The Omnibus Homo Sacer
Page 44
maybe ironically eschatological—has become one of the paradigms of the mod-
ern theory of the State. But it is certain that the political philosophy of moder-
nity will not be able to emerge out of its contradictions except by becoming
aware of its theological roots.
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HOMO SACER II, 3
THE SACRAMENT
OF LANGUAGE
An Archaeology
of the Oath
TRANSLATED BY DANIEL ADAM KOTSKO
Contents
Translator’s Note
299
Abbreviations
300
The Sacrament of Language
301
Bibliography
357
Von diesen Vorgängenen meldet kein Zeuge; sie zu verstehn bietet unser
eignes Bewusstsein keinen Anhalt. Nur eine Urkunde ist uns von ihnen
geblieben, so schweigsam dem unkundigen, wie beredt dem kundigen: die
Sprache.
(No witness reports these events; our own consciousness offers no grounds to
understand them. Only one document is left to us by them, as silent to the
ignorant as it is eloquent to the experienced: language.)
—Hermann Usener
Der Schematismus der Verstandesbegriffe ist . . . ein Augenblick in welchem
Metaphysik und Physik beide Ufer zugleich berühren Styx interfusa.
(The schematism of the concepts of the intellect . . . is an instant in which the
shores of metaphysics and physics make contact St
yx interfusa.)
—Immanuel Kant
Translator’s Note
The translator would like to thank Giorgio Agamben, Kevin Attell, Daniel Coluc-
ciello Barber, Joshua Furnal, Ted Jennings, and Virgil Brower for their suggested
improvements; Nunzio N. D’Alessio, Dennis Hou, Evan Kuehn, Craig McFarlane,
and Yotam Pappo for bibliographical assistance; and Emily-Jane Cohen, Sarah
Crane Newman, and the rest of the staff of Stanford University Press.
Existing English translations have been used wherever possible, though
sometimes altered to reflect the translation provided by the author; citations
of modern texts where a translation is available have the original page numbers
followed by the English edition cited, while premodern texts are cited according
to standard textual divisions. All biblical quotations are taken from the New
Revised Standard Version. All other translations are my own, carried out in con-
sultation with the author’s translations.
299
Abbreviations
Aen.
Aeneid (Virgil)
Ann.
Annales (Tacitus)
Apol.
Apologeticus (Tertullian)
Cra.
Cratylus (Plato)
Mens.
De mensibus (Lydus)
Il.
The Iliad (Homer)
Inst.
Institutiones (Gaius)
Metaph. Metaphysics (Aristotle)
Od.
The Odyssey (Homer)
PL
Patrologia Latina ( J.-P. Migne, ed.)
Pyth.
Pythian Odes (Pindar)
Rep.
Republic (Plato)
Theog.
Theogonia (Hesiod)
Tib.
Life of Tiberius (Suetonius)
Verr.
The First Oration Against Verres (Cicero)
300
The Sacrament of Language
1. In 1992 Paolo Prodi’s book Il sacramento del potere (The Sacrament of
Power) forcefully called attention to the decisive importance of the oath
in the political history of the West. Situated at the intersection of religion and
politics, the oath not only testifies to that “dual belonging” (Prodi, 522) that
defines, according to the author, the specificity and vitality of Western Chris-
tian culture. It is also, in fact—and this is the diagnosis from which his book
begins—the “basis of the political pact in the history of the West” (ibid., 11).
As such, it is possible to find the oath in an eminent role every time this pact
enters into crisis or turns to renew itself in diverse forms, from the beginning
of Christianity to the War of Investiture, from the “commune” (“sworn associa-
tion”) of the late Middle Ages to the formation of the modern State. In keeping
with its central function, the irreversible decline of the oath in our time can only
correspond, according to Prodi, to a “crisis in which the very being of man as
a political animal is at stake” (ibid.). If we are today “the first generations who,
notwithstanding the presence of some forms and liturgies from the past . . . , live
our own collective life without the oath as a solemn and total, sacredly anchored
bond to a political body,” this means, then, that we find ourselves, without being
conscious of it, on the threshold of “a new form of political association” (ibid.),
whose reality and meaning we have yet to recognize.
As is implicit in its subtitle, Il giuramento politico nella storia costituzionale
dell’Occidente (The Political Oath in the Constitutional History of the West),
Prodi’s book is a historical study, and, as must happen in such studies, the author
does not pose for himself the problem of what he defines as the “ a-historical and
immobile nucleus of the oath-event” (ibid., 22). The definition “from the an-
thropological point of view,” which is summarily indicated in the introduction,
thus repeats certain commonplaces drawn from the investigations of historians
of law, historians of religion, and linguists. As often happens when a phenome-
non or institution is positioned at the crossroads of diverse territories and disci-
plines, none of them can lay claim to it entirely on their own, and the attempt
301
302
HOMO SACER II, 3
at synthesis, which gestures toward its complexity, origin, and overall relevance,
falters before the often imposing mass of particular studies. Since, however, an
eclectic compendium of the results of individual disciplines does not seem scien-
tifically reliable and the model of a “general science of man” has been out of favor
for some time now, the present study proposes to undertake not an investigation
into the oath’s origin but rather a philosophical archaeology of the oath.
Bringing together the stakes of a historical investigation like Prodi’s—which,
like every true historical study, cannot fail to call the present into question—and
the results of research into linguistics, the history of law, and religion, the issue
here, above all, is the question, What is an oath? What is at stake in it, if it de-
fines and calls into question man himself as a political animal? If the oath is the
sacrament of political power, what is it in its structure and its history that has
made it possible for it to be invested with such a function? What anthropolog-
ical level—a decisive one in every sense—is implicated in it, so that all of man,
in life and death, can be called to account in it and by it?
2. The essential function of the oath in the political constitution is clearly ex-
pressed in the passage from Lycurgus’s Against Leocrates that Prodi uses as an epigraph: “The power that holds together [ to synechon] our democracy is the oath”
(Lycurgus, 79). Prodi could have cited another passage, from the Neo platonic
philosopher Hierocles, who, at the twilight of Hellenism, seems to confirm this
centrality of the oath by making it the principle that completes the Law: “We
have previously shown that the law [ nomos] is the always uniform operation by
means of which God eternally and immutably leads everything to existence.
Now we call oath [ horkos] that which, following this law, conserves [ diatērousan]
all things in the same state and renders them stable in such a way that, as they
are held in the guarantee of the oath and maintain the order of the law, the im-
mutable stability of the order of creation is the completion of the creating law”
(Hirzel, 74; see also Aujoulat, 109–10).
It is necessary to pay attention to the words that express the function of
the oath in the two passages. In both Lycurgus and Hierocles the oath does not
create anything, does not bring anything into being, but keeps united [ synechō]
and conserves [ diatēreō] what something else (in Hierocles, the law; in Lycurgus,
the citizens or the legislator) has brought into being.
An analogous function seems to be assigned to the oath by what Prodi con-
siders the fundamental text concerning this institution that has come down to
us from Roman juridical culture, namely, the passage from De officiis (3.29.10)
in which Cicero defines the oath thus:
THE SACRAMENT OF LANGUAGE
303
Sed in iure iurando n
on qui metus sed quae vis sit, debet intellegi; est enim iu-
siurandum affirmatio religiosa; quod autem affirmate quasi deo teste promiseris
id tenendum est. Iam enim non ad iram deorum quae nulla est, sed ad iustitiam
et ad fidem pertinet.
[But in taking an oath it is our duty to consider not what one may have to fear
in case of violation but wherein its obligation lies: an oath is an assurance backed
by religious sanctity; and a solemn promise given, as before God as one’s witness,
is to be sacredly kept. For the question no longer concerns the wrath of the gods
(for there is no such thing) but the obligations of justice and good faith.]
Affirmatio does not signify simply a linguistic utterance but what confirms and
guarantees. (The phrase that follows, “affirmate . . . promiseris,” does nothing
but reaffirm the same idea: “That which you have promised in the solemn and
confirmed form of the oath.”) And it is this function of stability and guarantee
that Cicero draws attention to, writing at the beginning, “In the sacrament it is
important to consider not so much the danger that it generates, but its own effi-
cacy [ vis]”; and the answer to the question of what this vis consists in appears unequivocally in the etymological definition of the fides that, according to Cicero, is at stake in the oath: quia fiat quod dictum est appelatam fidem (“good faith
[ fidem]” is so called because what is promised is “made good [ fiat]” [ibid., 1.23]).
It is with this specific vis in mind that one must reread the words with which
Émile Benveniste, at the beginning of his 1948 article “L’expression du serment
dans la Grèce ancienne” (The Expression of the Oath in Ancient Greece), de-
fined its function:
[The oath] is a particular modality of assertion, which supports, guarantees, and
demonstrates, but does not found anything. Individual or collective, the oath
exists only by virtue of that which it reinforces and renders solemn: a pact, an
agreement, a declaration. It prepares for or concludes a speech act which alone
possesses meaningful content, but it expresses nothing by itself. It is in truth an