When I heard of Leviathan, Kapoor’s massive sculpture in the Grand Palais of Paris, what else could possibly come to mind? I visited the exhibit on June 12, exactly two years after the elections that resulted in the Green Movement—an uprising against Iran’s own leviathan. The sea monster leviathan has roots in the Old Testament, but for me the name evokes the book by Thomas Hobbes.

Leviathan, published in 1651, begins with a warning to those who desire easy solutions to worldly conflicts. Hobbes’s goal is twofold, namely to establish a balance—“on one side for too great Liberty, and on the other side for too much Authority.” There is no intellectual escape in focusing only on one of these sides: “… ‘tis hard to passé between the points of both unwounded” (Leviathan: 3). We are, says Hobbes, fundamentally wounded beings, capable of the greatest cruelties. To deal with this inescapable human condition, he proposes the “social contract,” by which a people becomes a people and ends the civil war of all against all. This escape from nature, in so far as that is possible for a materialist like Hobbes, would be man made. Institutions and with them power are “constructed” (Ch. 47) and Hobbes describes his alternative, the leviathan, as an “artificiall person” (Ch. 16).

Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan is caged by the framework of the Grand Palais. From the sunny streets of Paris just outside, he goes unnoticed. To see him, visitors show their bags to security, as if they are the threat. They have no anxiety or fear. Children play and parents drink cappuccinos as they observe a tamed motionless leviathan. Here, in this safe space , I imagine confronting the monster. A friend takes my picture. “No, not like this … maybe this pose is better.” I think about my friends who protested in Tehran, refusing to be what the Leviathan wanted them to be. Staring at the unmoving beast, I find it hard to separate hope from despair.

Many believe that Hobbes only cared about physical safety, so he allowed the sovereign beast to grow powerful. The protegio ergo obligio is the cogito ergo sum of the state (Schmitt: xl). As long as protection exists, subjects must obey the leviathan. They have no right to revolution. But this interpretation is too simple (Arendt, for example, espouses this view: CR: 86). Hobbes describes safety broadly, not only “bare Preservation, but also all other Contentments of life, which every man by lawfull Industry, without danger, or hurt to the Common-wealth, shall acquire to himselfe” (Leviathan, Ch. 30). How are we to judge then whether the sovereign is sufficiently securing safety? In Iran, the supporters of the Green Movement do not believe that their sovereign is providing sufficient protection, even though the memories of war and direct physical harm on a massive scale are still fresh in their national consciousness. They yearn for other types of safety as well. Is their civil disobedience then justified?

From the conservative viewpoint, to look to other states as example—to allow freedom of expression and open access to information from abroad—would be to blaspheme against God. A muhareb, an enemy of God, must be punished by the state. But does an omnipotent God require such protection? The difference between God and the leviathan is that God’s power is unlimited, whereas the leviathan’s power is threatened if he cannot offer security to his subjects. He is, after all, just an artificial creation, a manmade security machine that can be dismantled. Thus, a rebellion might end his power, but it can never be justified. According to Hobbes, rebellion, civil disobedience, and civil war are virtually synonymous concepts.

Carl Schmitt, a very dubious man, interpreted Hobbes in a most extreme way:

“The state machine either functions or does not function. In the first instance, it guarantees me the security of my physical existence; in return it demands unconditional obedience to the laws by which it functions” (Schmitt: 45) … “Resistance as a “right” is in Hobbes’ absolute state in every respect identical to public law and as such is factually and legally nonsensical and absurd. The endeavor to resist the leviathan, the all powerful, resistance-destroying, and technically perfect mechanism of command, is practically impossible” (Schmitt: 46) ... “There exists no right of resistance to him, neither by invoking a higher nor a different right, nor by invoking religious reasons and arguments. He alone punishes and rewards. Based on his sovereign power, he alone determines by law, in questions of justice, what is right and proper and, in matters pertaining to religious beliefs, what is truth and error” (Schmitt: 52).

In the Iranian context, this means that anything we—protestors, ordinary citizens, victims, and exiles—might say in protest to the law is undemocratic, but anything the Supreme Leader might say is, by definition, democratic. The voice of the sovereign is the will of the people, whether they like it or not. Nothing in Iran is truth. Everything is a command (Schmitt: 55), be it a miracle or an election. The victory of the leviathan is when people resign to this situation, when they stop feeling angry and stop wanting something else.

It comes as no surprise that Dabashi’s passionate book on the history of Iran is subtitled, “a people interrupted.” The trauma of being a people interrupted, a people who have failed to become a free nation, is entrenched in the national psyche. One might expect then, the existence of a type of Iranian whose beliefs are comparable to the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. This person accepts that since failure is inevitable, it is better to live in failure—and to perfect one’s own life as much as possible—than to act. In a video posted on Youtube after the 2009 elections, a young man talks to his grandmother, probably in Tehran. He supports the Green Movement protestors. She replies: “But what if something happens to you? We cannot carry such burdens any longer!”

My own grandmother would agree with this style of thinking. She did not finish high school. She does not read the newspapers, nor does she travel. In fact, the words of men seem to her just that, merely words. During all the chatter surrounding the bombings of Tehran, what I remember most vividly is her silence after each piece of bad news. Her thought process could be described as instrumental, practical and realistic. Rather than praying, she prefers to smoke many cigarettes and to surround herself with flowers and her few remaining loved ones. What could she possibly share with a philosopher like Hobbes? The answer is simple: fear.

Hobbes attributes his premature birth to his mother’s fear of the Spanish Armada. Although the Armada was defeated, fear dominated his life, which was often threatened and for years secured only in exile. And even when he returned to his homeland, his life was endangered because of his heretical views. Weary of violence, he concluded that physical protection always outweighs the principles of conscience, which he described as mere subjective preference. If a monarch is defeated, Hobbes advises the people to accept defeat and to obey the new sovereign, even if his principles are contrary to their own: For example, Hobbes preferred the royalists, but when Cromwell won, his logic compelled him to advise obedience rather than resistance. We do not have a right to disobey, because that will only cause more unnecessary bloodshed.

My grandmother was against the 1979 uprising in Iran. It is better, she said, to stay home and be safe, than to risk your life by joining the protestors, even if their anger is justified. When the Islamic Republic was created, she immediately argued that we must now accept this new power and obey, even though she found the new laws oppressive. Today, many years later, she has not changed her stance: the young protestors of the Green Movement should have stayed in their homes, because nothing good can follow such dangerous behavior. While she believes that the sovereign should create conditions in which people can flourish, she disagrees that citizens should take matters into their own hands.

Similarly, Hobbes’ account of the peaceful society, and of men in general, is positive. Despite our evil nature, we can create a place of industry, culture, commodities, science and arts. The alternative is rather unattractive: a life of solitude, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Perhaps like a grandmother, Hobbes loved people far too much to condone any manner of solitude. He was a good man, someone who was admired and respected by many of his contemporaries and considerate of the poor. But fusing love with politics can be fatal. It becomes truly awful when the victims are blamed for the actions of the perpetrator, a depressing tendency that infects the Hobbesian mind.

Despite Hobbes’ extreme ideals, Carl Schmitt criticized him for allowing a space for inner thoughts: “The sovereign-representative person dies of the separation of the inner from outer.” If the sovereign alienates the people from themselves, forcing them to live two lives, in the long run, he will bring about his own end. He “may be ever so completely and emphatically recognized and ever so loyally respected, but only as a public and only an external power it is hollow and already dead from within” (Ch. V). If the leviathan allows a separation between life in the house and life in public, he breeds a paradoxical situation that will be his downfall. The Islamic leviathan shouts orders through public speakers. But his citizens answer in their hearts: “We will obey as far as your eyes reach, and when you are not there, we will dance, hold hands and curse your law!” Eventually, the separation of public and private will collapse, as in 2009.

Kapoor’s artwork allows visitors to literally enter the Leviathan. Here, for a moment, I was overwhelmed by the people crowding to pass through the revolving door to enter the bowels of the beast. Everything was red, the color of flesh and blood, the creature that devoured Neda. Her death is the most powerful symbol that the leviathan does not guarantee safety, physical or otherwise. Following the Hobbesian logic, his fate may lie inside a cage, like Kapoor’s harmless Leviathan.

References

- CR: Arendt, Hannah (1972). Crises of the Republic. Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego, New York and London.

- Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan (ed. Richard Tuck). Cambridge University Press, 1996.

- Schmitt, Carl (1996). The Leviathan in the state theory of Thomas Hobbes (translated by George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein). The University of Chicago Press.