The Omnibus Homo Sacer

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by Giorgio Agamben


  Satta, Sebastiano, Il mistero del processo (Milan: Adelphi, 1994).

  Sereny, Gitta, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Random House, 1983).

  Sofsky, Wolfgang, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1997).

  Spinoza, Baruch, Compendium grammatices linguae hebraeae, in Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt, vol. 3

  (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1925).

  Wiesel, Elie, “For Some Measure of Humanity,” in Sh’ma, A Journal of Jewish Responsibility 5, October 31, 1975.

  HOMO SACER IV, 1

  THE HIGHEST

  POVERTY

  Monastic Rules

  and Form-of-Life

  TRANSLATED BY ADAM KOTSKO

  Contents

  Translator’s Note

  885

  Preface

  887

  PART ONE: RULE AND LIFE

  1. Birth of the Rule

  893

  2. Rule and Law

  912

  3. Flight from the World and Constitution

  927

  Threshold

  936

  PART TWO: LITURGY AND RULE

  1. Regula Vitae

  941

  2. Orality and Writing

  947

  3. The Rule as a Liturgical Text

  952

  Threshold

  957

  PART THREE: FORM-OF-LIFE

  1. The Discovery of Life

  961

  2. Renouncing Law

  975

  3. Highest Poverty and Use

  985

  Threshold

  1001

  Bibliography

  1003

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  Translator’s Note

  Where English translations are available, works are cited according to the page

  number of the original text, followed by the page number of the translation

  (where applicable), or else by a 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 bibliography, 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 Kevin Attell, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Ted Jennings,

  Brad Johnson, and an anonymous reviewer for their suggested improvements;

  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; and Emily-Jane Cohen, Emma Harper,

  and the rest of the staff of Stanford University Press.

  885

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  Preface

  The object of this study is the attempt—by means of an investigation of the

  exemplary case of monasticism—to construct a form-of-life, that is to say, a life

  that is linked so closely to its form that it proves to be inseparable from it. It is

  from this perspective that the study is confronted first of all with the problem

  of the relationship between rule and life, which defines the apparatus through

  which the monks attempted to realize their ideal of a communal form of life.

  What is at stake is not so much—or not only—the task of investigating the

  imposing mass of punctilious precepts and ascetic techniques, of cloisters and

  horologia, of solitary temptations and choral liturgies, of fraternal exhortations and ferocious punishments through which cenoby constituted itself as a “regular

  life” in order to achieve salvation from sin and from the world. Rather, it is first

  of all a matter of understanding the dialectic that thus comes to be established

  between the two terms rule and life. This dialectic is indeed so dense and complex that, in the eyes of modern scholars, it seems to resolve itself at times into a

  perfect identity: vita vel regula (“life or rule”), according to the preamble of the Rule of the Fathers, or in the words of Francis’s Regula non bullata, haec est regula et vita fratrum minorum . . . (“The rule and life of the Friars Minor is this . . . ”).

  Here it is preferable, however, to leave to the vel and the et all their semantic ambiguity, in order instead to look at the monastery as a field of forces run through

  by two intensities that are opposed and, at the same time, intertwined. In their

  reciprocal tension something new and unheard-of, that is, a form-of-life, has

  persistently approached its very realization and has just as persistently missed it.

  The great novelty of monasticism is not the confusion of life and norm or a new

  declension of the relationship between fact and right. Rather, it is the identifica-

  tion of a level of consistency that is unthought and perhaps today unthinkable,

  which the syntagmas vita vel regula, regula et vita, forma vivendi, forma vitae sought laboriously to name, and in which both rule and life lose their familiar meaning in order to point in the direction of a third thing. Our task is precisely

  to bring this third thing to light.

  887

  888

  HOMO SACER IV, 1

  In the course of this study, however, what has appeared to present an ob-

  stacle to the emergence and comprehension of this third thing is not so much

  the insistence on apparatuses that can appear to be juridical to modern people,

  like the vow and the profession. Rather, it is a phenomenon that is absolutely

  central in the history of the Church and opaque for modern people: the lit-

  urgy. The great temptation of the monks was not that which paintings of the

  Quattrocento have fixed in the seminude female figure and in the shapeless

  monsters that assail Antony in his hermitage, but the will to construct their

  life as a total and unceasing liturgy or Divine Office. Hence this study, which

  proposed initially to define form-of-life by means of the analysis of monas-

  ticism, has had to contend with the unforeseen and, at least in appearance,

  misleading and extraneous task of an archeology of duty [ ufficio] (the results

  of which are published in a separate volume with the title Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty).

  Only a preliminary definition of this paradigm—which is at once ontolog-

  ical and practical, interwoven with being and acting, with the divine and the

  human, and which the Church has not stopped modeling and articulating in the

  course of its history, from the first, uncertain prescriptions of the Apostolic Constitutions up to the meticulous architecture of the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand of Mende (thirteenth century) and the calculated sobriety of

  the encyclical Mediator Dei (1947)—could actually allow us to comprehend the

  experience, at once very near and remote, that was in question in form-of-life.

  If the comprehension of the monastic form of life could be achieved only

  by means of a continuous opposition to the liturgical paradigm, what is perhaps

  the crucial test of the study could only be found, however, in the analysis of the

  spiritual movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which culminate in
<
br />   Franciscanism. Insofar as they situate their central experience no longer on the

  level of doctrine and law, but on the level of life, they appear from this perspec-

  tive as the moment that was in every respect decisive in the history of monasti-

  cism, in which its strength and its weakness, its successes and its failings reached

  their greatest tension.

  The book closes, therefore, with an interpretation of the message of Francis

  and of the Franciscan theory of poverty and use. On the one hand, a premature

  legend and an immense hagiographic literature have covered this theory over

  with the too-human mask of the pazzus and the fool or with the no-longer-

  human mask of a new Christ. On the other hand, an exegesis more attentive

  to the facts than to their theoretical implications has enclosed Francis’s message

  in the confines of the history of law and of the Church. In one case as in the

  THE HIGHEST POVERTY

  889

  other, what remained untouched was perhaps the most precious legacy of Fran-

  ciscanism, to which the West must return ever anew to contend with it as its

  undeferrable task: how to think a form-of-life, a human life entirely removed

  from the grasp of the law and a use of bodies and of the world that would never

  be substantiated into an appropriation. That is to say again: to think life as that

  which is never given as property but only as a common use.

  Such a task will demand the elaboration of a theory of use—of which West-

  ern philosophy lacks even the most elementary principles—and, moving forward

  from that, a critique of the operative and governmental ontology that continues,

  under various disguises, to determine the destiny of the human species. This task

  remains reserved for the final volume of Homo sacer.

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  PART ONE

  Rule and Life

  This page intentionally left blank

  1

  Birth of the Rule

  1.1. The fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era witnessed the birth

  of a peculiar literature that, at least at first glance, does not seem to

  have had precedents in the classical world: monastic rules. The set of texts that the

  tradition classifies under this rubric is, at least as concerns form and presentation,

  so diverse that the incipit of the manuscripts can only summarize them under

  very diverse titles: vitae, vita vel regula, regula, horoi kata platos, peri tēs askēseōs tōn makariōn paterōn, instituta coenobiorum, praecepta, praecepta atque instituta, statuta patrum, ordo monasterii, historiae monachorum, askētikai diataxeis . . . But even if we keep to the very narrow conception of the term that underlies the

  Codex regularum, in which Benedict of Aniane collected around twenty-five an-

  cient rules at the beginning of the ninth century, the diversity of the texts could

  not be greater. This diversity appears not only as to dimensions (from the approx-

  imately three hundred pages of the Regula magistri to the few sheets of the rule

  of Augustine or of the second Rule of the Fathers), but as to presentation (ques-

  tions and answers— erotapokriseis—between monks and master in Basil, an im-

  personal collection of precepts in Pachomius, verbal proceedings of a gathering

  of Fathers in the Rule of the Four Fathers). Above all, they are diverse in terms of content, which ranges from questions regarding the interpretation of Scripture

  or the spiritual edification of monks to the dry or meticulous enunciation of pre-

  cepts and prohibitions. These are not, at least at first glance, juridical works, even

  though they claim to regulate, often in fine detail and through precise sanctions,

  the life of a group of individuals. They are not historical narratives, even though

  at times they seem to simply transcribe the way of life and habits of the members

  of a community. They are not hagiographies, even though they are frequently

  mixed together with the life of the founding saint or Father to such a degree that

  they present themselves as recording it in the form of an exemplum or forma vitae (in this sense, Gregory Nazianzus could state that the life of Anthony written by

  Athanasius was “legislation [ nomothesia] for the monastic life in narrative form

  [ en plasmati diēgēseōs]”; Gregory Nazianzus, Oration 21). Although their ultimate 893

  894

  HOMO SACER IV, 1

  goal is doubtless the salvation of the soul according to the precepts of the Gospel

  and the celebration of the Divine Office, the rules do not belong to ecclesiastical

  literature or practice, from which they distance themselves—not polemically but

  nonetheless firmly. They are not, finally, hypomneumata or ethical exercises, like those that Michel Foucault has analyzed from the late classical world. And yet

  their central preoccupation is precisely that of governing the life and customs of

  men, both singularly and collectively.

  The present study intends to show how, in these texts that are at once dis-

  similar and monotonous, the reading of which seems so difficult to the modern

  reader, a transformation is carried out. This transformation—to an extent proba-

  bly more decisive than in the juridical, ethical, ecclesiastical, or historical texts of

  the same era—collides with law as much as with ethics and politics. It also implies

  a radical reformulation of the very conceptuality that up until that moment artic-

  ulated the relationship between human action and norm, “life” and “rule,” and

  without which the political and ethical-juridical rationality of modernity would

  be unthinkable. In this sense, the syntagmas vita vel regula, regula et vita, regula vitae are not simple hendiadyses. Rather, in the present study they define a field of historical and hermeneutical tensions which demands a rethinking of both

  concepts. What is a rule, if it seems to be mixed up with life without remainder?

  And what is a human life, if it can no longer be distinguished from the rule?

  1.2. The perfect comprehension of a phenomenon is its parody. In 1534, at

  the end of the Vie très horrifique du grand Gargantua, Rabelais recounts how

  Gargantua, in order to reward the monk with whom he has shared his uned-

  ifying undertakings, has an abbey constructed for him which was to be called

  Thélème. After having described in all the particulars the architectonic structure

  of the edifice ( en figure exagone, en telle façon que à chascun angle estoit bastie une grosse tour, “hexagonal in shape in such a way that at each angle was built a stout round tower”; Rabelais, pp. 41/118), the arrangement of the accommodations,

  the style of the vestments of the Thelemites and their age, Rabelais explains

  comment estoient reigléz leur manière de vivre, “how they were regulated in their

  way of life,” in a form that is, by all evidence, nothing but a parody of monastic

  rule. As in every parody, it witnesses a point-by-point inversion of the monastic

  cursus, scrupulously articulated by the rhythm of the horologia and the Divine Office, in what seems, at least at first glance, to be an absolute lack of rules:

  Et parce que ès religions de ce monde, tout est compassé, limité et reiglé par

  heures, feut decrété que là ne seroit horologe ny quadrant aulcun, mais selon les

  occasions et opportunitéz seroient toutes les œuvres dispensées; car (disoit Gar-

  THE HIGHEST POVERTY

  895

>   gantua) la plus vraye perte du temps qu’il sceust estoit de compter les heures—

  quel bien en vient-il?—et la plus grande resverie du monde estoit soy gouverner

  au son d’une cloche, et non au dicté de bon sens et entendement [And because

  in the monasteries of this world everything is compassed, limited, and regulated

  by hours, it was decreed that there should never be any clock or sundial whatever,

  but all works would be dispensed according to the occasions and opportunities;

  for, Gargantua used to say, the greatest waste of time he knew of was to count

  the hours—what good comes of that? And the greatest folly in the world was to

  govern oneself by the ring of a bell and not at the dictation of good sense and

  understanding]. (Rabelais, pp. 37/116–17)

  Toute leur vie estoit employée non par loix ou reigles, mais selon leur vouloir

  et franc arbitre. Se levoient due lict quand bon leur sembloit, beuvoient, man-

  geoient, travailloient, dormoient quand le désir leur venoit; nul le esveilloit, nul

  ne les parforceoit ny à boire ny à manger ny à faire chose aultre quelconque. Ainsi

  l’avoid estably Gargantua. En leur reigle n’estoit que ceste clause: fay ce que

  vouldras [All their life was laid out not by laws, statues, or rules but according

  to their will and free choice. They got up out of bed when they saw fit, drank,

  ate, worked, slept when they came to feel like doing so; no one woke them up,

  no one forced them either to drink or to eat or to do anything else whatever.

  Thus Gargantua had established it. In their rule was only this clause: do what

  you will]. (Rabelais, pp. 60/127)

  It has been said that Thélème “was the antimonastery” (Febvre, pp. 165/158). And

  yet if we look more closely, it is not simply a matter of an inversion of order into

  disorder and of rule into anomia. Even if contracted into only one sentence, a rule

  exists and has an author ( ainsi l’avoit estably Gargantua, “thus Gargantua has es-

  tablished it”). And the end that it intends is, despite the point-by-point dismissal

  of every obligation and the unconditional liberty of each, perfectly homogenous

  with that of the monastic rule: “cenoby” ( koinos bios, the common life), the per-

 

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