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1.14. Aristotle does not explicitly thematize the introduction of time into
being implied in the ti en einai. However, when he explains ( Metaphysics, 1028a 30ff.) in what sense ousia is protos, primary and first of all, he distinguishes three aspects of this priority: according to the concept ( logoi), according to knowledge ( gnosei), and according to time ( chronoi). According to the concept, insofar as in the concept of each thing is necessarily present that of ousia; according to
knowledge, because we know something better when we know what it is. The
explication of the third aspect of priority, the temporal, seems to be lacking. In
place of this, Aristotle formulates the task of thought in these terms: kai de kai
to palai te kai nyn kai aei zetoumenon kai aei aporoumenon, ti to on, touto esti tis
he ousia (“and indeed the question that, both now and of old, has always been
raised, and always been the subject of doubt, is what ousia is”). If, according
to the logical sequence, this sentence should be read as a clarification of the
temporal sense of the protos, then it cannot refer solely to a chronological time.
Here Aristotle implicitly cites a passage from Plato’s Sophist, which Heidegger
was to use as the epigraph of Being and Time: “you have long known what you
meant when you said ‘being’; we, by contrast, at one time [ pro tou] knew it, but
now we have fallen into an aporia [ eporekamen]” (Plato, Sophist 244a). Being is that which, if one seeks to catch hold of it, divides itself into a “before” ( palai), in which one believed one could comprehend it, and a “now” ( nyn) in which it
becomes problematic. The comprehension of being, that is to say, always entails
time. (Heidegger’s posing again of the problem of being is a revival of Aristote-
lian ontology and will remain up to the very end in solidarity with its aporias.)
1.15. In the ontological apparatus that Aristotle leaves as an inheritance to
Western philosophy, the scission of being into essence and existence and the in-
troduction of time into being are the work of language. It is the subjectivation
of being as hypokeimenon, as that-on-the-basis-of-which-one-says, that puts the
apparatus in motion. On the other hand, as we have seen, the hypokeimenon is al-
ways already named by means of a proper name (Socrates, Emma) or indicated by
means of a deictic “this.” The ti en einai, the “what it was for Emma to be Emma,”
expresses a relation that runs between the entity and its being in language.
By abstracting itself from predication, the singular being recedes into a past
like the sub-iectum on the presupposition of which every discourse is founded.
The being on-the-basis-of-which-one-says and that cannot be said is always al-
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ready pre-supposed, always has the form of a “what it was.” In being presupposed
in this way, the subject maintains at one and the same time its priority and its
inaccessibility. In the words of Boehm, it is inaccessible due to—and at the same
time, despite—its priority and has its priority despite—and at the same time due
to—its inaccessibility (Boehm, R., pp. 210–211). But as Hegel comprehends in
the dialectic of sense certainty that opens the Phenomenology, this past is precisely what allows one to grasp in language the immediate “here” and “now” as time, as
“a history.” The impossibility of saying—other than by naming it—singular being
produces time and dissolves into it. (That Hegel thought the absolute as subject
and not as substance means precisely this: that the presupposition, the “subject”
as hypokeimenon has been liquidated, pushed into the background as presup-
position, and at the same time captured, by means of the dialectic and time, as
subject in a modern sense. The presuppositional structure of language is thus
revealed and transformed into the internal motor of the dialectic. Schelling will
instead seek, without success, to arrest and neutralize linguistic presupposition.)
1.16. Now one can understand what we meant when we affirmed that ontol-
ogy constitutively has to do with anthropogenesis and, at the same time, what is
at stake in the Aristotelian ontological apparatus—and more generally, in every
historical transformation of ontology. What is in question, in the apparatus as
in its every new historical declination, is the articulation between language and
world that anthropogenesis has disclosed as “history” to the living beings of the
species Homo sapiens. Severing the pure existent (the that it is) from the essence (the what it is) and inserting time and movement between them, the ontological
apparatus reactualizes and repeats the anthropogenetic event, opens and defines
each time the horizon of acting as well as knowing, by conditioning, in the sense
that has been seen as a historical a priori, what human beings can do and what
they can know and say.
According to the peculiar presuppositional structure of language (“language,”
according to Mallarmé’s precise formulation, “is a principle that develops itself
through the negation of every principle”—that is, by transforming every archè
into a presupposition), in anthropogenesis the event of language pre-supposes
as not (yet) linguistic and not (yet) human what precedes it. That is to say, the
apparatus must capture in the form of subjectivation the living being, presup-
posing it as that on the basis of which one says, as what language, in happening,
presupposes and renders its ground. In Aristotelian ontology, the hypokeimenon,
the pure “that it is,” names this presupposition, the singular and impredicable
existence that must be at once excluded and captured in the apparatus. The “it
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was” ( en) of the ti en einai is, in this sense, a more archaic past than every verbal past tense, because it refers to the originary structure of the event of language.
In the name (in particular in the proper name, and every name is originally a
proper name), being is always already presupposed by language to language. As
Hegel was to understand perfectly, the precedence that is in question here is not
chronological but is an effect of linguistic presupposition.
Hence the ambiguity of the status of the subject- hypokeimenon: on the one
hand, it is excluded insofar as it cannot be said but only named and indicated;
on the other hand, it is the foundation on the basis of which everything is said.
And this is the sense of the scission between “that it is” and “what it is,” quod est
and quid est: the ti en einai is the attempt to overcome the scission, by including it in order to overcome it (in the medieval formula quod quid erat esse, this attempt to hold together the quod est and the quid est is obvious).
א According to the axiom formulated by Aristotle in the De anima 415b 13 (“Being
for the living is to live,” to de zen tois zosi to einai estin), what holds on the level of being is transposed in a completely analogous way onto the level of living. Like being, so also
“living is said in many ways” ( pleonachos de legomenou tou zen; ibid., 413a 24), and here as well one of these senses—nutritive or vegetative life—is separated from the others
and becomes a presupposition to them. As we have shown elsewhere, nutritive life thus
becomes what must be excluded from the city—and at the same time included i
n it—as
simple living from politically qualified living. Ontology and politics correspond perfectly.
1.17. The ontological paradigm in Plato is completely different. He is the first
to discover the presuppositional structure of language and to make this discov-
ery the foundation of philosophical thought. This is the passage—as celebrated
as it is misunderstood—from the Republic (511b) in which Plato describes the
dialectical method:
Then also understand the other subsection of the intelligible, I mean that which
language itself [ autos ho logos] touches on [ haptetai] with the potential of dialoguing [ tei tou dialegesthai dynamei]. It does not consider these presuppositions
[ hypotheseis, etymologically, “that which is placed under, at the foundation”] as
first principles [ archai] but truly as presuppositions—as stepping-stones to take
off from, enabling it to reach the non-presupposed [ anypotheton] toward the
principle of everything and, having touched on it [ hapsamenos autes], it reverses
itself and, keeping hold of what follows from it, comes down to a conclusion
without making use of anything visible at all but only of ideas themselves, moving
on from ideas to ideas and ending in ideas.
The power of language is that of transforming the principle (the archè) into a
presupposition (“hypothesis,” what the word presupposes as its referent). It is
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what we do in every non-philosophical discourse, in which we take it for granted
that the name refers to something non-linguistic that we therefore treat as a
given, as a principle from which we can start in order to acquire knowledge. The
philosopher, by contrast, is someone who, conscious of this presuppositional
power of language, does not treat hypotheses as principles but rather as presup-
positions, which are to be used only as footholds to reach the non-presupposed
principle. Contrary to a recurrent equivocation, it is important to understand
that the method that Plato describes has nothing to do with a mystical prac-
tice but is situated rigorously within language (as he says beyond all possible
doubt, what is in question is what “language itself touches on with the poten-
tial of dialoguing”). That is to say, it is a matter, once we have recognized the
presuppositional power of the logos—which transforms the reality that thought
must reach into the given referent of a name or a definition—of recognizing
and eliminating the presupposed hypotheses (Plato also calls them “shadows”—
skiai—and “images”— eikones; Republic 510e) by making use of language in a non-presuppositional, which is to say non-referential, way (for this reason, when
it is a question of confronting decisive problems, Plato prefers to have recourse
to myth and joking).
This is to say that the philosopher frees language from its shadow and,
instead of taking hypotheses for granted, seeks to ascend from these latter—
namely, from denotative words—toward the non-presupposed principle. The
idea is this word freed from its shadow, which does not presuppose the archè
as given but seeks to reach it as what is not a presupposition to name and
discourse. Philosophical discourse always and only moves by means of these
non-presuppositional words, emancipated from their sensible referent, which
Plato calls ideas and which, significantly, he always expresses by means of the
name in question preceded by the adjective autos (“itself ”): the circle itself
( autos ho kyklos; Epistle VII, 342a–b), the thing itself. The thing itself, which is in question here, is not an obscure non-linguistic presupposition of language
but what appears when, once we have taken note of its presuppositional power,
language is liberated from its shadow. The “circle itself” is the word “circle”
insofar as it signifies not simply the sensible circle but itself insofar as it signifies
it. Only by extinguishing the presuppositional power of language is it possible
for it to let the mute thing appear: the thing itself and language itself ( autos ho
logos) are in contact at this point—united only by a void of signification and
representation. (A word can signify itself only by means of a representative
void—hence the metaphor of “touching”: the idea is a word that does not de-
note but “touches.” That is to say, as happens in contact, it manifests the thing
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and at the same time also itself—recall, in De anima 423b 15, the definition of
touching as that which perceives not “through a medium” [ metaxy] but “at the
same time [ ama] as the medium.”)
In this sense, Kojève is right to say that philosophy is the discourse that, in
speaking of something, also speaks of the fact that it is speaking about it. It goes
without saying, however, that this awareness does not exhaust the philosophical
task, because with this starting point, different and even opposed perspectives
are possible. While according to Plato thought must seek to reach the non-pre-
supposed principle by eliminating the presuppositional power of language,
Aristotle—and Hegel after him—by contrast put at the basis of their dialectic
precisely the presuppositional power of the logos.
1.18. Ontology thinks being insofar as it is said and called into question in
language, which is to say that it is constitutively onto-logy. In the Aristotelian apparatus, this is manifested in the scission of being into a hypokeimenon, something lying-at-the-base (the being named or indicated of a singular existent, in-
sofar as it is not said of a subject but is a presupposition for every discourse) and
that which is said on the presupposition of it. In the ti en einai Aristotle seeks to think their identity, to articulate together what had been divided: being is what
was always presupposed in language and by language. That is to say: existence
and identity coincide—or can coincide by means of time.
In this way, the task that the apparatus, as historical a priori, opens up for
the history of the West is both speculative and political: if being is divided in the
logos and nevertheless not irreducibly split, if it is possible to think the identity of the singular existent, then upon this divided and articulated identity it will also
be possible to found a political order, a city and not simply a pasture for animals.
But is there really such an articulation of being—at once divided and uni-
tary? Or is there not rather in the being so conceived an unbridgeable hiatus?
The fact that unity entails a past and demands time in order to be realized ren-
ders it no less problematic. In the ti en einai, it has the form: “what it was each time for this existent to be (or live).” The past measures the time that necessarily
insinuates itself between the existentive determination of being as hypokeimenon
(this existent, the tode ti, the first subject) and its persevering in being, its being identical to itself. Existence is identified with essence by means of time. That is to
say, the identity of being and existence is a historical-political task. And at the same time, it is an archeological task, because what must be grasped is a past (a “was”).
History, insofar as it seeks to gain access to presence, is always already archeology.
The ontological apparatus, insofar as
it is chronogenic, is also “historicogenic”; it
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produces history and preserves it in motion, and only in this way can it be pre-
served. Politics and ontology, ontological apparatuses and political apparatuses
are in solidarity, because they have need of one another to actualize themselves.
א In this sense, being and history are in solidarity and inseparable. Here the Benja-
minian axiom holds according to which there is a history of everything of which there is
a nature (which is to say, being). Taking up once more the Aristotelian thesis according to which “nature is on its way toward itself,” one can say that history is the way that nature takes toward itself (and not, as in the ordinary conception, something separate from it).
1.19. At the end of Homo Sacer I, the analogy between the epochal situation of politics and that of ontology had been defined on the basis of a radical crisis,
which assails the very possibility of distinguishing and articulating the terms of
the ontologico-political apparatus:
Today bios lies in zoè exactly as essence, in the Heideggerian definition of Dasein, lies ( liegt) in existence. Schelling expressed the outermost figure of his thought in the idea of a being that is only what is purely existent. Yet how can a bios be only its own zoè, how can a form of life seize hold of the very haplos that constitutes both the task and the enigma of Western metaphysics? (Agamben 4, pp. 210–211/188)
Existence and essence, existentive being and copulative being, zoè and bios are today completely pulled apart or have just as completely collapsed into one another, and the historical task of their articulation seems impossible to carry out.
The bare life of the homo sacer is the irreducible hypostasis that appears between them to testify to the impossibility of their identity as much as their distinction:
“what it was for X to be or live” is now only bare life. In the same way, the time—
at once chronological and operative—in which their articulation was achieved,
is no longer graspable as the medium of a historical task, in which being could
realize its own identity with itself and human beings could secure the conditions
of their human, which is to say, political, existence. The Aristotelian ontological
apparatus, which has for almost two millennia guaranteed the life and politics of