The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  In profound boredom, Dasein regresses, so to speak, to an animal condition: it is

  consigned to something that refuses itself to it, exactly as the animal in its capti-

  vation is captured and exposed in a non-unveiling. For this reason Heidegger can

  write that profound boredom is the human phenomenon to which “captivation,

  as precisely the essence of animality, apparently belongs in the closest proximity”

  (p. 409/282). But it is precisely in this “being-held-in-suspense” ( Hingehaltenheit) of the human being with respect to the things that encircle it, in this self-refusal of

  beings as a whole, that something like a possibility—the possibility of Dasein—is

  produced in the human being. And this is precisely what the animal, captivated in

  its disinhibitor, cannot do, because its relation to the environment is constituted

  in such a way that a suspension and a possibility can never manifest themselves.

  The human being thus appears as a living being that, in suspending its re-

  lations to things, grasps beings in their self-refusal as possibility. It is an animal

  that, in becoming bored, has awoken from and to its own captivation and can

  now grasp it as such, a moth that, while the flame is consuming it, notices the

  flame and itself for the first time. This means that Dasein is an animal that has

  grasped its animality and has made of this the possibility of the human being.

  But the human being is void, because it is only a suspension of animality.

  10. Nowhere does Heidegger clearly pronounce a similar thesis, and it is

  in fact possible that at a certain point he retreated before it. And yet perhaps

  only such a thesis could allow us to understand why the clearing of Dasein is a

  burden that it is necessary to take up, why mood or attunement reveals Dasein

  in its being consigned and thrown into the “there.” The “there” that the human

  being is and has to be and that stands before it as an implacable enigma has no

  concrete content, because what is grasped in it through its suspension is only

  animal captivation. This latter, which is something like an Ur-Stimmung and the

  ultimate source of every human mood or attunement, is the dark jewel set in the

  clearing of being, the black sun shining in the open.

  For this reason, in the Beiträge, the fundamental attunement of the human

  being to come is defined as “die Verhaltenheit,” re-straint, which is to say the

  “readiness for the refusal as gift” (Heidegger 9, p. 15/14), and “das Erschrecken,”

  the dismay that withdraws before something that is veiled and, at the same time,

  holds Dasein enchanted with itself. And in the 1934–35 course on Hölderlin, it

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  is the same factical situation, the same being irrevocably thrown into a given

  condition that presents itself as a task: “the historical vocation is always that of

  transforming the already-given [ das Mitgegebene] into what is given-as-task [ das Aufgegebene]” (Heidegger 11, p. 292/264). And if one wanted to name something

  like the fundamental attunement or mood, the Grundstimmung that dominates

  all of Heidegger’s thought, one would have to define it as being obstinately con-

  signed to something that just as tenaciously refuses itself, or being consigned

  to something unassumable. But this unassumable is nothing other than animal

  captivation, the “essential shock” that arises out of the living being from its being

  exposed and captured in a non-revelation. The living being is not simply a pre-

  supposition, which can be dialectically overcome and conserved, but something

  unassumable and obscure that remains in suspense in the very heart of Being.

  11. This feeling of being implacably consigned to something that nevertheless

  must be taken up—being-thrown as task—was perhaps at the root of the “pet-

  ty-bourgeois radicalism” and “will to destruction” in Heidegger that so irritated

  Löwith and Leo Strauss, and by which they partly explained his support of Na-

  tional Socialism. And perhaps this also explains why, at the end of the eighties

  in Paris, when Levinas, knowing of my participation in the seminars of Le Thor,

  had asked about my impressions of Heidegger, he was so surprised that I had

  found him “gentle.” Like Löwith, Levinas, who had known him in the thirties,

  remembered him as strong and decisive, as someone who sought precisely to

  assume a task that he did not manage to carry through.

  I remember the moment of his arrival at Le Thor in September 1966. I met

  him in the garden of the small hotel—it was called “Le chasselas,” named after

  a vintage of the region—where he was also going to stay and suddenly his eyes

  struck me, so lively, bright, and penetrating, with nothing at all downcast about

  them, as in Löwith’s recollection. The expression on his face was at once severe

  and gentle, of the kind of gentle severity that I had seen on the face of Tuscan

  peasants. He was, or so it seemed to me, self-conscious and yet seemed to sud-

  denly forget himself to abandon himself to a smile, as when I showed him the

  photograph that I had just taken of him with a Polaroid (in those years it was

  still a novelty) and he exclaimed with surprise: “Sie sind ein Zauberer!” (“You are

  a magician!”). But he had impulses of anger that were just as sudden, as when,

  toward the end of the seminar on Heraclitus, he said, staring at Jean Beaufret:

  “You have constantly kept me from bringing the seminar to a conclusion.”

  He stopped for a long time to watch bocce players in the village, comment-

  ing on their moves with a sort of participatory, cheerful skill. And in the com-

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  pany of René Char or in Madame Mathieu’s house, he showed a comfortable

  familiarity with the quality of the grape or wine. But when, near Aix, after a long

  hike in the woods we reached the point where Cézanne placed his easel to paint,

  he remained motionless for almost an hour, silent and as though struck dead be-

  fore the stupendous vision of Ste. Victoire. Perhaps, even if the history of Being

  had now reached an end and the fundamental mood or attunement was by this

  time Gelassenheit, he still sought to assume the “there,” to remain in the clearing of Being, in suspended animality.

  12. If the interpretation of the genesis of the human being from animality

  that we have delineated here is correct, then possibility is not one modal cat-

  egory among others but is the fundamental ontological dimension, in which

  Being and the world are disclosed by the suspension of the animal environment.

  And it is because Being reveals itself above all in the form of the possible that

  Heidegger can write that “the human being, which as existent transcendence is

  thrown before in possibility, is a being of distance” (Heidegger 10, p. 131/135).

  The human being is a being of distance because it is a being of possibility, but

  insofar as the possibility to which it is assigned is only the suspension of the im-

  mediate relation of the animal with its environment, it contains the nothing and

  non-being as its essential traits. And precisely because being-human is given to it

  only as possibility, the human being is continually in the act of falling back into

  animality. The privilege of
possibility in Heideggerian ontology is indissoluble

  from the aporia that assigns humanity to the human being as a task that, as such,

  can always be mistaken for a political task.

  13. In 1929 at Davos, during the encounter—or clash—between Cassirer and

  Heidegger, the young Emmanuel Levinas, who was attending with other com-

  panions among whom was Franz Rosenzweig, resolutely took the side of Heideg-

  ger. It is recounted that that evening, while they were discussing and celebrating

  together the victory of the new thought against the old academic philosophy,

  Levinas, putting a white wig on his head, had caricatured the neo-Kantian phi-

  losopher, with his imposing, premature white hair. All the more striking, then,

  is the fact that some of the central categories of the early Levinas can be read,

  without forcing, as caricatures (in the etymological sense of an “affected [It.,

  caricata] figure,” whose traits have, that is to say, been exaggerated) of Heideg-

  gerian notions, particularly of being-thrown.

  In the essay De l’évasion (cf. above, part I, §8.4), Levinas pushes the opacity

  of Geworfenheit to the extreme, to the point of making of the brute fact of the

  “there is” ( il y a), to which the human being is always consigned and “nailed

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  down” ( rivé), the fundamental characteristic of his ontology. In the experience

  of the “there is,” which is revealed in insomnia, “when there is nothing to watch

  and despite the absence of any reason for remaining watchful,” we are delivered

  over to an anonymous and oppressive presence, from which we cannot flee: “one

  is held by being, held to be” (Levinas 2, p. 75/65).

  That what is in question here every time is nothing other than a heighten-

  ing of the Heideggerian being-thrown is not doubtful; but while in Heidegger

  it is a matter precisely of assuming the “there” that Dasein is and has to be, by

  contrast, for Levinas, by means of a caricatured exaggeration of the emotive

  situation, of which he has highlighted the dreadful and shameful traits, it is

  a question of running away from the experience of “being consigned,” from

  which—Levinas seems to suggest—Heidegger never seems to have managed to

  liberate himself. And the fact that the parodic intention here had a decisively

  critical function is confirmed beyond any doubt by the brief text On the Phi-

  losophy of Hitlerism written a year before, in which the same category of “being

  nailed down” serves to define the Nazi conception of corporeity.

  14. Oskar Becker, one of the most gifted of Heidegger’s early students, had

  also sought to find a way out of the master’s thought by means of an exagger-

  ation of the category of being-thrown. But while in Levinas it was a matter of

  a caricature of excess, Becker seems to practice a sort of caricature of defect or

  antiphrasis. To the Heideggerian pathos of being consigned, there corresponds

  here the adventurousness and lightness of a mode of existing from which every

  weight and every having-to-be seem to have disappeared.

  The parodic intent is so little concealed that Becker, in opposition to the

  Heideggerian ek-sistence, can call the “hyperontological” experience that he seeks

  to analyze “paraexistence,” and in the same sense, he can place a Dawesen precisely alongside Dasein.

  One of the spheres in which Becker seeks to put what can be defined as

  his “counter- or para-analytic of Dasein” to the test is the existence of the

  artist. Heideggerian being-thrown, he argues in a 1929 essay, is not sufficient

  to account for the peculiar Dasein of the genius in all its aspects. Here the

  “character of weight” that defines Dasein in its being consigned and thrown

  into the “there” disappears. The artist’s mode of existence, which is not simply

  historical but “adventurous and eventful,” needs a new ontological category

  to be grasped, which can be approximately designated as “quasi-existential

  or para-existential.” The “paraexistential” that is in question appears as some-

  thing symmetrically inverse with respect to the existentials that Heidegger calls

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  “ being-thrown” and “projected.” For this reason Becker calls it “being carried”

  ( Getragensein; Becker, passim).

  Taken literally, Becker argues, the expression could be misunderstood, as if

  one still had to do with a weight that must be supported. “With being-carried

  ( vehi, pheresthai), one must rather think the peculiar weightless mobility of the

  firmament in the ancient conception (not Newtonian mechanics, according to

  which, by contrast, gravitation and centrifugal force uninterruptedly drag the

  stars along in the heavens).”

  That is to say, we are dealing with a being carried without there being any-

  thing that supports us, with a condition in which what carries us is not—as

  in Heideggerian being-thrown or persuasion in Michelstaedter—the weight to

  which we are consigned but precisely the opposite, our absolute lack of weight

  and lack of a task. This does not mean that the artist lives in complete un-

  consciousness or outside history: instead, the peculiar “adventurousness” of his

  existence is situated “at the midpoint between the extreme insecurity of the pro-

  jected-thrown and the absolute security of being-carried, between the extreme

  problematicity of everything historical and the absolute ‘no problem’ of every

  natural being” (ibid., pp. 31–32).

  In this sense, being-thrown and being-carried define the two poles between

  which the various grades and modalities of existence are deployed and articu-

  lated. And as the form par excellence of being-carried, the inspiration of artistic

  existence—“heedless and not menaced by guilt and death” (p. 36)—is the oppo-

  site of the anguished and decisive being consigned to a task. And yet it is, at the

  same time, exposed in a fragility and caducity that being-thrown does not know.

  15. Nothing compares to the condition described by Becker like the am-

  orous experience, and the best testimony of being-carried is not found in the

  writings and working notes of artists but in the diary of a woman in love: Helen

  Grund Hessel.

  Even though the events narrated in this diary are known from other sources

  and inspired a very celebrated film in the sixties, the edition published in 1991,

  almost ten years after the author’s death, constitutes an exceptional document, in

  which, beyond the extraordinary amorous events that are narrated there, a form

  of life testifies of itself with an absolutely incomparable intensity and immediacy.

  The diary covers three months, from August to October 1920. The existence

  that is described there in all its particulars, including intimate details, is never

  exhausted in a series of deeds and episodes, and thus it does not in any way

  constitute anything like a biography. Helen’s life is “carried” to such a point

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  that nothing can be isolated in it and acquire a factual consistency: everything

  flows and passes ceaselessly into vision (the diary is strewn with such moments

  in which the account
breaks into a vision). And her being-carried is not some-

  thing individual but drags along with itself the existence of the persons who

  surround her, from her lover Henri-Pierre Roché to her husband Franz Hessel,

  from her sons Uli and Stéphane to her sister Bobann and her friends Thankmar

  von Münchhausen, Herbert Koch, and Fanny Remak. The life that Helen lives

  and the life through which she lives are identified without remainder, and what

  appears in this coincidence is no longer a presupposed life but something that,

  in life, ceaselessly surpasses and overtakes it: a form-of-life.

  PART THREE

  Form-of-Life

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  1

  Life Divided

  1.1. A genealogy of the concept of zoè must begin from the recognition—

  not initially to be taken for granted—that in Western culture “life”

  is not a medical-scientific notion but a philosophico-political concept. The fif-

  ty-seven treatises of the Corpus Hippocraticum, which gather the most ancient

  texts of Greek medicine, composed between the last few decades of the fifth

  century and the first few of the fourth century bce, fill ten quarto volumes in

  the Littré edition. But an examination of the Index Hippocraticum shows that the

  term zoè occurs there just eight times, and never in a technical sense. That is to say, the authors of the Corpus were able to describe in minute detail the humors

  that compose the human body and whose equilibrium determines health and

  sickness; consult one another on the nature of nourishment, on the growth of

  the fetus, and on the relation between modes of life ( diaitai) and health; describe the symptoms of acute maladies; and, finally, reflect on the medical art, without

  the concept “life” ever assuming an important role and a specific function. This

  means that to construct the techne iatrike (medical art), the concept “life” is not necessary.

  א Of the eight texts of the Corpus in which the word zoè appears, three (“The Letter to Damagete,” “The Discourse at the Altar,” “The Discourse at the Embassy of Thessaly”) do not have a medical character and are certainly apocryphal. Of the other five

  occurrences, three refer to the patient’s duration of life in relation to imminent death:

  On Joints, 63, “life in such cases lasts only a few days” ( zoè oligomeros toutoisi ginetai); On Affections, 23: “there is no hope of life” ( zoes oudemia elpis); Precepts, 9: “they depart this life” ( metallassousi tes zoes). In two, finally, the sense could be relevant, but it is left entirely indeterminate: On the Heart, 7: “These ventricles are the fountains of a person’s being, and rivers pass from them through the body to water its frame; these rivers carry life to