The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

besides the relationship” ( Omnis essentia quae relative dicitur est etiam aliquid ex-

  cepto relativo). For Augustine, it was a question of thinking the relation between unity and trinity in God, namely, of saving the unity of the divine essence without negating its articulation into three persons. We have shown that Augustine

  solves this problem by excluding and at the same time including relation in being

  and being in relation. The formula excepto relativo is to be read here according to the logic of the exception: the relative is both excluded and included in being, in

  the sense that the trinity of persons is captured in the essence-potential of God,

  in such a way that the latter is still maintained as distinct from the former. In

  Augustine’s words, essence, which is and is said in relation, is something beyond

  relation. But this means, according to the structure of the sovereign exception

  that we have defined, that being is a presupposition of relation.

  We can therefore define relation as that which constitutes its elements by at

  the same time presupposing them as unrelated. In this way, relation ceases to be

  one category among others and acquires a special ontological rank. Both in the

  Aristotelian potential-act, essence-existence apparatus, and in trinitarian theol-

  ogy, relation inheres in being according to a constitutive ambiguity: being pre-

  cedes relation and exists beyond it, but it is always already constituted through

  relation and included in it as its presupposition.

  8. It is in Scotus’s doctrine of formal being that the ontological rank of relation

  finds its most coherent expression. On the one hand, he takes up the Augustinian

  axiom and specifies it in the form omne enim quod dicitur ad aliquid est aliquid

  praeter relationem (“what is said with respect to something is something beyond

  relation”; Op. Ox. , 1, d. 5, q. 1, n. 18; qtd. in Beckmann, p. 206). The correction shows that what is in question for Scotus is the problem of relation as such. If, as

  he writes, “relation is not included in the concept of the absolute” (ibid.), it fol-

  lows that the absolute is always already included in the concept of relation. With

  an apparent reversal of Augustine’s theorem, which brings to light the implication

  that remained hidden in it, he can therefore write that omne relativum est aliquid

  excepta relatione (“every relative is something excepted from the relation”; ibid., 1, d. 26, q. 1, n. 33).

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  What is decisive, in any case, is that for Scotus relation implies an ontology,

  or a particular form of being, which he defines, with a formula that will have

  great success in medieval thought, as ens debilissimum: “among all beings relation is a very weak being, because it is only the mode of being of two beings with

  respect to one another” ( relatio inter omnia entia est ens debilissimum, cum sit sola

  habitudo duorum; Super praed. , q. 25, n. 10; qtd. in Beckmann, p. 45). But this lowest form of being—which as such is difficult to know ( ita minime cognoscibile

  in se; ibid.)—in reality takes on a constitutive function in Scotus’s thought—and

  starting with him, in the history of philosophy up to Kant—because it coincides

  with the specific contribution of his philosophical genius, the definition of the

  formal distinction and of the status of the transcendental.

  In the formal distinction, that is to say, Scotus has thought the being of lan-

  guage, which cannot be realiter different from the thing that it names; otherwise

  it could not manifest it and make it known but must have a certain consistency

  of its own; otherwise it would be confused with the thing. What is distinguished

  from the thing not realiter but formaliter is its having a name—the transcendental is language.

  9. If a privileged ontological status belongs to relation, it is because the very

  presupposing structure of language comes to expression in it. What Augustine’s

  theorem affirms is in fact: “all that is said enters into a relation and therefore is

  also something else before and outside the relation (that is to say, it is an unre-

  lated presupposition).” The fundamental relation—the onto-logical relation—

  runs between beings and language, between Being and its being said or named.

  Logos is this relation, in which beings and their being said are both identified and differentiated, distant and indistinguishable.

  Thinking a purely destituent potential in this sense means interrogating and

  calling into question the very status of relation, remaining open to the possibility

  that the ontological relation is not, in fact, a relation. This means engaging in

  a decisive hand-to-hand confrontation [It., corpo a corpo] with the weakest of

  beings that is language. But precisely because its ontological status is weak, lan-

  guage is the most difficult to know and grasp, as Scotus had intuited. The almost

  invincible force of language is in its weakness, in its remaining unthought and

  unsaid in what says and in that of which it is said.

  For this reason, philosophy is born in Plato precisely as an attempt to get to

  the bottom of logoi, and as such, it has a political character immediately and from the very start. And for this reason, when with Kant the transcendental ceases to

  be what thought must get to the bottom of and instead becomes the stronghold

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  in which it takes refuge, then philosophy loses its relation with Being and poli-

  tics enters into a decisive crisis. A new dimension for politics will be opened only

  when human beings—the beings who have logos to the same extent that they

  are possessed by it—have gotten to the bottom of this weakest potential that

  determines them and tenaciously involves them in an errancy—history—that

  seems interminable. Only then—but this “then” is not future but always under

  way—will it be possible to think politics beyond every figure of relation.

  10. Just as the tradition of metaphysics has always thought the human being

  in the form of an articulation between two elements (nature and logos, body and

  soul, animality and humanity), so also has Western political philosophy always

  thought politics in the figure of the relation between two figures that it is a ques-

  tion of linking together: bare life and power, the household and the city, violence

  and institutional order, anomie (anarchy) and law, multitude and people. From

  the perspective of our study, we must instead attempt to think humanity and

  politics as what results from the disconnection of these elements and investigate

  not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction but the practical and political one

  of their disjunction.

  Let us define relation as what constitutes its elements by presupposing them,

  together, as unrelated. Thus, for example, in the couples living being/language,

  constituent power/constituted power, bare life/law, it is evident that the two el-

  ements are always mutually defined and constituted through their oppositional

  relation, and as such, they cannot preexist it; and yet the relation that unites

  them presupposes them as unrelated. What we have defined in the course of this

  study as the ban is the link, at once attractive and repulsive, that links the two

  poles of the sovereign exception.

  We call a potential destituent that is capable of always depo
sing ontological-

  political relations in order to cause a contact (in Colli’s sense; cf. part III, §6.5

  above) to appear between their elements. Contact is not a point of tangency nor a

  quid or a substance in which two elements communicate: it is defined only by an

  absence of representation, only by a caesura. Where a relation is rendered desti-

  tute and interrupted, its elements are in this sense in contact, because the absence

  of every relation is exhibited between them. Thus, at the point where a destituent

  potential exhibits the nullity of the bond that pretended to hold them together,

  bare life and sovereign power, anomie and nomos, constituent power and consti-

  tuted power are shown to be in contact without any relation. But precisely for

  this reason, what has been divided from itself and captured in the exception—

  life, anomie, anarchic potential—now appears in its free and intact form.

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  11. Here the proximity between destituent potential and what in the course

  of our research we have designated by the term “inoperativity” appears clearly.

  In both what is in question is the capacity to deactivate something and render it

  inoperative—a power, a function, a human operation—without simply destroy-

  ing it but by liberating the potentials that have remained inactive in it in order

  to allow a different use of them.

  An example of a destituent strategy that is neither destructive nor constitu-

  ent is that of Paul in the face of the law. Paul expresses the relationship between

  the messiah and the law with the verb katargein, which means “render inoper-

  ative” ( argos), “deactivate” (Estienne’s Thesaurus renders it with reddo aergon et inefficacem, facio cessare ab opere suo, tollo, aboleo, “to render aergon and ineffective, to cause to cease from its work, to take away, to abolish”). Thus, Paul can

  write that the messiah “will render inoperative [ katargese] every power, every au-

  thority, and every potential” (1 Corinthians 15:24) and at the same time that “the

  messiah is the telos [namely, end or fulfillment] of the law” (Romans 10:4): here

  inoperativity and fulfillment perfectly coincide. In another passage, he says of

  believers that they have been “rendered inoperative [ katargethemen] with respect

  to the law” (Romans 7:6). The customary translations of this verb with “destroy,

  annul” are not correct (the Vulgate renders it more cautiously with evacuari),

  all the more so because Paul affirms in a famous passage that he wants to “hold

  firm the law” ( nomon istanomen; Romans 3:31). Luther, with an intuition whose

  significance would not escape Hegel, translates katargein with aufheben, which is to say, with a verb that means both “abolish” and “preserve.”

  In any case, it is certain that for Paul it is not a matter of destroying the

  law, which is “holy and just,” but of deactivating its action with respect to sin,

  because it is through the law that human beings come to know sin and desire: “I

  would not have known what it is to desire if the law had not said, ‘You shall not

  desire.’ But seizing an opportunity in the commandment, sin rendered operative

  [ kateirgasato, “activated”] in me all kinds of desire” (Romans 7:7–8).

  It is this operativity of the law that the messianic faith neutralizes and ren-

  ders inoperative, without for that reason abolishing the law. The law that is

  “held firm” is a law rendered destitute of its power to command, that is to say,

  it is no longer a law of commands and works ( nomos ton entolon, Ephesians 2:15;

  ton ergon, Romans 3:27) but of faith ( nomos pisteos, Romans 3:27). And faith is essentially not a work but an experience of the word (“So faith comes from what

  is heard, and what is heard comes through the word”; Romans 10:17).

  That is to say, the messiah functions in Paul as a destituent potential of

  the mitzwoth that define Jewish identity, without for that reason constituting

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  another identity. The messianic (Paul does not know the term “Christian”)

  does not represent a new and more universal identity but a caesura that passes

  through every identity—both that of the Jew and that of the Gentile. The “Jew

  according to the spirit” and “Gentile according to the flesh” do not define a

  subsequent identity but only the impossibility of every identity of coinciding

  with itself—namely, their destitution as identities: Jew as non-Jew, Gentile as

  non-Gentile. (It is probably according to a paradigm of this type that one could

  think a destitution of the apparatus of citizenship.)

  In coherence with these premises, in a decisive passage of 1 Corinthians (7:29–

  31), Paul defines the form of life of the Christian through the formula hos me:

  I mean, brothers and sisters, time has grown short; what remains is so that those

  who have wives may be as not having, and those who mourn as not mourning,

  and those who rejoice as not rejoicing, and those who buy as not possessing, and

  those who use the world as not abusing. For the figure of this world is passing away.

  The “as not” is a deposition without abdication. Living in the form of the “as

  not” means rendering destitute all juridical and social ownership, without this

  deposition founding a new identity. A form-of-life is, in this sense, that which

  ceaselessly deposes the social conditions in which it finds itself to live, without

  negating them, but simply by using them. “If,” writes Paul, “at the moment of

  your call you find yourself in the condition of a slave, do not concern yourself

  with it: but even if you can become free, make use [ chresai] rather of your con-

  dition as a slave” (1 Corinthians 7:21). “Making use” here names the deponent

  power of the Christian’s form of life, which renders destitute “the figure of this

  world” ( to schema tou kosmou toutou).

  12. It is this destituent power [It., potere destituente] that both the anarchist

  tradition and twentieth-century thought sought to define without truly succeed-

  ing in it. The destruction of tradition in Heidegger, the deconstruction of the

  archè and the fracture of hegemonies in Schürmann, what (in the footsteps of

  Foucault) I have called “philosophical archaeology,” are all pertinent but insuffi-

  cient attempts to go back to a historical a priori in order to depose it. But a good part of the practice of the artistic avant gardes and political movements of our

  time can also be seen as the attempt—so often miserably failed—to actualize a

  destitution of work, which has instead ended up re-creating in every place the

  museum apparatus and the powers that it pretended to depose, which now ap-

  pear all the more oppressive insofar as they are deprived of all legitimacy.

  Benjamin wrote once that there is nothing more anarchic than the bourgeois

  order. In the same sense, Passolini has one of the officials of Salò say that the true

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  anarchy is that of power. If this is true, then one can understand why the thought

  that seeks to think anarchy—as negation of “origin” and “command,” principium

  and princeps—remains imprisoned in endless aporias and contradictions. Because

  power is constituted through the inclusive ex
clusion ( ex-ceptio) of anarchy, the

  only possibility of thinking a true anarchy coincides with the lucid exposition

  of the anarchy internal to power. Anarchy is what becomes thinkable only at the

  point where we grasp and render destitute the anarchy of power. The same holds

  for every attempt to think anomie: it becomes accessible only through the expo-

  sition and deposition of the anomie that the juridical order has captured within

  itself in the state of exception. This is also true for thought that seeks to think the

  unrepresentable—the demos—that has been captured in the representative appa-

  ratus of modern democracy: only the exposition of the a-demia within democracy

  allows us to bring to appearance the absent people that it pretends to represent.

  In all these cases, destitution coincides without remainder with constitution;

  position has no other consistency than in deposition.

  א The term archè in Greek means both “origin” and “command.” To this double

  meaning of the term there corresponds the fact that, in our philosophical and religious

  traditions alike, origin, what gives a beginning and brings into being, is not only a pre-

  amble, which disappears and ceases to act in that to which it has given life, but it is also what commands and governs its growth, development, circulation, and transmission—in

  a word, history.

  In an important book, The Principle of Anarchy (1982), Reiner Schürmann sought

  to deconstruct this apparatus, beginning from an interpretation of Heidegger’s thought.

  Thus, in the later Heidegger he distinguishes being as pure coming to presence and being

  as principle of historical-epochal economies. In contrast to Proudhon and Bakunin, who

  did nothing but “displace the origin” by substituting a rational principle for the principle of authority, Heidegger had thought an anarchic principle, in which origin as coming to

  presence is emancipated from the machine of epochal economies and no longer governs

  a historical becoming. The limit of Schürmann’s interpretation clearly appears in the very (willfully paradoxical) syntagma that furnishes the book’s title: the “principle of anarchy.”

  It is not sufficient to separate origin and command, principium and princeps: as we have shown in The Kingdom and the Glory, a king who rules but does not govern is only one of the two poles of the governmental apparatus, and playing off one pole against the