Prospectus

We had previously identified two key theological markers that play a critical role in the governmental apparatus: economy and glory.

Economy as a heretofore unacknowledged essence of the Trinity and the major theological disputes of the early church, and glory as that upon which God depends for his sustenance.

As politics is downstream from theology, we see that the essence of sovereignty as economy is its efficacy, its ability to render effective its goals. Being which was once independent of its actions is now in some way predicated upon its actions through this paradigm of effectiveness.

Yet in order for God to maintain transcedence (and by extension the sovereign), he must not be bound up in immanent activity which is why angels and ministers respectively are needed to actively administrate and carry out the activity of government. This providential apparatus is also the foundation of the modern State and its bureaucratic extensions.

Aside from this dimension of operativity also lies the dimension of glory which is not merely an indicator or external signifier of power but is itself a performative generator and instantiator of power. This can be seen through the ritualisms of power in Rome as well as how they are appropriated through Christian liturgy, doxology, and sacramentology to fulfill a demand to glorify God, to enhance his power.

Glory itself is the deactivation of all activity, and it is the only proper "action" of angels and humans when the end times come and the administration of economy is complete. This enshrines inoperativity as the root of both the divine and human essence.

It is inoperativity that moves us beyond bios and zoe to a new thinking where we are no longer subject to the violent force of law.

What remains is for us to better understand is what is this inoperativity proposed here and what makes it distinct from being inert or inactive? That is the objective of II.5.

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Homo Sacer II.5 - Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty

Liturgy as we use it today is a relatively modern term used to designate activities that for most of church history were referred to as officium. As II.4 uncovered that the liturgy can only be understood in its effectiveness, now must we understand this transformation which renders being and action indistinct through the vehicle of the officium.

Leitourgia originated in Greek as the "public work" which obligated citizens to support public services either through supplying triremes or chariots, or funding the city's delegates to the Olympics. Romans referred to this as munera.

The translators of the Septuagint chose to translate the Hebrew seret into the Greek as leitourgia, thus Aaron's priestly functions were deliberately construed as public and communal in its intercessory nature. The New Testament does little to modify this term but it does emphasize that Christ's sacrifice is a liturgical act of his messianic priesthood. While the Levitical tradition repeated these sacrifices yearly, Christ's sacrifice was once for all time.

The earliest church has no formal juridical structure, that is until Clement whose Letter to the Corinthians inaugurates a legal tradition of presbyters and bishopers presiding over individual churchs and performing the liturgy. This is to introduce unity where factionalism had introduced civil war (stasis).

Apostolic succession emerges with this new legal, bureaucratic hierarchy implemented in the church, where the elders of each church would reactualize Christ's sacrifice through their liturgical work. The liturgy thus identifies the oikonomia of salvific work with the political metaphor of salvation.

It also introduces a polarity into the concept of liturgy. For in the New Testament (Hebrews specifically), Christ is the agent of liturgy, but the patristics described the elders as the performers of the liturgy. Is it God or man who truly enacts the liturgy? This is the fundamental question of Donatism which would be fully formulated by Aquinas' innovation of a fifth cause to solve this question: the instrumental cause.

The instrumental cause is an intermediate agent that renders themselves available for a prime agent to enact their work. The chisel is an intermediate cause of the sculpture, and the priest is the intermediate cause of the Eucharist. It is a subtle solution, but it introduces a decoupling from a human subject and an action. A gap that would continue to grow.

But first we must understand the nature of mystery, a concept explored at great length by Odo Casel. He argues Christian mystery is tied to its pagan antecedents which consisted of a set of gestures and actions to effect divine action. The question for Casel is how Christianity has reimplemented this ritualism following the death of classical Greece.

He defines this mystery as cultic action and argues that it is participation in cultic activities (i.e. the liturgy) that is more essential for church membership than acceptance of the creeds. For Casel, the divine presence and mystery are grounded in one another as one brings the other about. The divine presence makes the Eucharist the body and blood of Christ, but the priest performs the mystery to make this effect happen.

This introduces a nunaced sense of effect where the Eucharist is not a signifier of grace but is its actualization. Being and action once again rendered indeterminate. Walter Diezinger has gone so far as to claim it as the fundamental concept of liturgy.

Where does effect in this sense come from? This ambiguity of something's being dependent upon act stems even from effectus, the term Cicero and Varro employ. Cicero introduces it as a third concept beyond Aristotle's distinction of energeia and dynamis. While potentiality (energeia) can often actualize itself through some internal force, such as a germinating seed, the effectus depends on an external agent. Quintilian would take up Cicero's categorization which Ambrose would uncritically absorb into Christian thought. This is quite foreign to classical Aristotelianism, and effect and effectiveness become the most decisive categories.

Pelagius in this sense was an orthodox Aristotelian who was defeated by this new paradigm of effect and operativity spearheaded by Ambrose's student, Augustine.

The ontology of effectiveness would continue to be developed in medieval thought by Berengar of Tours, Hugh of St. Victor, culminating in Aquinas as instrumental cause. In this new theory, the sacraments are both a sign of the cause and the cause of that which they are a sign of. Purely circular. Operativity is in this way more decisive than the work itself.

The instrumental cause ends up creating a pradox where the cause is also an effect and the effect is also a cause which violates the very foundation of Aristotle's distinction of cause and effect to begin with. Furthermore, the liturgy is now indifferent to the human subject, as every priest is merely an instrument to God.

This paradigm of operativity can thus be reflected back into the internal activity of the Trinity inheriting the paradox of Neoplatonic hypostasis which had been absorbed into Christian ontology. As the One becomes more transcendent (being) it needs the hypostasis by which can also effect immanent change (action).

Which leads us back to the question of officium, the true name of effective practice (not liturgy).

Cicero introduced this term in De offiis derived from the Stoic concept of kathekon. Officium is not an absolute duty or ethic but rather what one ought to do in certain circumstances given their social standing. If a navigator crashes the ship, there is greater blame if the ship is full of cargo than if it is empty, even if in some sense he makes the same mistake.

While it is questionable whether kathekon should be translated as officium, this was the term that came to be accepted and was in the early modern period itself translated into the vernacular word for "duty". However, duty implies an absolute moral obligation that simply is not present in Cicero's original term.

For Cicero, officium is always concerned with both the highest good and the precepts that give form to the "use of life", that is what is proper to humans as rational creatures. It is attempt to render life governable through reason.

This is a third layer between morality and law but not without its own ambiguities. How does it interface with virtue? Cicero himself seems confused on the subject as at times he tries to distinguish officia from virtue but then at other times lists it interchangeably with virtue.

Incidentally, this actually subordinates virtue to officium because it is officium which has the power to render effective virtue.

Ambrose recapitulates this system point-by-point, merely substituting Christian and biblical examples for the pagan examples Cicero had provided. Ambrose will then ground the priestly function on its officium, thus pushing being and action into indistinction.

Varro offers his own spin on this innovation by noting three Latin terms for human action agere, facere, and gerere. While the former two are tied to Aristotle's praxis and poiesis, gerere is a true Roman innovation which denotes the carrying out of office, more specifically the proper act of imperator.

This leads to a final consideration on this subject. One could argue that across Indo-European languages the imperative mood is often a stripped-down root of the verb. In a sense it is fundamental to language in that it strips away other form.

The one who executes an act is the one subject to the command which confronts the listener with a having-to-be, the foundation of duty in modern ethics.

So we have two ontologies of action and being.

If we look at Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals we find a curious absence of "duty" as a subject of analysis though the term is employed frequently. His mentor Schopenhauer had already argued that duty was a modern imperative derived from the theological notion of blessing and punishment.

If we return once again to Aristotle, it is habit (hexis) that actualizes the potential. The question is how we can govern or control habit so that the potential can be realized.

For Agamben and his reading of Aristotle, it is critical that a thing's potential rests in its ability to not be actualized. It must be free to either come to fruition or opt not to. In a sense it must have potential-to-not (adynamia), or inoperativity.

Though Aristotle consistently asserts the primacy of the work (ergon) over the act, he has produced an aporia which Western philosophy and theology has tried to solve: how to govern the passage from potential to actual.

By the time we get to Aquinas, he defines habit as a specifically human form of potential, one that is essentially tied to the action that it produces. This again introduces a circularity between being and action and even accidentally elevates perfectability to the status of what is good or not.

In Ia IIae, question 81, article 2 Aquinas provides a strikingly modern articulation of the necessity of virtue, rendering it a duty.

Another threshold of indistinction between virtue and officium is religio. Aquinas attaches this and devotion to the specific virtues tied to the individual's relationship with the divine.

While this is an aside for Aquinas, Suarez would thematize this concept as the centerpiece of a treatise in his attempt to transplant Thomism into a legal context. Debitum is the formal object of religion for Suarez who emphasized the debt that every creature owes God as creation.

Through being created, creatures thus always are a having-to-be.

Suarez introduces two themes which Kant would adopt quite literally into his own framework. First, this notion of the bond between human and God being legal is formulated in the same terms as Kant frames the individual's relationship with the moral law. Second, Suarez introduces an infinite debt that is fundamentally unpayable much like Kant's infinite task of duty and ethics.

After Suarez though, it was Pufendorf who first fundamentally detached virtue from ethics, arguing that duty is more properly the foundation of ethics, owing in part to the localized nature virtue played to Greek democracy and in part to Spinoza's atheistic abuse of virtue.

For Pufendorf, God gives force to duty through his transcendence and providence.

But the paradigm of duty reaches its extreme in Kant who identifies duty with virtue. He reduces action to command, derived from the theological heritage of officium but without God to ground it.

While in Christianity, Christ guaranteed the effectiveness of liturgical officium, in Kant it is the absolute law that acts as this guarantor.

The subject can only stand with reverence (or respect, Achtung) before the law. They are also subject to self-constraint by which the will operates as both subject and object of the law, by feeling its force and executing its norm. It follows a modal contradiction of "to be able to do what one must". The categorical imperative is predicated on this collapsed notion of will without any room to be inoperative.

The only emotional content Kant can attach to duty is the humiliation one feels in not living up to one's duty. It is from such pure negativity that Kant can justify the submission to duty as freely willed. Yet, both respect and duty are nothing other than a subjection to the command of law, regardless of what that law is.

Heidegger argues that the separation of being and having-to-be is completed in Kant and so we see this truly the case with the completion of the ontology of operativity as that of command. This is Kant's true Copernician Revolution.

Law, religion, and the oath are structurally imperative, enacting what they command. Kelsen even articulates the irreducibility of these two competing ontologies of command and being, but no attempts can successfully erase violence and pleasure from the law.

In closing, this ontology of command parallels what Ernst Benz called the metaphysics of the will. Finding its root in Neoplatonism and the hypostasis of the One into the Trinity, there is always already a sense of having-to-be and putting-to-work which leaves the Trinity in ceaseless activity.

The new philosophy must think beyond operativity and command to liberate ethics from the concepts of duty and will.

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In Review

This is the strongest of Homo Sacer's entries. Whether or not it is because it was the latest published chronologically and thus the most mature, it does come the closest to cogency in advancing something new for the world of philosophy.

Many riddles are solved by this volume, if one begins from its conclusion.

In the final chapter, Agamben signals what his argument is actually about, albeit very indirectly.

Duty is the hidden antagonist that Agemben seeks to overcome, what previously was articulated as mandatory submission to the force of law is now given the name of duty. This is the cipher that helps us understand Agamben's vantage point.

In fact, I would argue that Agamben's entire Homo Sacer project finds its originary structure (to borrow one of Agamben's idiosyncratic terms) in this counterstance to duty, the theoretical prod of National Socialist ideology.

This is already apparent in the course of II.5 as the theoretical framework Agamben attempts to trace out seems eerily familiar to Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.

In fact, it is this very book that Agamben cites in the coda to the climax of his argument, that the ethical paradigm of the West arrives at this extreme form of duty which is essentially fungible and serviceable to any institution of force and power that demands submission. It is the plea "I was just following orders" that was echoed at the Nuremburg Trials. It was also the defense of Adolf Eichmann, as Hannah Arendt recounts, though in the nuanced sense that Eichmann seemed to genuinely feel that his actions were consistent with Kant's categorical imperative. He was merely submitting himself to the duty of such precepts as the demands of his office.

Agamben takes issue with Arendt's response to this claim, as she merely dismisses Eichmann as being cynical or misapplying what Kant actually meant.

He would contend that what Kant did mean by the categorical imperative is in fact fully applicable to the actions of the National Socialist regime. This is the inherent danger of such a notion as duty.

If you work backward through his argument, this also illuminates the significance of instrumental cause and officium.

If a priest's actions are inconsequential for the effecting of the sacrament, and if the priest merely operates in their office or role so that the higher, divine agent may carry out the desired end goal, this same model can be transposed to bureaucracy or any other hierarchical structure where the individual merely submits themselves to the deeds of the higher authority. Even if their hands of the instrument carry out the work, they are merely an intermediate cause for that higher authority and can in some sense deny full responsibility for their actions. That is when you have this layer of abstraction in place which introduces a paradoxical slippage between cause and effect.

Hence this notion of office which is distinct from virtue is dangerous, because we can see its logical culmination in Adolf Eichmann who can plead off any atrocity on the basis of Kantianism.

If law can be understood as this universally malleable play thing which can compel obedience to any act, this would also elucidate Agamben's pre-eminent concern with the relation between law and bare life in its negative sense, and why he has been so interested in postulating the deactivation of law as a new objective for Western philosophy, thinking beyond the operativity of the law.

Inoperativity, previously flittering around in the penumbra, now enters center stage as the fulcrum for this new philosophy. Drawing together Agamben's descriptions of this concept, it does not mean an incapability but a willed refusal to act out what is demanded. Hence why Bartleby is the ethical ideal Agamben references on several occasion. He is the moral agent who could but simply "prefers not to". Bartleby manifests adynamia and the potential-not-to.

If Agamben's foundational consideration is to refute the National Socialist plea "I had no choice but to follow order", it would explain why he is so ardently focused on this notion of inoperativity which reintroduces the possibility of resisting force at the individual level.

Homo Sacer can thus at its most elemental level be read as a twelve hundred page apology for civil disobedience.

This is the necessary conclusion Agamben is seeking to work backwards from. That we must abandon the ethics of duty and the force of law. It explains the presupposed conclusions Agamben forces every text and argument toward, even if it entails scurrilous scholarly manoeuvres. One that may become even more apparent to the reader who proceeds on to Homo Sacer III: The Remnants of Auschwitz from here.

Three considerations I would like to comment upon in light of this.

First, it is important that Agamben introduces a key formulation of ethics as the question of governing or controlling the passage from the actual human subject as they are toward a potential ideal of the good. Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Kant and others are very much concerned with reducing the contingency of this gap to render the ethical good more immediate and present and automatic to the given human subject. And this is heavily dependent upon the ontology of potential versus actual which can often be overlooked in ethical discussions, and Agamben is more than right to make this the foundation of his investigation.

What is sorely missing from Agamben's framework however is a robust anthropology. This may be due to his inheritance of Foucauldian posthumanism, but whatever the cause may be, there is no portrait of the human subject beyond the blank slate for systemic forces.

If Agamben is so critically centered upon the primacy of Bartleby's willed inoperativity, it would behoove his analysis to seek out the root of what makes a Bartleby emerge.

Furthermore, this sense that the individual could independently veto any force whatsoever merely through inoperativity seems at best underdeveloped and at worst naive. Agamben seems to presume innocence or moral neutrality at the individual level. It only seems to be the external, overarching forces of law and religion and whatnot that seem to corrupt and reduce the human individual to that minimum of bare life.

Despite such frequent engagement with Hobbes or gestures to other figures like Plato or Vico, Agamben never accounts for the counterpoint that civilization is predicated upon the use of force to subjugate individual vices or desires or sins, depending on your framework. Or that even if such force is wrong, the individual can still be compelled to obey, regardless of their ontological commitments. If law is deactivated, a new concept will arise to incarnate the machinations of violence and force.

But most importantly, there is never a mention across Agamben's work of the individual capacity toward wrongdoing as something that could or ought to be regulated.

And this foregone consideration would indicate why Agamben seems drawn to these naive conclusions that the law should be deactivated or that the oath should be made non-binding or that we should abolish the imperative mood in language. The assumption here is that the individual has no disposition toward wrongdoing that is worrisome enough to require a check or balance.

I do not seek to explore this question myself here, but I would say it should be much more acutely accounted for in Agamben's framework than it is. And it leaves a sufficiently large gap in his comprehensive project, that I would consider Homo Sacer an incomplete system.

If there is some value in a governmental capacity to subjugate and regulate wayward, individual wills, this could offer theoretical grounding for violence or force in ways that most theory and late continental philosophy is unwilling to countenance. Many thinkers would say there is this value. Even Freud made this the axiom of civilizatin in Civilization and Its Discontents.

Second, if it is accurate that Homo Sacer's most decisive, foundational commitment is the rejection of this fungible, totalitarian notion of duty in light of the Holocaust, then I would contend the Homo Sacer project is misconceived in its structure and method. If only because II.5 illustrates the possibility of a higher tier of philosophical work.

There are five main dimensions of this, many of which recapitulate recurring shortcomings we have noted before:

One, the endless catalogue of etymologies leads to a multiplication of terms and concepts that does more to obscure and how these words relate and cloud the goal of the core argumentation than they do to help support it.

Let us compare II.4 and II.5 to illustrate this point. II.4 begins with an investigation of the "mystery of economy"/"economy of mystery" formula through oikonomia, though without any consideration of "mystery". It then proceeds into Neoplatonic dynamis and theological controversies before elaborating a double paradigm of kingdom versus government which is then developed into an analysis of providence and its antecedents in Stoic fate and destiny. From there, II.4 moves to the etymology of hierarchy as a common attribute of angelology and bureaucracy, before moving into ministerium which lands in an archeology of the acclamation that grows into a study of glory and glorification across political and religious sphere, through its Greek etymology.

II.5 in a sense begins, without much reference to the trajectory of II.4, by considering the etymology of liturgy (leitourgia) which was merely alluded to before as part of Christian worship (i.e. acclamation, the glorification factories). While liturgy initially points to officium as the next term for genealogical analysis, the next chapter pivots into mystery as analyzed by Otto Casel, without any mention of its key role within the "decisive" formula of the "economy of mystery" from II.4. In fact, mystery is not even analyzed outside of Casel's own definition, even if it is reintroduced near the conclusion as suddenly the link that ties office to Trinitarian economy. But before that, II.5 proceeds from mystery to effectus to hexis to officium to religio to "duty", mentioning a number of technical terms along the way that are skipped over, such as debitum or ergon.

The layout is confused, tangential, and burdened with many stops that play an unclear role in the strategy of the investigation. It is like meandering through a hedge maze garden. It may be pleasant for a promenade with tidbits here and there along the way, but a bit circuitous and annoying if you are looking for real exercise, particularly if your guide points at every flower and tells you it may look like a Rosa rubiginosa but it is actually reduced by the threshold of indistinction into a mere plant.

Many of the analyzed terms play no role in the larger argument. Subtracting some of these etymologies can actually make the text flow far better, such as where and how "mystery" is considered which merely interrupts the transition from liturgy to officium, without any reference to its importance to the core originary structure of II.4--the mystery of economy.

Other terms seem to be merely redundant or have unclear overlap with one another. In II.4, oikonomia was the originary structure of the Trinity but now in II.5 it is operativity. Of course it is easy to see the ostensible similarites between the two technical terms, but it is never teased out. Moreover, Agamben often replaces terms with one another while at other interludes distinguishing them, or saying that have an apparent distinction but are actually indistinct.

By II.5, we have accumulated a wide array of competing technical terms that are abandoned as shiny new ones come into play. Our Agemben lexicon now includes but is not limited to homo sacer, bios, zoe, sovereignty, the state of exception, nomos, law, the sacred, the ban, the camp, force-of-law (the text has an annoying strikethrough through law), commissarial versus sovereign dictatorship, iustitium, auctoritas, potestas, stasis, the multitude, the oath, vindicta, Kingdom and Government, oikonomia, glory, ordo, gubernatio, first and second causes, general and special providence, an-archic, hierarchy, acclamation, ministerium, liturgy, inoperativity, mystery, effect, instrumental cause, officium, duty.

Many of these terms are introduced and either never referred to again or are briefly noted without any acknowledgement of their supposed technical significance. It is strange.

However, we cannot be too quick to judge on this front.

A number of these terms were introduced as evidence or springboards to advance further questions or claims. I do not take issue with that. My concern is the injudicious multiplication of concepts and categories that are then used in awkwardly overlapping ways without any systematic division. That leads us to the next issue.

Two, Agamben not only proliferates his specialized lexicon but also his "originary" structures.

The term "originary" may itself sound awkward in English, an inept translation of "original", but I would argue there is good grounding for this decision. The Italian term originario is undoubtedly borrowed from Heidegger's ursprünglich, a neologism to characterize ontological priority, since "original" (originale in Italian and original in German) has chronological connotations.

"Originary" is an acceptable terminological choice here however it is the liberal use of this designation across the Homo Sacer corpus. We are told at various times that homo sacer, the state of exception, the civil war (stasis), the oath, oikonomia, glory, and inoperativity are the "originary structures" of Western ontology, political sovereignty, or language at various junctures.

This of course is not to say that there must be some single monistic force at the root of it all, but Agamben himself seems to volunteer these terms at various stages as playing that very "beginning of it all" role. When he offers a new "beginning of it all" term, there seems to be an amnesiac silence over the previously purported "originary structure". It would be more credible if Agamben established a relational mapping to indicate that while X may have seemed to be a true originary structure in II.3, it in fact succeeds Y which we found out about in II.4. This he does not do.

This is a critical oversight in a work of supposedly systematic philosophy and stems from the larger tendency toward this fragmented, episodic structure of Homo Sacer. As I have mentioned in earlier reflections, there is very little continuity across the volumes. The most continuity we see is between II.4 and II.5 but even then it seems like II.4 is a rough draft of the ideas that emerge in II.5. It does not feel like there is a broader architectural plan here and that we are following a haphazard course of etymological outings rather than a coordinated campaign.

It is like Kant's criticism of Aristotle, that he merely gropes about for ideas, taking up his categories as he happened to come across them and arraying them in a list.

I noted last time that if you follow the progression of Homo Sacer's volumes, it seems like Agamben is trying to articulate the same core ideas but starting from scratch each time with new technical terms and material. Each volume is a self-enclosed cycle or iteration as he works toward a more final capitulation of his thesis, the one I have surmised above.

Consequently, this is why I view the Homo Sacer as ill-conceived in its structure, if it is to be taken as anything beyond speculative philosophy. It feels like we are accompanying Agamben on a journey through his research notes, which is why he packs so much extra paraphernalia and asides as he goes, lengthening the book with what are admittedly interesting details but that lack any strategic contribution to the larger project.

It honestly would be best and far more palatable if it were published as a Nachlass (if Agamben had the cheek to fake his death) rather than a seemingly complete work of philosophy. Or if it were split into a hundred or so journal articles that were collected together in a more consciously episodic style, with appended speculative essays to tie those ideas together.

Three, the dance of method. I will not reiterate myself yet again on this point as the previous sections exemplified this shortcoming rather overtly, but we see the same problem in II.5, though thankfully less pronounced. On one hand, Agamben refers to his studies interchangeably as archeologies and genealogies, which is itself a methodological conflation, but at the same time he openly and casually violates the precepts of those Foucauldian methods by interjecting his own normative, speculative claims in a very rushed, nearly incoherent attempt to make a moral lesson out of the investigation.

It betrays a lack of scholarly discipline when he could very easily organize his word studies into independent, discrete essays or articles which he then supplements with his own normative evaluations that live independently of the analysis itself. While one could easily argue that normative assertions are always already present in the questions of scholarship, it still would be better if Agamben followed through on the methodolgy he professes to adopt. It would also make his case far more persuasive if he exercised restraint and put in the discipline to build his case rather than jump from a decently-laid foundation to then attempting to install a chimney before the walls go in.

Four, along the lines of method is the consistent and patronizing use of amphiboly and paralipsis. The swapping of concepts and names as well as the frequent use of insinuation to manipulate the reader does not win me (and hopefully others) to Agamben's claims. If is done unintentionally, it indicates confusion and a failure to adequately grasp the concepts and their relationships. If intentionally, it feels sneaky, duplicitous, and characteristic of the ambiguity that analytics decry in continental philosophy. This set of sophistic tactics is not persuasive to somebody taking these claims beyond face value.

Most optimistically, I would venture that this is the result of recourse from poor book planning as deadlines approach rather than an strategy of dishonesty adopted from the outset to advance his points. Nevertheless, it does leave many logical gaps, many of which are never filled or visited again.

Five, despite the immense and laudable breadth of Homo Sacer it lacks systematic depth.

Agamben has two argumentative moves: (1) reduce to a dualism which often leads to (2) argue the distinction of the dualism is not ultimately viable and the dualism is actually indistinct and inchoate.

Unfortunately this is done so frequently and ad nauseam that it becomes rather rote and uninteresting. Zoe and bios, sovereignty and law, potestas and auctoritas, law and religion, being and action, reign but not govern, transcendence and immanence, oikonomia and inoperativity, power and glory, virtue and officium, etc.

Of course much of philosophy is built on the art of the dualism, but, betraying his structuralist tendencies, Agamben tends to employ rather unrelenting force to violently shoehorn just about any phenomena into his dualistic schemata, shaving off the unique difference of empirical phenomena to meet his theoretical framework. Ironically this enforces a totalitarian mold that requires silent conformity of the subject matter. In a way his epistemological legerdemain enacts the very thing he decries in political and ethical frameworks of the West.

And this is without consideration of whether his readings of his sources are accurate, as I have bracketed most of those questions out of interest of time.

Again my complaint here is also not that he has so many dualisms (though perhaps they could use a trip to Ockham's razor) but that the "infinite task" of Homo Sacer seems to be the construction, elaboration, then deconstruction of these dualisms and thresholds of distinction. In each exercise, Agamben gestures towards speculative next steps in the project such as the deactivation of law, the abolition of the imperative, and the ontology of inoperativity but rather than directly addressing or exploring these seemingly fanciful goals he proceeds on to yet another topic to begin constructing a new etymology or dualism.

To the reader, it appears like philosophical procrastination for a philologist who enjoys word studies and making grand philsophical claims but would rather not complete the work of defending these grand philosophical claims on philosophical grounds.

It is for these reasons I believe Homo Sacer to be fragmentary, meandering, and confused even if it is very philosophically invigorating to engage with.

The third and final observation for today is the positive contribution of this volume. The allusions to inoperativity in previous volumes now make their grand debut.

This is undoubtedly Agamben's most original contribution to philosophy.

Agamben argues that inoperativity is the core of God and humanity as its adynamis provides in a more plain English sense the freedom and the drive to pursue self-identified ends rather than feeling orchestrated by an external force of law.

While Agamben gives too much primacy to the the ability to not actualize, he is on to something here.

The new focus on operativity and effect gives a new energy to ontology that can certainly lay the groundwork for new philosophy.

Intellectuals through Western history have often been so focused on tracing antecedents amongst each other, they never quite get to the true empirical material they are supposed to provide explanatory models for, not least of all the ethical project of governing the human subject's character or action in its passage from an actual state to a desirable potential state. Even most empiricists are guilty of this, hence the collapse of Enlightenment empiricism as the holistic framework became fragmented into different, almost incompatible scientific disciplines.

The distinction as Agamben outlines it in II.4 is that while scientific inquiry is rules based from first principles, economic administration is activity based toward certain ends. It is in a sense achieving what the technical science purport to understand, how one advances the means to an end. Again this is not the modern science of economics which also invariably falls into traps of deriving everything from first causes (e.g. human as rational agent), but the art of operativity which can produce effects and produce them reliably.

It works from consideration of the effects and the results in a ruthlessly pragmatic manner and is arguably the most rigorously empirical method out there. The "schoolmen" across the ages have been justifiably ridiculed for their ceaseless, ponderous efforts to explain things from first causes, but always seem behind the bill. This pragmatic turn is intended to work from consequents and be much closer to the things as they happen.

While much is unsaid here about the nature of how a philosophical paradigm of operativity or economy would function, it does open a new horizon.

The trick is that it must find axiomatic foundations that differentiate such an inquiry from the popular discourses of productivity culture, which could arguably be said to have the same aims an ethical project of effectiveness.

Such foundations could be the questioning of productivity culture's presumption that what one feels compelled to "accomplish" is automatically the good, or that the means and disciplinary mechanisms by which one compels themselves to make accomplishments, may not be justified. An extension of Agamben's critique of duty in line with Byung Chul Han's conception of psychopolitics as the psychological internalization of the master-slave dialectic in today's knowledge worker.

What again is lacking in Agamben is a systematic anthropology which could inform and shape the ethics of (in)operativity, in what likely would need to be a circular hermeneutic structure.

As well as a very practical acceptance of the necessity of institutions for human civilization to function. The categorical deactivation of human institutions will only engender a reset as they will organically re-emerge yet again.

What would be more fruitful is not the discredit of human institutions as such through philological analysis but rather the construction of a heuristic by which institutions can be evaluated for their value in tending the individual and whole toward the "good" (or some other established normative objective), with careful consideration of how inoperativity could be laced inside such an apparatus.

This would require a more nuanced sense of how individuals, offices, and collective institutions should be related to one another, but unfortunately this investigation has been repeatedly obstructed by students of Foucault and other readers of postmodernity who are constrained to believe that institutions as vehicles of power are "bad" ipso facto. This can lead to rather vulgar political ideological commitments to anarchism, socialism, communism, or some convoluted neologism pretending not to be one of those three.

Such an outlook would also help correct Agamben's misguided presumption that the human being bears no debt as such as a living being, as he briefly ties it to Kantian duty. But this is a denial of quite human realities acknowledged from Socrates to Pascal to social contract theorists to Heidegger and beyond. This in itself like modern providence and economy is rooted in the theological relationship of creator and creature that undergirds Western society in a way that not even the most strident atheist can theoretially circumvent unless they were to exit the Western language-game altogether.

The extreme rejection of obligation and responsibility whether internal or external is absurd, even if it is an increasingly popular sentiment. Unfortunately what Agamben and others do not seem to realize, is that it is the lack of responsibility as bios which ineluctably leads to the reduction to bare life zoe in its negative sense. The deactivation of the command in all forms will yield total impotency in the true sense that one will not be able to at all.

To splice Augustine's "non posse non peccare" with Varro's dictionary, "non possimus ullum rem agere nec facere nec gerere."