摘要：In his most recent book, Eric Santner adds a brilliant chapter to his ongoing series of works tracing connections between political theology and psychoanalysis.1The Royal Remains both performs and calls for a more thorough treatment of flesh as both object and idea. For Michel Foucault, the reordering of sovereign powers over life and death which culminated in new regulations of both personal and species bodies converges around sex, which serves simultaneously as example and impetus for two linked processes: One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death...In concrete terms, starting in the seve nteenth century, this power over life evolved in two basic forms...One of these poles— the first to be formed, it seems—centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an an anatamo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births a nd mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which organization of power over life was deployed
