The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  more striking that, despite this warning, Guy had continued to pursue this light,

  to stubbornly peer into the flame of singular and private existence.

  4. Toward the end of the nineties, on the shelves of a Parisian bookstore, the

  second volume of Panégyrique, containing iconography—by chance or out of

  an ironic intention of the bookseller—was next to the autobiography of Paul

  Ricoeur. Nothing is more instructive than to compare the use of images in the

  two cases. While the photographs in Ricoeur’s book depicted the philosopher

  solely in the course of academic conferences, almost as though he had had no life

  outside them, the images of Panégyrique aspired to a state of biographical truth

  that concerned the existence of the author in all his aspects. “L’illustration au-

  thentique,” the brief preamble informs us, “éclaire le discours vrai . . . on saura

  donc enfin quelle était mon apparence à différentes âges; et quel genre de visages

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  m’a toujours entouré; et quels lieux j’ai habités. . . .” (“An authentic illustration

  sheds light on a true discourse. . . . People will at last be able to see what I looked

  like at various stages of my life, the kinds of faces that have always surrounded

  me, and what kind of places I have lived in. . . .”; Debord 2, p. 1691/73–74).

  Once again, notwithstanding the obvious insufficiency and banality of its docu-

  ments, life—the clandestine—is in the foreground.

  5. One evening in Paris, when I told her that many young people in Italy

  continued to be interested in Guy’s writings and were hoping for a word from

  him, Alice responded: “on existe, cela devrait leur suffire” (“we exist, this should

  be sufficient for them”). What did she mean by: on existe? Certainly, in those

  years, they were living in seclusion and without a telephone between Paris and

  Champot, in a certain sense with eyes turned to the past, and their “existence”

  was, so to speak, entirely hidden in the “clandestinity of private life.”

  And again, shortly before his suicide in November 1994, the title of the last

  film prepared for Canal Plus: Guy Debord, son art, son temps does not seem—

  despite the truly unexpected phrase son art—completely ironic in its biographical

  intention, and before concentrating with an extraordinary vehemence on the hor-

  rors of “his time,” this (sort of) spiritual last will and testament reiterates, with the

  same candor and the same old photographs, the nostalgic evocation of his past life.

  What does it mean, then: on existe? Existence—that concept that is in every

  sense fundamental for the first philosophy of the West—perhaps has to do con-

  stitutively with life. “To be,” writes Aristotle, “for the living means to live.” And

  centuries later, Nietzsche specifies: “To be: we have no other representation than

  to live.” To bring to light—beyond every vitalism—the intimate interweaving

  of being and living: this is today certainly the task of thought (and of politics).

  6. The Society of the Spectacle opens with the word “life” (“Toute la vie des

  sociétés dans lesquelles règnent les conditions moderns de production s’annonce

  comme une immense accumulation de spectacles”; “In societies where modern

  conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumu-

  lation of spectacles”; Debord 3, §1), and up to the end the book’s analysis never

  stops making reference to life. The spectacle, in which “everything that was directly

  lived has moved away into a representation” (§1), is defined as a “concrete inver-

  sion of life” (§2). “The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated

  from his life” (§33). Life under spectacular conditions is a “counterfeit life” (§48)

  or a “survival” (§154) or a “pseudo-use of life” (§49). Against this alienated and

  separated life, what is asserted is something that Guy calls “historical life” (§139),

  which appears already in the Renaissance as a “joyous rupture with eternity”: “in

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  the exuberant life of Italian cities . . . life is experienced as enjoyment of the passage of time.” Already years previously, in Sur le passage de quelques personnes and Critique de la séparation, Guy says of himself and his companions that “they wanted to reinvent everything every day, to become masters and possessors of their own life”

  (Debord 1, p. 22/14), that their meetings were like “signals emanating from a more

  intense life, a life that has not truly been found” (p. 47/32).

  What this “more intense” life was, what was inverted and falsified in the

  spectacle, or even what one should understand by “life of society” is nowhere

  clarified; and yet it would be too easy to reproach the author for incoherence or

  terminological imprecision. Guy is doing nothing here but repeating a constant

  attitude in our culture, in which life is never defined as such but is time after

  time articulated and divided into bios and zoè, politically qualified life and bare life, public life and private life, vegetative life and a life of relation, so that each of the partitions is determinable only in its relation to the others. And perhaps it is

  in the last analysis precisely the undecidability of life that makes it so that it must

  each time be decided politically and singularly. And Guy’s indecision between

  the secrecy of his private life—which, with the passing of time, had to appear

  to him as ever more fleeting and undocumentable—and historical life, between

  his individual biography and the obscure and unrenounceable epoch in which it

  was inscribed, betrays a difficulty that, at least under present conditions, no one

  can be under the illusion of having resolved once and for all. In any case, the

  stubbornly sought-after Grail, the life that is uselessly consumed in the flame,

  was not reducible to either of the opposed terms, neither to the idiocy of private

  life nor to the uncertain prestige of public life, and it indeed calls into question

  the very possibility of distinguishing them.

  7. Ivan Illich has observed that the conventional notion of life (not “a life,”

  but “life” in general) is perceived as a “scientific fact,” which has no relationship

  with the experience of the singular living person. It is something anonymous and

  generic, which can designate at times a spermatozoon, a person, a bee, a cell, a

  bear, an embryo. It is this “scientific fact,” so generic that science has given up on

  defining it, that the Church has made the ultimate receptacle of the sacred and

  bioethics the key term of its impotent foolishness. In any case, “life” today has

  more to do with survival than with the vitality or form of life of the individual.

  Insofar as a sacral remainder has crept into it in this way, the secret that

  Guy pursued has become even more elusive. The Situationist attempt to bring

  life back to the political runs up against a further difficulty, but it is not for this

  reason less urgent.

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  8. What does it mean that private life accompanies us as a secret or a stow-

  away? First of all, that it is separated from us as clandestine and is, at the same

  time, inseparable from us
to the extent that, as a stowaway, it furtively shares exis-

  tence with us. This split and this inseparability constantly define the status of life

  in our culture. It is something that can be divided—and yet always articulated and

  held together in a machine, whether it be medical or philosophico- theological or

  biopolitical. Thus, not only is private life to accompany us as a stowaway in our

  long or short voyage, but corporeal life itself and all that is traditionally inscribed

  in the sphere of so-called intimacy: nutrition, digestion, urination, defecation,

  sleep, sexuality. . . . And the weight of this faceless companion is so strong that

  each seeks to share it with someone else—and nevertheless, alienation and secrecy

  never completely disappear and remain irresolvable even in the most loving life

  together. Here life is truly like the stolen fox that the boy hid under his clothes and

  that he cannot confess to even though it is savagely tearing at his flesh.

  It is as if each of us obscurely felt that precisely the opacity of our clan-

  destine life held within it a genuinely political element, as such shareable par

  excellence—and yet, if one attempts to share it, it stubbornly eludes capture and

  leaves behind it only a ridiculous and incommunicable remainder. The castle of

  Silling, in which political power has no object other than the vegetative life

  of bodies, is in this sense the cipher of the truth and, at the same time, of the

  failure of modern politics—which is, in reality, a biopolitics. We must change

  our life, carry the political into the everyday—and nevertheless, in the everyday,

  the political can only make shipwreck.

  And when, as it today happens, the eclipse of the political and of the public

  sphere allows only private and bare life to subsist, the clandestine, left as sole

  master of the field, must, insofar as it is private, publicize itself and attempt to

  communicate its own no longer risible documents (though they remain such),

  which at this point correspond immediately with it, with its identical days re-

  corded live and transmitted on screens to others, one after another.

  And yet, only if thought is able to find the political element that has been

  hidden in the secrecy of singular existence, only if, beyond the split between

  public and private, political and biographical, zoè and bios, it is possible to delineate the contours of a form-of-life and of a common use of bodies, will politics

  be able to escape from its muteness and individual biography from its idiocy.

  PART ONE

  The Use of Bodies

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  1

  The Human Being without Work

  1.1. The expression “the use of the body” ( he tou somatos chresis) is found

  at the beginning of Aristotle’s Politics (1254b 18), at the point where it

  is a question of defining the nature of the slave. Aristotle has just affirmed that

  the city is composed of families or households ( oikiai) and that the family, in its perfect form, is composed of slaves and free people ( ek doulon kai eleutheron—

  the slaves are mentioned before the free; 1253b 3–5). Three types of relations

  define the family: the despotic ( despotikè) relation between the master ( despotes) and the slaves, the matrimonial ( gamikè) relation between the husband and wife,

  and the parental ( technopoietikè) relation between the father and the children

  (7–11). That the master/slave relation is in some way, if not the most important,

  at least the most evident is suggested—aside from its being named first—by the

  fact that Aristotle specifies that the latter two relations are “nameless,” lacking a

  proper name (which seems to imply that the adjectives gamikè and technopoietikè are only improper denominations devised by Aristotle, while everyone knows

  what a “despotic” relation is).

  In any case, the analysis of the first relation, which immediately follows, in

  some way constitutes the introductory threshold of the treatise, almost as if only

  a correct preliminary understanding of the despotic relation would allow access

  to the properly political dimension. Aristotle begins by defining the slave as a

  being that, “while being human, is by its nature of another and not of itself,”

  asking himself immediately after “if a similar being exists by nature or if, by

  contrast, slavery is always contrary to nature” (1254a 15–18).

  The answer proceeds by means of a justification of the command (“to com-

  mand and be commanded are not only necessary parts of things but also expe-

  dient”; 21–22), which in living beings are distinguished into despotic commands

  ( archè despotikè) and political commands ( archè politikè), exemplified respectively in the command of the soul over the body and that of the intelligence over the

  appetite. And just as in the preceding paragraph he had affirmed in general the

  necessity and natural ( physei) character of command not only among animate

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  beings but also in inanimate things (in Greek, the musical mode is the archè of

  the harmony), now he seeks to justify the command of some men over others:

  The soul commands the body with a despotic command, whereas the intellect

  commands the appetites with a political and royal command. And it is clear that

  the command of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element

  over the passionate, is natural and expedient; whereas the equality of the two or

  the command of the inferior is always hurtful. . . . The same must therefore also

  happen among human beings. . . . (1254b 5–16)

  א The idea that the soul makes use of the body as an instrument and at the same

  time commands it was formulated by Plato in a passage of the Alcibiades (130a 1) that Aristotle very likely must have in mind when he is seeking to found the dominion of the

  master over the slave through that of the soul over the body.

  What is decisive, however, is the genuinely Aristotelian specification, according to

  which the command that the soul exercises over the body is not of a political nature

  (the “despotic” relation between master and slave is after all, as we have seen, one of

  the three relations that, according to Aristotle, define the oikia, the household). This means—according to the clear distinction that separates the household ( oikia) from the city ( polis) in Aristotle’s thought—that the relationship soul/body (like master/slave) is an economic-domestic relationship and not a political one, as is, by contrast, that between

  intellect and appetite. But this also means that the relation between master and slave and that between soul and body are defined by one another and even that we must attend

  to the first if we want to understand the second. The soul is to the body as the master

  is to the slave. The caesura that divides the household from the city persists in the same threshold that separates and at the same time unites body and soul, master and slave.

  And it is only by interrogating this threshold that the relationship between economy and

  politics among the Greeks can become truly intelligible.

  1.2. It is at this point that there appears, almost in the form of a parenthesis,

  the definition of the slave as “the being whose work is the use of the body”:

  These human beings differ among themselves like the soul from the body or the

  human from
the animal—as in the case of those whose work is the use of the body

  [ oson esti ergon he tou somatos chresis], and this is the best [that can come] from them [ ap’auton beltiston]—the lower sort are by nature slaves, for whom it is better to be commanded with this command, as said above. (1254b 17–20)

  The problem of what is the ergon, the work and proper function of the human

  being, had been posed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. To the question of

  whether there was something like a work of the human being as such (and not

  simply of the carpenter, the tanner, or the shoemaker), or whether the human

  being was not instead born without work ( argos), Aristotle had there responded by

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  affirming that “the work of the human being is the being-at-work of the soul ac-

  cording to the logos” ( ergon anthropou psyches energeia kata logon; 1098a 7). All the more striking, then, is the definition of the slave as the human being whose work

  consists only in the use of the body. That the slave is and remains a human being

  is, for Aristotle, beyond question ( anthropos on, “while being a human being”;

  1254a 16). This means, however, that there are some human beings whose ergon is

  not properly human or is different from that of other human beings.

  Already Plato had written that the work of each being (whether it is a matter

  of a human being, a horse, of or whatever other living thing) is “what it alone

  does or what it does better than anything else” ( monon ti e kallista ton allon

  apergazetai; Republic, 353a 10). Slaves represent the emergence of a dimension of human beings in which the best work (“the best for them”—the beltiston of the

  Politics probably refers to the kallista of the Republic) is not the being-at-work ( energeia) of the soul according to the logos but something for which Aristotle can find no other denomination than “the use of the body.”

  In the two symmetrical formulas—

  ergon anthropou psyches energeia kata logon

  ergon (doulou) he tou somatos chresis

  the work of the human being is the being-in-action of the soul

  according to the logos

  the work of the slave is the use of the body

  — energeia and chresis, being-at-work and use, seem to be juxtaposed precisely as are psychè and soma, soul and body.