The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  the nudity of a material thing that is antithetical to the spirit but the nudity of

  our entire Being, in all its plenitude and solidity, in its most brutal expression,

  of which one cannot not be aware. The whistle that Charlie Chaplin swallows

  in City Lights makes appear the scandal of the brutal presence of his Being; it is like a recording device that allows one to lay bare the discrete signs of a presence

  that the legendary Charlot cloak barely hides . . . . What is shameful is our in-

  timacy, that is, our presence to ourselves. It reveals not our nothingness but the

  totality of our existence. . . . What shame discovers is the Being that discovers

  itself. (Levinas 1982: 87)

  Let us seek to deepen Levinas’s analysis. To be ashamed means to be con-

  signed to something that cannot be assumed. But what cannot be assumed is not

  something external. Rather, it originates in our own intimacy; it is what is most

  intimate in us (for example, our own physiological life). Here the “I” is thus

  overcome by its own passivity, its ownmost sensibility; yet this expropriation

  and desubjectification is also an extreme and irreducible presence of the “I” to

  itself. It is as if our consciousness collapsed and, seeking to flee in all directions,

  were simultaneously summoned by an irrefutable order to be present at its own

  defacement, at the expropriation of what is most its own. In shame, the subject

  thus has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness to

  its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject. This double movement, which is

  both subjectification and desubjectification, is shame.

  3.10. In his 1942–43 lecture course on Parmenides, Heidegger was also concerned with shame or, more precisely, with the corresponding Greek term aidos,

  832

  HOMO SACER III

  which he defined as “a fundamental word of authentic Greekness” (Heidegger

  1992: 74–75, translation modified). According to Heidegger, shame is something

  more than “a feeling that man has” (ibid., translation modified); instead, it is an

  emotive tonality that traverses and determines his whole Being. Shame is thus a

  kind of ontological sentiment that has its characteristic place in the encounter

  between man and Being. It is so little a matter of a psychological phenomenon

  that Heidegger can write that “Being itself carries with itself shame, the shame

  of Being” (ibid., translation modified).

  To emphasize this ontological character of shame—the fact that, in shame, we

  find ourselves exposed in the face of Being, which is itself ashamed— Heidegger

  suggests that we consider disgust ( Abscheu) . Curiously enough, he does not proceed to develop this point, as if it were immediately obvious, which is not at all

  the case. Fortunately, Benjamin offers an analysis of disgust that is both brief

  and pertinent in an aphorism of One-Way Street. For Benjamin, the predomi-

  nant feeling in disgust is the fear of being recognized by what repulses us. “The

  horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that in him something lives

  so akin to the animal that it might be recognized” (Benjamin 1979: 50). Who-

  ever experiences disgust has in some way recognized himself in the object of his

  loathing and fears being recognized in turn. The man who experiences disgust

  recognizes himself in an alterity that cannot be assumed—that is, he subjectifies

  himself in an absolute desubjectification.

  We find a reciprocity of this kind again in the analysis that Kerenyi, more

  or less in the same years, dedicates to aidos in his book, Ancient Religion. “The phenomenon of aidos, a fundamental situation of the Greeks’ religious experience, unites respectively active vision and passive vision, the man who sees and

  is seen, the seen world and the seeing world—where to see is also to penetrate.

  . . . The Greek is not only ‘born to see,’ ‘called to see;’ the form of his existence

  is to be seen” (Kerényi 1940: 88). In this reciprocity of active and passive vision,

  aidos resembles the experience of being present at one’s own being seen, being

  taken as a witness by what one sees. Like Hector confronted by his mother’s

  bare chest (“Hector, my son, feel aidos for this!”), whoever experiences shame is overcome by his own being subject to vision; he must respond to what deprives

  him of speech.

  We can therefore propose a first, provisional definition of shame. It is noth-

  ing less than the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign. Shame is what

  is produced in the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectifica-

  tion, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty.

  REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ

  833

  3.11. A specific domain exists in which this paradoxical character of shame is

  consciously taken as an object to be transformed into pleasure—in which shame

  is, as it were, carried beyond itself. This is the domain of sadomasochism. Here

  the passive subject, the masochist, is so overtaken by his own passivity, which

  infinitely transcends him, that he abdicates his condition as a subject by fully

  subjecting himself to another subject, the sadist. Hence the ceremonial panoply

  of lace, contracts, metals, girdles, sutures, and constrictions of all kinds through

  which the masochistic subject vainly tries to contain and ironically fix the very

  passivity which he cannot assume and which everywhere exceeds him. Only be-

  cause the masochist’s own suffering is first of all that of not being able to assume

  his own receptivity can his pain be immediately transformed into delight. But

  what constitutes the subtlety of the masochistic strategy and its almost sarcastic

  profundity is that the masochist is able to enjoy what exceeds him only on the

  condition of finding outside himself a point in which he can assume his own

  passivity and his own unassumable pleasure. This external point is the sadistic

  subject, the master.

  Sadomasochism thus appears as a bipolar system in which an infinite receptiv-

  ity—the masochist—encounters an equally infinite impassivity—the sadist—and

  in which subjectification and desubjectification incessantly circulate between two

  poles without properly belonging to either. This indetermination, however, in-

  vests subjects not merely with power, but also with knowledge. The master-slave

  dialectic here is the result not of a battle for life and death, but rather of an infinite

  “discipline,” a meticulous and interminable process of instruction and apprentice-

  ship in which the two subjects end by exchanging their roles. Just as the masochis-

  tic subject cannot assume his pleasure except in the master, so the sadistic subject

  cannot recognize himself as such—cannot assume his impassive knowledge—if

  not by transmitting pleasure to the slave through infinite instruction and pun-

  ishment. But since the masochistic subject enjoys his cruel training by definition,

  what was to be the instrument of the transmission of knowledge—punishment—

  is instead the instrument of pleasure; and discipline and apprenticeship, teacher

  and pupil, master and slave become wholly indistinguishable. This indistinction

  of discipline and enjoyment, in which the two subjects momentaril
y coincide, is

  precisely shame. And it is this shame that the indignant master continually recalls

  to his humorous pupil: “Tell me, aren’t you ashamed?” That is: “Don’t you realize

  that you are the subject of your own desubjectification?”

  3.12. A perfect equivalent of shame can be found precisely in the originary

  structure of subjectivity that modern philosophy calls auto-affection and that,

  834

  HOMO SACER III

  from Kant onward, is generally identified as time. According to Kant, what de-

  fines time as the form of inner sense, that is, “the intuition of ourselves and of

  our inner state” (Kant 1929: 77), is that in it “the understanding . . . performs this

  act upon the passive subject, whose faculty it is, and we are therefore justified in saying that inner sense is affected thereby” (ibid.: 166) and that therefore in time

  “we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected by ourselves” (ibid.: 168). For Kant, a clear proof of this self-modification implicit in our intuition of ourselves

  is that we cannot conceive of time without drawing a straight line in the imagi-

  nation, a line which is the immediate trace of the auto-affective gesture. In this

  sense, time is auto-affection; but precisely for this reason Kant can speak here

  of a genuine “paradox,” which consists in the fact that we “must behave toward

  ourselves as passive” ( wir uns gegen uns selbst als leidend verhalten mussten) (ibid.) .

  How are we to understand this paradox? What does it mean to be passive

  with respect to oneself ? Passivity does not simply mean receptivity, the mere fact

  of being affected by an external active principle. Since everything takes place here

  inside the subject, activity and passivity must coincide. The passive subject must

  be active with respect to its own passivity; it must “behave” ( verhalten) “against”

  itself ( gegen uns selbst) as passive. If we define as merely receptive the photo-graphic print struck by light, or the soft wax on which the image of the seal is

  imprinted, we will then give the name “passive” only to what actively feels its own

  being passive, to what is affected by its own receptivity. As auto-affection, passivity is thus a receptivity to the second degree, a receptivity that experiences itself, that

  is moved by its own passivity.

  Commenting on these pages of Kant, Heidegger defines time as “pure

  auto-affection” that has the singular form of a “moving from itself toward . . .”

  that is at the same time a “looking back.” Only in this complicated gesture, in

  this looking to oneself in distancing oneself from oneself, can something like an

  identical self be constituted:

  Time is not an active affection that strikes an already existing subject. As pure

  auto-affection, it forms the very essence of what can be defined as seeing oneself

  in general. . . . But the self itself that, as such, can be seen by something is, in

  essence, the finite subject. Insofar as it is pure auto-affection, time forms the

  essential structure of subjectivity. Only on the basis of this selfhood can finite

  Being be what it must be: delivered over to receiving. (Heidegger 1990: 131–32,

  translation modified)

  Here what is revealed is the analogy with shame, defined as being consigned

  to a passivity that cannot be assumed. Shame, indeed, then appears as the most

  REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ

  835

  proper emotive tonality of subjectivity. For there is certainly nothing shameful in

  a human being who suffers on account of sexual violence; but if he takes pleasure

  in his suffering violence, if he is moved by his passivity—if, that is, auto-affection

  is produced—only then can one speak of shame. This is why the Greeks clearly

  separated, in the homosexual relation, the active subject (the erastēs) and the passive subject ( eromenos) and, for the sake of the ethicity of the relation, demanded that the eromenos not experience pleasure. Passivity, as the form of subjectivity, is thus constitutively fractured into a purely receptive pole (the Muselmann) and an actively passive pole (the witness), but in such a way that this fracture never

  leaves itself, fully separating the two poles. On the contrary, it always has the

  form of an intimacy, of being consigned to a passivity, to a making oneself passive in which the two terms are both distinct and inseparable.

  In his Compendium grammaticus linguae hebraeae, Spinoza illustrates the concept of immanent cause—that is, an action in which agent and patient are

  one and the same person—with the Hebrew verbal categories of the active re-

  flexive and the infinitive noun. “Since it often happens,” he writes, referring

  to the infinitive noun, “that the agent and the patient are one and the same

  person, the Jews found it necessary to form a new and seventh kind of infini-

  tive with which to express an action referred both to the agent and the patient,

  an action that thus has the form both of an activity and a passivity. . . . It was

  therefore necessary to invent another kind of infinitive, expressing an action

  referred to the agent as immanent cause . . . which, as we have seen, means ‘to

  visit oneself,’ or ‘to constitute oneself as visiting’ or, finally, ‘to show oneself as

  visiting’ ( constituere se visitantem, vel denique praebere se visitantem)” (Spinoza 1925: 361). Explaining the meaning of these verbal forms, Spinoza is not satisfied

  with the reflexive form “to visit oneself,” and is compelled to form the striking

  syntagm “to constitute oneself as visiting” or “to show oneself as visiting” (he

  could also have written “to constitute or show oneself as visited”). Just as in

  ordinary language, to define someone who takes pleasure in undergoing some-

  thing (or who is somehow an accomplice to this undergoing) one says that he

  “gets himself done” something (and not simply that something “is done to

  him”), so the coincidence of agent and patient in one subject has the form not

  of an inert identity, but of a complex movement of auto-affection in which the

  subject constitutes—or shows—itself as passive (or active), such that activity

  and passivity can never be separated, revealing themselves to be distinct in their

  impossible coincidence in a self. The self is what is produced as a remainder in the double movement—active and passive—of auto-affection. This is why subjectivity constitutively has the form of subjectification and desubjectification;

  836

  HOMO SACER III

  this is why it is, at bottom, shame. Flush is the remainder that, in every sub-

  jectification, betrays a desubjectification and that, in every desubjectification,

  bears witness to a subject.

  3.13. There is an exceptional document of desubjectification as a shameful

  and yet inevitable experience. It is the letter Keats sends to John Woodhouse on

  October 27, 1818. The “wretched confession” of which the letter speaks concerns

  the poetic subject himself, the incessant self-loss by which he consists solely in

  alienation and non-existence. The theses that the letter states in the form of

  paradoxes are well known:

  1) The poetic “I ” is not an “I ”; it is not identical to itself: “As to the poetical Character (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member . . . ) it

  is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character”

  (Keats 193
5: 226).

  2) The poet is the most unpoetical of things, since he is always other than himself; he is always the place of another body: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of

  any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually filling in

  for—and filling some other Body” (ibid.: 227).

  3) The statement “I am a poet” is not a statement, but rather a contradiction in terms, which implies the impossibility of being a poet: “If then he has no self,

  and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no

  more?”(ibid.).

  4) The poetic experience is the shameful experience of desubjectification, of a full and unrestrained impossibility of responsibility that involves every act of speech

  and that situates the would-be poet in a position even lower than that of chil-

  dren: “It is a wretched thing to confess; but it is a very fact that not one word I

  ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical

  nature—how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People

  if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself

  goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press

  upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among Men; it

  would be the same in a Nursury of children” (ibid.) .

  But the final paradox is that in the letter the confession is immediately fol-

  lowed not only by silence and renunciation, but also by the promise of an abso-

  lute and unfailing writing destined to destroy and renew itself day after day. It is

  almost as if the shame and desubjectification implicit in the act of speech con-

  tained a secret beauty that could only bring the poet incessantly to bear witness

  to his own alienation: “I will assay to reach to as high a summit in Poetry as the

  REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ

  837

  nerve bestowed upon me will suffer . . . I feel assured I should write . . . even if

  my night’s labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever shine upon

  them. But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself: but from some

  character in whose soul I now live” (ibid.: 227–28).

  3.14. In the Western literary tradition, the act of poetic creation and, in-

  deed, perhaps every act of speech implies something like a desubjectification