The key to Agamben Homo Sacer series, the first major exposition of the flicker of light appearing in other books in the series, appears in The Highest Poverty. Building on the genealogy of the Nightmare, the Apparatus of the Camp which Social Democracy reproduces endlessly, the way out appears at the very same time. And as modernity only intensifies and immanentizes the Kingdom of Darkness, such existed for centuries at lesser forms of intensity, the building blocks one can discover in the palimpsest of Babel. But there is hope. For just as the first major appearance of Babel in the High Middle Ages darkened the skies, so too did salvation appear at the same time. The Highest Poverty holds these two in juxtaposition as Agamben sketches out both the doom and hope of our contemporary times.
In the preface, Agamben lays out the hope of his project. It is to examine the form-of-life, where life constitutes a rule, rather than its sinister alternative, where a rule constitutes the life. The former is freedom, the latter slavery. But it is in the fracture, and dialectical relationship, between "rule" and "life" which determines the redemption or damnation of humanity. Thus the life of Francis of Assisi, and his band of Little Brothers/Sisters, unveils the possibility of the new, and coming, politics. Thus, as Agamben hopes:
"the most precious legacy of Franciscanism, to which the West must return ever anew to contend with it as its undeferrable task: ow to think a form-of-life, a human life entirely removed from the grasp of the law and a use of bodies and of the world that would never be substantiated into an appropriation. That is to say again: to think life as that which is never given as property but only as a common use." (xiii)
It is in Francis that life is liberated to be lived, rather than to be divorced, divided, and sequester for particular appropriations set apart from it itself. The Franciscan monastic way thus represents a very stark departure with most of the norms of Western monasticism. The source of Western monasticism begins among the cenobitic communities, places which emphasize "common-life" of the monks. These neither reflect the ethical communities of the schools, which Foucault analyzed. Nor are they juridical communities of law and penalty. Rather these are the dominions of the Rule, an holistic and totalized view of life which absorbs all without remainder (though this, in itself, is always strained against in that which remains unregulated). This reality is manifest primarily in the use of "the hours" of monastic living. It was in the cenobitic monastery where the use of the clock first took primacy. The clock becomes necessary as an artificial nature, because the otherwise given forms of time (the movements of the sun) are not sufficient for the whole embrace of life. This flowed from a particular interpretation of the Apostolic injunction to pray ceaselessly:
The novelty of cenoby is that, by taking literally the Pauline prescription of unceasing prayer (adialeiptos proseuchesthe; 1 Thess. 5:17) it transforms the whole life into an Office by way of temporal scansion. (22)
The cenobitic project is a "sanctification of life by means of time" (24) which subjects the body, far before the Kantian philosophic revolution, to a universalized sense of temporality. Clock time regulated not only bodily movements, but every interior dialog and thought, counted indefinitely through the tick-tock of the eternal clock. This takes places through that ceaseless prayer, translated into meditatio. The mind always called to focus, and under guilt for failure to sustain this vocation, operates as a never-ending process of self-mechanization as the rule comes to life in The Monk (a category conforming all to the rule increasingly without remainder, ruthlessly snuffing out distinction). It is totalitarian:
"Meditation, which can accompany any activity, is in this sense perhaps the apparatus that permits the accomplishment of the totalitarian demands of the monastic institution. It is decisive, however, that the rule enters intros way into a zone of undecidability and with respect to life. A norm that does not refer to single acts and events, but to the entire existence of an individual, to his forma vivendi, is no longer easily recognizable as a law, just as a life that is founded in its totality in the form of a rule is no longer truly a life" (26)
This disposition increasingly threatens to create an unending crisis of dehumanization. For the mind struggles endlessly to conform to this rule and it is threatened with its own collapse. The monk was constantly under threat from the vice of acedia, the sloth which would blind the monk's eyes from the ability to read. Yawning, eyes glazed, sleepy, leafing through pages without intent, the monk's mind is threatened with failure. Yet the alternative vision, gestured at, is in St Antony. For when a fellow monk asks Antony how he can do without books, he responds that Nature itself is his book. Summarized: "The perfect life coincides with the legibility of the world, sin with the impossibility of reading (with its becoming illegible)" (27). Perfecting the technique of the rule-as-life results in the shattering of the mind, the full reign of acedia. It's not hard to see how this applies, from Monk to Consumer, to the proliferation of boredom. One keeps consuming, yet is always threatened with the exhaustion which will bar him from the paradise of the next hot take, the next experience, etc. You simply become the node within a world prison-system, mindlessly reproducing something which does not exist without act.
It's in this sense where the very attempt at fleeing the world, which the (evil) monk attempts ends up, in the very act, reproducing the world. The monastic rule is, itself, a flight from the world. But in so doing it becomes a liturgy:
"the theme of the flight from the world, so constitutive of monasticism, is united with the exercise of an ecclesial practice in which the fugitive appears as a true minister of the community: 'the minister of God's holy altar is one who is in flight from his own' [...] And it is on this basis that monastic exile from the world could be conceived as the foundation of a new community and a new public sphere" (50).
Though beyond the immediate scope of Agamben's analysis, it's in this way that esoteric cults often become themselves appendages of the world in which they exist. Why? Because the flight itself is a fantastical rendering of a world that is a dialectical negation of the very same. Thus, an example Agamben returns to a few times, de Sade's Silling imitates the mechanical rigor of the monastery, even as it is an experiment in total rejection of the Ancien Regime's moral framework. Thus, the gnostic cult reflected the worldly organization of guilds and colleges in city life, as much as a modern cults engage in the production and sale of cheap reproduced goods and live like an NGO. Therefore the cancer, rather than stultified or reversed, only expands into more and more dimensions of life. It's for this reason that the Reformation casts a dark shadow, as it is the monastic liturgy escaping into the entirety of society:
"If the liturgy is totally transformed into life, then the fundamental principle of opus operates - which already, beginning with Augustine, sanctioned the indifference of the priest's moral qualities with regard to the efficacy of his office -cannot hold. While the unworthy priest remans in any case a priest, and the sacramental acts he carries out do not lose their validity, an unworthy monk is simply not a monk
[...]
From this perspective, the Protestant Reformation can be seen legitimately as the implacable claim, promoted by Luther (an Augustinian monk), of the monastic liturgy against the Church liturgy. And it is not an accident if from the strictly liturgical point of view, it is defined by the preeminence of prayer, reading, and psalmody (forms proper to the monastic liturgy) and the minimization of the eucharistic and sacramental Office." (84)
One can fault Agamben painting with a broad brush, for certainly Luther (precisely as an Augustinian!) found the liturgy of the Church to be preeminent. However, it is still certainly the case that Luther's reforming program sought to bring the monastery into the village/city. Luther, and his loyal friends, may have fought to maintain this integration, the forces of reform often pushed for this collapse of the one into the other. It is only from the point of view of history and the confessions that Carlstadt or Muntzer can be pushed out of the "Lutheran" camp, but at the moment they were deviant comrades. The efforts of Martin Bucer's de regno Christi sought to transform Edward Tudor's England into the perfect monastic republic. Geneva, in which John Knox saw the finest school of Christ since the Apostles, reflected this applied vision. Though Calvin was far more irenic and moderate than many of his disciples (and later reputation) revealed, it was his struggles with Geneva's city council that revealed this monasticization. And when these efforts failed, such as the defeat of both the radical puritans and covenanters by the end of the British War of Three Kingdoms, they only birthed different forms of the same thing. Pietism, Moravianism, Methodism, and Revivalism, all of these referred to the creation of new monastic regimens. And still Roman Catholic monastic orders continued, inspiring the secular socialism of Fourier and Saint Simon.
The point is that the Augustinian system (as Agamben understands it) which birthed the work-worked sacrament (devoid of human person), was replicated in increasing intensity outside of it. Thus, as Weber described in the "worldly asceticism" of Calvinism (though misidentifying the bulk of the Reformed tradition with Baxterian post-puritanism): every aspect of life took on importance before God, but regulated before some pattern (rule) of life. Far beyond Sabbath day prohibitions and daily opportunities for worship (like the monastery), expectations of conversion and renewal were forms for framing (and thus creating) the inner life. And as happens among contemporary evangelicals, often the conformity of life into a rule creates the manic stress (and fear) of insufficient conversion. For the technique of the rule, an apparatus which exists only through its use, colonizes the mind. Thus one becomes a divine machine, turning the image of God into an idol of God.
The alternative of a lifeless rule assuming life is a life forming itself as a rule. This Agamben develops from Wittgenstein's notion of "form-of-life". It is worth quoting in bulk:
"Starting with Wittgenstein, contemporary thought and more recently philosophers of law have sought to define a peculiar type of norms, the norms called constitutive, which do not prescribe a certain act or regulate a preexisting state of things, but themselves bring into being the action or state of things. The examples Wittgenstein uses are chess pieces, which do not exist before the game, but are constituted by the rules of the game [...] It is obvious that the execution of a rule of this type, which does not limit itself to prescribing to an agent a certain conduct but produces this conduct, becomes extremely problematic [I blame a degenerate academic translator, like Adam Kotsko, for choosing this phrase for Agamben's Italian].
Paraphrasing the scholastic saying forma dat esse rei ("form gives being to the thing"), one could state here that norma dat esse rei ("norm gives being to the thing"; Conte, p. 526). A form of life would thus be the collection of constitutive rules that define it. But can one say in this sense that the monk, like the pawn in chess, is defined by the sum of prescriptions according to which he lives? Could one not rather say with greater truth exactly the opposite, that it is the monk's form of life that creates his rules? Perhaps both theses are true, on the condition that we specify that rules and life enter here into a zone of indifference, in which - as there are no longer the very possibility of distinguishing them - they allow a third thing to appear, which the Franciscans, albeit without succeeding in defining it with precision, will call 'use,' as we will see.
In reality, as Wittgenstein seems to suggest, the very idea of a constitutive rule implies that the common representation according to which the problem of the rule would consist simply in the application of a general principle to an individual case - that is, according to the Kantian model of determinate judgement, in a merely logical operation - is neutralized. The cenobitic project, by shifting the ethical problem from the level of the relation between norm and action to that of form of life, seems to call into question the very dichotomy of rule and life, universal and particular, necessity and liberty, through which we are used to comprehending ethics." (71-72)
Thus, precisely at the same time that a monk is made as such by the rule, it is also true that the monk living his own life will create a very rule (a form-of-life) out of the whole. In living his life as it is, he constitutes a rule out of the plethora of movements. And if a life becomes a rule, at the same time that a rule becomes a life, the threshold of change opens up the possibility of nullification. For at the same time that a rule seeks to alter one's behavior, one can simply frame a rule out of one's behavior. Or, in the terms of chess, is it the rule of the pawn's motions that make a pawn a pawn, or is the action of this piece what constitutes it as a pawn. This space of indeterminacy (ie does the movement make the piece or the piece make the movement?), which allows unleashes true freedom of self-awareness, that blurring of freedom and necessity Agamben highlights. And it was the life of St Francis, and the order it inspired, which saw the appearance of this, ultimately Messianic, nullification of the apparatus which would subject man to the fiction of his hands. Monasticism may reproduce the crisis of the problem, but it's also the very means of resolution:
"It goes without saying that from its origins monasticism was inseparable from a certain way of life. But the problem in cenoby and hermitage was not life as such so much as the ways, norms, and techniques by means of which one succeeded in regulating it in all it's aspects. To use the terminology of a Cistercian text, the life of the monk was traditionally conceived as 'penitential,' while now it [among the early Franciscans] reclaims its 'apostolic' character, which is to say 'angelic' and 'perfect' character [...] It is just as obvious that a form of life practiced with rigor by a group of individuals will necessarily have consequences on the doctrinal level, which can bring forth - as they in fact did bring forth - clashes and disagreements with the Church hierarchy. But it is precisely on these disagreements that the attention of historians has mainly been focused, leaving in shadows the fact that perhaps for the first time, what was in question in the movements was not the rule, but the life, not the ability to profess this or that article of faith, but the ability to live in a certain way, to practice joyfully and openly a certain form of life" (92-93)
The future conflicts of Franciscans with the hierarchy, which plenty of historians have documented, most importantly reflect this nullification of the rule, not this or that doctrinal position. The Franciscan monk, similarly to anchoritic bio-graphs of St Antony, had the world entirely intelligibly open before it as the life lived, with all its twitches and ticks, was itself the very form of the monk. Hence why St Francis left behind no rule, but only the fabric of his life recorded among his disciples to examine and draw out of. The Apostles did not leave behind the Didache (an apocryphal text, though one perhaps logical enough in its formulation) but Gospels, historical biography. For it is imitation of Christ (or St Paul or St Francis as they imitate Christ) that a holy and joyful life lay open, even in a state of destitution, subjection, and hardship. Count all things as joy, says the Apostle, and it is a counsel that Francis manifests in his own mission. Thus the very life of Christ, in all its potency and pluriformity, was the law of the monk. As pseudepigrapha attributed to St Basil laid out (translated by a Spiritual Franciscan): "Every action... and every word [pasa praxis...kai pas logos] of our Savior Jesus Christ [...] is a rule [kanon] of piety and virtue"(99). Thus the true alternative is to find your life sanctified, not in changing your life according to a sacred form:
"It is not a matter so much of applying a form (or norm) to life, but of living according to that form, that is of a life that, in its sequence, makes itself that very form, coincides" (99)
Therefore the tertium quid of biography (a life, a rule, and neither) opens the possibility of true change. Agamben is not an apologist for the silence of the animals, the dropping down of humanity among the beasts. Rather man has the potential, as a priest of creation, to lift up all creatures and humanizes them. It is in thought, that act and potential, where the otherness between lives is recognized and respected. For as much as Francis follows Christ, and identifies with him in his miracles and teachings, he is nevertheless Francis. And yet the Francis he is, his form-of-life, stands apart from the life he imitates. And it is this inappropriable space, one through love that has no tension, where the saint finds a life apart, holy and joyful, that is him without any claim. For no one can own this identity, not even the one living it. Francis is not a possessive role or office, it is merely a name. And as Christ grew out of him many branches, little Christs (lit. Christians), so too did Francis bud little Francises, Franciscans, who continue this unending branching. And in that there is distinction in unity, manifest in the relations between these vines, branches, and twigs, yet inseparable. The problem is not a metaphysical sublation, which only will provoke further dialectical resolutions until there is only the one. Rather it is a logical, at most, process of distinction to see the revelation of the relation, an agent and patient simultaneously and not at all, a branch on the tree of Christ. It is thus this disjunctive, rather than subjunctive, that allows for true unity through the difference of love:
"Franciscanism represents the moment when the tension between forma vitae and officium is released, not because life is absorbed into liturgy [hell on earth], but on the contrary, because life and Divine Office reach their maximum disjunction. In Francis, there cannot be any claim of meritum vitae against ordo as in the religious movements contemporary with him, nor as in the origins of monasticism, a transformation of life into liturgy and incessant prayer, because the life of the Friars Minor is not defined by officium but solely by poverty" (119)
Thus Francis was truly radical in his reform movement. The purpose of the Friars Minor was not to offer a rival or sect within the Church to repair it on the same terms. A Franciscan is not an office, but a form-of-life. Thus the habit which vests the brother is not a particular role (as if a chess-piece could be reforged in the image of a pawn), but in action. A pawn is a pawn because he moves like a pawn, not because he looks like a pawn. Thus the Franciscan operates outside the norms of the Church, without seeking to overthrow or replace them. As Francis' Testament puts it: "the clergy say the Office like other clergy, and the lay brothers say the Our Father" (119). And this question of non-appropriated action (one does not own this office, but simply lives it) that applied to the Franciscan vow of poverty. Francis did not dispute private property (to communalize it, as many revolutionaries and utopians advanced), but deactivated it. For the form-of-life of Francis and his early disciples was:
"that life which maintains itself in relation, not only to things, but even to itself in the mode of inappropriability and of the refusal of the very idea of a will of one's own" (140)
Thus Agamben concludes this work:
"But what is a life outside the law, if it is defined as that form of life which makes use of things without ever appropriating them? And what is use, if one ceases to define it solely negatively with respect to ownership
[...]
How can use - that is, a relation to the world insofar as it is inappropriable - be translated into an ethos and a form of life? And what ontology and which ethics would correspond to a life that, in use, is constituted as inseperably from its form?" (144)
It is the biography, as a genre of text, that highlights this tension. For it is the revelation of an other life which one takes up as one's own, yet without appropriation. It does not belong to you, yet you use it anyway. It becomes a form, yet not through an apparatus such as "will", which shifts you from the formless into the formed. Rather use opens up the meaning that had been there all along. It is the revelation of who you always were ("born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God") interrupting in media res. Hence the emphasis in much of orthodox Christianity: you do not chose to be a Christian, you not decide for Christ, you simply erupt, like a butterfly out a cocoon, from the cacophony of one's life. The intelligibility of nature bursts before you, as history (as much as anything else) becomes a book before your eyes, not meaningless scribbles. The form-of-life is not a means to an end, but deactivates all ends as the telos bursts upon the scene. As St Paul would put it: "for you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God".
To conclude, this form-of-life is not simply the basis of a new ethics or politics, but these are themselves emergent out of a true eschatology. It is only in the hic et nunc that the joy and holy life of Christ will appear. And it is this messianic rupture, not to reinstantiate a new law, but its perfection through inoperativity, which will free us. To live is Christ, to die is gain.
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