In the chapter "The Body of the Condemned," Foucault cites Kantorowitz's notion of the King's two bodies and adds:
"At the opposite pole one might imagine placing the body of the condemned man; he, too, has his legal status; he gives rise to his own ceremonial and he calls forth a whole theoretical discourse, not in order to ground the 'surplus power' possessed by the person of the sovereign but in order to code the 'lack of power' with which those subjected to punishment are marked. In the darkest region of the political field, the condemned man represents the symmetrical inverted figure of the king...... "
And he then formulates the puzzling question:
"If the surplus power possessed by the king gives rise to the duplication of his body, has not the surplus power exercised on the subjected body of the condemned man given riste to another type of duplication? That of a 'non corporal,' a 'soul' as Mably called it." (Foucault Reader, 176)
In his book on Pierre Riviere a similar question was posed, when he discusses the tradition of the ballads that were printed and handed out at executions in England. What we see there, he argues, is the emergence of the 'condemned as a Lyrical Subject.'
What does he mean here?
