ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, “Patrons of the State”, focuses on the politico-theological division of the private and the public beginning with an examination of De officiis by the Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero. The chapter outlines Cicero’s concentric political philosophy of obligation, beginning with the family – famulus – and ending with the Republic. Turning to the doctrine of the enemy of all, the figure of exception, the juridical mechanism at the root of radical exclusion – here reliant on the doctrine that those who to fail to commit to the patriarchal family are simply excluded from the logic of the (implied) human contract (anticipating the modern liberal subject). The state, both subtended by the regulation of intimacy and functioning as the guarantor for the legitimation of social (and extra social) relations – beginning with the family – not only underlies a politics of opposition but more deeply, determines what is excluded from the conditions for the possibility of recognition, what ultimately conditions the shape of the necropolitical. The chapter critiques Kant’s determination of the distinction between private and public and closes with a deeper consideration of the underlying theological principles of authority.
