The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  4.5. A theological paradigm of the division between Kingdom and Govern-

  ment can be found in Numenius. This Platonic philosopher, who was active

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  around the second half of the second century ad and exercised a considerable

  influence over Eusebius of Caesarea and, through him, on Christian theology,

  distinguishes in fact between two gods. The first, defined as a king, is foreign to

  the world, transcendent, and completely inoperative; while the second is active

  and deals with the government of the world.

  The entirety of fragment 12, preserved by Eusebius ( Preparation for the Gospel,

  11, 18, 8), revolves around the problem of the operativeness or inoperativeness of

  the first god:

  For it is not at all becoming that the First God should be the Creator [ dēmiourgein]; also the First God must be regarded as the father of the God who is Creator of

  the world. If then we were inquiring about the creative principle, and asserting

  that He who was pre-existent would thereby be preeminently fit for the work,

  this would have been a suitable commencement of our argument. But if we

  are not discussing the creative principle, but inquiring about the First Cause,

  I renounce what I said, and wish that to be withdrawn [ . . . ] the First God is

  inoperative [ argon] with regard to all kinds of work and reigns as king [ basilea], but the Creative God [ dēmiourgikon] governs [ hēgemonein], and travels through the heaven. (Ibid., p. 536)

  Peterson had already observed that what is crucial here is not so much whether

  there is one or more gods, but rather whether the supreme divinity is or is not par-

  ticipating in the forces that govern the world: “From the principle according to

  which God reigns but does not govern, one draws the Gnostic consequence that

  God’s kingdom is good, but the government of the demiurge—the demiurgic

  forces, which can also be considered under the category of functionaries—is evil,

  or, in other words, that the government is always wrong” (Peterson 1994, pp. 27–

  28). In this sense, a Gnostic political conception is not simply one that opposes

  a good god to an evil demiurge, but one that distinguishes also and especially

  between a god who is idle and without relation to the world from a god who

  actively intervenes in it in order to govern it. That is, the opposition between

  Kingdom and Government is part of the Gnostic legacy in modern politics.

  What is the meaning of this distinction? And why is the first God defined

  as a “king”? In an instructive study, Heinrich Dörrie has reconstructed the Pla-

  tonic origin of this regal metaphor of divinity (more precisely, it originated in

  the circle of the Ancient Academy). It goes back to the exoteric excursus of the

  second Platonic (or pseudo-Platonic) Letter, which distinguishes a “King of All”

  [ pantōn basilea], who is the cause and the end of all things, from a second and a third god, around whom revolve second and third things (Plato, Letters, II, 312e).

  Dörrie follows the history of this image through Apuleius, Numenius, Origen,

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  Clement of Alexandria, up to Plotinus, in whose Enneads the image appears

  four times. In the strategy of the Enneads, the metaphor of the god-king, with

  its equation between heavenly and earthly powers, would allow us “to clarify

  Plotinus’s theology against the Gnostics” (Dörrie, p. 233):

  Plotinus appropriates it because he sees in it a fundamental point of his theology.

  On the other hand, we must refer here to the representation of God that had

  been predominant for some time, which does not distinguish between earthly

  and heavenly powers: God must be surrounded by a court that is ordered hier-

  archically just like the earthly sovereign. (Ibid., p. 232)

  Numenius’s theology thus develops a paradigm that is not only Gnostic, but

  that circulated in early and middle Platonism and that, by presupposing two

  (or three) divine figures that are at the same time different and coordinated,

  certainly aroused the interest of the theorists of the Christian oikonomia. How-

  ever, the specific function of Numenius’s theology is that it links the figures of

  the god-king and the demiurge to the opposition between operativeness and

  inoperativeness, transcendence and immanence. That is, it represents the bor-

  derline case of a tendency that radically divides Kingdom and Government,

  separating a monarch who is basically foreign to the cosmos from the immanent

  government of earthly things. In this perspective, it is interesting to note that,

  in fragment 12, basileus (referred to the first god) is terminologically opposed

  to hēgemonein ( referred to the demiurge), which indicates a specific and active

  function of guidance and command: hēgemōn (like the Latin dux) can be, in

  turn, the animal that leads a flock, the driver of a cart, the military commander,

  and, technically, the governor of a province. However, if the distinction between

  Kingdom and Government is certainly clear, even in Numenius the two terms

  cannot be unrelated, and the second god somehow represents a necessary com-

  plement of the first. In this sense, the demiurge is compared with the pilot of a

  boat: just as the latter scans the sky to orientate himself, so the former “gazes at

  the highest god, not at the sky” in order to orientate himself in his governmental

  function (fragment 18). Another fragment compares the relationship between

  the first god and the demiurge with that of the seeder and the farmer: the earthly

  god transplants, takes care, and distributes the seeds that the first god spread in

  the souls (fragment 13). In point of fact, the god that governs needs the inopera-

  tive god and presupposes him, just as this requires the activity of the demiurge.

  In other words, everything seems to suggest that the kingdom of the first god

  forms a functional system with the government of the demiurge, just as, in the

  Christian oikonomia, the god who carries out the work of salvation acts accord-

  ing to the will of the father, even if he is an anarchic hypostasis.

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  א In the history of the early Church, Marcion is the most radical supporter of the

  Gnostic antinomy between a god who is foreign to the world and an earthly demiurge

  (“Gott ist der Fremde” is the motto with which Harnack summarizes Marcion’s gospel:

  Harnack, p. 4). From this perspective, the Christian oikonomia can be seen as an attempt to overcome Marcionism, in that it inserts the Gnostic antinomy within the divinity and,

  in this way, reconciles the divinity’s noninvolvement with the world with its government.

  The god who has created the world now faces a nature that has been corrupted by sin and

  has become foreign to him; the savior god, to whom was entrusted the government of the

  world, needs to redeem it for a kingdom that is not, however, of this world.

  א In Apuleius’s Apologia, we find a peculiar figure of deus otiosus who is, however, also a creator. Here, the summus genitor and the assiduus mundi sui opifex are defined as

  “sine opera opifex,” builder without work, and “sine propagatione genitor,” father without begetting ( Apologia, 64).

  4.6. The philosophical paradigm of the distinction between Kingdom and

 
Government is contained in the final chapter of Book L of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the same text from which Peterson extracts the quotation that opens his treatise

  against political theology. Aristotle has just expounded what goes by the name of

  his “theology,” in which God appears as the first immovable mover who moves

  the celestial spheres and whose form of life ( diagōgē) is, in essence, thought of

  thought. The chapter that follows, the Tenth, is dedicated—apparently without

  any logical consistency—to the problem of the relation between the good and

  the world (or the way “in which the nature of the universe contains the good”),

  and is traditionally interpreted as a theory of the superiority of the paradigm of

  transcendence over that of immanence. In his commentary to Book XII of the

  Metaphysics, Thomas Aquinas thus writes that “the separate good of the universe,

  which is the first mover, is a greater good than the good of order which is found

  in the universe” (Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle,

  Book XII, Lesson XII, n. 2631). The author of the most recent critical edition of

  the Metaphysics, William D. Ross, similarly affirms that “the doctrine here stated is that goodness exists not only immanently in the world but transcendently in

  God, and even more fundamentally in Him, since He is the source of the good

  in the world” (Ross, p. 401).

  The passage in question is actually one of the most complex and fraught

  with implications for the entire treatise: it cannot in any way be simplified in

  these terms. In it, transcendence and immanence are not simply distinguished

  as superior and inferior, but rather articulated together so as almost to form a

  single system, in which the separated good and the immanent order constitute

  a machine that is, at the same time, cosmological and political (or economic-

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  political). And this is all the more relevant insofar as, as we shall see, Chapter X

  of the Metaphysics was always interpreted by medieval commentators as a theory

  of the divine government ( gubernatio) of the world.

  But let us turn to the passage that interests us. Aristotle begins by expound-

  ing the problem in the guise of a dichotomic alternative:

  We must now consider also in which of two ways the nature of the universe

  contains the good or the highest good, whether as something separate [ kechōrismenon] and by itself [ kath’hauto], or as the order [ taxin] of the parts. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 10, 1075a)

  If transcendence is here defined by means of the traditional terms of separation

  and autonomy, it is instructive to note that the figure of immanence is, on the

  other hand, that of order, that is, the relation of every thing with other things.

  The immanence of the good means taxis, order. This model is, however, soon

  complicated and, through a comparison taken from military science (which is

  almost certainly at the origin of the analogous image we encountered in De

  mundo), the alternative is turned into a compromise:

  Probably in both ways, as an army [ strateuma] does. For the good is found both

  in the order and in the leader [ stratēgos], and more in the latter; for he does not depend on the order but it depends on him. (Ibid.)

  The passage that follows clarifies in what sense we have to understand the no-

  tion of an immanent order if it is to be reconciled with the transcendence of

  the good. To this end, Aristotle abandons the military metaphor and resorts to

  paradigms taken from the natural world and, above all, the administration of

  the house:

  All things are ordered together [ syntetaktai] somehow, but not all alike—both

  fishes and fowls and plants; and the world is not such that one thing has nothing

  to do with another, but there is something [that connects them in an orderly

  manner]. For all are ordered together to one end. (But it is as in a house [ en

  oikiai], where the freemen are least at liberty to act at random, but all things or most things are already ordained for them, while the slaves and the beasts do

  little for the common good, and for the most part live at random; for this is the

  sort of principle [ arkē] that constitutes the nature of each.) I mean, for instance, that all must at least come to be dissolved into their elements, and there are other

  functions similarly in which all share for the good of the whole. (Ibid.)

  It is odd that the reconciliation between transcendence and immanence through

  the idea of a reciprocal order of things is entrusted to an image of an “economic”

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  nature. The unity of the world is compared with the order of the house (and not

  that of a city), and yet, this very economic paradigm—which, for Aristotle, is as

  such necessarily monarchical—allows in the end the reintroduction of an image

  of a political nature: “But entities do not want to have a bad political constitu-

  tion [ politeuesthai kakōs]. ‘The rule of many is not good; let there be one {sover-iegn}’” (ibid., 1076a). As a matter of fact, in the administration of a house, the

  unitary principle that governs it manifests itself in different modes and degrees,

  in accordance with the different nature of the individual beings that make up its

  parts (with a formulation that will have a long theological and political legacy,

  Aristotle links together the sovereign principle and nature, archē and physis). Free men, as rational creatures, are in an immediate and conscious relation with the

  unitary principle, and do not act at random, while slaves and domestic animals

  cannot but follow their nature, which however contains, albeit to different ex-

  tents, a reflection of the unitary order, which makes it possible for them to act in

  agreement toward a common goal. Eventually, this means that the immovable

  mover as transcendent archē and the immanent order (as physis) form a single bipolar system, and that, in spite of the variety and difference of natures, the

  house-world is governed by a single principle. Power—every power, both human

  and divine—must hold these two poles together, that is, it must be, at the same

  time, kingdom and government, transcendent norm and immanent order.

  4.7. Any interpretation of Metaphysics, L, X should begin with an analysis of

  the concept of taxis, “order,” which is not defined thematically in the text, but

  only exemplified by means of the two paradigms of the army and the house.

  After all, the term appears several times in Aristotle’s work, but is never the

  object of a real definition. In Metaphysics, 985b, for instance, it is mentioned together with schēma and thesis with regard to the differences that, according to the Atomists, determine the multiplicity of entities: taxis refers to the diathigē, the reciprocal relation, which is exemplified by the difference between AN and NA.

  Analogously, in Metaphysics, 1022b, the disposition [ disposizione] ( diathesis) is defined as “the arrangement of that which has parts, in respect either of place or

  of potency or of kind.” And, in the Politics (1298a), the constitution ( politeia) is defined as taxis (reciprocal order) of the powers ( archai), and “there are as many forms of constitution as there are possible taxeis between the parts.” It is therefore precisely in the passage that interests us here that this generic meaning of

  the term “order” is replaced by its strategic displacement at the junction betweenr />
  ontology and politics, which makes of it a fundamental terminus technicus of

  Western politics and metaphysics, even if it has rarely been investigated as such.

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  As we have seen, Aristotle begins by opposing the concept of order to what

  is separated ( kechōrismenos) and for itself ( kath’hauto). That is to say, order structurally implies the idea of an immanent and reciprocal relation: “All things are

  ordered together [ . . . ] and the world is not such that one thing has nothing

  to do with another” ( Metaphysics, 1075a). The phrase used by Aristotle ( thaterōi pros thateron mēden) decidedly inscribes the concept of order in the sphere of the category of relation ( pros ti): order is thus a relation and not a substance. But we can understand the meaning of this concept only if we become aware of its

  location at the end of Book L of the Metaphysics.

  Book L is, in fact, entirely dedicated to the problem of ontology. Those

  who have some familiarity with Aristotle’s philosophy know that one of the

  fundamental exegetical problems that still divides interpreters is that of the

  double determination of the object of metaphysics: separate being and being

  as being. Heidegger wrote that “this dual characterization of prōtē philosophia

  does not contain two radically different trains of thought, nor should one be

  weakened or rejected outright in favor of the other. Furthermore, we should

  not be over-hasty in reconciling this apparent duality” (Heidegger 1962, p. 12).

  As a matter of fact, Book L contains Aristotle’s so-called theology, that is, the

  doctrine of the separate substance and of the immovable motor, which, despite

  being separated from them, moves the celestial spheres. At this point, Aristotle

  introduces the concept of order as a way to tackle the splitting of the object

  of metaphysics. Order is the theoretical apparatus that allows us to think the

  relation between the two objects, which immediately presents itself, in the pas-

  sage we quoted above, as the problem of the way in which the nature of the

  universe contains the good: “We must now consider also in which of two ways

  the nature of the universe contains the good or the highest good, whether as

  something separate and by itself, or as the order of the parts” ( Metaphysics,