The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  self-using as acting, visiting, walking, loving. Hence difficulties and aporias of

  every kind. The problem of the Foucauldian subject is the problem of the au-

  toconstitution of being, and a correct understanding of ethics here necessarily

  entails a definition of its ontological status. When was something like a “sub-

  ject” separated off and hypostatized in being in a constituent position? Western

  ontology is from the very beginning articulated and run through by scissions

  and caesurae, which divide and coordinate in being subject ( hypokeimenon) and

  essence ( ousia), primary substances and secondary substances, essence and exis-

  tence, potential and act, and only a preliminary interrogation of these caesurae

  can allow for the comprehension of the problem that we call “subject.”

  14. Precisely because the theory of the subject entails an ontological problem,

  we find here the aporias that have marked from the very beginning its status in

  first philosophy. The relation with the self determines, as we have seen, the way

  in which the individual is constituted as subject of its own moral actions. The

  self, however, according to Foucault does not have any substantial consistency

  but coincides with the relationship itself, is absolutely immanent in it. But then

  how can this self, which is nothing but a relation, be constituted as subject of its

  own actions in order to govern them and define a style of life and a “true life”?

  The self, insofar as it coincides with the relationship with the self, can never be

  posited as subject of the relationship nor be identified with the subject that has

  been constituted in it. It can only constitute itself as constituent but never iden-

  tify itself with what it has constituted. And yet, as constituted subject, it is, so to

  speak, the Gnostic or Neoplatonic hypostasis that the practice of the self allows

  to subsist outside itself as an ineliminable remainder.

  What happens in the relationship between the self and the moral subject is

  something like what Sartre described in the relationship between consciousness

  and the ego: the self, which has constituted the subject, allows itself to be hypno-

  tized and reabsorbed in it and by it. Or again, it is like what, according to Rudolf

  Boehm, happens in the Aristotelian scission between essence and existence: this

  pair, which was supposed to define the unity of being, in the last analysis splits

  it up into an inexistent essence and an inessential existence, which ceaselessly

  refer to one another and endlessly fall outside one another. That is to say that self

  and subject are circularly linked in a constituent relation, and at the same time,

  precisely for this reason they find themselves in an absolute impossibility of co-

  inciding once and for all. The subject, which must govern and direct its actions

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  in a form of life, has been constituted in a practice of the self that is nothing

  other than this very constitution and this form of life.

  15. The ontological aporia is found in Foucault, as one could have foreseen,

  on the level of practice, in the theory of power relations and of the governance

  of human beings that is actualized in it. Power relations, unlike states of domi-

  nation, necessarily entail a free subject, which it is a matter of “conducting” and

  governing and which, as free, stubbornly resists power. And yet, precisely insofar

  as the subject “freely” conducts and governs itself, it will inevitably enter into

  power relations, which consist in conducting the conduct of others (or allowing

  one’s own to be conducted by others). The one who, by “conducting” his life,

  has been constituted as subject of his own actions, will thus be “conducted”

  by other subjects or will seek to conduct others: subjectivation into a certain

  form of life is, to the same extent, subjection to a power relation. The aporia of

  democracy and its governance of human beings—the identity of the governors

  and the governed, absolutely separated and yet to the same degree indissolubly

  united in an indivisible relation—is an ontological aporia, which concerns the

  constitution of the subject as such. As constituent power and constituted power,

  the relation with the self and the subject are simultaneously transcendent and

  immanent to one another. And yet it is precisely the immanence between self

  and subject in a form of life that Foucault persistently sought to think up to

  the end, tangling himself in ever more difficult aporias and, at the same time,

  forcefully pointing in the only direction in which something like an ethics could

  become possible for him.

  16. In the interview given to Les nouvelles littéraires less than a month before

  his death and posthumously published on June 28, 1984, Foucault turns to the

  question of the subject and, in defining his final investigations, writes that in

  these latter for him it was a matter “of reintroducing the problem of the subject

  that I had more or less left aside in my first studies . . . to show how the problem

  of the subject has not ceased to exist throughout this question of sexuality” (Fou-

  cault 2, p. 705/Lotringer, p. 472). Immediately after, however, he specifies that in

  classical antiquity, the problem of the care of the self was forcefully posed, while

  a theory of the subject was entirely lacking:

  This doesn’t mean that the Greeks didn’t strive to define the conditions of an

  experience, but it wasn’t an experience of the subject; rather, it was of the indi-

  vidual, insofar as he sought to constitute himself through self-mastery. Classical

  antiquity never problematized the constitution of the self as subject; inversely,

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  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  beginning with Christianity, there is an appropriation of morality through the

  theory of the subject. Yet a moral experience centered essentially on the subject

  no longer seems to me satisfactory today. (Ibid., p. 706/Lotringer, p. 473)

  If antiquity offers the example of a care and of a constitution of the self without

  the subject and Christianity that of a morality that entirely absorbs the ethical

  relation with the self into the subject, Foucault’s wager is thus to keep hold of

  the reciprocal co-belonging of the two elements.

  17. From this perspective, one can understand the interest that the sadomas-

  ochistic experience could take on in his eyes. Sadomasochism for Foucault is first

  of all an experiment in fluidifying power relations. “One can say,” he declares in

  a 1982 interview,

  that S&M is the eroticization of power, the eroticization of strategic relations.

  What strikes me with regard to S&M is how it differs from social power. What

  characterizes power is the fact that it is a strategic relationship which has been sta-

  bilized through institutions. So the mobility in power relations is limited . . . the

  strategic relations of people are made rigid. At this point, the S&M game is very

  interesting because it is a strategic relation, but it is always fluid. Of course, there

  are roles, but everyone knows very well that those roles can be reversed. Some-

  times the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end the slave has

  become the master. Or, e
ven when the roles are stabilized, you know very well

  that it is always a game. Either the rules are transgressed, or there is an agreement,

  either explicit or tacit, that makes them aware of certain boundaries. (Foucault 2,

  pp. 742–743/Rabinow, p. 169)

  The sadomasochistic relation is, in this sense, entirely immanent to a power

  relation (“S&M is not the relationship between one who suffers and the one

  who inflicts suffering, but between a master and the one over whom the master

  exercises mastery”; ibid., p. 331/Rabinow, p. 151), which uses and transforms it

  into a function of power. “S&M is the utilization of a strategic relationship as a

  source of pleasure (physical pleasure)” (p. 743/Rabinow, p. 170).

  If sadomasochism interests Foucault, this is because it shows that it is possi-

  ble to act on these relations, whether in order to fluidify them and invert their

  roles or to displace them from the social level to the sexual or corporeal level,

  using them for the invention of new pleasures. But in any case, the power rela-

  tion remains, even if it is opened in this way to a new dialectic, different from

  that between power and resistance whose structure Foucault had defined. The

  horizon of power relations and governmentality remains not only unsurpassable

  but also, in some way, inseparable from ethics (“la notion de gouvernementalité,”

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  he wrote in a long interview from January 1984, “permet de faire valoir la liberté

  du sujet et le rapport aux autres, c’est-à-dire ce qui constitue la matière même

  de l’éthique [the concept of governmentality makes it possible to bring out the

  freedom of the subject and its relationship to others—which constitutes the very

  stuff of ethics],” p. 729/Rabinow, p. 300).

  Nevertheless, the transformation of power relations that occurs in sadomas-

  ochism cannot fail to entail a transformation on the level of ontology. The S&M

  relation, with its two poles in mutual exchange, is an ontological relation, for

  which the Foucauldian thesis according to which “the self with which one has

  the relationship is nothing but the relationship itself” holds in a paradigmatic

  way. Foucault did not unfold all the implications of the “ontological adequa-

  tion of the self to the relationship,” which he nonetheless caught a glimpse of.

  Certainly the subject, the self of which he speaks, cannot be inscribed into the

  tradition of the Aristotelian hypokeimenon, and yet Foucault—likely for good

  reasons—constantly avoided the direct confrontation with the history of ontol-

  ogy that Heidegger had laid out as a preliminary task.

  What Foucault does not seem to see, despite the fact that antiquity would

  seem to offer an example in some way, is the possibility of a relation with the self

  and of a form of life that never assumes the figure of a free subject—which is to

  say, if power relations necessarily refer to a subject, of a zone of ethics entirely

  subtracted from strategic relationships, of an Ungovernable that is situated be-

  yond states of domination and power relations.

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  PART TWO

  An Archeology of Ontology

  IN the pages that follow we propose to ascertain whether access to a first phi-

  losophy, that is, to an ontology, is today still—or once again—possible. For

  reasons that we will seek to clarify, at least since Kant, this access has become so

  problematic that it is not thinkable except in the form of an archeology. First

  philosophy is not, in fact, an ensemble of conceptual formulations that, however

  complex and refined, do not escape from the limits of a doctrine: it opens and

  defines each time the space of human acting and knowing, of what the human

  being can do and of what it can know and say. Ontology is laden with the histor-

  ical destiny of the West not because an inexplicable and metahistorical magical

  power belongs to being but just the contrary, because ontology is the originary

  place of the historical articulation between language and world, which preserves

  in itself the memory of anthropogenesis, of the moment when that articulation

  was produced. To every change in ontology there corresponds, therefore, not a

  change in the “destiny” but in the complex of possibilities that the articulation

  between language and world has disclosed as “history” to the living beings of the

  species Homo sapiens.

  Anthropogenesis, the becoming human of the human being, is not in fact

  an event that was completed once and for all in the past: rather, it is the event

  that never stops happening, a process still under way in which the human being

  is always in the act of becoming human and of remaining (or becoming) inhu-

  man. First philosophy is the memory and repetition of this event: in this sense,

  it watches over the historical a priori of Homo sapiens, and it is to this historical a priori that archeological research always seeks to reach back.

  א In the preface to Les mots et les choses (1966), Foucault uses the term “historical a priori” to define that which, in a determinate historical epoch, conditions the possibilities of the formation and development of knowledges. The expression is problematic, because

  it brings together two elements that are at least apparently contradictory: the a priori, which entails a paradigmatic and transcendental dimension, and history, which refers to

  an eminently factual reality. It is probable that Foucault had drawn the term from Husserl’s 1127

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  Origin of Geometry, which Derrida had translated into French in 1962, but certainly not the concept, because while in Husserl the historisches Apriori designates a sort of universal a priori of history, it instead always refers in Foucault to a determinate knowledge and to a determinate time. And yet, if it does not in any way refer back to an archetypal dimension beyond history but remains immanent to it, its contradictory formulation brings

  to expression the fact that every historical study inevitably runs up against a constitutive dishomogeneity: that between the ensemble of facts and documents on which it labors

  and a level that we can define as archeological, which though not transcending it, remains irreducible to it and permits its comprehension. Overbeck has expressed this heterogeneity by means of the distinction, in every study, between prehistory ( Urgeschichte) and history ( Geschichte), where prehistory does not designate what we usually understand by this term—that is, something chronologically archaic ( uralt)—but rather the history of the point of emergence ( Entstehungsgeschichte), in which the researcher must settle accounts with an originary phenomenon (an Urphänomen in Goethe’s sense) and at the same time with the tradition that, while it seems to transmit the past to us, ceaselessly covers up the fact of its emergence (It., sorgività) and renders it inaccessible.

  One can define philosophical archeology as the attempt to bring to light the various

  historical a priori s that condition the history of humanity and define its epochs. It is possible, in this sense, to construct a hierarchy of the various historical a priori s, which ascends in time toward more and more general forms. Ontology or first philosophy has

  constituted for centuries the fundamental historical a priori of Western thought.

  The archeology that attempts to reopen access to a first philosophy must

  nevertheless first of all settle accounts with the striking fact t
hat, beginning from

  a moment for which the name of Kant can serve as a signpost, it is precisely the

  impossibility of a first philosophy that has become the historical a priori of the time in which we still in some way live. The true Copernican turn of Kantian

  critique does not concern the position of the subject so much as the impossibil-

  ity of a first philosophy, which Kant calls metaphysics. As Foucault had intuited

  early on, “it is probable that we belong to an age of critique whose lack of a

  first philosophy reminds us at every moment of its reign and its fatality” (Fou-

  cault 6, pp. xi–xii/xv). Certainly Kant, at the very moment when he sanctioned

  the impossibility of metaphysics, sought to secure its survival by giving it refuge

  in the stronghold of the transcendental. But the transcendental—which in me-

  dieval logic designated what is always already said and known when one says

  “being”—necessarily entails a displacement of the historical a priori from the

  anthropogenetic event (the articulation between language and world) to knowl-

  edge, from a being that is no longer animal but not yet human to a knowing

  subject. Ontology is thus transformed into gnoseology and first philosophy be-

  comes philosophy of knowledge.

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  Up to Heidegger, all or almost all post-Kantian professional philosophers

  had kept to the transcendental dimension as if it went without saying, and in

  this way, believing themselves to be saving the prestige of philosophy, they in

  fact enslaved it to those sciences and knowledges of which they thought they

  could define the conditions of possibility, precisely when these latter, projected

  toward a technological development without limits, demonstrated that they did

  not actually have any need of it. It fell to non-professional philosophers, like

  Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Foucault, and in a different sense a linguist like Émile

  Benveniste, to seek a way out of the transcendental. And they have done this by

  shifting the historical a priori back from knowledge to language: and in this, by

  not attending to the level of meaningful propositions but by isolating each time

  a dimension that called into question the pure fact of language, the pure being