A key to understanding the intensifying crisis of western politics begins with ontology - the logic of being. This claim may sound ridiculous on its face, a fever dream of academic philosophers and theologians who seek to explain why de-industrialization, global financialization, and managerial neoliberal NGO political economy has dominated the West. But the interest in ontology is not a quest for a magical essence that lay hidden beneath the acts of men. Rather, an exploration of ontology reveals a mechanism - a machine - which crisscrosses the threshold between potential and act, between the world and language. For Agamben, it is precisely the space between the non-linguistic world of beasts or bodies and the linguistic world of the mind that ontology straddles. The Human being is not a stable category, but a project. Ontology explains the process by which Humans are made, and consequently unmade. An archaeology of Ontology - an exploration of how the relation between world and language has been assessed - is necessary to properly address the fundamental source of the above woes. Again, the excavation will not produce an immediate solution to the future wars of drone strikes, spec ops, and social media hyper-reality. It will not have clear significance for understanding rainbow flag plasticity or the bestial mixed economy of Dollar hegemony. Rather, it will unveil the core questions addressed in the process by which a man becomes dehumanized - or fails to fully humanize - that justify black bag renditions as much as partial birth abortions. If these questions are brought to light, an alternative answer may emerge and offer escape from a machine that seems only to become more destructive and decayed.
Pre-modern ontology established distinctions of duality, unresolved contradictions which afflicted Aristotle's first articulation of it. While The Philosopher, in Categories, sought to disaggregate words and the concepts to which they refer. However, this criss-crossing of how a word and a concept meet, in any meaningful way, remains obscure in the distinction of being and saying. A simple denotative sentence of identity - such as I am Cal - presupposes something beneath these identities. The 'I' receives the predication of a name (Cal), or perhaps sometimes an adjectival description ('Cal is good', 'Cal is tall'). But behind both the subject and the predication is pure subsistence of Being. For Being (ousia) is the presupposed, the unsaid, within every statement. Behind or beneath the 'I' and 'Cal' stands Being, which acts through the conjunctive relationship of the 'is'. Being is what is presupposed in every language and language is what summons Being through an accusation (the original meaning of kategorein). All language and philosophy depends on Being as its floor, and this is recognized in the Latin cognate 'subject' [sub-jectum], as well as 'substance' [sub-stantia]. Similarly in Greek, what undergirds the reality of the speaking subject is its hypo-stasis, the hypokeimenon which actualizes the only potentiality implicit in a category. We may speak of Human, but it's only cognizable in light of the human being, the 'subject' which actualizes or unveils this categorical reality. But here the gap between essence (Being as such) and existence (Being actualized in a subject) appears. How is it that what is exists, and what exists is? How does form combine with matter (pure potentiality)? Is it possible for a non-existent essence? Is it possible for an inessential existent?
Here Agamben takes up the philological question of what Aristotle meant when he defined Being: to ti en einai. Drawing on the work of other philologists, Agamben concludes that this statement means "what it was for [X] to be", with the empty signifier standing for any particular person (e.g. Cal, Socrates, John Smith). But why does this formula use the past tense? The problem takes its form:
"why must Aristotle introduce into the definition of essence a past tense, why 'what it was' instead of 'what it is'? This turns out to be the decisive problem that defines the ontological apparatus that Aristotle has left as an inheritance to Western philosophy." (124)
The framework introduced, which has marked out all efforts to analyze the relation of Being (and form) to subject, is temporalizing. History defines thus the Human being:
"If, insofar, as it has been presupposed, the individual can be grasped only as something past, the only way to catch hold of the singularity in its truth is in time. The past tense 'was' in the formula ti en einai certainly expresses the identity and continuity of being, but its fundamental achievement, whether or not Aristotle was fully aware of it, is introduction of time into being. The 'something more profound' that 'is hidden' in the past tense 'was' is time: the identity of the being that language has divided, if one attempts to think it, necessarily entails time. In the very gesture with which it divides being, language produces time." (125)
Time becomes the organizing means by which the mind organizes the world through language. The time is not chronological, in the sense of trying to capture something's essence through its sequential past. Rather the time introduced is the event of the mind's unfolding, its recognition of the thing as distinct amidst its many parts. It is the connection between a thing and its meaning, between humanity and this subject, this individuated thing. However, if the substance is still what is in question, the quest becomes unending. For every time the Being that founds the individuation appears, it immediately subdivides. For what is before me in the 'now' duplicates in the mind between what is and what was. And every attempt to single out what was only subdivides further backwards in time to what becomes impossible to ever fully grasp, the Beginning. Therefore a historical (if not political) task rapidly assumes mythological discursive marks as Being is ascertained.
While premodern philosophy maintained these distinctions and disaggregations within a mutual harmony, modern philosophy has exacerbated the tensions into complete collapse. Thus, even as this schema seems to determine the reality of the existent through its actualization of essence, the result can flow back the other way. The existent is mere ephemera of the essential, which always lies behind and before. It's not unlike the odd and unexplained comment from the Devil (disguised as a little girl angel) to Christ in The Last Temptation of Christ: "There is only one woman in the world. One woman, with many faces." Within the dream world of his last temptation, and confronted with the death of his beloved Mary Magdalene, the essence of woman is something infinite and constantly becoming. The death of one gives birth to the life of another. It's a perfect circle that only makes sense in a time that seems to collapse beginning and end. The end-result is Bare Life, pure Being, that remains completely confused and completely separated out from existent human beings. The Aristotelian machine, the means to distinguish between form and essence, has collapsed through its misuse and exacerbations.
The discursive markers of "Human Rights" and "All Lives Matter" represents incoherence. What does it mean to be "alive"? Both rightists and leftists participate in this complete collapse. Life becomes completely separated out from any particular how of life, with identity politics as a stick residue of this process internalized. It's not a question of how one is, but what one is. Radical Feminism with its ontologizing of womanless through biology is only a mirror of the process that refers this process to psychological subjectivity. A woman is simply a genetic pattern or an emotively willed disposition. As technological ability increases, the blur will only continue. Outside the fictional possibility of gene splicing or gene recoding for the human being, the technologies of artificial wombs, genital reconstruction, and hormonal therapy only exacerbate the zone of indistinction. Is a woman an XX chromosome? Is a woman a certain chemical cocktail of estrogen and testosterone? The abortion debate runs similarly about trying to demarcate *the* moment a fetus moves from organic material into life. And when politicians, like Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, announced their war on corona virus, it was a refusal of death. None should die! No needless deaths! But this presupposes a needful death. What is a statistical aberration and what is a statistical norm? And how does one cross between all of these thresholds? The result is the intensified importance of law. What is alive or dead? What is culpable or not? What is a woman? Legislation steps in to mark out these caesurae and resolve the problem, but its flimsiness breeds its own ferocity. Questions of being dissolve into the epistemic scaffold of the command. We will return to this problem.
The problem of the existent, from the other side, appears in the technical terminology of the 'subject' [hypostasis; subjectum]. The origins of the term are odd given its importance for Christian theology. A 'sediment' or a 'remainder', hypostasis refers to this concrete instance, the existent as what remains after the appearance of Being. As a radical shift within classical ontology, the gap between essence and existence receives greater strain. The Neo-Platonic philosophers struggled to ever arrive at the Being-beyond-being, and the gap only continued to be populated with hypostatic manifestations of Being. As if a reversal of hunting, the fresher the tracks results in greater disappointment, for Being seems to be farther away from when the quest began. Neo Platonists, like Plotinus, resented Gnostic cultists like Valentinian or Ptolemey, who seemed to mock philosophy through their absurd cosmologies. The chaste hypostatic emanation (a shift from existence as original to existence as given or produced) of Being in Nous or Good is replaced with the obscenity of the Ogdoad or the Duodecad, mythologized through copulative celestial regimes. Whether Gnosticism was sincere nitwits or opportunistic hucksters, it reveals the problem that Neo-Platonists (in combining Stoic and Aristotelian thought) had expanded. In the quest to find The One, it becomes entirely unclear how Being-beyond-being can ever be found. If Stoics imagined hypostasis as the result of a process of hypostatization between essence and existence, then Neo-Platonists made this entire operation unreal. How could what lies behind all beings ever make those beings if the threshold back, the movement of reditus, can never conclude?
This philosophical problem transferred to Christianity through the trinitarian debates. The creedal formula - three persons, one substance - depended on the question of divine hypostatization to explain how the one God could exist (eternally) as Father, Son, and Spirit. Yet this process included a "personalization" of each hypostasis, apparent in the Latin terminology of one substantia in three personae. While the clearest translation of hypostasis would have been substantia, the use of persona reflected a conflation of terms that better solved Christian ends. The hypostasis of the Father, for example, was not simply an individuation of divine nature, but had something more of a "personal" character. These terms themselves the confluence, for the subject moved towards subjectivity (though not in any psychological sense). And while Latin and Greek triadology developed major differences, a luminary like St Gregory Nazianzen recognized the Latin persona as equivalent in meaning.
This shift of emphasis opened the possibility (though one that would only be realized in time through particular thinkers acting in response to particular questions) that existence would take priority over essence. The hypostases of Father, Son, and Spirit were not simply masks or characters that existed for a time (which the word persona might imply). The trinitarian persons were not merely avatars for Being behind, but were themselves key in constituting essentially what God is, even if this what-ness was worked out through apophatic negative theology. While Agamben on this point does not fully exegete different approaches within Christian theology (especially differences over the Father's relation to the essence of divinity), the result is a modern emphasis on the existent and the increasing tension over the relation between essence and existence. Augustine becomes decisive for the West in adumbrating this problem through the relation of the divine persons. To prevent a tri-theistic fracture, the persons constitute a relation of the divine essence to itself. Analogously of a master and a slave - where the master is only such in relation to the existence of the slave - the Father is the Father as the Father is not-Son (ungenerate) and not-Spirit (unspirated). However if this relation is understood in the sense of an ex-ceptio, where what is excluded (the Son) through inclusion (Father and Son are both divine), than this raises the specter of a gap. How is the Father and Son different outside of increasingly technical and at times vague and unclear categorizations? These tensions would form the trinitarian debates that would continue to rock Christian theology (Latin most of all) throughout the Middle Ages.
Again, this problem may sound radically abstract, but it's the fracture which spawns the intellectual justification (or confusion) behind the modern crisis of ontology. Straddling between complete separation and collapse - where Being simply becomes what's existent - results in the efforts at total identification. In political ontology, the caesura between constitutive and constituted powers, between sovereignty and government, between The People and The People's representatives becomes entirely meaningless. The modern drive to resolve these disjunctures may result in radical displacement and collapse. Between The People and the mass of people, a revolutionary movement may seek to exterminate the difference. A Robespierre exterminating counterrevolutionaries or a Hitler exterminating Slavs are simply coherent applications of revolutionary logic. The People must remove those who've unpeopled themselves, and the difference must be established through an act of will. And this act of radical identification results in the production of the pure undifferentiated opposite. The decapitated body of the royalist or the Jew is the remainder, as fully actualized essence is existent in the will of the citizen or fuhrer that commands it to be. The fracture between world and language, which threatens into complete incoherence, is resolved through the verbal mechanism of the command. Yet every use to cross between the essence that stands beneath all existent phenomena strains at its use. What is a Corona virus death, but the legal determination of medical professionals? What is this crisis besides the manufacturing of a will to mandate whichever manner of resolution? If every policy is to prevent a needless death, what produces the alternative? This chaos emerges from this inability to rectify with the fundamental ontological division that justifies all the subsequent divisions, which have only become more confused through modern efforts to rectify them.
But is there a solution outside of this ontological collapse, whose resolution is only The Will? Is there a way of language that does not produce the presuppositions, subjects, and predication that unleash the bottomless quest towards the Being upon which all rests? Agamben believes Western philosophy has unveiled a way out, as much as intensification of the problem. One of the first major figure that saw through this ontological puzzle was Plato. The use of language which attempted to convert essence into existence, the principle [arche] into hypostases, must be abandoned. And this process is only possible through language's self-disclosure through an anaphoric reference. Thus while the presuppositional language game ("this is the circle") must be deactivated through an indirect gesture, saying the unsayable ("the circle itself"). The itself only points back at the Circle, but with a distinction that looks away from itself. Rather than the world-building powers of Logos, which moves out from essence to existence, which marked the presuppositional projects of Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger (perhaps the last true Aristotelian great), the Logos must suspend itself through self-disclosure. Language cannot absorb the World - the purpose of dialectical separation and reunion - but only "touch" it, the thing which mediates itself (the way the 'itself' is both the Circle and its mediation as an unsayable word). In other words, the Logos unveils the darkness of Nature, the ungraspable essence of it, which exists through radical distinction. The Christ reveals the fullness of Humanity at the precise moments his humanity is stripped (e.g. Pilate's "ecce Homo" at Christ's trial or the Centurion at the Cross who proclaims "This truly was son of God" at the moment of Christ's death). It was this truth of the Logos - the inoperativity of language at rest - which Plato understood, the moment where language leads to the revelation of the mystery (and its implied silence). The light of reason shows the opacity of Nature, and it is precisely at that moment something new may emerge.
Ontologically, the hope of escape is through a modal ontology - the medium identical with the thing it touches. A major pioneer to stress this way out was Leibniz, who had brought scholastic metaphysics to a point of disjuncture. Rather than the classic Aristotelian concepts of form and matter, what united all the monads (the essential principles) was their substantial bond, a relation that was indissoluble and more real than the monads themselves (thus giving a sense that this substantial bond was the absolute subject). And while this bond demands the monads, it does not imply them or require them to exist. The result of this relation would be like an echo without an original sound, for how could a bond between the monads be substantial (meaning it is inherent and necessary, not an accident of existence) without the monads? Leibniz postulated an originary echo or an echo as a source of modification. Thus it's the existent which then opens up the possibility of what originally was, that hearing the echo is what opens the mind to think what the source in fact was. It's in this way that the echo is substantive, an aftershock that redefines the original, a relationship that is more primary than two poles. The notion is absurd in the abstract, but it's a way of framing how precisely the relationship between the essential and existent may reach a stand-still. Rather than working down from essence, which must explain manifest in the variety of existents, what happens when a singular uncategorized existent reveals an unsaid (or unsayable) essence? What if all that exists does not have a name as a discrete hypostasis of Being, but rather it is all Being in its various modes? There is no finding a way to this Being because all things are - mediated through their solitary existences - Being itself. The subject is swallowed up for an anaphoric revelation. The 'I' in the 'I am Cal' deactivates, and instead 'Cal himself' appears without this temporal predication.
Leibniz developed his thought from the richness of Scholastic theology, which had absorbed the Neo-Platonic metaphysical categories. In a quest to work down from Being - the fundament beneath all - scholastics struggled to avoid shipwreck into pantheistic nihilism. Thomas had advanced Aristotelian categories to discuss mode as the mechanism by which the forms mixed with matter, actuality with potentiality, to form the composite existent beings. But this composition was itself an addition to form, manifest in the many accidents attributable to existent beings. The bond between them lack reality, in the sense that existence did add something to an essence. It was this other which defined the potentiality of matter, which was the means by which essence made itself existent. While the mode was nothing, it revealed something about how Being makes itself known. Scotus, in contrast, advanced beyond this to make mode a quality of a substance, its haecceity, its here-ness. Existence was contained within every Being, otherwise it would be hard to justify how essence could be thinkable in relation to the essence of the existent and its material defects and accidents. In Leibnizian terms, existence is the demand of an essence. Thus in Leibniz is a transformation of scholasticism on the cusp. What exactly moved from essence to existence in its modal relation - which had begun as "non-repugnance" (Scotus) and "aptitude" (Suarez) - had become a requirement.
An alternative to this paradigmatic crossing was emanation. Essence does not will existence, but cannot help but express itself. The modal relation is simply the unfolding of Being, like a flower flowering. However, these emanations are not themselves coincident with Being, but become, through space and time separated. Again, we return to the Neo-Platonic schema mutating into the cosmology of Gnosticism, with the drama of salvation as the shipwrecked emanations attempting to overcome their birth and return. Kabbalah also reflected this Neo-Platonic emanation, with the En-Sof (the Being-beyond-being) emanates finally into the hypostatic sephirah. However, unlike Neo-Platonism's elaborate chain-of-being, an ontological novum appears in the "nothing" that is the gap between the emanator and emanation. Kabbalah, in its apophatic mysticism, made being out of this nothing. This complete collapse is a simultaneous occurrence of both pantheism and nihilism: everything is everything and everything is nothing. However here is where modal ontology could rescue this eminational schema that threatened to dissolve into absolute simultaneity and difference:
"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 coincidence, 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 [sic] does not mean 'God = nature': the sive (whether it derives from the conditional and concessive si or the anaphoric sic) expresses the modalizaion, 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 - 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." (164).
A figure, which had been lurking in the shadows, emerges in full. Spinoza, the arch-heretic and atheistic pantheist, finds redemption as a scholastic saint. Spinoza's project was not to fully unravel the caesura through which he gleefully destroys metaphysics. Rather it is a radical reframing of the entire metaphysical project. God is not identical to the various existent individuals of the world - disturbingly expressed (per Bayle) as God modified in the Germans killed God modified in ten thousand Turks. Rather, the mode of existent beings is how God acts in the world. God - as anaphoric and non-presuppositional Logos - is not a question of what, as if God is Being or the Being-beyond-being. Rather God is the unsayable name (manifest in God's self-referential revelation as "I AM WHAT I AM" in Exodus). It's not that God is the Germans, God is the bullets, God is the dead Turks, and so on. Rather, God is all and in all precisely through the making use of the Germans, guns, and the Turks. Spinoza, in this way, is not the arch-heretic, but a supremely Christian theologian. It is not the abandonment of Scholastic ontology, but its redemption.
Reframed, the modal ontology changes a conceptualization of language and identity. Language is not to label the presupposed, substantive, and hypostatized Being which lay behind and beneath. Rather, Language is the unveiling of Being, Being is always already said. Thus, Cal is not a falling-down of an individuated Human nature, not a mere instance of a primal category. Rather Cal is a mode of Human being, it is the unveiling of a fully Human way of being. Modal ontology thus revises the Leibnizian formula. The substantial bond is not the monads that requires existence, but existents that require being. This is reminiscent of the Franciscan metaphysicians who "affirmed that the living body is already given in the embryo in its unity and perfection, even before the soul is united to it" as a form-of-body (148). Justice is the requirement of all that exists to have a name, that there is fundamentally no such thing as an accident, an existent that will simply melt away. As the Franciscan examples signifies, every human form requires its own naming. Scotus had made the Augustinian error of theologizing from essence to existent hypostases (even to the point of believing the Divine nature could be contemplated outside the persons). A modal ontology would, in reverse, mean that the Godhead is only intellgible in its revelation. God exists because Jesus Christ exists. The descent described in the Scripture has spatial imagery precisely because the sayability of the unsayable comes down to us. The revelation of the Word in an unjust world - a world that refuses the essence of the existent - is a humiliation of the Word. The act of naming is the fulfillment of justice, to answer the requirement of the existent to be.
A modal ontology - the primacy of 'as' in a form-of-life - thus liberates. It allows the mutant and strange to exist as they are, yet at the same time refuses the bio-medical attempt to essentially conform the existent through an exercise of the will. Agamben's work has often found resonance with non-Marxist leftists, which has rejected the repressive moral regime of bourgeois progress. However, this condemnation easily flows the other way. What is gender assignment surgery, but the application of the will to command what should not be into what should be. Agamben was, for this reason, opposed to a friend's heart transplant surgery when doctors counseled it. Why? Because it refused the existent body for a substantive modification through the surgeon's knife. It scooped out his supposedly rotten flesh for what functioned. It is the claim of crisis, the medical necessity, that supposedly transforms an insane act of mutilation into the life-saving procedure. The same logic is often applied at the destructive cutting and gutting of otherwise functional genatalia to be resculpted into the essence of either masculinity or femininity. The psychological dissonance of the modern subject must command the object of his will into conjuncture, a moment that expresses both extreme disjuncture (this body is not me) and extreme confluence (this body must be me). The 'I' becomes a ravenous tyrant. But salvation occurs not in an invasion or a conquest (misunderstandings many Jews attributed to their coming Christ). Rather it is unveiling of what exists, including the God who is none other than Language Himself.
What this means is either the redemption or destruction of humanity:
"Only a conception of the human that not only does not add anything to animality but does not supervene upon anything at all will be truly emancipated from the metaphysical definition of the human being. Such a humanity nonetheless could never be thought as a task to be 'taken on' or as the response to a call" (183)
It is not that any particular human being could be disqualified as a human being, whether the elderly, the terminally ill, or the fetus. Humanity is not something that comes upon the animal body of man (treated as an ugly remainder), or a task taken up. Humanity in these terms, as a particular set of capabilities or functions (whether Man as rational, political, or economical animal), must be put aside. Rather, the command of the modern subject of the I is deactivated for a different form of linguistic formulation. Though Agamben does not mention it, the biblical subjunctive (beneath the command, the weak bond) is what frames the world in all of its existent modes. Fiat Lux is the same impotent potency of Fiat Iustitia. It does not involve an invasion from a higher metaphysical dimension, but rather the recognition of God's creation. Benjamin's Messianic redemption as Nature's Night would be better served as the illumined opacity, the enlightened darkness, of Pascal's cruciform cosmos:
"If the world existed to instruct man of God, His divinity would shine through every partThe God who hides himself makes appear through his humiliation. It is not a question of conformity or obedience, but faith. Let the righteous be righteous still, let the unrighteous be unrighteous still. This forms the basis of the proper crisis of forgiveness, between those who will name the existent world and those who command their essential fantasies to exist, whatever the cost. If there is to be a new politics, let mercy triumph over judgement.
in it in an indisputable manner; but as it exists only by Jesus Christ, and for Jesus Christ,
and to teach men both their corruption and their redemption, all displays the proofs of these
two truths. All appearance indicates neither a total exclusion nor a manifest presence of divinity, but the presence of a God who hides himself. Everything bears this character."
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