The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  language: one as a formal system that exists in itself (namely, as a langue) and

  another as a use or praxis (namely, as a parole).

  For this reason it has rightly been asked whether it is possible to transgress

  a rule of chess, like what constitutes checkmate. One would be tempted to say

  that transgression, which is impossible on the level of constitutive rules, is pos-

  sible on the pragmatic level. In reality, the one who transgresses the rule simply

  ceases playing. Hence the special gravity of the swindler: the one who swindles

  does not transgress a rule but pretends to keep playing when in reality he has

  left the game.

  7.6. What is really in question in constitutive rules, what they inadequately

  seek to prove, is something like the process of the autoconstitution of being,

  namely, the same process that philosophy had expressed in the concept of the

  causa sui. As Spinoza has suitably reminded us, this certainly cannot mean that

  “before existing it had brought to pass that it was to be, which is absurdity itself

  and cannot be” (Spinoza 4, II, XVII); instead it means the immanence of being

  to itself, an internal principle of self-movement and self-modification, because

  of which every being, as Aristotle says of physis, is always on the way to itself.

  The constitutive rule, like form of life, expresses this auto-hypostatic process, in

  which the constitutive is and remains immanent to the constituted, is actualized

  and expressed in it and by means of it, inseparable.

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  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  If one reads attentively, Wittgenstein writes as much in one of the rare pas-

  sages in which he makes use (in English) of the term “to constitute” with respect

  to the rules of chess:

  What idea do we have of the king of chess, and what is its relation to the rules of

  chess? . . . Do these rules follow from the idea? No, the rules are not something

  contained in the idea and got by analyzing it. They constitute it. . . . The rules

  constitute the “freedom” of the pieces. (Wittgenstein 5, p. 86)

  Rules are not separable into something like an idea or a concept of the king (the

  king is the piece that is moved according to this or that rule): they are immanent

  to the movements of the king; they express the autoconstitution process of their

  game. In the autoconstitution of a form of life what is in question is its freedom.

  7.7. For this reason Wittgenstein does not consider form of life from the

  point of view of rules (constitutive or pragmatic as they may be) but from that

  of use, which is to say, starting from the moment where explanations and jus-

  tifications are no longer possible. Here one touches a point at which “giving

  grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end” (Wittgenstein 6,

  §204), something like a “foundation” that corresponds to a level that is, so to

  speak, animal in the human, to his “natural history.” As one of the very rare

  passages where the term “form of life” appears outside the Philosophical Investi-

  gations says, “Now I would like to regard this certainty, not as something akin

  to hastiness or superficiality, but as a form of life. . . . But that means I want to

  conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were,

  as something animal” (ibid., §§358–359). The animality that is here in question

  is in no way opposed, according to the tradition of Western philosophy, to the

  human being as rational and speaking being. Quite the contrary, they are pre-

  cisely the most human practices—speaking, hoping, recounting—which here

  reach their ultimate and most proper ground: “Giving orders, asking questions,

  telling stories, having a chat, are as much a part of our natural history as walking,

  eating, drinking, playing” (Wittgenstein 1, §25). For this ground impenetrable

  to explanations, which constitutive rules seek in vain to grasp, Wittgenstein also

  makes use of the terms “usage, custom, institutions”: “This is simply what we

  do. This is use and custom among us, or a fact of our natural history” (Witt-

  genstein 2, pt. 1, §63); “To follow a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to

  play a game of chess, are customs (usages, relations)” (Wittgenstein 1, §199). The

  opacity of forms of life is of a practical and, in the last analysis, political nature.

  8

  Work and Inoperativity

  8.1. In his course on L’herméneutique du sujet, Foucault closely links the

  theme of truth and that of mode or form of life. Starting from a

  reflection on Greek Cynicism, he shows that the ethical practice of the self

  here takes the form not of a doctrine, as in the Platonic tradition, but of a

  test ( épreuve), in which the choice of a mode of life becomes in every sense

  the decisive question. In the lineage of the Cynical model, which makes of the

  philosopher’s life an unceasing challenge and a scandal, Foucault evokes two

  examples in which the claim of a certain form of life becomes ineludible: the

  political militant’s style of life and, a little later, the life of the artist in moder-

  nity, which seems caught in a curious and inextricable circularity. On the one

  hand, the biography of the artist must testify through its very form to the truth

  of the work in which it is rooted. On the other hand, by contrast, it is the prac-

  tice of art and the work that it produces that are to confer on the life itself the

  seal of authenticity.

  Although the problem of the relation between truth and form of life is cer-

  tainly one of the essential themes of the course, Foucault does not linger fur-

  ther on the at-once exemplary and contradictory status of the condition of the

  artist in modernity. The coincidence between life and art that is in question

  here is, from Romanticism to contemporary art, a constant tendency, which has

  brought about a radical transformation in the mode of conceiving the work of

  art itself. This bears witness beyond any possible doubt to the fact that we are not

  dealing with an accidental question. Not only have art and life ended up being

  indeterminated to such an extent that it has often become impossible to distin-

  guish life practice from artistic practice, but starting from the twentieth-century

  avant-garde, this has had as a consequence a progressive dissolution of the very

  consistency of the work. The truth criterion of art has been displaced to such a

  degree into the minds and, very often, into the very bodies of the artist, into his

  or her physicality, that these latter have no need to exhibit a work except as ashes

  or as a document of their own vital praxis. The work is life and the life is only

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  work: but in this coincidence, instead of being transformed or falling together,

  they continue to pursue each other in an endless fugue.

  8.2. It is possible that in the paradoxical circularity of the artistic condition

  there comes to light a difficulty that concerns the very nature of what we call

  form-of-life. If life is here inseparable from its form, if zoè and bios are here intimately in contact, how are we to conceive their non-relation, how to think

  their being given together and simultaneously falling? Wha
t confers on form-

  of-life its truth and, at the same time, its errancy? And what relationship is there

  between artistic practice and form-of-life?

  In traditional societies and, to a lesser extent, still today, every human exis-

  tence is caught up in a certain praxis or in a certain mode of life—a trade, pro-

  fession, precarious occupation (or today, increasingly often, in a privative form,

  unemployment)—that in some way defines it and with which it tends to identify

  itself more or less completely. For reasons that this is not the place to investigate

  but that certainly have to do with the privileged status that, beginning in moder-

  nity, is attributed to the work of art, artistic praxis has become the place where

  this identification comes to know a durable crisis, and the relation between the

  artist as producer and his work becomes problematic. Thus, while in classical

  Greece the activity of the artist was defined exclusively by his work, and, con-

  sidered for this reason as banausos, he had a status that was, so to speak, residual with respect to the work, in modernity it is the work that comes to constitute in

  some way an embarrassing residual of the artist’s creative activity and genius. It is

  not surprising, therefore, that contemporary art has achieved the decisive step of

  substituting the life itself for the work. But at this point, if one does not wish to

  remain imprisoned in a vicious circle, the problem becomes the entirely paradox-

  ical one of trying to think the artist’s form of life in itself, which is precisely what

  contemporary art attempts but does not seem to be able to achieve.

  8.3. What we call form-of-life is not defined by its relation to a praxis ( en-

  ergeia) or a work ( ergon) but by a potential ( dynamis) and by an inoperativity.

  A living being, which seeks to define itself and give itself form through its own

  operation is, in fact, condemned to confuse its own life with its own operation,

  and vice versa. By contrast, there is form-of-life only where there is contempla-

  tion of a potential. Certainly there can only be contemplation of a potential in a

  work. But in contemplation, the work is deactivated and rendered inoperative,

  and in this way, restored to possibility, opened to a new possible use. That form

  of life is truly poetic that, in its own work, contemplates its own potential to do and not do and finds peace in it. The truth that contemporary art never manages

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  to bring to expression is inoperativity, which it seeks at all costs to make into a work.

  If artistic practice is the place where one is made to feel most forcefully the

  urgency and, at the same time, the difficulty of the constitution of a form-of-

  life, that is because in it there has been preserved the experience of a relation to

  something that exceeds work and operation and yet remains inseparable from

  it. A living being can never be defined by its work but only by its inoperativity,

  which is to say, by the mode in which it maintains itself in relation with a pure

  potential in a work and constitutes-itself as form-of-life, in which zoè and bios, life and form, private and public enter into a threshold of indifference and what

  is in question is no longer life or work but happiness. And the painter, the poet,

  the thinker—and in general, anyone who practices a poiesis and an activity—are

  not the sovereign subjects of a creative operation and of a work. Rather, they

  are anonymous living beings who, by always rendering inoperative the works of

  language, of vision, of bodies, seek to have an experience of themselves and to

  constitute their life as form-of-life.

  And if, as Bréal suggests, the term ethos is only the pronominal reflexive root

  e followed by the suffix - thos and thus means simply and literally “selfhood,”

  namely, the mode in which each one enters into contact with oneself, then artis-

  tic practice, in the sense that we are here seeking to define, belongs above all to

  ethics and not to aesthetics; it is essentially use-of-oneself. At the point where he

  constitutes-himself as form-of-life, the artist is no longer the author (in the mod-

  ern, essentially juridical sense of the term) of the work nor the proprietor of the

  creative operation. These latter are only something like the subjective remainders

  and the hypostases that result from the constitution of the form of life. For this

  reason Benjamin could claim that he did not want to be recognized ( Ich nicht er-

  kannt sein will; Benjamin 3, p. 532), and Foucault, even more categorically, that

  he did not want to identify himself (“I prefer not to identify myself ”; Rabinow,

  p. 184 [in English in original]). Form-of-life can neither recognize itself nor be

  recognized, because the contact between life and form and the happiness that

  are in question in it are situated beyond every possible recognition and every

  possible work. In this sense, form-of-life is above all the articulation of a zone

  of irresponsibility, in which the identities and imputations of the juridical order

  are suspended.

  9

  The Myth of Er

  9.1. At the end of the Republic, Plato recounts the myth of Er the Pam-

  phylian, who died in battle and unexpectedly returned to life when

  his body had already been laid on the funeral pyre to be burned. The report

  that he makes of his soul’s voyage into “a certain daemonic place,” where he

  witnessed the judgment of souls and the spectacle of their reincarnation in a

  new bios, is one of the most extraordinary visions of the hereafter, comparable

  in liveliness and richness of meaning with the nekyia in the Odyssey and Dante’s Comedy. The first part of the account describes the judgment of the souls of the

  dead: between two adjacent chasms in the earth and two other openings in the

  heavens, there sit judges ( dikastai) who,

  having rendered their verdict, ordered the just to go upward to the heavens

  through the door on the right, with signs of the judgment attached to their chests,

  and the unjust to travel downward through the opening on the left, with signs

  of all their deeds on their backs. When Er himself came forward, they told him

  that he was to be a messenger [ angelon] to human beings about the things that

  were there, and that he was to listen to and look at everything that happened in

  that place. He said that he saw souls departing after judgment through one of

  the openings in the heavens and one in the earth, while through the other two

  souls were arriving. From the door in the earth souls came up covered with dust

  and dirt, and from the door in the heavens souls came down pure [ katharas]. And

  the souls who were arriving all the time seemed to have been on long journeys so

  that they gladly went to the meadow, like a crowd going to a solemn festival [ en

  penegyrei], and camped there. The souls who knew each other exchanged greet-

  ings, and those who came up from the earth asked those who came down from

  the heavens about the things there and were in turn questioned by them about the

  things below. And so they told their stories to one another, the former weeping as

  they recalled all they had suffered and seen on their journey below earth, which

  lasted a thousand years, while the latter, who had come from heaven, told about
/>   how well they had fared and about the inconceivably fine and beautiful sights

  [ theas amechanous to kallos] they had seen. There was much to tell, Glaucon, and

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  it took a long time, but the main point was this: for each in turn of the unjust

  things they had done and for each in turn of the people they had wronged, they

  paid the penalty ten times over, once in every century of their journey. Since a

  century is roughly the length of a human life, this means that they paid a tenfold

  penalty for each injustice. (614c–615b)

  9.2. The most significant part of the myth, at least for us, begins only at

  this point and concerns the choice that every soul, before reentering the cycle

  of birth and death, must make of its form of life, of its bios. All the souls, after having spent seven days in the meadow, on the eighth day had to go on a journey

  in order to reach on the fourth day a place from which they can make out

  a straight column of life that stretched over the whole of heaven and earth, more

  like a rainbow than anything else, but brighter and more pure. After another

  day, they came to the light itself, and there, in the middle of the light, they saw

  the extremities of the bonds stretching from the heavens, for the light binds

  [ syndesmon] the heavens like the cables girding a trireme and holds its entire

  revolution together. From the extremities hands the spindle [ atrakton] of Ananke,

  by means of which all the spheres are turned. Its stem and hook are of adamant,

  whereas in its whorl [ sphondylos] adamant is mixed with other kinds of material.

  The nature of the whorl was this: its shape was like that of an ordinary whorl,

  but from what Er said, we must understand its structure as follows. It was as

  if a big whorl had been made hollow by being thoroughly scooped out, with

  another smaller whorl closely fitted into it, like nested boxes, and there was a

  third whorl inside the second, and so on, making eight whorls altogether, lying

  inside one another, with their rims appearing as circles from above, while from

  the back they formed one continuous whorl around the stem, which was driven