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The Omnibus Homo Sacer

Page 177

by Giorgio Agamben


  1.14. Aristotle does not explicitly thematize the introduction of time into

  being implied in the ti en einai. However, when he explains ( Metaphysics, 1028a 30ff.) in what sense ousia is protos, primary and first of all, he distinguishes three aspects of this priority: according to the concept ( logoi), according to knowledge ( gnosei), and according to time ( chronoi). According to the concept, insofar as in the concept of each thing is necessarily present that of ousia; according to

  knowledge, because we know something better when we know what it is. The

  explication of the third aspect of priority, the temporal, seems to be lacking. In

  place of this, Aristotle formulates the task of thought in these terms: kai de kai

  to palai te kai nyn kai aei zetoumenon kai aei aporoumenon, ti to on, touto esti tis

  he ousia (“and indeed the question that, both now and of old, has always been

  raised, and always been the subject of doubt, is what ousia is”). If, according

  to the logical sequence, this sentence should be read as a clarification of the

  temporal sense of the protos, then it cannot refer solely to a chronological time.

  Here Aristotle implicitly cites a passage from Plato’s Sophist, which Heidegger

  was to use as the epigraph of Being and Time: “you have long known what you

  meant when you said ‘being’; we, by contrast, at one time [ pro tou] knew it, but

  now we have fallen into an aporia [ eporekamen]” (Plato, Sophist 244a). Being is that which, if one seeks to catch hold of it, divides itself into a “before” ( palai), in which one believed one could comprehend it, and a “now” ( nyn) in which it

  becomes problematic. The comprehension of being, that is to say, always entails

  time. (Heidegger’s posing again of the problem of being is a revival of Aristote-

  lian ontology and will remain up to the very end in solidarity with its aporias.)

  1.15. In the ontological apparatus that Aristotle leaves as an inheritance to

  Western philosophy, the scission of being into essence and existence and the in-

  troduction of time into being are the work of language. It is the subjectivation

  of being as hypokeimenon, as that-on-the-basis-of-which-one-says, that puts the

  apparatus in motion. On the other hand, as we have seen, the hypokeimenon is al-

  ways already named by means of a proper name (Socrates, Emma) or indicated by

  means of a deictic “this.” The ti en einai, the “what it was for Emma to be Emma,”

  expresses a relation that runs between the entity and its being in language.

  By abstracting itself from predication, the singular being recedes into a past

  like the sub-iectum on the presupposition of which every discourse is founded.

  The being on-the-basis-of-which-one-says and that cannot be said is always al-

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  ready pre-supposed, always has the form of a “what it was.” In being presupposed

  in this way, the subject maintains at one and the same time its priority and its

  inaccessibility. In the words of Boehm, it is inaccessible due to—and at the same

  time, despite—its priority and has its priority despite—and at the same time due

  to—its inaccessibility (Boehm, R., pp. 210–211). But as Hegel comprehends in

  the dialectic of sense certainty that opens the Phenomenology, this past is precisely what allows one to grasp in language the immediate “here” and “now” as time, as

  “a history.” The impossibility of saying—other than by naming it—singular being

  produces time and dissolves into it. (That Hegel thought the absolute as subject

  and not as substance means precisely this: that the presupposition, the “subject”

  as hypokeimenon has been liquidated, pushed into the background as presup-

  position, and at the same time captured, by means of the dialectic and time, as

  subject in a modern sense. The presuppositional structure of language is thus

  revealed and transformed into the internal motor of the dialectic. Schelling will

  instead seek, without success, to arrest and neutralize linguistic presupposition.)

  1.16. Now one can understand what we meant when we affirmed that ontol-

  ogy constitutively has to do with anthropogenesis and, at the same time, what is

  at stake in the Aristotelian ontological apparatus—and more generally, in every

  historical transformation of ontology. What is in question, in the apparatus as

  in its every new historical declination, is the articulation between language and

  world that anthropogenesis has disclosed as “history” to the living beings of the

  species Homo sapiens. Severing the pure existent (the that it is) from the essence (the what it is) and inserting time and movement between them, the ontological

  apparatus reactualizes and repeats the anthropogenetic event, opens and defines

  each time the horizon of acting as well as knowing, by conditioning, in the sense

  that has been seen as a historical a priori, what human beings can do and what

  they can know and say.

  According to the peculiar presuppositional structure of language (“language,”

  according to Mallarmé’s precise formulation, “is a principle that develops itself

  through the negation of every principle”—that is, by transforming every archè

  into a presupposition), in anthropogenesis the event of language pre-supposes

  as not (yet) linguistic and not (yet) human what precedes it. That is to say, the

  apparatus must capture in the form of subjectivation the living being, presup-

  posing it as that on the basis of which one says, as what language, in happening,

  presupposes and renders its ground. In Aristotelian ontology, the hypokeimenon,

  the pure “that it is,” names this presupposition, the singular and impredicable

  existence that must be at once excluded and captured in the apparatus. The “it

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  was” ( en) of the ti en einai is, in this sense, a more archaic past than every verbal past tense, because it refers to the originary structure of the event of language.

  In the name (in particular in the proper name, and every name is originally a

  proper name), being is always already presupposed by language to language. As

  Hegel was to understand perfectly, the precedence that is in question here is not

  chronological but is an effect of linguistic presupposition.

  Hence the ambiguity of the status of the subject- hypokeimenon: on the one

  hand, it is excluded insofar as it cannot be said but only named and indicated;

  on the other hand, it is the foundation on the basis of which everything is said.

  And this is the sense of the scission between “that it is” and “what it is,” quod est

  and quid est: the ti en einai is the attempt to overcome the scission, by including it in order to overcome it (in the medieval formula quod quid erat esse, this attempt to hold together the quod est and the quid est is obvious).

  א According to the axiom formulated by Aristotle in the De anima 415b 13 (“Being

  for the living is to live,” to de zen tois zosi to einai estin), what holds on the level of being is transposed in a completely analogous way onto the level of living. Like being, so also

  “living is said in many ways” ( pleonachos de legomenou tou zen; ibid., 413a 24), and here as well one of these senses—nutritive or vegetative life—is separated from the others

  and becomes a presupposition to them. As we have shown elsewhere, nutritive life thus

  becomes what must be excluded from the city—and at the same time included i
n it—as

  simple living from politically qualified living. Ontology and politics correspond perfectly.

  1.17. The ontological paradigm in Plato is completely different. He is the first

  to discover the presuppositional structure of language and to make this discov-

  ery the foundation of philosophical thought. This is the passage—as celebrated

  as it is misunderstood—from the Republic (511b) in which Plato describes the

  dialectical method:

  Then also understand the other subsection of the intelligible, I mean that which

  language itself [ autos ho logos] touches on [ haptetai] with the potential of dialoguing [ tei tou dialegesthai dynamei]. It does not consider these presuppositions

  [ hypotheseis, etymologically, “that which is placed under, at the foundation”] as

  first principles [ archai] but truly as presuppositions—as stepping-stones to take

  off from, enabling it to reach the non-presupposed [ anypotheton] toward the

  principle of everything and, having touched on it [ hapsamenos autes], it reverses

  itself and, keeping hold of what follows from it, comes down to a conclusion

  without making use of anything visible at all but only of ideas themselves, moving

  on from ideas to ideas and ending in ideas.

  The power of language is that of transforming the principle (the archè) into a

  presupposition (“hypothesis,” what the word presupposes as its referent). It is

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  what we do in every non-philosophical discourse, in which we take it for granted

  that the name refers to something non-linguistic that we therefore treat as a

  given, as a principle from which we can start in order to acquire knowledge. The

  philosopher, by contrast, is someone who, conscious of this presuppositional

  power of language, does not treat hypotheses as principles but rather as presup-

  positions, which are to be used only as footholds to reach the non-presupposed

  principle. Contrary to a recurrent equivocation, it is important to understand

  that the method that Plato describes has nothing to do with a mystical prac-

  tice but is situated rigorously within language (as he says beyond all possible

  doubt, what is in question is what “language itself touches on with the poten-

  tial of dialoguing”). That is to say, it is a matter, once we have recognized the

  presuppositional power of the logos—which transforms the reality that thought

  must reach into the given referent of a name or a definition—of recognizing

  and eliminating the presupposed hypotheses (Plato also calls them “shadows”—

  skiai—and “images”— eikones; Republic 510e) by making use of language in a non-presuppositional, which is to say non-referential, way (for this reason, when

  it is a question of confronting decisive problems, Plato prefers to have recourse

  to myth and joking).

  This is to say that the philosopher frees language from its shadow and,

  instead of taking hypotheses for granted, seeks to ascend from these latter—

  namely, from denotative words—toward the non-presupposed principle. The

  idea is this word freed from its shadow, which does not presuppose the archè

  as given but seeks to reach it as what is not a presupposition to name and

  discourse. Philosophical discourse always and only moves by means of these

  non-presuppositional words, emancipated from their sensible referent, which

  Plato calls ideas and which, significantly, he always expresses by means of the

  name in question preceded by the adjective autos (“itself ”): the circle itself

  ( autos ho kyklos; Epistle VII, 342a–b), the thing itself. The thing itself, which is in question here, is not an obscure non-linguistic presupposition of language

  but what appears when, once we have taken note of its presuppositional power,

  language is liberated from its shadow. The “circle itself” is the word “circle”

  insofar as it signifies not simply the sensible circle but itself insofar as it signifies

  it. Only by extinguishing the presuppositional power of language is it possible

  for it to let the mute thing appear: the thing itself and language itself ( autos ho

  logos) are in contact at this point—united only by a void of signification and

  representation. (A word can signify itself only by means of a representative

  void—hence the metaphor of “touching”: the idea is a word that does not de-

  note but “touches.” That is to say, as happens in contact, it manifests the thing

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  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  and at the same time also itself—recall, in De anima 423b 15, the definition of

  touching as that which perceives not “through a medium” [ metaxy] but “at the

  same time [ ama] as the medium.”)

  In this sense, Kojève is right to say that philosophy is the discourse that, in

  speaking of something, also speaks of the fact that it is speaking about it. It goes

  without saying, however, that this awareness does not exhaust the philosophical

  task, because with this starting point, different and even opposed perspectives

  are possible. While according to Plato thought must seek to reach the non-pre-

  supposed principle by eliminating the presuppositional power of language,

  Aristotle—and Hegel after him—by contrast put at the basis of their dialectic

  precisely the presuppositional power of the logos.

  1.18. Ontology thinks being insofar as it is said and called into question in

  language, which is to say that it is constitutively onto-logy. In the Aristotelian apparatus, this is manifested in the scission of being into a hypokeimenon, something lying-at-the-base (the being named or indicated of a singular existent, in-

  sofar as it is not said of a subject but is a presupposition for every discourse) and

  that which is said on the presupposition of it. In the ti en einai Aristotle seeks to think their identity, to articulate together what had been divided: being is what

  was always presupposed in language and by language. That is to say: existence

  and identity coincide—or can coincide by means of time.

  In this way, the task that the apparatus, as historical a priori, opens up for

  the history of the West is both speculative and political: if being is divided in the

  logos and nevertheless not irreducibly split, if it is possible to think the identity of the singular existent, then upon this divided and articulated identity it will also

  be possible to found a political order, a city and not simply a pasture for animals.

  But is there really such an articulation of being—at once divided and uni-

  tary? Or is there not rather in the being so conceived an unbridgeable hiatus?

  The fact that unity entails a past and demands time in order to be realized ren-

  ders it no less problematic. In the ti en einai, it has the form: “what it was each time for this existent to be (or live).” The past measures the time that necessarily

  insinuates itself between the existentive determination of being as hypokeimenon

  (this existent, the tode ti, the first subject) and its persevering in being, its being identical to itself. Existence is identified with essence by means of time. That is to

  say, the identity of being and existence is a historical-political task. And at the same time, it is an archeological task, because what must be grasped is a past (a “was”).

  History, insofar as it seeks to gain access to presence, is always already archeology.

  The ontological apparatus, insofar as
it is chronogenic, is also “historicogenic”; it

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  produces history and preserves it in motion, and only in this way can it be pre-

  served. Politics and ontology, ontological apparatuses and political apparatuses

  are in solidarity, because they have need of one another to actualize themselves.

  א In this sense, being and history are in solidarity and inseparable. Here the Benja-

  minian axiom holds according to which there is a history of everything of which there is

  a nature (which is to say, being). Taking up once more the Aristotelian thesis according to which “nature is on its way toward itself,” one can say that history is the way that nature takes toward itself (and not, as in the ordinary conception, something separate from it).

  1.19. At the end of Homo Sacer I, the analogy between the epochal situation of politics and that of ontology had been defined on the basis of a radical crisis,

  which assails the very possibility of distinguishing and articulating the terms of

  the ontologico-political apparatus:

  Today bios lies in zoè exactly as essence, in the Heideggerian definition of Dasein, lies ( liegt) in existence. Schelling expressed the outermost figure of his thought in the idea of a being that is only what is purely existent. Yet how can a bios be only its own zoè, how can a form of life seize hold of the very haplos that constitutes both the task and the enigma of Western metaphysics? (Agamben 4, pp. 210–211/188)

  Existence and essence, existentive being and copulative being, zoè and bios are today completely pulled apart or have just as completely collapsed into one another, and the historical task of their articulation seems impossible to carry out.

  The bare life of the homo sacer is the irreducible hypostasis that appears between them to testify to the impossibility of their identity as much as their distinction:

  “what it was for X to be or live” is now only bare life. In the same way, the time—

  at once chronological and operative—in which their articulation was achieved,

  is no longer graspable as the medium of a historical task, in which being could

  realize its own identity with itself and human beings could secure the conditions

  of their human, which is to say, political, existence. The Aristotelian ontological

  apparatus, which has for almost two millennia guaranteed the life and politics of

 

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