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360
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HOMO SACER II, 4
THE KINGDOM
AND THE GLORY
For a Theological
Genealogy of Economy
and Government
TRANSLATED BY LORENZO CHIESA
(WITH MATTEO MANDARINI)
Contents
Translator’s Note
367
Preface
369
1. The Two Paradigms
373
Threshold
385
2. The Mystery of the Economy
387
Threshold
417
3. Being and Acting
419
Threshold
430
4. The Kingdom and the Government
432
Threshold
467
5. The Providential Machine
470
Threshold
498
6. Angelology and Bureaucracy
502
Threshold
521
7. The Power and the Glory
523
Threshold
549
8. The Archaeology of Glory
551
Threshold
602
Appendix: The Economy of the Moderns
609
1. The Law and the Miracle
609
2. The Invisible Hand
623
Bibliography
633
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Translator’s Note
Chapters 1 to 5 were translated by Lorenzo Chiesa. Chapters 6 to 8 and the Ap-
pendix were drafted by Matteo Mandarini and revised by Lorenzo Chiesa.
In accordance with the author’s request, after prior consultation of the origi-
nal works, all quotations were translated into English in line with his own trans-
lation into Italian, with the notable exception of works originally published in
English. This also applies to works currently available in English translation, in
which case translations were consulted, incorporated, and, where appropriate,
modified. Significant phrases and sentences that do not appear in the existing
English translations are indicated in braces. I have used the same method to sig-
nal the few instances in which the author’s personal translation and the English
version differ substantially. Page references refer to the English translation or,
failing this, to the original.
I wish to thank Giorgio Agamben, Tom Baldwin, Emily-Jane Cohen, Mike
Lewis, Frank Ruda, Danka Štefan, and Alberto Toscano for their valuable sug-
gestions and for their help in securing access to sources that proved difficult to
obtain.
367
Oeconomia Dei vocamus illam rerum omnium administratione vel gubernationem, qua Deus utitur, inde a conditio mundo usque ad consummationem saeculorum, in
nominis sui Gloriam et hominum salutem.
—J. H. Maius, Oeconomia temporum veteris Testamenti
Chez les cabalistes hébreux, malcuth ou le règne, la dernière des séphiroth, signifiat que Dieu gouverne tout irresistiblement, mais doucement et sans violence, en sorte que
l’homme croit suivre sa volonté pendant qu’il exécute celle de Dieu. Ils disaient que le
peché d’Adam avait été truncatio malcuth a ceteris plantis; c’est-à-dire qu’Adam avait rentranché la dernière des séphires en se faisant un empire dans l’empire.
—G. W. Leibniz, Essais de théodicée
We must then distinguish between the Right, and the exercise of supreme authority, for they can be divided; as for example, when he who hath the Right, either cannot, or will not be present in judging trespasses, or deliberating of affaires: For Kings sometimes
by reason of their age cannot order their affaires, sometimes also though they can doe
it themselves, yet they judge it fitter, being satisfied in the choyce of their Officers and Counsellors, to exercise their power by them.
Now where the Right and exercise are severed, there the government of the Commonweale is like the ordinary government
of the world, in which God, the mover of all things, produceth natural effects by the
means of secondary causes; but where he, to whom the Right of ruling doth belong,
is himselfe present in all judicatures, consultations, and publique actions, there the
administration is such, as if God beyond the ordinary course of nature, should immedi-
ately apply himself unto all matters.
—Th. Hobbes, De Cive
While the world lasts, Angels will preside over Angels, demons over demons, and men
over men; but in the world to come every command will be empty.
—Gloss on 1 Corinthians 15:24
Acher saw the angel Metatron, who was given permission to sit down and write the
merits of Israel. He then said: “It is taught that on high there will be no sitting, no
competition, no back, and no tiredness. Perhaps, God forbid, there are two powers in
heaven.”
—Talmud, Hagiga, 15 a
Sur quoi la fondera-t-il l’économie du Monde qu’il veut gouverner?
—B. Pascal, Pensées
Preface
This study will inquire into the paths by which and the reasons why power in
the West has assumed the form of an oikonomia, that is, a government of men. It
locates itself in the wake of Michel Foucault’s investigations into the genealogy
of governmentality, but, at the same time, it also aims to understand the internal
reasons why they failed to be completed. Indeed, in this study, the shadow that
the theoretical interrogation of the present casts onto the past reaches well be-
yond the chronological limits that Foucault assigned to his genealogy, to the early
centuries of Christian theology, which witness the first, tentative elaboration of
the Trinitarian doctrine in the form of an oikonomia. Locating government in
its theological locus in the Trinitarian oikonomia does not mean to explain it
by means of a hierarchy of causes, as if a more primordial genetic rank would
necessarily pertain to theology. We show instead how the apparatus of the Trin-
itarian oikonomia may constitute a privileged laboratory for the observation of
the working and articulation—both internal and external—of the governmental
machine. For within this apparatus the elements—or the polarities—that artic-
ulate the machine appear, as it were, in their paradigmatic form.
In this way, the inquiry into the genealogy—or, as one used to say, the
nature—of power in the West, which I began more than ten years ago with
Homo Sacer, reaches a point that is in every sense decisive. The double struc-
ture of the governmental machine, which in State of Exception (2003) appeared
in the correlation between auctoritas and potestas, here takes the form of the articulation between Kingdom and Government and, ultimately, interrogates
the very relation—which initially was not considered—between oikonomia and
Glory, between power as government and effective management, and power as
ceremonial and liturgical regality, two aspects that have been curiously neglected
by both political philosophers and political scientists. Even historical studies of
the insignia and liturgies of power, from Peterson to Kantorowicz, Alföldi to
Schramm, have failed to question this relation, precisely leaving aside a number
of rather obvious questions: Why does power need glory? If it is essentially force
369
370
HOMO SACER II, 4
and capacity for action and government, why does it assume the rigid, cumber-
some, and “glorious” form of ceremonies, acclamations, and protocols? What is
the relation between economy and Glory?
Bringing these questions back to their theological dimension—questions
that seem to find only trivial answers on the level of political and sociological
investigations—has allowed us to catch a glimpse of something like the ulti-
mate structure of the governmental machine of the West in the relation between
oikonomia and Glory. The analysis of doxologies and liturgical acclamations, of
ministries and angelical hymns turned out to be more useful for the understand-
ing of the structures and functioning of power than many pseudo-philosophical
analyses of popular sovereignty, the rule of law, or the communicative procedures
that regulate the formation of public opinion and political will. Identifying in
Glory the central mystery of power and interrogating the indissoluble nexus that
links it to government and oikonomia will seem an obsolete operation to some.
And yet, one of the results of our investigation has been precisely to note that
the function of acclamations and Glory, in the modern form of public opinion
and consensus, is still at the center of the political apparatuses of contemporary
democracies. If the media are so important in modern democracies, this is the
case not only because they enable the control and government of public opinion,
but also and above all because they manage and dispense Glory, the acclamative
and doxological aspect of power that seemed to have disappeared in modernity.
The society of the spectacle—if we can call contemporary democracies by this
name—is, from this point of view, a society in which power in its “glorious”
aspect becomes indiscernible from oikonomia and government. To have com-
pletely integrated Glory with oikonomia in the acclamative form of consensus
is, more specifically, the specific task carried out by contemporary democra-
cies and their government by consent,* whose original paradigm is not written in
Thucydides’ Greek, but in the dry Latin of medieval and baroque treaties on the
divine government of the world.
However, this means that the center of the governmental machine is empty.
The empty throne, the hetoimasia tou thronou that appears on the arches and
apses of the Paleochristian and Byzantine basilicas is perhaps, in this sense, the
most significant symbol of power. Here the theme of the investigation touches
its limit and, at the same time, its temporary conclusion. If, as has been sug-
gested, there is in every book something like a hidden center, and the book was
written to reach—or elude—it, then this center is to be found in the final para-
graphs of Chapter 8. In opposition to the ingenuous emphasis on productivity
* In English in the original.—Trans.
THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY
371
and labor that has long prevented modernity from accessing politics as man’s
most proper dimension, politics is here returned to its central inoperativity, that
is, to that operation that amounts to rendering inoperative all human and divine
works. The empty throne, the symbol of Glory, is what we need to profane in
order to make room, beyond it, for something that, for now, we can only evoke
with the name zoē aiōnios, eternal life. It is only when the fourth part of the investigation, dedicated to the form-of-life and use, is completed, that the decisive
meaning of inoperativity as a properly human and political praxis will be able to
appear in its own light.
Detail of apse mosaic, Basilica Papale di San Paolo fuori le Mura, Rome. Photograph
by Luca Marchi.
1
The Two Paradigms
1.1. Let us begin this investigation with an attempt to reconstruct the ge-
nealogy of a paradigm that has exercised a decisive influence on the de-
velopment and the global arrangement of Western society, although it has rarely
been thematized as such outside a strictly theological field. One of the theses
that we shall try to demonstrate is that two broadly speaking political paradigms,
antinomical but functionally related to one another, derive from Christian the-
ology: political theology, which founds the transcendence of sovereign power
on the single God, and economic theology, which replaces this transcendence
with the idea of an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent ordering—domestic
and not political in a strict sense—of both divine and human life. Political phi-
losophy and the modern theory of sovereignty derive from the first paradigm;
modern biopolitics up to the current triumph of economy and government over
every other aspect of social life derive from the second paradigm.
For reasons that will become clear in the course of the research, the history of
economic theology, which developed enormously between the second and fifth
centuries ad, has been left in the shadows not only by historians of ideas but also
by theologians, to the extent that even the precise meaning of the term has fallen
into oblivion. In this way, both its evident genetic proximity to Aristotelian
economy and its likely connection with the birth of the économie animale and
of political economy in the eighteenth century have remained unquestioned. An
archaeological study that investigates the reasons for this repression and attempts
to go back to the events that produced it is all the more necessary.
א Although the problem of oikonomia is present in countless monographs on individual Church Fathers (Joseph Moingt’s book on the Théologie trinitaire de Tertullien is in this sense exemplary: it contains a relatively comprehensive treatment of this question between the second and third centuries), until Gerhard Richter’s recent work Oikonomia, published when the historical part of the present study had already been completed, we lacked a
general study of this fundamental theological theme. Marie-José Mondzain’s Image, icône, économie limits itself to analyzing the implications of this concept for the iconoclastic 373
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