The finale of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer series comes as a denouement in The Use of Bodies. More a series of interconnected essays than a singular work, Agamben completes several themes developed among his several works. Like the works Homo Sacer and State of Exception, Agamben outlines the fundamental evil and rot at work in modern politics and their inevitable drift towards the Camp (at first concentration and work, then effectively a death camp). Also, following his works The Kingdom and the Glory and Opus Dei, Agamben returns to themes of political theology and how this world-order reflects fundamental caesurae within the secularized Christian theology that makes up European ideologies. And finally, drawing on his vision of a new politics in The Highest Poverty and a theoretical examination of the Wittgensteinian form-of-life, Agamben sketches out what true liberation from these evils looks like.
This exposition will mainly work through the first section of this work and draw some concluding reflections (in relation to the rest of the book) for the current times.
Titled as the name of the book, the first section examines the Aristotelian caesura in the institution of slavery and the limits of Foucault's analysis of antiquity. The primary problem is the fracture of life into zoe and bios, into mere naked life (the misnamed biological life of pure existence) and life as a particular form or shape. The purpose of Agamben's project is put simply in his prologue:
"when, as it today happens, the eclipse of the political and public sphere allows only private and bare life to subsist, the clandestine, left as sole master of the field, must, insofar as it is private, publicize itself and attempt to communicate its own no longer risible documents (though they remain such0, which at this point correspond immediately with it, with its identical days recorded live and transmitted on screens to others, one after another.
And yet, only if thought is able to find the political element that has been hidden in the secrecy of singular existence, only if, beyond the split between public and private, political and biographical, zoe and bios, it is possible to delineate the contours of form-of-life and of a common use of bodies, will politics be able to escape from ts muteness and individual biography from its idiocy" (xxi)
In other words, the evil of the modern world is the sublation of one pole of the fracture into another towards the destruction of humanity. In antiquity, Aristotle was one of the chief theorists (or collator of theories) of division within human existence. The nobility of human action was mixed up with human animality, and the main result of the Hellenic mind was a fragmentation to set apart the noble from the base. Thus the glory of politics was put apart from, separate but obviously interrelated, the menial reality of the home (oikos). Thus the law (nomos) of the city ran separate (or separable) from the law of the home (oiko-nomos). Politics was distinct from economics, the latter which would become increasingly important. Similar fractures existed between being and act, male and female, soul and body, free and slave. It's in the latter two that Agamben turns his analysis: the body of the slave. For Aristotle, as was common with other ontologists of Plato's philosophy, the soul of the body had an analogous relationship to the master of the slave. Thus, Aristotle can say in Politics that "the soul commands the body with a despotic command, whereas the intellect commands the appetites with a political and royal command" (1254b 5-16; on 4). The mental world of the mind, where intellect commands appetite, is separated from the physical world, where the vital principle of soul commands body (a shift from Plato, who placed bodily command in the political. Thus, the body is used.
But what does it mean to use a slave's body? An animate tool, the slave carries out his master's work. But since this is the case, the slave's activity is in no way productive. As Agamben explicates:
"Unlike the cobbler, the carpenter, the flute player, or the sculptor, the slave, even if he carries out these activities -and Aristotle knows perfectly well that this can happen in the oikonomia of the household-is and remains essentially without work, in the sense that, in the contrast to what happens with an artisan, his praxis is not defined by the work that he produces but only by the use of the body" (15)
The Slave cannot work, as work is defined by the intention of the one working, which is manifest in and through the product produced. The slave can only be used through the intention of another. Therefore, in a more vulgar and disturbing analogy, Agamben explains how ancients believed sex with a slave to be equivalent to masturbation, since one was using the body of the slave to achieve sexual satisfaction (18). It is in this relation that one sees clearly the Ancient vision of freedom. It is not so much in being a producer, but in being a user. It is the one who has mastery of his tools, not his labor, which glorifies a freeman. Thus self-mastery, using one's own body, becomes crucial for understanding the political definition of the citizen as user. Yet, as is common for Agamben, the focus is on the threshold of the act. When one uses one's self, it becomes a blur between the active and the passive, the constituter of an act and the act constituted, subject and object.
How does the active self pass over into the passive self acted upon? Through an internal division, which becomes the arbitrary means to forcibly divide various elements of life. But what if this division is playfully exploited to the limits? Here enters Foucault's fascination with sadomasochism and death-driven orgies. In the role-played scenario of dominator and dominated, the roles themselves are fundamentally exhausted. The dominated is often the one who requested this role prior to the game, whereas the dominator acts at the behest of the dominated. Thus, in Agamben's exegesis of Foucault:
"sadomasochism exhibits the truth of use, which does not know subject and object, agent and patient" (35)
But Foucault does not truly understand the extent of the problem. Yes, this role-play of master and slave paradoxically reverses the roles. However, the role-reversal does nothing to understand the fundamental fracture, only relativize it into meaninglessness. Hence it's no surprise Foucault's utopia vision is a death-orgy, where all things are lost in a swarming mass of ligaments and passion, life and death blur in a disgusting bloodbath of sex and murder. No matter how fundamentally evil Foucault is, this can blur the far more mediocre aspect of his exhausted post-modernism. As Hegel had already recognized, the coming-to-be of self consciousness results in role-reversal of consciousness. The master, who comes to see himself through the joy of his using the slave as an extension of himself, ends up a slave of his desires; whereas the slave, realizing his ability to hold his own against the commands of his master, gains a self-awareness as free subject. But, as should be clear, this role reversal does not end the fracture, just relativizes it towards an infinite regression of reversal and sublation. Thus Agamben states:
"sadomasochism appears as an insufficient attempt to render inoperative the dialectic between master sand slave by parodic ally finding in it the traces of that use of bodies to which modernity seems to have lost all access" (37)
Foucault may have restored, strangely, the ancient sense of self. But he did not overcome the problem, which resulted in ultimate subjection to forces beyond. For even as the Ancients understood periods of anomie, where kings were spit on as beggars and prostitutes heralded as queens, all of these were subject to the rules of a community (koinonia zoe) which preserved the dance. In other terms, it's no surprise many disciples of Foucault as limousine liberals, whose transgressions only reaffirm the cosmological prison in which much of the world remains. They simply get to enjoy the game they play because they see the hands pulling their strings.
What is the solution? For Agamben, as clear in his more obviously theological works (The Time That Remains), it is with the Christ. The way out is not to enter into the maze of constituting and being constituted. It is not, as is common for many Nietzschean-Foucaultian radicals, to reinscribe the rules of the game on different terms. One does not enter into endless parodic and paradoxical exchanges of self with self, where the master is the slave is the master, and so on. Rather the way out is through St Paul's messianic ethic: "as not". The Apostle counsels all those who are in a particular constitutive role to have as not. A man is a slave? Make *use* of it. A husband has a wife? Make *use* of it. One must live *as not* so as to creatively make new *use* of these otherwise given roles. It is in this way that the Christian is a new creature. For the Christian, according to St Paul, is not one who makes his peace in this world, but orients himself towards a new world (literally, new world-order, the new age). Thus, rather than getting caught up in the question of ownership, which demarcates user/used, it is simply to engage in the process. Thus Agamben states:
"Paul counterposes usus to dominium: to dwell in the call in the form of the 'as not' signifies never making of the world an object of ownership but only of use" (57)
Here there is a clear question of politics and economics. As gestured at above, Agamben is quite firmly non-Marxist, yet nevertheless a professed "leftist" (though that term, especially in the age of Corona Biomedical Security, has become increasingly meaningless). Thus the new politics is one that gets beyond the question of ownership, whether individually (per liberal capitalism) or corporately (whether through primordial or industrial-marxian socialism). How does one get to use without the fruit of ownership, the deed by which a master owns a slave or a soul owns a body? How can *I* make use of what I am, and what is around me, without introducing that fracture of which demarcated the zone of private ownership (as opposed to political communality) which has increasingly circumscribed all reality? How does the Pauline "as not" not simply replicate one more reversal or another layer of paradox, but deactivates this division?
As sketched out through the growth and failure of the Franciscan movement, Agamben turns his focus to the question of "habit". The habit, as it was in medieval theology derived from Aristotle, operates as a threshold concept, mediating between the potential and the actual, between being and act. Habit is "the form in which potential exists and given reality as such" (59). Habit's key importance for overcoming the ontological caesura is given further explanation:
"Only if we think habit not only in a negative mode, beginning from impotential and from the possibility of not passing into act, but rather as habitual use, is the aporia, against which Aristotelian thought on potentiality has made shipwreck, dissolved. Use is the form in which habit is given existence, beyond the simple opposition between potential and being-at-work. And if habit is, in this sense, always already use-of-oneself and if this latter, as we have seen, implies neutralization of the subject/object opposition, then there is no place here for a proprietary subject of habit, which can decide to put it to work or not. The self, which is constituted in the relation of use, is not a subject, is nothing other than this relation" (60)
Let's restate the problem.
There is a fundamental ontological fracture between several modes of being which come back to the basic of subject/object. In social life, this division is reflected in the political (active-ordering) and economic/domestic (passive-ordered). Thus, the citizen-male (who is also pater familias) is a political being, but his wife, children, and slaves pertain to the home. This fracture plays out through the question of ownership, which is the basis upon which the political exists, and yet the ends towards its ordering. On its face, this distinction creates a whole host of problems that require resolution, and efforts were made throughout antiquity, the medieval, and early modern period. But the exhaustion at maintaining these distinction have resulted in liberal order of modernity, where political economy rapidly becomes simply economy. The triumph of this view is the Clintonian social democracy view: "it's the economy, stupid!"
The classical liberal order of reducing and restraining the political reached a complete crisis where the political (rather than shrinking and disappearing, as hoped in both Smith and Marx) expanded indefinitely. How? The eventual triumph of a liberal order of limited and constitutional government transformed into a wholly privatized order where government (a fundamentally economic concept) could be fully unleashed. This is where left-wing criticisms of "capitalism" and right-wing criticisms of "communism" dovetail neatly. For as they use radically different conceptual tools (with often wildly different views in mind), they describe the same set of forces. For as the political became wholly sublated into the economic, there was therefore no more political questions. There was no polis, now there was only the series of interlinked oikoi which were to be governed. It's no surprise that this fissure (which began in the 1870s and reached complete destruction by the 1970s) saw the rise of the paternalistic and maternalistic government of the warfare-welfare state. Heads of state, separate and separable from the ministries (slaves!) which conducted palace affairs, were voided. Even their limited powers (to resolve constitutional crises) were often inoperable without provoking more crisis. Increasingly as governments expanded as permanent institutions to deal with economic questions (even as the extent of those economic questions could be strictly limited), the complexities of economies rapidly provoked crisis after crisis. Thus there's an almost seamless logic that as politics shrunk (those questions of what a human being is and how should humans relate to one another as a civilization, as a polis, as well as with other civilizations, other poleis) that it would become a subterranean force within the sprawling mandate to govern the economy. Capitalism and Communism were only rival governmental ideals, and (as Kojeve predicted) their hostility was only a pretext for merger. Thus the end of the Cold War, the supposed "End of History", resulted in the erasure of politics, but its pure operative potency now submerged into questions of economy. Thus governments have an infinite mandate to act, coerce, and destroy in the name of bodies, medicine, and resources.
Such is the logic of The Camp: the administration of goods for the Community, resulting in the logic of genocide when rations are short.
Returning to the point at hand, the problem is that this fracture between subject and object results into the objectification of all things and the sublation of the subject (perhaps explaining the brief fad of "object oriented ontology"). Yet this precisely is the mode in which a subjectless subject can achieve its goals. Like a Svengali, the mystic never acts but is an object for the forces acting through him. Representative government never does anything besides what the people determine. Economic forces are objects in motion, there is no hand moving them to any particular end. To raise this point is to fundamentally reintroduce politics, which will always be labeled as some form of boogeyman, the reintroduction of barbarism into the civilized world-order at The End of History. Classical Liberals would blanch at what became of their efforts to address substantial political questions (most of them would probably end up as some fringe extremists in today's world). Nevertheless, their inability to solve the fundamental questions posed to them only continued on this sublation of politics to economy. Now to reintroduce the political does not only offer an alternative, but results in being a labeled of mankind. It is this state-of-exception which justified the execution of king Louis XVI of France, as well as the removal (and eventual extermination) of ethnic minorities throughout the Third Reich. The law (a political relic) becomes suspended for the bureaucratic administration, the state becoming an animate tool in its own service. It's a slave that carries out no action, yet unleashed for the slaughter.
If that's the problem, the solution is not to simply reestablish the distinctions. For these distinctions themselves come to be in time, and thus the possibility of reversal, parody, and paradox only reintroduce the problem. Foucault's sadomasochism does not end the distinction through confusion, but only obfuscates the true exercise of power. The sovereign subject esoterically lurks in the exoteric epiphenomena of a world made up only of objects. The wearing of masks does not, radically (so they say), reveal we have no face, but obscures the murderous intent of one seeking to hide. For Agamben, the point is to find our faces.
In contrast, Agamben wants to assert the primacy of the threshold. For it is not the habit which is nonexistent, the threshold between the potential and the actual, but it is the most real. We are not a non-existent I, which in some kind of pre-ontological moment or state opts to bring about. Rather the source ourselves, the origin, is in the middle of things. It's in the relation out of which *I* am. Thus the Master-I does not take possession of the Slave-It. Neither does the Master-I offer a source of superiority out of its relation to the Slave-Thou. Rather, *I* emerge out of the relation, the dialogue. I do not exist until I am addressed. And it's in this sense that the habit, the indeterminate passing over of potentiality into actuality, is the truth of things. For I act, but I could do no other than I did, and that itself becomes intelligible. And in making use of this, and all things, one finds freedom, the Pauline "as not" where new use can be made of the material of our relations. Thus I find myself a slave, and yet I use this slavery because, in these actions, I am no longer bound to this role, but am the relation of self relating to self.
This abstract and heady description gets more flesh as Agamben sketches out this vision of freedom. He gives an example of a true poet, apart from misapplied use of the will (which operates as an ex-post facto rationalization, just as a government murdering its citizens takes its justification that it is the People's Will):
"A poet is not someone who has the potential or faculty to create that, one fine day, by an act of will (the will is, in Western culture, the apparatus that allows one to attribute the ownership of actions and techniques to a subject), he decides - who knows how and why - like the God of the theologians, to put to work. And just like the poet, so also are the carpenter, the cobbler, the flute player, and those who, with a term of theological origin, we call professionals - and, in the end, every human being - not transcendent title holders of a capacity to act or make: rather, they are living beings that, in the se and only in the use of their body parts of the world that surrounds them, have self-experience and constitute-themselves as using (themselves and the world)" (62)
And again to drive the point home:
"And if the architect and the carpenter remain such even when they are not building, that is not because they are title-holders of a potential of building, which they can also not put to work, but because they habitually live in use-of-themselves as architect or carpenter: habitual use is a contemplation and contemplation is a form-of-life" (63)
Thus the new politics, for Agamben, is a politics of freedom. It is the imagination that is allowed a primary role to frame and form subjectivity and activity. For just as the apparatus that enslaves us hides dominating subjectivity amidst the inanity ruin of objects, the freedom of salvation sublates objectivity into the subject appearing amidst him. The true architect is not the one who holds a business card or license, nor is it merely in the acting or resultant act. Rather, the architect, like the poet or any other vocation, is the one who dreams.
But the free dreamer is juxtaposed to the identity of this sovereign subject. Agamben lambasts the sacramentology which eliminates the subjectivity of the celebrant into the divine order of celebration. The priest is merely an animate tool, the means by which God acts, a divine slave. Thus, just as the actions of a slave are imputed to his master, so too does the effect of the sacrament belong to the Church or Christ, the personae in whom the minister acts (74-75). The intention behind this doctrine is noble, but the result is disastrous. For while this maintains the legality of sacraments performed by evil priests (whose will is perverse), it makes man a servant of a machine. The sacrament's intentionality is entirely sublated into a cosmic order, and the minister effectively acts (or at least is treated as) a machine. Agamben explains how this ecclesiastical order gave birth to our current situation with technology:
"It is legitimate to suppose that the absolute instrumentality that is thought here constitutes in some way the paradigm of modern technologies, which tend to produce apparatuses that have incorporated themselves the operation of the principal agent and can thus 'obey' its commands (even if these are actually inscribed into the functioning of the apparatus, in such a way that the one using them, in pushing the 'controls,' obeys in turn a predetermined program). Modern technology does not derive only from the dream of the alchemists and magicians but also and more probably from that peculiar 'magical' operation that is the absolute, perfect instrumental efficacy of the sacramental liturgy" (77)
The horror of this pronouncement is hard to understate. Up to this point, as I've been describing things, one might suspect to find some group of scheming elites pulling the strings. Surely this oligarchic command is the sovereign subject lurking behind the world of objects! Surely it's a human face deciding these nightmares. But the truth is that the system takes on a life of its own. That's what makes this problem an apparatus (dispositif in French, per Foucault's use). It only exists through its enactment, yet it seems to claim universal potency in the very same. Thus, the rules of the game begin to take on a life of their own, a preexistent potency enacted to structure the very world in which we live, move, and have our being. It is in this sense that Ellul (among many others) saw "technique" as the height of idolatry. No one is pulling the strings, we have become enslaved to the creature of our hands. The iron laws of necessity thus instrumentalize use to commit unrelenting brutalities. The manipulative Svengali truly loses himself, he is not his own but belonging to a force in which he induced himself. Robespierre truly is possessed of The People, a fiction he brought into being as he removed the head of the king and unleashed Terror. The New World Order, that socialized capitalism (or capitalized communism), demands an offering. Molech demands blood and we are the instruments of his will!
The modern world, with its staggery array of new technologies, has not made us free. Rather, it has become the height of idolatry, as we are immolated for the Will of an Object. We have made god with our own hands and he has killed us.
Freedom lays not in a sovereign subject pulled apart. To reiterate the horror, this violent reintroduction creates the Sadean Tormenter. At first, he is the ultimately free subject because he may take any and all, including the inapproriable. Thus this satanic need to free the will to want all and nothing at the same time. It is the consumption of bodies. And yet this manic freedom is the ultimate slavery, as the 120 Days of Sodom results in hyper-regulation of all in the origiastic routine of the debauched. This results in enslavement to the game, where ultimately the sovereign subject is dissolved into the quest to appropriate. As vile as it is, perhaps de Sade intended it as parody, the end result of the obsessive quest to find the sovereign subject willing his will. The result is pure evil (93).
Domination, control, ownership. This runs into the stark sublation of all objects into the subjectivity of service. Not like the Newtonian Urizen, in Blake's poetry, is the world liberated, but this results in the forging of chains. Instead, one is the passive-subject, the ideal of the poet. Reality comes about through dreaming, and dreaming itself is both world-forming and world-formed. It is the disposition, the habit, of the lover. Love sets one at the feet of the beloved as freedom. It is in a refusal to own, dominate, or master that marks love. When Christ bent down to wash the feet of his disciples, it was neither a demonstration of his unworthiness nor of their superiority. Rather, this act constituted Christ. For here was the king on his knees before his disciples. These he named friends!
It is in being taken up in the given, enraptured and in love with what is before you, that gives wings to an imaginative respect. Whatever the confines of created existence, imagination unleashes potency in act through inoperativity. In other words, it is when you love something you can see it as other than it is and allow its new flourishing. One can read Torah with love when one is no longer a slave under its commands, but a poetic ode to the new creature called out of it. True justice will reign when the law is a summons and address, not a claim of ownership and dominion. I am bound to the Law because I love God's word, not because I an made an object of its censure. This is the freedom of the Christian. This is the form-of-life.
Thus, near the end of the work, Agamben paints a vision of grace, the free gift of form-of-life:
All living beings are in a form of life, but not all are (or not all are always) a form-of-life. At the point where form-of-life is constituted, it renders destitute and inoperative all singular forms of life. It is only in living a life that it constitutes itself as a form of life, as the inoperativity immanent in every life. The constitution of a form-of-life fully coincides, that is to say, with the destitution of the social and biological conditions into which it finds itself thrown. In this sense, form-of-life is the revocation of all tactical vocations, which deposes them and brings them into an internal tension in the same gesture in which it maintains itself and dwells in them. It is not a question of thinking a better or more authentic form of life, a superior principle, or an elsewhere that suddenly arrives at forms of life and tactical vocations to revoke them and render them inoperative. Inoperativity is not another work that suddenly arrives and works to deactivate and depose them: it coincides completely and consistutively with their destitution, with a living life. (277)
Reframed in my own terms: every living creature acts in certain ways. It is only in the self-consciousness of a sudden action, where one lovingly makes use of this act. It is to recognize this whole host of acts, including the most clearly inapprorpriable (the twitch, the sneeze, etc), and make use of them towards an end. The entirety of your subjectivity, as well as the objectivity of your body, is sublated into a loving for what is as the source of who you are. It's in this sense we can say Christ is the Lamb who was slain before the foundation of the world. For Christ's very origin, who He is, can be nowhere else than in the precise act made use of to form his very identity. Intentions and involuntary actions, all of these elicit a summons to simply be. We should not go searching for *who* I am amidst the wreckage of professions, callings, and offices. Rather, the power of grace is to transform the very life lived. It is, in a sense, the power of forgiveness to come to terms with the totality of your life. It is the way of St Francis, who lived his life of poverty in riches, who never ceased to repent and yet was filled with joy. It is not a sovereign I who decides which of the many lives is best to live, but it is drawing upon the power of God working towards salvation in you.
Thus Agamben ends this work with the hope of a coming Nocturnal Council. The vision is clear:
"Contemplation and inoperativity are in this sense the metaphysical operators of anthropogenesis, which, in liberating living human beings from every biological and social destiny and every predetermined task, render them available for that peculiar absence of work that we are accustomed to calling 'politics' and 'art'"
To be a human is to think, imagine, contemplate. It in this sense that separates a piece of carpentry from a piece of art. For the latter is recognized, and love, for the meaning it exudes. For politics, it is no longer the slavery of acting according to the laws of nature, the laws of economy, the laws of biology, which are chains forged to make us appendages of the Machine. Rather, it's through the Nocturnal Council:
"It would be necessary to think an element that, while remaining heterogenous to the system, had the capacity to render decisions destitute, suspend them, and render them inoperative. Plato had in mind something of the kind when at the end of the Laws (986c), he mentions as 'protector' (phylake) of the city a 'Nocturnal Council' (nykterinos syllogos), which, however, is not an institution in a technical sense because, as Socrates specifies, 'it is impossible to lay down the council's activities until it has been established [prin a kosmethe]...through a long standing together [meta synousia pollen].' While the modern State pretends through the state of exception to include within itself the anarchic and anomic element it cannot do without, it is rather a question of displaying radical heterogeneity in order to let it act as a purely destituent potential" (278-279)
As revealed in the age of Terror and Rona, the uncontrolled and unmanaged require increasingly extrinsic measures, and thus the state itself through the state-of-exception must recognize its own anarchic power. The uncontrollable must be unleashed to control the uncontrollable, which easily becomes a meat-grinder. Yet it is precisely as an outside political council, gathered to save the city yet not belonging to the government of the city, which can not only unveil the anomic nature of the state, but subject it to question. For the power of the Nocturnal Council is after-the-fact, its scope is only after it has itself determined itself. Thus this form of politics recognizes the inappropriable, namely the citizen's conscience manifest through his own corporial con-spiracy (literally a embodied breathing together). But unlike the anarchy of a government acting to the save idol of the state, it is these guardians taking upon themselves the name of the state to suspend the actions of the government. It is the way concerned subjects will come to be as a group to stand against evil ministers and wicked counselors in the name of the king. The goal is not to create a new state or a new government (called some revolutionary citizen's council or committee for public safety). Rather it is the ability to deactivate, stop, the rumblings of an apparatus rapidly taking on its own justification.
The only way out of the Nightmare is the power of Christ. In him, you are already dead and buried, you have risen and ascended. All earthly cares melt away from the Heavenly servant, free now to embrace, without remainder, the totality of what God has given. As St Paul could say triumphantly: "by the grace of God, I am what I am".
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