Prospectus

Homo Sacer series: I · II.1 · II.2 · II.3 · II.4 · II.5 · III · IV.1 · IV.2. Previous: IV.1.

We have arrived at the final section of Homo Sacer. A long, perilous journey that by the time we finish will be just shy of thirteen hundred pages.

There is no perhaps no single project that completes as much philosophical globetrotting as this one. It is easy to lose track of where we have been, and questions that had been deferred until later. Or what we have even covered in this curious circumnavigation.

But here we have an attempt to tie together many, if not all of these threads through an articulation of this new ontology of inoperativity, one in the conclusion will be renamed destituent potential.

This is not the end but a beginning, a radical beginning.

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Homo Sacer IV.2 - The Use of Bodies

It is expected for philosophical work to be split between deconstruction and positive construction. One part critique, the other advancing its own theory. However Agamben would like to call such a formulaic method into question. Perhaps the concepts we see here cannot be concluded, only in some sense abandoned in the end.

Agamben opens with a reflection on the life and work of Guy Debord, a figure whom he feels wrestled very deeply with the question of the form-of-life. What youth and life mean as such things are lost, as society is reduced to a mere market. After Guy Debord's suicide, Agamben recalls a conversation he had with the man's widow, Alice. She was rather surprised to learn that others were interested in the personal biography of her husband, remarking in reply that "on existe" and that is all.

This is in some ways the foundational question of this volume: how are existence and life linked.

Life itself is an incredibly vague notion, one that cannot be reduced to the scientific or medical notion of survival, even if philosophy has resigned the concept of life and handed it over to medicine.

As Debord understood, private life accompanies us like a secret; it shares existence with us. The split and inseparability of private life defines our cultural attitudes toward life itself.

Agaben likens it to the fable of the Spartan boy who hides a fox in his clothes so he does not get in trouble. Even as it eats away at him and digs into his flesh, he bears it silently, until he collapses dead. In this way, the private life is something unconfessable but one that devours us all the same.

It is only through a form-of-life and a common use of bodies that politics can escape this imposed muteness.

The Use of Bodies

Near the beginning of Politics Aristotle defines the nature of the slave as the being whose work is the use of the body. Unlike the other two domestic relationships between husband and wife, parent and child, this despotic relation between master and slave is fundamental to understand the political condition.

As Plato notes in the Alcibiades, the imperative command is directed at the slave, a mirror for how the body should be a slave to the soul's commands, so that the soul can make use of the body.

What is this work (ergon)? Elsewhere in Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines ergon as the being-at-work of the soul according to the logos. Not much clearer, but it does shine light on one thing. Though the slave remains a human being, yet there is some human-driven ergon that is not properly human either.

The work of slaves is not necessarily their own but that of their masters. Thus an exception is formed. Whereas the free man produces work from their own soul, the slave's body is put to use by the master's soul to produce work.

Aristotle opposes energeia (being-at-work) from chresis (use). This is a philosophical innovation. Plato had originally opposed chresis with dynamis in Euthydemus, and Aristotle would reiterate this dichotomy at one point. But later on he shifts this distinction to energeia versus chresis. It is Western philosophy's abandonment of chresis that has resulted in thinking being as actuality.

What many fail to realize is that the ancients lacked the modern notion of labor. They only considered work from what resulted, there was no abstracted sense of labor to produce that work. Hence Aristotle describes slavery as a physical phenomenon rather than a political one. The master puts the body of the slave to use, not to work. But this introduces problematic questions around how a human being can have a body that is not its own primary body (i.e. how does the master have the slave's body).

One way he navigates this is by likening the slave to household tools or equipment (ktemata). Slaves are like the automata of Hephaestus necessary for the administration of the household. They are not directed toward the production of ergon as such but rather use. This ties to Aristotle's distinction of those instruments which produce goods against those which are merely used. For example, musical instruments have no lasting product but are used to create music. Slaves are to be thought of instruments in this sense.

This is rather foreign to use moderns who think use in terms of instrumentality and technical ends, but we must understand the fundamental ancient distinction between poiesis (creation) and praxis (practice). A practice does not necessarily produce ergon.

To label slaves equipment excludes them from the law. They participate in the household's activity in an economic sense. The salve is a part of the master's body in a quasi-organic community between slave and master.

Hence the use "of the body" is a geneitive that is not merely objective but subjective as well. Use and body determine one another. The body is in use.

The slave has no work since their body is not their own for their soul to produce anything. Interestingly enough, the closest we get to an ancient notion of labor is when a master loaned their slave to another. They loaned them the use of the slave's body, the usufruct, almost like they are loaning out the labor.

The use of the slave's body can be understood more clearly in considering the frequent and socially acceptable sexual relationships both male and female slaves had with their masters in antiquity. This was never considered abusive as the slave is the equipment of the master, can one abuse one's own body?

Hence slaves could be engaged in very intimate physical care of their masters' hygiene without any shame on either's part. Yet if a master were to publicly prostitute their slave it was deemed extremely shameful and despicable, as if one were prostituting one's own body. The master-slave relationship in antiquity is thus strictly personal, not public.

Arendt has argued that ancient slavery aimed to eliminate labor from the proper human life (i.e. free persons should not need to work). To see it this way, slaves operate as an inclusive exclusion by which their exclusion from humanity becomes the condition on which others can become human, through the bios of politically qualified life, freed from work.

Thus, the slave is not human but is the only way by which others can become human.

To apply this to "use of the body", we can see how Aristotle excludes use from production (poiesis) but also in a sense from praxis. Hence it is not possible for a slave to be virtuous since they have no work or excellence to attain. Their body belongs to the soul of the master, where virtue may or may not be exercised.

The life of the slave is most like nutritive or vegetative life. It grounds the possiblity of higher kinds of life but cannot participate in them.

Following Aristotle, action would be privileged over use, as legal and religious institutions educed their commands from actions. Perhaps we should therefore posit use as the fundamental political category.

Let us assess this term use which translates chresis in Greek and uti in Latin. Georges Redard gave a lecture on chre pointing out that is simply undefinable but operates almost like a formulaic modifier to other verbs or nouns. It is always employed in relation to something else wehre subject and object become indeterminate.

This term renders indistinct the subject-object relationship. The verb itself is neither active nor passive, but used in the middle voice. The subject participates in the process of which they are an agent. The subject is produced in the occurrence, and chresthai can be deemed a relation with oneself.

As noted in earlier volumes, Spinoza described this phenomenon of the immanent cause in his compendium on Hebrew grammar, specifically when talking about the agent-patient. A Hebrew verbal mode in which the agent and patient are identified as one another. This is an ontology of immanence where autoconstitution occurs.

Use can be understood in this light. By making use of something, you are entered into relation with it and affected by it in turn. Subject and object are deactivated and rendered indeterminate.

Foucault has similar thoughts on this in his Hermeneutics of the Subject lectures where in his analysis of Plato's Alcibiades the one who uses the body is not reducible to the body, therefore there is a separate soul that uses the body and thus takes it into its care. This is the foundation of the soul's transcendental relationship not just with the body but with the world.

For Foucault, the subject is not a substance but a process. Thus the ethical dimension of the care of self cannot live independently as its own substance but only in its relation between the human being and the world. The problem is that if there is a subject-substance that operates on the body in a transcendent position, then there will need to be another subject to take that subject into its care, ad infinitum.

This is the same question of governmentality that Foucault had raised earlier in the 1970s. How can care-of-oneself occur without being reduced to governance of self plus others. Hence we must rethinkt he relationship between care and use of self, particularly as Foucault does not properly thematize use of self. He merely subordinates use to care in the way that Plato does, thus giving action total primacy.

Care and use seem to have a circular relationship. A human must be a subject that participates in the relation of use before a care of self is possible. The subject of use and care remain identical however. The affection of self is already manifest in the grammatical middle voice. So if this is true, how can care lay claim to anything outside use? It seems like it is contained within then. It is perhaps because of this that Foucault introduced abandonment-of-self which is also mixed up with use language.

This helps us to situate sadomasochism and the master-slave relation both in Foucault and in Hegel.

In Foucauldian sadomasochism, the master and slave have reciprocated relationships through use of body, a more enjoyable and liberated relation to one's own body through another's, a more originary form of people as property without reducing use-of-body to law.

In Hegel, it is this enjoyment that arises from recognition of self-consciousness through another in the master-slave dialectic that has a constitutive anthropological function. Enjoyment and labor is unassignable to either party.

However, sadomasochism fails to render the master-slave dialectic inoperative, as it merely re-enacts lost traces of this ancient relation of slave and master.

In Being and Time, care (Sorge) is presented as the ontological structure of Dasein, again giving care priority over use. Because of Dasein's factical thrownness, it is always already in the power of the things that it takes into its care. This is how Heidegger comes upon the paradigm of equipment, the use of the world.

Interestingly enough, how Heidegger refers to our ways of being-in the world correspond rather neatly with the various semantic uses of chresis as use. Use in this sense is a pre-thematic way to ground our means of knowing Being. Use is our most immediate relationship with the world.

However, Heidegger maintains the primacy of care over use by presupposing care and injecting it into the originary relation of Dasein's being-in. Yet he never properly defines care's relation to familiarty and use, even after elevating it to such a level of priority.

He uses the sentiment of anxiety to accomplish this inversion that places care above use by arguing that Dasein's uncanniness has intimacy as a mode rather than saying that uncanniness is a mode of intimacy with the world. He neutralizes familiarity through this anxiety of the uncanny to prop up care as the primary structure.

His hierarchy of proper and improper Dasein also illustrates this. Dasein can only emerge authentically and properly from inauthentic Dasein, a modified sense of the proper. But this is a strange foundation that Dasein must begin with what it then must immediately discard? Why does the human rely upon the not-truly-human?

By 1946, Heidegger attempts to restore use over care by linking chreshtai to use (Brauch) and thus handiness, in his work on Anaximander. Here he elevates use to a fundamental ontological role by which being maintains beings in presence. It is not clear how this relates to the concept of "familiarity" in Being and Time however.

At one point though, Heidegger subordinates use to energeia as something that brings forth a work, a product, but this demonstrates a philological imprecision that misses the Aristotelian opposition between chresis and energeia.

What if we thought instead of a potential that need not be a passage to action? What if use provides us a way to think beyond the dichotomy of action and potential?

"Use" is central to Stoic ethical doctrine which is built on the "use of life". The self becomes familiar to itself through this use, oikeiosis. This process is only thinkable from a sense of con-sentiment of self, how we use our bodily organs and appendages to perceive sensations, to use ourselves to feel ourselves.

Seneca poses this oikeiosis as conciliatio, the way by which the self is constituted. In this sense, the self is not a substance nor pre-existent but emerge out of use by the living being. It is this originary ontological relation of use that creates the self, and the self is nothing outside this.

Plotinus uses this idea to create an exception for one mode of being that can exist outside the One and its emanations. The use-of-oneself has this kind of self-standing existence, that is not hypostatic in the manner the rest of existence is. He even offers a brief aside on how use-of-oneself precedes being but does not develop it further.

This clarifies how Paul talks about the living as not in this world. Things are used but no longer are divided into being and action. The factical conditions of the world remain, but the law has been deactivated in the messianic call.

Aristotle identified use with energeia, separated from potential and habit. But now we must think being-in-use separately being-in-act, while simultaneously giving it some form of habit. Galen had already thought this when describing use as the natural developmetnal capacity of an entity to ultimately meet its function. This is not a passage from potential to act but a habitual use.

The Aristotelian opposition of dynamis and energeia must be overturned. One could say these can only result from the unnecessary division of use. Aristotle thought habit could provide reality to the potential, by governing the passage from potential to actual.

But he merely reintroduces the same problem at the layer of habit and being-at-work, where there still must be some capacity to not pass over into actuality. Otherwise all potency would already be actuality.

This a-dynamia clears space for habit but still subordinates it to the act which it is driven to do. One ought to do such and such.

Habit must be removed from this negative model and instead think a positive content of the impotential. Use is the form where habit can be given existence, a neutralization of the subject and object, of potency and act. It recognizes the self as constituted in use.

Having a habit (hexis-habitus) is how philosophy has connected being and having, but from a linguistic lens, these both seem to indicate a state. Being establishes an intrinsic relation between two terms, having establishes an extrinsic relation.

If as Aristotle says, hexis can be said of a being, it is then attributable to a subject, claiming that one is disposed to a certain action or another. It is potential (dynamis). Yet elsewhere, Aristotle contradicts this by defining hexis as a being-at-work of the one who has it, in addition to being such a disposition. It both a mode of being and a state of the subject. There must be something that determines if the potential does or does not get actualized, and Aristotle hands this power to habit.

Yet this is a circular solution where having is derived from being, just as being is derived from having. The circle of having a habit.

We do have an alternative, suggested from this section.

Habit cannot be possessed without introducing this circle between being and having.

Use breaks this ambiguity. Use is the form-of-life as a habit. A living being who uses their body and world to constitute themselves through use. A thesis affirmed to measure by Pelagius in writing the humans have the possiblity to not sin, a sort of a-dynamia.

But what is habitual use? If a habit is used, is this not merely action?

The work is no longer result of a potential but an outcome in which potential and habit are not extinguished but remain, and are in a sense opened up even more for new possiblity. The work perpetually opens itself up for new use as more is made of it. It is Spinoza's acquiescence in oneself, the figure of inoperativity.

Use falls under the umbrella of contemplation, for contemplation does not have a subject. THe one who contemplates is lost and dissolved in the array of the world, not even having an object. Subject and object are rendered indeterminate in contemplation, life itself is rendered inoperative. Contemplation is merely use of onself.

In fact, the self only becomes possible in this contemplative gesture.

We do not say a builder ceases to be builder because they are not working on a house every hour of the day. They habitually live in use-of-themselves as a builder as a form-of-life.

Contemplation is separated from consciousness, affectability form personality. In contemplation, we have a zone of non-consciousness. This is not the mystical loss of self but the habitual dwelling of living being in a pre-subjectivated state. They are not yet constituted as subjects but living through contemplation.

This notion of habit as ethos was covered up by medieval virtue ethics which arraigned virtue as an operative habit that ought to drive this habit to this or that actuality. It imposes movement and action into habit.

However to break this vicious circle of virtue, one must think of virtue as use, beyond a mere dichotomy of being and action. The virtual is not opposed ot the real but exists through use in the mode of habit.

Use is in itself always virtuous and needs nothing further to be made operative. There is no such things as virtuous actions, only a virtuous use-of-onself, this active patient, this middle of being and acting.

Returning to Heidegger, familiarity and handiness define the originary and immediate relation of Dasein and world but remains fundamnetally instrumental, that is laden with use. His work on equipment and aesthetics also captures this as well. Equipment by virtue of its reliability gives the world necessity and proximity to things. Equipment opens the world to the human being, but does risk regressing to mere instrumentality.

So human beings are dependent upon the availability of their equipment, because it is only through this they enter the world. Heidegger wanted to free the human from the narrow limits of use and that perhaps explains why he prioritized care over use, or reliability over use. This way he could still put to work the truth of being.

Yet by the time of The Question Concerning Heidegger he argues against Spengler that it is in fact possible to understand technology by starting from the instrument rather than the human, for technology is broadly stated a human action directed toward a goal. Yet this instrumentalization of technology seems insufficient ot him as he ascribes to it poeitic, that is dimensions of creation and production, technology that permits us to unveil Being.

Agamben wants to follow a different path and explore technology as in fact being fundamentally instrumental. As seen in earlier volumes, instrumentality is not easily reducible to the four causes of Aristotle, hence the Scholastic invented instrumentality as a fifth cause in large part to explain the intermediate agent of the priest in performing God's Eucharist. A development that Heidegger overlooked.

The instrumental cause is philosophically problematic because it somehow manifests a law that is both immanent to it but also transcends it. Ivan Illich explored this further, arguing that this instrumental cause is the first conception of technology as such and would become the ultimate causal principle. Before, there was only ergon that was produced, but now there is this intermediate dimension of instrument that is available and serviceable ot all.

Thus the sacraments become technological in a sense, they are neither reducible to a final or efficient cause. They cannot be defined by use but only by instrumentality, upon which modern utility would be founded.

It is curious that Aquinas in describing the operation of the Sacrament makes explicit reference to Aristotle's theory of slavery. God makes use of the priest's body to effect the sacrament. The minister acts on behalf of the whole church, their body is not their own.

In this light, the slave is the first expression of pure instrumentality, dividing use into work and instrument.

But anyway, the sacraments are thus mechanized with this instrumental cause. The effect can be administered regardless of the priest who admits it and how deeply evil they may be. It can always be actaualized, since God is the primary agent.

Suarez would take up this instrumetnal cause and elevate it to the prime ontological category, as all God's actions would be rendered through instruments, hence the birth of modern providence. Divine ordinance orchestrates all its instruments.

We now see one thing that is common to both modern technology and ancient slavery. They are not simply oriented toward production or activity but to make possible the becoming human of the living human being. Political life (bios) is only possible because bare life (zoe) is mobilized and put to use so that the free citizens may become properly human through political life.

The modern abolition of slavery has thus unfettered technology as the new living instruments. Now humans have lost use of their bodies altogether and, blocked form their own animal nature, they enter a new form of slavery.

In Homo Sacer IV.1, use was the center of the Franciscan strategy to legitimize their poverty and to abdicate the right of ownership, while still having access to materials and goods. However, as we saw, they enclosed themselves in a defensive definition that ultimately lost them the debate.

How can we think use in itself and not as a negation of ownership?

The inappropriables offer us this answer. As Walter Benjamin noted, justice is not a virtue but a state of affairs. So too use is relation to an inappropriable, a state of affairs that cannot be appropriated as one's own.

Agamben provides three examples of the inappropriable.

The body is one such case.

Phenomenology misled philosphy by equating the "I" to the body as the originary relationship. We can still perceive another's body and yet it is not my own, the "I"'s body. This egotism also problematizes the possiblity of empathy. Husserl, Edith Stein, and Lipps all jumped through hoops to try to resolve this. Husserl resorted to arguing all bodies participate in a shared, living current of the "I".

The truth is that the exception of impropriety is more strongly originary to the body than propriety itself, as Levinas showed. Nausea, bodily need, shame in nudity. It is these discomfitures, this being thrown into an improper factitity that are in fact a more immediate, intimate link with with our body than this "I" that is considered proper to it.

The second example is language.

Even for one fluent in language, we still have lapses, stuttering, slips, forgetfulness. We speak language and yet we as speaker are still removed from it, and feel this alienation from being in language itself.

Poets inflict this inappropriability even more so on themselves by destroying all convention and comfort which renders all language strange.

Style and manner mark two opposing poles, style is the pole of the approbiability of language while manner indicates the expropriative and non-belonging nature of the human being's relationship with language.

In this way, Mannerism is the paradoxically ruthless adherence to a model that may come so close to being like the model but is always removed from it. Art always lives in between this singular idiosyncrasy and this general stereotype. Use is the field of tension bounded on one side by appropriation and expropriation on th eother, between homeland and exile.

The third example is landscape.

Any discussion of landscape has a sort of indeterminacy as to whether it is natural or artificial. Others are uncertain where it is merely a modern invention or part of being human. Because ancient sources testify to such a marveling at landscapes, it is clear it is related to being human in an essential way.

We can understand this through Heidegger's thought on the relation between animal and human. Via Uexkull, Heidegger argues that animals are related to their environment in a closed off way. Their disinhibitors, that is their animal instincts, incline them deterministically to particular responses to stimuli. Animals neither see this lack of openness or the fact they do not have it. Humans emerge from an animalistic relationship with the world when they disclose the open, free space of being. Being is thus grounded in negativity, the not-animal, disorientation toward one's animal instincts.

The landscape is this ultimate stage of openness and contemplationw ith respect to the world. We preserve being as a whole. We do not seek to comprehend or dominate but only to look.

From these examples we can get that intimacy is use-of-oneself as a relation with an inappropriable. In modernity this desire to regulate access to intimacy is privacy. This selective sharing of use-of-oneself is the very constitution of self, and privacy replaces the use of bodies where subject and object were once indeterminate.

Sade has underscored this in the politicization of jealousy, the desire to possess and control the body of another. But as we have seen, this property cannot be shared. It is the inappropribale.

Agamben closes this first part by comparing Foucault against one of his colleagues Pierre Hadot.

Hadot had commented that while both were interested in ancient philosophy as the exercise or style of life, he had thought Foucault had missed the mark when it came to the moral dimensions of beauty and wisdom.

Foucault's private life and sexual encounters reflect an earnest attempt to live out the aesthetics of self he studied near the end of his life. While Hadot may understand this aesthetics of existence as outside good and evil, Foucault firmly planted it in the ethical "care of the self". As he stated in his interview with Dreyfus and Rabinow, he was interested in bios as the foundation of aesthetics.

Hadot seems to have missed that Foucault mentioned wisdom fairly frequently in his later work and himself carries the baggage of a transcendent subject that exists outside life and its actions. So he wrongly interprets Foucault as a subject working out the work as an object that is external to him. But the subject cannot live in such a transcendent relation to the self. The self can only live in the operation of its own relation, contra Aristotle and Descartes.

Thus for Foucault, ethics should be a relationship with oneself rather than a relationship with a norm. Ethics in fact is a relation with self that develops out of one's relation with others.

In his last lecture, Foucault identified the philosophical life as true, disclosed life, a theme taken from Greek Cynicism. While Plato links practice of self and truth therein to knowledge, Cynicism seeks truth of a being in a form of life. It is a style of existence that is how one bears witness to one's life, and this circular ontology of the subject and self can be extend to the political circularity of constituting and constituted power.

But how does one constitute oneself?

Spinoza provides an answer in the ontology of immanence where the actiev and passive are identified with one another.

But how does this immanent self that can only exist in relation thus become a subject that then governs that relation?

Sartre talks about this int erms of a self that constitutes the subject and is then absorbed into it. Self and subject are circularly linked, never having a permanent coincidence.

It is this ontological aporia that shows up in Foucault on the level of practice with how one can theorize power relations in human governance. Unlike sheer domination, power entails a free subject. The subject may freely conduct itself, but power can bring itself to bear to shape the conduct of such a subject. Through subjectivation, power directs the subject toward a certain form of life.

In his last interview, Foucault described his attempt to balance the constitution of self between its pagan and Christian heritages. On the classical side, there was a constitution of self without a subject. In Christianity, the self is fully absorbed into the subject.

Sadomasochism was one of his attempt to liquidate these power relations back toward free and total immanence. A critique of power structures where the self is always already bound up in relation. But what Foucault failed to see is that the self never assumes the role of a free subject. We must find something fundamentally ungovernable from the standpoint of domination and power.

An Archeology of Ontology

This second part of this volume asks the question if we can still access first philosophy (i.e. ontology). This access has become so problematic since Kant that we can only proceed through archeology to try to trace it out.

Anthropogenesis is an event that is always underway. Ontology is the originary place of the articulation between language and world where this event occurs.

Foucault frames archeology as being concerned both with determinate knowledge and determinate time. Hence his sense of historical a priori which sounds oxymoronic but is phrase inherited from Husserl or Derrida. It is an idea that recognizes the fundamental heterogeneity of assembled facts and the interpretive framework imposed upon them but is somehow still immanent to them. Philosophical archeology is concerned with bringing to light the various historical a priori's that condition humanity. Ontology is the fundamental historical a priori of Western thought.

Kant's true Copernican Revolution is not the subject but the impossibility of first philosophy, that is metaphysics. His attempts to protect it in the transcendental mere displace the historical a priori to epistemology, and ontology become gnoseology. Post-Kantian philosophy preserved the transcendental until Heidegger, but they inevitably subordinated philosophy to the natural sciences. Many other scholars in various disciplines took up the task of an escape from teh transcendental, shifting the a priori from knowledge and into language.

This linguistic turn of ontology has been completed, as we live in a time that believes it is not conditioned by historical a priori and is thus post-historical.

If ontology is a hodology, in the sense that we study the ways we speak of Being, this way opens itself historically. We must see whether we can recover this path or whether we must abandon it.

This archeology must first begin from the Aristotelian division of Being, for here lies the origin of every ontological difference.

In the Categories, Aristotle distinguishes the primary essence (ousia) from secondary essences. A primary essence cannot be said of a subject but lies under it (hypokeimnon) as shown by how singular entities can only be referred to by names or by pointing. By contrast, secondary essences are the genera of these species abstracted from individuals. This is the fundamental ontological division of Western politics and life itself.

Commentators debate over whether the Categories is concerned with words, things, or concepts. But we must consider with Philoponus that these three in inseparable. They are three aspects a unitary thing. Logic and ontology are consubstantial.

Aristotle distinguishes between saying of a subject (existentive) and to be in a subject (predicative). Language presupposes predication with respect to a subject at every term. However he drops it here and does not consider it further. This is the root aporia of much of Western ontology.

The subjectivation of being is inseparable from predication in langauge. Language accuses (kategorein) Being to bring it to trial and subjectivate it. Thus the specific potential of language is the relation of presupposition. Something non-linguistic is presupposed in the event of language. This non-linguistic entity is itself unsayable, non-relational, but this unsayability is the ultimate category, the linguistic relation in itself. A relation of non-relation.

Thus, Being is divided between primary, existentive being and secondary, predicative being. The task of thought is to reassemble this unity, as Hegel and Schelling attempted in their ownw ay. Being is the presupposition of language which manifests it.

The primary substances takes priority through its expression by a proper name. This is the limit point of subjectivation, the "this" that is only proper of primary substances. One cannot indicate a secondary essence in itself through pointing and saying "this".

This impredicable singularity is translated into Latin as substantia even though Boethius acknowledged essentia would be a more fitting term. So while Neoplatonism elevated Aristotle's Categories to a definitive rank in his corpus, Boethius would certify substance ontology, and all medieval philosophy would follow the course of this decision. All Western ontology is the result of prioritizing a primary substance that lies underneath every predication.

In Metaphysics Book VII, Aristotle asks "what is ousia?" and distinguishes four senses of this term before referring back to the subjective determination in the Categories. Here htough he seems to call into question the priority of the subject, introducing a separate determination the ti en einai fully distinct from that which lies underneath (hypokeimnon).

One student of Heidegger, Rudolf Boehm, analyzed this apparent contradiction of the two senses. He argues that Aristotle's subjective determination of essence thinks ousia only insofar as something else demands it stands at its own base. This divides being between an inexistent essence (that it is but without being) and an inessential existent (a being that is not). The to ti einai is Aristotle's attempt to think the unity of existence and essence but incidentally abolishes the hypokeimnon of the subject. Being and existing become mutually exclusive, dancing around each other but never overlapping.

What Boehm overlooks is the grammatical structure of to ti einai. Why is it in the past tense, for example?

There is both a pure dative and predicative dative here, and Aristotle generally uses the predicative dative to predicate essence. Yet his example here in Metaphysics only uses a pure dative, speaking of this human being, so we could translate it as "what it was for X to be". He uses the imperfect past to indicate a temporal gap between the being-there of the individual entity and the mind's grasping of it. It was already there. Thus Aristotle introduces time into being far before Kant.

The identity of being may be divided in language, but it is produced in time.

This is an operative time, not a chronological time. The time it takes the mind to think the articulation between subjet and essence. It can simultaneously be translated "What it was for X to be" and "being what X was", for they are bound in time.

Though this is implicit, Aristotle never explicitly ties time to being, but we can see how being is divdied into the before where it was but was not comprehended and now where it has been problematized. Ironically, Heidegger would recapitulate these same ideas and wrestle with the same problems, all the way to the end.

With this, the singular being is abstracted out of predication and recedes into an imperfect past where the presupposition of every discourse must find its ground, that which lies underneath lies in the past. The subject maintains both priority and inaccessibility in this way. The impossibility of saying a singular being thus produces time and dissolves being in time.

By cutting the pure existent from the essence and inserting time between them, now ontology reactualizes the event of anthropogenesis every time being is spoken. The subject lying underneath is an inclusive exclusion. It is captured on the outside through its name but cannot be thematically treated. Yet it remains the ground of which everything is said, the homo sacer of language.

Plato's ontology is radically different from Aristotle's. He makes the presuppositional structure of language the foundation of thought. The task of philosophy is to take the given, named thing and interrogate it back to a non-presupposed principle. Hence there is always something beyond the being itself: the idea. It is the idea that is freed of the referent, the mute thing can appear and speak in this way. As Kojeve said, philosophy is concerned with speaking of something but the fact that something is being spoken about.

So while Plato recognizes the idea is beyond language and being, Aristotle and Hegel with him tightly hold on to the presuppositional power of logos rather than putting that power into question.

The task of Western ontology is both speculative and political. If one can think the identity of a singular existent, then it is possible to fuond a political order. Politics and ontology are interdependent.

As noted in Homo Sacer I, we have the lost the ability to even distinguish ontology and politics, as their former artificial distinctions have been mutilated and collapsed into one another, and now we have arrived at total bare life.

Aristotelian ontology has collapsed upon itself can no longer function as the historical a priori to condition human knowledge. It has reached a terminal point and must be overthrown entirely. Heidegger's project failed because he failed to overturn the Aristotelian division of being, he affirmed the identity of time with the I, i.e. the autoaffection of Kant. This identification produces a discrepancy in which bare life proliferates. Nietzsche saw this clearly in the mantra that "one becomes what one is".

Hypostasis is the ontological concept that accomplished this unfortunate division of being and sealed it in the philosophical firmament. There was no such thing as hypostasis in classical thought. It only emerged through Neoplatonism's peculiar way of designating existence while maintaining the immobility of the One.

Etymologically, hypostasis refers to sediment, the remainder of solids left behind by a liquid. There is a real consistency that stands outside of the liquid. This is how the One can be transcendent to Being yet leave behind a residual sediment of existence, all while remaining immutable and immobile.

For Aristotle, hypokeimnon was the primary, immediate form of being. Hypostasis indicates a being outside beings which has a passage from being-in-itself into existence. This hypostatization is a process or event and is how being is actualized down to existence. Porphyry would cement this further by combining Neoplatonic hypostasis with the Aristotelian twofold division of being. But this introduces a fundamental tension between the Platonic vertical notion of something beyond being that can somehow be in existence with Aristotle's horizontal articulation of being as immanent.

This paradox emerges in the Fifth Ennead where the One is affirmed as immobile and immutable and yet the hypostatic event is described in terms of a "going out", using language of motion to describe the actualization of being into existence. Existence is now a performance of essence. This seems to undermine the foundations of Aristotle's ontology and yet it was accepted by medieval thought. Time is introduced into this circular hypostatic movement where the emanation goes out of the One but then returns back into it again somehow.

Through Victorinus and Augustine, hypostatic ontology becomes hypostatic ontology. One must describe the Trinity through Neoplatonic hypostasis, those who rejected this were deemed heretics. Thus hypostasis became the only way to think God and existence.

However, a new problematic emerges out of this: the problem of individuation.

How does an individual existence come to be? What is its relation to essence?

For Aristotle, the singular existent was a given, but now in hypostatic ontology, it is something that must be effected out of essence. This question would haunt all medieval thought as the privileging of essence over existence would lessen, until existence would assert its primacy over essence in modern thought.

One particular manifestation of this problem is Augustine's decisive framework for describing the relation between essence and existence.

When considering how one can think God as one being but also with three existent persons, he uses the example of the master and slave, and how the master exists in himself outside of his relation with the slave. This is a weak analogy because God is always already triune and nothing but triune. The master's role of master is merely accidental to who he is.

It can only be thought now through the logic of the exception. The relative is exclusive included in the absolute God, and thus relation is the foundation of God's nature.

All the disputes and contradictions of church history emerge from this aporia, this paradox. We must abandon the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ontology to resolve these questions.

The beginnings of a modal ontology can be found in the correspondence between Leibniz and the Jesuit Des Bosses which focuses at one point very cogently on the problem of singularity in Aristotelian thought.

Their specific question is how one can think of a unity of composite substances so that they possess a whole beyonda mere sum of its parts.

Leibniz argues that an absolute principle confers a reality of unity upon monads, a necessary unity which elevates these corporeal bodies beyond appearances.

But the question remains how do we think these as a unity rather than as a union of parts.

Des Bosses argues that an absolute accident or substantial mode modified the monads to compose a unified singular substance.

Leibniz by contrast argues that no modifications of the monads occur, the unity is superimposed on top of them. The bond thus constitutes the unity of the body.

The "bond" is an interesting concept to invoke because it occupies an intermediate state where it is often (though not always) unnecessary to its individual elements. A bond is an active potenital that joins what is divided in nature.

This is the path to a post-Aristotelian ontology.

How can we think this bond of corporeal singularities as something real? While Des Bosses follows the traditional route of saying the accident emanates from substantial form, Leibniz introduces a new principle which think it in the order of substance in a radical way that rethinks substance itself.

He uses the analogy of musical echo to describe this new sense. A substantial bond is not a mode since the monads are not modified or linked in an essential way, only naturally. Each can exist independently of one another. Leibniz invokes the image of the echo to express the intimacy and exteriority of bond and monads. There is an originary echo that is the source of these modifications.

Thus "this body" does not refer to an individuality of substance but a mere appearance. The echo demands the monads but does not depend upon them. The Aristotelian formula "what it was for X to be" is no longer presupposed but an active force.

Leibniz is most directly responding to Suarez where the relation between essence and existence had already grown ambivalent as Scholasticism attempted to solve for the problem of individuation.

The common starting point in this debate is that existence adds something to essence. Henry of Ghent argued this difference between essence and existence is merely a distinction of the mind, while Aquinas affirmed a real difference between essence and existence, at least in created beings.

Suarez evolved a third position taken from Scotus which argued that there is a formal distinction between esssence and existence, intermediate between a real difference and one only in reason. The individual adds something really distinct to the common nature but singular existence is not distinct from essence in the way one thing is distinct from another. Singular existence thus is not reducible to essence, nor fully separable form it.

This is how mode emerges as a category of ontology.

Giles of Viterbo was the first to suggest a theory of modes. He argued that extension is something other than matter. For example as in the popular Scholastic example of transubstantiation, the essence of the substance is not expressed nor just a mere accident. Christ has a mode of being that "inheres" in the bread and wine, converted into body and blood.

Thus, being for itself and being in another differ modally.

Giles thus disagrees with Henry of Ghent and argues that nature and supposition (i.e. singular existence) do have a real difference, but this real difference is modal. He use the example of how a human and humanity have a true, real difference.

Thus the mode is both ontological and logical.

Scotus' formal distinction would be radicalized by Suarez into a modal distinction that has a reality outside essence. Mode is an affection of the thing. It cannot have an essence of its own, but for Suarez does have a real distinction from it.

To think this through then, if singular existence is a mode of essence, would not this make individuation impossible or unthinkable? Suarez does not want to concede this, but the question is introduced if existence is inessential, nothing more than a modification of essence, and essence can fully subsist without mode. How then does essence even emerge into existence?

Scotus had thought this problem through haecceity, the "thisness" of a thing. Individuation is not an additional essence but it is a real addition to a common nature. This bypasses the need in hypostatic ontology to identify a principle of individuation. Now in modal ontology, there is only an ultimacy of form, a extreme modification to produce the indviidual. The common form is indifferent to singularity, and the essence is indifferent to both generality and singularity.

Suarez radicalized this starting to argue that essence does not need any principle of individuation whatsoever, for individual existence and common sense no longer have a modal difference but a difference of reason. It is not founded in the thing distinct from the essence.

For Suarez, the essence of the singular thing already contains its possible individuation and needs no real supplement, not even mode itself.

How then can the individual be produced in its singularity?

Aristotle's answer was the problematic formulation of the potential-actual distinction.

Scotus posited an indifferent essence, and Suarez then must adopt an aptitude for an essence to drive toward actualization in singular existence.

Scotus has posited an indifference, Suarez strengthens it to aptitude.

But what can this aptitude entail if essence already contains all the ingredients of the individual, so to speak? This is Leibniz's question to Des Bosses.

Suarez offers one gesture to thinking the difference of essence and existence. He at one point mentions the individuation of beign is a mode of expression for the entity. Existence is merely more determinate than essence.

What this expressivity is remains undeveloped by Suarez.

So to return to Leibniz and Des Bosses, Des Bosses affirms the traditional modal view that existence is merely a mode of being. However, Leibniz takes a new path by introducing the substantial bond. The bond demands unity of its monads. This is a further strengthening of what Suarez had called aptitude, and Scotus had called indifference.

Spinoza and Leibniz may sound similar here, but it is important to remember that Leibniz was highly critical of Spinoza. For Spinoza argued that nothing existed except substance and modes. He never directly mentions the problem of individuation, and this is likely because he understood the individual as only having the weakest difference from substance (i.e. relation). A human being is a mode in God.

Unfortunately, none of this elaborated very much by Spinoza, but it is important to note that while in hypostatic ontology, there is a "going out" from the One, for Spinoza there is no such movement. The modes remain in God.

This is the problem Heidegger himself equivocated on over time as he sought to estabish the difference between Being and beings. In 1943, for example, he wrote that Being is certainly without beings but then changed this in 1949 to say Being is never without beings.

This problem of ontological difference is solved in modal ontology. The relationship of being and modes is not one of identity or difference, for it can be both identical and different in the mode. The two can coincide. Hence the profundity of Spinoza's famous quote, "Deus sive natura", the sive expression the neutralization of identity and difference. God modifies himself as the agent-patient.

It is difficult for us to think modality. Our accustomed language is driven by substantival terminology, while modality is adverbial in nature.

Spinoza's immanent cause, the agent-patient is the nature. "Use" is the proper medial term to describe how being uses-itself.

The active element of immanent cause expresses itself in the second element. It neutralizes causality itself, decimating all hierarchy.

To tie this all then together, the ti en einai is the identity-relation of a thing with itself, only thinkable when a thing is named. A thing's sayability renders its being.

Hence why Scotus calls it a formal distinction, it is simple a matter of being-said. Through invoking it, something happens outside the mind reify it without full actualization. Scotus extends the being of relation as a form, the weakest thing perhaps, but still an existing thing. This is the ens debilissimum.

Scotus inherits Augustine's error which conceives essence in itself and which must presuppose its being said relatively, an essence independent of relation. God's Trinitarian essence can be considered independently of his unitary essence.

However this means that one could love God and not Christ, which is clearly false. This would allow us to love an identity only its essence without necessarily what it is in existence.

Yet essence cannot be without relation, nor being without the entity. The modal relation passes between the entity and its identity with itself. Singularity and sayability cross over into one another. Being is always already said.

Immanent cause is a foundation of modal ontology, further furnished by Leibniz's concept of demand. Existence, possibility, and contingency are all modified by this new kind of demand which in turn demands us to rethink philosophical categories. The possible demands to be made real. In Latin, existiturientia. God's demand to exist renders necessary the possible.

Leibniz thought existence to be the object of demand but this betrays his commitments to traditional ontological priority.

What if demand is more original than this distinction between essence and existence?

Demand does not necessitate its object. A thing can be demanded and yet not come to be. Here lives the hyphen which unites the ontic and the logical.

This unification is not a substantial connection, but it is real. Language and world confront each other through pure demand, a pure sayability.

In becoming demand, essence is not merely potential of something else but a model of potential in itself. The possible does not demand to exist as Leibniz claimed, but the real demands to be possible. Being is not the agent-patient of the middle voice, making use of itself.

Leibniz's substantial bond must now be rethought. Being does not pre-exist its modes but is constitued itself through its modifications. Substance must be replaced with demand. The doctrine of transcendnetals must be understood as being's demand to be transcendentals as modes. Hence why Spinoza defines essence as conatus, a term of the middle voice, a medial proess.

Singular existence as mode is thus an infinite series of modal oscillations as substance expresses itself in tension with its manifestations.

It has been said that metaphysics is the science of "being qua being" but the qua has always remained uninvestigated. It is this qua that is the originary mode, the soruce of the modifications of being. It must be restored to its com-moditas, its rhythmic measure, a form without fixture that was articulated in Presocratic philosophy.

Mode itself a peculiar temporarily. The Latin modo expresses a sense of indeterminate recency. It is sometimes translated as "just now", the minimal level of a temporal gap between two things. In a sense it is not past, present, or future. (The term modernity can best be understood in this sense as positing oneself in temporal relationship with something earlier.)

Mode is indifferent to ontology and ethics. Being demands its modifications, that is its ethos. The mode in which something is belongs both to ontology and ethics.

Now we can confront Heidegger's ontology. Heidegger emphasized that his sense of existence is founded on the distinction between essence and existence. Dasein is not indifferent to its modifications, it always is its mode of being.

Yet even in such surprisingly modal terms, Heidegger never commits himself to it. It is perhaps his latent Aristotelianism, or some other reason. But either way, it does indicate how he could never confront Spinoza.

Agamben closes this section with a reflection on Heidegger.

Throughout the thirties, Heidegger struggled to articulate the question that confronts every first year student of philosophy: what is the relation between the human and Dasein?

The circular ontological constitution of Dasein in Being and Time entails a priority and distinctiveness of Dasein that is itself ontological, rather than ontic. Heidegger strives to think outside ontology, so how does he resolve this?