Amputation's Agency, or How Titus Turned me Into a Leper

In his article on necropolitics, Achille Mbembe suggests that imagining the political as a form of war begs the questions “What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?” (12).  Concerned only with tracing the concept of sovereignty from late-modern times (as opposed to pre- or early-modern times), Mbembe chooses the institution of slavery as the paradigmatic example of wounded or slain bodies in order to answer his questions and understand the historical account of the rise of terror in contemporary times.  The slave’s humanity, though his body is kept alive, is erased through the master’s possession of his body; this possession manifests itself through a sustained state of terror—the threat (without the fulfillment) of possible death—and this threat is kept alive through repetitive injuries of the slave body.  Mbembe’s discussion of injured bodies still relies on this opposition of life and death, and gives no special credence to the injured body beyond this—the slave’s existence is one of death-in-life, and the subjected—but living—body remains a “shadow” of existence, rather than a powerful entity, itself.  Perhaps this is because of the special quality of the slave as commodity.  Were the slave to lose a hand, his body would become even more of a shadow than it is to begin with, and rather than being subjected to a state of terror, in which he can harness the power of that “protean capability” to create art from suffering, his utility being nullified, his body would simply be discarded. The slave’s capabilities for art and alternative perspectives rely on an able body (mostly able, anyway), just as, in Foucault’s world, the plague-victim’s agency in creating and maintaining sovereign power relies on his ability to survey his neighbors.

In Titus Andronicus, the necropolitical influence of the sovereign clearly permeates and catalyzes the plot.  It is precisely the right of the state to kill (as a Roman general, Titus sentences the son of his enemy queen to death) that initiates the revenge (that queen, made empress, uses her power to subject Titus’s daughter to rape and amputation).  Later, under the influence of Aaron’s sadistic ruse, Titus donates his hand to the emperor in hopes of saving his sons’ heads (literally—they are to be decapitated). 

In a very crude analogy, we can try to compare Titus, as a “slave” to the Roman state to the literal slaves of the plantation.  However, unlike the slave of Mbembe’s argument, Titus can lose his hand and still participate in the revenge plot.  When compared to a figure more like the leper of Foucault’s lecture, Titus’s role in the revenge plot reveals a more subversive agency than that of the slave or the plague-victim, and beyond anything Mbembe discusses.  Titus, though wronged by the Roman state and deprived of his hand, can exact a revenge of his own, one carried out through madness, rather than the reason that seduces the subject of a sovereign power into believing, as Mbembe articulates, that “[t]he exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom” (13).  Ostracizing himself from the community of reasonable, autonomous subjects that achieve agreement “through communication and recognition” and forge a new political body, Titus effectively subverts the power those subjects participate in, and reinstates his family as a ruling sovereign in Rome (or, at least, that is the very optimistic reading of Titus’s conclusion).  By literally cutting himself (or his hand) off from the community, he manages to reorganize power in a way that those who work within the community (the queen and Aaron as plague victims?) fail to do. 

If, as Mbembe suggests, we, rather than “considering reason as the truth of the subject, we can look to other foundation categories that are less abstract and more tactile, such as life and death” (14), can we then revise Mbembe’s “categories” to include something not like the death-in-life of the slave/ plague-victim, but rather something very tangible like the deformed (re-formed?) body of the handless general or the ailing leper?