The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  through the center of the eighth. The first or outside whorl had the widest circular

  rim; that of the sixth was second in width; the fourth was third; the eighth was

  fourth; the seventh was fifth; the fifth was sixth; the third was seventh; and the

  second was eighth. The firm of the largest was spangled; that of the seventh was

  brightest; that of the eighth took its color from the seventh’s shining on it; the

  second and fifth were about equal in brightness, more yellow than the others; the

  third was the whitest in color; the fourth was rather red; and the sixth was second

  in whiteness. The whole spindle turned at the same speed, but as it turned, the

  inner circles gently revolved in a direction opposite to that of the whole. Of the

  whorls themselves, the eighth was the fastest, second came the seventh, sixth, and

  fifth, all the same speed; it seemed to them that the fourth was third in its speed

  of revolution; the fourth, third; and the second, fifth. The spindle itself turned

  on the lap of Ananke. And up above on each of the rims of the circles stood a

  Siren, who accompanied its revolution, uttering a single sound, one single note.

  And the concord of the eight notes produced a single harmony. And there were

  1254

  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  three other beings sitting at equal distances from one another, each on a throne.

  These were the Fates, the daughters of Ananke: Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos.

  They were dressed in white, with garlands on their heads, and they sang to the

  music of the Sirens. Lachesis sang of the past, Clotho of the present, and Atropos

  of the future. With her right hand, Clotho touched the outer circumference of

  the spindle and helped it turn; Atropos with her left hand did the same to the

  inner ones; and Lachesis with both hands helped motions in turn. (616b–617d)

  9.3. After this extraordinary vision, entirely under the sign of necessity and

  perfect—even if obscure—harmony, there follows, in stark contrast, the descrip-

  tion of the choice that souls make of their modes of life. The unfailing rigor of a

  cosmic machine, which operates through bonds and chains and as a result pro-

  duces a harmonic order, symbolized by the song of the Sirens and the Moirai, is

  now replaced by the “at once pitiful, ridiculous, and marvelous” spectacle (619e)

  of the way in which the souls again enter into the “death-bearing” cycle of birth

  (617d). If there had previously been bond, destiny, and necessity, here Ananke

  seems to cede her reign to Tyke, and everything becomes chance, contingency,

  and luck of the draw. And if the cipher of necessity was the wondrous metallic

  whorl that regulates the movements of the celestial spheres, that of contingency

  here has an entirely human and erratic name: airesis, “choice”:

  When the souls arrived at the light, they had to go to Lachesis. There a herald

  [ prophetes] arranged them in order, took from the lap of Lachesis a number of lots

  [ klerous—the tablet and piece of chalk that each citizen signed and then put in

  a receptacle for the drawing] and examples of modes of life [ bion paradeigmata],

  mounted a high pulpit, and spoke to them: “Here is the message of Lachesis, the

  maiden daughter of Ananke: ‘Ephemeral souls, this is the beginning of another

  mortal cycle bearing death [ periodou thnetou genous thanatephorou]. Your dae-

  mon will not be assigned to you by lot; you will chose [ airesethe] your daemon.

  The one who has the first life will be the first to choose a form of life to which he

  will then be bound by necessity [ aireistho bion oi synestai ex anankes]. By contrast, virtue is free [ adespoton, without a master, unallotted]; each will possess it to a greater or less degree, depending on whether he values or disdains it. The fault

  [ aitia] lies with the one who makes the choice; the god is innocent.’” When he

  had said this, the herald threw the lots among all of them and each picked up

  [ anairesthai, the same verb that Plato relates to the hypostases in Book VII of

  the Republic] the one that fell next to him, with the exception of Er, who wasn’t

  allowed to choose. And the lot made it clear to the one who picked it up where

  in the order he would get to make his choice. After that, the herald placed on

  the ground before them the examples of modes of life. There were far more of

  them than there were souls present, and they were of all kinds, for the animals’

  THE USE OF BODIES

  1255

  forms of life [ bious] were there, as well as all kinds of human forms of life. There were tyrannies among them, some of which lasted throughout life, while others

  ended halfway through in poverty, exile, and beggary. There were lives of famous

  men, some of whom were famous for the beauty of their appearance, others for

  strength or athletic prowess, others still for their high birth and the virtue or ex-

  cellence of their ancestors. And there were also lives of men who weren’t famous

  for any of these things. And the same for lives of women. But the arrangement

  of the soul was not included in the model because the soul is inevitably altered

  by the different lives it chooses. But all the other things were there, mixed with

  each other and with wealth, poverty, sickness, health, and the states intermediate

  [ mesoun] to them. . . . Then our messenger from the other world reported that

  the herald spoke as follows: “There is a satisfactory life rather than a bad one

  available even for the one who comes last, provided that he chooses it rationally

  and lives it seriously. Therefore, let not the first be careless in his choice nor the

  last discouraged.”

  Er said that when the herald had told them this, the one who came up first

  chose the greatest tyranny. In his folly and greed he chose it without adequate

  examination and didn’t notice that, among other evils, he was fated to eat his

  own children as a part of it. When he examined at leisure the life he had chosen,

  however, he beat his breast and bemoaned his choice. And ignoring the warning

  of the herald, he blamed chance [ tyken], daemons, and everything else for these

  evils but himself. He was one of those who had come down from heaven, having

  lived his previous life in a well-ordered city, where he had participated in virtue

  through habit and without philosophy. Broadly speaking, indeed, most of those

  who were caught out in this way were souls who had come down from heaven

  and who were untrained in suffering as a result. The majority of those who had

  come up from the earth, on the other hand, having suffered themselves and seen

  others suffer, were in no rush to make their choices. Because of this and because

  of the chance of the lottery [ dià ten tou klerou tyken], there was an interchange of goods and evils for most of the souls. However, if someone pursues philosophy

  in a sound manner when he comes to live here on earth and if the lottery doesn’t

  make him one of the last to choose, then given what Er has reported about the

  next world, it looks as though not only will he be happy here but his journey from

  here to there and back again won’t be along the rough underground [ chthonian]

  path but along the smooth heavenly one.

  Er said that the way in which souls chose their lives was a sight [ thean]

  worth seeing, since it was pitiful, ridi
culous, and marvelous [ eleinenkai geloian

  kai thaumasian] to watch. For the most part, their choice depended upon the

  habit [ synethian] of their former life. For example, he said that he saw the soul

  that had once belonged to Orpheus choosing a swan’s life, because he hated the

  female sex because of his death at their hands and so was unwilling to have a

  woman conceive and give birth to him. Er saw the soul of Thamyris choosing

  1256

  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  the life of a nightingale, a swan choosing to change over to a human life, and

  other musical animals did the same thing. The twentieth soul chose the life

  of a lion. This was the soul of Ajax, son of Telamon. He avoided human life

  because he remembered the judgment about the armor. The next soul was that

  of Agamemnon, whose sufferings also had made him hate the human race, so

  he changed to the life of an eagle. Atalanta had been assigned a place near the

  middle, and when she saw great honors being given to a male athlete, she chose

  his life, unable to pass them by. After her, he saw the soul of Epeius, the son of

  Panopeus, taking on the nature of a craftswoman. And very close to last, he saw

  the soul of the ridiculous Theristes clothing itself as a monkey. Now, it chanced

  that the soul of Odysseus got to make its choice last of all, and since memory

  of its former sufferings had relieved its love of honor, it went around for a long

  time, looking for the life of a private individual who did his own work, and with

  difficulty he found one lying off somewhere neglected by the others. He chose

  it gladly and said that he’d have made the same choice even if he’d been first.

  Still other souls changed from animals into human beings, or from one kind of

  animal into another, with unjust people changing into wild animals, and just

  people into tame ones, and all sorts of mixtures occurred.

  After all the souls had chosen their lives, they went forward to Lachesis in

  the same order in which they had made their choices, and she assigned to each

  the daemon it had chosen as guardian of its life and fulfiller of its choice. This

  daemon first led the soul under the hand of Clotho as it turned the revolving

  spindle to confirm the fate [ moiran] that the lottery and its own choice had

  given it. After receiving her touch, he led the soul to the spinning of Atropos,

  to make what had been spun irreversible [ ametastropha]. Then, without turning

  around, they went from there under the throne of Ananke, and, when all of them

  had passed through, they traveled to the plane of Lethe in burning, choking,

  terrible heat, for it was empty of trees and earthly vegetation. And there, beside

  the river of unheeding, whose water no vessel can hold, they camped, for night

  was coming on. All of them had to drink a certain measure of this water, but

  those who weren’t saved by reason drank more than that, and as each of them

  drank, he forgot everything and went to sleep. But around midnight there was

  a clap of thunder and an earthquake, and they were suddenly carried away from

  there, this way and that, up to their births, like shooting stars. Er himself was

  forbidden to drink the water. All the same, he didn’t know how he had come

  back to his body, except that waking up suddenly he saw himself lying on the

  pyre at dawn. (617b–621b)

  9.4. Every reading of the myth of Er must try to define the strategy in which

  it is inscribed, above all by singling out the problem that Plato is seeking to un-

  derstand through it. In his commentary, Proclus formulates it in this way: it is a

  question of “showing the whole of providence, whether of Gods or of daemons,

  THE USE OF BODIES

  1257

  insofar as it concerns the soul, its descent into birth [ genesis], its being separated from it, and the multiform modes of its behavior.” Stated more precisely: the

  problem that Plato wants to address through the myth is the fact that, with

  birth, every soul seems to find itself necessarily and irrevocably united to a cer-

  tain form of life ( bios), which it abandons at death. The life ( zoè) of mortals (the soul is the principle of life) is always in a certain bios, in a certain mode of life (we could say that it is “thrown” into it), and yet it does not coincide with this latter,

  nor is it united to it by any substantial connection. The myth explains this facti-

  cal union—which includes a non-coincidence and a gap and, at the same time, a

  necessary bond—by means of the idea of a “choice”: each soul, on entering into

  birth, chooses its bios and then forgets having done so. From this moment on,

  it finds itself united to the form of life that it has chosen by a necessary bond ( oi

  synesthai ex anankes). For this reason Lachesis can say that “the fault lies with the one who makes the choice; the god is innocent.”

  That is to say, the myth seems to explain the irreparable union of each soul

  with a certain form of life in terms that are moral and, in some way, even jurid-

  ical: there has been a “choice,” and there is therefore a responsibility and a fault

  ( aitia). To the physics of the first part of the account, which explains necessity in terms of a cosmic machine, there corresponds an a posteriori necessity, which

  results from an ethical choice (for this reason Proclus speaks of a “necessity of

  result”; Proclus 2, p. 234).

  9.5. Karl Reinhardt has shown that in Plato, mythos and logos, explanation through story and dialectical rigor, are not contradictory but are mutually integrated (Reinhardt, passim). This means that, in our case as well, the myth is

  a complex figure, which seeks to explain something that logos by itself cannot

  clarify and that therefore demands in its turn an uncommon hermeneutical ca-

  pacity. The myth of Er thus seems to suggest that the factical union of soul and

  form of life must be explained as a choice, which therefore introduces into the

  harmonious necessity of the cosmos something like a moral fault (Porphyry,

  albeit with great reserve, speaks here of something like a “free will,” to eph’ emin, that which is in our power; Porphyry, On Free Will, qtd. in Proclus 2, p. 353). But is it really so? Do the souls really choose their life freely from among the “examples” ( paradeigmata) that the daughter of necessity, Lachesis (the name simply

  means: “the one who distributes lots”), puts before them?

  First of all we will do well not to let it escape us that the image of cosmic

  necessity, which takes up the first part of Er’s report, not only is not as serene

  and harmonic as the commentators profess but includes decidedly sinister traits.

  1258

  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  Plato certainly could not have been ignorant of the fact that the Moirai are in-

  scribed in the lineage of Night, before whom even Zeus shows terror (in Homer,

  the Moira is defined as “destructive” and “difficult to bear”). The threads that the

  Moirai spin out are the days of our life, which Atropos (the name means “she

  who cannot be dissuaded,” “the inexorable”) suddenly cuts. The Sirens are crea-

  tures who are just as sinister, true and proper goddesses of death (Kerényi, p. 58),

  birds with the strongest of claws. In the Odyssey, they dwell on an island full of putrefied bones and desiccated human skins and enchant sailors with their song

  to make shipwreck there. This is so much the case that
to avoid having them cast

  a gloomy shadow over the cosmic machine, Proclus suggests, obviously without

  the slightest foundation, that Plato actually meant to refer to the Muses.

  But even the singular machine of adamant and other metals chained to the

  heavens has nothing reassuring about it. If Proclus feels the need to explain that

  adamant is the symbol of inalterability (Proclus 2, p. 159), this is because he

  knew perfectly well that in Hesiod, adamant is linked to the third age of the

  world, that of bronze, a terrible and violent one after the happy age of gold and

  the less happy age of silver: human beings had arms and houses of bronze then,

  but their heart, said Hesiod, was adamant. Everything leads one to think that

  by inserting these and other grim traits (like the “choking, terrible heat” and the

  desert of Lethe, absolutely barren of every form of life) into the vision of Er, Plato

  intended to suggest that it was precisely not an image of justice and harmony.

  9.6. Let us now look to the souls who, obeying Lachesis’s proclamation,

  choose their forms of life. Just as the machine of necessity was not, in reality,

  either just or harmonious, in the same way the souls’ choice is not properly a free

  choice. First of all, the order in which the souls must make their choice depends

  on the way—it is not clear if it is by chance or decided by Lachesis—in which

  the lots are cast. All the souls pick up the lot that has fallen near them and, ac-

  cording to the order that has befallen them, choose the paradigm of life that the

  herald has placed on the ground in front of them. If Er defines the spectacle of

  this choice as “pitiful” and “ridiculous,” that is because the souls, as the examples

  of Orpheus, Thamyris, Ajax son of Telamon, Agamemnon, Atalanta, Ulysses,

  and Theristes eloquently show, do not choose freely but “according to the habit

  [ synetheia, the mode of living] of their former life.” For this reason, Porphyry

  writes that Plato in this way risks “doing away with free will and, more generally,

  what we call autonomy of choice, if it is true that the souls arrive at their choice

  in consequence of their prior lives according to preceding cycles and with a

  character already formed according to what they have loved and hated” (ibid.,