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8.24. The apparatus of glory finds its perfect cipher in the majesty of the
empty throne. Its purpose is to capture within the governmental machine that
unthinkable inoperativity—making it its internal motor—that constitutes the
ultimate mystery of divinity. And glory is as much the objective glory that ex-
hibits the inoperativity of the divinity, as it is the glorification in which human
inoperativity celebrates its eternal Sabbath. The theological and profane appa-
ratuses of glory coincide here, and, following the aims that have governed our
investigation, we can make use of it as the epistemological paradigm that will
enable us to penetrate the central mystery of power.
We can now begin to understand why doxology and ceremonials are so essen-
tial to power. What is at stake is the capture and inscription in a separate sphere
of the inoperativity that is central to human life. The oikonomia of power places firmly at its heart, in the form of festival and glory, what appears to its eyes as the
inoperativity of man and God, which cannot be looked at. Human life is inoper-
ative and without purpose, but precisely this argia and this absence of aim make
the incomparable operativity [ operosità] of the human species possible. Man has
dedicated himself to production and labor [ lavoro], because in his essence he is
completely devoid of work [ opera], because he is the Sabbatical animal par excel-
lence. And just as the machine of the theological oikonomia can function only if
it writes within its core a doxological threshold in which economic trinity and
immanent trinity are ceaselessly and liturgically (that is, politically) in motion,
each passing into the other, so the governmental apparatus functions because it
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has captured in its empty center the inoperativity of the human essence. This in-
operativity is the political substance of the Occident, the glorious nutrient of all
power. For this reason festival and idleness return ceaselessly in the dreams and
political utopias of the Occident and are equally incessantly shipwrecked there.
They are the enigmatic relics that the economic-theological machine abandons
on the water’s edge of civilization and that each time men question anew, nostal-
gically and in vain. Nostalgically because they appear to contain something that
belongs to the human essence, but in vain because really they are nothing but
the waste products of the immaterial and glorious fuel burnt by the motor of the
machine as it turns, and that cannot be stopped.
א Aristotle has written on the idea of the constitutive inoperativity of humanity
as such in a passage from the Nichomachean Ethics (1097b). When he comes to define happiness as the ultimate end of the science of politics, Aristotle poses the question of
what “the function of man” is ( to ergon tou anthropou) and he evokes the idea of a possible inoperativity of the human species:
For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or any artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function [ ergon] or activity [ praxis], the good and the “well” is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function.
Have the carpenter, then, and the tanner certain functions or activities, and has
man none? Is he naturally functionless [ argon]? (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1097b, 25–30, vol. 2, p. 1735)
The idea is immediately dropped and the work of man is identified with that particular
“operativity” ( energeia) that is life according to the logos. But the political relevance of the theme of an essential inoperativity of man as such did not escape Averroes, who makes
power [ potenza] and not the act of thought what determines the specific character of the human species, or Dante, who in De Monarchia (I, 3) places it at the heart of his doctrine of the multitude.
8.25. We can now try to answer the questions that without ever having been
explicitly formulated have accompanied our archaeology of glory from the be-
ginning: Why does power need inoperativity and glory? What is so essential
about them that power must inscribe them at all costs in the empty center of
its governmental apparatus? What nourishes power? And finally, is it possible to
think inoperativity outside the apparatus of glory?
If by following the epistemological strategy that has orientated our investiga-
tion we reformulate our first three questions above on the plane of theology, Ju-
daism and the New Testament agree on a single answer: chayye ‘olam, zōē aiōnios,
eternal life. First of all these syntagmas name what is due to the just in the
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future eon. In this sense, zōē aiōnios appears for the first time in the Septuagint as the translation of chayye ‘olam in Daniel 12:2, where it is written that “many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life,
and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Here, “everlasting,” or “eternal,”
as is clear in both the Hebrew ‘olam, which indicates the divine world and the
eschatological reality, and the Greek aiōn (“the aiōn,” writes John of Damascus,
“was created before heaven and before time”), does not have a merely temporal
significance but designates a special quality of life and, more precisely, the trans-
formation that human life undergoes in the world to come. Hellenic Judaism
defines it, therefore, as “{true life}” ( alēthinē zōē: Philo, The Special Laws 1, §32, pp. 536–537) or “{incorruptible life}” ( aphthartos zōē: ibid., On the Giants, §15; On Flight and Finding, §59, pp. 153 and 326, respectively) or even “carefree life”
( zōē amerimnos). The rabbinical tradition describes this future life in opposition to the present life and, at the same time, in a singular contiguity with it; that
is, as a deactivation of biological functions and bad instincts: “In the world to
come there will be no eating and drinking, nor any generation and reproduc-
tion. There will be no commerce and trade, quarrels, envy or hostility; the just
will sit with their crowns on their heads and will be refreshed by the splendor of
the shekinah” (Talmud, b Berakhot, 17a).
The crown that the just wear upon their heads is derived from the diadem
that is owed to the triumphant imperator or athlete as a symbol of victory and
expresses the glorious quality of eternal life. It is this same symbol of a “crown of
glory” ( stephanos tēs doxēs) or a “crown of life” ( stephanos tēs zōēs) that in the New Testament becomes the technical term for the glory of the blessed: “Be thou
faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life” (Revelation 2:10); “Ye
shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away” (1 Peter 5:4); and “He shall
receive the crown of life” (James 1:12).
Paul uses this symbol on more than one occasion to describe the eschatolog-
ical situation of the just, who are compared to athletes running a race (“they do
it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible”: 1 Corinthians 9:25;
“I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith:
Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the
righteous judge, shall give me at that day”: 2 Timothy 4:7–8). For him, however,
the theme of eternal life not only indicates a future condition but the special
qua
lity of life in messianic time ( ho nyn kairos, the time-of-now), that is, the
life in Jesus the Messiah (“unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord”: Romans
5:21). This life is marked by a special indicator of inoperativity, which in some
ways anticipates the sabbatism of the Kingdom in the present: the hōs mē, the
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“as not.” In the same way that the Messiah has brought about the law and, at the
same time, rendered it inoperative (the verb that Paul uses to express the relation
between the Messiah and the law— katargein—literally means “to render argos,”
inoperative), so the hōs mē maintains and, at the same time, deactivates in the
present all the juridical conditions and all the social behaviors of the members
of the messianic community:
But this I say, brethren, the time is short: it remaineth, that both they that have
wives be as though they had none [ hōs mē]; and they that weep, as though they
wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy,
as though they possessed not; and they that use this world, as not abusing it: for
the fashion of this world passeth away. (1 Corinthians 7:29–31)
Under the “as not,” life cannot coincide with itself and is divided into a life
that we live ( vitam quam vivimus, the set of facts and events that define our
biography) and a life for which and in which we live ( vita qua vivimus, what
renders life livable and gives it a meaning and a form). To live in the Messiah
means precisely to revoke and render inoperative at each instant every aspect of
the life that we live, and to make the life for which we live, which Paul calls the
“life of Jesus” ( zōē tou Iesou—zōē not bios!) appear within it: “For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’s sake, that the life also of Jesus might
be made manifest in our mortal flesh” (2 Corinthians 4:11). The messianic life
is the impossibility that life might coincide with a predetermined form, the
revoking of every bios in order to open it to the zōē tou Iesou. And the inoperativity that takes place here is not mere inertia or rest; on the contrary, it is the
messianic operation par excellence.
By contrast, in the future eon, when the just will enter into the inoperativity
of God, the eternal life is, for Paul, placed decisively under the sign of glory.
The celebrated passage in 1 Corinthians 15:35–55—the interpretation of which
is the source of so much endeavor for the theologians from Origen to Thomas
Aquinas—in truth says nothing more than this: that the bodies of the just will
be resurrected in glory and will be transformed into glory and into the incor-
ruptible spirit. What in Paul is left intentionally indeterminate and generic (“It
is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in
power: it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body”) is articulated and
developed into a doctrine of the glorious body of the blessed by the theologians.
In accordance with an apparatus that has by now become familiar to us, a doc-
trine of glorious life that isolates eternal life and its inoperativity in a separate
sphere comes to substitute that of the messianic life. Life, which rendered all
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forms inoperative, itself becomes a form in glory. Impassivity, agility, subtlety,
and clarity thereby become the characters that define the life of the glorious
body according to the theologians.
8.26. In the scholium to Proposition 36 of Book V of the Ethics, Spinoza
unexpectedly evokes the idea of glory in relation to the mind’s love for God.
The proposition had shown that the intellectual love of the mind for God is
nothing other than the love with which God loves himself and that, therefore,
the mind’s love for God is not distinct from God’s love of men. It is at this
point that the scholium develops a theory of glory that mobilizes and con-
denses in a few, vertiginous lines the theological motifs of the Jewish kabhod
and Christian doxa:
From this we clearly understand in what our salvation or blessedness or freedom
consists, namely, in the constant and eternal love toward God, that is, in God’s
love toward men. This love or blessedness is called Glory in the Holy Scriptures,
and rightly so. For whether this love be related to God or to the mind, it can
properly be called spiritual contentment, which in reality cannot be distinguished
from glory. For insofar as it is related to God, it is pleasure (if we may still use
this term) accompanied by the idea of himself, and this is also the case insofar as
it is related to the mind. (Spinoza, Ethics, Book V, Proposition 36, pp. 378–379) Moreover, pushing to the limit the correspondence between glory and glorification, inner glory and outer glory, glory names here a movement internal to
the being of God, which proceeds as much from God toward men as from men
toward God. But we also discover here the Sabbatical connection between glory
and inoperativity ( menuchah, anapausis, katapausis—here rendered with the
term acquiescentia, which was unknown in classical Latin), understood here in
a specific way. Inoperativity and glory are, here, the same thing: “Acquiescentia
[ . . . ] revera a gloria [ . . . ] non distinguitur.”
In order to fully grasp the sense of this radicalization of the theme of glory
and inoperativity it will, therefore, be necessary to return to the definition of
acquiescentia contained in the demonstration of Proposition 52 of the fourth
book. “Self-contentment” [ acquiescentia in se ipso] writes Spinoza, “is the plea-
sure arising from man’s contemplation of himself and his power of activity”
(ibid., Book IV, Proposition 52, proof, p. 347). What does Spinoza mean when
he writes of “man’s contemplation of himself and his power of activity”? What
is an inoperativity that consists in contemplating one’s own power [ potenza] to
act? And how, from this perspective, are we to understand an inoperativity that
“cannot be distinguished from glory”?
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Philo had written that the inoperativity of God does not mean inertia or in-
activity [ aprassia], but a form of action that implies neither suffering nor effort: In fact, only God, among existing things, is inoperative [ anapauomenon], and
by “inoperativity” I do not mean “inactivity” (since that which is by its nature
energetic, that which is the cause of all things, can never desist from doing what
is most excellent), but I mean an energy [ energeian] completely free from labor
[ aponōtatēn], without any feeling of suffering, and with the most perfect ease
[ eumareias]; for one may say, without impropriety, that the sun and moon, and
the entire heaven, inasmuch as they are not endowed with independent power,
and are continually in a state of motion and agitation, [do suffer] [ . . . ] and the
most undeniable proofs of their labor are the yearly seasons [ . . . ] God is subject
to no labor [ . . . ] and that which has no participation in weakness, even though
it moves everything, cannot possibly cease to enjoy inoperativity for ever. So that
rest and inoperativity are the appropriate attributes
of God alone. (Philo, On the
Cherubim, §87–90, p. 89)
Spinoza describes as “contemplation of [ . . . ] power” what one might describe
as an inoperativity within the operation itself, that is, a sui generis “praxis” that
consists in rendering all specific powers of acting or doing inoperative. The life,
which contemplates its (own) power to act, renders itself inoperative in all its op-
erations, and lives only (its) livability. We write “own” and “its” in parentheses,
because it is only through the contemplation of power, which renders all spe-
cific energeia inoperative, that something like an experience of one’s “own” and
a “self” becomes possible. “Self,” subjectivity, is what opens itself as a central
inoperativity in every operation, like the live- ability of every life. In this inoperativity, the life that we live is only the life through which we live; only our power
of acting and living, our act- ability and our live- ability. Here the bios coincides with the zōē without remainder.
One can therefore understand the essential function that the tradition of
Western philosophy has assigned to contemplative life and to inoperativity:
properly human praxis is sabbatism that, by rendering the specific functions of
the living inoperative, opens them to possibility. Contemplation and inopera-
tivity are, in this sense, the metaphysical operators of anthropogenesis, which,
by liberating the living man from his biological or social destiny, assign him to
that indefinable dimension that we are accustomed to call “politics.” Opposing
the contemplative life to the political as “two bioi ” (Aristotle, Politics, 1324a, p. 2102), Aristotle deflected politics and philosophy from their trajectory and, at
the same time, delineated the paradigm on which the economy-glory apparatus
would model itself. The political is neither a bios nor a zōē, but the dimension
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that the inoperativity of contemplation, by deactivating linguistic and corpo-
real, material and immaterial praxes, ceaselessly opens and assigns to the living.
For this reason, from the perspective of theological oikonomia the genealogy of
which we have here traced, nothing is more urgent than to incorporate inoper-
ativity within its own apparatuses. Zōē aiōnios, eternal life, is the name of this inoperative center of the human, of this political “substance” of the Occident