The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  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),

  THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY

  601

  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

  THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY

  603

  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-

  604

  HOMO SACER II, 4

  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.

  THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY

  605

  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.

  606

  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