“Bound” (1996) – Gorgio Agamben vs. William Connolly

In this post I seek to examine Andy and Larry Wachowski’s film “Bound” from the perspective (once again) of Giorgio Agamben. This time I want to go over the scene where Caesar kills Gino (played by Richard Sarafian). I suggest that Caesar’s ability to kill Gino is a good illustration of the figure of homo sacer within the sovereign. I want to then consider  William Connolly’s criticism of Agamben, and relate that back to the film – showing how there is no one true sovereign in the scene but also how Connolly is being unfair in his characterization of Agamben’s argument.

Agamben’s argument (which I also examine here) is that “for the sovereign, death reveals the excess that seems to be as such inherent in supreme power, as if supreme power were, in the last analysis, nothing other than the capacity to constitute oneself and others as life that may be killed but not sacrificed” ( Homo Sacer, 101). He finds the figure of homo sacer – the one who can be killed but not sacrificed – within the sovereign. He finds this figure within sovereignty by tracing Ernst Kantorowicz’s argument about the king’s two bodies back to pagan ritual. That derivation will, for this post, be relatively unimportant. Instead I want to consider what should be true if Agamben’s thesis is correct, namely that “we ought to be able to find analogies and correspondences in the juridico-political status of these two apparently distant bodies” (102). Now, the two analogies that he finds are that the “killing of the sovereign,” like the killing of homo sacer, is never “classified simply as an act of homicide” (ibid.) and that (as Michael Walzer pointed out about the death of Louis XVI) neither the homo sacer nor the sovereign can be ritually sacrificed (by which he means put through the ritual of a trial). However, since “Bound” does not have a properly juridico-political sovereign (and since, as Agamben points out, “sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept” or “an exclusively political category”) these two analogies do not apply to Gino’s death (28).

What, then, are the analogies to be found? Can we find any at all? What impact would it have if this sovereign death bore no analogies to the death of homo sacer? William Connolly (in his book Pluralism) effectively argues that precisely because we cannot find strict analogies in every situation of sovereignty, we must reject Agamben’s tight theory of paradoxes (cf. Connolly, 140). His argument is precisely that we cannot find homo sacer everywhere, that we cannot find a relatively singular model of sovereignty everywhere, and that trying to generalize the two (in a tight logic) is unacceptable. Thus he claims that it is the sacralization of sovereignty, the process of generalizing homo sacer, that prevents a renegotiation of sovereignty (“To renegotiate the ethos of sovereignty in the contemporary context requires an audacious pluralization of the sacred and a corollary realization of what it takes to defile the sense of the sacred embraced by you, me, or others”) (Connolly, 147). Thus also he divides sovereignty into a “positional sovereignty” (an institutional position, like the Supreme Court, which reigns supreme) and the sovereignty of power (the group or individual with an irresistible amount of power at their disposal) (ibid.). “The finality of sovereignty circulates uncertainly between authoritative sites of enunciation and irresistible forces of power. This is not a confusion in the idea of sovereignty – a misunderstanding to be eliminated by a sharper definition of the term. It is, rather, the zone of instability that sovereignty inhabits.” (Connolly, 141).

The two theorists are engaging in an interesting and profound debate. I want to halt their discussion for a moment to interject a text on which to debate about it (namely, the movie “Bound”, and specifically the scene of Gino’s death).

The position of the positional sovereign is completely clear in this scene. Gino sits down between the two disputants and dispenses judgment (not unlike Connolly’s example of the Supreme Court). When he walks towards Caesar, he imperiously declares: “You point the gun at me? You know who I am? I am Gino Marzoni! Capeesh?”. Nor is there any doubt in his mind that Caesar will give the gun to him. His is clearly the positional sovereignty.

And it would indeed seem that there is another sovereignty, a sovereignty of power. Thus I think it is significant that, when Caesar pours Gino’s drink, we see him split into many distorted images and we hear an echo. Clearly this is supposed to initiate the schizophrenia that consumes Caesar for the rest of the movie, but I also think it serves another purpose: it makes Caesar stand in for the multitude, for the many, who are in a position to challenge Gino. Caesar seems to clearly possess the irresistible force of power in this scene.

I would argue, however, that the true holders of irresistible power are Violet and Corky, who hold the money. The money, in this case, represents the power to challenge the positional sovereign. Violet and Corky hold it, and they are the ones who are truly behind this killing (it is possible to understand Caesar’s abdication of responsibility towards the end of the scene in this light). Of course, it is also possible to see fissures of Gino’s authority in Johnny’s insistence that they stay instead of go. And Connolly’s point, that this is not wrapped up in a tight logic of paradox because there was a way to check and change the result, of course makes sense (cf. Connolly, 142). If Gino had asserted his positional sovereignty here (and it would have made sense to do so), then the scene could have gone completely differently. But instead he allowed the fight between Johnny and Caesar to escalate, which led to the pulling of a gun, which led to Gino’s death. So it truly does seem like there is a split sovereignty here.

But, on the other hand, I also think it is possible to find analogies to homo sacer (a figure that I am not sure Connolly understands as Agamben does). Caesar is not punished for killing Gino (indeed, no matter how hard Micky looks for him, he will never be found, having been killed for something other than killing Gino). Nor is Gino sacrificed (he is killed not through some ritual process, not through some inter-mafia war as Caesar intends to contend). And the excess revealed through his death is what Caesar does to Johnny after he dies. The pathetic “don’t shoot” that Johnny says after he has been shot is sovereignty reduced to its inability to be sacrificed (here the analogy would be something like Johnny does not die in a dignified way, or in a way that would befit the supreme power – leaving what that way is vague) and yet its clear ability to be killed. So, on my reading, the homo sacer revealed through the death of the sovereign is Johnny. This is not the tightest reading of Agamben, since I am not talking about the sovereign’s homo sacer, but it is a genetic reading in the literal sense that Johnny is Gino’s son. He is what is left after when Gino dies. It is not a direct translation of Agamben’s argument about sovereignty, but I think it is fairly clear that Johnny is a figure akin to homo sacer.

Such a reading might seem to acknowledge that Connolly has the right of it in this debate. After all, did I not just claim that I was not tightly applying Agamben’s logic? Yes, I certainly did, but it is precisely because I do not see Agamben as articulating such a tight structure of sovereignty that I am more sympathetic to him. He does not find the literal ritual of a second death in today’s sovereigns as it was in ancient Rome. Instead he finds “a trace of the unsacrificeability of the sovereign’s life” in America’s law against trying the president in an ordinary legal trial (Agamben, 103). Clearly he is not simply saying that the President of the United States is homo sacer; instead he is advancing a very sophisticated comparison between the two that is fairly compelling. And it is a comparison that can also be adapted to fit the shooting in “Bound”. So I think Connolly’s points stand, but that they miss their target.