an archeological idling of the machine and the works of life, language, economy,
and society, in order to carry them back to the anthropogenetic event, in order
that in them the becoming human of the human being will never be achieved
once and for all, will never cease to happen. Politics names the place of this
event, in whatever sphere it is produced.
2.4. The political power that we are familiar with is instead always ultimately
founded on the separation of a sphere of bare life from the context of forms of
life. Thus, in the Hobbesian foundation of sovereignty, life in the state of nature
is defined solely by its being unconditionally exposed to the threat of death (the
unlimited right of all over all), and political life, namely, that which develops
under the protection of the Leviathan, is only this same life, exposed to the
threat that now rests in the hands of the sovereign alone. The puissance absolue
et perpétuelle, which defines state power, is in the last instance not founded on a political will but on bare life, which is preserved and protected only to the extent
that it is subjected to the sovereign’s (or the law’s) right of life and death. The
state of exception, on which the sovereign always decides, is precisely that state
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in which bare life, which in the normal situation seems to be rejoined to the
multiple social forms of life, is again explicitly called into question as ultimate
foundation of political power. The ultimate subject, which it is a question of
excepting and at the same time including in the city, is always bare life.
2.5. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of exception’ in
which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds
to this fact.” This diagnosis of Benjamin’s, at this point more than fifty years
old, has lost none of its contemporaneity. And this is not so much or not only
because power today has no form of legitimation other than emergency and ev-
erywhere and continually refers to it and, at the same time, secretly works to pro-
duce it (how can one not think that a system that can now only function on the
basis of an emergency is also interested in maintaining it at any price?). It is also
and above all because, in the meantime, bare life, which was the hidden founda-
tion of sovereignty, has everywhere become the dominant form of life. Life, in
the state of exception that has become normal, is the bare life that in all spheres
separates forms of life from their cohesion into a form-of-life. From the Marxian
scission between man and citizen there follows that between bare life, ultimate
and opaque bearer of sovereignty, and the multiple forms of life abstractly re-
codified into juridical-social identities (voter, employee, journalist, student, but
also HIV-positive, transvestite, porn star, senior citizen, parent, woman), which
all rest on the former. (Having mistaken this bare life separated from its form, in
its abjection, for a superior principle—sovereignty or the sacred—is the limit of
Bataille’s thought, which renders it useless to us.)
2.6. Foucault’s thesis according to which “what is at stake today is life” and
politics has therefore become biopolitics is, in this sense, substantially accurate.
But what is decisive is the way in which one understands the sense of this trans-
formation. What in fact remains uninterrogated in contemporary debates on
bioethics and biopolitics is precisely what is above all worthy of interrogation,
mainly, the very biological concept of life. This concept—which today appears
in the garb of a scientific notion—is in reality a secularized political concept.
Hence the often unnoticed but decisive function of medical-scientific ideology
in the system of power and the growing use of scientific pseudoconcepts for ends
of political control: the very drawing out of bare life, which sovereign power in cer-
tain circumstances could work on forms of life, is now achieved massively and on a
daily basis by pseudo-scientific representations of the body, of sickness and health,
and by the “medicalization” of ever wider spheres of life and of the individual
imagination. Biological life, a secularized form of bare life, which has in common
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1217
with the latter unspeakability and impenetrability, thus constitutes the real forms
of life literally into forms of survival, remaining intact in them as the obscure
threat that can be suddenly actualized in violence, in extraneousness, in sickness,
in an accident. It is the invisible sovereign that watches us behind the idiotic masks
of the powerful who, whether they realize it or not, govern us in its name.
2.7. A political life, which is to say, one oriented toward the idea of happiness
and cohering in a form-of-life, is thinkable only starting from emancipation
from this scission. The question of the possibility of a non-state politics thus
necessarily has the form: is it possible today, is there today something like a
form-of-life, namely, a life for which, in its living, one has to do with the living
itself, a life of potential ?
We call thought the connection that constitutes forms of life into an insep-
arable context, into form-of-life. By this we do not understand the individual
exercise of an organ or psychic faculty but an experience, an experimentum that
has as its object the potential character of life and human intelligence. Thinking
does not mean simply being affected by this or that thing but this or that content
of thought in act, but being at the same time affected by one’s own receptivity,
gaining experience, in every thought, of a pure potential of thought. Thought is,
in this sense, always use of oneself, always entails the affection that one receives
insofar as one is in contact with a determinate body (“Thought is the being
whose nature is that of being in potential . . . when thought has become active
in each of the intelligibles . . . it also therefore remains in some way potential,
and it is then able to think itself”; Aristotle, De anima, 429a–b).
Only if act is never totally separated from potential, only if, in my lived
experiences and my acts of understanding [It., nei mei vissuti e nei miei intesi], I always have to do with living and understanding in themselves—that is to
say, if there is, in this sense, thought—then a form of life can become, in its
very facticity and thingliness, form-of-life, in which it is never possible to isolate something like a bare life.
2.8. The experience of thought that is here in question is always an experi-
ence of a potential and of a common use. Community and potential are iden-
tified without remainder, because the inherence of a communitarian principle
in every potential is a function of the necessarily potential character of every
community. Among beings who were always in act, who were always already
this or that thing, this or that identity, and in these had entirely exhausted their
potential, there could be no community but only factual coincidences and par-
titions. We can communicate with others only through what in us, as in others,
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ha
s remained in potential, and every communication (as Benjamin had intuited
for language) is above all a communication not of a common but of a communi-
cability. On the other hand, if there were a unique being, he would be absolutely
impotent, and where there is potential, there are always already many (just as, if
there is a language, namely, a potential to speak, then there cannot be only one
being who speaks it).
For this reason modern political philosophy does not begin with classical
thought, which had made of contemplation, of bios theoreticos, a separate and
solitary activity (“exile of one alone with one alone”), but only with Averroism,
namely, with the thought of one sole possible intellect common to all human
beings, and most decisively at the point in De monarchia at which Dante affirms
the inherence of a multitudo in the very potential for thought. After having af-
firmed that “there is some activity specific to humanity as a whole, for which the
whole human race in its vast multitude is designed” (Dante 2, 1.3.4), he identifies
this operation not simply with thought but with the potential of thought:
So the highest faculty in a human being is not simply to exist, because the ele-
ments too share in the simple fact of existence; nor is it to exist in compound
form, for that is found in minerals; nor is it to exist as a living thing, for plants
too share in that; nor is it to exist as a creature with sense perception, for that is
also shared by the lower animals; but it is to exist as a creature who apprehends
by means of the potential intellect [ esse apprehensivum per intellectum possibile]; this mode of existence belongs to no creature (whether higher or lower) other
than human beings. For while there are indeed other beings who like us are
endowed with intellect, nonetheless their intellect is not potential in the way a
human being’s is, since such beings exist only as intelligences and nothing else,
and their very being is simply the act of understanding that their own nature
exists; and they are engaged in this without discontinuity [ sine interpolatione],
otherwise they would not be eternal. It is thus clear that the highest potential
of humankind is its intellectual potential or faculty. And since that potentiality
cannot be fully actualized all at once in any one individual or in any of the
particular social groupings, there must needs be a multitude in the human race
[ multitudinem esse in humano generi], through whom the whole of this potential
can be actualized [ per quam tota potentia hec actuetur]. . . . [T]he activity proper to humankind considered as a whole is to constantly actualize the full intellectual potential of humanity, primarily through thought and secondarily through
action. (Dante 2, 1.3.6ff., 1.4.1)
2.9. Let us reflect on the constitutive connection that Dante establishes be-
tween multitudo and the potential of thought as generic potential of humanity
( ultimum de potentia totius humanitatis). Here multitude is not only a quantitative
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1219
or numerical concept. As results unmistakably from the fact that it defines the
specificity of the human with respect to the animals and angels and from the spec-
ification “as a whole,” it instead names the generic form of existence of the properly human potential, namely, thought. That is to say, it is not a matter of something
like the sum of individual actualizations of potential nor—hence the special rele-
vance of the adverb “always” ( semper)—of a process at the completion of which the
potential of humanity will be fully actualized. There is a multitude because there is
in singular human beings a potential—that is, a possibility—to think (and not, as
in the angels, a thought that can know no interruption— sine interpolatione); but
precisely for this reason, the existence of the multitudo coincides with the generic actualization of the potential to think and, consequently, with politics. If there
were only the multiple individual actualizations and their sum, there would not
be a politics but only the numerical plurality of activities defined by the variety of
particular goals (economic, scientific, religious, etc.). But because the actualization
of the generic potential of thought coincides with the existence of a multitudo, this latter is immediately political.
Just as according to Averroës the multitudo, as generic subject of the poten-
tial of thought, is always to be thought in relation to the existence of a singular
philosopher who, by means of the phantasms of his imagination, is united with
the unique intellect, so also is the potential of thought of which we are speaking
always to be put into relation with the singular use of a common potential. For
this reason, that is to say, insofar as the unicity of common thought remains
linked to the contingency of a singular exercise, it is necessary to consider cau-
tiously the political function of the Internet, of which one speaks so often today.
Insofar as it depends on the permanent availability in actu of a preconstituted
social knowledge, there is lacking in it precisely the experience of potential that defines human knowledge with respect to the angelic. What remains caught
in the “net,” so to speak, is thought without its potential, without the singular
experience of its generic actualization.
The multitudo is a political concept only insofar as it inheres in the potential
of thought as such. And thought does not define one form of life among others
in which life and social production are articulated: it is the unitary potential that
constitutes the multiple forms of life into form-of-life. In the face of state sovereignty, which can affirm itself only by separating bare life from its form in every
sphere, it is the potential that ceaselessly reunites life with its form or prevents
them from being dissociated. The distinction between the simple, massive in-
scription of social knowledge in the productive processes, which characterizes
the contemporary phase of capitalism, and thought as antagonistic potential and
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form-of-life, passes through the experience of this cohesion and this insepara-
bility. Thought is form-of-life, life unsegregatable from its form, and wherever
there appears the intimacy of this inseparable life, in the materiality of corporeal
processes and habitual modes of life not less than in theory, there and there
alone is there thought. And it is this thought, this form-of-life that, abandoning
bare life to “man” and the “citizen,” who provisionally served as clothing for it
and represented it with their “rights,” must become the guiding concept and the
unitary center of coming politics.
3
Living Contemplation
3.1. A genealogy of the idea of life in modernity must begin from the
revaluation and hypostatization of zoè that was carried out begin-
ning from the second century of the Christian era in Neoplatonic, Gnostic,
and Christian spheres. We do not know the reasons why late-ancient thought
arrived at the reversal of the hierarchical relationship between bios and zoè: what is certain is that, when the second Academy and then Neoplatonism elaborate
the theory of the three hypostases (being, life, thought) or when early Christian
; texts speak of an “eternal life” or even when the couple “life and light” (or “life
and logos”) make their appearance in the Corpus hermeticum and in Gnosticism, it is not, as we might have expected, the term bios that appears in the foreground but simply zoè, the natural life common to all living beings that has, however, in the meantime undergone a complete semantic transformation. A lexical indicator for this phenomenon is the progressive, inexorable decline of the term bios
in the course of the third century ce and the resulting weakening of the bios/ zoè opposition. A glance at the Index Plotinianum shows that while in the Enneads, bios is retained in relatively few passages (almost always to indicate the human
mode of life), zoè, which up to Plotinus was very rare in the sense of form of life, is gradually substituted for bios and acquires the entire range of meanings that
flow together into the modern term “life” (in this sense, the spread of zoè in the vocabulary of intimacy and private life is significant, both as proper name and as
an expression of tenderness, as in the modern “my life”).
3.2. The most significant document of this transformation of the classical
conception of zoè are Plotinus’s two treatises “On Happiness” ( Ennead 1, 4) and
“On Contemplation” (3, 8). Here in all likelihood Plotinus is starting from the
passage in the Sophist (248e–249a) that attributes to being “change, life, soul,
and thought, since it cannot stay changeless, solemn, and holy without living
or thinking and without understanding” and from the analogous affirmation, in
Book Lambda of the Metaphysics (1072b 27), according to which “life [ zoè] also 1221
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HOMO SACER IV, 2
belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality;
and God’s essential actuality is the perfect and eternal life [ zoè aristè kai aidios].”
For Plato and Aristotle it was essentially a matter of attributing life to thought
and of conceiving the life of thought as a property specific to divine being (and
human being, to the extent to which it is capable of “making itself eternal”).
For Plotinus, however, with a radical inversion that constitutes one of the most
characteristic traits of the late-ancient world’s vision, it is not that thought is also
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