The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  This means, however, entirely rethinking and correcting, starting from habit

  and use, the Aristotelian doctrine of dynamis and energeia, of potential and act.

  Aristotle—one could say—has divided what we are here seeking to think as use

  and has called dynamis and energeia that which results from the division. The concept of habit ( hexis) was thought by Aristotle precisely to eliminate the aporias implicit in this doctrine and to assure to potential some reality. If being (use)

  is divided into potential and act, something that articulates and renders possible

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  the passage from one to the other will indeed be necessary. If potential were

  always and only generic potential, such as the purely chimerical potential that

  belongs to a baby, of whom we say that he could become a writer or carpenter,

  an architect or a flute player, then the concept of potential would dissolve and

  its being put to work would be unthinkable. Habit is what renders possible the

  passage of potential from mere genericity to the effective potential of the one

  who writes or plays the flute, builds tables or houses. Habit is the form in which

  potential exists and is given reality as such.

  The aporias of generic potential, which are neutralized in this way, are, how-

  ever, immediately reproduced in the new reality that it has been given. In order

  that a distinction between habit and being-at-work be maintained, in order that

  hexis not always already blindly cross over into energeia, it is in fact necessary that the one who has the habit of a technique or of a knowledge be able not to

  exercise it, be able not to pass to the act. For this reason, in book nine of the

  Metaphysics, the decisive thesis on potential-habit reads: “every potential is im-

  potential of the same and according to the same” ( tou autou kai kata to auto pasa

  dynamis adynamia; Metaphysics 1046a 30). Impotential, adynamia, here means to be able not to pass to the act and, in accordance with the philosopher’s intense

  antipathy for sleep that we have already noted, habit is in this sense compared to

  sleep and the act to wakefulness: “waking corresponds to knowing in act, sleep-

  ing to a having without exercising” ( echein kai me energein; On the Soul, 412a 25).

  The ambiguity of the notion of “potential not to” here appears clearly: it is what

  permits habit to be given existence as such, and at the same time it is constitu-

  tively inferior to the act to which it is irrevocably destined. As Aristotle never

  stops repeating against the Megarians, the one who truly has a potential is the

  one who can both put it and not put it into action; but energeia, being-at-work,

  remains the end of potential. In this way, however, the aporia that was thought

  to be eliminated reappears in an even more acute form: if in every potential-habit

  there irreducibly inheres a potential not to pass to the act, how will it be possible

  to lead it to this passage; how will it be possible to stir it from its sleep?

  By assimilating use to energeia and being-at-work and by separating it from

  habit as wakefulness from sleep, Aristotle set thought durably off course. Only

  if we think habit not only in a negative mode, beginning from impotential and

  from the possibility of not passing into act, but rather as habitual use, is the aporia,

  against which Aristotelian thought on potentiality has made shipwreck, dissolved.

  Use is the form in which habit is given existence, beyond the simple opposition

  between potential and being-at-work. And if habit is, in this sense, always already

  use-of-oneself and if this latter, as we have seen, implies a neutralization of the

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  subject/object opposition, then there is no place here for a proprietary subject of

  habit, which can decide to put it to work or not. The self, which is constituted in

  the relation of use, is not a subject, is nothing other than this relation.

  6.2. In the concept of hexis-habitus ( hexis is the nominalization of echein, “to have”), philosophy has thought the constitutive connection that unites being

  to having, which remains a still uninvestigated chapter in the history of ontol-

  ogy. In an exemplary study, Benveniste sought to define the linguistic function

  and relation of “being” and “having” in Indo-European languages. They are

  both verbs that indicate a state: “To be is the state of being, of that which is

  something; to have is the state of having, of that to which something is. The

  difference thus emerges. To be establishes an intrinsic relationship of equivalence between the two terms which it joins: it is the consubstantial state. In contrast,

  the two terms joined by to have remain distinct; the relationship between them

  is extrinsic and establishes a belonging” (Benveniste, p. 198/172). According to

  Benveniste, moreover, to have is nothing but an inverted “being to (or of )”:

  habeo aliquid, “I have something,” is only a secondary and derivative variant of

  mihi est aliquid, “something is to me, belongs to me.”

  One must pursue Benveniste’s analysis beyond the limits of linguistics. In re-

  ality, the relation between “being” and “having” is more intimate and complex.

  Hexis, potential insofar as it is a habit, is according to Aristotle one of the ways in which being is said. Namely, it indicates the state of being, insofar as it is attributed to a subject. What is had in hexis is a certain mode of being, a diathesis, a being disposed in a certain way (being knowledgeable, being an architect, being

  a flute player . . .). Aristotle calls this being that one has dynamis, “potential,”

  and the one who has this certain state and this certain being is dynatos, “potent.”

  In any case, having ( echein) is here always “having a being.”

  This means that the doctrine of habitus delimits the logical place in which a

  doctrine of subjectivity would have been possible. For this reason, in the philo-

  sophical dictionary in book Delta of the Metaphysics (1022b 4–6), Aristotle can

  write, in an apparent contradiction, that hexis means both “a certain being-at-work

  [ energeia] of the one having and the thing had” and “the disposition [ diathesis]

  according to which what is disposed is disposed well or badly”: it is both a mode

  of being and the state or disposition of a subject. And for this reason, apropos of

  the rational potentials, which are capable of a thing as much as of its contrary,

  he can say that it is necessary that there be a sovereign ( kyrion) element that is in a position to decide the potential in one direction or the other and that it must

  be “something else” ( heteron ti) with respect to potential ( Metaphysics 1048a 11).

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  Habit is the point at which a subjectivity seeks to make itself master of being, the

  place in which, with a perfect circularity, having, which derives from being, ap-

  propriates the latter to itself. Having is nothing but the appropriation of a being.

  6.3. There is a text of Aristotle in which a different conception of habit could

  perhaps have been founded. In the above-cited passage from book Delta of the

  Metaphysics, one reads that if habit is defined as the relation between the one

  who has and that which is had, then “it is impossible to have a habit, because if

  it were possible to have th
e habit that one has, there would be infinite regress”

  (1022b 7–10). It is in this elusive, fugitive place that modern thought will situate

  its subject, which is posited as master of what cannot be had.

  In Aristotle’s warning there comes to light the aporia inherent in the inter-

  weaving of being and having that has its place in habit. Against the scholastic

  doctrine according to which “the use of potential belongs to the one to whom

  habit belongs,” it is necessary to affirm that use does not belong to any subject,

  that it is situated beyond both being and having. That is to say, use breaks the

  ambiguous implication of being and having that defines Aristotelian ontology.

  Glenn Gould, to whom we attribute the habit of playing the piano, does noth-

  ing but make use-of-himself insofar as he plays and knows habitually how to

  play the piano. He is not the title holder and master of the potential to play,

  which he can put to work or not, but constitutes-himself as having use of the

  piano, independently of his playing it or not playing it in actuality. Use, as habit,

  is a form-of-life and not the knowledge or faculty of a subject.

  This implies that we must completely redraw the map of the space in which

  modernity has situated the subject and its faculties.

  A poet is not someone who has the potential or faculty to create that, one

  fine day, by an act of will (the will is, in Western culture, the apparatus that

  allows one to attribute the ownership of actions and techniques to a subject),

  he decides—who knows how and why—like the God of the theologians, to put

  to work. And just like the poet, so also are the carpenter, the cobbler, the flute

  player, and those who, with a term of theological origin, we call professionals—

  and, in the end, every human being—not transcendent title holders of a capacity

  to act or make: rather, they are living beings that, in the use and only in the use

  of their body parts as of the world that surrounds them, have self-experience and

  constitute-themselves as using (themselves and the world).

  א The thesis that potential is in some way always in use, even if it does not pass over

  into action, is affirmed by Pelagius in his impassioned defense of the human possibility not to sin, which Augustine vainly seeks to refute in his anti-Pelagian writings (in particular,

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  in De natura et gratia). Potential, writes Pelagius, “inheres in me even if I do not will it and it never contains in itself any idleness” (qtd. in Augustine 1, 57, 49). Nevertheless, insofar as it is given to us by God, to whom it essentially belongs, it is not in our power ( in nostra potestate).

  6.4. But what is habitual use, and how is a habit used without causing it to

  pass over into action, without putting it to work? It is clear that this does not

  mean inertia or simple absence of works but a totally other relation to them.

  The work is not the result or achievement of a potential, which is realized and

  consumed in it: the work is that in which potential and habit are still present,

  still in use; it is the dwelling of habit, which does not stop appearing and, as it

  were, dancing in it, ceaselessly reopening it to a new, possible use.

  In book IV of the Ethics, Spinoza has provided the key to understanding the

  special relation with potential that is in question here and that he calls acqui-

  escentia in se ipso. “Acquiescence in oneself,” he writes, “is the pleasure arising from a person’s contemplation of himself and his potential for acting” (Spinoza 2,

  p. 183). What does it mean for a human being to contemplate himself and his

  potential for acting? Acquiescence is certainly a figure of inoperativity—but what

  is an inoperativity that consists in contemplating the very potential to act?

  Contemplation is the paradigm of use. Like use, contemplation does not

  have a subject, because in it the contemplator is completely lost and dissolved;

  like use, contemplation does not have an object, because in the work it contem-

  plates only its (own) potential. Life, which contemplates in the work its (own)

  potential of acting or making, is rendered inoperative in all its works and lives

  only in use-of-itself, lives only (its) livability. We write “own” and “its” in pa-

  rentheses because only through the contemplation of potential, which renders

  inoperative every energeia and every work, does something like the experience of

  an “own” and a “self” become possible. The self—whose place the modern sub-

  ject will usurp—is what is opened up as a central inoperativity in every opera-

  tion, as the “livability” and “usability” in every work. And if the architect and the

  carpenter remain such even when they are not building, that is not because they

  are title holders of a potential of building, which they can also not put to work,

  but because they habitually live in use-of-themselves as architect or carpenter:

  habitual use is a contemplation and contemplation is a form of life.

  6.5. At the end of What Is Philosophy? Deleuze defines life in its immediacy

  as “contemplation without consciousness” (Deleuze and Guattari, p. 213). Of

  this “passive creation” that “is but does not act,” he furnishes the examples of

  sensation and habitual praxis (p. 212). In the same sense, in his Mémoire sur la

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  décomposition de la pensée, Maine de Biran indefatigably seeks to grasp, beyond

  the ego and the will, a “mode of existence that is so to speak impersonal,” which

  he calls “affectability” and defines as the simple organic capacity to be affected

  without consciousness or personality, which, like Condillac’s statue, becomes all

  its modifications and all its sensations and yet constitutes “a positive and com-

  plete manner of existing in its kind” (Maine de Biran, p. 370).

  What is decisive here is the separation between contemplation and con-

  sciousness and between affectability and personality. Contrary to the prestige of

  consciousness in our culture, it is always necessary to recall anew that sensation

  and habitual praxis, as use-of-oneself, articulate a zone of non-consciousness,

  which is not something like a mystical fog in which the subject loses itself but

  the habitual dwelling in which the living being, before every subjectivation, is

  perfectly at ease. If the gestures and acts of the animal are agile and graceful (“no

  animal is at a loss in use-of-itself”), this is because for it no act, no gesture consti-

  tutes a “work” of which it is posited as responsible author and conscious creator.

  It is in this way that we must think contemplation as use-of-oneself. Every

  use is the articulation of a zone of non-consciousness. And this is not the fruit of

  a removal, like the unconscious of psychoanalysis, nor is it deprived of relation

  to the living thing that dwells in it: on the contrary, using-oneself means main-

  taining oneself in relation with a zone of non-consciousness, keeping it intimate

  and close just as habit is intimate to use. This relation is not inert but is preserved

  and constituted through a patient, tenacious deactivation of the energeiai and

  the works that ceaselessly surface in it, by means of the quiet cancellation of

  every attribution and every property: vivere sine proprio.
And it is not import-

  ant that cancellation and disappropriation are continually lost in the tradition,

  that contemplation and use-of-oneself never cease to make shipwreck in the

  history of works and subjects. Contemplation, the zone of non-consciousness,

  is the nucleus—unforgettable and at the same time immemorial—inscribed in

  every tradition and in every memory, which signs it with a mark of infamy or

  glory. The user, always unauthorized, is only the auctor—in the Latin sense of

  witness—who bears testimony of the work in the very gesture in which, in con-

  templation, he revokes it and constantly puts it back into use.

  6.6. The most proper characteristic of habit as ethos and use-of-oneself was

  covered and rendered inaccessible by the medieval theory of virtue. According

  to this doctrine, which takes up and develops the Aristotelian definition of aretè

  as habit ( hexis), virtue is an “operative habit,” which causes potential or habit

  to pass into act in the best way. Human potential—thus the scholastics argue,

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  who formulated and transmitted to Western ethics the doctrine of virtue—in

  contrast to natural potentials is constitutively undecided, insofar as it can indif-

  ferently want this or that object, the good as well as the bad. For this reason, it is

  necessary that there be produced in potential a habit that is essentially ordained

  to good action: this habit is virtue as habitus operativus. The Aristotelian pri-

  macy of energeia over habit is here confirmed: virtue is that by means of which

  habit, which in Aristotle is a category of ontology, is transformed into acting

  and crosses over into ethics (Aristotle had divided being into potential and act in

  order to insert movement and action into it). And yet precisely this indetermi-

  nation of being and praxis, habit and energeia, marks the status of virtue with its ambiguity: it is the mode of being of a subject (the virtuous human being) and

  at the same time a quality of his action. The human being acts well insofar as he

  is virtuous, but he is virtuous insofar as he acts well.

  In breaking the vicious circle of virtue, it is necessary to think the virtuous

  (or the virtual) as use, that is, as something that stands beyond the dichotomy