The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  1075a). Transcendence, immanence, and their reciprocal coordination corre-

  spond here to the splitting of the object of metaphysics, and to the attempt to

  keep together the two figures of being. Yet the aporia lies in the fact that order

  (that is, a figure of relation) becomes the way in which the separate substance

  is present and acts in the world. The eminent place of ontology is in this way

  displaced from the category of substance to that of relation, of an eminently

  practical relation. The problem of the relation between the transcendence and

  immanence of the good thus becomes that of the relation between ontology

  and praxis, between the being of God and his action. That this shift encounters

  some fundamental difficulties is evident from the fact that Aristotle does not

  tackle the problem directly, but simply relies on two paradigms, a military one

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  and a genuinely economic one. Just as, in an army, the ordered deployment of

  soldiers must be in relation with the command of the strategist and, in a house,

  the different beings who inhabit it—each following its own nature—actually

  conform to a single principle, so the separate being maintains a relation to

  the immanent order of the cosmos (and vice versa). In any case, taxis, order,

  is the apparatus that makes possible the articulation of the separate substance

  with being, of God with the world. Taxis names their aporetic relation.

  Although there is absolutely no notion of providence in Aristotle, and he

  could not in any case have conceived the relation between the immovable mover

  and the cosmos in terms of pronoia, it is easy to understand how later philoso-

  phers, beginning already with Alexander of Aphrodisias, found in this passage

  from the Metaphysics the foundation for a theory of divine providence. In other

  words, without this being one of his aims, Aristotle transmitted to Western pol-

  itics the paradigm of the divine regime of the world as a double system, formed,

  on the one hand, by a transcendent archē, and, on the other, by an immanent

  concurrence of secondary actions and causes.

  א Will Durant was one of the first scholars to put the Aristotelian god in relation to

  the paradigm Kingdom/Government: “Aristotle’s God [ . . . ] is a roi fainéant, a do- nothing king; ‘the king reigns, but he does not rule’” (Durant, p. 80).

  א In his commentary on Book L of the Metaphysics, Averroes poignantly observes

  that one can infer the radical outcome of Gnostic ditheism from the Aristotelian doctrine

  of the two modes in which the good exists in the universe, “in virtue of order and in

  virtue of that thanks to which order exists”:

  There are people who say that there is nothing for which God does not care,

  because they claim that the Sage must not leave anything without providence

  and must not do evil [ . . . ] Other people refuted this theory through the fact

  that many things happen that are evil, and the Sage should not produce them

  [ . . . ] Some people carried on their reflection on this to the point that they said

  that there are two gods, a god who created evil and a god who created good. (Ibn

  Rushd, Metaphysics, p. 201)

  According to Averroes, Gnostic ditheism would find its paradigm in the fracture between

  transcendence and immanence that Aristotelian theology bequeathed to the modern age.

  4.8. The turning of the concept of order into a fundamental paradigm, both

  metaphysical and political, is one of the achievements of medieval thought. In-

  sofar as Christian theology had adopted the canon of transcendent being from

  Aristotelianism, the problem of the relation between God and the world could

  only become, in any sense, the most decisive question. However, the relation

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  between God and the world necessarily entails an ontological problem, since

  it is not a relation between two entities, but one that concerns the preeminent

  form of being itself. In this perspective, the passage from Book L provided a

  valuable and, at the same time, aporetic model. It thus became the constant

  point of reference that oriented the incredibly numerous treatises De bono and

  De gubernatione mundi.

  If, in order to analyze this paradigm, we choose here the work of Thomas

  Aquinas (rather than that of Boethius, Augustine, or Albert the Great—who are,

  along with Aristotle, Thomas’s principal sources with regard to this problem), it

  is not only because the concept of order becomes with him “a central principle”

  (Silva Tarouca, p. 342) and almost “the current that pervades the entirety of his

  thought” (Krings 1941, p. 13), but also because the dissymmetries and conflicts

  that it implies are here particularly evident. Following an intention that deeply

  marked the medieval vision of the world, Thomas tried to make of order the fun-

  damental ontological concept, which determines and conditions the very idea of

  being; and yet, precisely for this reason, the Aristotelian aporia reaches with him

  its most radical formulation.

  The scholars who studied the idea of order in Thomas’s thought noted the

  twofold character that defines it (order, like being, can be said in many ways).

  Ordo expresses, on the one hand, the relation of creatures with God ( ordo ad

  unum principium) and, on the other, the relation of creatures with themselves

  ( ordo ad invicem). Thomas often explicitly asserts this structural duplicity of

  order: “Est autem duplex ordo considerandus in rebus. Unus, quo aliquid crea-

  tum ordinatur ad alium creatum [ . . . ] Alius ordo, quo omnia creata ordinantur

  in Deum” ( Summa Theologiae, I, q. 21, a. 1, ad 3; see also Krings 1941, p. 10).

  “Quaecumque autem sunt a Deo, ordinem habent ad invicem et ad ipsum

  Deum” ( Summa Theologiae, I, q. 47, a. 3). That this duplicity is strictly linked to the Aristotelian aporia is proved by the fact that Thomas resorts to the paradigm

  of the army (“sicut in exercitu apparet”: Contra Gentiles, Book III, Chapter 64,

  n. 1) and quotes repeatedly and in an explicit way the passage from Book L of

  the Metaphysics we discussed earlier (“Finis quidem universi est aliquod bonum

  in ipso existens, scilicet ordo ipsius universi, hoc autem bonum non est ulti-

  mus finis, sed ordinatur ad bonum extrinsecum ut ad ultimum fine; sicut etiam

  ordo exercitus ordinatur ad ducem, ut dicitur in XII Metaphys.”: Summa Theologiae, I, q. 103, a. 2, ad 3). But it is in Thomas’s commentary on the Metaphysics that the splitting of the two aspects of order is referred back, without reservations, to the twofold paradigm of the good (and of being) in Aristotle. Here, not

  only does the duplex ordo correspond to the duplex bonum of Aristotle’s text, but

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  the problem is soon specified as that of the relation between the two orders (or

  between the two figures of the good). Thomas notes that Aristotle

  says, first, that the universe has both the separate good and the good of order

  [ bonum ordinis]. For there is a separate good, which is the first mover, on which

  the heavens and the whole of nature depend as their end or desirable good [ . . . ]

  And since all things having one end must agree in their ordination to that end,

  some order must be
found in the parts of the universe; and so the universe has

  both a separate good and a good of order. We see this, for example, in the case

  of an army [ . . . ] (Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle,

  Book XII, Lesson XII, 2629–2630)

  Although the two goods and the two orders are strictly linked, they are not yet

  symmetrical: “The separate good of the universe, which is the first mover, is a

  greater good [ melius bonum] than the good of order which is found in the uni-

  verse” (ibid., 2631). This imbalance between the two orders manifests itself in the

  difference between the relation of every creature to God and its relations with

  other creatures, which Aristotle expresses through the economic paradigm of the

  government of the house. Every creature—Thomas remarks—is in relation to

  God through its own particular nature, exactly as in the case of a house:

  In an ordered household or family different ranks of members are found. For

  example, under the head of the family there is a first rank, namely, that of the

  sons, and a second rank, which is that of the slaves, and a third rank, which is

  that of the domestic animals, as dogs and the like. For ranks of this kind have

  a different relation to the order of the household, which is imposed by the head

  of the family, who governs the household [ . . . ] And just as the order of the

  family is imposed by the law and precept of the head of the family, who is

  the principle of each of the things which are ordered in the household, with a

  view to carrying out the activities which pertain to the order of the household,

  in a similar fashion the nature of physical things is the principle by which each

  of them carries out the activity proper to it in the order of the universe. For

  just as any member of the household is disposed to act through the precept of

  the head of the family, in a similar fashion any natural being is disposed by its

  own nature. (Ibid., 2633–2634)

  The aporia that marks like a thin crack the wonderful order of the medieval cos-

  mos now begins to become more visible. Things are ordered insofar as they have

  a specific relation among themselves, but this relation is nothing other than the

  expression of their relation to the divine end. And, vice versa, things are ordered

  insofar as they have a certain relation to God, but this relation expresses itself

  only by means of the reciprocal relation of things. The only content of the tran-

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  scendent order is the immanent order, but the meaning of the immanent order

  is nothing other than the relation to the transcendent end. “Ordo ad finem” and

  “ordo ad invicem” refer back to one another and found themselves on one another.

  The perfect theocentric edifice of medieval ontology is based on this circle, and

  does not have any consistency outside of it. The Christian God is this circle,

  in which the two orders continuously penetrate one another. Since that which

  the order must keep united is in point of fact irremediably divided, not only is

  ordo—like Aristotle’s being— dicitur multipliciter (this is the title of Kurt Flasch’s dissertation on Thomas), but ordo also reproduces in its own structure the ambiguity that it must face. From this follows the contradiction, noticed by scholars,

  according to which Thomas at times founds the order of the world in the unity

  of God, and at times the unity of God in the immanent order of creatures (see

  Silva Tarouca, p. 350). This apparent contradiction is nothing other than the

  expression of the ontological fracture between transcendence and immanence,

  which Christian theology inherits and develops from Aristotelianism. If we push

  to the limit the paradigm of the separate substance, we have the Gnosis, with its

  God foreign to the world and creation; if we follow to the end the paradigm of

  immanence, we have pantheism. Between these two extremes, the idea of order

  tries to think a difficult balance, which Christian theology is always in the pro-

  cess of losing and which it must at each turn regain.

  א Order is an empty concept, or, more precisely, it is not a concept, but a signature

  [ segnatura], that is, as we have seen, something that, in a sign or a concept, exceeds it to refer it back to a specific interpretation or move it to another context, yet without exiting the field of the semiotic to construct a new meaning.

  The concepts that order has the function of signing are genuinely ontological. That

  is, the signature “order” produces a displacement of the privileged place of ontology from the category of substance to the categories of relation and praxis; this displacement is

  perhaps medieval thought’s most important contribution to ontology. For this reason,

  when in his study on ontology in the Middle Ages, Krings reminds us that, “being is ordo and the ordo is being; the ordo does not presuppose any being, but being has the ordo as its condition of possibility” (Krings 1940, p.233), this does not mean that being receives a new definition through the predicate of order, but that, thanks to the signature “order,”

  substance and relation, ontology and praxis enter into a constellation that represents the specific legacy that medieval theology leaves to modern philosophy.

  4.9. Before Thomas, the text in which the aporetic character of order appears

  most strongly is Augustine’s De genesi ad litteram. Here, while discussing the six days of creation and the meaning of the number 6, Augustine suddenly quotes

  Wisdom, 11: 21: “Omnia mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti,” that is, one

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  of the texts upon which the theological tradition agrees to found the idea of

  an order of creation (Albert, Thomas’s teacher, uses these terms as synonymous

  with ordo: “creata [ . . . ] per pondus sive ordinem”: Summa Theologiae, q. 3, 3, a. 4, I). The quotation gives rise to a philosophical digression on the relation

  between God and order, and on the very place of order, which is certainly one of

  the pinnacles of Augustine’s theology. Augustine begins by asking the question

  of whether “these three, measure, number, weight, in which, as it is written,

  God has arranged all things, were somewhere or other before the whole natural

  cosmos was created, or whether they too were created; and if they existed before-

  hand, where were they?” (Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 4, 3, 7,

  p. 246). The question regarding the place of order is immediately turned into a

  question on the relation between God and order:

  After all, before creation there was nothing except the creator. Therefore they were

  in him. But how? I mean, we read that these other things that have been created

  are also in him; so are these three identical with him, or rather are in him by

  whom they are governed and directed [ a quo reguntur et gubernantur]? And how

  are these identical with him? God, after all, is neither measure nor number nor

  weight, nor all of them together. Or, rather, as we ordinarily understand measure

  in the things we measure, and number in the things we number or count, and

  weight in the things we weigh, no, God is not these things; but insofar as mea-

  sure sets a limit [ modum praefigit] to everything, and number gives everything its specific form [ speciem praebet], and weight draws [ trahit] everything to rest and stability, he is the original, true and unique measure
which defines for all things

  their bounds, the number which forms all things, the weight which guides all

  things; so are we to understand that by the words You have arranged all things

  in measure and number and weight nothing else was being said but “You have

  arranged all things in yourself”? It is a great thing, a concession granted to few,

  to soar beyond everything that can be measured and see measure without mea-

  sure, to soar beyond everything that can be numbered and see number without

  number, to soar beyond everything that can be weighed and see weight without

  weight. (Ibid., 4, 3, 7–8, p. 246)

  It is important to dwell on this extraordinary passage, in which the paradoxical

  relation between God and order finds its most radical formulation and, at the

  same time, displays its connection with the problem of oikonomia. Measure,

  number, and weight, that is, the order by means of which God has arranged

  creatures, cannot themselves be created things. Therefore, although they are cer-

  tainly also present in things, insofar as God “so arranged all things that they

  would have measure and number and weight” (ibid., 4, 5, 11, p. 248), they are

  outside of things; they are in God or coincide with him. God is, in his own

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  being, ordo, order. And yet he cannot be measure, number, and order in the

  sense in which these terms define the order of created things. God is, in himself,

  extra ordinem, or rather, he is order only in the sense of an ordering and arranging, that is, not in the sense of a substance, but in that of an activity. “He is not measure, number, and weight in an absolute way, but ille ista est in a completely new way [ . . . ] in the sense that ordo is no longer given as mensura, numerus, pondus, but as praefigere, praebere, trahere; as finishing, forming, ordering” (Krings 1940, p. 245). The being of God, as order, is structurally ordinatio, that is, praxis of government and activity that arranges [ dispone] according to measure, number, and weight. It is in this sense that the dispositio (which we should not forget is the Latin translation of oikonomia) of things in the order means nothing else

  but the dispositio of things in God himself. Immanent and transcendent order

  once again refer back to each other in a paradoxical coincidence, which can