Translator’s Note
647
Preface
649
1. Liturgy and Politics
653
Threshold
673
2. From Mystery to Effect
675
Threshold
701
3. A Genealogy of Office
703
Threshold
720
4. The Two Ontologies; or, How Duty Entered into Ethics
722
Threshold
750
Bibliography
753
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Translator’s Note
One difficulty facing the translator of this work was the multiplicity of Italian
terms connoting the concept of “duty.” The first is ufficio, which primarily con-
notes “duty” but can also mean “office” in the sense, for example, of holding a
political office. (Though the English term office can carry connotations of “duty,”
this meaning is somewhat antiquated.) Like the Latin term officium, which plays
a decisive role in Agamben’s archaeological investigation, this term can also refer
to the “Divine Office” or liturgy. I have rendered this term as “office,” “duty,” or
“office or duty,” depending on the context, and have frequently left the Italian
word in brackets. Most notably, the term ufficio is rendered as “duty” in the
subtitle of the work as a whole but as “office” in the title of the third chapter.
A related word is dovere, a noun meaning “duty” and also the infinitive of
the Italian auxiliary verb meaning “must, should, ought to, to have to.” One
challenge in translating this term comes in Agamben’s references to two ontol-
ogies, one of essere and one of dovere-essere. This distinction is often captured in English by juxtaposing the terms is and ought, but that conventional translation lacks the connotations of the imperative or command that Agamben associates
with the ontology of dovere-essere. Thus I translate this contrast as one between
“being” and “having-to-be.”
Finally, a much less frequent term is vece, which carries connotations of duty,
as well as alteration and vicarious action (as in the phrase fare le veci, to act in someone’s place or stead). When this term occurs, I have translated it according
to the context but left the Italian word in brackets.
Another difficulty stems from words related to the Latin term effectus: the
Italian effettuale, effettualità, etc. In Italian these terms are generally translated with words like real, actual, or true, but to emphasize the etymological connections Agamben is making, I have chosen to translate them more literally with the
English terms effective or effectiveness.
Works are cited according to the page number of the original text, followed
by the page number of the English translation (where applicable), or else by a
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HOMO SACER II, 5
standard textual division that is consistent across translations and editions. All
translations from the Bible are based on the New Revised Standard Version.
Translations have been frequently altered throughout for greater conformity
with Agamben’s usage. Where no English translation is listed in the bibliogra-
phy, the translations are my own. Where the main text is a close paraphrase of
a Latin quotation or where Agamben’s purpose in quoting a Latin text is simply
to demonstrate the presence of a particular term or phrase in that text, I have
often opted not to provide an English translation in order to avoid redundancy.
I would like to thank Giorgio Agamben, Kevin Attell, Colby Dickinson,
David U. B. Liu, and Harold Stone for their suggested improvements; Virgil
Brower and the rest of the Paul of Tarsus Interdisciplinary Working Group at
Northwestern University for inviting me to discuss a portion of the translation;
Junius Johnson for providing his translation of Agamben’s quotations from In-
nocent III’s De sacro altaris mysterio; Michael Hollerich for providing his trans-
lation of Peterson’s Theological Tractates; Henrik Wilberg and Kieran Healy for
bibliographical assistance; and Emily-Jane Cohen, Emma Harper, and the rest
of the staff of Stanford University Press.
Preface
Opus Dei is a technical term that, in the tradition of the Latin Catholic Church
that starts from the Rule of St. Benedict, designates the liturgy, that is, “the exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ. . . . In the liturgy the whole public
worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head
and His members” (Vatican Council II, Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, De-
cember 4, 1963).
The word liturgy (from the Greek leitourgia, “public services”) is, however, relatively modern. Before its use was extended progressively, beginning at the
end of the nineteenth century, we find in its place the Latin officium, whose se-
mantic sphere is not easy to define and in which nothing, at least at first glance,
would seem to have destined it for its unusual theological success.
In The Kingdom and the Glory we investigated the liturgical mystery above all
in the face it turns toward God, in its objective or glorious aspect. In this volume
our archaeological study is oriented toward the aspect that above all concerns
the priests, that is, the subjects to whom belongs, so to speak, the “ministry
of the mystery.” And just as in The Kingdom and the Glory we sought to clarify
the “mystery of the economy,” which theologians had constructed by reversing
a Pauline expression that was clear in itself, here it is a matter of tearing the li-
turgical mystery out of the obscurity and vagueness of the modern literature on
the subject, returning it to the rigor and splendor of the great medieval treatises
of Amalarius of Metz and William Durand. The liturgy is, in truth, not very
mysterious at all, to the point that one can say that, on the contrary, it coincides
with perhaps the most radical attempt to think a praxis that would be absolutely
and wholly effective. The mystery of the liturgy is, in this sense, the mystery of
effectiveness, and only if one understands this arcane secret is it possible to un-
derstand the enormous influence that this praxis, which is only apparently sepa-
rate, has exercised on the way in which modernity has thought both its ontology
and its ethics, its politics and its economy.
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HOMO SACER II, 5
As happens in every archaeological study, this one leads us well beyond the
sphere from which we started. As the diffusion of the term office in the most
diverse sectors of social life attests, the paradigm that the Opus Dei has offered to human action has been shown to constitute for the secular culture of the West
a pervasive and constant pole of attraction. It is more efficacious than the law
because it cannot be transgressed, only counterfeited. It is more real than being
because it consists only in the operation by means of which it is realized. It is
more effective than any ordinary human action because it acts ex opere operato,
independently of the qualities of the subject who officiates it. For all these rea-
sons, office has exercised on modern culture an influence so profound—that is,
subterra
nean—that we do not even realize that not only does the conceptuality
of Kantian ethics and of Kelsen’s pure theory of law (to name only two mo-
ments, though certainly decisive ones, in its history) depend entirely upon it,
but that the political militant and the ministerial functionary are also inspired in
the same way by the model of the “acts of office,” that is, duties.
The paradigm of the office signified, in this sense, a decisive transformation
of the categories of ontology and of praxis, whose importance still remains to
be measured. In office or duty, being and praxis, what a human does and what
a human is, enter into a zone of indistinction, in which being dissolves into its
practical effects and, with a perfect circularity, it is what it has to be and has to
be what it is. Operativity and effectiveness define, in this sense, the ontological
paradigm that in the course of a centuries-long process has replaced that of clas-
sical philosophy: in the last analysis—this is the thesis that our study will wish to
put forward for reflection—being and acting today have for us no representation
other than effectiveness. Only what is effective, and as such governable and effi-
cacious, is real: this is the extent to which office, under the guise of the humble
functionary or the glorious priest, has changed from top to bottom the rules of
first philosophy as much as those of ethics.
It is possible that today this paradigm is going through a decisive crisis, the
results of which cannot be foreseen. Despite the renewed attention toward lit-
urgy in the twentieth century, of which the so-called “liturgical movement” in
the Catholic Church on the one hand and the imposing political liturgies of the
totalitarian regimes on the other are an eloquent testimony, many signs allow
one to think that the paradigm that office or duty has offered to human action is
losing its attractive power precisely when it has reached its maximum expansion.
Thus, it was all the more necessary to try to establish its characteristics and define
its strategies.
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To act is said in two ways:
1. the true and primary act, that is, to produce things from non-being to being
2. to produce an effect in that in which an effect is produced.
—Al-Kindī
The work of art is the setting-to-work of the truth of Being.
—Martin Heidegger
1
Liturgy and Politics
1. The etymology and meaning of the Greek term leitourgia (from which our
word liturgy derives) are clear. Leitourgia (from laos, people, and ergon, work) means “public work” and in classical Greece designates the obligation
that the city imposes on the citizens who have a certain income to provide a
series of services for the common interest. These services ranged from the orga-
nization of gymnasia and gymnastic games ( gymnasiarchia) to the preparation
of a chorus for the city festival ( chorēgia, for example the tragic choruses for the Dionysian festival), from the acquisition of grain and oil ( sitēgia) to arming and commanding a trireme ( triērarchia) in case of war, from directing the city’s delegation to the Olympic or Delphic games ( architheōria) to the expectation that
the fifteen richest citizens would pay the city for all the citizens’ property taxes
( proeisphora). It was a matter of services that were of a personal and real character (“each one,” writes Demosthenes, “liturgizes both with person and with property” [ tois sōmasi kai tais ousiais lēitourgēsai]; Fourth Philippic Oration 28) that, even if they were not numbered among the magistracies ( archai), had a part in
the “care of common things” ( tōn koinōn epimeleian; Isocrates 25). Although the
services of the liturgy could be extremely onerous (the verb kataleitourgeō meant
“to be ruined by liturgies”) and there were citizens (called for this reason diadrasi-
politai, “citizens in hiding”) who sought by every means to exempt themselves
from them, the fulfillment of the liturgies was seen as a way of obtaining honor
and reputation, to the point that many (the prime example, referred to by Lysis,
is that of a citizen who had spent in nine years more than twenty thousand
drachmae for the liturgies) did not hesitate to renounce their right not to serve
the liturgies for the two following years. Aristotle, in the Politics (1309a18–21), cautions against the custom, typical of democracies, of “costly but useless liturgies like equipping choruses and torch-races and all other similar services.”
Since the expenses for the cult also concern the community ( ta pros tous
theous dapanēmata koina pasēs tēs poleōs estin), Aristotle can write that a part of the common land must be assigned to the liturgies for the gods ( pros tous theous
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HOMO SACER II, 5
leitourgias; ibid., 1330a13). The lexicons register numerous witnesses, both epi-
graphic and literary, of this cultic use of the term, which we will see taken up
again with a singular continuity both in Judaism and among Christian authors.
Moreover, as often happens in these cases, the technico-political meaning of the
term, in which the reference to the “public” is always primary, is extended, at
times jokingly, to services that have nothing to do with politics. A few pages
after the passage cited, Aristotle can thus speak, in reference to the season best
suited to sexual reproduction, of a “public service for the procreation of chil-
dren” ( leitourgein . . . pros teknopoiian; ibid., 1335b29); in the same sense, with even more accentuated irony, an epigram will evoke “the liturgies” of a prostitute
( Anthologia Palatina 5.49.1; qtd. in Strathmann, 217). It is inexact to claim that in these cases “the significance of the lēitos [public element] is lost” (Strathmann, 217). On the contrary, the expression always acquires its antiphrastic sense only in
relation to the originary political meaning. When the same Aristotle presents as
a “liturgy” the nursing of puppies on the part of the mother ( De animalia incessu
711b30; qtd. in Strathmann, 217) or when we read in a papyrus the expression “to
oblige to private liturgies” ( Oxyrhynchus Papyri 3.475.18; qtd. in Strathmann, 218), in both cases the ear must perceive the forcing implicit in the metaphorical shift
of the term from the public and social sphere to the private and natural sphere.
א The system of liturgies ( munera in Latin) reached its greatest diffusion in imperial Rome starting in the third century ad. Once Christianity becomes so to speak the religion
of the State, the problem of the exemption of the clergy from the obligation of public
services acquires a special interest. Already Constantine had established that “those who
see to the ministry of the divine cult [ divini cultui ministeria impendunt], that is, those who are called clergy, must be completely exempted from any public service [ ab omnibus omnino muneribus excusentur]” (qtd. in Drecoll, 56). Although this exemption implied the risk that affluent people would become clergy to escape onerous munera, as a subsequent decree of Constantine that prohibited decuriones from taking part in the clergy proves, the privilege was maintained, albeit with various limitations.
This proves that the priesthood was seen in some way as a public service and this may
be among the reasons that will lead to the specialization of the term leitourgia in a cultic sense in the sphere of Greek-speaking Christianity.
&n
bsp; 2. The history of a term often coincides with the history of its translations
or of its use in translations. An important moment in the history of the term
leitourgia thus comes when the Alexandrian rabbis who carried out the trans-
lation of the Bible into Greek choose the verb leitourgeō (often combined with
leitourgia) to translate the Hebrew šeret whenever this term, which means generically “to serve,” is used in a cultic sense. Starting from its first appearance
OPUS DEI
655
in reference to Aaron’s priestly functions, in which leitourgeō is used absolutely ( en tōi leitourgein: Exodus 28:35), the term is often used in a technical combination with leitourgia to indicate the cult in the “tent of the Lord” ( leitourgein tēn leitourgian . . . en tēi skēnēi; Numbers 8:22, referring to the Levites; leitourgein tas leitourgias tēs skēnēs kyriou, in 16:9). Scholars have wondered about this choice
with respect to other available Greek terms, like latreuō or douleō, which are generally reserved for less technical meanings in the Septuagint. It is more than
probable that the translators were well aware of the “political” meaning of the
Greek term, if one remembers that the Lord’s instructions for the organization of
the cult in Exodus 25–30 (in which the term leitourgein appears for the first time) are only an explication of the pact that a few pages earlier constituted Israel as
a chosen people and as a “kingdom of priests” ( mamleket kohanim) and a “holy
nation” ( goj qados) (Exodus 19:6). It is significant that the Septuagint here has recourse to the Greek term laos ( esesthe moi laos periousios apo pantōn tōn ethnōn,
“you shall be my treasured people out of all the nations”; Exodus 19:5) in order
then to subsequently reinforce its “political” meaning by translating the text’s
“kingdom of priests” as “royal priesthood” ( basileion hierateuma, an image sig-
nificantly taken up again in the First Epistle of Peter 2:9—“you are a chosen race,
a basileon hierateuma”—and in Revelation 1:6) and goj qados as ethnos hagion.
The election of Israel as “people of God” immediately institutes its liturgical
function (the priesthood is immediately royal, that is, political) and thus sancti-
fies it insofar as it is a nation (the normal term for Israel is not goj, but am qados, laos hagios, “holy people”; Deuteronomy 7:6).
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