The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  It is important not to confuse bare life with natural life. Through its division

  and its capture in the apparatus of the exception, life assumes the form of bare

  life, which is to say, that of a life that has been cut off and separated from its

  form. It is in this sense that one must understand the thesis at the end of Homo

  Sacer I according to which “the fundamental activity of sovereign power is the

  production of bare life as originary political element” (Agamben 4, p. 202/181).

  And it is this bare life (or “sacred” life, if sacer first of all designates a life that can be killed without committing homicide) that functions in the juridico-political

  machine of the West as a threshold of articulation between zoè and bios, natural life and politically qualified life. And it will not be possible to think another

  dimension of politics and life if we have not first succeeded in deactivating the

  apparatus of the exception of bare life.

  2. Yet in the course of the study, the structure of the exception that had been

  defined with respect to bare life has been revealed more generally to constitute

  in every sphere the structure of the archè, in the juridico-political tradition as 1265

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  much as in ontology. In fact, one cannot understand the dialectic of the foun-

  dation that defines Western ontology, from Aristotle on, if one does not under-

  stand that it functions as an exception in the sense we have seen. The strategy

  is always the same: something is divided, excluded, and pushed to the bottom,

  and precisely through this exclusion, it is included as archè and foundation. This holds for life, which in Aristotle’s words “is said in many ways”—vegetative life,

  sensitive life, intellectual life, the first of which is excluded in order to function

  as foundation for the others—but also for being, which is equally said in many

  ways, one of which is separated as foundation.

  It is possible, however, that the mechanism of the exception is constitu-

  tively connected to the event of language that coincides with anthropogenesis.

  According to the structure of the presupposition that we have already recon-

  structed above, in happening, language excludes and separates from itself the

  non-linguistic, and in the same gesture, it includes and captures it as that with

  which it is always already in relation. That is to say, the ex-ceptio, the inclusive exclusion of the real from the logos and in the logos is the originary structure of the event of language.

  3. In State of Exception, the juridico-political machine of the West was thus

  described as a double structure, formed from two heterogeneous and yet in-

  timately coordinated elements: one normative and juridical in the strict sense

  ( potestas) and one anomic and extrajuridical ( auctoritas). The juridico-normative element, in which power in its effective form seems to reside, nevertheless has

  need of the anomic element for it to be able to apply itself to life. On the other

  hand, auctoritas can affirm itself and have sense only in relation to potestas. The state of exception is the apparatus that must ultimately articulate and hold together the two aspects of the juridico-political machine by instituting a thresh-

  old of undecidability between anomie and nomos, between life and the juridical

  order, between auctoritas and potestas. As long as the two elements remain correlated but conceptually, temporally, and personally distinct—as in republican

  Rome, in the opposition between senate and people, or in medieval Europe, in

  that between spiritual power and temporal power—their dialectic can function

  in some way. But when they tend to coincide in one person alone, when the

  state of exception, in which they are indeterminated, becomes the rule, then the

  juridico-political system is transformed into a killing machine.

  In The Kingdom and the Glory, an analogous structure was brought to light

  in the relation between rule and governance and between inoperativity and

  glory. Glory appeared there as an apparatus directed at capturing within the

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  economic-governmental machine the inoperativity of human and divine life that

  our culture does not seem to be in a position to think and that nevertheless never

  ceases to be invoked as the ultimate mystery of divinity and power. This inop-

  erativity is so essential for the machine that it must be captured and maintained

  at all costs at its center in the form of glory and acclamations that, through the

  media, never cease to carry out their doxological function even today.

  In the same way some years earlier in The Open, the anthropological machine

  of the West was defined by the division and articulation within the human being

  of the human and the animal. And at the end of the book, the project of a de-

  activation of the machine that governs our conception of the human demanded

  not the study of new articulations between the animal and the human so much

  as rather the exposition of the central void, of the gap that separates—in the

  human being—the human and the animal. That which—once again in the form

  of the exception—was separated and then articulated together in the machine

  must be brought back to its division so that an inseparable life, neither animal

  nor human, can eventually appear.

  4. In all these figures the same mechanism is at work: the archè is constituted

  by dividing the factical experience and pushing down to the origin—that is, ex-

  cluding—one half of it in order then to rearticulate it to the other by including

  it as foundation. Thus, the city is founded on the division of life into bare life

  and politically qualified life, the human is defined by the exclusion-inclusion of

  the animal, the law by the exceptio of anomie, governance through the exclusion

  of inoperativity and its capture in the form of glory.

  If the structure of the archè of our culture is such, then thought finds itself

  here confronted with an arduous task. Indeed, it is not a question of thinking, as

  it has for the most part done up to now, new and more effective articulations of

  the two elements, playing the two halves of the machine off against one another.

  Nor is it a matter of archeologically going back to a more originary beginning:

  philosophical archeology cannot reach a beginning other than the one that may

  perhaps result from the deactivation of the machine (in this sense first philoso-

  phy is always final philosophy).

  The fundamental ontological-political problem today is not work but inoper-

  ativity, not the frantic and unceasing study of a new operativity but the exhibition

  of the ceaseless void that the machine of Western culture guards at its center.

  5. In modern thought, radical political changes have been thought by means

  of the concept of a “constituent power.” Every constituted power presupposes

  at its origin a constituent power that, through a process that as a rule has the

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  form of a revolution, brings it into being and guarantees it. If our hypothesis

  on the structure of the archè is correct, if the fundamental ontological problem

  today is not work but inoperativity, and if this latter can nevertheless be attested

  only with respect to a work, then access to a different figure of politics cannot<
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  take the form of a “constituent power” but rather that of something that we

  can provisionally call “destituent potential.” And if to constituent power there

  correspond revolutions, revolts, and new constitutions, namely, a violence that

  puts in place and constitutes a new law, for destituent potential it is necessary

  to think entirely different strategies, whose definition is the task of the coming

  politics. A power that has only been knocked down with a constituent violence

  will resurge in another form, in the unceasing, unwinnable, desolate dialectic

  between constituent power and constituted power, between the violence that

  puts the juridical in place and violence that preserves it.

  The paradox of constituent power is that as much as jurists more or less

  decisively underline its heterogeneity, it remains inseparable from constituted

  power, with which it forms a system. Thus, on the one hand, one affirms that

  constituent power is situated beyond the State, exists without it, and continues

  to remain external to the State even after its constitution, while the constituted

  power that derives from it exists only in the State. But on the other hand, this

  originary and unlimited power—which can, as such, threaten the stability of the

  system—necessarily ends up being confiscated and captured in the constituted

  power to which it has given origin and survives in it only as the power of con-

  stitutional revision. Even Sieyès, perhaps the most intransigent theorist of the

  transcendence of constituent power, in the end must drastically limit its omnip-

  otence, leaving it no other existence than the shadowy one of a Jury constitution-

  naire, to which is entrusted the task of modifying the text of the constitution,

  according to definitively established procedures.

  Here the paradoxes theologians had to grapple with concerning the problem

  of divine omnipotence seem to repeat themselves in secularized form. Divine

  omnipotence implied that God could do anything whatsoever, including de-

  stroying the world that he had created or annulling or subverting the prov-

  idential laws with which he had willed to direct humanity toward salvation.

  To contain these scandalous consequences of divine omnipotence, theologians

  distinguished between absolute power and ordained power: de potentia absoluta,

  God can do anything, but de potentia ordinata, which is to say, once he has

  willed something, his power is thereby limited.

  Just as absolute power is in reality only the presupposition of ordained power,

  which the latter needs to guarantee its own unconditional validity, so also can

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  one say that constituent power is what constituted power must presuppose to

  give itself a foundation and legitimate itself. According to the schema that we

  have described many times, constituent is that figure of power in which a destitu-

  ent potential is captured and neutralized, in such a way as to assure that it cannot

  be turned back against power or the juridical order as such but only against one

  of its determinate historical figures.

  6. For this reason, the third chapter of the first part of Homo Sacer I affirmed

  that the relationship between constituent power and constituted power is just

  as complex as that which Aristotle establishes between potential and act, and it

  sought to clarify the relation between the two terms as a relation of ban or aban-

  donment. The problem of constituent power here shows its irreducible ontological

  implications. Potential and act are only two aspects of the process of the sovereign

  autoconstitution of Being, in which the act presupposes itself as potential and the

  latter is maintained in relation with the former through its own suspension, its

  own being able not to pass into act. And on the other hand, act is only a conser-

  vation and a “salvation” ( soteria)—in other words, an Aufhebung—of potential.

  For the sovereign ban, which applies to the exception in no longer applying,

  corresponds to the structure of potential, which maintains itself in relation to

  act precisely through its ability not to be. Potential (in its double appearance

  as potential to and potential-not-to) is that through which Being founds itself

  sovereignly, which is to say, without anything proceeding or determining it, other

  than its own ability not to be. And an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by

  simply taking away its own potential-not-to, letting itself be, giving itself to itself.

  (Agamben 4, p. 54/46)

  Hence the difficulty of thinking a purely destituent potential, which is to say,

  one completely set free from the sovereign relation of the ban that links it to con-

  stituted power. The ban here appears as a limit-form of relation, in which being

  is founded by maintaining itself in relation with something unrelated, which is

  in reality only a presupposition of itself. And if being is only the being “under the

  ban”—which is to say, abandoned to itself—of beings, then categories like “let-

  ting-be,” by which Heidegger sought to escape from the ontological difference,

  also remain within the relation of the ban.

  For this reason the chapter could conclude by proclaiming the project of

  an ontology and a politics set free from every figure of relation, even from the

  limit-form of the ban that is the sovereign ban:

  Instead one must think the existence of potential without any relation to being in

  act—not even in the extreme form of the ban and the potential-not-to be—and

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  of the act no longer as fulfillment and manifestation of potential—not even in

  the form of self-giving and letting be. This implies, however, nothing less than

  thinking ontology and politics beyond every figure of relation, beyond even the

  limit-relation that is the sovereign ban. (Ibid., p. 55/47)

  Only in this context could it become possible to think a purely destituent poten-

  tial, that is to say, one that never resolves itself into a constituted power.

  א It is the secret solidarity between the violence that founds the juridical order and

  that which conserves it that Benjamin thought in the essay “Critique of Violence,” in

  seeking to define a form of violence that escapes this dialectic: “On the interruption

  of this cycle maintained by mythic forms of law, on the destitution [ Entsetzung] of the juridical order together with all the powers on which it depends as they depend on it,

  finally therefore on the destitution of state violence, a new historical epoch is founded”

  (Benjamin 4, pp. 108–109/251–252). Only a power that has been rendered inoperative and

  deposed by means of a violence that does not aim to found a new law is fully neutralized.

  Benjamin identified this violence—or according to the double meaning of the German

  term Gewalt, “destituent power [It., potere destituente]”—in the proletarian general strike, which Sorel opposed to the simply political strike. While the suspension of labor in the

  political strike is violent, “since it provokes [ veranlasst, “occasions,” “induces”] only an external modification of labor conditions, the second, as a pure means, is nonviolent”

  (ibid., p. 101/246). Indeed, it does not imply the resumption of labor “following external co
ncessions and this or that modification to working conditions” but the decision to take

  up a labor only if it has been entirely transformed and not imposed by the state, namely, a

  “subversion that this kind of strike not so much provokes [ veranlasst] as realizes [ vollzieht]”

  (ibid.). In the difference between veranlassen, “to induce, to provoke,” and vollziehen, “to complete, to realize,” is expressed the opposition between constituent power, which destroys and re-creates ever new forms of juridical order, without ever definitively deposing it, and destituent violence, which, insofar as it deposes the juridical order once and for all, immediately inaugurates a new reality. “For this reason, the first of these undertakings is lawmaking but the second anarchistic” (ibid.).

  At the beginning of the essay, Benjamin defines pure violence through a critique of the

  taken-for-granted relation between means and ends. While juridical violence is always a

  means—legitimate or illegitimate—with respect to an end—just or unjust—the criteria of

  pure or divine violence is not to be sought in its relation to an end but in “the sphere of means, without regard for the ends they serve” (p. 87/236). The problem of violence is not the oft-pursued one of identifying just ends but that of “finding a different kind of violence . . . that was not related to them as means at all but in some different way” (pp. 102–103/247).

  What is in question here is the very idea of instrumentality, which beginning with

  the Scholastic concept of “instrumental cause,” we have seen to characterize the modern

  conception of use and of the sphere of technology. While these latter were defined by an

  instrument that appears as such only insofar as it is incorporated into the purpose of the principal agent, Benjamin here has in mind a “pure means,” namely, a means that appears

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  as such, only insofar as it emancipates itself from every relation to an end. Violence as pure means is never a means with regard to an end: it is attested only as exposition and destitution of the relationship between violence and juridical order, between means and end.

  7. A critique of the concept of relation has been indicated in Chapter 2.8 of

  the second part of the present study, in connection with Augustine’s theorem:

  “Every essence that is called something by way of relationship is also something