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  THE OM NIBUS HOMO SACER

  MERIDIAN

  Crossing Aesthetics

  T H E O M N I B U S

  HOMO

  SACER

  GIORGIO AGAMBEN

  STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

  STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

  Stanford University Press

  Stanford, California

  © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

  All rights reserved.

  This book was negotiated through Agnese Incisa Agenzia Letteraria, Torino.

  Since this page cannot accommodate all the copyright notices,

  the Credits constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at the Library of Congress

  ISBN 9781503603059 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 9781503603158 (electronic)

  Designed by Bruce Lundquist

  Typeset at Stanford University Press in 11/15.5 Adobe Garamond Pro

  CONTENTS

  I. HOMO SACER:

  Sovereign Power and Bare Life

  1

  II, 1. STATE OF EXCEPTION

  161

  II, 2. STASIS:

  Civil War as a Political Paradigm

  247

  II, 3. THE SACRAMENT OF LANGUAGE:

  An Archaeology of the Oath

  295

  II, 4. THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY:

  For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government

  363

  II, 5. OPUS DEI:

  An Archaeology of Duty

  643

  III. REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ:

  The Witness and the Archive

  761

  IV, 1. THE HIGHEST POVERTY:

  Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life

  881

  IV, 2. THE USE OF BODIES

  1011

  vi

  CONTENTS

  Index

  1291

  Credits

  1323

  THE OMNIBUS HOMO SACER

  HOMO SACER I

  HOMO

  SACER

  Sovereign Power

  and Bare Life

  TRANSLATED BY DANIEL HELLER-ROAZEN

  Contents

  Introduction

  5

  PART ONE: THE LOGIC OF SOVEREIGNT Y

  1. The Paradox of Sovereignty

  17

  2. ‘Nomos Basileus’

  29

  3. Potentiality and Law

  36

  4. Form of Law

  44

  Threshold

  54

  PART TWO: HOMO SACER

  1. Homo Sacer

  61

  2. The Ambivalence of the Sacred

  64

  3. Sacred Life

  69

  4. ‘Vitae Necisque Potestas’

  74

  5. Sovereign Body and Sacred Body

  78

  6. The Ban and the Wolf

  88

  Threshold

  94

  PART THREE: THE CAMP AS BIOPOLITICAL

  PARADIGM OF THE MODERN

  1. The Politicization of Life

  99

  2. Biopolitics and the Rights of Man

  105

  3. Life That Does Not Deserve to Live

  113

  4. ‘Politics, or Giving Form to the Life of a People’

  119

  5. VP

  127

  6. Politicizing Death

  132

  7. The Camp as the ‘Nomos’ of the Modern

  137

  Threshold

  148

  Bibliography

  155

  Das Recht hat kein Dasein für sich, sein Wesen vielmehr ist das

  Leben der Menschen selbst, von einer Seite angesehen.

  —Savigny

  Law has no existence for itself; rather its essence lies, from a certain perspec-

  tive, in the very life of men.

  Ita in iure civitatis, civiumque officiis investigandis opus est, non quidem ut

  dissolvatur civitas, sed tamen ut tanquam dissoluta consideretur, id est, ut

  qualis sit natura humana, quibus rebus ad civitatem compaginandam apta

  vel inepta sit, et quomodo homines inter se componi debeant, qui coalescere

  volunt, recte intelligatur.

  —Hobbes

  To make a more curious search into the rights of States, and duties of Subjects,

  it is necessary, (I say not to take them in sunder, but yet that) they be so

  considered, as if they were dissolved, (i.e.) that wee rightly understand what

  the quality of humane nature is, in what matters it is, in what not fit to make

  up a civill government, and how men must be agreed among themselves, that

  intend to grow up into a well-grounded State.

  Euretē moi hē entolē hē eis zōēn, autē eis thanaton.

  —Saint Paul

  And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.

  Introduction

  THE Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word

  “life.” They used two terms that, although traceable to a common ety-

  mological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men,

  or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group. When Plato mentions three kinds of life in the Philebus,

  and when Aristotle distinguishes the contemplative life of the philosopher

  ( bios theōrētikos) from the life of pleasure ( bios apolaustikos) and the political life ( bios politikos) in the Nichomachean Ethics, neither philosopher would ever have used the term zoē (which in Greek, significantly enough, lacks a plural).

  This follows from the simple fact that what was at issue for both thinkers was

  not at all simple natural life but rather a qualified life, a particular way of life.

  Concerning God, Aristotle can certainly speak of a zoē aristē kai aidios, a more noble and eternal life ( Meta physics, 1072b, 28), but only insofar as he means to underline the significant truth that even God is a living being (similarly,

  Aristotle uses the term zoē in the same context—and in a way that is just as

  meaningful—to define the act of thinking). But to speak of a zoē politikē of

  the citizens of Athens would have made no sense. Not that the classical world

  had no familiarity with the idea that natural life, simple zoē as such, could be

  a good in itself. In a passage of the Politics, after noting that the end of the city is life according to the good, Aristotle expresses his awareness of that idea with

  the most perfect lucidity:

  This [life according to the good] is the greatest end both in common for all men

  and for each man separately. But men also come together and maintain the po-

  litical community in view of simple living, because there is probably some kind

  of good in the mere fact of living itself [ kata to zēn auto monon] . If there is no great difficulty as to the way of life [ kata ton bion] I clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life [ zoē] as if it were a kind of serenity [ euēmeria,
<
br />   beautiful day] and a natural sweetness. (1278b, 23–31)

  5

  6

  HOMO SACER I

  In the classical world, however, simple natural life is excluded from the

  polis in the strict sense, and remains confined—as merely reproductive life—to

  the sphere of the oikos, “home” ( Politics, 1252a, 26–35). At the beginning of the Politics, Aristotle takes the greatest care to distinguish the oikonomos (the head of an estate) and the despotēs (the head of the family), both of whom are concerned

  with the reproduction and the subsistence of life, from the politician, and he

  scorns those who think the difference between the two is one of quantity and

  not of kind. And when Aristotle defined the end of the perfect community in

  a passage that was to become canonical for the political tradition of the West

  (1252b, 30), he did so precisely by opposing the simple fact of living ( to zēn)

  to politically qualified life ( to eu zēn) : ginomenē men oun tou zēn heneken, ousa de tou eu zēn, “born with regard to life, but existing essentially with regard to the good life” (in the Latin translation of William of Moerbeke, which both

  Aquinas and Marsilius of Padua had before them: facta quidem igitur vivendi

  gratia, existens autem gratia bene vivendi) .

  It is true that in a famous passage of the same work, Aristotle defines man as a

  politikon zōon ( Politics, 1253a, 4). But here (aside from the fact that in Attic Greek the verb bionai is practically never used in the present tense), “political” is not an attribute of the living being as such, but rather a specific difference that determines the genus zōon. (Only a little later, after all, human politics is distinguished from that of other living beings in that it is founded, through a supplement of

  politicity [ policitAa] tied to language, on a community not simply of the pleasant and the painful but of the good and the evil and of the just and the unjust.)

  Michel Foucault refers to this very definition when, at the end of the first

  volume of The History of Sexuality, he summarizes the process by which, at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms

  and calculations of State power, and politics turns into biopolitics. “For millen-

  nia,” he writes, “man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with

  the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose

  politics calls his existence as a living being into question” ( La volonté, p. 188).

  According to Foucault, a society’s “threshold of biological modernity” is sit-

  uated at the point at which the species and the individual as a simple living body

  become what is at stake in a society’s political strategies. After 1977, the courses

  at the Collège de France start to focus on the passage from the “territorial State”

  to the “State of population” and on the resulting increase in importance of the

  nation’s health and biological life as a problem of sovereign power, which is then

  gradually transformed into a “government of men” ( Dits et écrits, 3: 719). “What follows is a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisti-

  HOMO SACER

  7

  cated political techniques. For the first time in history, the possibilities of the

  social sciences are made known, and at once it becomes possible both to protect

  life and to authorize a holocaust.” In particular, the development and triumph

  of capitalism would not have been possible, from this perspective, without the

  disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which, through a series of

  appropriate technologies, so to speak, created the “docile bodies” that it needed.

  Almost twenty years before The History of Sexuality, Hannah Arendt had

  already analyzed the process that brings homo laborans— and, with it, biological

  life as such—gradually to occupy the very center of the political scene of moder-

  nity. In The Human Condition, Arendt attributes the transformation and decadence of the political realm in modern societies to this very primacy of natural

  life over political action. That Foucault was able to begin his study of biopolitics

  with no reference to Arendt’s work (which remains, even today, practically with-

  out continuation) bears witness to the difficulties and resistances that thinking

  had to encounter in this area. And it is most likely these very difficulties that ac-

  count for the curious fact that Arendt establishes no connection between her re-

  search in The Human Condition and the penetrating analyses she had previously

  devoted to totalitarian power (in which a biopolitical perspective is altogether

  lacking), and that Foucault, in just as striking a fashion, never dwelt on the ex-

  emplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure

  of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.

  Foucault’s death kept him from showing how he would have developed

  the concept and study of biopolitics. In any case, however, the entry of zoē

  into the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such—constitutes

  the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the

  political- philosophical categories of classical thought. It is even likely that if pol-

  itics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics

  has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. The “enigmas”

  (Furet, L’Allemagne nazi, p. 7) that our century has proposed to historical reason and that remain with us (Nazism is only the most disquieting among them)

  will be solved only on the terrain—biopolitics—on which they were formed.

  Only within a biopolitical horizon will it be possible to decide whether the

  categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left, private/pub-

  lic, absolutism/ democracy, etc.)—and which have been steadily dissolving, to

  the point of entering today into a real zone of indistinction—will have to be

  abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very

  horizon. And only a reflection that, taking up Foucault’s and Benjamin’s sug-

  gestion, thematically interrogates the link between bare life and politics, a link

  8

  HOMO SACER I

  that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most distant from one

  another, will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the

  same time, return thought to its practical calling.

  One of the most persistent features of Foucault’s work is its decisive aban-

  donment of the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is based

  on juridico-institutional models (the definition of sovereignty, the theory of

  the State), in favor of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which

  power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life. As shown by a seminar

  held in 1982 at the University of Vermont, in his final years Foucault seemed to

  orient this analysis according to two distinct directives for research: on the one

  hand, the study of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals

  into its very center; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of the

  self by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself

  to his own identity and consciousness and,
at the same time, to an external

  power. Clearly these two lines (which carry on two tendencies present in Fou-

  cault’s work from the very beginning) intersect in many points and refer back

  to a common center. In one of his last writings, Foucault argues that the mod-

  ern Western state has integrated techniques of subjective individualization with

  procedures of objective totalization to an unprecedented degree, and he speaks

  of a real “political ‘double bind,’ constituted by individualization and the simul-

  taneous totalization of structures of modern power” ( Dits et écrits, 4: 229–32).

  Yet the point at which these two faces of power converge remains strangely

  unclear in Foucault’s work, so much so that it has even been claimed that Fou-

  cault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power. If

  Foucault contests the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is

  exclusively based on juridical models (“What legitimates power?”) or on institu-

  tional models (“What is the State?”), and if he calls for a “liberation from the the-

  oretical privilege of sovereignty” in order to construct an analytic of power that

  would not take law as its model and code, then where, in the body of power, is the

  zone of indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques

  of individualization and totalizing procedures converge? And, more generally, is

  there a unitary center in which the political “double bind” finds its raison d’être?

  That there is a subjective aspect in the genesis of power was already implicit in

  the concept of servitude volontaire in Étienne de La Boétie. But what is the point at which the voluntary servitude of individuals comes into contact with objective

  power? Can one be content, in such a delicate area, with psychological explana-

  HOMO SACER

  9

  tions such as the suggestive notion of a parallelism between external and internal

  neuroses? Confronted with phenomena such as the power of the society of the

  spectacle that is everywhere transforming the political realm today, is it legitimate

  or even possible to hold subjective technologies and political techniques apart?

  Although the existence of such a line of thinking seems to be logically im-

  plicit in Foucault’s work, it remains a blind spot to the eye of the researcher,