Prospectus
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.
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 Agambem would like to call such a formulaic method into question. Perhaps here the concepts we see 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, but what theoretical discourse has consigned it to.
As Debord understood, private life accompanies us 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 undersand the political condition.
As Plato notes in the Alcibiades, the imperative command is to 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 Nicomeachean 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 as Plato had originally opposed chresis with dynamis in Euthydemus, and Aristotle would reiterate this dichotomy at one point. But later on he shifts this 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 likenign 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 description of the agent-patient in his compendium on Hebrew grammar, 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 isntead 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?
Later he introduces Ereignis as the way in which human being and Dasein can have co-belonging and reciprocal founding of one another.
Yet how does this rational animal human become Dasein? If Being and its clearing is grounded in Dasein, does Dasein need to be founded in the human being?
Heidegger never seems to tackle this question head on, only approaching it "angularly" as Walter Benjamin put it. At one point he argues the human being is the project of Being, detached from an anthropological basis. Yet Dasein is also always already framed in reference to the human being. The human being as steward of the truth of Being thus belongs to Being in a unique way.
Furthermore, he often insists the Dasein is defined by the "there" but this remains cryptic and impenetrable to further analysis as well, offered as a non-place of the living human being. The "there" seems expropriated by Dasein from the human before it is offered up to Being.
Is there an animal-human for Heidegger that is not yet human (i.e. a non-rational human)? Taking this to the next level, if the human being only becomes Dasein in being opened up to Being, then is there a non-human human that must be transformed into Dasein?
Heidegger fumbles around with this question as well, offering thrownness as an answer for how Dasein is generated in response to the call of Being, but this still presupposes a non-human that is prior to the human.
It is like his presupposition that Dasein has both ontic and ontological priority over simple life but yet remains founded upon it.
It is mirrored in his exposition on animal life which is marked by the paradox of animals both being radically closed from the world through stimuli response, but also radically open to it in their simplicity. Animal captivation is ecstatic in the same way as human ecstasy suspends all and renders Being totally open.
It would seem then that Dasein is an animal that has grasped its animality and from this makes the human being possible, but the human being itself is void, only a suspension of animality.
The Grundstimmung of Heideggers' thoguht is an obstinate consignment to something that refuses itself, producing a task that one must assume but cannot carry out. An attitude which may explain his support of National Socialism.
In a sense, Heidegger excludes the human being but captures it on the outside to thus found Dasein and Being on top of it. An inclusive exclusion of the human.
Levinas would radicalize this thrownness as the consignment most fundamental to Dasein. For Heidegger, the "there" is factical but also normative, but for Levinas in almost caricature extension of this, Dasein is always running away from this consignment, perhaps what Heidegger himself unintentionally thought this as.
Another student of Heidegger, Oskar Becker, inverts this being-thrown into a sense of lightness and adventure. One is free to move or step out of where one is thrown, framing it as Dawesen. A weightless mobility of being, a "being carried".
Being thrown and being carried are thus the two poles of existence. One can perhaps see this sense of being carried most clearly in Helen Grund Hessel's diary of summer adventures. How the love affairs and stories and individuals flow into one another as she is being carried through life, surpassing it and entering a form-of-life.
Form-of-Life
A genealogy of zoe must begin by noting that the medical tradition treats life as survival and does not philosophically thematize it in the same way.
To return to the investigations of Homo Sacer I, we see in Aristotle's Politics that he is concerned with citizens living in a hierarchical community where one can live well, not as mere isolated, living bodies. The polis itself weaves together.
The perfect community is thus the unity of simply living (zoe) with politically qualified life (bios).
Autarchy is the passage from simple, factical life to politically qualified life. In fact political life is necessary autarchic. The problem is that while human lives participate in the common life, some are excluded from the political community.
It is the fact that autarchy is the measure of reaching a political community, that it shows the polis is genuinely biopolitical. It is not merely a numerical measure but a measure of a life capable of happiness.
Aristotle thematized life in De Anima where he divides the functions of the soul, offering nutritive or vegetative life as the most fundamental and basic form of life. Interestingly enough, while nutritive life can live apart from sensation or intellect, sensation and intellect cannot live apart from nutritive life.
Thus nutritive life is an inclusive exclusion upon which all other life depends for its own existence. Zoe msut be divided into multiple articulations such as nutritive life and exclude that articulation in order to negative formulate the polis above and on top of this negativity.
Thus the ontological-biopolitical machine of the West is founded upon this division of life. The polis cannot exist outside this exclusion of nutritive life. Aristotle's division of the soul is thus fundamentally political.
And as we can see with the advent of resuscitation technology, we have reached a decisive point in Western biopolitics where it no longer seems appropriate to separate vegetative life form other vital human functions. All the concepts o politics can be called into question.
If nutritive life is most fundamental to all life in general, one may also notice upon a closer reading of De Anima that Aristotle ties it most closely to the operation of the intellect. If nutritive life is concerned with the generation and use of food, so too is the intellectual principle concerned with the generation and the use of thought.
Nutritive life is thus this middle-voice conatus that drives every being to preserve itself and to feed itself. It confers unity and sense on every form of life. We must now rethink the indivisibility of form and life.
Form-of-life erases the distinction between zoe and bios in which bare life is produced.
What does a form-of-life mean? Individual modes and acts are no longer facts but potentialities. Potential can be suspended and contemplated. Habit may or may not exercise this potential through use of self according to the form-of-life. Potential does not belong to a subject, for the human being is indifferent to the actualization of potential.
Form-of-life is thus the memory and repetition of the event of anthropogenesis. The anthropogenetic event is the fracture of life and language, going all the way back to Aristotle's original division. Politics is the experience of this recapitulated division of life, where bare life is captured on the outside as the foundation of the political order. Bare life is not superior principle as Bataille would say but an utter reduction.
Foucault rightly observed that biopolitics is fundamentally true, but the biological concept of life has remained uninvestigated, ceding such terminological territory to the medical establishment which in turn has reduced it to survival.
Only the reunion of these two articulations can truly think a political life oriented toward happiness. It is thought that connects form and life into form-of-life. Thought as a self-affection, a use of oneself where community and potential are identified with one another without remainder. Community is thus dependent upon potentiality to bring about this cohabitation.
Dante had once posed this multitudo that participates in the potential of thought. It is not a numerical concept but a generic form of existence proper to the human potential of thought. It is not an aggregation of individuals but something that exists in generic actualization that thinks through possible, for no politics would be possible if all actualizations are individual.
Thus multitudo is inherently political. In modern thought, the individual can think the multitudo throught the Averroes' notion of common intellect. A unity of thought out there even if exercised individaully and case-by-case. This is the danger of the Internet that one cannot experience the potential of human knowlege as all is presented as pre-constituted and permanently available.
Thought is this unitary potential to constitute multiple forms of life into a form-of-life, and thus it must be subordinated to politics.
A genealogy of the modern concept of life must begin with Neoplatonism's hypostatization of zoe which subseuqently entered and defined Christian thought. Across Gnostic, Christian, and other texts of late antiquity zoe comes to replace bios more and more.
Plotinus himself indicates this substitution by attributing change and movement and life (zoe) ot being itself, even attributing contemplation to all living beings. Thus zoe is no longer the sum of heterogeneous parts but is a unitary, vital phenomenon of "living contemplation", analogous to the Stoic concept of a logical life, one which Plotinus would adopt himself.
This unity of life and thought presents a new ontological status: the form of life. The bio-ontology of Plotinus thinks life not as undifferentiated subject that lies underneath but as an indivisible whole. Life is a homonym where each form of life is differentiated according to its being. The happy life is the form of life which passes into it completely, without remainder, thus abolishing the ancient opposition of bios and zoe.
Only at this limit concept of autarchy can it pass over into living well through the form of life, healing the fracture introduced by Aristotelian ontology.
Marius Victorinus inherited Plotinus' sense of the form-of-life which was then passed on to Augustine who subsequently thought the unity and consubstantiality Father and Son as bio-ontology. This consubstantiality os co-originarily generates in the form-of-life, and Victorinus thus configured the Trinity as a modal ontology. However, this was to be rejected in favor of hypostatic procession, God's three persons as modes of one divine substance, rather than the indistinction of substance and modes.
In God, form of life is so inseparably united to living that one cannot say that God has existence, but rather he exists his living.
To apply this beyond theology, we can say that the form-of-life is not in a subject but generated as a mode through life.
The problem again is that bios is a form of life but it is separable from life (zoe), an originary exclusion which produces politically qualified life on the bones of bare life. We must neutralize this distinction of two sorts of life. Happiness is only possible in the dissolution of this division.
There a few examples of the form-of-life:
- If we look at Krafft-Ebing's work on sexual psychopathy, we can see these individuals participate in a blessed life where they live out free use of their bodies.
- A more high-brow example is early Christianity where the unity of life and logos is thought in Origen and Marius Victorinus
- The Franciscan order and its radical theory of poverty and use
- Plutarch's exemplary historical characters he presents in their form-of-life
- Ferdinand Deligny observed a home of autistic children, tracing out a map of their movements. The etched out circles and patterns of their routes offer a prelinguistic and yet collective form-of-life.
- Personal advertisements in newspapers for dating encapsulate the form-of-life. A photo paired with hobbies.
Kafka once observed a girl working at a hotel who did something slightly disgusting yet in perfect innocence. It reminded him how it is those slightly disgusting mannerisms in which one becomes most intimate and endearing to us, their most unforgettable. Mannerisms express the indissoluble unity of the form-of-life, which is at the same time separable from every living thing.
So far the form-of-life has been posed as an ethical or aesthetic problem but it must be elevated to an ontological level, if we are to properly problematize style and the mode of life.
An ontology of style that can explain how multiple modes can modify or express one substance. This is a question that is unclear though many in the poetic tradition would point to contemplative love for how we can know oneself and another.
Plotinus described the life of gods and happy men as a "exile of one along with one alone" expressing both a communal bond and a separation from the world. This is not a ban of the individual from the city, but a willful withdrawal of one along being with one along in felicity and lightness.
Philosophy is thus outside of politics and yet included in it. One lays claim to one's own bare life. To live as a political factical existent outside all political relation.
When two entities make contact, there is only nothing between them such as how thought touches what is intelligible. So too when bios and zoe are in contact they become the form of life. As Heidegger noted in his course on Holderlin, such a dwelling of two opposites alongside one another is intimacy, the most originary dimension accessible to the human being who lives in harmonic opposition to others, thus negating and neutralizing all opposition.
All opposition is thus rendered inoperative when engaged in political intimacy. It is this archeological drive to uncover the originary unity of things that can disclose the gap at the center of the ontologico-political machine and thus neutralize it.
Wittgeinstein used the term "form of life" to describe the language game. It is taking part in activity, something beyond mere rightness or wrongness of following rules. It is this language game that is posed as the originary phenomenon which we must stop all investigation at. It is impenetrable and what we are given. It is the use of the pieces of the chessboard that give them meaning and their form-of-life. Constitutive rules are not to be considered in the sense of explicitly communicable set of rules, but the fact the pieces of chess are immanent to their movement, their activity in their form of life. It is why we say when asked, "This is simply what we do."
Repeating an earlier thought, Foucault links truth to the mode of form of life in Hermeneutics of the Subject, particularly through Greek Cynicism where the biography of the artist must testify to truth through its very form, but also through the practice of the work. Art and life have become indeterminate through the corporeality of the artist.
If form-of-life is an inseparable unity, then how can their non-relation be thought, since they are now given together?
Every trade or profession has a certain praxis that defines it, an identification which has come into crisis in modernity, particularly in the vocation ot an artist. Whereas in classical Greece, the activity of the artist was defined exclusively by the work reduced, in the modern world artistic work is almost considered residual to artistic genius.
Form-of-life is not defined by relation to praxis or work but rather im-potential, the ability to not come to pass, or in other words the suspension of operativity in contemplation.
A living being cannot be defined by its work only its inoperativity, that is the mode of its relation to pure potential. As Breal has suggested, ethos is merely just selfhood, the mode in which one comes into contact with oneself thorugh use-of-oneself. There is not such things as recognition for the form-of-life by either self or others.
Agamben closes this section by turning to the myth of Er at the end of Plato's Republic. In this often overlooked section, Er the Pamphylian dies and his soul goes to the afterlife. There all the souls go on a journey together before they must choose the next life they will enter through a kind of lottery system, thereafter descending back to the earthly world.
At birth, every soul is united to a certain form of life that it is consigned to until death. The zoe of mortals is always thrown into bios, but there remains a choice of a kind of bios which thus implies the moral categories of responsibility and fault.
It should be noted that the souls do not have free choice to any life that may be out there. They must pick up the lot is assigned to them. Justice in this cosmic vision is blind and violent, binding unwitting souls to necessity in a fixed game. How can one judge the actions of one who no longer has power.
The myth of Er shows destiny in its tragedy is a comic gesture. Justice is impossible as all are submitted to blind choice.
Yet despite this Plato suggests that even though our choices are constrainted, we must choose the best option among the presented forms of life.
They must seek the golden mean in the life they pick up. Bios is a single field of forces between two extremes. In the bios that we are forced to choose, we must choose virtue as the mean that cuts life in half and makes use of it as form-of-life.
The herald in this myth does not show a set of rules for each soul to live its live but only offers paradigmmatic examples. The paradigm after all is how ideas and singular things can be represented in their individuality, deactivating their own empirical givenness and rendering other singularities intelligible.
Porphyry's reading of this myth points out the ambiguous sense in which Plato uses bios, both in its standard sense and substituting it for zoe. The soul has an essential predetermined zoe before it chooses a particular bios. The goal of this myth is not to better represent the soul but to deactivate it altogether.
Aristotle tries to force the bond between soul and zoe but this divides life further into a distinction that then produces bare life.
The soul is both factically united to a particular zoe and bios but irreducible to these either. The soul is in the bodily life and does coincide with bios. The sould indissolubly holds both kinds of life in contact, testifying on both of their behalf.
Epilogue: Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential
This archeology of politics is not concerned with particular Western institutions but rather to question the originary structure of politics itself, to question its hidden foundation of bare life, that inclusive exclusion on which all Western ontology has been crafted.
Bare life must not be confused with natural life.
Natural life is made bare through sacralization, its capture on the outside. It is this cornerstone exception which must be deactivated first before something new can be thought.
It has been shown how the structure of the exception is the arche of every sphere, constitutivelyy linked to the event of language in which anthropogenesis occurs. Language founds itself on the inclusive exclusion of the non-linguistic.
This arche divides factical experience in two and pushes one part down to the origin, through exclusion in order to found upon that sacralized half the elevation of the other half.
The ongoing game of Western thought has been to rename, play, and redeploy these halves against each other. To solve this, we cannot simply go back archeologically to a more originary beginning. The only beginning we can reach is the one that results from deactivating this machine. Hence first philsophy is always final philosophy.
The fundamental problem today is inoperativity.
Because it is caught up in the model of operativity, constituent power cannot create a situation that allows us to escape these restrictions.
We must instead think destituent potential as the new politics, our only way to move beyond the aporias at the root of the theory of sovereignty and theology of omnipotence.
We saw in Homo Sacer I the ban as a limit form of potential which cast the individual out of the community. But since it does deactivate all relation, it also offers us a positive example of how to think a purely destituent potential that can never be resolved into constituted power.
As we saw in this volume, Augustine posited essence as something outside of relation, but we must elevate relation to become the ultimate ontological category. Scotus' doctrine of formal being comes closest to formulating relation as such as this weakest form of being on which all else can be founded. The presuppositional structure of language is expressed in relation itself.
Relation when considered in itself is non-relational. It is pure destituent potential. Yet also because it is so ontologically weak, it is the hardest to grasp in language.
Inoperativity and destituent potential are linked in this capacity to render something operative without destroying it, thus opening the path for new potentialities to emerge. Paul himself deploys a destituent potential when he describes the deactivation of the law through the messianic call.
Twentieth century thought has come close but never fully succeeded in grasping this notion of destituent power. Even philosophical archeology cannot go back to some historical a priori in order to depose it.
We must instead understand that anarchy is internal to power and thus render it destituent.
By overturning the Aristotelian opposition of act and potential, we now the potential-not-to that is the basis of a constitutively destituent form-of-life.
All living beings are in a form-of-life but not always are a form-of-life. The constitution of form-of-life destitutes all singular forms of life, therefore inoperativity must be immanent in every life.
Contemplation is thus most proper to the uman life. It renders inoperative all functions of the living being, so that they idle. From here all possibility is open. Politics and art are these dimensions of deactivation and contemplation.
As Spinoza once wrote, the greatest good for a human being is the joy that results in contemplating themselves and their own potential for action.
In Review
Homo Sacer, this encyclopedic garden of forking paths has come to a close.
Is this final installment as decisive or conclusive as could be hoped?
No, but Agamben himself notes that was not entirely the goal. He merely sought to clear the ground to think something new, even if, by his own admission, he were to stumble in the process.
We get our glimpse of form-of-life and modal ontology that had been teased through all these volumes.
Answers that may not be solutions, but ones we shall explore nonetheless.
Like Agamben, I intend this reflection to be neither comprehensive nor conclusive in considering this finale to Homo Sacer. That would take more space than this already bloated post would be able to handle.
We will do a few things here:
Isolate some weaknesses and incongruities in the arguments presented. More for the sake of sardonic amusement than anything. Or for those with a dogmatic trust in Agamben, to loosen the grip of a literalist reading.
Through such considerations, ascertain what value remains of them and their strategic worth in the Homo Sacer project.
Then, we will identify two key pieces of the substratum that drives Agamben's work and thought. One could playfully call them the originary structure of Agamben's ontology.
A Tower of Leaky Buckets
We have noted in earlier installments certain eyebrow-raising statements or insinuations Agamben makes or leads us to, sometimes in ways that seem to undermine his own position. It is hard to tell how much of this is intentional or accidental.
There is no shortage of these faux pas type statements here in IV.2 either.
Sexual Psychopathy as a Way of Life?
To briefly survey these, let us consider the brief range of examples he provides to illustrate to us the "form-of-life", where life is not reducible to a rule. What he posits as the ultimate ethical project.
In IV.1, our key to understanding the form-of-life is the Western cenobitic tradition, particularly the Franciscan order. Like I noted then, it is not clear what is so distinctively unique about the Franciscans to elevate them to such an exemplary status above other mendicant orders or even other movements across human history.
In IV.2 Part Three, chapter 5 he provides us a small array of examples of practitioners of the form-of-life.
His very first example are the individuals documented in Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis: criminal sexual predators. What Agamben likely had in mind by going here is Foucault's fascination with BDSM as a destabilization of power relations, but it remains all the same rather bizarre that the first example of this ethical paradigm would be sexual perverts. This is even more questionable considering the point of form-of-life is that it collapses the "ought" into the "is". You should not bind yourself to an external law but should live out your existence free of that constraint.
So it is not even a message about those suffering from sexual psychopathy who hold themselves in restraint but rather those who make use of their desires.
From sexual perversion, he proceeds to note certain Christian thinkers who speak about this form-of-life, namely Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Marius Victorinus, but says nothing about the exemplary practice of such alternative early Christian thought. From there he gestures incredibly briefly to the Franciscans again and then to Plutarch's Lives as an example of the form-of-life.
He then introduces two other questionable examples to round it out.
Another example of the form-of-life is the particular paths that mute, autistic children will take when running around the house. Referring to it as a pre-linguistic collective form-of-life. A charming example but one that has no clear bearing on anything spoken of before.
And then he also talks about personal dating ads in newspapers as an example both positive and negative of the form-of-life, the way it tries to encapsulate who someone is with a photo and a bulleted list of hobbies.
So our only concrete practitioners of the form-of-life introduced in this chapter are sexual predators, autistic children, and Tinder users.
This is the new ethical paradigm we have been building toward for so long. For one who speaks so much of the paradigmmatic example he in no way indicates how these paradigmmatic figures can speak into our own lives.
We will return to the form-of-life, but I would like to consider Agamben's strikingly bold move of elevating slavery to an ontological model.
Let's Return to Slavery?
Agamben opens IV.2 with a consideration of the ancient theory of slavery. He must be credited for his ability to attempt to see the phenomenon in strikingly neutral lens, but he perhaps goes too far in raising it as a preferable ethical relation, at least from what he seems to suggest.
The fundamental idea again is the ancients had no abstract sense of labor. There was merely work, produced by the soul. Because the slave belonged to the master, their work belonged to the soul of the master as well. Thus masters could put to use the bodies of the slave.
Because Agamben is concerned with the critique of operativity, that is the production of work, he sees this theoretical treatment of slavery as a preferable norm for theorizing "what one does". Instead of being-put-to-work, we should make use of our bodies. This ostensibly liberates us from being compelled toward certain ends, or needing to produce results.
But what is implied in this whole argumentative procedure is that slavery is a positive model for living our lives, above the model of modern labor. This is likely not the intent, but an easy conclusion to reach given the terms Agamben speaks of slavery at least in this initial chapter. Even more dubious when one encounters the slightly odious aside he provides detailing a testimony of a slave in ancient times who fantasized about masturbating their master, how this provides sexual pleasure for both parties. He mentions this to do some wordplay around "equipment" in the Heidegger sense, but quite odd taken on its own. Again this is postulated as superior to the reduction to bare life we experience in contemporary society.
However, much of what Agamben says here in the first chapter is contradicted by a reversed formulation of slavery in chapter 7, without any indication as to whether he is revising his perspective.
In chapter 7, Agamben is considering how the fifth cause of instrumentality is the ontological foundation of technology as a whole. As seen in earlier volumes, Aquinas introduced the instrumental cause to explain the priest's role in the performance of the sacraments. A founding articulation of the ontology of operativity, later radicalized by Suarez who reduced all phenomena as caused by the instrumental arrangement of providence.
Near the end of this chapter, Agamben points out that since slavery consigns the body to the work of another, in a sense the the slave is merely the instrumental cause of the master's work. Thus the connection between technology and slavery is more fundamental than work itself as all politically qualified life (bios) is founded upon the exclusion of the bare life of the slave.
But did we not just surmise in Chapter 1 that ancient slave labor was excluded from the realm of work (ergon), falling under the umbrella of use which Agamben has time and again repeated is the path to escape the ontology of operativity? Now he explicitly ties it the production of bare life and technology and the ontology of opeativity, thus making it reprehensible. This seems like a total negation of all the claims presented in the first chapter, and he had spent a lengthy amount of space constructing such an alternative picture of the theory of slavery.
He wraps up this thought with an even more muddy-the-waters assertion that modern technology alienates human beings from both their bodies and their animal nature, inventing an entirely new form of "slavery" we live under. The implication being that our life with modern technology is in fact worse than physical slavery.
It is not clear how these ideas are meant to coinhere.
Both/And
The same can be said of technology which at some points Agamben interprets favorably in the Heidegger lens through how we relate to the world through equipment (i.e. instruments), an example of use. We use instruments.
But then when he circles back to it later in the chapter, instrumentality is the original sin of modern operativity (which is more consistent with his views in II.4). This could perhaps be explained by his statement that modern utility arises out of the instrumental cause, but he never provides states or supports the idea of a genealogical difference between ancient use (chresis) and modern utility outside this gesture to instrumentality.
We will return to his account of use (chresis) soon, but this double treatment of technology and slavery is not alone in IV.2 for this kind of contradictory protrayal.
We see this also with Neoplatonic philosophy where hypostasis is labeled a primary villain in the emergence of the ontology of operativity and command, but then later it is also the ground zero of a "form-of-life" ethic that we are seeking out to think something new. The tension and ambivalence of Neoplatonism as hero and villain is never addressed or acknowledged which is surprising given the number of deviations and asides Agamben had made to underscore any such paradoxical tensions, even where such connections seem tenuous.
It is not fully clear how the Neoplatonic ethic of contemplation and "form-of-life" could be divorced from the hypostatic ontology of the One, particularly considering the direction of such contemplation. This is not addressed.
We see this same kind of fundamental ambiguity in Agamben's treatment of zoe/bios in the Greek polis.
Again this split is the most originary sin of all Western ontology for Agamben, the division of life.
Yet there is a considerable degree of whiplash in his handling of this division because it at times seems like the Greeks are at at fault for introducing or cementing such a division, particularly Aristotle, but then at other times the Greeks are lauded for thinking through how the division of life can be healed. This back-and-forth occurs with such frequency, I will not attempt to exhaustively document it here, but it does cripple our ability to understand what it means for bare life to be produced in historical concreteness.
It is frankly not very convincing. Some space had been dedicated in Homo Sacer I to identifying a true semantic split between bios and zoe. It had been named but not justified and rests on rather flimsy grounds. Every subsequent volume has gestured to this terminological distinction as something that is at times needing more exploration but also has already been clearly seen and articulated to the point of becoming a philosophical postulate, all while no work is being done to actually think through this distinction.
So to now return to the Greek polis and argue that they have already thought through healing the fracture for us, a fracture whose existence is questionable in the first place, it seems like Agamben is merely solving a puzzle of his own design. He invented a separate philosophical discourse to then pretend to find solutions in old terms by simply using them how they would have been used in their pre-existing framework anyway.
Does the polis produce the division of life into zoe and bios by which bare life emerges, or is the healing of that division?
At many times it seems like Agamben is merely reinventing the wheel of virtue ethics or identifying the union of the rational and animal nature in man, just through the deployment of overly complex terminology to render such ideas inaccessible or foreign to most readers of classics.
It would be most desirable to read these assessments of polis, zoe, bios, and soul from a more neutral, dare we say truly archeological lens, but Agamben so candidly shows his cards on wanting to label certain concepts and thinkers heros or villains, good or bad, that it is far too clear what his end goal is. And that can make his intermediate assessments all the more puzzling and incoherent.
Such casual looseness of terminology can be seen in how he again applies the label of biopolitics seemingly indiscriminately. Back in Homo Sacer I, he had argued the sovereign as "living law" was the originary biopolitical entity. Now he argues that the Greek polis is fundamentally biopolitical because in Aristotle's Politics he describes the emergence of a polis as happening through reaching a measure of autarchy. Something not quite numerical but does indicate a measure of community. This is like saying that because an ancient people conducted a census, their society was fundamentally biopolitical. It frankly does not fit unless the foundations of the term are completely altered, in which case it loses much of its meaning.
Virtue, but Not Virtue
I had expressed in the IV.1 reflection how Agamben's portrait of a form-of-life seems to resemble rather closely virtue ethics as the alternative to Kantian ethics he is seeking out.
Here we actually get a brief aside on why virtue is not the answer for Agamben, but for reasons that seem more tangential than essential.
He argues that Aristotelian and perhaps implicitly other virtue traditions are constrained by the ontological division of potential and act, it compels the bearer toward actualizing virtue. One must become what is.
Agamben caches this as the circular aporia of being and having at the foundation of Aristotelian ontology. How does one have a habit? Is the habit in them? Are they the habit?
Fair enough on these questions, we will not explore these here, but his articulation of use as a having-habit that bypasses this ontological problem seems to beg a large number of questions.
Could not the having-habit be merely substituted within a virtue ethics as a form-of-life. Or is he saying that virtue as such is too laden with the imperative of actualization, he simply wants new terms?
There does not seem something fundamentally exclusive about this alternative ontology and a more generic sense of virtue (particularly envisioned by Plutarch or Plotinus, two heroes in Agamben's narrative).
Other problems exist around this inoperativity that can liberate us from actualization, but we will return to that later.
What is the Use?
This ties into the sheer lack of clarity surrounding Agamben's technical sense of use. It is ironic that he will lambast Heidegger for ceaselessly chanting the same impenetrable terminology over and over without further analysis, when he is perhaps worse on this count than Heidegger.
Through a linguistic analysis of use in chresis (but also Latin uti?) he argues that this peculiar verbal formation actually produces the indetermination of subject and object which become fused together. It is frankly radically unclear how most of the individual usages of the term in ancient accounts could even indeterminate the subject and object on a grammatical level, let alone an ontological one.
He then says use is further explained through being tied to the middle voice, which is important for his larger point on Spinoza's agent-patient. This grammatically true, chresthai is a deponent verb. However other a brief aside on the deponent, he does not return to deponent verbs whatsoever.
If use is ontologically foundational by virtue of being a deponent verb, then why is the deponent verb as such excluded from a systematic consideration? Why does he ignore the fact that deponent verbs are not merely middle voice but can also be passive as well?
To extend Agamben claims for him, it sounds like he would like to reinvent language to be free of substantival nouns or adjectives or transitive verbs, but for everything to be written in deponent form. This would accomplish one of his favorite talking points, the coincidence of agent and patient in one term, as noted in Agamben's interpretation of Spinoza's immanent cause.
Some striking deficiencies of his statements on this point though is that he does not offer any linguistically precise or accurate formulation of Hebraic syntactic and grammatical structure to support his argument.
He gestures merely to a single sentence from a work on Hebrew grammar that was uncompleted at the time of Spinoza's death, elevating it from grammar to ontology, then making it definitive for all language as a whole.
It obscures the complexities of the fact that there are two quasi-middle voice verbal forms in Hebrew: Nif'al and Hitpa'el. How these map onto the Greek term chresthai and Latin uti whose own grammatical sense of "deponent" verbs varies between them is never acknowledged or explored, though it seems like an obvious step in continuing this investigation, even if its genuine retrieval of Spinoza's project is shaky at best.
The talk around use then merely offers a cheap signifier which is meant to be a strong ontological/ethical player but is never imbued with any depth to render it meaningful or useful for someone looking to continue this work. Perhaps by diving even deeper into the weeds of Agamben could such a path be extracted, but it is not clear even on a subsequent reading.
The Scotus Question
The relation of essence and existence, the problem of individuation, these are the primary concerns of Western ontology's aporia, at least for Agamben.
Any scholar of medieval thought would point to Scotus as at least one primary interlocutor in such discussions.
Agamben himself does not seem quite decided on the role Scotus does play in this story.
A curious ambivalence made even more curious that Scotus himself is never cited directly and does not even appear in the bibliography of IV.2. All references and quotations of Scotus come through Beckmann's 1967 monograph which is strangely bizarre given how Agamben goes to great lengths to cite critical editions of thinkers far more tangential to his thought than Scotus is.
In Part 2, chapter three, we for the first time see some elaboration of a modal ontology, taking Leibniz's monadism as a starting point. Agamben reads Leibniz as responding to Suarez who he argues is the primary articulator of a third position, begun by Scotus but not culminating until Suarez, that there is a formal difference between existence and essence. Suarez renders this a modal distinction.
I can speak to this to some extent from my academic training in medieval philosophy, but Agamben's interpretation misreads both Scotus and Suarez in a way that makes for a neater narrative than plays out in their actual thought.
While Agamben wants to present a story arc of individuation from Scotus' indifference to Suarez's aptitude to Leibniz's demand, this does not hold up textually.
As Giorgio Pini has noted, Scotus' ontology is not merely the formal distinction but also a deeply modal ontology.
In fact Scotus' ontological commitments are far more modal in the way Agamben is seeking out than Suarez, for Suarez rejects haecceities and the formal distinction, arguing existence and essence are distinct only by reason (like Henry of Ghent before Scotus), inhereing in the thing itself rather than a common essence.
What Agamben states as the scholastic common point that "something is added" through individuation, is blanketedly what Suarez denies as individuation comes from the entity itself.
From Scotus we have a richly articulated system of modal ontology with intrinsic modes and groupings that do deserve recognition for their subtletly and sophistication. It is far more coherent and elaborated a system than Agamben provides us. By contrast, Suarez's sense of a modal ontology is constrainted to the one-way separability of existence and essence in creatures.
Although Suarez is considered the forerunner in that chapter, in the epilogue he is entirely erased from the picture in favor of Scotus, praising Scotus for elevating relation as the fundamental ontological category.
But again I do not think Agamben makes a strong case for why Scotus is not sufficiently radical enough to be discarded entirely. One could even contend that he does far more to think a new ontology outside traditional bounds than either Spinoza or Leibniz who Agamben turns to here. This is why Scotus' absence from the bibliography seems to be a significant lapse.
There is a reason both Heidegger and Deleuze took such an acute interest in this thinker.
An Ethic of Narcisscism
This last part could use broader treatment, but I hope to outline what the converging threads of Agamben's inoperativity and form-of-life mean in the political context that we are reminded is so critical for this entire project.
The modal ontology has a few pieces provided to us, albeit provisional and few as they are. Agamben ushers us toward some admixture of Leibniz's monadic bond and Spinoza's immanent cause. He of course mentions the not so friendly relationship the two thinkers and their ideas shared, but does not seem to consider this problematic for fusing them toward a modal ontology.
Again the main ideas are that the agent and patient must be fused together to dissolve the problem of transcendence and the idea that a law or external telos could be applied to a living being.
There are several problems that have been glaring gaps in this kind of project ever since it was first proposed, few of which have been considered that I would like to articulate here.
Immanent cause does not abolish hierarchy, try as Agamben might to make this the case in revising Aristotelian ontology. Even in framing a middle voice, there remains even in Agamben's own terminology an active and passive "element" or aspect, even if the being is united. While he criticizes Aristotle and hypostatic ontology for kicking ontological aporias down the road, he does so himself by merely rendering subject and object indeterminate and moving that transcendent move and immanent recipient into the same entity. He does not persuasively abolish the transcendent.
Deleuze who wrote on Spinoza as well came far closer to this project of absolute immanence in describing the plane of being in terms of circuitry, folds, and currents. One could question if even then the transcendent is entirely removed, but it does radically liquidate subject-object relations into a fluid pool-like movement so to speak. Merely injecting the subject-object into a single verbal form whether Hebraic or deponent does not ontologically abolish the fact that one does something.
This is also the problem of the language of use and the use-of-bodies. Agamben understands the problem Foucault wrestles with in trying to distinguish the substance-subject and substance-self, but he does provide a meaningful solution to escaping the ontological hoops of trying to erase the agent, though he seems to claim he does.
It makes one question why all of thought must be restructured around the need to obviate an agent or subject or law altogether.
Why does Agamben so deeply resent even the semblance or vestige of an external standard to hold oneself to?
Did he have trouble with book deadlines? It can't have been issues with an editor, the text shows hardly any indication of editorial pushback.
All this talk of co-belonging and the reinstantiation of all living beings is something, but the abolition of accountability, responsibility or law has net-negative value for practical application.
It is hard to know how the Agamben political model would even begin to address a dispute between two members given how thoroughly regressive it is in wishing for anarchic communal structures.
While there is widespread recognition of human violence across Homo Sacer, there is no mention of how this new politics would not simply abandon all existing safeguards against violent behavior.
Is this why homo sacer and Auschwitz which were so primary to other volumes of Homo Sacer are passed over in total silence in IV.2?
One congruity that can be identified in this project is the ultimate good that Agamben does postulate, one he explicitly states in the closing good. Quoting Spinoza, it is the highest good for humans to contemplation themselves and their capacity for action.
If the form-of-life is meant in its highest form to be a self-contemplation, would not Narcissus be the premiere exemplar of the form-of-life?
It is perhaps astute that Agamben gestures toward Tinder as an example of the form-of-life: we need to abandon a sense of external calling and purpose and withdraw into a communal ritual of navel-gazing.
It it not even that Agamben's new politics could contingently fall into a culture of solipsism, he seems to be driving straight toward a atomized society of narcisscism. Regardless of the gestures to communal way of life or the inclusion of all, Agamben has stumbled upon perhaps the most exclusive and reductive form of life possible, one that can do nothing but produce the bare life he casts aspersions upon.
These problems all stem from a foundational attitude that almost seems too simple to be true.
The originary structure that Agamben seeks to depose is that of the human relationship with God.
This emerges most succinctly in Agamben's reinvention of Spinoza's God.
While Spinoza's God could be seen as monistic and inert, in a way his detractors noted, Agamben here suggests the abolition of God altogether. We do not live in God's modes. We live in our own individual form-of-life monads. We do not contemplate GOd as the early church and the Franciscans did in their form-of-life, we contemplate ourselves.
Agamben merely seeks to extend the erasure of God from the firmament of ontology. Perhaps it seems to him this is the only way to avert another Auschwitz. At least that is what he seems to indicate.
But one could ask does not the Leibnizian bond, the demand for the real to be possible, thus impose an equally burdensome task on us, that we must out of pure negativity define for ourselves a form-of-life irreducible to external law or standard?
Is not this the most paralyzing thing of all?
To be stripped of all concepts and language and customs and institutions and be told to create from scratch?
This is the torture of the philosopher and the poet, as Agamben notes. They undergo the much-derided "ban" which is the originary structure of bare life in Homo Sacer I. But now the ban is to be wished upon all of us.
We remain killable but unsacrificeble in this dubious project to overturn all Western thought.
Agamben it seems wishes merely to totalize the homo sacer permanently. Can he show us otherwise?
Two Ideas to Consider
We have spent considerable letters in dissecting Homo Sacer for what it says.
While I find it to be deeply imaginative and inquisitive work, I find it more useful as a philosophical questionnaire than systematic work. Still it is leagues above most peddled philosophy that circulates common-place ideas ad infinitum. There is a genuine thrust toward something new here.
I would like to gesture very briefly to two philosophical movements that occur time and again as the argumentative rhythm Agamben lives by.
First, the logic of the exception. Initially highlighted as the inclusive exclusion of homo sacer in the very first volume, Agamben finally thematizes and recognizes the central role it plays in his thought in the epilogue. It is this movement by which a thing is divided, one part of it is excluded and then subsumed as the foundation of the other part which is privileged above it. It smacks of Hegelian sublation, but all the same, it is the driving force in many of Agamben's argumentative moves, particularly the most questionable ones.
It would be worth exploring this idea further. How exception and example relate to the phenomena they seek to describe. To what extent we can speak of this "capture on the outside", almost a Girardian scapegoat upon which all else rests.
Second, the indifferentiation of concepts. Agamben (or at least his translator) nearly universally identifies the motion of philosophical archeology as tracing two disparate threads back to a point of unity, rendering them indeterminate, or the threshold of indistinction as he puts it. This can also happen in the progression of ontology and biopolitics in which such artificial divisions come to collapse through changing circumstances.
It would be interesting to analyze more directly this process of indifferentation as its links up with questions of concepts and thought, parts and whole, singularities and generalities in ways that interested Derrida and Deleuze as well. The difference, so to speak, is that the latter two were concerned with the production of difference, whereas Agamben is interested in the process of indifferentiation, of healing fracture.
And this seems a worthwhile project to consider, if one were to more astutely follow the methods they attest to follow. (After all, archeology is concerned with knowledge practices in attempt to move away from the history of ideas. Treating Aristotle and Plotinus in isolation without consideration of contemporary practices seems to betray the root of Foucauldian archeology. But let me stop myself there.)
We would not want to apply it so blanketedly as Agamben tends to do to just about very pairing of concepts he could find, but it would be an interesting addition to the toolkit, if formulated properly.
And that is perhaps the use we can find in Agamben's thought.
Series Conclusion
I have spent the greater part of a year engaged with Agamben, both in reading Homo Sacer as well as a select few others of his books that I felt could help elucidate the core project presented here.
What I have documented in this perhaps excessively long series is not something I would deem worthy of publication nor have I intended it do be so.
Anyone who cares to have glanced through this may find a private diary of sorts, wrestling through the ideas of a continental theorist who is perhaps the latest and greatest living continental thinker in terms of erudition and breadth. One who sat at the feet of Heidegger and Foucault and is still with us today.
I remain ambivalent about Agamben's philosophical conclusions and his work in general.
He traverses many important domains and fields often left unturned in the world of philosophical writing. This is not to be discounted.
But he suffers from the same weaknesses as many students of the interdisciplinary world who trade depth for shallowness. Philosophical tourism, the collection of ideas like passport stamps or filling out a crossword puzzle of theory wordplay.
Semblances, or signatures as Agamben would put it, between disciplines are taken to be more meaningful or analogous than they are to someone with a more than elementary familiarity with the field (saying this as someone barely familiar with these individual fields at all).
The insistent schematism tends to reduce the source material to a superficial or brutely simplistic rendering that dilutes the content of its singular significance. Not unironic given some of Agamben's rhetoric on the reduction to bare life and his ability to open new potentialities.
Despite the lack of methodological nuance or intellectual discipline, the number of connections and either semantic or homonymic parallels he can find across broad swathes of canonical or obscure texts is all the same very impressive, and perhaps one of the more enjoyable parts of the Homo Sacer journey.
Yet there remain many moments that I have detailed (perhaps ad nauseam for the reader) where bizarre twists of logic or reasoning take place that, especially when juxtaposed with the meticulous philological tracing, are rather disconcerting for the reader who may be attempting to assess Agamben's philosophical acumen. Is there something of worth beneath the ponderous exposition?
Such theoretical galavanting is fun and all and frankly par for the course in the continental philosophical mode, but the systematic ambitions that Agamben pronounces again and again do commit the oeuvre to a higher standard of analytic systematicity that Agamben consistently undermines in his fanciful flight from one lustrous object of inquiry to the next.
Ironically, what is most philosophically novel and interesting about Homo Sacer is almost never treated explicitly but lurks behind the scenes as the operative force that shapes the investigation.
The logic of the exception and the indifferentiation of concepts are even more fundamental to Agamben's thought than bare life or the modal ontology that he frames as the centerpiece. And yet these unthematized key figures only have an glimmering iota importance recognized in the epilogue of this last volume, almost as if Agamben came to this realization himself as he wrote his concluding thoughts on destituent potential.
Both these and other core agents of Agamben's thought make for more interesting opportunities of further research than the middle voice and modal ontology he circles so frequently. Perhaps someone may take the time to work these out further, or, failing that, they can be considered inoperative, things for us to contemplate in their destituent potential.
I do not know at this stage if I will again publish my notes on this site for other thinkers I read, like I have with Agamben.
This may not be the most appropriate venue for such work.
Perhaps I will come back to Agamben's other smaller works, some of which I have read, and produce notes on those.
Or more likely, I will take a more fine tuned approach to the philosphical etchings that appear here on this site. Something more original and to the point than sundry summaries.
As things come together.
Which they do, in the end.