The law, by necessity disseminated throughout the territory, must nevertheless have a separate existence, a jealously guarded body of its own. The Book of Lord Shang specifies that a complete record of it must be kept in a forbidden archive in the capital [D 329/KH 26:187].After the foundation of the Qin Dynasty, weapons from throughout territory were brought to the capital and melted down. They were cast into giant guardian statues in 'barbarian' dress and stationed inside the imperial palace at Xianyang [SJ 6: 239-40, 240n6/MH 2:134-35, 134n1].
Upon unification of the empire, a reported 120,000 dispossessed feudal lords were forced to move to the capital. The mightiest among them received prime accommodations: replicas of their home palaces built in the vicinity of the imperial palace [SJ 6:239/MH 2:137-38].
Toward the end of his reign, the First Emperor built a new palace of unrivalled splendor for himself. It was surrounded by an elevated circular road for ceremonial processions. A straight road ran from the front of the palace to the summit of a hill, upon which an arch was erected. Another road led across the Wei river to the town of Xianyang. The arch was the palace door, open to the sky. The circular road was an expression of the Emperor's elevation. The road across the water bridged the distance between the emperor on high and his lowly subjects, duplicating the hanging bridge of stars which, in Chinese astronomy, spans the Milky Way [SJ 6: 257/MH 2:174-75].
The First Emperor subsequently built covered roads connecting his new palace to the 270 replica palaces. He would circulate among them at will, disguised so no one would know where he was at any given time [SJ 6: 257/MH 2:177-78].
Eleven years before the emperor's death, hundreds of thousands of conscripts were set to work on the Emperor's tomb. Precious objects of every description were brought to the site. Models of palaces, towers, and official buildings were constructed, as were mechanized waterways reproducing the rivers and seas in miniature. Painted on the ceiling was a chart of the heavens. On the floor was a map of the land. When the tomb was closed, the artisans who had built the machinery were executed and buried alongside their creations, so that no one would be left alive to divulge the secrets of the emperor's last whereabouts. [SJ 6:265/MH 2:194-95]. The area around the tomb was sealed off by two concentric walls [Cotterell 1981:18].
Recent archeological excavations have unearthed portions of the funerary complex. A pit containing an army of thousands of life-sized terra cotta soldiers and horses in battle formation was found on the eastern flank. Other pits have been found in each of the three other directions [Li Xueqin 1985:251-62].
At the pulsating heart-mind of the empire, point of conversion between the spiral of State order and the line of outward attack, lies the emperor's body. A singular phenomenon occurs there. An increasing portion of the captured bodies and goods destined for the outlet of war are diverted. Rather than being flushed out, more and more of the "poison" in the body politic continues to eddy, ever inward. Energies are diverted from the straight and narrow path of attack, but not into a controlled mini-spiral, or reproductive cycle perpetuating the privilege of a mediating caste of lice, whether mercantile, feudal, or bureaucratic. These energies take a third route, neither productive-destructive (agriculture to war) nor reproductive (consumptive, preservative, reflective). The centripetal flow pattern is pushed to its extreme, swirling into a centralized sink-hole of antiproductive expenditure. The excess that had been extirpated from the State returns, entirely defunctionalized and in absurdly exaggerated dimensions.
What the de-loused but unmilitarized energies spiral in toward is a microcosmic doubling. The country, its inhabitants and products, the earth and its waters, the sky and the stars, the entire universe, are sucked into the center, toward the emperor's body. Duplicated in miniature, they mark the site of that body's disappearance. Disappearances. A maze of palaces produces invisibility in life, in a rehearsal for the tomb. A doubling of the world, within which a double disappearance occurs.
There are varieties of void. The first disappearance is of a different nature from the second. Palatial invisibility is oneness. The emperor's live disappearance is a fusion with the universe in its microcosmic expression. It is a symbolic unification of the empire, its cosmological foundations, and its reigning principle, in a black hole of exalted anonymity. Death is the ultimate amputation. It equals dismemberment.
The double disappearance of the emperor's body is a recapitulation of the antagonism between unity and dismemberment constituting the overall dynamic of the empire. The site of the disappearances is itself a recapitulation of the same antagonism: the symbolic unification of the imperial microcosm is only possible in a highly artificial, strictly segregated realm of doubling. Imperial unity is predicated on separation from the empire it unifies. The empire only exists as a whole apart from itself (the empire as a whole only exists as a part of itself).
The centrifugal outflux of law and striating order returns as a centripetal influx of smoothed, captured energies, which is then diverted into an eddying reflux of excess disappearance. The outward spiral of embodiment is answered by an inward spiral of disembodiment. The becoming immanent to the body politic of the emperor is accompanied by a proportional transcendentalization of his body at dead center.
Corresponding to the explosive channeling of energies out of the State spiral into war is an equal and opposite implosive diversion of energies into its heart-mind.
The more the law striates, the smoother things flow. The smoother things flow, the closer the centrifugal spiral comes to coinciding with the centripetal. The closer the centrifugal spiral comes to coinciding with the centripetal, the closer the source of all State flow comes to coinciding with its destination. The closer the source of State flows comes to coinciding with its destination, the more concertedly the State explodes through its only outlet. The more concertedly it explodes, the more forcefully it implodes.
The antagonism between unity and dismemberment can never be overcome, only recapitulated. It can (and must) be contracted into a smaller and smaller space, in an infinite regress of transcendence (doubling and disappearance: the concentric symbolic circles revolving around what in relation to the present-day avatar of despotic desire--Oedipal subjectivity--is called the "signifier of signifiers").[23] It can also (and must) be concretized in a line of destructive expansion of the sustaining field of immanence (the appearance of a one-way growth vector of physical attack; today it is in suspense, having assumed a peculiar form of perpetual war called "deterrence" [Virilio 1976, 1986]). The simultaneity of the two movements is the end of state--in both the chronological and metaphysical meanings of the word.
The absolute state is an impossibility, a virtual point of synthesis that is never attained. The State is an Idea.
1. THE JEALOUSY OF THE LAW. "Should anyone dare to tamper with the text of the Law, to erase or add
one single character, or more, he shall be condemned to death without pardon. Whenever
government officials or the people have questions about the meaning of the laws, [the officer who
presides over the law] should, in each case, answer clearly according to the laws and mandates
about which it was originally desired to ask questions ... Should the officers who preside over the
Law not give the desired information, they should be punished according to the contents of the law;
that is, they should be punished according to the law about which the government officials or the
people have asked information" [D 328/KH 26.186]. The law is an animal--it acts like a defensive
organism that strikes back when and where it is stricken. It is to be treated as though it had a body.
The Yunmeng documents echo the quasi-sentient vengefulness of the law described in the
preceding quote from the Book of Lord Shang:
"When a member of a group of five denounces another member, hoping thereby to escape
punishment, (and the denunciation is) careless, (the denunciator) is to be punished with the
punishment he had hoped to escape. (The Statute) also says: 'When one is unable to determine the
criminal and denounces another person, this is (a case of) being careless in denouncing.' Now A
says, 'The member of my group called B has killed a person with murderous (intent). B is
immediately arrested, but questioning shows that he did not kill a person. What A reported is
careless. Is he warranted to be sentenced for carelessness in denouncing, or for what he (had
hoped) to escape? To sentence him for what he (had hoped) to escape is fitting.'." [H145.D80.W8.30a]
Granet also remarked upon the jealously of the law, which he notes was inscribed on the cauldrons
used to boil criminals.
The law must be hidden. But to function, it must be broadcast--on everything from cauldrons to
imperial monoliths. Even in its shyness, it is self-replicating. The Yunmeng legal documents were
found inside the tomb of a local official named Xi, buried on top, alongside, and underneath him, as
if appendages to his body (see note [4]). They appear to have been his personal copy, and his tomb
became their forbidden archive. The most important doublings of the law--those providing it with a
local seat from which to meet the people--are also disappearances mimicking that of the forbidden
archives in the capital in their relation to the body of the emperor. The law as a whole is a repeat
performance of the emperor's act, and is struck with the same centripetal-centrifugal tension as his
body is: it is embedded in the territory and at the same stroke recedes into the center, which once
again becomes unlocalizable, for by dint of doubling it is everywhere at once. The law also repeats
the unification-dismemberment dilemma. It must be forever sealed, but in order to be implemented
it must open itself to copying, and to defend itself must open itself to and register excitations. It is at
once absolutely singular and essentially double, open and closed, whole and traumatized, hidden
and manifest. Materially so. As before, these are less metaphysical contradictions than a dynamic of
accelerating physical alternations. The law, like the emperor, is irrevocably body-bound.
There is one way the law cannot be replicated: by speech. "If above the ruler of men makes laws,
but below the inferior people discuss them, the laws will not be definite and inferiors will become
superiors." [D 333/KH 26:182] Only superiors can speak the law. The August Superior.
Underlying the writing of the law is the invisible voice of the despot, which cannot be doubled but
does disappear.
2. THE MEMORY OF THE LAW. The Yunmeng documents state that all inquiries concerning the meaning
of the law are to be carefully recorded and added to the archives, becoming part of the body of the
law itself [H145.D80.W8.30a]. If the law is a body, it is a body-memory. Any impingement from
the outside is a potential trauma, and is permanently registered--exactly like the Freudian
unconscious, which registers a permanent, physical trace of every excitation [see Derrida 1978].
Only this structure is collective and manifest, seeming to confirm Deleuze and Guattari's theory
[1983] that the Freudian unconscious is an individualization of a despotic political structure (rather
than despotism being the result of a projection of a personal unconscious structure).
3. THE HIDING OF THE LAW. "Forbidden archives are to be built for the laws, which are locked with a
lock and key to prevent admittance, and are to be sealed up; herein should be sealed one set of the
laws and mandates. Inside the forbidden archives they should be sealed with a seal forbidding their
opening. Whoever ventures unauthorizedly to break the seals of the forbidden archives, to inspect
the forbidden laws and mandates or to tamper with one or more characters of the forbidden laws
shall, in any of these cases, be [sentenced to] death without pardon." [D 229/KH 26:190].
BACK TO CHAPTER 2 CONTENTS PAGE
BACK TO FIRST AND LAST EMPERORS HOME PAGE
CONTINUE