The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

of mode to think these differences. It has quite appropriately been noted that

  in Spinoza the problem of the principle of individuation is never mentioned

  (Wolfson, p. 392). This means that the substance/modes relationship is posed for

  him in an entirely different way from the way that Scholasticism had thought

  the passage from common nature to the individual supposition or from poten-

  tial to act. He most likely chose the term “mode” because, without simply signi-

  fying a difference of reason, it implied the least possible difference with respect

  to substance. Modes are in the substance, are in God ( quod omnia in Deo sint;

  Spinoza 2, 1, app.), and yet the relation, at once of identity and of difference,

  between the multiple, particular, finite things and the unique substance remains

  problematic, at least as long as we are constrained to think it in terms of the

  concepts of traditional ontology.

  In point of fact, in what sense is one to understand the affirmation that

  modes “are in another,” if they are only affections and modifications of sub-

  stance? Is it here a question of a real difference or of a logical difference? The

  human being (Spinoza 2, 2, prop. X and cor.) is a mode, and as such it is in God

  and expresses God’s nature. The human being’s nature “is constituted by definite

  modifications of the attributes of God,” and yet “the being of substance does

  not pertain to the essence of the human being.” The interweaving of reality and

  mode of thinking, of ontological and logical, which Spinoza proposed to clarify,

  here reaches its greatest density. Are the modes affections of God or of God’s

  attributes (the attributes are—as per definition 4, part 1—“that which the intel-

  lect perceives of substance as constituting its essence”)? Precisely with respect to

  the substance/modes relationship, one could say that Spinoza did not manage

  to resolve the ambiguity between ontological and logical that the Aristotelian

  apparatus had left as a legacy to Western philosophy.

  א The concept of mode—insofar as it seeks to think the coincidence or indifference

  of essence and existence, potential and act—carries with it an ambiguity, so that in the

  history of philosophy, it is presented now as a logical concept (one prefers to speak then of

  “modality” or modal logic), now as an ontological concept. The ambiguity is still evident

  in Kant, according to whom the categories of modality express the relation of an object

  with our faculty of knowing and yet “do not have only a logical meaning . . . but are to

  pertain to things and their possibility, actuality, or necessity” ( Critique of Pure Reason, A219, B627). It is possible to see in this dual nature of modalities something more than an echo of the peculiar nature of the formal distinction according to Scotus (which is more

  than a distinction of reason and yet less than a real distinction) and of mode according to

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  Suárez, which is real, but not like a thing (the modes non sunt formaliter entia). The undecidability of logic and ontology is, in this sense, consubstantial with the concept of mode and must be brought back to the constitutive undecidability of Aristotelian onto-logy,

  inasmuch as the latter thinks being insofar as it is said. This means that the ambiguity of the concept of mode cannot be simply eliminated but must rather be thought as such.

  It is possible that the dispute between philosophy inappropriately defined as conti-

  nental and analytic philosophy has its root in this ambiguity and can therefore be resolved only on the terrain of a rethinking of the theory of modes and of the categories of modality.

  3.14. A possible paradigm to explain the relationship between substance

  and modes, between natura naturans and natura naturata, is the emanation-

  ist paradigm. Scholars have shown the analogies between the Spinozan model

  and that which the Neoplatonic tradition had transmitted to philosophers and

  Jewish Kabbalists. God is cause of the modes not through an act of creation

  but through the very necessity according to which, in the emanationist model,

  the intellects and hypostases emanate from the first cause. The analogy is mis-

  leading, however. In the emanationist paradigm, that things proceed from God

  means that they really go out from God and become separated from God. In

  Spinoza, by contrast, the modes remain in God:

  There is no such thing as the procession of the finite from the infinite in Spinoza.

  God or substance is to him an infinite logical crust which holds together the

  crumbs of the infinite number of the finite modes, and that crust is never broken

  through to allow the crumbs to escape or to emanate. Infinite substance by its

  very nature contains within itself immediate infinite modes, and the immedi-

  ate infinite modes contain within themselves mediate infinite modes, and the

  mediate infinite modes contain within themselves the infinite number of finite

  modes. . . . (Wolfson, p. 398)

  Bayle’s ironic observation that God modified in the Germans kills God modified

  in ten thousand Turks, with the pantheistic implication that it suggests, was

  perhaps not so impertinent.

  3.15. The problem of the ontological meaning of the difference between being

  and modes emerges with particular clarity in the relationship between En-sof and

  sefiroth in the Kabbalah. Scholem has brought to light the connections and di-

  vergences between Plotinus’s One and the Kabbalists’ En-sof (the “without end”

  or “Infinitely,” given the originary adverbial character of the expression). But he

  saw with just as much clarity that the crucial question here is that of the identity

  or difference between the En-sof and the sefiroth (which correspond to Plotinus’s hypostases). Like Plotinus’s One, so also the En-sof is absolutely deprived

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  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  of determinations or attributes (as such, it is called belimah, literally “without which,” by the Kabbalists). What happens, then, in the passage from this “infinitely without which” to the sefiroth, each of which represents, like the hypos-

  tases in Plotinus, a property and a determination? The problem is made more

  pressing—the decisive leap or fracture is in fact situated here—in the relation

  between the En-sof and the first sefirah (which according to some is thought and according to others is will). If the En-sof and the first sefirah (or, more generally, the ensemble of the ten sefiroth) are essentially different, then between God and

  his emanations or words (as the Kabbalists also call them) an abyss is thrown

  open; if they are identical, the risk is the fall into pantheism.

  Hence the strategic meaning of the nothing in the Jewish (and Christian)

  conception of creation ex nihilo: between the En-sof and the sefiroth there is the nothing ( ‘ayin) and, in the words of the Kabbalist Azriel, in producing being

  from the nothing, God “has made his Nothing into his Being” (Scholem 1,

  p. 424). The problem reproduces itself, however, at this point as the problem of

  the relation (of identity or difference) between the En-sof and the nothing.

  One could say that the early Kabbalists, who wanted to establish between the En-sof

  and the ‘ayin a difference that would be in name but not in nature, thereby in fact struck the first act out of the drama of the universe, which contains the dialectical

  exposition of the Whole
. Hence the theory of the identity between the two terms

  gave rise to a pantheistic reversal: the creation out of nothing is only a cipher of

  the essential unity of all things with God. (Scholem 2, pp. 78–79)

  The relation between the En-sof and the sefiroth seems always on the point of making shipwreck in an absolute identity or of shattering into a difference every

  bit as absolute.

  א Herrera, in his treatise The Gate of Heaven, expresses this difficulty by saying that it is just as contradictory to affirm that the En-sof, as first cause, produces what it already is and contains in itself, as to affirm that it produces what it is not and does not possess: But if the First Cause contains everything in itself, because it is infinitely perfect,

  I wonder if, in the universal production of all things, it has given and communi-

  cated that which it is and has in itself, or that which it is not and does not have.

  If they should answer me claiming that it gave that which it is and has, I would

  argue that this cannot be, because that which it is and has is infinite and most

  simple, but everything that it gave is limited and somehow composite, and also

  because that which it is and has, because it is unproduced and unproducible,

  cannot be produced, and because nothing can or does produce the being and

  existence that it already has, because production is a passage from non-being to

  being. . . . But if they should say that it gave that which it is not and does not

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  have, it would appear that there is something that the supremely and infinitely

  perfect one is not or does not have in itself, which is against what reason properly

  shows us. . . . It is left for us, then, to conclude, fitting together and in effect

  reconciling these two extremes and mediating between them like the prince of

  the Peripatetics who introduced potential between nothing and being in act, that

  the First Cause in a particular fashion produces what it is and has, and somehow

  produced what it is not and does not have. . . . (Herrera, p. 292)

  It clearly results that the problem cannot be resolved from within the categories of traditional ontology and demands instead the passage to a different conceptuality.

  3.16. What is in question here is nothing less than the metaphysical prob-

  lem of the ontological difference between Being and beings. In the relationship

  between the En-sof and the sefiroth, between the One and the hypostases, it is a question of the ontological difference that, according to Heidegger, defines the

  metaphysics of the West. As sometimes happens, the cruciality and the difficulty

  of the decision is attested in Heidegger in an easily overlooked textual detail: the

  correction of one word in a sentence of the Nachwort added in 1943 to the fourth

  edition of What Is Metaphysics? Where in the 1943 text we read: “It belongs to the truth of Being that Being certainly [ wohl ] is without beings, and that by contrast beings are never without Being,” the fifth edition (1949) corrects the “certainly”

  into “never”: “It belongs to the truth of Being that Being is never without beings

  and that beings are never without Being” (Heidegger 10, p. 102/233). While in

  the first version the connection between Being and beings is broken from the

  side of Being, which consequently appears as nothing, the second edition affirms

  that Being can never be separated from beings and is in some way identified

  with them, as the manifestation and unveiling of something is not essentially

  other with respect to what it manifests. Does the ontological difference mean a

  separation and a hiatus between Being and beings, or is what is in question here

  instead the unveiling and veiling of one and the same thing? What are beings

  for Being and Being for beings, if they can never be separated? The correction,

  left without a motivation, seems to indicate an oscillation and an uncertainty.

  The problem is resolved—here as for the relationship between the En-sof and

  the sefiroth and between the One and its hypostases—if one poses it in terms of

  a modal ontology (assuming that one can still speak of an ontology in that case).

  Between being and modes the relationship is neither of identity nor of difference,

  because the mode is at once identical and different—or, rather, it entails the co-

  incidence, which is to say the falling together, of the two terms. In this sense, the

  problem of the pantheistic risk is poorly posed. The Spinozan syntagma Deus

  sive nature does not mean “God = nature”: the sive (whether it derives from the

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  conditional and concessive si or the anaphoric sic) expresses the modalization, which is to say, the neutralization and disappearance of identity as much as difference. What is divine is not being in itself but its sive, its always already modifying itself and “naturing itself”—being born [It. nascere]—in the modes.

  At this point, the problem is that of finding the concepts that allow us to

  correctly think modality. We are accustomed to think in a substantival mode,

  while mode has a constitutively adverbial nature, it expresses not “what” but

  “how” being is.

  3.17. In Spinoza, there is a concept that furnishes the key for understanding

  the substance/modes relation beyond the contradictions of traditional ontology.

  It is that of the immanent cause, over which we have already had occasion to

  linger. Proposition XVIII of the first part states it in this way: “God is the im-

  manent, not the transitive, cause of all things,” which the demonstration states

  precisely by specifying that “there can be no substance external to God, that is, a

  thing which is in itself external to God. . . . Therefore God is the immanent, not

  the transitive, cause of all things.” The reference to the Aristotelian concept of

  internal cause ( enyparchon) as opposed to external ( ektos; Metaphysics, 1070b 22) is pertinent, but it adds nothing to what seems to be a tautological explanation

  (God is internal or immanent cause, because there is nothing outside God).

  We have shown (cf. above, part 1, §2.5) how Spinoza furnished a decisive

  indication on how one should understand this concept in the Compendium

  grammatices linguae hebraeae, in connection with a special form of the infinitive

  noun (the infinitive in Hebrew is declined like a noun), which expresses an ac-

  tion referred at once to the agent and the patient (which he exemplifies with the

  expressions “to constitute-oneself as visiting” or “to walk-oneself ”). This form of

  the Hebrew verb corresponds exactly to the middle voice of the Greek or Latin

  verb, which we have evoked in connection with use (cf. above, part 1, §2.3).

  The immanent cause is therefore an action in which agent and patient coin-

  cide, which is to say, fall together. This means that, in the modes, substance, to

  paraphrase Spinoza’s example, “constitutes itself as existing” (or living, if, as is

  written in the Cogitata, ch. 6, God is life), “walking-itself” into existence. But this also means that, in order to think the substance/modes relationship, it is necessary

  to have at our disposal an ontology in the middle voice, in which the agent (God,

  or substance) in effectuating the modes in reality affects and modifies only itself.

  Modal ontology can be understood only as a medial ontology, and Spinozan pan-

  theism, if it is a question of
pantheism, is not an inert identity (substance = mode)

  but a process in which God affects, modifies, and expresses Godself.

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  In the first part of this book, we have called “use” a medial process of this

  kind. In a modal ontology, being uses-itself, that is to say, it constitutes, expresses,

  and loves itself in the affection that it receives from its own modifications.

  א The relation of immanent cause entails that the active element not cause the second

  but rather “express” itself in it. The concept of expression, to which Gilles Deleuze quite fittingly drew attention and which we have seen to appear already in Suárez and Thomas

  of Argentina, runs through the whole of Spinoza’s Ethics, and it refers both to the relationship between attributes and substance (every attribute “expresses eternal and infinite essence”; Spinoza 2, 1, def. 6) and to that between the modes and God (“Whatever exists

  expresses God’s nature or essence in a definite and determinate mode”; prop. XXXVI,

  proof.). From the perspective that interests us here, the expression acts as a principle

  of transformation and neutralization of the concept of cause that, by abandoning all

  hierarchy between cause and effect, affirms the immanence of the expressed in the one

  expressing and of the passive in the active.

  3.18. A correct understanding of the being/modes relationship allows us to

  resolve, or rather to transform into euporias, the aporias of the Aristotelian ap-

  paratus, above all that of the fundamental relation between being and language.

  What is at stake in the ti en einai was the identity-relation of a thing with itself, the relation between Emma and her being Emma (“what it was for Emma to be

  Emma”). But this relation is thinkable only because the entity has been named,

  only because Emma has a name, has been called Emma (cf. above, part 2, §1.15).

  That is to say, the ontological relationship runs between the entity and its being

  named, between Emma and her being-called Emma, between Emma and her

  “sayability” (this is what the Stoics called lekton, “sayable,” and conceived as an attribute that is neither mental nor linguistic but ontological).

  It is this relation that is also in question—without his being able to become