The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

in its specific locus, which is to say, in the relationship between the oikos, the family or the household, and the polis, the city. ‘The matter’, she writes, ‘will be played out between three terms: the stasis, the city, the family’ (Loraux 1997, 38).

  Such an identification of the place of civil war entails redrawing the traditional

  topography of the relations between the family and the city from scratch. What

  is at issue is not, as the prevailing paradigm would have it, an overcoming of

  the family in the city, of the private in the public and of the particular in the

  general, but a more ambiguous and complex relation; and it is precisely this

  relation which we will seek to grasp.

  Loraux begins her analysis with a passage from Plato’s Menexenus, in which the

  ambiguity of civil war appears on full display. Describing the stasis which divided the citizens of Athens in 404, Plato writes ironically:

  Our war at home [ ho oikeios hēmin polemos] was waged in such a fashion that were

  fate to condemn humanity to conflict no one would wish to see their city suffer

  this predicament in any other way. With such joviality and familiarity did those

  from the Piraeus and those from the city engage with one another [ hōs asmenōs

  kai oike kai oikeiōs allēlois synemeixan]! ( Menex. , 243e–244a)

  Not only does the verb that Plato employs ( symmeignymi) mean both ‘to mingle’

  and ‘to enter the fray, to fight’; but the very expression oikeios polemos is, to the

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  Greek ear, an oxymoron: polemos designates external conflict and, as Plato will

  record in the Republic (470c), refers to the allotrion kai othneion (alien and foreign), while for the oikeios kai syggenēs (familiar and kindred) the appropriate term is stasis.

  According to the reading that Loraux gives to these passages, Plato seems to imply

  that ‘the Athenians had waged an internecine war only in order to better reconvene

  in a family celebration’ (Loraux 1997, 22). The family is simultaneously the origin

  of division and stasis and the paradigm of reconciliation (the Greeks, Plato will

  write, ‘fight amongst themselves as if they were fated to be reconciled’ [ Rep. , 471a]).

  5. The ambivalence of the stasis, according to Loraux, is thus attributable to

  the ambiguity of the oikos, with which is it consubstantial. Civil war is the stasis emphylos; it is the conflict particular to the phylon, to blood kinship. It is to such an extent inherent to the family that the phrase ta emphylia (literally, ‘the things internal to the bloodline’) simply means ‘civil wars’. According to Loraux, the

  term denotes ‘the bloody relationship that the city, as a bloodline (and, as such,

  thought in its closure), maintains with itself’ (Loraux 1997, 29). At the same

  time, precisely because it is what lies at the origin of the stasis, the family is also what contains its possible remedy. Vernant thus notes that the rift between

  families is often healed through an exchange of gifts, which is to say, by virtue

  of a marriage between rival clans: ‘In the eyes of the Greeks it was not possible

  to isolate the forces of discord from those of union either in the web of human

  relationships or in the constitution of the world’ (Vernant 1988, 31).

  Even tragedy bears witness to the intimate link between civil war and the

  family, and to the threat that the Ares emphylios— the god of warfare who dwells

  in the oikos—brings to bear on the city ( Eumenides, 862–3). According to Loraux, the Oresteia is simultaneously the evocation of the long chain of killings in the

  house of the Atridi and the commemoration of its overcoming through the foun-

  dation of the court at the Areopagus, which puts an end to the family massacre.

  ‘The civic order has integrated the family in its midst. This means that it is al-

  ways virtually threatened by the discord that kinship is like a second nature, and

  that it has simultaneously always already overcome this threat’ (Loraux 1997, 39).

  Insofar as civil war is inherent to the family—insofar as it is, that is to say,

  an oikeios polemos, a ‘war within the household’—it is, to the same extent—this

  is the thesis that Loraux seems to suggest here—inherent to the city, an integral

  part of the political life of the Greeks.

  6. Toward the end of her essay, Loraux analyses the case of a small Greek city in

  Sicily, Nakōnē, where, in the third century bce, the citizens decided to organise the

  reconciliation following a stasis in a particularly striking way. They drew the names

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  of the citizens in lots, in order to then divide them into groups of five, who in this

  way became adelphoi hairetoi, ‘brothers by election’. The natural family was neu-

  tralised, but this neutralisation was accomplished simultaneously through a symbol

  par excellence of kinship: fraternity. The oikos, the origin of civil strife, is excluded from the city through the production of a false fraternity. The inscription that has

  transmitted this information to us specifies that the neo-brothers were to have no

  family kinship between them: the purely political fraternity overrules blood kin-

  ship, and in this way frees the city from the stasis emphylos. With the same gesture, however, it reconstitutes kinship at the level of the polis: it turns the city into a family of a new kind. It was a ‘family’ paradigm of this kind that Plato had employed

  when suggesting that, in his ideal republic, once the natural family had been elimi-

  nated through the communism of women and goods, each person would see in the

  other ‘a brother or a sister, a father or a mother, a son or a daughter’ ( Rep. , 463c).

  The ambivalent function of the oikos—and of the stasis that is inherent to it—is once again confirmed. And at this point, Loraux can conclude her analysis

  with a twofold invitation:

  [ S] tasis/family/city [ . . . ] these notions are articulated according to lines of force in which recurrence and superimposition mostly prevail over every continuous

  process of evolution. Hence the paradox and the ambivalence, which we have

  encountered many times. The historian of kinship may find here the occasion

  to re-examine the commonplace of an irresistible overcoming of the oikos by the

  city. As for the historian of politics, he will perhaps strengthen his conviction

  that ambivalence presides over the Greek reflection on the city once the stasis

  must be incorporated within it; for internal conflict must now be conceived as

  having actually emerged within the phylon, instead of having been imported from

  without, as a convenient solution would have it [ . . . ] We must attempt to think,

  together with the Greeks, the war within the family. Let us suppose that the city

  is a phylon; it follows that the stasis is its revealer. Let us make the city an oikos; on the horizon of the oikeios polemos thus looms a festival of reconciliation. And let us admit, finally, that between these two operations, the tension cannot be

  resolved. (Loraux 1997, 61–2)

  7. Let us attempt to summarise the findings of Loraux’s essay in the form of

  theses:

  (1) In the first place, stasis calls into question the commonplace that con-

  ceives Greek politics as the definitive overcoming of the oikos in the polis.

  (2) In its essence, stasis or civil war is a ‘war within the family’, which comes

  from the oikos and not from outside. Precisely insofar as it is inherent to the family, the stasis acts as its revealer; it attests
to its irreducible presence in the polis.

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  (3) The oikos is essentially ambivalent: on the one hand, it is a factor of divi-

  sion and conflict; on the other, it is the paradigm that enables the reconciliation

  of what it has divided.

  What becomes immediately evident from this summary exposition is the

  fact that while the presence and function of the oikos and the phylon in the city are broadly examined and to a certain extent defined, it is precisely the function

  of the stasis, which constitutes the object of the investigation, which remains in the shadows. It is but a ‘revealer’ of the oikos. Reduced, in other words, to the

  element from which it originates and to whose presence in the city it can only

  attest, its own definition ultimately remains elusive. We will therefore attempt

  to examine Loraux’s theses in this direction, by seeking to determine the ‘capac-

  ity for development’ that they contain, which will enable us to bring to light

  this unsaid.

  8. Regarding the first point, I believe that my recent investigations have

  shown beyond doubt that the relations between the oikos and the polis, and between zōē and bios, which are at the foundation of Western politics, need to be rethought from scratch. In classical Greece, zōē, simple natural life, was excluded from the polis and remained confined to the sphere of the oikos. At the beginning of the Politics, Aristotle thus carefully distinguishes the oikonomos (the head of an enterprise) and the despotēs (the head of the family), who are concerned with

  the reproduction and conservation of life, from the statesman; and he sharply

  criticises those who maintain that the difference that separates them is one of

  quantity rather than one of kind. And when, in a passage that will become ca-

  nonical in the Western political tradition, he defines the end of the polis as a

  perfect community, he does so precisely by opposing the simple fact of living ( to

  zēn) to politically qualified life ( to eu zēn).

  This opposition between ‘life’ and the ‘good life’ is nonetheless at the same

  time an implication of the first in the second, of the family in the city and of

  zōē in political life. One of the aims of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Agamben 1998) was precisely that of analysing the reasons for, and consequences of, this exclusion—which is at the same time an inclusion—of natural

  life in politics. What relations should we suppose between zōē and the oikos, on the one hand, and between the polis and political bios, on the other, if the former must be included in the latter through an exclusion? From this perspective,

  my investigations were perfectly consistent with Loraux’s invitation to call into

  question the commonplace ‘of an irresistible overcoming of the oikos on the

  part of the polis’. What is at issue is not an overcoming, but a complicated and

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  unresolved attempt to capture an exteriority and to expel an intimacy. But how

  should we understand the place and the function of civil war in this context?

  9. In this light, the second and third theses in which we have summarised

  Loraux’s research appear more problematic. According to these theses, the origi-

  nal place of the stasis is the oikos; civil war is a ‘war within the family’, an oikeios polemos. And an essential ambivalence inheres in the oikos (and in the stasis that is connatural to it), according to which it is simultaneously what causes the

  destruction of the city and the paradigm of its reunification. How can we ex-

  plain this ambivalence? If the oikos, insofar as it contains strife and stasis within itself, is an element of political disintegration, how can it appear as the model of

  reconciliation? And why does the family irreducibly entail conflict at its centre?

  Why would civil war be a secret of the family and of blood, yet not a political

  mystery? Perhaps the location and generation of the stasis within the oikos, which Loraux’s hypotheses seem to take for granted, needs to be verified and corrected.

  According to its etymon, stasis (from histemi) designates the act of rising, of standing firmly upright ( stasimos is the point in the tragedy when the chorus stands still and speaks; stas is the one who swears the oath while standing).

  Where does the stasis ‘stand’? What is its proper place? In order to respond to

  these questions, it will be necessary to reconsider some of the texts that Loraux

  analyses in order to test her thesis regarding the family situation of civil war and

  to check whether they in fact consent to a different reading.

  First of all, a citation from Plato’s Laws (869c–d):

  The brother [ adelphos, the blood brother] who kills his brother in combat during a civil war [ . . . ] will be held pure [ katharos] as if he had killed an enemy [ polemios]; the same will happen when a citizen has killed a citizen in the same conditions,

  or a stranger a stranger.

  Commenting on this passage, Loraux once again perceives testimony of the in-

  timate relation between stasis and the family:

  [I]n the outburst of civil hatred, it is the nearest of kin that one kills [ . . . ] it is the immediate family that the stasis dissolves by dividing it. The real family in

  the city, the family as metaphor of the city. (Loraux 1997, 44)

  Yet what follows from the text of the law that the Athenian of the Platonic dia-

  logue proposes is less the connection between stasis and oikos than the fact that the civil war assimilates and makes undecidable brother and enemy, inside and

  outside, household and city. In the stasis, the killing of what is most intimate is indistinguishable from the killing of what is most foreign. This means, however,

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  that the stasis does not have its place within the household, but constitutes a

  threshold of indifference between the oikos and the polis, between blood kinship and citizenship.

  Another passage, this time from Thucydides (which Loraux cites in a foot-

  note), confirms this new situation of the stasis at the border between the house-

  hold and the city. Regarding the bloody civil war that had taken place in Corcira

  in 425, Thucydides records that the stasis attained such ferocity that ‘the family bond [ to syggenēs] became more foreign than the factional bond [ tou etairikou]’

  ( Hist. , 3, 82, 6). Loraux explains that the inverse formulation—‘the factional bond became more intimate than the family bond’—would have been more

  natural for expressing the same idea (Loraux 1997, 35n45). In truth, what is once

  again decisive is the fact that the stasis, through a double displacement, confuses what pertains to the oikos with what is particular to the polis, what is intimate with what is foreign. The factional bond moves into the household to the same

  extent to which the family bond is estranged in the faction.

  It is perhaps possible to interpret in the same sense the curious device con-

  trived by the citizens of Nakōnē. Here too the effect of the stasis is that of

  rendering the oikos and the polis indiscernible: kinship is dissolved into citizenship, while the factional bond assumes, for the ‘brothers by election’, the

  incongruous form of a kinship.

  10. We can now attempt to respond to the question: Where does the stasis

  ‘stand’? What is the proper place of civil war? The stasis—this is our hypothe-

  sis—takes place neither in the oikos nor in the polis, neither in the family nor in the city; rather, it constitutes a zone of indifference between the unpolitical space of the family and the political space of the city. In
transgressing this

  threshold, the oikos is politicised; conversely, the polis is ‘economised’, that is, it is reduced to an oikos. This means that in the system of Greek politics civil war functions as a threshold of politicisation and depoliticisation, through which the

  house is exceeded in the city and the city is depoliticised in the family.

  In the tradition of Greek law, there is a curious document that seems to con-

  firm beyond any doubt the situation of civil war as a threshold of politicisation/

  depoliticisation that we have just proposed. Although this document is men-

  tioned not only by Plutarch, Aulus Gellius and Cicero, but also, and with partic-

  ular precision, by Aristotle ( Ath. Const. , 8, 5), the valuation of stasis that it entails has appeared so disconcerting to modern historians of politics that it has often

  been ignored (even Loraux, who cites it in her book, does not mention it in the

  article). The document in question is Solon’s law, which punishes with atimia—

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  which is to say, with the loss of civil rights—the citizen who had not fought for

  either one of the two sides in a civil war. As Aristotle bluntly expresses it,

  whoever did not join sides [ thētai ta opla, literally ‘provide the shield’] with either party when civil strife [ stasiazousēs tēs poleōs] prevailed was to be held in dishonour

  [ atimon einai] and no longer a member of the state [ tēs poleōs mē metēchein].

  (By translating it with capite sanxit, Cicero— Att. , 10, 1, 2—correctly evokes the capitis diminutio, which corresponds to the Greek atimia.)

  Not taking part in the civil war amounts to being expelled from the polis and

  confined to the oikos, to losing citizenship by being reduced to the unpolitical

  condition of a private person. Obviously this does not mean that the Greeks

  considered civil war to be a public good, but rather that the stasis functions

  as a reactant which reveals the political element in the extreme instance as a

  threshold of politicisation that determines for itself the political or unpolitical

  character of a certain being.

  11. Christian Meier has shown how a transformation in constitutional con-

  ceptuality took place in fifth-century bce Greece, which was accomplished