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Christos Tsaitouridis, "Leviathan - Moby Dick: The Physics of The State", Law and Critique VIII/2 (1997), 223-243: This paper attempts a comparative reading of a political treatise and a novel which share similar textual characteristics and a "mighty theme": the whale, Leviathan and its relationship to man. In Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan and Herman Melville's Moby Dick the title of the book exceeds both the more "literal" subtitle and the text; also it implies a structural bond between the name and the body. The primacy of the body (symbolised by the almighty Leviathan) over the soul and the spirit is the main principle of the authors' dramatic and powerful critique of Metaphysics. The positivities of space and the present are juxtaposed to the eschatology of Christianity. Leviathan also subverts the traditional hierarchy of means and ends in political theory, thus becoming the foundation of a radical critique of representation in law. The leviathanian legality is utterly corporeal and therefore it can be comprehended by the axioms of what we could call Physics of the State, for which law and force are in principle indistinguishable. Hobbes presents the law as an order of means, an exteriority, as his insistence on the "artificiality" of the legal order suggests.

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