The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  other attributes, thereby making a dominion within a dominion:

  With the Hebrew Cabalists, Malcuth or the Kingdom, the last of the Sephiroth,

  signified that God controls everything irresistibly, but gently and without vio-

  lence, so that man thinks he is following his own will while he carries out God’s.

  They said that Adam’s sin had been truncatio Malcuth a caeteris plantis, that is to say, that Adam had cut back the last of the Sephiroth, by making a dominion

  for himself within God’s dominion [ . . . ] but that his fall had taught him that

  he could not subsist of himself, and that man must be redeemed by the Messiah.

  (Leibniz, §372, p. 348)

  According to Leibniz, Spinoza (who in the Theologico­Political Treatise again

  takes up the image of the imperium in imperio in order to criticize the modern

  idea of freedom), in his system, had done nothing but take the cabalist thesis to

  its extreme point.

  The oikonomia of the moderns is this truncatio Malcuth that, taking for itself a sovereignty separated from its divine origin, in truth maintains the theological

  model of the government of the world. It establishes an oikonomia in the oikonomia, leaving intact the concept of government that conformed to this model.

  For this reason, it does not make sense to oppose secularism and the general will

  to theology and its providential paradigm; what is needed is, rather, an archaeo-

  logical operation like the one that we have attempted here, one that, by moving

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  upstream to a time before the separation that took place and that turned the two

  poles into rival but inseparable brothers, undoes the entire economic-theological

  apparatus and renders it inoperative.

  That the two poles of this apparatus are not antagonistic, but remain secretly

  in agreement until the end, is evident in the thinking of the theologian who has

  brought the providential standpoint to such an extreme that it appears to resolve

  itself completely and without remainder in the image of the world of modernity.

  In his Traité du libre arbitre Bossuet tries at all costs to reconcile human freedom with the divine government of the world. God, he writes, wishes for all eternity

  that man be free, and not only potentially but in the actual and concrete exercise

  of his freedom.

  What is there more absurd than to say that man is not free because God wants

  him to be unfree? Should one not instead say, on the contrary, that he is free

  because God wants him so; and that, just as it comes about that we are free as a

  consequence of the decree that states that we are free, in the same way we freely

  execute this or that action as a consequence of the same decree that extends to

  the particulars? (Bossuet 1871, Chapter 8, p. 64)

  The divine government of the world is so absolute and it penetrates creatures so

  deeply, that the divine will is annulled in the freedom of men (and the latter in

  the former):

  It is not necessary that God, to make us conform with his decree, places within

  us anything other than our own determination or that he places it within us

  through others. Just as it would be absurd to say that our own determination

  takes away our freedom, equally it would be to affirm that God takes it from us

  through his decree; and just as our will, deciding to choose one thing rather than

  another, does not take away the power to choose, one must conclude in the same

  way that God does not take it from us either. (Ibid., p. 65)

  At this point, theology can resolve itself into atheism, and providentialism into

  democracy, because God has made the world just as if it were without God and

  governs it as though it governed itself:

  One can in fact say that God makes us just as we would be were we able to be

  on our own; because he makes us in all the principles and states of our being.

  Therefore, it is true to say that the state of our being is to be all that God wishes

  us to be. In the same way he makes man be what man is; and body be what body

  is; and thought be what thought is; and passion be what passion is; and action

  be what action is; and necessary be what necessary is; and free be what free is;

  and free in action and exercise what free in action and exercise is [ . . . ] (Ibid.)

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  In this grand image, in which the world created by God is identified with the

  world without God, and where contingency and necessity, freedom and slavery

  all merge into one another, the glorious center of the governmental machine

  appears clearly. Modernity, removing God from the world, has not only failed

  to leave theology behind, but in some ways has done nothing other than to lead

  the project of the providential oikonomia to completion.

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