The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  and wine. It will be sufficient that the bond of the body of Christ eliminates and

  substitutes for the prior bond that defined the aggregate of those substances. The

  phrase “this is my body” therefore does not designate the monads but the bond

  that actualizes their unity:

  I think that your transubstantiation can be explained by retaining monads (which

  seems to agree better with the reason and order of the universe), but with the

  substantial bond of the body of Christ added by God to unite the monads of the

  bread and wine substantially, while the former substantial bond is destroyed, and

  with it its modifications or accidents. Thus there will remain only the phenom-

  ena of the monads of the bread and wine, which would have been there, if no

  substantial bond had been added to their monads by God. (p. 459/273)

  Against Des Bosses, who persists in conceiving what makes up the unity of

  the singular substance as a special form of accident, which he calls “absolute

  accident” or “substantial mode,” Leibniz affirms that the singularity of the com-

  posite substance does not result from a modification of the monads nor can it

  be something like a mode or accident that would exist in them as in a subject.

  The bond, though not a preexisting form, constitutes the unity of the body as a

  substantial reality.

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  3.3. It is certainly not by chance that Leibniz has recourse to the term “bond”

  to express what the ontological vocabulary called the unity of substance. The

  Franciscans, who from the start had affirmed that the living body is already

  given in the embryo in its unity and perfection, even before the soul is united to

  it, had called this principle forma corporeitatis. With respect to the term forma, so closely linked to Aristotelian ontology, the term vinculum emphasizes the

  fact that Leibniz was seeking to think something different, even if (or perhaps

  precisely for this reason) he is constrained to add the adjective “substantial.” It

  has been observed that Leibniz uses the term “bond” in his minor mathematical

  work to designate a sign that combines numerical or algebraic symbols into a

  unity. If in certain cases the union is contingent and the bond can be dissolved,

  in others, like the square root of two, it is indissoluble from the quantities that

  it modifies, which therefore exist solely by means of the bond. But the term

  vinculum had behind it other traditions well known to Leibniz as well, like those

  of law and magic, in which the bond is an active potential, which indissolubly

  joins what in nature is divided.

  In every case it is certain that the terminological choice, just like the tenacity

  with which Des Bosses opposes it, corresponds to the attempt, which as we will

  see is not always successful, to think in a new way the categories of the Aristo-

  telian ontology.

  3.4. What is at stake in the debate is at this point clear: how to think the

  unitary nature of corporeal singularity not as an appearance but as something

  real. For Des Bosses, the unity of the body (such and such a horse, such and such

  a boy: the primary substance in Aristotle) is nothing but a mode or an accident

  emanating from the substantial form. For Leibniz, it is by contrast a question of

  a new principle that is still of the order of substance but that obliges us to rethink

  substance in unheard-of terms, even at the risk of contradicting its traditional

  definition.

  Just as in the Monadology the relation of the monads among themselves was

  expressed with the metaphor of a “living mirror” (every monad is un miroir

  vivant of the whole universe), the image that progressively clears a path for Leibniz to define the peculiar nature of the bond is the acoustico-musical one of

  an echo. The letter that closes the exchange is, in this sense, a sort of miniature

  treatise that seeks to define, not without difficulties and contradictions, a new

  vocabulary for ontology.

  Des Bosses insisted on conceiving the substantial bond as a mode. Leibniz

  affirms that it cannot be a mode, because it neither alters nor modifies the monads

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  (“sive ponas, sive tollas, nihil in monadibus mutatur”; p. 516/367). Furthermore,

  even though both the substantial form and the material of the composite are

  contained in the bond, this latter does not link the monads in an essential way

  ( essentialiter) but solely in a natural way ( naturaliter). In Leibnizian vocabulary, this means that the bond “demands [ exigit] the monads, but does not essentially imply

  [ involvit] them, because it can exist without the monads and vice versa.” Hence the appropriateness of the metaphor of the echo: just as the soul is the echo of external

  things and is nonetheless independent of them, so also “it is an echo of monads,

  according to its constitution, with the result that once posited it demands monads,

  but does not depend on them [ exigit monades, sed non ab iis pendet]” (p. 517/369).

  What the image of the echo seeks to express is this curious intimacy and, at

  the same time, exteriority between the bond and the monads. If the body were

  something other than an exterior echo of the monads, it would be a different

  substance and not their bond; if it were something inherent to them, it would

  be one of their accidents or a modification. And yet the idea of an echo as some-

  thing substantial is certainly paradoxical. Indeed, if it is possible to conceive of

  sounds (monads) without an echo, we cannot see how it is possible to think an

  echo without the sounds that precede it. For this reason Leibniz is constrained

  to hypothesize something like an “originary echo” ( echo originaria; p. 519/375), or an echo that is a “source of modifications” ( fons modificationum; p. 504/351). And to the objection that an echo cannot be a principle of action, he responds that “a

  body returning an echo is a principle of action” (p. 503/349).

  And when Des Bosses suggests that in saying “this body,” as Christ does in

  the Eucharist, the demonstrative pronoun does not necessarily refer to the indi-

  viduality of the substance ( individualitatem substantiae) but to that of appear-

  ances (p. 454/261), Leibniz responds that “when it is said, ‘this is my body’. . . we

  do not designate monads by either ‘this’ or ‘body’. . . but the substance arising

  or composed through substantial bonds” (p. 459/273). What constitutes the un-

  mistakable singularity of such and such a body is not appearance but reality; it

  is not only a mode but a substance—and yet a substance that does not have any

  consistency other than the purely acoustical one of an echo. But it is an echo that

  is, so to speak, active, which demands the monads but does not depend on them

  and in fact acts on them as something originary that harmonizes and constitutes

  them into a unity.

  3.5. Many times in the dispute the two interlocutors give the impression

  that their divergence is more terminological than real (“Whether one can call

  beings modes or accidents is a question of words,” p. 453/259; “You are free to

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  call the bond that gives reality to the composite a substantial mode,” p. 515/363).

  But in truth, what
is at stake concerns precisely the way in which one must un-

  derstand the fundamental concepts of scholastic ontology. For the Jesuit, who

  firmly holds to the traditional concept, what Leibniz understands as the unity of

  the singular body can only be a mode or an accident, even if of a special type (for

  this reason defined, through forcing the concept, as “substantial”); for Leibniz,

  bodies are neither modes nor accidents but substances (Boehm, A., p. 32); it is,

  however, a matter of forcing the traditional concept of substance in an unfore-

  seen direction. On the one hand, what he wants to grasp is still the Aristotelian

  prime substance, “what it was for X to be.” On the other hand, this no longer

  appears to him as a presupposition but as an active force, which results almost

  a posteriori from the monads as an echo and therefore cannot be easily subsumed

  under the concept of substance, of something that lies beneath and at the base.

  It has been proposed that we interpret the novelty of Leibniz’s conception

  by means of a primacy of relation over being (Fremont, p. 69). This means,

  however, on the one hand, diminishing the novelty, because Scholastic theol-

  ogy had already unreservedly affirmed the priority of the trinitarian relation

  (the “economy”) over substance in God. On the other hand, it contradicts what

  Leibniz actually says, which, in the letter that concludes the correspondence,

  seems to distinguish the bond from the relations that run between the monads:

  “The orderings,” he writes, “or relations that join two monads are not in one

  monad or the other, but in both equally and at the same time; that is, really in

  neither, or only in the mind thinking this relation, unless you add a real bond,

  or something substantial, which is the subject of the common predicates and

  modifications, that is, those joining them together” (Leibniz 1, p. 517/371). If the

  bond is a relation, however, it does not, like a mode, have a subject in which it

  inheres: it is “something absolute, and therefore substantial” ( absolutum aliquid

  adeoque substantiale; ibid., p. 433/227).

  3.6. In the stubbornness with which the Jesuit holds to his “substantial

  mode” and the philosopher to his “bond,” what was really going on was a dif-

  ficulty concerning the historical situation of ontology. The philosophy that in

  the background for Leibniz was late Scholasticism, which had found perhaps

  its most complete expression in Francisco Suárez’s Disputationes metaphysicae

  (it has been rightly said that Suárez is the “manual” in which Leibniz reads the

  Schola Peripatetica). Here the tradition that identified the object of metaphysics in the ens qua ens had reached a point at which the relation between essence

  and existence, which Aristotle believed he had resolved in the ti en einai, had

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  become the central problem of ontology. If in God essence and existence coin-

  cided, in creatures—and markedly in bodies and composite substances—it was

  rather a matter of thinking their relation, which was anything but taken for

  granted. While in his investigation of ousia Aristotle began with a primacy of

  the hypokeimenon, which is to say, of the singular existent, Scholasticism by con-

  trast, developing a Neoplatonic gesture, began with a primacy of essence, from

  which it was a matter of deducing existence. But once the being of creatures was

  defined starting from essence, the principle that worked out its determination

  in singular existence became extremely problematic. Singular existence remains

  the experimentum crucis of philosophy, which it cannot avoid and in which it

  unceasingly threatens to make shipwreck.

  3.7. It is in the attempt to define the relation between essence and existence

  that philosophers and theologians run aground in a series of distinctions as sub-

  tle as they are inconclusive. These reach their critical mass in the problem of the

  principle of individuation. In the Scholastic tradition from Aquinas and Scotus

  up to Cajetan and Suárez, everyone conceded that individual existence added

  something to essence: the divergences concerned how to define their difference

  and their relation. Two positions here seem to be definitively opposed: the first,

  represented by Henry of Ghent, denies every real difference between essence and

  existence (or, as it is also expressed in Scholastic theology with regard to individ-

  uation, between common nature and the supposition). The other, exemplified

  by Thomas Aquinas, affirms that in material creatures essence and existence,

  nature and supposition differ realiter.

  Between these two positions, a third progressively imposed itself, which, de-

  veloping one of Scotus’s theses, found perhaps its most complete formulation

  in Suárez. According to this doctrine, in created things the individual adds to

  the common nature something really distinct from it, and yet singular existence

  is not distinct from essence like one thing is distinct from another ( ut res a re).

  Already Aquinas, despite affirming that existence really differs from essence,

  specified that “just as we cannot say that running itself runs, so we cannot say

  that existence exists” (Aquinas 6, lectio 2). If singular existence cannot be simply reduced to essence, it can never be separated from this latter like one thing from

  another, one essence from another essence. It is to define this peculiar status of

  singular existence that the concepts of “mode” and “modal difference” arise.

  3.8. The theory of modes finds its first thematic elaboration in Giles of

  Viterbo. Already in his early treatise on The Degrees of the Forms, Giles observed that in extended matter, extension (which admittedly belongs to the category of

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  quantity) is not some other thing with respect to the matter (which belongs to

  the category of substance) but only its mode of being ( modus se habendi):

  Others believe that the extension of matter differs from extension as quantity and

  is a certain different thing from matter, in such a way that matter and its extension

  would be two really [ realiter] different things. . . . It is, however, preferable to say that the passive extension of which they speak is not a category in itself but falls

  into the essence of the matter and is a certain mode of being [ quendam modum

  se habendi], which belongs to the matter insofar as it is conjoined to quantity.

  (Trapp, pp. 14–15)

  The same concept of mode is used by Giles to explain eucharistic transubstantia-

  tion, in which the accidents of the bread and wine that remain as such after tran-

  substantiation, deprived of substance, acquire the mode of a substance, while the

  human nature of Christ, insofar as it is united to the divine Word, despite being

  a substance, acquires the mode of an accident:

  In the sacrament of the Eucharist, since the accidents are here without sub-

  stance . . . what here according to the thing is an accident, has a certain mode

  of substance [ habet quendam modum substantiae], insofar as it belongs to them

  to exist for themselves; and in the human nature of Christ, the nature, although

  according to the thing it is a substance, nevertheless insofar as it inheres to the

  Word in its ent
irety, acquires the mode of an accident [ habet quendam modum

  accidentis]. (Trapp, p. 17)

  According to Giles, “being for itself” ( per se esse) and “inhering” ( inesse) do not express the essence of substance and accident but only a mode of their being

  (“Inhering does not mean the very being of the accident but a certain mode of

  its being [ modus essendi eius], just as being for itself does not mean the very being of substance but a certain mode of being of substance”; p. 18). “Being for itself ”

  and “being in another” ( esse in alio), these two fundamental terms of Aristotelian ontology, differ modally ( modaliter) and not essentially. The Spinozan definition

  of substance as “what is in itself” ( quod in se est) and of mode as “what is in

  another” ( quod in alio est) becomes more comprehensible if one places it against

  the background of Giles’s conception of modal difference.

  It is in the treatise On the Composition of the Angels that the concept of mode

  finds its proper place in the context of the problem of individuation as a means

  of defining the relationship between common nature (essence) and supposition

  (singular existence). Against Henry of Ghent, Giles maintains that nature and

  supposition really differ (otherwise homo and humanitas would be the same thing) but that this difference has a modal and not essential character ( suppositum non

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  dicit essentiam aliam a natura); otherwise we could not predicate, as we in fact

  do, the humanity of the human being. The common nature (humanity) differs

  from the supposition (the singular human) like potential from act, like a res not

  yet modified differs from the same res once modified (pp. 24–25).

  In accordance with an ambiguity that will durably mark the concept of

  mode, the difficulty here concerns the very status of mode, which is both logical

  and ontological. Nothing is more instructive, from this perspective, than the

  tenacious polemic concerning Giles’s concept of mode that takes place between

  Godfrey of Fontaines and Thomas of Argentina. According to the former, that

  something really differs from another and is nonetheless not another thing is

  logically contradictory. “If mode,” writes Godfrey,

  is a nothing [ nihil ] or absolutely non-existent [ absolute non ens], then by means of it one thing cannot differ from another, not only really but not even according