The Omnibus Homo Sacer
Page 193
Plotinus does nothing but take up an ancient tradition. Not only had Plato
made use in the Phaedo (67a) of a political metaphor ( apodemia, emigration, literally the abandonment of the demos) to define the separation of the soul
from the body, but in the Theatatus (176a–b), in a passage that is customarily
adduced as a possible source of Plotinus’s formula— phygè de omoiosis theoi kata
ton dynaton—its original political meaning is restored to the term phygè: “the assimilation to God is virtually an exile.”
Another precedent for the characterization of the philosophical life as exile
is found in the passage of the Politics in which Aristotle defines the bios of the philosopher as “foreign”: “Which bios is preferable, that which is actualized
through doing politics together [ synpoliteuesthai] and participating in common
[ koinonein] in the polis, or instead, that which is foreign [ xenikos] and untied to the political community?” (1324a 15–16). The contemplative life of the philosopher is here compared to that of a foreigner who, like the exiled, could not par-
ticipate in political life in the Greek polis. That the condition of the apolis, of the one who is cut off from all political community, seems particularly disquieting
to the Greek (and, precisely for this reason, both superhuman and subhuman)
1242
HOMO SACER IV, 2
is attested by a choral passage in the Antigone, in which Sophocles defines the
essence of the deinos, the “terrible power” that belongs to man, with the oxymo-
ronic hypsipolis apolis, literally: “superpolitical apolitical.” And Aristotle was certainly mindful of this passage when, at the beginning of the Politics, he affirms
for his part that “the one who is stateless by nature and not by chance is either
inferior to or stronger than a man” (1253a 4–8).
6.4. In the tradition of Greek philosophy, the exiled and stateless are thus
not neutral figures, and only if one restores it to its juridico-political con-
text does Plotinus’s formula acquire its full sense. Taking up the juxtaposition
between the philosophical life and exile, Plotinus pushes it to the extreme,
proposing a new and more enigmatic figure of the ban. The relation of the
ban in which bare life is held, which we have identified in Homo Sacer I as the
fundamental political relationship, is laid claim to and assumed as his own by
the philosopher. But in this gesture, it is transformed and inverted into some-
thing positive, having been posed as a figure of a new and happy intimacy, of
an “alone by oneself” as a cipher of a superior politics. Exile from politics cedes
its place to a politics of exile.
In this way, philosophy is presented as an attempt to construct a life at once
“superpolitical and apolitical” ( hypsipolis apolis): separated in the ban from the city, it nevertheless becomes intimate and inseparable from itself, in a nonrelation that has the form of an “exile of one alone to one alone.” “Alone with
one alone” (“alone by oneself ”) can only mean: to be together beyond every
relation. Form-of-life is this ban that no longer has the form of a bond or an
exclusion-inclusion of bare life but that of an intimacy without relation.
(It is in this sense that one is to read the gesture in §4.6 of Homo Sacer I to-
ward the necessity of no longer thinking the political-social factum in the form
of a relationship. From the same perspective, developing the idea that the State
does not found itself on a social link but on the prohibition of its dissolution,
§4.3 suggested that dissolution is not to be understood as the dissolution of an
existent bond, because the bond itself does not have any other consistency than
the purely negative one that it derives from the prohibition of dissolution. Since
there is originally neither bond nor relation, this absence of relation is captured
in state power in the form of the ban and of prohibition.)
6.5. Developing Aristotle’s characterization of the activity of thought as
thigein, “touching,” Giorgio Colli defines “contact” as the “metaphysical inter-
stice” or the moment in which two entities are separated only by a void of
representation. “In contact two points are in contact in the limited sense that
THE USE OF BODIES
1243
between them there is nothing: contact is the indication of a representative
nothing, which nevertheless is a certain nothing, because what it is not (its
representative outline) gives it a spatio-temporal arrangement” (Colli, p. 349).
Just as thought at its greatest summit does not represent but “touches” the in-
telligible, in the same way, in the life of thought as form-of-life, bios and zoè, form and life are in contact, which is to say, they dwell in a non-relation. And it
is in a contact—that is, in a void of representation—and not in a relation that
forms-of-life communicate. The “alone by oneself” that defines the structure of
every singular form-of-life also defines its community with the others. And it is
this thigein, this contact that the juridical order and politics seek by all means to capture and represent in a relation. Western politics is, in this sense, constitutively “representative,” because it always already has to reformulate contact into
the form of a relation. It will therefore be necessary to think politics as an inti-
macy unmediated by any articulation or representation: human beings, forms-
of-life are in contact, but this is unrepresentable because it consists precisely
in a representative void, that is, in the deactivation and inoperativity of every
representation. To the ontology of non-relation and use there must correspond
a non-representative politics.
א “Alone by oneself” is an expression of intimacy. We are together and very close,
but between us there is not an articulation or a relation that unites us. We are united to one another in the form of our being alone. What customarily constitutes the sphere of
privacy here becomes public and common. For this reason, lovers show themselves nude
to one another: I show myself to you as when I am alone with myself; what we share is
only our esoterism, our inappropriable zone of non-knowledge. This Inappropriable is the
unthinkable; it is what our culture must always exclude and presuppose in order to make
it the negative foundation of politics. For this reason the bare body must be covered by
clothing to assume a political value: like bare life, so too is nudity something that must be excluded and then captured in order then to reappear only in the form of undressing
(the fact that in the Lager the deported had to be stripped of all clothing before being eliminated again shows this political significance of nudity).
Ethologists and scholars of behavior are familiar with an exhibition of intimate
parts—both among animals and among children and primitives—with an apotropaic
and repulsing character. In confirmation of its originary political character, the intimacy that unites here becomes what repulses and separates. This meaning is even more obvious
in the gesture of Hecuba, who shows her bare breast to her son Hector to drive him to
go to the battlefield: “Hector, my child! Show aidos before this!” (Homer, XXII, 82).
Aidos—translating it as “shame” would be insufficient—is an intimate sentiment that makes obligatory a public behavior. Nudity here shows its value as threshold between public and private.
12
44
HOMO SACER IV, 2
6.6. In his course on Hölderlin in the winter semester of 1934–35, Heidegger,
taking up an expression of the poet’s, calls intimacy ( Innigkeit) a dwelling that
maintains itself in the conflict between two opposites:
Intimacy does not mean the mere “interiority” [ Innerlichkeit] of sensation, in the sense of the closing off within oneself of a “lived experience” [ Erlebnis]. Nor does it mean an intensified degree of “warmth of feeling.” Intimacy is also not a word
that belongs in the context of the “beautiful soul” and that way of conceiving
the world. For Hölderlin, the word carries nothing of the flavor of some dreamy,
inactive sentimentality. Quite the contrary: it means, first, supreme force of
Dasein. Second, this force evinces itself in withstanding the most extreme conflict
[ Widersreit]. . . . (Heidegger 11, p. 117/106)
That is to say, according to Heidegger, intimacy names “a knowing standing
[ Inner stehen] and supporting [ Austragen] of the essential conflict of that which, in being opposed [ Entgegensetzung] possesses an original unity” (ibid., p. 119/106).
Heidegger thus calls intimacy the mode in which one must live out the dwell-
ing in the most originary dimension accessible to the human being, the “harmon-
ically opposed.” In Heideggerian ontology, this corresponds to the experience of
difference as difference. Dwelling in this experience means maintaining and at
the same time negating the opposites, in accordance with a gesture that Heideg-
ger, once again following Hölderlin, calls Verleugnung, from a verb that means
“to hide by negating, to renege.” Freud had called Verneinung an abolition of the
repressed, which in some way gives it expression, yet without carrying it to con-
sciousness. In an analogous way, Verleugnung, leaving unsaid the unsayable in the
said, poetically expresses the secret—namely, the co-belonging of the opposites—
without formulating it; it negates it and at the same time maintains it (here there
comes to light the problem of the relationship, still insufficiently investigated, of
Heidegger’s thought with that of Hegel).
Intimacy as a political concept, which is here in question for us, is situated
beyond the Heideggerian perspective. It is not a question of having an experi-
ence of difference as such by holding firm and yet negating the opposition but of
deactivating the opposites and rendering them inoperative. Archeological regres-
sion must neither express nor negate, neither say nor un-say: rather, it reaches a
threshold of indiscernibility, in which the dichotomy diminishes and the oppo-
sites coincide—which is to say, fall together. What then appears is not a chrono-
logically more originary unity, nor a new and superior unity, but something like a
way out. The threshold of indiscernibility is the center of the ontologico-political
machine: if one reaches it and holds oneself there in it, the machine can no longer
function.
7
“That’s How We Do It”
7.1. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein uses the term Lebens-
form, “form of life,” five times to explain what a language ( eine
Sprache) is and how one should understand a language game ( Sprachspiel). “To imagine a language,” reads the first occurrence, “means to imagine a form of life”
(Wittgenstein 1, §19). Shortly afterward, Wittgenstein specifies that “the word
‘language-game’ is used here to emphasize the fact that the speaking of language
is part of an activity [ Tätigkeit], or of a form of life [ Lebensform]” (§23). And that this “activity or form of life” is something different or more profound than
recognizing the correctness of a rule or an opinion is stated further on: “What
is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This agreement is not in opinions [ Meinungen], but rather in form
of life” (§241). Later on, the proximity between language (more precisely: use of
language) and form of life is again emphasized: “Can only those hope who can
talk? Only those who have mastered the use [ Verwendung] of a language. That
is to say, the manifestations of hope are modifications of a complicated form of
life” (p. 183). And the last occurrence suggests that form of life is something like
a given that must be assumed as such: “What has to be accepted, the given [ das
Hinzunehmende, Gegebene], is—one might say—forms of life” (p. 238).
7.2. This last occurrence seems to characterize form of life (and the language
game with which it is compared) as a sort of limit point at which, in accordance
with a typical Wittgensteinian gesture, explanations and justifications seem to
stop. “Our mistake,” one reads toward the end of the first part of the book,
“is to look for an explanation where we ought to regard the facts as originary
phenomena [ Urphänomene]. That is, where we ought to say: this is the language game that is being played” (§654). In the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Wittgenstein 2, pt. 2, §74), the same concept is repeated: “The danger
here, I believe, is one of giving a justification of our procedure where there is no
such thing as a justification and we ought simply to have said: that’s how we do
1245
1246
HOMO SACER IV, 2
it [ so machen wir’s].” Every investigation and every reflection reaches a limit at which, as in the “originary phenomenon” according to Goethe, the study must
halt. But the novelty with respect to the Goethe citation is that this Urphänomen
is not an object; it is simply a usage and a practice. It does not concern a “what”
but only a “how”: “that’s how we do it.” And it is to this “how” that one actually
refers in every justification: “What people accept as a justification shows how
they think and live” (Wittgenstein 1, §325).
7.3. Some have sought to explain the concept of form of life through that
of constitutive rule, namely, of a rule that is not applied to a preexisting re-
ality but constitutes it. Wittgenstein seems to refer to something of the type
when he writes that “chess is characterized [ charakterisiert] by its rules” (Wittgenstein 3, §13) or, even more precisely, “I can’t say: that is a pawn and such and
such rules hold for [ bestimmen] this piece. No, it is the rules alone which define
[ bestimmen] this piece: a pawn is the sum of the rules for its moves” (Wittgen-
stein 4, pp. 327–328/327).
The concept of “constitutive rule,” though apparently clear, nevertheless
hides a difficulty that one must confront. While customarily one understands by
a rule something that is applied to a preexisting reality or activity, in this case the
rule constitutes the reality and thus seems to be identified with it. “A pawn is
the sum of the rules for its moves”: thus, the pawn does not follow the rule but
is the rule. But what can it mean to “be” its own rule? Here one again finds the
same indetermination between rule and life that we have observed in monastic
rules: they are not applied to the monk’s life but constitute it and define it as such.
But precisely for this reason, as the monks had at once understood, the rule is
resolved without remainder into a vital praxis, and this coincides at every point
wit
h the rule. The “rule-based life” is a “vital rule,” and, as in Francis, regula and vita are perfectly synonymous. Can one say, then, of the monk, as of the pawn in
the game of chess, that “it is the sum of the rules for its moves”?
7.4. Those who make use of the concept of “constitutive rule” seem to imply
that the rule, while being resolved into the constitution of the game, remains
separate from it. But as has been noted, this holds only so long as the game is
considered as a formal whole of which the rules describe the structure (or furnish
the instructions for use). If we instead consider the game as it is in reality, namely,
as a series of “concrete interactive episodes involving actual persons, invested with
specific goals, skills, and linguistic and other capacities” (Black, p. 328), if, in a
word, we regard the game from the perspective of use and not from that of in-
structions, then the separation is no longer possible. On the pragmatic level, the
THE USE OF BODIES
1247
game and the rule become indiscernible, and what appears in their becoming
indeterminated is a use or a form of life. “How am I able to follow a rule? Once I
have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned.
Then I am inclined to say: ‘this is simply what I do’” (Wittgenstein 1, §217).
In the same way, if we regard language from the point of view of grammatical
rules, one can see that these define the language as a formal system while remain-
ing distinct from it; but if we regard language in use (namely, as parole and not
as langue), then it is just as true if not more so to say that the rules of grammar are drawn from the linguistic usage of the speakers and are not distinguished
from them.
7.5. In reality the oft-invoked distinction between constitutive rule and prag-
matic rule has no raison d’être. Every constitutive rule—the bishop moves in
this or that way—can be formulated as a pragmatic rule—“one cannot move the
bishop except diagonally”—and vice versa. The same happens with grammati-
cal rules: the syntactic rule “in French the subject normally precedes the verb”
can be formulated pragmatically as “you cannot say pars je ; you can only say je pars.” In truth it is a matter of two different ways of considering the game—or