the idea of a “form of corporeity” ( forma corporeitatis), which is already found
perfected in the embryo before the intellectual soul and later co exists with it.
This means that there is never anything like a bare life, a life without form that
functions as a negative foundation for a superior and more perfect life: corporeal
life is always already formed, is always already inseparable from a form.
5.8. How to describe a form-of-life? At the beginning of his Parallel Lives,
Plutarch evokes an eidos, a form that the biographer must know how to pick out
beyond the muddle of events. What he seeks to grasp is not, however, a form-of-
life but an exemplary trait, something that, in the sphere of action, allows him to
unite one life to another in a single paradigm. In general, ancient biography—
the lives of philosophers and poets that it has transmitted to us—does not seem
interested in describing the real events nor in composing them into a unitary
form so much as instead choosing a paradigmatic fact—extravagant and signifi-
cant—deduced from the work rather than the life. If this singular projection of
work over life remains problematic, it is nonetheless possible that precisely the
attempt to define a life starting from a work constitutes something like the logi-
cal place where ancient biography had a presentiment of a form-of-life.
5.9. Fernand Deligny never sought to recount the life of the autistic children
with whom he lived. Instead, he attempted to scrupulously transcribe on tracing
paper the routes of their movements and encounters in the form of what he called
“lines of drift” ( lignes d’erre). Placed on top of one another, the tracing papers allow a sort of circular or elliptical ring ( cerne) to appear, beyond the tangle of lines, which include within themselves not only lines of drift but also the points
( chevêtres, from enchevrêment, “entanglement”), strikingly constant, at which the routes cross. “It is clear,” he writes, “that the routes—the lines of drift—are transcribed and that the ring area each time appears as the trace of something else that was not foreseen or pre-thought by those doing the tracing nor by those being
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traced. It is clear that it is a question of the effect of something that is not due to language, nor does it refer to the Freudian unconscious” (Deligny, p. 40).
It is possible that this striking tangle, apparently indecipherable, expresses
more than any account not only the mute children’s form of life but any form
of life. In this sense it is an instructive exercise to attempt to mark on the map
of the cities where we have lived the itineraries of our movements, which prove
to be stubbornly and almost obsessively constant. It is in the tracks of that in
which we have lost our life that it is perhaps possible to find our form-of-life. In
any case, Deligny seems to attribute to his lignes d’erre something like a political meaning that is prelinguistic and yet collective: “It is by observing this ring area
that there came to us the project of persisting in transcribing the simple visible
waiting to see appear there a trace of what we write with a capital W, inscribed in us since our species had existence, a primordial We that insists on foreshadowing, beyond every will and every power, for nothing, immutable, just like, on the
opposite pole, ideology” (ibid.).
5.10. I have in my hands the page of a French newspaper that publishes per-
sonals ads for people who are seeking to meet a life companion. Curiously, the
column is called “modes of life,” and it includes, alongside a photo, a brief mes-
sage that attempts to describe through small, laconic traits something like the
form or, more precisely, the mode of life of the advertisement’s author (and some-
times of the ideal addressee as well). Under the photograph of a woman seated at
a café table, with her serious—indeed, decidedly melancholy—face resting on her
left hand, one can read: “Parisian, tall, thin, blonde, and classy, in her fifties, lively, good family, sports: hunting, fishing, golf, horseback riding, skiing, would love to
meet serious man, witty, sixty, the same profile, to live happy days together, Paris
or country.” The portrait of a young brunette who is fixated on a ball suspended
in the air is accompanied by this caption: “Young juggler, pretty, feminine, spiri-
tual, seeks young woman 20–30, similar profile to be united in the G-spot!!!” At
times, the photograph also tries to present the occupation of the one who is writ-
ing, like the one that shows a woman who is throwing a rag into a bucket to clean
floors: “50, blonde, green eyes, 1m 60cm, porter, divorced (3 sons, 23, 25 and 29,
independent). Physically and morally young, charming, desire to share the simple
joys of life with lovable companion 45–55.” Other times, the decisive element for
characterizing the form of life is the presence of an animal, who appears in the
foreground in the photograph alongside its owner: “Gentle Labrador seeks for
his mistress (36) a sweet master who is a lover of nature and animals, to swim in
happiness in the countryside.” Finally, the close-up of a face on which a tear leaves
THE USE OF BODIES
1237
a trace of mascara reads: “Young woman, 25, with a skin-deep sensibility, seeks a
tender and spiritual young man, with whom to live a river-romance.”
The list could continue, but what is both irritating and moving each time is
the attempt—a complete success and, at the same time, an irreparable failure—
to communicate a form of life. How indeed can this certain face, this certain
life coincide with that italicized list of hobbies and character traits? It is as if
something decisive—and, so to speak, unequivocally public and political—has
collapsed to such a degree into the idiocy of the private that it is becoming for-
ever unrecognizable.
5.11. In the attempt to define oneself through one’s hobbies, there comes to
light in all its problematicity the relation between singularity, its tastes, and its
inclinations. The most idiosyncratic aspect of everyone, their tastes, the fact that
they like coffee granita, the sea at summertime, this certain shape of lips, this
certain smell, but also the paintings of the late Titian so much—all this seems
to safeguard its secret in the most impenetrable and insignificant way. It is nec-
essary to decisively subtract tastes from the aesthetic dimension and rediscover
their ontological character, in order to find in them something like a new ethical
territory. It is not a matter of attributes or properties of a subject who judges but
of the mode in which each person, in losing himself as subject, constitutes-him-
self as form-of-life. The secret of taste is what form-of-life must solve, has always
already solved and displayed—just as gestures betray and, at the same time,
absolve character.
Two theses published in Tiqqun 2 ( Introduction to Civil War) figuratively summarize the ontological meaning to “tastes” in their relation to a form-of-life:
Every body is affected by its form-of-life as if by a clinamen, a leaning, an attrac-
tion, a taste. A body leans toward whatever leans its way. (§3)
“My” form-of-life relates not to what I am, but to how I am what I am. (§5) If every body is affected by its form-of-life as by a
clinamen or a taste, the ethical subject is that subject that constitutes-itself in relation to this clinamen,
the subject who bears witness to its tastes, takes responsibility for the mode in
which it is affected by its inclinations. Modal ontology, the ontology of the how, coincides with an ethics.
5.12. In his letter to Milena of August 10, 1920, Kafka recounts his fleet-
ing encounter with a girl in a hotel. During this encounter, the girl did “in
perfect innocence” “something slightly disgusting” and “said something slightly
obscene”—and yet Kafka realized in that precise instant that he would never
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forget it, as if precisely this small gesture and this small word had drawn him
irresistibly into that hotel. Ever since then, adds Kafka, for years and years his
body “was shaken almost unbearably” by the memory and by the desire for that
“very particular, trivial, disgusting thing” (Kafka, p. 147).
The decisive element, what renders this trivial disgusting thing unforgetta-
ble, is obviously not the thing in itself (Kafka says that it is “not worth mention-
ing”); it is not only the girl’s abjection but her particular mode of being abject,
her bearing witness in some way to her abjection. It is this and only this that
renders that abjection perfectly innocent, which is to say, ethical.
It is not justice or beauty that moves us but the mode that each one has of
being just or beautiful, of being affected by her beauty or her justice. For this
reason even abjection can be innocent, even “something slightly disgusting” can
move us.
5.13. A double tendency seems to be inherent to form-of-life. On the one
hand, it is a life inseparable from its form, an indissoluble unity in itself, and
on the other, it is separable from every thing and every context. This is evident
in the classical conception of theoria, which is in itself united but separated and separable from every thing, in perpetual flight. This double tension is the risk
inherent in form-of-life, which tends to separate itself ascetically into an auton-
omous sphere, theory. It is necessary instead to think form-of-life as a living of
its own mode of being, as inseparable from its context, precisely because it is not
in relation but in contact with it.
The same thing happens in sexual life: the more it becomes a form-of-life,
the more it seems separable from its context and indifferent to it. Far from being
a principle of community, it separates itself to constitute a special community of
its own (the castle of Silling in Sade or the California bathhouses for Foucault).
The more form-of-life becomes monadic, the more it isolates itself from the
other monads. But the monad always already communicates with the others,
insofar as it represents them in itself, as in a living mirror.
5.14. The arcanum of politics is in our form-of-life, and yet precisely for this
reason we cannot manage to penetrate it. It is so intimate and close that if we
seek to grasp it, it leaves us holding only the ungraspable, tedious everyday. It
is like the form of the cities or houses where we have lived, which coincide per-
fectly with the life we have frittered away in them, and perhaps precisely for this
reason, it seems suddenly impenetrable to us, while other times, at a stroke, as in
revolutionary moments according to Jesi, it is collectively innervated and seems
to unveil to us its secret.
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5.15. In Western thought, the problem of form-of-life has emerged as an eth-
ical problem ( ethos, the mode of life of an individual or group) or as an aesthetic problem (the style by which the author leaves his mark on the work). Only if
we restore it to the ontological dimension will the problem of style and mode
of life be able to find its just formulation. And this can happen only in the form
of something like an “ontology of style” or a doctrine that is in a position to
respond to the question: “what does it mean that multiple modes modify or
express the one substance?”
In the history of philosophy, the place where this problem has been posed is
Averroism, as a problem of the conjunction ( copulatio) between the singular in-
dividual and the one intellect. According to Averroës, the mean term that allows
this union is the imagination: the singular is joined to the possible or material
intellect through the phantasms of its imagination. The conjunction can happen,
however, only if the intellect strips the phantasms of their material elements, to
the point of producing, in the act of thought, a perfectly bare image, something
like an absolute imago. This means that the phantasm is what the singular sensi-
ble body marks on the intellect to the same extent to which the inverse is true,
namely, that it is what the one intellect works and marks in the singular. In the
contemplated image, the singular sensible body and the one intellect coincide,
which is to say, fall together. The questions “who contemplates the image?” and
“what is united to what?” do not have a univocal response. (Averroistic poets,
like Cavalcanti and Dante, made love the place of this experience, in which the
phantasm contemplated is at once subject and object of love and the intellect
knows and loves itself in the image.)
What we call form-of-life corresponds to this ontology of style; it names the
mode in which a singularity bears witness to itself in being and being expresses
itself in the singular body.
6
Exile of One Alone with One Alone
6.1. At the end of the Enneads (VI, 9, 11), in order to define the life of
the gods and of “divine and happy men” (namely, philosophers),
Plotinus makes use of the formula phygè monou pros monon, which remains ex-
emplary as an expression of Neoplatonic mysticism. Bréhier translates it with
these words: “Telle est la vie des dieux et des hommes bienheureux: s’affranchir
des choses d’ici bas, s’y déplaire, fuir seul vers lui seul.”
In 1933, Erik Peterson, who had converted to Catholicism a short time pre-
viously, published a study on “The Origin and Meaning of the Formula ‘ monou
pros monon’ in Plotinus.” Against the interpretation of Cumont, who had seen in
the expression the transposition of a pagan cultic formula, the neo-Roman Cath-
olic theologian, with a gesture that betrays a Protestant sensibility, instead points
toward an “old Greek expression” belonging to the vocabulary of intimacy as the
origin of the formula. Expressions of the type monos monoi, he suggests, are com-
mon in Greek to designate a personal, private, or intimate relation. Plotinus did
nothing but introduce into this conventional formula “the conceptual meaning
of his metaphysics and his mysticism” (Peterson, p. 35). The metaphor “flight of
one alone with one alone,” which according to Peterson contains in itself both
the idea of a bond ( Verbundenheit) and that of a separation ( Absonderung), dislocates an expression belonging to the sphere of the private lexicon into that of
mystical-philosophical terminology, and in this displacement consists Plotinus’s
“most proper and original contribution.”
6.2. However, the whole qu
estion is distorted by the fact that scholars’ at-
tention has been concentrated solely on the formula monou pros monon, taking
for granted the meaning of the term phygè that immediately precedes it and of
which the formula itself is only a determination. The correct but generic trans-
lation with “flight” (or “fleeing”) has thus constantly concealed the essential
linguistic data, namely, the fact that phygè in Greek is a technical term for exile ( phygen pheugein means “to go into exile,” and phygas is the exiled person). This 1240
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is so true that, a few pages before, encountering the substantive phygè in the
series of three terms by means of which Plotinus describes the distance from
the “sources of life,” the same translators render it with none other than “exile.”
Plotinus does not simply transfer a formula from the sphere of intimacy to the
metaphysical-philosophical sphere. Much more significant is the fact that he
categorizes the divine and happy life of the philosopher above all through a
term drawn from the juridico-political lexicon: exile. And yet exile is now no
longer the ban of an individual from the city into another plan but that of “one
alone with one alone,” and the condition of negativity and abandonment that
it expresses seems to be inverted into a state of “felicity” ( eudaimonon bios) and
“lightness” ( kouphisthesetai).
Plotinus’s “most proper and original contribution” consists, then, in having
united a juridico-political term that means exclusion and exile to a syntagma
that expresses intimacy and being together (also in Numenius, in a passage
that is often cited as a possible source of Plotinus’s formula, we find in place
of phygè a verb— omilesai—that means “to converse” and “to stand together”).
The divine life of the philosopher is a paradoxical “separation (or exclusion)
into intimacy.” At stake in the formula is an exile into intimacy, a ban of the
self to the self.
6.3. In defining the condition of the philosopher through the image of exile,
The Omnibus Homo Sacer Page 192
