The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  the idea of a “form of corporeity” ( forma corporeitatis), which is already found

  perfected in the embryo before the intellectual soul and later co exists with it.

  This means that there is never anything like a bare life, a life without form that

  functions as a negative foundation for a superior and more perfect life: corporeal

  life is always already formed, is always already inseparable from a form.

  5.8. How to describe a form-of-life? At the beginning of his Parallel Lives,

  Plutarch evokes an eidos, a form that the biographer must know how to pick out

  beyond the muddle of events. What he seeks to grasp is not, however, a form-of-

  life but an exemplary trait, something that, in the sphere of action, allows him to

  unite one life to another in a single paradigm. In general, ancient biography—

  the lives of philosophers and poets that it has transmitted to us—does not seem

  interested in describing the real events nor in composing them into a unitary

  form so much as instead choosing a paradigmatic fact—extravagant and signifi-

  cant—deduced from the work rather than the life. If this singular projection of

  work over life remains problematic, it is nonetheless possible that precisely the

  attempt to define a life starting from a work constitutes something like the logi-

  cal place where ancient biography had a presentiment of a form-of-life.

  5.9. Fernand Deligny never sought to recount the life of the autistic children

  with whom he lived. Instead, he attempted to scrupulously transcribe on tracing

  paper the routes of their movements and encounters in the form of what he called

  “lines of drift” ( lignes d’erre). Placed on top of one another, the tracing papers allow a sort of circular or elliptical ring ( cerne) to appear, beyond the tangle of lines, which include within themselves not only lines of drift but also the points

  ( chevêtres, from enchevrêment, “entanglement”), strikingly constant, at which the routes cross. “It is clear,” he writes, “that the routes—the lines of drift—are transcribed and that the ring area each time appears as the trace of something else that was not foreseen or pre-thought by those doing the tracing nor by those being

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  traced. It is clear that it is a question of the effect of something that is not due to language, nor does it refer to the Freudian unconscious” (Deligny, p. 40).

  It is possible that this striking tangle, apparently indecipherable, expresses

  more than any account not only the mute children’s form of life but any form

  of life. In this sense it is an instructive exercise to attempt to mark on the map

  of the cities where we have lived the itineraries of our movements, which prove

  to be stubbornly and almost obsessively constant. It is in the tracks of that in

  which we have lost our life that it is perhaps possible to find our form-of-life. In

  any case, Deligny seems to attribute to his lignes d’erre something like a political meaning that is prelinguistic and yet collective: “It is by observing this ring area

  that there came to us the project of persisting in transcribing the simple visible

  waiting to see appear there a trace of what we write with a capital W, inscribed in us since our species had existence, a primordial We that insists on foreshadowing, beyond every will and every power, for nothing, immutable, just like, on the

  opposite pole, ideology” (ibid.).

  5.10. I have in my hands the page of a French newspaper that publishes per-

  sonals ads for people who are seeking to meet a life companion. Curiously, the

  column is called “modes of life,” and it includes, alongside a photo, a brief mes-

  sage that attempts to describe through small, laconic traits something like the

  form or, more precisely, the mode of life of the advertisement’s author (and some-

  times of the ideal addressee as well). Under the photograph of a woman seated at

  a café table, with her serious—indeed, decidedly melancholy—face resting on her

  left hand, one can read: “Parisian, tall, thin, blonde, and classy, in her fifties, lively, good family, sports: hunting, fishing, golf, horseback riding, skiing, would love to

  meet serious man, witty, sixty, the same profile, to live happy days together, Paris

  or country.” The portrait of a young brunette who is fixated on a ball suspended

  in the air is accompanied by this caption: “Young juggler, pretty, feminine, spiri-

  tual, seeks young woman 20–30, similar profile to be united in the G-spot!!!” At

  times, the photograph also tries to present the occupation of the one who is writ-

  ing, like the one that shows a woman who is throwing a rag into a bucket to clean

  floors: “50, blonde, green eyes, 1m 60cm, porter, divorced (3 sons, 23, 25 and 29,

  independent). Physically and morally young, charming, desire to share the simple

  joys of life with lovable companion 45–55.” Other times, the decisive element for

  characterizing the form of life is the presence of an animal, who appears in the

  foreground in the photograph alongside its owner: “Gentle Labrador seeks for

  his mistress (36) a sweet master who is a lover of nature and animals, to swim in

  happiness in the countryside.” Finally, the close-up of a face on which a tear leaves

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  a trace of mascara reads: “Young woman, 25, with a skin-deep sensibility, seeks a

  tender and spiritual young man, with whom to live a river-romance.”

  The list could continue, but what is both irritating and moving each time is

  the attempt—a complete success and, at the same time, an irreparable failure—

  to communicate a form of life. How indeed can this certain face, this certain

  life coincide with that italicized list of hobbies and character traits? It is as if

  something decisive—and, so to speak, unequivocally public and political—has

  collapsed to such a degree into the idiocy of the private that it is becoming for-

  ever unrecognizable.

  5.11. In the attempt to define oneself through one’s hobbies, there comes to

  light in all its problematicity the relation between singularity, its tastes, and its

  inclinations. The most idiosyncratic aspect of everyone, their tastes, the fact that

  they like coffee granita, the sea at summertime, this certain shape of lips, this

  certain smell, but also the paintings of the late Titian so much—all this seems

  to safeguard its secret in the most impenetrable and insignificant way. It is nec-

  essary to decisively subtract tastes from the aesthetic dimension and rediscover

  their ontological character, in order to find in them something like a new ethical

  territory. It is not a matter of attributes or properties of a subject who judges but

  of the mode in which each person, in losing himself as subject, constitutes-him-

  self as form-of-life. The secret of taste is what form-of-life must solve, has always

  already solved and displayed—just as gestures betray and, at the same time,

  absolve character.

  Two theses published in Tiqqun 2 ( Introduction to Civil War) figuratively summarize the ontological meaning to “tastes” in their relation to a form-of-life:

  Every body is affected by its form-of-life as if by a clinamen, a leaning, an attrac-

  tion, a taste. A body leans toward whatever leans its way. (§3)

  “My” form-of-life relates not to what I am, but to how I am what I am. (§5) If every body is affected by its form-of-life as by a
clinamen or a taste, the ethical subject is that subject that constitutes-itself in relation to this clinamen,

  the subject who bears witness to its tastes, takes responsibility for the mode in

  which it is affected by its inclinations. Modal ontology, the ontology of the how, coincides with an ethics.

  5.12. In his letter to Milena of August 10, 1920, Kafka recounts his fleet-

  ing encounter with a girl in a hotel. During this encounter, the girl did “in

  perfect innocence” “something slightly disgusting” and “said something slightly

  obscene”—and yet Kafka realized in that precise instant that he would never

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  forget it, as if precisely this small gesture and this small word had drawn him

  irresistibly into that hotel. Ever since then, adds Kafka, for years and years his

  body “was shaken almost unbearably” by the memory and by the desire for that

  “very particular, trivial, disgusting thing” (Kafka, p. 147).

  The decisive element, what renders this trivial disgusting thing unforgetta-

  ble, is obviously not the thing in itself (Kafka says that it is “not worth mention-

  ing”); it is not only the girl’s abjection but her particular mode of being abject,

  her bearing witness in some way to her abjection. It is this and only this that

  renders that abjection perfectly innocent, which is to say, ethical.

  It is not justice or beauty that moves us but the mode that each one has of

  being just or beautiful, of being affected by her beauty or her justice. For this

  reason even abjection can be innocent, even “something slightly disgusting” can

  move us.

  5.13. A double tendency seems to be inherent to form-of-life. On the one

  hand, it is a life inseparable from its form, an indissoluble unity in itself, and

  on the other, it is separable from every thing and every context. This is evident

  in the classical conception of theoria, which is in itself united but separated and separable from every thing, in perpetual flight. This double tension is the risk

  inherent in form-of-life, which tends to separate itself ascetically into an auton-

  omous sphere, theory. It is necessary instead to think form-of-life as a living of

  its own mode of being, as inseparable from its context, precisely because it is not

  in relation but in contact with it.

  The same thing happens in sexual life: the more it becomes a form-of-life,

  the more it seems separable from its context and indifferent to it. Far from being

  a principle of community, it separates itself to constitute a special community of

  its own (the castle of Silling in Sade or the California bathhouses for Foucault).

  The more form-of-life becomes monadic, the more it isolates itself from the

  other monads. But the monad always already communicates with the others,

  insofar as it represents them in itself, as in a living mirror.

  5.14. The arcanum of politics is in our form-of-life, and yet precisely for this

  reason we cannot manage to penetrate it. It is so intimate and close that if we

  seek to grasp it, it leaves us holding only the ungraspable, tedious everyday. It

  is like the form of the cities or houses where we have lived, which coincide per-

  fectly with the life we have frittered away in them, and perhaps precisely for this

  reason, it seems suddenly impenetrable to us, while other times, at a stroke, as in

  revolutionary moments according to Jesi, it is collectively innervated and seems

  to unveil to us its secret.

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  5.15. In Western thought, the problem of form-of-life has emerged as an eth-

  ical problem ( ethos, the mode of life of an individual or group) or as an aesthetic problem (the style by which the author leaves his mark on the work). Only if

  we restore it to the ontological dimension will the problem of style and mode

  of life be able to find its just formulation. And this can happen only in the form

  of something like an “ontology of style” or a doctrine that is in a position to

  respond to the question: “what does it mean that multiple modes modify or

  express the one substance?”

  In the history of philosophy, the place where this problem has been posed is

  Averroism, as a problem of the conjunction ( copulatio) between the singular in-

  dividual and the one intellect. According to Averroës, the mean term that allows

  this union is the imagination: the singular is joined to the possible or material

  intellect through the phantasms of its imagination. The conjunction can happen,

  however, only if the intellect strips the phantasms of their material elements, to

  the point of producing, in the act of thought, a perfectly bare image, something

  like an absolute imago. This means that the phantasm is what the singular sensi-

  ble body marks on the intellect to the same extent to which the inverse is true,

  namely, that it is what the one intellect works and marks in the singular. In the

  contemplated image, the singular sensible body and the one intellect coincide,

  which is to say, fall together. The questions “who contemplates the image?” and

  “what is united to what?” do not have a univocal response. (Averroistic poets,

  like Cavalcanti and Dante, made love the place of this experience, in which the

  phantasm contemplated is at once subject and object of love and the intellect

  knows and loves itself in the image.)

  What we call form-of-life corresponds to this ontology of style; it names the

  mode in which a singularity bears witness to itself in being and being expresses

  itself in the singular body.

  6

  Exile of One Alone with One Alone

  6.1. At the end of the Enneads (VI, 9, 11), in order to define the life of

  the gods and of “divine and happy men” (namely, philosophers),

  Plotinus makes use of the formula phygè monou pros monon, which remains ex-

  emplary as an expression of Neoplatonic mysticism. Bréhier translates it with

  these words: “Telle est la vie des dieux et des hommes bienheureux: s’affranchir

  des choses d’ici bas, s’y déplaire, fuir seul vers lui seul.”

  In 1933, Erik Peterson, who had converted to Catholicism a short time pre-

  viously, published a study on “The Origin and Meaning of the Formula ‘ monou

  pros monon’ in Plotinus.” Against the interpretation of Cumont, who had seen in

  the expression the transposition of a pagan cultic formula, the neo-Roman Cath-

  olic theologian, with a gesture that betrays a Protestant sensibility, instead points

  toward an “old Greek expression” belonging to the vocabulary of intimacy as the

  origin of the formula. Expressions of the type monos monoi, he suggests, are com-

  mon in Greek to designate a personal, private, or intimate relation. Plotinus did

  nothing but introduce into this conventional formula “the conceptual meaning

  of his metaphysics and his mysticism” (Peterson, p. 35). The metaphor “flight of

  one alone with one alone,” which according to Peterson contains in itself both

  the idea of a bond ( Verbundenheit) and that of a separation ( Absonderung), dislocates an expression belonging to the sphere of the private lexicon into that of

  mystical-philosophical terminology, and in this displacement consists Plotinus’s

  “most proper and original contribution.”

  6.2. However, the whole qu
estion is distorted by the fact that scholars’ at-

  tention has been concentrated solely on the formula monou pros monon, taking

  for granted the meaning of the term phygè that immediately precedes it and of

  which the formula itself is only a determination. The correct but generic trans-

  lation with “flight” (or “fleeing”) has thus constantly concealed the essential

  linguistic data, namely, the fact that phygè in Greek is a technical term for exile ( phygen pheugein means “to go into exile,” and phygas is the exiled person). This 1240

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  is so true that, a few pages before, encountering the substantive phygè in the

  series of three terms by means of which Plotinus describes the distance from

  the “sources of life,” the same translators render it with none other than “exile.”

  Plotinus does not simply transfer a formula from the sphere of intimacy to the

  metaphysical-philosophical sphere. Much more significant is the fact that he

  categorizes the divine and happy life of the philosopher above all through a

  term drawn from the juridico-political lexicon: exile. And yet exile is now no

  longer the ban of an individual from the city into another plan but that of “one

  alone with one alone,” and the condition of negativity and abandonment that

  it expresses seems to be inverted into a state of “felicity” ( eudaimonon bios) and

  “lightness” ( kouphisthesetai).

  Plotinus’s “most proper and original contribution” consists, then, in having

  united a juridico-political term that means exclusion and exile to a syntagma

  that expresses intimacy and being together (also in Numenius, in a passage

  that is often cited as a possible source of Plotinus’s formula, we find in place

  of phygè a verb— omilesai—that means “to converse” and “to stand together”).

  The divine life of the philosopher is a paradoxical “separation (or exclusion)

  into intimacy.” At stake in the formula is an exile into intimacy, a ban of the

  self to the self.

  6.3. In defining the condition of the philosopher through the image of exile,