The core reason for an emphasis on form-of-life is to deactivate the bio-political apparatus which has dominated modern democracies and rapidly consumes the world. This machine (as Agamben calls it) originates from the original fracture in politics, reflected in Aristotle's commentary, between mere biological life [zoe] and a particular vocation and qualitative life [bios]. This division is what ultimately founds the bio political order as the gap between these two realities becomes increasingly blurred. For even as physical life had been relegated to the home (ordered by oikonomia, law of the house), this distinction itself is a product of the political. It is precisely a political act to determine what is, in fact, political and what is not. But in this exclusion, the city claims a hidden jurisdiction, for as this aspect of life is excepted it is captured (the literal sense of ex-ceptio: captured out). This problem is not serious throughout most of Western history where this distinction is maintained. However, with the advent of the nation-state, and the rapid collapse of the ancien regime, these problems came to a fore. With the advance of representative democracy, popular sovereignty, and nationalism, bio-politics became increasingly normative through police. As the blur between political and economic, public and private, bare-life and political-life evaporates, the ex-ceptio becomes more important to control even as politics formally has nothing to do with it. Think of the fact that sexual identity politics moved, in a blink, between the bedroom is not political (thus decriminalizing all kinds of behaviors) to growth of sex education in public schools. This long predates the recent "Don't Say Gay" controversy, dating back to the mid-twentieth century where sodomy laws were repealed at the same time sex education was introduced to public schools.
The alternative to this increasingly erratic and destructive caesura is through form-of-life. Rather than the split, physical life becomes its own political life. A form-of-life is "a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate and keep distinct something like a bare life" (The Use of Bodies, 207). However, modernity's growth in statism inverts this relationship. The bare-life becomes distanced increasingly as the site of crisis, even as its own regulation becomes the foundation for the state. The founding myth derives from the Hobbesian "state of nature", where the naked barbaric existence of a short and brutish life is locked away through the constituting act of polity. The incoherent and formless masses establish themselves as The People to enact a constitutional settlement (Hobbes' preference was hereditary monarchy). This constituted government then maintains this distinction, even as the ex-ceptio is precisely the heart of the city. Killing is outlawed precisely through the sovereign's ability to determine what is murder (unlawful killing) and what is execution (lawful killing; the sovereign's self-exception). Bare life, the source and threat of the modern state, becomes the secret center of all government. And as modernity has expanded, developed, and intensified, the crisis has only become more pertinent. The norm has become entirely blurred through its exercise. The state of exception is the norm. This confused intensification is nowhere clearer than in the realm of the biomedical:
"the very drawing out of bare life, which sovereign power in certain circumstances could work on forms of life, is now achieved massively and on a daily basis by pseudo-scientific representations of the body, of sickness and health, and by the 'medicalization' of ever wider spheres of life and of the individual imagination. Biological life, a secularized form of bare life, which has in common with the latter unspeakability and impenetrability, thus constitutes the real forms of life literally into forms of survival, remaining intact in them as the obscure threat that can be suddenly actualized in violence, in extraneousness, in sickness, in an accident. It is the invisible sovereign that watches us behind the idiotic masks of the powerful who, whether they realize it or not, govern us in its names." (210)
In other words, the crisis of modernity is the increasing emphasis on medicalizing all problems as matters of survival. It's no wonder then (as Agamben notes elsewhere) that popular media fixates on the apocalyptic. Whether it's aliens, environmental catastrophe, nuclear holocaust, pandemics, or a Malthusian population collapse from resource wars, all of these frame the imagination to expect imminent destruction. And thus politics simply becomes the task of staving off oblivion without concern for precisely *how* one would live a life. It's no surprise that the epidemiologists of Corona World shrugged their shoulders at concerns of living standards. Survival, measured in functioning lungs and hearts, was the only calculus to measure success. Siege mentality was the norm in a "war" against a virus.
The alternative towards this medicalized politics of bare-life is thought:
"Thought is form-of-life, life unsegregatable from its form, and wherever there appears the intimacy of this inseparable life, in the materiality of corporeal processes and habitual modes of life not less than in theory, there and there alone is there thought. And it is this thought, this form-of-life that, abandoning bare life to 'man' and the 'citizen,' who provisionally served as clothing for it and represented it with their 'rights,' must become the guiding concept and the unitary center of coming politics" (213)
However thought, in this definition, is no longer according to the classical definition as a kind of self-imposed exile. Contemplation, where one must self-impose
Agamben traces this philosophical concept through Plotinus, who revolutionized Plato's works against Aristotelian ontology. Life was not the activity of the solitary, a particular vocation. Rather thought, in its modern form since Averroism, has the multitude inhere within itself. Intellect is not something one exercises, but belongs within. The world of thought is something one belongs within and subsists in. The promise of modernity is, as G.K. Chesterton noted in Orthodoxy, is the poet poking his head into the heavens; the threat is the lunatic trying to fit the heavens into his small and fragile noggin. And belonging to the intellectual world of forms, a countryman wandering the starry heavens, the mere life coincides completely with a particular vocation. Every particular zoe is its own bios, with thought providing the creative means. Thus, it's not the issue that a biological entity can be abstracted from purposive living (the disgusting proposition from many illiterate libidinal atheists), but purposive living appears in and only through the thinking through as a biological life. In other words, life itself provides its own forms. Like God in scholastic theology, being does not have existence, but being is a mode of existence. Life does not have living, living is the expression of life. Every particular expression of life is something inherent to it, not an alien trait it participates in. There's no way to separate the dignity of a particular form of life, from the mere form of life. Therefore, it's not insane to wonder why someone who choose the joy of living his life over mere survival. The medicalized politics of the actuary have no bearing on a freeman who chooses his life as such.
The hope is that form-of-life, as tertium quid, deactivates the distinction between physical and political life, a threshold that ascends beyond. Agamben sketches out a philosophical tradition that attempts to move beyond these shackles, ranging from Plotinus to Scotus to Averroists like Dante. The means to exit in the midst of the given of zoe and bios. Imagination is one expression of the threshold that links, separates, and reunites the philosophic problem between the one and many, between spirit and matter. The intellect gathers up the plethora of material ideas in the mind, stripping them of their characteristics, rendered strictly as an image. Between the mind thinking and the idea contemplated, both fall in together, lost in mutual gazing. For an Averroist like Dante, the result is love: where the intellect contemplating finds itself in the image contemplated, thus deactivating any subject/object dichotomy. It's this indistinction, and mutual cancellation (as intellect and idea cannot but be conjoined), which forms an "ontology of style". There is no abstract intellect that can hold itself apart from the ideas that it contemplates. Form-of-life is that the particular mind has wedded itself, without remainder, to a particular way. It's in this moment, where one imagines or falls in love with not life-itself (as in mere biological life, some dissolved down essence of bare life), that escape is possible. The purpose is not distinction towards dialectical reunion, but freedom:
"Intimacy as a political concept, which is here in question for us, is situated beyond the Heideggerian perspective. It is not a question of having an experience of difference as such by holding firm and yet negating the opposition but of deactivating the opposites and rendering them inoperative. Archaeological regression must neither express nor negate, neither say nor un-say: rather, it reaches a threshold of indiscernibility, in which the dichotomy diminishes and the opposites coincide - which is to say, fall together. What then appears is not a chronologically more originary unity, nor a new and superior unity, but something like a way out. The threshold of indiscernibility is the center of the ontological-political machine: if on reaches it and holds oneself there in it, the machine can no longer function" (239)
To the jaded, the appeal to a metaphysics of love may seem quaint. However, the Christian must not fail to recognize that God is love and love is the highest virtue to dwell in. And this love is manifest through art, through poeisis, through the intelligible creation. Such is the task of the Logos and such is the same for man as imago Dei. And like God, the purpose of art is life: the work is a life, a life is the work. The ancients had maintained a distinction, where the work was the living proof of an artist (ie an artist was such because he made a work). The moderns, in complete reversal, had made the work of an art an embarrassing residue, a product of the genius. The result of modernity, resembling the increasing frenzy of confusion for the political-ontological machine. Thus the artist must manically manufacture his own life, sovereignly imposed upon the plastic lump of his flesh a vision that takes the form of particular acts, antics, and gestures. It's the seemingly schizophrenic life of someone like Madonna, who crafts her life as the image of the party-girl, but in reality a workaholic, obsessively choreographing all her movements. She is condemned to confuse art with her own life, and vice versa, till she's made a dumb and deaf idol. The modern artist is Pygmalion, whose art is not the beautiful woman but himself (a tale now -- in its modern form -- of masturbation, not love).
In contrast, art through inoperativity becomes free for contemplation:
"in contemplation the work is deactivated and rendered inoperative, and in this way, restored to possibility, opened to a new possible use. That form of life is truly poetic that, in its own work, contemplates its own potential to do and not do and finds peace in it. The truth that contemporary art never manages to bring to expression is inoperativity, which it seeks at all costs to make into a work. If artistic practice is the place where one is made to feel most forcefully the urgency and, at the same time, the difficult of the constitution of a form-of-life, that is because in it there has been preserved the experience of a relation to something that exceeds work and operation and yet remains inseparable from it. A living being can never be defined by its work but only by its inoperativity, which is to say, by the mode in which it maintains itself in relation with a pure potential in a work and constitutes-itself as form-of-life, in which zoe and bios, life and form, private and public enter into a threshold of indifference and what is in question is no longer life or work but happiness. And the painter, the poet, the thinker - and in general, anyone who practices a poiesis and an activity - are not the sovereign subjects of a creative operation and of a work. Rather, they are anonymous living beings who, by always rendering inoperative the works of language, of vision, of bodies, seek to have an experience of themselves and to constitute their life as form-of-life" (247)
The purpose of this dense passage is to escape from polarization between a conceptual dichotomy, not to heal the cut but set these concepts aside. The purpose is not to invent a third out of the rift, or simply piece them together. In other words, it's not trying to find a more adept reconciliation between public and private life, or between the home and the city. Rather, it's the ability to make both of these concepts inactive from their original categorical purpose. Man, the individual soul & mind created to be as God, is not made for the city, the family, or the many works that exist. Rather all of these are to be cease in their function in order for their use. The form-of-life is dissociating with the particular givens, so as to learn to love what they precisely are. Thus Agamben extensively replicates, with little commentary, Plato's "Myth of Er" from The Republic. In it, Plato imagines a post-mortem scenario where the souls of the departed witness all kinds of lives that they then choose to reincarnate as. The soul may choose to live the life of a hero like Orpheus or Hercules, or perhaps he chooses reincarnation as a swan or bee. The end is ultimately justice, blessed existence of divine harmony. The choice is not a naked subject, but the living life making sense of itself, a life divided against itself [mesos bios; a lifestyle split in the midst of things] so as to make use of itself towards righteousness. Such is, ultimately, the soul:
"The soul, just like form-of-life, is what in my zoe, in my bodily life does not coincide with my bios, with my political and social existence, and yet has 'chosen' both, practices them both in this certain, unmistakable mode. It is itself, in this sense, the mesos bios that, in every bios and every zoe, adventurously severs, revokes, and realizes the choice that unites them by necessity in this certain life. Form-of-life, the soul, is the infinite complement between life and mode of life, what appears when they mutually neutralize one another and show the void that united them. Zoe and bios - this is perhaps the lesson of the myth - are neither separate nor coincident: between them, as a void of representation of which it is not possible to say anything except that it is 'immortal' and 'ungenerated' (Phaedrus, 246a), stands the soul, which holds them indissolubly in contact and testifies for them" (262)
Thus the only hope of salvation is to stop the quantification of life, in the frantic movement between biological subsistence and a particular identity or vocation. Rather both kinds of life, biological and vocational, are set aside to reveal the logoi of Humanity. Man's ability to think, contemplate, imagine, and fall in love with the images set forth in the swirl of energetic movement, frees man to stop. Neither mere biological subsistence (as if being on a ventilator - survival - is living) nor some identity (whether of class, wealth, race, cult, etc.) determines you. Rather, the soul (life living, the rational breath) is the end. The freedom of the Christ - the conversion to being a Christian - is not a third thing, as if it's simply one more identity. Even worse, it's not a conjunctive movement through an ecumenical hyper-sacralization. Such is our world-order, why Ivan Illich referred to the current era as the most explicitly Christian, where everyone is a Child of God, every identity is an equal demonstration of a sacred calling. Of course, per the ex-ceptio this is manifest in the legislative protection of particular groups (gender, sexuality, religious, racial identities, among others), which implies un-protection for whatever is not an identity. Thus Islam is a religion as long as it's not fundamentalist, which is banished as pernicious politics (similar to Locke's ecumenical tolerance which excluded papists).
Instead Christian is the divine "as not" to our several vocations. The Christian life is to make use of whatever is true, either biologically or vocationally, towards the ends of the Kingdom of Heaven. As St Paul argues: circumcision or uncircumcision doesn't matter. The Jew lives "as not" a Jew; the Gentile lives "as not" a Gentile. Rather, all of these positions (class, wealth, race, etc.) serve the reign of justice. For freedom has man been set free. Such is the vocation to end all vocations, the call of eternity, the life of Christ lived through. The manic effort to square the circle of divisions is not overcome, it ceases.
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