Abstract
Restoration rhetoric of the body politic, as in Hobbes’s Leviathan, uses a confusion of metaphors, biological and mechanistic. Rather than asking whether such inconsistencies point to the death of the organic analogy of the body politic, this chapter explores the rearticulation of the body politic, not as a substance that may or may not be integral, unified, and consistent across time and space, but as a disassembled and reassembled set of forces and relationships (gendered, racialized, erotic) that construct the population that will thrive and be invested with right and that which will be disqualified, an asymmetrical distribution of life chances designated biopolitics. The necropolitics of the colony provides the constitutive outside or other of the White state’s biopolitical investment in its population. Division, separating out, and reassembly, then, is the key form of the body politic, not what threatens its ideal unity.