The Omnibus Homo Sacer
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which is called material, has been instituted. Rather, this is in order to secure
the correct implementation of the execution [ propter beneficium execucionis]. For the spiritual sword could not execute spiritual tasks or devote itself to spiritual
matters so well or so beneficially if it did not have the aid of the material sword
[ . . . ] (Ibid., pp. 110–111)
Beyond the dispute about the primacy of one sword over the other, to which
scholars have exclusively devoted their attention, it turns out that what is pri-
marily at stake in the division between the two powers is guaranteeing the pos-
sibility of the government of men. This possibility requires the supposition of
a plenitudo potestatis that, however, must immediately distinguish itself from
its actual exercise (its executio), which then constitutes the secular sword. From a theoretical point of view, the debate is not so much between the supporters
of the primacy of priesthood or the empire, but between the “governmental-
ists” [“governamentalisti ”] (who conceive power as always already articulated ac-
cording to a double structure: authority [ potestà] and execution; Kingdom and
Government) and the promoters of a sovereignty in which it is not possible to
separate power from act, ordinatio from executio. Gelasius I’s well-known dictum according to which “duo quippe sunt [ . . . ] quibus principaliter mundus hic
regitur: auctoritas sacra pontificum, et regalis potestas” ( Epistolae et decreta, 8, in PL, 59, 42a)—which he addressed to the emperor Anastasius in 494, that
is, well before the beginning of the conflict between the two swords—must be
translated—after all, in an absolutely literal way—as: the world is governed
through the coordination of two principles, the auctoritas (that is, a power with-
out actual execution) and the potestas (that is, a power that can be exercised); the Kingdom and the Government.
א In this perspective, it is possible to clarify the position of those who, like John
Quidort, refuse to accept the theory of the pontiff ’s plenitudo potestatis, since it implies an unnatural separation of power [ potenza] from act, and power [ potere] from execution. Referring most likely to Giles of Rome, John writes in his De potestate regia et papali that
some claim that the secular power belongs to the pope immediately and accord-
ing to his primary authority, but that the pope does not have the immediate
execution of it, which he delegates to the prince [ . . . ] It can certainly happen
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that somebody has the power to do something, but not the act, because of some
hindrance, like, for example, if one has the power to build, but not the act, since
he lacks the matter, or because of a corporal defect, as in the case of a dumb per-
son who cannot speak. These are hindrances that befall the conferring of power.
But only a foolish person would bestow the priesthood upon somebody if he
knew that he was hindered in this way. Therefore, it is meaningless to say that
the pope receives immediately from God the power of the secular sword, whose
exercise, however, is not usually his responsibility. If this were the case, God
would act against nature, as the latter never gives to anybody a virtue separated
from the act, since those who have the power also have the act [ cuius potentia,
eius est actus]. (Quidort, p. 120)
Here, the conflict does not concern only and especially the primacy of one power [ potere]
over the other, but the separation of titularity from exercise, of the Kingdom from the
Government.
א Peters followed the progeny of the figure of the medieval rex inutilis in the notion of roi fainéant between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term appears in the fourteenth century in the Grandes chroniques de France to translate the rex nihil faciens of medieval chronicles, and is later applied, according to its double meaning of sluggish
(“qui fit nule chose”) and dissolute (“adonné à la paillardise, oisiveté et vices”), to the last of the Carolingian monarchs. In his 1643 Histoire de France, Mezeray contemptuously applies it to the last of the Merovingian kings, “tous fainéants, hébetez, et plongés dans les ordures du vice” (Peters, p. 543). We can then find it applied to Louis VI, Charles VI, and Henry III of France, as well as, among other English kings, to Henry III, Henry VI,
and even the figure of King Arthur in some courtly novels (Peters, p. 547).
4.14. The theological model of the separation of power from its exercise
is found in the distinction between absolute and ordered power [ potenza] in
God—that is, in the doctrine of divine impotence, of what God, in spite of
his omnipotence, cannot do (or cannot not do). According to this doctrinal
complex (which was founded on a passage from De natura et gratia—1, 7, 8—in
which Augustine answers the question as to whether Christ could have pre-
vented Judas’s betrayal by saying that he certainly could have done it, but he
had not wanted it: “Potuit ergo, sed noluit”), God, with regard to his power
considered as such ( de potentia absoluta), could do anything that did not entail a contradiction (for instance, embodying himself as a woman, instead of as Jesus,
to save men; or damning Peter and saving Judas; or even just destroying all of his
creation). But de potentia ordinata, that is, with regard to his will and wisdom, he can only do what he has decided to do. In other words, the will constitutes the
apparatus that, dividing power into absolute and ordered power, allows to con-
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tain the unacceptable consequences of divine omnipotence (and, more generally,
of any doctrine of power), but without negating it as such. Thomas writes that
nothing can be within divine power which is not held in the wisdom and justice
of his mind and will. All the same, since his will is not bound of necessity to this
or that particular objective [ . . . ] there is no reason why something should not
be within divine power which God does not will, and which is no part of the
present order he has established. We conceive of understanding and wisdom as
directing, will as commanding, and power as executing; as for what lies within
power as such, God is said to be able to do it by his absolute power [ . . . ] As
for what lies within his power as carrying out the command of his just will, he
is said to be able to do it by his ordinate power. Accordingly, we should state
that by absolute power God can do things other than those he foresaw that he
would do and pre-ordained to do. Nevertheless nothing can come to pass that
he has not foreseen and pre-ordained. (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1,
q. 25, a. 5, ad 1)
What is interesting about this theological apparatus is that, contrary to those
who rejected any distinction between absolute and ordered power, it made it
possible to reconcile God’s omnipotence with the idea of an ordered, nonarbi-
trary, and nonchaotic government of the world. But this de facto amounted to
making the distinction in God between his absolute power and its effective ex-
ercise, between a formal sovereignty and its execution. Limiting absolute power,
ordered power constitutes it as the foundation of the divine government of the
world. The nexus between this theological problem and the juridical-political
problem of the separation between sovereignty and its exerc
ise is evident, and
was soon noticed by canonists. With regard to a decretal by Innocent IV that
denied an abbot the power to suspend a monk’s vow of poverty, the distinc-
tion between absolute and ordered power was thus applied by Hostiensis and
other canonists to the problem of the papal plenitudo potestatis, to show that, de potentia ordinata, the pontiff must abide by the law, although de potentia absoluta he is not bound by it (Courtenay, pp. 107–108).
Once again, the plenitudo potestatis is shown to have an inner articulation
that structurally divides it, and the doctrine of what God cannot do becomes the
paradigm of the distinction between power [ potere] and its exercise, the King-
dom and the Government.
In Matthew of Acquasparta’s questions on providence, God’s impotence
clearly displays its governmental meaning. Giving a negative answer to the ques-
tion of whether God could have created a rational creature who could not sin,
Matthew explains that this is impossible not because of an impotence on the
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HOMO SACER II, 4
part of God, but because it would have made the providential government of the
world pointless. As a matter of fact, creating a rational creature completely unable
to sin would mean, on the one hand, denying him free will and, on the other,
making the grace by means of which God preserves and governs creatures useless.
Every rational creature, insofar as it is a creature, must be preserved by God and
needs the creator’s continuous maintenance [ manutenentia], for if he ceased to
govern the things that he had created, these things would go to ruin [ . . . ] The
general influence of divine maintenance is not sufficient for the preservation
of the moral good of creatures: the latter also needs that of grace. For this, just
as God cannot make it so that a creature preserves itself, so he cannot make it
so that by nature and by itself it cannot sin. (Matthew of Acquasparta, p. 292)
God’s impotence functions to make possible a righteous government of the
world.
Threshold
WE can now better understand the Arthurian mythologeme of the roi
mehaignié. It is the reflection in the literary field of a transformation and
splitting of the concept of sovereignty that must have deeply troubled contem-
porary minds. Although, as we have seen, it had some precedents in the Gnostic
doctrine of the idle god and some parallelisms in the tradition of Roman law,
this transformation is essentially carried out, from a technical point of view, in
a canonistic field. The theological model of this separation is the doctrine of
divine impotence, that is, the distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. Hugh of Pisa and the Grandi decretal—with which Innocent IV, in the case of the rex inutilis Sancho II, separated regality from its exercise—gave to this distinction a juridical form of whose general meaning and political implications they were perhaps not fully aware. However, it is certain that, as has
been observed, “Grandi, indeed, contained the results of the most articulate legal
tradition which Europe had seen since the age of Justinian, but few territorial
monarchies were capable, in 1245, of profiting fully from that tradition” (Peters,
p. 304). The conflict that was here in question is not, however, so much between
“legal authority” (which, due to the decretal, rested with the Earl of Boulogne)
and “personal loyalty” (which was still owed to the sovereign Sancho II), as be-
tween a sovereignty inseparable from its exercise and a regality that is structurally
divided and separable from government (or, in Foucault’s terms, between terri-
torial sovereignty and governmental power).
It is in this perspective that we can interpret the debate that, in the first few
decades of the fourteenth century, opposes John XXII to Ockham. According
to John, the laws that God has established are identical with his essence and,
consequently, are eternal and unchangeable. Therefore, he cannot act otherwise
than how he has chosen to act. Absolute and ordered powers are the same thing,
and their distinction is purely nominal.
It is impossible for God to save according to absolute power a man devoid of
the sacrament of baptism, because this was decided from eternity according to
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ordered power, which is to be identified with God and cannot be changed [ . . . ]
Some claim that God can do many things according to the absolute power which
he cannot do according to the ordered power, but this is false and wrong, for
the absolute power and the ordered power in God are the same thing and can
be distinguished only by name, like Simon and Peter, which name the same
person. Just as it is impossible that somebody hits Simon without hitting Peter,
or that Peter does something that Simon does not, insofar as they are the same
man, so it is impossible for God to do according to the absolute power things
that are different from those he does according to ordered power, for they are
the same thing and differ and can be distinguished only by name. (Quoted in
Courtenay, p. 162)
What Ockham proposes against this thesis is the irreducibility of absolute power
to ordered power: these are not two powers, but two different ways in which
we say that God can or cannot do something, or two internal articulations of a
single divine power in respect to the act.
If one looks closely at this issue, saying that God can do things according to
the absolute power which he cannot do according to the ordered power means
nothing else than God can do things that he had not decided to do [ quae tamen
minime ordinaret se facturum]. But if he were to do these things, he would do
them according to the ordered power, for if he did them, he would have decided
to do them. (Quoted in Courtenay, p. 164)
For Ockham, as a more modern thinker, it is essential to preserve the contin-
gency of decision against an understanding of acting, professed by Muslims and
“old women” ( vetulae), that reduces it to pure necessity (“from this would follow
that no creature could do anything that he does not actually do, so that all would
happen according to necessity and nothing in a contingent way, like the infidels
claim, and the ancient heretics, and also the occult heretics, the lays and the old
women”: quoted in ibid.).
What is at stake in this conflict is, in the final analysis, the functioning of
the governmental apparatus. While, for the pontiff, the difference between the
two levels or moments of the apparatus is purely nominal, so that the act of
real government always already determines the power, and the Kingdom is fully
identified with the Government, for Ockham, the Kingdom (absolute power)
exceeds and always in some way precedes the Government (the ordered power),
which reaches and determines it only at the moment of the executio, yet without
ever exhausting it completely. In other words, two different conceptions of the
government of men confront each other: the first is still dominated by the old
model of territorial sovereignty, which reduces the double articulation of the gov-
THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY
469
ernmental machine to a purely formal moment; the second is closer to the new
economico-providential paradigm, in which the two elements maintain their
identity, in spite of their correlation, and the contingency of the acts of govern-
ment corresponds to the freedom of the sovereign decision. And yet, because of
a peculiar inversion, this very paradigm that is, so to speak, more “democratic” is
also close to the position of those canonists and theologians (like Duns Scotus)
who, in the same years, elaborate the doctrine of the potentia absoluta as a model for exceptional powers [ poteri eccezionali]. Insofar as it structurally exceeds ordered power [ potenza ordinata], absolute power [ potenza assoluta] is—not only in God, but in every agent (and, in particular, in the pontiff )—that which allows one to act legitimately “beyond the law and against it”:
Potest agere conformiter illi legi rectae, et tunc secundum potentiam ordinatam
(ordinata enim est in quantum est principium exsequendi aliqua conformiter legi
rectae) et potest agere praeter illam legem vel contra eam, et in hoc est potentia
absoluta, excedens potentiam ordinatam. (Duns Scotus, quoted in Courtenay,
p. 112)
5
The Providential Machine
5.1. Michel Foucault’s 1977–1978 course at the Collège de France, entitled
Sécurité, territoire, population, is devoted to a genealogy of modern
“governmentality.” Foucault begins by distinguishing three different modalities
in the history of power relations: the legal system that corresponds to the institu-
tional model of the territorial State of sovereignty and that defines itself through
a normative code that opposes what is allowed to what is prohibited, and con-
sequently establishes a system of punishments; the disciplinary devices that
correspond to the modern societies of discipline and put into practice, alongside
the law, a series of police, medical, and penitentiary techniques to order, correct,
and modulate the bodies of subjects; finally, the apparatuses of security that
correspond to the contemporary state of population and the new practice that
defines it, which Foucault names “the government of men.” Foucault is careful
to specify that these three modalities do not succeed one another chronologi-