tion of an English-speaking scholar, “privacy will be defined as: selective control of access to the self. . . . It is an interpersonal boundary process, whereby the openness-closedness from others shifts with the circumstances” (Altman, p. 8ff.). But
what is at stake in this selective sharing of use-of-oneself is in reality the very
constitution of the self. That is to say, intimacy is a circular apparatus, by means
of which, by selectively regulating access to the self, the individual constitutes
himself as the pre-supposition and proprietor of his own “privacy.” As the same
author suggests, albeit beyond his own intentions, what is vital for the definition
of the self is not the inclusion or exclusion of others so much as the capacity to
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regulate contact when one desires to: “the privacy mechanisms serve to define
the limits and boundaries of the self” (ibid., p. 26). The dominion of privacy
therefore replaces, as a constitution of subjectivity, the use of bodies, in which
subject and object were indeterminated.
One can therefore understand how, in a society formed from individuals,
the transformation of use-of-oneself and of the relation to the inappropriable
into a jealous possession in reality has a political significance that is all the more
decisive insofar as it remains stubbornly hidden. It is in the work of Sade—that
is to say, precisely at the moment when singular living beings as such became
the bearers of the new national sovereignty—that this political meaning comes
forcefully to light. In the manifesto “Français encore un effort si vous voulez être
républicains” that the libertine Dolmancé reads in Philosophie dans le boudoir,
the political locus par excellence becomes the maisons in which every citizen
has a right to summon any other person to freely use his or her body. Intimacy
becomes here what is at stake in politics; the boudoir is totally substituted for
the cité. If the sovereign subject is first of all sovereign over his or her own body, if intimacy—which is to say, use-of-oneself as inappropriable—becomes something like the fundamental biopolitical substance, then one can understand that
in Sade it can appear as the object of the first and unconfessed right of the
citizen: each individual has the right to share his or her liking of the other’s in-
appropriable. Common above all is the use of bodies.
What in Dolmancé’s pamphlet was a juridical constitutional contract,
founded on republican reciprocity, in the 120 Days of Sodom instead appears as
a pure object of dominion and of unconditioned violence (it is certainly not an
accident that the loss of all control over one’s own intimacy was, according to the
testimonies of the deportees, an integral part of the atrocities of the Lager). The criminal pact that rules the castle of Silling, in which the four wicked potentates
enclose themselves with their forty victims, establishes the absolute control on
the part of the masters of the intimacy of their slaves—even their physiological
functions are minutely regulated—the total and unlimited use of their bodies.
The relation with the inappropriable, which constitutes the biopolitical sub-
stance of each individual, is thus violently appropriated by those who constitute
themselves in this way as lords of intimacy, of that free use of the proper that, in
the words of Hölderlin, appeared as “the most difficult thing.”
Against this attempt to appropriate the inappropriable to oneself, by means
of right or force, in order to constitute it as an arcanum of sovereignty, it is
necessary to remember that intimacy can preserve its political meaning only on
condition that it remains inappropriable. What is common is never a property but
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only the inappropriable. The sharing of this inappropriable is love, that “use of
the loved object” of which the Sadean universe constitutes the most serious and
instructive parody.
א In the course of this study of the use of bodies, a term has never stopped appearing:
inoperativity. The elements of a theory of inoperativity had been elaborated in a previous volume (Agamben 2, passim and in particular §§8.22–8.24; but cf. also Agamben 3, §9);
the concept of use that we have attempted to define can be correctly understood only if it is situated in the context of this theory. Use is constitutively an inoperative praxis, which can happen only on the basis of a deactivation of the Aristotelian apparatus potential/act, which assigns to energeia, to being-at-work, primacy over potential. Use is, in this sense, a principle internal to potential, which prevents it from being simply consumed in the
act and drives it to turn once more to itself, to make itself a potential of potential, to be capable of its own potential (and therefore its own impotential).
The inoperative work, which results from this suspension of potential, exposes in the
act the potential that has brought it into being: if it is a poem, it will expose in the poem the potential of language; if it is a painting, it will expose on the canvas the potential of painting (of looking); if it is an action, it will expose in the act the potential of acting.
Only in this sense can one say that inoperativity is a poem of poetry, a painting of painting, a praxis of praxis. Rendering inoperative the works of language, the arts, politics, and
economy, it shows what a human body can do, opens it to a new possible use.
Inoperativity as a specifically human praxis also allows us to understand in what way
the concept of use here proposed (like that of form-of-life) relates to the Marxian concept of “form of production.” It is certainly true that, as Marx has suggested, the forms of production of an epoch contribute in a decisive way to determine its social relationships and culture; but in relation to every form of production, it is possible to individuate a “form of inoperativity” that, while being held in close relationship with it, is not determined
by it but on the contrary renders its works inoperative and permits a new use of them.
One-sidedly focused on the analysis of forms of production, Marx neglected the analysis
of the forms of inoperativity, and this lack is certainly at the bottom of some of the aporias of his thought, in particular as concerns the definition of human activity in the classless society. From this perspective, a phenomenology of forms of life and of inoperativity that proceeded in step with an analysis of the corresponding forms of production would be
essential. In inoperativity, the classless society is already present in capitalist society, just as, according to Benjamin, shards of messianic time are present in history in possibly
infamous and risible forms.
Intermezzo I
1. In a brief work published four years after the death of Michel Foucault,
Pierre Hadot, who had been acquainted with him and episodically asso-
ciated with him since 1980, takes care to specify the “convergences” and “diver-
gences” between his thought and his friend’s, in the course of a dialogue that was
interrupted all too soon. If, on the one hand, he claims to find in Foucault the
same themes and interests, which converge in a conception of ancient philos-
ophy—and of philosophy in general—as an “exercise” or “style of life,” on the
other hand, he firmly distances himself from his friend’s theses:
In this labor of the self on the self, in this exercise of the self I also recognize,
for my part, an essential aspect o
f the philosophical life: philosophy is an art of
living, a style of life that touches on all of existence. I would, however, hesitate to
speak, as Foucault does, of an “aesthetics of existence,” both in connection with
Antiquity and, in general, as the task of the philosopher. Michel Foucault un-
derstands . . . this expression in the sense that our own life is the work of art that
we must make. The term “aesthetics” indeed evokes, for us moderns, resonances
very different from those that the word “beauty” ( kalon, kalos) had in Antiquity.
Moderns have the tendency to represent the beautiful as an autonomous reality
independent of good and evil, while for the Greeks, by contrast, when the term
referred to a human being, it normally implied a moral value. . . . For this rea-
son, instead of speaking of a “cultivation of the self,” it would be better to speak
of transformation, of transfiguration, of “overcoming the self.” To describe this
state, one cannot avoid the term “wisdom,” which, it seems to me, in Foucault
appears rarely, if ever. . . . Curiously Foucault, who does do justice to the concep-
tion of philosophy as therapeutics, does not seem to notice that this therapeutics
is above all intended to procure peace of the soul. . . . In Platonism, but also in
Epicureanism and Stoicism, liberation from anxiety is obtained by means of a
movement that causes us to pass from individual and impassioned subjectivity
to the objectivity of a universal perspective. It is not a matter of the construction
of a self, but on the contrary, of an overcoming of the I, or at least of an exercise
by means of which the I is situated in the totality and has an experience of the
self as part of this totality. (Hadot 1, pp. 231–232)
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2. At first glance, the opposition appears to be clear and seems to reflect a
real divergence. As Hadot himself observes, what is in question is the “aesthetics
of existence” that was Foucault’s final conception of philosophy and that corre-
sponded, moreover, in all probability with “the philosophy that he concretely
practiced throughout his life” (Hadot 1, p. 230). In an article that Hadot cites a
little earlier in support of his diagnosis, Paul Veyne, a historian of antiquity to
whom Foucault felt particularly close, seems, at least apparently, to move in the
same direction:
The idea of styles of existence played a major role in Foucault’s conversations and
doubtless in his inner life during the final months of a life that only he knew to
be threatened. Style does not mean distinction here; the word is to be taken in the sense of the Greeks, for whom an artist was first of all an artisan and a work of
art was first of all a work. . . . The self, taking itself as a work to be accomplished,
could sustain an ethics that is no longer supported by either tradition or reason;
as an artist of itself, the self would enjoy that autonomy that modernity can no
longer do without. (Veyne, p. 939/7)
3. The biography published in English by James Miller in 1993, with the
meaningful title The Passion of Michel Foucault, contains ample sections on
the private life of Foucault, in particular on his homosexuality and his regular
visits to bathhouses and sadomasochistic gay bars (like the Hothouse in San
Francisco) during his stays in the United States. But already a few years after
Foucault’s death, a young writer who had been close to him in his final years,
Hervé Guibert, had related in two books ( Les secrets d’un homme in 1988 and
À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie in 1990) the childhood memories and secret
traumas that Foucault is supposed to have communicated to him on his death-
bed. Even earlier, during his first decisive stay in California, Simeon Wade, a
young scholar who had accompanied the philosopher in a memorable excursion
to Death Valley, had carefully taken down in handwritten notebooks his reac-
tions during an experiment with LSD, as though these were just as precious and
important for the understanding of Foucault’s thought as his works.
Certainly Foucault himself, who at a certain point had joined FHAR (Front
homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire) and openly declared his homosexuality,
despite being a reserved and discreet person according to his friends’ testimony,
never seems to draw sharp divisions between his public life and private life. In
numerous interviews, he thus refers to sadomasochism as a practice of the in-
vention of new pleasures and new styles of existence and, more generally, to the
homosexual circles of San Francisco and New York as a “laboratory” in which
one “tries to explore all the internal possibilities of sexual conduct from the per-
THE USE OF BODIES
1115
spective of the creation of new forms of life” (Foucault 2, p. 331/Rabinow, p. 151;
cf. also p. 737/Rabinow, p. 164). It is therefore possible that precisely the Fou-
cauldian idea of an art of existence, already clearly formulated at the beginning
of the eighties, and his growing attention to practices through which human
beings seek to modify themselves and to make their own life something like a
work of art, may have authorized our interest in aspects of existence that usually
are not considered pertinent for the understanding of an author’s thought.
4. Hadot first of all understands the aesthetics of existence, which he attrib-
utes to Foucault as “his final conception of philosophy,” according to its modern
resonance, in which, as an “autonomous reality independent of good and evil,”
it is opposed to the ethical dimension. In this way, he in a certain way attributes
to Foucault the project of an aestheticization of existence, in which the subject,
beyond good and evil, more similar to Huysmans’s Des Esseintes than to the
Platonic Socrates, shapes his life as a work of art. A survey of the places where
Foucault makes use of the expression “aesthetics of existence” instead shows be-
yond any doubt that Foucault resolutely and constantly situates the experience
in question in the ethical sphere. Already in the first lecture of the 1981–82 course
The Hermeneutics of the Subject, almost as though he had foreseen Hadot’s ob-
jection in advance, he warns against the modern temptation to read expressions
like “care of the self” or “concern with oneself” in an aesthetic and non-moral
sense. “Now you are well aware,” he writes, “that there is a certain tradition (or
rather, several traditions) that dissuades us (us, now, today) from giving any pos-
itive value to all these expressions . . . and above all from making them the basis
of a morality. They . . . sound to our ears . . . like a sort of challenge and defi-
ance, a desire for radical ethical change, a sort of moral dandyism, the assertion-
challenge of a fixed aesthetic and individual stage” (Foucault 1, p. 14/12). Against
this (so to speak) aestheticizing interpretation of the care of the self, Foucault
instead underlines that it is precisely “this injunction to ‘take care of oneself’ that
is the basis for the constitution of what have without doubt been the most severe,
strict, and restrictive moralities known in the We
st” (ibid., p. 14/13).
5. The expression “aesthetics of existence”—and the theme of life as work of
art that is joined with it—is always used by Foucault in the context of an ethical
problematization. Hence in the 1983 interview with Dreyfus and Rabinow (to
which Hadot also makes reference), he declares that “the idea of bios as material
for an aesthetic piece of art is something that fascinates me”; but he adds imme-
diately, to specify that what he has in mind is a non-normative form of ethics:
“The idea also that ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without
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HOMO SACER IV, 2
any relation with the juridical per se, with an authoritarian system, with a dis-
ciplinary structure” (Foucault 2, p. 390/Rabinow, p. 260). In another interview,
published in May 1984 with the editorial title “An Aesthetics of Existence,” the
expression is preceded by an analogous specification: “This elaboration of one’s
own life as a personal work of art, even if it obeyed collective canons, was at
the center, it seems to me, of moral experience, of the moral will, in Antiquity;
whereas in Christianity, with the religion of the text, the idea of God’s will,
and the principle of obedience, morality took much more the form of a code
of rules” (Foucault 2, p. 731/Lotringer, p. 451). But it is above all in the intro-
duction to the second volume of The History of Sexuality that the pertinence of
the “aesthetics of existence” to the ethical sphere is clarified beyond any doubt.
If Foucault here proposes to show how sexual pleasure was problematized in
antiquity “through practices of the self that brought into play the criteria of an
aesthetics of existence” (Foucault 3, p. 17/12), this takes place in order to respond
to the genuinely ethical question: “why is sexual conduct, why are the activities
and pleasures that attach to it, an object of moral solicitude?” (ibid., p. 15/10).
The “arts of existence” with which the book is concerned and the techniques of
the self through which human beings sought to make of their life “an oeuvre that
carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” are in reality
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