The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  ( ousia) and power ( dynamis). The ancient philosophers—he writes—who have

  claimed that the entirety of the perceptible world is full of gods formulated an

  argument that does not apply to the being of God, but to his power (Aristotle,

  De mundo, 397b). While God actually dwells in the highest region of heaven,

  his power, “extend[s] through the whole universe, [ . . . ] and [is] the cause of

  permanence [ sōtērias, ‘salvation’] to all that is on this earth” (ibid., 398b). He is, at the same time, savior ( sōtēr) and generator ( genetōr) of all that occurs in the cosmos. Yet, he “endures not all the weariness of a being that administers and

  labors on one’s own [ autourgou], but exerts a power that never wearies; whereby

  he prevails even over things that seem far distant from him” (ibid., 397b). The

  power of God, which almost seems to become autonomous from his essence, can

  thus—in a clear reference to Chapter X of Book L of Aristotle’s Metaphysics—be

  compared with the head of an army in a battle (“all is hurry and movement in

  obedience to one word of command, to carry out the orders of the leader who

  is supreme over all”: De mundo, 399b) or—in an image that is almost identical

  to that used by Tertullian for the oikonomia of the Father—with the imposing

  administrative apparatus of the king of the Persians:

  The king himself, so the story goes, established himself at Susa or Ecbatana,

  invisible to all, dwelling in a wondrous palace [ basileion oikon] within a fence

  gleaming with gold and amber and ivory. And it had many gateways one after

  another, and porches many furlongs apart from one another, secured by bronze

  doors and mighty walls. Outside these the chief and most distinguished men had

  their appointed place, some being the king’s personal servants, his bodyguard

  and attendants, others the guardians of each of the enclosing walls, the so-called

  janitors and “listeners,” that the king himself, who was called their master and

  THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY

  435

  deity, might thus see and hear all things. Besides these, others were appointed as

  stewards of his revenues and leaders in war and hunting, and receivers of gifts, and

  others charged with all the other necessary functions [ . . . ] and there were couriers

  and watchmen and messengers [ aggeliaforoi] and superintendents of signal-fires.

  So effective was the organization, in particular the system of signal-fires, which

  formed a chain of beacons from the furthest bounds of the empire to Susa and

  Ecbatana, that the king received the same day the news of all that was happening

  in Asia. Now we must suppose that the majesty of the Great King falls as far

  short of that of the God who possesses the universe, as that of the feeblest and

  weakest creature is inferior to the king of Persia. Wherefore, if it was beneath

  the dignity of Xerxes to appear himself to administer all things and to carry out

  his own wishes and superintend the government of his kingdom, such function

  would be still less becoming for a god. (Ibid., 398a–398b)

  In a characteristic move, the administrative apparatus through which the sover-

  eigns of the earth preserve their kingdom becomes the paradigm of the divine

  government of the world. At this stage, the author of the treatise is, however,

  concerned to specify that the analogy between the power of God and the bureau-

  cratic apparatus should not be pushed to the point of completely dividing God

  from his power (just as, according to the Fathers, the oikonomia should not

  entail a division of the divine substance). Unlike worldly sovereigns, God in fact

  does not need “many hands” ( polycheirias), but “by simple movement of that

  which is nearest to [him], imparts [his] power to that which next succeeds, and

  thence further and further until it extends to all things” (ibid., 398b). If it is true

  that the king reigns but does not govern, his government—his power— cannot

  be separated completely from him. The fact that there is in this sense an almost

  perfect correspondence between this Judaic-Stoic idea of the divine government

  of the world and the Christian idea of a providential economy is proved by a

  long passage from Chapter Six that describes such a government precisely in

  terms of a providential organization of the cosmos:

  The single harmony produced by all the heavenly bodies singing and dancing

  together springs from one source and ends by achieving one purpose, and has

  rightly bestowed the name not of “disordered” but of “ordered universe” upon

  the whole. And just as in a chorus, when the leader gives the signal to begin, the

  whole chorus of men, or it may be of women, joins in the song, mingling a single

  studied harmony among different voices, some high and some low; so too is it

  with the God that rules the whole world. For at the signal given from on high by

  him who may well be called their chorus-leader, the stars and the whole heaven

  always move, and the sun that illuminates all things travels forth on his double

  course, whereby he both divides day and night by his rising and his setting, and

  436

  HOMO SACER II, 4

  also brings the four seasons of the earth, as he moves forward toward the north

  and backward toward the south. And in their own due season the rain, the

  winds, and the dews, and all the other phenomena that occur in the region that

  surrounds the earth, are produced by the first, primeval cause [ . . . ] (Ibid., 399a)

  The analogy between the images of the De mundo and those used by the theorists

  of the oikonomia is such that we should not be surprised to find the term oikonomeō with regard to the divine government of the world, when it is compared to the action of the law in a city (“the law of a city, fixed and immutable [ . . . ]

  governs all the life of the state [ panta oikonomei],” ibid., 400b). It is all the more peculiar that, even in this occasion, Peterson refrains from making the slightest

  remark about economic theology—which would clearly allow us to relate this

  text to Judaic-Christian political theology.

  4.3. In his late and resentful reply to Peterson, Carl Schmitt analyzes with par-

  ticular care the use of the “notorious formula” le roi règne, mais il ne gouverne pas made by the theologian in his 1935 treatise. “I think,” Schmitt writes not without

  irony, “it is exactly this interpolation, in this context, which is the most intrigu-

  ing contribution that Peterson—maybe unconsciously—attributed to political

  theology” (Schmitt 2008a, p. 67). Schmitt traces the formula back to Adolphe

  Thiers, who uses it as a keyword for parliamentarian monarchy, and even earlier,

  in its Latin version ( rex regnat, sed non gubernat), to the seventeenth-century

  polemic against Sigismund III, king of Poland. For Schmitt, the resolute ges-

  ture with which Peterson moves the formula back in time and transfers it to

  the dawn of Christian theology is all the more astounding. “[This] shows how

  much reflection and thought can be invested in a useful politico-theological or

  politico-metaphysical formulation” (ibid., p. 68). The real contribution of Peter-

  son to political theology would thus not amount to having been able to demon-

  strate the impossibility of a Christian political theology, but to having grasped


  the analogy between the liberal political paradigm that separates kingdom from

  government and the theological paradigm that distinguishes between archē and

  dynamis in God.

  However, even here, the apparent disagreement between Peterson and

  Schmitt hides a more essential solidarity. Both authors are, as a matter of fact,

  earnest enemies of the formula: for Peterson, it defines the Hellenistic-Judaic

  theological model that lies at the basis of the political theology he intends to

  criticize; for Schmitt, it provides a symbol and a keyword to the liberal de-

  mocracy against which he wages his battle. Even in this context, it is crucial to

  examine not only what it says but also what it omits to say in order to grasp the

  THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY

  437

  strategic implications of Peterson’s argument. It should be evident by now that

  the difference between kingdom and government does not, in fact, have a theo-

  logical paradigm only in Hellenistic Judaism—as Peterson seems to be taking

  for granted—but also and especially in the Christian theologians who, between

  the third and the fifth centuries, elaborated the distinction between being and

  oikonomia, theological rationality and economic rationality. In other words, the

  reasons why Peterson is interested in keeping the Kingdom/Government par-

  adigm within the limits of Judaic and pagan political theology are exactly the

  same as those that caused him to remain silent about the original “economic”

  formulation of the Trinitarian doctrine. After eliminating, against Schmitt, the

  theological-political paradigm, it was a matter of avoiding at all costs—this time

  in agreement with Schmitt—its replacement by the theological-economic par-

  adigm. A new and more detailed genealogical investigation of the theological

  presuppositions and implications of the difference Kingdom/Government then

  becomes all the more urgent.

  א According to Peterson, an “economic” paradigm in the strict sense is an inherent

  part of the Judaic legacy of modernity, in which banks tend to take the place of the temple.

  Only the sacrifice of Christ at the Golgotha marks the end of the sacrifices in the Jewish temple. In fact, according to Peterson, the driving away of the merchants from the temple

  shows that behind the sacrifice at the Golgotha lies “the dialectic of money and sacrifice.”

  After the destruction of the temple, the Jews have attempted to replace sacrifice with alms.

  But the money that is offered to God and accumulated in the temple transforms

  the temple into a bank [ . . . ] The Jews, who had renounced the political order,

  when they declared that they had no king [ . . . ] condemning Christ because

  of his words against the temple, intended to save the economic order. (Peterson

  1995, p. 145)

  It is precisely this substitution of economy for politics that is rendered impossible by the sacrifice of Christ.

  Our banks have been transformed into temples, but they themselves make evi-

  dent in the so-called economic order the superiority of the bloody sacrifice at the

  Golgotha and demonstrate the impossibility of saving what is historical [ . . . ]

  Just as the secular kingdoms of the people of earth can no longer be “saved”

  in the political order after the eschatological sacrifice, so even the “economical

  order” of the Jews cannot be preserved in the guise of a connection between the

  temple and money. (Ibid.)

  In this way, both political and economic theology are excluded from Christianity as a

  purely Judaic legacy.

  438

  HOMO SACER II, 4

  4.4. Schmitt’s aversion toward any attempt to divide Kingdom from Govern-

  ment and, in particular, his reservations concerning the liberal-democratic doctrine

  of the separation of powers—which is strictly linked to such a division—emerges

  many times in his work. Already in the 1927 Verfassungslehre, he quotes the formula le roi règne, mais il ne gouverne pas in relation to the “Belgian-style parliamentarian monarchy,” in which the direction of affairs is in the hands of the ministers, while

  the king represents a kind of “neutral power.” The only positive meaning that

  Schmitt seems to acknowledge in the separation of Kingdom from Government is

  that it is possible to refer it back to the distinction between auctoritas and potestas: The question posed by a great teacher of German public law, Max von Seydel,

  what then remains of “régner” if one removes “gouverner?,” is answerable in

  reference to the fact that one distinguishes between potestas and auctoritas and

  that the distinctive meaning of authority is made evident in regard to political

  power. (Schmitt 2008b, p. 315)

  Schmitt clearly states what this meaning is in his 1933 essay State, Movement,

  People, in which, in an attempt to outline the new constitution of the nation-

  al-socialist Reich, he re-elaborates from a new perspective the distinction between Kingdom and Government. Although during the radical political-social conflicts

  of the Weimar Republic, he energetically defended the extension of powers to the

  president of the Reich as the “warden of the constitution,” Schmitt now affirms

  that the president “has gone back to a kind of ‘constitutional’ position of author-

  itarian head of State qui règne et ne gouverne pas” (Schmitt 1933, p. 10). Facing this sovereign who does not govern, there now is, in the person of the chancellor Adolf

  Hitler, not only a function of government ( Regierung), but a new figure of political power that Schmitt names Führung, and that indeed is to be distinguished from

  traditional government. It is in this context that Schmitt delineates a genealogy of

  the “government of men” that seems to anticipate, with a vertiginous glimpse, the

  genealogy that, in the second half of the 1970s, will occupy Michel Foucault in his

  courses at the Collège de France. Like Foucault, Schmitt sees in the pastorate of

  the Catholic Church the paradigm of the modern concept of government:

  Leading [ führen] is not commanding [ . . . ] For its power of dominion over believers, the Roman Catholic Church has transformed and completed the

  image of the shepherd and the flock in a theological-dogmatic idea. (Ibid., p. 41)

  Similarly, in a well-known passage of The Statesman, Plato

  considers the various comparisons that one can make about a statesman in re-

  lation to a doctor, a shepherd, and a pilot, and privileges the image of the pilot.

  THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY

  439

  The latter has reached all the languages influenced by Latin through the word

  gubernator and has become the term for government [ Regierung], like in gouvernement, governo, government, or like in the gubernium of the ancient Habsburg monarchy. The history of this gubernator contains a nice example of how an imaginary comparison can become a juridico-technical concept. (Ibid., pp. 41–42)

  א Against this governmental background Schmitt tries to outline the “fundamentally

  German meaning” (ibid., p. 42) of the national-socialist concept of Führung, which “does not derive from baroque allegories or representations [an allusion to the theory of sovereignty that Benjamin develops in his Ursprung] or from a Cartesian idée générale,” but is “a concept of the immediate present and of an effective presence” (ibid.). This distinction is however not so simple, since there is not a “fundamentally German” meaning of the term,

  and
the word Führung, just like the verb führen and the noun Führer—unlike the Italian duce, which had already known a specialization in a political-military sense, for instance, in the Venetian doge—refers back to an extremely broad semantic field, which includes all the cases in which somebody guides and orients the movement of a living being, a vehicle,

  or an object (obviously including the case of the gubernator, that is, the sea pilot). After all, earlier in his essay, analyzing the triple articulation of the new material national-socialist constitution into “State,” “movement,” and “people,” Schmitt had defined the people as the

  “impolitical side [ unpolitische Seite] that develops under the protection and in the shadow of political decisions” (ibid., p. 12), thus attributing to the party and the Führer an unmistakable pastoral and governmental function. Yet, according to Schmitt, what distinguishes the Führung from the pastoral-governmental paradigm is that while in the latter “the shepherd remains absolutely transcendent with regard to the flock” (ibid., p. 41), the former is rather defined “by an absolute equality of species [ Artgleichkeit] between the Führer and his followers” (ibid., p. 42). The concept of Führung appears here as a secularization of the pastoral paradigm, one that eliminates its transcendent character. However, in order to subtract the Führung from the governmental model, Schmitt is obliged to give a constitutional status to the concept of race, by means of which the impolitical element—the people—is politicized.

  For Schmitt there is only one possible way to achieve this politicization, that is, by turning the equality of lineage into the criterion that, in separating what is foreign from what is equal, decides at each turn who is a friend and who an enemy. Not without analogies with

  the analysis that Foucault will develop in Il faut defendre la société, racism thus becomes the apparatus through which sovereign power (which, for Foucault, coincides with the power

  over life and death while, for Schmitt, it corresponds with the decision over the exception) is reinserted into biopower. In this way, the governmental-economic paradigm is brought

  back to a genuinely political sphere, in which the separation of powers loses its meaning

  and the act of government ( Regierungakt) gives way to the single activity “by means of which the Führer affirms his supreme Führertum.”