The Omnibus Homo Sacer
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employ must likewise differ in kind. The mode of life [ bios] is a praxis and not
a production, and therefore the slave is an assistant for things of praxis. Now
“equipment” has the same meaning as “part” [ morion, “piece,” what belongs to
an ensemble]; for the part is not only a part of something else [ allou] but totally belongs to it [ holos—some manuscripts have haplos, “absolutely,” or with a still stronger expression, haplos holos, “absolutely and totally”]. This same can be said for equipment. The master is only the master of the slave and is not [part] of him;
the slave is not only slave of the master but is totally [part] of him.
Hence we see what is the nature [ physis] and the potential [ dynamis] of the slave: the one who, while being human [ anthropos on], is by nature of another,
is a slave by nature; and the one who is of another who, while being human, is
equipment, that is, a practical and separate instrument [ organon praktikon kai
choriston]. (1254a 1–17)
The assimilation of the slave to equipment or to an instrument is here developed
by first of all distinguishing instruments into productive instruments and instru-
ments of use (which produce nothing, except their use). In the expression “use
of the body,” use must therefore be understood not in a productive sense but in
a practical one: the use of the slave’s body is similar to that of a bed or clothing, and not to that of a spool or plectrum.
We are so accustomed to thinking of use and instrumentality as a function
of an external goal that it is not easy for us to understand a dimension of use
entirely independent of an end, such as that suggested by Aristotle: for us the
bed serves for rest and clothing to protect us from the cold. In the same way, we
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are accustomed to consider the labor of the slave to be just like the eminently
productive labor of the modern worker. A first, necessary precaution is therefore
that of abstracting the slave’s “use of the body” from the sphere of poiesis and production, in order to restore it to the sphere—according to Aristotle by definition
unproductive—of praxis and mode of life.
א The distinction between the operation that produces something external and that
from which there results only a use was to be so important for Aristotle that he develops
it from a properly ontological perspective in book Theta of the Metaphysics, dedicated to the problem of potential and act. “The work [ ergon],” he writes,
is the end, and the being-at-work [ energeia] is the work. Therefore even the
term “being-at-work” derives from “work,” which means also possessing-
oneself-in-the-end [ entelecheia]. And while in some cases the use [ chresis] is the ultimate thing (e.g., in sight [ opseos] the ultimate thing is seeing [ horasis], and no other product besides this results from sight), but from some things a
product follows (e.g., from the art of building there results a house as well as
the act of building [ oikodomesin]). . . . Where, then, the result is something
apart from the use, the being-at-work is in the thing produced, e.g., the act of
building is in the thing that is being built and the act of weaving in the thing
woven . . . ; but when there is no product apart from the being-at-work, the
being-at-work resides in them, in the sense that the act of seeing is in the one
seeing and contemplation [ theoria] in the one who contemplates and life in
the soul. ( Metaphysics, 1050a 21–1050b 1)
Aristotle seems here to theorize an excess of energeia over the ergon, of being-at-work over the work, which in some way implies a primacy of operations in which nothing is
produced other than use over poietic operations, whose energeia resides in an external work and which the Greeks tended to hold in low regard. It is certain, in any case, that
the slave, whose ergon consists only in the “use of the body,” is to be inscribed, from this point of view, in the same class in which vision, contemplation, and life figure.
1.7. For Aristotle, the assimilation of the slave to a ktema implies that he is a
part ( morion) of the master, and part in an integral and constitutive sense. The
term ktema, which, as we have seen, is not a technical term of law but of oikonomia, does not mean “property” in a juridical sense, and in this context, it desig-
nates things insofar as they are part of a functional whole and not insofar as they
belong to an individual in ownership (for this latter sense, a Greek would say not
ta ktemata but ta idia). For this reason, as we have seen, Aristotle can consider ktema as synonymous with morion and takes care to specify that the slave “is not only slave of the master but is totally part of him” (1254a 13). In the same sense, it
is necessary to restore to the Greek term organon its ambiguity: it indicates both
THE USE OF BODIES
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the instrument and the organ as a part of the body (in writing that the slave is
an organon praktikon kai choriston, Aristotle is obviously playing on the double
sense of the term).
The slave is a part (of the body) of the master, in the “organic” and not sim-
ply instrumental sense of the term, to such an extent that Aristotle can speak of
a “community of life” between slave and master ( koinonos zoes; 1260a 40). But
then how are we to understand the “use of the body” that defines the work and
condition of the slave? And how are we to think the “community of life” that
unites him to the master?
In the syntagma tou somatos chresis, the genitive “of the body” is not to be
understood only in an objective sense but also (analogously to the expression
ergon anthropou psyches energeia in the Nicomachean Ethics) in a subjective sense: in the enslaved human being, the body is in use just as, in the free human being,
the soul is at work in accordance with reason.
The strategy that leads Aristotle to define the slave as an integral part of the
master shows its subtlety at this point. By putting in use his own body, the slave
is, for that very reason, used by the master, and in using the body of the slave,
the master is in reality using his own body. The syntagma “use of the body” rep-
resents a point of indifference not only between subjective genitive and objective
genitive but also between one’s own body and that of another.
א It is helpful to read the theory of slavery that we have delineated up to this point
in light of Sohn-Rethel’s idea according to which in the exploitation of one human being
on the part of another there occurs a rupture and a transformation in the immediate
relationship of organic exchange between the living being and nature. For the relation-
ship of the human body with nature, there is substituted a relation of human beings
among themselves. The exploiters live, that is to say, from the products of the exploited’s labor, and the productive relationship between human beings and nature becomes the
object of a relationship between human beings, in which the relation itself is reified
and appropriated. “The productive relationship humans-nature becomes the object of a
human-human relationship, is subjected to its order and to its laws and therefore ‘dena-
tured’ with respect to the ‘natural’ state, by being subsequently realized solely according to the laws of the forms of mediation that represent its affirmative negation” (Adorno
and Sohn-Rethel, p. 32).
&
nbsp; In Sohn-Rethel’s terms, one could say that what happens in slavery is that the relation-
ship of the master with nature, as Hegel had intuited in his dialectic of self- recognition, is now mediated by the relationship of the slave with nature. The slave’s body in its relationship of organic exchange with nature is thus used as a medium of the relationship
of the master’s body with nature. One can ask, however, whether mediating one’s own
relation with nature through the relation with another human being is not from the very
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beginning what is properly human and whether slavery does not contain a memory of
this original anthropogenetic operation. The perversion begins only when the reciprocal
relation of use is appropriated and reified in juridical terms through the constitution of slavery as a social institution.
Benjamin once defined the just relation with nature not as “dominion of the human
being over nature” but as “dominion of the relationship between the human being
and nature.” One can say, from this perspective, that while the attempt to master the
dominion of humanity over nature gives rise to contradictions that ecology does not
manage to work out, a dominion of the relation between the human being and nature is
rendered possible precisely by the fact that the relation of the human being with nature
is not immediate but mediated by his or her relation with other human beings. I can
constitute myself as ethical subject of my relationship with nature solely because this
relationship is mediated by the relationship with other human beings. However, if I seek,
through what Sohn-Rethel calls “functional socialization,” to appropriate mediation for
myself by means of the other, then the relation of use decays into exploitation, and, as
the history of capitalism sufficiently shows, exploitation is defined by the impossibility of being mastered (for this reason, the idea of a sustainable development in a “humanized”
capitalism is contradictory).
1.8. Let us reflect on the singular condition of the human being whose ergon
is the use of the body and, at the same time, on the peculiar nature of this “use.”
Unlike the cobbler, the carpenter, the flute player, or the sculptor, the slave, even
if he carries out these activities—and Aristotle knows perfectly well that this can
happen in the oikonomia of the household—is and remains essentially without
work, in the sense that, in contrast to what happens with an artisan, his praxis is
not defined by the work that he produces but only by the use of the body.
This is all the more surprising in that—as Jean-Paul Vernant has shown in
an exemplary study (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, pp. 28–33)—the classical world
never considered human activity and its products from the point of view of the
labor process that they entailed but solely from that of their result. Yan Thomas
has thus observed that work contracts never determine the value of the com-
missioned object according to the amount of labor that it requires but solely
according to the characteristics proper to the object produced. Historians of
law and economy are, for this reason, accustomed to affirming that the classical
world does not know the concept of labor. (It would be more exact to say that
they do not distinguish it from the work it produces.) The first time—this is Yan
Thomas’s discovery—that, in Roman law, something like labor appears as an
autonomous juridical reality is in contracts for the locatio operarum of the slave by someone who had ownership or—in the case that is exemplary according to
Thomas—the usufruct of that slave.
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It is significant that the isolation of something like a “labor” of the slave
could happen only by conceptually separating the use ( usus)—which could not
be alienated by the usuarius and coincided with the personal use of the slave’s
body—from the fructus, which the fructuarius could alienate on the market: The labor to which the usuarius has a right is mixed together with the personal
or domestic use that he has of the slave—a use that excludes mercantile profit.
The labor to which the fructuarius has a right can, on the contrary, be alienated
on the market in exchange for a price: it can be rented out. In both cases, that is
to say, whether it is a matter of use or usufruct of the slave, the slave concretely
labors. But his activity, which common language would call his labor, does not
have the same value for the law. In one case, the slave remains at the disposal of
the usuary in person: it is a matter, then, of a service so to speak in nature, which
we could call a labor of use, in the sense in which one speaks of use value. In the
other case, his operae, separated from him, represent a “thing” alienable to third parties, in the juridical form of a contract. For the usufructary, it will then only
be a matter of a monetary income. To the labor of use there is added in this way
a labor that can be defined as merchandise, in the sense in which one speaks of
market value. (Thomas 1, p. 222; cf. Thomas 2, p. 227)
The use of the slave, even when the owner has ceded it to others, always remains
inseparable from the use of his body. “If anyone,” writes Ulpian, “has received in
inheritance the use of service personnel, he can use them for himself or for his
children or for his relatives . . . but he cannot lease the work of the slave of whom
he has use, nor concede the use of him to others” (Thomas 1, pp. 217–218). This
is even more clear in the case of slaves from whom there was no possible work,
like infants, the use of whom coincided with the delight ( delicia, voluptas) that is derived from them. When we read in the Digest “if only the use of an infant
slave should be bequeathed . . .” ( Digest, 7, 1, de usuf., 55), it is clear that here the juridical term usus is confounded with the use of the body without remainder.
It is necessary to reflect on this inseparable and personal character of the
use of the slave. As we have seen, even when Roman jurists, using the notion
of fructus, distinguished the labor ( operae does not indicate the product but the activity in itself) of the slave from use in the strict sense, the latter is and remains
personal and inseparable from the body itself. The separation of something like a
labor activity is here possible only by separating the body as object of use from its
activity as alienable and remunerable: “the worker is divided between two zones
of law that correspond respectively to what he is as body and what he is as mer-
chandise, as incorporeal good” (Thomas 2, p. 233). At this point, the slave enters
into the centuries-long process that will be able to transform him into a worker.
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From the perspective that interests us here, we can hypothesize that the late
appearance of the dimension of labor happened in the case of the slave before
that of the artisan precisely because the activity of the slave is by definition
deprived of a proper work and therefore cannot be valued on the basis of his
ergon, as would happen for the artisan. Precisely because his ergon is the use of the body, the slave is essentially argos, deprived of work (at least in the poietic sense of the term).
1.9. The peculiar nature of the use of the slave’s body appears clearly
in a
sphere that has curiously escaped the attention of historians. Already in 1980,
in his study on Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, Moses Finley, taking up
an observation of Joseph Vogt, lamented the lack of any study on the relation
between slavery and sexual relationships. Unfortunately, Kyle Harper’s recent
study ( Slavery in the Late Roman World, 2011), which dedicates a lengthy chapter
to this problem, concerns only late Roman antiquity and must therefore make
use of Christian sources that are not always objective. His study, however, shows
beyond any doubt that sexual relationships between the master and his slaves
were considered totally normal. The sources examined by Harper suggest, in
fact, that they functioned in some way as a counterpart to the institution of
marriage and that it was even thanks to them that this latter institution was able
to maintain its strength in Roman society (Harper, pp. 290–291).
What interests us here, rather, is that the sexual relationship made up an
integral part of the use of the slave’s body and was not in any way perceived as
an abuse. Nothing is more significant, from this perspective, than the fact that
the testimony of Artemidorus’s Interpretation of Dreams lists sexual relationships with slaves among those that are “natural, legal, and customary” ( kata physin kai
nomon kai ethos; Artemidorus, 1.78). In perfect coherence with the Aristotelian
doctrine of the slave as equipment, sexual use of the slave in dreams is here
the symbol of the best possible relationship with one’s own objects of use: “to
dream of having sex with one’s slave, whether male or female, is good; for slaves
are equipment [ ktemata] of the dreamer, so that uniting oneself with them will
mean, quite naturally, that the dreamer will derive pleasure from his equipment,
which will grow greater and more valuable.” As proof of its completely normal
character, the sexual relationship with the slave can also appear as a key for the
interpretation of a dream: “If one dreams of masturbating with one’s hands, it
means that one will have sexual relations with a male or female slave, insofar as
the hands that approach the genitals are serviceable [ hyperetikas].” Naturally, a