Prospectus
We have traversed three of the four divisions of Homo Sacer. Although the fourfold division is never explicitly explained with the work, we can perhaps surmise the intent from what we have covered so far.
Homo Sacer I introduces us to the notion of bare life, the one who can be killed but not sacrificed. It sought to establish the principle of inclusive exclusion, the logic of the exemption which grounds so much of Agamben's method. This reduction to bare life, the foundation of all Western politics finds its logical culmination in the camps.
Homo Sacer II is concerned with the various conceptual instruments and practices that divorced life from law, being from action, enunciation from language, sovereignty from governance, and more. Limit cases create exception that neutralize a distinction into indetermination. The culminating example is a pure duty untethered from a higher good and purely instrumentalized to compel submission to force.
Homo Sacer III visits the fallout of these developments in Auschwitz. The definitive model of Western ontology, politics, and ethics which reduces its subjects to bare life (i.e. the Muselmann). Responsibility, guilt, and dignity are nullified as ethical categories both in regards to the perpetrators and the victims. Such a crisis almost neutralizes our concepts of sayability, of testimony, of witness. This is the apocalyptic nadir of Western ontology.
Homo Sacer IV is organized in two parts as the attempt to coalesce these findings and attempt to think something new. Gestures have been occasioned to this new Western politics, ontology, and ethics, but the work had hardly begun.
We do not see here a definitive tour-de-force to elaborate this new mode of thought, but we see the first strides toward this radical rethinking that Agamben has time and again called for.
Homo Sacer IV.1 - The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life
Rule and life have often been divorced from one another through law, office, and duty. These instruments have separated being from action, rendering individual character null and void in the performance of one's offices.
The goal here is to review monastic literature as an alternative to ecclesiastical thought, for in the monastics we find a necessarily combined form-of-life which blends rule and life together. A paradigm that was developed in oopposition to that of liturgy and church office.
Monastic rules first appeared in late antiquity as an entirely new form of literature not legal, nor historical, nor ecclesiastical, nor hagiographical. Neither are they the ethical exercises that Foucault had analyzed in his later life.
Rather they are concerned with a radical rethinking of life and rule to govern life both individually and collectively.
Peculiarly enough, we this model effectively protrayed in the parody of Rabelais' Gargantua and in the satire of de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom which poke fun at the comprehensive regulation and organization of life according to the rule.
But if we go back, we ironically find the foundation of monastic community (cenobitism) in the idea of flight from the world. The hermit who saw himself as a fugitive from worldly affairs became the prototype of monastic communities, isolated from the world. This was inverted in the Council of Toledo which mandated that one could only become a hermit if they previously went through initiation in a monastic order.
Across Cassian the early rules we see an ardent commitment to construct order above and against chaos, to establish patterns of not merely physically living together but a spiritual cohabitation in the sense of the apostolic church where things are had in common.
It is here that habitus became identified with virtue, a way to conduct or bear oneself, not merely in actions but in very particular things such as the mode of dress (i.e. the monk's habit). It is not without coincidence that the moment of initiation for a neophyte is exchanging their secular clothes for monastic garb. Here we see for the first time clothing charged with moral and spiritual meaning.
Foucault's treatments of modern institutions such as the prisons focus on the novel organization and regulation of time, but we see all the same strategies and mechanisms for the measurement and organization of time in the monastic orders, as an uncreasing articulation of time. Paul had called for praying without ceasing, and the monks rigorously applied this through the recitation of church offices, through lectio, and meditatio whereby one's entire form-of-life could be a ceaseless prayer.
Long before Kant, we already the form of inner sense as time through meditatio that mixes labor with prayer. It is this practice that aligns biological existence with a form of life of prayer. One cannot point to a single act as an implementation of form-of-life, but rather only to the whole life of an individual. These precepts are not legal in a juridical sense but truly vital and invigorating.
Is there a sense in which these monastic rules are juridical? Not entirely.
Roman law is concerned with the person as an abstract legal entity. The monastic rule is concerned with every facet of existence in a way truly beyond the law.
Law is generally compulsory, and the monastic rules have an ambiguous relationship to whether one is willingly subjected to the rule or if there are punitive measures for violation. The life of Pachomius includes an anecdote where Pachomius punishes two brothers for a physical altercation but then repents of such a decision, stating it is wrong to punish a brother as their own heart should convict them.
Medieval and modern commentators too seem uncertain on how obligatory such rules are. The baseline obligations of the Rule of St. Augustine are a commitment to observing obedience, chastity, and humility but this does not translate into an exposition of individual cases or questions of application.
Henry of Ghent would problematize this question in Scholastic thought by formulating the notion of rules in terms of penal law. Peter of Aragon and other later Scholastics would further carry out this transformation of monastic rule into juridical law.
But if we stick with original texts, we can find a cipher if not the answer in the question of the monastic vow. Throughout antiquity, the vow has been theoretically ambiguous and a number of various terms were applied to this phenomenon in Greek and Latin. It does not emerge in the first monastic texts but in the Benedictine Rule of the Master, a contract by which one submits one's life to God.
This is not an obligation of individual acts but the subjection of will and life as a whole. It was only when the ecclesiastical offices asserted their authority over the cenobitic orders, that this began to shift.
Frankly, it is unclear how law can even be spoken of in ancient or medieval contexts, given the anachronism of forensic terminology we moderns apply to it, further complicated by Paul's own problematization of the law in the New Testament.
In all this, one aspect of the rules can be considered juridical: their public nature. They are public insofar as they are common or shared across the political, cenobitic community. Again these are a community of believers who consider themselves fugitives from the age (fuga saeculi).
Philo derived from this concept from Jacob's flight from Laban, a self-imposed exile to reclaim an inheritance, a notion that later applied to the Levitical (i.e. liturgical) cities of refuge. Ambrose appropriated Philo's concept rather heavily and identified this spiritual fugitive as the true minister of the public community.
What is decisive across all these ideas that Agamben has brought us through is that the monastic rule calls into question the very foundations of both laws and ethics. How do life and norm relate?
The form-of-life does not subject or obligate individual acts under a codified law but rather puts into question a way of life that is more than the sum of its parts. Suarez formulates this as a paradoxical type of obligation, an obligation to be obligated. A bond produced in the submission of individual will, engendering a new kind fo will. There is no extrinsic content to this form-of-life, it is merely a habitus, a form-of-life followed in public, communal life. As Wittgeinstein has observed, there can be no private rule. These rules are followed in communal life.
As the Franciscans would put it, life is applied to the norm, rather than the norm to life.
Where does the rule (regula) come from? We find it originally in the grammatical debates of the second century, the rules of analogy and anomaly. Regula is consistently paired with a noun in the genitive, a subjective genitive, which indicates the rule is produced out of something always already existent.
Regula is employed in this sense across the Patristics, but in the Rule of the Four Fathers we find regula vitae transformed into something between a subjective and objective genitive, a genitive which flows both ways, entering a threshold of indistinction.
What if there is a life indistiguishable from the rule?s
Wittgenstein and his successors have attempted to defin constitutive norms which do not regulate particular acts but engender the conditions that organically produce the desired state of character. To borrow a Scholastic formula, one could say norma dat esse rei. The monk's form-of-life forms the rules.
While in the traditional model, general principles are applied to individual cases a la Kant's determinate judgment, this neutralize this unilaterial motion.
And if we peruse the Rule of the Four Fathers we see other distinctions rendered indeterminate. The speaker vs. listener, the reader vs. writer. In the reflexive action of meditatio, these two enter a threshold of distinction. One must read the rule everyday, but by reading it thus performatively render it as an effect. This is how the rule is embodied.
The rule itself becomes a liturgical text in the sense of lectio. The church had established this in the fifth century by establishing a calendar of biblical readings, the lectionary. By aligning the calendar with the Word of God, the act of lectio is the speaking anew the Word of God in a living, divine voice.
The Rule of the Master thus is precisely like the Bible an object of lectio continua. While the priesthood extracted liturgy from life, the monastic has fused them together. Augustine's anti-Donatist stance (which rendered meaningless the moral qualities of the priest) has no place in the monastic order.
Thus monasticism has been the most rigorous attempt to achieve Christ's form-of-life.
The phenomena we often refer to as the religious movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries tried to extend these same practices to the laity, particularly through its emphasis on poverty and penitence.
It is in the Franciscan claim of poverty (usus pauper) that we see the most decisive debate between the church and the monastic over two mutually incongruent models.
But let us return to this formula "form of life". It emerges first in Cicero and Quintilian before being handed down to the Latin Patristics who protray it as part of the logic of example, but one that does not specifically apply general law.
The Franciscans were the first to employ this phrase in monastic literature. What does it mean when "form of life" is paired with the rule? Francis opposes the "what I must do" from a "that I must live", noting that it is in simplicity that the rule of Christ's life may be applied to our own.
The rule is not an explicit teaching but a sequence or following of life. Rule and life are indeterminated into one another. Francis resisted any attempt to apply the rule in a forceful or compulsory way, as it must be led by the Spirit. This was the frame that was taken up by his successors such as Bonaventure and Thomas of Celano.
As one modern commentator has observed, the rule can be evaluated using legal principles, but a form-of-life cannot.
So how does the Franciscan paradigm of rule and life collide with the sphere of law? This occurred in a debate with the papacy over the question of poverty and property.
The Franciscans had denied themselves any property right but did lay claim to right-of-us for simple things that are necessary for survival. Pope Nicholas III had accepted this, but his successor Pope John XXII overturned this decision, arguing that ownership was inseparable from use.
Franciscans of many stripes entered this theoretical debate which threw into question the foundations of notions of property and use. Hugh of Digne argued that the Franciscans were like children, with the Pope as their father. They did not own the Father's property but should not be denied its use. Many other arguments rested on the notion that the church should share in the communion of goods, or that they were acutalizing an Edenic state where property or law did not exist. In such an alternate state, the law must abdicate its predominance (abdicatio iuris).
Ockham argued from Roman jurisprudence, claiming that Roman law created space for use in a state of extreme necessity (i.e. exception), in which one could make use of another's goods. In this view, one can certainly renounce a right to property but it is point of fact impossible to renounce a right to use. Thus, Franciscans live in a state of exception that is both before and outside the law.
This of course is part of a larger ontological clash between priest and monk, between the model of church office and the model of form-of-life. Francis himself was fairly clever in that he did not denounce the Church in any way like the Waldenesians and others did. He did not seek to contest the ecclesiastical offices or authority but merely sought to carve out an alternate space that lived outside that activity. His foresight and reasoning established a separate sphere which deferred the clash of monasticism and church. Usus as poverty enabled them to live outside law.
Hugh of Digne and Bonaventure attempted to clarify the distinction of usus to maintain a theoretical space for the monastic abdication of property, creating an exceptional of right almost on the level of a royal law. Nicholas III confirmed this by distinguishing a right of use (ius utendi) from de facto use (simplex usus facti), notably through legal categories.
This caused a break between the Conventuals and Spirituals who were not clear among themselves the extent of their renunciation and the extent of their claim to use.
But John XXII argued that it simply is not possible to separate use from ownership when it comes to consumable things. If one eats the food, it cannot continue to belong to someone else. He denies a right of use that is separate from the factual use of a thing. He goes on to argue that there simply cannot be an abstracted notion of right of use, because use is tied to the moment an object is utilized. But the reality of that use cannot exist outside this activation, hence there cannot be a right to something not real.
A number of arguments were posed to defend the Franciscan claim to poverty. Michael of Cesena appealed to the Garden of Eden. Francis of Ascoli denied that things in nature can even be subject to rights of use at all, as they belong to no one. Olivi question the reality of ownership altogether, arguing that it was a purely significatory abstraction existing in the level of signs and mind, and not in nature.
Yet these Franciscans arguments were a double-edged sword for by advocating their case with respect to its lawfulness, they conceded that form-of-life is indeed subordinate to law. Francis had astutely avoided this rhetorical stance, but his successors missed this manipulation and were forced into a defensive strategy whereby they became embroiled in legal argumentation and distinction, whose nuances eventually overwhelmed them.
They never questioned the validity of law or its foundations, instead hoping that they could the instruments of law to secure its own deactivation. They had missed what Paul had already advocated in 1 Corinthians 7, the deactivation of the law.
Their retreat led to an internal debate on a finer distinction between an actus intrinsecus and actus extrinsecus on the notion of property and use, but they had already surrendered the foundation.
It is the abdicatio iuris that is a path to life outside of law, to follow in Christ's form-of-life without the law to haunt us. It is this eschatology which is not concerned with the physical presence fo Christ but rather the diffusion of his form-of-life as rule for us all. It is on this basis that Western ethics and politics, most notably the Western ontology of operativity, can be overturned.
In Review
Earlier entries have been critical of Agamben's habit in the first three divisions to point toward radical solutions but without a concomitant exploration of what such solutions would entail. While II.4 and II.5 offer an apex in the originality and breadth of Homo Sacer, IV.1 and IV.2 do offer us the most in pursuit of a positive philosophy.
I would like to consider this volume from four angles: genealogy, theology, church history, and operative ethics.
First, let us recapitulate the genealogical findings we are presented with here. At a superficial level, it is easy to assume that the medieval Catholic church was more unitary than it was, and that bishops, monastic, and later university professors primarily scabbled amongst themselves rather than in between their respective camps.
What Agamben identifies as the predominant paradigm is that of the church offices which governed most of Christendom through priestly offices, primarily a paradigm of ethics built on the separation of office from character and an abstracted notion of duty that is liable to offer itself up as an instrument to any power that may be.
In seeking an alternative possibility, Agamben turns to what one could genealogically consider a discontinuity or exception within this umbrella of church governance: the monastic orders. While in its attempt to stifle Donatism, the Church would divorce moral character from competence to perform the sacraments, the monastics saw no such distinction by merging law and life into a form-of-life, an alternative conception in which submitting life to a higher good is irreducible to a set of explicit rules or acts.
This was at least implicitly a successful ethical model internally until it buckled until the external pressures of ecclesiastical authorities who wished to regulate the monastic orders more closely and underneath their own paradigm.
There is more to be said on the new ethics this presents, but this is a curious solution to be selected genealogically speaking.
On the surface, it may make sense to trace a solution from the most recent "rupture" in Christian thought by looking at the monastic literature, rich and fascinating as it is as a genuinely atypical genre. The split between priest and monk is a nice, tidy tale.
But I would argue it does live in relative contradiction to the earlier genealogies we have been provided over the course of Homo Sacer.
We should not forget that in the second chapter of II.5, Agamben has already constructed a genealogical constellation which roots the ontology of operativity, the instrumental cause, and this array of conceptual villains in the Neoplatonic hypostasis which invaded Christianity through Augustine's Trinitarian theology.
There, Agamben had entreated us to rethink ontology through modal categories rather than this forced separation of being and action, itself a result of a theistic commitment to a God with a will distinct from a nature.
Perhaps this is due to the chronological progression of his thought, but it is not clear why adopting monastic thought sufficiently escapes the entrapments of the Christian paradigm which seem to have been rather completely dismissed, polluted as they are by this dichotomy of transcendence versus immanence.
This leads into a larger genealogical question: what distinguishes the monastic form-of-life from virtue ethics? Why is it a better solution?
If Agamben is concerned about an ethics that (1) ensures a strict conjoinment of being and action with (2) a public commitment to (3) ongoing practices comprehensive to all life that (4) are not reducible to a set of explicit rules, these concerns all seem to be addressed in virtue ethics.
The aretaic turn of moral philosophy whether one credits it to Anscombe or Macintyre overtly commits to these criteria in response to the Kantian deontological ethics that Agamben himself seems to distance himself from.
And while its community of adherents tends to lean Roman Catholic, there is nothing strictly Christian about virtue ethics in the same way as Western monasticism, and the theological snares and ontological commitments that Agamben bemoans.
This seems even more fitting a genealogical branch to trace the rupture back to as he can work from an alternative Aristotelianism unpolluted by Neoplatonic theology. And, as we shall see more fully in IV.2, this would help service his deeper desire of displacing God entirely from the picture.
It is not clear what this alternative picture of monastic rule would hold that is not provided in a less theologically-baggaged aretic turn. Perhaps it is the monastic rigor of the regulation and ordering of time as a more comprehensive and invasive program of individual management.
While Agamben does discuss the monastic technologies of time, it is strange that he does not regard such exhaustively regulatory procedures and protocols with suspicion as he and Foucault do for modern institutions who as he notes borrow from the monastics. He seems to view it neutrally if not positively since meditatio he treates as a sublime instrument of creating a form-of-life.
One could even argue the Stoic model is safer in this regard of avoiding force-of-law.
Why Agamben commits himself most specifically to the monastic strategy as his preferred alternative, at least on genealogical grounds, is an open question.
The only speculation that could be offered is that this was the path begun by Foucault at the end of his studies. Although funnily enough, while Agamben notes very briefly that Foucault had written on the early hermits, he was more concerned with their ethical rules.
However, if one is acquainted with Foucault's later thought they would know that he offers far more to say on the monastic tradition than Agamben credits him for here. History of Seuxality: Volume Four and Hermeneuetics of the Subject both deeply delve into Cassian, monastic time management, and subjection of will to a spiritual leader in far more detail and with far more rigor than even Agamben attempts in a volume ostensibly dedicated to this specific task of understanding "form-of-life". This is perhaps due to publication availability, but is still fairly surprising, given Agamben repeats some of Foucault's claims here as his own insights.
Theologically, it is not clear if Agamben knows what he is getting himself into, especially given his planned expulsion of God from the philosophical picture altogether that we will see next.
This has not been discussed as much in earlier entries, but Agamben has an odd habit of reinventing Christian doctrine at various intervals throughout the Homo Sacer project.
It would not be a far theoretical leap to tie the concepts of homo sacer or Muselmann to the suffering and sacrifice of Christ. To tie the efficacious act of language to the Word of God. The state of exception as God's fundamental authority over the created order. Civil war and the eschatological backdrop of earthly, temporal power.
We see here a reinvention of Christianity that even a Western theology novice would notice rather quickly. The bilateral dependence of being and action could easily be correlated with the elementary distinction of faith and works. (Complications abound here but a case could be made.)
Agamben's anxiety about an evil person fulfilling their office should at least theologically be rendered nugatory through the necessity of good works as an outpouring of faith.
Of course this simply does not come to pass for everyone who claims to profess Christianity, even among priests. Which is why there is a surrender of ultimate justice enacted on Judgment Day, with a heightened scrutiny on church teachers and leaders.
Agamben's criticism of the anti-Donatist position as well as many of his other critiques of Western Chalcedonian Christianity is predicated upon the non-existence or inaction of God. (For those hung up on applying the terms existence or being to God, the idea that God is fundamentally passive or not here or there at all.)
Orthodox Christianity recognizes the fallenness of clergy but ascribes ultimate vengeance, justice, and accountability to God in the eschaton.
As Agamben himself notes, the Donatist debate paved the way for the instrumental cause, because the question was, who is the primary agent in the administration of the sacraments. If it is the Holy Spirit that is active through the intermediate cause of the priest, this position makes sense. But if the Holy Spirit simply is not there, this leads to the vacuous and bureaucratic notion that the priest simply performs an office.
Insofar as Agamben mobilizes Christian concepts to reply against his more secular counterparts, yet he maintains a fundamentally non-theistic stance in his assessments of Christian doctrine. If you remove a lynchpin of a paradigm, it would only make sense that the belief system collapses.
This is also why Agamben's use of Paul tends to be ineffective across Homo Sacer. Paul makes frequent use of paradox in his own epistles to convey the extent to which the old logic of Judaism has been shattered through Christian revelation.
Agamben makes frequent allusions to Paul's language of deactivation of the law, a theme with important parallels to Agamben's own project, but these references are simplistic and lack the nuance that Paul did employ. Quotations out of context or with lack of regard for Paul's systematicity as they do occur seem like cheap appeals to authority.
We saw this at the end of II.5, on the brief note on "eternal life" where Agamben argues Paul's messianic rhetoric is concerned with the deactivation of a normative life of bios and a renewal zoe (eternal life) in this life.
I do not know how one can begin to read Paul and claim he sought to dis-establish ethical norms altogether, as he is very frequently criticized by post-Christian Westerners for doing the opposite.
We see it here on the Franciscan question of poverty where the Franciscans failed to create a positive definition for use that stands outside law. Agamben points to 1 Corinthians 7:20-31 as the Pauline precedent for this kind of argument.
This passage which talks about the remaining time growing short urges readers to live in the world as if they have nothing inside it, providing examples of marriage and property.
The paradox here is clearly intended to point to the mindset of Christian believes living in a world before the Second Coming, an attitude of detachment from worldly things, even though Christians still do live and operate in the world through marriage and commerce. This theme is elaborated in other epistles such as 1 and 2 Thessalonians where Paul exhorts his audience to keep working and remain active in the world (apparently as some had ceased to work in anticipation of Christ's return).
Perhaps to the untrained eye Agamben's citations of Paul may seem like legitimate appeals to theological authority, but many such references do not hold weight outside epigrammatic amusement.
So let us consider some theological dimensions specifically of the monastic rule as it is presented here.
Agamben reviews the literature of the Rule so to speak with what seems to be thoroughness, but he protrays the monastic form-of-life as primarily dedicated to the rule itself in some ways. The obligation to an obligation.
While he does briefly trace lectio and meditatio to Scripture as the reinstatement of the Word of God, he quickly transposes this from applying to the Bible to the text of the monastic rules themselves. He does not offer reasons nor even suggest justification for such a transposition.
Effectively the monastic rule literature itself becomes the foundational documentation of the order as the centerpiece of the cenobite's mind and heart and form-of-life. In Agamben's telling, the Scriptures appear merely incidental to their practice.
Perhaps this move can be argued from the lens of genealogy which attempts to abstract the practices and forms from its content, but it seems strange that what is so ardently theocentric in its own terms and texts should be so divorced from God in Agamben's reconstruction.
To be fair, Agamben is right to point to the monastics as the most spiritually rigorous and logically consistent set of communities living in this period. Foucault offers us much to read on that front, at least from the sphere of continental theory.
But Agamben does no more than briefly cover the impetus behind the cenobitic orders as a successor of the various anchorites: the rejection of the world and its temptations to build an isolated community dedicated to prayer (believed to be efficacious) and sharpening one's soul for the next life or the eschaton.
It is about God and submitting oneself with thoroughness to the will of God.
If the problem of global society is the force of law and a moral framework that can demand submission to any command or order, how can such a deeply religious and other-worldly motivated set of monastic rules be the foundation for a total, globalized post-legal framework?
This seems untenable as a normative claim from theological grounds. The monastic order is inteded to be a retreat from the world (fuga saeculi), not an imperialism to dominate it. It would give monasticism the scope of ecclesiastical globalism which the lauded Francis himself actively sought to forego.
Third, while there is something of value here in Agamben's narrative, it does very conspicuously lack a historian's grasp of the subject matter.
Like I mention above, Agamben provides us with a neat and tidy tale of monasticism, so tidy perhaps that it should indicate to the reader that much has been glossed over.
The simple dichotomy of monk vs. priest, monastic rule vs. liturgical office is so thoroughly reductionistic, it is hard to discern if the theory itself holds any weight if one were to make the effort to delve into the empirical particularities of church history.
For example, Anthony is passed over entirely in silence though Pachomius is given predominant status as a figure in this history of monasticism.
The social, political, and spiritual dimensions of the Egyptian Anchorite movement are not acknowledged. John Cassian's writings are mentioned but without any biographical (or genealogical) interest in his role transmitting cenobitism to the West.
The tensions and complications of Western and Eastern Christianity do not seem material to Agamben although they produced striking influences in their respective anchorite and cenobitic orders. The anchoritic movement is implied to have passed away entirely after the Council of Toledo, though no mention or interest is given to the very long heritage of that movement and its ongoing relationship with cenobitic monastic orders.
While the Rule of St. Augustine is mentioned, there is no distinction at all between the various Catholic mendicant orders with the Franciscans inheriting exclusive focus as the definitive form-of-life monastics, with no mention whatsoever of Carmelites, Dominicans or other monastic order who may or may not share in this monastic rule logic that Agamben advocates for.
Furthermore, there is no consideration at all of individual abbeys and monasteries as cases of the monastic form-of-life. Cluny, Monte Cassino, Lindisfarne, none of these are at all mentioned by name. None of the abbots' writings or other on-the-ground records are considered.
For one who delights in archeology's focus on documentary evidence over propositional content, it is strange to exclusively analyze the literature of monastic rules in general without considering the source material of those writing about their form-of-life rule in their lives.
Nor do we consider the nature of the secular clergy (referred to as the priesthood) or the administrative apparatus of diocesan politics which sought to effectively govern entire populaces of laity rather than small-scale, concerted monastic communities. The ecclesiastical structure of the Catholic church is reduced to mere priest and Pope in Agamben's paradigm.
The lack of nuance can even be extended toward a disregard for the particular geopolitical circumstances of individual monastic movements whether in Anglo-Saxon England, Carolinginian Europe, Anglo-Norman rule, Capetian France, or the tensions between the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. This last one is the most striking because Agamben presents the question of property and use as the definitive Christian dilemma here but without even once considering how the precedent of the Investiture Controversy and the Concordat of Worms in the twelfth century set a trajectory for papal policy we see continued here.
Or for that matter for biographical nuances around Pope John XXII who lived in the period of the Avignon papacy in a time of immense ecclesiastical strife. In his disputes with Louis IV the Bavarian over limits on papal power, Louis IV invaded Italy and installed an antipope Nicholas V.
If we are to read John XXII's argumentation more charitably, it is important to note that some Franciscans were agitating against papal authority during this conflict. These theoretical debates that Agamben visits do make insinuations that it should not be theologically justified for the church to hold any property whatsoever, an idea that would seem very dangerous to John XXII if antagonistic Holy Roman Emperors would employ this excuse to expropriate all ecclesiastical holdings and wealth (such expropriation would become reality in future revolutions).
Furthermore, if we are to consider the Franciscan argument of poverty from John XXII's viewpoint this introduces a number of administrative hurdles.
As Agamben quips in referring to ius utendi as almost a royal law, this would give Franciscans carte blanche to requisition anyone's goods or resources. I do not know in practice what this looked like, but this would leave both church and laity exposed to self-generous requisitions, hence John XXII's argument concerning consummable goods.
Furthermore, fourteenth century ecclesiastical history saw a focus on standardization and uniformity across the curia. The question of poverty lived in fundamental contradiction to ecclesiastical practice and administration, and one could argue that Pope John XXII merely sought to align the church under a consistent set of expectations and practices and to abolish the double standard regarding mendicant orders.
There are sympathetic ways to treat Pope John XXII who is a controversial ruler, but to promulgate the Franciscan monastic rule as the rule par excellence for all the West, fails to take into account the logistic and administrative constraints of such a model as well as the material and ideological circumstances which undergirded this debate with the Franciscans. This is why Francis was prescient in trying to set aside his mendicant order as something totally outside ecclesiastical administration. In one way to prevent it from ecclesiastical oversight (which turned out to be borrowed time) but to also avoid expanding it to an enforced, total structure as Agamben argues for.
This is not to say that one must be a Peter Brown to be able to comment upon the monastic rule and form-of-life syntagma as something instructive for us, but to entrench it with such sweeping claims as Agamben does with a case-deficient account of such practices is not entirely persuasive on its own but does open the door for further analysis.
It is easy to make big claims, but as Christopher Lasch once remarked, there are often no easy solutions.
We have considered IV.1 from the angle of methodology and considering the contents of its claims, but let us also look at the ethical, the "for us" aspect of this work.
At the very beginning of Homo Sacer, Agamben committed himself to the project of re-identifying bios (ordered, normative life) with zoe (factual life), for it is in the gap between the two that bare life can be produced and exploited.
This is reiterated at the close of II.5 where he calls upon the need to deactivate a self-standing bios that can stand apart from eternal life (i.e. zoe).
Homo Sacer III demanded a reset to confront the sheer beyondness of Auschwitz and hte atrocities there, the paradigm of modern biopolitics.
Ever since the closing of Part One of Homo Sacer I, the answer to prevent this reduction to bare life is the deactivation of the law that it may be only of use for study, defanged of its force.
Here we receive the solution in the form-of-life in which rule and life have a bilateral, circular relationship. The norm is not applied to life but the life is applied to the norm.
An inversion of Kant, to say the least, but as Agamben argues, a refutation of so much more.
As I have mentioned since the start of Homo Sacer it is difficult for anyone to comment on these notions of life and law because they are employed with a heavy degree of ambiguity, terms that are overcharged to make grandiose claims but then at various intervals deployed in specific amphibolous senses as seems fitting to the author at one juncture or another.
The same goes here with the deactivation of law.
Here is an earnest attempt to reconstruct as favorably as possible Agamben's framework.
Auschwitz generates a crisis for Western philosophy. If Eichmann can truly, sincerely and full validity attest to the atrocities he committed as the proper demand of Kantian ethics, we must revisit the groundwork which led us here.
In one primary thread, the issue can be traced back from Kant through Pufendorf to Suarez and then via Aquinas to the question of Donatism.
The Donatist controversy established an abstraction between the moral character of a priest and their competence for church office. Through the innovation of an instrumental cause, human individuals can operate in their appointed roles as mere instruments that produce the effects but without responsibility of being the initial cause. This is legalized over time and then is elevated to absolute principle through Kant's pure duty which demands utter submission to whatever ends are dictated by reason. And reason is sufficiently malleable to be manipulated toward justifying any action whatsoever. This is the crux of the problem in the Neoplatonic and Stoic differentiation of being and action through the introduction of the will.
What is necessary is to indifferentiate being and action. To make it so that what one does can characterize what or who they are. They cannot eschew responsibility through pointing blame up the providential chain of being.
The monastic rule provides a model for this by fusing form to life via the form-of-life, something fundamentally public and communitarian in its nature, something set apart from talk of responsibility, duty, and law.
What can we glean here?
The most burning question here is the intended scope of this reinvented form-of-life. Agamben frequently speaks of the problems we face globally as we move toward the paradigm of the camps and the total reduction of all life. Auschwitz is one manifestation of what is the inevitable conclusion of Western metaphysics and politics.
So if the intent is to also deactivate law globally across all political jurisdictions, then it seems that Agamben is suggesting the monastic form-of-life model would be ushered in globally as a replacement. Christian (or better put, post-Christian) anarchism.
Would this be uniformly applied across urban and rural areas? How would the membership and boundaries of these anarchic monastic orders be arranged? Would these occupy geographically delimited areas or would they live amongst each other? This is not clear not does it seem the concern of Agamben's study, though they would be pertinent for anyone seeking the implementation of such a program.
The problems of anarchism is that most articulations of this political/ethical philosophy very quickly come to the problems that face tribalistic societies. How does one regulate the internal affairs of one anarchistic group? And what measures are there to safeguard peace between various splinter-sized groups?
We know that Agamben is not promoting an atomized level of individual anarchy as he points to the public nature of cenobitic orders as superior to the anchorite hermits living off on their own.
What remains perhaps deliberately ambiguous in Agamben's presentation is how a cenobitic order handles violation of the rule by internal members. Agamben does not decisively say but he does end on the note of Pachomius saying it is wrong to punish a brother.
More needs to be said on this question.
If each member of a rule-of-life community is only accountable to their own internal spirit, this would quickly devolve into barbarism and violence. Nothing would prevent one brother from killing all the rest, if there are no mechanisms for accountability.
This recycled state-of-nature brings us back to the invention of law which was initially designed to adjudicate between families or individuals through arbitration, and then through force.
The ambivalence on whether a member of an order may be punished for violating the rule is in fact rather decisive for the practical living out of a public community, for otherwise it falls into a private form-of-life. If one joins an order volitionally, to what extent may they be punished against their will?
This leads to the question of submitting one's will to God, as Agamben puts it. However this neglects to mention that for many cenobitic orders the members of the order are submitting themselves also to the head of their local order, usually the abbot. This is unavoidable in both the cenobitic literature and in the organization of such communities. This introduces hierarchy, governance, and sovereignty into the rule-of-life community, phenomena which Agamben has previously deemed problematic.
Then of course there remains the rivalry and potential warfare that would emerge between various rule-of-life groupings. Is this meant simply to play out organically? There is nothing said on this question, so we will let it be.
Another fundamental anxiety Agamben carries is that law reduces all acts to discrete, explicit rules. Law comes to bear force on the micromanagement of specific activities while missing the fact that we should be engendering a spirit that should produce good character of its own accord or nature.
Law tries to educe through extrinsic force what should be produced through intrinsic form-of-life.
What is missing here as well is a consideration of the extent to which it is possible, especially on a global scale, to inculcate a universally compatibilistic and in some vague sense moral fiber in every single individual on the planet while also standing down any punitive measures or force with which to bring it about.
The same could even be said on the scale of small communities like the monastic had and remains a live problem for handling recalcitrance among members.
The refusal to accept an explicit law code in favor of a more general rule is understandable on some grounds but faces rather severe practical dimensions as such explicit rules and laws were developed in the first place to prevent subjective, whimsical arbitration by which a magistrate could invoke far more severe punishments on the basis of someone's ethnic characteristics or willingness to bribe against a standardized, specific law code which binds particular punishments to particular acts. Why does Agamben remain quiet on Hammurabi?
The law is designed to be a protection of the weak from the strong, hence its ties to justice, despite Agamben's insistence to the contrary. It is not without concidence that the Roman plebeians fought violently for the right to have at least some of the laws patricians had applied to them. This also is not countenanced.
If we do seek to remove the closest institutional measures we have to objective fairness within a society in the name of fairness and protecting life from being reduced further, it is not clear from the framework provided how this is not simply a regression to a pre-legal society which would simply reinvent law in its own time.
What is also overlooked is that explicit laws are communicable with far more efficiency and standardizability than a form-of-life rule which would ostensibly require an entire education in which the intuitions of magistrates or cenobitic leadership could be aligned in a way to produce similar judgments, if equity is a concern for Agamben. Stating such rules explicitly may create an abstraction which can be untethered from the original conscientious impulse, but it is far more administratively effective in promoting uniformity in legal treatments regardless of subjective characteristics which may prejudice for or against an adjudicant.
This all is clear from someone who treats ancient and medieval texts on jurisprudence and law fairly and not with the degree of parsimonious selectivity that Agamben employs to try to argue the opposite of their case.
These problems are why I stated above it would be much simpler and apropos to leverage virtue ethics of some Greek or Roman strain as matters of private conviction, for Agamben does not offer the conceptual machinery to regard how such form-of-life could be rendered at a communitarian, and much less a global, scale. If one out of their own will submits themselves to the will of a spiritual mentor (cenobitic) or only to God (anchoritic), this form-of-life can be a framework for formulating new communities.
But to advise it for populaces with conflicting interests, ideologies, and levels of conscientiousness, one is merely inviting totalitarianism of the vein that Agamben has for so long preached against. Again this is why its strange that Agamben carries on Foucault's biopolitical mantle of decrying the technologies which regulate everyday life but is so enthralled with monasticism which is far more totalistic a model of control than the contemporary globalized consumerist society that is so loathsome to him.
This also overlooks the issues surrounding the logistical provisioning for such communities, as the Franciscan question of poverty and use showed us. The Lockean cliche is that law is founded in the safeguarding of property rights, and whether or not that is true, there is certainly a sense in which law is tightly bound up with adjudication of property disputes.
It is not clear if Agamben is also advising the total abolition of all property for us to all live as Franciscans, but if he were to stop short of that conclusion, there are many practical barriers and hoops one would have to address in a split model of property versus use, as Pope John XXII had to contend with for only a small subset of a populace. And of course if Agamben does wish to abolish property altogether then he faces far more startling and intransigent concerns for his project.
All this being said, I would reiterate that Agamben is asking fascinating questions and raising source material that few others do in these debates, at least on the scale of breadth and novelty that he does. A fundamental problem is his inability to build robust positive concepts and philosophy that are able to withstand at least an initial barrage of practical concerns. These are the problems that often confront those who are first and foremost committed to radical conclusions and build the rest around it.
Agamben's attempt to follow through on his earlier questions and suggestions is appreciated, but it remains severely underdeveloped and exposed to many nugatory considerations. It does offer a useful catalyst for lines of research or questioning nonetheless, for example if one were to turn Wittgenstein's linguistic schema of rules and form-of-life into an ethical or political project.
But Agamben does little more than offer a few foundational stones, but one may hope that was his intent, merely to inspire a new generation rather than to complete the task for them.