The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  the fact that one can speak in an originary way of a populus ( laos) or of an ekklēsia

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  only where there is, for a people, the possibility of performing juridical actions.

  Someone who one day wants to write a history of the “laicized” [ Laie] ( laos) will have to pay attention to all the contexts hinted at here and, at the same time,

  understand that the laos is precisely the ochlos, insofar as it must utter liturgical acclamations. Hence, when the laos proffers liturgical acclamations, it binds itself to its statute of ecclesiastic law in the same way in which in public law the laos

  receives its statute precisely through the right to proffer its ekboēsis (acclamation) to the despotēs in the profane ekklēsia. (Peterson 1926, p. 179)

  Characteristically, it is in a footnote that Peterson interprets the amen that intermittently appears in the liturgical celebration as an acclamation in the technical

  sense, one through which the multitude of the faithful constitutes itself as the

  “people” ( laos) (ibid., note 2). When Justin ( The First Apology, 65, 3, p. 64) informs us that, at the end of the prayer and the Eucharist, “all the people present

  express their assent by saying Amen [ pas ho parōn laos euphēmei legōn: Amēn],”

  what is in question is precisely the technico-juridical meaning of the acclama-

  tion that constitutes the “publicity” of the liturgy; or more precisely, the “litur-

  gical” character of the Christian Mass.

  א An analysis of the terms that in the New Testament—and, in particular, Paul’s

  Letters—refer to the people can shed light on Peterson’s antimessianic strategy. The term

  dēmos, which is so important for our understanding of the polis, hardly appears. The people are referred to by the term ochlos (as many as 175 times in the New Testament; it is, moreover, translated into Latin by turba; in the Vulgate, alongside turba and populus, one can find the terms plebs and multitudo; massa, which would be a good translation of ochlos, has, since Augustine, had the negative meaning of carrier of the original sin: “ea damnatione,

  quae per universam massam currit”: Augustine, On Nature and Grace, § 8.9, p. 28) or with plēthos (which appears frequently in Luke) and, in a sense that corresponds to the term that in the Septuagint recurrently designates the chosen people, with laos (which occurs 142 times). Peterson relates the impolitical ochlos to the theological meaning of laos: the ochlos becomes laos; it becomes “politicized” through liturgy. To do this, he must ignore the peculiar usage adopted by Paul. It is in fact significant that Paul never uses the term ochlos and uses laos only twelve times, and always with reference to biblical citations (for example, with reference to Hosea in Romans 9:25: “my non- people”). Hēmeis, that is,

  “we,” is the term by which Paul refers to the messianic community in the technical sense,

  often in opposition to laos (as in Romans 9:24) or to Jews and Greeks (as in 1 Corinthians 1:22–24: “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we [ hēmeis de]

  preach Christ crucified”). In the cited passage from the First Letter to the Corinthians, the pronoun “we” is qualified immediately by “those who are called” ( autois de tois klētois). In Paul, the messianic community as such is anonymous and appears to be situated on an

  undifferentiated threshold between public and private.

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  7.5. In 1934 and 1935, Andreas Alföldi published the results of his research on

  the forms and insignia of the imperial Roman ceremonial in the Römische Mitteilungen. Abandoning the stereotype already to be found in classical sources according to which the imperial ceremonial, thought to be alien to the traditional

  sobriety of Roman politics, had been introduced by Diocletian according to the

  model provided by the rituals of Persian courtiers, Alföldi demonstrates instead

  how it gradually developed from the last years of the republic and from the first

  years of the principality in accordance with a paradigm into which several differ-

  ent traditions certainly flowed, but which was substantially theological. In order

  to understand the “theologico-sacred” character that the relationship between

  the sovereign and his subjects begins to assume in Rome, it is by no means neces-

  sary to more or less arbitrarily draw upon the Eastern model of divine monarchy.

  “The principality had raised the head of State infinitely higher than the senators,

  who pray and celebrate sacrifices for his well-being, swear on his name, invoke

  him as the son of God, and celebrate his birthday and other private festivities as

  a public ceremonial. The auctoritas that, according to their declaration, raises the principes above all others, had assumed a religious hue, as had the sacred title of Augustus that they bore” (Alföldi, p. 29).

  Alföldi minutely reconstructs, from within this perspective, the introduction

  of the proskynēsis (adoration), which already in the republican era appears as the gesture of the suppliant who falls upon his knees before the powerful and, little

  by little, becomes an integral part of the imperial ritual. The senators and the

  higher-ranking knights kissed the emperor on each cheek ( salutatio); but with

  time they were only allowed to kiss once they had kneeled before him; until

  the moment when, in Byzantium, the salutatio ended up always including the

  adoratio, the kissing of the knees and hands.

  Of particular interest is the broad treatment of the costumes and insignia of

  power that Alföldi significantly dedicates to the memory of Theodor Mommsen,

  as though he were completing the missing part of the Staatsrecht with his own

  analysis of the ceremonial. Although Alföldi does not always seem to be entirely

  aware of this, the field of research that opens up here is one in which what is at

  stake is the very way in which that field will be defined. He shows how the im-

  perial costume, which at the beginning of the principality simply coincides with

  the toga of the Roman citizen, progressively assumes the characteristics of the

  robes that the victorious magistrate would wear in the triumphal cortege and,

  later, as a constant feature from the time of Commodus, the military uniform

  with paludamentum and armor ( lorica). At the same time, as demonstrated by numerous sculptures, the crown of laurel of the vir triumphalis became a techni-

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  cal attribute of sovereignty, which would later be replaced, especially on coins, by

  the corona radiata (which in contrast to the laurel crown seems never actually to

  have been worn). In analogous fashion, the sella curulis upon which the consuls

  sat became the seat of the prince who, in isolating himself on a podium from at

  least the time of Caligula, progressively transforms its function into that of a

  throne ( basileios thronos, hedra basilikē).

  What is decisive, however, is the technico-juridical significance of these

  transformations. Indeed, it is not a case of a simple passion for luxury and pomp,

  or merely a desire to distinguish oneself from ordinary citizens, but of a veritable

  sphere that is constitutive of sovereignty. The difficulty scholars encountered in

  defining this sphere is evident in their necessarily vague use of terms such as “cer-

  emonial,” “insignia or signs of domination” ( Herrschaftszeichen), and “symbols

  of power or of the state” ( Machtsymbole, Staatssymbolik). We already see this in

  the way Mommsen observes that, from the third century onward, “the pu
rple

  clothing of war becomes the symbol of monarchy” (Mommsen, vol. I, p. 433).

  But what does “symbol” mean here? The technical meaning of objects such as

  the fasces lictoriae in Roman public law or of the crown in medieval law have

  been known for some time, and yet, a juridical theory able to precisely define

  their sphere and value is still lacking.

  Let us consider the problem of the mutatio vestis that leads the emperor to

  substitute the toga of the citizen with the paludamentum insigne of the military

  commander. To understand this process (as Alföldi does) simply as a consequence

  of the growing primacy of the army in contrast to the authority of the senate; or

  to speak, in relation to the ceremonial, of an opposition between law and power,

  still says nothing about its specific meaning. For we know that already in the

  republican era, the opposition between toga and paludamentum corresponded to

  the distinction between the pomerium and the rest of the territory and so imme-

  diately had implications for public law. Under no circumstances could the magis-

  trate enter Rome in military dress, having rather to sumere togam before crossing the frontier. So the fact that the emperor would wear his purple paludamentum

  in the city did not so much indicate the factual predominance of the army but

  mainly signaled a lack of determination of the formal difference between consular

  power and proconsular power, pomerium and territory, the laws of peace and the

  laws of war. The mutatio vestis has, therefore, an immediate performative effect

  in public law. Only from this perspective can one understand how in Byzantium

  the ceremonial of the emperor’s robes was assigned to a particular office, called

  mētatōrion, in which high-ranking functionaries would be scrupulously attentive

  to the fact that to each situation there would correspond the correct garb. Only

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  if we understand the legal significance of the color purple as the insignia of sov-

  ereignty is it possible to comprehend how, beginning in the fourth century, the

  production of the color purple was nationalized and its possession by a private

  person could result in the crime of lese majesty (Alföldi, p. 169).

  Analogous remarks can be made in relation to the complicated protocol that

  regulates, in addition to the proskynēsis, the relation between the erect and the

  seated posture in the public appearances of the emperor. In this case as well, rather

  than see in the posture merely the symbolic expression of rank, it is necessary

  to understand that it is the posture that immediately establishes the hierarchy.

  In the same way that for the Pseudo-Dionysius the divinity is not manifested in

  the hierarchy but is itself ousia and dynamis—glory, substance, and power of the celestial and worldly hierarchies ( Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 378a)—so imperial sovereignty is, in its very behavior, in its gestures as in its apparel, both hierarchical

  ceremonial and insignia.

  7.6. Ernst Percy Schramm, a historian who became known even outside the

  strictly academic field through his edition of Adolf Hitler’s Tischrede, dedicated a monumental study to the insignia and symbols of power. In the preface and the

  introduction to the three volumes of Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik, he

  insists on the need to rescue the field of his research from those “romantics—or

  worse still—those who seek in the signs of sovereignty what they imagine to be

  the ‘spirit of the Middle ages’” (Schramm, vol. 1, p. ix) and to abandon, because

  of their ambiguity, terms like “insignia” and “symbol,” preferring instead the—

  hardly more precise—“signs of dominion” ( Herrschaftszeichen) and “symbolism

  of the state” ( Staatssymbolik) (ibid.).

  Despite the fact that Schramm returns more than once to terminological and

  methodological questions, and speaks, following the Warburgian Pathosformeln,

  of “formulae of majesty” ( Majestätsformeln) and of “model-images” ( Bildmodel ), the book is in fact an immense poem dedicated to the signs of power. In the

  course of the work, which runs to nearly twelve hundred pages, hardly anything

  escapes the meticulous, ekphrastic passion of the author and the scrupulousness

  of the cataloguing by his collaborators: from the triumphal trabea of the Roman

  emperor to the mitre and tiara of the pontiffs and the sovereigns; from the holy

  lance of the Germanic and Lombard kings to the bells ( tintinnabula) that adorn

  the gowns of the churchmen and kings; from the infinite forms of the royal and

  imperial crowns, to the rich phenomenology of the throne in all of its varieties—

  from the cathedra Petri to the thrones of the English, the Aragones, the Poles, the Swedish, the Sicilians.

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  Of particular interest is the section on monograms and seals, including that

  of Theodoric the Great concerning which Schramm makes an observation that is

  worth developing. He writes: the “monogramatic nomen regium [ . . . ] represents

  force and law as well as an effigy might: the monogram does not simply explain

  the image; it rather renders the king present [ stellt ( . . . ) den König dar] on its own” (ibid., vol. 1, p. 226). In the second volume, the section on flags ( bandum,

  vandum, banière) and standards deserves particular attention. Here the character

  and special performative force of insignia appear with a clarity that, unfortu-

  nately, Schramm does not seem to be fully aware of. He refers to the works of

  a historian of law, Carl Erdmann, who had demonstrated that the particular

  power of the flag does not lie in its markings or the colors that it contains, but

  springs from the thing itself. For this reason, “like the crown, the king’s flag must

  not be lost; just as the king’s honor can be harmed through the crown, so it can

  be through the flag [ . . . ] the flag can substitute for the sovereign, it shows where

  his peace reigns and how far his power extends” (ibid., vol. 2, p. 653).

  At the beginning of his work, Schramm stated his wish that “from what has

  been, until now, the arbitrary and subjective treatment of the signs of power,”

  there might be born a science as exact and rigorous as that to which we have be-

  come accustomed in historical research. At the end of the book, where Schramm

  attempts to set out the Grundbegriffe (Schramm, vol. 3, p. 1098) that guided his

  work, it is clear that his wish has not been fully realized. In the same way that

  in the frontispiece to the first volume he had framed his research in light of

  Goethe’s definition of the symbol (“the symbol is the thing without being the

  thing and yet it is the thing: an image condensed in the mirror of the mind and

  yet identical with the object”), so he now evokes a passage from Hegel, who

  defines the symbolic as “something obscure, which becomes ever more obscure

  the more forms we learn to understand” (Schramm, vol. 3, p. 1065). Schramm

  never entirely escapes the obscurity and ambiguity of these concepts. The science

  of the signs of power still awaits its foundation.

  7.7. Karl von Amira, a historian who would compromise himself by a relation-

  ship to Nazism and whom Schramm cites in his investigation, advanced a science

  called “the archaeology of righ
t.” A clear example of Amira’s genealogical method

  is his work on hand gestures in the miniatures of the medieval code known as

  Sachsenspiegel, whose exuberant mimicry had been compared to the gesticulations

  of the Neapolitans as described by de Jorio. In the debate between those who,

  like Jacob Grimm, considered miniature figures exclusively from the perspective

  of the history of art, as a “symbolism of the artist” ( Simbolyk des Künstlers), and

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  those who instead saw in them the expression of a genuinely juridical mimicry,

  Amira resolutely takes the middle path by mobilizing the resources of both disci-

  plines. He thereby distinguishes between authentic gestures ( echte Handgebärden),

  in which the hand immediately symbolizes a spiritual process, and inauthentic

  gestures, where the hand is only the “instrument of a symbol” that is intended not

  for the effective expression of a will but is to make visible a social attribute of the

  person (Amira, p. 168). Amira fixes his attention on the former alone, in order to

  verify the extent to which each time the gestures of the miniatures can be ascribed

  with certainty to juridical symbolism.

  The distinction between authentic (or pure) gestures and inauthentic ones

  suggests a conceptual direction for the investigation that Amira, who is only

  preoccupied with identifying the juridical uses of gesture, does not pursue. One

  of the most interesting mimetic categories to be found in the work is the gesture

  that accompanies discourse, the linguistic gesture ( Redegestus). In this case a gesture that derives from the ingens manus, which expressed the special efficacy of

  imperial power (the open hand that is raised along with the forearm in such a

  way as to more or less form a right angle with the arm), merges with the gestures

  that, according to ancient rhetoric, should accompany the actio of the orator in

  order then to become fixed in the gesture of the Logos of benediction—which

  was to assume such an important function in Christian liturgy and iconog-

  raphy (the benedictio latina, with thumb, index, and middle finger distended