The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

a theological and “almost philosophical” (ibid., p. 18) consistency. The anna is

  no longer the nourishment of this or that god; it is “nourishment in general,

  anna-in-itself, annadya, the edible, and the possession of what is edible” (ibid., p. 8). The annadya thereby becomes one of the qualities that define the kshatra, regal power. Not only does the king, to whom sacrifices are offered, become the

  “lord of nourishment”; we also see the gradual birth of a veritable “cult of nour-

  ishment” in India, having the character of a public cult, in the course of which

  nourishment “becomes the object of a kind of divinization” (ibid., p. 14). The

  anna, stripping itself of its material qualities, becomes the principle of life, the force that maintains and augments life; “one might almost say that nourishment

  is the vital breath and spirit” (ibid., p. 20). Insofar as it is the living principle

  and the active and spiritual essence, nourishment can be common to men as

  much as it is to the gods, and “sacrifice is nothing but the nourishment of the

  gods” (ibid., p. 24) in which men participate and from which they also draw

  nourishment. It is precisely in developing this idea of nourishment that Mauss

  is able to recount the tale of the formation, beyond the pantheon of the divine

  persons, of the idea of Prajapati, of a “unique, cosmic existence, of a God, male

  and firstborn, at once sacrifice and offering” (ibid., p. 28). On the last page, just

  before the manuscript abruptly breaks off, in the course of describing the cul-

  tural function of the Prajapati, Mauss appears to intentionally evoke, without

  ever naming, the Christian sacrifice: the body of Prajapati is “the matter of the

  universal feast [ . . . ] the supreme host that nourishes this entire world”; he is

  the nourishment-god who, in saying “there is no other nourishment than me,”

  offers himself up as a sacrifice for the life of his creatures (ibid., 29). “The divine

  essence,” concludes Mauss, “was, from this point of view, a food, nutrition itself.

  God was food” (ibid.).

  Among the papers that refer to the incomplete study of nourishment in

  the Brahmana, there is a brief article, “Anna-Viraj,” in which the theory of

  anna is taken in an unexpected direction. The viraj is a metrical Vedic form composed of three feet of ten syllables each (the title could be translated as

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  “ nourishment-hymn”). The Brahmana regards this metrical form as itself pos-

  sessing a fundamental and specific nutritional virtue. “The ideal of the Brahmins

  was to compose through a collection of hymns, of songs [ . . . ], a male life, a bird,

  animal, or man and offer this supreme mystical food to the eating god, creator

  of the world” (Mauss 1974, p. 594). What is decisive here is that the hymn, the

  viraj, does not simply produce the food, but is food in-itself. In order to assure at all costs the presence of nourishment, the Brahmins would employ the rites of

  mantra composed with this meter; and lacking these, verses and formulae from

  other sources would be transposed, prosodically, into the form of the viraj. “Ar-

  bitrary pauses after every ten syllables; interruptions with musical cries repeated

  ten times; any expedient, barbarous or refined, is used to force songs intended to

  be sung in other forms into the procrustean bed of the viraj ” (ibid., p. 595). The link between the metrical form and its nutritious character is so essential that

  the Brahmin theologians affirm without reserve that if one sings the hymn in the

  form of the viraj, “that is because the viraj has ten syllables, because the viraj is nutrition” (ibid., p. 597). The link is so intimate that Mauss, in the unfinished

  manuscript on the notion of nutrition, appears to suggest that the speculations

  on the anna­ nutrition could precisely enable one to comprehend the sense of

  the prosodic structure of the Veda: “These hymns, songs, meters, these things

  expressed through numbers, these numbers, these rhythmical gestures, veiled

  words, cries that mean nutrition and are arranged, in relation to others, like food

  is arranged within the body or near it, all is part of a system of which we will

  discover the explanation when we have carried out the history of the ideas and

  the symbols concerning food” (Mauss, Manuscript, pp. 15–16).

  In the theology of the Brahmana, the gods nourish themselves with hymns,

  and men, who ritually sing the viraj, provide for the gods’ nourishment in this

  way (and indirectly provide for their own as well). This perhaps permits us to

  unexpectedly shed some light on the essence of liturgy. Just as in the case of the

  Eucharistic sacrifice, the god who offers himself as nourishment to men can do

  so only in the context of the doxological canon, so in the Brahmana, the metrical

  form of the hymn must be ritually fixed since it amounts to the food of god.

  And vice versa.

  8.21. That the ultimate purpose of the word is to celebrate is a recurrent

  theme in the poetic tradition of the West. The specific form of celebration in this

  tradition is the hymn. The Greek term hymnos is derived from the ritual accla-

  mation that was shouted out during the marriage ceremony: hymēn (frequently

  followed by hymenaios). It does not correspond to a definite metrical form, but,

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  585

  from the time of the most ancient attestations in the so-called Homeric hymns,

  it refers above all to the song in honor of the gods. This, in any case, is its content

  in Christian hymnology, which flourishes in the fourth century, if not earlier,

  with Ephrem the Syrian, Ambrose, Hilary, and Prudentius among the Latin

  speakers, and Gregory of Nazianzus and Synesius from the Eastern Church.

  Isidore defines it in tripartite form: praise, the object of praise (God), and song:

  Hymnus est canticus laudantium, quod de Graeco in Latino laus interpretatur,

  pro eo quod sit carmen laetitiae et laudis. Proprie autem hymni sunt continen-

  tes laudem Dei. Si ergo sit laus et non sit Dei, non est hymnus; si sit et laus et

  Dei laus, et non cantetur, non est hymnus. Si ergo et in laudem Dei dicitur et

  cantatur, tunc est hymnus.

  (The hymn is the song of he who praises, which in Greek means “praise,” be-

  cause it is a poem of joy and praise. But hymns in the proper sense are those

  that contain praise of God. If, therefore, there is praise but not of God, it is not

  a hymn; if there is praise of God, but it is not sung, it is not a hymn. If, on the

  other hand, it is in praise of God and is sung, only then is it a hymn.) (Isidore,

  The Etymologies, 6, 19, 17)

  Sacred hymnology begins its irreversible decline at the end of the Middle Ages.

  The Franciscan Laudes creaturarum, despite not being fully part of the hymno-

  logical tradition, constitutes the last great example of it and, at the same time,

  marks its end. Modern poetry is more elegiac than hymnological, despite some

  important exceptions in the German tradition in particular (as well as in the

  Italian, as is the case with Manzoni’s Sacred Hymns).

  In the poetry of the 1900s, Rilke is a case apart. He dressed up an indubitably

  hymnological intention in the garb of elegy and lament. The almost liturgical aura

  of sacredness that has always surrounded the Duino Elegies is pr
obably owed to

  this contamination of elements, to this spurious attempt to grasp a dead poetic

  form. Their hymnological character, in the technical sense, is evident from the

  first verse, which calls into question the angelic hierarchies (“Who, if I cried out,

  would hear me among the angelic orders?”: Rilke 2000, p. 5), that is, precisely

  those who must share the hymn with men (“For the reason why we recite this

  doxology is to share in the singing [ koinōnoi tēs hymnōdias ( . . . ) genōmetha] of the angelic armies,” writes Cyril of Jerusalem in his Mystagogic Catechesis, p. 183).

  The angels, to whom Rilke addresses his hymn of praise (“Praise the world to the

  Angel”: Rilke 2000, 9, 53, p. 55), which they sing along with him, remain to the

  end the privileged interlocutors of the poet (“may I emerge singing praise and

  jubilation to the assenting angels [ zustimmenden Engeln] who join in the song”:

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  ibid., 10, 1–2, p. 59). And in the Sonnets to Orpheus, which Rilke considered to be an essential companion to the Elegies and almost a kind of esoteric exegesis of the same, he clearly announces the hymnological (that is, celebratory) vocation of

  his poems: “Rühmen, das ists!,” “Praising, that’s it!” (Rilke 1987, 7, 1, p. 15). The

  eighth sonnet thus supplies the key to the elegiac titles of his hymns: the lam-

  entation ( Klage) can exist only in the sphere of celebration (“Nur im Raum der

  Rühmung darf die Klage / gehn [ . . . ]”: ibid., 8, 1–2) just as in the tenth elegy the

  hymn passes with equal necessity into the sphere of the lament.

  Furio Jesi, who has dedicated some exemplary studies to Rilke’s work, in

  a planned preface to an edition of the Elegies that would never see the light of

  day, overturns the customary critical accounts that glimpse in the Elegies an

  exceptionally rich doctrinal content. He asks whether it makes sense to speak

  of “content” in this case. He proposes to bracket out the doctrinal content of

  the Elegies (which is in any case a sort of rehash of the clichés of Rilke’s poetry) and to read them as a series of rhetorical possibilities that keep the poet from

  remaining silent. The poet wants to speak, but what wants to speak within him

  is the unknowable. For this reason,

  The discourse that resonates has no content: it is a pure will to discourse. The

  content of the voice of the secret that ultimately resonates is nothing other than

  the fact that “the secret speaks.” For this to occur, it is necessary that the modalities

  of discourse are emptied out of all content, and that this is done in a totalizing

  manner in order to bring to an end all the activity that has gone before, all the

  words uttered, at a single point. The organization of the multitude of Rilkean

  commonplaces, even of the oldest, in the context of the Elegies, follows from this.

  But so does the necessity for there to be somewhere for the content of these topoi

  to flow, so that in the Elegies they are able to echo in vain [ . . . ] (Jesi, p. 118) Jesi’s definition of the Elegies as a poem that has nothing to say, as a pure “as-severation of the semantic nucleus of the word” (ibid., p. 120), is valid—in

  truth—for the hymn in general; that is, it defines the most profound intention

  of every doxology. At the point where it perfectly coincides with glory, praise is

  without content; it culminates in the amen that says nothing but merely assents

  to and concludes what has already been said. And what the Elegies lament and,

  at the same time, celebrate (according to the principle that lamentation can

  take place only in the sphere of celebration) is precisely the incurable absence

  of the content of the hymn, the turning in the void of language as the supreme

  form of glorification. The hymn is the radical deactivation of signifying lan-

  guage, the word rendered completely inoperative and, nevertheless, retained as

  such in the form of liturgy.

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  א In the final years of his poetic production, between 1800 and 1805, Hölderlin

  composed a series of often fragmentary and unfinished poems that have traditionally

  been called “hymns.” And in the technical sense they are hymns, because their content

  is fundamentally concerned with the gods and demigods (here, the latter can be said

  to take the place of the angels in some way). Nevertheless, because of a decisive shift,

  what these hymns celebrate is not the presence of the gods but their departure. In other

  words, Hölderlin’s late hymns are the symmetrical inverse of Rilke’s elegies: whereas the

  latter are hymns dressed up as elegies, Hölderlin writes elegies in the form of hymns.

  This sober inversion, this irruption of elegy into an alien context, is marked metrically

  by the breaking of the hymn’s rhythm. The particularly fierce prosodic fragmentation

  that characterizes Hölderlin’s hymns has not escaped the notice of the critics. It is

  precisely in order to underline this tearing apart of the syntactic structure that Adorno

  called his reading of Hölderlin’s final literary productions “Parataxis.” Norbert von Hellingrath, who in 1913 edited the first philologically accurate posthumous edition of

  Hölderlin’s writings, had registered this prosodic breaking more thoroughly. He drew

  on Alexandrine philology—in particular the work of Dionysius of Halicarnassus—the

  poetological distinction between harmonia austera and harmonia glaphyra (or austere connection—whose greatest exemplar is Pindar—and elegant connection—literally

  “hollow,” derived from glaphy, “cave”) and translated it into modern terms such as harte and glatte Fügung, hard articulation and flat articulation. In his comments on Hölderlin’s translation of Pindar’s fragments, he writes: “We can render this Greek terminology with

  ‘hard articulation’ and ‘flat articulation’ and establish that it is realized through the hard or flat character of the syntactical articulation of single elements in the three parallel strata of the poem: the rhythm of the words, the melos, and the sound” (Hellingrath, pp. 20–21). It is not so much the parataxis itself that defines the hard articulation as that, in it, single words are isolated from their semantic context to the point of constituting

  a sort of autonomous unity, whereas in the case of the flat articulation, the images and

  the syntactic context subordinate and link together a number of words. “The hard ar-

  ticulation does all it can to emphasize the word itself, imparting it to the listener and

  tearing it, as much as possible, from the associative context of the images and feelings

  to which it belonged” (ibid., p. 23).

  The broken prosody and the almost aprosody of Hölderlin’s late hymns could not

  be characterized more precisely. The single words—sometimes even simple conjunctions

  such as aber, “but”—are isolated and jealously wrapped up in themselves; and the reading of the verse and the strophe is nothing but a succession of scansions and caesura in which all discourse and all meaning appear to break up and retract, as in a sort of prosodic

  and semantic paralysis. In this “staccato” of rhythm and thought, the hymn exhibits the

  elegy—that is, the lament for the taking leave of the gods or, rather, for the impossibility of the hymn—as its only proper content. Poetry’s bitter tendency to isolate words, which

  the Alexandrines used to call “free style,” can be defined as “hymnical.” It rests on the

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  is, with the enunciation and repetition of the divine names. In hymn, all names tend to

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  be isolated and become desemanticized in the proper names of the divine. In this sense,

  every poem presupposes the hymn—however distant they are—which is to say, it is

  only possible against the backdrop and within the horizon of the divine names. In other

  words, poetry is a field of tensions traversed by the currents of the harmonia austera and the harmonia glaphyra, and at whose polar extremes there stand, on the one hand, hymn, which celebrates the name and, on the other hand, elegy, which is the lament for the

  impossibility of proffering the divine names. Breaking the hymn, Hölderlin shatters the

  divine names and, at the same time, takes leave of the gods.

  The most extreme form of the hymnical isolation of the word in modern poetry may

  be found in the work of Mallarmé. Mallarmé has enduringly sealed French poetry by

  giving a genuinely hymnical purpose to an unheard of exasperation of harmonia austera.

  The latter disarticulates and breaks the metrical structure of the poem to such an extent

  that it literally explodes in a handful of names without links, disseminated across the

  page. Isolated in a “vibratile suspension” from their syntactic context, the words, restored to their status of nomina sacra, are exhibited—in Mallarmé’s words—as “ce qui ne se dit pas du discourse,” as that which in language tenaciously resists the discourse of meaning.

  This hymnological explosion of the poem is the Coup de dés. In this unrecitable doxology, the poet, in a gesture that is at once an initiation and an epilogue, has constituted modern lyric poetry in the form of an a-theological (or rather, theo-alogical) liturgy, in comparison to which the celebratory intention of Rilke’s elegy seems decidedly belated.

  8.22. The special relation that ties glory to inoperativity is one of the recur-

  rent themes of economic theology that we have tried to reconstruct. Inasmuch as

  it names the ultimate ends of man and the condition that follows the Last Judg-

  ment, glory coincides with the cessation of all activity and all works. It is what

  remains after the machine of divine oikonomia has reached its completion and