that the machine of the economy and of glory ceaselessly attempts to capture
within itself.
א A model of this operation that consists in making all human and divine works
inoperative is the poem. Because poetry is precisely that linguistic operation that renders language inoperative—or, in Spinoza’s terms, the point at which language, which has deactivated its communicative and informative functions, rests within itself, contemplates
its power of saying [ potenza di dire] and in this way opens itself to a new possible use. In this way, Dante’s La Vita Nuova and Leopardi’s Canti are the contemplation of the Italian language, Arnauld Daniel’s sestina the contemplation of the Provençal language, Hölderlin’s hymns or the poems of Bachmann the contemplation of the German language, Les
Illuminations of Rimbaud the contemplation of the French language, and so on. And
the poetic subject is not the individual who wrote these poems, but the subject that is
produced at the point at which language has been rendered inoperative and, therefore,
has become in him and for him, purely sayable.
What the poem accomplishes for the power of saying, politics and philosophy must
accomplish for the power of acting. By rendering economic and biological operations
inoperative, they demonstrate what the human body can do; they open it to a new,
possible use.
א It is only from the perspective opened by this genealogy of government and of glory
that Heidegger’s decision to pose the question of technology as the ultimate problem of
metaphysics acquires its proper significance and, at the same time, reveals its limits. The Gestell, which Heidegger defines as the essence of technology, “the complete orderability of all that is present” (Heidegger 1994, p. 54), the activity that arranges and accumulates things and even men as resources ( Bestand ), is nothing other than that which, from within the horizon of our investigation, appears as oikonomia; that is, as the theological apparatus of the government of the world. “Orderability” ( Bestellbarkeit) is nothing other than governmentality; and that which, on the theological plane, is presented as
that which must be ordered and guided toward salvation, arranges itself, on the plane of
technology, as a resource to sustain the Gestell. The term Gestell corresponds perfectly (not only in its form: the German stellen is equivalent to ponere, that is, to place) to the Latin term dispositio, which translates the Greek oikonomia. The Gestell is the apparatus of the absolute and integral government of the world.
The failure of Heidegger’s attempt to resolve the problem of technology is also evi-
dent here. Insofar as technology is not, in itself, “anything technological” (ibid., p. 57),
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but is the epochal figure of the unveiling-veiling of being, it rests in the final analysis on ontological difference in the same way that, in theology, the economy-government
is founded in the economy of the Trinity. Therefore, the problem of technology is not
something that can be decided by men, and the self-refusal of the world that takes place
in the Gestell is the “supreme mystery of being” (ibid., p. 107), just as the “mystery of the economy” is the most intimate mystery of God. For this reason men cannot but
correspond ( entsprechen) to this mystery in a dimension in which philosophy appears to pass into religion and which, in its very name ( Kehre), repeats the technical term for conversion (in German, Bekehrung). Salvation ( Rettung), which grows in the danger of technology, does not signify an action but a bringing back into the essence, a guarding
( in die Hut nehmen), a preserving ( wahren) (ibid., p. 102).
Heidegger cannot resolve the problem of technology because he was unable to re-
store it to its political locus. The economy of being, its epochal unveiling in a veiling is, like economic theology, a political mystery that corresponds to power’s entering into the
figure of Government. And the operation that resolves this mystery, which deactivates
and renders inoperative the technological-ontological apparatus, is political. It is not a guarding of being and of the divine but an operation that, within being and the divine,
deactivates its economy and accomplishes it.
Threshold
HERE, the investigation that has led us from the oikonomia to glory may
come to a halt, at least provisionally. It has brought us into proximity with
the center of the machine that glory envelops with its splendor and songs.
The essential political function of glory, of acclamations and doxologies ap-
pears to have declined. Ceremonies, protocols, and liturgies still exist everywhere,
and not only where monarchical institutions persist. In receptions and solemn
ceremonies, the president of the republic continues to follow protocol rules the
observance of which is ensured by special functionaries, and the Roman pontiff
continues to sit on the cathedra Petri or on the sedia gestatoria and wears paraments and tiaras, whose meaning is largely lost to the memory of the faithful.
Generally speaking, however, ceremonies and liturgies tend today to be simpli-
fied; the insignia of power reduced to a minimum; crowns, thrones, and scepters
kept in glass cases in museums or treasuries; and the acclamations that had such
great importance for the glorious function of power appear everywhere to have al-
most disappeared. It is certainly true that it was not so long ago that, in the field of
what Kantorowicz called the “emotionalism” of fascist regimes, acclamations played
a decisive function in the political life of certain great European states: perhaps
never has an acclamation, in the technical sense of the word, been expressed with so
much force and efficacy as was “Heil Hitler” in Nazi Germany or “Duce duce” in
fascist Italy. And yet these uproarious and unanimous cries that resounded yesterday
in the piazzas of our cities appear today to be part of a distant and irrevocable past.
But is it really so? Taking up again in 1928, in his Constitutional Theory, the
theme of his article, written a year earlier, “Referendum and Petition for a Ref-
erendum,” Schmitt specifies the constitutive function of acclamation in public
law and does so precisely in the chapter dedicated to the analysis of the “theory of democracy.”
“People” is a concept that becomes present only in the public sphere [ Öffentlichkeit]. The people appear only in the public, and they first produce the pub-602
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lic generally. People and public exist together: no people without public and
no public without the people. By its presence, specifically, the people initiate the public. Only the present, truly assembled people are the people and produce
the public. The correct idea that supports Rousseau’s famous thesis that the people
cannot be represented rests on this truth. They cannot be represented, because
they must be present, and only something absent, not something present, may
be represented. As a present, genuinely assembled people, they exist in the pure
democracy with the greatest possible degree of identity: as [ ekklēsia] in the market of Greek democracy; in the Roman forum; as assembled team or army; as a local
government of a Swiss Land [ . . . ] The genuinely assembled people are first a
people, and only the genuinely assembled people can do that which pertains
distinctly to the activity of this people. They can acclaim in that they express their consent or disapproval simply by calling out, calling higher or lower, celebrating
a leader or a suggestion, honoring the king or some other person, or denying
the acclamation by silence or complaining [ . . . ] When indeed only the people
are actually assembled for whatever purpose, to the extent that it does not only
appear as an organized interest group, for example, during street demonstrations
and public festivals, in theaters, on the running track, or in the stadium, this
people engaged in acclamation is present, and it is, at least potentially, a political
entity. (Schmitt 2008b, p. 272)
Schmitt’s contribution here is not only to have established an indissoluble link
between acclamations and democracy as well as between acclamations and the
public sphere but also that of identifying the forms in which it can subsist in
contemporary democracies, in which “genuine popular assemblies and accla-
mations are entirely unknown” (ibid., p. 273). In contemporary democracies,
acclamations survive, according to Schmitt, in the sphere of public opinion and
only by setting out from the constitutive nexus of people—acclamation—public
opinion is it possible to reintegrate into its rights the notion of publicity, which
is today “rather obscure, [but] is essential for all political life, especially for mod-
ern democracy” (ibid., p. 272).
Public opinion is the modern type of acclamation. It is perhaps a diffuse type, and its problem is resolved neither sociologically nor in terms of public law. However, its essence and political significance lie in the fact that it can be understood
as an acclamation. There is no democracy and no state without public opinion,
as there is no state without acclamation. (Ibid., p. 275)
Of course, Schmitt is conscious of the essential risks that democracy is exposed
to, from such a perspective, with the manipulation of public opinion; but, in
accordance with the principle that the ultimate criterion of the political exis-
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tence of a people is its capacity to distinguish friend from enemy, he maintains
that, while that capacity exists, such risks are not decisive:
In every democracy, there are parties, speakers, and demagogues, from the [ prostatai] of the Athenians up to the bosses in American democracy. Moreover, there are the press, films, and other methods of psycho-technical handling of great
masses of people. All that escapes a comprehensive set of norms. The danger
always exists that invisible and irresponsible social powers direct public opinion
and the will of the people. (Ibid.)
More than the singular linking (which is already present in the 1927 article) of
acclamations to the genuine democratic tradition—they appear to belong rather
to the tradition of authoritarianism—what we wish to focus on is the suggestion
that the sphere of glory—of which we have attempted to reconstitute the mean-
ing and archaeology—does not disappear in modern democracies, but simply
shifts to another area, that of public opinion. If this is true, the problem of the
political function of the media in contemporary society that is so widely debated
today acquires a new meaning and a new urgency.
In 1967, Guy Debord—in what appears to us a truism today—diagnosed
the planetary transformation of capitalist politics and economy as an “im-
mense accumulation of spectacles” (Debord, p. 12) in which the commodity
and capital itself assume the mediatic form of the image. If we link Debord’s
analysis with Schmitt’s thesis according to which public opinion is the mod-
ern form of acclamation, the entire problem of the contemporary spectacle
of media domination over all areas of social life assumes a new guise. What is
in question is nothing less than a new and unheard of concentration, multi-
plication, and dissemination of the function of glory as the center of the po-
litical system. What was confined to the spheres of liturgy and ceremonials
has become concentrated in the media and, at the same time, through them it
spreads and penetrates at each moment into every area of society, both public
and private. Contemporary democracy is a democracy that is entirely founded
upon glory, that is, on the efficacy of acclamation, multiplied and dissemi-
nated by the media beyond all imagination. (That the Greek term for glory—
doxa—is the same term that today designates public opinion is, from this
standpoint, something more than a coincidence.) As had always been the case
in profane and ecclesiastical liturgies, this supposedly “originary democratic
phenomenon” is once again caught, orientated, and manipulated in the forms
and according to the strategies of spectacular power.
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We are now beginning to better understand the sense of the contempo-
rary definitions of democracy as “government by consent” or “consensus
democracy”* and the decisive transformation of the democratic institutions
that is at stake in these terms. In 1994, following the verdict of the German
Federal Court that rejected the appeal to the unconstitutional nature of the rat-
ification of the Maastricht Treaty, a debate took place in Germany between an
illustrious scholar of constitutional law, Dieter Grimm, and Jürgen Habermas.
In a brief article (significantly entitled in the interrogative, “Braucht Europa
eine Verfassung?,” “Does Europe Need a Constitution?”), the German consti-
tutional theorist intervened in the discussion, which was particularly animated
in Germany, between those who believed the treaties that had led to European
integration had formal constitutional value and those who instead believed that
an actual constitutional document would be required. He underlined the irre-
solvable difference between international treaties, whose juridical foundation
lies in the agreement between states, and constitutions that presuppose the con-
stitutive act of the people.
[ . . . ] It is inherent in a constitution in the full sense of the term that it goes back to an act taken by or at least attributed to the people, in which they attribute
political capacity to themselves. There is no such source for primary Community
law. It goes back not to a European people but to the individual member states,
and remains dependent on them even after its entry into force. (Grimm, p. 290)
Grimm had no nostalgia for the nation-state model or for that of the national
community whose unity is in some sense presupposed in a substantial form or
“rooted in ethnic origin” (ibid., p. 297); but he could not but register that the lack
of a European public opinion and of a common language makes the formation
even of something like a common political culture impossible, at least for now.
This thesis, which lucidly reflected the principles of modern public law, sub-
stantially coincided with the position of those sociologists, such as Lepsius, who,
in more or less the same years, while distinguishing between ethnos (national col-
lectivity based upon descent and homogeneity) and dēmos (the people as “ nation
of citizens”), had affirmed that Europe did not yet possess a common dēmos and
cannot therefore constitute a politically legitimate European power.
To this conception of the necessary relationship between people and con-
stitution, Habermas opposes the thesis of a popular sovereignty that is entirely
emancipated from a substantial subject-people (constituted by “members of a
* In English in the original.—Trans.
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HOMO SACER II, 4
collectivity who are physically present, participating, and involved”) and fully
resolved in the communicative forms without subject that, according to his idea
of publicity, “regulate the flows of the political formation of public opinion and
will” (Habermas, p. xxxix*). Once popular sovereignty dissolves itself and is lique-
fied in such communicative procedures, not only can the symbolic place of power
no longer be occupied by new symbols of identity, but the objections of constitu-
tionalists to the possibility that something like a “European people”—correctly,
that is communicatively, understood—can exist, also fall away.
It is well known that in subsequent years a “European constitution” was drafted,
with the unexpected consequence—which should have been anticipated—that
it was rejected by the “citizens as people” [“popolo dei cittadini ”] who were asked to ratify what was certainly not an expression of their constituent power. The fact
is that, if to Grimm and the theorists of the people- constitution nexus one could
object that they still harked back to the common presuppositions of language
and public opinion, to Habermas and the theorists of the people-communica-
tion one could easily object that they ended up passing political power into the
hands of experts and the media.
What our investigation has shown is that the holistic state, founded on the
immediate presence of the acclaiming people, and the neutralized state that re-
solves itself in the communicative forms without subject, are opposed only in
appearance. They are nothing but two sides of the same glorious apparatus in its
two forms: the immediate and subjective glory of the acclaiming people and the
mediatic and objective glory of social communication. As should be evident today,
people-nation and people-communication, despite the differences in behavior
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