The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  through what he calls a ‘politicisation’ ( Politisierung) of the citizenry. Where social belonging had previously been defined primarily by conditions and statuses

  of various kinds (nobles and members of religious communities, farmers and ar-

  tisans, heads of families and relatives, inhabitants of the city and of the country-

  side, masters and retainers), and only secondarily by citizenship with the rights

  and duties that the latter implied, now citizenship as such became the political

  criterion of social identity. ‘In this way’, he writes,

  a specifically Greek identity arose—the political identity of citizenship. The cit-

  izens were expected to act ‘as citizens’ [ bürgherlich], that is, ‘politically’ (in the Greek sense of the word), and this expectation was now given an institutional

  form. Political identity was not exposed to any significant competition from

  group loyalties based on religion, common economic interests, the individual’s

  place in the work space, or the like [ . . . ] In devoting themselves to political

  life broad sections of the citizenry in the Greek democracies saw themselves pri-

  marily as participants in the government of the polis. The polis rested essentially on their interests in order and justice, which formed the basis of their solidarity

  [ . . . ] In this sense, polis and politai could continue to interact [ . . . ] Hence, for a fairly large number of citizens, politics became a consuming interest that

  made up much of the content of their lives [ Lebensinhalt] [ . . . ] There was a

  strict separation between the polis, the area in which they acted jointly as citizens, and the house, between politics and the ‘realm of necessity’ ( anankaia). (Meier

  1979/1990, 204/165–6)

  262

  HOMO SACER II, 2

  According to Meier, this process of politicisation of the citizenry is specifically

  Greek, and was bequeathed by Greece, with alterations and discontinuities of

  various kinds, to Western politics. From the perspective that interests us here,

  it is necessary to specify that the politicisation of which Meier speaks is situated

  in the field of tensions between oikos and polis, which are defined by the polar opposed processes of politicisation and depoliticisation. In this field of tensions,

  stasis constitutes a threshold through which domestic belonging is politicised into citizenship and, conversely, citizenship is depoliticised into family solidarity. Because these tensions are, as we have seen, contemporaneous, what becomes deci-

  sive is the threshold in which they are transformed and inverted, conjoined and

  disjoined.

  ℵ Meier broadly accepts the Schmittian definition of the political as ‘the degree of

  intensity of an association and a disassociation’. As he suggests, however, this definition concerns less the essence of the political than political unity. In this sense, as Schmitt specifies,

  political unity [ . . . ] describes the most intensive degree of unity, from which,

  therefore, the most intensive differentiation, grouping into friend and enemy, is

  decided. Political unity is the supreme unity [ . . . ] because it decides and can,

  within itself, prevent all other opposed groupings from disassociating to the point

  of extreme hostility (i.e. to the point of civil war). (Schmitt 2000, 307)

  In truth, if an opposed pair of concepts defines a particular field, neither of the two can be excluded entirely without compromising its reality. As the extreme degree of disassociation, civil war is, even from the Schmittian perspective, an ineliminable part of the

  political system of the West.

  12. Another Greek institution—which Loraux does not mention in the ar-

  ticle, but to which she dedicates an important chapter (the sixth) of La Cité

  divisée— confirms this essential connection between stasis and politics: amnesty.

  In 403, following the civil war in Athens which concluded with the defeat of

  the oligarchy of the Thirty, the victorious democrats, led by Archinus, solemnly

  pledged ‘not in any instance to remember the past events [ ton de parelēly thotōn

  mēdeni pros mēdena mnēsikakein]’ ( Ath. Const. , 39, 6), that is, not to prosecute crimes committed during the civil war. Commenting on this decision, which

  coincides with the invention of amnesty, Aristotle ( Ath. Const. , 40, 2) writes

  that in this way the democrats ‘behaved towards the past disasters in the most

  [ . . . ] statesmanlike manner [ politikōtata ( . . . ) chrēsasthai]’. Amnesty with respect to civil war is thus the comportment most appropriate to politics. From

  the juridical point of view, stasis thus seems to be defined by two prohibitions,

  STASIS 263

  which perfectly cohere with one another: on the one hand, not participating

  in it is politically culpable; on the other, forgetting it once it has finished is a

  political duty.

  The mē mnēsikakein formula of the amnestic oath is usually translated with ‘do

  not remember’ or even ‘do not be resentful, do not have bad memories’ (Loraux

  translates it as je ne rappellerai pas les malheures, ‘I will not recall the misfortunes’

  [Loraux 1997/2001, 147/149]). The adjective mnēsikakos thus means ‘rancorous,

  resentful’ and refers to someone who harbours bad memories. It is doubtful, how-

  ever, that the same applies for the verb mnēsikakein. In the cryptotype that rules the formation of compound verbs of this type in Greek, the active one is generally

  the second term. Mnēsikakein means less ‘to have bad memories’ than ‘to do harm

  with memory, to make bad use of memories’. In this case, it is a legal term, which

  refers to the fact of prosecuting someone for crimes committed during the stasis.

  The Athenian amnēstia is not simply a forgetting or a repression of the past; it is an exhortation not to make bad use of memory. Insofar as it constitutes a political

  paradigm inherent to the city, which marks the becoming-political of the unpolit-

  ical (the oikos) and the becoming-unpolitical of the political (the polis), the stasis is not something that can ever be forgotten or repressed; it is the unforgettable

  which must remain always possible in the city, yet which nonetheless must not

  be remembered through trials and resentments. Just the opposite, that is to say, of

  what civil war seems to be for the moderns: namely, something that one must seek

  to render impossible at every cost, yet that must always be remembered through

  trials and legal persecutions.

  13. Let us attempt to draw some provisory conclusions from our analyses:

  (1) The stasis does not originate in the oikos; it is not a ‘war within the family’, but forms part of a device that functions in a manner similar to the state of

  exception. Just as in the state of exception, zōē, natural life, is included in the juridical-political order through its exclusion, so analogously the oikos is politicised and included in the polis through the stasis.

  (2) What is at stake in the relation between oikos and polis is the constitution of a threshold of indifference in which the political and the unpolitical, the

  outside and the inside coincide. We must therefore conceive politics as a field of

  forces whose extremes are the oikos and the polis; between them, civil war marks the threshold through which the unpolitical is politicised and the political is

  ‘economised’:

  politicisation ←

  → depoliticisation

  oikos  stasis polis

  dissolved

  multitude

  civil war


  people-king

  disunited

  multitude

  264

  HOMO SACER II, 2

  This means that in classical Greece, as today, there is no such thing as a political

  ‘substance’: politics is a field incessantly traversed by the tensional currents of

  politicisation and depoliticisation, the family and the city. Between these op-

  posed polarities, disjoined and yet intimately bound together, the tension—to

  paraphrase Loraux’s diagnosis—is irresolvable. When the tension toward the

  oikos prevails and the city seems to want to transform itself into a family (albeit of a particular kind), then civil war functions as a threshold in which family

  relationships are repoliticised; when it is instead the tension toward the polis

  that prevails and the family bond appears to weaken, then the stasis intervenes to recodify the family relationships in political terms.

  Classical Greece is perhaps the place in which this tension found for a mo-

  ment an uncertain, precarious equilibrium. In the course of the subsequent po-

  litical history of the West, the tendency to depoliticise the city by transforming

  it into a house or a family, ruled by blood relations or by merely economic

  operations, will alternate together with other, symmetrically opposed phases in

  which everything that is unpolitical must be mobilised and politicised. In accor-

  dance with the prevailing of one or the other tendency, the function, situation

  and form of civil war will also change. But so long as the words ‘family’ and

  ‘city’, ‘private’ and ‘public’, ‘economy’ and ‘politics’ maintain an albeit tenuous

  meaning, it is unlikely that it can ever be eliminated from the political scene of

  the West.

  א The form that civil war has acquired today in world history is terrorism. If the

  Foucauldian diagnosis of modern politics as biopolitics is correct, and if the genealogy

  that traces it back to an oikonomical-theological paradigm is equally correct, then global terrorism is the form that civil war acquires when life as such becomes the stakes of politics.

  Precisely when the polis appears in the reassuring figure of an oikos—the ‘Common European Home’, or the world as the absolute space of global economic management—then

  stasis, which can no longer be situated in the threshold between the oikos and the polis, becomes the paradigm of every conflict and re-emerges in the form of terror. Terrorism

  is the ‘global civil war’ which time and again invests this or that zone of planetary space.

  It is no coincidence that the ‘terror’ should coincide with the moment in which life as

  such—the nation (which is to say, birth)—became the principle of sovereignty. The sole

  form in which life as such can be politicised is its unconditioned exposure to death—that

  is, bare life.

  2

  Leviathan and Behemoth

  1. You have before you a photocopy of the famous engraving from the frontis-

  piece of the first edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, ‘printed for An-

  drew Crooke at the Green Dragon in St. Paul’s Church-yard’ in 1651. As has been

  rightly observed, this is ‘the most famous visual image in the history of modern

  political philosophy’ (Malcolm 1998, 124). Given that in those years emblematic

  literature had reached its apogee, it is reasonable to suppose that the author had

  intended to summarise in an image the entire content of the work (or at least its

  esoteric meaning)—the ‘idea of the work’, as is written in the engraving which

  Giambattista Vico chose for the frontispiece of his Scienza Nuova. And yet, despite experiencing a kind of acceleration in recent decades, the bibliography on this emblem par excellence of modern politics is relatively meagre. As happens every time

  that research is situated at the intersection of different disciplinary specialisations,

  the scholars who have confronted this task appear to move on a kind of terra in-

  cognita, whose navigation would necessitate combining the resources of iconology

  with those of what is arguably the most tenuous and uncertain discipline among

  the many taught in our universities: political philosophy. The knowledge that

  would be required here would be that of a science we could call iconologia philo-

  sophica; a science which perhaps existed between 1531 (the date of publication of

  Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata) and 1627 (when Jacob Cats’s Sinne- en minnebeelden appeared), but for which today we lack even the most elementary principles.

  In my attempt to interpret the emblem, I will endeavour not to forget what

  it probably was in Hobbes’s intentions: a door or a threshold that would lead,

  even if in a veiled manner, into the problematic nucleus of the book. This does

  not necessarily mean that I intend to advance an esoteric reading of Leviathan.

  Carl Schmitt, to whom we owe an important monograph on the book, indeed

  intimates on numerous occasions that Leviathan might be an esoteric book. ‘[I]t

  is possible’, he writes,

  that behind the image [of the Leviathan] is hidden a deeper, more mysterious

  meaning. Like all the great thinkers of his time, Hobbes had a sense for esoteric

  265

  Figure 1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Crooke, London 1651. Frontispiece of the First Edition.

  STASIS 267

  veils. He said about himself that now and then he made ‘overtures’, but that he

  revealed his thoughts only in part and that he acted as people do who open a

  window only for a moment and close it quickly for fear of a storm. (Schmitt

  1982/1996, 43–4/26)

  And again in 1945, in a letter to Ernst Jünger signed with the name of Melville’s

  character Benito Cereno, he writes:

  This is a thoroughly esoteric book [ ein durch und durch esoterisches Buch], and its inherent esotericism increases the deeper one penetrates into it. Take it off my

  hands! Put it back in its place! [ . . . ] Do not dive into its arcana, but wait until you have been initiated into it in an appropriate form and ultimately admitted.

  Otherwise, you may be seized by a fit of rage, which would be bad for your

  health, and try to destroy something that is beyond all destruction. (Jünger and

  Schmitt 1999, 193)

  These remarks are obviously just as esoteric as the book to which they refer, yet

  they still do not succeed in grasping the arcana which they purport to know.

  Every esoteric intention inevitably contains a contradiction, which marks its

  point of distinction with respect to mysticism and philosophy: if the conceal-

  ment is something serious and is not a joke, then it must be experienced as such

  and the subject cannot profess to know what he or she can only be oblivious to;

  if, conversely, it is a joke, then in this case the esotericism is even less justified.

  It is possible, moreover, that in the very frontispiece with which we are con-

  cerned Hobbes had alluded to something like an ‘esoteric veil’. Indeed, the em-

  blem contains at its centre a kind of veil or stage curtain upon which the title of

  the work is inscribed and which it would be theoretically possible to lift in order

  to see what lies behind it. Schmitt does not fail to observe that the ‘stage curtain

  that hangs at the centre alludes to the fact that here many things are said, but also

  many hidden’ (Schmitt 1982, 151). The most proper intention of one of the main

  currents of the political theory o
f the Baroque age, beginning with Arnold Clap-

  mar’s De arcanis rerum publicarum libri sex (1605) and Christoph Besold’s Dis-

  sertatio de arcanis rerum publicarum (1614), is precisely that which distinguishes in the structure of power one visible face and another that must remain hidden

  (the veritable arcana imperii). Nothing could be further from the intentions of

  Hobbes, who, as has been suggested, wanted to put political philosophy for the

  first time on a scientific basis (Berns 1987, 396). If we will attempt in the ensuing

  pages to raise this curtain, this does not mean that we intend to attribute an es-

  oteric intention to Hobbes. Unless one wants to call esoteric a writing that relies

  on alert readers; readers, that is to say—as any reader worthy of the name should

  Figure 2. Abraham Bosse, Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651. Copy on

  parchment. British Library, Mss. Egerton, 1910.

  STASIS 269

  be—capable of not allowing the particular details and modalities of the exposi-

  tion to escape them.

  א A stage curtain already existed in the theatres of the classical world. It did not fall from above, however, but was raised from below (as in the curtain today in the German

  style) and stored in a cavity between the stage and the orchestra. I do not know when the

  curtain began instead to be dropped from above, as if what had to hide the theatrical scene and separate it from reality came from heaven and not from the earth, as in the ancient

  theatres. Today, as you know, the stage curtain for the most part opens horizontally from

  the centre, like a double blind. It is unclear whether it is legitimate to attribute significance to these changes in the stage curtain’s movement on the proscenium. In any case, the veil

  or stage curtain that in the frontispiece of Leviathan hides the symbolic centre of power is supported by two knots overhead and hence would fall from heaven and not from earth.

  2. The question of the artist—Abraham Bosse, according to the majority

  of scholars—who created the image following Hobbes’s instructions does not

  concern us here. More interesting is the existence of a manuscript copy on

  parchment, which Hobbes had prepared for Charles II and in which the image

  on the frontispiece presents some important differences—the most significant