The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  1.7. What is decisive from our perspective is that this division of life as such

  immediately has a political meaning. Since zoè can achieve autarchy and con-

  stitute itself as a political life ( bios politikos), it is necessary for it to be divided and for one of its articulations to be excluded and, at the same time, included

  and placed at the negative foundation of the politeia. For this reason, in the

  Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle takes care to specify that the political man must

  be familiar with what concerns the soul and know that there is in it a part—

  nutritive (or vegetative) life—that does not participate in reason in any way and,

  being therefore not truly human, remains excluded from happiness and virtue

  (and thus from politics):

  It is thus necessary that the political man also be familiar with what concerns

  the soul. . . . We have said that there is a part of it that is deprived of reason and

  another that by contrast possesses it. Whether these are separated as parts of the

  body or of anything divisible are, or are distinct by definition but by nature in-

  separable, like the convex and concave in the circumference of a circle, does not

  affect the present question. Of the irrational element one division seems to be

  common [to all the living] and vegetative, namely, the principle of nutrition and

  growth; for such a faculty of the soul is found in all the beings that are nourished,

  in embryos as also in complete beings. . . . Now the virtue of such a faculty seems

  to be common to all beings and not properly human [ anthropine]; for this part

  or faculty seems to function most in sleep, while goodness and badness are least

  manifest in sleep, whence comes the saying that the happy are not better off than

  the wretched for half their lives. . . . Let us, however, leave the nutritive faculty

  alone, since it has by its nature no share in human virtue. (1102a 23–1102b 14)

  In the Magna Moralia this exclusion is confirmed in particular with respect to

  happiness: “the nutritive soul does not contribute to happiness” (1185a 35).

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  א In the De anima, Aristotle establishes a striking correspondence between touch

  and nutritive life, as though to touch there belonged, on the level of sensation, the same primordial role that corresponds to nutrition. After having confirmed that “the nutritive

  faculty must be found in all beings that grow and decay” (434a 23), he writes, “An animal is a body with a soul in it: every body is tangible [ hapton] and perceptible by touch [ haphei]; hence necessarily, if an animal is to survive, its body must have tactile capacity. . . . That is why taste is also a sort of touch; it is relative to nutriment, which is a tangible body . . . and it is clear that without touch it is impossible for an animal to exist” (434b 12–20).

  And just as, with respect to the nutritive faculty, sensation and intellect entail a het-

  erogeneous supplement that differentiates the animal and the human from the plant, so

  too, while touch renders life possible, do “the other senses exist in view of the good” (ibid., 24), and just as it is not possible in mortals to separate the nutritive soul from the others, in the same way “without touch it is not possible for there to be any other sense . . . and, with the loss of touch, animals die” (435b 3–4). The metaphysical-political apparatus that divides and articulates life acts on all levels of the living body.

  1.8. At this point we can further specify the articulation between simple life and

  politically qualified life, zoè and bios, that we placed at the foundation of Western politics in Homo Sacer I. What we can now call the ontological- biopolitical machine of the West is founded on a division of life that, by means of a series of cae-

  surae and thresholds ( zoè/ bios, insufficient life/autarchic life, family/city), takes on a political character that was initially lacking. But it is precisely by means of this

  articulation of its zoè that the human being, uniquely among the living, becomes

  capable of a political life. The function proper to the machine, that is to say, is an

  operation on the living that, by “politicizing” its life, renders it “self-sufficient,”

  namely, capable of taking part in the polis. What we call politics is above all a

  special qualification of life, carried out by means of a series of partitions that pass

  through the very body of zoè. But this qualification has no content other than the pure fact of the caesura as such. This means that the concept of life will not truly

  be thought as long as the biopolitical machine, which has always already captured

  it within itself by means of a series of divisions and articulations, has not been

  deactivated. Until then, bare life will weigh on Western politics like an obscure

  and impenetrable sacral residue.

  One can therefore understand the essentially ontologico-political and not

  only psychological meaning of the division of the parts of the soul (nutri-

  tive, sensitive, intellectual faculties) in Book II of De anima. From this per-

  spective, the problem of whether the parts of the soul are only logically or also

  physically-spatially separable, which Aristotle does not fail to dwell upon, seems

  all the more determinative. While what is proper to the vegetable soul is, in fact,

  being able to exist independently of the others (as happens in plants), the other

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  parts, at least in mortal beings (the restriction allows one to understand that it

  was perhaps possible in the gods), cannot be separated from it. “Is each of these

  faculties,” asks Aristotle,

  a soul or a part of the soul? And if a part, a part separable only logically [ logoi]

  or a part distinct according to place [ topoi]? In some cases it is not difficult to answer, while others contain difficulties. Just as in the case of plants that, when

  divided, are observed to live though separated from one another (thus showing

  that in their case the soul of each individual plant was actually one, potentially

  many), so we notice a similar result in other varieties of soul, as in insects that

  have been cut in two. . . . We have no evidence as yet about intellect or the

  potential for thought, but it seems to be a different kind of soul, differing as

  what is eternal from what is perishable; it alone is capable of being separated.

  All the other parts of the soul, it is evident from what we have said, are, in spite

  of certain statements to the contrary, incapable of separate existence though, of

  course, distinguishable by logos. (413b 14–29)

  Logos can divide what cannot be physically divided, and the consequence that

  this “logical” division exercises on life is that of rendering possible its politiciza-

  tion. Politics, as the ergon proper to the human, is the practice that is founded on the separation, worked by the logos , of otherwise inseparable functions. Politics here appears as what allows one to treat a human life as if in it sensitive and intellectual

  life were separable from vegetative life—and thus, since it is impossible in mor-

  tals, of legitimately putting it to death. (This is the meaning of the vitae necisque

  potestas that we saw defined sovereign power; cf. Agamben 4, pp. 97–101/87–90).

  For this reason, a decisive threshold in the history of Western biopolitics was

  reached when, in the second half of the twentieth century, through the develop-

  ment of techniques of resuscitation (the Italian expression, reanimazion
e, is sig-

  nificant: in question here are, once again, the soul and life), medicine succeeded

  in actualizing what Aristotle maintained was impossible, namely, the separation

  of vegetative life from the other vital functions in the human being. It should

  not surprise us if, from that moment on, all the fundamental concepts of politics

  were also again called into question. From a redefinition of life there necessarily

  follows a redefinition of politics.

  א It is necessary to reflect on the analogy between being and living in the Aristotelian

  strategy. The metaphysical-political thesis declares: “To be for the living is to live” ( to de zen tois zosi to einai estin; De anima, 415b 13). Both being and living, however, “are said in many ways” and are thus always already articulated and divided. Just as the articulation

  of being allows one to introduce movement into it and to render it finally thinkable, so

  also the division of life, by removing its unidimensionality, allows one to make it the

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  foundation of politics. To the isolation of a being, “which is said most properly in the first place and above all,” there corresponds, on the level of being, the separation of a sphere of life (vegetative life), which functions as archè, “by means of which living belongs to the living.” In this sense, life is the political declension of being: to the pleonachos legesthai of the latter, there corresponds the pleonachos legesthai of the former, and to the ontological apparatus, which articulates being and puts it in motion, there corresponds the biopolitical machine, which articulates and politicizes life. And a deactivation of the biopolitical machine necessarily implies a deactivation of the ontological apparatus (and vice versa).

  1.9. What allows nutritive life to function as foundation and motor of the

  bio-political machine is above all its separability from the other spheres of life

  (while the others cannot be separated from it). But what constitutes its privilege

  is also what authorizes its exclusion from the city and from everything that de-

  fines the human as such.

  A more rigorous reading of the section of the De anima devoted to the nutri-

  tive faculty shows, however, that it contains elements that could allow us to re-

  gard it in a completely different way. Just as he is defining the erga proper to this faculty, namely, generation and the use of food ( gennesai kai trophei chresthai;

  415a 26), Aristotle seems to establish a striking correspondence between the low-

  est part of the human soul and the highest, thought ( nous): “The most natural

  work of the living . . . is the production of another like itself, an animal pro-

  ducing an animal, a plant a plant, in order that, to the extent possible, it may

  partake in the eternal and the divine” (415a 27–30). A few pages later, he writes

  that nourishment “preserves the being” ( sozei ten ousian) of the living and that

  the nutritive faculty “is a principle [ archè] capable of preserving the one that

  possesses it as such” (416b 15–16). In both Aristotle and the commentators one

  encounters, moreover, a curious terminological proximity between the nutritive

  (or vegetative) soul and the intellectual: the intellectual is in fact also “separa-

  ble” ( choristos; 430a 18) and, like the intellect, the nutritive principle is also “active” ( poietikon; 416b 15); even more decisively in Alexander of Aphrodisias, the

  theorist of the active (or poetic) intellect: “the nutritive principle is poietikon”

  ( Alexander, p. 74/59).

  In an exemplary essay, Émile Benveniste has called attention to the appar-

  ently inexplicable double meaning of the Greek verb trepho, which means both

  “to nourish” and “to thicken, to coagulate a liquid” (for example, trephein gala,

  “to cause milk to curdle”). The difficulty is resolved if one understands that the

  true meaning of trepho is not merely to nourish but rather “to let grow or to

  favor the natural development of something.” There is no contradiction between

  trephein gala (“to nourish the milk,” that is, “to let it curdle”) and trephein paidas

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  (“to nourish children”), because both mean “to let something attain the state

  toward which it is tending” (Benveniste, p. 349/252).

  By all evidence, this is the meaning that the verb and its derivative threptikon

  have in Aristotle, and for this reason he can write that the nutritive soul is a

  “a principle that preserves the being of the one that possesses it.” Preoccupied

  solely by the necessity to hold firm the political function of the signature of the

  division of life, the philosopher nonetheless had to exclude nutritive life from

  the happiness and aretè that define the city of men.

  Both with and against Aristotle, it is a question, rather, of thinking nutritive

  life as what allows the living to reach the state toward which it tends, as the

  conatus that drives every being to preserve its being ( sozein ten ousian). Not only must we learn to think an aretè of nutritive life, but trephein names in this sense the fundamental virtue of the living, the impulse thanks to which every faculty

  reaches the state toward which it naturally tends. And its political meaning lies

  not in its exclusion-inclusion in the city but in the fact that, in letting the heart

  beat, the lungs respire, and the mind think, it confers unity and sense on every

  form of life. Up to now we have thought politics as what subsists thanks to the

  division and articulation of life, as a separation of life from itself that qualifies

  it on different occasions as human, animal, or vegetable. Now it is a question of

  instead thinking a politics of form-of-life, of life indivisible from its form.

  2

  A Life Inseparable from Its Form

  2.1. This project started from the observation that the Greeks did not

  have a single term to express what we understand by the word life.

  They made use of two semantically and morphologically distinct terms: zoè,

  which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living things (animals,

  human beings, or gods), and bios, which signified the form or manner of life

  proper to an individual or group. In modern languages, in which this opposition

  gradually disappears from the lexicon (where it is preserved, as in biology and

  zoology, it no longer indicates a substantial difference), one sole term—whose

  opacity grows to an extent proportional to the sacralization of its referent—

  designates the bare common presupposition that it is always possible to isolate

  in each of the innumerable forms of life.

  With the term form-of-life, by contrast, we understand a life that can never

  be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate and keep

  distinct something like a bare life.

  2.2. A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which, in its

  mode of life, its very living is at stake, and, in its living, what is at stake is first

  of all its mode of life. What does this expression mean? It defines a life—human

  life—in which singular modes, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts

  but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all potential. And potential, insofar as it is nothing other than the essence or nature of each being,

  can be suspended and contemplated but never absolutely divided from act. The


  habit of a potential is the habitual use of it and the form-of-life of this use. The

  form of human living is never prescribed by a specific biological vocation nor

  assigned by any necessity whatsoever, but even though it is customary, repeated,

  and socially obligatory, it always preserves its character as a real possibility, which

  is to say that it always puts its very living at stake. That is, there is not a subject

  to which a potential belongs, which he can decide at his will to put into act:

  form-of-life is a being of potential not only or not so much because it can do

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  or not do, succeed or fail, lose itself or find itself, but above all because it is its

  potential and coincides with it. For this reason the human being is the only

  being in whose living happiness is always at stake, whose life is irredeemably and

  painfully consigned to happiness. But this constitutes form-of-life immediately

  as political life.

  2.3. This means that what we call form-of-life is a life in which the event of

  anthropogenesis—the becoming human of the human being—is still happen-

  ing. Only because what is at stake in form-of-life is the memory and repetition

  of this event, can thought reach back archeologically to the very separation be-

  tween zoè and bios. This separation was produced in the anthropogenetic event when, following a transformation whose study is not the task of the human sciences, language appeared in living beings and these latter put their very natural

  life at stake in language. That is to say, the anthropogenetic event coincides with

  the fracture between life and language, between the living being and the speak-

  ing being; but, precisely for this reason, the becoming human of the human

  being entails the unceasing experience of this division and, at the same time,

  of the just as unceasingly new historical rearticulation of what has been thus

  divided. The mystery of the human being is not the metaphysical one of the

  conjunction between the living being and language (or reason, or the soul) but

  the practical and political one of their separation. If thought, the arts, poetry,

  and human practices generally have any interest, it is because they bring about