The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

transformation of the first Aristotelian category is to be read in connection

  with the doctrine of the three hypostases of the one divine substance that had

  prevailed in the Church starting with Athanasius. Dörrie has shown that in

  Athanasius “hypostasis” no longer means a reality ( Realität), but a realization

  ( Realisierung), in which one same essence is manifested and rendered effective

  in three aspects or, as will be said later, persons (Dörrie, 60). And it is this oper-

  ative meaning of the term substance, in which the act of realizing and rendering

  effective remains in the foreground, that theologians will make use of to inter-

  pret the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews (11:1) in which faith is defined as

  “the substance of things hoped for” ( sperandarum substantia rerum, elpizomenōn hypostasis). “Since things in hope are without substance [ anhypostata],” writes John Chrysostom, “faith offers substance to them [ hypostasin autois charizetai]”

  (qtd. in Dörrie, 63). And Haimo of Auxerre will write in the same sense: Resur-

  rectio generalis necdum facta est et cum necdum sit in substantia, spes facit subsistere in anima nostra (The general resurrection has not yet been done, and while it

  is not yet in substance, hope causes it to subsist in our soul; qtd. in ibid., 61).

  Being does not exist but is done and realized; it is, in any case, the result of a

  praxis, of which faith is the operator. According to the formulation cited from

  Marius Victorinus, in faith the working itself is being. Christian faith is a mobi-

  lization of ontology, in which what is in question is the transformation of being

  into operativity.

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  16. In the paradigm of operativity, a process that was present from the very

  beginning of Western ontology, even if in a latent form, reaches its culmination:

  the tendency to resolve, or at least to indeterminate, being into acting. In this

  sense the potential-act distinction in Aristotle is certainly ontological ( dynamis

  and energeia are “two ways in which being is said”): nevertheless, precisely be-

  cause it introduces a division into being and afterward affirms the primacy of

  energeia over dynamis, it implicitly contains an orientation of being toward operativity. This distinction constitutes the originary nucleus of the ontology of

  effectiveness, whose very terminology takes form, as we have seen, by means

  of a translation of the term energeia. Being is something that must be realized

  or brought-into-work: this is the decisive characteristic that Neoplatonism and

  Christian theology develop, starting from Aristotle, but in what is certainly a

  non-Aristotelian perspective.

  The place and moment when classical ontology begins that process of trans-

  formation that will lead to the Christian and modern ontology is the theory of

  the hypostases in Plotinus (which will exercise a decisive influence on Augus-

  tine’s trinitarian doctrine through Marius Victorinus). An essential function is

  here developed by the very term hypostasis. Dörrie has shown, as we have seen,

  that this term—which in Hippocratic treatises still meant “sediment, deposit”—

  already in Neoplatonism, and afterward in Christian authors, acquires an active

  meaning and designates the realization of a transcendent principle; it means, that

  is to say, not Realität but Realisierung. To the extent that the One becomes more and more transcendent, it is all the more essential that it be given reality through

  three hypostases, which will constitute the logical model of the Christian Trinity

  (Picavet, passim). But this means that ontology is conceived fundamentally as a

  realization and a hypostatic process of putting-to-work, in which the categories

  of classical ontology (being and praxis, potential and act) tend to be indetermi-

  nated and the concept of will, as we will see, develops a central function.

  The operator of this indetermination in Plotinus is the term hoion (as if, so

  to speak), whose strategic meaning clearly appears in the passage of the Enneads

  in which the will to overcome the duality of being and acting, potential and act,

  goes together with the impossibility of dropping it altogether. In Enneads 6.8.7

  Plotinus writes with regard to the One:

  His, so to speak [ hoion], hypostasis and his, as it were, energeia are not two distinct things (they are not this even in the intellect); neither is the energeia according to [ kata] its being, nor the being according to the energeia. It cannot possess being in action [ energein] as something that follows from its nature, nor will its activity and its life, as we may call it, be referred to its, in a manner of speaking,

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  substance, but its (something like) substance is with and, so to put it, originates

  with its energeia and it itself makes itself from both, for itself and from nothing.

  The technical use of hoion (Plotinus affirms it without reserve; ibid., 6.8.13: “one should understand and always add hoion to every individual concept”) and the

  final idea of a synousia and of a conjoined generation of substance and energeia, shows how a tendency toward the indetermination of the categories of classical

  ontology is at work in Neoplatonism that will lead to the elaboration of the

  paradigm of effectiveness in the Christian sphere.

  17. In his 1941 course “Metaphysics as History of Being,” reprinted in the

  second volume of Nietzsche in the Gesamtausgabe (1961), Heidegger dedicates an important section to the “change of energeia to actualitas” ( Die Wandel der energeia zur actualitas). “Now ergon,” he writes,

  becomes the opus of the operari, the factum of the facere, the actus of the agire. The ergon is no longer what is freed in the openness of presencing [ das ins Offene des Anwesens Freigelassene], but what is effected in working [ das im Wirken Gewirkte].

  The essence of the “work” is no longer “workness” [ Werkheit] in the sense of dis-

  tinctive presencing in the open, but rather the “reality” [ dies Wirklichkeit] of a real thing which rules in working and is fitted into the procedure of working. Having

  progressed from the beginning essence of energeia, Being has become actualitas.

  (Heidegger 1, 412/12)

  Heidegger identifies the Roman matrix of this transformation (from the point of

  view of historiography, it is a matter of a “transition from the Greek to the Roman

  conceptual language”) and signals the determinant influence that the “Roman

  church” exercised in it (ibid.). The ontological paradigm that oriented this trans-

  formation of ontology according to Heidegger is, however, “the biblical-Christian

  faith in creation”: “Being which has changed to actualitas gives to beings as a

  whole that fundamental characteristic which the representational thinking of the

  biblical-Christian faith in creation can take over in order to secure metaphysical

  justification for itself” (ibid., 414/14).

  The above analyses have shown that the decisive theological paradigm of the

  ontology of operativity is not the concept of creation but rather the sacramental

  liturgy, with its theses on the effectus of the opus operatum. In this sense the investigations undertaken here reconstruct a missing chapter in the history of the

  transformation of energeia into actualitas and must be understood—like those of Heidegger, of which they represent a completion—as a contribution, thought

  from the perspective of the history of being ( sein
sgeschichtlich; ibid., 415/15), to the “destruction” of the ontology of modernity.

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  Putting the creationist paradigm at the center of his reconstruction of the his-

  tory of being leads Heidegger to define the central trait of modern metaphysics

  as a working in the sense of a causing and producing. The ergon, which named

  the persistence of being in presence in a form, now becomes the product of an

  effectuating and a producing:

  When Being has changed to actualitas (reality), beings are what is real. They

  are determined by working, in the sense of causal making. The reality of hu-

  man action and divine creation can be explained in terms of this. . . . Esse, in

  contradistinction to essentia, is esse actu. Actualitas, however, is causalitas. The causal character of Being as reality shows itself in all purity in that being which

  fulfills the essence of being in the highest sense, since it is that being which can

  never not be. Thought “theologically,” this being is called “God.” . . . The high-

  est being is pure actuality [ Verwirklichung] always fulfilled, actus purus. (Ibid., 414–15/14–15)

  Standing before God is the human world understood as the effectiveness that

  is caused by creation: “The real is the existing. The existing includes everything

  which through some manner of causality constituitur extra causas. But because

  the whole of beings is the effected and effective product [ das Gewirkte-Wirkende]

  of a first producer [ Wirker], an appropriate structure enters the whole of beings

  which determines itself as the co-responding of the actual produced being to

  the producer as the highest being” (419/18). And it is this conception of being as

  effectiveness that, according to Heidegger, renders possible the transformation

  of truth into certainty, in which the human being, whom faith in God renders

  certain of salvation, secures its unconditional dominion over the world by means

  of techniques.

  One can ask to what extent this reconstruction of the determinate influence

  of Christian theology on the history of being is indebted to the privilege ac-

  corded to the creationist paradigm. It is by virtue of this model that Heidegger

  could think the essence of technology as production and disposition and the

  Gestell as the securing of the real in the mode of availability. But precisely for this reason he was not able to see what has today become perfectly obvious, and that

  is that one cannot understand the metaphysics of technology if one understands

  it only in the form of production. It is just as much and above all governance

  and oikonomia, which in the last analysis can even provisionally put causal pro-

  duction between parentheses in the name of a more refined and diffuse form of

  management of human beings and of things. And it is this peculiar praxis whose

  characteristics we have sought to define through our analysis of liturgy.

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  א In his reconstruction of the passage from energeia to actualitas, Heidegger never mentions the terms that, as we have seen, furnish the first Latin translation of energeia, namely effectus and operatio, and prefers to concentrate on the word actualitas, which appears only in late scholasticism. It is possible that there are reasons for this internal to his thought, the ontology of which is more in solidarity with the paradigm of operativity

  that he intends to critique than is commonly believed. The being of Dasein, that is, of the being whose essence lies in existence and which, insofar as it must each time assume

  its being thrown into facticity, has to be its own ways of being—it is decisively effective, even if in a peculiar sense. Since “it has to do, in its being, with its own being,” Dasein is not, but has to be its own being, that is, must realize it and render it effective. For this reason, Dasein can be presented in Heidegger at the same time as a given and as an accomplishment, that is, as something that exists in the mode of its own incessant effectuation.

  It is significant, from this perspective, that even at the foundation of the Heideggerian

  interpretation of the work of art (which is put forth consistently as ontological and not

  aesthetic), one finds an analogous operative paradigm. The celebrated definition of art

  as a “setting-to-work of truth” ( das Kunst ist das Ins-Werk-setzen der Wahrheit; Heidegger 2, 64/55) in the last analysis presupposes an operative ontology. In the Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) the work of art is what “effectuates [ erwirkt] Being in a being” and

  “to effectuate [ erwirken] means to bring-into-work” (Heidegger 3, 122/170). Being is something that must be “brought-into-work,” and art and philosophy are the agents of

  this operation.

  In the Zusatz added to the Ursprung des Kunstwerks ( Origin of the Work of Art) in 1956, Heidegger, who uses the term Gestell in the essay (“What we here call ‘figure’ [ Gestalt] is always to be thought out of that particular placing [ stellen] and placement [ Ge-stell ] as which the work comes to presence when it sets itself up and sets itself forth [ sich aufund herstellt]”; Heidegger 2, 50), can thus significantly evoke without reservation the mutual belonging between the Gestell that takes place in the work of art and the Gestell as the term that designates technological production (ibid., 67–68). A little before, he points

  out the ambiguity implicit in the expression in-das-Werk-setzen, which can mean both that being is brought into work by itself and that it has need of human intervention for

  this. In Heideggerian ontology, being-there and being, Dasein and Sein are implicated in a relationship of reciprocal effectuation, in which, as in the paradigm of liturgical operativity, one can say both that being-there brings being into work and renders it effective and that being actualizes being-there. In any case the relationship between Dasein and Sein is something like a liturgy, an at once ontological and political performance.

  Threshold

  LET us attempt to summarize in thesis form the characteristics that define

  the ontology of the liturgical mystery.

  1. In liturgy what is in question is a new ontological-practical paradigm,

  namely that of effectiveness, in which being and acting enter into a threshold of

  undecidability. If, in the words of Foucault, Plato taught the politician not what

  he must do but what he must be in order ultimately to act well (Foucault 1, 273),

  now it is a matter of showing how one must act in order to be able to be—or,

  rather, of reaching a point of indifference, in which the priest is what he has to

  do and he has to do what he is. The subordination of acting to being, which

  defines classical philosophy, thus loses its meaning.

  2. While being and substance are independent of the effects that they can

  produce, in effectiveness being is thus indiscernible from its effects; it consists in

  them ( esse in effectu) and it is “functional” to them.

  3. An essential characteristic of effectiveness is operativity. We understand

  with this term the fact that being does not simply exist but is “brought into

  work,” is effectuated and actualized. Consequently, energeia no longer designates

  being-at-work as a full dwelling of presence but an “operativity” in which the

  very distinctions between potential and act, operation and work are indetermi-

  nated and lose their sense. The opus is the operatio itself and the divine potency, which in its very virtuality is brought into work and actualized, is operative ( operatoria virtus Dei). Operativity is, in this sense, a real virtuality or a virtual reality.

  4. In this d
imension cause and effect persist, but at the same time they are

  indeterminated: on the one hand, the agent acts only insofar as it is an effect in

  its turn (insofar as it is, as an instrument, acted upon by a principal agent); on

  the other, the effect is autonomized by its cause (which is only its instrumental,

  not efficient or final, cause).

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  5. Consequently, the sacramental action is divided in two: a manifest action

  ( opus operans or operantis) that seems to act but in reality does nothing but offer the instrument and the “place” [ vece] to a hidden agent, to whom all the operation’s efficacy belongs. But it is precisely owing to this separation of an action

  (reduced to instrumental cause) from its efficacy that the sacramental operation

  can unfailingly attain its effectiveness ex opere operato.

  3

  A Genealogy of Office

  1. In the history of the Church the term that names the effective praxis whose

  characteristics we are seeking to define is not liturgy (which in Latin appears

  only starting from the seventeenth century and prevails as a general technical

  term only in the twentieth century) but officium.

  Certainly in the early centuries various terms compete in the translation of

  the Greek leitourgia and serve more generally to designate the function that it

  expressed. First of all, there is the term that indicated the political liturgy in

  the Roman Empire: munus. Since munus corresponded perfectly to leitourgia in Roman political-juridical vocabulary, secular sources speak indifferently of

  munera decurionum, curialium, gladitorium, annonarium, militiae, and so forth

  and distinguish, as the Greeks did for leitourgia, among munera personalia, munera patrimonii, and munera mixta. It is not surprising, therefore, to see the term pass in time into the vocabulary of the Church to designate either the divine service

  of the priest generically or else the very sacrifice of Christ. Still in Ambrose, who

  also provides a decisive impulse in the use of the term officium, both meanings

  are attested. Recounting in a letter that while he was beginning to celebrate mass

  in the new basilica, some of the faithful had departed at the news of the arrival