The Omnibus Homo Sacer
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paradigm of another human activity and another relation with the living body,
for which we lack names and which for now we can only evoke by means of the
syntagma “use of the body.” Slavery (as a juridical institution) and the machine
represent in a certain sense the capture and parodic realization within social insti-
tutions of this “use of the body,” of which we have sought to delineate the essen-
tial characteristics. Every attempt to think use must necessarily engage with them,
because perhaps only an archeology of slavery and, at the same time, of technology will be able to free the archaic nucleus that has remained imprisoned in them.
It is necessary, at this point, to restore to the slave the decisive meaning that
belongs to him in the process of anthropogenesis. The slave is, on the one hand,
a human animal (or an animal-human) and, on the other hand and to the same
extent, a living instrument (or an instrument-human). That is to say, the slave
constitutes in the history of anthropogenesis a double threshold, in which animal
life crosses over to the human just as the living (the human) crosses over into the
inorganic (into the instrument), and vice versa. The invention of slavery as a ju-
ridical institution allowed the capture of living beings and of the use of the body
into productive systems, temporarily blocking the development of the technolog-
ical instrument; its abolition in modernity freed up the possibility of technology,
that is, of the living instrument. At the same time, insofar as their relationship
with nature is no longer mediated by another human being but by an appa-
ratus, human beings have estranged themselves from the animal and from the
organic in order to draw near to the instrument and the inorganic to the point
of almost identifying with it (the human-machine). For this reason—insofar as
they have lost, together with the use of bodies, their immediate relation to their
own animality—modern human beings have not truly been able to appropriate
to themselves the liberation from labor that machines should have procured for
them. And if the hypothesis of a constitutive connection between slavery and
technology is correct, it is not surprising that the hypertrophy of technological
apparatuses has ended up producing a new and unheard-of form of slavery.
8
The Inappropiable
8.1. In The Highest Poverty ( Homo Sacer IV.1), we have shown how the
concept of use was at the center of the Franciscan strategy and how,
precisely with respect to its definition and to the possibility of separating it from
ownership, it had produced the decisive conflict between the order and the curia.
Preoccupied solely with assuring the lawfulness of the refusal of every form of
ownership, the Franciscan theorists therefore ended up enclosing themselves in
a solely juridical polemic, without managing to furnish another definition of use
that would not be put in purely negative terms with respect to the juridical order.
Perhaps nowhere does the ambiguity of their argumentation appear more clearly
than in the willfully paradoxical thesis of Hugh of Digne, according to whom
the Franciscans “have only this right, not to have any rights” ( hoc ius nullum ius
habere; Hugh of Digne, p. 161).
The Franciscan vindication of poverty is thus founded on the possibility for
a subject to renounce the right of ownership ( abdicatio iuris). What they call
“use” (and at times, as in Francis of Ascoli, “bodily use,” usus corporeus) is the dimension that opens out from this renunciation. From the perspective that
interests us here, the problem is not whether the Franciscan thesis, which ended
up succumbing to the curia’s attacks, could have been more or less rigorously
argued: instead, what would have been decisive was a conception of use that
was not founded on an act of renunciation—that is, in the last analysis, on the
will of a subject—but, so to speak, on the very nature of things (as the frequent
reference to the state of nature seems, after all, to imply).
8.2. In 1916, Benjamin jotted down in one of his Notizblöcke a brief text with
the title “Notes toward a Work on the Category of Justice,” which establishes a
close connection between the concept of justice and that of inappropriability:
“To every good,” he writes,
limited as it is by the spatio-temporal order, there accrues a possession-character.
But the possession, as something caught in the same finitude, is always unjust.
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No order of possession, however articulated, can therefore lead to justice. Rather,
this lies in the condition of a good that cannot be a possession [ das nicht Besitz
sein kann]. This alone is the good through which goods become possessionless
[ besitzlos]. (Benjamin 1, p. 41/257)
Justice, Benjamin continues, has nothing to do with the allotment of goods
according to the needs of individuals, because the subject’s claim to the good is
not founded on needs but on justice, and as such it is directed not “toward the
possession-right of the person but possibly toward the good-right of the good”
( ein Gutes-Recht des Gutes; ibid.).
At this point, with a striking contraction of ethics and ontology, justice is
presented not as a virtue but as a “state of the world,” as the ethical category that
corresponds not to having-to-be but to existence as such:
Justice does not appear to refer to the good will of the subject, but, instead,
constitutes a state of the world [ einen Zustand der Welt]. Justice designates the
ethical category of the existent, virtue the ethical category of the demanded.
Virtue can be demanded; justice in the final analysis can only be as a state of the
world or as a state of God.
And it is in this sense that it can be defined as “the striving to make the world
into the highest good” (ibid.).
If we recall that justice, in the immediately preceding passage, coincided
with the condition of a good that cannot be appropriated, to make of the world
the supreme good can only mean: to experience it as absolutely inappropriable.
In this fragment, which is radically Franciscan in a certain way, poverty is not
found on a decision of the subject but corresponds to a “state of the world.” And
if, in the Franciscan theorists, use appeared as the dimension that is opened when
one renounces ownership, here the perspective is necessarily reversed and use
appears as the relation to an inappropriable, as the only possible relation to that supreme state of the world in which it, as just, can be in no way appropriated.
8.3. The testimony of experience, which daily offers us examples of inappro-
priable things with which we are nevertheless intimately in relation, testifies that
a similar conception of use as relation to an inappropriable is not completely
strange. Here I propose we examine three of these inappropriables: the body,
language, and landscape.
A correct posing of the problem of the body was put durably off course by
the phenomenological doctrine of the body proper. According to this doctrine—
which finds its topical place in the polemic of Husserl and Edith Stein against
Lipps’s theory
of empathy—the experience of the body would be, together with
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the I, what is most proper and originary. “The originary donation of the body,”
Husserl writes,
can only be the donation of my body and no one else’s [ meines und keines andern Leibes]. The apperception “my body” is in any originally essential way [ urwesent-lich] the first and only one that can be fully originary. Only if I have constituted my body can I apperceive every other body as such, and this apperception principally has a mediated character. (Husserl 1, p. 7)
And yet precisely this apodictic pronouncement of the originary character as
“mine” of the donation of a body never stops giving rise to aporias and difficulties.
The first is the perception of the body of the other. This latter is not actually
perceived as an inert body ( Körper) but as a living body ( Leib), endowed like mine with sensibility and perception. In the notes and fragmentary drafts that
make up volumes XIII and XIV of the Husserliana, pages and pages are dedicated
to the problem of the perception of the hand of the other. How is it possible to
perceive a hand as alive, that is, not simply as a thing, a marble, or painted hand
but as a hand “of flesh and blood”—and yet not mine? If to the perception of the
body there originarily belongs the character of being mine, what is the difference
between the hand of another, which I see in this moment and which touches me,
and mine? It cannot be a question of a logical inference or an analogy, because I
“feel” the hand of the other, I identify with it, and its sensibility is given to me in
a sort of immediate presentification ( Vergegenwärtigung; Husserl 2, pp. 40–41).
Then what keeps us from thinking that the hand of the other and mine are given
co-originarily and that only in a second moment is the distinction produced?
The problem is particularly pressing because at the time when Husserl wrote
his notes, the debate around the problem of empathy ( Einfühlung) was still very
much alive. In a book published some years before ( Leitfaden der Psychologie,
1903), Theodor Lipps had excluded the idea that empathetic experiences, in
which the subject finds himself suddenly transferred into another’s lived experi-
ence, could be explained by means of imitation, association, or analogy. When
I observe with full participation the acrobats who are walking suspended in the
void and cry out in terror when it looks like they will fall, I am in some way
“with” them and feel their body as if it were my own and my own as if it were
theirs. “It is therefore not the case,” writes Husserl, “that I first solipsistically
constitute my things and my world, and then empathetically grasp the other I,
as solipsistically constituting his world for himself, and that only then is the one
identified with the other; but rather my sensible unity, insofar as the external
multiplicity is not separate from mine, is eo ipso empathetically perceived as
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the same as mine” (Husserl 1, p. 10). In this way, the axiom of the originarity
of the body proper is seriously called into question. As Husserl could not fail to
admit, empathetic experience introduces into the solipsistic constitution of the
body proper a “transcendence,” in which consciousness seems to go beyond itself
and distinguishing one’s own lived experience from another’s becomes problem-
atic (ibid., p. 8). This is especially the case since Max Scheler, who had sought
to apply to ethics the methods of Husserlian phenomenology, had postulated
unreservedly—with a thesis that Edith Stein had designated as “fascinating”
even if erroneous—an originary, undifferentiated current of lived experience, in
which the I and the body of the other are perceived in the same way as one’s own.
None of the repeated attempts of Husserl and his student to restore the
primacy and originarity of the body proper is finally convincing. As happens
every time we persist in maintaining a certainty that experience has revealed to
be fallacious, they come to a contradiction, which in this case takes the form of
an oxymoron, of a “non-originary originarity.” “Neither the external body nor
external subjectivity,” writes Husserl, “is given to me originaliter; and yet that human being is given to me originarily in my surrounding world” (Husserl 1,
p. 234). And in an even more contradictory way, Edith Stein says:
While I am living in the other’s joy, I do not feel originary joy. It does not issue
live from my “I.” Neither does it have the character of having-once-been-lived
like remembered joy. . . . This other subject is originary although I do not live it
as originary; the joy that arises in him is originary even though I do not live it as
originary. In my non-originary lived experience I feel, as it were, accompanied
by an originary lived experience not lived by me but still there, manifesting itself
in my non-originary lived experience. (Stein, p. 11)
In this “non-originarily living an originarity,” the originarity of the body proper
is maintained so to speak in bad faith, only on condition of dividing empathetic
experience into two contradictory moments. Immediate participation in exter-
nal lived experience, which Lipps expressed as my being fully and distressingly
transported “alongside” the acrobat who walks on the tightrope, is thus hastily
set aside. In any case, what empathy—but, alongside it, it would be necessary
to mention hypnosis, magnetism, and suggestion, which in those years seem to
have obsessively captured the attention of psychologists and sociologists—shows
is that however much one affirms the originary character of the “propriety” of
the body and of lived experience, the intrusiveness of an “impropriety” shows
itself to be all the more originary and strong in it, as if the body proper always
cast a shadow, which can in no case be separated from it.
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8.4. In the 1935 essay De l’évasion ( On Escape), Emmanuel Levinas subjects to a merciless examination bodily experiences as familiar as they are disagreeable:
shame, nausea, need. According to his characteristic gesture, Levinas exaggerates
and drives to the extreme the analytic of Dasein of his teacher Heidegger so as to
exhibit, so to speak, its dark side. If in Being and Time Dasein is irreparably thrown into a facticity that is improper to it and that it has not chosen, such that he always
has to assume and grasp impropriety itself, this ontological structure now finds
its parodic formulation in the analysis of bodily need, nausea, and shame. In fact,
what defines the experiences is not a lack or defect of being, which we seek to fill up
or from which we take our distance: on the contrary, they are founded on a double
movement, in which the subject finds himself, on the one hand, irremissibly con-
signed to his body and, on the other, just as inexorably incapable of assuming it.
Let us imagine an exemplary case of shame: shame due to nudity. If in nudity
we experience shame, it is because in it we find ourselves consigned to something
that we cannot at any cost retract.
Shame arises each time we are unable to make others forget our basic nudity. It
is related to
everything we would like to hide and that we cannot bury or cover
up. . . . What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to one-
self, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalter-
ably binding presence of the I to itself. Nakedness is shameful when it is the sheer
visibility of our being, of its ultimate intimacy. . . . It is therefore our intimacy,
that is, our presence to ourselves, that is shameful. (Levinas 1, pp. 86–87/64–67)
This means that, at the instant in which what is most intimate and proper to
us—our body—is irreparably laid bare, it appears to us as the most foreign thing,
which we cannot in any way assume and which we want, for that reason, to hide.
This double, paradoxical movement is even more evident in nausea and bodily
need. Indeed, nausea is “the revolting presence of ourselves to ourselves” that, in
the instant in which it is lived, “appears insurmountable” (ibid., p. 89/66). The
more the nauseating state, with its vomiting, consigns me to my stomach, as to
my sole and irrefutable reality, so much more does it seem to me to be foreign
and inappropriable: I am nothing but nausea and vomiting, and yet I can neither
accept it nor come out of it. “There is in nausea a refusal to remain there, an ef-
fort to get out. Yet this effort is always already characterized as desperate. . . . In
nausea—which amounts to an impossibility of being what one is—we are at the
same time riveted to ourselves, enclosed in a tight circle that smothers” (p. 90/66).
The contradictory nature of the relation to the body reaches its critical mass
in need. At the moment that I experience an uncontestable urge to urinate, it is
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as if all my reality and all my presence are concentrated in the part of my body
from which the need is coming. It is absolutely and implacably proper to me,
and yet just for this reason, precisely because I am nailed down to it without
escape, it becomes the most external and inappropriable thing. The instant of
need, that is to say, lays bare the truth of the body proper: it is a field of polar
tensions whose extremes are defined by a “being consigned to” and a “not being