“E proboscis unum: Law, literature, love, and the limits of sovereignty”

• Pages: 1-20
• Date: 29 February 2008
• Published date: 29 February 2008
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00601-1
• Author: Harriet Murav

‘‘E PROBOSCIS UNUM: LAW,

LITERATURE, LOVE, AND THE

LIMITS OF SOVEREIGNTY’’

Harriet Murav

ABSTRACT

The phrase ‘‘e proboscis unum,’’ a parody on the more familiar Latin

phrase that means ‘‘out of many one’’ is taken from the courtroom scene

of the 1964 Broadway musical Hello, Dolly! In this scene, the entire cast

is under arrest for disturbing the peace, but the young impoverished clerk

Cornelius Hackl takes the opportunity to proclaim his love for the milliner

Irene Molloy in the song ‘‘It only takes a moment.’’ The matchmaker

Dolly pokes fun at the judge, the figure of authority, by commenting on

the appearance of his nose, which she characterizes as ‘‘a flaming beacon

of justice’’ and ‘‘living symbol of the motto of this great land,’’ ‘‘e

proboscis unum.’’ The bickering, fighting crowd, however, in spite of the

parody, are transformed into a community as they witness the young

man’s declaration. As this episode shows, popular culture reads the law

and the courts as making possible a space for personal transformation and

transformative sociality. The recent debate about same-sex marriage in

Massachusetts shows that both individual persons and the law itself are

open to a process of mutual transformation. The chapter uses Hello,

Dolly!, the 2003 Massachusetts Supreme Court decision on same-sex

marriage, and Shoshana Felman’s The Juridical Unconscious to argue

Special Issue: Law and Literature Reconsidered

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 43, 1–20

Copyright r2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00601-1

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that the study of law and literature is crucial in the current academic

environment in which many critics, influenced by Giorgio Agamben, argue

that law and the courts are merely the space for the exercise of the state’s

sovereign power to carry out punishment.

In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Girogio Agamben

provocatively argues that the basis for the state’s protection of human ‘‘life

is the possibility of destroying it.’’ The constitution of sovereign power is the

ability to decide life and death. Agamben provides three fundamental theses

at the conclusion of his work:

1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of

indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion).

2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare

life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between

nature and culture, zoe and bios.

3. Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental

biological paradigm of the West (Agamben, 1998, p. 181).

The way that political life, or sovereign power, also called state power –

creates itself is by expelling a part of itself, which it defines as ‘‘bare life.’’

Bare life marks the constantly shifting boundary between what and who is

included in political life, and its protections and opportunities, and who is

not. Andrew Norris, explicating Agamben, writes ‘‘Politics thus entails the

constant negotiation of the threshold between itself and the bare life that

is both included within and excluded from its body’’ (Norris, 2000, p. 47).

The state of exception, or, the boundary space, is the all-important defining

moment of political life for Agamben.

Bare life means human life as nothing more than a mere instrument that

performs labor and, as Agamben says, can be killed, but not sacrificed. Bare

life is the life of ‘‘homo sacer,’’ the‘‘sacred’’ human. The concentration camp

inmate, stripped of all rights, outside of all law, and reduced to a status of a

‘‘living corpse’’ – is the exemplar of bare life for Agamben. The model of the

‘‘living corpse’’ comes from the discussion of the concentration camp in

Hannah Arendt, on whom Agamben significantly depends. In The Origins of

Totalitarianism Arendt relatess the camp inmate to the citizen of the

totalitarian state: ‘‘the human specimen reduced to the most elementary

reactions, the bundle of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced

by other bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way, is the

model ‘citizen’ of the totalitarian state; and such a citizen can be produced

only imperfectly outside the camps’’(Arendt, 1973, p. 456). For Agamben the

HARRIET MURAV2