The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  able to assume.” My body is given to me originarily as the most proper thing,

  only to the extent to which it reveals itself to be absolutely inappropriable.

  א The characteristics of inappropriability and externality that inhere ineliminably in

  the body proper emerge with particular obviousness in all those disturbances of gesturality and speech that, from the name of the French psychiatrist Gilles de la Tourette, are commonly defined with the term “Tourette’s syndrome.” The “tics,” the compulsive utterances

  (generally of an obscene character), the impossibility of completing a movement, the

  tremors of the musculature ( chorea), and all the vast symptomatology that defines this syndrome delimit a sphere of relationship to the body proper that eludes any possibility

  for the patient to clearly distinguish between the voluntary and the involuntary, the

  proper and the external, the conscious and the unconscious.

  8.5. There exists, from this perspective, a structural analogy between the body

  and language. Indeed, language also—in particular in the figure of the mother

  tongue—appears for each speaker as what is the most intimate and proper; and

  yet, speaking of an “ownership” and of an “intimacy” of language is certainly

  misleading, since language happens to the human being from the outside,

  through a process of transmission and learning that can be arduous and painful

  and is imposed on the infant rather than being willed by it. And while the body

  seems particular to each individual, language is by definition shared by others

  and as such an object of common use. Like the bodily constitution according

  to the Stoics, that is to say, language is something with which the living being

  must be familiarized in a more or less drawn-out oikeiosis, which seems natural

  and almost inborn; and yet—as lapsus, stuttering, unexpected forgetfulness, and

  aphasia testify—it has always remained to some degree external to the speaker.

  This is all the more evident in those—the poets—whose trade is precisely

  that of mastering language and making it proper. They must for this reason first

  of all abandon conventions and common use and, so to speak, render foreign the

  language that they must dominate, inscribing it in a system of rules as arbitrary

  as they are inexorable—foreign to such a point that according to a firm tradition,

  it is not they who speak but another, divine principle (the muse) who utters the

  poem for which the poet is limited to providing the voice. The appropriation of

  language that they pursue, that is to say, is to the same extent an expropriation,

  1106

  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  in such a way that the poetic act appears as a bipolar gesture, which each time

  renders external what it must unfailingly appropriate.

  We can call the ways in which this double gesture is signed in language

  style and manner. Here it is necessary to abandon the customary hierarchical

  representations, for which manner would be a perversion and a decline of style,

  which for them remains superior by definition. Style and manner instead name

  the two irreducible poles of the poetic gesture: if style marks its most proper

  trait, manner registers an inverse demand for expropriation and non-belonging.

  Appropriation and disappropriation are to be taken literally here, as a process

  that invests and transforms language in all its aspects. And not only in literature,

  as in the last dialogues of Plato, in the late Goethe, and the final Caproni, but

  also in the arts (the exemplary case is Titian) one witnesses this tension of the

  field of language, which elaborates and transforms it to the point of rendering it

  new and almost unrecognizable.

  8.6. If mannerism, in the history of art and in psychiatry, designates exces-

  sive adherence to a usage or a model (stereotype, repetition) and, at the same

  time, the impossibility of truly identifying oneself with it (extravagance and

  artifice), analogous considerations can be made for the relation of speakers to

  their inappropriable language: it defines a field of polar forces, held between

  idiosyncrasy and stereotype, the excessively proper and the most complete exter-

  nality. And only in this context does the opposition between style and manner

  acquire its true sense. They are the two poles in the tension of which the gesture

  of the poet lives: style is disappropriating appropriation (a sublime negligence, a

  forgetting oneself in the proper), manner an appropriating disappropriation (a

  presenting oneself or remembering oneself in the improper).

  We can therefore call “use” the field of tension whose poles are style and

  manner, appropriation and expropriation. And not only in the poet but in every

  speaking human being with respect to their language and in every living thing

  with respect to its body there is always, in use, a manner that takes its distance

  from style and a style that is disappropriated in manner. In this sense, every use is

  a polar gesture: on the one hand, appropriation and habit; on the other, loss and

  expropriation. To use—hence the semantic breadth of the term, which indicates

  both use in the strict sense and habitual praxis—means to oscillate unceasingly

  between a homeland and an exile: to inhabit.

  א Gregory the Great ( The Life of St. Benedict, II, 3, 37) writes of St. Benedict that at a certain point in his life, “he returned to his beloved place of solitude and before the eyes of the supreme spectator alone habitavit secum, he inhabited with himself.” What

  THE USE OF BODIES

  1107

  can it mean to “inhabit with oneself”? Habitare is an intensive form of habere. Use, as relation to an inappropriable, appears as a field of forces held between a propriety and an impropriety, a having and a not having. In this sense, if one recalls the proximity between use and habit and between use and use-of-oneself that we have evoked above, to inhabit

  means to be in a relation of use, thus understood, with something to the point of being

  able to lose and forget oneself in it, of constituting it as inappropriable.

  To inhabit with oneself, to inhabit-oneself, therefore names the fundamental trait of

  human existence: the form of life of the human being is, in the words of Hölderlin, an

  “inhabiting life” ( Wenn in die Ferne geht der Menschen wohnend Leben . . . ; Hölderlin, p. 314). But precisely for this reason, in the letter to Böhlendorff of December 4, 1801, in which Hölderlin formulated his supreme thought, use appears as always already divided

  into “proper” and “foreign,” and the decisive thesis reads: “the free use of the proper [ der freie Gebrauch des Eignes] is the most difficult thing.”

  8.7. A definition of the third example of the inappropriable, landscape, must

  begin from the exposition of its relationship with the environment and with the

  world. And this is not because the problem of landscape as it has been dealt with

  by art historians, anthropologists, and historians of culture is irrelevant. Rather,

  what is decisive is the observation of the aporias to which these disciplines remain

  prisoner whenever they seek to define landscape. Not only is it unclear whether it

  is a natural reality or a human phenomenon, a geographical place or a place in the

  soul; but in this second case, neither is it clear whether it should be considered as

  consubstantial to the human being or is instead a modern invention. I
t has often

  been repeated that the first appearance of a sensibility to landscape is the letter of

  Petrarch that describes the ascension of Mount Ventoux as motivated sola videndi

  insignem loci altitudinem cupiditate ductus (“by nothing but the desire to see its conspicuous height”; Petrarch, p. 36). In the same sense, it has been affirmed that

  landscape painting, unknown to antiquity, was the invention of the Dutch paint-

  ers of the Quattrocento. Both affirmations are false. Not only are the place and the

  date of composition of the letter probably fictitious, but the citation of Augustine

  that Petrarch introduces there to stigmatize his cupiditas vivdendi implies that already in the fourth century human beings loved to contemplate landscape: et eunt

  homines mirari alta montium et ingentes fluctus maris et latissimos lapsus fluminum.

  Numerous passages testify, in fact, to a true and proper passion of the ancients for

  contemplation from the heights ( magnam capies voluptatem, writes Pliny, si hunc regionis situm ex monte prospexeris [“You would be most agreeably entertained by

  taking a view of the face of this country from the mountains”]; Pliny 1, V, vi, 13),

  which ethology has unexpectedly found in the animal kingdom, where one sees

  goats, vicuñas, felines, and primates climbing up to an elevated place to then con-

  template, for no apparent reason, the surrounding landscape (Fehling, pp. 44–48).

  1108

  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  As for painting, not only the Pompeian frescos but the sources as well show that

  the Greeks and Romans were familiar with landscape painting, which they called

  topiographia or “scenography” ( skenographia), and they have preserved for us the names of landscape painters like Ludius, qui primus instituit amoenissimam pari-etum picturam (“who first introduced the attractive fashion of painting walls with pictures of country houses”; Pliny 2, XXXV, 116–17), and Serapion, of whom we

  know that he could paint scenographies of landscapes but not human figures ( hic

  scaenas optime pinxit, sed hominem pingere non potuit; ibid., XXXV, 113). And those who have observed the petrified, dreamy landscapes painted on the walls of Campanian villas, which Rostosvzev called idyllic-sacral ( sakral-idyllisch), know that they find themselves before something extremely difficult to understand but that

  they recognize unequivocally as landscapes. The landscape is therefore a phenom-

  enon that concerns the human being—and perhaps the living being as such—in

  an essential way, and yet it seems to elude every definition. Only to a philosophical

  consideration will it perhaps be able to disclose its truth.

  8.8. In the course of the winter semester of 1929–30 at Freiburg (published

  with the title The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude), Heidegger seeks to define the fundamental structure of the human being as a

  passage from the “poverty in world” of the animal to the being-in-the-world that

  defines Dasein. On the basis of the work of Uexküll and other zoologists, ex-

  tremely perceptive pages are dedicated to the description and analysis of the re-

  lationship of the animal with its environment ( Umwelt). The animal is poor in

  world ( weltarm), because it remains a prisoner of the immediate relationship with a series of elements (Heidegger calls “disinhibitors” what Uexküll defined as “bearers of significance”) that their receptive organs have selected in the environment.

  The relationship with these disinhibitors is so strict and totalizing that the animal

  is literally “stunned” and “captured” in them. As a representative example of this

  stunning, Heidegger refers to the experiment in which a bee is placed in a labora-

  tory in front of a glass full of honey. If, after it has begun to suck, one removes the

  bee’s abdomen, it tranquilly continues to suck, while one sees honey flowing out

  where the abdomen has been cut off. The bee is so absorbed in its disinhibitor that

  it can never place itself before it to perceive it as something that exists objectively

  in and for itself. Certainly, with respect to the rock, which is absolutely deprived

  of world, the animal is in some way open to its disinhibitors and yet can never see

  them as such. “The animal,” writes Heidegger, “can never apprehend something

  as something” (Heidegger 5, p. 360/248). For this reason the animal remains en-

  closed in the circle of its environment and can never open itself into a world.

  THE USE OF BODIES

  1109

  The philosophical problem of the course is that of the boundary—that is to

  say, of the extreme separation and vertiginous proximity—between the animal

  and the human. In what way is something like a world opened for the human

  being? The passage from the environment to the world is not, in reality, simply

  the passage from a closure to an opening. The animal in fact not only does not

  see the open, beings in their unveiled being, but nor does it perceive its own

  non-openness, its own being captured and stunned in its own disinhibitors. The

  skylark that soars in the air “does not see the open,” but neither is it in a position

  to relate to its own closure. “The animal,” writes Heidegger, “is excluded from

  the essential domain of the conflict between unconcealedness and concealed-

  ness” (Heidegger 6, pp. 237–238/159–160). The openness of the world begins in

  the human being precisely from the perception of a non-openness.

  This means, therefore, that the world does not open up onto a new or ulterior

  space, fuller and more luminous, conquered beyond the limits of the animal en-

  vironment and without relation with it. On the contrary, it has been opened only

  through a suspension and deactivation of the animal relationship with the disin-

  hibitor. The open, the free space of being do not name something radically other

  with respect to the non-open of the animal: they are only a grasping of a dis-un-

  veiling, the suspension and the capture of the skylark-not-seeing-the-open. The

  openness that is in question in the world is essentially the openness to a closure,

  and the one who looks into the open sees only a closing up, sees only a non-seeing.

  For this reason—that is to say, insofar as the world has been opened only

  through the interruption and nullification of the relationship of the living being

  with its disinhibitor—being is from the very beginning traversed by the nothing,

  and the world is constitutively marked by negativity and disorientation.

  8.9. One can comprehend what landscape is only if one understands that it

  represents, with respect to the animal environment and the human world, an

  ulterior stage. When we look at a landscape, we certainly see the open and con-

  template the world, with all the elements that make it up (the ancient sources

  list among these the woods, the hills, the lakes, the villas, the headlands, springs,

  streams, canals, flocks and shepherds, people on foot or in a boat, those hunting

  or harvesting . . .); but these things, which are already no longer parts of an

  animal environment, are now, so to speak, deactivated one by one on the level

  of being and perceived as a whole in a new dimension. We see them as perfectly

  and clearly as ever, and yet we already do not see them, lost—happily, immemo-

  rially lost—in the landscape. Being, en état de paysage, is suspended and rendered inoperative, and the world, having become per
fectly inappropriable, goes, so

  1110

  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  to speak, beyond being and nothing. No longer animal nor human, to the one

  who contemplates the landscape is only landscape. That person no longer seeks

  to comprehend, only look. If the world is the inoperativity of the animal envi-

  ronment, landscape is, so to speak, inoperativity of inoperativity, deactivated

  being. And negativity, which inhered in the world in the form of the nothing

  and non-openness—because it comes from the animal closure, of which it was

  only a suspension—is now dismissed.

  Insofar as it has in this sense gone beyond being, landscape is the outstand-

  ing form of use. In it, use-of-oneself and use of the world correspond without

  remainder. Justice, as a state of the world as inappropriable, is here the decisive

  experience. Landscape is a dwelling in the inappropriable as form-of-life, as jus-

  tice. For this reason, if in the world the human being was necessarily thrown

  and disoriented, in landscape he is finally at home. Pays! paese! (“country,” from pagus, “village”) is according to the etymologists originally the greeting that is exchanged by those who recognize each other as being from the same village.

  8.10. We can call “intimacy” use-of-oneself as relation with an inappropri-

  able. Whether it is a matter of bodily life in all its aspects (understood as those

  elementary ethe that we have seen urinating, sleeping, defecating, sexual plea-

  sure, nudity, etc., to be) or of the special presence-absence to ourselves that we

  live in moments of solitude, that of which we have an experience in intimacy

  is our being held in relation with an inappropriable zone of non-consciousness.

  Here familiarity with self reaches an intensity all the more extreme and jealous

  insofar as it is in no way translated into anything that we could master.

  It is precisely this opaque sphere of non-awareness that in modernity be-

  comes the most exclusive and precious content of “privacy” [ translator’s note:

  English in original here and throughout this passage]. The modern individual is

  defined first of all by means of his faculty (which can take the form of a true and

  proper right) to regulate access to his intimacy. According to the laconic defini-