If hunting is the activity from which the dynamics of domination and sovereignty arise, the place where it is carried out must be its primordial locus. Originally, hunting takes place in the forest—mythological representation of the unconscious and the natural place of the “other”—but as this activity becomes associated with sovereignty, an exclusive place for it is institutionalized, a closed park that the greeks, following a Persian use, called paradeisos (0.3). In the New Testament Greek Lexicon we find the following definition of this term:

among the Persians a grand enclosure or preserve, hunting ground, park, shady and well watered, in which wild animals were kept for the hunt; it was enclosed by walls and furnished with towers for the hunters.¹

The park, understood as a ground destined exclusively for hunting, is an extension of the house, the domus and, through it, of human domination. The domus is the emotional core of the paradeisos. Thus, enclosing a park implies creating a threshold between the self and the other. In a paradeisos we are both inside and outside; inside the domus and outside in nature.

In this regard, it is worthy of note that the hunting park, evidently a locus terribilis for the animals trapped therein, shares two of its main characteristics with the locus amoenus: being shady and well-watered (0.1). This shows the deep interpenetration, the single threshold from which the pleasant and the terrible arise; a genuine locus ambiguus that is amenable for the self and sovereignty and terrible for the prey, by now the embodiment of the other. In Agamben’s terminology, the hunting park is a place that excludes the other by including it (hunting it) and includes it by excluding it (trapping or killing it). If the exception is the juridical form of the locus terribilis, (0.10) the paradeisos is its topological form.

Here I should note that the extension of the human domain implied in the hunting park, brings forth the complete division of the self and the other in an escenario of exception. Once this process has taken place there is no limit to the abuses of sovereignty, which are carried out as an act of hunting over everyone and everything.  

In Rousseau’s words: “mankind is divided like herds of cattle, each of which has a master, who looks after it in order to devour it.” 

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1. It is important to note that paradises were attested in Lydia before the time of the Persian empire. According to historian Pierre Briant, “such parks were known in Assyria and elsewhere well before. Rather, the Persians probably spread the model of the paradise still more widely in Asia Minor. Xenophon (Cyr. VIII.6.12) reports that ‘Cyrus’ enjoined his satraps to ‘have parks, too, and keep wild animals in them.’ We might say, then, that social intercourse between Lydian and Persian aristocracies ensured that their social behavior would not diverge much from each other.” (Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, 83-84). Thus, the presence of paradeisos in numerous cultures in both the Middle East and Asia Minor shows an inclination of the elites towards the domestication of the land along with everything in it. ↩︎