Charismatic Politics: From Relics to Portraits

ABSTRACT In his book Le portrait du roi, Louis Marin seems to continue Ernst Kantorowicz’s work on the Middle Ages, extending it to Early Modernity. Marin’s book adds another body to the historical and juridical political bodies of Kantorowicz’s King described in The Two King’s Bodies, namely the portrait of the King. According to Marin, this body drives the interchange between the historical and juridical bodies; hence, the absolutist king has three bodies in one: the historical, the semiotic-sacramental, and the juridical. Following Kantorowicz and Marin’s argumentative line, this paper addresses the ways in which absent or dead bodies can act politically, in particular, the shift in political legitimation that goes hand in hand with the transition from a politics of relics to a politics of images.