Anomic Jugglers. Political Body and Late Medieval Anthropological Machine

Abstract

The text consists of four parts. Assuming that the late Middle Ages was an era of an unusual intensity of conflicts based on religion and race, it will be shown how the notion of the Church as mystical body (Corpus Ecclesiae mysticum), which was its answer to those conflicts, arises from the conservative interpretation of the divine Incarnation. I thereby prove that the entire medieval political theology is self-established as an attempt of repressive suppression of the horizontal (and without organs) political body, created by the early Christianity. The second part is an attempt to describe an anthropological machine, whereby from the 11th century the Curia produced the radically exclusive notion of a political body, dividing the world of those days into humans (who will be saved) and none-humans, which consist of the condemned mass. The third part indicates how this process assumes the form of excommunication, which despite the fact of being created as an extraordinary measure, became the norm for the medieval masses. The last part describes the Franciscanism as a social and religious movement based on the concept of repetition of the Incarnation event – tragic from the orthodox theology point of view. In this context the hidden under the surface of the struggle for investiture, the unbreakable alliance is revealed, maintained between the Papacy and the Empire that was created to hold back the new, heterodox outbursts and the anti-imperialist line of the outlets.