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Corruption: Three Bodies, and Ungovernable Subjects

Corruption is the disappeared body coming back to life.
Its flesh seizes the veins of the postrevolutionary state, pumping, circulating, and blocking in a synchronized manner while unleashing shape-shifting forms as its residue.

In medieval Europe, the Sovereign’s body was considered to be double: the limited apparatus of the natural body, and a larger state of abstraction of the body politic. Together they formed the geocosmic “whole” of sovereign territorial governance, unifying a corpus of subjects and providing a temporal stabilizer. Mortality and exhaustion could be associated with the ruler as a human protagonist, while the more-than-human power matrices of rulership could be implanted in the mystic morphology of the kingdom or commonwealth as a higher ground. This prevailing notion of the two bodies permitted the continuity of monarchy even upon the death of the monarch, best expressed by the formulation “The King is dead, long live the King.”

However, the deception at the heart of this circuit causes a third body to arise from the organically immunized perpetuity of the double ruler. And this third body does not inhabit either of these theological conceptions derived from the Christian corpus naturale and corpus mysticum. We can call this third morphology “corruption.”

Corruption literally and symbolically splices through the indivisibility of the two bodies as a corporeal passage that undermines the singular thrust of their governing power. Casting a shadow reality over the surface of society and then dynamically percolating deeper, the parasitic quest of Trojan horses, double agents, fly-by-night operators, shady middleman with multiple cell phones, and match-fixers creates a relation with a business-friendly face before lurking into the “back office” to disclose their objectives.

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