The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  Already in the preface the declared goal of the treatise is not the theoretical

  analysis of the essence of religio but the practical and juridical presentation of the debitum that is in question in it. Just as the divine wisdom does not limit itself to illuminating the mind with knowledge, but also furnishes a norm to the will,

  so also would theology be less praiseworthy if it limited itself to illuminating the

  mind without guiding customs ( si mentem illustraret, non mores dirigeret). “For

  this reason,” concludes Suárez, “I could do no less than to become immersed in

  the explanation of these questions, which teach us to render to God the worship

  that is due to him [ quae nos Deo debitum cultum edocerent]” (Suárez, 1).

  To the citations from Isidore and Augustine, to which Aquinas referred for

  the etymology of the term religio, Suárez thus adds one from Lactantius, which

  has at its center the juridical notion of the vinculum that obliges the human

  being to God ( religionem dictam esse ab illo vinculo naturali, quo Deo obligamur).

  The definition of religion that follows strictly unifies duty and habit in the idea

  of a virtue that is at the same time an officium: “the name of religion can thus be correctly explained: since the rational creature is bound by a natural debt and by

  an intimate inclination to offer worship to its author, it is bound anew [ religatur]

  by a voluntary choice and by a habit added to it. Therefore the virtue that fulfills

  this officium can be called religio” (ibid., 5).

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  Thanks to this coincidence of virtue and duty, in the following chapters

  debitum can be constituted as the “definition and formal object” ( ratio et objectum formale) of religion. What defines religio as a virtue is not simply the fact that by means of it worship and honor are rendered to God, but that these are rendered

  to him solo in quanto dovuti: “the function of justice is to render duty, but religion is part of justice. . . . Moreover the honor and worship of God form a part of religion only insofar as they are duties [ honor et cultus Dei non cadit in religione, nisi ut ei debitus]” (ibid., 20). For this reason, against those who distinguish religious duty (which is owed to God solely by reason of his excellence) from legal duty

  (which also derives from a juridical precept), Suárez affirms the properly legal

  nature of the debitum religionis: “religion . . . renders to God the worship that

  is owed to him by right [ iure proprio illi debitum] and moreover the duty that it

  fulfills is not generically moral, but proper and legal [ non utcumque morale, sed

  proprium et legale]” (ibid., 22). In the idea of a being that is totally dissolved into a debt, into a having to be, law and religion necessarily coincide.

  11. Two points in Suárez’s treatise are of particular interest to us. The first is

  where he specifies the legal nature of the bond that unites the human being and

  God in religion with the term respect ( reverentia—the same word with which Kant will translate the German term Achtung in the Metaphysics of Morals, where it defines the nonempirical feeling that the human being experiences before the

  moral law). Respect does not coincide with obedience because while the first has

  to do with the excellence of the person ( directe respicere personam excellentem),

  the second concerns solely the concrete norm that emanates from it ( personae ex-

  cellentis praeceptum; Suárez, 13). If one remembers that for Suárez religious duty has a juridical character, the subtlety with which he distinguishes respect (which

  is a duty, but so to speak to the law as such propter excellentiam, independently

  of the concrete content of the norms) from obedience (which has to do solely

  with a certain normative content) is all the more striking. Religion is the virtue

  that applies to God by means of a duty that derives not from a norm but from

  the respect that the law as such—or rather, the legislator—inspires.

  The second point is where Suárez defines religious duty as an “infinite debt.”

  In contrast with other human duties, the debt that is in question in religio can-

  not be satisfied once and for all, because it is in its essence inexhaustible: “It

  cannot happen, in fact, that the material and debt of religion can be exhausted

  [ exhauriri possit], because it is proper to this virtue that its debt can never be absolved and fulfilled [ impleri solutione], both because it is a matter of a debt that is in some way infinite [ debitum quodammodo infinitum] and because it grows with

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  its very satisfaction, insofar as through this the human being receives a further

  benefit. This does not happen in justice with respect to human beings, whose

  debt can be wiped out with its satisfaction, in such a way that there is no place to

  display justice any further. Through the acts of religion, by contrast, the human

  being can never exhaust the debt that he has before God” (ibid., 22).

  In the figure of a virtue that can never fully satisfy its debt, the idea—so

  dear to the moderns—of an infinite task or duty makes its first appearance in

  Western ethics. As Kant will write almost two centuries later, “Virtue is always

  in progress and yet always starts from the beginning.—It is always in progress because, considered objectively, it is an ideal and unattainable, while yet constant approximation to it is duty” (Kant 1, 409/537).

  Here one clearly sees that the idea of a “duty-to-be” is neither solely ethical

  nor solely ontological; rather, it aporetically binds being and praxis in the musi-

  cal structure of a fugue, in which acting exceeds being not only because it always

  gives it new precepts but also and above all because being itself has no content

  other than a pure debt.

  12. In the genealogy of the idea of duty Samuel Pufendorf’s letter to Chris-

  tian Thomasius of July 17, 1688, occupies a peculiar place. In it we in fact find

  clearly affirmed for the first time, even if in a cursory way, the principle accord-

  ing to which the category that must guide the discussion of ethics is not virtue

  but duty. “On the other hand,” Pufendorf writes to his friend, “I consider it a

  strong argument for rational people that one must not organize morality accord-

  ing to Aristotle’s eleven virtues, from the moment that I could demonstrate that

  they were adapted only to a certain type of republic. And in general [ in univer-

  sum] my opinion is that one must not organize and discuss morality according to

  virtues, but according to duties [ die Morale nicht secundum virtutes, sed secundum

  officia einrichten und tractiren soll ]” (Pufendorf 1, 197).

  Since this peremptory thesis marks the entrance into modern ethics of the

  idea of duty that was never again to leave it, it will be useful to linger on the

  modalities and context of its enunciation. First of all, the objection against

  the virtues is articulated in two moments, one specific and one general ( in

  universum). The first refers to the fact that, as Pufendorf had suggested in the

  immediately preceding letter of June 19, in formulating his ethics Aristotle in

  reality had in mind those Greek democracies that he considered the best type

  of republics. This narrow formulation is followed by the more general affir-

  mation according to which ethics must not be treated according to virtue but

  according to duty.

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  It is characteristic of Pufendorf’s letters that they are often presented as a

  series of digressions (each time introduced by a brusque sonsten, “on the other

  hand”) that, at least in appearance, seem to have no connection among them.

  In this case the passage that immediately precedes, from which the paratac-

  tic sonsten would be taking distance, contains a fierce critique of the thought

  of Spinoza. Pufendorf, who in his letter of June 16 had evoked his encounter

  with the philosopher, ironically defined as “ein leichtfertiger vogel [a thoughtless character], deorum hominumque irrisor, who has bound in one volume the New

  Testament and the Koran,” shows that he knows the thinker well, because he

  indicates the root of his “brazen atheism” ( welcher ein unverschämter atheist ist) in the concept of immanent cause: “to the extent to which he calls God causam

  immanentem omnium rerum, he says nothing different from what Orpheus had

  said according to Aristotle, Apuleius in the De mundo, and Virgil in book six of

  the Aeneid ” (ibid., 195).

  The three passages in question (in particular the last two) do not in any

  way contain a negation of the existence of God but a radical formulation of

  pantheism ( omnia Iove plena esse in the words of Apuleius, De mundo, 34; the citation from Virgil refers to the celebrated spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus / mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet [one primal Mind, immin-gled with the vast and general frame, fills every part and stirs the mighty whole];

  Aeneid 6.724–27). Atheism, in the philosophical discourse of the time, does not

  designate those who deny the existence of God but those who deny the divine

  governance of the world, that is, providence. It is in this sense that Leibniz could

  write of Spinoza that “he was truly an atheist.” Perhaps there is therefore a con-

  nection between the critique of Spinoza and the affirmation of officium for ethics, which it will now be helpful to investigate.

  13. In 1673 Pufendorf published De officio hominis et civis ( On the Duty of

  Man and the Citizen), in which he summarized the results of his magnum opus,

  De iure naturae et gentium ( On the Law of Nature and of the Nations, 1672), organizing them around the concept of officium. At the same time, he actualized

  the project earlier enunciated in the letter to Thomasius of an ethics articulated

  according to duties and not according to virtues. In the book of 1672 the sphere

  of ethical-juridical phenomena had been defined as that of entia moralia (that is, with a terminology borrowed precisely from the atheist Spinoza), the “modes”

  of which are added to physical beings “for the purpose of directing and regu-

  lating the free, voluntary actions of human beings, and for giving human life a

  certain order and grace” (Pufendorf 2, 14/100). And just as physical substances

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  presuppose a space in which they consist and move, so also to moral beings

  there corresponds a “state” ( status), in which they “exercise their actions and

  their effects.” The action of moral beings (in particular of persons) in the sphere

  of the “state” is defined by their imputativitas, that is, by the fact that they and their effects can and must be imputed to agents. The obligation that arises from

  these actions does not coincide with external constraint but penetrates into the

  very will of the agent, as a sort of intrinsic moral sense ( obligatio vero moraliter

  voluntatem afficiat et peculiari quasi sense eandem intrinsece imbuat; ibid., 72/121), which leads it to conform to the prescription of the norm.

  In De officio, duty ( officium) is the term that designates human action insofar as it conforms to the obligation that arises from the prescription of natural law

  ( officium . . . vocatur actio hominis, pro ratione obligationis ad praescriptum legis

  recte attemperata; Pufendorf 3, 13/17). The fundamental principle of the law of

  nature, to which officium must conform, is socialitas, which is formulated in these terms: “every man ought to do as much as he can to cultivate and preserve

  sociality [ cuilibet homini quantum in se colendam et servandam societatem]” (ibid., 23/35). To found this precept and confer the force of law to it, Pufendorf has

  need not only of a God but of a transcendent God who governs the world with

  his providence: “these precepts get the force of law [ vim legis obtineat] only upon the presuppositions that God exists and governs all things by his providence

  [ deum esse et sua providentia omnia regere]” (ibid., 23/36). Unlike other creatures, in fact, the human being is constituted in such a way that it cannot survive

  as a human being without society ( citra socialem vitam): “the human being is

  obligated by God to observe natural law, which is not a product of human will

  and changeable at his pleasure, as the means which God himself has established

  expressly to achieve this end” (ibid., 23/36). For this reason there is no difference

  between denying that God exists and denying that God cares for human affairs:

  “both opinions utterly undermine all religion [ cum utrumque omnem religionem

  plane tollat]” (ibid., 25/40). There is therefore a connection between the critique of Spinozism and putting forth duty as a fundamental category of ethics: it is a

  matter, in both cases, of affirming the solidarity between divine governance of

  the world and imputability of human actions. The threefold division of duties

  into duties toward God, toward oneself, and toward others confirms this soli-

  darity. Situated on the hinge between human socialitas and divine providence,

  officium renders governance possible and guarantees its effectiveness.

  א The specific service of Pufendorf’s work is that of diverting the tradition of natural

  law into the concept of officium. Before him, Hobbes had already declared in the preface of the De cive that the goal of his treatise was to define “the duties [ officia] of men, first as

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  men, then as citizens” ( On the Citizen, 7), and it is likely that the very title of Pufendorf’s book was only a summary of this program. But as Strauss showed already in a 1933 review

  and then in the 1936 book The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, in reality Hobbes substitutes for the notion of duty that of right (the right to the conservation of life, founded not on a divine precept but on human beings’ fear in the face of violent death). Naturally, this

  right can also be presented as a duty, as happens at times in Strauss himself: “in Hobbes

  there is only one basis for duty: the fear of violent death” (Strauss, 258).

  א In Jean Domat the articulation of law in terms of duty is already complete. When,

  at the beginning of his treatise on public law (1697), the great French jurist defines the foundation of the police générale d’un État with the term devoir, what he names with this term is, however, nothing but the officium of which we have sought to reconstruct the genealogy. “Tout le monde sait,” he writes, “que la société des hommes forme un corps dont chacun est membre, et cette vérité que l’Écriture nous apprend et que la lumière de la raison nous rend évidente, est le fondement de tous les devoirs qui regardent la conduite de chacun envers tous les autres et envers le corps. Car ce sort de devoirs ne sont autre chose que les fonctions propres aux engagements où chacun se trouve par le rang qu’il tient dans le corps.” (Everyone knows that human society forms a body of which each is a member, and this truth that

  Scripture teaches us and that the light of reason renders evident to us is the foundation of al
l the duties that concern the conduct of each toward all the others and toward the body.

  For these kinds of duties are nothing but the functions proper to engagements where each

  is found according to the rank that he holds in the body.) (Domat, 2). For this reason the term devoir is closely connected in Domat with the term conduite: the life and action of human beings in society is always “conduct,” the object of a guidance and a governance.

  14. It is obvious that the paradigm of duty or office [ ufficio] finds its most ex-

  treme and aporetic formulation in Kantian ethics. Since this is certainly not the

  place for an exhaustive investigation of Kantian ethics in light of duty or office,

  we will limit ourselves to indicating the most obvious connections, which others

  will be able to integrate in detail.

  It is in the last work that Kant dedicated to morality, the Metaphysics of

  Morals of 1797, that these connections are clearly shown even on the lexical

  level. At the center of his treatise Kant places the concept of a “duty to virtue”

  ( Tugendpflicht), the concept of “an end that is also a duty” (Kant 1, 395/525). In identifying duty and virtue, it is a question of bringing the dimension of ethics

  to coincide with that of an action whose sole motive and impulse ( Triebfeder)

  is duty. But this is precisely what defines the paradigm of duty or office, in

  particular in its extreme figure of religio, in which, as we have seen, the theory of the virtues had been firmly joined with liturgical office, opening up the road

  to the project, already clearly formulated in Pufendorf, of an ethics founded on

  duties. If the whole theological tradition that we have examined, from Ambrose

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  to Suárez, tends in the last analysis to arrive at a zone of indifference between

  virtue and duty or office, Kantian ethics, with its “duty of virtue,” is the complete

  realization of this project. Here it is not a matter, however, so much of verifying

  the immediate genetic connections (the idea of a “duty of virtue”— Pflicht der

  Tugend—is already explicitly formulated in Crusius and Meier, and Kant did not

  have any need to extract it from the theory of religio in Suárez). Instead, what is at stake is to understand that if the aberrant idea of an action carried out only