What makes the Son of Heaven noble (in the eyes of his people) is that they hear only the sound (of his voice), and none of the subjects can obtain a view of his countenance. Thus he calls himself divine. [SJ 87:2558/Bodde 1938:44]
This explanation of the Emperor's transcendence was given after his death by his closest advisor, Li Si, to his heir, eager to learn how to emulate his father. It was in response to the question: "How can I give free play to my impulses and broaden my desires, so as to enjoy the empire for a long time to come without harm to myself?" [SJ 87:2553-54/Bodde 1938:38] "All talented rulers," says Li Si, "must be able to oppose the world and to grind usages (to their own liking), destroying what they like and establishing what they desire. ... The intelligent ruler makes decisions solely himself ... so that within the palace, he alone sees and listens. ... Therefore he is able for himself alone to follow a mind of complete unrestraint. ... Only in this way can one be said to be capable of ... practising the laws of Lord Shang." [SJ 87:2557/Bodde 1938:42].
The ruler alone will rule in the empire, and will be ruled by none. He will succeed in reaching the apex of pleasure. ... To possess the empire, and yet not throw off all restraints, is called making shackles (for oneself) out of the empire. [SJ 87:2554/Bodde 1938:39]
What is embodied in the unified territory and its organ-ized bodies is the ruler's desire made law.
If the absolute state is an idea, the idea is a desire. It is the despotic desire to be one in order to dominate the other, to infuse in order to transcend all outside limitations. Or is it to dominate the other in order to be one, and to transcend in order to infuse? It amounts to the same thing.
Either way, despotism overlooks the fact that for there to be one through domination there must be an other to be dominated. That makes two. Once the second is subjugated, another other must come for the unification to continue: three. Oneness reposes on multiplicity.
This fundamental paralogism of the absolute-state desire for unity in no way militates against its status as idea. On the contrary, it constitutes its ideality. It defines it as a serialized drive to overcome a contradiction that is resolvable only at an ideal point of synthesis. In other words, not at all. The absolute state is the Law of nonresolution behind the voice behind the law. It is the exaltation of a recurrently embodied but nonetheless impossible idea.
The double-bind of the one and the multiple and the manic quest to overcome it is common to many social formations, all of which could broadly be termed fascist. "Oriental despotism" is perhaps the first, perhaps the most extreme, but by no means the last embodiment of fascist desire.
It would be a mistake to attribute fascist desire to an individual body. The idea returns, eternally. Wherever the ideology of unity is, there is fascism, in one form or another.
It could be asked of the First Emperor if he had an empire, or if the empire had him. And of the emperor's Oedipal son, in his many reincarnations throughout the course of history: did you inherit your Father's desire, or did your Father's desire inherit you?
Ruler and empire, father and son, are united by the Holy Ghost of fascist desire.
One, if not two--in which case it is three--is double disappearance.
Why have you abandoned me? cries the son of heaven at the height of his Passion.
1. INDIVIDUALITY? The Qin state constituted the "individual" as a standardized unit enslaved in a
megamachine of war, a process precluding individuality in the modern Western sense of the
word.[24] The parameters of social existence the Qin state established were without exception
supra-individual. This is most clearly visible in the five-man or five-family units--a kind of collective
superego.[25] The reduction of the people's drives to imperial predation in the name of the Law of
the emperor's desire can be seen as a collective id. There was no individuality as we know it
because these mechanisms not only did not require the people to internalize them, but actively
discouraged them from doing so: internalizing the Law leads to the formation of a semi-autonomous
command post that can "perversely rely on itself and return to its own house." This fosters exactly
the kind of louse-like moralism the Qin state strove to stamp out. The practical effect of the
forbiddenness and perpetual doubling of the ever-receding law was precisely to prevent
internalization. The fact that the West would invent 'Oedipal' mechanisms to miniaturize this kind of
structure and (in Deleuze and Guattari's terms) "apply" it to the individual human body does not
necessarily mean that it was part of an internalization process in China. On the contrary, it calls into
question whether Western individuality effectively constitutes an interiority.
The emperor's objectification of his subjects could be seen as an attempt to retain a monopoly on
individual subjectivity for himself. But he disappeared into his own black hole. It may be recalled,
however, that modern Western thought, from Hegel [see Kojève 1947] to Nietzsche to Sartre to
most forms of poststructuralism [in particular Lacan and Foucault] places the emergence of
self-consciousness squarely in the camp of the "slave," not the "master." If there is no individuality
among the people, it is certain that there will be none on the side of the emperor.
Desire as we are using the term is not contained in an individual body or mind. It is nothing other
than the "inter-dynamism" we set out to find: a pattern of interrelationship that can only be thought
of as the in-between of bodies and concepts (and texts and events).
Granet offers a highly imaginative reconstruction of early Chinese society organized around a
matrilineal kinship system.[26] According to Granet, the primary tie, however, was not one of blood
but of territory. All of the inhabitants of the same village, he says, bore the same family name, and
were united as a clan by their religious bond to the presiding mother-goddess. When men married,
they joined the household of their wives, whose name and clan affiliation they adopted. Lineage
therefore passed from mother to daughter. It was forbidden to marry relatives (fellow clan
members, even if unrelated by blood), but also to marry complete strangers. The custom was
marriage between cousins: since brothers and sisters ended up in different clans after marrying, their
children were considered unrelated and could marry one another. The result was a permanent
alliance between two clans who exchanged their sons generation after generation. (In
anthropological terms, the kinship system was based on exogamous clans joined by endogamous
matrilineal cross-cousin marriage alliances.) The fabric of regional power consisted of two-clan
alliances in rivalry with similar alliances in the vicinity. Within each clan, kinship terms were
collective, designating not individuals but cohorts: "the word 'mother' itself applies to a large group
of people: if it be taken in an individual sense, it is used to name, not the woman who has given one
birth, but the most respected woman of the generation of mothers ... the affinities of relationship
have a universal character" [1930:155]. The system of cross-cousin marriage meant that fathers
and maternal uncles belonged to the same cohort and shared the same appelation, as did sons and
nephews, and brothers and cousins. Marriage itself was collective: ceremonial group marriages
apparently took place during seasonal fertility festivals of "communions, orgies, and games"
[1930:160-70].
Granet emphasizes that the kinship system and fabric of alliances and rivalries was profoundly
conservative, favoring social and political stasis. Moreover, since they "recognized neither personal
ties nor an hierarchy" [1930:155], they were incompatible both with the family as we know it with
state organization. The state could only have been imposed from outside. An adequate summary of
Granet's theory of state development is beyond the scope of this article. Briefly, he theorizes that
male corporations developed parallel to the kinship and political system described above,
eventually arrogated to themselves the supernatural properties of the tutelary spirits and holy places,
then superimposed their fundamentally different system of alliances and rivalries upon the territorial
clans. The progression was as follows: the formation of fraternities based on male activities (such as
metalworking, in particular the manufacture of weapons); rivalries among fraternities, expressed
through "jousts," other competitions, and ritual warfare; hierarchies based on the results of the
competitions, which displace the fertility festivals; the head of each hierarchy assuming mythic
stature by usurping the powers of mother-goddesses and other nature deities; formation of a
tributary kingship serviced by court aristocrats. The transformation of the symbolic leadership of the
tributary king into effective administrative control took place in border regions, in particular in Qin,
and was directly related to changes in military organization brought about by contact with
'barbarians' [1930:220-24]. (See From the Steppes to the Sea: "Nomadic Carriers" below)
The feudal kings went the mother-goddesses one better, claiming not only to embody the powers
of the earth but of the skies as well: the king was the "Son of Heaven." Men's usurpation of divine
powers, which took the form of male ancestor worship, favored patrilineal descent, but remnants of
the old clan order interfered with the transmission of either family name or social position from
father to son (they tended instead to skip a generation) [1930:209-211, 312-20; also Chang
1977b:179-81]. "The feudal and agnatic order came into being as soon as the military codes had
permeated the relations between families and cities. ... Nevertheless, as long as the feudal order
lasts, the notions of domestic authority and filiation do not arrive at a combination sufficiently close
to produce the idea of paternal authority." The son had to establish his right to be his father's
inheritor. This he did by establishing a vassal-lord relationship with him [Granet 1930:320-43]. The
father-son relationship is a derivative of a political-religious structure. "It is precisely the absence of
kinship [between father and son] which makes it possible for [the son] to infeudate himself"
[1930:320].
The final ascendency of the Father had to wait until male hierarchy, male religious authority, male
descent, and male political authority fused into a solid structure at all levels of society. This fusion
was achieved by the First Emperor: "he gave the rule of the separation of the sexes a significance
favorable to the development of marital and paternal authority. ... He aimed at making the authority
of the father the sole basis of domestic order in all classes of society" [1930:417]. The monoliths he
erected at the borders and atop sacred mountains--rising pointedly heavenward from a mother
earth now overlaid by patriarchy--broadcast the new sexual politics:
"He conclusively separated the interior from the exterior," they boasted. "Man and woman conform
to certain rites" (i.e., the fertility festivals have been suppressed and the man no longer moves into
his wife's household, under threat of banishment). "He has forbidden and suppressed debauchery ...
Everything has its station."[27]
2. DIVINITY AS THE FULFILLMENT OF PATRIARCHY. According to Marcel Granet [1930], it was not until the
Qin dynasty that patrilineal descent coupled with effective paternal power in the home and the
public sphere was firmly established in China. He relates the transition to patriarchy to religious
changes culminating in the divinization of the emperor.
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