The Omnibus Homo Sacer
Page 138
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
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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-