The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  (poets have named this desubjectification the “Muse”). “An ‘I’ without guar-

  antees!” writes Ingeborg Bachmann in one of her Frankfurt Lectures, “what is the ‘I,’ what could it be? A star whose position and orbit have never been fully

  identified and whose nucleus is composed of substances still unknown to us.

  It could be this: myriads of particles forming an ‘I.’ But at the same time the

  ‘I’ seems to be a Nothing, the hypostasis of a pure form, something like an

  imagined substance” (Bachmann 1982: 42). Bachmann claims that poets are

  precisely those who “make the ‘I’ into the ground of their experiments, or who

  have made themselves into the experimental ground of the ‘I’”(ibid.) . This is

  why they “continually run the risk of going mad” (ibid.) and not knowing

  what they say.

  But the idea of a fully desubjectified experience in the act of speech is also

  not foreign to the religious tradition. Many centuries before being programmat-

  ically taken up by Rimbaud in his letter to P. Demeny (“for ‘I’ is another. If brass

  wakes up a trumpet, it’s not its fault”), a similar experience appeared as the com-

  mon practice of a messianic community in Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians.

  The “speaking in tongues” ( lalein glōssē) of which Paul writes refers to an event of speech—glossolalia—in which the speaker speaks without knowing what he

  says (“no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries”

  [1 Corinthians 14:2]). Yet this means that the very principle of speech becomes

  something alien and “barbaric”: “If I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall

  be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbar-

  ian unto me” (14:11). The literal meaning of the term barbaros, a “barbarian,”

  is a being not gifted with logos, a foreigner who does not truly know how to understand and speak. Glossolalia thus presents the aporia of an absolute desubjectification and “barbarization” of the event of language, in which the speaking

  subject gives way to another subject, a child, angel, or barbarian, who speaks

  “unfruitfully” and “into the air.” And it is significant that although he does not

  altogether exclude the Corinthians’ glossolalic practice, Paul alerts them to the

  puerile regression it implies, enjoining them to interpret what they say: “For if

  the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? . . .

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  So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how

  shall it be known what is spoken? For ye shall speak into the air. . . . Wherefore

  let him that speaketh in an unknown tongue pray that he may not interpret.

  For if I pray in an unknown tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is

  unfruitful. . . . Brethren, be not children in understanding” (14: 8–20).

  3.15. The experience of glossolalia merely radicalizes a desubjectifying expe-

  rience implicit in the simplest act of speech. Modern linguistic theory main-

  tains that language and actual discourse are two absolutely divided orders,

  between which there can be neither transition nor communication. Saussure

  already observed that if language (in the sense of langue) in itself is constituted by a series of signs (for example, “mud,” “lake,” “sky,” “red,” “sad,” “five,” “to

  split,” “to see”), nevertheless nothing makes it possible to foresee and under-

  stand how these signs will be put into action to form discourse. “The series of

  these words, as rich as it is through the ideas that it evokes, will never show one

  individual that another individual, in pronouncing them, means something.”

  “The world of signs,” Benveniste added a few years later, taking up and devel-

  oping Saussure’s antinomy, “is closed. From the sign to the phrase there is no

  transition, be it by syntagmatization or by any other means. A hiatus separates

  them” (Benveniste 1974: 65).

  However, every language has at its disposal a series of signs (which linguistics

  call “shifters” or indicators of enunciation, among which, for example, there are

  the pronouns “I,” “you,” “this,” and the adverbs “here,” “now,” etc.) destined

  to allow the individual to appropriate language in order to use it. Unlike other

  words, these signs do not possess a lexical meaning that can be defined in real

  terms; their meaning arises only through reference to the event of discourse in

  which they are used. “What then,” Benveniste asks, “is the reality to which I or

  you refers? It is solely to a ‘reality of discourse,’ and this is a very strange thing.

  I cannot be defined except in terms of ‘locution,’ not in terms of objects as a

  nominal sign is. I signifies ‘the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I ’” (Benveniste 1971: 218).

  Enunciation thus refers not to the text of what is stated, but to its taking

  place; the individual can put language into act only on condition of identifying himself with the very event of saying, and not with what is said in it. But then

  what does it mean “to appropriate language”? How is it possible to “start to

  speak” in these conditions?

  When one looks closely, the passage from language to discourse appears as

  a paradoxical act that simultaneously implies both subjectification and desub-

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  jectification. On the one hand, the psychosomatic individual must fully abolish

  himself and desubjectify himself as a real individual to become the subject of

  enunciation and to identify himself with the pure shifter “I,” which is absolutely

  without any substantiality and content other than its mere reference to the event

  of discourse. But, once stripped of all extra-linguistic meaning and constituted

  as a subject of enunciation, the subject discovers that he has gained access not so

  much to a possibility of speaking as to an impossibility of speaking—or, rather,

  that he has gained access to being always already anticipated by a glossolalic

  potentiality over which he has neither control nor mastery. Appropriating the

  formal instruments of enunciation, he is introduced into a language from which,

  by definition, nothing will allow him to pass into discourse. And yet, in saying

  “I,” “you,” “this,” “now . . . ,” he is expropriated of all referential reality, letting

  himself be defined solely through the pure and empty relation to the event of

  discourse. The subject of enunci ation is composed of discourse and exists in discourse alone. But, for this very reason, once the subject is in discourse, he can say nothing; he cannot speak.

  “I speak” is therefore just as contradictory a statement as is “I am a poet.” For

  not only is the “I” always already other with respect to the individual who lends it speech; it does not even make sense to say that this I-other speaks, for insofar as it is solely sustained in a pure event of language, independent of every meaning,

  this I-other stands in an impossibility of speaking—he has nothing to say. In the absolute present of the event of discourse, subjectification and desubjectification

  coincide at every point, and both the flesh and blood individual and the subject

  of enunciation are perfectly silent. This can also be expressed by saying that ther />
  one who speaks is not the individual, but language; but this means nothing other

  than that an impossibility of speaking has, in an unknown way, come to speech.

  It is therefore not surprising that in the face of this intimate extraneousness

  implicit in the act of speech, poets experience something like responsibility and

  shame. This is why Dante, in his Vita nuova, commanded the poet to know

  how “to open by prose” ( aprire per prosa) the reasons of his poetry on pain of the “greatest shame.” And it is difficult to forget the words with which Rimbaud

  evoked his earlier years as a poet: “I could not continue; I would have gone mad

  and, what is more . . . it was evil.”

  3.16. In twentieth-century poetry, Pessoa’s letter on heteronyms constitutes

  perhaps the most impressive document of desubjectification, the transformation

  of the poet into a pure “experimentation ground,” and its possible implications

  for ethics. On January 13, 1935, he responds to his friend Adolfo Casais Monteiro,

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  who had asked him about the origin of his many heteronyms. He begins by pre-

  senting them as “an organic and constant tendency toward depersonalization:”

  The origin of my heteronyms is basically an aspect of hysteria that exists within

  me. I don’t know whether I am simply a hysteric or if I am more properly a neur-

  asthenic hysteric. I tend toward the second hypothesis, because there are in me

  evidences of lassitude that hysteria, properly speaking, doesn’t encompass in the

  list of its symptoms. Be that as it may, the mental origin of heteronyms lies in

  a persistent and organic tendency of mine to depersonalization and simulation.

  These phenomena—fortunately for me and others—intellectualize themselves. I

  mean, they don’t show up in my practical life, on the surface and in contact with

  others; they explode inside, and I live with them alone in me. . . . An urging of

  spirit came upon me, absolutely foreign, for one reason or another, of that which

  I am, or which I suppose that I am. I spoke to it, immediately, spontaneously, as if

  it were a certain friend of mine whose name I invented, whose history I adapted,

  and whose figure—face, build, clothes, and manner—I immediately saw inside

  of me. And so I contrived and procreated various friends and acquaintances who

  never existed but whom still today—nearly thirty years later—I hear, feel, see. I

  repeat: I hear, feel, see. . . . And get greetings from them. . . . (Pessoa 1988: 7–9)

  Next comes the summary of the sudden personalization, on March 8, 1914,

  of one of his most memorable heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, who was to become

  his teacher (or, rather, the teacher of another one of his heteronyms, Alvaro Do

  Campos):

  I went over to a high desk and, taking a piece of paper, began to write, standing

  up, as I always do when I can. And I wrote some thirty poems, one after another,

  in a kind of ecstasy, the nature of which I am unable to define. It was the trium-

  phant day of my life, and never will I have another like it. I began with the title,

  The Keeper of Sheep. What followed was the appearance of someone in me whom

  I named, from then on, Alberto Caeiro. Forgive me the absurdity of the sentence:

  In me there appeared my master. That was my immediate reaction. So much so

  that scarcely were those thirty-odd poems written when I snatched more paper

  and wrote, again without stopping, the six poems constituting “Oblique Rain,” by

  Fernando Pessoa. Straight away and completely. . . . It was the return of Fernando

  Pessoa/Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa himself. Or better, it was the reaction

  of Fernando Pessoa against his nonexistence as Alberto Caeiro. (Ibid.: 9)

  It is worth examining this incomparable phenomenology of heteronymic

  depersonalization. Not only does each new subjectification (the appearance of

  Alberto Caeiro) imply a desubjectification (the depersonalization of Fernando

  Pessoa, who submits himself to his teacher). At the same time, each desubjec-

  tification also implies a resubjectification: the return of Fernando Pessoa, who

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  841

  reacts to his non-existence, that is, to his depersonalization in Alberto Caeiro. It

  is as if the poetic experience constituted a complex process that involved at least

  three subjects—or rather, three different subjectifications-desubjectifications,

  since it is no longer possible to speak of a subject in the strict sense. First of all

  there is the psychosomatic individual Fernando Pessoa, who approaches his desk

  on March 8, 1914, to write. With respect to this subject, the poetic act can only

  imply a radical desubjectification, which coincides with the subjectification of

  Alberto Caeiro. But a new poetic consciousness, something like a genuine ēthos

  of poetry, begins once Fernando Pessoa, having survived his own depersonal-

  ization, returns to a self who both is and is no longer the first subject. Then he

  understands that he must react to his non-existence as Alberto Caeiro, that he

  must respond to his own desubjectification.

  3.17. Let us now reread the phenomenology of testimony in Primo Levi,

  the impossible dialectic between the survivor and the Muselmann, the pseudo-witness and the “complete witness,” the human and the inhuman. Testimony

  appears here as a process that involves at least two subjects: the first, the survivor,

  who can speak but who has nothing interesting to say; and the second, who “has

  seen the Gorgon,” who “has touched bottom,” and therefore has much to say but

  cannot speak. Which of the two bears witness? Who is the subject of testimony?

  At first it appears that it is the human, the survivor, who bears witness to the

  inhuman, the Muselmann. But if the survivor bears witness for the Muselmann—

  in the technical sense of “on behalf of” or “by proxy” (“we speak in their stead,

  by proxy”)—then, according to the legal principle by which the acts of the del-

  egated are imputed to the delegant, it is in some way the Muselmann who bears

  witness. But this means that the one who truly bears witness in the human is

  the inhuman; it means that the human is nothing other than the agent of the

  inhuman, the one who lends the inhuman a voice. Or, rather, that there is no

  one who claims the title of “witness” by right. To speak, to bear witness, is thus

  to enter into a vertiginous movement in which something sinks to the bottom,

  wholly desubjectified and silenced, and something subjectified speaks without

  truly having anything to say of its own (“I tell of things . . . that I did not actually

  experience”). Testimony takes place where the speechless one makes the speak-

  ing one speak and where the one who speaks bears the impossibility of speaking

  in his own speech, such that the silent and the speaking, the inhuman and the

  human enter into a zone of indistinction in which it is impossible to establish

  the position of the subject, to identify the “imagined substance” of the “I” and,

  along with it, the true witness.

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  This can also be expressed by saying that the subject of testimony is the one

  who bears witness to a desubjectification. But this expression holds o
nly if it is not forgotten that “to bear witness to a desubjectification” can only mean there is no

  subject of testimony (“I repeat, we are not . . . the true witnesses”) and that every

  testimony is a field of forces incessantly traversed by currents of subjectification

  and desubjectification.

  Here it is possible to gage the insufficiency of the two opposed theses that

  divide accounts of Auschwitz: the view of humanist discourse, which states

  that “all human beings are human” and that of anti-humanist discourse, which

  holds that “only some human beings are human.’’ What testimony says is

  something completely different, which can be formulated in the following the-

  ses: “human beings are human insofar as they are not human” or, more pre-

  cisely, “human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman.”

  3.18. Let us consider the individual living being, the “infant” in the etymolog-

  ical sense, a being who cannot speak. What happens in him—and for him—in

  the moment he says “I” and begins to speak? We have seen that the “I,” the sub-

  jectivity to which he gains access, is a purely discursive reality that refers neither

  to a concept nor to a real individual. The “I” that, as a unity transcending the

  multiple totality of lived experiences, guarantees the permanence of what we call

  consciousness is nothing other than the appearance in Being of an exclusively

  linguistic property. As Benveniste writes, “It is in the instance of discourse in

  which I designates the speaker that the speaker proclaims himself as the ‘subject.’

  And so it is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of lan-

  guage” (Benveniste 1971: 226). Linguists have analyzed the consequences of the

  insertion of subjectivity into language for the structure of languages. The conse-

  quences of subjectification for the living individual, however, remain largely to be

  considered. It is thanks to this unprecedented self-presence as “I,” as speaker in

  the event of discourse, that there can be in the living being something like a uni-

  tary center to which one can refer lived experiences and acts, a firm point outside

  of the oceans of sensations and psychic states. And Benveniste has shown how