The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  has no beginning. Indeed as long as the producer has no beginning, that which is

  produced has not a beginning. As both are together [ simul, “at the same time”], they are also consubstantial. But living is God, life is Christ, and in living is life, and in

  life is living. In this way certainly one is in the other because produced [ confectum]

  and producer [ conficiens] are one in the other: for as the producer is in the product, so also the product is in the producer, especially if they always coexist. Therefore

  the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father. And indeed, the producer is

  producer of a product, and the product, product of a producer. Therefore one

  is their substance, not one in two or two in one but because, in the very substance

  in which God is, in this same substance is the Son, that is, in the following way:

  as God lives, so the Son lives also; in whatever kind of substance the Father is, the

  Son is in such a substance. (Victorinus, pp. 536–538/271)

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  It is necessary to reflect on the radical transformation that classical ontology

  undergoes once being is displaced onto the level of living. Essence and existence,

  potential and act, material and form are indeterminated and now refer to one

  another as “living” and “life,” that is—according to a syntagma that begins to

  appear with growing frequency in Latin prose—as vivere vitam, “living life.”

  Not only does no hierarchical or genetic superiority belong to form, since it is

  no longer what gives and defines being, but on the contrary, form is generated

  and produced in the very act of being—that is, living—and it is only a forma

  viventis confecta illo ipso cui forma est (“the form of living produced by the very one for which it is form”). Just like the Father and the Son, so also essence and

  existence, potential and act, living and life interpenetrate one another to such an

  extent that it no longer seems possible to distinguish them. It is significant that

  Victorinus must configure the relationship between God and the three persons

  of the Trinity in terms of a modal ontology, according to a paradigm that had

  found its first formulation among the Stoics. “For living is being; but being life

  is a certain mode . . .” ( modus quidam—the correction to motus in the editio princeps is to be rejected in favor of the reading of the most authoritative manuscript), just as, a little later, Father and Son are defined as “modes” of the one

  divine substance. And just as mode adds nothing to substance and is only a

  modification or manner of being, so life adds nothing to living; it is only the

  form that is generated in it by living: precisely form-of-life, in which living and

  life become indiscernible on the level of substance and discernible only as man-

  ifestation and “appearance”:

  Therefore, life is produced by living [ conficitur vivendo], and by existing together it is formed. But this formation is an appearance [ formatio apparentia est]; but

  the appearance arose, indeed, from hiddenness, and this arising from hiddenness

  is birth, the birth of the one who, before coming forth, already existed. (Ibid.,

  p. 544/273–274)

  4.3. It is at this point that Victorinus, taking up and pushing to the extreme

  the Plotinian idea of an eidos tes zoes in which bios and zoè, life of thought and common life enter into a threshold of indistinction, can make use of the syntagma “form of—or of a—life” ( vitae forma) in a technical sense:

  God is nothing other than living, but the original living, the one whence comes

  all the living of all the others; he is action itself, existing in acting [ actio ipsa in agendo existens], in this movement having his own being, which is having either

  existence or substance, although truly not having it [ habens quamquam ne habens

  quidem] but existing itself as that which is originally and universally living [ existens

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  ipsum quod sit principaliter et universaliter vivere]. But that which is produced from this act is in some way its form is life. Indeed as the aion (eon) is produced by the always present act of all things, so it is by living and by the act of living which is

  always present that life is produced, and as we express it, vitality, which is somehow

  a form of [or “of a”] life [ vitalitas, hoc est ut vitae forma], is generated according to its own power and substance. (p. 542)

  In God, form of life is so inseparably united to living that here there is no place

  for anything like a “having”; God does not “have” existence and form but rather,

  with a grammatical forcing that renders the verb “to exist” transitive, he “ exists”

  his living and, in this way, produces a form that is nothing other than his “vital-

  ity” or the form of his life. Once again, the modal paradigm (substance/modes)

  calls into question the Aristotelian ontology founded on the existence/essence,

  potential/act oppositions: substance does not “have” but “is” its modes. In every

  case, in the idea of a “form-of-life,” just like existence and essence, so also do zoè and bios, living and life contract into one another and fall together, allowing a

  third to appear, whose meaning and implications still remain for us to deliberate.

  5

  Toward an Ontology of Style

  5.1. Let us pursue Victorinus’s reflection beyond its theological context.

  Form-of-life is not something like a subject, which preexists living

  and gives it substance and reality. On the contrary, it is generated in living; it

  is “produced by the very one for which it is form” and for that reason does not

  have any priority, either substantial or transcendental, with respect to living. It

  is only a manner of being and living, which does not in any way determine the

  living thing, just as it is in no way determined by it and is nonetheless insepa-

  rable from it.

  Medieval philosophers were familiar with a term, maneries, which they traced

  back to the verb manere, while modern philologists, identifying it with the mod-

  ern “manner,” have it derive from manus. A passage of the Book of Muhammad’s

  Ladder instead suggests a different etymology. The author of this visionary work, which must have been familiar to Dante, at a certain point witnesses an apparition

  of a pen, from which “ink issued” ( manabat encaustum). “And all these things,” he

  writes, “were done in such a manner that they seemed to have been created in that

  very instant” ( et haec omnia tali manerie facta erant, quod simul videbantur creata

  fuisse; Hyatte, p. 126). The etymological juxtaposition manare/ maneries shows that maneries here means “mode of welling up”: all these things emanate from the pen

  in such a way that they seem to have been created in that very instant.

  In this sense, form-of-life is a “manner of rising forth,” not a being that has

  this or that property or quality but a being that is its mode of being, which is its

  welling up and is continually generated by its “manner” of being. (It is in this sense

  that one is to read the Stoic definition of ethos as pegè biou, “rising-forth of life.”) 5.2. It is in this way that we must understand the relationship between bios

  and zoè in form-of-life. At the end of Homo Sacer I, form of life was briefly evoked as a bios that is only its zoè. But what can “living (or being) one’s own zoè” mean? What can a mode of life be that has for its object only life, whi
ch

  our political tradition has always already separated into bare life? Certainly it will

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  mean living it as something absolutely inseparable, causing bios and zoè to coincide at every point. But above all, what are we to understand by zoè if it cannot

  be a question of bare life? Our corporeal life, the physiological life that we tend to

  always already separate and isolate? Here one sees the limit and, at the same time,

  the abyss that Nietzsche had to have glimpsed when he speaks of “great politics”

  as physiology. Here the risk is the same one that the biopolitics of modernity has

  fallen into: to make bare life as such the preeminent object of politics.

  Therefore it is necessary above all to neutralize the bipolar zoè/ bios apparatus.

  Just as every time we find ourselves confronted with a two-sided machine, here

  one needs to guard against the temptation of playing one pole off against the

  other as well as that of simply contracting them onto one another in a new artic-

  ulation. That is to say, it is a matter of rendering both bios and zoè inoperative, so that form-of-life can appear as the tertium that will become thinkable only

  starting from this inoperativity, from this coinciding—which is to say, falling

  together—of bios and zoè.

  5.3. In ancient medicine there is a term— diaita—that designates the regime

  of life, the “diet” of an individual or a group, understood as the harmonic pro-

  portion between food ( sitos) and physical exercise or labor ( ponos). Thus, in the Corpus Hippocraticum, “the human diet” ( diaite anthropine) is something like the mode of life, variously articulated according to seasons and individuals, best

  adapted to good health ( pros hygeien orthos). That is to say, it is a question of a bios whose object seems to be solely zoè.

  Curiously, this medical term also has another technical meaning, which this

  time refers—as also happens, after all, with our term “diet”—to the political-

  juridical sphere: diaita is that arbitration that decides a suit not according to the letter of the law but according to circumstances and equity (hence, in medieval

  and modern vocabulary, it has developed the meaning of “a political assembly

  with decision-making power”). In this sense, the term is opposed to dike, which

  indicates not so much custom or mode of life but imperative rule (Aristotle,

  Rhetoric, 1374b 19: “one must recur rather to diaita than to dike, because diaitetes, the will, looks to the convenient, while dikastes, judgment, to the law [ nomos]”).

  As often happens, the gap between two meanings of the same term can give

  rise to instructive considerations. If politics, as we have seen, is founded on an

  articulation of life (living/living well; life/autarchic life), then it certainly cannot

  be surprising that the mode of life, the “diet” that secures the good health of

  human beings, can also assume a political meaning, which, however, concerns

  not the nomos but the governance and regime of life (and it is no accident that

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  the Latin term that translates diaita— regimen—also preserves the same semantic duplicity: the title de regimine is common to both medical and political treatises).

  On the level of “regime,” biological life and political life are indeterminated.

  5.4. Theologians distinguish between the life that we live ( vita quam vivimus),

  namely, the sum of facts and events that constitute our biography, and the life

  by means of which we live ( vita qua vivimus), that which renders life livable

  and gives to it a sense and a form (it is perhaps what Victorinus calls vitalitas).

  In every existence these two lives appear divided, and yet one can say that every

  existence is the attempt, often unsuccessful and nevertheless insistently repeated,

  to realize their coincidence. Indeed, only that life is happy in which the division

  disappears.

  If one leaves to one side projects to reach this happiness on the collective

  level—from convent rules to phalansteries—the place where the study of the

  coincidence between the two lives has found its most sophisticated laboratory

  is the modern novel. Henry James’s characters—but it holds for all charac-

  ters—are in this sense only the experiment in which the life that we live is

  ceaselessly divided from the life by which we live and, at the same time, just as

  obstinately seeks to reunite itself with it. Thus, on the one hand, their existence

  is split into series of faces, perhaps accidental and in any case unassumable,

  object of the mundane episteme par excellence, gossip; on the other hand, it ap-

  pears as the “beast in the jungle,” something that is always waiting in ambush

  for them in the curves and cruxes of life and will one day inevitably pounce to

  show “the real truth” about them.

  5.5. Sexual life—which appears, for example, in the sexual biographies that

  Krafft-Ebing collects in his Psychopathia sexualis in the same years when James

  is writing his novels—seems to actualize a threshold that escapes the scission

  between the two lives. Here the beast in the jungle has always already pounced—

  or rather, has always already unveiled its phantasmatic nature. These biographies,

  which are by all appearances miserable and have been transcribed solely to bear

  witness to their pathological and infamous character, testify to an experience in

  which the life that has been lived is identified without remainder with the life by which it has been lived. In the life that the anonymous protagonists live what is

  at stake in every instant is the life by which they live: the latter has been wagered

  and forgotten without remainder from the beginning in the former, even at the

  cost of losing all dignity and respectability. The short-sighted summaries of med-

  ical taxonomy conceal a sort of archive of the blessed life, whose pathographic

  seals had each time been broken by desire. (The narcissistic withdrawal of libido

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  into the Ego, by which Freud defines perversion, is only the psychological tran-

  scription of the fact that for the subject what is in question in that determined

  and uncontrollable passion is his life, that this life has been entirely put at stake

  in this certain gesture or in that certain perverse behavior.)

  It is striking that to find examples and materials of a life inseparable from

  its form in our society, one has to rummage through pathographic registers—or,

  as happened to Foucault for his Lives of Infamous Men—in police archives. In

  this sense, form-of-life is something that does not yet exist in its fullness and can

  be attested only in places that, under present circumstances, necessarily appear

  unedifying. In any case, it is a matter of an application of the Benjaminian prin-

  ciple according to which the elements of the final state are hidden in the present,

  not in the tendencies that appear progressive but in the most insignificant and

  contemptible.

  5.6. There is, however, also a high tradition of inseparable life. In early Chris-

  tian literature, the proximity between life and logos that is in question in the prologue to the Gospel of John was taken as the model of an inseparable life. “Life

  itself,” one reads in Origen’s commentary, “comes into existence after
the Word

  [ epigignetai toi logoi], being inseparable [ achoristos] from it after it has come into existence” (Origen, II, 129).

  According to the messianic paradigm of “eternal life” ( zoè aionos), the very

  relationship between bios and zoè is transformed in such a way that zoè can appear in Clement of Alexandria as the supreme end of bios: “Piety toward God

  is the only truly universal exhortation that clearly concerns bios in its entirety, stretched out in every instant toward the supreme end, zoè” (Clement, XI). The

  reversal of the relation between bios and zoè here allows for a formulation that simply would not have made sense in classical Greek thought and that seems to

  anticipate modern biopolitics: zoè as telos of bios.

  In Victorinus the attempt to think the relationship between Father and Son

  produces an unheard-of ontology, according to which “every being has an insep-

  arable species [ omne esse inseparabilem speciem habet], or rather, the species is the substance itself, not because the species is prior to being, but because the species

  defines being” (Victorinus, p. 234/116). Like living and life, so also being and

  form here coincide without remainder.

  5.7. It is from this perspective that one can read the way in which Franciscan

  theorists completely rethought the Aristotelian division of souls (or lives), to

  the point of radically calling into question both the very reality of the division

  and the hierarchy between vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual soul that Scho-

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  lasticism had drawn from it. Intellectual life, writes Scotus, contains in itself

  vegetative and sensitive life not in the sense that the latter, being subordinated to

  the former, are to be abolished or formally destroyed but, on the contrary, only

  in the sense of their greater perfection ( Intellectiva continet perfecte et formaliter vegetativam et sensitivam per se et non sub ratione destruente rationem vegetativae et sensitivae, sed sub ratione perfectiori quam illae formae habeantur sine intellectiva).

  Richard of Middleton can thus affirm that “the vegetative, sensitive, and intellec-

  tive are not three forms, but one sole form [ non sunt tres formae, sed una forma], by means of which there is in the human being a vegetative, sensitive, and intellective being.” And beyond the Aristotelian division, the Franciscans elaborate