The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  THE USE OF BODIES

  1259

  p. 349). Even more pertinent is the other objection mentioned by Porphyry,

  concerning the irrevocable character of the choice, confirmed by the Moirai and

  by the daemon who will keep watch so that the soul will remain faithful to its

  choice: “But if all this has been spun, determined by necessity, sanctioned by the

  Moirai, by Lethe, by Ananke, if a daemon guards the fate and keeps watch so

  that it is accomplished, of what are we ever masters and in what sense can one

  say ‘virtue is free’?” (p. 350).

  To the pseudo-justice of a blind and violent necessity, which seems to make

  use of souls for its own inscrutable designs, there corresponds the pseudo-

  freedom of the souls who believe they are choosing but who in this way do

  nothing but submit to a destiny that has been decided elsewhere. If the game is

  fixed in this sense, how can judges judge actions that depend on a choice that

  one is not only not free to revoke but that has, moreover, been worked out as a

  consequence of past behavior, over which the agent no longer has any power?

  9.7. It is necessary to reflect on the “ridiculous” ( geloian) character of the spectacle ( thea, the term used by Plato, means “sight” but also “theatrical spectacle”) of the choice that the souls make of their bioi. That is to say, Er attends a spectacle that, even though it should arouse pity ( eleinen), actually seems ridiculous to him.

  If one recalls the preference that Plato seems to accord to comedy, in particular to

  mime (according to a durable legend, attested by Diogenes Laertius [III, 18] and

  repeated by Valerius Maximus and Quintilian, he loved the mimes of Sophron so

  much that he imitated their characters— ethopoiesai—and kept them under his

  pillow at the moment of his death), one could say that Er attends a comic specta-

  cle, in which what was in question was an “ethology,” a “description of characters,”

  or a mimesis biou, an imitation of form of life (“mime is an imitation of bios, which includes both the decent and the indecent”; Keil, p. 491). What in tragedy is presented as the choice of a destiny is actually a comic gesture, the choice of a char-

  acter. The choice of forms of life, despite the risk ( kindynos, 618b) that it entails, is thus in the last analysis comical, and in philosophy, which exhibits and describes

  this ethology, what is in question is an ironic salvation rather than a condemnation

  of character without appeal. It is in this sense that one should read the passage,

  precisely at the end of the Symposium, in which Socrates convinces Aristophanes

  and Agathon that the same person ought to compose tragedies and comedies and

  that “the skillful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet” (223d).

  9.8. What, then, is the sense of the myth that closes the Republic, which is to

  say, a dialogue whose themes are justice and politics? One might say that once

  the soul, following the decree of necessity, has entered into the cycle of births

  1260

  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  and has chosen a form of life, all justice—both on its own part and on that of

  those who must judge him—is impossible. To a blind choice there can only

  correspond a blind necessity, and vice versa.

  And yet there is a passage, which we have up to now omitted to transcribe, in

  which Plato seems precisely to want to suggest the way of “choosing always and

  on every occasion the best form of life among those possible.” Immediately after

  having described (618a) how, in Er’s report, the modes of life had been mixed

  before them, some united to riches or poverty, the others to sickness or to health,

  while others still were intermediate ( mesoun) among them, Plato adds:

  Now, it seems that it is here, Glaucon, that a human being faces the greatest

  danger of all. And because of this, each of us must neglect all other subjects and

  be most concerned to seek out and learn those that will enable him to distinguish

  the good [ chreston, literally “usable”] life from the bad and always to choose always and on every occasion the best bios among those possible. He should think over

  all the things that we have mentioned and how they jointly and severally stand

  with regard to the virtuous life [ pros areten biou]. That way he will know what the good and bad effects of beauty are when it is mixed with wealth, poverty, and a

  particular state of the soul. He will know the effects of high or low birth, private

  life or ruling office, physical strength or weakness, ease or difficulty in learning,

  and all the things that are either naturally a part of the soul or are acquired, and

  he will know what they achieve when mixed with one another. And from all

  this he will be able, by considering the nature of the soul, to reason out which

  life is better and which worse and to choose accordingly, calling a life worse if it

  leads the soul to become more unjust, better if it leads the soul to become more

  just, and ignoring everything else. We have seen that this is the best way to choose,

  whether in life or death [ zonti te kai teleteusanti]. Hence we must go down to

  Hades holding with adamantine determination to the belief that this is so, lest

  we be dazzled there by wealth and other such evils, rush into a tyranny or some

  other similar course of action, do many irreparable evils, and suffer even worse

  ones. And we must always know how to choose the mean form of life [ ton meson

  bion] among them and how to avoid either of the extremes [ hyperballonta], as far as possible, both in this life and in all those beyond it. This is the way that a

  human being becomes happiest. (618c–619b)

  9.9. What does it mean to choose “the mean bios”? First of all, a preliminary

  observation, which concerns the place and time when the choice happens. By

  writing “whether in life or death” and by specifying a little later “both in this

  life and in all those beyond it,” Plato reveals that what in the myth seemed to

  concern only the souls of the dead and the not yet born actually refers also and

  above all to the living. The choice that the myth situates in a “certain daemonic

  THE USE OF BODIES

  1261

  place” takes place also in this life, in which according to the myth souls are al-

  ways already linked by necessity to a certain form of life. The life of the mean is,

  that is to say, the virtuous life, and virtue, being adespotic and unassignable,

  is not one among the various forms of life that souls can choose, but according

  to Lachesis, each one will have it to a greater or less extent according to whether

  it loves it or despises it.

  If this is true—and it can mean nothing else for virtue to be adespotic—then

  the “choice” of the life of the mean is not properly a choice but rather a praxis,

  which by orienting itself in the inextricable mixture of nobility and obscurity,

  private and public, wealth and poverty, strength and weakness that characterize

  every bios, succeeds in distinguishing and discerning ( diagignoskonta) the best form of life, namely, that which will render the soul most just. It is necessary to

  imagine bios as a single segment or a single field of forces defined by two opposed extremes (Plato calls them excesses, ta hyperbollonta): to choose the mean does

  not mean to choose a bios but, in the bios that it has befallen us to choose, to be in a position to neutralize and fl
ee the extremes through virtue. The mesos bios

  cuts every life in half and, in this way, makes use of it and constitutes it into a

  form-of-life. It is not a bios but a certain mode of using and living bios.

  9.10. It is from this perspective that one must recall that what the herald

  shows to the souls are not bioi, modes of life, but examples ( paradeimata) of modes of life. Following up on the work of Victor Goldschmidt, we have elsewhere pointed out the peculiar function that the concept of a paradigm, which

  can refer to both ideas and sensible things, develops in Plato’s thought. The

  example is a singular element that, by deactivating for an instant its empirical

  givenness, renders intelligible another singularity (or a group of singularities).

  By proposing paradigms of life and not simply lives to the souls, the herald gives

  them the possibility of understanding and rendering intelligible each form of

  life before choosing it, which is precisely what, in contrast with the majority of

  souls, the virtuous soul succeeds in doing. It is not surprising, then, that in the

  dialogue in which Plato reflects most extensively on the paradigm, it is never

  something given but is produced and recognized through a “bringing together,”

  a “putting beside,” and a “showing” ( Statesman, 278b–c). Once again, what the

  myth presents as a fact (the paradigms of life placed on the ground by the herald)

  is actually the result of a discernment and a virtuous praxis, which confers on

  each bios an exemplary or paradigmatic character. The mesos bios is that form of life that is totally concerned with its own exemplarity ( forma vitae in the vocabulary of monastic rules means “example of life, exemplary life”).

  1262

  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  9.11. In his reading of the myth of Er, Porphyry calls attention to the fact

  that Plato uses the term bios in an ambiguous way. That is to say, he means by

  this term both modes of life in the proper sense and zoè. Plato “does not speak

  of modes of life in the sense of the authors of the treatises On Modes of Life,

  who mention first one mode of life, that of the farmer, then another, that of the

  statesman, and then still another, the military life.” Since, among the numerous

  modes of life in use among human beings, our free will can choose to abandon

  one in order to assume another, unprepared readers are surprised that, in the

  myth, the one who has chosen a bios remains bound to it by necessity.

  This is because, according to the Stoics, “mode of life” only has the meaning of

  rational life [ logikes zoes], since they mean by this term a certain course [ diexodos]

  constituted by actions, reflections, and effects that are produced or undergone.

  But Plato means by bios the lives [ zoas] of animals as well. Thus for him the zoè of a swan is also a bios, and that of the lion as lion and that of the nightingale is a bios too. And that of men and women are also bios. . . . This is, for him, a primary meaning of the term bios, but there is another one that refers to accidental traits of these modes of life, a sort of character that is added in a secondary way to the

  principal sense. Thus for the dog bios in the principal sense is the zoè of the dog.

  By contrast, it is accidental to the canine life that it belongs to the species of

  dogs that hunt or that of bloodhounds or that of dogs who sit next to the table

  or that of guard dogs: this bios is secondary. And if, for animals deprived of free will, this character comes to be added by nature or by the training imposed by

  their master, it is also given to human beings by nature or by chance to be born

  of noble parents or to be endowed with physical beauty, and it is clear that this

  does not depend on our free will. Rather, as to the acquisition of a certain trade,

  occupation, or knowledge, as to undertaking the political life or public offices

  or other things of the kind, all this depends on us. . . . (Porphyry, On Free Will, qtd. in Proclus 2, p. 351)

  This observation, which Porphyry uses solely to distinguish what depends on us

  from what we cannot change, deserves to be taken up and developed. In Plato,

  the soul certainly has an essential connection with zoè (it “carries life [ pherousa zoen] into whatever it occupies”; Phaedo, 105c). By choosing a certain bios, a mode of life, it chooses or has already chosen a zoè as well: the life of a man, a woman, a swan, a lion, a nightingale. And yet, just as it cannot be identified with

  a certain bios, neither can it be resolved into a certain zoè (the soul “chooses”

  both, and Plato does not seem to distinguish, as Porphyry professes, between the

  choice of a zoè and that of a bios as far as responsibility is concerned).

  If the distinction in time between a “before birth,” an “after birth,” and

  an “after death” is, as we have seen, only an expedient of the myth, this means

  THE USE OF BODIES

  1263

  that in this life—which constitutes the problem that the myth seeks to render

  comprehensible—a game is being played between three at once intimate and

  heterogeneous “partners”: the soul, zoè, and bios. The soul is not (only) zoè, natural life, or (only) bios, politically qualified life: it is, in them and between them, that which, while not coinciding with them, keeps them united and inseparable

  and, at the same time, prevents them from coinciding with each other. Among

  soul, zoè, and bios there is an intimate contact and an irreducible gap (this is the ultimate sense of the image of the “choice”: what is chosen does not belong to us,

  and yet in some way it has become ours). And the goal of the myth is not that of

  furnishing us with a different and better representation of the soul: rather, it is

  that of stopping representation, in order to exhibit a non-representable.

  To comprehend the singular status of the Platonic psychè, it will be helpful to

  compare it with his disciple Aristotle’s definition of the soul. Forcing the Platonic

  connection between soul and zoè, Aristotle defines the soul as “the being-at-work

  [ energeia] of a body that has zoè in potential,” and in this way he identifies soul and life in action. On the other hand, having thus resolved the soul into zoè, he

  must then necessarily divide it and articulate it functionally into the vegetative,

  sensitive, and intellectual soul (or life), in order to then make of it, as we have

  seen, the presupposition of political existence (which entails a clear distinction

  and, at the same time, a strategic articulation between zoè and bios). For this reason there belongs to the vegetative soul a status that in some way recalls that of

  the Platonic psychè: it is separable according to logos, while in mortals the others cannot be separated from it.

  Let us now return to the aporetic situation of the soul in Plato. While being

  factically united to a certain zoè and a certain bios, it remains irreducible to them. This irreducibility does not mean that the myth is to be read literally, as

  if souls existed separately in a certain daemonic or hyperuranian place. The soul

  moves the body from within and not from without like an adventitious external

  principle: according to the clear statement of the Phaedrus (245c), “every body

  that moves itself from within [ endothen] is animate [ empsychon], because this is the nature of the soul.” Hence the striking silence in the myth—over which

  it seems that the commentators have not sufficiently lingered—on the way in

  which Er sees and recognizes the souls (“he said that
he saw [ idein] the soul that had once belonged to Orpheus . . .”), as if they were in some way constitutively

  united to their body or preserved its image. And yet it will be the soul and not

  the body that is to be judged for the actions committed during life.

  The soul, just like form-of-life, is what in my zoè, in my bodily life does not coincide with my bios, with my political and social existence, and yet has

  1264

  HOMO SACER IV, 2

  “ chosen” both, practices them both in this certain, unmistakable mode. It is

  itself, in this sense, the mesos bios that, in every bios and every zoè, adventurously severs, revokes, and realizes the choice that unites them by necessity in

  this certain life. Form-of-life, the soul, is the infinite complement between life

  and mode of life, what appears when they mutually neutralize one another and

  show the void that united them. Zoè and bios—this is perhaps the lesson of the myth—are neither separate nor coincident: between them, as a void of representation of which it is not possible to say anything except that it is “immortal” and

  “ungenerated” ( Phaedrus, 246a), stands the soul, which holds them indissolubly

  in contact and testifies for them.

  Epilogue:

  Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential

  1.The archeology of politics that was in question in the “Homo Sacer” proj-

  ect did not propose to critique or correct this or that concept, this or that

  institution of Western politics. The issue was rather to call into question the

  place and the very originary structure of politics, in order to try to bring to light

  the arcanum imperii that in some way constituted its foundation and that had

  remained at the same time fully exposed and tenaciously hidden in it.

  The identification of bare life as the prime referent and ultimate stakes of

  politics was therefore the first act of the study. The originary structure of West-

  ern politics consists in an ex-ceptio, in an inclusive exclusion of human life in the form of bare life. Let us reflect on the peculiarity of this operation: life is not in

  itself political—for this reason it must be excluded from the city—and yet it is

  precisely the exceptio, the exclusion-inclusion of this Impolitical, that founds the space of politics.