as these sovereigns use their
terrifying magic to convert the loser’s fright into a bond that divides the victorious from the
conquered, the predator from the prey.166 It is through the sting of defeat that magician-kings

159
Pierre Clastres, Archaeology of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010),
274-277.
160
Ibid, 274.
161
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 417.
162
Ibid, 417-418.
163
Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 98.
164
Ibid, 98; 99.
165
Ibid, 129; 139-149; 143.
166
Ibid, 155.
marshal their forces by capturing the vanquished, appropriating their power from afar, and
commanding them with terrifying magic.

1.10.3 Sovereignty is defined by its mutilation of outsiders, ridding them of any memory of
life beyond the state.167 It would be easy to assume that such mutilation comes from war. But
the mutilations of state violence originate from the price people must pay to work. Even
before it sends these appropriated subjects off to war, the state first inflicts them with a
wound that never heals but continues to afflict them until they learn to relish its hot pain as
a warm reminder of the suffering, sacrifice, and loss that it took to live “meaningful life”:

the mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite of
separation (this is the idea behind cutting, piercing, etc.) which automatically
incorporates him into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable traces,
the incorporation is permanent.168

The violence of the archaic state therefore takes on a unique significance; it appears as “the
magic of birth”; a miracle, the pre-accomplished, necessary, and justified separation from
everything that came before it.169 “This is why theses on the origin of the state are always
tautological,” as the state’s existence is premised on the denial and non-recognition of life
outside it.170

167
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 424-425.
168
Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 72.
169
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 424-426.
170
Ibid, 426.
1.11.0 Two types of flows escape the state while it is freeing codes to overcode them. First,
there are the scraps of decoded flows that do not fit and are thus left behind. These relatively
decoded leftovers are the cracks and fissures that constitute the gaps between the abstract
categories of the state, such as the separation between the general rules of law and the singu-
larity of the concrete case.

1.11.1 Consider a spatial example found in the vague terrain between two overlapping arch-
aic states.
Mandala spaces of overlapping dual sovereignty in Southeast Asia encouraged contest-
ation and thus subjected those who resided there to multiple tributary exactions or raids to
punish disloyalty. And while this can sometimes advantage the state, these ambiguities
usually work against it. Many of the peoples living at the periphery of two states use this
relative autonomy to “strategically manipulate the situation” by playing the two states against
each other, such as people in Cambodia, tributary to Siam and Vietnam in the nineteenth
century.171 As this example illustrates, the area at arm’s length from the state is then less a
space of lawlessness than a zone of indistinction where loosened codes are only partially over-
coded but also multiplied. Such ambiguity diffuses state conquest by spreading the state’s
thick overdetermined power out into a thin underdetermined application of codes. But even
as strategies of confusion are multiplied within this zone of indistinction, the Archaic state
makes up for the infrequency of power by amplifying its capriciousness and brutality.
The second flow to escape overcoding is a line of flight. These flows escape by virtue
of their speed, as they are too swift for the state to snatch immediately after decoding. In
contrast to the indistinct scraps mentioned above, these flows are not accidental or
supplemental. Rather, this escape is the exodus of heretics who pervert the magic of the
archaic state for their own purposes, leading to millennial revolts that are as regular to the
feudal world as strikes are to industrial capitalism.172 The seeds of these uprisings are usually
planted in secret, hidden from public view. Yet the principles and prophecies behind these
movements are hardly difficult to find; the only necessity is to hide them from the jealous
eyes of the magician-king. So, after circulating promiscuously, a prophet eventually appears,
giving these furtive myths enough consistency to transform conspiracy into public revolt.

1.11.2 The Burmese monk Sayan San, for example, underwent a transformation while
serving on a colonial committee surveying peasant living conditions. Through powerful
images of the Hindu bird Galon, Sayan promised a utopia that would break the bond of the
British and their taxes. His followers bore the image of Galon as part of their divine mission,
believing their tattoos and amulets would protect them from British bullets.173

171
Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 60-61.
172
Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet Sondheimer
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), 17.
173
Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial
Burma (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010).
1.11.3 To imagine flying—if one ascends a small amount above the earth <and> is in an
upright position—is good for the observer. For however far one ascends above the earth, to
this degree will he be higher than those who walk about below. And we always call those
who are more fortunate ‘loftier’. And it is good not to experience this dream while in one's
own fatherland, since it signifies a migration due to one's not walking upon the earth. For in
a certain way the dream indicates that the fatherland will be inaccessible to the observer. To
fly while having wings is good for all in common. For slaves, following this dream, will be
freed, since in fact all birds that fly are also (159) without a master and have no leader. And
poor men will earn much money. For just as money elevates men, so too do wings elevate
birds.
But, for the rich and those with great power, it creates a public office. For just as those
who fly are above those who creep upon the earth, so too are those in government above
private people.

—Artemidorus, Interpretation of Dreams, 2.68

1.11.4 On the occasion that the magician-king casts his gaze beyond the court, his first
reaction is disgust, for all he sees are the barbarian virtues of those who speak a different
tongue and act with unpalatable violence. If threatened, the archaic state responds with its
primary function, conquest, to recapture the lost codes and make them once again subser-
vient. Yet that disgust sometimes provokes something else altogether: a prayer, where a
stranger falls in supplication before the magician-king. Such a transformation is completely
alien to the archaic mode of conquest, as it would require extending tolerance and civility,
which are foreign to a sovereign who knows indifference but not respect.
Ultimately, we can say that the horrifying sovereign of the state does not sit on a
throne of death but resides over the flesh of the living. His tools of governance are cruelty and
magic; one he steals from the system of anti-production and the other is of his own invention.
Together, he deploys these forces to reverse the centripetal power of the circulatory system
of pain to concentrate its cruelty in a unified mode of production built on the backs of slaves.
Furthermore, the magician-king boasts about the effects of his trickery, taking immense pride
in the forces he accumulates in his own name, neglecting to admit that his only talent is
capturing the power of others. Though other state-forms appear more restrained, all share in
this thirst for conquest. And while playing down its cruelty, the modern state and the social
do not hide this authoritarian force but simply channel it into the police and biopower.