Martène and U. Durand (Paris, 1717).
Thomas, Yan, “Le sujet concret et sa personne: Essai d’histoire juridique rétrospective,” in Oliver Cayla and Yan Thomas, Du droit de ne pas naitre: À propos de l’affaire Perruche (Paris: Gallimard, 2002).
Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920). Online edition 2008: www.newadvent.org/summa (last accessed October 26, 2012).
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, ed. M. I. Finley, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1954).
Tyconius, The Book of Rules, ed. W. S. Babcock (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1989).
THE HIGHEST POVERTY
1009
Ubertino: Ubertini de Casali “Super tribus sceleribus,” ed. A. Heysse, in Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 10 (1917): 103–74.
Varro, On the Latin Language (Loeb Classical Library), trans. Roland G. Kent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938).
Villey, Michel, La formation de la pensée juridique moderne (Paris: PUF, 1968).
Vogüé 1: Les règles des saints pères, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, Sources Chrétiennes series, no. 297, 2 vols. (Paris: Cerf, 1982). English translation: Early Monastic Rules: The Rules of the Fathers and the Regula Orientalis, trans. Carmela Vircillo Franklin, Ivan Havener, and J. Alcuin Francis (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1982).
——— 2: La règle du maître, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, Sources Chrétiennes series, no. 105, 3 vols.
(Paris: Cerf, 1964). English translation: The Rule of the Master, trans. Luke Eberle (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1977).
——— 3: Adalbert de Vogüé, De St. Pachôme à Jean Cassien: Études littéraires et doctrinales sur le monachisme égyptien à ses débuts (Rome: Centro Studi Sant’Anselmo, 1996).
Werner, Eric, Il sacro ponte: Interdependenza liturgica e musicale nella Sinagoga e nella Chiesa del primo millennio (Naples: Dehoniane, 1983).
Wittgenstein 1: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, in Schriften 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969). English translation: Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Wiley, 2009).
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HOMO SACER IV, 2
THE
USE
OF
BODIES
TRANSLATED BY ADAM KOTSKO
A boy from Sparta stole a fox and hid it under his cloak, and because his people, in their foolishness, were more ashamed of a botched robbery than we fear punishment,
he let it gnaw through his belly rather than be discovered.
—Montaigne, Essais, 1, XIV
. . . it’s the fox that boy stole
and it hid in his clothes and it ripped his thigh . . .
—V. Sereni, “Appointment at an Unusual Hour”
The free use of the proper is the most difficult thing.
—F. Hölderlin
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Contents
Translator’s Note
1017
Prefatory Note
1019
Prologue
1021
PART ONE: THE USE OF BODIES
1. The Human Being without Work
1029
2. Chresis
1049
3. Use and Care
1056
4. The Use of the World
1063
5. Use-of-Oneself
1073
6. Habitual Use
1081
7. The Animate Instrument and Technology
1088
8. The Inappropriable
1100
Intermezzo I
1113
PART TWO: AN ARCHEOLOGY OF ONTOLOGY
1127
1. Ontological Apparatus
1131
2. Theory of Hypostases
1149
3. Toward a Modal Ontology
1159
Intermezzo II
1186
III. FORM-OF-LIFE
1. Life Divided
1203
2. A Life Inseparable from Its Form
1214
3. Living Contemplation
1221
1016
HOMO SACER IV, 2
4. Life Is a Form Generated by Living
1227
5. Toward an Ontology of Style
1231
6. Exile of One Alone with One Alone
1240
7. “That’s How We Do It”
1245
8. Work and Inoperativity
1249
9. The Myth of Er
1252
Epilogue: Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential
1265
Bibliography
1281
Translator’s Note
To the extent possible, I have used consistent renderings for technical terms.
This is above all the case for the by-now classical distinction between potere and potenza, which I have translated as “power” and “potential,” respectively, even in cases where the latter is somewhat awkward and unidiomatic. The most notable
example is in the epilogue’s discussion of “destituent potential,” which previous
translators have sometimes rendered as “destituent power.” I have rendered the
verb destituire sometimes as “to render destitute” and sometimes as “to depose,”
as the latter often seemed unavoidable. With regard to the two terms that can
be translated as “law,” legge and diritto, the latter is always translated as “juridical order” unless it clearly means “right” in context.
Uso is almost always translated as “use,” except where the context of linguistics
demands the more technical “usage.” The verb esigere and the noun esigenza have been rendered as “to demand” and “demand,” respectively, despite the fact that
the latter has sometimes been translated as “exigency.” It seemed to me that there
was no clear benefit to using the Latinate form, especially at the cost of obscur-
ing the connection between the noun and verb. (Relatedly, the term domanda is
always translated as “question,” except in a brief discussion of Marx where the
economic context requires the translation “demand.”)
A variety of reflexive constructions modeled on Spinoza’s use of the Ladino
term pasearse have been rendered “[verb]-oneself” or “[noun]-of-oneself.” My
model here was David Heller-Roazen’s elegant solution of this translation problem
in Potentialities. I follow Agamben in translating the Heideggerian Eigentlich and Uneigentlich, customarily translated as “authentic” and “inauthentic,” as “proper”
and “improper,” and I have altered quotations from the English translation accord-
ingly. The term presupposato is translated sometimes as “presupposed” and some-
times as “presupposition,” depending on which is most idiomatic. Neither English
term represents any other Italian term. Vincolo is always rendered as “bond” and is the only term so rendered. Finally, in the prologue on Debord, the term clandestino
is variously translated as “clandestine,” “secret,” or “stowaway.”
1017
1018
HOMO SACER IV, 2
I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for their help and support. Above
all, I must thank Carlo Salzani for carefully comparing my entire manuscript to
the o
riginal Italian text and offering invaluable corrections and clarifications. I
would also like to extend my gratitude to Agatha Slupek, Philippe Theophanidis,
and Mark Westmoreland for their bibliographical assistance, and to Emily-Jane
Cohen, Tim Roberts, Friederike Sundaram, and the entire staff at Stanford Uni-
versity Press.
Prefatory Note
Those who have read and understood the preceding parts of this work know
that they should not expect a new beginning, much less a conclusion. In fact,
we must decisively call into question the commonplace according to which is
it a good rule that an inquiry commence with a pars destruens and conclude
with a pars construens and, moreover, that the two parts be substantially and
formally distinct. In a philosophical inquiry, not only can the pars destruens not be separated from the pars construens, but the latter coincides, at every point and without remainder, with the former. A theory that, to the extent possible, has
cleared the field of all errors has, with that, exhausted its raison d’être and cannot
presume to subsist as separate from practice. The archè that archeology brings
to light is not homogeneous to the presuppositions that it has neutralized; it is
given entirely and only in their collapse. Its work is their inoperativity.
The reader will thus find here reflections on some concepts—use, demand,
mode, form-of-life, inoperativity, destituent potential—that have from the very
beginning oriented an investigation that, like every work of poetry and of thought,
cannot be concluded but only abandoned (and perhaps continued by others).
Some of the texts published here were written at the beginning of the investi-
gation, which is to say, almost twenty years ago; others—the greater part—were
written in the course of the last five years. The reader will understand that, in a
writing process so prolonged in time, it is difficult to avoid repetitions and, at
times, discordances.
1019
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Prologue
1. It is curious how in Guy Debord a lucid awareness of the insufficiency of
private life was accompanied by a more or less conscious conviction that
there was, in his own existence or in that of his friends, something unique and ex-
emplary, which demanded to be recorded and communicated. Already in Critique
de la séparation, he thus evokes at a certain point as intransmissible “cette clandestinité de la vie privée sur laquelle on ne possède jamais que des documents
dérisoires” (“that clandestinity of private life regarding which we possess nothing
but pitiful documents”; Debord 1, p. 49/33); and nevertheless, in his first films and
again in Panégyrique, he never stopped parading one after the other the faces of his friends, of Asger Jorn, of Maurice Wyckaert, of Ivan Chtcheglov, and his own face,
alongside that of the women he loved. And not only that, but in Panégyrique there
also appear the houses he inhabited, 28 via delle Caldaie in Florence, the country
house at Champot, the square des Missions étrangères at Paris (actually 109 rue du
Bac, his final Parisian address, in the drawing room of which a photograph from
1984 shows him seated on the English leather sofa that he seemed to like).
Here there is something like a central contradiction, which the Situationists
never succeeded in working out, and at the same time something precious that
demands to be taken up again and developed—perhaps the obscure, unavowed
awareness that the genuinely political element consists precisely in this incom-
municable, almost ridiculous clandestinity of private life. Since clearly it—the
clandestine, our form-of-life—is so intimate and close at hand, if we attempt to
grasp it, only impenetrable, tedious everydayness is left in our hands. And none-
theless, perhaps precisely this homonymous, promiscuous, shadowy presence
preserves the stowaway of the political, the other face of the arcanum imperii, on which every biography and every revolution makes shipwreck. And Guy, who
was so shrewd and cunning when he had to analyze and describe the alienated
forms of existence in the society of the spectacle, is equally innocent and helpless
when he tries to communicate the form of his life, to look in the face and dis-
solve the stowaway with which he had shared his journey up to the end.
1021
1022
HOMO SACER IV, 2
2. In girum imus nocte et consumimir igni (1978) opens with a declaration of
war against its time and continues with a relentless analysis of the conditions
of life that the market society at the last stage of its development had estab-
lished over all the earth. Unexpectedly, however, around the middle of the film,
the detailed and merciless description stops and is replaced by the melancholic,
almost mournful evocation of personal memories and events, which anticipate
the declared autobiographical intention of Panégyrique. Guy recalls the Paris of
his youth, which no longer exists, in whose streets and cafés he had set out
with his friends on the stubborn investigation of that “Graal néfaste, dont per-
sonne n’avait voulu” (“sinister Grail, which no one else had ever sought”). Al-
though the Grail in question, “glimpsed fleetingly” but not “encountered,” must
unquestionably have had a political meaning, since those who sought it “found
themselves capable of understanding false life in light of true life” (Debord 1,
p. 252/172), the tone of the commemoration, punctuated by citations from
Ecclesiastes, Omar Khayyam, Shakespeare, and Bossuet, is at the same time indis-
putably nostalgic and gloomy: “À la moitié du chemin de la vraie vie, nous étions
environnés d’une sombre mélancolie, qu’ont exprimée tant des mots railleurs et
tristes, dans le café de la jeunesse perdue” (“Midway on the journey of real life we
found ourselves surrounded by a somber melancholy, reflected by so much sad
banter in the cafés of lost youth,” Debord 1, p. 240/164). From this lost youth,
Guy recalls the confusion, the friends and lovers (“comment ne me serais-je pas
souvenu des charmants voyous et des filles orgueilleuses avec qui j’ai habité ces
bas-fonds . . . [I couldn’t help remembering the charming hooligans and proud
young women I hung out with in those shady dives . . . ]”; p. 237/162), while
on the screen there appear the images of Gil J. Wolman, Ghislain de Marbaix,
Pinot-Gallizio, Attila Kotanyi, and Donald Nicholson-Smith. But it is toward
the end of the film that the autobiographical impulse reappears more forcefully
and the vision of Florence quand elle était libre (“when it was free”) is interwoven with images of the private life of Guy and of the women with whom he had lived
in that city in the seventies. One then sees pass by rapidly the houses in which
Guy lived, the impasse de Clairvaux, the rue St. Jacques, the rue St. Martin, a
parish church in Chianti, Champot, and, once more, the faces of friends, while
one hears the words from Gilles’ song in Les visiteurs du soir: “Tristes enfants
perdus, nous errions dans la nuit. . . .” And, a few sequences before the end,
pictures of Guy at 19, 25, 27, 31, and 45 years of age. The sinister Grail, which the
Situationists had set out to investigate,
has to do not only with the political, but
in some way also with the clandestinity of private life, of which the film does not
hesitate to exhibit, apparently without shame, the “pitiful documents.”
THE USE OF BODIES
1023
3. The autobiographical intention was, however, already present in the pal-
indrome that gives the film its title. Immediately after having evoked his lost
youth, Guy adds that nothing expresses its dissipation better than that “ancient
phrase that turns completely back on itself, being constructed letter by letter like
an inescapable labyrinth, thus perfectly uniting the form and content of loss: In
girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. ‘We turn in the night, consumed by fire’”
(Debord 1, p. 242/165–166).
The phrase, at times defined as the “devil’s verse,” actually comes, according
to a short article by Heckscher, from emblematic literature and refers to moths
inexorably drawn by the flame of the candle that will consume them. An em-
blem consists of an impresa—which is to say, a phrase or motto—and an image;
in the books that I have been able to consult, the image of moths devoured by
flame appears often, yet it is never associated with the palindrome in question
but rather with phrases that refer to amorous passion (“thus living pleasure leads
to death,” “thus to love well brings torment”) or, in some rare cases, to impru-
dence in politics or war (“non temere est cuiquam temptanda potentia regis,”
“temere ac periculose”). In Otto van Veen’s Amorum emblemata (1608) a winged
love contemplates the moths who hurl themselves toward the flame of the can-
dle, and the impresa reads: brevis et damnosa voluptas.
It is thus probable that Guy, in choosing the palindrome as a title, was
comparing himself and his companions to moths who, amorously and rashly
attracted by the light, are destined to lose themselves and be consumed in the
flame. In The German Ideology—a work that Guy knew perfectly well—Marx
evokes this image critically: “and it is thus that nocturnal moths, when the sun of
the universal has set, seek the light of the lamp of the particular.” It is thus all the
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