The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  the West, can no longer function as a historical a priori, to the extent to which

  anthropogenesis, which it sought to fix in terms of an articulation between lan-

  guage and being, is no longer reflected in it. Having arrived at the outermost

  point of its secularization, the projection of ontology (or theology) onto history

  seems to have become impossible.

  א For this reason, Heidegger’s attempt to grasp—in perfect coherence with precisely

  his Aristotelian model—being as time could not but fail. In his interpretation of Kant,

  Heidegger affirms that time, as form of internal sense and pure autoaffection, is identified with the I. But precisely for this reason, the I cannot grasp itself in time. The time that,

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  with space, was to render experience possible is itself inexperienceable; it only measures the impossibility of self-experience. Every attempt to grasp the I and time therefore

  entails a discrepancy. This discrepancy is bare life, which can never coincide with itself, is always in a certain sense missed and never truly lived. Or, if one prefers, to live is

  precisely this impossibility of self-experience, this impossibility of making one’s existing and one’s being coincide. (This is the secret of James’s novels: we can live only because

  we have missed our life.)

  The precept “become what you are,” in which one could express the intention of the

  Aristotelian apparatus (with the slight correction: “become what you were”), insofar as

  it entrusts to time a task that it can never bring to an end, is contradictory. According to Kojève’s suggestion, it should rather be reformulated in this way: “become what you can

  never be” (or “be what you can never become”). It is only at the price of madness that

  Nietzsche, at the end of the history of metaphysics, believed he was able to show in Ecce Homo “wie man wird, was man ist,” “how one becomes what one is.”

  2

  Theory of Hypostases

  2.1. An epochal change in the ontology of the West happens between

  the second and third century of the common era and coincides with

  the entry into the vocabulary of first philosophy of a term almost completely

  unknown to classical thought (completely absent in Plato, in Aristotle it ap-

  pears only in the originary sense of “sediment, remainder”): hypostasis. In a study devoted to the semantic history of the term, Dörrie has shown how this word,

  which appears for the first time in Stoic ontology, beginning with Neoplatonism

  progressively spread as a true and proper Modewort (Dörrie, p. 14) in the most

  diverse philosophical schools to designate existence, in place of the classical

  ousia. In its character as a “fashionable term,” it constitutes a striking antecedent of the analogous diffusion of the term “existence” in twentieth-century philosophies. At the end of the ancient world, there is a proliferation of hypostasis in

  the philosophico-theological vocabulary just as, in the philosophical discourse

  of the twentieth century, there will be a proliferation of existence. But while

  in twentieth-century existentialism a priority of rank of existence over essence

  corresponds to the lexical priority, in late-ancient thought the situation of hy-

  postasis is more ambiguous: indeed, the presupposition of the term’s diffusion is

  an inverse process through which being persistently tends to transcend existence.

  To the displacement of the One beyond being there thus corresponds an equal

  heightening of its being given existence and manifesting itself in hypostases.

  And to this change of the historical a priori there corresponds, in every sphere

  of culture, an epochal transformation whose importance—insofar as we perhaps

  still live under its sign—we are still not in a position to measure. Being (as is ob-

  vious today) tends to exhaust itself and disappear, but in disappearing, it leaves

  in its place the residual pure effectiveness of hypostasis, bare existence as such.

  Heidegger’s thesis according to which “ essence lies [ liegt] in existence” is, in this sense, the final—almost sepulchral—act of hypostatic ontology.

  2.2. The originary meaning of the term hypostasis—alongside that of “base,

  foundation”—is “sediment” and refers to the solid remainder of a liquid. Thus,

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  in Hippocrates hyphistamai and hypostasis designate, respectively, the deposit-ing of urine and the sediment itself. In Aristotle the term appears only in this

  sense, to signify the sediment of a physiological process ( On the Parts of Animals,

  677a 15) and excrement as the remainder of nourishment (ibid., 647b 28, 671b

  20, 677a 15). We must reflect on the fact that it is precisely a term that originally

  meant “sediment” or “remainder” that became the key term or Modewort to

  express a fundamental ontological concept: existence. In an exemplary article,

  Benveniste has suggested that in the presence of identical morphemes provided

  with completely different meanings, one must seek out above all whether there

  exists a use of the term able to lead back to unity the apparent diversity of the

  meanings (in this way, as we will see, he was able to explain the two appar-

  ently irreconcilable meanings of trepho: “to nourish” and “to curdle”; Benveniste, pp. 290–293/249–253).

  It will thus be opportune to ask ourselves from this perspective which mean-

  ing of hyphistamai and hypostasis allows one to make sense of an apparently incomprehensible semantic development of the term. In reality, the diversity

  of meanings is easily explained. Once one considers that, if the verb originally

  means “to produce a solid remainder”—and thus, “to reach the solid state, to be

  given a real consistency”—the development toward the meaning of “existence”

  is perfectly natural. Existence here appears—with a radical transformation of

  classical ontology—as the result of a process by means of which being is reified

  and given consistency. Not only does the originary meaning not disappear in the

  new one, but it allows us to understand how a school of thought, namely, Neo-

  platonism, which persistently sought to displace the One beyond being, could

  never conceive existence except as “hypostasis,” that is, as the material remainder

  and sediment of that transcendent process.

  2.3. While the hypokeimenon, the simple existent, was for Aristotle the first

  and immediate form of being, which had no need for a foundation because it

  was itself the first (or ultimate) subject, on the presupposition of which every

  comprehension and every predication becomes possible, already the Stoics had

  instead made use of the terms hyphistasthai and hypostasis to define the passage from being in itself to existence. Thus, they designated with the verb hyphistasthai the mode of being of incorporeals, like the “sayable,” time, and the

  event, while they made use of the verb hyparchein in reference to the presence

  of bodies. There is an incorporeal dimension of being, which has the nature of

  a process and an event, and not of a substance. Further developing this ten-

  dency, hypo stasis now becomes something like an operation—conceptually if

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  not genetically second—by means of which being is actualized in existence. For

  this reason Dio of Prusa can write: “every being has a hypostasis” ( pan to o
n

  hypostasin echei; Dörrie, p. 43). Being is distinct from existence, but this latter is at the same time something (once again the image of sediment is illuminating)

  that being produces and that moreover necessarily belongs to it. There is no

  other foundation of existence than an operation, an emanation, or an effectu-

  ation of being.

  א That the new hypostatic terminology, which takes form beginning with the Stoics,

  was initially hardly comprehensible, is clearly shown in a passage from Galen, in which

  he defines as “pedantry” the distinction that some philosophers make between being and

  hypostasis: “I say that it is pedantry [ mikrologia] to distinguish according to category being and hypostasis [ to on te kai to hyphestos]” (Galen 2, II, 7). But that this “pedantry”

  instead corresponds to a real change in the way of conceiving being appears just as clearly if one compares two occurrences—distant from one another and, moreover, symmetrically inverse—of the new terminology. Philo, who as always anticipates tendencies that

  will be confirmed only with Neoplatonism and Christian theology, thus writes that “only

  God exists [or subsists] in being” ( en toi einai hyphesteken); Alexander of Aphrodisias by contrast, to define the mode of existence of single beings as opposed to categories and

  ideas, makes frequent use of the expression “to be in hypostasis [in existence]” ( einai en hypostasei; Dörrie, p. 37). Beings are in the mode of hypostasis, of existence, but there is also a non-hypostatic being. On the one hand, there is the God of Philo, in whom it

  is not possible to distinguish being and existing (or, to paraphrase a modern expression,

  whose existence lies in his essence); on the other hand, there are the multiple beings in

  which being lies and remains in existence. “To exist in being” and “to be in existence”: here begins the process that will lead to an ever greater pulling apart of being from existence and of the divine from the human.

  2.4. If it is true that Plotinus is the creator of the Neoplatonic doctrine of

  hypostases (Dörrie, p. 45), it was Porphyry who technicalized the term “hypos-

  tasis” in his teacher’s thought, already in the titles that he gives to essays 1 (“On

  the Three Principal Hypostases”) and 3 (“On the Cognitive Hypostases”) of the

  fifth Ennead.

  Neoplatonic ontology seeks to combine the Aristotelian apparatus of scis-

  sion and articulation of being with the genuinely Platonic impulse toward a

  beyond of being. The result is that being becomes a field of forces held in tension

  between a principle beyond being and its realizations (or emanations) in exis-

  tence, called precisely hypostases. For the horizontality of Aristotelian ontology

  there is substituted a decisively vertical conception (high/low, transcendence/

  hypostasis). In Plotinus and his disciples, the term “hypostasis” thus designates

  the intellect, the soul, and all things that gradually proceed from the One and

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  the hypostases that it has produced: “So it goes from the beginning to the last

  and lowest, each remaining behind in its own place, and that which is generated

  taking another, lower rank with respect to its generator” (V, 2, 2).

  The use of the expressions “to have a hypostasis” ( hypostasin echein, eighteen

  occurrences) or “to take a hypostasis” ( hypostasin lambanein, at least six occur-

  rences) in the Enneads is significant. Existence is not the originary given but

  something that is “taken” or produced (“Hypostases are generated [ hai hypo-

  staseis ginontain] while remaining immobile and invariant principles”; III, 4, 1).

  But it is precisely the relationship between the principle beyond being and the

  multiplicity of hypostases that emanate from it that constitutes the problem that

  Plotinian ontology never manages to unravel.

  In essay 4 of the fifth Ennead, which bears the title “How Things That Are

  from the First Are after It, or on the One,” the problem displays its most aporetic

  formulation. On the one hand, there is an immobile and immutable principle,

  and, on the other, there are the “existences” that proceed from it by means of an

  enigmatic proodos, a “going out” that is not yet a creation and that therefore does not correspond in any way to an act or movement of the One:

  If, then, something comes into being while the One abides in itself, it comes

  into being from it when it is most of all what it is. When, therefore, the One

  abides in its own proper way of life [ en toi oiekeioi ethei], that which comes into being does come into being from it, but from it as it abides unchanged. . . . But

  how, when the One remains unchanged, is something generated in act [ ginetai

  energeia]? There is, on the one hand, the being in act of being [ ousias] and, on the other, the being in act [which derives] from the essence of each thing. The first is

  each being insofar as it is in act, and the second derives from the first and must

  in everything be a consequence of it and be different from it. As in fire there is a

  heat which is the fullness of its essence and a heat that is generated from it when

  the fire exercises the activity that is native to its essence in abiding unchanged as

  fire. So it is also for the principle, abiding in its own proper way of life, a being

  in action [ energeia] that is generated by its perfection, having taken a hypostasis

  [ hypostasin laboua] from a great power, indeed the greatest of all, adds to the

  being and the essence [ eis to einai kai ousian elthen]. For that principle is beyond being [ epekeina ousias]. (V, 4, 2, 21–39)

  2.5. Perhaps never as in this passage does the impossibility of expressing the

  new hypostatic paradigm with the vocabulary of Aristotelian ontology appear

  so obvious. The Aristotelian apparatus of the division of being (being/existence,

  potential/act) is still standing, but the relation between the two counterposed

  terms changes completely. While in Aristotle essence was what resulted from a

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  question turned toward grasping existence (what it was for X to be), existence

  (hypostasis) is now in some way a performance of the essence.

  The hypokeimenon, the subject lying at the base in the Aristotelian apparatus,

  which had to be taken up by means of the ti en einai as the being that it was, is now separated and enters into an infinite process of flight: on the one hand, an

  ungraspable and unsayable principle, which tends to proceed or regress beyond

  being; on the other hand, its hypostatic emanations into existence. Aristotelian

  ontology has been irrevocably damaged: between the presuppositional subject

  in flight beyond being and language and the hypostatic multiplicities there does

  not seem to be any passage.

  It is this contradictory tension—which is also that between Platonic eternity

  and Aristotelian time—that Plotinus and Porphyry’s theory of hypostases tries in

  vain to unravel. The introduction of time into being, implicit in the Aristotelian

  apparatus, thus takes the form of a circular movement of hypostases that come

  out of being ( proodos) in order to make a return to it ( epistrophè).

  א In the Elements of Theology, Proclus systematizes the Plotinian hypostatic ontology.

  On the one hand (Proclus 1, prop. 27), he forcefully emphasizes that the productive prin-

  ciple does not produce the hypostases because of a l
ack or by means of a movement (it is

  significant that Proclus here uses the expression “to confer a hypostasis”— ten hypostasin parechetai—but parecho means etymologically “to have alongside”) but only due to its fullness and superabundance. On the other hand, he seeks to find a medium or a common element between the producer and the hypostases by means of the concepts of similarity

  ( homoiotes; prop. 28–29), participation ( metexis; prop. 23–24, 68–69), and irradiation ( ellampsis; prop. 81). “For if the participant is separate [from the participated], how can it be participated by that which contains neither it nor anything from it? Accordingly a

  potential or irradiation, proceeding from the participated to the participant, must link

  the two” (ibid.). Here one clearly sees how the Neoplatonic attempt to reconcile a genu-

  inely Platonic conceptuality (participation, similarity) with the categories of Aristotelian ontology necessarily produces aporias, which the concepts of irradiation and procession

  vainly seek to resolve.

  א The concept of hypostasis has a particular importance in Gnosticism. Plotinus

  reproved the Gnostics for multiplying hypostases ( Ennead II, 9, 2 and 6). In effect, in the testimonies that have been preserved, according to the Gnostics, from preexisting

  principles, also called “Abyss” or “Protofather,” there gush forth a multiplicity of “existences” or hypostases, which seem to parody or disseminate the three Plotinian hypostases.

  What defines the Gnostic hypostases is that they are in some way incarnate in a personal

  entity, which is inscribed in a genealogy and of which something like a myth is recounted.

  Thus, one of the hypostases, Sophia (which corresponds to the soul, according to some;

  Hadot 2, p. 214) suffers a “passion” and falls, departing from the Father. According to what

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  Hippolytus recounts, from the passion of Sophia are produced “hypostatic substances”

  ( ousias hypostatas; “from fear, the psychical substance, from pain the material, from aporia the demonic, from conversion and supplication the return”). Here we can obviously see

  that the hypostases are the place of a subjectivization, in which an ontological process

  that goes from the preexistent to existences finds something like a personal figure. In the Gnostic hypostases, the Aristotelian “subject” (the hypokeimenon) enters into a process that will lead to its being transformed into the modern subject.