slave can also be the one to dream: “I know of a slave who dreamt that he mastur-
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bated his master, and he became the companion and attendant of his children,
for in his hands he held his master’s penis, which is the symbol of his children”;
the prediction can, however, also be unfavorable: “I know another who, by con-
trast, dreamed of being masturbated by his master; he was tied to a pillar and
received many lashes” (Artemidorus, 1.78).
What Artemidorus’s oneirocritical acumen seems to suggest here is that not
only does the use of the slave’s body include the use of his sexual parts, but also
that, in the indetermination of the two bodies, the “serviceable” hand of the
master is equivalent to the service of the slave. Hence the striking promiscuity
that always defines relationships with servants, whom masters (or mistresses)
have bathe them, clothe them, and comb their hair without this corresponding
to any real necessity.
However, precisely for this reason and in confirmation of the personal and
non-mercantile character of the use of the slave’s body, the master who prosti-
tutes a slave dishonors himself and his household.
1.10. The slave’s activity has often been identified with that which moderns
have called “labor.” As is well known, this is the more or less explicit thesis of
Arendt: the victory of homo laborans in modernity and the primacy of labor over
all other forms of human activity (producing, Herstellen, which corresponds to
the Aristotelian poiesis and acting, Handeln, which corresponds to praxis) in actuality implies that the condition of the slave, that is to say, of the one who is
entirely occupied with the reproduction of bodily life, has, with the end of the
ancien régime, been extended to all human beings. That the modern worker is
more comparable to the slave than to the creator of objects (with whom mo-
dernity tends, according to Arendt, to confound the worker) or the political
man is unquestionable, and already Cicero affirmed that for those who sell their
labor, the compensation is “a pledge of their slavery” ( auctoramentum servitutis;
Cicero 1, 1, 42, 150). However, one must not forget that the Greeks were ignorant
of the concept of labor and, as we have seen, conceived the activity of the slave
not as an ergon but as a “use of the body.”
If in Greece there can be no general notion of labor comparable to our own,
this is because, as Vernant has shown, productive activities are not conceived in
relation to the unitary referent that the market is for us, but with respect to the
use value of the object produced.
By means of the market, all labors effectuated in a society in their totality are
put in relation with one another, compared among themselves, and equal-
ized. . . . This universal equalization of the products of labor on the market, in
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HOMO SACER IV, 2
the same instant that it transforms diverse labors, completely diverse from the
point of view of their use, into merchandise comparable from the point of view
of their value, also transmutes all human labors, entirely diverse and particular,
into one same general and abstract labor activity. By contrast, in the sphere
of ancient technique and economy, labor appears only in its concrete aspect.
Every task is defined as a function of the product that it proposes to fabricate:
the cobbler with respect to the shoe, the potter with respect to the pot. Labor is
not considered in the perspective of the producer, as an expression of one same
human effort that creates a social value. For this reason, in classical Greece there
does not exist a single great human function, called labor, which includes all
trades, but rather a plurality of diverse trades, each of which defines a particular
type of activity that produces its own work. (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, p. 28)
It is in this context that one must situate Aristotle’s reflection on poiesis in the above-cited passage from the Metaphysics (1050a 21–1050b 1): while the one who
acts or uses without producing possesses energeia in his very action, the artisan
who produces an object does not possess in himself the energeia of his activity,
which instead resides outside him in the work. For this reason his activity, consti-
tutively submitted to an external end, is presented as inferior to praxis. Vernant
can thus rightly affirm that
in a similar social and mental system, the human being “acts” when he uses things
and not when he makes them. The ideal of the free and active human being is
to be always and universally a “user” and never a producer. The true problem of
action, at least insofar as it concerns the relationship of the human being with
nature, is that of the “good use” of things and not of their transformation through
labor. (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, p. 33)
In this perspective, the interpretation of the slave’s activity in terms of labor
appears, even aside from the anachronism, extremely problematic. Insofar as it
seems to dissolve into an unproductive use of the body, it seems almost to consti-
tute the other face of the good use of things on the part of the free person. That
is to say, it is possible that the “use of the body” and the absence of work of the
slave are something more or, at any rate, different from a labor activity and that
they instead preserve the memory or evoke the paradigm of a human activity
that is reducible neither to labor, nor to production, nor to praxis.
1.11. Hannah Arendt has recalled the difference that separates the ancient
concept of slavery from that of the moderns: while for the latter the slave is a
means of procuring labor-power at a good price with the goal of profits, for the
ancient it was a matter of eliminating labor from the properly human life, which
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1045
was incompatible with it and which slaves, by taking it upon themselves, ren-
dered possible. “Since human beings are subjected to the necessities of life, they
can be free only if they subject others, forcefully constraining them to endure
those necessities for them” (Arendt, p. 78).
It is necessary to add, however, that the special status of slaves—at once
excluded from and included in humanity, as those not properly human beings
who make it possible for others to be human—has as its consequence a can-
cellation and confounding of the limits that separate physis from nomos. Both artificial instrument and human being, the slave properly belongs neither to
the sphere of nature nor to that of convention, neither to the sphere of justice
nor to that of violence. Hence the apparent ambiguity of Aristotle’s theory of
slavery, which, like ancient philosophy in general, seems constrained to justify
what it can only condemn and to condemn that of which it cannot deny the
necessity. The fact is that the slave, although excluded from political life, has
an entirely special relation with it. The slave in fact represents a not properly
human life that renders possible for others the bios politikos, that is to say, the truly human life. And if the human being is defined for the Greeks through a
dialectic between physis and nomos, zo�
� and bios, then the slave, like bare life, stands at the threshold that separates and joins them.
א The anthropology that we have inherited from classical philosophy is modeled on
the free man. Aristotle developed his idea of the human being starting from the paradigm
of the free man, even if this latter implies the slave as his condition of possibility. One can imagine that he could have developed an entirely other anthropology if he had taken
account of the slave (whose “humanity” he never intended to negate). This means that, in
Western culture, the slave is something like the repressed. The reemergence of the figure
of the slave in the modern worker thus appears, according to the Freudian scheme, as a
return of the repressed in a pathological form.
1.12. How are we to understand the peculiar sphere of human acting that Ar-
istotle calls “use of the body”? What does “using” mean here? Is it really a matter,
as Aristotle seems to suggest, possibly through distinguishing it from production,
of a sort of praxis (the slave is a “practical instrument”)?
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle had distinguished poiesis and praxis on the basis of the presence or absence of an external end ( poiesis is defined by an
external telos that is the object produced, while in praxis “acting well [ eupraxia]
is in itself the end”; 1140b 6). Aristotle unreservedly affirms many times that the
use of the body does not belong to the productive sphere of poiesis; nor does it
seem possible to simply inscribe it in the ambit of praxis. The slave is indeed
assimilated to an instrument and defined as an “instrument for life [ zoè]” and
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HOMO SACER IV, 2
“assistant for praxis”: but precisely for this reason, it is impossible to say of his
actions that, as happens in praxis, acting well is in itself the end.
This is so true that Aristotle explicitly limits the possibility of applying to
the action of the slave the concept of virtue ( aretè) that defines the acting of the free man: insofar as the slave is useful for the necessities of life, “it is clear that
he needs some small virtue, such as will prevent him from abandoning his work
through cowardice or lack of self-control” ( Politics 1260a 35–36). There is not an aretè of the slave’s use of the body, just as (according to the Magna Moralia, 1185a 26–35) there cannot be an aretè of nutritive life, which is for this reason excluded from happiness.
And just as it seems to escape the opposition between physis and nomos, oikos and polis, neither is the activity of the slave classifiable according to the dichotomies poiesis/ praxis, acting well/acting badly that would seem, according to Aristotle, to define human operations.
א In the above-cited passage from the Magna Moralia (1185a 26–35), Aristotle asks if a virtue of nutritive life is possible (that is to say, that part of human life that human beings have in common with plants and that, beginning with late-ancient commentators,
will be defined as “vegetative”): “What happens if we ask if there is a virtue for that part of the soul? For if it does, it is clear that there will be here also a being-at-work [ energeia]
and happiness is the being-at-work of a perfect virtue. Now whether there is or is not a
virtue of this part is another question; but, if there is, it has no being-at-work.”
It is interesting to reflect on the analogy between a human activity deprived of ergon and virtue, which that of the slave is, and vegetative life, as human life excluded from
virtue. And just as Aristotle seems to suggest for this latter the possibility of a virtue without being-at-work (“if it even exists, there is no being-at-work of it”), in the same way
one could think for the body of the slave an aretè that knows neither ergon nor energeia and nevertheless is always in use. Perhaps one of the limits of Western ethics has been
precisely the incapacity to think an aretè of life in all its aspects.
The reason why Aristotle cannot admit an energeia and a virtue in an act of vege-
tative life is that it is, according to him, deprived of hormè, of impulse or conatus. “For those things that have no hormè,” continues the cited passage, “will not have any energeia either; and there does not seem to be any impulse in this part, but it seems to be on par
with fire. For that also will consume whatever you throw in it, but if you do not throw
anything in, it has no impulse to get it. So it is also with this part of the soul, for if you give it food, it nourishes, but if you fail to throw in food, it has no impulse to nourish.
There is no being-at-work of that which has no impulse. So that this part in no way
contributes to happiness.”
By all indications, it is the will to exclude nutritive life from ethics (to say that something does not contribute to happiness means, for a Greek, to exclude it from ethics)
that leads Aristotle to deny to it anything like a conatus. An ethics that does not want
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1047
to exclude a part of life will have to be in a position not only to define a conatus and an aretè of life as such but also to rethink from the very beginning the very concepts of
“impulse” and “virtue.”
1.13. Let us attempt to fix in a series of theses the characteristics of the activity
that Aristotle defines as “use of the body.”
1. It is a matter of an unproductive activity ( argos, “inoperative,” “without
work” in the terminology of the Nicomachean Ethics), comparable to the
use of a bed or a garment.
2. The use of the body defines a zone of indifference between one’s own
body and the body of another. The master, in using the body of the slave,
uses his own body, and the slave, in using his own body, is used by the
master.
3. The body of the slave is situated in a zone of indifference between the
artificial instrument and the living body (it is an empsychon organon, an
animate organ) and, therefore, between physis and nomos.
4. The use of the body is, in Aristotelian terms, neither poiesis nor praxis, neither a production nor a praxis, but neither is it assimilable to the labor
of moderns.
5. The slave, who is defined by means of this “use of the body,” is the human
being without work who renders possible the realization of the work
of the human being, that living being who, though being human, is
excluded—and through this exclusion, included—in humanity, so that
human beings can have a human life, which is to say a political life.
Yet precisely insofar as the use of the body is situated at the undecidable thresh-
old between zoè and bios, between the household and the city, between physis and nomos, it is possible that the slave represents the capture within law of a
figure of human acting that still remains for us to recognize.
א From Aristotle on, the tradition of Western philosophy has always put at the
foundation of the political the concept of action. Still in Hannah Arendt, the public
sphere coincides with that of acting, and the decadence of the political is shown by the
progressive substitution, in the course of the modern era, of making for acting, of homo faber and, later, of homo laborans for the political actor.
The term actio, however, from which the word “action” derives and which, beginning with the Stoics, translates the Greek praxis, originally belongs to the juridical and religious sphere and not to the political. Actio designates in Rome first of all a trial. The Justinian Institutes thus begin by dividing the sphere of law into three great categories: the personae
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(personal laws), the res (property law), and the actiones (trial law). Actionem constituere therefore means “to start proceedings,” just as agere litem or causam means “to conduct a trial.” On the other hand, the verb ago originally means “to celebrate a sacrifice,” and, according to some, it is for this reason that in the most ancient sacramentaries the mass
is defined as actio and the Eucharist as actio sacrificii (Casel, p. 39; Baumstark, pp. 38–39).
It is a term that comes from the juridico-religious sphere that has furnished to the
political its fundamental concept. One of the hypotheses of the current study is, by calling into question the centrality of action and making for the political, that of attempting to think use as a fundamental political category.
2
Chresis
2.1. In March 1950, Georges Redard discussed before the École pratique
de hautes études a mémoire on the meaning of the Greek words chre, chresthai. The committee was presided over by Émile Benveniste, who was also
the supervisor for this research. The mémoire, which the subtitle defines as “a
study of semantics,” was conceived as a chapter of a fuller study on mantic termi-
nology (the words in question, which we normally refer to the sphere of use, be-
long originally in Greek, according to Redard, to the family of “oracular words”).
What is most surprising when one first examines the ample lexical material
collected by Redard is that the verb chresthai does not seem to have a proper
meaning but acquires ever different meanings according to the context. Re-
dard thus lists twenty-three meanings of the term, from “to consult an oracle”
to “have sexual relations,” from “to speak” to “be unhappy,” from “to punch
someone” to “feel nostalgia.” The common strategy in our dictionaries, which
consists in distinguishing the “different” meanings of a term, in order then to
defer to the etymology the attempt to lead them back to a unity, here shows its
insufficiency. The fact is that the verb in question seems to draw its meaning
from that of the term that accompanies it, which is not normally, as we mod-
erns would expect, in the accusative but in the dative or, at times, the genitive.
The Omnibus Homo Sacer Page 161
