The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

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  HOMO SACER I

  (and of the state of exception that it inaugurates) that our position distinguishes itself from that of deconstruction. Our age does indeed stand in front of language just as the man from the country in the parable stands in front of the door of the Law. What threatens thinking here is the possibility that thinking might find itself condemned to infinite negotiations with the doorkeeper or, even worse, that it might end by itself assuming the role of the

  doorkeeper who, without really blocking the entry, shelters the Nothing onto which the

  door opens. As the evangelical warning cited by Origen concerning the interpretation of

  Scripture has it: “Woe to you, men of the Law, for you have taken away the key to knowl-

  edge: you yourselves have not entered, and you have not let the others who approached

  enter either” (which ought to be reformulated as follows: “Woe to you, who have not

  wanted to enter into the door of the Law but have not permitted it to be closed either”).

  4.4. This is the context in which one must read both the singular “inversion”

  that Benjamin, in his essay on Kafka, opposes to law’s being in force without

  significance, and the enigmatic allusion, in his eighth “Theses on the Philosophy

  of History,” to a “real” state of exception. A life that resolves itself completely

  into writing corresponds, for Benjamin, to a Torah whose key has been lost: “I

  consider the sense of the inversion toward which many of Kafka’s allegories tend

  to lie in an attempt to transform life into Scripture” (Benjamin and Scholem,

  Briefwechsel, p. 155). Analogously, the eighth thesis opposes a “real” ( wirklich) state of exception, which it is our task to bring about, to the state of exception in which

  we live, which has become the rule: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that

  the ‘state of exception’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept

  of history that corresponds to this fact. Then we will have the production of the

  real state of exception before us as a task” (Benjamin, “Über den Begriff,” p. 697).

  We have seen the sense in which law begins to coincide with life once it has

  become the pure form of law, law’s mere being in force without significance. But

  insofar as law is maintained as pure form in a state of virtual exception, it lets

  bare life (K.’s life, or the life lived in the village at the foot of the castle) subsist

  before it. Law that becomes indistinguishable from life in a real state of excep-

  tion is confronted by life that, in a symmetrical but inverse gesture, is entirely

  transformed into law. The absolute intelligibility of a life wholly resolved into

  writing corresponds to the impenetrability of a writing that, having become

  indecipherable, now appears as life. Only at this point do the two terms distin-

  guished and kept united by the relation of ban (bare life and the form of law)

  abolish each other and enter into a new dimension.

  4.5. Significantly, in the last analysis all the interpreters read the legend as the

  tale of the irremediable failure or defeat of the man from the country before the

  impossible task imposed upon him by the Law. Yet it is worth asking whether

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  Kafka’s text does not consent to a different reading. The interpreters seem to

  forget, in fact, precisely the words with which the story ends: “No one else could

  enter here, since this door was destined for you alone. Now I will go and shut it.”

  If it is true the door’s very openness constituted, as we saw, the invisible power

  and specific “force” of the Law, then we can imagine that all the behavior of the

  man from the country is nothing other than a complicated and patient strategy

  to have the door closed in order to interrupt the Law’s being in force. And in

  the end, the man succeeds in his endeavor, since he succeeds in having the door

  of the Law closed forever (it was, after all, open “only for him’’), even if he may

  have risked his life in the process (the story does not say that he is actually dead

  but only that he is “close to the end”). In his interpretation of the legend, Kurt

  Weinberg has suggested that one must see the figure of a “thwarted Christian

  Messiah” in the shy but obstinate man from the country ( Kafkas Dichtungen,

  pp. 130–31). The suggestion can be taken only if it is not forgotten that the

  Messiah is the figure in which the great monotheistic religions sought to master

  the problem of law, and that in Judaism, as in Christianity or Shiite Islam, the

  Messiah’s arrival signifies the fulfillment and the complete consummation of the

  Law. In monotheism, messianism thus constitutes not simply one category of

  religious experience among others but rather the limit concept of religious ex-

  perience in general, the point in which religious experience passes beyond itself

  and calls itself into question insofar as it is law (hence the messianic aporias con-

  cerning the Law that are expressed in both Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and the

  Sabbatian doctrine according to which the fulfillment of the Torah is its trans-

  gression). But if this is true, then what must a messiah do if he finds himself, like

  the man from the country, before a law that is in force without signifying? He

  will certainly not be able to fulfill a law that is already in a state of suspension,

  nor simply substitute another law for it (the fulfillment of law is not a new law).

  A miniature painting in a fifteenth-century Jewish manuscript containing

  Haggadoth on “He who comes” shows the arrival of the Messiah in Jerusalem.

  The Messiah appears on horseback (in other illustrations, the mount is a don-

  key) at the sacred city’s wide-open gates, behind which a window shows a fig-

  ure who could be a doorkeeper. A youth in front of the Messiah is standing

  one step from the open door and pointing toward it. Whoever this figure is (it

  might be the prophet Elijah), he can be likened to the man from the country

  in Kafka’s parable. His task seems to be to prepare and facilitate the entry of the

  Messiah—a paradoxical task, since the door is wide open. If one gives the name

  “provocation’’ to the strategy that compels the potentiality of Law to translate

  itself into actuality, then his is a paradoxical form of provocation, the only form

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  HOMO SACER I

  adequate to a law that is in force without signifying and a door that allows no

  one to enter on account of being too open. The messianic task of the man from

  the country (and of the youth who stands before the door in the miniature)

  might then be precisely that of making the virtual state of exception real, of

  compelling the doorkeeper to close the door of the Law (the door of Jerusalem).

  For the Messiah will be able to enter only after the door is closed, which is to

  say, after the Law’s being in force without significance is at an end. This is the

  meaning of the enigmatic passage in Kafka’s notebooks where he writes, “The

  Messiah will only come when he is no longer necessary, he will only come after

  his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last day.” The final

  sense of the legend is thus not, as Derrida writes, that of an “event that succeeds

  in not happening” (or that happens in not happening: “a
n event that happens

  not to happen,” un événement qui arrive à ne pas arriver [“Préjugés,” p. 359]), but rather precisely the opposite: the story tells how something has really happened

  in seeming not to happen, and the messianic aporias of the man from the coun-

  try express exactly the difficulties that our age must confront in attempting to

  master the sovereign ban.

  א One of the paradoxes of the state of exception lies in the fact that in the state

  of exception, it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from execution of

  the law, such that what violates a rule and what conforms to it coincide without any

  remainder (a person who goes for a walk during the curfew is not transgressing the law

  any more than the soldier who kills him is executing it). This is precisely the situation

  that, in the Jewish tradition (and, actually, in every genuine messianic tradition), comes to pass when the Messiah arrives. The first consequence of this arrival is that the Law

  (according to the Kabbalists, this is the law of the Torah of Beriah, that is, the law in

  force from the creation of man until the messianic days) is fulfilled and consummated.

  But this fulfillment does not signify that the old law is simply replaced by a new law that is homologous to the old but has different prescriptions and different prohibitions (the

  Torah of Aziluth, the originary law that the Messiah, according to the Kabbalists, would

  restore, contains neither prescriptions nor prohibitions and is only a jumble of unordered letters). What is implied instead is that the fulfillment of the Torah now coincides with its transgression. This much is clearly affirmed by the most radical messianic movements, like that of Sabbatai Zevi (whose motto was “the fulfillment of the Torah is its transgression”).

  From the juridico-political perspective, messianism is therefore a theory of the state

  of exception—except for the fact that in messianism there is no authority in force to

  proclaim the state of exception; instead, there is the Messiah to subvert its power.

  א One of the peculiar characteristics of Kafka’s allegories is that at their very end they offer the possibility of an about-face that completely upsets their meaning. The obstinacy of the man from the country thus suggests a certain analogy with the cleverness that allows

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  Ulysses to survive the song of the Sirens. Just as the Law in “Before the Law” is insuperable because it prescribes nothing, so the most terrible weapon in Kafka’s “The Sirens” is not

  song but silence (“it has never happened, but it might not be altogether unimaginable

  that someone could save himself from their song, but certainly never from their silence.”

  Ulysses’ almost superhuman intelligence consists precisely in his having noticed that the

  Sirens were silent and in having opposed them with his trick “only as a shield,” exactly

  as the man from the country does with respect to the doorkeeper of the Law. Like the

  “doors of India’’ in “The New Lawyer,” the door of the Law can also be seen as a symbol

  of those mythic forces that man, like Bucephalus, the horse, must master at all costs.

  4.6. Jean-Luc Nancy is the philosopher who has most rigorously reflected upon

  the experience of law that is implicit in this being in force without significance.

  In an extremely dense text, he identifies its ontological structure as that of aban-

  donment and, consequently, attempts to conceive not only our time but the entire

  history of the West as the “time of abandonment.” The structure he describes nev-

  ertheless remains inside the form of law, and abandonment is conceived as aban-

  donment to the sovereign ban, without any way out of the ban being envisaged:

  To abandon is to remit, entrust, or turn over to . . . a sovereign power, and to

  remit, entrust, or turn over to its ban, that is, to its proclaiming, to its convening, and to its sentencing.

  One always abandons to a law. The destitution of abandoned Being is mea-

  sured by the limitless severity of the law to which it finds itself exposed. Aban-

  donment does not constitute a subpoena to present oneself before this or that

  court of law. It is a compulsion to appear absolutely under the law, under the law

  as such and in its totality. In the same way—it is the same thing—to be banished

  amounts not to coming under a provision of the law but rather to coming under

  the entirety of the law. Turned over to the absolute of the law, the abandoned

  one is thereby abandoned completely outside its jurisdiction. . . . Abandonment

  respects the law; it cannot do otherwise. ( L’impératif catégorique, pp. 149–50) The task that our time imposes on thinking cannot simply consist in recognizing the extreme and insuperable form of law as being in force without signifi-

  cance. Every thought that limits itself to this does nothing other than repeat the

  ontological structure that we have defined as the paradox of sovereignty (or sov-

  ereign ban). Sovereignty is, after all, precisely this “law beyond the law to which

  we are abandoned,” that is, the self-presuppositional power of nomos. Only if it

  is possible to think the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of law (even

  that of the empty form of law’s being in force without significance) will we have

  moved out of the paradox of sovereignty toward a politics freed from every ban.

  A pure form of law is only the empty form of relation. Yet the empty form of

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  relation is no longer a law but a zone of indistinguishability between law and life,

  which is to say, a state of exception.

  Here the problem is the same one that Heidegger confronts in his Beiträge

  zur Philosophie under the heading of “Seinsverlassenheit,” the abandonment of the entity by Being, which, in fact, constitutes nothing less than the problem of

  the unity and difference between Being and being in the age of the culmination of

  metaphysics. What is at issue in this abandonment is not something (Being) that

  dismisses and discharges something else (the being). On the contrary: here Being

  is nothing other than the being’s being abandoned and remitted to itself; here Being is nothing other than the ban of the being:

  What is abandoned by whom? The being by Being, which does and does not

  belong to it. The being then appears thus, it appears as object and as available Being, as if Being were not. . . . Then this is shown: that Being abandons the being

  means: Being dissimulates itself in the being-manifest of the being. And Being

  itself becomes essentially determined as this withdrawing self-dissimulation. . . .

  Abandoned by Being: that Being abandons the being, that Being is consigned

  to itself and becomes the object of calculation. This is not simply a “fall” but the

  first history of Being itself. ( Beiträge zur Philosophie, p. 115)

  If Being in this sense is nothing other than Being in the ban of the being

  [ l’essere a bandono dell’ente], then the ontological structure of sovereignty here fully reveals its paradox. The relation of abandonment is now to be thought in a

  new way. To read this relation as a being in force without significance—that is,

  as Being’s abandonment to and by a law that prescribes nothing, and not even itself—is to remain inside nihilism and not to push the experience of abandonment to the extreme. Only where the experience of abandonment is freed from

  every idea of law and destiny (including the Kantian form of law and law’s being

&n
bsp; in force without significance) is abandonment truly experienced as such. This is

  why it is necessary to remain open to the idea that the relation of abandonment

  is not a relation, and that the being together of the being and Being does not have

  the form of relation. This does not mean that Being and the being now part ways;

  instead, they remain without relation. But this implies nothing less than an

  attempt to think the politico-social factum no longer in the form of a relation.

  א Alexandre Kojève’s idea of the end of history and the subsequent institution of a new

  homogenous state presents many analogies with the epochal situation we have described as

  law’s being in force without significance (this explains the contemporary attempts to bring Kojève to life in a liberal-capitalist key). What, after all, is a State that survives history, a State sovereignty that maintains itself beyond the accomplishment of its telos, if not a law that is in force without signifying? To conceive of a fulfillment of history in which the

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  empty form of sovereignty still persists is just as impossible as to conceive of an extinction of the State without the fulfillment of its historical forms, since the empty form of the

  State tends to generate epochal contents that, in turn, seek out a State form that has be-

  come impossible (this is what is happening in the ex-Soviet Union and in ex-Yugoslavia).

  The only thought adequate to the task would be one capable of both thinking the

  end of the State and the end of history together and mobilizing the one against the other.

  This is the direction in which the late Heidegger seems to move, if still insufficiently,

  with the idea of a final event or appropriation ( Ereignis) in which what is appropriated is Being itself, that is, the principle that had until then determined beings in different epochs and historical figures. This means that with the Ereignis (as with the Hegelian Absolute in Kojève’s reading), the “history of Being comes to an end” (Heidegger, Zur