Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought 9780823267644

Citation preview

TWO

153-61106_ch00_3P.indd i

6/20/15 10:51 AM

Fordham University Press New York 2015

Commonalities Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

153-61106_ch00_3P.indd ii

6/20/15 10:51 AM

T WO The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought

Roberto Esposito Translated by Zakiya Hanafi

153-61106_ch00_3P.indd iii

6/20/15 10:51 AM

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. This book was originally published in Italian as Roberto Esposito, Due: La macchina della teologia politica e il posto del pensiero, © 2013 by Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino. The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche

Via Val d’Aposa 7 - 40123 Bologna - Italy [email protected] - www.seps.it Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Esposito, Roberto, 1950– [Due. English] Two : the machine of political theology and the place of thought / Roberto Esposito ; translated by Zakiya Hanafi. pages cm. — (Commonalities) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6761-3 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8232-6762-0 (paper) 1. Political theology. 2. Philosophy, Modern—19th century. 3. Philosophy, Modern—20th century. I. Title. BT83.59.E8713 2015 195—dc23 2015006051 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15

54321

First edition

153-61106_ch00_3P.indd iv

6/20/15 10:51 AM

CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

Passage: Gestell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

16

1 Machination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23

Passage: Katechon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

76

2 The Dispositif of the Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83

Passage: Nexum (Economic Theology I) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 3 The Place of Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Passage: Sovereign Debt (Economic Theology II) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

153-61106_ch00_3P.indd v

6/20/15 10:51 AM

This page intentionally left blank

TWO

153-61106_ch00_3P.indd vii

6/20/15 10:51 AM

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION

If there is one concept that remained impermeable to critical analysis during a discussion that lasted for the entire twentieth century, it is “political theology.” The reasons for this resistance—historical, philosophical, and semantic—are many. A stable, unambiguous definition was made impossible by the diversity of contexts, on the one hand, and by the variety of meanings given to the terms “politics” and “theology,” on the other. But on top of this thematic and lexical difficulty there lies another, more essential obstacle that on closer examination is the origin and cause of the first: namely, our inherent relation to the phenomenon that we seek to interpret. The basic obstacle to fathoming the ground of political theology, fundamentally, is the fact that we find ourselves already on it. This is why it has proven to be so intractable—not because its entrance is bolted, but because back in the mists of time we crossed over its threshold, before the door slammed shut behind us, barring our exit. Th is is why it is impossible for us to take the sort of distance required for an analytical and critical examination. Just as when we are inside an environment to the point of being confused with its elements or when we look at an object from too close up, it is impossible to make out its contours. To do so—to grasp the overall meaning of political theology—we need to look at it from the outside, expressing ourselves in a different language from its own. But this is exactly what its excessive proximity stops us from doing, by crushing us up against its interior walls. The problem is that for at least two thousand years we have spoken using a vocabulary that is inherently political-theological. We therefore have neither mental schemas nor linguistic models that are free from its syntax. All the categories that have been employed on various occasions

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 1

6/20/15 10:54 AM

to arrive at the connection between politics and theology—like “disenchantment” or “secularization” or “profanation”—turn out to have politicaltheological origins themselves. By this I mean that they presuppose what they should explain, because without some sort of enchantment there could be no disenchantment, and without something sacred there would be nothing to desecrate. The first author to grasp this difficulty was Heidegger, when he clearly took his distance from the concept of secularization, defining it as not only inadequate but also “misleading.” Secularization must be rejected, not because it dilutes the specificity of the modern era by making it continuous with the preceding period, but because by presupposing the theological origin from which it severed itself, it implicitly affi rms what it seeks to negate. Just as it makes no sense to talk about secularization unless we understand in advance what seculum is, it is useless to theorize a mundanization before having called into question the category of “world.” But Heidegger goes a step further, which brings us back to the problem of the impenetrability of the political-theological paradigm. The fact that this paradigm remains out of reach not because of its distance but because it is too near—because it precedes us and envelopes us in its effects of meaning—shows that what we are dealing with is not a simple concept but something much more enigmatic, which Heidegger refers to as “machination.” In reality, he does not directly relate machination to the political-theology nexus, but the moment he uses it to replace the category of disenchantment—tracing machination back instead to a sort of “enchantment” or “bewitchment”—he effectively makes it an interpretive key for political theology. Like political theology, machination also proves to be impenetrable because it manifests itself in the form of its exact opposite, and because it tends to swallow us up inside itself as well, making its modus operandi invisible. This is not the crucial point in Heidegger’s argument, however. There is an estrangement process connected with the capturing effect of machination that penetrates our experience, separating it from itself. In a similar fashion to the “dispositifs” that Foucault talks about—whose main features were anticipated by Heidegger in the 1940s—people are caught in a mode that escapes them but that also leads to a splitting of their lives into two spheres, one of which is subjected to the domination of the other. It is precisely this splitting, or doubling, in the human race but also in each individual, that ushers us into the secret heart of the political-theological dispositif. Even its name is composed of 2

Introduction

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 2

6/20/15 10:54 AM

two terms that are connected but that never fully correspond, and indeed they are bound together by a kind of excess that each holds in relation to the other. In its dynamic, what defines the political-theological process is not the joining together so much as the difference that puts in opposition what it unites. Both historically and conceptually, the two poles of the political and the theological enter into relationship with each other in the continuous attempt to overcome the other. As in the clash between the two powers of Church and Empire, never definitively resolved, the twentieth-century debate on political theology is marked by the effort each interpreter made to substitute his or her perspective in the place of others, thereby excluding the opposing view from the hermeneutic horizon. The controversy between Carl Schmitt, Erik Peterson, and Jacob Taubes is emblematic of this defiant struggle for monopoly over the political-theological concept—as if the only way to achieve semantic unity between the political and theological lexicons is by having one surrender to the domination of the other. I argue that this process of exclusionary assimilation is the fundamental, defining action of the political-theological machine. It operates precisely by separating what it purports to join and by unifying what it divides, by submitting one part to the domination of the other. The entire philosophical inquiry into political theology, inaugurated by Hegel at the beginning of the nineteenth century and pursued throughout the following two centuries, expresses but at the same time conceals this violent crossing—the presence of the Two in the One, the imposition of one that seeks to eliminate the other. The ultimate meaning of Hegel’s political theology lies in his insistence that the task of Christianity is to include inside it what it has historically overcome. According to this perspective—presented as a destiny—the history of the world includes a nonhistorical portion inside it that constitutes both its dialectical driving force and the excluded remainder. This happens because one part—defined as the West—is at the same time also considered the whole, to the point of reducing the other to an inner propellant of its own expansion. Hegel’s philosophy of history rotates around the axis that divides and separates outside and inside, whole and part, present and past, in a process aimed at functionalizing the second term to develop the first. This constitutive link between the One and the Two— which gives the form of exclusion to the universal—expresses both the profundity and the reticence of the gaze that first fathomed the politicaltheological machine of the West, without revealing its secret. The fact that the Introduction 3

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 3

6/20/15 10:54 AM

geospiritual process described by Hegel culminates in the connection between reformed Christianity and the advent of the Germanic regime lends his perspective a political tone, expressed in the personal figure of the sovereign. When Schmitt reopened the political-theological dossier in the 1920s, he would meet with the same question posed by Hegel. For him, too, the sovereign apex of political theology was the ultimate decision that unifies the national body through potential conflict with other states. But, unlike Hegel, Schmitt locates the polemical relationship between unity and exclusion inside as well as outside the body politic. In a framework that opposes the original energy of the political to the ongoing neutralization, the possibility of democracy depends on identifying an internal enemy who must be expelled. In this case as well, the unity of the political body appears to be the violent outcome of a reduction of the Two to its dominant part. The fact that duality is not only the outcome but also the constitutive character of Western politics is what emerges from Ernst Kantorowicz’s studies on the two bodies of the king. While Hegel had located the split in universal history and Schmitt in the state form, Kantorowicz places it in the body of the sovereign itself, split into a private, mortal part and a public part, made eternal by the continuity of dynastic succession. The fact that this metaphysical construct is derived by analogy from the dual nature of Christ testifies to its theological origin but also to its bipolar formation. The construct is recognizable in the theological figure of the Trinity as well, in which the Third person is pushed into the background in favor of an exclusive relationship between Father and Son. Not by chance, every time the theological vocabulary takes on a political connotation, the Three slips into the semantics of the Two, hardening the dynamic into an oppositional schema. This explains why Peterson’s frontal attack against Schmitt’s political theology in the 1930s took its impetus from a Trinitarian perspective. For him, it served the purpose of preventing any analogy between religious monotheism and political monotheism. But it also served to prevent any split— always latent in the economy of salvation—between the Father who reigns and the Son who governs in His place. Strikingly enough, thirty years later, Schmitt would diametrically reverse his argument: Peterson, intending to protect the theological from any form of political influence, ended up opposing it to the political, thereby restoring a political confl ict to it. Positioning himself precisely at the point of tension between the two authors, Jacob Taubes confirmed this inevitability when he reversed the rela4

Introduction

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 4

6/20/15 10:54 AM

tionship of priority between theological and political, putting the political first. To speak, as he does, of “negative political theology”—which is to say, removed from any form of earthly power—means to endow theology with a power that is opposite, but symmetrical, to that of the political. How is one to define a “nonpeople” (which for Taubes is the Jewish people) if not by presupposing, by contrast, the characteristics of a people? The fact that one never escapes outside the political-theological lexicon, as we have said from the beginning, is what Jan Assmann asserted at the close of the twentieth-century debate. Because the viewpoint he adopted on the entire question stood at a distance from both the Christian and Jewish interpretations, it seems to have caused a shift in emphasis. What he saw, gleaned from the perspective of ancient Egypt, was not a different proportion between theology and politics, but the inevitability of their involvement, in a form that both politicizes theology and theologizes politics. With a passage that seems to take us back to Heidegger’s Machenschaft, he recognized the prevailing effect of political theology in mutually concealing its terms. Outside of any harmonious perspective, what unites the two competing poles of the political and the theological is the exclusionary capture that each performs on the other. There is a limit that the hermeneutics of political theology cannot overstep, however, unless it crosses up with another paradigm that constitutes its semantic operator and linchpin, so to speak. In order to make the politicaltheological machine run—separating what unifies and unifying what divides—it needs one more dispositif: the category of “person.” The fact that the great interpreters of political theology—from Hegel to Weber to Schmitt—appeal to personhood as the focal point of their perspective is certainly not a coincidence. The personal element, although different for each of them, is both the subject and the horizon of meaning for every possible relationship between theology and politics. While Hegel, along a path opened up by Hobbes, made the notion of person the essential epicenter of the sovereign’s function, Weber saw the resurgence of the charismatic personality as the only force capable of curbing the increasing political entropy. Schmitt, in his turn, combined the two positions, making personal decision at the same time the line of resistance and the point of excess for modern processes of neutralization. The accusation he brought against Kelsen’s legal normativism was precisely directed against its impersonal nature. Without Introduction 5

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 5

6/20/15 10:54 AM

reference to a personal entity, the political order cannot constitute itself or is destined to crumble. Only by being embodied in a concrete person can it find the essential energy for reproducing itself. But Schmitt added something more impor tant still, regarding the dialectic between friend and enemy, which he made an a priori of political action: the category of person produces order because it draws the possibility of conflict inside oneself. It creates political subjectivity through the line of division that, by discriminating against one part of the body politic, locates enmity inside the space of friendship. Even before delving into this antinomic aspect, let us stay on the genealogical plane, with the formation of the concepts. One might well say that the notion of person constitutes the original place of intersection between the Christian religion and ancient Roman law—to the point that historians are still divided on the question of which of the two paradigms appeared first. Whether the legal lexicon influenced Christian dogma or vice versa, the lexical and conceptual exchange that took place between the two from the outset remains undisputed. If only by being in contact with the Roman legal conception, the Christian notion of person took on the consistency that solidified its dogmatic status; this, in turn, acted on the Roman notion, gradually altering its meaning. Whatever took place historically, despite enormous differences between the two contexts, there is a striking sort of correspondence, or resonance at least, connecting the two concepts. In both the juridical person of ancient Rome and the theological, Christian person, unity and separation are linked in a productive nexus of specific effects. Although developed in the two, separate “laboratories” of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the Christian category of person was still used by the Church Fathers to articulate identity and plurality within the divinity. Against the opposing heresies of Gnosticism and Monarchianism, what they sought to safeguard through the idea of the person was a form of monotheism not locked up in itself, but rather, devised as three persons in the same substance, or as two natures in the same person. As we have said, even in Trinitarian dogma there can be seen a tendency—never declared but practiced in actuality—to contract the triadic formula into a dual model, centered on the hierarchical relationship between Father and Son. In the salvific economy developed by Tertullian—the first to give the Christian category of person a fully developed dogmatic status—this binary paradigm took on the character of a functional distinction between 6

Introduction

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 6

6/20/15 10:54 AM

first person, owner of the sovereign power, and second person, delegated to the effective governing of people. This is how the Two took up residence at the economic junction between the One and the Three, thus reproducing the splitting of the Incarnation on Trinitarian grounds as well. Like the dual nature of Christ, both divine and human—or the relationship between body and soul in every human being—a duality tends toward unity through the submission of one part to the domination of the other. The same thing happens—at a different level but with performative outcomes that are certainly comparable—in the Roman dispositif of the legal person. According to Gaius’s summa divisio, “persona” is the general category under which all the others fall, ranked progressively lower until arriving at the category of slave, who lacks any personal prerogative at all. In this way the status of personhood became an agent of depersonalization, along an interlinking chain of subordinations that ultimately thrust a certain type of human being into the domain of things. Moreover, the qualification of person in ancient Rome was always a function—or, according to the etymology of the term, a mask—that never coincided with the living body in which it inhered. This duality within unity characterizes the entire legal order originating from ancient Rome. With the passage into the modern era, it passed from an objectivistic lexicon to a subjectivist one, since even the idea of “subject”—as it took form between Leibniz and Kant—underwent the same splitting, clearly transposed from the legal to the philosophical sphere. Thus, the link between unity and separation, which in the Roman ius sliced humankind up along thresholds of mutual subjugation, was reproduced inside the individual human being, who was divided into two asymmetrical parts: a properly personal part, of a rational and voluntary type, and another with a corporeal character, akin to the animal kingdom. The antinomic connection between politics, law, and theology that was destined to mark the entire post-Christian history with the exclusionary results that we have recalled was thus reconstructed. The modern notion of person, by regulating its slices, was precisely what set into motion this mechanism whose consequences and presuppositions are still in effect today. Originating in the semantic segment that combines Christian theology and Roman law, it acquired the importance of a true dispositif, nestled in the performative kernel of the political-theological machine. Its formation was anything but uniform; it appeared in at least three different strains, which are described here in a brief genealogy. The first—already introduced Introduction 7

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 7

6/20/15 10:54 AM

in connection with the category of sovereignty—is the one connecting Hobbes to Schmitt through Hegel, although the latter eludes any unidimensional classification. At its origin there lies the link between subjectivity and subjugation that, as Foucault argued, makes one the function of the other. To argue, as Hobbes did, that in the founding covenant of the state it is the contracting parties themselves who authorize the sovereign means to recognize them as subjects of their own subjugation and therefore as objects of the one subject who is fully endowed with a personal status—in other words, the sovereign himself. From this point of view, despite obvious differences in vocabulary, all three authors remain in the wake of the Romanistic tradition that Hegel sought to deconstruct, but without managing to surpass it. True, he extended to every human being the personality that had previously been reserved to only one kind. But, by identifying the right of property as the prototype of all rights, he remained within the patrimonial semantics of ancient Rome, all the while adapting it to the forms of modern society. What connects Hegel backward to Hobbes and forward to Schmitt is the role acquired by sovereign decision, embodied in the concrete person of the monarch. The second strain that joins the dispositif of the person to the theologicalpolitical machine is the one leading from Locke to Kant. While Hegel looked to the dogmas of the Incarnation and the Trinity as his landmarks, Locke turned to the idea of Universal Judgment. The desubstantialization of the subject that he produced made it not so much a substrate or a compound as a function intended to secure the individual identity required to make each person responsible for his or her own thoughts and actions. What is impor tant for my argument, however, is that this process of attributing personal identity does not reduce the internal splitting, transferred from the gap dividing the person from the body to the person itself, which is now divided into a judging I and a judged I. In this sense, the attribution (a “forensic” one, as Locke defi nes it) coincided with the imputation through which the person came to be identified in legal terms. When Kant split the subject into two different, opposing orders—a sensible one of efficient causes versus an intelligible one of ends—by subjecting the first to the control of the second, all he did was reinforce the binary effect of the dispositif. On this basis, the person came to be one of two poles and at the same time the horizon on which they relate. In the ethical and rational sense, the person

8

Introduction

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 8

6/20/15 10:54 AM

is what directs its own bodily part, which is thus placed in a position of ontological inferiority. The third vector for the dispositif of the person is the utilitarian conception that runs from John Stuart Mill all the way to the liberal bioethics of contemporary authors like Peter Singer and Hugo Engelhardt. In the division they proclaim between a genuine person and a simple member of the species Homo sapiens the two previous lines of thought seem to converge, mutually reinforcing each other. To maintain that not all human beings are persons and that nonpersons and semipersons are entirely at the disposition of the former, who even wield the power of life and death over the latter, is further proof of the extraordinary persistence of the Roman summa divisio. It is striking to see how any attempt to heighten the level of personalization is met with a corresponding, inverse, and necessary depersonalization. Their economic considerations on the material cost for maintaining these nonpersons, which form the basis for deciding whether to allow them to live or leave them to die, can be considered an outcome of the utilitarian perspective as well as a trace of the original oikonomic version of the dispositif. But even more striking is the importance attached to thought in qualifying someone as a person. Only a being who thinks can be introduced into the sovereign enclosure of personhood. In reality, these authors do nothing but take the metaphysical assumption of an entire tradition to its final conclusions: just as the possession of thought qualifies the individual, similarly thought is entirely enclosed within the limits of the individual subject. From this springs the attitude of excluding from the confi nes of personhood any life that lacks or is insufficiently endowed with thinking substance. The conditions of childhood, old age, or mental illness thus become the part excluded from a humanity defined by the thinking character of its individual members. Given that the inherence of thought in the individual space of the subject is the epicenter of the political-theological dispositif of the person, it is not surprising that a philosophy of the impersonal entails a dislocation of the “place” of thought. The fact that, over the course of time and in widely disparate contexts, the metaphysical tradition has launched full frontal attacks against anyone who has practiced a philosophy of the impersonal is no coincidence, then. One thing that authors persecuted to the point of

Introduction 9

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 9

6/20/15 10:54 AM

damnation, exile, and death—such as Averroes, Bruno, and Spinoza—have in common with others who remained isolated or misunderstood for long periods of time—like Schelling, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze—is a common tendency to externalize thought with respect to the interiority of consciousness. The subversive potential perceived (quite rightly) in their works is that by sabotaging the dispositif of the person, this shift will end up derailing the machine of political theology on which it rests. Compared to this danger—whose generative nucleus erodes the entire ethical, legal, and political dominant order—even the separation that they set up between the religious and philosophical spheres remains more an effect than a cause. Averroes, Bruno, and Spinoza, albeit in different forms, separated the purpose of religion, aimed at social cohesion, from that of philosophical study, directed instead toward knowledge of truth. But, when examined from a different point of view, their “irreligious” attitude appears to be the outcome of a much deeper theoretical rumbling regarding the place and role they attributed to thought. What they all maintained in various ways was the exteriority of thought with respect to the individual subject, which the political-theological machine instead bound to it—as if the individual subject were the natural container of thought. The idea that thought belongs to a single consciousness, which owns it—something that we take today as indisputable fact—was in no way taken for granted by the thinkers of classical Greece, especially for those with an Aristotelian bent. They would have considered the idea of thought enclosed within the confines of a subject or a person quite bizarre, regardless of the meanings assigned to these terms. At least before the time when Augustine, in revisiting a Platonic theme, began the work of internalization that was completed first by Locke and then by Kant, the driving force of thought was located in a circuit that was separate from the properly human sphere. It is precisely this Aristotelian concept, obscured by centuries of personalist philosophy, that Averroes radicalized in his thesis on the unity and impersonality of thought—one that was picked up by a heterodox line of thinkers situated on the margins of the philosophical tradition. Of course, the idea that thought is not a possession or inherent quality of the personal subject does not mean that it cannot be considered the most worthy, and almost divine, activity of human beings—something that we can attain to only by going beyond our natural faculties. But this is not to say that thought is what makes human beings human, to the point 10

Introduction

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 10

6/20/15 10:54 AM

that those who do not think, or have not begun to think, or have stopped thinking are subhuman, as presumed by the tradition that distinguished itself by the classical formulation of the cogito. What shuts down the dispositif of the person, by its own assumption, is the idea put forward by these authors that the relationship between thought and the individual is not essential and permanent, but potential and contingent. To say that a human being is not a subject but an occasion or vehicle of thought means, on the one hand, to ask what a human being is when it does not think—because it is an infant, forgetful, asleep, or even insane—and on the other hand, what a thought is when it is no longer or not yet thought. The answer that Averroes provides to these questions in his Long Commentary on the “De anima” of Aristotle, at the origin of a philosophy of the impersonal, is the following: if thought does not preliminarily belong to anyone—if nobody owns it to the point of being able to identify himself or herself with it—then it belongs to everyone. All people can think, even if this does not put them in a condition of ontological or metaphysical superiority with respect to those who do not. For Averroes, the “possible intellect” is a simple potentiality, a pure receptivity, devoid of any prerogative other than that of making visible the objects that are illuminated by the “agent intellect.” The possible intellect is the medium that connects the celestial intelligences with the imaginative power of human beings. In this sense, the separateness of thought theorized by Averroes should be seen as a kind of ability that everyone can draw on without ever being able to definitively own it, rather than as an exclusionary principle. Of course, in an interpretation of this sort, which pushes the Aristotelian text to the limits of intelligibility, it is easy to gather up references, arguments, and implications that cannot be assimilated into our vocabulary, because they are rooted in a pre- Copernican universe that no longer has the capacity to speak to us. And yet, when we read it from a different point of view—as a radical alternative to the system of knowledge that became established in modernity—the impression remains that Averroes’s Commentary opens up an avenue that was prematurely abandoned. As its keenest opponents first perceived—from Thomas Aquinas to Leibniz—it contains a principle that is potentially subversive to the order based on the theological-political relationship between transcendence of the law and imputability of the individual. The full ownership of thought by a single individual, rather than its autonomy, became the noetic assumption of the subjection of the individual Introduction 11

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 11

6/20/15 10:54 AM

to a legal order that is always able to impute to individual people the responsibility of their acts. But what the principle of the impersonality of thought calls into question, perhaps even prior to this, is the set of exclusionary thresholds that cut the human race into overlapping segments based on the amount of reason attributed to them—starting from the unbreakable line that separates the bearers of thought from those who are incapable of true speculative activity and therefore subjected to the control of those who are. To see intelligence not as a property of the few, to the detriment of others, but as a resource for all, through which one can pass without appropriating it for oneself, means to assign it a collective power that only the human species as a whole can fully actualize. Despite the radical change in perspective, associated with the differing cultural contexts of Italy in the sixteenth-century and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth, Bruno and Spinoza unleashed attacks on the metaphysical tradition that were comparable to the one launched by Averroes. What brings them into proximity, along a broken, discontinuous line, is their common criticism of the dispositif of the person, which they identify as the linchpin of the political-theological machine. At the heart of Bruno’s fierce polemic on the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation, just as in Spinoza’s battle against an anthropomorphic God-Person, there is the most stringent rejection of dualism between a bodily substance and another, spiritual substance, set above it. In this case, too, the place of thought takes on a special, strategic importance. The fact that thought is no longer separate in the work of Bruno and Spinoza, as in Averroes’s model, does not mean that its impersonal nature has lost force. In the case of Bruno, the impersonality of thought comes as a consequence of the relationship that binds the individual consciousness to the bodily layer, inside of which it is inextricably enclosed, and to humankind as a whole, thus bringing human beings closer to other living species. In Spinoza’s case, it results from his equating a God devoid of the personal attributes of the sovereign with the rational order of things. This causes subject and object of thought to overlap in a single nexus that makes one the mirror image of the other. Never did the regime of the Two get reabsorbed into the uniqueness of the substance, instead of being multiplied into a triad, as it did in his case. Far from being produced by par ticu lar subjects, ideas are the expression of a human intelligence consisting of the interaction between individual minds in the unity of the social brain. To what extent this can be related to a collective 12

Introduction

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 12

6/20/15 10:54 AM

political figure, equally different from the people and from a set of individuals connected together by the sovereign power, remains an open question. What is certain in Spinoza’s system is the intrinsic connection that links the impersonal nature of thought to the fi rst breach in the flank of the political-theological machine. For this reason, the authors who follow after him—from Schelling to Deleuze—took their inspiration from Spinoza’s works. Certainly, they did so with different attitudes and intentions. In Schelling, the “ecstasy of reason” and “indifference of the beginning” create a critical rift in subjectivity that exposes it to its opposite in a sort of indistinguishability between personalization and depersonalization. In the end, this movement of displacement also affects thought—divided between an objectivizing knowledge doomed to failure and a delocalized wisdom that has no place in humankind or God because it is irreducible to a personal form. By pitting thought against itself, Schelling introduced a discursive orbit that only Nietzsche had traversed in its entirety. For Nietzsche, too, thought splayed out into two different, contrasting layers: the first, of an individual nature, was stuck in an immunitary logic; the second, free from predefined boundaries, was capable of reconnecting with the deep wellsprings of life. At the origin of this passage there was a change of register that would ultimately force open the political-theological lexicon. By initiating a critical knowledge of the origin, the genealogical process deconstructed the presumed precedence of theology over politics and, more generally, all linear orders of succession. At the beginning there is nothing but an unexhausted struggle between active and reactive forces, which, in their antagonism, constitute the will to power. In this way, by recognizing that the reactive forces are simply active forces in disguise, Nietzsche was the first to understand the machination that Heidegger linked to the history of metaphysics. By negating the affirmation expressed by the active forces, the reactive forces— the most influential of which is precisely Christian political theology—affirm the negation, according to the principle of exclusionary inclusion that makes the One the counterfeit image of the Two. The primacy of affirmation over negation, consequent to the adoption of the genealogical paradigm, is the starting point for both Bergson and Deleuze. In both, the fact that the distance they take from the politicaltheological dispositif passes via a critique of the category of subject—and hence, of the category of object as well, its mirror image—is confirmation Introduction 13

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 13

6/20/15 10:54 AM

of the unbreakable bonds that tie the semantics of the person to the machine of political theology. In Bergson’s work, the clearest point of rupture with the subjectivist lexicon lies in his analysis of perception, which he views as detached from consciousness and even from the body of the subject, rooted in the impersonal substrate of reality. What connects this externalization of perception to his criticism regarding the deforming dispositif that replaces spatial categories with temporal ones is clear. Attributing to ourselves what does not belong to us means anchoring to consciousness the founding process, of which it is certainly not the origin, but rather an outcome that is modifiable from one instance to the next. Th is exchange—between origin and end, cause and effect, space and time—is the result of a dichotomous schema that breaks the real into two strata vying for mastery over each other. Rather than oppose this dualism with the homogeneity of the undifferentiated, Bergson counters with the multiplicity of difference. To say that reality is divided into two spheres, one of which is inhabited by difference, does not mean placing it above the other one; rather, it is made different even from itself, in an unstoppable flow that opens every reality to the possibility of its overcoming. All of the categories developed by Nietzsche and Bergson in contrast to the political-theological model—affi rmation against negation, difference against repetition, becoming against being—reappear in Deleuze’s work with an even more powerful deconstructive charge. This is what he means by “plane of immanence”—understood as something that is not contrary to transcendence but which eludes even this metaphysical dichotomy. If immanence is opposed to transcendence from the outside, it would inevitably be swallowed up back into its void. Therefore, through difference, all the concepts created by Deleuze are inclusive of their apparent opposite. But if this is the case, our perception of the political-theological machine itself is bound to change—for one thing, because in its capitalist form it reveals its own oikonomic nerve system, suspending the concealing effect. But also because, in the oneness of being, it shows itself to be inside another machine, one that is more inclusive still, equivalent to the disruptive potency of life. This does not imply the disappearance of the conflicts that cut through contemporary reality with a force proportional to the political character of economic theology and the economic character of political theology. What Deleuze grasps for the fi rst time with absolute clarity is that the machine cannot be attacked from the outside, since on the plane of 14

Introduction

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 14

6/20/15 10:54 AM

immanence there is no outside. What we can and must do is look to what Deleuze, using a deliberately theological term, defined as a “conversion” of the dispositif into its opposite. Th is is also the fate of a thought of the impersonal: not to frontally oppose what a long tradition has defined as person, or even as subject, but to allow it to rotate on its hinges until its exclusionary power is diffused. Even the concept of “debt,” encamped at the heart of economic theology, can be interpreted as what leads in the end to exhaustion. In situations like our current one, in which everyone is indebted, the notion of credit itself begins to lose force. Certainly, this passage, which flips the violence of debt over into the solidarity of a shared munus (a burden or task but also a kind of gift) is not automatic. It can only result from a conflict against the political-theological order that unifies the world in the form of its division. In order for debt to be extinguished, rather than being repaid, it must be shifted from an economic dimension back into an ontological status—to what each of us always owes everyone else. In this way, only by assuming the common debt will it be remitted at the same time. The biblical figure of liberation from all debts, no longer confined to the sabbatical year, can become the philosophical and political mirror in which political theology glimpses the unforeseen possibility of its own undoing.

Introduction 15

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 15

6/20/15 10:54 AM

PA S S A G E Gestell

In revisiting the paradigm of the “dispositif”—how it has developed over the last twenty-five years, starting from Deleuze’s essay on Foucault—one is struck by the fact that the relationship between Foucault and Heidegger has remained somewhat in the shadows compared to other (certainly relevant) points of reference like Hegel’s Positivität. The reason for this, beyond the different languages of the two authors, may be that at least starting from what is referred to as the “turning” (Kehre), Heidegger embarked on a path that led further and further away from the genealogical perspective adopted subsequently by Foucault, following primarily in the footsteps of Nietzsche. Heidegger’s recurrent interest in technology, which was not incompatible per se with Foucault’s studies on how knowledge, power and the processes of subjectification are mutually involved, at a certain point acquired an ontotheological inflection that was untranslatable into Foucault’s idiom. The lecture given by Heidegger in Munich in 1953 entitled “The Question Concerning Technology” is expressive of this drift, which shifts the author’s attention away from the semantics of “danger,” represented by the technical apparatus, to what, from inside it, “saves” in a mode that can never be fully known to us. When considered in reference to “the saving power” (das Rettende), technology is a force that imposes itself, but also a form of production or presentation that belongs to the sphere of disclosure, and therefore of truth. At the heart of these overlapping and divergent meanings there stands the term Gestell, derived from a union between the prefi x Ge-, indicating a collective form, with the word stellen, corresponding to the

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 16

6/20/15 10:54 AM

English “to position, place, set.” Heidegger deduces the positive and negative significance of technology from the crisscrossing play of its derivatives— such as vor-stellen (to represent), her-stellen (to produce), be-stellen (to order), and nach-stellen (to pursue). While stellen, in the sense of orderingpositioning, threatens to obstruct the process of disclosure, it also preserves the dignity of humankind when understood in the sense of producingcreating, traceable back to the Greek poiesis. “The irresistibility of ordering and the restraint of the saving power,” concludes Heidegger, “draw past each other like the paths of two stars in the course of the heavens. But precisely this, their passing by, is the hidden side [das Verborgene] of their nearness.”  Does this mean that Heidegger lost sight of the question of the dispositif and everything it evokes? Not at all. To begin with, the concept is explicitly referred to in a passage from the same essay-lecture, in which he states that “the whole complex of these contrivances [i.e., dispositifs] is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance—in Latin, an instrumentum. The affi nity of Heidegger’s inspiration with the aims of Foucault is even more recognizable in a previous lecture, given in Bremen in 1949, in which the subsequent salvific turning, although announced, is ultimately withheld. In this essay, the theme of Gestell takes on such importance that it occupies the entire text, and even lends its name to the title. The most common translation for the term in Italian is impianto (installation). Gianni Vattimo evidently found this choice unsatisfactory, since he preferred imposizione (imposition), an expression that is not only more charged but also etymologically more suited to the “positioning” conveyed by stellen. Similarly, the 2012 translation of the essay into English adopts “positionality” for Ge-Stell. However, in a world now marked by Foucault’s terminology, the French translator who recently entitled the essay “Le dispositif” went even further. Is this pushing things too far, or is it the most appropriate choice? If we compare the characteristics attributed to Gestell with what Heidegger had previously sought to convey with the term Machenschaft, translated by “machination,” the meaning as a whole that emerges from it appears to be very close to what we find in the machine of political theology and, more particularly, in the dispositif of the person. The first connotation of Gestell is its elusiveness. Like political theology, this quality has less to do with something inside it, removed from our sight, than it does with the extension of its horizon, which coincides with the Passage: Gestell 17

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 17

6/20/15 10:54 AM

horizon of the reality in which it is inscribed, making it devoid of any distinguishing traits. The opening topic of the essay—the simultaneous loss of distance and nearness—refers to an implosion of the spatial dimension. Consequent to the technical development of communications, because there is no longer any significant distance between one place and another, distance and nearness lose any distinctiveness and become superimposed on each other in an undifferentiated equivalence. The very definition of Gestell, in its absolute generality, appears to be a nondefinition: “This word [Ge-Stell, positionality] now no longer names an individual object of the sort like a bookcase or a water well. Positionality now also does not name something constant in the ordered standing reserve. Positionality names the universal ordering, gathered of itself, of the complete orderability of what presences as a whole.” Nothing escapes its inclusionary grip, which extends to reality as a whole. But, by comprehending everything that exists— natural elements, artificial things, animals, human beings— Gestell itself cannot be comprehended; it slips free of every hold, precisely because there is no point outside it from which it can be grasped. As the universal container, it cannot be contained by anything else: “In its positioning, positionality is universal. It concerns all that presences; everything not only in sum and sequentially, but everything insofar as everything that presences as such is here positioned in its very consistency by a requisitioning [Bestellen].”  Similar in this respect to the general structure of the law, Gestell is a purely formal apparatus: it has no objectives over and above its ordering mechanism. All it does is make the real conform to its presupposed form; hence the circular nature of a procedure that adjusts everything to a need for order, in turn ordered by the figure of mere orderability. In this closed circuit there can be no purpose beyond the preestablished one: “Again we ask: where does the chain of such requisitioning finally run out to? It runs out to nothing; for requisitioning produces nothing that could have, or would be allowed to have, a presence for itself outside of such positioning. . . . Rather it only enters into its circuit. Only in this does the orderable have its persistency [Bestand].” Th is passage connects the circularity of Gestell to the fully accomplished internalization of what it absorbs—namely, reality in its entirety. If everything that exists is internal to the machine, in a mode that excludes the “outside” itself, then the machine is coextensive with the world, as Heidegger himself does not hesitate to state in another lecture that he gave in Bremen the same year: “World 18

Passage: Gestell

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 18

6/20/15 10:54 AM

and positionality are the same.” Even if Heidegger explains that they are the same in a different way—while the world is the guardian of the essence of being, positionality is the complete forgetting of the truth of being—this difference relates to the relationship with being, not to the coinciding amplitudes of their horizons: “The essence of technology bears the name positionality because the positioning that is named in positionality is being itself [das Sein seiber].” The second characteristic of Gestell is tied precisely to the misunderstanding of this coextensiveness: “The essence of technology is positionality. The essence of positionality is the danger. Beyng is, in its essence, the danger of itself.” What is this danger? Arising directly out of being, it has no specific content other than its intrinsic dangerousness. Like for the political-theological regime of the dispositif of the person, the greatest risk lies in underestimating the effect of its imposition—of not perceiving the threat that it entails: “In this regard, what is most dangerous in the danger consists in the danger concealing itself as the danger that it is. Pursuing the essence of beyng, positionality dissembles its essential danger.” What it hides from human eyes—the predominant danger that it conceals, because it is constitutive of being—are the lesser risks that swarm into our lives, blinding us to its presence. What human beings do not see, or see in inverted terms, is their own position in relation to Gestell. Their relationship with the dispositif, which they imagine that they govern, manage, and direct, is reflected upside down in their eyes: in reality, they are governed, managed, and directed by it according to a logic that eludes their capacity to understand. Heidegger stresses the necessary character of this misunderstanding. The fact that people feel like the subjects and beneficiaries of the machine “is even an avoidable one. Nevertheless, it remains a mere illusion.” Not only because it reverses the actual power relations that get established in the dispositif, but also because this machine does not aim to gain anything, except orderability as such. According to its grammar, all orderables are directed toward the next order in an ordering logic that never goes beyond the confines of the ordering. Thus, whoever orders—or believes that he or she is ordering—is already ordered or positioned in a form that is superordinate to him or her. In this horizon, it is impossible to break the chain of assumptions that preliminarily neutralizes everything that might tamper with it. The machine cannot even be turned off, because the act of shutting it down is also a function of the mechanism that sets it Passage: Gestell 19

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 19

6/20/15 10:54 AM

in motion. Just as human beings are already inside the machine that they believe they are constructing, the machine originates from the essence of technology, which directs its production from the outset. However—and here we arrive at the last characteristic of Gestell—the inclusionary power of the machine with respect to everything positioned outside it is expressed through the exclusion of some inside part. Indeed, in opting for a much more powerful semantic choice, Heidegger talks about the “piece” (Stück) rather than the “part,” since “the part shares itself with parts in a whole. It takes part in the whole, belongs to it. The piece on the contrary is separated and indeed, as the piece, is even isolated from the other pieces.” At the heart of unification—“requisitioning is only directed at one thing, versus unum, namely to position the one whole [das Eine Ganze] of what presences as standing reserve”—there looms the sign of the Two once again. Rather than being produced by integrating its parts, the One is created through the separation of its pieces. The machine works through an exclusionary selection of what it absorbs. This is not a matter of demarcating the ancient loci that preceded the advent of technology, such as the spinning wheel and the water mill, which, at a certain point, began to disappear by themselves. Rather, this is an expulsion, allied with the gathering, that passes via lines running internally inside the same sphere of the dispositif. “Positionality is a plundering [Geraff ].” However, explains Heidegger, this plundering is never limited to stockpiling existing resources. Indeed, it constantly drags the ordered away into the circular course of orderability, inside of which one thing positions the other: the one drives out the other, however, into the “ahead and away” [in das Hinweg] of requisitioning. What demands our attention here is the nexus that draws the “positioning a thing” and the “driving out” into a single movement of exclusionary inclusion. This is not a matter of eliminating something that is no longer needed in order to make room for another—which may serve to improve product quality. The point is: rather than being positioned in the form of their preservation, all things are positioned in the form of their immediate availability for use by others. Hence, unlike what is produced for itself, “the tractors and automobiles are brought out, spewed out [herausgebracht], serially piece by piece.” In this sense, even whole objects like an automobile or a television are “a piece of the standing reserve (Bestand-Stück),” stacked up in the reserve of the orderable by the machine. By “reserve” what is meant here is precisely an outside that lies inside: an object spewed out to be sold and 20

Passage: Gestell

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 20

6/20/15 10:54 AM

consumed—a spectral object of sorts, dead somehow even before it is born. Heidegger, who had already included “skeleton” among the meanings of Gestell (while calling it “eerie”), concludes that if you wanted to put the reserve pieces together “the result would be some kind of automobile graveyard.” But the crucial element that leads directly to Foucault’s dispositif is yet another—namely, the inclusion of human beings within the “pieces of the standing reserve.” After quickly annexing animals—usually torn to pieces—into the category of replaceable objects, Heidegger extends the qualification to humans as well, who are subordinated to the machine that they themselves build and operate. Although they belong to the machine in a different way from the materials out of which it is made, this does not detract from the fact that they are a part of it. Like the pieces produced, they too are interchangeable and therefore replaceable at will—to the point that the qualifiers of “employee” and “functionary,” with no other connotations, refer precisely to this interchangeability. Indeed, it is their difference from a simple thing that positions human beings on the threshold dividing the human from the inhuman by separating them, in a form that is far more disturbing than the separation between humans and machines: “The human never becomes a machine,” Heidegger insists in unusually charged tones. “The inhuman and yet human is admittedly more uncanny, while more evil and ominous, than the human who would merely be a machine.” Th is condition—being situated on the cutting line that divides inside and outside, making one the function of the other—concerns not only the operators of the machine but also its countless beneficiaries and ultimately the totality of human beings, who are all in some way inside the dispositif. Here Heidegger brushes up against the dialectic between subjectification and subjugation later theorized by Foucault. The reason why human beings cannot escape from the dispositif that includes them, placing them outside itself, is not the fact that they lack subjectivity. What binds them to it much more irremediably is the fact that only in this bond, which is now internalized, can they become subjects. And for this reason they can neither escape from it nor remove it as such. “Let us just for once posit the unlikely case,” argues Heidegger, taking the prototype of modern devices as his example, “that a public broadcast director recommended the abolition of the radio. He would be dismissed overnight and indeed because he only is what he is as something positioned of a standing reserve in the positionality Passage: Gestell 21

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 21

6/20/15 10:54 AM

of the ordering of the public sphere.” What would be taken away from the director, much more than his employment, is his personality as a subject— which is to say, that set of arrangements that fi lls our lives while emptying it of meaning: “Let us again suppose, indeed, a more unlikely case, that suddenly everywhere across the earth the radio receivers were to disappear from every room—who would be able to fathom the cluelessness, the boredom, the emptiness that would attack the human at a stroke and would completely dishevel their everyday affairs?”

22

Passage: Gestell

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 22

6/20/15 10:54 AM

1 M A C H I N AT I O N

Why begin a book on political theology with Martin Heidegger? Why bring into the discussion one of the few thinkers of the twentieth century who never explicitly used the concept and who intentionally stayed on its sidelines? The basic reason for my choice lies precisely in this eccentricity. To arrive at the core of such an elusive category, we need to place ourselves outside it. This is exactly where the difficulty of our investigation lies—not in having to delve into a lexicon that we have already long possessed, but rather, in having to get outside it, by removing ourselves from its enveloping hold. Indeed, the entire linguistic tissue that innervates our conceptual categories is deeply imbued with a political-theological undertone—expressed in a secularized form, of course, but this makes it even harder to decipher. Even the secularization paradigm itself is shot through with it, which only demonstrates the persistence of political-theological language during the age of its supposed disappearance. Thus, contrary to what one may think, the secularization paradigm does not allow a critical perspective on political theology to be opened up. On the contrary, on more than one occasion the secularization paradigm has prevented its most hidden-away meaning from being understood. The fact that almost all twentieth-century thinkers used the secularization paradigm as their entrance key into the political-theological compound has something to do with the blind spot where they all ultimately arrived. The tool that they used was the least suitable one to shed light on the connection between theology and politics— because the tool is inevitably part of the connection. Continuing to advance the secularization paradigm did nothing to make its predominant effect

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 23

6/20/15 10:54 AM

recognizable—which is to say, the intrinsically contradictory effect of obscuring what it promises to illuminate. This is exactly what Heidegger maintained, in no uncertain terms: “In most decisive respects,” he observes in his essay on European nihilism, “such talk of ‘secularization’ is a thoughtless deception.” He thus dismissed, with surprising curtness, a concept considered by twentieth-century thought to be central not only to the interpretation of political theology but to all modern history as well. But even more noteworthy is the fact that he did not dissociate himself from the secularization paradigm because of its homologating effect on the specificity of the Modern. On the contrary, Heidegger stresses the relation that tethers the modern age to Christianity. The two conceptual worlds refer to each another in a connection that cannot be pulled apart, because it is inherent to both: “This history of modern mankind . . . was mediately prepared by Christian man, who was oriented toward the certitude of salvation. Thus one can interpret certain phenomena of the modern age as ‘secularization’ of Christianity.”  It is true that while Christian man seeks salvation of the soul, modern man aims at ensuring his earthly destiny. And yet, although they oppose each other, both are driven by a need for “assurance” that makes their attitudes complementary. Certainly, the modern individual replaces the need for otherworldly salvation with worldly salvation, but “the nature of such a transformation implies that the transformation often pursues its course within the very ‘language’ and representations of what is left behind by the transformation.” However, up until this time, the reason for Heidegger’s drastic rejection of the secularization paradigm still remains unclear. Although the Christian and the modern worlds are different, and even opposed in their conceptual syntax, the two remain within one and the same horizon, defined by their opposing relationship. Only at a certain point, immediately after announcing his rejection, does Heidegger bring his strongest argument into play. Talk of secularization is inadequate because “a world toward which and in which one is made worldly already belongs to ‘secularization’ and ‘becoming worldly.’ ”  What draws Heidegger’s critical attention about the concepts of secularization (Säkularisierung) and mundanization (Verweltlichung) is the fact that both presuppose the ideas of saeculum and “world” but without having developed them. In the absence of any preliminary examination of these terms, the use of categories that derive from them not only remains illegitimate, but it also makes them vulnerable to a reversal 24

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 24

6/20/15 10:54 AM

that deforms their meaning. What condemns the secularization theory to ineffectualness is not so much its hermeneutic outcome as its dependence on something for which it is unable to account. To say that Christianity engenders the modern world, or that the modern world arose out of Christianity, does not help unless one first grasps the metaphysical context that characterizes them both. What does secularization entail? What does the concept of secularization imply, without revealing it? Or, better yet, what does secularization keep concealed, even though what it hides objectively arises out of it? To answer these questions we must pass from Heidegger’s Nietzsche to his Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie), specifically to section  2, on “The Resonating,” in which he seemingly changes his view with respect to his previous observations. The concept now being deconstructed is “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) which, at least in Max Weber’s categorial apparatus, has a role similar to the one played by the concept of mundanization or “becoming-worldly”: “We are used to calling the era of ‘civilization’ the one that has dispelled all bewitchery, and this dispelling seems more probably—indeed uniquely—connected to complete unquestionableness. Yet it is just the reverse. We merely need to know where the bewitchery comes from.” To grasp the significance of mundanization we must examine the idea of the world; in the same way, to understand disenchantment in depth, which is to say, in its beginnings, we need to go back to the logically presupposed concept of enchantment. But more than a first cause, enchantment is in its turn the product of something even earlier, from which the entire chain of meanings is generated, as if from a preoriginary structure. Heidegger gives this the enigmatic name of “machination” (Machenschaft), which already appeared in the conclusion to the essay on nihilism. It would appear that his intention in referring to this term was to radically shift the internal relations of the paradigm of secularization. In any case, what is rejected is the idea of a linear, consecutive process that leads from enchantment to disenchantment—or that slips seamlessly from the theological into the political sphere. To understand their relationship, the concept of secularization is inadequate and even misleading because it tends to fall along the same shifting line of lexicons and regimes that should instead be viewed as antinomically intertwined. Like the relationship between Christianity and modernity, the connection between theology and politics is formed in a metaphysical space that determines the meaning of both. Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 25

25

6/20/15 10:54 AM

But the reference to “machination” contains something more—even beyond the author’s own intentions, perhaps—that allows us to take a step forward in our investigation into the workings of the political-theological dispositif. To begin with, it must be noted that the first role of machination is to hide what it produces. Instead of referring to “disenchantment,” machination actually has more to with an opposite effect of “enchantment” (Bezauberung) or “bewitchery.” Enchantment, Heidegger maintains, comes from “the unbridled dominance of machination. When machination attains ultimate dominance, when it pervades everything, then there are no more circumstances whereby the bewitchery can be sensed explicitly and resisted.”  This is the crucial passage in his argument. The fact that machination “bewitches” means not only that it produces enchantment, but at the same time it conceals the original link that unites enchantment to disenchantment, tying them together in a metaphysical bond. Like every demythologization in relation to myth, the supposed disenchantment does not free us from the enchantment of machination; on the contrary, it remains part of it, like a surface reaction that reinforces what it is intended to oppose. But, then, if the interweaving of enchantment and disenchantment is the effect of machination, how are we to interpret it? What is hidden away in its false bottom? And, above all, how is it connected to the dispositif of political theology? Let us begin by saying that although Heidegger refers to machination as a “distorted essence,” its defi nition is stripped of any judgmental tone. Rather, the concept is traced back to a pure procedure—which, as we said, is precisely one of strengthening a phenomenon through its apparent opposite. What specifically characterizes machination more than any other quality is the reinforcing effect of an entity through the production of its opposite. The three “laws” that qualify it appear to be associated with this function. To begin with, in the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern age, the more machination develops, the more it conceals itself—in the first period behind the categories of ordo and analogia entis, and in the second behind scientific objectivity. Furthermore, “the more decisively machination conceals itself in this way, all the more does it press toward the predominance of that which seems completely opposed to its essence and yet is of its essence, i.e. toward lived experience.” Finally, as soon as lived experience presents itself as the criterion for the measure of truth, machination becomes unrecognizable. The two poles around which Heidegger’s 26

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 26

6/20/15 10:54 AM

position appears to be fi xed are those of artifice and lived experience, assumed in the concealing effect that each produces on the reality of the other. This, in turn, is the outcome as well as the cause of a false comparability, to which the philosopher gives the name “fettering”: “What does machination mean? That which is released to its own fettering. What are the fetters? The schema of thorough and calculable explainability, whereby everything draws equally close together to everything else and becomes completely foreign to itself.” Not only does machination conceal itself by wrapping itself up in the false appearance of its opposite, it introduces an element of foreignness into its object that separates it from itself while making it similar to its opposite. From this perspective, without mixing up heterogeneous terminologies, in this procedure of concealing and separating we can observe how machination has something in common with what Michel Foucault later intended by the concept of “dispositif”—also etymologically linked, moreover, to Ge-Stell, which in Heidegger’s work is flanked with the term Machenschaft. If we keep in mind the three laws we have just recalled, the similarity with Foucauldian dispositifs is even more marked. Like Heidegger’s machination, Foucault’s dispositifs never completely declare their function, concealing their real effect behind apparently opposing aims. They, too, affect our lived experience in a way that separates it from itself, fettering it to its opposite. Moreover, Heidegger himself had connected machination to the formation of “apparatuses” which, like Foucault’s dispositifs, influence our behav ior in a way whose meaning eludes us. He refers to them with regard to a science that must be followed up “all the way to the apparatuses and institutions . . . which necessarily belong to its machinational essence.” In short, the common characteristic of Heideggerian machination and Foucauldian dispositifs is the production of something designed to subjugate existence by separating it from itself. Th is is the precise root of the technological dominance that places subjects in the web of an order that they cannot escape, precisely because it is the web that makes them what they are. As Heidegger notes elsewhere, if we analyze the dispositifs of radio and fi lm, the technician who installs the equipment as much as the spectator or listener “remains confined even if he still thinks he is entirely free to turn the device on and off.” Without forcing the logic of a text that is resistant to any undue semantic slippage, let us try to string together the different steps of our analysis. Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 27

27

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Nothing Heidegger says directly concerns the concept of political theology. However, he situates himself in relation to it precisely to the extent that he dismisses the paradigm of secularization, categorized as the inverse of political theology. The secularization paradigm is misleading because it presupposes what it should explain, obscuring the metaphysical ground that unites the Christian conception and modern thought in the same horizon. This ground is traced back by Heidegger to the concept of machination, the main result of which is to conceal what it reveals in the figure of its opposite—so as to separate it from itself in a sort of mirror-image splitting that tends to make one the warped reflection of the other. The antinomic relation of unity and separation is central to Hegel’s philosophy of history, which fully inscribes them in the paradigm of secularization. In this sense, one can well say that Hegel is the first, and greatest, political-theological thinker of modernity. With him, the category of political theology extends its scope beyond the regional or methodological to the global and ontological. As the locus of the incarnation of Spirit, the entire course of history has a political-theological substance, even if it is only with the advent of Christianity that it becomes aware of this. The difference between these two levels of consciousness provides the paradigmatic key to Hegel’s method. What precedes Christianity is at the same time inside and outside its horizon—it is the negative through which Christianity makes itself history, by including even that which it would otherwise exclude. Of course, Hegel does not express himself in these terms, but this is the outcome that objectively results from his text. One might say that Hegel simultaneously reveals and conceals this logic. He reveals it in its origin and in its internal passages. He conceals it in its final result, when he absorbs separation within unity, with no remainders. This double effect— of revelation and concealment—arises from the use of the secularization paradigm (Säkularisierung), although Hegel prefers the term “mundanization” (Verweltlichung). Like all the secularization theorists who followed after him, the effect of the political-theological dispositif is mixed up with the objective process that expresses it, in an extraordinary inversion between consequence and presupposition. That which is presupposed—the unification of difference—appears to be the intended consequence of the process. The difficulty, but also the strength, of Hegel’s work lies in the continuous oscillation between absolute transparency and maximum opacity. 28

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 28

6/20/15 10:54 AM

It is as if the story that he tells—which up to a certain point discerns the political-theological mechanism in all its antinomies—became an integral part of the mechanism, thereby hiding the very dynamic that is being revealed. In short, as in Heidegger’s machination, the evidence of the object is removed from view by the same perspective that makes it visible. At the heart of this extraordinary metaphysical device lies the connection between universalism and exclusion: not in the weak sense that something always stays outside the framework, but in the more powerful sense that every universal is the product and, at the same time, the inclusive capture of an excluded part. The category of the West as set out by Hegel refers to a partiality that is virtually coextensive with the whole. Its dominant part tends to overlap over the whole, expelling or marginalizing the other. Without the opposing relation with its contrary, the concept of the West would be meaningless. But this opposition is simply the first step in a process destined to phagocytize what it other wise expels. To understand the functioning of this singular dialectical process, we must not lose sight of the simultaneity of the two steps—division and unification: each one is both the instrument and the consequence of the other. Separating itself from what it is not, the West tends to include the separated part within itself, like a past whose importance is denied but which is necessary for its development. This perspective clarifies the meaning of the political-theological dispositif as it is put into action by Hegel. The Christian West is the horizon that is capable of incorporating inside itself—in a subordinate form—the portion of the world from which it has separated itself. This is the phenomenon that he describes, extending it to the entire course of history, in terms of appropriating the foreign: Persia is appropriated by Greece, Greece by Rome, and the Latin civilization by Germanicism. By appropriating what is initially other, the latter remains at the same time included and excluded: included because it is incorporated into the new body; but excluded because it is deprived of its content, which is no longer usable as such. From the beginning, argues Hegel, a people with a precondition “has a double factor within itself: on the one hand, it proceeds from itself, on the other hand, from something alien, a foreign stimulus; and its maturation consists in bringing this doubling into unity, into unification. For a people has to digest the foreign element and expel what remains alien.” What characterizes the political-theological scenario outlined by Hegel is the disjunctive connection of the One and the Two. The history of the Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 29

29

6/20/15 10:54 AM

world originates from a nonhistory, which characterizes a large part of the “Oriental World,” simultaneously internal and external to it. Throughout the first section of his philosophy of world history, Hegel moves along this line of separation and joining, between inside and outside, whole and part, past and present. While almost all of the African continent is excluded from the historical process, another part of it—the Mediterranean, including Carthage and Egypt—is instead included for the peculiar reason that it is not properly African because it is in direct contact with the other two continents. What is most striking about this, more than the setting of the threshold of exclusion, is its band of oscillation, which widens and narrows depending on the cosmic-historical need proclaimed by the author. Turning to Asia, the perspective breaks up into a series of further divisions between areas that continue to become increasingly assimilable to history proper—the exclusive purview of the West—but never entirely internal to it. This is the case for China, characterized by a history that “is, for the most part, really unhistorical, for it is only the repetition of the same majestic ruin,” but for India as well, which also lacks a properly historical character. It is true that India has already entered into relations with Eu ropean civilization—but only from a passive point of view, as an object of conquest by the Western peoples who have occupied it. Hence, “the spread of Indian culture is pre-historical, for History is limited to that which makes for an essential epoch in the development of spirit.” In order for it to arrive at history, it needs to pass through the last leg, formed by the people of Caucasian race, who are, as Hegel hastens to clarify, not really Asian but of “European stock.” As history includes within it the nonhistory from which it separates itself, so Europe, the only living West (since America is still shrouded in the mists of the future), includes within itself the only part of Asia that is assigned a unique historical role: that of being defeated, and partially assimilated, by Greece. But this dialectic of selection and appropriation toward the outside world is transported inside the West itself—in this case, too, with a twofold effect of illuminating and obscuring the mechanism that puts it into operation. None of the Western regimes escape it—starting from the Greek one, which incorporates into itself the Persian principle that it had initially opposed. The category of the political brought to expression by the Greeks bears these Persian traces: they are recognizable not only in the deadly confl ict that gripped the city-states after the wars with Persia, condemning them to per30

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 30

6/20/15 10:54 AM

petual conflict, but also in the duality that threatened the Greek world from within. If separation presupposes unity, this, in turn, carries within it the seeds of a new separation. It is precisely the fully political spirit of Greek life—the fact that a citizen cannot live outside of institutions, laws, and customs objectivized in the polis—that inscribes within it an insurmountable threshold of division, and therefore, also a threshold of exclusion. The entire Greek conception of life is divided by an insuperable duality that cuts it into two areas, only one of which is destined to achieve individual form—unlike the other, which remains undifferentiated. The impressive power of Hegel’s work lies in the way it unhesitatingly represents to us how this performative machine functions: in this dispositif, exclusion is not the opposite or the remainder but, rather, the form of equality, in itself inclusive, that the universal assumes. On the one hand, separation is revealed as the productive mainspring of political development, which for the first time in history frees man from his natu ral constraints. On the other, by splitting the sphere of labor and bodily needs from that of political action, Hegel breaks up the unity of life by delivering the ancient Greek world to the incipient domination of the next world-historical people: those who went by the chilling, yet dazzling, name of Rome. While antithesis (Gegensatz) serves purely as the oppositional force in ancient Greece, driving the unity of the polis, it expresses the very essence of the Roman world. This is not only because it replaces Greek democracy with a form of aristocracy that “has opposition and struggle within it . . . something that does not lend itself to internal unity and that can be unified only by harsh measures,” but because of an even more intrinsic reason, concerning the new universal that the West embarked on after the political, namely, law as a rule of shared life. In the perfect formal constructs of the law was rooted the abstract power that separates life from itself, but which also infuses it with the chill of death. The abstraction that rigidified the new Roman universal expressed itself in the frontal antithesis between the state and the individual, now both emptied of life. In response to a state that exerted violence on its own subjects no less than on other peoples, there was private law, which, in its turn, divided living beings into juridically codified types that ran from the pater (the only one who was sui juris, or master of himself), to all the others, who were variously, inexorably, subjugated to his manus. The Two was now encamped at the heart of the One. Rome was unified by a duality that ran throughout its entire history, driving it toward its fatal outcome: “It is this Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 31

31

6/20/15 10:54 AM

dualism that, properly speaking, marks Rome’s inmost being.” Despite a tendency toward synthesis demonstrated by all political bodies, the Roman world continued as the reign of division. Without detracting from its greatness, Hegel views antithesis as crucial to all the transitions in ancient Rome. Having already insinuated itself during the ascending phase, through the relentless fight between patricians and plebeians, antithesis scourged Rome until its ruin under the onslaught of the new world-historical people. This was the Germanic reign, destined to spread the principle of Christianity throughout the world and, therefore, oriented toward conciliation. In spite of this, it too was furrowed by a series of fractures that exposed it to infinite doublings. Christianity itself was born from a radical break with the world. This is the source of the double antithesis that in medieval society separated not only the opposing powers of the Empire and the Church, but also each of these with respect to itself: “The second period develops the two sides of the antithesis to a logically consequential independence and opposition—the Church for itself as a Theocracy, and the State for itself as a Feudal Monarchy.” To the cleavage in the political sphere, which prevented any genuine relationship of fealty between emperor and feudal lords, there corresponded a relationship originating from the unjustified superimposition between a salvific function and a worldly power in the ecclesial sphere. Seeking to dominate the world that it nevertheless shunned, the Church could only proceed in the most instrumental way, by incorporating inside itself what it otherwise condemned. Once again, and indeed in an even more harsh form than in previous regimes, two opposing principles coexisted in the same world-historical nexus, deforming its features. It is as if the poison of the Two spread through all the arteries of the medieval civilization, with divisive consequences. Even the Crusades, which seemingly increased Church authority, in actuality only exacerbated its internal contradiction: the empty tomb that the crusader armies found at the end of an uninterrupted chain of atrocities and acts of violence testifies to the failure of the reconciliation between the human and the divine—of which the Germanic people declared themselves to be the bearers. At a certain moment, however, Hegel seems to change step, adopting a different register for his analysis, which until then had been mainly negative, in order to assume a decidedly positive tone. After having recognized the structurally double character of the Westernization process of the world in all the previous periods, he now makes it result in a fully accomplished 32

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 32

6/20/15 10:54 AM

reconciliation. It is as if his analysis of the political-theological machine of the West, until then located at a safe distance from the subject at hand, had now pulled up so close that it became one of its inner workings. The turning point, or the linchpin of the narrative, is the advent of the Protestant Reformation. This is what roots heaven in earth—what for the first time reconciles the latent discord between Church and State, faith and existence, interiority and exteriority that had until then cut life into two juxtaposed planes. When the Christian religion—long degraded due to its secular contents, both non-Christian and anti-Christian—turned itself into an inner conviction, it began to radiate out into the world, now emancipated from any subjugation to superordinate powers. In reality, for Hegel, even the latter process of unification was the dialectical result of a division between the Catholic countries, for whom “the ground of this separation lies in their inmost soul,” and the Protestant countries, who were by now shielded from the spirit of division. While to enter fully into modernity, the Catholic countries—especially France—would have to pass through a tragic revolutionary break, the Protestant countries were spared this because their ethical-political structure had already been deeply renewed by the Reformation. The world-historical burden to bring the process of Westernization to completion would therefore fall on them much more so than on the Catholic countries. Once again, as in the previous steps, the inclusion of a people—the Germanic people of the “Reformed doctrines”—within the superior circle of historical time passes through an exclusionary selection procedure against another portion of the West that is not equally representative of the living spirit. But this is the last bipartite division, after which the world seems to settle permanently into reconciliation. Of course, reciprocal independence between sovereign states remains in Europe, along with potential discord between them, but within a single horizon defined precisely by the affirmation of state sovereignty as the intended outcome of the secularization of Christianity. This metaphysical device is both completed and deconstructed by Max Weber. His crucial role of unraveling what lies within the paradigm of secularization consists in an interpretation of modernity that, on the one hand, presupposes the Hegelian dialectic of theology and politics, and, on the other, pushes it off its hinges, sending it in a different direction. Like Hegel, he also rejects the weak reading of modernization as simple laicization, Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 33

33

6/20/15 10:54 AM

positing Christian theology as the origin of modern rationality; and, like Hegel, he identifies its Protestant aspect, rather than the Catholic one, as the predominant driving force of subsequent history. But, unlike Hegel, he does not perceive it as the locus of reconciliation, but as one of the most intense points of laceration. As the bearer of an irremediable separation, Calvinism flushed Western man into the current of modernity. From this point of view, Weber restores the integrity of the perspective that Hegel had sacrificed to the fulfillment of his own course. The Protestant reformation possesses both the form and the content of division; it not only sanctioned the rupture of the Christian world, but it also incorporated this rupture as a permanently broken symbol. This constitutes an abrupt change in perspective, breaking up the linearity of the secularization paradigm and radically altering its status. It does not mark the passage from transcendence to immanence, like the Hegelian category of mundanization, but rather the introduction of transcendence into immanence—not the unification of the Two, but the division of the One. “This-worldly” askesis, as the theological root of capitalism, is entirely traversed by this splitting. Far from reducing the distance between God and humans, askesis conveys its maximum intensification into the world. What disappears along with this distance are all mediations of a magical nature that linked heaven and earth in the primitive religions and, albeit in a different way, in the Catholic religion as well. But what also characterizes Puritanical Calvinism is the absence of religious sentiment—also the case for Lutheranism—and, even more, participation in the divine that is typical of the mystical experience. For the radical Calvinist, the separation of the creature from the creator is absolute, just as the divine decision that separates the chosen few from the mass of the damned is absolute and divorced from any reason. The entirely negative character of this dialectic, devoid even of the possibility of “overcoming,” is clear: Rather than restore the shattered unity, it definitively stabilizes the division between human beings and God, the damned and the chosen, power and the good. The ascetic impulse, which pushes the Puritan to economic production, does not arise from a transfer of power from God to humankind but, on the contrary, from the awareness of human powerlessness. Thus the basis of Protestant ethics is not aspiration, but renunciation of the enjoyment of worldly goods. People are not the agents of their own salvation, but simple tools, or receptacles, of divine grace. Since we are totally incapable of propitiating divine grace through our actions, the most we can do is bear 34

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 34

6/20/15 10:54 AM

witness to its presence through a lifestyle forged entirely by the harshest of inner control and discipline. Unlike Catholic works or Lutheran emotions, both of which are associated with natural human impulses, Calvinist asceticism presupposes constant control and systematic rules for every single act of life. Never does the echo of this separation as the constitutive form of modern reason resound as it does in the final sections of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: “To recapitulate, decisive again and again for our investigation was the conception of the religious ‘state of grace.’ Reappearing in all the denominations as a par ticu lar status, this state of grace separated people from the depravity of physical desires and from ‘thisworld.’ ” The renunciation of the world is precisely what allows it to be completely dominated. Contrary to Hegel’s mundanization (Verweltlichung), Weber’s disenchantment (Entzauberung) does not dissolve the exteriority of the outside in the unity of the world; rather, it drags it inside itself like a line of tangency that separates life from itself by stripping it of its naturalness: “the special life of the saint—fully separate from the ‘natural’ life of wants and desires—could no longer play itself out in monastic communities set apart from the world. Rather, the devoutly religious must now live saintly lives in the world and amidst its mundane affairs.” Far from healing the rupture created by early Christianity between the spiritual and temporal spheres (as on the Hegelian stage) by reconstructing the cohesion of life, the religion of the new Puritan saints deepened the fracture, making the earth the antinomic locus of a flight from the world. But the distance from Hegelian political theology does not lie solely in the division between divine transcendence and human existence. It also passes, within human existence, through the unresolved tension between economics and politics. This is another difference in the secularization paradigm. While the one used by Hegel converges at the end of the process toward the sovereign figure of the state as the outcome of the divine being realized in the world, Weber’s disenchantment entails the destiny of incipient depoliticization. The dramatic prognosis that closes the essay on the Protestant ethic—the transformation of concern for external goods from a “light cloak” to a “steel cage”—is well known. This arises from a mechanization that narrows the fulfi llment of vocation (Beruf ) into a pure economic exercise. This is not dissociated from a parallel change in the political sphere, which always tends to reduce the scope of decision to a simple cog Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 35

35

6/20/15 10:54 AM

in the administrative apparatus. Conceived as part of modern secularization, and thus connected to the technical and bureaucratic direction assumed by capitalist development, the “political” remains locked in the same dispositifs that fostered its growth. This is exactly how the organic connection is broken between theology and politics that Hegelian sovereignty referred to. It is as if the economy introduced a wedge between the two that prevented their reciprocal articulation. There is no direct passage between theology and politics—the political is no longer the secular realization of theology. Hence the difficulty of viewing the political-theological nexus starting from a paradigm that only identifies one face while leaving the other in the shadows. Although the paradigm is capable of restoring the dialectical connection of theology with the economic sphere, it is not able to express what antinomically binds it to the political. In Weber’s work, the political does not emerge from the secularization side but from the opposite one, from a tear that interrupts its continuous progress: namely, the semantics of charismatic power. With his usual acuteness, Carl Schmitt identified in this a “fragment of Lutheran political theology,” connecting it, quite rightly, to his own theory of sovereignty and the state of exception. From this standpoint, political theology and secularization are joined, but in a contrasting form, as two confl icting powers, trapped within each other in a contradictory fashion. The theological, from this perspective, is neither the origin nor the limit of secularization but rather a fragment, or a splinter, that at a certain moment, when its entropy has grown, wedges itself inside it, tearing its close-knit fabric. When we retrace the theory of charismatic power, especially in Weber’s last writings, we grasp this element of excess that cuts the process of secularization like an unresolved remainder, destined to reemerge whenever this process tends to dry up the vitality of the political in the abstraction of technoeconomic automatisms. We know that in Weber’s typology, among the three forms of legitimacy, charismatic power originates before rational power, but in some respects before traditional power as well, which it sometimes accompanies but without ever merging with it and indeed, on the contrary, even opposing it. But more impor tant, because of the break that it causes with respect to a linear model of rationalization, is the fact that it periodically surfaces in the course of history, as it did with Cromwell, Napoleon, or Gladstone, and as it would in the years following Weber’s death.

36

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 36

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Of course he himself saw a risk in this resurgence but also, at the same time, a source of energy, one capable of breaking a deadlocked situation by reversing a seemingly irreversible drift in its opposite—namely, in a new primacy of the decision over the norm, of command over bureaucracy, of the person over the impersonality of the automatic mechanism. It is on this latter point, which I will come back to again in the second part of this book, that our attention should now be focused, because it is the most illuminating point of entry into the black box of the political-theological dispositif. First things first, however. It is known that Weber developed the Pauline concept of charisma based on Rudolph Sohm’s studies on the origins of the Catholic Church. In these, Sohm claimed that the original organization of Christianity was not founded on the rule of law, but rather on charisma: in the Church, power can be exercised only in the name of Christ and not on the basis of a regulatory apparatus of a legal nature. This is the source of the rigidly hierarchical characterization of ecclesiastical power: Instead of providing for a community of equals, it establishes a vertical relationship between those who command and those who obey. From this standpoint, too, the theological-political characteristic of the charismatic leader is resolutely at odds with the economic lexicon, which does not distinguish between subjects connected together by relations of mutual interest. Furthermore, unlike patriarchal power and bureaucratic power, which are rooted in an economic type of structure, charismatic legitimacy excludes the latter, but expresses a power that is explicitly anti-economic: “In contrast to all patriarchal forms of domination, pure charisma is opposed to all systematic economic activities; in fact, it is the strongest anti-economic force.” This is a further indication of the split in Weber’s outlook, since the political-theological vector—represented by charisma—does not coincide with the economic junction that binds the Protestant ethic to the spirit of capitalism; indeed, it radically diverges from it: “However, the antagonism between charisma and everyday life arises also in the capitalist economy, with the difference that charisma does not confront the household but the enterprise.” But the even sharper opposition that Weber derives from Sohm’s theory is the one between charisma and office—where “office” is meant to be understood as the formal institution in which the legal norm is crystallized. Even more than by the secular opposition between church and state, one

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 37

37

6/20/15 10:54 AM

might say that all of Western history is characterized by the transversal opposition between charisma and office. Unlike the Church, which forms heterodirected individuals, the sect, out of which the charismatic spirit is generated, builds personalities centered on freely adopted values. While the priest, the expression of an institutionalized religion like the Catholic Church, speaks in its name, the prophet—which is the original archetype of the charismatic leader—speaks in his own name. He too, of course, is the bearer of a cause—indeed without it, his power would be diminished. And he, too, more than ever, is invested with a mission. But the crucial point is that a mission or cause of this sort “is believed to be embodied in his person.” This is the term that Weber stresses with regularity, even emphatically: “We shall understand ‘prophet’ to mean a purely personal bearer of charisma, who by virtue of his mission proclaims a religious doctrine or divine commandment.” Whether the prophet limits himself to renewing an old revelation or announces a whole new one is entirely immaterial in this regard. It makes no difference if he counts on his listeners being attached to his personal presence in order to spread his message, as in the case of Zarathustra, Jesus, or Muhammad; or to his doctrine, as it was for Buddha and the prophets of Israel: “The personal call is the decisive element distinguishing the prophet from the priest. . . . Even in cases in which personal charisma may be involved, it is the hierarchical office that confers legitimate authority upon the priest as a member of an organized enterprise of salvation. But the prophet, like the magician, exerts his power simply by virtue of his personal gifts,” in spite of the fact that, in contrast to the prophet, the content of his mission is not magic but doctrines or commandments. Central to the political-theological dispositif, then, is the concept of “person.” If we go back to what we have said about the splitting of the whole into two separate, unequal parts—with regard to Heidegger’s “machination” as well as to Hegel’s theophilosophy—we can then take another step forward. What qualifies the charismatic personality—and more specifically the inherent relationship between charisma and person—is its stretching apart between two realities bound together in an asymmetrical relationship. Indeed, its specific role is to transport into this world an otherworldly value that is embodied in one’s own body, as it was for the greatest bearer of charisma, Jesus. Like him, a charismatic leader is perfectly divided in his own body between heaven and earth, between the divine and the mundane, the good and power—in the narrow sense that he draws his power over others 38

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 38

6/20/15 10:54 AM

from the value that he represents, thereby allowing them to participate in it. Only from the distance that cuts him into opposing parts can he dominate his life and that of others. Like the Calvinist saint, he lives in the world without belonging to it. He lowers himself down into the ordinary dimension but without losing the extraordinary. He gives life to the norm but starting from the exception. Of course, this tension between the one and the other polarity cannot last for long; and therefore, sooner or later, by losing the personal element, he slips inevitably into traditional or rational power—until, with a rebounding swing of the pendulum, the dispositif of the person is resurrected to flourish once again at the heart of these powers. Nothing better conveys the sense of this genuine tragedy of the political in the era of its secularization than the immensely power ful final pages of Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” torn between the two ethics of responsibility and conviction, opposed and yet linked by an unbreakable bond. What holds together the “two laws,” each of which is forever tempted to overcome the other, is the figure that Weber defines as “a hero”—the only one capable of making the Two the soul of the One, of maintaining the antinomic power of separation in his own identity. A hero is not someone who secularizes the theological, or who seeks to lead the saeculum (worldly life) back to its ancient theological matrix; rather, he is someone who opens a point of transcendence within it intended to put the world in conflict with itself. Th is is the core confl ict in the work of Carl Schmitt. Far from being a peaceful process of demythification, in Schmitt’s account secularization becomes the battlefield between opposing powers, each of which generates the other. What is constantly put into play in this dialectic is the relationship with the Originary—which is to say, with the element from which historical development draws both its creative drive and its destructive charge. The more it is denied or removed, the more it returns, resurfacing with a violence proportional to the attempt to shove it back into an obsolete past. The most dramatic representation of this resurgence that never resolves successfully is his 1929 essay on the “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations.” Foreign to every scheme of philosophy of history, both the rising and falling types, it narrates the succession of reference points— from the theological to the metaphysical, and from the metaphysical to the moral-humanitarian up to the economic—by which the “European spirit” variously constructed a different domain of neutralization for the struggle Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 39

39

6/20/15 10:54 AM

that had erupted in the previous domain. Thus, to quell the continuous wars of religion, the cultural elites transferred the struggle to the metaphysical plane; then, when this also became impracticable, they moved it to the ethical-humanitarian plane; and then finally, to the economic one. But, in this way, instead of achieving peace, they ended up rekindling an increasingly bitter conflict, given that “in the new domain, at first considered neutral, the antitheses of men and interests unfold with a new intensity and become increasingly sharper. Europeans always have wandered from a conflictual to a neutral domain, and always, the newly won neutral domain has become immediately another arena of struggle, once again necessitating the search for a new neutral domain.” When viewed from this angle, the dynamic of secularization reveals all its contradictory character. The further along it progresses, tearing itself free from its theological root, the more its theological origins appear in front of it, or inside it, like a crevice into which it continually risks sliding. Not even when this path comes to an end, when it stabilizes the primacy of technology—considered the neutral domain par excellence—is the struggle appeased. On the contrary, the conquest of technology becomes the object of a no-holds-barred struggle like no other between factions aimed at mutual domination. But what is most striking in comparison with Weber’s perspective is that here, too, perhaps even more evidently, the political-theological tip that pierces the surface of secularization is in the form of the person. The whole course of post-Christian civilization, in its progressive depoliticization, takes on the traits of an impersonal current destined to break the bipolar relationship that binds state sovereignty to divine power. The slippage from the theological to the metaphysical, then to the ethical-humanitarian and the economic is allied with the disappearance of the symbolic mediation between heaven and earth first embodied by the person of Christ and then by that of his vicar in the world. The transition from world empire to national states, by fragmenting the unity of sovereign command, starts off the process of depersonalization. The displacement of the law from the sacred ground of veritas to the profane ground of auctoritas, confirmed by Hobbes, constitutes a first tear between authority and power that heralds the even more pronounced disconnection to come. However, in this case, too, like in the changing series of domains, the process of secularization is cut off and countered by a return of political theology, which aims to reconstruct

40

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 40

6/20/15 10:54 AM

the ancient symbolic mediation of the pontiff, or at least to imitate it. Indeed, Hobbes himself, who also inaugurated legal positivism, reunited decision and person in the secular sphere and in doing so, challenged all subsequent attempts to replace concrete state sovereignty with an impersonal, abstract order. Indeed, was it not Hobbes who said that “for subjection, command, right, and power are accidents, not of powers, but of persons”? This is the same political-theological choice ensuring that, ultimately, Hobbes “remained personalistic and postulated an ultimate concrete deciding instance, and why he also heightened his state, the Leviathan, into an immense person and thus point-blank straight into my thology.” It is true that in answer to Hobbes’s personalism there first came the response of John Locke, who interpreted the concept of law as antithetical to the personal command of the monarch. Locke was followed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who replaced the person of the sovereign with the people as a whole. By not framing the will of the people as a personal decision, he ensured that the possibility of making the political-theological comparison between the sovereign and God would also be eliminated. The culmination of the antipersonalistic wave is represented by Kelsen, for whom “the highest competence cannot be traceable to a person or to a sociopsychological power complex but only to the sovereign order in the unity of the system of norms. For juristic consideration there are neither real nor fictitious persons, only points of ascription.” Schmitt makes light work for himself in retorting to this conclusion that neither the system of norms nor the sovereign order can stand without a subjective referent capable of embodying it in the concreteness of his or her own person. But this happens in a horizon now marked by progressive depersonalization, in which the return of the person acquires a clear political-theological character. What is at stake in this comparison with Kelsen is precisely the question of political theology in the time of its apparent disappearance. Is this a disappearance, or a hiding in the guise of its opposite, in line with the distortion effect of “machination”? While Kelsen sees the end of political theology as having already occurred, by emptying the sovereign function, Schmitt not only contests its disappearance but also declares that political theology is insuperable. Th roughout his subsequent theoretical turns and political ambiguity, what remains a fi xed point of his thought is the belief that there is no exit from the political-theological horizon. No matter how much

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 41

41

6/20/15 10:54 AM

we attempt to flatten the transcendental pole onto a plane of immanence, as soon as we go beyond the normal state to enter into a crisis situation, transcendence returns, resurfacing with a force, and at times an aggressive charge, equal to the desire to negate it. But the most important point for our argument is that when this happens, it always takes place by passing through the dispositif of the person. As we know, this takes the form of an asymmetrical relationship between two opposing polarities, the one inclusive of the other, and thus also with a divisive effect on it. This dispositif assumes a different form in Schmitt’s work depending on the horizon into which it is introduced and also on the internal shifting of his perspective from an explicitly Catholic vector to another one that, without negating it, interprets it in a different key. The difference relates to the link between secularization and political theology—or rather, to the antinomic presence of the one within the other. In both cases the dispositif inscribes itself in the line that at the same time unites and divides two planes of reality. But while in the first period, the explicitly Catholic one, the line runs between transcendence and immanence, in the second period it shifts inside immanence. In a series of youthful works, culminating in the 1923 book on Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Schmitt identifies Roman Catholicism as the only point of resistance against the depoliticizing drift of the modern age. Starting from this angle, he enters into a complex relationship of proximity and divergence with Weber’s position. Like Weber, Schmitt also locates the beginnings of the secularization process on the Reformed side of the Catholic Church. But, recognizing its depoliticizing effect, he opposes it to the very Catholic principle that Weber tended instead to marginalize, because it was destined to dry up personal charisma in legal procedures. Schmitt affirms the connection between Catholicism and law, but instead of opposing person and office, he incorporates the one within the other through the category of “representation”: “The Church is a concrete personal representation of a concrete personality. . . . Therein—in its capacity to assume juridical form—lies one of its sociolog ical secrets. But it has the power to assume this or any other form only because it has the power of representation.” Precisely in this lies its superiority over economic thought. The Church represents the principle of supreme authority, initially in the person of Christ and then in that of his representatives, because this principle hinges on an idea capable of being turned into a person, or personalized.

42

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 42

6/20/15 10:54 AM

But the crucial element introduced by Schmitt is that by inhering in a person, or by personifying itself, this idea exerts a formal domination over the life into which it seeps: “From the standpoint of the political idea of Catholicism, the essence of the Roman-Catholic complexio oppositorum lies in a specific, formal superiority over the matter of human life such as no other imperium has ever known.” The same figure—of hierarchical unification—characterizes the principle of personhood, once it is inscribed in the secularized sphere of the modern state. The same sovereign person who ensured the link with divine authority in imperial political theology now has the task of unifying the political body, shielding it from the risk of internal division. This need, to create order, is addressed by the power of decision by which sovereignty itself is defined in relation to the state of exception. But it may do so by “deciding,” in other words, by separating the unity of the body politic from what threatens it. This is what Schmitt means when he specifies that the essence of state sovereignty is not in the monopoly of sanction, but in decision, where this term must be understood in its etymological sense of cutting between the two parts of a whole [from Latin de– “off ” + caedere “to cut”]. The primary function of unification in the sovereign person is thus identical with the function of separation. Only by separating itself from what is external to it can a political unity overcome the internal conflicts that tear it apart. As Schmitt maintains in his first Political Theology, we know that “sovereignty (and thus the state itself) resides in deciding this controversy, that is, in determining definitively what constitutes public order and security, in determining when they are disturbed, and so on.” But instead of being the opposite of conflict, order is now how confl ict takes form—its formation along lines of separation that divide each state from all the others, without ever excluding the extreme possibility of war. When the personality of the state resurfaces out of the impersonal ground of secularization as a political-theological fragment, it clashes head-on with the universalist idea of the indivisibility of the human race. This is because the unified entity is the outcome of a preexistent separation between powers destined to compete for the conquest of the whole: “The political entity cannot by its very nature be universal in the sense of embracing all of humanity and the entire world.”  It is always one part that aspires to the whole, by squeezing the other one out onto the edge of nothingness.

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 43

43

6/20/15 10:54 AM

But if the sovereign personality carves out a place for itself by separating itself from all the others, it finds its greatest point of unification in the decision that divides it, also within itself, from a part included in the form of its exclusion. Th is is the ultimate consequence that Schmitt’s politicaltheological dispositif arrives at, taking the concept of sovereign person, or of personal sovereignty, to its greatest expressive capacity. As the decisive political unity, the state concentrates inside itself the possibility of waging war, and therefore the right to dispose of people’s lives—not only those of its enemies but also those of its own soldiers, who are forced to kill or be killed. The task of the state is also, and above all, to protect the population in normal situations. But this necessity is precisely what leads to a division inside the national boundaries, in response to another type of enemy who is closer-at-hand and even more disturbing: the internal enemy. “As long as the state is a political entity this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy.”  Every kind of state—from the Greek polis to the Roman republic to modern democracies—has always produced a series of special laws, expulsions, proscriptions, outlawry designed to thrust certain groups outside the law. Without them, which is to say, without an exclusionary power, continues Schmitt, no state identity would be possible. The very idea of democracy, in contrast with that of liberalism, derives from it. Contrary to the abstract universalism of liberalism, what characterizes the democratic regime is the principle of identity, or homogeneity, of the people with respect to itself. But this homogeneity is only detectable through the creation of a heterogeneity intended to negatively strengthen it: “Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”  The conclusion to which Schmitt leads his argument is not based on a denial of the concept of equality, but on its differentiation into two differing, opposing types. While the first—the universal equality of liberal regimes—excludes inequality per se, the political equality that characterizes democracy implies inequality as its precondition. It is the concrete expression of the personal character of a people that can make itself equal to itself only to the extent to which it differentiates itself from what is dissimilar to it, both inside and outside its borders: In modern democracies, “general human equality is once

44

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 44

6/20/15 10:54 AM

again neutralized through the definitive exclusion of all those who do not belong to the state, of those who remain outside it.”  It may come as a surprise that the most powerful point of precipitation on political theology put forward thus far is a piece by Georges Bataille on the psychological structure of fascism, written the same year that Hitler seized power. Although it has been excluded from all the bibliographies on the subject because of its unorthodox features, upon close examination the text presents a diagonal that cuts across the perspectives of Weber and Schmitt, pushing them beyond their horizon. From Weber Bataille takes the paradigm of disenchantment, while from Schmitt he reproduces the necessary and risky resurgence of the sacred from within disenchantment. But what makes this fragmentary piece even more meaningful is its allusion to the dichotomous order that we recognized at the heart of the political-theological dispositif. The latter is characterized by the opposition between the categories of “heterogeneous” and “homogeneous,” similar to the contrast between “sacred” and “profane” developed by authors such as Rudolph Otto, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss. But there is a difference. While this opposition is clearly definable, the one between heterogeneous and homogeneous is obscured, in the eyes of the observer, by the continuous capture of the heterogeneous within the homogeneous. As in Heidegger’s “machination,” not only is one part—the heterogeneous—incorporated by the other, it even takes over its features. All of Western civilization is interpreted by Bataille as  the perpetually repressed history of this exclusionary inclusion—but also of the return of the political-theological that the latter causes as a reaction, of which fascism represents the latest and most haunting expression. Before getting to this, we would do well to reflect on the liminal or oblique stance taken by Bataille toward the secularization paradigm. On the one hand, he embraces Weber’s pathway from Calvinism to the spirit of capitalism, reaching the same conclusion about the primacy of the economic in an increasingly bureaucratized world. On the other hand, he highlights its depoliticizing aspect with a clearness that is lacking in Weber’s more sober and controlled analysis. The loss of the sacred, implicit in the generalized domain of the useful, condemns modern society to atrophy—from which it can escape only by surrendering itself to those who seek to subjugate it. Along these lines, the charismatic leaders that Weber had tried to

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 45

45

6/20/15 10:54 AM

keep within the democratic parliamentary framework become the fascist meneurs des foules (leaders of crowds). But what even further distinguishes Bataille’s position from that of Weber is the fact that he attributes the initial loss of the sacred to Christianity itself. On the one hand, in the Crucifixion Christianity celebrates the most tragic sacrificial ceremony, prompting the faithful to identify with the victim. On the other hand, Christianity reduces the antinomic scope of the Crucifi xion by sublimating the cruel character of death on the cross into the glorious resurrection of the condemned, who is called to sit at the right side of the Father. This is how the first transition took place from the impure to the pure sacred, or from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous, which marks the history of the West. If the sacred is always a principle of cohesion, obtained through the violent breaking down of individual boundaries, then Christian dogma, after having initiated the sacred, reinstitutes the domain of the discontinuous by differentiating the fate of individual souls. Modeling a God in the form of a person who divides the elected from the damned makes the fusional effect of Christ’s sacrifice ineffectual, separating the sacred from the world once again. By denying the sanctity of works and condemning unproductive consumption, Calvinism, in its turn, only radicalized the process of desacralization already initiated by early Christianity. Since then, the unity of the modern world appears to be hollowed out by an irremediable contradiction that manifests itself in the obsessive fantasy about the king’s execution as a secular replication of Christ’s torment. The medieval contrast between spiritual and temporal power was the first consequence, destined to be reproduced in all the dichotomies that marked subsequent history. The outcome that resulted from it, namely, the complete secularization of bourgeois society, carried within itself this loss of sacral authority. The transition from the semantics of tragedy, characterized by the outburst of passions, to the language of power attests to a first transfer of the sacral core from the religious to the political plane. In this way modern sovereignty, although derived from the theological lexicon, remained devoid of a transcendental charge. From this perspective, starting from Weber’s diagnosis, Bataille ends up converging with Schmitt’s prognosis: Flattened onto the plane of immanence, the political can only surrender in the face of the economic, governed by the principle of profit and the naked logic of gain. When the bourgeois classes eliminated the wasteful expenditure that still characterized the sumptuous rites of the feudal world, the 46

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 46

6/20/15 10:54 AM

sacred began to disappear along with a consequent deflation in sociopolitical cohesion. The spirit of capitalism, produced by disenchantment, is radically antipolitical because, by eradicating the theological root, it reduced authority to power and legitimacy to legality. The end of sovereignty, sanctioned by the revolutionary fall of the royal head, was simply the last act in a process whose outcome was the capitalistic reduction of human beings to things. The outcome was the exhaustion of social unity in favor of a bloodless individualism that tends reverse itself into its opposite, which is to say, into the mass homogenization of democracies. But this loss in par ticular, with the ensuing depoliticization, makes democracies vulnerable to a forced return of political theology as a violent surrogate of the absent sovereignty. Fascism represents the most aggressive form of this return. Trapped in the mechanical relationship between structure and superstructure, the Marxist interpretation of this resurgence is rendered ineffective precisely because of its blindness to the political-theological foundation. What is involved is not so much the relationship between the political and the religious as the compulsive return of the Two within the unity that the fascist regime at the same time negates and reproduces. Bataille takes as his starting point the original bipolarity that opposes the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. While the homogeneous implies the commensurability of the elements and their interchangeability, the heterogeneous consists of that which remains excluded from it, in particular from the characteristics of excess and violence that are associated with the sphere of the sacred. This exclusion includes the proletarian class, which is integrated into the factory but deprived of the profit. Here we already see taking shape the mechanism of exclusionary inclusion that governed the political-theological paradigm during the time of its ghostly resurgence. But the dissociation that had remained latent until this point becomes even tenser when the homogeneous block manages to divide the opposing one, allying itself with one part against the other. This division into two is made possible by the fact that the heterogeneous sphere is already separated from itself into zones of purity and impurity. While the unclean area appears scattered among its different members, the pure area is instead concentrated around the person of the leader. To it belongs the morphological structure of fascism— down to the name, which evokes concentration and fusion. As with Weber and Schmitt earlier, Bataille also insists on the constitutive link between sovereignty and charismatic personal power, but with a peculiarity that typifies Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 47

47

6/20/15 10:54 AM

the fascist regime. Of course, as in every type of charismatic power, the emotional flow that unites the followers to the head radiates from the energies that accumulate in his or her person. “But this concentration in a single person intervenes as an element that sets the fascist formation apart within the heterogeneous realm,”  because rather than sacralizing the excluded part, it violently turns against it, threatening to annihilate it. This is where we find the kind of immunitary dispositif that leads to rejecting as impure waste the lower part of the sacred, from which even fascism drew its own propellant force. As “sacred persons” expressive of a virulence that is absent in the homogeneous universe of liberal democracies, the fascist leaders belong to the heterogeneous side of society, but lie in its upper or sovereign segment insofar as they reduce the lower segment into obedience. This superiority derives from the personal nature of their power, just as this personal nature is linked to the exclusion of the impure elements that threaten to contaminate their power. In this way, although the low heterogeneous is organic to the high heterogeneous, by expelling it, fascism ends up performing the same exclusionary function exerted by the homogeneous forces, thereby strengthening them. For Bataille, the segment that is intermediate to them is the state sphere, located like a fi lter between the bourgeois classes and the imperative instances. This is how a dual interpenetration is created, on the basis of which the sovereign function is included within the state, just as this, in its turn, is dominated by a sovereignty that expresses an irreducible personal element. To understand the true nature of fascism, we must understand this peculiar mechanism that intertwines the homogeneous and the heterogeneous, to the extent that it separates the two levels of the heterogeneous. Never before had unity been so literally constituted as by the separation embodied in the person of the Duce. When Mussolini decreed that the principle unifying the multitude into a single will to power was selfconsciousness—a personality—“the term personality must be understood as individualization, a process leading to Mussolini himself,” just as the mystical idea of race “appeared to be incarnated in the person of the Führer.”  But the symbol of fascism seems even more typical of this personal power to Bataille than the Nazi swastika, because it depicts the sovereign right of life and death over the subjects of the regime. Like the insignia of magistrates to the imperium, such as consuls and praetors, the lictor’s fas-

48

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 48

6/20/15 10:54 AM

ces in Rome—with the ax for capital execution—alludes to the union of military power with the religious power of augury. It is here that the taut political-theological node takes form, in the most hidden depths of the fascist regime. Every royal power had already established itself as a transposition of the divine power, on the basis of “the religious character of all royalty and the sovereign character of all religious forms.” But what is important in the definition of political phenomena are the different weights of the two components that signal the prevalence of the political in the one case, and the predominance of the theological in the other. Intersecting this first bipolarity, doubling it, there is a second bipolarity, between a religious code and a military code, which Bataille likens to the bipartite division of Church and army formulated by Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. While in cases such as the Islamic caliphate the military element prevailed over the religious, thus giving rise to a political-theological formation that served the expansion of Islam, fascism was oriented in the opposite direction. We have seen how it caused a heterogeneous power—that is, a sacral power—to be introduced into the homogeneous world. Now, in spite of the blood and mass deaths produced by wars, the army is in itself a homogeneous body, founded on the adherence of the soldiers, who come from the lowest strata of the people, to the flag and to the person of their general. But military force alone is not able to institute any lasting power. The inner attraction exerted by the military leader is not enough to cement the social formation in the absence of an external attraction, which can only be of a religious type. Without this, no sovereign power would have been able to legitimate itself in the continuity of the royal dynasty, guaranteed by the divine source of its origin. Fascism understood this need, reversing the political-theological nexus into a theological-political node welded together by the perfect interpenetration of the two elements: “Fascist power is characterized by a foundation that is both religious and military, in which these two habitually distinct elements cannot be separated: it thus presents itself from the outset as an accomplished concentration.” But the very indistinguishability of the two elements testifies to the theological tone of their union. It is produced by something—a supreme value—capable of constituting it. This is the heterogeneous power that inhabits and exceeds the homogeneity of the state, the party, and the army, constituted by the unique person “of the chief as the

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 49

49

6/20/15 10:54 AM

transcendent object of collective affectivity.” The chief incarnates in his own person the transcendent principle brought to the point of incandescence of a divine force that, in addition to passion, demands a sort of ecstasy from the followers. Bataille’s entire argument seems to converge toward this theological-political apex—understood as both a picklock capable of breaking open the iron cage of desacralized democracies and as the fatal whirlpool destined to suck them down into its void. Once again, from an absolutely heterogeneous perspective to the legal-political lexicon, the political-theological principle returns to consolidate itself in the point of the sovereign person, remaining trapped, however, in the duality that it bears within, in its very foundation: “Nevertheless,” concludes Bataille, “the forms of life rigorously conserve . . . a radical duality of principles in the very person of the one holding power: the president of the Italian council and the German chancellor represent forms of activity radically distinct from those of the Duce or the Führer.” Even from the highly unusual point of view opened up by Bataille, the unity of the person seems to split into two powers that cannot be assimilated, except in the form of mutual oppression. Exactly ten years before publishing his masterpiece on medieval political theology, Ernst Kantorowicz focused on an unusual representation of the Trinity that appears in a book of officia composed in Winchester at the beginning of the eleventh century. The disconcerting aspect about it, which he immediately focuses on, lies in the fact that the divine Persons depicted in the image are not three, but two. Moreover, the two figures—the Father and Son—are almost identical, except for a very slight detail in their posture. The Third person appears, almost in passing, in the likeness of a dove resting on the crown of the Virgin with the Child in her arms. This means that the Son appears twice, first as an adult, like a mirror image of the Father, and second as an infant, in Mary’s lap. Consequently, aside from the mother, who stands outside the Trinitarian scene, it could be said that there are four characters depicted, since the Second person is split in two. In short, in a drawing entitled Officium Trinitatis, what is missing between the Four and Two is precisely the Three. In an attempt to unravel the paradox of this “Quinity,” as the author himself defi nes it, Kantorowicz argues that two chronologically distinct traditions overlap in it. The first is that of the “Binity” of Byzantine origin, aimed at countering the Arian heresy by attesting to the consubstantiality of Christ and God in illustration of Psalm 110.1, 50

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 50

6/20/15 10:54 AM

which, in the Latin version, reads as follows: “Dixit Dominus domino meo: sede a dextris meis, donec ponam inimicos tuos scabellum pedum tuorum” (The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool). The second, to which we owe the late addition of the dove, is instead the orthodox Trinitarian tradition, tied to the dual nature of the Son, both human and divine. Despite the ultimate victory of the Trinitarian model over the binary one, the latter never quite disappeared altogether, interweaving and even colliding at times with the Trinitarian one. At the end of the essay, Kantorowicz discusses another painting included in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript dating from the ninth century that reproduces the famous Utrecht Psalter. Intended to illustrate Psalm 2:7, “Dominus dixit ad me: Filius meus es tu, ego hodie genui te” (The Lord said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you), in the picture there appears the Father with a Son of an indefinite age, no longer a child but not yet an adult. In this case, too, the Three of the Trinity gives place to the Two of the Binity. But even more striking is the replacement of the generatio in carne (begetting in the flesh), naturally connected to the figure of the Mother, with the generatio in spiritu (begetting in the spirit), inspired, instead, by the mystery of Paternity. In his careful study of the matter, Alain Boureau links this to the rigidly masculine relationship between father and son or teacher and pupil that was characteristic of the George Circle, the German literary group centered around the poet Stefan George, which Kantorowicz frequented in the 1920s. But equally important is the line of continuity that connects Kantorowicz’s research on iconography to his subsequent discoveries in political theology. The identification of the Father with the Son—reproduced in the icon of emperor Frederick II as Pater et Filius Iustitiae (Father and Son of Justice), but already encoded other wise in late Roman law—was the theoretical dispositif through which the monarchs were able to designate their children as king while still alive, thereby doubling or splitting the sovereign person. This was made possible by that metaphorical passage from the theological to the political, later designated as “political theology,” to whose reconstruction Kantorowicz subsequently devoted his most celebrated work. The first occurrence of the term appears in his 1955 article, “Mysteries of State,” in reference to the medieval passage from the arcana ecclesiae to the arcana imperii. On that occasion Kantorowicz cites an essay by George La Piana entitled “Political Theology” and alludes to the lively debate on the topic that was taking place in Germany Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 51

51

6/20/15 10:54 AM

at the time in the early 1930s. This attests to Kantorowicz’s knowledge of Schmitt’s text on political theology and the controversy launched against him by Erik Peterson, which we will return to in more detail. Furthermore, this is the same debate to which the subtitle of The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology alludes, however cryptically. Regardless of Kantorowicz’s intention toward someone who would later become an awkward figure, namely, the German scholar of public law (with whom he had also shared at least an initial ambivalence toward the new Reich), the fact that he subscribed to the semantic horizon we have traced out thus far is unquestionable. Not too distant from Bataille’s interests in “sacred sociology,” influenced by the work of Durkheim on the relationship between society and religion, Kantorowicz’s Frederick the Second remains incomprehensible unless the connection is made to Weber’s concept of charismatic power. The figure of the emperor who starts from a precarious condition and ends up ruling an enormous empire by means of his extraordinary personal qualities constitutes an absolutely exemplary prototype of charismatic power. But, even beyond the 1927 book on Frederick II, all of Kantorowicz’s work is engaged with the paradigm of secularization, a topic on which he had already given two lectures during his stay in Oxford in 1934. “We are far too often inclined to talk about ‘secularization’ of ecclesiastical thought and institutions in connection with the modern state,” he writes almost thirty years later. He then immediately points out that “we find little of that ‘secularization’ in the twelft h century. What happened then was not a secularization of the spiritual, but rather a spiritualization and sanctification of the secular.”  Kantorowicz’s complete change in direction with respect to Weber can hardly be overlooked. What was a process of demystification for Weber became a dynamic of sacralization of power for Kantorwicz, in a fashion suggesting that he adopted Heidegger’s invitation to dwell on the essence of enchantment before questioning the meaning of disenchantment. Certainly, even in the case of the author of The Two Bodies of the King we can speak of “profanation” but not in the Enlightenment sense of a simple transition from the sacred to the profane; rather, in the sense of a use of the sacred for profane purposes and, therefore, of a genuinely politicaltheological dispositif, which the notion of secularization fails miserably to capture. Of course Kantorowicz was well aware of the biunivocality of the political-theological dynamic—that is to say, of the mutual exchange be52

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 52

6/20/15 10:54 AM

tween the religious and political spheres already brought to light in the work of Andreas Alföldi on the ceremonies of the Roman emperors, in the work of Theodor Klauser on the origin of episcopal insignia, and especially that of Percy Ernst Schramm (who became the official historian of the Wehrmacht) on the functional relationship between sacerdotium and regnum. Just as the emperor wore pontifical shoes and priestly vestments, the Pope liked to adorn his tiara with a golden crown and wear imperial purple. All the while, both civil and canonical glossators and annotators were using the same arguments, although with opposite intentions, in a tirade of metaphors, symbols, and analogies at the center of which the insignias of power stood out in sharp relief. But in addition to the mutual influence that the two sides exerted on each other, what especially attracted Kantorowicz’s gaze was the effect of reversal that occurred, ultimately turning in favor of the monarchy. For example, the ceremony of anointing the king, which Marc Bloch also drew attention to in his landmark work, interpreted by the papal authors as a sign of the subordination of the king to the pontiff, ended up transferring to the former the salvific powers of the latter, resulting in a double-edged sword. It is true that without the theological transfer and then the liturgical mediation of the anointing, fi rst the emperor and then the monarchs would not have been able to tap into that symbolic resource that was required to stabilize power in institutional terms. But once the ceremonial and lexical passage from the theological to the political sphere had taken place, the political had no more use for the theological—not because it rejected the religious investiture, but because it claimed to acquire it directly from God, thereby bypassing ecclesial mediation. In this way the sacral element, far from dissolving, was incorporated into the political institution, which located its source of legitimacy within itself. In this case, it can be said that the political-theological dispositif functioned by including theology within a political form that appropriated it while emptying it of content. Kantorowicz’s entire narrative strategy is aimed at retying the threads of this extraordinary metaphysical mechanism that, starting in late antiquity, structured the entire lexical system of European society by reversing the meaning of the metaphor. This is the case with the category of “patria,” which shifted from the ancient meaning of “city of origin” to the otherworldly one of “heavenly homeland,” and then mutated again into the mystical image of a national territory for which it is right to give one’s life. Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 53

53

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Moreover, the transposition of the ancient motto Unus Deus, unus Papa, unus Imperator (One God, One Pope, One Emperor) into the acclamation Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Reich, One Leader), shouted out on the occasion of the Nazi annexation of Austria, goes in the same apologetical direction. At the origin of this path—explored in all its infinite semantic folds in The Two Bodies of the King—there lies the analogy between the monarch and Christ: Just as Christ has two natures, human and divine, the king has two bodies, the first natural and mortal, and the second political and immortal, because it is transmitted through heredity to his successors. Accordingly, the notion of body underwent the same splitting into two unequal parts, one of which was superior and included the other, that we previously discovered in the category of person. Thus, at the core of the political-theological dispositif there remained an asymmetric duality, but it shifted from the person to the body. Indeed, Kantorowicz does not fail to emphasize that, rather than a replacement, this was an overlapping in terminology that did not change how the dispositif worked. First, because it referred to Elizabethan England and not to the continental political tradition, which maintained the term “person.” And second, because the two categories of person and body, although certainly distinct, are inextricably intertwined along the entire route examined. In the beginning, the dominant lemma was the corpus mysticum, which had passed from Christ to the body of the Church, and then from this to the whole political community. This language clearly corresponded to the spread of the organological metaphor, which had moved into the political lexicon ever since antiquity and was brought back in vogue in the Middle Ages, especially by John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. But the term best suited to indicate the distinction between the individual king and his public function, also going back to Christian theology and Roman law, was that of person. Thomas Aquinas had already defined the Church not as corpus mysticum but as persona mystica, synonymous with the person ficta, or repraesentata who, starting with Innocent IV, dated back to the legal vocabulary of ancient Rome. As the more technical approach of Baldus de Ubaldis and Bartolus de Saxoferrato showed, this category alluded specifically to an abstract reality; in other words, to a person without a body, including a set of people such as a university or a college. This allowed several individuals to be treated as a single one as well as to distinguish between a legal person and a natural person: “The king performs the 54

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 54

6/20/15 10:54 AM

functions of two people (loco duarum personarum rex fungitur)” stated Baldus (Consilia, III.159, no. 6, fol. 45). But the most conspicuous advantage of this lexical invention, in the political-theological sense, was the fact that, by going beyond the physical reality of the individual, the collective person thus defined could be projected out not only in space but also in time. This permitted a hereditary transmission to take place, ensuring that there would be no vacancy of power. The allusion to the Binity being superimposed on the Trinity and at the same time underlying it can be traced back to this highly significant point. Once the still-reigning father was identified, along with the son who was destined to succeed him without any interruptions, it was possible to construct a legal body whose members were placed longitudinally one above the other, in such a way as to bestow the decisive attribute of perpetuity to sovereignty. By thus fulfilling the Justinian gloss (by which father and son are a single person according the function of the law) in the continuity of the dynasty, the individual ended up being coextensive with the entire species and the community was condensed into the time frame of a single person. The courtly metaphor of the phoenix being reborn from its ashes offered the most resplendent figuration of the ancient formula dignitas non moritur (the office does not die), translating it into the absolutist axiom of rex qui numquam moritur (the king who never dies). When it was still the custom in royal funerals to accompany the mortal remains of the king with an effigy that symbolized his ever-living office, the paradoxical outcome was the representation of a persona ficta, the dignitas, with another persona ficta, the effigy. Subsequently, with an increasing emphasis on the binary component, funeral monuments were built in which the gisant (the deceased in a reclining position) appeared both as a dying being as well as a character dressed according to the rank he held in life, so that the second figure absorbed the disfigured face of the first and sublimated it. This makes it apparent that the mechanism of a political-theological dispositif aimed at unifying different individuals into a single person worked by separation into two elements that were unequal in terms of importance and duration—to the point that, in certain circumstances, one could even be used against the other. Thus, for example, during the revolution, the English Parliament summoned up the army to rally in the name of the body politic of King Charles I against his natu ral body, which could be put to death without harming the body politic. It is precisely from this reversibility Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 55

55

6/20/15 10:54 AM

of the dispositif that Kantorowicz infers the superiority of the semantics of the body over those of the person. Unlike on the continent, tied to the abstract form of personification, the jurists of the Tudor period turned to the more concrete metaphor of incorporation. Only this was able to give expression to a political construct centered on the function of the parliament understood as the living body of the kingdom. This is where the idea of two bodies, one inside the other, came from—what Frederic William Maitland described as “metaphysical nonsense.”  As Francis Bacon still put it, “There is in the king not a body natural alone, nor a body politic alone, but a body natu ral and politic together: corpus corporatum in corpore naturali, et corpus naturale in corpore corporate.”  Rather than two persons, or even a double person—a twin personality—only in the English corporation was it possible to recognize the two bodies of the same person. It is as if, with respect to the formalized vocabulary of the person, but with the same subordinating effect on one party with respect to the other, the English theory of the two bodies of the king took the political-theological dispositif back to its original Christological value, reviving the binary meaning of the Incarnation. Just as the Son—depicted as identical to the Father in the Winchester drawing and yet different from him—includes his own human nature in the divine nature, so the earthly ruler subordinates his natural body, subject to death, to the political body, destined to perpetuity. The antinomic relation of the Unity with the competing powers of the Two and the Three is exactly what Erik Peterson’s essay on “Monotheism as a Political Problem” centered on in 1935, opening up his sparring match with Carl Schmitt. The fact that Schmitt waited thirty-five years before responding to him in Political Theology II is a posthumous testament to how deeply the arrow fired by his old friend—compared to a fleeing Parthian warrior who unexpectedly turns back to strike—penetrated him to the quick. But it also shows its remarkable penetration force against the political-theological dispositif. If we add to this the strong resonance that Peterson’s first book, Heis Theos published in 1926, has in par ticular with Kantorowicz’s studies on imperial ceremonies, a sort of triangle is traced out between the three authors, linked by a complex nexus of symmetry and difference. While in his Laudes regiae Kantorowicz made positive mention of Peterson’s studies, Schmitt, on the contrary, felt obligated to challenge Peterson’s claim that

56

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 56

6/20/15 10:54 AM

the latter had liquidated political theology—but without superseding its lexicon. What Schmitt contested was not the extent to which Peterson grasped the political-theological dispositif—the antinomic presence of the Two in the regime of the One—but his polemical reservation regarding all political theologies. To identify the reasons for this overlapping through opposition—which juxtaposes the two authors precisely along the edge of their divergence— we need to go back to the twofold historical circumstances of Peterson’s conversion to Catholicism, which occurred during the night of Christmas 1930, and the stance he subsequently took toward Nazism. While the second circumstance inevitably distanced him from someone like Schmitt, who had become an official representative of the Nazi regime, the first ultimately drew him closer again. This is because unlike evangelical theologians such as Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, who were attacking the Deutsche Christen (the German Christians) in the name of the absolute distance between God and the world, Peterson granted the Church a role of mediation and representation that was not dissimilar to the one Schmitt assigned it. Moreover, Peterson attributed the need for the ecclesiastical institution during the intermediate time between the birth of Christ and the Parousia to the failed conversion of the Jews. Without slipping into a form of full blown anti-Semitism in this regard, his interpretation of Paul’s argument in Romans 9–11, which he put forward in his “The Church from Jews and Gentiles” of 1933, ushered in a line of reasoning that, especially considering its fateful year of publication, lent itself to more than a few misinterpretations. While in the 1920s Peterson had connected the defense of the ecclesial institution to the risk of slipping back into the perspective of Old Testament law, in the 1933 essay, although stating that at the end of time the Synagogue would also be converted to Christ, he in fact identified its current existence as the obstacle to the eschatological fulfillment of history: “The Church of God can certainly not wish for the destruction of the Jews, since its fulfi llment is subject to the conversion of the Jews, after which there will follow the universal resurrection.” Although Schmitt located the katechon—the bulwarks holding back chaos—in the Roman Empire rather than in the Church, there is an unmistakable commonality of antiJewish tones that marks all the Catholicism of the period. Such was the atmosphere of the time when the Nazi regime managed to attract into its orbit

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 57

57

6/20/15 10:54 AM

some branches of Catholicism along with a series of evangelical theologians. The cases of Friedrich Gogarten on the one hand and Karl Eschweiler on the other are symptomatic of this tendency. Now the most significant thing about this as far as our inquiry is concerned is that these choices for Nazism all come under the label of “political theology.” Th is is exactly what the 1932 essay by Karl Eschweiler “Politische Theologie” alludes to, down to its title. It is also the main theme of Friedrich Gogarten’s writings on the connection between the Gospel, the nation, and the people. Considering that it was Schmitt who, starting in the 1920s, developed this paradigm in a key picked up by both Gogarten and Alfred de Quervain in support of the Deutsche Christen, it is not surprising that Peterson decided to aim his own attack of 1935 precisely at the category of political theology. However, right from the outset his maneuver seems riddled with internal contradictions. First, his intention is not to entirely deny the possibility of a relationship between Christianity and politics—even if he confines it to the liturgical sphere of angelic praise. This inclination is akin to the epigraphic research on ecclesial ceremonies that Kantorowicz initiated during the same years. But in this way Peterson ends up sharing the same field with Schmitt, since it is the doxological theme of the acclamatio, especially as it appears in Heis Theos, that provides material for his theory of acclamation as the direct participation of the German people in the new Reich. In short, from this aspect as well, the triangulation with Schmitt and Kantorowicz extends Peterson’s discourse beyond the confines within which he intended to keep it, causing a series of possible misunderstandings. It is precisely this thread that he decides to cut short with an essay explicitly aimed at eradicating the very possibility of a political theology. To do this, Peterson does not start from scratch; rather, he uses two of his previous texts—Gottliche Monarchie (1931) and Kaiser Augustus im Urteil des Antiken Christentums (1932–33)—which are not entirely homogeneous. While the first does not contain any reference to the category of political theology, limiting itself to an internal genealogy of the idea of divine monarchy, the second, emphasizing the political-theological role played by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea at the court of Constantine, introduces a first note that is critical of Schmitt: “The formulations that follow belong to a field that a German professor of public law of our time, Carl Schmitt, has designated political theology. However, in its essence, political theology is not an 58

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 58

6/20/15 10:54 AM

element of theology but rather of political thought.” Now, this contraction of political theology inside its second term, in order to free the first term of any possible contamination, is the axis around which Peterson melds the contents of the two essays in the new text. His intent is to use ample historical research on the sources from antiquity and late antiquity for a precise polemical objective: Schmitt’s category of political theology and the apologetic use of it that, in the 1930s, sought to portray Deutsche Christen as supporters of the Nazi regime. With respect to the definition of divine monarchy and also to the delegitimization of Eusebius (reduced to the guise of court hairdresser, as Franz Overbeck once caustically quipped), which are already present in the first essay, the new element that comes into play is the reference to Augustine and to the Trinitarian conception. This is presented as opposed to every form of monarchism and therefore to the very possibility of something like a political theology. What the Trinitarian dogma makes impossible is the analogy between the single divine principle and the single king which, starting from the Aristotelian tradition, traverses the Judaic and later Hellenistic conception to the Christian apologetics of the first centuries. But, if we closely examine Peterson’s treatment of the topic, what the Trinitarian formula opposes—along the line that leads from Gregory of Nazianzus to Augustine—is not the monarchical principle as such, but the inextricable knot that ties it from the outset to the category of duality. It is true that the verses from the Iliad quoted by Aristotle in Book 12 of his Metaphysics are opposed specifically to Platonic dualism: “But things do not wish to be governed badly: The rule of many is not good; let one the ruler be (Homer, Iliad 2.204).”  But already in the pseudoAristotelian piece on the world, which elaborates the lesson on the topic, the emphasis shifts to the distinction within the divine principle between fi rst authority (arche) and power (dynamis). Rather than Aristotle’s invisible mover, God thus becomes the puppeteer who, by pulling on the characters’ strings, enables the multiplicity of their movements. Hence, Peterson can state that “God is the presupposition of the fact that ‘power’ . . . is active in the cosmos, but precisely for that reason, he himself is not a ‘power.’ ”  Starting from this splitting of the One, destined to mark the entire development of political theology, Peterson introduces the saying attributed to Louis Adolphe Thiers and repeatedly cited by Schmitt: le roi règne, mais il ne gouverne pas (the king reigns but does not govern). This formula can be interpreted in two ways. When seen from the perspective of divine auctoritas, it Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 59

59

6/20/15 10:54 AM

also seems to include potestas; as it does for example in the Quaestiones by Pseudo Augustine. When the distinction is interpreted in terms of Platonic dualism, however, it can lead to the Gnostic conclusion according to which the sovereignty of God is good in itself but the government made in his name by the demiurge, or by his ministers, is bad. What makes the political-theological dispositif negative in Peterson’s eyes, through all its inner metamorphoses, is not, therefore, the principle of the One, moved from the divine sphere to the human sphere; but rather its coexistence with that of the Two, which both affirms and perverts it, exposing it to the double heretical risk of Gnosticism and Arianism. Even Tertullian, in his polemic against Prassea’s Monarchianism, ends up emphasizing the distinction between Father and Son, probably inspired by the ancient Roman legal model of the double principality. The problem—not an easy one to resolve—underlying all the theological treatises of the patristic period remains that of combining the unitary criterion of monotheism with the Trinitarian mystery, without falling into a dual logic of subordination between First and Second person. Monarchianism and Subordinationism are the rocky shores that no Christian theologian manages to safely navigate without drifting toward one or the other. In developing Eusebius’s imperialist arguments, when Orosius ends up attributing the foundation of Rome to divine providence, even making Christ a Roman citizen, all he is doing is openly expressing the Arian tendency that underlies the imperial theology from the start. “We see that it was a pressing political interest that first drove the emperors to the side of the Arians,” concludes Peterson, forcing the historical data to some extent, “and that, on the other hand, the Arians were fated to become the theologians of the Byzantine court. Orthodox Trinitarian doctrine in effect threatened the political theology of the Roman Empire.”  What the author infers from this, to further his polemical goal, is the condemnation of a given form of political theology; but also the defeat of the political-theological paradigm in whatever guise it had assumed— including the one adopted in Schmitt’s footsteps by theologians who supported Nazism: “To my knowledge, the concept of ‘political theology’ ”—here comes the final blow—“was introduced into the literature by Carl Schmitt (Politische Theologie, Munich 1922). . . . Here we have tried to show by a concrete example the theological impossibility of a ‘political theology.’ ”  Th is point—the theological character of this impossibility—is what Schmitt’s response focuses on. Beyond the undoubtedly impor tant meth60

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 60

6/20/15 10:54 AM

odological disputes—the anomalous structure of Peterson’s text, the undue demonization of Eusebius, the historical inconsistency of his comparison with Augustine—what the jurist rejects is not the dichotomous characterization of the political-theological dispositif (which, on the contrary, he upholds) but rather its supposed incompatibility with the theological sphere. The idea that political discourse is essentially imbued with the theological— according to the oppositional friend/enemy bipolarity—is a fact that for Schmitt requires no further proofs. But what he forcefully states is that the dual structure of the political does not clash with the Christian theologumenon, because this is precisely what it derives from. The test bench he uses to turn Peterson’s idea back against him, is the same text by Gregory of Nazianzus cited by his adversary with the opposite intention. Th is is the “Oration on the Son” in which Peterson spots the frontal collision between the Trinitarian principle and the political-theological dispositif. Unlike anarchy and polyarchy, which lead to disorder and division, for Gregory only monarchy ensures a just order for human society. But—this is what sets them apart—not a monarchy that is contained in one single person. For it is possible for this one person, if at variance with itself, to become a plurality of persons. But it is a plurality which consists of an equality of nature, a unanimity of will, and an identity of action, and which converges back into the One from which they come—a thing unheard of among created natures. . . . Thus from the beginning the One, moving toward the Twofold, found its rest in the Threefold. This complex passage centers on the relationship between the Father and the Son, according to the difference between what is “begotten” and what is “unbegotten.” For Nazianzus—as well as for the other two Cappadocians, Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea—this takes form as a relationship in which a single substance consists of three different persons. This is precisely the point over which the clash between Peterson and Schmitt takes place. While Peterson insists on the consubstantial relationship between the divine One and the Trinitarian economy, to the exclusion of the dual principle originating from Gnosticism, Schmitt, on the contrary, brings to the fore the confl ict of the One with itself. There is no doubt that in philological terms, Peterson’s interpretation is the correct one; but this does not remove a basic difficulty concerning the defi nition of divine unity, as he Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 61

61

6/20/15 10:54 AM

himself deduces from Gregory. Out of the Twofold comes the One: either the Unity is constituted by a single principle—bringing us back to the Monarchian heresy; or it is doubled by the Second person, with the consequence of reintroducing the difference between arche and dynamis, between kingdom and government, that Peterson had recognized at the foundation of political theology. In short, the basic problem posed by Schmitt is the inevitable presence of the Two in the figure of the Incarnation, with which the Trinitarian principle is closely connected in Christian dogma. Th is means that, far from being confined to the political sphere, the most heated conflict—like the one that takes place between the two natures of the same person—arises within the same theological space that Peterson seeks to preserve from conflict. Therefore, rather than “saving” the theological from political semantics, the Trinitarian figure inevitably destines the theological to political semantics. “Peterson,” concludes Schmitt, “wants to uphold the absolute separation between the two domains, but, where the doctrine of the Trinity is concerned, an absolute separation would only be possible in the abstract, given that the second person of the Godhead represents the perfect unity of the two natures, the human and the divine.”  In this sense, for the jurist, one might say that “at the heart of the doctrine of Trinity we encounter a genuine politico-theological stasiology. Thus the problem of enmity and of the enemy cannot be ignored.”  As in the Winchester Binity, it is precisely the apparent identity between First and Second persons that sparks the most radical disagreement when, at the time of the Crucifi xion, the Son feels abandoned by the Father and fully experiences His remoteness. Th is is  when Schmitt—talking about “Christological politics”—can quote Goethe’s statement “nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse” (no one is/can do anything against God except God himself) which was, in turn, derived from a fragment from Catherina von Siena by Jakob Michael Lenz, when, fleeing her father, she exclaims “God against God,” thus placing “the problem of political theology in terms of the enemy.”  To this first observation, concerning dogma, Schmitt adds a second, even more cutting one that regards the political-theological dispositif itself. Just as it cannot be freed from the Two that permeates it through and through, so it cannot escape the unity that makes it such—both theological and political, in a bond whose undecidability can only be resolved by an untenable contradiction. This is precisely what Peterson runs into the moment he 62

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 62

6/20/15 10:54 AM

imagines a separation of spheres that are in reality indivisible. The reason for this is because the desire he expressed to theologically liquidate political theology is only testable through a political type of division. On the one hand, the theologian takes it upon himself to decide what is political; on the other, he advances a claim to authority over it, subordinating it to theology. However one looks at it, his decision—from or on the political— becomes all the more political, which is to say, exclusionary, the more it is declared to be theological: “Th is claim becomes politically more intense along with the degree to which theological authority claims to supersede political power. If the theologian insists on his theological decision, then he has decided on a political question theologically and has claimed for himself a kind of political competence.”  Each decision presupposes another regarding who decides and who judges its content. Consequently, if the political-theological dispositif is in itself a unity divided by a duality, then a further separation is not going to provide a way out. Th is is precisely the route that Jacob Taubes takes. He, too, stands in a unique, three-way relationship that connects him to Schmitt to the same extent that it separates him from Peterson, and vice versa. Once the boundary line that differentiates him from both—regarding their anti-Jewish Catholicism—is sharply delineated, he regains in that distance a proximity that is greater than the divergence, because it originates precisely from it, as a positive reaction. Moreover, on several occasions over the course of his work, a corpus indelibly marked by the events of his life—and in the end, also by the approach of death—Taubes refers to the secret node that, according to the teachings of Paul, connects enmity and love. Th is is so much the case that he even identified the focal point of his relationship with Schmitt in the tragic figure of the “enemy” that the Nazi regime pinned on him for being a Jew, something Schmitt was partly responsible for: “We knew that we were opponents to the death, but we got along splendidly. We knew one thing: that we were speaking on the same plane. And that was a very rare thing.”  This clear difference in fields is exactly what allowed a relationship to take form beyond simple contiguity, to plumb the depths of thought. Consequently, while Taubes agrees with Peterson’s critique of Schmitt’s political theology, rather than wholly reject it, he reverses its inner relations, shifting the center of gravity from the political to the theological Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 63

63

6/20/15 10:54 AM

sphere. But, in this way, by situating the political within the theological, he ends up separating it from itself, just as Schmitt had split the divine substance into two opposing polarities. The starting point for reconstructing this remarkable maneuver of adopting and reversing the political-theological dispositif is the letter written by Taubes on February 14, 1952, to Armin Mohler, better known as Ernst Junger’s secretary. In it, after having stated in no uncertain terms that “Carl Schmitt is (besides Heidegger) the intellectual capacity who stands above all intellectual scribbling,” he asks whether “the new nomos of the earth can compete with the nomos of Christ,” concluding that the answer is yes. And this is not because the post Christum world is not entirely marked by nihilism, but precisely for this reason—because, according to the messianic perspective that characterizes all of Taubes’s work, time is coming to an end: “And surely the question of law must today be posed ‘theologically’: that is, it must be asked: how does a system of law [Recht] look, given that atheism is our fate?” It is on this occasion that Taubes for the first time introduces an explicit reference to political theology, understood as “ ‘the’ cross of every theology.” But he immediately explains that this is not to be understood as Augustine defined it, but rather in terms of the Jewish, specifically antinomic meaning, on the basis of which “theology finally cannot be broken down by dividing it by ‘political,’ because law is finally not the first and the last after all, because there are ‘even’ between man and man relationships that ‘exceed,’ ‘transcend’ law.” Already in this passage there is a clear distance separating Taubes from the author to whom he nonetheless awarded the highest recognition. What he rejects about Schmitt’s political theology, because it serves the existing order, is a unification of his terms based on their preliminary separation, thus destined to make theology an instrument of political legitimacy. It is not difficult to recognize in this articulation the same dispositif—a unity inhabited by duality—that Peterson rejected in the idea of monotheism. But, at the time that he agrees with Peterson’s criticism of Schmitt, Taubes rejects the conclusion, namely, the liquidation of all forms of political theology by restoring the separation between its terms. Against this “solution”—in the literal sense of dissolving that which is united—Taubes moves in the opposite direction. Rather than assume the separation between theology and politics—as does Schmitt before denying it, and Peterson before confirming it—he presupposes their original unity, viewed from a theological perspective. This passage in particular, 64

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 64

6/20/15 10:54 AM

from the plane of the political to the plane of the theological, is what prevents any drift toward a legitimizing meaning that Schmitt himself arrives at in defense of the nomos. There is a distinction that must be firmly maintained with regard to this risk of instrumentalization that will serve to preserve the initial implication between theology and politics at the heart of the divergence. In order to understand exactly what Taubes meant when he argued against Schmitt that “the separation of powers between worldly and spiritual is absolutely necessary. This boundary, if it is not drawn, we will lose our Occidental breath,” we must integrate this statement with the apparently contrary one that “there is, in fact, no theology that should not be relevant for the order of society. Even a theology that claims to be apolitical altogether, and conceives the divine as the totally foreign, as the totally other to man and world, may have political implications.” As is evident, the passage just quoted is not directed only at Peterson— against the elimination of political theology through the absolute separation of its poles—but also against the dialectical theology of Karl Barth, who, in his The Epistle to the Romans, had proclaimed the impolitical character of the theological word, arriving, at least from this point of view, at a condemnation of political theology that was no different from Peterson’s. What escapes both, in Taubes’s opinion, is the political kernel preserved by theology, expressed precisely in their necessary tension. There is a point that is concealed and yet never so alive as during the time of the end of time, in which theology and the political relate to each other along the arc of their divergence. This point is the critique of power: “The secret nexus between the two realms is established by the concept of power. Only when the universal principle of power is overruled will the unity of theology and political theory be superseded. A critique of the theological element in political theory rests ultimately on a critique of the principle of power itself.” Here, finally, his criticism of Peterson is joined to the contrary one, directed against Schmitt. Unlike Peterson, Schmitt recognizes the unity between the two realms, but as a function of a sovereign right that excludes one of them, the theological, in favor of the other. Not that he does not really grasp the nihilistic drift that threatens the world—the signs of the apocalypse; but instead of recognizing it as the harbinger of the Parousia, he wants to delay it by means of a restraining katechon constituted by the state or by the Church of Rome. It is from this perspective that Taubes can defi ne Schmitt as the “apocalyptician of counterrevolution” while considering himself the Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 65

65

6/20/15 10:54 AM

“apocalyptician of revolution”: “This is what he later calls the katechon. The retainer [der Aufhalter] that holds down the chaos that pushes up from below. That isn’t my worldview, that isn’t my experience. I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is.” Nowhere more than in these phrases do we see the traces of another author who, in the dual divergence with Schmitt and Peterson, stands as the true point of reference for Taubes’s political theology. I am referring to Walter Benjamin, who, in opposition to Theodor Adorno’s censure, Taubes claims has an affinity with Schmitt’s lexicon, once again through opposition. As Benjamin himself recognizes in a letter that later became famous for not having been included in the posthumously published collection, what unites him to the German jurist, beyond the insurmountable distance between them, is the theory of the state of exception as a breach in the time of normal rule. However, while for Schmitt it is the measure of sovereignty, for Benjamin it represents the narrow door through which the Messiah may break through at any time. The required point of reference, in addition to the “Theologico-Political Fragment,” is Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” as the battlefield for the final clash between the two adverse political theologies—the katechontic, that of the defense of power; and the apocalyptic, that of its destruction. Corresponding to these is the opposition between the mythical violence of law and divine violence, which destabilizes it. What appears to affect Taubes the most in this sort of scenario is not only the obvious conflict but also the secret contiguity between the two types of violence—both of which are what they are because they are both attached to a law, albeit an antinomic one. The messianic type of political theology refers precisely to a divine nomos that is both constitutive and deprivative. It does not refer to the simple abolition of the law, but to its fulfillment in the form of an implosion that is extraneous to simple anarchy as well as to the existing legal order. Taubes’s perspective—located at the point of internal tension between eschatology, apocalyptics, and messianism—is that the end of time, made possible by the foundering of all katechons, is not external but internal to time itself, present, and active in every moment. Returning to political theology, this means that once the law is released from all legitimating roles, in order to be adequate for the time of the end, it must coincide with its own disactivation. It must become the law of the end of the law. All these reasons return, in a singular mixture of exegetical notes and personal moods, in the seminar on the Epistle to the Romans, which is the 66

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 66

6/20/15 10:54 AM

most acute point in Taubes’s reflection on the relationship between theology and politics. The seminar held in Heidelberg in 1987, a few weeks before his death, with the intensely prophetic title of “The deferral granted to the condemned. An apocalyptic experience of time,” distances itself from all the usual readings by stating the essentially political meaning of the Pauline epistle. By addressing the letter to not just any community, but to that of Rome, the seat of the Empire, Paul intends to oppose it with a counterpower. Therefore, more than a sermon or a convocation, it has the tones of a “political declaration of war against Rome.” According to a thesis already advanced by Bruno Bauer in Christus und die Caesaren, in the document that begins Christian literature Taubes identifies an explicit protest against the Roman cult of the Caesars. At its heart there stands the challenge to the law that the interpretative tradition has read especially in an anti-Jewish key, but that, according to Paul’s intentions, is directed to all forms of nomos, starting with that of the emperor. Against its claim to universality, this nomos takes shape as Rome’s instrument of domination over other peoples. Therefore it should be demolished in favor of those who have been condemned by it. For Paul, “it isn’t nomos but rather the one who was nailed to the cross by nomos who is the imperator! . . . This is nothing like nomos as summum bonum. This is why this carries a political charge; it’s explosive to the highest degree. And this is expressed in the language itself.” However, once the political character of the Pauline letter has been established, where exactly does this reside? How is it exercised? Which subject is its bearer? And, above all, if its objective is subversive in nature, how can this be reconciled with chapters 12–13, which theorize obedience to the existing power? These are crucial questions, because the meaning that Taubes gives to what he calls “political theology” is contained in their answers. We have seen how he rejects the thesis of its liquidation, advanced by Peterson against Schmitt. But we have also noted his distance from all legitimizing interpretations like Schmitt’s in relation to the sovereign power. Indeed, the only form of political theology that Taubes affirms is one that is designed to eliminate it altogether—one that is not only foreign to power but also opposed to it. Unlike Karl Barth’s stance, which excludes any “positive possibility”—beyond the universal principle of love—Taubes recognizes the theological significance of a power that subverts the existing power relations. But, at the same time, he avoids giving any indications as to the tools needed to put this into operation. As much as Paul shared the anti-Roman Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 67

67

6/20/15 10:54 AM

intention of the Zealots, who violently demanded their autonomy from Rome, he did not identify with their nationalist movement. So, then, how does his political theology take form? What is it exactly that renders it “political”? If Paul’s attitude is revolutionary, what is its mode, its direction, its mission? In reality, Taubes provides a response when he claims that Paul measures himself against Moses, surpassing him with regard to the need to reestablish a different people than the one of his provenance. While Moses refused to give life to a new people, thereby extinguishing the preceding one, Paul laid claim to precisely this role. His intention was to establish a completely new people. But what exactly did “the establishment of a new people” mean for him? And even before that, what is a people from the point of view of a messianic political theology? To answer this question we must go back to the fi rst, and only, book by Taubes, on Occidental Eschatology, which elaborates on the politicaltheological paradigm through the concept of “theocracy,” which the author also revisits in his later writings. The first person to make use of the term was the historian Flavius Josephus when he alluded to a political form that by assigning absolute command to God eliminates any sovereignty within the community. While Taubes’s main source on this topic is the book by Julius Wellhausen, A Community without Authority, the most significant term of comparison remains Martin Buber’s studies on The Kingship of God. By comparing the original Judaic political organization to the protoIslamic world of the Bedouins, Buber depicts it specifically as a direct government of Yahweh, to the exclusion of all other forms of power. In Judges 8:22, when the soldiers offer Gideon the hereditary rulership, he answers, “JHWH, who is God himself, He it is who is to rule over you. These words, concludes Buber, dare to deal seriously with the rulership of God.” However, Taubes shifts the center of gravity toward a more radically antinomic key compared to Buber’s reading. Both interpret the “theopolitical” (as Buber defines it) of the Jewish people in terms of an alliance with God that is alternative to any other source of power. And both recognize that Yahweh is estranged from any territorial roots. But Taubes extends the rootlessness to the people itself, which is thus barred from any spatial belonging and is destined to eternal wandering. More than being extended in space, the rootlessness is extended into the extreme time of the eschaton: “Ezekiel, the prophet of the Exile, is convinced that putting down roots in the state and in the earth was misguided. Therefore, he completely uproots the tree of the 68

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 68

6/20/15 10:54 AM

nation from the old earthly kingdom and—in a monstrous inversion of the laws of natu ral growth—replants it with its roots pointing upward.” Despite the change in relationship between eschatology and messianism, this is the horizon in which the concept of political theology must be situated as it is used in the seminar on the Epistle to the Romans. We have seen how it should be examined in the context of the youthful writings of Walter Benjamin and especially the “Theologico-Political Fragment.” In this, Benjamin says that since the kingdom of God is not the goal, but the end of history, “the order of the profane cannot be built up on the idea of the Divine Kingdom” and therefore “theocracy has no political, but only a religious meaning.” This irremediable gap between the profane and the divine kingdoms is the source of the apparently indecipherable character of Paul’s political action, and, in general, of a literally antinomic political theology. According to the Marcionite school of thought, which Taubes views as connecting the messianism of Paul with that of Benjamin, it can only express itself by withdrawing: like the law in the time of the end of all laws, it takes the form of its own disactivation. Therefore, the political theology that Taubes endorses, contrary to Peterson and contrary to Schmitt, can only assert the “negative,” in line with a perfect correspondence between affirmation and negation. Following this reasoning, the Jewish people that Paul wants to reestablish, founding it along with the pagan people converted to Christianity, is a nonpeople, a people inhabited by its own negation: “Abraham’s race regards itself not as belonging to the nations, but as a nonnation. This is exactly what the name Hebrew means.” To be truly universal it must enter into contradiction with itself. How could this people be both natural and elected at the same time? How could it belong to the earth and to heaven? How can it attend to the flesh and to the spirit? The only way is to be different from itself, identified by a constitutive difference, united by what divides it—two-in-one and one-in-two, like that which includes by excluding itself. Once again, even when turned inside out in its messianic version, by presupposing the unity of its terms, the political-theological dispositif goes back to speaking the language of the Two. Absorbed into theology, the political can only be expressed by negating itself—splitting itself into an authority without community and a community without authority. The debate between Schmitt, Peterson, and Taubes contains all the elements of the theological-political paradigm, but expressed in a contracted as well Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 69

69

6/20/15 10:54 AM

as contrastive form, which does not allow for a unitary conceptual organization. It is as if the three authors were too involved in the context of their origins to be able to draw an objective picture. For this to happen, we must go outside the political-theological context as such—or at least outside the Judeo-Christian monotheism that constitutes the predominant flow channel, to examine it from the outside. This is what Jan Assmann does in a series of texts with rare hermeneutic depth, using his skills as an Egyptologist not to evade the issues posed in particular by Taubes and Schmitt but to view them more objectively through a broader perspective. The result is not a different balance of power between theology and politics but a more acute reconstruction of their mutual implication. What attracts Assmann’s attention is not so much their unity, already theorized by Schmitt, or their separation, differently maintained by both Peterson and Taubes, as much as the antinomic node that makes one both the opposite and the content of the other. At the beginning of Power and Salvation: Political Theology in Ancient Egypt, he proposes to develop a concept of political theology that includes both, the idea of the necessary unity of power and salvation exactly as much as the idea of their necessary separation. Therefore, no matter how explicitly stated, the author’s proposition to overturn Schmitt’s idea that all concepts imbued with modern political science have a theological root should not be absolutized into the contrary idea, according to which theological dogmas are rooted in political semantics. Aimed at deconstructing the paradigm of secularization that Schmitt himself ended up adopting (albeit in a critical manner), Assmann’s proposition must be understood as the first step in a more complex discourse. At its foundation there is the rejection of a unilinear interpretation of the historical process that, moving from a single point toward a superior outcome, seems to exclude in principle the recurrence of phenomena considered to be superseded, such as, for example, religious conflicts. At stake, even before the direction of the process—from theology to politics, rather than from politics to theology—is the question of its origin, as Assmann does not fail to note: “My perspective is not limited to overturning Schmitt’s thesis; rather it broadens it by engaging with the history that precedes it. The religion that provided political science with the significant concepts issued in its turn from something else. I will investigate the origin of religion according to the same meaning of ‘origin’ with which Christian Meier speaks of the origin of the political.” This means revoking the idea that the political was 70

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 70

6/20/15 10:54 AM

derived simply from theology, since theology must, in its turn, seek its own origin in the political. As Peterson demonstrated in his book on monotheism, the concept of divine monarchy developed by Philo of Alexandria, Origen, and Eusebius arose from the theological adoption of the imperial Roman model. Still more symptomatic along these lines is the Old Testament theology of the covenant, obviously based on formulas from political treaties and the vassal’s oath of fealty to the king. For Assmann, the idea of covenant (berit in Hebrew) is not one example among others, but the categorial archetype of the transfer from the political language to the religious one. Since then, at least starting from the biblical books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, this transfer carried on throughout the entire Jewish tradition, ultimately spreading to the Christian one. But, as Assmann himself immediately makes clear, while it cannot be said that religion is the origin of the political, neither can the political be simply posited as the origin of the theological. By this he means that in order to transmigrate into the religious lexicon, the political concepts must, in their turn, have been influenced by theological concepts, so as to create a double cross flow that theologizes the political and politicizes the theological. Which of the two processes was the origin of the other is a misleading question that has nevertheless affected the entire history of political theology, since it presupposes exactly what does not occur—which is to say, the cohesion of the origin, split apart from the outset in two different directions. From this point of view, the hypothesis of a simple chronological succession—from a theological phase to a secularized one—is wrong, since the two movements do not follow each other in time, but overlap each other. In this continuous oscillation between the political and the religious, we glimpse the first quality of the political-theological machine. It is not reducible to theological legitimization of the political, as Peterson would have it, to a posthumous politicization of theology, according to Schmitt’s thesis, or to the essentially political character of theology, as Taubes conceives it. None of these interpretations is entirely false on its own, only if inextricably mixed together with the others. Political theology, in the full meaning of the expression, is precisely the performative effect that each of the two terms causes on the other, changing its meaning: “When central axioms of cultural semantics are ‘transposed’ from the social dimension to the religious dimension of human life, this has consequences for the collectivity exactly as it has consequences for the religion when, in the reverse Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 71

71

6/20/15 10:54 AM

direction, central religious axioms are transposed into the social, or political, dimension and are thus secularized.” In this production of mutual effects, the nature of the political-theological process as a dispositif becomes manifest. As we have said from the outset, it should be seen as neither a simple historical fact nor a conceptual category, but as a performative mechanism that acts on what it takes hold of, in some way separating the latter from itself. It is for this reason that even before referring to Michel Foucault, we discussed what Heidegger called “machination”—meaning something that presents itself in the form of its opposite. This is precisely what Assmann identifies, à propos of the dispute between Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg, in the relationship between the religious and the secular, recognizing one as the inverse result of the other: “The ‘theological,’ exactly like the ‘secular,’ is also not something originary: it is the direction imparted by a contrary process.” As we have seen, in the relationship between theology and the political, neither of the two has absolute priority, because it is a matter of the same dynamic that plays out differently depending on the temporary dominance of one of the two poles. Now, however, Assmann adds a new characterization that brings it another step closer to Heidegger’s Machenschaft: not only do the two terms overlap, but they also do so through a sort of mutual masking that makes the one the counterfeit face of the other. Rather than a harmonious synthesis, the result is a genuine battle for the conquest of the dominant meaning. Political theology is not, in itself, a unity or a separation; it is a unity consisting of a separation—a Two that tends toward the One by means of the exclusionary inclusion of the other pole. Nothing corresponds to this logic more than Judeo-Christian monotheism, as is evident from the comparison established by Assmann with Egyptian political theology. In both cases unity merges with duality. Indeed, in Egypt the original presence of the double is even more pronounced than in Israel: The political symbolism of ancient Egypt, which is to say, the forms in which the Egyptians conceptualized their state, hinges around the themes of the division and reuniting of two parts, or dualism and unity. Egypt means “the two countries” or “the two shores” . . . “Unification” is the keyword that most accurately captures the meaning of this distinctly dualistic symbolism. 72

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 72

6/20/15 10:54 AM

The same foundational myth of the clash between the principle of order, represented by Horus, and that of chaos, impersonated by Seth, concludes with a reconciliation that marks the subordination of the latter to the authority of the former. Once it takes form, however, unity tends to prevail over separation—so much so that the word “bond” is the passkey into the Egyptian world, to which, in their constitutive relationship, the four spheres of morality, law, politics, and religion refer. The last two in particular—law and politics—are not opposed to each other nor do they tend to exclude each other, but rather they are expressed in a dialectic that views one emerging from the other according to the par ticu lar form of political theology that Assmann defines as “representative.” By this he means that with the supreme power fi xed in the divine sphere, the power of the pharaoh descends from it as a sort of earthly appendage endowed with its own sphere of autonomy. Thus, we can say that in Egypt the line of the political did not run counter to but alongside that of theology, in a subordinate but autonomous fashion. Quite different is the case of Israel, where the theologization process went in the opposite direction to synthesis, marking a clear separation between power and salvation. In the dialectic between unity and duality, the latter clearly prevailed over the former, but without ever losing its relationship with it. While in Egypt it could be said that the Two is what generated the One, in Israel the opposite took place. The type of monotheism that gained ground there for the first time (after the unsuccessful attempt by Akhnaton) was precisely what established the conditions for a distinction, but also for a genuine conflict, with earthly power. Instead of a representative political theology like what formed in Egypt, the model that took shape was the one that Taubes traced to theocracy. In this case, the theological did anything but fuse with the political; instead it tended to replace the political, subjecting it to theological domination. This is the crucial threshold, starting from which the political-theological machine arrived at its final form, constituted by a violent exchange between its terms that attributes to one the qualities of the other. We are very far from a harmonious concept of secularization, in a dynamic that sees the two poles of theology and the political aiming at mutual exclusion: When theological concepts are “secularized” this has consequences for theology. It is not confined, in short, to discovering an analogy, a third Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 73

73

6/20/15 10:54 AM

term common to the almighty God and the almighty legislator. The consequences are much more drastic: in the name of the almighty legislator, the almighty God must vacate the position of the lawmaker. In the process of transposition that I call “theologization” what happens is exactly the opposite: in the name of God the legislator, the earthly ruler must vacate this position. But the front line of the battle is not limited to the clash between theology and politics. It runs, vertically, through each of the two fields with disruptive effects on the structure of the other. Certainly, the origin of violence is always political—it regards and involves primarily the power relations that constrain people according to determinate forms of command and obedience, oppression and resistance. But in order to acquire the force that characterizes it, it must pass through the language of theology, turning it into a new, more powerful, political device. Thus, the violence that runs through the Old Testament, starting at least from Exodus, came about through the Jews assuming, inside themselves, the violence that they endured during the Egyptian captivity, from whom they managed to achieve emancipation only by adopting it themselves in some way. In other words, they made it into a force of impact not only against the Egyptian state, but also against the state institution as such, which they replaced in Israel with a divine power alternative to any earthly authority. In Assmann’s view, this process is closely intertwined with that of the historical clash within the theological realm, between primary religions that are not yet exclusive of other religious forms, and secondary religions that are organized instead around the true/false dichotomy, immediately transposed into the friend/enemy political antagonism. But the aspect that is even more characteristic of the Judaic political-theological rule is that the predominant object of this confl ict, which also emerged during the struggle against Egyptian domination, did not arise from an external alterity. In other words, it did not come from foreign peoples, but from an alterity within the community of membership: “The violence and the law mobilized in this case strike much more at their own group than at others, acting much more effectively toward the inside than the outside.” Thus, while foreign cities can be conquered “normally,” the inhabitants of Canaan, as Jews who have yet to be converted, must be smitten with the edge of the sword (Deut. 13:15), because what must be completely eradicated is not the polytheism of others but whatever remains of 74

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 74

6/20/15 10:54 AM

polytheism inside monotheism—in actuality, only to the extent that its own unity is reinforced by the sword of division. Assmann repeats several times that his message has nothing to do with any form of anti-Semitism or even anti- Christianism. When he stresses in no uncertain terms that the violence incorporated into the Old Testament never had any real effect in Jewish history, since it was transferred, rather, into the Christian and then Muslim worlds, his intention is not to  express a negative opinion of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Even less does he advocate some sort of regression to a polytheistic or cosmotheistic era that would be unfeasible today. It is not that religious monotheism is violent per se, as only a superficial reading would conclude. Monotheism becomes violent when it politicizes at the same time that the political dons a theological mask. At the heart of this dialectic, to which we have traced back the performative core of the political-theological dispositif, there lies the relationship between universalism and exclusion. Those who assert the inclusive nature of Judeo- Christian monotheism, projecting the division onto the polytheistic pantheon, are largely in the right, except in their attempt to specifically locate in it a nonsecondary root of exclusion. As in the Hegelian philosophy of history, the tendency to include difference in order to evacuate it as such, by getting rid of the irreducible portion, is specific precisely to Judeo-Christian monotheism. This is so much the case that in the absence of an external foe, it turns the violence against its own people, like what took place in Israel: “Judaism is a religion of selfexclusion. Through its divine election, Israel isolates itself (or is isolated by god) from the circle of peoples. The law erects a high wall around the chosen people, a cordon sanitaire that prevents any contamination by, or assimilation of, the idea and customs of the environment.” It is no coincidence that in the Bible the most brutal massacres strike the worshippers of the golden calf and the Jewish followers of Baal. Similarly, forms of violent proselytism have marked the history of Christianity no less than the history of Islamism. Along these lines, monotheism can be defined as “political at its core,” which is to say, “basically political theology,” because only in monotheism, for the first time in history, were politics and theology articulated in a machine that unifies a people through its self-exclusion.

Machination

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 75

75

6/20/15 10:54 AM

PA S S A G E Katechon

One of the biggest obstacles to penetrating the enclosure of political theology can be traced to the passkey that is generally used: the renowned isomorphism between theological concepts and political concepts theorized by Carl Schmitt in his 1922 essay. The entire debate, brought to a close eighty years later by Jan Assmann’s book on power and salvation, remained confined, one might say, within Schmitt’s methodological boundaries. Although the terms were reversed—going from the political to the theological instead of the other way around—the discussion continued to move within Schmitt’s paradigm, reproducing its analogical method. Not that using Schmitt’s work as a starting point was a mistake, considering that it effectively originated the twentieth-century formulation of the concept. But, rather than refer exclusively to the theory of sovereignty, it would have been better to focus attention on the figure of the katechon instead. This figure makes its most significant appearance in The Nomos of the Earth, in which Schmitt argues that the essential character of the Christian empire was not to be eternal: “It always had its own end and that of the present eon in view. Nevertheless, it was capable of being a historical power. The decisive historical concept of this continuity was that of the restrainer [Aufhalter]: katechon.” In reality, as Schmitt himself recalls, his interest in the katechon dates back to 1932, when he began to believe “that there is in every century a concrete bearer of this force and that it is a matter of finding it. . . . This is a total presence hidden under the veils of history.” Schmitt was not the first writer to note the enigmatic nature of the katechon: Augustine, commenting on Paul’s

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 76

6/20/15 10:54 AM

text in which the term appears for the first time, frankly confesses that he does “not know what he means.” The original passage in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians itself spoke of “mystery,” referring to anomie or lawlessness. This, according to Paul, is already at work, but, “Only he who now restrains it (ho katechon) will do so until he is out of the way” (2 Thess. 2:7). Before coming to the main question regarding the subject of the katechein, let us pause on its function, which for Schmitt was to “restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon.” Its aporetic character lies in the fact that the katechon, by holding back evil, also prevents the ultimate good from manifesting itself. Indeed, only when the katechon has been “cleared away” will the Parousia come to pass. In order to protect people from the Antichrist, the katechon defers the final battle that will lead to the victory of the good. This means that rather than eradicate evil, the katechon restrains it to prevent it from being unleashed, based on the idea that the worst is yet to come. The need to incorporate evil, controlling it, issues from this imperative: to safeguard the possibility of the good by delaying its realization. This explains the ambivalent tone of the Epistle, which is neither completely negative nor completely positive. Although Paul wrote it to curb the apocalyptic impatience of the early Christian communities, he does not want to disappoint their expectations either, so he confines himself to describing the opportunity of a further waiting period made possible by the restraining force of the katechon. But who—or what—is the katechon? This is the pivotal question of Schmitt’s treatise. His political problem—an eminently political-theological one, at that, completely foreign to the apocalyptic propensities of early Christianity—is to preserve an order threatened by the disruptive powers of division. To this end, he resolves Paul’s still undecided attitude in a resolutely positive key. At stake in Schmitt’s eyes is the self-destructive process of Europe and the entire civilization it engendered. Katechon is what opposed this divisive tendency, standing up to it, at least until a certain time. Far from being a recent phenomenon, this divisive drift had a long incubation period dating back to the end of the respublica Christiana, when the Empire began to split up into what became the different national states. This is what lies behind the unusual stance that Schmitt takes toward them. Although at the moment of Europe’s defeat he looks back with regret on the time of the ius publicum europaeum, now on the threshold of exhaustion, from a historical perspective he considers it a late-phase consequence of a Passage: Katechon

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 77

77

6/20/15 10:54 AM

previous division. Having loosened the knot between authority and power from which the respublica christiana derived its legitimacy, the European states now remain exposed to a process of depoliticization brought to its culmination by the impersonal dominion of technology. If this is the case, if the disintegration began with the formation of national states, then the restraining force that the Church Fathers defined as katechon can only be the Roman Empire. Moreover, at the beginning of a long political-theological tradition, Tertullian maintained that “a mighty shock impending over the whole earth—in fact, the very end of all things threatening dreadful woes—is only retarded by the continued existence of the Roman empire.”  When Bishop Eusebius, in officially inaugurating Constantine’s political theology, identified the Roman Empire as the precondition for the spread of the Word, prearranged by Providence, he legitimated this interpretation from the theological point of view as well. For Schmitt, the fact that other authors identified the katechon as the Church itself, or even as God’s salvific economy, integrated rather than clashed with his own interpretation, since the Empire and the Church placed themselves in a continuous relationship, converging in the same mission to keep Europe united: “The unity of this respublica Christiana had its adequate succession of order in imperium [empire] and sacerdotium [priesthood]; its visible agents, in emperor and pope.”  In this passage, the figure of the katechon comes so close to what I have called the “machine of political theology” that they are almost superimposed on top of each other. We have already seen how they share the same enigmatic face of internal contradiction: Like Heidegger’s machination, in producing the good through evil, or entrusting evil with the safeguarding of the good, the katechon presents itself hidden in the guise of its opposite. But another peculiar characteristic of this machine is also revealed in the katechon: the presence of the Two within the One. Schmitt insists on this point, while also stressing its unitary aspect: “The medieval West and Central European unity of imperium and sacerdotium was never a centralized accumulation of power in the hands of one person. From the beginning, it rested on the distinction between potestas [power] and auctoritas [authority] as two distinct lines of order of the same encompassing unity.” In his interpretation, the diversity between the two powers does not conflict with the unity of the respublica Christiana; on the contrary, it reinforces the unity, expressing it as a functional distinction. The assumption underlying 78

Passage: Katechon

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 78

6/20/15 10:54 AM

this argument is that the relationship of the Church with the Empire is essentially different from the relationship of the Church with the states. While the states had to pass through the neutralization of the wars of religion in order to establish themselves, the relationship between the Church and the Empire maintained its homogeneity by combining the two spheres into a unity shared equally by the pope and the emperor. As Schmitt goes on to explain, the powers of the pope and the emperor, both of which were rooted in a transcendent source, were not opposed in any absolute way; on the contrary, they constituted the two complementary sides of a single politicaltheological world that was nurtured by their relationship. Only starting from the thirteenth century, when they were ascribed to two societates perfectae (perfect societies), did the duality begin to undermine the unity, ending up by shattering it. Schmitt extends his organicistic interpretation to the point of stating that “neither for an emperor, who had a pope installed and removed in Rome, nor for a pope in Rome, who released the vassals of an emperor or a king from their oath of allegiance, was the unity of the respublica Christiana ever brought into question.” As the Church inherited its legal form from Roman law, so the Empire incorporated the ecumenical potential of the Church into its civilizing mission. This original integration is what ensured that Roman Catholicism would maintain its monopoly over the political in the era of depoliticization. But is this really how things stand? Or, just like what happened to Hegel, was Schmitt’s reconstruction captured by the machine that he was describing? To argue that the conflict between the two forces was absent throughout the Middle Ages when in actuality it reached its apex during this period is an optical illusion created by the same political-theological conception that Schmitt seeks to account for. In reality, the unity of the respublica Christiana was undermined from the outset by the continuous struggle between the two competing powers that attempted to subjugate each other. It is true that there was a current, attributable to Ambrose and brought to completion in Dante’s Monarchy, on the basis of which the two “suns” could coexist without necessarily colliding, founded on their respective independence. But this theory was soon superseded and then swept away by Pope Gelasius’s political Augustinianism and rescript, which affirmed the primacy of religious authority in a form that was unacceptable to the emperors. Seeking to subordinate political power, Gelasius’s claim to papal primacy unleashed a battle for supremacy in the Christian West that Passage: Katechon

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 79

79

6/20/15 10:54 AM

lasted for centuries. In terms of dogma, what was at stake was the relationship between the two fateful biblical passages of Romans 13 and Matthew 22. Once again, the issue is the relationship between the One and the Two—the way in which one pole tends to include the other in its own sphere of competence, excluding the other from exercising the function for which it was intended. As we know, while Romans 13:1 states that “there is no authority except from God,” Matthew 22:21 restores the binary paradigm, by inviting us to render “to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” While in Paul’s text God is the fount of all authorities, which are unified by a common inferiority to the source from which they emanate, in Matthew there are at least two autonomous spheres, governed by their internal laws. What he sought to avoid in this manner was destructive conflict. But the problem is that even this potentially neutralizing division saw a unifying trend prevail within it that was destined to inevitably rekindle the dispute. If there are two auctoritates, which of them is greater than the other, to the extent of being able to claim supremacy? Unity, split by this distinction, thus reassembles along lines of force that incite the two poles to mutually subjugate each other. Unlike what Schmitt argues, this happens precisely because of—and not despite—a politicaltheological dispositif that is always oriented toward the violent unification of the Two. The most remarkable fact—expressive of the internal contradiction of the paradigm of secularization that he employs—is that Schmitt himself had argued that confl ict always resurfaces in the unity, as demonstrated by the clash between Father and Son in the Trinity. At the root of the conflict of jurisdiction there lies the assumption of the idea of representation, posited by Schmitt as the foundation of Catholicism. It came into being when the idea of the nonrepresentability of God was superseded in favor of a regime that made extensive use of images. As long as God could not be figured, nobody could claim to represent him and, therefore, to govern in his place. Not unsurprisingly, the Jewish politicaltheological model is one of divine monarchy: Without the fi lter of representation, God can reign only directly. Everything changed when an iconological practice began to be disseminated. The most influential formulation of this practice in given in Eusebius’s Life of Constantine. In contrast to the propensity of original Christianity, which tended to clearly separate the spiritual dominion from the temporal one, for Eusebius, first the bishop and then the emperor in objective competition with him became 80

Passage: Katechon

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 80

6/20/15 10:54 AM

bearers of the holy icon in their person. From that moment on they both felt authorized to represent the supreme power that derives from it. When the early Christians came to theorize that as the prince conveys the image of God, the bishop reproduces that of Christ, all the preconditions for the confrontation were now set in place. It was on this ground that political Augustinianism took root, through the immediate transposition of the binary relationship from the anthropological plane to the political one: just as in every human being the body is subordinated to the soul, similarly the political body is subject to the mystic soul of the Church. Except that, once it is transferred to this terrain, the order of priority can easily be inverted. This is where the struggle to seize political control of consciences originated, which first saw the pope prevail and then the emperor. This means that political theology does not reside solely in the hierocratic thesis—or even in the opposing one—but precisely in their antinomic overlapping that makes this conflict the divided heart of the respublica Christiana. Political theology is the compulsion—one that has persisted into our times—to repeat the tendency to unify a compound through the exclusionary inclusion of its subaltern part. In this sense, one can well say that the both the ius publicum europaeum and the bipolar world of the postwar period as well as the globalized world (also structured along exclusionary division lines) all lie within the political-theological horizon, still subject to the restraining force of the katechon. If this is the case, a fundamental question still remains to be answered concerning the possibility—but also the absolute difficulty—of exiting that horizon. How can we escape from the horizon that protects us? How can we open ourselves to the Parousia (to stay with the Pauline language) without ushering in the devastating fury of the Apocalypse? How can we attain salvation while avoiding the encounter with anomos? This question, which has been asked and answered in the negative every time the threat of revolution looms up in the West, resounds once again when the crisis takes on a global aspect that is apparently unresolvable using mechanisms of a technical nature. Before formulating any par ticu lar answer, it requires that we delve deeper, with greater awareness, into the machine that holds us hostage. A question to start with concerns how Paul viewed the status of that mysterious anomie. Is it something that is frontally opposed to the nomos or to one of its excessive modes, which views the norm not as a simple secularization of the law, but rather as a different and, up until Passage: Katechon

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 81

81

6/20/15 10:54 AM

that point, unprecedented form of the nomos? The pages that follow mark out a path—certainly a difficult but not impassable one—of resistance to the political-theological lexicon, which deconstructs its prevailing dispositif: the category of the person. If the notion of personhood is what regulates the mechanism of exclusionary inclusion that separates both individuals from themselves as well as the human race from itself, then a philosophy of the impersonal constitutes a first approximation for disassembling the political-theological machine. Against the idea of restoring personal representation, it is a matter of pushing the dissolution of the old political form to the maximum in order to benefit a different relationship between norms and forms of life. As we shall see, this has more traits in common with a conversion than a desacralization. What is involved is nothing less than imagining a Parousia without Apocalypse, or an affirmation without negation. Only in this way can we break through the walls of the katechon without fearing the fury of anomos—and commend the government of men to a power that liberates to rather than to the power that withholds (qui tenet).

82

Passage: Katechon

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 82

6/20/15 10:54 AM

2 THE DISPOSITIF OF THE PERSON

Tertullian’s treatise Against Praxeas is unquestionably where the term “person” first acquired a precise theological meaning. The author was certainly familiar with the term’s dramatic meaning of “character,” already in use in the literary production of the time. He was also aware of the grammatical meaning of the pronominal person, as evidenced by the expressions in persona and ex persona, referring respectively to the Father and to the Son. At other times he used the word in the general sense of a human entity, single or multiple, endowed with its own individuality. What remains less clear, however, is the relationship between the theological and legal lexicons. Which of the two engendered, or at least preceded, the other? Critical opinions on this question—crucial to defining the concept of “political theology”—diverge. Adolf von Harnack, although he later changed his opinion, was inclined toward an originally legal source—he accordingly traced the Trinitarian formula una substantia, tres personae to three subjects having a single good in common. Similarly, he traced the Christological formula of una persona, duae substantiae to a single subject possessing two different goods. Siegmund Schlossmann was of the opposite opinion: if anything, it was the legal codification of ancient Rome that benefited from the theological formula. The impression we get from this logic of antecedence, so to speak, is that not only is it difficult to get to the bottom of the question, the crucial point gets lost in the shuffle. This lies at the exact point of mutual implication between the two lexicons—namely, as we have already observed about the political-theological dispositif, in the performative effects that one produces in the other.

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 83

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Both Joseph Moingt and René Braun took a step forward in this direction, by clarifying that the category of person gave Tertullian a way to combine unity and duality in Christian dogmatics through the invention of a specialist lexicon that had the same capacity for abstraction as Roman law and Greek philosophy. But even more noteworthy is how the terminus technicus of persona acted as a semantic transformer in the workings of the political-theological machine. We know that this consists in unifying the Two in such a way as to subordinate one part to the supremacy of the other. This occurs precisely through the theological category of person, in both its Trinitarian and Christological formulations. In both cases, it fulfills the need of expressing a unity through a division. This is how Gregory of Nazianzus would later express it, bringing to completion the path that Tertullian had so brilliantly opened up: the “hypostasis” (the term Gregory also used to refer to persons) “is divided without division, if I may put it that way, and is joined together in the midst of distinction.” What he conceives of here is nothing less than a division that unites instead of dividing, while nevertheless continuing to differentiate. According to the NiceneConstantinopolitan formula, there are three Persons, it is true. But right from the start—along a line that continued at least as far as Hilary of Poitiers and Basil of Ancyra—the Third, which is to say the Holy Spirit, does not seem to enjoy the same rank as the First and Second. It is placed at the middle point of their junction rather than by their side. Moreover, Tertullian assigns it a certainly peculiar, if not marginal, task that situates it both inside and outside the Trinitarian figure. On one hand, as the Third, it is part of the Trinity, but on the other hand it is what interprets the Trinity, by bringing it to light: the Paraclete is “the Third Name in the Godhead, and the Third Degree of the Divine Majesty; the Declarer of the One Monarchy of God, but at the same time the Interpreter of the Economy” (XXX.5)—that which connects the ontological plane of monarchy with the administrative plane of economy, revealing it to human beings. In short, the problem that the author attempts to resolve through the paradigm of the person—prior to the relationship between the Three, which also ensues from it—is the relationship between the Two, that is, between Father and Son, as depicted in the Winchester Binity that we examined in connection with Kantorowicz. The enigmatic words of John 1:1 resound within it: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This seems to identify two subjects, while at the same time stating that they are different. 84

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 84

6/20/15 10:54 AM

But how can a single entity split itself into two? How can two distinct entities unify themselves while maintaining their difference? And how are we to understand the other passage in John (10:30) “I and the Father are one,” in which plural and singular seem to be completely identical? As early as the second century CE, this crucial question was given essentially two types of answers, both of which were considered heretical by those who considered themselves interpreters of orthodoxy. The fi rst is the “ditheist” or “bitheist” response, also appearing in a Gnostic version, which doubles the divine entity into two principles that are separate and, therefore, de facto competitors. To this first option, with a polytheistic ring to it, there corresponds another, called “Monarchian,” because of its tendency to eliminate duality in favor of the single God, or “modalist,” inclined to conceive the duality as its simple “mode” of being. This second heresy—represented primarily by Noetus, challenged by Hippolytus in Contra Noetum, and, as we have seen, by Praxeas—is what Tertullian took a stand against by making a programmatic distinction between a unique substance and different persons. When he challenges those who “will have the Two to be but One, so that the Father shall be deemed to be the same as the Son [duos unum volunt esse ut idem Pater et Filius habeatur]” (V.1), he is referring specifically to the thesis that transfers the distinction into the figure of Christ, so as not to dispense with it completely. Christ is thus understood as the incarnation of the Father through a process of self-regeneration that ultimately turns Him into his own Son. Thus, even within a single person, the Son is split into a human principle named Jesus and a divine principle named Christ, who is also subject to his birth, Passion, and death. To tackle this tangle of contradictions Tertullian mobilizes a different dispositif, founded on the articulation between two different, related planes—the ontological plane of the monarchy and the technological plane of the economy. While the former ensures that it remains anchored to the monotheistic dogma, which is in any case indispensable, the latter allows it to be modulated in binary and possibly Trinitarian terms: “We,” says Tertullian, “declare that Two Beings are God, the Father and the Son, and, with the addition of the Holy Spirit, even Three, according to the principle of the divine economy, which introduces number, in order that the Father may not . . . be Himself believed to have been born and to have suffered” (XIII.5). Once the figure of the Son is differentiated from that of the Father, the presence of the Spirit neither raises problems nor demands further The Dispositif of the Person 85

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 85

6/20/15 10:54 AM

proofs. Not surprisingly, the most frequent accusation made against Tertullian, often associated with accusations of Gnosticism or Marcionism, is more often that of “ditheism” than “tritheism.” On the other hand, it is undeniable that the economic dispositif—the Latin translation of the Greek term oikonomia is dispositio or dispensatio (dispensation)—presupposes the same binary element that Erik Peterson discovered at the heart of political theology, which is to say the distinction in the monarchical regime between the supreme authority and the administration of men. This is precisely what allows Tertullian to situate himself at an equal distance between monists and polytheists: “If, moreover,” he warns, “there be a son belonging to him whose monarchy it is, it does not forthwith become divided and cease to be a monarchy, if the son also be taken as a sharer in it; but it is as to its origin equally his, by whom it is communicated to the son; and being his, it is quite as much a monarchy (or sole empire), since it is held together by two who are so inseparable” (III. 3). If the principle of the Two is introduced into a monarchy, then, it can also make itself into Three and even multiply itself into an army of angelic officers: “Therefore, inasmuch as the Divine Monarchy also is administered by so many legions and hosts of angels . . . it has not from this circumstance ceased to be the rule of one (so as no longer to be a monarchy), because it is administered by so many thousands of powers [tanta milia virtutum]” (III. 4). What is most striking in this economical distribution of the parties is the connection established between the political-theological machine and the dispositif of the person. The latter is what makes possible the divine plan for humankind’s salvation, at the same time making it manifest. We should not overlook the fact that its mysterious nature—attested to after Paul (Eph. 3:9) by Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus—makes it curiously similar to the “machination” that we discussed earlier: not only does it conceal itself from our eyes, but it sometimes presents itself in the guise of its opposite, which is to say, in the Gnostic tale of demiurgic design. According to this theory, the creation of the world was the work of a demon who is different from and antagonistic to the true God. Now, the category of person—presenting the Son and the Holy Spirit as divisions within a single divine substance—has the effect of restoring the truth of the salvific plan. But in order to do this, it must strengthen the unity pole over the diversity pole. In the beginning God is alone and therefore not yet Father. He only becomes Father later, when he decides to generate the Son. 86 The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 86

6/20/15 10:54 AM

This is the source of the Son’s relationship of dependency on, but also inherency in, the Father, from whom he never entirely separates himself, and to whom he ultimately returns. He is generated in the same way as the shoot from the root, the river from the source, and the ray from the sun—in other words, without ever separating from him. Tertullian insists on the fact that the distinction between the Two is not a form of “separation” (divisio). In actuality, the new economic lexicon makes it instead a form of “disposition” (dispositio) or “distribution” (distributio)—meaning, coessentiality of the Second, and then of the Third, with the First, which is also the All that includes them. But if that is so, if the second is an integral part of the First, disposition must necessarily also signify hierarchical dependency, as Tertullian himself confirms when he asserts that “Thus the Father is distinct from the Son, being greater than the Son, inasmuch as He who begets is one, and He who is begotten is another; He, too, who sends is one, and He who is sent is another; and He, again, who makes is one, and He through whom the thing is made is another” (IX. 2). This subordination-inherency is inevitable in the logical structure of the monotheist regime, even prior to its theological structure. However, when Tertullian affirms that “the Father is the entire substance, but the Son is a derivation and portion of the whole” (IX. 2), thereby coming close to the emanatistic language of the Valentinians, the relationship between the Two takes on an increasingly intrinsic character. Rather than two joined elements, they appear to be the internal divisions of a single element that makes one of the two parts into the functional instrument of the other. It is from here that the marked political-theological connotation arises, with the semantics of the person constituting both its effect and its internal mechanism. Its ultimate outcome is especially condensed into a passage of par ticu lar importance in which it is announced that all the power initially entrusted to the Son is returned to the person of the Father. The monarchy “remains so firm and stable in its own state, notwithstanding the introduction into it of the Trinity, that the Son actually has to restore it entire to the Father; even as the apostle says in his epistle, concerning the very end of all: ‘When He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; for He must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet’ ” (IV. 2). We will recall that this is the very same Psalm that the Binity of Winchester was attempting to illustrate, in a way that reunited the Two through the domination of its ruling part. On one hand, Christ appears to subjugate the The Dispositif of the Person 87

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 87

6/20/15 10:54 AM

world to his own majesty, but on the other hand he subjugates himself to God, who temporarily entrusts this lordship to him before laying claim to it for Himself. The result, to use a vocabulary that is by now familiar to us, is a unique overlapping of subjectivity and subjugation, as appears from the following words of the Psalm, cited by Tertullian: “ ‘Sit Thou on my right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool [Ps. 110:1]’ ‘When, however, all things shall be subdued to Him, (with the exception of Him who did put all things under Him) then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all [1 Cor. 15:27– 28].’ ” (IV. 2). The Second person—from which the human is generated—is therefore a subject that can subjugate others only if it subjugates itself to the one who gave it this prerogative, until the latter reabsorbs it inside himself. The transition from the Trinitarian formula una substantia, tres personae to the Christological one of una persona, duae substantiae, which occupies the final chapters of the treatise, marks the shift of the dispositif of the person from an active mode to a passive one. While in the figure of the Trinity “person” is what differentiates the unity, in the figure of the Son incarnate it is the exact locus where there takes place the differentiation into two parts that in this case, too, are distinct but not separate, joined but not mingled. The issue here, once again, is to articulate the One with the Two in such a way that one is not dissolved into the other, but also without producing a third from their fusion. Just as there is no mingling between Father and Son, but rather, economic distribution, similarly in the person of Christ, spirit and flesh do not interpenetrate; instead, they are structured in a form that leaves them intact, despite their joining. The transition from the Trinitarian lexicon to the Christological one in the theology of the early centuries was never easy, due to the essential lack of homogeneity between their semantics. At the confluence of both there remains the ambiguous figure of the person as a dispositif of decision—in the etymological sense of division. What in one case separates, in the other is separated. But, despite the heterogeneity of function, the asymmetrical character of the distinction, typical of the political-theological machine, remains unchanged. Rather than keeping the two parts on the same plane, it “disposes” them onto two different levels, the higher, superior one in contact with heaven, and the lower, inferior one rooted in the land: “the property of each nature is so wholly preserved, that the Spirit on one hand did all things in Jesus suitable to Itself, such as miracles, and mighty deeds, and wonders; and the 88

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 88

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Flesh, on the other hand, exhibited the affections which belong to it. It was hungry under the dev il’s temptation, thirsty with the Samaritan woman, wept over Lazarus, was troubled even unto death” (XXVII.11). Even for a Christian theologian more inclined to grant importance to the flesh like Tertullian, the body is subordinated to the other substance in which the person remains divided, although without becoming disintegrated. According to an economy of disposition, but also of subordination, one is destined ad opera et signa (to works and signs), while the other is fated ad mortem (to death). As we mentioned, Tertullian’s extraordinary exegetical effort is concentrated in the arduous task of resisting the divisive drive that was set in motion si multa neously by dualists and monists. The dispositif of the person is the great katechon that he constructs to block the double heretical drift, in an unprecedented figure that makes the Two the content of the One and the One the form of the Two. The notion of person as compared to that of “thing” is the semantic epicenter and categorial linchpin around which the entire ancient Roman legal system rotates. Placed by Gaius at the opening of his treatise, person includes all types of human beings, in the way a single genus can embrace different species. In this sense it cannot be equated with a particular status or, strictly speaking, with a predicate, although it can be predicated to every human being, regardless of their condition. This is demonstrated by the famous passage from his Institutions, which says, “The principal division of the ius of persons is the following, namely, that all men are either free or slaves.” However, right from the beginning this first formulation poses a problem, not an easy one to resolve, over which different and sometimes opposite interpretations have clashed for some time. How can the species of slaves, who are devoid per se of any personal attributes (to the point that Gaius places them under the category of an appropriated thing) belong to the genus of person? True, Gaius always uses the expression persona servi or persona servilis rather than the simple noun persona for the servus—but this is precisely what sounds in the Roman context like a sort of oxymoron, a conjunction of contradictory terms. Friedrich Carl von Savigny reasoned that, given the total legal incompetence of slaves, one would have thought that they would be denied the label of person altogether. Siegmund Schlossmann spoke of an “anomaly,” while others came to the conclusion that it was simply an error. As much as a category can be extended, it The Dispositif of the Person 89

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 89

6/20/15 10:54 AM

cannot also include its opposite. The response of the most recent historiography to this apparent inconsistency goes in diverging directions. While some interpreters tend to accentuate the element of division between the two types of persons, others have diminished its importance, focusing instead on the unity that combines conditions that are very different but not quite incomparable, such as those of freemen and slaves, inside the same container. Influenced by the Stoic tradition, and even possibly by a sensibility of Christian origin, Gaius is thought to have pushed his own legal culture to the limit, assimilating into the category of homines types that were located at the opposite poles of the ancient Roman social stratification. But even if this were the case, there is something that does not quite make sense. If homines was the common genus that Gaius intended to refer to in order to lump together different conditions, why would he have used the more technical term of persona? This is not to mention the fact that over time homo had acquired the predominant meaning of “slave,” devoid of any legal competence, while the specification de iure in Gaius’s text clearly indicates that the discourse is to be situated on a legal plane. Rather than opposing unity and division, the only way to unravel the apparent paradox is to express unity and division in the same logic, for which the concept of a person appears to be the semantic transformer. According to this interpretation, the divisio that Gaius talks about in this case is summa not because it cannot be surmounted but because it is the dispositif that produces the legal unity through the formal inclusion of the de facto excluded part. If we take note, in Roman law the positive category—that of liber in relation to servus, ingenuus in relation to libertus, or sui iuris in relation to alieni iuris—is never defined in itself but always by contrast, or as a remnant, with respect to the negative meaning. A free man in ancient Rome is someone who does not belong to someone else, just as someone who is sui iuris is not alieni iuris. In the same way, in an even more blatant fashion, res nec mancipi are the things that are not mancipi. Indeed, faced with the lack of a full definition of the libertatis status, the condition of slavery, which also implies exclusion from the sphere of law, is perhaps the most meticulously defi ned and regulated legal institution. This indicates that the negative is at the same time included on the plane of meaning—as that which gives positive relief to its opposite—and excluded on the plane of qualitative attributions. This is the only way to understand the functionality of the inclusion of the slave condition within the dispositif of the person, which in 90

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 90

6/20/15 10:54 AM

other respects excludes it, pushing it toward the impersonal dimension of the res. Division—not only the summa divisio but also all the others that spin off from it—is not, in this sense, what definitively separates different classes but, rather, what arranges them into a unity consisting of two asymmetrical parts, one of which is subjugated to the other, which thus tends to coincide with the whole. From this point of view, the figure of the slave does not belong entirely to the sphere of the person or to that of the thing, but to the indefinite area that brings them together and juxtaposes them at the same time. When we examine the condition of the servus, we easily recognize this dimidiated and amphibologic aspect. From this perspective, we see a return of the paradigmatic connection between theology and law that unifies the entire semantics of the person as a sign of the “two in one.” Just as the person of Christ has a dual nature, divine and human, similarly the slave is a Doppelnatur, both human being and thing, as has been noted. Defined as a “speaking instrument,” he is at the same time a person and a nonperson— the nonperson inside the person—since he is not allowed to own property, but he can act in the name of his master, sometimes even to the point of administering part of his master’s assets. He cannot get married, but he can cohabit more uxorio according to the institution of contubernium. He cannot be a party in legal proceedings, but he can testify under torture. If killed by someone who is not his own master, the killer may, at the discretion of the latter, be indicted for property loss or for murder, depending on whether the victim is considered a thing or a person. What is even more symptomatic of this perpetual oscillation between two opposing but also overlapping, dimensions, is the transition that is always possible from one to the other, according to the two-step procedure of manumissio and mancipatio. The first, manumissio, relating to the passage from slavery to freedom, was regulated by a complex ritual that gave rise to par ticular regimes; the second one, mancipatio, was even more expressive of a dispositif that personalizes some through the depersonalization of others, now made into objects of domination. In ancient Rome, one is born a slave from a woman who is already a slave. But one also becomes a slave in a whole series of circumstances that range from falling into enemy captivity to dodging military ser vice or not being registered in the census lists, to being caught thieving, and, if you are a woman, to coupling with someone else’s slave. Thus in the passage from slavery to freedom there are a whole series of intermediate The Dispositif of the Person 91

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 91

6/20/15 10:54 AM

and occasional stages. These include emancipation sub condicione, after the death of the dominus, when an event stipulated in the contract takes place but before which the slave’s freedom is suspended, leaving him in the transitory position of statuliber. Then there is the status of emancipated slaves who have committed serious crimes. They are deprived of citizenship and given the same status as the Latini from the colonies—authorized to trade but not to make a will, so that, as has been noted, they live as freemen but die as slaves. Similarly, a free woman who was sentenced to slavery for having lain with a slave who was not her property could avoid being reduced into slavery herself only by making herself a liberta (freed woman) of his master. In all these passages of progression toward a new state or regression to the old one, it is always the dispositif of the person that defines the exact point where each human being is situated along the line that runs from thing to person and vice versa. From this point of view, the bodily thing (res corporalis) is not a dimension in opposition to the person, but one of its internal modes, no matter how degraded, that is included in the form of exclusion from any prerogative of a personal type. This condition, which reaches its extreme in slavery, is not, however, reducible to it. Anyone who was put in a state of legal dependency—which in actuality included everyone except the patres familias—shared the status of subiectus, meaning, an object under the domination of others. Although there were human beings in ancient Rome who were reduced to the simple status of thing, such as slaves, there were many others, alieni iuris, whose subjective dimension continually crept toward the objective. These were personae who, within the framework of the summa divisio, were cata logued in the sphere of free men but with such burdensome limitations that they were close to the condition of slaves. Uxores in matrimonio, filii in potestate, mulieres in manu, liberi in mancipio, addicti, nexi, auctorati, ducti are all groups of humans that had decreasing legal competence, to the point that their de facto status slid into one that was very close to that of slavery. What determined the degree of subordination in such an intensely patrimonialistic legal framework as the ancient Roman one was always the relationship with things, including bodies, which were considered to be a particular genus of things. Those who were sui iuris were, in the first instance, owners of things, starting from their own body, but also, in the majority of cases, the body of others, which were at their disposition to various degrees as an object of gain, pleasure, or power. Slaves fell under the first category, women 92

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 92

6/20/15 10:54 AM

under the second, while the third ranged from children, subject to paternal sovereignty, to insolvent debtors, subject to the implacable hand of their creditors. If we consider that before being emancipated or becoming a father, everyone was a child in his or her turn, we get a measure of the subordination to which all Roman citizens were destined. Not only could children (filii), at least in the archaic era, be killed, exhibited, or sold at the whim of the father (pater), but even when they were sold they continued to remain in his power at least until the third sale. After this they were only temporarily emancipated in order to be finally adopted, and thus owned, by the new father. Hence, they enjoyed a transitory autonomy before being submitted to the new depersonalization. The most atrocious form of the equivalence between body and thing caused by the dispositif of the person was expressed by “personal execution.” This involved the physical acquisition of the insolvent debtor’s body by the creditor to guarantee the sum owed. What is striking about this case is not only the ritual of public degradation that decreed the disgrace or infamy of the debtor in a sort of reverse funeral ceremony, but also its eminently physical character. The body of the debtor was attacked along with everything he owned: according to a custom dating much further back, he was dragged in chains by the creditor in blatant disproportion to the monetary damage suffered and with more of an intention to inflict pain than to be compensated. Neither the labor power that the creditor acquired nor the precarious expectation of getting a ransom from the offender’s friends or relatives mattered as much as the vicious revenge he exacted on the debtor, who was forced to drag himself behind his tormentor. What was of value, more than the doubtful economic benefits—after all, the creditor still had to maintain the debtor—was the symbolic increase in his person, inversely proportional to the diminishment of the person of the ductus, offering further proof of the constitutive link between personalization and depersonalization that characterized the entire ius personarum. Studies on the Roman legal tradition—with some exceptions—have not focused enough on these procedures, either dating them back to a primitive time or forward to a medieval phase. But all attempts to rationalize such practices go against not only a series of unquestionable testimonies, but also, more generally, against a deep vein of Roman law that originates in the exclusionary dispositif of the person. In reality, these behaviors remain as The Dispositif of the Person 93

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 93

6/20/15 10:54 AM

signs of something extreme located within the ius, not outside it, in an area of punishment suspended between the possible and the real. Whether freemen or slaves, those who had been convicted but whose sentence had not yet been implemented—a period that could be prolonged at the whim of their jailers—were called penal slaves (servi poenae, literally, “slaves of punishment”) or devotees of death. Like homo sacer—but in a reverse fashion, because instead of being banished outside the walls he was forcefully retained inside them—the servus poenae, a name derived perhaps from the name of one of the Furies who were imagined to torment him, was at the total disposition of those who kept him alive for a life entirely destined to death ad gladium (by the sword), ad furcam (by the trident), or ad bestias (by wild beasts). At the opposite pole of the person, but still within its dispositif, the body of the damnatus (condemned) was simply the last station in a downward gradation that the summa divisio implied as its negative premise. The Christian author whose work most closely connects the dispositif of the person and the theological-political machine in the name of the Two is Augustine. It is true that an entire block of his thought is devoted to the Trinitarian structure of the divine substance, in an original reworking of Tertullian’s perspective. But he himself recognizes a difficulty, never completely resolved, in uniting the monotheistic logic of the One with the triadic reasoning of the divine persons. Not viewing the concept of person as the suture point between identity and relation, as would subsequent interpreters along a line arriving at Thomas Aquinas, he finds nothing better than to attribute its use to a sort of expressive immaturity of Latin Christianity: But because with us the usage has already obtained, that by essence we understand the same thing which is understood by substance; we do not dare to say one essence, three substances, but one essence or substance and three persons: as many writers in Latin, who treat of these things, and are of authority, have said, in that they could not find any other more suitable way by which to enunciate in words that which they understood without words. Not wanting to subordinate the three Persons like the Arians do, or to mix them up, as the Sabellians do, Augustine assigns to each of them an identity of its own. But, in so doing, he ends up losing their consubstantial rela94

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 94

6/20/15 10:54 AM

tionship. Once the concept of person has been overlaid on top of that of hypostasis, and this on top of the notion of substance, its triadic structure cannot be combined logically with the unity. Since the Father is not the Son, just as the Son is not the Holy Spirit, their intrinsic bond remains obscure: “Yet, when the question is asked, What three? human language labors altogether under great poverty of speech. The answer, however, is given, three ‘persons,’ not that it might be [completely] spoken, but that it might not be left [wholly] unspoken.” No less complex is the relationship between unity and duality in the human being, composed of body and soul, in parallel with the Incarnation of Christ. At stake is the relationship between the two natures, spiritual and bodily, that Augustine establishes according to a modality that would persist for a long time, despite the changes that took place over the course of his work. He assigns a clear primacy to the soul over the body, conceiving them as substances that are not only dishomogeneous but also opposing. This does not mean that Augustine aligns himself with the Platonic conception, as does Origen, for example, when he views the body as a prison of the soul. The body can become a prison, but only on condition that the soul allows itself to be seduced into consenting to this. However, there remains the fact that the instrument of the fall is still the body, characterized because of this as the animal part of man, to the point that the human tendency to overcome its bodily needs may be defined as an illness (infirmitas, aegritudo). The basic problem remains that of its relationship with the divine substance, made possible by the mediation of the soul. It is this, and only this, in its spiritual nature, that comes into contact with the divine ideas, unlike the body, which is extended in space and therefore flattened into an irreducibly material dimension. This is where the unquestioned priority of the soul over the body derives from, in the sense that it is the soul that gives it life and sustenance. It is true that the body is also necessary to the existence of the soul—but always as something passive with respect to the uniquely active principle, which “makes use of the body” (utens corpore) for its own needs. Perhaps what gives this utilitarian terminology a clear politicaltheological significance—by setting up a comparison between the use the soul makes of the body and the use God makes of man in the figure of Christ—is to be found in a letter dating from 411 CE, late in Augustine’s production: “For just as in the unity of the person, the soul uses the body in The Dispositif of the Person 95

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 95

6/20/15 10:54 AM

order to constitute man, even so in the unity of the person, God uses man to constitute Christ [Nam sicut in unitate personae anima utitur corpore, ut homo sit: ita in unitate personae Deus utitur homine, ut Christus sit]” (Letter 137, 11). It is no surprise that, even in this case, the semantic transformer of the passage from one domain to another is the paradigm of the person. Although called into question with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity, it played a decisive role in the structure of the double binary bond that ties man to God and the soul to the body. What places them in a symmetrical relationship is the sovereignty that in each case one term exerts over the other. Of course, between the Incarnation of Christ and the embodiment of the soul there is a fundamental difference, and that is precisely what distinguishes the divine person from the human person. In Christ the elements that are joined together, while remaining distinct, are not, strictly speaking, two but three—“God, soul, and flesh,” as Augustine says in On the Holy Trinity (Book 17, Chapter 22). In the human person, there are only two. But what is even more noteworthy in the logic of the dispositif is that their co-belongingness entails a subordination of one to the other. It is true that the human person always involves the presence of a body, without which it would not such as it is, but in a form that diminishes its ontological rank, excluding it from being likened, through its image, to God: “And hence each individual man, who is called the image of God, not according to all things that pertain to his nature, but according to his mind alone [secundum solam mentem], is one person, and is an image of the Trinity in his mind.” This is where the need arises for man’s dual political-theological submission— along with himself and what is other than himself: only by fully dominating one’s body can the soul resolutely obey God. Failing to achieve the first result—if the flesh remains under the law of sin—the second will also remain beyond his reach: But is it not the infirmities of the flesh which hamper it in its ser vice? Yet what does it matter how its ser vice is hampered, so long as the fact remains, that by the just retribution of the sovereign God whom we refused to be subject to and serve, our flesh, which was subjected to us, now torments us by insubordination, although our disobedience brought trouble on ourselves, not upon God? That this quote is taken from the City of God—which is to say, from the first great work of political theology of the entire Christian tradition—makes 96

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 96

6/20/15 10:54 AM

clear the direct passage from the anthropological domain of the relationship between body and soul to the metaphysical one of the clash between opposite principles that vie for man’s destiny. Even from this perspective, what we see is the confrontation between the One and the Two—or rather, between the Two for the conquest of the One. The earthly city, founded by Cain and partially embodied by the Roman Empire, arises from the breaking down of the divine unity on the part of a humanity that strives to take its place. All of history is interpreted by Augustine as the attempt to conquer the One on the part of a human subject that seeks to include the divine principle in its own immanent dimension, thereby taking its place. In other words, it is not simply the powers of unity and separation that are vying for the battleground, but those of a unity that separates into two overlapping parts, and of a separation that fights to conquer the unity. At the beginning, Adam derived his being from unity with God, in a condition in which body and soul were also one. This integration arose from the perfect obedience of the body to the soul and of man to God. Then came the rebellion, aimed at asserting a human unity as an alternative to the divine Unus. From this fi rst metaphysical breach came the breakdown of the union between body and soul and the revolt of the latter against its own creator principle. Instead of the hegemony of the spirit over the flesh, what thus came about in violation of the divine command was the hegemony of the flesh over the spirit: “man, who by keeping the commandments should have been spiritual even in his flesh, became fleshly even in his spirit.” This division from God is refracted through the strife man has with himself—not only of the body with respect to the soul but also of the soul between two contrasting desires. Having demanded to incarnate the unity, rending the divine unity from which he comes, man consigns himself to division, from which only Christ can save him by putting back together what he has broken, so that “reconciled to God, we are to cleave to the One, to feast upon the One, to continue one (aereamus Uni, fruamur Uno, permaneamus Unum).” However, this plan of salvation—the “economic device,” in the language of the Church Fathers—is not fully achieved because of the clash with the tenacious persistence of the divisive spirit. History as a whole is unified, we might say, by the separation between the two opposing cities in their metaphysical principle, but they are mixed in variable proportion in the earthly life. Far from being homogeneous with each other, each is The Dispositif of the Person 97

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 97

6/20/15 10:54 AM

also divided within itself, without ever coinciding fully with the spheres of Church and State, which nevertheless represent them in this world. While the heavenly city is distinct among the ranks of angels and saints, on the one hand, and that of pure people, peregrini in saeculo (strangers in the world), on the other, the earthly world is cut through in its turn by the difference between those who are lost and those who, within the state institution, respect human justice. The fratricide out of which Rome issued, replicating Abel’s killing by Cain, expresses the violent nature of the Roman unification. The appetitus unitatis et omnipotentiae (desire for unity and omnipotence) of the Empire, which certainly did unify the world under its domination, was the fruit of a destruction of otherness—because this suppression of all other parts to the benefit of its own was the only way for it to become one. All the decisive moments of Roman history, beginning with its origins, repeat this same logic of unification through exclusion of what is included in the circle of its increasing dominion. This is what happened, for example, to the town of Alba, whose “population, they say, was amalgamated with the inhabitants of Rome so that the two cities were one. . . . [But] to effect this pitiful conglomerate of the war’s leavings, much blood was spilt on both sides.” This is the stuff—blood, violence, and death—that went into creating a pax of an imperium that was made absolute only by wiping out everything that opposed it. In the face of this imperium was erected the unity of the Church representing the divine Unus, insofar as it embraced the One as its universal significance. Augustine emphasizes the contrasting elements between the two realms, expressive in their turn of the metaphysical clash between the two cities of which they are the manifestation. But more than the divergences between the two, what is most striking about his extraordinary tableau, and what lends it its specific political-theological tone, is their symmetry: this is built through a series of analogies, founded ultimately on the correspondence between God and man created in His image. We have already seen how both the cities tend to the One and therefore to the absorption of the other city within itself. The logic that moves them, it is true, is quite the opposite: in one case the inordinate growth of its own power and, in the other, salvation in the name of Christ. But the goal they assign themselves is the same: to embody the unity of the world-historical process. Precisely because they compete in the same field, their clash proves to be implacable. Both have a religious purpose, a genuine political theology 98 The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 98

6/20/15 10:54 AM

that is opposed to the other: the earthly city that Varro defines as theologia civilis, aimed at divinizing the political power versus the city of God, the salvific plan guided by divine command. In their perennial clash, amor Dei and amor sui, transcendence and immanence, faith and idolatry, reflect each other like the two halves of a single whole. Both—the eternal city on earth and the eternal city in heaven—aim to fulfi ll time over an infinite period. And both represent themselves in the trinity of aeternitas, veritas, and caritas (eternity, truth, and charity). Just as the Christian conception absorbs the Roman legal logic within itself, in the same way the religio romana (the Roman religion) is conceived by Varro based on a Trinitarian figure. But beyond and within their opposition, the element that unifies the two cities into the same political-theological vocabulary is precisely the machine of exclusionary inclusion. Since neither of the two wants to annihilate or is able to annihilate the other, at least before the end of times, what both tend toward is the subjugation of their rival. The earthly city’s attempt to appropriate the sacrum through its own idolatrous cults is the fulcrum of Augustine’s narrative. For this reason, we can say that its political theology is aimed at the acquisition and use of the divine for its own ends of power. However, the city of God implements a political theology of its own, albeit a “negative” one. From this point of view, both Peterson and Schmitt are right: it is true, as the former maintains, that Augustinian political theology has nothing to do with the imperial political theology of Eusebius and Orosius. Its subject is not a Christianized empire, cloaked in worldly insignia, but rather an autonomous Church for its own purposes. However, the Roman Empire, at least after Constantine, made use of it as its essential tool. Not only that, but it was used to suppress those who rejected Christianity and to conquer those who were unaware of it, just like Roman Empire did with peoples who failed to recognize its supremacy. On the topic of this coercive, expansive potency of the Christian religion—against, but also through, the Empire—Augustine is anything but unequivocal. Given that a theocratic current emerged that was defi ned as “political Augustinianism,” it is inconceivable that it has no relationship to his work. Certainly, he never thought that the political could dress the part of the theological— he always left a space of eschatological excess open for the advent of Grace. And even less did he believe that the theological had a directly political role. The kingdom of God certainly did not need one—and indeed it shunned it. And yet, on His throne there appear the same glorious signs of sovereign The Dispositif of the Person 99

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 99

6/20/15 10:54 AM

power, the same symbols of the earthly triumph, when His will “makes the winds His messengers, Flaming fi re His ministers” (Psalm 104:3), He expresses His absolute power over everything that moves in the world: And so it comes to pass that the will of God is the first and the highest cause of all corporeal appearances and motions. For nothing is done visibly or sensibly, unless either by command or permission from the interior palace, invisible and intelligible, of the supreme Governor, according to the unspeakable justice of rewards and punishments, of favor and retribution, in that far-reaching and boundless commonwealth of the whole creature. If we compare the two conceptions of the person arising from the Roman tradition, on the one hand, and from the Christian tradition, on the other, we can locate the point of their overlapping in a common tendency toward splitting, or doubling, the entities to which they are related. As regards the first, we have already seen how Roman jurists dissociated the concrete individual from the role that he or she had in the legal scenario. The persona is for them the formal device that separates the physical and mental reality of the individual from his or her legal identity, since this had no ontological status. Personhood is a technical artifact that does not coincide with any given living being; furthermore, it splits into two different planes, to the point of being able to refer to several individuals or of allowing a single individual to assume various persons. This fact—of pertaining to a general class of human beings rather than to a certain subject—implies that rather than bestowing a permanent identity, the qualification of personhood was continuously modifiable on the basis of an increase or a decrease in status. The medieval canonists and commentators, from Pope Innocent IV (Sinibaldo Fieschi) to Bartolus de Saxoferrato, widening the gap between individual and person even more, also applied this term to collective subjects such as universities and colleges, according to the theory of the persona ficta or repraesentata (artificial or represented person)—in other words, one that is constructed out of a purely mental act instead of existing in itself. Along this increasingly abstract direction, the person, which generally had a living body as its substrate, could also represent a nonhuman entity— inasmuch as it is a “moral person”—or a nonliving entity, such as someone who has died but is not devoid of legal ownership. In spite of all the twists 100

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 100

6/20/15 10:54 AM

and turns and internal differences that marked its reception, it was a construct that had an extremely long life, destined to leave its mark not only on the Ancien Régime but also on the formation of the French Civil Code. Suffice to say that only a few years before the Revolution that would proclaim the inalienable rights of the citizen, Joseph Pothier, in his Traité des personnes et des choses, classified people into six general categories, assigning certain prerogatives to each of them in accordance with the defi nition of their status, which went from the slave up to the noble. Certainly, compared to this propensity for formal dissociation that characterizes Roman law, the Christian version, especially in the form provided by Augustine, goes in the direction of a reunification of the subjective experience. This takes place through the embodiment of the person in each human being, who is thus considered the bearer of an inalienable value in the image and likeness of He who created him. But, as we have already seen, in the Christian concept, the division, which no longer relates to the relationship between the person and the living individual, is reconstituted within the latter, in the two distinct components of the body and the soul. Trinity and Incarnation—the two major Christian laboratories of the concept of person—establish this constitutive nexus of unity and separation: a distinct substance in three persons and a distinct person in two natures are the formulas, endlessly reworked, that make unity conditional on the separation between subordinate parts. Hence, compared to Roman law, one might well say that it goes from a functional type of division between person and individual to an ontological type of division within the individual-person composite, between its two different substances. From a legal standpoint, this additional splitting gives rise to a distinction in the person, now incorporated in the human being, between a level that is real and another that is artificial. The law pertains only to the latter. The result of this development, marked by the superimposition of the Roman and Christian logics, both of which are binary, was the expulsion of the res servile from the category of person. However, it also led to a further division between fact and law, natural reality and legal reality, that became more and more pronounced. It should thus come as no surprise that in the systematic law of the Ancien Régime, for Hugues Doneau, “a slave is a man, not a person (servus . . . homo est, non persona),” since “man is a term of nature, person is a term of civil law (homo naturae, person iuris civilis vocabulum).” For his part, Hermann Woehl confi ned the qualification of person to “a The Dispositif of the Person 101

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 101

6/20/15 10:54 AM

man possessing civil status (homo habens caput civile),” while Arnold Vinnen wrote that “a person is a man with a certain status, just as if he had been clothed in it (persona est homo statu quodam veluti indutus).” What appears to be increasingly marked, in all of them, in short, is the idea that, in accordance with the Christian perspective, although all men are considered equal with regard to their natural characteristics, only a few enjoy subjective rights. And it is the possession of these subjective rights that distinguishes those who should be awarded the title of person from those who are denied it on the basis of an objective legal order that is posited prior to the prerogatives of subjects. It is no coincidence that the syntagm subiectum iuris, “the subject of law,” did not become established before the seventeenth century. Before this time the term did not designate the holder of particular rights, but the object of judicial law. Subiectum, anything but the agent, is the beneficiary of laws that come prior to it. Similarly, by “right” what is meant is not some subjective prerogative but rather something like the counterpart of an objective legal order. Moreover, Hans Kelsen, rejecting any undue naturalization, sees in the subject of law a simple point of imputation of predetermined legal rules. There is no doubt that, at a certain time corresponding with the development of the natural law tradition, a watershed occurred that, without canceling out all the previous semantics, drew them in a subjective direction. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, following a current embraced by German Pandectism and brought to its greatest maturity by Fredrich Carl von Savigny, rather than being submitted to an objective set of rules, the subiectum became its driving force. It was along this track that, partly as a consequence of the French Revolution, every man was regarded as the bearer of subjective rights, in such a way as to remove from the regulatory system the capacity to create, or modify, given legal situations, and leaving it only the function of protecting preexisting rights, inherent as such to human nature. In this way the category of person also began to change little by little its rigidly functional character, becoming the point of correspondence between the status of natural man (hominis naturalis) and that of civil man (hominis civilis). From this perspective, in close symbiosis with the new concept of the subject of law, unity now seemed to prevail over separation to the point of completely absorbing it. Identical to the subject, the person became a candidate for

102

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 102

6/20/15 10:54 AM

turning into an active nucleus, at the same time rational and voluntary, endowed with both par ticu lar and universal value. This self-interpretation on the part of modern law—which views the paradigm of subject as the locus unifying the person and the living individual—does not take into account a decisive element, however, which it leaves concealed: namely, the binary character of the notion of subject itself, fully recognizable only through comparison of the philosophical genealogy with the legal and theological genealogy of the person. It is at their confluence that Boethius’s definition resides (in De persona et duabus naturis, 3), according to which the person is an individual substance of a rational nature (naturae rationalis individua substantia). In this definition can be traced the first conceptual kernel that, through the mediation of Thomas Aquinas and then the second Scholastic school of the Salamancan Dominicans, would lead to the idea of the subject-agent, a voluntary and conscious master of its own acts. Of course, in Boethius this “substance”— which translates the term hypostasis, used by the Greek Fathers in Trinitarian discourse—should not be understood in the modern sense of a subjective principle, but in the much earlier sense of suppositum, or substrate, in which there inhere certain essential or accidental properties. However, its individual character already heralds, in a certain way, the determination of a peculiar entity endowed with a specific identity. For this seed to be adequately developed, it would have to wait for the theory of the mens humana (human mind), oriented, already in the Augustinian tradition, toward the figure of egoity, and to the Thomistic reworking of the Aristotelian notion of hypokeimenon. When these two strands converged into a single semantic block (in par ticular through the thesis of the Franciscan Pierre de Jean Olieu), the first beginnings of a subjective entity posited as prior to its own perceptive acts began to appear in broad strokes. Before it assumed the form of a real subject, it was necessary to arrive not so much at Descartes (as popular Heideggerian wisdom would have it) nor even at Leibniz (who also saw the transformation happening without being able to express it with clarity), but to Kant, with his first Critique. It was from him that the transcendental conditions of access to objectivity would be attributed to a perceiving and acting Subjekt. Only from that moment on did the term subiectum, which until then had roughly the meaning that we now intend with “object,” acquire its definitive status as the ordering principle of reality.

The Dispositif of the Person 103

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 103

6/20/15 10:54 AM

But to reconstruct the entire semantic relationship between the paradigms of subject and person, we must look at their dialectic in the politicaltheological key that marks and distinguishes the entire question. While the philosophical meaning of the entity as master of its actions changed the legal one, orienting it in a subjective direction, the legal meaning, deriving from the Roman source, had a retroactive effect on the philosophical one, folding it back on itself. In political-legal terms, subiectus means “submitted to the dominion of others,” just as in its original etymology subiectum alludes to something underlying, or presupposed, with respect to what is posited. It is true that from the lexical point of view there always remains a differential margin between being “placed below” and being “placed in subjection” but this does not erase their obvious relation, recognizable in the etymological affinity between the modern concepts of subjectivity, subjection, and subjugation. Now, the crucial point as far as our inquiry is concerned is that the locus of indistinctness between these three terms is specifically the dispositif of the person—at work from the beginning in the Roman distinction between persons who are sui iuris and those who are alieni iuris, formulated by Gaius with the exclusionary effects that we are familiar with. This is because the line of separation between the various types passes precisely through the logical nexus connecting persona and subiectus. The differing degrees of personality within the human race are defi ned by whether one is subject to oneself or to others, just as the different degrees of subjection depend on where one is located within the class of persons. The turn that Thomas Aquinas took, breaking away from Augustinian dualism by reworking Aristotle’s categories, is also interpretable in these terms of self-appropriation. There is no doubt that his basic intention is to give value to the entire human experience, but with a marked tendency to give priority to the rational part over the animal part. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes this superiority to such an extent that he makes it the locus of man’s greatest perfection. A person, for him, is the context in which the rational substances exert absolute “dominion over their own actions.” The author’s entire attention is focused on the mastery over the body that reason brings to bear. A gap appears in the professed unity of the living being, one that we might call political, between the part that dominates and the part that obeys. To be a person, you must have full possession of a bodily material that is valueless in itself, because it is enclosed in a body of flesh. Without underestimating the watershed role played by Thomas Aquinas in 104

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 104

6/20/15 10:54 AM

breaking with Augustinian spiritualism—above all in relation to his Trinitarian conception—this rift between reason and body, or between human and animal, was destined to be one of the most stable presuppositions of the dispositif of the person. Not surprisingly, well into the twentieth century, the Catholic philosopher of personalism, Jacques Maritain, picked up again on exactly the same terms to define the meaning of the human person. It is “a whole, master of itself and of its acts,” with the specification that “if a sound political conception depends above all on concentrating on the human person, it must at the same time bear in mind that this person is an animal gifted with reason, and that the part of animality in such a set-up is immense.” A human being is a person if, and only if, it is the master of its animal part. Of course not everybody has this inclination, or this disposition, to deanimalize themselves. The degree of humanity to be found in each human being will therefore depend on the greater or lesser intensity of deanimalization, as will the difference in principle between those who can be defined as fully qualified persons and those who can be so only under certain conditions. If there is something the Roman and Christian dispositif of the person has managed to project all the way to us, it is precisely this politicaltheological node between subjectivity and subjugation. Moreover, the pivot for the semantic switching between freedom and obedience is expressed in Latin rather than in ancient Greek. To make oneself into a “subject” one must be subiectus, subjugated to others or to oneself. It was certainly not the Greek polis that made obedience the method for salvation, but rather the political theology of the Roman Empire, by accepting the Christian theologumenon. This was when the transformation of the subiectus into subditus fi rst occurred—to begin with, in the servile form imposed on all the inhabitants of the Empire, and later on in the form of subservience to the sovereign in the absolute state. Indeed, precisely in the latter, the antinomic relationship between legal subject and state subject achieved its perfection through Hobbes’s notion of authorization—on the basis of which the power of human beings is handed over to the one who makes the all into the subjects of their own subjugation. The emblematic figure that acts as a backdrop to this dynamic is what Étienne de la Boétie named “voluntary servitude.”  Its lifespan, persisting for over a thousand years, goes beyond the usual distinction between what appear to be contrary political conceptions. Suffice to say that the political theology secularized by Hobbes was The Dispositif of the Person 105

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 105

6/20/15 10:54 AM

brought to its logical conclusion by his democratic opponent Rousseau— who equated the citizen with the subject who is obedient to the general will. The important point for him is that subjugation is freely willed. But free subjugation is no different from a subjugated freedom, separated from and opposed to itself by means of the same political-theological mechanism that cleaves the subject into asymmetrical parts. It is difficult not to connect this influential paradigm to what Foucault theorized in his works on disciplinary power. As we know, it is to him that we owe the most complete analysis of the link between the formation of subjectivity and subjugation. The fact that he connected it to the institution of confession is a further confirmation of its inherently political-theological character. If we reread these studies from this perspective, however, an unanswered question remains regarding their failure to engage with the category of person. He had all the conceptual tools to trace back to it, from both the theological and legal spheres: on the one hand, the development of the concept of dispositif, and on the other, in a parallel fashion, the recognition of the pastoral power that characterized Christian political theology. While the sovereign function considers obedience to be the inevitable price of protection, the power of the shepherd over his flock of believers stems from their free belief that leads to the salvation of souls. In contrast to the sovereign, the shepherd does not obligate already-constituted subjects to comply with the law, but he makes them such by extracting their inner truth from them through the rite of confession. Never as in this case did subjectification and subjugation merge into a single segment that divides the subject from itself according to the machine of the person. When Foucault returned to examine the role of Christianity in the formation of subjectivity, during his last courses, he connected it, on the one hand, perhaps too closely, to late Hellenism and, on the other, to the dawn of the modern world, once again without dwelling on the category of person. But, precisely because of this, by leaving unexplored what showed through from the other side of his discourse, he opened up the space for a new inquiry. The link between subjectivity and subjugation, implicit in the theological and legal category of the person, was transposed by Hobbes into the political domain. To grasp the importance of this passage we must decouple Hobbes’s lexicon from the natural law tradition with which it is sometimes still associated. Far from unifying the status naturalis and status civilis, as 106

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 106

6/20/15 10:54 AM

the school of natural law tended to do, Hobbes put them in opposition in the clearest form, by removing the idea of nature from any possible normative interpretation. Not only are the two orders disconnected, to constitute itself the civil state must drastically reject the natural one. This is where his discourse takes on its conventionalistic turn. As in the Roman ius—but transferred from private to public law—the category of person is characterized by Hobbes in a strictly functional sense. Rather than being a substantial entity, it is a linguistic construction intended to make the political order possible. Therefore, even when Hobbes speaks of a “natu ral person”—he whose words and actions are considered as his own—he clearly distinguishes this from the empirical individual who is its bearer. Even when the person represents itself, then, it is never the human being as such but the role that he or she plays under the eyes of others. This theatrical meaning is made explicit by a citation from Cicero’s On the Orator: So that a person is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate is to act or represent himself or another; and he that acteth another is said to bear his person, or act in his name (in which sense Cicero useth it where he says, Unus sustineo tres personas; mei, adversarii, et judicis: I bear three persons; my own, my adversary’s, and the judge’s). Thus, three terms are needed in order for personification to take place: the representer (or representative), the represented, and those in whose eyes the representation occurs. Of course this applies a fortiori to the “feigned or artificial person,” which is delegated to represent another and is therefore entirely independent of the body in which it resides. In short, a person is not something that one is, but something that one has on the basis of a legal—not natu ral—attribution or imputation. This denaturalized model provides the foundation for Hobbes’s idea that habere personam is not limited necessarily to a human being or to a set of individuals—a thing or an institution such as a church, bridge, or hospital can also possess personhood. Although the rhetorical/theatrical meaning of the person plays a fundamental role in Hobbes’s work, we are not to imagine that this takes place at the expense of the theological meaning. Other wise, we would fail to grasp the sense of Schmitt’s observation that in Thomas Hobbes’s doctrine of state we glimpse “a piece of his political theology.”  Contrary to how it may The Dispositif of the Person 107

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 107

6/20/15 10:54 AM

appear, the fundamental effect of the English thinker was not a break with political-theological language, but its translation into secular terms, precisely by means of the dispositif of the person. We have already identified the thread that binds Hobbes’s use of the term to the late medieval conception of fictio. Although this presupposes a substantialist underpinning of an Aristotelian type, which Hobbes surpasses by taking a nominalist direction, what remains in common with it is a functional splitting between the body natural and the body politic. When Hobbes writes, “For man is not just a natural body, but also a part of the state, or (as I put it) of the body politic,”  he is in fact using a language that is not very different from the one reconstructed by Kantorowicz in his studies on medieval political theology. What has changed is the relationship between body and person. While in Tudor England, following an extremely old tradition, the semantics of the body prevailed, with Hobbes center stage is now occupied by the principle of the person. It is true that in the Elements of Law Natural and Political he still refers to the metaphor of the body politic, but he immediately associates it with the technically much more developed term of person, understood as that which unifies an other wise dispersed multitude of human beings: “This union so made, is that which men call now a-days a body politic or civil society; and the Greeks call it polis, that is to say, a city, which may be defined to be a multitude of men, united as one person, by a common power, for their common peace, defence, and benefit.”  In De Cive, then, the lexicon of the person prevails by far over the body, to the point of making it residual. In this work, the author takes his distance from those who, by comparing the state to a man, identify sovereignty with the head rather than with the soul. This replacement suggested by Hobbes is very impor tant because it marks a significant distancing from the paradigm of incorporation that, through the analogy between the Empire and the Church, had formed the generative nucleus of the entire medieval political theology: as the Church is the corpus mysticum of which Christ is the head, so the Empire is the corpus reipublicae of which the emperor is the head. What served to articulate the double metaphor within the same organismic language was the logic of inclusion by which, if human nature and divine nature are united in the body of Christ, power and society are integrated in the body politic in a relationship of mutual implication. This inclusive line of reasoning is precisely what Hobbes distances himself from through the notion of representation. Without breaking the thread 108

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 108

6/20/15 10:54 AM

that unites politics and theology, he binds them together in a form that shifts the semantics of the person from the side of unity to that of separation. The metaphorical substitution of the soul for the head serves to make this transition. Unlike the head, which is organically rooted in the body, the soul is comprised within it, but without ever being completely integrated. In theological terms, this prevalence of separation over unity translates into a shift of the attention from the dogma of Incarnation to that of the Trinity. Indeed, the most important religious controversy in the second half of the seventeenth century in England raged around the question of the Trinity. Without reconstructing it here, we must at least recall that it originated from what was called the Socinian controversy and that it produced a considerable number of publications from authors such as Stephen Nye, William Sherlock, and Robert South, but also from philosophers of the ilk of Locke and Leibniz, in a generally critical attitude toward the far from orthodox position assumed by Hobbes. More specifically, in a passage from the Leviathan, bitterly disputed by the bishop Bramhall, Hobbes had argued that God, who can be “personated,” was “the person represented” by Moses, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Beyond the glaring inconsistency of introducing Moses into the divine triad, the disruptive element here is the breaking of the substantial unity of the divinity resulting from an unprecedented use of the notion of representation. The three—Christ, the Holy Spirit, and Moses—are not understood as an integral part of the one divine substance but as its representatives, separated both from each other and from the divine substance, to the point of manifesting at different historical times: “Here we have the person of God born now the third time,” argues Hobbes. “For as Moses, and the high-priests, were God’s representative in the Old Testament; and our Saviour himself, as man, during his abode on earth: so the Holy Ghost . . . ha[s] represented him ever since.”  How this interpretation breaks the theologically necessary link between the Trinity and the Incarnation is evident—as a simple representative of God, Christ cannot share the divine nature. But it ends up also deconstructing the figure of the perichoresis used by Augustine to indicate the indivisible interrelation of the three divine Persons. Once the dispositif of the person as conceived by Hobbes is removed from the logic of mutual incorporation, it leads to the dissolution of the intradivine unity. To maintain that Christ is limited to representing God, rather than sharing the same substance, means that the Son does not partake of God’s essence. In defending The Dispositif of the Person 109

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 109

6/20/15 10:54 AM

himself from the charges laid against him, in the appendix to the Latin edition of Leviathan, when Hobbes says that the Cappadocian Fathers have hypostatized the divine persons, thus arriving at a sort of Tritheism, he is simply restating his own position. And even when it comes to hypothesizing a comparison between the Three of the Trinity and the tres personae interpreted by Cicero’s orator—my own, my adversary, and the judge’s—the distance from the orthodox formulation becomes greater, even further accentuating the element of division. But even more impor tant is the fact that this perspective assumed by Hobbes in the Trinitarian controversy is also refracted through the political sphere. The conceptual link between the intransigent defense of divine unicity—against any substantialist conception of the Trinity—and the absoluteness of the sovereign’s power in his kingdom is obvious. Like the Second and the Third person, with the peculiar addition of Moses, they do not share the substance of the First; at most, they can act as its ministers. In the same way as representatives of partial political and private systems, the public ministers appointed by the sovereign do not share the power, but are limited to carrying out a delegated, subordinate function. This applies even more to the individuals who created the Leviathan with their covenant—they are at the same time established as persons and deprived of personhood. They are established as persons because, outside the normative system put in place by the sovereign, they did not yet have a legal personality; and they are deprived of personhood because, as soon as they obtain it, their person is entirely absorbed by the sovereign according to a procedure that expresses legal inclusion and de facto exclusion: A multitude of men are made one person when they are by one man, or one person, represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in par ticular. For it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one. And it is the representer that beareth the person, and but one person: and unity cannot other wise be understood in multitude. Certainly, the representer includes the represented but at the same time excludes them from the active form of representation, thereby making the unity conditional on an intrinsic separation. At the origin of this antinomy there stands the complex legal figure of authorization. In Leviathan, Hobbes makes sovereign power conditional on being authorized to assume representation, given by the individuals who 110 The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 110

6/20/15 10:54 AM

created the pact. In this way, since every action of the sovereign is approved in advance by all his subjects, none of them can rebel against something of which they themselves are the author. This is made clear by the fact that not even an innocent person may complain of being unjustly condemned. It is precisely here that the dispositif of the person causes a point of indistinctness between subjectivity and subjection, implicit in the term of subiectus itself. The subjects of the state are subjects of their own subjugation since “when the actor maketh a covenant by authority, he bindeth thereby the author no less than if he had made it himself; and no less subjecteth him to all the consequences of the same.” The flow axis of the dispositif of the person from the pole of subjectification to the pole of subjugation thus passes through the relationship between author and actor. As has been noted, it is precisely regarding this relationship that Hobbes performs a clear semantic reconversion that alters the meaning of both terms down to their roots. In accordance with the Latin etymon augere, the auctor was originally understood as someone who takes the initiative, but who also keeps it for himself, in both public law and the private sectors, for example, as someone’s guardian. In the same way, in criminal law, the author of a crime is also the actor of that crime. When traced back to the verb “to authorize” and the noun “authority,” as it is in Hobbes’s work, the author definitively transfers the right, and therefore the power, into the hands of the actor who, in this way, also ends up assuming the function of the author. It was starting from this lexical transfer that the subject became subditus, while, correspondingly, personalization was forever poised to slip into a form of depersonalization. Since the sovereign is authorized indefinitely and not just for a period or a limited objective, he goes from being the author to the actor of what he had originally, once and for all, been authorized to do by those who transmitted their own personhood to him, having passed for a moment through the figure of person. By giving the title of one to the many—something they would otherwise not possess—and by becoming actor, the sovereign person at the same time assumes the role of author. This is because he exerts full authority over those who lose all individual prerogatives in order to become a collective person: “And because the multitude naturally is not one, but many; they cannot be understood for one; but many authors, of every thing their representative saith, or doth in their name; every man giving their common representer, authority from himself in par ticu lar; and owning all the actions the representer doth, in case they The Dispositif of the Person 111

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 111

6/20/15 10:54 AM

give him authority without stint.” Moreover, from another point of view, the supreme representative can have himself represented—for example by judges—without for this reason losing dominion over the representation. As in the ancient Roman ius personarum, what remains unchanged in this shifting game of representation is the possibility of continuously articulating unity and separation, or inclusion and exclusion, in a manner that makes one the content of the other. It was John Locke who even more drastically separated the person from the living body: by first embracing the antisubstantialistic position of Hobbes, and second by giving it a different political-theological tonality. If his definition of person—especially as formulated in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding—appears to recall the classical model put forward by Boethius, in reality it deprives the latter of its substantial status, in order to make it conditional on the inner relationship of consciousness with itself. From this point of view—which coincides with neither the Scholastic formula of the incarnated soul nor with the Cartesian conception of a subject divided into two substances—Locke reworks, if anything, the Augustinian idea of a mind extended in the flow of time, although now deprived of a transcendent support and returned to an entirely earthly sphere. To speak of self, rather than subiectum, means, for him, that the identity of the person is different from that of the human being as a specimen of a given animal species. While the identity of the human-animal consists “in nothing but a participation of the same continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body” personal identity is defi ned rather by the continuity of consciousness in time. Th is necessarily creates a constitutive link with the memory, so much so that oblivion becomes, for Locke, the sign of a sort of ontological deficiency. If the memory allows consciousness to experience itself as identical at different times in life, forgetfulness stops the dialectic between present and past existence, by opening up a breach in self-identification; hence the importance given to the proper name, as what allows certain acts or words to be attributed to the same individual. From this point of view, the subject is not, as in the Scholastic tradition, the sum of a body and a soul but that of a living body with a proper name. Being both the element of self-identification as well as differentiation from others, the

112

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 112

6/20/15 10:54 AM

name is precisely the protocol by which each individual is perceived as person. This is where the affinity and the distance between Locke and Hobbes is located. For both, the person is a nonsubstantial element, very different from the body in which it resides; however, while Locke ties it to the specificity of the name, Hobbes connects it rather to the function. This does not mean that a precise legal significance is missing from the Lockean concept of person—on the contrary, in another sense it is even more pronounced. Nor does it mean that it lacks a profound relationship with the politicaltheological machine inside of which the device of the person operates. It only means that while Hobbes approaches it from the aspect of the Trinity, Locke does so from the Resurrection and the Judgment. His intention is no longer to define the relationship between the various persons of a single substance, such as in the Trinitarian dispute, or to find the right link between body and soul, in the modes of the Incarnation; rather, his point is to define the animated body according to the personal quality that makes it the subject of attribution. What guarantees that the old man of today is the same person he was when he was young, or that the madman has the same personal identity as when he was sane? It is obvious how these questions lead to a paradigm leap with respect to the previous semantics and push onto philosophical grounds the difference between man and person that had been formulated on legal grounds by the Roman tradition. But the most characteristic feature is that this lexical shift, rather than break up the theological wrapping, insinuates itself inside it, as demonstrated by the explicit allusion to the figure of the Resurrection. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding returns repeatedly to the topic—especially the twenty-seventh chapter that was added to the second edition specifically in response to the theological controversies that arose in England in the 1690s. The fundamental question is whether it is “the same person at the Resurrection, though in a body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here.” Locke is not so much interested in the question in itself as he is in the consequence that derives from the definition of personal identity and its emancipation from all substantialist perspectives. If we accept that the person, after death, can become incarnated in a body that was not his or hers, this means that the person is devoid of any substantial substrate and therefore that it can be associated with one or the other at various times.

The Dispositif of the Person 113

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 113

6/20/15 10:54 AM

This topic leads us into the most problematic part of Locke’s perspective, regarding the possibility of imagining a single man who is incarnated at different times as two persons, or a single person shared by two human beings. The problem of multiple personalities was connected, at this stage, to theological debates on metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, which had come to the philosopher via Ralph Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists. During the same period, a wide-ranging discussion had been sparked by the case of Siamese twins who were joined at the vagina and rectum. How many souls did they have—one or two? And how was baptism to be performed on a deformed baby born with two heads? In both cases it could be said that this was both one person with two bodies and a single body belonging to two persons. What Locke gleaned from the discussions was that the symmetry between person and human individual, still present in Roman law and reappearing in a modified version in the Christian conception, had now been definitively superseded. Neither tradition, as we have seen, stopped a splitting from taking place—in the first case between the artificial person and the natural human being, and in the second between the mortal body and the immortal soul. Indeed, they both presupposed it, but without causing the one-to-one correspondence between the two terms to disappear. The medieval category of persona ficta—which Hobbes took to its extreme artificial consequences—pushed this process of disincarnation even further, functionalizing it for the representative logic of sovereignty. Locke takes a step further in the dispositif of the person by completely releasing it from the bodily substrate and making it conditional on a pure principle of attribution: for someone to assume the title of person, he or she must prove, first of all to himself—or herself—that he or she is the same individual over the course of time and, having accepted the dogma of the Resurrection, even after death, when his or her soul goes into another body. This is clearly a qualitative leap with respect to the binary logic we have reconstructed thus far: Just as in Rome, the double passes between person and body but penetrates into the person itself, which is divided, or multiplied, by two or more than two, on the basis of different states of consciousness or, more precisely, on the perception that may be formed of them. To fully grasp the political-theological significance of the change that was underway, however, we must associate the semantics of the Resurrection with that of the Divine Judgment, understood as the prototype of all secular justice. Underlying this passage there was the constitutive relationship 114

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 114

6/20/15 10:54 AM

between the concepts of attribution (“to attribute”) and imputation (“to impute”), both translations of the Greek verb kategorein. To attribute something to someone, or to oneself—such as an act or a thought—is never independent from the moral judgment that such an attribution entails. In fact, the decisive element in Locke’s definition of person is precisely the possibility of imputing to someone the responsibility for his or her actions according to a judgment of innocence or guilt formulated by a virtual judge who could be equally someone else or oneself. Locke strongly emphasizes this ethical but also specifically legal dimension: “Person,” he says, is a forensic term appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents capable of a law, and happiness and misery. This personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground, and for the same reason, that it does the present. This is where the two sides of the same dispositif appear, pressed together by the vocabulary of responsibility, attribution of the qualification of person, and imputation of its actions. It has no importance if whoever says “I” has a par ticular substance—if his body corresponds to a soul or if this soul can be ascribed to given qualities. It is sufficient if he answers for himself and for his actions, acknowledging that he is the one who committed them. This is what Locke meant by accountability, as an essential and indispensable character for the person inasmuch as it is a moral agent—no longer in the medieval sense of persona moralis, that is, a collective person, but in the sense of a judgment of oneself. The court—including that of one’s own conscience—must ascertain whether the man present in front of the court is the same person who committed a specific act and whether he is aware of its consequences. Of course, Locke knows that human justice is not always able to discriminate between objective guilt and intentional guilt, ending up by punishing both in the same manner. But it is precisely for this reason that the judgment of one’s own conscience remains the most reliable, waiting for the definitive judgment of God: For though punishment be annexed to personality, and personality to consciousness, and the drunkard perhaps be not conscious of what he did: yet human judicatures justly punish him; because the fact is proved The Dispositif of the Person 115

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 115

6/20/15 10:54 AM

against him, but want of consciousness cannot be proved for him. But in the great day, wherein the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open, it may be reasonable to think no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of; but shall receive his doom, his conscience accusing him or excusing him. This logic of retribution, suspended between ethics and law, allows us to go back to the question of subjectivity and its relationship with subjection in the political-theological dispositif of the person. When Locke argues that “in this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment,”  he gives personalization a role constitutive of law itself, while at the same time, he views the person as the linchpin between the subject and object of law. To grasp the meaning of this categorial shift in the semantics of the person from subject to object, it helps to read what Edmund Law wrote in response to Joseph Butler in a text published in 1769 with the title Defense of Mr. Locke’s Opinion Concerning Personal Identity. After stating that person is a forensic term and that it should be used in a strictly legal sense, the author notes that it makes the moral agent at the same time a subject of law and a true object of rewards or punishments. Within the threshold of indistinctness that the dispositif of the person causes between morality and law, man is an agent, which is to say, a subject, only inasmuch he is subjugated to the laws and therefore an object of imputation. From this point of view, the brilliant operation of desubstantialization, accomplished by Locke along a line that originates in Augustinian theology, comes to objectivize this same subject that declares itself to be such. Transferred to the ethical-legal dispositif of the person, it is perennially submitted to a double tribunal that is both external and internal at the same time. His “justifiable” condition—in the eyes of a court, and even more so, of his own conscience—slides relentlessly into a dimension that is “condemnable,” meaning, subject to an inappellable judgment that transcends it. From this point of view, we have gone beyond even Hobbes’s reasoning on authorization. For Hobbes, the relationship that obligates each citizen to obedience passes by way of an external element—the will of the sovereign who represents the subject. In the case of Locke, even before being experienced by the other, it is introjected into the very consciousness of the subject, who is thus transformed into an object of his or her own inner con116 The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 116

6/20/15 10:54 AM

viction. This circumstance may, of course, be interpreted as a step forward in the process of subjectification but also as an exposure of the subject, thus constituted, to an internal control that ultimately objectifies it. Not by coincidence, in the constitution of the person, the two complementary procedures for attribution and imputation converge in the more politically charged one of appropriation. Already in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, consciousness is the perception of what is happening in one’s spirit but also the fact that that spirit is in fact one’s “own,” in the strict sense that it belongs to someone like any other property. Accountability has the meaning of responsibility—the inner necessity of giving an account of oneself—but also that of an accounting certifying the property of one’s self. Only someone who is fully self-possessed is able to dominate his or her actions. As logic, morality, and law converge in the same politicaltheological dispositif, similarly memory, responsibility, and appropriation overlap in the same perception of the self as an object of its own subjective identification. In Locke’s political writings, and in particular in the Second Treatise on Government, the theme of appropriation acquires an ontological, even metaphysical, depth closely tied to the lexicon of the person. When the philosopher writes that “though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person,”  or that “Man (by being Master of himself and Proprietor of his own Person, and the Actions or Labour of it) had still in himself the great Foundation of Property,”  he makes personal self-appropriation the cornerstone of a political order founded on the reduction of the common to the proper. Each individual’s property of self corresponds to the property of his or her goods, in a way that makes freedom itself both the condition and outcome of a process of appropriation. By saying that each individual has the property of his own person, Locke opens up a thread at the end of which, by relaunching the political-theological lexicon of sovereignty, Mill can say that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”  It is true that Descartes had already declared his belief that “as for the body which by some special right I called ‘mine,’ my belief that this body, more than any other, belonged to me had some justification.”  However, while for him having a body was still a function of being a body, with Locke the relation became reversed. From that time on, rather than “being a body” it would be a matter of “having one.” The link connecting this assumption to what was said about The Dispositif of the Person 117

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 117

6/20/15 10:54 AM

personal identity as consciousness of one’s acts and thoughts is obvious. As for personal identity, the constitution of subjectivity is tied to selfidentification, so that in the case of the civil person, it is the property of one’s self that legitimizes the property of one’s goods. But if the possession of things arises from the possession of the person, it means that the separation of the person with respect to the living being is reproduced in the polarity between a part that possesses and another that is possessed. To the moral person—the subject of law—there corresponds a body-person, which is an object of possession no different from the thing possessed and consumed. The antinomic relationship between person and thing is central to Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals. Unlike the opposite directions taken by Hume and by Leibniz—the former in antisubstantialist terms and the latter in neoAristotelian ones—Kant takes up Locke’s lexicon of legal imputability, emphasizing its moral character: “A person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. Moral personality is therefore nothing other than the freedom of a rational being under moral laws. . . . From this it follows that a person is subject to no other law than those he gives to himself (either alone or at least along with others).”  The dispositif of subjectification through subjugation reappears, this time in a form that is free from any psychologistic elements: a person is the par ticu lar mode of constituting the subject that submits the subject to the law that it gives to itself. But—one might ask—if the law is not imposed by anyone other than the subject itself, in what sense does the law subjugate the subject? Or, if the law does subjugate the subject, how can the subject be said to remain the subject of the law? How can the subject be at the same time the creator and the accused of the law that he or she authorizes? Not only does Kant not conceal the logical difficulty contained in his own reasoning, he sets it out in explicit terms: “As a colegislator in dictating the penal law, I cannot possibly be the same person who, as a subject, is punished in accordance with the law; for as one who is punished, namely as a criminal, I cannot possibly have a voice in legislation.” The strategy for avoiding this difficulty leads once again to the semantics of the person, which are used by Kant to split the subject into two different, and even opposing, orders—the intelligible order of ends and the sensible order of efficient causes. While in the first, freedom coincides fully with the law, in the second, freedom tends regularly to diverge from it. This is why, to fulfi ll the imperative, homo noumenon must submit homo 118

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 118

6/20/15 10:54 AM

phaenomenon to his own judgment, considering him, to all effects and purposes, to be a person different from him: “Consequently, when I draw up a penal law against myself as a criminal, it is pure reason in me (homo noumenon), legislating with regard to rights, which subjects me, as someone capable of crime and so as another person (homo phaenomenon).”  What for Locke was still an academic hypothesis—the fact that one man could embody two different persons, finding himself in different states, such as reason and madness—became a given for Kant, a constant for all human beings, who are separated at each stage of their existences into two distinct persons, one of whom is the object of judgment for the other. The author who serves as a bridge between Locke and Kant from this point of view is Christian Wolff. Although Wolff picks up on Locke’s definition of person founded in the memory (persona dicitur ens, quod memoriam sui conservat, what is called a person is a being who preserves the memory of itself), he makes the logic of imputation conditioned by the prior division of the human being into homo spiritualis, to whom the higher faculties belong, and homo carnalis, who is vested with the lower faculties. But, apart from this precedent, it was Kant who situated the Two at the heart of personal identity. Of course, this does not mean that he restored a sort of Cartesian, or even less, a Platonic, dualism between the two different substances. In the transcendental turn, what are separated are two qualities of the same human nature. That which is defined as subject must adopt a differentiating attitude, as is appropriate when dealing with an animal being, on the one hand, and a moral one, on the other. Hence, Kant can specify that he does not want to refer to “a dual personality [doppelte Personlichkeit]; only the self that thinks and intuits is the person, whereas the self of the object that is intuited by me is, like other objects outside me, the thing [Sache].” What thus arises out of this is not a simply binary schema between subject and object but a more complex model: the person is one of the two poles and at the same the regime that provides the basis for qualifying the poles. This is how the peculiar effect was restored whereby, through the dispositif of the person, one part includes the other as its negative while at the same time pushing it outside its own confines. The thinking subject—abstracted from any physical determination and thus able to represent universal principles—remains within the regime of the person, while the natu ral human being participates in personhood and yet is excluded from it. It is a person when it recognizes itself in a system of ends that predetermines it; The Dispositif of the Person 119

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 119

6/20/15 10:54 AM

it is not a person when, dominated by its own animal part, it falls outside that system. Domestic relations, defined by Kant as pertaining to the family and servants, seem to be characterized by the same oscillation. The truth is, contrary to the Roman principle of the summa divisio, which was still adopted at the time by authors such as Pufendorf and Wolff—and which includes the slave in the ranks of persons—Kant reserved the qualification of person only to the subject who is endowed with legal competence. Personhood is granted only to those who, by reason of their condition of freedom, can be imputed with obligations and rights, unlike the slave, who cannot be. But then, once this absolute criterion has been established, when he moves onto the concrete ground of interhuman relations, Kant puts forward a series of limiting conditions that ultimately blur the contours of the alternative, overlapping the two conditions—at least regarding one trait. As the philosopher argues, setting out his first reservation regarding the criterion that he himself had adopted: Whoever is another’s tool (which he can become only by judgment and Right) is a bondsman (servus in sensu stricto) and is the property (dominium) of another, who is accordingly not merely his master (herus) but also his owner (dominus) and can therefore alienate him as a thing, use him as he pleases (only not for shameful purposes) and dispose of his powers, though not of his life and members. If the slave, by virtue of his master’s humanity (and not his own), may not be used for any shameful purposes, or be deprived of life or limbs, this is true a fortiori for those like domestics and contract workers who, while being under the control of others, are not in their possession. At the origin of this distinction there lies the difference between mastery and ownership, which, before applying it to the relationship with others, Kant applied to the originary relationship with oneself: “So a man can be his own master (sui iuris) but cannot be the owner of himself (sui dominus) (cannot dispose of himself as he pleases)—still less can he dispose of other men as he pleases— since he is accountable to the humanity in his own person.” The same distinction differentiates between use and abuse: while a person can be used as a thing by his master, he cannot be abused beyond a certain limit. But— this is the problem to which the author fails to provide a clear answer—what is this limit? For the human being who is dominated in accordance with the 120

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 120

6/20/15 10:54 AM

mastery relationship, but not with that of ownership—where does the boundary lie between being a thing and being a person? This question, which is undecidable within the semantics of the person, is posed by Kant through the development of a legal category that is so fluid that he himself compares it to a shooting star in the juristic sky. This is the “right to a person akin to a right to a thing (ius realiter personale).” While ius reale is a right relating to things and ius personale is the power to determine the behav ior of another person, by demanding from him or her a certain performance, the right to a person akin to a right to a thing is a mix between the two, consisting in the right “of possession of an external object as a thing and use of it as a person.” In a definition of this sort, the clarity of the distinction between person and thing wavers to the point of pushing them close to each other. But Kant intensifies the contradiction in his reasoning, to the point of undermining its capacity to be expressed in legal terms. The ius realiter personale is a right that is at the same time less and more than a right—a pre-right or a meta-right. It is irreducible to either a factual given or to a contractual relationship, because it expresses a law that coincides with the very dispositif of the person: “For,” he explains, since this kind of right is neither a right to a thing nor merely a right against a person but also possession of a person, it must be a right lying beyond any rights to things and any rights against persons. That is to say, it must be the Right of humanity in our own person, from which there follows a natural permissive principle, by the favor of which this sort of acquisition is possible for us. Even while defending his formulation from criticisms, when he questions this concept of “not treating persons in a similar way to things in all respects, but still of possessing them as things and dealing with them as things in many relations,”  Kant still does not manage to avoid contradiction; rather, he merely shifts it into a question of semantics. Indeed, the distinction he appeals to, between the adjectival, not necessarily possessive, form and the noun form of “mine” (meum, das Meine), marks a further slippage toward the overlap between person and thing. The case of the relationship with one’s wife is exemplary of this: If I say: “my wife” this signifies a special, namely a rightful, relation of the possessor to an object as a thing (even though the object is also a person). The Dispositif of the Person 121

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 121

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Possession (physical possession), however, is the condition of being able to manage (manipulatio) something as a thing, even if this must, in another respect, be treated at the same time as a person. Between the three “objects” of the right to a person akin to a right to a thing—namely, that of heads of households over domestics, parents over their children, and husbands over their wives—the latter case is the most extensive because it is justified by Kant on the basis of a double inequality that is both natural and legal. As for inequality, he does not hesitate to maintain that, “for the law to say of the husband’s relation to the wife, he is to be your master (he is the party to direct, she to obey): This cannot be regarded as conflicting with the natural equality of a couple if this dominance is based only on the natural superiority of the husband to the wife.”  The short circuit between person and thing reaches its apex, then, when it comes to equality before the law. Given that marriage is “the union of two persons of different sexes for lifelong possession of each other’s sexual attributes,”  Kant recognizes the logical and ethical inconsistency of the reduction of the body to a pure object of consumption by another person sanctioned by a legal contract. But, rather than release the bond between person and thing that gets established in this manner, by clearly separating them, he doubly reinforces the association, restoring the principle of equality through the reciprocity of use: In this act a human being makes himself into a thing, which conflicts with the Right of humanity in his own person. There is only one condition under which this is possible: that while one person is acquired by the other as if it were a thing, the one who is acquired acquires the other in turn; for in this way each reclaims itself and restores its personality. In this way, personalization becomes the result of depersonalization of the other, as long as the fi rst person is depersonalized by the second. The category of person thus stands at the legal crossroads of a double reification— as Kant confirms a little later with regard to the criminal possibility of one of the spouses removing itself from the possession of the other: “That this right against a person is also akin to a right to a thing rests on the fact that if one of the partners in a marriage has left or given itself into someone else’s possession, the other partner is justified, always and without question, in bring122

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 122

6/20/15 10:54 AM

ing its partner back under its control, just as it is justified in retrieving a thing.”  This is a further indication of the intrinsic connection between the dispositif of the person and the sovereign paradigm. The husband’s relation of mastery over his wife, that of parents over their children, and that of the head of the household over his servants is not perceived by Kant as inconsistent with the principle of equality, but rather, on the contrary, as being derived from it. In the same way that the persona alieni iuris—to use the Roman expression—is subjugated by the persona sui iuris who exercises mastery over him, all the persons that form the state are subiectae to the person of the sovereign. This is where the link between subjectification and subjugation reappears. Even prior to being a subject of law, the subiectus is subject to a duty of obedience, a prerequisite to the exercise of freedom, that does not allow for any exceptions. What, if anything, presents restrictive exceptions is the principle of the equality of subjects—for example, with regard to hereditary nobility, which is declared to be unassailable except through the natural extinction of its members. On this occasion as well Kant takes care to distinguish from a formal standpoint between the sovereign’s ownership and mastery, reserving the former to the land and the second to the people: “The people, the multitude of subjects, also belong to him (they are his people). But they belong to him as their supreme commander [Oberbefehlshaber] (by a right against persons)”  This does not detract from the fact that the sovereign, as the absolute person—the possessor of all rights who is also free of any obligation toward his subjects— occupies a completely asymmetrical position in their regard that is defi ned as impossible to resist and even “inscrutable.” Without taking away or diminishing the cosmopolitan and genuinely Enlightenment character of his other texts, from this perspective Kant appears backward, at least on one point, compared to the contractualist tradition. He opposes the genealogical inquiry launched by Hobbes on the origin of political society, by prohibiting questions regarding the genesis of power: “Whether a state began with an actual contract of submission (pactum subiectionis civilis) as a fact, or whether power came first and law arrived only afterward, or even whether they should have followed in this order: for a people already subject to civil law these rationalizations are altogether pointless and, moreover, threaten a state with danger.”  The political-theological turn that Kant imparts to his discourse is crystal clear. If the Pauline precept according to The Dispositif of the Person 123

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 123

6/20/15 10:54 AM

which “all authority is from God” is not “an assertion about the historical basis of the civil constitution; it instead sets forth an Idea as a practical principle of reason,”  the ensuing consequence is that the sovereign has only rights and no duties toward his subjects, so that in no case can they offer resistance to oppose him. Anybody who did so would be put to death and expelled as an outlaw (exlex). His condemnation—by the sovereign person with respect to another person who is no longer such because he is entirely taken over by his animal part and therefore driven by it into the abject sphere of the thing—crosses over the line of death to become eternal, like the injury that he has caused to the supreme power: “It is regarded as a crime that remains forever and can never be expiated (crimen immortale, inexpiabile), and it seems to be like what theologians call the sin that cannot be forgiven either in this world or the next.”  This unwarranted overlap between people and things is precisely what Hegel disputed in the Kantian category of ius realiter personale, as part of a polemic aimed ultimately at the entire legal framework inherited from ancient Rome. Behind the confusion attributed to Kant between rights involving substantial relations and those which only concern the abstract personality, Hegel glimpsed the division between persons who are sui iuris and those who are alieni iuris, the latter tipping over into the regime of things: “(In Kant, by the way, family relationships fall under personal rights of a real kind.) The Roman right of persons is therefore not the right of the person as person but at most the right of a person in his particular capacity.” The basis of this criticism, also directed against Savigny —is the Hegelian universalization of the idea of person, condensed into the ethical imperative: “Be a person and respect others as persons.” In opposition to the Roman compulsion to make personal autonomy dependent on possessing a par ticular status—that of patres—Hegel extends it to all human beings according to an emancipatory perspective that generalizes the concrete realization of freedom. However, things are not that simple—as regards both the relationship with Roman law, and even more, what follows from it for conceptualizing the category of person. As far as the first point is concerned, it should be borne in mind that Hegel’s explicit polemic against the ius did not stop him from recruiting its conceptual vocabulary, often mediated by Johann Gottlieb Heineccius’s Elementa iuris civilis. Indeed, we could say that he gener124

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 124

6/20/15 10:54 AM

alized it to the entire sphere of interpersonal relationships. What the philosopher rejects in the ancient Roman category of person is its inclusion of human beings who have no legal status, and who are therefore assimilable to things: “It was an unjustifiable and unethical proviso of Roman law that children were from their father’s point of view ‘things.’ . . . Here, then, the two qualities ‘being a thing’ and ‘not being a thing’ were united, though quite wrongly.” For Hegel, unlike the jurists of the Ancien Régime who continued to distinguish between persona and homo, every individual, without distinction of origin or condition, is, as such, a person: “It is part of education, of thinking as the consciousness of the individual in the form of universality, that the I comes to be apprehended as a universal person in which all are identical. A human being counts as a human being in virtue of his humanity, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, etc.” The natural quality of the individual is enough to endow it with full personality, so that nobody is in principle excluded. But Hegel’s criticism of Roman law seems to be more concerned with access to legal competence than it does with the definition of it. It is true that, unlike Kant, he does not include other persons in the category of goods possessed, but his analysis remains ruled by the constitutive relationship between right and property, to the point that this appears as the archetype of all other civil rights. It is as if, from Hegel’s perspective, citizens should all be patres— made such by the possession of usable res, things that can be exchanged or sold. Legal personality coincides with the owners’ capacity to own property. What qualifies them is in fact property (Eigentum)—not necessarily some thing in par ticular, but the abstract capacity to possess. Only through this are people able to enter into legal relations with each other: “A person by distinguishing himself from himself relates himself to another person, and it is only as owners that these two persons really exist for each other.” To grasp the entire movement of Hegelian thought, however, the relationship between person and property needs to be examined from the other side as well. Just as personality presupposes property, property, in its turn, is limited and contained, so to speak, by personality. If Hegel’s stance is distant from Kant’s, it is even more remote from Locke’s—to the point that, if looked at from the perspective of civil society, and even more, from that of the political state, Hegel’s philosophy can be interpreted as a kind of restraining force on the full unfolding of proprietary individualism. Private property, central to the section on abstract right, finds in fact a sort of The Dispositif of the Person 125

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 125

6/20/15 10:54 AM

relativization in the sphere superordinate to it, of ethicality, which subsumes it as an unavoidable but partial given. In a word, if property in its beginnings defines personality, then personality includes property, circumscribing it within its own horizon of meaning. And yet, in a sort of continuous dialectical rebound, it ends up confirming the centrality of possession, since the person is itself the outcome of the fullest of appropriations—namely, that of itself. Only by fully possessing oneself does one become a person. Hegel distinguishes between two types of appropriation: one is external, of things possessed as property ownership; the other is inside the person itself, of its own bodily and intellectual aspects, such as life, limbs, ideas, talents, and religious convictions. While the first is characterized by full, limitless control, the second is subject to certain restrictions, such as that of a certain degree of inalienability. For example, although the author of a book is the owner of his own ideas, he cannot dispose of them, even if he transfers them to a publisher. In general, these internal properties may be alienated, which is to say, externalized, made productive for others, only if this does not compromise the interests of the person in whom they inhere. This does not detract from the fact that, despite these restrictions, both types of the person’s relations—with things and with itself—come under the category of appropriation, which remains the logical pivot on which the entire discourse hinges. Indeed, Hegel notes that while the relation with things is never complete—since they tend to resist being completely assimilated by the subject—this does happen with self-appropriation, which is therefore, in its fullness, the most perfect form of property ownership and a model for all others. This way of thinking situates him on the borderline or, better still, along an overlapping stretch, between Roman property law and modern possessive individualism. The one penetrates and alters the contours of the other with an effect of radical semantic switching. This conceptual dynamic derives from the fact that Hegel moves simultaneously on two planes of the process of the self-constitution of the spirit. From the point of view of private law, which he himself defines as abstract, the proprietary paradigm of the person is the only means of relationship between human beings. However, from that of civil society, it only represents a partial, inadequate way of looking at social life, because it ignores the set of concrete needs that escape the meshes of the legal system. The latter, circumscribed by the privatist lexicon of the contract—of the use and alienation of the thing—leaves 126 The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 126

6/20/15 10:54 AM

out all substantial relations. Moreover, in a society based on simple property relations, every individual is separate from the other, but, even prior to this, he or she is also divided from himself or herself. As Hegel grasps perfectly, the dispositif of the person cuts subjectivity into two parts, one of which is constituted as the exterior object of the other: “Personality begins not with the subject’s mere general consciousness of himself as an I concretely determined in some way or other, but rather with his consciousness of himself as a completely abstract I in which every concrete restriction and value is negated and without validity. In personality, therefore, knowledge is knowledge of oneself as an object.” It was along this line of reasoning that the flattened profi le of the thing—established by the ius romano and adopted by a legal tradition that, at least from this point of view, arrived all the way to Kant—loomed up once again on the formalized horizon of the person. If the appropriable, or appropriated, thing is what connects individuals in the horizon of the law, this means that all the relations it translates wind up being reified at bottom. As he had stated in the Phenomenology of Spirit, for Hegel, “this dead spirit, the universal—the universal, split up into the atoms of absolutely many individuals—is an equality in which everyone counts as each one, that is, as persons.” Far from differentiating themselves from things, devoid of any par ticular subjectivity and perfectly standardized between each other, persons slide into the same indistinctness as things. Equally pointed criticisms are difficult to find in the corpus of the modern philosophical tradition. Formed at the point of intersection with the thing, the ancient Roman category of person loses contact with both individual and universal lives: “the right of the person is neither tied to a richer or more powerful determinate being of the individual as such, nor even to a universal living spirit, but rather to the pure one of abstract actuality; that is, to that one as self-consciousness in general.” Within the legal dispositif of the person, the principle of the One carries within itself the indelible traces of an irreducible duality. The entire Roman schema, to which Hegel rightly attributes the legal invention of the person, is traced back by him to the laceration between the unrelated point of the individual and the equally abstract absoluteness of a power without confines. Far from bringing together the logic of particular interest with that of general interests, the person ends up putting them into irreparable opposition. This is why Hegel goes so far as to say that “to designate an individual as a person is an expression of contempt.” The Dispositif of the Person 127

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 127

6/20/15 10:54 AM

This is not his last word on the topic, however, even in the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. As always happens in Hegel’s mighty dialectical machine, even the concept of the person, deconstructed into its splitting and abstraction effect, is restored on another plane of the discourse. It is not intended to negate the first, but to integrate it within a different order of arguments. At this new level of analysis, regarding the sphere of ethics, the idea of person, which is initially locked inside the formalism of abstract right, becomes fi lled with lifeblood in the institutions of civil society, such as the family and the corporation, interconnected in the even more developed circle of the state. Only when individuals—rather than expecting to create the political body on the basis of an arbitrary contract—perceive themselves as its internal expressions, can they break the façade that separates them from themselves in the proprietary bond with things. Within this broader perspective, the category of person comes to lose the abstractly formal characterization that it retained in the field of private law and takes on a different value. At issue is not so much the figure of the “moral person” (picked up in the modern juridical tradition and confined by Hegel to within the prestatal sphere) as the personality of the state itself, understood as a precondition and ultimate end of the process of the realization of Spirit. As we know, the tradition of defining the state in terms of personhood has a venerable history that found its most influential theoretician in Hobbes, through the development of the category of sovereignty. But while Hobbes tried to derive this from the contractual choice of the subjects through the mechanism of authorization—albeit at the price of the contradictions we have already noted—Hegel emphasizes the aspect of its autonomy. Going against the artificial modern logic, he almost seems to stress the naturalistic traits of the sovereign in a form that tends to isolate it not only from the subjects but also from the other bodies of the state. The person does not refer to an institutional function or to a procedure of representation in the state, but to the single figure of the sovereign, understood in the concreteness of his physical presence: “personality, like subjectivity in general, as infinitely self-relating, has its truth (to be precise, its initial, immediate, truth) only in a person, in a subject existing for himself, and what exists for itself is also simply one. It is only as a person, the monarch, that the personality of the state is actual.” As we know, these passages from the last section of the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right are subject to different interpretations, partly because 128

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 128

6/20/15 10:54 AM

they themselves underwent transformations, both in tone and topic, in the drafts that preceded and followed the print edition. For reasons of political expediency as well, there is no doubt that in the latter Hegel stressed the absolutist elements that in the other lecture series were filtered and nuanced, as far as the relationship between the various powers is concerned, in line with a more dynamic and balanced constitutional system. However, there remains the fact that the category of the person is what served him to give his discourse an explicitly political-theological tone. It would seem as if the need to recompose the split paradigm of the legal person induced him to model it in a markedly monistic key, opposing it as a single superordinate point to the rest of the framework. In other words, to heal the division between human being and person, rather than make every human being a person—although proclaiming this in opposition to legal systems derived from Roman law—he reserved the concrete personality of decision-making to only one man, isolated from the rest of the people, whom he nevertheless represents. Even from this point of view he seems closer to Hobbes than to Rousseau—not so much because he rejects any notion of popular sovereignty, but because he endows the monarch with a naturalistic dimension that sets him in competition with the other sovereign bodies, in line with the stark law of self-preservation: “Hence the determination of naturalness is contained in its very concept. The monarch, therefore, is essentially determined as this individual, in abstraction from all other content, and this individual is raised to the dignity of monarchy in an immediate, natural, fashion,  i.e. through his natural birth.” This birthright is allied with a decision-making power that “reabsorbs [aufhebt] all particularity into its simple self, cuts short the weighing of pros and cons between which it lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying ‘I will’ makes its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality.” Not surprisingly, then, the immediate realization of the sovereign will in the actualized reality leads Hegel to compare the dispositif to the ontological proof of the existence of God, with which it shares “the same conversion of the absolute concept into being.” The reason Hegel gives to justify this semantic slippage from the legal to the political-theological domain is that while the intellect proceeds by means of causal links that are deductive in nature, the concept of monarch cannot be deduced because it is “purely self-originating. . . . Closest to this concept, therefore, is the idea of treating the monarch’s right as grounded in the authority of God, since the unconditional character of that The Dispositif of the Person 129

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 129

6/20/15 10:54 AM

right is contained in its divinity.” The fact that Hegel avoids this apologetic argument in later versions does nothing to obviate the internal necessity that led the paradigm of person to join up again with its original theological matrix as it completed its modern trajectory. If Hegel’s political theology, carried forward through the paradigm of the sovereign, culminated in the work of Carl Schmitt, what is defined as liberal bioethics takes its origin from the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The fact that it can more properly be called “economic theology,” rather than “political theology,” does not much change the substance of things, considering that the political-theological dispositif of the person employed the lexicon of oikonomia to designate the divine government over men starting with Tertullian. On the other hand, if we consider Peter Singer and Hugo Tristram Engelhardt as the most impor tant representatives of this current of thought, it is striking that behind the references to Locke, Kant, and Mill, there reappear figures and concepts deriving directly from Roman law. In contrast with the Christian principle of the sacredness of life, liberal personalism draws on modern authors but it also reaches back to a horizon, prior to Christianity, in which human life is not deemed to be the primary value. “If we go back to the origins of Western civilization,” meaning the Greek and Roman era, as Singer explains by way of legitimizing his own choices: we note that being a member of a species was not enough to ensure the protection of life. There was no respect for the lives of slaves or other “barbarians”; and even among the Greeks and Romans, infants did not automatically have the right to life: those that were diseased or deformed were killed by exposing them to the elements. As for Engelhardt, his reference to the ius personarum is even more explicit. To support the idea that children are the absolute property of their parents he refers, of course, to Locke’s paradigm of ownership and to Hegel’s personal right, but in doing so he places them in a continuous line with Gaius’s Institutions, from which he cites a passage (I. 67) stating that “if we capture a wild animal, a bird or a fish, what we so capture becomes ours forthwith and is held to remain ours so long as it is kept in our control.” In the same way, continues the author, using formulations even more consistent with the Roman lexicon, “Children, insofar as they remain unemancipated 130

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 130

6/20/15 10:54 AM

and fail to go out and support themselves on their own, by remaining in their parents’ hands are in part owned (or to recall the ancient Roman usage, they remain in manu or in parental potestas).” If we recall that the Roman patres could dispose of their children’s lives, and all the more so if they were deformed, the analogy with the bioethical principles of Singer and Engelhardt is certainly surprising. By heading backward to go beyond modern moral philosophy (which they say they seek to bring to fulfi llment), it is as if they arrived at the very source of the dispositif of the person, with all its attendant hierarchical and exclusionary effects. What binds Singer and Engelhardt to the semantics of Roman law, distancing them from the natural law tradition that tried to reunite person and human being, is the restoration of their very clear distinction. For them, not only are all people not human beings, as demonstrated by the fact that personal traits can be attributed to mythological or imaginary figures, but not all human beings are persons. Some of them are limited to being members of the living species of Homo sapiens, but without attaining the higher rank of personhood. If, as Locke maintains, the characteristics of personality are rationality, consciousness of self, and a moral sense, it is clear that not all human beings are endowed with an equal measure of it. Not only that, but these characteristics have a much shorter duration than the entire arc of biological life—in the sense that they arise at a certain point of development and diminish, until they disappear altogether, often well before death: “Persons in the strict sense, come into being only some time, likely years, after birth, and likely cease to exist sometime before the death of the organism.” Personhood, in its most advanced form, when it is fully aware, that is, reaches its apex only in adults in good health, after a short period of latency and prior to a phase of inevitable fogginess. Along this line of reasoning, the comparison with Roman law is inevitable. As in ancient Rome, in the world of Singer and Engelhardt, relationships between human beings are modulated and sectioned off by a series of shifting thresholds, on the basis of different degrees of personhood. This is how we arrive at a descending scale that goes from the person in the full sense, to the quasi-person (such as young children), to the semi-person (such as the elderly who are no longer mentally and physically able), to the nonperson (such as the terminally ill), to the anti-person, or fools, who Singer puts in the same relationship to the intelligent human being as that between the animal and the normal human being. It is staggering to see The Dispositif of the Person 131

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 131

6/20/15 10:54 AM

how the paradigm of person once again causes a depersonalizing effect for those who it thrusts toward the margins of the category. “Personhood,” says Engelhardt, is fundamentally impor tant for the very idea and undertaking of morality. Only persons have problems and moral obligations. The world of morality itself is made thinkable by persons. The problem is that not all human beings are persons. At the very least, they are not persons in the strict sense of moral agents. Infants are not persons. Individuals in an advanced state of senility and the seriously mentally ill are not persons in this critical, crucial sense. From this perspective we see the real relationship that (at least in this type of “bioethics”) ties together political-theological ethics and biological life in a way that, if we wanted to infer a definition of biological life from political-theological ethics, the former would be the premise of the latter. Of course, within the framework of this intensely selective schema, human nonpersons—those who are not yet or no longer persons—are at the disposition of the persons who take on their care and at the same time decide their fate. The caretakers have charitable obligations, of course, toward these individuals who belong to the species Homo sapiens but who are excluded from the bounds of personhood, partly thanks to a natural intraspecies sympathy; however, this collides against a precise limit, beyond which it is useless and counterproductive to proceed. The placement of this limit, like the attribution of “degrees of humanity” for that matter, is the sole purview of “true” persons, the only arbiters of fate for the depersonalized human beings. Beyond the subjective benevolence of the caretakers toward their charges, there is, however, an objective criterion, provided by the utilitarian model, which radically restricts the theoretically unlimited scope of Kant’s universalism. While for Kant no human being can be treated as a means for any other, for bioethical utilitarianism it might be said that no one can be treated as an end—that is, they must all enter into a network of mutual use. In order to be maintained and taken care of by persons, the nonpersons must not tip the cost-benefit ratio too heavily toward the costs. This applies first of all on a global scale—the increase in potential persons must not in any case harm the actual persons, who are obligated to share the same resources with them: “Reflections on the consequences of over132

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 132

6/20/15 10:54 AM

population may lead to the rational conclusion that it would be best if there were not more persons to feed, care, and respect. In addition, one might conclude that the persons of a particular sort, such as those with severe physical or mental impairments, would create particularly severe moral obligations, which would be best avoided.” But even in the case of individuals who are already living, there may be a deficit when calculating benefits versus costs. According to the utilitarian model, since happiness, like pain for that matter, is calculated in global terms—in the sense that it is deduced from the sum of individual happinesses—the birth of a disabled or deformed child may preclude a normal one from being born later. This is already ample enough reason to stop any birth that is suspected of potentially causing damages to those who have to provide for its sustenance, in addition to those affecting the child itself. But if this is true of those who are not yet born, permitting indiscriminate abortion for economic reasons, like in China or Tahiti, why should it not also apply to those who are already living? “I cannot see how one could defend the view that fetuses may be ‘replaced’ before birth, but newborn infants may not be. Nor is there any other point, such as viability, that does a better job of dividing the fetus from the infant.” A differentiating criterion, he continues, could be provided along the lines of Locke’s schema, whether there is consciousness of self. But this is precisely what is not found in the fetus or the newborn. Neither of them is able to understand itself as a separate entity, projected into the future with a specific life plan, such as to make their elimination morally condemnable. Certainly, if the infant was at least able to fear its own death, grants Singer, an ethical motivation to keep it alive could be found, even if this proved to be uneconomical. But this is exactly what can be excluded: “Only a being able to see herself as existing over time can fear death and can know that if people may be killed with impunity, her own life could be in jeopardy. Neither infants nor those nonhuman animals incapable of seeing themselves as existing over time can fear their own deaths.” From here we arrive at the conclusion that, if it is good and indeed morally necessary to protect the lives of persons, this is not true of humans who are not yet or no longer persons. The only precaution to be taken, according to Engelhardt, is to ensure that the human beings being put down do not suffer, or that their suffering does not outweigh the benefit created by their deaths for themselves and for society. As a result, one’s “obligations will simply be to make sure that the good The Dispositif of the Person 133

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 133

6/20/15 10:54 AM

pursued, such as avoiding the birth of a Down’s syndrome child, outweighs the evil of the pain to the animal organism to be killed.” It would be difficult to find a more cogent example of an interweaving between political theology and economic theology (between theo-bioeconomics and theo-bio-politics) that has been twisted into thanatopolitics. In this case, economy is not only the administration of the human world through an intermediary person on the part of the divine authority, as it was in the ancient, salvific oikonomia of the Church Fathers. It is, rather, the horizon in which all human social relationships are included in order to exclude one part from the sphere of the bios, now flattened into bare zoe. Cost effectiveness is what determines the number and quality of those who can be “saved”—in the double sense of the term, economic and military. But what defines the threshold of exclusion in this economy of the bios—as in ancient Roman law—is the sovereign power of life and death exercised by the patres on all beings who are alieni iuris. Of course, this outcome goes well beyond and contradicts to the core the ethical intention that drives these authors. It is no coincidence that Singer has felt the need on several occasions to reaffirm his distance from the eugenic practices of Nazism, to which his perspective has often been likened. But this need for clarification is already the symptom of an objective, albeit unconscious, relationship made possible by the dispositif of the person, which, more than any other dispositif, should have prevented any proximity whatsoever with these practices. Brought back into action in the mid–twentieth century, precisely in order to respond to the Nazi attempt to reduce human experience to bare biology, the notion of person ended up, unconsciously, reproducing some of its thanatological assumptions, at least in conceptual terms. This is a further indication of the slippage in the perspective of a paradigm that is naturally vulnerable to being overturned into its opposite. There are two points where liberal bioethics and Nazi thanatopolitics coincide, or at least overlap. The first is the concept of a “life not worthy to be lived,” notorious in Germany in the 1920s and applied with absolute savagery over the next decade. Both Singer and Engelhardt make extensive use of it in their texts, without making any mention, of course, of these embarrassing precedents. However, it is precisely their silence on them that makes a proximity— and not simply a semantic one—even more obvious. When Singer underlines the difference between his own conception of a life “that does not deserve to be lived” and the Nazi idea of a life “not worthy to be lived”— 134

The Dispositif of the Person

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 134

6/20/15 10:54 AM

saying that only the former takes the need of the subject into question—he fails to note the fact that the Nazis also proclaimed the same intention, to the point of soliciting certain disabled people to request their own deaths. The problem is not, of course, to determine who gives the death order but rather the preliminary exclusion of human beings from the ranks of persons, who are preventively classified under an inferior anthropological or even zoological category. The partial lack of distinction implicit in Singer and Engelhardt’s liberal bioethics between anthropology and zoology is actually the other connection to Nazi biocracy. As has been noted, the animalist thesis of  both— which, in itself, is not only acceptable but even morally applaudable—envisages equality between animal and human conditions. They consider the unconditional dominion of humans over animals, who are fated to providing humans with nourishment and being intensively exploited, as another legacy of the Christian culture to be rejected: “whether a being is or is not a member of our species is, in itself, no more morally relevant to the wrongness of killing it than whether it is or is not a member of our race.” The day will come when the way we still treat animals today—because of its homicidal intensity—will be compared to some aspects of modern genocides. But to equalize the conditions of animals with those of humans by lowering some types of humans to the animal level, rather than elevating some types of animals to the human race, gives rise to a different problem. To argue that “the moral standing of adult mammals, ceteris paribus, would be higher than that of human infants” entails precise consequences. Observing that the Nazi leaders, starting with Hitler, were also strong supporters of animal rights, when Singer argues that “there will surely be some nonhuman animals, whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans,” he breaks down a boundary between humans and animals only to erect another, no less exclusionary one, within the human race. At this point, more than being one of our ancestors, or even one of our “kin,” the animal becomes the wedge that fits between groups of human beings, some of whom are welcomed within the boundaries of the person while others are expelled outside it. Never as in this case has the human race been cut into two asymmetrical parts, one of which claims to represent it in its entirety, by pushing the other to the borders of nothingness.

The Dispositif of the Person 135

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 135

6/20/15 10:54 AM

PA S S A G E Nexum (Economic Theology I)

In 1848, in his commentary on the Napoleonic Civil Code, the great French jurist Raymond Théodore Troplong dedicated an entire volume to the legal institution of contrainte par corps—imprisonment for unpaid debt, literally, “bodily constraint”—transposed in 1865 into the Italian Code as well with the name of arresto personale or “personal arrest.” Without losing sight of this semantic overlap between the debtor’s person and the debtor’s body, which situates a corporal punishment (what detention is, in effect) under the heading of “personal execution,” let us stay for now with the text by Troplong. While lamenting that the French law of 1832 stopped short at limiting contrainte par corps without abolishing it, he nevertheless argues that it not only conforms to the law but is also a necessary guarantee for the creditor and a bulwark of private property. Right from the opening lines, however, the author imparts a tone to his discourse that is far from neutral, establishing a sinister parallel between personal execution and the death penalty: “Contrainte par corps is the most extreme brutality of civil law, just as the death penalty is the ultimate degree of cruelty in criminal law.” Th is assertion refers indirectly to the opinion expressed by Cicero, in his oration For Publius Quinctius, according to which anyone who is subject to the venditio bonorum—to the loss of all goods—“is not only erased from the list of men, but he is removed out of sight, if possible, even beneath the dead” (is non modo ex numero vivorum exturbatur, sed, si fieri potest, infra etiam mortuos amandatur: 15.49).

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 136

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Beyond the rhetorical emphasis, what is Cicero referring to? What effect is caused by the confiscation of goods that is worse than death itself? And what is the relationship between property, body, and personhood? To answer these questions—clearly relevant to economic theology—our attention needs to be focused on the ancient figure of the nexum, central to Troplong’s discussion. In The Gift, Marcel Mauss traces its meaning to the point of confluence between archaic Roman law and Germanic law, in an era when the logic of the gift was still undistinguishable from the legally regulated logic of the contract. Previously compared by Paul Huvelin to the Germanic wadium and to the “additional pledges” found in Togo and in the Caucasus, Mauss traces nexum to the verb nectere—to the inextricable tie binding the individual who gives (tradens), to the one who receives (accipiens). What binds them is not only the solemnity of the rite that accompanies the giving, but also the thing itself that is being exchanged, which is still symbolically impregnated with the personal virtues of the first owner. Out of these stem the recipient’s obligation to return the goods acquired, but also the danger that he runs until the debt has been repaid: “So long as the contract is not completed, he is, as it were, the loser of the wager, the one who comes second in the race.”  What he loses, which is greater than the value of the thing gained, is his freedom, given as a pledge to the giver in a form that makes him emptus, that is, bought, as well as acceptus—accepted as a sort of “loan” to be paid until the contracted debt has been extinguished. At a time when relations between human beings were still regulated by magic rituals, the nexum was situated at the point of overlap, and exchange, between person and thing. In addition to being obligatus, the individual who received the thing, giving himself as a pledge, was also damnatus until he was freed, or reus. Regarding the latter term, Mauss observes that the meaning of “involved in a trial,” which is to say, “responsible” or “guilty,” is derived from the original term of “possessed by the thing”: rei-jos, formed by adding the genitive suffi x os to res. From this viewpoint all the theories of “quasi-offence” as the origin of contract, of nexum and actio, become a little clearer. The mere fact of having the thing puts the accipiens in an uncertain state of quasiculpability (damnatus, nexus, aere obaeratus), of spiritual inferiority and moral inequality (magister, minister), in relation to the one delivering (tradens) the contract. Passage: Nexum

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 137

137

6/20/15 10:54 AM

In light of this genealogy, the ancient Roman formula of nexum takes on a different protojuridical value. It is the institution through which the insolvent debtor physically places himself in the hands of his creditor until the debt has been repaid. Still widespread in the fift h century BCE, when the fall of the monarchy caused the plebes to be deeply indebted to the nobles, this practice was repealed—at least on paper—by the Poetelia Papiria de nexis law, around 330 BCE. Historians agree that this formal abolition did not put an effective stop to the practice; rather, it engendered a sort of juridicization aimed not so much at lightening the punishment as at clarifying the procedures that still conformed to extremely ancient rituals. On the basis of an ancient law from the Twelve Tables, the addictus or ductus (as the insolvent debtor subjected to the judgment of the magistrate was defined) had sixty days to repay the debt, or to find a vindex able to represent him. If these conditions were not met, after being displayed three times on the public market, he was left to the vengeance of the creditor who, having acquired possession of his body, could put him to death or sell him as a slave on the other side of the Tiber River. If there were several creditors involved, each had the right to a fragment of the debtor’s body, which was literally torn to pieces. Some scholars have given this prescription a metaphorical meaning, interpreting it as the dividing up of the property of the ductus rather than his body. Troplong disputes any minimizing interpretation that seeks to diminish the literal intensity of the partes secanto (cutting into parts), by invoking testimonies that leave no doubt as to the actual subject of the dismemberment. He refers, for example, to a passage from Quintilian, according to which “corpus inter creditores dividi licuit” (the body of a debtor might be divided among his creditors; Instit. Orat. 3, Chap. 6.84); and to another from Tertullian, stating that “iudicatos in partes secari a creditoribus leges erant” (there were laws that parties against whom a decision had been given might be cut in pieces by their creditors; Apology, 4.9). This hermeneutic wavering regarding the meaning of the law is not solely attributable to the modernizing trend that applies assumptions and values of our own legal culture to archaic Roman law. The overlap between body and property is made possible by a contiguity that rendered them effectively inextricable in the Roman experience. In a legal conception dominated by the importance of the thing possessed, the dispossession of goods ended up being identical to the dispossession of the owner’s body. As evidence of this, Livy defines outstanding debt as an ulcer that, after consuming 138

Passage: Nexum

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 138

6/20/15 10:54 AM

the debtor’s property, penetrates his very body until it, too, is consumed (Ab urbe cond. 2, Chap. 23). The material nature of the nexum, or the addictio, stems from this absolute bond between the subject and the thing possessed. In ancient Rome, anyone who did not possess things, including human ones, could not be a person. Thus, dominion over a person passed through control over his things, starting with his body. Since property could not escape the owner’s hands except by his will, to take possession of it, the creditor also had to include the debtor’s body in his dominion as well. If the debtor resisted pledging himself, the creditor resorted to the act of the manus iniectio, which made the debtor into an addictio, placing him at the creditor’s ser vice. On the basis of concepts like these, which turn the body into the substitute of property, Troplong identifies a form of savage political theology that seeks to avenge the failure to comply by means of a form of human sacrifice. All classic Roman law, moreover, has a theological root that for a long time marked its formulations and its practices, concealing them inside an initiatory shell. But what is most striking about this political theology is its clear economic value, which connects body and money, flesh and property. In this economic theology, even the legal apparatus, although responsible for governing the proceedings, in reality ends up being subordinated to them, in a form that makes control over things central to all relations. The category of person, anything but attenuating this process, actually provided the formal device for carrying it out. Rather than protecting human life from being seized, it defined the conditions and procedures of subjugation. Separated, in principle, from the living body, the person was sucked into the body when the latter lost its autonomy. As in personal execution, in which the body of the debtor took the place of the property, similarly the freedom of his person was lost together with that of his body. Only those who kept the body physically free of constraints could be sui iuris— independent of the control of others. To thoroughly grasp this dialectic—between property, body, and person—it behooves us to follow all the steps of Troplong’s genealogy. He begins by challenging the idea that in Rome a freeman could not be a slave. Th is is exactly what happened in the institution of the nexum, when the debtor freely delivered himself into the hands of the creditor, entering into the sphere of his dominion. The fact that, at a certain point, laws were promulgated that prohibited this practice demonstrates that at other, previous (and, as we shall see, later) times, it was in full effect. Its liminal status with Passage: Nexum

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 139

139

6/20/15 10:54 AM

respect to the law is proven by the fact that those who sold themselves— whether to escape poverty, or to gain economic benefits from the rank of their master—normally concealed their status as freemen, declaring themselves to have already been servants. Only on this condition could the dominus legitimately gain possession of them. However, there remains the legally uncertain character of a servitude issuing from an act of freedom or of a freedom that is self-suspending. In Rome, freedom and slavery were not at the disposition of the subject, because they depended on a series of objective relations that went far beyond the subject’s individual will. Of course, the transfer from one condition to another—from freedom to slavery and vice versa—was not only possible, it happened frequently through the specifically designed institutions of manumissio and mancipatio. But, in both cases, the change in status occurred at the behest of the dominus and not of the individual who was being subordinated—unlike in the case of the venales, who sold themselves. This gives rise to a status that is difficult to place and that also affects the profi le of the nexus. Certainly, the latter was forced to opt for servitude due to his condition of insolvency, but this always remained a free act, performed in a state of freedom. From this point of view, it might be said that he shared the ambivalent situation of those who enslaved themselves—but with a difference of no little account that made the condition of the nexus even more legally elusive, because, even though he became to all effects and purposes the slave of his creditor, he remained free with regard to everyone else. While the servus was such objectively, in a form recognizable to everyone, the nexus was so only for the individual to whom he was subjugated and only until he had paid off his debt. Of course, this happened only infrequently, given the impossibility of acquiring new goods, but it was possible in principle, if someone else redeemed him, restoring him to his previous rank. This adds one more twist to the dispositif of the person. In this case, it is not a matter of passing from the status of person to that of nonperson or vice versa. Nor is it a question of a nonperson, as the slave was, moving into the general category of person, according to Gaius’s summa divisio. What we have instead is a person who, while remaining such in the sphere of public law, loses his status in the sphere of private law. His is a slave to someone but free for everybody else, to the point of being able to preserve his name and be enlisted in the army—as happened in reality to various addicti after the defeat of Cannae. Furthermore, because the master was the only one who 140

Passage: Nexum

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 140

6/20/15 10:54 AM

could demand his ser vices, the dominus could not sell the nexus, even though he did have full possession of his body. The master was bound to feed him, with a pound of spelt a day, but he could keep him in chains and inflict the cruelest of tortures on him. Th is ambiguous character—of a free slave, or of an enslaved freeman—is in some way recognizable in Varro’s definition: “a free man who, for money which he owed, ‘bound’ his labor in slavery until he should pay” (liber qui suas operas in servitutem pro pecunia quam debebat nectebat, dum solveret; Lingua Latina 7.105, trans. R. G. Kent). As shown by the subtle semantic distinction of the expression in servitute, with respect to the clarity of the term servus, the nexus retained the status of freeman, although being in mancipio to the creditor. Like the filius in potestate of the father or the uxor under the hand of her husband, he remained a citizen of Rome, although he could be reduced to the status of thing by his dominus. Troplong expresses this anomaly by defining the nexus as a slave in relative rather than absolute terms: “A mixture of freedom and slavery . . . holding the middle between the fully free citizen and the fully unfortunate slave” (xviii). No matter how heaped in ignominy or infamy, the nexus occupied a rung on the social ladder a step higher than that of the servus, as attested to by the fact that, unlike the slave who was emancipated, once he finished his imprisonment, the nexus did not enter into the conditions of a libertinus (freed slave) but returned to being an ingenuus, namely, a man born free. But if that is the case, then why does Troplong, following Cicero, place the nexus in a status that is no different, and possibly inferior, to those who are condemned to death? What about his condition is even worse than death? Quintilian provides a preliminary explanation, by recalling the case of an addictus who, having asked to be freed like the other slaves, according to the provisions of his dead master’s will, had his request denied. Since the nexus was a freeman and not technically a slave, even if he was in mancipio, he could not be emancipated by a procedure applicable only to slaves. Quintilian uses this reasoning to argue for a legal superiority of the addictus over the servus, one that, however, gets reversed into a de facto inferiority. The nexus could not be released even on the death of the dominus, unless he repaid his debt to the heirs. In this sense, his captivity was more enduring than death—that of others, but also his own. Even after he died, the creditor had the right to keep his corpse sequestered, denying him a proper burial: poena extra mortem manet (the punishment remains Passage: Nexum

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 141

141

6/20/15 10:54 AM

beyond death). The condemnation of the insolvent debtor—carried out in the corner of the Comitium between the Curia and the Prison, where the other funerals took place—already had all the features of a funeral rite, ending with the dragging of the accused in chains to the private prison. But this death in life—or “civil” death, consequent to the maxima deminutio capitis (greatest reduction in status)—continued even after the biological one. Laid in the ground, in a form that made burial impossible, his mortal remains were dispersed in such a way as to deny the relatives even the integrity of the body, so as to produce a perennial damnatio memoriae (condemnation against being remembered). “Keep your debtor,” writes Saint Ambrose, then the consul for Emilia-Liguria, before being elected bishop of Milan, “and, so that he cannot escape, take him home with you, lock him up in a cubicle, you who are tougher than the torturers, because the man you detain is no longer held by the prison and the tax collector absolves him. After his death, the prison releases his things, you lock them up again! The deceased is acquitted from the severity of the laws, and you hold onto him” (De Tobia 10. 36–37). Th is practice, authorized by Ambrose as iudex ordinarius would then be suppressed by Justin and by Justinian, only to be reactivated soon thereafter in Late Antiquity, along with personal execution, which persisted until the modern era, when the private jail was finally replaced with the public one. However, the link between debt and corporal punishment remained intact, and was prolonged in all the twentieth-century constitutions, persisting in Italy until 1942. The role played by the dispositif of the person in determining the guilt of the debtor with respect to the creditor did not escape Nietzsche when, in On the Genealogy of Morals, he observed that “the feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, had its origin, as we saw, in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: it was here that one person first encountered another person, that one person first measured himself against another.” Never as in this grim tale of the contrainte par corps—rooted in the origins of Roman law, persisting until a short time ago, and protracted in various ways even today—have political theology and economic theology clasped together in such a deadly embrace. It is a bond that passes, without a break, from property to the body, and from the body to the person, making the person the legal pivot of transference from one to the other.

142

Passage: Nexum

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 142

6/20/15 10:54 AM

3 THE PLACE OF THOUGHT

The inconceivability—even prior to the inadmissibility—of challenging the assumptions of political theology is attested to by the fate of the first disruptive text that did so. Indeed, it is difficult to fi nd another work in the philosophical tradition that has been attacked, abused, and literally banned as much as the one I am referring to—Averroes’s Long Commentary on the “De anima” of Aristotle. The fact that we do not have a complete, modern translation of it, unlike other writings by the Arab philosopher, is indicative of a difficulty not solely epigraphic in nature, although this, too, is certainly not an irrelevant issue. Lost in the original, with the exception of a few fragments, and transmitted to us only in the unreliable Latin version by Michael Scotus, the Long Commentary was made by the author not on the Greek text by Aristotle but on one of its Arabic translations, which was also subsequently lost. But in addition to these philological injuries, there are other, no less serious obstructions of a political and, strictly speaking, philosophical nature: to begin with, the exile of the author—along with the public burning of his works—lasting until the year before his death, further confirmation of his substantial incompatibility with Islamic culture, which remained largely unimpressed by him. The toughest clash, however, came with the Western tradition, which, after praising him for two decades as the restorer of the true word of Aristotle, proceeded to make him the object of the most violent smear campaign. With the glaring exception of Dante— who, in the Divine Comedy, placed Averroes in Limbo along with the great spirits (Inferno 4.144)—and a few others who will be mentioned later, his rejection was expressed in such a brutal form that one suspects that the game being played around the work, and the name of Averroes itself, was

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 143

6/20/15 10:54 AM

not only philosophical but political-theological in character. In 1270, spearheaded by the Archbishop of Paris Étienne Tempier, on the urging of pope John XXI himself, when the Church put thirteen Avveroist propositions on the index, later increasing them to two hundred and nineteen (in a form more reminiscent of Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia), the opposition of the intellectuals was united in denigrating his works. Defined as “maledictus” by Duns Scotus, as “a rabid dog barking against the Catholic faith” by Petrarch, and as a “vile, illiterate drunkard” by Lorenzo Valla, Averroes was reviled as the enemy of all laws, according to an accusation embraced by the Florentine Platonists and transmitted to modern philosophy along a line that reached at least as far as Leibniz. It was the latter, especially in his “Reflections On the Doctrine of a Single Universal Spirit,” who offered a series of signposts pointing to the real nature of what was at stake. There is no doubt that it concerned above all the twofold denial of the immortality of the individual soul and of the divine creation of the world. But these ideas—which were just as disruptive to Islamic theology as they were to Christian theology—were the inevitable outcome of an even more radical theory: that of the separate, impersonal unity of the intellect. More than the so-called doctrine of the double truth (never preached as such by Averroes, who was engaged instead in uncoupling the sphere of faith, essential to preserve the social order, from that of reason), it was the location of the “material” intellect outside the confines of the individual—along with the disintegrative consequences for its status of personal subject—that was rejected en masse. That this was the real goal of the attack on the Arab philosopher was, moreover, openly stated by Leibniz, when he expressed his concern over the effects that Averroes’s theory would have on the composite of body and soul, expressive of the political-theological notion of person: “But to go so far as to say that this universal spirit is the only spirit and that there are no par ticu lar souls or spirits, or at least that these par ticu lar souls cease to subsist, is, I believe, to exceed the bounds of reason.”  It is no surprise that when Ernst Renan reopened the dossier on Averroes after a long period of oblivion, he continued to hammer on the same issue, with no less rancor: “Certainly, if there has been a revolting absurdity in the world, it is the unity of souls as it has feigned to be intended, and if Averroes had ever been able to assert a doctrine of this sort literally, Averroism would deserve to figure in the annals of dementia and not in those of philosophy.” 144

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 144

6/20/15 10:54 AM

To understand its real terms, we must recall the essential traits of Averroes’s theory of the material intellect. This is made complicated by both the hermeneutics he conducts of Aristotle’s text and by the critical comparison that he engages in with other Arab commentators like Avicenna and Avempace, and with other Greek commentators like Themistius and Alexander of Aphrodisias. Although Averroes refers to five types of intellect—“agent,” “material,” “acquired,” “in habitu,” and “speculative”—what counts is primarily the relationship between the first two, from whose form the others are derived. Both are separate, but while the agent intellect has the function of actualizing the intelligible forms in the material intellect, the latter must be understood as a pure potential, free of any nature other than simple receptivity: “After he had explained that the material intellect does not have some form characteristic of material things, he began to define it in the following way. He said it has no nature according to this except the nature of the possibility for receiving intelligible material forms.”  The metaphor Averroes uses to describe the relationship created between the two intellects by the actualization of the intelligibles is that of sunlight and air. Like the air, the material intellect is the transparent medium through which the sunlight makes objects visible: “Just as light makes color in potency to be in act in such a way that it can move the transparent [medium], so the agent intellect makes the intentions in potency to be intelligible in act in such a way that the material intellect receives them.” More than a blank tablet on which forms of knowledge are inscribed—as Alexander defines it—the material intellect is the very possibility of their visibility, the mirror that makes them perceptible from one time to the next. This is not a detached and transcendent subjectivity, but what we would today call a competence, to which everyone has access, although without ever being able to make it their own. The problems that arise at this point, to which the author dedicates a large part of his treatise, are fundamentally two in number. The first regards the nature of the intelligibles, declared to be generable and corruptible, although produced by the agent intellect and received by the material intellect, both of which are instead eternal. The other concerns the relationship between the multiplicity of human individuals and the unity, separated and impersonal, of the intellect through which they think, or rather, through which they become the occasion for thought. The solution the author puts forward is that the intelligibles are unique in relation to the intellect that receives them, and multiple in relation to the individual faculties that cause them to The Place of Thought 145

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 145

6/20/15 10:54 AM

arise; they are incorruptible from the point of view of the material intellect, but corruptible relative to each individual. The point of juncture between the separate unity of the intellect and the plurality of human beings is their imaginative capacity, which connects the ephemeral and bodily reality of human beings to the eternal and incorporeal quality of the intellect. The role of the imagination turns out to be essential in this schema. Reason needs the imagination because only through it can the pure transparency of the intellect become thought about something. In a nutshell, located at the apex of human experience, the imagination is the aptitude that allows it to attain the separate sphere of knowledge and to reunite itself with that sphere. In this case, the principle of separation—which also places the material intellect outside the body of the individual—does not create an exclusionary effect. Rather, belonging to everyone, it is what brings into relationship the sensible and the intelligible, potency and act, the proper and the common. In this way, the immortality that is negated from the point of view of the individual soul can be attained from the impersonal perspective of the species. When the material intellect is linked with the agent intellect, dissolving into it, then the human race as a whole will also become eternal. But even now, even in life, the individual can participate in a sort of immortality, constituted by the speculative activity, which is our highest disposition: “Once it has been explained that the condition of happiness necessarily belongs to man not because of the fact that he dies, but rather because of the attribute and shape that make him immortal, what is the way to achieve it? The road to reach the intellect is study and speculation.” If these, in their most condensed form, are the terms of Averroes’s interpretation of Aristotle, what frightens his critics to the point of prompting them to reject his interpretation even before discussing it? His faithfulness to Aristotle’s text—certainly dubious as a verbatim account—is not in question so much as the philosophical horizon in which his exegesis is inscribed, perceived as clearly incompatible with the political-theological machine governed by the category of person. A passage from Thomas Aquinas’s On the Uniqueness of Intellect Against Averroists (III.82) is absolutely clear in this regard. “If then,” he says, the intellect is not something of this man such that it is truly one with him, but it is united to him only through phantasms or as a mover, will would not be in man, but in the separated intellect. And thus a man 146

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 146

6/20/15 10:54 AM

would not have dominion over his acts, nor could anyone be praised or blamed for his acts, which is to destroy the principles of moral philosophy. And since that is absurd and out of keeping with human life—it would be unnecessary to take counsel or to pass laws. Thomas’s text has the merit of concentrating in a single turn of phrase the whole chain of negative consequences that the political-theological tradition drew from the Averroist theory of the separate intellect. It is no exaggeration to say that, taken in its most radical sense, this theory shatters the relation of implication between ethics and law that hinges on the dispositif of the person. What disappears from it is not only the inherency of the intellect in the metaphysical composite of the soul and the body, on which both the Christian tradition and its modern secularization are based, but also the mechanism of appropriation that all individuals exercise on themselves, making them masters of their own thoughts and actions. What is in question, in the first instance, is the relationship between intellect and will as it takes shape in the Scholastic discussion. While Thomas took a middle position in this debate by connecting intellect and will in a one-to-one relationship, the Augustinian tradition tended to stress the primacy of the will. This opened up a path traveled to the end by Duns Scotus on the Christian side and by Al-Ghazali and Avicenna on the Islamic side. In a conceptual framework dominated by the principle of contingency—and therefore of the predominance of the category of possibility over that of necessity—the world appears to be created, and then guided, by the free decision of an omnipotent God, who exerts absolute sovereignty over human beings, intervening at all times in their lives. At the extreme opposite of this paradigm, both personalist and decisionist at the same time, Averroes argues for the clear primacy of an impersonal intellect that places God in an external, and essentially irrelevant, position with respect to human events, which are known to him only from the perspective of the universal, and not from that of the particular. Being a formal, but not an efficient, cause of the world, he does not govern over it—unlike his role in the political-theological paradigm. Not even creation responds to an arbitrary act of divine will— occurring, that is, at a certain time on the basis of a final decision. If this had been the case, it would be tantamount to saying that God, through creation, had passed from an initial state of imperfection to one of perfection— which is incongruous with his omnipotence, since everything that is possible The Place of Thought 147

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 147

6/20/15 10:54 AM

by God is already in act. More than a Person, for Averroes the deity is the set of intellectual conditions that enable the life of the whole. This regime of impersonality does not concern only God—who in reality tends to coincide with the natural order and is therefore an object more than a subject of love on the part of human beings—but also humans themselves, who are deprived of their central position and introduced into a unitary horizon in which the living species relate to each other according to a difference of degree more than rank. From this point of view, contrary to all forms of anthropocentrism, Averroes is situated in a line that, from Siger to Pomponazzi, draws the destiny of man closer to that of other living beings, without losing the differences relating to their peculiar cognitive aptitude, however. The prime mechanism of this passage is the shift of the intellect to outside the confines of the individual. By arguing that “homo non intellegit” (man does not understand)—as his opponents had him say, imposing a more complex reasoning that makes man the vehicle, or the occasion, rather than the sole proprietor for the unfolding of thought— Averroes opens up a theoretical space in which there is room for neither the Roman-Christian paradigm of person nor the modern one of subject. While both view human life as essentially characterized by thought, so as to cease being such in its absence—as follows from the very defi nition of animal rationale—for Averroes their relationship is contingent and occasional. Just as there exists a human life that is not rational—that of the infant, the sleeper, the madman, but also someone who is not thinking—in the same way, in its potentiality, the intellect is in itself independent of the biographical events in the life of the individual, because it precedes this individual in time and continues to exist well beyond the circumstances of its death. Indeed, we can say that the basic question of Averroes concerns mainly this condition: What can be said of thought at the moment when a given individual ceases to think? And what is a life that is not yet, or no longer, governed by thought—no less complete and perfect for that reason, however—such as that of a baby or someone who has lost his or her memory? No subject survives what he or she has thought, in such a way as to definitively possess it. Every thought transmigrates continuously into other subjects—more than subjects of thought, subjects to thought, in a certain sense “thought” by thought, as Alexander of Aphrodisias puts it in De intellectu (§29–31). It is so in a way that, rather than calling up the famous formula of the cogito, suggests the passive form of the cogitor: the human 148

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 148

6/20/15 10:54 AM

being as the vehicle through which a thought in potency is actualized, before going back to being a potential, available for activation by anyone. Moreover, both the exercise of learning and the history of philosophy are proof of this impersonal and transindividual mobility that cannot be appropriated by the individual, because it is endlessly in transit from one to  the other. There thus falls away the threshold discriminating between owners of thought, who have the capacity to attain the highest rank of personhood, and everybody else, who are ignorant or unsuitable to speculative activity. To say that thought is a possibility open to everyone, a common place that is not exclusively occupied and cannot be exclusively occupied by anyone, means to theorize, for the first time with such clarity, not only that intelligence is a collective power but also that, as expressed by the greatest of Averroists, it “cannot be fully actualized all at once in any one individual or in any one of the social groupings,” because it requires “a vast number of individual people in the human race, through whom the whole of this potentiality can be actualized.” Both sides of the modern dispositif of the person are called into question, and even divested of their political-theological foundation before their time: the Lockean-Kantian aspect of imputation, and the HobbesianHegelian aspect of sovereignty. As regards the first, we will recall that, starting with Locke, inherency—the fact that a certain thought is intrinsic to a given living organism—is not enough to define the category of person. For personality to be recognized, the subject must have full consciousness of it in a form made continuous in time by the thread of memory. Only if thought adheres to its life like an original mold can the subject can be imputed as the originator of its actions. Only then can it be declared responsible for those actions before itself and others—specifically, before a human or divine court that judges its conduct and assigns it rewards or punishments. For this reason, the exclusive belonging of thought to its own subject—the subjectivity of thought—is a noetic prerequisite of a legal order that subjugates the thinking individual by making it subject to the law. This is how a technically gnoseological question took on an immediate political importance. Only if the subject recognizes itself and is at the same time recognized as the sole proprietor of its own thoughts in the form of personhood, which unites its ability to think with its life, can the person be inscribed in a regime governed by a transcendent law in Hobbes’s sense or a transcendental law in Kant’s sense. The activity of thought thus becomes The Place of Thought 149

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 149

6/20/15 10:54 AM

the point of articulation between a theological presupposition—that of the incarnation of a spiritual principle in a living body—and the political-legal obligation of the subject toward an order that is authorized to make it account for its every action. It is evident that by breaking the relationship between thought and subject, or by reinterpreting it in a key that makes the subject the vehicle rather than the owner of thought, Averroes dismantles not only a metaphysical block but also a political-theological horizon that hinges on the semantics of the person. The concept of the person takes a blow from the legal-ethical side of imputation, but it is also challenged from the more intensely political side of sovereignty. In this case, too, the location of thought, whether internal or external to the individual, plays a crucial role. To place the intellect in the individual sphere of the thinking subject means, according to the most typical personalist presupposition, to assign it unchallenged dominion over its own volitions through the joining between reason and will that was asserted by Thomas Aquinas against Averroes. If the will obeys reason in the acts of the subject, reason, in its turn, presupposes the potency to actualize them by means of a free volition. Now this dialectic, which regards the individual, also extends to the attitude toward others. The possibility of directing them, on the part of what Hobbes and Hegel define (albeit differently) as the sovereign person, is in any case conditional on a rational control and voluntary order that human beings exercise on themselves. A construct like this in turn presupposes (as has been pointed out repeatedly), a unity and along with it a division between a part that is rational and voluntary, constituted by the individual intellect and by free will, and another area that is bodily or animal, subject to the first like a sort of slave inside it. Looked at from a different angle, this is the same relationship that exists between potency and act. In the individual who is master of himself or herself and of his or her actions, the act is the actualization of a potency that responds to both the internalized law in the moral sense as well as the external law, established by the sovereign. In this case, too, it is evident that the disarticulation that Averroes performed—between an intellect capable of joining with the entire community of human beings via their vis imaginativa, and the single individual who participates in it without appropriating it as his or her own possession—was destined to undermine the logical axis around which the entire modern political order turns. If the will no longer responds to an intellect implanted inside the individual body, but enters into 150 The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 150

6/20/15 10:54 AM

a provisional, never-definitive contact with a shared potency of an impersonal character, its options will also lie within a collective interest that regards the human species as a whole. What changes in this scenario is the entire meaning of what is defined as politics—no longer is it the domination of the self oriented toward the domination of others, but rather the development of a resource that belongs to everyone from the outset. In this way, the political-theological machine that through the dispositif of the person unites human beings by separating them is flipped over into a theory of a separate intellect that unifies them in a common destiny. “To find an open supporter of Averroes’s doctrine,” writes Bruno Nardi, “we must leave behind Christian Averroism, by then engulfed in the ruins of Aristotelianism, and proceed to Giordano Bruno.” The relationship between Bruno and Averroes is not easy to reconstruct in a few simple strokes, to begin with because, as Nardi observes, there is no direct relation of the phi losopher with the Aristotelian tradition and with Italian Averroism itself. And then, above all, because Bruno’s personality—and also his unique ability to mix Aristotelian and Platonic sources in an entirely original conceptual lexicon—makes it impossible to establish direct lines of fi liation. A secure point of contact between the two, however, consists in the defense of philosophy from the invasiveness of religion that ultimately led Bruno to his death in Campo de’ Fiori. In The Ash Wednesday Supper, when he argues that “the purpose of the laws is not so much to seek the truth of things and speculations as to achieve benign usages, the advantage of civilization,” citing the philosopher Al-Ghazali, in reality, he is resorting to an argument that Averroes specifically used against Al-Ghazali. Whatever the reason for this switch in names—a slip of the pen seems unlikely, while caution regarding a compromised name seems more probable—the fact remains that Bruno largely shared Averroes’s distinction between a religion intended to maintain the social order and free philosophical study devoted to seeking the truth. In a passage from On the Heroic Frenzies that juxtaposes Averroes and Al-Ghazali, the reference to the dialectic between food and poison also returns to hammer on the necessary separation between the two spheres: what is food for the simple can become poison for the palate of the wise, and vice versa. Certainly, in Bruno there is something more compared to Averroes—a libertine and even blasphemous tone—permitted to him by the Anglican context in which he moved that was as adverse to intolerant The Place of Thought 151

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 151

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Calvinism as it was to watchful Catholic orthodoxy. But their convergence on a few heretical themes—for example, that of the generation of the world, which did not escape the Roman inquisitors—consolidates the impression of a bond between them that can well be ascribed to a shared rejection of political-theological semantics. It might paradoxically be said that the political use of religion, preached by both, is precisely what in principle cuts off every possible theological foundation of the political: If the purpose of theology has a political character, it cannot at the same time be its transcendent foundation. The most important issue as far as our inquiry is concerned is quite another, however: namely, the theoretical bridge that joins this position to the deconstruction of the personalist lexicon as regards the conception of both the deity and the knowing subject. There are places where Bruno explicitly rejects the category of person, which he considers to be illegitimate from the historical and philological point of view, and inadequate from a theoretical one. When he states that “this noun ‘person’ . . . in Saint Augustine is said to be not ancient, but a new one of his time” and that he himself doubted whether it “was suited to the deity,” this signifies making a frontal break with an entire tradition hinging on dogmas concerning the Trinity and the Incarnation. As regards the Trinity, he denies that the deity can be separated from itself, rediscovering its fullness in a sort of triplication. This process of self-transcending through two other persons destroys the unity of the utterly simple divine intelligence, equally diff used, like light, in the theater of the universe, which is equally indivisible. As for the Incarnation—represented mockingly in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast by the dual nature of the centaur Chiron—Bruno’s rejection is even more firm: Since God has been manifesting himself from the beginning in all His actuality, he has no need whatsoever to duplicate Himself in the person of the Son. Thus, what Bruno challenges about the idea of Incarnation is precisely the binary device of the person, as we have reconstructed it in its many forms: if the One had to split itself into two in order to express itself, not only would it lose its self-sufficiency, but it would fracture the world in which it is realized into two separate parts. Bruno connects theocentrism and anthropocentrism in the same criticism, which in more than one respect recalls that of Averroes. Like the Arab philosopher, for Bruno, too, the divine impersonality, expressed by the indistinctness of potency and act, excludes a form of direct sovereignty over a world that God has not chosen 152 The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 152

6/20/15 10:54 AM

among other possible worlds—as Leibniz would instead argue—because it is the object of its own self-realization. Starting from this aspect—which excludes God from governing the world, directly or indirectly—Bruno already lands a fi rst blow to the political-theological machine set up by Tertullian through the economic distinction of the divine persons. But the deconstruction of the paradigm of person has an equally forceful impact on the human subject, which is absorbed into an infi nite life that is identical to the perennial becoming of things. To define it—in the literal sense of delineating its confines—the analogy between the Creator and a creature made in His image and likeness, dissolved along with Christ’s mediation, is no longer acceptable. Between God and human beings, or between the infinite and the finite, there runs an ontological limit that is impossible to breach. Certainly, in a different sense, humans can approach the divine, although without ever drawing near to it. This is the unquenchable thirst to know already theorized by radical Aristotelianism in terms not always distinguishable from the Neoplatonic ones. But, as we have seen, in Averroes this implied a separation of the material intellect from the individual, who is united to it only by the power of the imagination. The consequence, or the assumption, of this definition was the impersonality of a thought that is available to the entire human race and that therefore cannot be appropriated by any one individual. From an anthropological perspective, this corresponds to the absence of a divine person. Bruno adopts this logical dispositif, but without conforming to it completely. On the one hand, he alters its contours, while, on the other, he draws from it even more radical consequences. What distinguishes the two authors, even within a common horizon, is first of all a semantic difference that causes similar terms—such as “universal soul” or “possible intellect”—to take on different meanings; conversely, terms that are different actually have a similar function. But what counts on the level of paradigm is a substantial affinity of intention that for both is aimed at dismantling the model of a personal subject divided from its own object and also from its own bodily part through the doubling of its consciousness of self. One of the most important texts in which this complex relationship (consisting of both assonances and differences) comes to light is in Cause, Principle and Unity, where Bruno recalls the topos of the ship and the helmsman. The fact that it is one of the propositions (the seventh) that the philosopher would be invited to retract during his trial is further confirmation The Place of Thought 153

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 153

6/20/15 10:54 AM

that, at its heart, there lies the choice for the impersonal that Averroes was also accused of, by Thomas Aquinas in the formal condemnation of 1277. The passage in question is the following. In response to the question of how the same subject can be principle and cause, which is to say, intrinsic and extrinsic parts of something, Theophilus responds as follows: That is no contradiction, if we consider that the soul is in the body as the pilot is in the ship: since the pilot is part of the ship, he moves with it; yet, considering that he governs and moves it, he must not be included as a part, but as a distinct efficient cause. Likewise, the soul of the universe, in so far as it animates and informs it, is found to be an intrinsic and formal part of the universe, but in so far as it directs and governs the universe, it is not a part, and does not have the character of principle, but of a cause. The meaning of the metaphor, which reappears with a similar function in the “Explanatory Epistle” to the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, resides in the dialectic between the efficient cause and the immanent principle that makes the intellective soul at the same time internal and external to the body. It is internal in the sense that, like the helmsman in the ship, it moves with it; it is external because, as the cause of the movement, it may not be identical with what moves. In this second sense—which brings Bruno closer to Averroes than he would like to reveal, prompting him to cover up the Arab philosopher’s name with Aristotle’s—the intellect, insofar as it is the cognitive power of the soul, “does not cause any part of man to be called man, or to be man, nor to be described as intelligent.” Despite a whole series of anything but insignificant lexical and even conceptual differences (Bruno refers to the agent intellect rather than to the material one, which is assimilated instead with the corruptible individual soul), there exists an obvious relationship with the formula attributed to Averroes of homo non intellegit (man does not understand). Referring to the intellect, when Bruno subordinates the expression ille noster to that of nos illius, he breaks with the classical, and humanistic, view of the animal rationale: It is not the intellect that belongs to humans but, rather, humans who can enter into relationship with it, by realizing, although never completely, the part of them that is divine. Certainly, on several occasions Bruno speaks out against the principle of the separation of the intellect, in opposition to Averroes. But this apparent contradiction must be seen within a wider 154

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 154

6/20/15 10:54 AM

framework in which the Italian philosopher pushes forward even further on the difficult road of a thought of the impersonal. Bruno’s ulteriority compared to his predecessor shines through, moreover, in his pronouncement (both appreciative and critical) on Averroes: “although an Arab, and not knowing Greek, he grasped more of the Peripatetic doctrine than any Greek we have read and he would have understood still more, had he not been so devoted to his idol Aristotle.” The additional step that Averroes did not take, which Bruno believes he has, is that of introducing the human race into the animal species, all of whose traces it bears, as well as into the infinite life of the universe. The specific target of his criticism about the Averroistic principle of the separate intellect is, in a nutshell, the residue of anthropocentrism that isolates human intelligence inside a sphere of absoluteness relative to the world into which it is inserted and from which it emerges into existence. This is the source of his difference from Averroes. While the latter separates the intellect from the individual, but in so doing situates him or her in a unique position with respect to the rest of the universe, Bruno does not exclude the existence of individual intellects. Furthermore, he welds them together into a network, both spiritual and material, that comes prior to them and produces them. When Bruno writes that “There are three kinds of intellect: the divine, which is everything, the mundane . . . which makes everything, and the other, particular ones, which become everything,” he is tracing out a more complex schema that the one delineated by Averroes, precisely because it is does not set up any sort of barrier dividing the divine from the mundane, the general from the par ticu lar, or the everything from the part. Just as the everything is distributed in the parts, so they in their turn tend toward the everything that simultaneously includes them and attracts them as their end. In this integrated horizon, in which what is individual never loses its connection with the whole inside of which it fits, the different cognitive powers—mind, soul, intellect, imagination, memory, sense, perception—become various modes, or gradations, of a single continuous flow. This is defined by a double process of ascent and descent that in the conquest of knowledge correlates the human soul to the universal, represented at its furthest segment by the divine intelligence. In his following works, Bruno partially modified the passages of this journey, without however calling into question its unitary character, radically opposed to any metaphysical or gnoseological dualism. In De Umbris Idearum, human The Place of Thought 155

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 155

6/20/15 10:54 AM

knowledge, based on the shadow of ideas, dates back to the first intellect and is attracted upward by the divine light that pervades reality; in Cause, Principle, and Unity, the connection between God and the world is pulled even tighter together, although without ever becoming perfectly identical. From this point of view, Bruno’s monism never slides into a kind of pantheism or panpsychism. If it did, if the cause were identical to the principle and the human intellect converged with the divine, it would lose the momentum that, from above and below, gives rise to the whole movement. Never perhaps as in this case can it be said that transcendence and immanence of the divine principle overlap without either of the two canceling out the other. The One transcends the world, but from inside it—the One is both reality and its mover. There is the same relation of unity and distinction between the soul of the world and living matter. The instant the divinity penetrates the entire universe, like a wave of light, sensible matter acquires the same ontological status as the intellect that knows it, without ever fi lling it to the brim. For this reason, unlike in Averroes’s conception, substantial forms cannot exist in Bruno’s world. The division into separate substances, comprehensible in the Ptolemaic cosmos, would no longer make sense in the new Copernican universe without limits and without a center. The moment the soul of the world is the universal principle of everything that lives, more than a form in itself, the intellect becomes its own internal potency: mover and magnet, mediation point and ring of juncture between the divine unity and the fi nite entity that extends toward it, to infinity. Like between the world soul and the human soul, there is neither pure exteriority nor simple indistinctness between the universal intellect and par ticu lar intellects: rather, there is an incessant motion that pushes, or attracts, the latter into the orbit of the former. In order to describe this emanative process, in a passage from On the Heroic Frenzies that once more calls on Averroes, Giordano Bruno uses the classical figure reworked in Ficino’s Theologia platonica of the moon illuminated by the sun that is in its turn a source of light: This uniquely, specifically human intellect, which exerts influence over all individuals, is like the Moon, which assumes no other species than one alone, endlessly renewed by its turning towards the Sun, which is the prime and universal intelligence. The human intellect, by contrast, particular and multiple, turns, like the eyes, towards innumerable and ut156 The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 156

6/20/15 10:54 AM

terly diverse objects, so that it is shaped in infinite gradations that follow all the forms of nature. The narrow distance that continues to distinguish Bruno from Averroes does not lie so much in a certain confusion between the “possible,” “passive,” and “agent” intellects as it does in the different way of describing the cognitive process to which the entire dialogue is devoted. What changes compared to the rigid Averroistic, and in general Aristotelian, schema is the much more dramatic tone that permeates and alters Bruno’s language, completing the deconstruction of the personal subject of knowledge as an entity that is separate and unique with respect to its object. To fully grasp the increasingly radical perspective that Bruno adopted toward the humanistic tradition and the incipient Cartesian conception—which was leaning toward a separation between the thinking and extended substances—we must keep in mind the superposition that he creates between the ontological level of reality and the epistemological one of knowledge. Knowledge is made possible by the fact that it is an integral part of the metaphysical structure of reality that it interprets, in the sense that the connections that innervate our minds—at the level of perception, then imagination and, finally, of reason—are the same that exist in nature. This strips any meaning from the idea of a personal subject that, through self-reflection, is able to independently turn to the object of knowledge, taking possession of it or, even, as he would later argue, constituting it through its own transcendental categories. For Bruno, knowledge of reality is not founded in the structure of consciousness, because this has always been rooted in a natural world that is one and the same as it. Rather than separating itself from the object (and before that, from itself, in the splitting that ensues from the dispositif of the person that we have learned to recognize) the subject of knowledge must, on the contrary, break the artificial barriers that divide it from itself. It must do so in order to reconstitute the unitary structure underlying both and that, in reality, constitutes the ultimate objective of cognitive tension, however difficult to achieve. For this to take place, in a certain sense pushing the human being beyond itself, an intense effort of will is required and also genuine intellectual passion for the truth, which is accessible only to a few individuals—including the author himself, naturally. As we know, this is the central theme of On the Heroic Frenzies. To grasp all its significance and originality—also in relation to the Averroistic The Place of Thought 157

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 157

6/20/15 10:54 AM

copulatio toward the highest spheres of intelligence—we must resituate it in its cultural context, which was in a highly charged state of Neoplatonic ferment. The role given to the will and to Eros, in a manner that balanced or even called into question the autonomy of the intellect preached by Averroes, can be attributed to the Neoplatonists. But perhaps the most significant feature in the scene that we have described thus far is that this strong infusion of erotic voluntarism into the realm of Aristotelian intellectualism not only does not reestablish the boundaries of the subject, whether humanistic or Cartesian, it submits the subject to an even more marked deconstruction. Central to it is the famous myth of the hunter Actaeon who, having seen Diana naked (symbolizing the ultimate object of knowledge) is torn to pieces by his own dogs, which is to say, his own thoughts. Hence, not only can there be no subject of knowledge separate from its object—which pursues it no less than it is hunted, transforming it from hunter into prey—this mutual incorporation, which exchanges subject and object, contaminating them, does not play out without consequences for the former, who is literally torn to pieces by the invasion of the latter. To reach the last station (where man draws so close to the divine light that illuminates and simultaneously constitutes the universal soul of the real that he is burned up by it), the hunter of intelligibles, as Averroes would put it, is submerged and fi lled up with it until he implodes, eviscerated in his interiority and turned inside out, like a glove, into the outer world. Rather than transfer itself into a separate sphere of the intellect, in a sort of deification, the intellect identifies with what it knows. In this transformatio sui in re (transformation of itself into thing)—in which the transformatio rei in seipsum (transformation of the thing into itself) is accomplished and inverted—there is nothing that points to the stability of a consciousness that withdraws in self-reflection into itself; still less is there any process of attribution, or imputation, of one’s acts or mental states. Bruno is light years away from the exclusionary machine that makes thought the linchpin of ethical and legal constitution, of a theologically founded political order—which, on the contrary, he challenges all the way to his death. At the end of the journey, the knowing subject immerses itself in its own material constitution, until merging with the same horizon in which it was situated from the beginning. The hunting of Actaeon—passing from the subjective genitive to the objective one—is interpretable as the shift from the first to the third person: from the “I,” still identified with its own 158

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 158

6/20/15 10:54 AM

individual contours, to an “it” mixed with the reality of the impersonal universe that contains it. The third philosopher who was long cursed, and whose image was burned countless times (although not his works, like Averroes, or his body, like Bruno), is Spinoza. What approximates him to two authors who are so distant to him in context and inspiration? And what is frightening about his writings, to the point of causing a universal rejection that has only recently, it seems, begun to thaw? I believe that to arrive at a deep understanding of this matter, we need to provide a single answer to these two questions. This must be sought, at least in the first instance, in their shared opposition to the political-theological machine. The fact that Spinoza expresses his opposition in a piece entitled Tractatus theologicus-politicus makes this common stance even more impor tant. The impression we get is that critiquing what for him was the lethal subordination of the political to the power of the church did not suffice: he wanted to bring the challenge inside the church. The Jewish theocracy, governed by a God capable of exerting absolute power over His own people through the dual use of miracles and prophecy became the polemical target of a mode of thought that reserves to religion solely the domain of inner conviction and the moral message. In Chapter 14 of the Tractatus, when he writes that “faith requires not so much true dogmas as pious dogmas, such as move the heart to obedience,” he is simply reasserting the functional distinction between philosophy and theology already theorized by Averroes and reinforced by Bruno, stretching it to its greatest point of tension. But if Spinoza’s break from the tradition, in agreement with his two precursors, was limited to this—to an Enlightenment sort of attitude toward religious dogma—the reaction against him would not have been so harsh. In reality, what frightened his contemporaries and successors was not only his attack on the Christian perspective, no matter how radical it was. There is something more, and more disturbing, in his work that concerns the theoretical horizon to which he takes his attack with an impact force never experienced before. The first indication we get of this lies in the distance taken by someone who had already accused him of a sort of latent Averroism. What Leibniz considered supremely “dangerous” in Spinoza’s Ethics are a few theses that are not only implausible but also untranslatable into the language of individual monads to which he had traced back the grammar of the personal subject: “As for example, that there is only one substance, The Place of Thought 159

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 159

6/20/15 10:54 AM

namely God; that creatures are modes or accidents of God; that our mind perceives nothing further after this life; that God himself does indeed think but neither understands nor wills; that all things happen by a kind of fatal nature.” The especially striking aspect of this is the polemical allusion to a thought that cannot be transformed into understanding and will, because this is reserved to a God that is coextensive with the objective and impersonal order of things. What more than anything else makes Spinoza unredeemable in Leibniz’s eyes, flattening him into an Averroistic hermeneutics, is, in short, the absence of the notion of person from which the political-theological structure draws its legitimacy and fuel. The thinker who goes straight to the point with his usual security of judgment is Hegel, when he identifies Spinoza’s limit—namely, the inability to save the finite—in his conception of the totality as a substance, but not as a subject. What it lacks, he specifies, is the “principle of the personality” without which Christianity will sink: “His philosophy has only a rigid and unyielding substance, and not yet spirit; in it we are not at home with ourselves. But the reason that God is not spirit is that He is not the Three in One.” The allusion to the Trinity, combined with the previous mention of the Incarnation in the Phenomenology, negatively defines Spinoza’s philosophy in relation to the entire political-theological front. By failing to arrive at a conception of God as a person—multiplied by three in the mystery of the Trinity and split into two in that of the Incarnation—conceiving of Him rather as substance, destroys the theological basis of the political order, making its preservation impossible. For this to occur (according to the “sovereignist” line running from Hobbes to Hegel) there must be an alterity that, if not more transcendent, is at least immanent to the political system—or in any case capable of governing it from on high. This is what the person of the monarch accomplishes—initially legitimized by analogy with God, and then increasingly adapted toward directly integrating the deity’s functions; but, even in this case, without ever losing the connection that binds the sovereign logically to the divine person. The sovereign can only inherit the power to release himself from his dependence on God from a deity who is completely free in his decisions. As we have said many times, rather than breaking open the political-theological casing, the paradigm of secularization—inaugurated by Hobbes and brought to awareness by Hegel—remained encapsulated inside it. This implication is precisely what Spinoza went to work on. Knowing full well that he could not separate the 160 The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 160

6/20/15 10:54 AM

fate of the earthly sovereign from the heavenly one—connected to it by the same personal status—he directs his deconstruction toward the theological terrain, deriving from it consequent effects for the political sphere. This is why he could give the name “political-theological” to a treatise aimed at critiquing the preeminence of theology over politics—because, to act on the political plane, the critique had to first make inroads on the theological. Th is is how God, deprived of all personal qualities, becomes nothing more than the rational structure of the real, the necessary order that connects its modes in a system of causes in which everything that exists achieves its full expression. Consequent to this ontological mutation, what disappears, on the one hand, is all forms of dualism—ancient or modern, Gnostic or Cartesian—now resolved within the eternal unity of the substance; and, on the other hand, any finalism, deactivated by the already perfectly rational character of reality. Also excluded is the direct intervention of God in the world—made impossible not for want of power but because of the fullness of his potency. Having been realized from the beginning, his power has no more reason to further manifest itself. In Spinoza’s world, there is no unsaturated remainder—there is no virtual that has not always been real. Each and every potential being is, for that very reason, being. An assumption, expressed differently, appearing in both Averroes and Bruno, returns in a much more developed theoretical framework: God would never have been able to postpone his intervention, as in the creatio ex nihilo, since in Him there is no difference between being and activity. Whatever is in his power is already, in and of itself, in act. If he could still do something with regard to what is, this would come off not as a demonstration of potency, but of impotence, because it would mean that his existence is not identical to his essence. Thus, from inside the political-theological paradigm, Spinoza demolishes the “performative” dispositif—which is to say, the principle that turns the divine will into the supporting prop of the sovereign will. The inadequacy of our imagination does not reside in deducing, illegitimately, the power of the sovereign from the divine power but, on the contrary, in modeling God’s power based on human power: By God’s power the common people understand free will and God’s right over all things that are, which things are therefore commonly considered contingent. They say that God has power to destroy everything and bring it to nothing. Furthermore, they frequently compare God’s power with The Place of Thought 161

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 161

6/20/15 10:54 AM

that of kings. But . . . we proved that God acts by the same necessity whereby he understand himself. God is not knowable by the will, but he is by a thought that is identical to what is thought. Subject and object of thought, even more than in Bruno, are the same thing. This inherence of each section of the real in the totality that expresses it is what incapacitates the sovereign principle. For God to exercise sovereignty over the world, a distance would have to exist that cannot be there, given that the world is the outcome implicit in his being. Therefore, in Spinoza’s world, there is neither Incarnation—which presupposes the distinction, if not the opposition, between two substances in a single person—nor Trinity, which implies a multiplication of the substance into three different persons. What disappear in the impersonality of a single living entity are both the sovereign figure of the Father and the mediating figure of the Son, in favor of a Spirit that is immanent to the reality of human beings and things. This is why, strictly speaking, for Spinoza one can talk neither about monotheism nor royal Christology—the two sides of Judeo- Christian political theology; rather, if anything, of a sort of social pneumatology. But if Spinozism, in contrast to Augustinian voluntarism, reduces the role of freedom to the conscious assumption of necessity—not to the transition from nonbeing to being but to the conformity of being to the most perfect mode—what happens to thought? Where is its place, in particular in relation to the separate intellect of radical Aristotelianism? To begin with, it must be remembered that the cultural context Spinoza moves in is different and far removed from Aristotelianism. His universe is not the one populated by celestial spheres, rotating around the unmoving mover, but rather, the Galilean universe. Nevertheless, more than one correspondence with Averroism can be found, starting from a shared distance from the subjectivist turn of modern philosophy. When he writes that “Man thinks,” the proposition—in apparent contradiction with the thesis attributed to Averroes, according to which homo non cogitat—this must not be understood in consciential terms, as if thought issued forth from consciousness, or in a transcendental sense, as if, in order to function, it required the presence of given categories in the human mind. In Spinoza’s conception, ideas— adequate or inadequate as they may be—are instead expressions of a human intellect, contained within the divine one; subjects are affected by them on 162

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 162

6/20/15 10:54 AM

the basis of combinations that are irreducible to the identity of any one individual. Not surprisingly, contrary to any form of anthropocentrism, he tends to replace the term “individual” with the neutral and impersonal one of res singularis. Nothing like a personal consciousness as a place of selfidentification or imputation is recognizable in what Spinoza calls thought. Rather, thought can be ascribed to the organization of individual minds in a collective structure arising from their interaction—a sort of polyvalent node, or multiple competence, from which the modes of the substance draw from the elements already acquired by the social brain, continually adding new ones to it. Certainly, the substance, endowed with the attribute of thought, thinks exclusively through its modes. It is not the subject of thought in a philosophy that radically severs the relationship between thought and subject. But not even the individual modes think, at least not in the subjective sense that we normally give this expression. Outside of their mutual connection, the only ideas they are capable of elaborating are inadequate ones, because they are ignorant of the common horizon in which they are immersed. Just as the human mind is not the subject of thought, similarly ideas are neither productions of consciousness nor representations of things. Rather, they are mobile expressions of a circuit that, only when recognized in its entirety, reflects the complexity of the world. Th is, rather than being an object of knowledge, is the horizon beyond which it could not come into existence, both in the sense that, for Spinoza, one never thinks on one’s own—one thought always arises out of another, along a thread that can never be retraced back to its first segment; and also in the sense that thought is itself a mode of being in the world. Philosophical activity, as a whole and in its individual moments, more than a form of interpretation or judgment, is an extension of the world itself. From this point of view we cannot say that thought is a property of the human intellect, or even of the divine intellect. It is not located inside the mind. If anything, the intellect of the individual is what lies situated within thought, which is to say, within the substance considered from the point of view of one of its two attributes. This is what lies behind his rejection of the Cartesian cogito as that which unites thought and subject in an intellectual act. If the world, understood as the whole of the existent reality, is not the object but rather the place or form of thought; if the world does not stand before the subject as something external that can be apprehended by the subject depending on the accuracy of an appropriate The Place of Thought 163

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 163

6/20/15 10:54 AM

method; if there is no passage of ideas from an inadequate mode to another mode that is adequate, since every idea is in any case part of the one reality; all this means that the cogito cannot be the criterion of self-legitimization for the subject. Indeed, it means that it cannot be declined in the first person, according to the canonical formula of cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. While interpellating an individual, the cogito does not arise from inside the subject; also, it tends to continuously go beyond the subject in a circuit that, in the final analysis, is coextensive with the overall movement of things. On more than one occasion when Spinoza argues that the idea always presents itself in its truth, he means that behind it there is no individual entity capable of producing it; and that no one, strictly speaking, possesses an idea—if anything the individual embodies the idea in its vital experience. Certainly, Spinoza does not always, or exactly, express himself in these terms. More than once he argues that human beings think and know the truth—although God’s knowledge is vaster and more complete than ours. But this proportion should not be understood as a domain included inside one that is bigger. In his system, there is no reserve of meaning. Or even an area of knowing that is the exclusive competence of the deity, from which human beings are excluded—almost as if it was a matter of competition between two subjects over something that was transcendent to them. But even if we wanted to express ourselves using this imprecise terminology, Spinoza’s lexicon would have to be situated outside the confines of the dominant axis of modern philosophy that connects Descartes to Kant. The subjective consciousness that for Locke distinguishes each person from all the others becomes in Spinoza’s view the locus of a knowledge that remains opaque, or even of the error stemming from the unawareness of the connections linking it to the substance. The mental or bodily change— marked by loss of memory—that Locke took as a negative paradox to confirm the need for personal identity is considered by Spinoza to be a normal condition of a life that is inherently predisposed to transformation, in relation to circumstances, encounters, and different states that alter its condition: “Sometimes a man undergoes such changes,” he writes, referring to Luis de Góngora y Argote, that I should hardly have said he was the same man. I have heard stories, for example, of a Spanish poet who suffered an illness; though he recovered, he was left so oblivious to his past life that he did not believe 164

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 164

6/20/15 10:54 AM

the tales and tragedies he had written were his own. He could surely have been taken for a grown-up infant if he had also forgotten his native language. Nothing says that a lack of memory, even about one’s own identity, constitutes a defective mode of existence. On the contrary, it cannot be ruled out that the extreme periods of life—such as childhood and old age, but also illness or sleep—may be richer than full intellectual maturity. This is partly because nobody stays long in the same state, identical to himself or herself, since what we call an individual is nothing but a moment of transition from a preindividual stage to a transindividual one. Moreover, beatitude itself, experienced during intellectual contemplation of God (not unlike the Averroist union with the agent intellect), consists of a process of deindividuation or desubjectification, which reassembles the unity of being beyond our imagination. There is, however, an important point which clearly differentiates the definition of thought in Spinoza from both the possible intellect and, all the more so, from the agent intellect that Averroes talks about, in part due to the lack of difference between potency and act: this is its separate dimension, at the heart of Averroes’s theory. That thought is impersonal and does not belong to anyone, as both philosophers maintain, does not mean that it is necessarily separate. Bruno had earlier challenged this conclusion, formulating a more complex dialectic between matter and spirit as part of infinite life. Spinoza emphasizes even more this tendency toward unification and the incorporation of thought. It is simply one of the two, inseparable attributes of the substance, one of which is the extension of the other. Therefore, not only can a mind not exist outside the body, the body is actually the content of the mind: “The first thing that constitutes the essence of the mind is nothing else but the idea of a body actually existing.”  Between the two there is a relationship of mutual proportionality that makes one the cause, or effect, of the increased potency of the other, so that “whatsoever increases or diminishes, assists or checks, the power of activity of our body, the idea of the said thing increases or diminishes, assists or checks the power of thought of our mind.” In the world of Spinoza nothing is separate from the substance and its modes. If they were—if thoughts were separate from extension or were bodiless—they would restore to the metaphysical plane the splitting that Spinoza had criticized in the political-theological The Place of Thought 165

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 165

6/20/15 10:54 AM

dispositif of the person. Not only does the mind have no privilege over the body, in the final analysis the body is what determines the quality, which is to say, the expansion or contraction, of the mind: “For as the body is more capable of being affected in many ways and of affecting external bodies in many ways, so the mind is more capable of thinking.”  To grasp this passage, which seems to distance Spinoza from radical Aristotelianism to the point of overturning the central thesis of the separate intellect, we must keep in mind a general change that took place. Starting from the Cartesian turn, the same separation used by Averroes to deconstruct the Christian or Platonic composite of body and soul became what marked the supremacy of the res cogitans over the res extensa. Transferred from the domain of the celestial spheres to the living body of the individual, the impersonality of the intellect was no longer ensured by its separateness—now serving the political-theological dispositif of the person—but by the indivisible unity of a substance that was at the same time extended and thinking. Th is is all the more true in that corporeity, in Spinoza, is not a locus of separation but of communication, and even contamination, between individuals created by their mutual relationship. Whether harmonious or confrontational, this in any case produces collective dynamics that ultimately affect the fate of the species as a whole. On these lines, one can well say that just as a body may be composed of multiple individuals, so an individual can be made up of one or more bodies: When a number of bodies of the same or different magnitude form close contact with one another through the pressure of other bodies upon them, or if they are moving at the same or different rates of speed so as to preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves, these bodies are said to be united with one another and all together to form one body or individual thing, which is distinguished from other things through this union of bodies. In a word, union, not division, creates what means simply “undivided” (according to the etymology as well)—not only from itself, as the binary structure of the person, but also from others with which it enters into an ontological relationship. Ontological, but also political. This is how we arrive at the end point of Spinoza’s perspective as well as the true leap forward with regard to the question of the impersonality of thought posed by Averroism. While Averroes’s 166 The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 166

6/20/15 10:54 AM

separate intellect, precisely because of its distance from the bodily sphere of human beings, remains necessarily in the intellectual domain, without being able to arrive at a public dimension, its introduction into the living body that Spinoza performs necessarily implies a political transposition. Without forcing a dynamic that is much more ambivalent into an exclusively emancipatory meaning—one centered on the multivalent category of “multitude” —there is no doubt that the impersonality of the mind, mediated by the unity of bodies, led to a decisive transition specifically with regard to the political-theological order into which the knowledge of the time was being arranged. A comparison with Hobbes gives ample evidence of this difference. While for him, the preservation of the community, threatened by mutual destruction, is ensured by separating the bodies so as to enclose each individual inside unbreakable boundaries, for Spinoza it is entrusted to an external relation that strengthens individuals: For example, if two individuals of completely the same nature are combined, they compose an individual twice as powerful as each one singly. Therefore nothing is more advantageous to man than man. Men, I repeat, can wish for nothing more excellent for preserving their own being than that they should all be in such harmony in all respects that their minds and bodies should compose, as it were, one mind and one body. As always in Spinoza, the chain of consequences takes on a geometric form: if the body is part and parcel of the mind, and if the mind has an impersonal capacity that breaks through the boundaries of the subjective cogito, the body will also tend to expand into a public dimension that is irreducible to the relationship of command and obedience set up by the sovereign dispositif. This is not to say that Spinoza wants to eliminate control over the irrational movement of the multitude, or that authority and power should be dissolved in a simple expansion of life vitality. But, in the Political Treatise, when he writes that “just as each individual in the natural state has as much right as the power he possesses, the same is true of the body and mind of the entire state,”  an entire legal and political order begins to rotate on its hinges, opening up a first glimpse into the modern politicaltheological regime. It’s an odd thing to read a blatant eulogy of the impersonal in the pages of a writer who is considered to be the founder of modern personalism. This The Place of Thought 167

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 167

6/20/15 10:54 AM

is what we find in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s Stuttgarter Privatsvorlesungen (Private Stuttgart Lectures) that he gave in 1810 to a small circle of friends in a private home. At a certain point, after touching on all the other themes of a theological character, the author begins a reflection on the human being, identifying its three “potencies”: “mind” (animus, Gemut), “spirit” (Geist), and “soul” (anima, Seele). The animus corresponds to the dark principle of being—objective and natural; it is weighted down by the impulses of nostalgia and melancholy. The spirit, on the other hand, represents what exists for itself, inclined to yearn for being, first unconsciously as mere appetite and then consciously as will. As “what there is in humans that is properly personal,” it is not what is highest in them, because it is also the locus of disease, error, sin, all of which have a spiritual character. On the contrary, the third potency, that of the soul, is the highest— “what there is in human beings that is properly divine, and therefore, what in them is impersonal, the being that is true and proper, to which the personal element, as a nonbeing, must submit itself.” To reinforce these points, Schelling goes on to explain that, unlike the spirit, the soul does not know and is not good—it is external both to the principle of individual knowledge and to the legal-ethical paradigm that ensues from it—not because it is unconscious or evil, but because it identifies with science and goodness in a form that transcends the separateness of the individual. That is why breaking the connection with the other potencies generates the phenomena of disease, stupidity, and madness—the latter being the base on which the intellect rests, thus understood as madness controlled, restrained, and dominated. For this reason, adds the philosopher, those who do not have even a grain of folly are weak of intellect and unfruitful; while, on the contrary, when madness is dominated by the soul, it can become divine, as Plato knew. When the two lower potencies of the animus and the spirit are devoid of the beneficial influence of the soul, the intellect, rather than dominate the madness within it, runs the risk of getting sucked into it. Reason is nothing, ultimately, but the reflected sphere of the intellect’s submission to the soul. In this respect, it is in itself passive, like a blank sheet that can be written on. It is limited to adopting the suggestions of the soul, thereby entering into contact with the truth, while, continues the author, “what reason does not understand, what it rejects, what it does not allow to be inscribed in itself, not inspired by the soul, comes from the personality.” Reason, in a word, is a filter inside thought that keeps out the personal 168 The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 168

6/20/15 10:54 AM

part, the part that does not adhere to the objectivity of things—such as, for example, the idea of a triangle, the longest side of which is opposite to the smaller angle. Schelling imparts a very different direction to this principle (for which Kant, inviting us to follow the inclinations of the soul, had limited himself to providing a formal expression) that protrudes outside the personalist lexicon of Kant’s philosophy, going so far as to actually flip it over into its opposite: “ ‘Act according the soul’ means: do not act as a personal being but in an utterly impersonal fashion; do not disrupt the influence of the soul with your personality. In all works, even those of art and science, the greatest moment comes about precisely because the impersonal is at work in them.” At this point, however, a problem arises that interpreters of Schelling generally solve by simply expunging passages such as these, which, if taken literally, would jeopardize the prevailing interpretation. How can statements that are so tilted toward the impersonal be reconciled with the proposition— dating to only a year earlier, and then subsequently reiterated and reinforced throughout the next phase—according to which “only in personality is there life” (“nur in der Persönlichkeit ist Leben”)? What pushes an explicitly personalist author to create a tear in the fabric of his own discourse? How, in other words, can the logically opposite paradigms of the person and the impersonal be integrated? A preliminary answer to this question—rarely asked in the critical literature, or explained away through the truism that what is defined in these texts as “impersonal” is nothing more than an immature formulation of what the author would elsewhere call “person”— should be sought in the conflictual but certainly critical relationship that the philosopher entertained with Spinoza throughout his career. The relevant passages are well known. In the preface to his Of the I as Principle of Philosophy, composed in 1795 while still under the prevailing influence of Fichte, he declares that “Spinoza, even with all his mistakes, is for his daring consistency infinitely more worthy of respect than many of the beloved eclectic systems of our learned world which, cobbled together with the tatters of all possible systems, become the death of any true philosophy.” And in a letter to Hegel on February 4 of the same year he does not hesitate to declare himself a Spinozist (“Ich bin indessen Spinozist geworden!”). However, at the same time, confounding those who seek to chain him to an author still considered a “dead dog,” Schelling punctiliously spells out the distance that separates him from Spinoza. The Place of Thought 169

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 169

6/20/15 10:54 AM

The real point of tension in this unique relationship of attraction and distancing should be traced back to the margin of difference between pantheism and determinism, namely, in the relation of implication but not identification between God and nature. According to the logical redefinition of the relationship between subject and predicate, repeatedly emphasized by Schelling (making the predicate an attribution that does not coincide with the extensiveness of the subject), the fact that nature is in God hardly means that God is coextensive with nature according to Spinoza’s well-known phrase Deus sive Natura (God or Nature). Certainly, God is also nature, but far from being identified with it, the deity experiences its personal essence precisely by detaching itself from nature—separating itself from a part of itself that certainly does not make up its entirety, indeed, that constitutes its point of inner conflict. It is precisely the failure to identify this difference between the two planes of the divinity that shuts Spinoza’s God inside an impersonal cage from which it cannot escape. This is not because we are dealing with a philosophy of identity—Schelling’s philosophy is that, too, at least up until a certain time—but because the identity between its elements is not constituted by their confl ict: “In Spinoza there may very well be absolute identity between the principles, but these principles are completely inactive with regard to one another, they do nothing to one another, they do not act on one another: they are; there is no living opposition or living interpenetration between them.” This is why the God of Spinoza remains crippled, clinging to itself and indecisive, incapable of attaining the personal dimension, which, as we know, requires the unification of a Two through the subordination of one polarity to the other. Both are necessary to the process of God’s self-generation, but in accordance with a binary device that makes one the base for the elevation of the other—exactly what happens between foundation (Grund) and existence (Existenz). This line of reasoning is behind Schelling’s objection to Spinoza that the natura naturans he speaks about is not the “true” God but only the prius of the divinity, the bedrock from which God reveals himself in order to affirm himself in his full living actuality. If this were not the case, God’s freedom would remain enchained to necessity, as indeed he is in Spinoza’s system. Schelling does not contest the necessary or pantheistic nature of the deity—it is equally distant from a “modern” idea of individual free will as it is from a Cartesian type of dualism. But, instead of locking freedom up inside the circle of necessity, he makes necessity the pedestal for freedom in a way that coin170

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 170

6/20/15 10:54 AM

cides with the development of God’s life as a person: “Spinozism is by no means in error because of the claim that there is such an unshakable necessity in God, but rather because it takes this necessity to be impersonal and inanimate.” However, this takes us along another track back to the problem we began with. How can this theological personalism be reconciled with the theory of an impersonal soul representing the part of the human being that is divine? And, more generally, can any form of pantheism, as Schelling’s philosophy seeks to be, be joined to a personal God? The crucial passage that allows us to penetrate further into these issues, without allowing either of the two sides to be lost, lies in the sharp divergence between personality and subjectivity. Above all, in God. We have already seen that God develops personality by splitting from his lower, or negative, part created by his own blind will to be—which also forms the necessary foundation for his existence. God makes himself into a person by drawing himself out of his selfsame being—out of that dense, shadowy vortex that is also the distant root of evil. This happens through a synchronous process of contraction and expansion. Positing himself as unconscious, or as an object, God at the same time establishes himself as the subject of this position, so that his ideal aspect corresponds to his real aspect, following a circuit that, in the end, through the double event of creation and revelation, recomposes him as the supreme figure of love. Already from this point of view—in the dialectic between two opposite, copresent principles that never come to a conclusive end, because the lower part, although eternally subordinated to the higher one, always remains in action, if for no other reason than to grant it victory— the divine personality cannot easily be interpreted as a subjective type of freedom. If, instead of being, it became, and thus gradually released itself from its state, it would have none of the stable, definite traits of subjectivity. But what is still more impor tant in excluding this possibility is the fact that the constitutive split of the God-person, although originary, is not the true beginning of the process, because, in order to be able to cause itself, a previous identity is presupposed in which these opposites are still clustered together in what Schelling defines as “indifference” (Indifferenz) or “nonground” (Ungrund): there must be a being before all ground and before all that exists, thus generally before any duality—how can we call it anything other than the The Place of Thought 171

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 171

6/20/15 10:54 AM

original ground or the non-ground [Ungrund]? Since it precedes all opposites, these cannot be distinguishable in it nor can they be present in any way. Therefore, it cannot be described as the identity of opposites; it can only be described as the absolute indifference [Indifferenz] of both. It has been noted that over the course of the years, between the Stuttgart and Berlin phases, the concept—if it can still be defi ned as such—of indifference, in its relationship with the origin and with the beginning, underwent a series of significant changes that defy any unambiguous definition. The fact remains, however we choose to understand it, that it can hardly be approximated to a personal subject or a subjective person. This is partly because the “indifferent” interpretation that the author gives to divine freedom implies both the possibilities of it coming into being and not coming into being, of creating and not creating, or even decreating—precisely the opposite of a univocal decision of a personal type. What can ever assimilate the latter to an equivalence, or copossibility, that bears within it all the possible, and impossible, alternatives—both potency and impotence, will and renunciation, explosion and implosion? Only in this way could Schelling continue to call himself pantheistic, in diverging agreement with Spinoza—without abandoning the vocabulary of personhood, but stretching it to the point of tracing the profile of its opposite in its core. How else could we describe the indifference that precedes but at the same time accompanies and follows the split between the two opposing principles, if not as the irreducible impersonal core hidden inside the person? To argue about a person—indeed, about the person—that it is both possible and impossible, both actual and potential, both present and absent, so that, as Schelling puts it, “whoever wants to locate himself at the starting point of truly free philosophy must abandon even God,”  means to expose it to the explosive power of its opposite. This is how He who is Person, more than any other, allows the indelible mark of the impersonal to be glimpsed. But if this applies to God, it is all the more true for those who “seek” him from “person” to “Person” (Person sucht Person), as the celebrated proposition in the Representation of Purely Rational Philosophy expresses it, themselves infected and traversed by the uprooting energy of the impersonal. As is known, Schelling establishes a parallelism, indeed a chiasmus, between the human being and God that goes beyond the analogical principle of “image and likeness.” In a form that has even raised suggestions of 172

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 172

6/20/15 10:54 AM

anthropomorphism, the human is placed so squarely at the center of Schelling’s design that, by its existence, it influences the very formation of the divine personality. Only through creation, and then revelation, caused by the irruption of the Son into history, does God bring to completion the theogonic process, conquering his own ontological lethargy. But this constitutive relationship between humans and God should also, and above all, be looked at from the other angle—from that of the entry of the living Spirit into a soul, already prepared to accept its ecstatic character. We are talking about the event, central to Schelling’s theoretical dispositif, identified at first by the term “intellectual intuition” (intettektuette Anschauung) and then, with a rather clear lexical difference, by that of “ecstasy of reason.”  In the transition from the first to the second formula, what takes place is a crescendo of passivities, describable, depending on the perspective adopted, in terms of both personalization and depersonalization—but whose ultimate meaning passes precisely through the point of their division, which is to say, through that impersonal base of the person already noted in God. What defi nes it is precisely the phenomenon of ex-stasis, that is to say, the escape of reason from itself, its passage from in-sistence to eksistence. While intuition still requires a fusion of subject and object, produced by the subject itself, in the case of ecstasy, as appears in the Erlangen Lectures, our I can accept the Absolute only by retreating and leaving its place to it: Our I is located outside itself, out of its own place. Its place is that of being subject. However, with respect to the absolute subject, it cannot be subject, because that absolute subject cannot behave as an object. Therefore, it must abandon its own place, it must be placed outside itself like something no longer existing there. This decisive step—which brings us back to a theme that is strategic for our inquiry, the place of thought—must be understood in all its internal complexity. First of all, it distinguishes the I from the subject, while indicating the latter as “the place” of the I. Then it situates this subject in an alternative relationship with the absolute subject that is destined to soon occupy it, ousting it from its position. In the third place, it attributes this movement first to the action of the subject, persuaded to abandon its own place, and then passes to the passive form, so that the abandonment is no longer performed by the subject but endured by it in a way that calls into The Place of Thought 173

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 173

6/20/15 10:54 AM

question even its existence. But then who is the true subject of this desubjectification—the human or the absolute? Is it the I that posits the absolute subject or is it the latter that ousts the I from the position it occupied earlier? The transition from the category of intellectual intuition—overly skewed toward the first hypothesis—to that of ecstasy does not resolve the question, at least not before a further step, taken between the Munich and Berlin periods, decisively shifted Schelling’s quadrant in a theistic and, indeed, monotheistic direction. In his Erlangen lecture of 1821—certainly the most theoretically taut, precisely because in this piece the movement of his thought appears in its characteristic oscillation—the solution is sought in a sort of splitting of the reflective activities of the I between a knowledge that represents the most ephemeral of individual experience and a thought pushed further and further away from the human subject, almost to the point of identifying with the absolute. As far as the fi rst is concerned— the desire to know—it can only lead to failure. Intent on knowing the freedom that, in the reflection of divine knowledge, lives individually in each of us, knowledge inevitably makes it into an object, reversing it into its opposite—into an appropriated freedom, which is therefore a lack of freedom. The activity of thought moves in the opposite direction to this kind of current. It participates in freedom precisely because it is external to our knowledge and to our own subjective reality: “To think,” explains the philosopher, “is to renounce knowledge; knowledge is constrained, while thought is instead absolutely free . . . thought is designated as that which is displaced.”  But, indeed, where is thought dislocated to—what, in the end, is its place? And what role does it play with respect to that absolute in view of which it freed itself from the objectivizing claims of knowledge, becoming nescient? Schelling’s response is that the place of thought approaches the place of the absolute subject, to the point of appearing identical to it. Thought thus becomes the empty space in which the subject is separated from itself so as to turn itself into a personal consciousness, and as such, destined to disappointment. Thought also becomes apprehension of the absolute subject, free from any subjective dross and, hence, obviously impersonal. This does not mean that the absolute subject, although exposed to thought, can be represented in a concept. The only exception is the living and compelling concept that is stronger than any I, which nescient knowledge tends to hold back. This is

174

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 174

6/20/15 10:54 AM

the role of philosophy, radically different from the role of all subjective forms of knowledge, because it is the only kind that is receptive of a movement that both forms it and goes beyond it: The movement itself is, in fact, completely independent of the philosopher. This is a particularly important point: it is not the philosopher who moves through his knowledge and by doing so produces knowledge (because knowledge produced in this way is a subjective knowledge, a mere logical knowledge that is devoid of reality). The philosopher’s knowledge, on the contrary, is that which of itself is unmoving, that which not only is non-knowledge, but opposes knowledge, resists movement, slowing it down and forcing it to stop, to dwell in each of its moments, skipping over none. In this delaying action, then, the true and proper force of the philosopher is also made evident. Unlike those who seek the foundation of knowledge in the subject, but also contrary those who use knowledge as a tool of the subject, Schelling places philosophical work at the intersection of two nonknowledges: that belonging to those who in trying to penetrate the inaccessible depths of the soul, lose it; and that of the nescient, who from the outset are aware of their ignorance. Compared to the state of “stupefaction” that the majority of people experience, who being “prematurely distracted, diverted from their interiority, are reduced to a condition of obnubilation that does them good,” thought takes form in a sphere that humans can only occasionally arrive at, without ever being able to possess it. Moreover, the relation from person to Person that Schelling alludes to is not to be understood as a relationship between two different entities of an individual sort. In the semantics of ecstasy, it can only signify an interpenetration between Two that, even in the infinite gap that separates them, tends toward the One through an activity of emptying the human subject. If there is something toward which the soul is eternally inclined—without ever being able to achieve it—it is identification with that perfect Beginning that, in its absolute undefinability, slips away even from God. The restraining force of philosophy is directed toward this outcome of self-suspension of the  I. It curbs and opposes the will, which, unstoppable nevertheless, seeks to know what is situated beyond knowledge and, therefore, cannot be possessed by any kind of knowledge. But alongside this negative energy,

The Place of Thought 175

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 175

6/20/15 10:54 AM

which opposes the claims of objectivizing knowledge, inasmuch as it is a nonknowledge, Schelling adds another impulse, an affi rmative one that expresses eternal freedom. To distinguish it from Wissen, he gives it the name of wisdom (Weisheit). Unlike knowledge, it is characterized in the metapolitical language of activity, rather than in theoretical terms: “Wisdom is even more than knowledge: it is efficient knowledge, it is active, living knowledge, which is to say, knowledge insofar as it is practical. . . . The Hebrew word that means wisdom originally signified lordship, potency, strength. Only in wisdom is there potency and strength, because it is what is in everything, but precisely for this reason, also that which is above everything.” The striking aspect about this, calling back into play what was already said about Spinoza, is that the more this wisdom is strengthened, and strengthens those it moves, the more it takes on a collective and impersonal dimension. Like the thought that earlier made space for it, not only has it no place in human beings, or even, strictly speaking, in God, it is impossible to localize, it is always “out of place” because, like a whirlwind, it flows through the entire universe, without ever getting stuck in an individual form: Singing the praises of this wisdom, an ancient Eastern poem asks: “Where is wisdom to be sought, and where is the place of intelligence? No one knows where it is, nor is it to be found in the land of the living. The abyss says: it is not in me, and the sea says: nor in me.” The meaning is the following: wisdom is not in any single thing, it does not dwell in the land of the living because it does not stop in any place, but rather, it passes through everything, like the wind whose whistling we hear, but whose dwelling place, no one knows. All the authors we have discussed thus far—from Averroes to Bruno, Spinoza, and Schelling himself—in differing domains and with diverse intentions, open up a preliminary, critical glimpse of the political-theological semantics of the person. However, the breakthrough comes with Nietzsche. The first explicit, diehard attempt to rock the machine of political theology, forcing it off its hinges, came from him. His frenzied search for a new vocabulary that would be adequate for the event of the “death of God,” (announced by him but never concluded), helps us to understand how aware he was of the need for this paradigm shift, but also its difficulty. What Nietzsche perceived with absolute clarity is the inability to leave political theol176

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 176

6/20/15 10:54 AM

ogy behind us as long as it persists in its language—that of the person, but also of the subject and the object, cause and effect, purpose and value. What needs to change, in his view, even before the terms and concepts, is the analytical instrument for freeing them of the metaphysical crust that crushes them down. The passkey he identifies is “genealogy.” The fact that Nietzsche specifically pits genealogy—which is to say, a critical knowledge of origins—against the political-theological dispositif is not surprising if we consider that the latter is based precisely on the presumption that theology originated prior to politics. This order of succession is precisely what he targets, not by rejecting it directly, but by diverting its meaning toward a completely new direction. Nietzsche does not dispute the theological, predominantly Judeo-Christian origin of the most influential modern political concepts—he actually uses a wealth of arguments to reaffirm it. But, rather than assuming it as a primary given, he subordinates it to something that dates even earlier, to which it comes second, and with regard to which it performs a reactionary, concealing function. His most explosive thesis is that precisely in this exchange between cause and effect there lies hidden the driving force that Heidegger would call “machination.” The long duration and extraordinary hold of Christian values on the secularized world can be explained by their capacity to assume the characteristics of the earlier force, which they take over in a reactive form, incorporating it and negating it at the same time. In keeping with reactionary modes, they weaken their opposing force not by going against it but by incorporating it into their own territory, thereby separating the adversary from its original root. Th is is how the reappearance of the mechanism of exclusionary inclusion—or of unification through division—that we traced back to the heart of the dispositif of the person was accomplished. In an aphorism in Human, All Too Human (1878), entitled “Morality as the SelfDivision of Man,” Nietzsche recognizes this process of unifying the two through the expulsion of one part in favor of the other in every one of its steps: “Is it not clear that in all these instances man loves something of himself, an idea, a desire, an offspring, more than something else of himself, that he thus divides his nature and sacrifices one part of it to the other?” And indeed, this exclusion, which human beings perform on their animal dimension, is what divides all of reality into areas of differing value, the last of which is made up of a class of people who are reduced to things: The Place of Thought 177

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 177

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Without the errors that repose in the assumptions of morality man would have remained animal. As it is, he has taken himself for something higher and imposed sterner laws upon himself. That is why he feels a hatred for the grades that have remained closer to animality: which is the explanation of the contempt formerly felt for the slave as a non-man, as a thing. But if that which under the mask of religion and morality presents itself as the origin is not the true origin, but rather its counterfeit, then what will be the objective of the genealogy? What is the furthest point that can be traced back? The difficulty of providing an affirmative response to this question lies in the fact that, first, there is no such thing as an origin not preceded, or followed, by another origin—as shown by the impossibility of establishing the beginnings of the human race and the universe; and, second, what has happened before is recognizable in its meaning as a whole only afterward—when what came first has already been disfigured and appropriated by what has taken its place, taking on its appearances. In this case, what appears before our eyes is always what comes at the end—destined to swallow up what preceded it, wiping it out. This is where the error of perspective that worms its way into common sense and philosophical knowledge comes from: “The other idiosyncrasy of the phi losophers is no less dangerous: it consists in confusing the last and the fi rst. They place that which comes at the end . . . in the beginning, as the beginning.”  Th is reversal—produced by the reactive forces that incorporate the active ones, separating them from themselves—affect both the diachronic axis of the before and after as well as the synchronic one of the relation between negation and affirmation. In negating affirmation, the reactive forces affirm negation as their model, thereby driving upward what is low, and vice versa. Thus, placing something at the origin that is not such, the politicaltheological machine presents itself as a sort of inverted genealogy, with the end placed at the beginning. But the two interpretive paradigms—the political-theological and the genealogical—while resembling each other, do not move on the same plane. Nor do they employ the same strategies. If that were the case, they would end up sliding into each other’s grooves, to the point of being identical. To prevent this, Nietzsche does not simply reverse the political-theological model into its opposite—thereby running the risk of falling prey to a reactive logic; instead, he deconstructs it piece by piece. On top of his search for the origin, he superimposes a declaration 178

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 178

6/20/15 10:54 AM

stating its absolute elusiveness. Rather than a single element at the origin, there is a plurality of origins competing to occupy the primary place. Instead of adopting any one definition of origin, in other words, Nietzsche traces it back to the internecine fight between active forces and reactive forces for the conquest of the prevailing interpretation. This is equivalent to saying that at the beginning of what never finishes beginning, there is nothing less than a never-reconciled dialectic between clashing powers, each of which is dressed in the part of the other. This is the inexhaustible conflict that Nietzsche would define using the fateful expression of “will to power.” What we are to understand by this— an underlying essence, a flow of matter, a vital magma—is still under debate, starting from Heidegger’s great, but problematic, interpretation. Wolfgang Muller-Lauter has even questioned whether the term can be put into the singular, since what takes place is always a conflict of wills in competition with each other. As far as our inquiry is concerned, it may be useful to compare Nietzsche’s category with the twofold horizon opened by Spinoza and Schelling. As to the latter—likened to Nietzsche along an interpretative line that leads back to Heidegger—if you see in the will to power an originary, chaotic, and unlimited force, irreducible to any conceptual standpoint, then a comparison with Schelling’s Absolute is not impossible. In both cases, an undifferentiated principle, translated into an absolute will, exerts its effect on itself—since there is nothing else outside it. An everything aimed at its own self-affirmation, it acts, without order or purpose, as both subject and object of potencies designed to outdo one another. The splitting theorized by Schelling between Grund and Existenz also has a correspondence in Nietzsche’s dialectic between the boundlessness of the Dionysian and the limiting constraint of the Apollonian—these, too, like Schelling’s bipolarity, are tied together in an inextricable knot. But, although coming from different lexicons and inspirations, what likens the two authors to each other even more is the irreducibility of this originary given to the schematisms of reason. Like Schelling’s Indifferenz, Nietzsche’s will to power is not knowable by the intellect but can be grasped through the intuition in an immediate representation. While for Schelling you can only have wisdom (Weisheit) and not knowledge (Wissen) of the nongrounded totality, Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht is in itself removed from a knowledge organized around the opposition between subject and object. For one as for the other, in other words, there are two kinds of knowledge, lying on different planes The Place of Thought 179

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 179

6/20/15 10:54 AM

and in some ways opposite—the first, of an instrumental nature, intended for preservation purposes; and the second, capable of initiating direct contact with the ultimate layer of the real, because in some way that is what it issues from. Before getting to this kind of knowledge, however, a basic difference between the authors needs to be noted. It relates to the character of the originary substance—which is theistic for Schelling and natu ral according to Nietzsche; and its regime, which for Schelling is monistic and, indeed, monotheistic, while for Nietzsche it is plural. It is true that Schelling’s God, as a person, affirms himself by overcoming his own murky depths, but that is precisely what Nietzsche rejects—both the personalistic interpretation, and the relationship of exclusionary inclusion that it presupposes. We must certainly not confuse the Nietzschean dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which organizes the real in a bipolar way, with its living substance, which is multiplied in an infinity of forces that are equally irreducible to the One or the Two. From this perspective—of the polysemic and impersonal structure of the will to power—Nietzsche’s point of reference is not Schelling but Spinoza. It passes, in fact, right along the line that we have seen dividing Schelling and Spinoza with regard to the relationship between God and nature—relativized by Schelling by the personal quality of a God who understands nature but cannot be identified with it, and intensified by Spinoza to the point of making God and nature wholly coextensive. One might say that what Schelling rejects in Spinoza—the impersonality of the originary substance—is precisely what Nietzsche appreciates in him, when comes to designating him as his “precursor” for at least five refutations: those of free will, the teleological order of things, the moral order of the world, altruism, and evil. If these are added together, the result is precisely the impersonal and necessary order from which Schelling had taken his distance in a form that still participated in the political-theological semantics. Returning to On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche says that the idea of free will together with the consequent idea of moral evil constitute the political-theological axis around which the modern legal order establishes itself. Guilt, condemnation, and atonement, as they are conceived by the law, originate from a more primeval relationship between creditor and debtor established by the Roman ius personarum in the acquisitive relationship between persons and things. What Nietzsche discovers in this, in its purest

180

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 180

6/20/15 10:54 AM

expression, is the concealed misunderstanding produced by the politicaltheological machine through the undue exchange of origin and end. The usefulness of any organ, whether physiological or political, has nothing to do with its actual origin, because the originary cause is always commandeered and reinterpreted by higher powers that make use of it for their own purposes. When he writes that “the world, for Spinoza, had returned to that state of innocence in which it had lain before the invention of the bad conscience,”  he is alluding to the mechanism for attributing responsibility and imputing blame that modern political theology made to rest on the platform of personal identity: “Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any being such-and-such is traced back to will, to purposes, to acts of responsibility.”  The “machine for manufacturing guilt”  is generated by the idea that it is possible to extract a fragment from the great chain of being in order to make it an object of a punishment posited, from time immemorial, prior to the sin committed. All of this—the rejection of a personalist conception of God, specular to the conception of man—is what Nietzsche absorbed from Spinozist pantheism in a form that explains his emphatic declaration of a spiritual affi nity between them. It is well known that this is contradicted by other passages in which Nietzsche takes an equally pronounced distance from his “precursor,” ultimately defining him as “consumptive,” “hypocritical,” and a “poison-brewer.” The meaning of this ambivalent relationship, beyond Nietzsche’s moody instability, is clarified by a fragment in which he paraphrases Spinoza’s Deus sive natura as Chaos sive nature. At the foundation of this semantic slippage there lies Nietzsche’s rejection of the theological residue still present in the concept of pantheism. Nietzsche accompanies, or juxtaposes, Spinoza’s naturalization of God with a dedivinization of nature that also affects his conception of human beings, reintroduced by him into their natural environment. This process of both fulfi lling and adapting Spinoza’s paradigm takes place through a twofold refutation. The fi rst concerns the primacy that Spinoza assigns to the instinct for self-preservation. Prior to it, Nietzsche places the expansive, and also dissipative, impulse of a will to power that can push itself to the point of self-sacrifice. Parallel to this first criticism, and consequent to it, there is the other one, which reverses Spinoza’s celebrated maxim non ridere, non

The Place of Thought 181

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 181

6/20/15 10:54 AM

lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere into its apparent opposite: intelligere, far from contradicting the primary instincts, stems precisely from their oppositional combination. As always, in Nietzschean genealogy, what is overturned is a mistaken perception of the order of things, causing us to project the final outcome of the cognitive process, apparently free from instinctual conflicts, onto its origin. This is the source of a certain conciliatory image of knowledge that dissociates it from that disharmonious tangle of instincts of which it is instead the late, drawn-out product: “Since only the last scenes of reconciliation and the final accounting at the end of this long process rise to our consciousness, we suppose that intelligere must be something conciliatory, just, and good—something that stands essentially opposed to the instincts, while it is actually nothing but a certain behavior of the instincts toward one another.”  At this point Nietzsche continues his argument by starting a radical inquiry into the “place of thought,” variously picked up again in several texts, that constitutes the main thread of our inquiry: “For the longest time, conscious thought was considered thought itself. Only now does the truth dawn on us that by far the greatest part of our spirit’s activity remains unconscious and unfelt.”  The consequences, as well as the presuppositions, that transpire from this passage are various. First and foremost, it establishes two layers or levels of differing magnitudes within thought: The first, deeper and broader, is marginalized and covered over by the second, which is more superficial and limited. Elsewhere, Nietzsche had insisted on the fallacy of the presumption that attributes to the consciousness something that not only does not belong to it but also blindly collides with it. Far from being the subjects of what they erroneously believe to be their “own” thought, human beings are traversed by it like a force that comes from outside, of which they can only be an object or a vehicle. In a fragment of 1885, the author expresses this extraneousness, or at least exteriority, of thought to the subject with the two intensely intransitive verbs “to come” and “to arise”: In the form in which it comes, a thought is a sign with many meanings, requiring interpretation or, more precisely, an arbitrary narrowing and restriction before it finally becomes clear. It arises in me—where from? How? I don’t know. It comes, independently of my will, usually circled about and clouded by a crowd of feelings, desires, aversions, and by other thoughts, often enough scarcely distinguishable from a “willing” or “feeling.”  182

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 182

6/20/15 10:54 AM

What Nietzsche means by this is not that human beings do not think— despite the fact that thought is not an essential element in human experience, surrounded and segmented as we are by the vitally active states of sleep, emotion, and forgetfulness. Except that not always, and indeed almost never, do we think that we are thinking when, buffeted by alien forces, we are in the act of doing so. This awareness—what we ordinarily identify as reflected consciousness—is not only located on the surface of thought, it also tends to hide the deep core of thought, rooted in the unconscious. This is where the congenital fragility of our knowledge stems from, putting it in a condition of reactive subservience with respect to the originary forces that arise from the recesses of life. The intellect erects its dividing barriers specifically to contain, and channel, the potentially destructive impulse that emanates from them. Nietzsche does not deny—and indeed he insists on— the necessary character of this protective thought, which from time to time takes on the name of intellect, reason, or knowledge. It is absolutely essential to the human species—weak and unhappy—which imagined that it could obtain an identity by denying its animal origins and its natural rootedness. Only by separating itself from itself has it managed to govern its excess of vitality, preventively immunizing itself from any ensuing risks. It is due to this need for preservation that human beings have built an entire conceptual order, likened by Nietzsche, because of its partitions, to an ancient “Roman columbarium.”  It is the outcome of the process of personalization that, in the human desire for emancipation from its natu ral matrix, devised “the construction of a pyramidal order based on castes and degrees,” and then “a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, definitions of boundaries, which now confronts the other, sensuously perceived world as something firmer, more general, more familiar, more human, and hence as something regulatory and imperative.” Only that, as is typical of any immunitary logic, this self-preservational intent is contradicted by an outcome that is potentially destructive of the very life it seeks to safeguard. This happens because the truths that human beings invent, distinguishing them from lies, are themselves untruthful. And then, because the exclusionary machine of the person works by cutting the ties that bind the conscience to the motivations of the body, from which they nevertheless generate, pushing the conscience “far away from the twists and turns of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream and the complicated tremblings of the nerve-fibres.” The Place of Thought 183

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 183

6/20/15 10:54 AM

The only way to turn off this self-disintegrating device, according to Nietzsche, is not to block the flow of thought—something that is impossible on the part of an individual will—but, on the contrary, to reconnect it to its primordial root from which it was torn by its defensive attitude. Only in this way, by breaking the fragile walls of the reflected consciousness— plunging into the full flow of life from which it springs—can thought free itself of its subservience to instrumental motivations and regain its lost momentum. But even in this case it is not autonomous in itself—it always bears imprinted in itself the signs of a dynamic inter-relationship that is irreducible to an individual dimension. Whether thought is conceived as the result of struggles internal to the body or as the outcome of external power relations, it is in any case, of necessity, common. One never thinks alone—in and of itself. We always think for or against others. But it’s one thing to confine this common element to the columbarium of discriminatory categories and quite another to adopt it, allowing it to cross through oneself, as an opportunity to break the narrow cage of concepts and liberate oneself of one’s limits: “The intellect, that master of pretense, is free and absolved of its usual slavery for as long it can deceive without doing harm, and it celebrates its Saturnalian festivals when it does so; at no time is it richer, more luxuriant, more proud, skillful, and bold.” Free thought, for Nietzsche, is not that of a individual who is detached, with respect to others and even to himself or herself, from the political-theological machine of the person, but rather, a thought that puts human beings in relationship with the vital forces that constitute them from inside and outside. The author who more than any other develops a perspective of this sort, pushing the deconstruction of the political-theological machine even further, is Bergson. Although with a different tone that cannot be compared to Nietzsche’s, it can be said that, unaware of doing so, he revisits all the steps of “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” introducing them onto an equally radical horizon. For him, too, the order of knowledge is modeled according to the logical and semantic procedures of a language designed to master experience and ensure vital needs. This explains its replacement of temporal categories with spatial ones—extension in the place of duration, a point instead of an instant, division rather than a continuity—in both common sense language and that of the philosophical tradition, separating them from the real movement of things. All of the unsolved problems of 184

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 184

6/20/15 10:54 AM

metaphysics stem from this original misunderstanding. Like Nietzsche, Bergson also unearths its genesis in an undue transfer from the practical and operational domain, in which our knowledge is rooted, to the cognitive and epistemic domain. Hence, what is solely a pragmatic need of ours takes on the false nature of a universal truth. But he goes a step further when it comes to the horizon presented thus far, to the extent that he interprets this perspectival error as resulting from a genuine performative dispositif, in whose meshes we are caught without being able to recognize its effects. This is what he defines as the “cinematographical mechanism of thought”: “Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.” Just as Heidegger traces the concealment of being to a sort of originary machination, which we never get to the bottom of because we are an integral part of it, in the same way Bergson shows that the substitution of space for time has a similar dispositif, whose first move is to withdraw itself from our view, turning the perspective axis upside down. Not unlike what happens in fi lm, motion is not eliminated, but it is reproduced in an artificial form that empties it of depth, pressing it onto a surface image. Like during the screening of a movie, when each frame, motionless in itself, is animated by the automatic movement of the film, similarly in the domain of knowledge we take things in as their discontinuous image, and then reassemble them mechanically by putting them inside the box, so to speak, of our perceptual apparatus. There are two consequences to this practice, says Bergson: blindness and deformation. On the one hand, we lose sight of reality and, on the other we produce it ourselves, flattened and upside down, on the moving screen of our optical perception. As a result, what is in the background is pushed to the surface, while what follows is placed before what precedes it. Th is is the source of both the phantasmal traits that obscure our vision, imprisoning them in an artificial, selective grid, inside of which each present event is reduced to a pure replication of the past. The first is that of anticipating the effect with respect to its cause. This is the same mechanism of retrospective action that was unmasked by Nietzsche’s genealogy, on the basis of which a current option assumes the originary appearances of an eternal value. What is evaluated in a given way today appears to us have always been that way, The Place of Thought 185

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 185

6/20/15 10:54 AM

as if the judgment could exist prior to the terms that form it. In this fashion, reality seems to be preceded by its possibility, when instead it is nothing but the retrospective projection of its possibility. It therefore happens, for example, that we confuse as harbingers of democracy events that are heterogeneous to it, events that only in retrospect appear to be its necessary antecedents. In reality, as genealogy shows, events cannot be captured in their initial form. This would be possible only if the past were lived, at the time when it occurs, in terms of a future that is always unpredictable. The very matrix of being is cognitively removed from us by a series of misapprehensions that conceal its contours. Our impression is that being has come at a given moment, to fill a void that preceded it. We use the concept of emptiness to think about fullness, without realizing that what we imagine as such is nothing but a reality that is different from the one we would like and that is declared nonexistent only for that reason. With the same prejudice, or prejudgment, we defi ne “disorder” as an order not to our liking, which we would like to replace with one that is more congenial to us. Images of nothingness or disorder are generated, in short, as if by magic in the empty point in which we no longer perceive what really exists and do not yet see what we would like to be happening. Thus continues Bergson— dismantling the double trap of presupposition and doubling—there is more reality in an object described as nonexistent, or only possible, than in one classified as real, which is to say, the existing object added to the exclusion of that which we do not consider such: “The possible,” he argues in a justly famous book, “is the combined effect of reality once it has appeared and of a condition that throws it back in time.” Unlike the virtual, which is already real, although not yet actual, the possible is not the matrix but the posthumous, retrospective product of what has materialized. What unifies these deconstructive movements of Bergson is his rejection of the negative as a mode for approaching reality. Negation is nothing but the undue substitution, satisfying a practical aim, of an affirmation of another aim that we are not willing to accept. And therefore, a seconddegree affirmation—referring to a judgment, more than to the object. This confusion between affirmation and negation—or even between action and reaction—is further proof of our difficulty of coming into direct contact with the real in its dynamic power. Not being able to know it from inside, which is to say, in the flux that constitutes it, we apply our mental patterns to it, losing sight of its unitary fabric. The analysis that Bergson conducted 186

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 186

6/20/15 10:54 AM

of “pure perception,” captured in its original stage, when it is not yet mingled with memory, is perhaps the most extreme point of his method. It breaks spectacularly with idealist, realist, transcendental, and phenomenological models of perception. In this case, too, he takes a 180-degree turn with respect to the modern tradition, which proceeds from subjective consciousness to the outside world. Bergson starts off, on the contrary, from the outside world to arrive in the first place at our body and, only afterward, in a form inseparable from the body, to consciousness. The images that we perceive always arise outside of us, in the things that surround us, and only through a selection oriented to the needs of our body do they reach our consciousness. Therefore, the voluntary and rational core that modern philosophy has posited at the origin of the category of person is nothing but the final point of arrival of a process arising and constituted outside it: There is, first of all, the aggregate of images; and, then, in this aggregate, there are “centers of action,” from which the interesting images appear to be reflected: thus perceptions are born and actions made ready. My body is that which stands out as the center of these perceptions; my personality is the being to which these actions must be referred. We cannot underestimate the deconstructive force of this perspective with respect to an entire philosophical front formulated in subjectivist and objectivist terms—the two sides of the same coin. When Bergson argues that perception “is not subjective, for it is in things rather than in me,” he opens a wide critical passage in the dispositif of the person, certainly not filled up by the use that he continues to make of the term. The personal subject is always relative, and logically subordinate, to the impersonal substrate out of which it arises and to which, to be expressed in all its potential, it must return: we hope to show that the individual accidents are merely grafted on to this impersonal perception, which is at the very root of our knowledge of things; and that just because philosophers have overlooked it, because they have not distinguished it from that which memory adds to or subtracts from it, they have taken perception as a whole for a kind of interior and subjective vision. Unlike affections, or sensations, inherent in our body, perception is located outside of it to the point that, even if the body did not exist, it would The Place of Thought 187

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 187

6/20/15 10:54 AM

subsist on its own. From here arises “the mistake of those who say that to perceive is to project externally unextended sensations, which have been drawn from our own depths, and then to develop them in space. . . . They forget that an impersonal basis remains in which perception coincides with the object perceived and which is, in fact, externality itself.” Here, without realizing it, Bergson attributes to perception the same common and impersonal exteriority that the Averroists—to whom he ascribes a static conception of the real—assigned to the possible intellect. The perceived image, before being “personalized” through the subjective contribution of the memory, constitutes a fault line running between things and representation, prior to their division, which refers to something like a pure perceptibility. It is an appearance that does not necessarily require a subject to appear to, because it comes to be before any I, consciousness, or—all the more—person. Like the diaphanous in Averroes, this is a translucent structure that allows things to become visible without being identical to them or to our sensory system. It is a spectacle that, in order to manifest itself, has no need of the presence of a spectator or a witness. It is as if perception, coming from outside, traveled through us, without, however, belonging to us at either the point of departure or arrival. Certainly, to be able to establish itself—and, even before that, carve out a place in the generality of images— it must encounter an individual body. From this point of view, one might also talk about a perceptual act, meaning the ability to retain the image inside us, organizing it into a form that is useful to our action. But this happens in a passive and almost unconscious mode that is irreducible to the active modes of the Cartesian cogito, Kant’s transcendental schematism, or phenomenological intentionality. In none of these cases is there an absolutely immanent field of vision—which the perceiving subject cannot transcend, because he or she is a part of it. Through the usual optical inversion of real relationships, we attribute to ourselves something that not only does not belong to us but, in a certain sense, precedes us and constitutes us. Of course this applies to the pure perception—isolated and abstract compared to the complexity of the process inside of which it is placed, which provides for the agent presence of memory right from the outset. If we were to remain at this level, isolated by Bergson only for expository purposes, we would never get outside the cinematographic device of thought. All we would do is turn it inside out. To master it, we must reconnect the perceptual instant to the collection of memories, fantasies, and intentions that, at 188

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 188

6/20/15 10:54 AM

a certain point, translate perceptions into ideas. They also define the human being, differentiating it from other living species. There is no doubt that individual elements as well as specifically personal ones come back into play from this angle, such as those that pertain to free action. That the effect is never entirely contained in its own cause—that the cause is actually nothing more than one of its retrospective results—means that the highest, and properly free, meaning of human action always lies in the excess that pushes it beyond itself in a continuous projection with respect to its own initial conditions. But from this point of view, too, it must be included in a greater movement that includes it as a cut, or a fold, in the becoming of reality. Freedom, for Bergson, is not the free will of the personalist tradition, according to which someone chooses between various equivalent opportunities, realizing one rather than the other. If this were the case, the choice would be already contained, and therefore canceled out, in something that precedes it; rather, the only event that is free is one that creates a new and unpredictable reality. But the fact that freedom is precisely an “event,” and not the prerogative of a given subject, means that it is located on the same plane of immanence to which all living beings, human and nonhuman, belong, together with natural processes. Of course, admits the phi losopher, the spiritualists are right to believe in the absolute reality of the person and in his independence toward matter; but science is there, which shows the interdependence of conscious life and cerebral activity. They are right to attribute to man a privileged place in nature, to hold that the distance is infinite between the animal and man; but the history of life is there, which makes us witness the genesis of species by gradual transformation, and seems thus to reintegrate man in animality. There is a clear paradigm shift here with respect to preceding and subsequent personalism—deriving from Catholic, phenomenological, and existentialist schools. What disappears from Bergson’s conception are the exclusionary thresholds that in the political-theological dispositif of the person separate the human individual from other living species and from themselves—by a corporeality imprisoned inside the subaltern sphere of the res extensa. We have seen how this formulation is called into doubt by a theory that ties the perception to the outside world—consciousness is not the prerequisite but the result of a process that takes place outside of the inner The Place of Thought 189

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 189

6/20/15 10:54 AM

experience and that only at a certain moment, through the work of memory, calls into question something like a subject. But this nudge toward exteriorization is accompanied by another push toward temporalization that is no less disruptive. The personal subject, reversed into its own outside, is at the same time dilated in a constant becoming, one that is necessarily impersonal, that extends its subjective substance in time: “each of our states, at the moment of its issue, modifies our personality, being indeed the new form that we are just assuming.” Not by chance, Bergson, no differently from what Giovanni Gentile was arguing during the same period, reduces the act not to what is done but to a “making itself,” understood, according to the Aristotelian concept of praxis, as the process that transforms the subject together with the object. More than a given person, this makes the subject the becoming in which it is multiplied: “If language were to be modeled on reality,” writes the author in Creative Evolution, we would not say “the child becomes a man,” but “there is becoming from the child to the man.” In the first proposition, “becomes” is a verb of indeterminate meaning, intended to mask the absurdity into which we fall when we attribute the state “man” to the subject “child” . . . In the second proposition, “becoming” is a subject. It comes to the forefront. It is the reality itself. What gets swept away in this fashion is the very system of the politicaltheological machine—the knot that it tightens between unity and duality in the form of an exclusionary inclusion. A fundamental distinction needs to be made regarding this point. We know that Bergson himself opposed a bipartite schema to the abstract homologation that the intellect produces when a spatial model is superimposed over temporal duration. But what he rejects by doing this is precisely the dispositif of unification through the exclusion of one of the two forms of experience by the other—space taking the place of time, time reduced to space. This is what lies behind the constant reference to the difference in nature, and not only in degree, that has the effect of splitting subject and object as much as idealism and realism amalgamate them, with idealism giving predominance to the subject and realism to the object. From Matter and Memory up to The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, this binary process becomes a constant in Bergson’s philosophy, always expressed in a dual form—duration/extension, quality/ quantity, instinct/intelligence, and so forth. But this method should not be 190

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 190

6/20/15 10:54 AM

absolutized to the point of losing the unitary horizon from which it originates. As always, in Bergson, it is a matter of looking at the real from a dual point of view—from inside as well as from outside that cinematic device that both reproduces and deforms it. The mode in which human beings live their experience is that of duality, adhering to one of the two levels on which their experience replicates itself, not the movement of reality, which, in and of itself, is always unitary. What is a double when looked at from the angle of the actual realization, when seen in its virtual beginnings is a single motion of contraction and stratification, tension and extension. Just as matter is not the opposite of the memory, but a memory solidified and stretched out, similarly, the past is not something dead and surpassed, but only the more dilated level of the present. This is where we see how radically extraneous Bergson’s thought is to the political-theological machine. Unlike what happens in the latter, neither of the two poles excludes the other, and indeed, each constitutes the inner springboard for the other’s infinite revival. Instead of being a factor for division and discrimination, in short, the Two is the very form of a single flow that unfolds through continuous disjunctions, each in their turn producing further offshoots: “the essence of a vital tendency is to develop fan-wise, creating, by the mere fact of its growth, divergent directions, each of which will receive a certain portion of the impetus.” Certainly, the two levels of reality are never symmetrical, but only because the one is inside the other, and at its limit point, coinciding with it. As Deleuze explains better than anyone else, if one of the two parties differs from the other because it expresses all the difference, it will necessarily have to differ from itself as well, doubling itself in its turn. A composite breaks down into two tendencies, one of which is the continuous and indivisible duration. But, if this is the only reality, it must include in itself the same matter that constitutes its structure, which is dormant and stratified, so to speak. This seemingly paradoxical logic is the result of substituting the possible with the virtual, and the paradigm of negation with that of difference. This logic is what dismantles the exclusionary inclusion around which the machine of political theology has always turned. In Bergson’s view, properly speaking, there is neither inclusion nor exclusion but only differentiation of a single, self-generating process. What in the political-theological dispositif is negation, or the subordination of the other, becomes, with his thought, the affirmative realization of a virtuality that precedes them and produces The Place of Thought 191

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 191

6/20/15 10:54 AM

both. Thus the individual is not constructed, like the person, on the primacy of the rational over the instinctual part, but through a process of individualization that moves ceaselessly from one to the other. Hence, that which appears to be a duality is, in fact, a multiple unity—made of a cascade of differences, one following on the other. Just as matter is an externalized form of memory and instinct is a reasoning still turned in on itself, similarly, the fi rst of the two sources of morality is the reserve of meaning from which there also springs the source destined to surpass it. Speaking in the language of Spinoza—in whom Bergson recognizes the only tiny ray of light in the philosophical tradition—it is the same relationship that exists between natura naturans and natura naturata. It is the same thing, looked at from the side of the river source, or from that of the mouth. But there is a difference from Spinoza in that, for Bergson, everything is not already given in advance and, indeed, always in excess compared to its origin. Since the difference is not the realization of a possible but the actualization of a virtual, it does not exclude another possibility; rather, it augments the reality of a segment that is not included in its original form. The actual is always different from the virtual that it nevertheless actualizes. Creative evolution is not an entity that produces differences but a pure differential— not something existing that differs but the movement of difference as such. The being that issues from it from one time to the next is not a subject but the effect that only retrospectively takes on a subjective quality. Thought outstretched in its greatest effort to surpass itself—which Bergson called “intuition” with the intention of increasing, not diminishing, its intellectual power—is measured by its ability to bring all dualities back to the unitary foundation of life. Thus, as Spinoza would have expressed it, while “science gives us the promise of well-being, or at most, of pleasure . . . philosophy could already give us joy.” The route opened up by Spinoza and developed along different trajectories by Nietzsche and Bergson is completed by Gilles Deleuze. If he does not refer explicitly to political theology, this is only because he identifies it in entirety with the capitalist machine. The stretch that he takes further than his predecessors lies specifically in his identification of the economic consequence of the political-theological dispositif, already implicit in the oikonomic matrix of the category of person. As we have seen so far, not only is the machination not what it declares itself to be, its first effect is expressed 192

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 192

6/20/15 10:54 AM

by its ability to disguise itself, which at the same time deforms and reproduces it in a more powerful form. Deleuze is perhaps the first to have grasped the double strata in which it is structured: the economic content of its political theology, and the political form of its economic theology. As we have argued from the very first pages of this book, the critical performance of the machine is its exclusionary inclusion, which is to say, the process through which reality is unified by the supremacy of one of its two parts over the other. This is exactly what Deleuze observes when he recognizes the binary structure—human/animal, adult/infant, male/female, black/white—as the linchpin of Western civilization. Within the binary structure, theology turns itself into politics, while politics takes on an economic form. If the theological turn of the economic procedure lies in dehistoricizing the model of the market, its political profi le must be identified in the bipolar, polemical interpretation of what is instead singular and multiple. But Deleuze’s rupture with modern thought lies in something else still: that is, in the affirmative interpretation of the relationship between the machine and its object—life in its infinite production of power. If it is true that life is caught, and doubled, by the machine, this in its turn is part of a life that includes everything at work inside it. Therefore, while dividing the real up into a binary form, the same machine has a multiple structure like the reality that it captures—to the point that we should not speak of a “machine” in the singular, but rather of “machines,” as plural as the number of lexical planes involved: there are social, political, economic, erotic, war machines, and so on. We might say that they do nothing but multiply themselves— each machine consists of other machines, each machine is a machine of machines in an unstoppable proliferation. Not only that, but the machine is never simple, in the sense that it is always essentially ambivalent. Th is is the clearest distinction that separates Deleuze’s perspective from others, such as Heidegger’s, that are oriented in a negative-critical direction. For him, the machine negates what it affirms but also affirms what it negates, in a flow that must always be understood in its entirety and in its reversibility. All the machines have repressive measures in them; however, they also bear a potentially liberating tendency. No matter how oppressive it may be, any machine includes forces that, flipped into their meaning as a whole, can take on an emancipatory value. This ambivalent character is particularly pertinent to the capitalist machine that expresses the basic tendency of our times. Rather than being The Place of Thought 193

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 193

6/20/15 10:54 AM

opposed to what Deleuze and Guattari define as a desiring machine, it is identical to it, situated exactly on its other side. Both are driven by desire and both reproduce desire incessantly. Unlike the previous politicaltheological regimes, the capitalist one, far from stifling desire, liberates and enhances it, recognizing it as the foundation of social production. Not only does capitalism not interrupt its flows, it actually loosens their disciplinary codification, multiplying their overall intensity. In the same way, in the dialectic that is always at work between territorialization and deterritorialization, capital puts itself in aid of the latter, pushing deterritorialization to an extreme through the creation of the world market. Against the territorial politics of states, it frees up financial and technological currents that cross over their boundaries, defying national sovereignty. In this sense, the capitalist machine arises at the point of confluence of all the flows that pass through individual and collective lives, not only enabling them but also adopting them as it own. But—this is the other side of the coin—this appropriation, serving its purposes, is precisely what constitutes the internal limit of the machine and the limit from which it begins to work against itself. By making them its own, twisting them toward an outcome that transcends their original energy it reduces the intensity of the flows, isolating them from their source and, in the end, drying them up. Th is withdrawal is what causes the spectral return of political-theological language in the time of economic theology. Capitalism is thus configured as a two-headed process—one facing toward desire and the other toward its capture— restoring the exclusionary logic of the Two to the globalized world. Despite its complete economic-technological unification, the globalized world remains divided between state bodies still fi xed to their territorial base. Inside them, economic theology returns to speak with a lexicon that is oriented toward the exclusionary selection of life rather than to its expansion. This will last until forces capable of liberating the energies blocked by the absolute imperative for profit come to prevail. When the criticism is directed against Deleuze’s work that there is a lack of attention to the category of the political equal to his reflection on art or fi lm, what is being forgotten is that in the horizon of economic theology, political action remains in any case included in the capitalist machine—either as its operational instrument or as its immanent criticism. The univocal character of being—maintained by Deleuze against any type of dualism—does not permit political language to be separated from the language of economics; in fact, their separation 194

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 194

6/20/15 10:54 AM

can be seen as the bipolar effect of the dispositif. Only by penetrating critically into the machine can the political escape the division from the economic that subordinates it to economic imperatives. As we see, the entire dialectic between action and reaction is played by Deleuze inside the machine rather than against it, partly because there is no subjectivity located on a plane other than its own that is able to evade it and attack it from the outside. The only effective possibility for critical thought is to attempt to transform it from inside, by freeing and bolstering its affi rmative aspects, not by pitting a counterpower, or a nonpower, against power but by introducing the former into the latter. All his discussions on minority, rhizomes, or points of flight should not give the impression that there exists an elsewhere, an alternative to the major powers, in which we can take refuge. The two dimensions—the major and the minor, the molar and the molecular—are always conceived by Deleuze as being inside one another, like its internal deconstruction. Compared to attempts to counteract the political-theological machine by attacking it head-on, the paradigm shift that he creates is obvious. Rather than attempt, in vain, to escape from the single dimension in which we are caught, Deleuze proposes to reconvert it, by freeing the potential energy residing within it. The absolute originality of his position is recognizable in relation to both Nietzsche and Bergson, both of whom are sources of inspiration to him. In Nietzsche, he rejects the exclusionary thresholds that segment life into anthropic types of differing ranks; in Bergson, he challenges an overly linear defi nition of dispositif, as a pure apparatus that blinds and deforms. The divergence from the latter— in a form that in the end seals their relationship even more—is mainly expressed in a different assessment of cinema. Deleuze takes Bergson’s diminished view of it as a perspectival “illusion” and makes it central to his own machine of thought. The theoretical importance that the question assumes is to be explained by the fact that both deal with cinematographic technology in terms of a dispositif intended to redefine our relationship with the world and therefore also the very shape of subjectivity. Indeed, the gap that widens between them is all the more significant the more Deleuze locates his disagreement within Bergsonism itself, eventually opposing the Bergson of Matter and Memory to that of Creative Evolution. While Bergson takes cinema as the prototype of the deceptive trend that crushes time onto the plane of space, Deleuze sees in it the most elaborate apparatus to produce images that structure our perceptual world. This sort of reality of The Place of Thought 195

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 195

6/20/15 10:54 AM

appearance that the cinema machine produces is what he alludes to when he asks the rhetorical question: “is not the reproduction of the illusion in a certain sense also its correction?” meaning, what appears to be an illusion actually constitutes the shape of reality itself. The movement-image that Bergson does not recognize in the cinema— partly due to the technical immaturity of its beginnings—is, for Deleuze, the same that the French philosopher had unearthed in the first chapter of his Matter and Memory. In its early stages—when the shot was fi xed and the spatial section was unmoving—the cinema still worked with isolated, discontinuous frames, integrated only afterward by the running of the film. Today, however, it is capable of producing images that are in themselves moving and, indeed, expressive of movement itself. Through the centrality of montage and the movement of the dolly, the shot is freed from the static condition of simple projection; time is incorporated inside the image itself. In this way, the cinematic dispositif, far from being reduced to pure illusion, becomes the most faithful expression of the plane of immanence that Bergson had “discovered” in the external nature of perception. This is the starting point from which Deleuze moves inside the machine to reverse the direction of its gears. If, as Bergson had sensed, the image exists by itself, without having any substrate behind it, this means that the idea of a natural reality to be known in its objectivity vanishes, along with, even more, the idea of a subject capable of actively producing it: “How could images be in my consciousness,” asks Deleuze, “since I am myself image, that is, movement?” In addition to matter and movement, the images are also made of light, causing an “appearing” that it is not aimed at anyone, that does not require the presence of a spectator. What sheds light onto the world is not, as phenomenology assumes, the subjective consciousness, but things themselves, luminous in themselves, without anything lighting them up—where consciousness, if anything, is the wall on which the light is refracted and thus goes dark. What Deleuze—against and through Bergson—infers from the cinema machine simply reiterates what he had always maintained regarding subjectivity, starting from his first book on the empiricism of Hume. Already central to this work was the secondary, not originary, character of the subject—its emergence from something that precedes it and determines it in its sensible impressions, and in relation to which it remains largely pas-

196

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 196

6/20/15 10:54 AM

sive. At its core there is neither the rationality of a reflected consciousness nor the act of a free will. While it lacks the original intuition of the Cartesian cogito, neither is it endowed with the transcendental activity of Kant’s “I think.” The autonomy that Descartes and Kant attributed to it is substituted by Hume, by a weave of passive syntheses and primary habits preceding its opposition to the object. This is not to say, of course, that Deleuze excludes, or even cuts down to size, the role of subjectivity. What he does do rather is remove it both from the regime of the individual, and even more, from the semantics of the person. When, in the preface to Difference and Repetition, he refers positively to “a world in which individuations are impersonal, and singularities are pre individual” he situates himself in a plane of immanence that dismantles from within the theological mechanism that reproduces transcendence. In this case, too, it is not a matter of an opposition external to its procedure—that would ultimately end up restoring it, doubling the splitting effect. As in Bergson, the opposition between immanence and transcendence, between unity and duality, belongs to the sphere of the second term—and is therefore outside the universe of the first. What Deleuze recovers is exteriority as such, intended to deconstruct the same contrast in principle between immanence and transcendence. It is not, therefore, a transcendence in the immanence, as is sometimes said, but an immanence that fills the transcendence to the point of removing it as such. It is the same relationship—not oppositional but inclusive—that exists between the person and the impersonal: if the first is the turning within, or refolding, of the second, the second is the unfolding, or extroversion, of the first. Contrary to what one might think, the impersonal does not refer to the homogeneity of the undifferentiated but to the heterogeneous mobility of difference. It is not the negation of the person, but its affirmative liberation from the dispositif that divides it from itself the instant it tears it away from the natural stratum from which it arises. It cannot be taken for granted that there is necessarily a Two at war with itself in the depths of the One. Between the one and the other there are the many, united in a plural combination of singularities: “For a long time we were stuck with the alternative: either you are persons or individuals, or you sink back into an undifferentiated sea of anonymity. Today, however, we are uncovering a world of pre-individual, impersonal singularities. They are not reducible to individuals or persons, nor to a sea without difference.” This is an entity that

The Place of Thought 197

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 197

6/20/15 10:54 AM

we call still call a subject, but only as long as we recognize its constitutively altered nature. True, they experience a process of identification with themselves, but only in the past—in the modes of an “I was”—no longer in the present, when the transformation in act prevents any self-representation in the first person from taking place, replacing it with the third person, according to the impersonal form of “one”: instead of “I think,” “one thinks,” no different, semantically, from “it’s raining” or “there’s a strong wind.” In this case, too, we are not talking about the suppression of the subject, in whose absence the event in question would not even be perceived, but of a subject understood as its effect more than as its cause. This reversal of the relationship between cause and effect is what Deleuze means by the term “haeccity,” relating to a mode of individuation that is different both from the individual already constituted, and, even more, from the person, because it refers indiscriminately to a human being, a state, or a time—like a heat wave, or a brightness of yellow, or five o’clock in the evening. In any case, it is not an ontological substance but a mode of existence that, without being presupposed, results instead from the encounter between forces, affects, and occurrences that precede it and cause it: Events pose very complex questions regarding composition and decomposition, speed and slowness, longitude and latitude, power and affection. Counter to any psychological or linguistic personalism, they lead to promoting a third person and even a “fourth” person singular, the non-person or It, in which we recognize ourselves and our community better than in the empty I-You exchanges. We believe that the notion of the subject has lost much of its interest in favor of pre-individual singularities and non-personal individuations. But the sabotage that Deleuze performs on the political-theological machine is not limited to the philosophical domain. It involves the entire semantics of the person—especially its legal aspect. That subjectivity is not identifiable in temporal terms—seeing that its past is always passed and reshaped by the present—implies that it eludes the two personal codes of attribution and implication. If the subject is not the same as it was, because it is furrowed and multiplied by incessant change, this means that it is not entirely subsumable under the order of the law. What its becoming-other— animal, woman, infant, or black, according to the repertoire of A Thousand

198

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 198

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Plateaus—eludes is precisely the normative regime that makes the law not only a dispositif for punishment but also for guilt, according to the politicaltheological paradigm that Kafka described in its eerie effects. But even in this case, it does not mean that Deleuze lies outside, or counter to, the sphere of the law. What he performs, once again, is a lexical shift that transfers the norm from the vertical plane of sovereign control to the horizontal plane of the life form. The passage from one to the other—from the regime of imposition to that of metamorphosis—is entrusted to the creative capacity of jurisprudence. If in the aprioristic logic of the law facts, like persons, are subjected to an order that judges individual cases on the basis of presupposed principles, the law, interpreted in its original creative power, derives the principles from individual cases. As Leibniz expressed it, announcing the transformation of the Law into universal Jurisprudence, “we shall multiply principles—we can always slip a new one out from under our cuffs—and in this way we will change their use. We will not have to ask what available object corresponds to a given luminous principle, but what hidden principle responds to whatever object is given, that is to say, to this or that ‘perplexing case.’ ” So, if a law that is finally jurisprudential is able to emancipate itself from its role of social control to embed the inventive capacity of thought in the praxis, it will acquire the creative function of philosophy. But for this to happen, philosophy itself must change its pace, pushing itself beyond the line that from the time of its origin has held it in the mold of an inadequate image. What this image may be, which Deleuze defines as dogmatic because it is prey to doxa, is discussed along an unbroken path that goes from the third chapter of Difference and Repetition to his last work, written with Guattari and programmatically entitled What Is Philosophy? We are talking about the unreflective, but widespread, assumption in the philosophical tradition that thought is naturally prone to truth, in accordance with the good will of the thinker and with the values that this presupposes. Spontaneously devoted to knowledge, thought is supposedly threatened by external forces, either opportunistic or passionate, that deter it from its natural propensity to confront its object. Only by returning to itself, by submerging itself once again in its interiority, can thought find its way back to the road toward pure reflection, because it is free from outside influences. Deleuze’s thesis is diametrically opposed to this comforting

The Place of Thought 199

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 199

6/20/15 10:54 AM

narrative: rather than recognize in thought an attribute of the personal subject that comes up against its limit in external forces, he sees in external forces the necessary thrust that allows the subject to overcome the resistance, the stickiness, and the prejudices that weigh it down from inside. Not only is there nothing spontaneous about it—it is a potency that, to actualize itself, must overcome a natural tendency to inertia, as Heidegger also argued, insisting that we have not yet begun to think. But, unlike him, and in agreement with Nietzsche, for Deleuze this possibility does not depend on a gift of being but on an unexpected pressure that wrenches the subject out of its torpor, forcing it to think: “We search for truth only when we are determined to do so in terms of a concrete situation, when we undergo a kind of violence that impels us to such a search.” On these lines, the condition of thought is strug gle with nonthought, which is both its root and its inner adversary—what it must conquer, without ever entirely leaving it behind, and indeed, carry ing it inside as that which must always be overcome: “Stupidity (not error) constitutes the greatest weakness of thought, but also the source of its highest power in that which forces it to think.” Thought, one might say, only thinks what it has not yet managed to think. It is situated not only outside the subject, as philosophers of the impersonal have argued, but also outside of itself. Rather than being a constitutive property of the individual, it emerges from a common impersonal ground identifiable with the plane of immanence. Out of this arise concepts, like individual waves that crest on the larger wave that carries them. Although concepts are properly philosophical, the plane of immanence is prephilosophical and therefore also nonphilosophical, but presupposed to philosophy. This means that “the non-philosophical is perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself, and this means that philosophy cannot be content to be understood only philosophically or conceptually, but it is addressed essentially to non-philosophers as well.” Nevertheless, it is not an innate faculty—on the contrary, requiring an effort to be formulated that separates it from common sense, it does not live outside its relation to community, to the dimension of community that is both singular and collective. At the conclusion of a philosophy of the impersonal—but one could also say as a preamble, if we recognize in it our task to come—what is posed again is the relationship between thought and unthought, or between singular and common, that we have found in continually different forms, in the Long 200 The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 200

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Commentary of Averroes, in the infinite universe of Giordano Bruno, and in the living substance of Spinoza—defined by Deleuze as “the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence, to have hunted it down everywhere.” Of course, that match was not won nor was it played all the way through. The machine of political theology has never been dismantled—even when it was believed that all that was required to do so was to deny the name of God, without realizing that this exercise “would still belong to the old plane as negative movement.” For this reason, the various paradigms of secularization, legitimation, and profanation, far from loosening the political-theological knot, have remained bound to it in a way that Nietzsche would have defined as reactive. The only opening, not for exiting the horizon of the machine, but for flipping it into the affirmative, is to define a plane of immanence that is not opposite to transcendence but coextensive with it—and only in this way sheltered from its effect of exclusionary splitting. When immanence is understood as the stark opposite of transcendence, it does nothing except redouble the dual logic. To defuse it, the only thing that remains is to increase its plural tension, transposing division into difference—by comparing the One not to the Two, but to the many of which it is composed. This would mean placing oneself not outside the machine, but transgressing the boundary that divides the inside from the outside, the internal from the external, the proper from the common. This goal is one that thought has sometimes had in its view, without ever attaining it. What should be thought has never been thought all the way through. Perhaps because it is from the unthinkable itself that thought arises. Perhaps because it is difficult for thought to think itself. Certainly, every time immanence has interpreted itself as immanent to something, instead of to itself, transcendence has reintroduced itself inside by reconstructing the exclusionary machine of the Two. But, from another point of view, it is also true that the failures continually witnessed by the history of philosophy have always caused a flicker to arise from something that they nevertheless denied, opening up a crack toward a mode of existence coinciding with the freedom to exist. This has happened every time philosophy—with a faith different from that of religion but no less intense—has believed in the possibility of the world and in the world as a creation of infinite possibilities. If taken all the way, this would not be a negation, or a diversion, but a true conversion that, instead of opposing political theology in vain, would hollow it out from inside, allowing The Place of Thought 201

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 201

6/20/15 10:54 AM

to shine through at last what its machine has always guarded over as its most secret, hidden core: It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion (we have so many reasons not to believe in the human world; we have lost the world, worse than a fiancée or a god). The problem has indeed changed.

202

The Place of Thought

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 202

6/20/15 10:54 AM

PA S S A G E Sovereign Debt (Economic Theology II)

For a few years now, what was once defined as “public debt” has taken on the more commanding name of “sovereign debt.” Of course, this should not be confused with what for centuries was personal debt owed by monarchs to other subjects—debt they might honor or decide unilaterally to cancel, by devaluing the currency or threatening their creditors with arms, as Philip II did, for example, to the Genoese bankers he was indebted to. The distinction between the two types of debt has always been clear, if as early as 1710, in his “Essay upon Publick Credit,” Daniel Defoe was able to write, “As the public credit is national, not personal, so it depends upon no thing or person, no man or body of men, but upon the government.” For debt to be considered public it must obligate not only the private body, but also, to use Kantorowicz’s terms, the political body of a king or queen who never dies thanks to the continuity of the dynastic succession. In this sense, unlike private credit, public credit “can be regarded as an eternal debt,” so that “once the debt is created, it is a sacred obligation.” Considering that after the French Revolution the republican government felt obligated to pay the creditors of the deposed monarchy, we get a measure of the sacral aura that has enveloped the institution of national debt from its beginnings. Moreover, in confirmation of the role played by theologians and the clergy in defining it, Alain Boureau recalled that already around 1200 the English monastery of Evesham, having fallen into debt, pleaded its permanence over time as a guarantee of its solvency.

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 203

6/20/15 10:54 AM

Compared to this dynamic in the publicization of debt, the recent qualification of “sovereign” in lieu of “public” may appear somewhat incongruous. All the more so since, in the current economic crisis, it refers to state bodies that are increasingly devoid of effective decision-making capacity with respect to transnational subjects, such as the financial markets, which are destined to replace them in formulating economic policies. Thus, a term that is highly politically charged like sovereignty ends up being used to ratify a process of depoliticization. Unless, instead of using the expression “sovereign debt” with its current meaning of “national debt,” we adopt the much more semantically charged one of “debt sovereignty,” of the transfer of sovereignty from the national government to global fi nance. If this were the case—if, rather than vanishing into nothingness, sovereignty had actually passed into other hands—then instead of talking about the end of political theology, we should be talking about its transformation into an economic theology, one that is itself endowed with political attributes, including the supreme one of deciding on the possible survival of subjects. The fact that the two paradigms of political theology and economic theology are not opposites, and they should not be ordered in a chronological sequence but integrated into a single meaningful block, is shown not only by the oikonomic matrix of the political-theological language, but also by the simultaneity of their theorization by two authors who are bound together by multiple ties: Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. Schmitt’s formulation of political theology dates from his famous book of 1922, while the announcement of something like an economic theology, contained in a fragment by Benjamin called “Capitalism as Religion,” preceded it by only a year. By making capitalism a genuine religion rather than an offshoot of religion, he captured the dramatic conceptual change that dismissed the classical paradigm of secularization, replacing it with that of metamorphosis. But what is most striking in the “divine capitalism”  that Benjamin describes—in addition to its other two characteristics, a lack of dogma and unbroken continuity—is the fact that it is an inexhaustible generator of guilt: “Capitalism is probably the fi rst instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. In this respect, this religious system is caught up in the headlong rush of a larger movement. A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt, but make it universal.”  While in the fragments “Fate and Character” and “Critique of Violence,” 204

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 204

Passage: Sovereign Debt

6/20/15 10:54 AM

written during the same period, Benjamin situates the concept of guilt in the orbit of the law, economic theology as he conceived it appears to reproduce the same exclusionary effect as the political-theological machine. Like it, economic theology also works by separating human life into two strata with unequal values, one of which is so dispossessed as to be subjected to the domination of an external power. Condemned by the law not to punishment, but to a guilt that is presupposed and therefore independent of his action, “It is never man but only the life in him that it strikes—the part involved in natural guilt and misfortune by virtue of semblance.” In a way that incorporates the legal-theological dispositif of the person, the law strikes life without further qualifications, exerting its own exclusionary power over it. By connecting this idea of Benjamin to the diagnoses made by Freud and Nietzsche—recalled in “Capitalism as a Religion” with regard to the guilty life—we can trace out the genealogical framework in which the sovereignty of debt takes on its most significant meaning. For Freud, in Totem and Taboo, the guilt of patricidal brothers is presupposed in the political order, while Nietzsche reports in even more detail on the origin of guilt in the ancient practice of debt, which is united to it by the shared German term of Schuld. Like Benjamin, Nietzsche saw guilt originating in insolvency to a creditor who was entitled to take revenge on the soul and body of the debtor: Above all, however, the creditor could inflict every kind of indignity and torture upon the body of the debtor; for example, cut from it as much as seemed commensurate with the size of the debt—and everywhere and from early times one had exact evaluations, legal evaluations, of the individual limbs and parts of the body from this point of view, some of them going into horrible and minute detail. The Roman figure of the nexum that apparently exited the stage in the twilight of the Middle Ages suddenly makes its reappearance. Similar to the ambivalent status of the nexum, aporetically suspended between the conditions of freedom and slavery, the modern debtor, although formally free, pays for the inexpiable sin of a debt that has seized his or her life. Never do the two roots of political theology, Christian and Roman, intertwine once again in its economic version as they do in this case. In the same way that original sin, in spite of Christ’s intercession, is paid for by all human beings with the ultimate punishment of mortality, the liability of the nexus to the arbitrary will of the creditor tends to become generalized in a condition Passage: Sovereign Debt 205

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 205

6/20/15 10:54 AM

of universal indebtedness. Th is state of irredeemable Verschuldung (indebtedness)—caused by the theological node of guilt and debt—that is the hallmark of our times has a far-reaching genealogy. According to a line of interpretation that reworks Nietzsche’s idea of originary indebtedness from a current perspective, the order of succession developed by traditional economic history from barter to currency to credit/debt should be reversed. Social relations do not emerge from the equality of exchange but from the hierarchical violence of a relationship between creditor and debtor that can go so far as to reduce him and his family to slavery. Following on the studies by Alfred Mitchell-Innes, according to David Graeber, the regime of debt slavery had a fundamental role in shaping our ethical vocabulary—by defining what is right and what is wrong. From the beginning, the world appeared enveloped in magical forces, to which human beings appeared to be ontologically indebted, as it were. This principle, present in various ways in all archaic communities, found a normative and symbolic formulation precisely in the protojuridical figure of the nexum—at the point of confluence between Roman law and Christian religion. Despite the critical function that Christianity performed toward Roman cruelty, the idea of original sin, with the eternal punishment that came as a consequence of it, ended up reinforcing the notion of the debtor’s irredeemable guilt. The long history of debt slavery—whose legitimacy alone has come to an end—attests to the resilience and widespread diffusion of this paradigm that is both legal and economic. Among the many examples that Graeber provides of wives or daughters sold as pledges for a debt, he also reminds us that in 1720 the British prisons were still divided into two strictly separated sections: one reserved for aristocrats, who were served by domestics in livery and comforted by prostitutes placed at their disposal; and the other for impoverished debtors, who were crammed into tiny, fi lthy cells. For that matter, to come back to today, in Minnesota arrest warrants against insolvent debtors have jumped by 60 percent in recent years, with 835 cases in 2009 alone. Even beyond pervasive episodes of personal execution, the thesis now advanced by many is that we are becoming structurally a society of debtors. That is because debt slavery remains the main practice for recruiting low-cost labor in a large part of the world, from Asia to Latin America; and because the majority of salaried workers and employees in Western countries work to repay loans, some at usurious interest rates. The strictly biopolitical character of this practice can hardly escape notice: as already 206

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 206

Passage: Sovereign Debt

6/20/15 10:54 AM

attested to by the condition of migrants forced to pay with their free labor the criminals who organized their transport, or that of university graduates who spend half of their lives repaying the loans they received for tuition fees, the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is loans for necessary medical care, which is to say, for bare survival. If we consider work conditions and practices today—which entirely absorb the body and mind of those who are fortunate enough to have a job at all—it is clear that biological life has became the new area of “theological” overlap between economics and politics. Maurizio Lazzarato, echoing André Orléan’s ideas, maintains that despite appearances to the contrary the current society of debt is thoroughly sustained by the political dispositifs of government. As Deleuze and Guattari worked out in Anti-Oedipus, in a novel reading combining Marx’s analyses of debt with Nietzsche’s genealogical studies, both logically and historically, the institution of credit preceded the relationship between production and wage labor. At the foundation of this relationship there lies something very close to what we have defined as the dispositif of the person— which is to say, the modular construction of a subjectivity indebted to others and to itself. Marx, in the third section of Capital, Volume One, writes, “Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.” When he does so, he grasps the link between the economy, politics, and religion that was set in motion by capitalist society since its beginnings. The increasingly extensive and pervasive mechanism of capture inside the cage of debt cannot be separated from the government of subjectivity, and, indeed, from the form of subjectification, practiced by current neoliberal governance. Surpassing even the status of individuals as entrepreneurs of themselves, which Foucault spoke about in his courses of the 1970s, what takes on increasing importance as a figure that encapsulates the others, both in the world of work and in the desert surrounding it, is that of the indebted human being. With the formulation of sovereign debts—of debt sovereignty—each one of us, even before we are born, is enchained to a system of debt that only shuts down at the end of our lives, which it may very well help to provoke. This also applies to individuals too poor to have access to loans. In the current transition from welfare to debtfare, they still have to contribute to paying off the public debt. But rather than being a necessity immanent to economic Passage: Sovereign Debt 207

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 207

6/20/15 10:54 AM

production, this depends on the choices implemented by government policies on different occasions. At the origin of the economic fluctuations of global finance, there are flows of power that traverse our lives, discriminating between them and setting them against each other. Behind the unification of the global world, the dual logic of marginalization and exclusion increasingly asserts itself. Universal indebtedness is the consequence of power relations between unequal parties that were instituted, and continuously reactivated, by the political-theological machine—with the difference that in the society of generalized debt, the fate of subservience, at one time reserved for just one part, now seems to have been extended to all. Instead of the strong part including the weak part inside its borders, as occurred in the modern civilization, today it is the weak part that sucks the strong into its own vacuum of resources. The fact that all states, divided by a clear inequality of resources, are now indebted to an entity as elusive as global finance means that for the fi rst time, perhaps, the world will experience a condition of shared suffering. It is as if splitting had become the general form of unity. We are joined by a debt that separates us even from ourselves, by suspending us from a model of development that produces loss. Since everyone is included in it, we are at the same time also all excluded. The point of arrival for economic-political theology is identity, with no remainders, between inside and outside, whole and part, One and Two. It is a model that is really difficult to overthrow, not only because another one looms on the horizon but also because by now even the horizon line lies within it. As was said from the beginning, the political-theological condition we have found ourselves in for a long time now surpasses our ability to remove it. To do so, in order to gain a way out from something that has no outside, even before changing life, we would need to change the way we interpret it—the conceptual language that we have inherited from an extremely long tradition. What we should all strive to do is convert the meaning of what we have simultaneously in front of us and behind us—starting from the system of indebtedness that has captured us for a long time. What we need to avoid is the presumption that we can free ourselves from it by returning to the situation preceding the crisis—as if that was what created the debt, by granting it the insignia of sovereignty. Rather, it was debt that caused the crisis and its consequences. What we can do, as far as sovereign debt is concerned, is reverse its meaning. Instead of trying to stop what is by now an unstoppable dynamic, we can speed it up, pushing it to its limit 208

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 208

Passage: Sovereign Debt

6/20/15 10:54 AM

point, until it implodes. The fact that we are all debtors, or are becoming ones, means that there are no more real creditors. Every creditor is a debtor to another, in a chain whose first link has been lost. The problem we are facing is to transform this oppressive chain into a circuit of solidarity. This is only possible in two ways: either by making insolvency no longer a declaration of servitude but an option for freedom; or by socializing debt—raising the demand for socially useful goods with a radical change to the current development model. In this case, rather than disappearing, its sign would flip, rejoining the munus comune—of each toward the other—which was the original meaning of the term communitas. In point of fact, in archaic societies, before being legally encoded in prescriptive terms, reciprocal debt, combined with the exchange of gifts, was a factor not of separation but of social cohesion. According to the first meaning of the word munus, debt, gift, and office are connected in a collective practice that does not envisage subjugation and enslavement. What flickers briefly, in the reverse of political theology, is the law of jubilee, which dictated that in sabbatical years, all debts were forgiven and all debts slaves were freed. If we revived this law, we would go from a sovereign debt to a common debt, to a community of debt, such that the immunitary grip in which the world is suffocating would be broken. Only then would the ancient nexum be shattered and the servus return to being completely liber.

Passage: Sovereign Debt 209

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 209

6/20/15 10:54 AM

This page intentionally left blank

NOTES

Translator’s notes appear in square brackets PA S S A G E : G E S T E L L

1. Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif?” in Michel Foucault Philosopher, ed. Timothy J. Armstrong (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 159–168. 2. See especially Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 3. On the relationship between the two paradigms with regard to the question of technology, see Timothy Campbell, Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 4. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 33. 5. Ibid., 5. 6. Martin Heidegger, “Das Ge-Stell (1949),” in Bremer und Freibürger Vorträge (1949–1957) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994); Italian translation: “L’impianto,” in Conferenze di Brema e di Friburgo, ed. Franco Volpi, trans. Giovanni Gurisatti (Milan: Adelphi, 2002); English edition: “Positionality,” in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking, trans. Andrew  J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 23–43; French translation by Servanne Jollivet, Poésie 115 (2006): 9–24. 7. Heidegger, “Positionality,” 31. 8. Ibid., 40. 9. Ibid., 28. 10. “The Danger,” in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 50. 11. Ibid., 61. 12. Ibid., 51. 13. Ibid., 52.

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 211

6/20/15 10:54 AM

14. Heidegger, “Positionality,” 28. 15. Ibid., 34. 16. Ibid., 30. 17. Ibid., 31. 18. Ibid., 34. 19. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 20. 20. Heidegger, “Positionality,” 34. 21. Ibid., 35. 22. Ibid., 36. [The English translation has been slightly modified to conform to the Italian version: “advisory council” has been changed to “director” (dirigente in the Italian text).] 23. Ibid., 36–37. 1 . M A C H I N AT I O N

1. For a reconstruction of the category from the perspective of conceptual history, see M. Scattola, Teologia politica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), and G. Duso, “Ripensare la rappresentanza alla luce della teologia politica,” Quaderni Fiorentini 41 (2012): 9–47; while, for a broader overview of its significance in contemporary scholarship, see G. Filoramo, ed., Teologie politiche. Modelli a confronto (Brescia: Centro di Alti Studi in Scienze Religiose di Piacenza, 2005; ed. M. Vatter, Crediting God: Sovereignty & Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); ed. E. Mendieta and J. Van Antwerpen, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (New York: Verso, 2012); V. Rocco and R. Navarrete, eds., Teologia y teonomia de la politica (Madrid: Abada Editores, 2012); Il pensiero 2 (2011), ed.  G. Goria and G. Petrarca, dedicated to political theology; and the section on the relationship between democracy and religion of Micromega—Almanacco di Filosofia 1 (2013). 2. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961); English version: Nietzsche, vols. 3 and  4 (Book 2), ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 100. 3. On the paradigm of secularization, in addition to G. Marramao, Potere e secolarizzazione (Rome: Bollati Boringhieri Editore, 1985), see J.-C. Monod, La querelle de la sécularisation. De Hegel à Blumenberg (Paris: J. Vrin, 2002). 4. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:100. 5. Ibid., 97. 6. Ibid., 100. 7. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989); English version: Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana Univer212

Notes to pages 19–25

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 212

6/20/15 10:54 AM

sity Press, 2012), 98. [See the review by Richard Polt in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (issue 2012.07.24) for a rationale on why this more recent translation is to be preferred over the 1999 version, also put out by Indiana University Press.] 8. Heidegger, “Contributions to Philosophy,” 98. 9. Ibid., 99. 10. Ibid., 100. 11. Ibid., 104. 12. Ibid., 112. 13. Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 36. 14. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltsgeschichte, the course given in the winter semester of 1822–23 (Hamburg: University of Duisburg– Essen, 1996). English version: Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Vol. 1, Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822–1823, ed. and trans. Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 372. 15. German source: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (1840), ed. Karl Hegel, in Werke, vol. XII (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1969–79). English source: G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: George Bell & Sons, 1894; repr., Kitchener, Ont.: Batoche Books, 2001), 124. 16. Ibid., 159. 17. Ibid., 191. 18. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 436. 19. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 298. 20. Ibid., 362. 21. Ibid., 440. 22. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Chicago: Roxbury, 2001), 100. 23. Ibid., 101. 24. [The original German term is stahlhartes Gehäuse, meaning “shell as hard as steel.” The famous image of the “iron cage” comes from the 1958 translation by Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2005), 123.] 25. Schmitt’s observation is contained in a letter (written in French) to Julien Freund, dated December 16, 1965, published in Schimittiana 4 (1994): 58. 26. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1922); English version: Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press 1978), 1113. 27. Ibid., 1118. 28. Ibid., 1117 [slightly modified to correspond to the Italian text]. 29. Ibid., 439 [slightly modified to correspond to the Italian text]. 30. Ibid., 440. Notes to pages 25–38 213

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 213

6/20/15 10:54 AM

31. Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (1919) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992); English version: “Politics as a Vocation,” in Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press 1946), 77–128. 32. For more along these interpretative lines, see especially the extensive research by Carlo Galli in Genealogia della politica. Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996). 33. Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” in The Concept of the Political, expanded edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 90. 34. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 33–34. The passage he cites from Hobbes is Leviathan, Part 2, Chap. 42. 35. Schmitt, Political Theology, 47. 36. Ibid., 19. 37. Carl Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form (Hellerau: KlettCotta, 1923); English version: Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 18–19. 38. Ibid., 8. 39. Schmitt, Political Theology, 9. 40. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 53. 41. Ibid., 46. 42. Carl Schmitt, “On the Contradiction between Parliamentarianism and Democracy,” in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 9. 43. Ibid., 12. 44. See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books/MIT Press, 1991). 45. See Georges Bataille, Lecture on “Power” of February 19, 1938, in College of Sociology (1937–1939), ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 134. 46. Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” trans. Carl R. Lovitt, New German Critique 16 (Winter 1979): 71. Also available in Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 122–146. 47. Ibid., 72. 48. Ibid., 83. 49. Bataille, College of Sociology, 135. 50. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. III, Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 232.

214

Notes to pages 39–49

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 214

6/20/15 10:54 AM

51. Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” 81. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 83. 54. [All citations from the Bible are taken from the English Standard Version, available at http:// biblehub.com/esv/.] 55. Alain Boureau, “Histoires d’un historien,” afterword to the French translation of Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, published along with Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (Paris: PUF, 2000), 1225–1309. On this see also E. Grunewald, Ernst Kantorowicz and Stefan George. Beiträge zur Biographie des Historikers bis zum Jahre 1938 und zu seinem Jugendwerk “Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite” (Wiesbaden: G. Bondi, 1982). 56. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Mediaeval Origins,” Harvard Theological Review XLVIII (1955): 65–91. 57. George La Piana, “Political Theology,” in The Interpretation of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), 67. 58. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 59. Ernst H. Kantorwicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Stuttgart 1927; English version: Frederick the Second 1194–1250, trans.  E.  O. Lorimer (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1951). 60. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Kingship under the Impact of Scientific Jurisprudence,” in Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society (1961), ed. M. Clagett, G. Post, and R. Reynolds (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 101. The two conferences on secularization were held at St. John’s College and at the Mediaeval Society of Oxford. 61. A. Alföldi, “Die Ausgestaltung des monarchischen Zeremoniells am römischen Kaiserhofe,” Römische Mitteilungen 49 (1934): 1–118; “Insignien und Tracht der römischen Kaiser,” Römische Mitteilungen 50 (1935): 1–171. 62. T. Klauser, Der Ursprung der bischöflichen Insignien und Ehrenrechte (Krefeld: Scherpe, 1949). 63. E. Schramm, “Sacerdotium Ministeriale und Regnum im Austausch ihrer Vorrechte,” Studi Gregoriani 2 (1947): 403–57. 64. See Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Dorset Press, 1989). 65. See Ernst Kantorowicz, “Pro patria mori,” American Historical Review 40 (1950–51): 472–492. 66. Frederic William Maitland speaks of “so marvellous a display of metaphysical—or we might say metaphysiological—nonsense.” “The Crown as Corporation,” Law Quarterly Review, 17 (1901): 131–146; later available in Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 104–146.

Notes to pages 49–56 215

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 215

6/20/15 10:54 AM

67. See Kantorowicz, The Two Bodies of the King, x. For the Bacon citation, see The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 15, Of the Literary and Professional Works (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900), 231. 68. Erik Peterson, “Monotheism as a Political Problem: A Contribution to the History of Political Theology in the Roman Empire,” in Theological Tractates, ed. and trans. Michael J. Hollerich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 68–105. 69. Erik Peterson, Heis Theos. Epigraphische, formgeschichtliche und religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Göttingen: Göttingen Universitätsverlag, 1920). 70. See Ernst Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946). 71. Erik Peterson, “The Church from Jews and Gentiles” (1933), in Theological Tractates, 40–67. 72. Erik Peterson, “What Is Theology” (1925), in ibid., 1–14. 73. Peterson, “The Church from Jews and Gentiles.” [This quote translated from the Italian edition: Il Mistero degli Ebrei e dei Gentili nella Chiesa, preface by Jacques Maritain, trans. A. Miggiano (Rome: Edizioni di Comunità, 1946), 71.] 74. Karl Eschweiler, “Politische Theologie,” Religiose Besinnung 4, no. 2 (1931–32): 72–88. 75. See especially Frederic Gogarten, Wider die Ächtung der Autorität, Jena 1930; Politische Ethik (Jena: Berg, 1932); Ist Volksgesetz Gottesgesetz? (Hamburg: Hanseatische, 1934). Regarding this question, see H. Meier, “Che cos’è la teologia politica? Note introduttive su un concetto controverso,” in La comunità. La sua legge, la sua giustizia, ed. R. Panattoni (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2000), 9–20; as well as R. Panattoni, Appartenenza ed Eschaton. “La Lettera ai Romani” di San Paolo e la questione “teologico-politica” (Naples: Liguori, 2001), 19ff. 76. See Alain de Quervain, Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Politik. Grundlinien einer politischen Theologie (Berlin: Furche-Verlag, 1931). For a reconstruction of this debate see Antonio Caracciolo’s Introduction to the Italian edition of Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: Teologia politica II. La leggenda della liquidazione di ogni teologica politica (Milan: Adelphi, 1992), v–xxx. 77. On the political-theological significance of acclamation, see Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), esp. 141ff. 78. Erik Peterson, “Göttliche Monarchie,” Theologische Quartalschrift 112 (1931): 537–564; and “Kaiser Augustus im Urteil des antiken Christentums. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Théologie,” Hochland 30 (1932–33): 289–299. 79. Peterson, Kaiser Augustus, 289 [translated from the Italian]. 80. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 12.1076a. 81. Erik Peterson, “Monotheism as a Political Problem” (1935), in Theological Tractates, 71. 216 Notes to pages 56–59

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 216

6/20/15 10:54 AM

82. Ibid., 103. 83. Ibid., 233–234 n. 168. 84. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Five Theological Orations, trans. Stephen Reynolds, 2011, 46; available at http://hdl.handle.net/1807/36303. 85. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 82–83. 86. Ibid., 123. 87. Ibid., 126. 88. Ibid., 114. 89. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 59. 90. This quote is taken from the version of the letter appearing as Appendix B to Political Theology of Paul, 107. The letter is also available in Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 91. Ibid., 108. 92. Ibid., 109. 93. Ibid., 110. 94. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 103. On Schmitt’s political theology, see the article by Taubes, “Der Furst dieser Welt. Carl Schmitt und die Folgen,” in Religionstheorie und politische Theologie, ed. Jacob Taubes (Munich: Fink, 1983), 1:9–15. 95. Jacob Taubes, “Theology and Political Theory,” Social Research 22, no. 1 (Spring 1955): 58. 96. Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 232. On this topic, see E. Stimilli, Jacob Taubes. Sovranità e tempo messianico (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2004). 97. Taubes, The Political Theology of Saint Paul, 103. 98. See Walter Benjamin, “Brief an Carl Schmitt,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 3 vols., ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt: Reidel, 1974), 1:887. The English version can be found in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910– 1940, trans. Manfred Jacobson and Evelyn Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 97–98. The letter in question is not included in Briefe, ed. G. Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966). 99. See Walter Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment” and “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essay, Aphorisms, Autographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1960), 312–313 and 277–300. 100. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 16. 101. See B. Bauer, Christus und die Caesaren. Der Ursprung des Christenthums aus dem römischen Griechenthum (Hildesheim: Eugen Grosser, 1987). 102. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 24. Notes to pages 60–67 217

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 217

6/20/15 10:54 AM

103. Ibid., 28. 104. See Julius Wellhausen, Ein Gemeinwesen ohne Obrigkeit (Göttingen: GeorgAugusts-Universität, 1900). 105. Martin Buber, The Kingship of God, trans. Richard W. Scheimann (New York: Humanity Books, 1990), 60. 106. Ibid., 58–59. 107. Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 25–26. 108. Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” 312. 109. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 17. 110. Jan Assmann, Herrschaft und Heil. Politische Theologie in Altagypten, Israel und Europa (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2000). [There is no English version of this text. This citation was translated from the Italian edition, Potere e salvezza. Teologia politica nell’antico Egitto, in Israele e in Europa (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), 16]. 111. Ibid., 22 [translated from the Italian]. 112. Ibid., 124 [translated from the Italian]. 113. Ibid., 21 [translated from the Italian]. 114. Ibid., 98 [translated from the Italian]. 115. Assmann, Potere e salvezza, 47 [translated from the Italian]. 116. Jan Assmann, Non avrai altro Dio (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), 87 [translated from the Italian]. 117. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 17. 118. Ibid., 31. 119. Ibid., 38. PA S S A G E : K AT E C H O N

1. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Candor, N.Y.: Telos Press, 2006), 59. On the figure of the katechon in Schmitt, see F. Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996). See also  M. Maraviglia, La penultima guerra. Il katechon nella dottrina dell’ordine politico di Carl Schmitt (Milan: LED, 2006). For more on the katechon in general see M. Nicoletti, ed., “Il ‘Katechon’ (2 Ts, 2.6–7) e l’Anticristo. Teologia e politica di fronte al mistero dell’anomia,” Politica e religione (2009). This was already in the production stage when Massimo Cacciari’s valuable work Il potere che frena. Saggio di teologia politica (Milan: Adelphi, 2013) became available for reading. 2. Carl Schmitt, Glossarium. Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991). Citations are translated from the Italian edition: Glossario 1947–1951, ed. P. Dal Santo (Milan: Adelphi, 2001), 113. 218

Notes to pages 68–76

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 218

6/20/15 10:54 AM

3. Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2009), Chapter 20, bk.19.2. 4. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 60. 5. In accordance with this interpretation by Schmitt, see Epimetheus, Finis Europae. Una catastrofe teologico-politica (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2007). 6. Tertullian, Apologetic 33.1–3, in the Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translation of the Writings of the Fathers, Down to AD 325, ed. Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, vol. 3, Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 43. 7. According to the interpretation by A. Strobel, in Untersuchungen zum eschatologischen Verzogerungsproblem, auf Grund der spätjudisch-urchristlichen Geschichte von Habakuk (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961), 106–107. 8. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 59. 9. Ibid., 61. 10. Ibid., 62. 11. See M. Rizzi, “Teologia politica: La rappresentazione del potere e il potere della rappresentazione,” in Il Dio mortale. Teologie politiche tra antico e contemporaneo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2002), 267–298. 2. THE DISPOSITIF OF THE PERSON

1. See Tertullian, Against Praxeas, Book 7, 2–3, in Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translation of the Writings of the Fathers, Down to AD 325, ed. Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, vol. 3, Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 597–628. 2. See Adolf von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (Tübingen: Wissenschaft liche Buchgesellschaft, 1931–32), 825ff. 3. See Siegmund Schlossmann, Persona und prosopon im Recht und im christlichen Dogma (Darmstadt: Wissenschaft liche Buchgesellschaft, 1968 [1906]), 118–128. 4. See Joseph Moingt, Théologie trinitaire de Tertullien, 4 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1966–69), 2:564–565; René Braun, Deus Christianorum. Recherches sur le vocabulaire doctrinal de Tertullien (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1962), 232. 5. Gregory of Nazianus, Oration 39.12, translated by Brian E. Daley in Gregory of Nazianzus (New York: Routledge, 2006), 132–133. 6. On this topic, see the extensive and thorough introduction by G. Scarpat to the Italian edition of Tertullian’s text, Contro Prassea (Turin: Società editrice internazionale, 1985), 55–56. 7. On the importance of the flesh in Tertullian, see J. Alexandre, Une chair pour la gloire. L’anthropologie réaliste et mystique de Tertullien (Paris: Beauchesne, 2001). 8. For a redefinition of the term “persona” in ancient Roman law, see especially E. Stolfi, “La nozione di ‘persona’ nell’esperienza giuridica romana,” Filosofia politica Notes to pages 77–89 219

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 219

6/20/15 10:54 AM

3 (2007): 379–399; Stolfi, Il diritto, la genealogia, la storia. Itinerari (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010), 139ff.;  U. Vincenti, “Persona e diritto: Trasformazioni della categoria politica fondamentale,” in Individuo e persona. Tre saggi su chi siamo, ed. G. Boniolo, G. De Anna, and U. Vincenti (Milan: Bompiani, 2007); A. Corbino, M. Humbert, and G. Negri, eds., Homo, caput, persona. La costruzione giuridica dell’identità nell’esperienza romana (Pavia: IUSS Press, 2010). 9. In Latin: “Et quidem summa divisio de iure personarum haec est, quod omnes homines aut liberi sunt aut servi.” From The Institutes of Gaius: Parts One and Two, Text with Critical Notes and Translation, ed. Francis de Zulueta, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), Book 1.9. 10. Friederich Karl von Savigny, System des heutigen Romischen Rechts, 3 vols. (Berlin: Veit, 1940), 1:32ff. 11. Schlossmann, Persona und prosopon, 32; on this question, see T. Quadrato, “La persona in Gaio. Il problema dello schiavo,” in Gaius dixit. La voce di un giurista di frontiera (Bari: Cacucci, 2010), 2ff. 12. See H. Wagner, Studien zur allgemeinen Rechtslehre des Gaius (Zutphen: Terra, 1978), 76. 13. On this topic, see G. Cricenti, “Persona, soggetto e corpo,” in I diritti sul corpo (Naples: Jovene, 2008), 35ff. 14. See the cogent essay by L. Peppe, “Fra corpo e patrimonio. Obligatus, addictus, ductus, persona in causa mancipi,” in Corbino, Humbert, and Negri, Homo, caput, persona, 435–490. 15. J. G. Wolf, “Lo stigma dell’ignominia,” in ibid., 491–550. 16. On the figure of the penal slave, see Aglaia McClintock, Servi della pena: Condannati a morte nella Roma imperiale (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche, 2010). 17. Augustine, On the Trinity, translated by Arthur West Haddan, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 3, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887), Book 5, Chapter  9. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. Available at http://www.newadvent.org /fathers/1301.htm. Accessed June 30, 2014. On the specificity of the Latin Christian lexicon compared to the Greek terminology, see J. Schrijnen, Charakteristik des altchristlichen Latein (Nijmegen: Dekker & van de Vegt, 1932); and Christine Mohrmann, Études sur le latin des Chrétiens, 4 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1958–77). 18. On the difficulties of expressing the Trinitarian discourse in Augustine, see A. Milano, Persona in teologia. Alle origini del significato di persona nel cristianesimo antico (Naples: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1984); M. Quatrefages, “Augustin et ‘persona,’ ” in La personne et le christianisme ancien, ed. B. Meunier (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2006), 73–104. 19. Augustine, On the Trinity, Book 5, Chapter 9. 20. On the Augustinian primacy of the spiritual over the bodily nature, see P. Cormier, “La fondation augustinienne de la personne,” Les Études Philosophiques 2 220 Notes to pages 89–95

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 220

6/20/15 10:54 AM

(2007): 147–162. Etienne Gilson had already expressed himself in these terms in his Introduction à l’étude de Saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1943), 57ff. H. R. Drobner puts more emphasis on discontinuities in his treatment of the question, Person-Exegese und Christologie bei Augustinus. Zur Herkunft der Formel “una persona” (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), 117ff. 21. Augustine, On the Trinity, Book 9, Chapter 1.1. 22. Augustine, Of the Morals of the Catholic Church, Book 1, Chapter 27. 52, in Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. 23. Augustine, On the Holy Trinity, Book 15, Chapter 7.11. 24. Augustine, City of God, translated by Marcus Dods, in Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Book 14, Chapter 15.2. 25. Ibid., Book 14, Chapter 15.1. 26. Augustine, On the Holy Trinity, Book 4, Chapter 7.11. 27. Augustine, City of God, Book 3, Chapter 14.3. 28. On the isomorphism of the two cities, see G. Lettieri, “Riflessioni sulla teologia politica in Agostino,” in Il Dio mortale. Teologie politiche tra antico e contemporaneo, ed. A. Bettiolo and G. Filoramo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2002), 215–265; see also the earlier publication by G. Lettieri, Il senso della storia in Agostino d’Ippona. Il ‘Saeculum’ e la gloria nel De Civitate Dei (Rome: Borla, 1988). 29. See the classic work by Henri-Xavier Arquillière, Augustinisme politique. Essai sur la formation des theories politiques du Moyen-Àge (Paris: Vrin, 1934). 30. Augustine, On the Holy Trinity, Book 3, Chapter 4.9. 31. On the artificial character of the Roman persona and its long-term presence in the history of the law, see Yan Thomas, “The sujet de droit, la personne et la nature,” Le débat 100 (1998): 85–107. 32. See Robert Joseph Pothier, Traité des personnes et des choses, in Oeuvres de R. J. Pothier, contenant les traités du droit français, vol. 8 (Paris: Pichon-Béchet, 1827). 33. For the transformation of the meaning of the term persona from the classical to the postclassical legal orders, see Riccardo Orestano, Il ‘problema delle persone giuridiche’ in diritto romano (Turin: G. Giappichelli, 1968), 5ff. 34. A wide-ranging, thorough reconstruction of this historical-conceptual question is provided by  A. De Libera in Archéologie du sujet,  I. Naissance du sujet (Paris: J. Vrin, 2007). 35. For more on all this, see the excellent entry on “sujet” by Étienne Balibar, in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, ed. B. Cassin (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 1233–1254. For the relationship between the subject and person, see Stefano Rodotà, “Dal soggetto alla persona. Trasformazioni di una categoria giuridica,” Filosofia politica 3 (2007): 365–377; Rodotà, Il diritto di avere diritti (Rome: Laterza, 2012), 140ff. 36. See C. de Belloy, “Personne divine, personne humaine selon Thomas d’Aquin: l’irréductible analogie,” Les Études Philosophiques 2 (2007): 163–181. Notes to pages 95–104 221

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 221

6/20/15 10:54 AM

37. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q. 29, Art. 1. 38. Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law, trans. Doris C. Anson (New York: Gordian Press, 1971), 65. 39. Ibid., 55. 40. See Étienne de la Boétie, Discours on Voluntary Servitude, trans. James B. Atkins and David Sices (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012). See also the introduction by  Paolo Flores d’Arcais to the Italian edition, Discorso della servitù volontaria (Milan: Chiarelettere, 2011). 41. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 3 in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; Now First Collected and Edited by Sir William Molesworth, Bart. (London: John Bohn, 1839–45), 148. 42. Ibid. 43. Carl Schmitt, “Die vollendete Reformation. Bemerkungen und Hinweise zu neuen Leviathan-Interpretationen,” Der Staat 4 (1965): 51–69; quoted from the Italian translation, “Il compimento della Riforma. Osservazioni e cenni su alcune nuove interpretazioni del ‘Leviatano’,” in Scritti su Hobbes, ed. Carlo Galli (Milan: Adelphi, 1986), 162. 44. Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive), ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 35. 45. Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore Politico, or the Elements of Law, vol. 4 in The English Works, 122. 46. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, vol. 2 in The English Works, 89. 47. On the position of Hobbes in the English Trinitarian dispute of the time, see Philippe Crignon, “L’altération du christianisme. Hobbes et la Trinité,” Les Études Philosophiques (April 2007): 235–263. 48. Hobbes, Leviathan, 487–488. 49. Ibid., 486–487. 50. On the conception of the Trinity, in addition to the already cited work by Crignon, “L’altération du christianisme,” see A. Matheron, “Hobbes, la Trinité et les caprices de la représentation,” in Thomas Hobbes. Philosophie première, théorie de la science et politique, ed. Y. C. Zarka and J. Bernhardt (Paris: PUF, 1990); G. Wright, “Hobbes and the Economic Trinity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7, no. 3 (1999): 397–428; G. Paganini, “Hobbes, Valla and the Trinity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11, no. 2 (2003): 183–218. 51. Hobbes, Leviathan, 151. 52. Ibid., 148. 53. See F. Lessay, “Le vocabulaire de la personne,” in Hobbes et son vocabulaire. Études de lexicographiephilosophique, ed. Y. C. Zarka (Paris: PUF, 1992), 155–186. 54. Hobbes, Leviathan, 151. 55. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 137. 222

Notes to pages 104–112

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 222

6/20/15 10:54 AM

56. Ibid., 142. 57. For more regarding the theological and philosophical discussions of the time, and also Locke’s position, see A. De Libera, Archéologie du sujet, II. La quête de l’identité (Paris: Vrin, 2008), esp. 121ff. 58. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 148. 59. Ibid., 146. 60. Ibid., 144. 61. Edmund Law, A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Opinion concerning Personal Identity, in Answer to the First Part of a Late Essay on that Subject, Cambridge 1769, in The Works of John Locke, 10 vols. (London: Dent, 1823), 2:301. 62. For more on this theoretical dispositif, see Étienne Balibar’s rich introduction to the French edition of Chapter 27 of Locke’s work, on identity and difference: John Locke, Identité et différence. L’invention de la conscience (Paris: PUF, 1998), 9–101. 63. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 287. 64. Ibid., 298. 65. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Kitchener, Ont.: Batoche Books, 2001), 13. 66. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 52. 67. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary McGregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50. 68. Ibid., 144. 69. Ibid. 70. On the relationship between Kant and Wolff as regards the theme of the person, see F. Sciacca, Il concetto di persona in Kant. Normatività e politica (Milan: A. Giuff rè, 2000), 3–27. 71. Christian Wolff, Psychologia rationalis, methodo scientifica pertractata, 2 vols., Sectio. IV, para. 741, in Gesammelte Werke (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1994), 660. 72. Christian Wolff, Jus naturae, methodo scientifica pertractatum, in Gesammelte Werke, Part I, Sectio 1, para. 40. 73. Immanuel Kant, “What Real Progress has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff ?” trans. Peter Heath, in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy After 1781 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 362. 74. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 139. 75. Ibid., 90. 76. Ibid., 165. 77. Ibid., 81. 78. Ibid., 95. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 164. Notes to pages 113–121 223

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 223

6/20/15 10:54 AM

81. Ibid., 165. 82. Ibid., 98. 83. Ibid., 96. 84. Ibid., 96–97. 85. Ibid., 97. 86. Ibid., 134. 87. Ibid., 129–130. 88. Ibid., 130. 89. Ibid., 132. 90. G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, translated by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 57. 91. For this topic, see Aldo Schiavone, Alle origini del diritto borghese. Hegel contro Savigny (Rome: Laterza, 1984). 92. Hegel, Outlines, 55. 93. On property and person, see  J. Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969); Italian edition: Metafisica e politica. Studi su Aristotele e Hegel (Genoa: Marietti, 1997), 139ff. 94. Hegel, Outlines, 59. 95. Ibid., 198. 96. Ibid., 56. 97. On this dialectic, see M. Xifaras, “L’individualisme possessif, speculatif (et néanmoins romain) de Hegel. Quelques remarques sur la théorie hégélienne de la propriété,” in Hegel penseur du droit, ed. J-F. Kervé-Gan and G. Marmasse (Paris: CNRS, 2004), 63–79. 98. Hegel, Outlines, 54. 99. G. W. F. Hegel, Spirit, Chapter Six of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. the Hegel Translation Group (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 31. 100. Ibid., 32. 101. Ibid., 33. 102. Hegel, Outlines, 267. 103. For a clear summary of the philosophy of religion in Hegel, see S. Achella, Rappresentazione e concetto. Religione e filosofia nel sistema hegeliano, preface by G. Cantillo, (Naples: Edizione Scientifica, 2010). 104. Hegel, Outlines, 271. 105. Ibid., 267. 106. Ibid., 272. 107. Ibid., 267. 108. Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 129. 109. Hugo Tristram Engelhardt, The Foundations of Bioethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 157. 224

Notes to pages 122–130

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 224

6/20/15 10:54 AM

110. Ibid., 156. 111. Ibid., 240. 112. Ibid., 240–241. 113. Engelhardt, Foundations, 142. 114. Singer, Writings, 191. 115. Ibid., 232. 116. Engelhardt, Foundations, 144 117. Singer, Writings, 201ff. 118. Ibid., 326. 119. Engelhardt, Foundations, 253. 120. Singer, Writings, 44. PA S S A G E : N E X U M  E C O N O M I C T H E O LO G Y I 

1. Raymond Théodore Troplong, La contrainte par corps, vol. 18, in Le Droit Civil expliqué suivant l’ordre du Code. Commentaires des titres XVI et XVII, livre III du Code Civil (Paris: Charles Hingray, 1847). Available online at https://archive.org /details/delacontraintepa00trop. Accessed August 15, 2014. 2. On the topic of personal arrest, see the essay referred to earlier by Peppe, “Fra corpo e patrimonio. Obligatus, addictus, ductus, persona in causa mancipi,” in Homo, caput, persona. La costruzione giuridica dell’identità nell’esperienza romana, ed. Alessandro Corbino, Michel Humbert, and Giovanni Negri (Pavia: IUSS, 2010), 435–490. More generally, on debt, see I. Kroppenberg, Die Insolvenz im klassischen römischen Recht. Tatbestände und Wirkungen ausserhalb des Konkursverfahrens (Köln: Böhlau, 2001). 3. Troplong, La contrainte par corps, iv. [All citations from this work are translated from the French.] 4. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (Abingdon: Routledge Classics, 2002), 80 5. Ibid., 67. 6. On the theological origins of Roman law, see Aldo Schiavone, The Invention of Law in the West, trans. Jeremy Carden and Antony Shugaar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). 7. The possibility of selling oneself in Rome is documented by J. Ramin and P. Veyne, “Droit romain et société: Les hommes libres qui passent pour esclaves et l’esclavage volontaire,” Historia 30 (1981): 472–497. 8. See  G. Purpura, “La pubblica rappresentazione dell’insolvenza. Procedure esecutive personali e patrimoniali al tempo di Cicerone,” in Fides Humanitas Ius. Studii in onore di Luigi Labruna, 8 vols. (Naples: Editoriale Scientifica, 2007, 6:4541ff. 9. [Translated from the Italian.] Notes to pages 131–142

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 225

225

6/20/15 10:54 AM

10. On the long duration of the institution of personal execution, see G. Pace, “Contrainte par corps,” in L’arresto personale per debiti nell’Italia liberale (Turin: Giappichelli, 2004). 11. Friedrich Nietz sche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 506. 3. THE PLACE OF THOUGHT

1. On the vicissitudes of Averroes’s Long Commentary on the “De Anima” of Aristotle, see the introduction by A. De Libera to the French edition: L’intelligence et la pensée. Sur le De anima (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 7–45. See also the edition edited by F. Stuart Crawford, Averrois Cordubensis, Commentarium magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, Cambridge 1953. More generally, on the Commentary, see H. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes on Intellect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 2. For an overview of Averroes’s work, including biographical information, see M. Campanini, Averroè (Bologna: UTET, 2007); D. Urvoy, Averroès. Les ambitions d’un intellectuel musulman (Paris: Flammarion, 1998). 3. See A. Illuminati, ed., Averroè e l’intelletto pubblico. Antologia di scritti di Ibn Rushd sull’anima (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996), 52ff. 4. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Reflections on the Doctrine of a Single Universal Spirit, 1702,” in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Kluwer Adademic, 1989), 555. 5. Ernst Renan, Averroes et l’Averroisme (Paris: Auguste Durand, Libraire, 1852), 105. 6. Averroes (Ibn Rushd) of Cordoba, Long Commentary on the “De Anima” of Aristotle, trans. Richard C. Taylor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 304. 7. Ibid., 328. 8. For a similar interpretation, see the essay by A. Illuminati, “Ibn Rushd: unità dell’intelletto e competenza comunicativa,” in Averroè e l’intelletto pubblico, 52ff. 9. In general on the theme of the imagination, but also in reference to Averroes, see E. Coccia, La vita sensibile (Bologna: UTET, 2011). 10. Ibn Rushd (Averroes), “Trattato sulla possibilità di unione tra intelletto materiale e intelletto agente nel corso della vita corporea (Epistola Averoys),” in Illuminati, Averroè e l’intelletto pubblico, 198. 11. Thomas Aquinas, De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas, translated as On the Uniqueness of Intellect Against Averroists, 82. Available at http://dhspriory.org /thomas/DeUnitateIntellectus.htm. In this regard, see P. Porro, Tommaso d’Aquino. Un profilo storico-filosofico (Rome: Carocci, 2012), 439ff. 12. The De intellectu by Alexander of Aphrodisias is available in Two Greek Aristotelian Commentators on the Intellect, trans. Frederic M. Schroeder and Robert B. Todd (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), 45–58. 226 Notes to pages 142–148

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 226

6/20/15 10:54 AM

13. Dante, Monarchy, trans. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7. 14. For this interpretation, see the excellent monograph by Emanuele Coccia, La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo, introduction by Giorgio Agamben (Milan: Mondadori, 2005), esp. 181ff. 15. Bruno Nardi, Le opere inedite del Pomponazzi (Florence: Sansoni, 1965), 380. On the relationship between Bruno and Averroes, see R. Sturlese, “ ‘Averroè quantumque arabo et ignorante di lingua greca . . .’ Note sull’averroismo di Giordano Bruno,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 71 (1992): 248–275; A. Gagliardi, Scritture e storia: Averroismo e cristianesimo (Rome: Soveria Mannelli, 1998), 173–201; M. A. Granada, “ ‘Esser spogliato dall’umana perfezione e giustizia.’ Nueva evidencia de la presencia de Averroes en la obra y en el proceso de Giordano Bruno,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 5 (1999): 305–31; E. Canone, “Giordano Bruno lettore di Averroè,” in Averroes and the Aristotelian Heritage, ed. C. Baffioni (Naples: Bompiani, 2004), 211–247. 16. Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, ed. and trans. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 178. 17. Giordano Bruno, On the Heroic Frenzies, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 331. 18. On this question, see G. Sacerdoti, Sacrificio e sovranità. Teologia e politica nell’Europa di Shakespeare e Bruno (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), esp. 129ff. 19. See V. Spampanato, Documenti della vita di Giordano Bruno (Florence: Sansoni, 1933), 199. 20. Regarding Bruno’s diffidence toward the concept of personhood, see M. Ciliberto, Giordan Bruno. Il teatro della vita (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), 33ff.; Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966); Italian edition: La legittimità dell’età moderna (Genoa: Marietti, 1992), 591ff. 21. See Luigi Firpo, Il processo di Giordano Bruno (Rome: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1993), 170. 22. Domenica Berti, Vita di Giordano Bruno da Nola (Turin, 1868), 358. 23. Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, and Essays on Magic, ed. Richard J. Balckwell and Robert de Lucca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 40. 24. Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, trans. Arthur D. Imerti (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 76. 25. Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, 47. 26. Ibid., 80. 27. Ibid., 39. 28. Bruno, On the Heroic Frenzies, 165; the reference to Averroes is at 173. 29. On the myth of Actaeon, see G. Carillo, Atteone o della democrazia (Naples: Bompiani, 2007). Notes to pages 149–158 227

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 227

6/20/15 10:54 AM

30. Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 516. 31. On Leibniz and Spinoza, see Vittorio Morfino, Il tempo della moltitudine (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), 51ff. 32. Gottfried W. Leibniz, Letter to Henri Justel of February 1678, in Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Berlin, 1923), 2:393; quoted in English in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd ed., translated and edited by Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 195. 33. For more on the Hegelian interpretation of Spinoza and, generally, on relations between the two phi losophers, see B. de Giovanni, Hegel e Spinoza. Dialogo sul Moderno (Naples: Guida, 2001). 34. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1896), 3:288. 35. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in Complete Works, 245. 36. On Spinoza’s relationship with Averroism, see Alexandre Koyré’s essays on the topic. They have been collected in an Italian edition entitled Scritti su Spinoza e l’averroismo (Milan: Ghibli, 2002). 37. Spinoza, Ethics, 244. 38. Regarding this interpretation, see what is to all effects and purposes a Spinozist book by M. Adinolfi, Continuare Spinoza. Un’esercitazione filosofica (Rome: Riuniti, 2012). 39. Spinoza, Ethics, 138. 40. See Étienne Balibar, Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality (Delft: Eburon, 1997). 41. Spinoza, Ethics, 282. 42. Ibid., 284. 43. Ibid., 361. 44. Ibid., 253. 45. In addition to Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), and Morfi no, Il tempo della moltitudine, see Warren Montag, “Who’s Afraid of the Multitude? Between the Individual and the State,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 655–673. 46. Spinoza, Ethics, 331. 47. Spinoza, Political Treatise, in Complete Works, 690. 48. Friedrich Wilhem Joseph Schelling, Stuttgarter Privatsvorlesungen, in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart-Augsburg, 1856–61), vol. 7. [All the quotes from the private lectures are translated from the Italian edition: Lezioni di Stoccarda, in Scritti sulla filosofia, la religione, la libertà, ed. Luigi Pareyson (Milan: Ugo Mursia, 1974).] 228

Notes to pages 159–168

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 228

6/20/15 10:54 AM

49. Ibid., 178. 50. Ibid., 180. 51. Schelling, Lezioni di Stoccarda, 183. 52. Ibid. 53. Friedrich Wilhem Joseph Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 75. 54. On the question of Schelling’s works, see G. Cusinato, especially La totalità incompiuta. Antropologia filosofica e ontologia della persona (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2008), 68ff. 55. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen [Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or On the Unconditional in Human Knowledge], in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1; quoted from the Italian version: Dell’Io come principio della filosofia, ed.  A. Moscati (Naples: Bompiani, 1991), 14. 56. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, in Briefe von und an Hegel, I. 1785–1812, ed. J. Hoff meister (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1981). 57. Schelling, Dell’Io come principio, 13. 58. Schelling, Lezioni di Stoccarda, 160. 59. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations on the Essence of Freedom, 61. 60. The essential reading on this question is Luigi Pareyson, Ontologia della libertà. Il male e la sofferenza (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 385ff. See also  F. Tomatis, Kenosis del logos. Ragione e rivelazione nell’ultimo Schelling (Rome: Laterza, 1994). 61. For this interpretation see Massimo Cacciari, Dell’inizio (Milan: Adelphi, 1990), 483ff. 62. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations on the Essence of Freedom, 68. 63. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Erlanger Vorträge [Erlanger Lectures], in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 9; quoted from the Italian version in Conferenze di Erlangen, in Scritti sulla filosofia, la religione, la libertà, 203. 64. Schelling, Philosophische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie oder Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 11. [Translated from the Italian version: Introduzione filosofica alla filosofia della mitologia, ed. L. Lotito (Milan: Adelphi, 2002).] 65. See J.-F. Courtine, Extase de la raison. Essais sur Schelling (Paris: Galilée, 1990). 66. Schelling, Conferenze di Erlangen, 212–213. 67. See G. Strummiello, L’idea rovesciata. Schelling e l’ontoteologia (Bari: Laterza, 2007), 163ff. 68. Schelling, Conferenze di Erlangen, 212. 69. Ibid., 219. Notes to pages 168–175 229

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 229

6/20/15 10:54 AM

70. Ibid., 221. 71. Ibid., 208. 72. Ibid. 73. For this interpretation, see Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by D. F. Bouchard, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–164. 74. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 42. 75. Ibid., 35. 76. Friedrich Nietz sche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietz sche (New York: Penguin, 1971), 481. 77. On the dynamics of the forces see Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Continuum, 2002). 78. Wolfgang Muller-lauter, Uber Werden und Wille zur Macht. NietzscheInterpretationen I (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999). 79. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974–84). [Quoted from the Italian version: Epistolario 1865–1900, ed. Barbara Allason (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 158–159.] 80. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 519. 81. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Gods, 499. 82. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 15. 83. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 261. 84. Ibid.: “Not to laugh, not to lament, nor to detest, but to understand,” from Spinoza’s Political Treatise, in Complete Works, 681. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., 262. 87. Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 34. 88. For more on this dialectic, see Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 89. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 147. 90. Ibid., 146. 91. For a reading of Nietzsche through the immune paradigm, see Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 78–109. 92. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” 142. 93. Ibid., 151. 230

Notes to pages 175–184

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 230

6/20/15 10:54 AM

94. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911), 306. 95. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Dover 2010), 83. 96. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 47. 97. For this original interpretation of Bergson, see Enrica Lisciani-Petrini, “Fuori della persona. L’ ‘impersonale’ in Merleau-Ponty, Bergson e Deleuze,” Filosofia politica 3 (2007): 393–409; “Quartetto per un’ontolgia del virtuale: Bergson, Jankélévitch, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze,” il Pensiero 1 (2008): 5–34. 98. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 230. 99. Ibid., 34. 100. Ibid., 66. 101. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 272ff. 102. See ibid., 268–269. 103. Ibid., 7. 104. For the parallel with Gentile, see R. Ronchi, Bergson. Una sintesi (Milan: Adelphi, 2011). 105. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 313. 106. On the unitary character of the splitting in Bergson, see F. Worms, Bergson, ou les deux sens de la vie: Étude inédite (Paris: PUF, 2004). 107. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (London: Macmillan, 1935), 254. 108. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 109. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 272ff. 110. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 106. 111. For the relationship between Deleuze and Bergson, see the introduction by G. Bianco, “Da Canguilhem a Deleuze passando per Bergson,” in Gilles Deleuze and Georges Canguilhem, Il significato della vita. Letture del III capitolo dell’Evoluzione creatrice di Bergson (Milan: Adelphi, 2006), 7–51, and, with a different approach, F. Luisetti, Una vita. Pensiero selvaggio e filosofia dell’intensità (Milan: Adelphi, 2011). 112. See Alan Badiou, “Existe-t-il quelque chose comme une politique deleuzienne?” special issue on Deleuze and the political, in Cités 40 (2009): 15–20. See also A. Bouaniche, Gilles Deleuze. Une introduction (Paris: PUF, 2007), 141ff. 113. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 2. On the relationship between cinema and philosophy in Deleuze, see also P. Marrati, “Deleuze. Cinéma et philosophie”, in F. Zourabichvili, A. Sauvagnargues, and P. Marrati, La philosophie de Deleuze (Paris: PUF, 2004), 233ff. 114. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 58. Notes to pages 185–196 231

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 231

6/20/15 10:54 AM

115. See Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: A Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 116. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), xxi. 117. For a philosophy of immanence, see R. Ciccarelli, Immanenza. Filosofia, diritto e politica della vita dal xix al xx secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009). 118. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 143. 119. Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 355. 120. See Laurent de Sutter and Kyle McGee, Deleuze and Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 121. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 122. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 67. 123. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 15. 124. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 275. 125. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 41. 126. Ibid., 48. 127. Ibid., 74. 128. Ibid., 75. PA S S A G E : S O V E R E I G N D E B T  E C O N O M I C T H E O LO G Y I I 

1. Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Publick Credit (London, 1710), 22–23. 2. P.-F. Pinaud, “La direction de la liquidation de la dette publique, 1790–93,” in État, finances et économie pendant la Révolution française (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1991), 145–158. [Translated from the Italian.] 3. L. Say, Dictionnaire des finances (Paris: Berger-Levbault, 1899), 1420. [Translated from the Italian.] 4. See  A. Boureau, “Le monastère médiéval, laboratoire de la dette pubblique?” in J. Andreau, G. Béaur, and J.-Y. Grenier, eds., La dette publique dans l’histoire (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2006), 37–62. 5. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). 232

Notes to pages 196–204

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 232

6/20/15 10:54 AM

6. See Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 288–291. 7. See Divine Capitalism: A Conversation about Money, Consumption, Art and Destruction, with Boris Groys, Jochen Hörisch, Thomas Macho, Peter Sloterdijk, and Peter Weibel (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007). 8. Benjamin, “Capitalism as a Religion,” 288. 9. Walter Benjamin, “Fate and Character,” in ibid., 204. 10. Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” in Basic Writings, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 2000), 500. 11. See Alfred Mitchell-Innes, “What Is Money?” Banking Law Journal (May 1913): 377–408; and “The Credit Theory of Money,” Banking Law Journal (January 1914): 151–168. 12. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011). 13. An original analysis of the phenomenon is to be found in E. Stimilli, Il debito del vivente. Ascesi e capitalismo (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2011). 14. On this change in paradigms, see Laura Bazzicalupo, Il governo delle vite. Biopolitica ed economia, foreword by Roberto Esposito (Rome: Laterza, 2006). 15. See M. Aglietta and A. Orléan, La monnaie entre violence et confiance (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002). 16. See Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012). 17. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, ed. Frederick Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 529. 18. See the observations on this topic by Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital: Toward a Philosophical Theory of Globalization (London: Polity, 2013). 19. See Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

Notes to pages 204–209 233

153-61106_ch01_3P.indd 233

6/20/15 10:54 AM

This page intentionally left blank

INDEX

Abraham 69 Achella, Stefania 224n103 Adinolfi, Massimo 228n38 Adorno, Theodor W. 66, 217n98 Agamben, Giorgio 211n2, 216n77, 227n14, Aglietta, Michel 233n15 Akhnaton (Amenhotep IV), Pharaoh 73 Al-Ghazali 147, 151 Alexander of Aphrodisius 145, 148 Alexandre, Jerome 219n7 Alföldi, Andreas 53 Alighieri, Dante 79, 143, Allason, Barbara 230n79 Ambrose, Bishop of Milan 79, 142, Andreau, Jean 232n4 Aristotle 11, 59, 104, 143, 145, 146, 154, 155 Arquilliere, Henri Xavier 221n29 Assmann, Jan 5, 70–75, 76, Augustine, Aurelius Bishop of Hippo 10, 59, 61, 64, 76, 94–99, 101, 109, 152, 219n3 Avempace (Ibn Bagga) 145 Averroes (Abu lwalid Muhammad ibn Rusd) 10–12, 143–166, 176, 188 Avicenna (Abu ‘Ali Ibn Sina) 145, 147

Béaur, Gérard 232n4 Belloy, Camille de 221n36 Benjamin, Walter 66, 69, 204–205 Bentham, Jeremy 130 Bergson, Henri Louis 10, 13–14, 184–192, 195–197 Bernhardt, Jean 222n50 Berti, Domenico 227n22 Bettiolo, Paul 221n28 Bianco, Giuseppe 231n111 Bloch, Marc 53 Blumenberg, Hans 72, 227n20 Boethius of Dacia 144 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 103, 112 Bouaniche, Arnaud 231n112 Boureau, Alain 51, 203 Bramhall, John 109 Braun, René 84 Bruno, Giordano 10, 12, 67, 151–162, 165, 176, 201 Buber, Martin 68 Buddha 38 Butler, Joseph 116

Bacon, Francis 56 Badiou, Alain 231n112 Baffioni, Carmela 227n15 Baldus de Ubaldis Balibar, Étienne 221n35, 223n62, 228n40 Barth, Karl 57, 65, 67 Bartolus de Sassoferrato 54, 100 Basil of Ancyra 84 Basil of Caesarea 61 Bataille, Georges 45–50, 52 Bauer, Bruno 67 Bazzicalupo, Laura 233n14

Cacciari, Massimo 61 Campanini, Massimo 226n2 Campbell, Timothy C. 211n3, 230n91, 233n19 Canguilhem, Georges 231n111 Cantillo, Giuseppe 224n103 Carillo, Gennaro 227n29 Cassin, Barbara 221n35 Charles I (Stuart), King of England 55 Ciccarelli, Roberto 232n117 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 107, 136–137, 141 Ciliberto, Michele 227n20 Clagett, Marshall 215n60

153-61106_ch02_3P.indd 235

6/20/15 10:55 AM

Clement of Alexandria (Titus Flavius Clemente) 86 Coccia, Emanuele 226n9, 227n14 Constantine the Great, emperor 58, 80, 99 Corbino, Alessandro 220n8, 220n14, 225n2 Cormier, Philippe 220n20 Courtine, Jean-François 229n65 Crawford, F. Stuart 226n1 Cricenti, Giuseppe 220n13 Crignon, Philippe 222n47, 222n50 Critchley, Simon 212n1 Cromwell, Oliver 36 Cudworth, Ralph 114 Cusinato, Guido 229n54

Gideon 68 Gilson, Étienne 221n20 Gladstone, William Ewart 36 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 62 Gogarten, Friedrich 58 Góngora y Argote, Luis de 164 Goria, Giulio 212n1 Graeber, David 206 Granada, Miguel Àngel 227n15 Gregory of Nazianzus 59, 61–62, 84 Gregory of Nyssa 61 Grenier, Jean-Yves 232n4 Grossheutschi, Felix 218n1 Grunewald, Eckhart 215n55 Guattari, Pierre-Felix 194, 199, 207

Dal Santo, Petra 218n2 Davidson, Herbert A. 226n1 De Giovanni, Biagio 228n33 De Sutter, Laurent 232n120 Defoe, Daniel 203 Deleuze, Gilles 10, 13, 14–15, 191–200, 201, 207 Descartes, Rene 103, 117, 164, 197 Doneau, Hugues (Hugo Donellus) 101 Drobner, Hubertus R. Duns Scotus (John) 144, 147 Durkheim, Émile 45, 52 Duso, Giuseppe 212n1

Harnack, Adolph von 83 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 3–4, 5, 8, 28–35, 79, 124–130, 160, 169 Hegel, Karl 213n15 Heidegger, Martin 2, 13, 16–28, 64, 72, 177, 179, 185, 200 Heineccius (Johann Gottlieb Heinecke) 124 Hilary of Poitiers 84 Hippolytus of Rome 85 Hitler, Adolf 45, 135 Hobbes, Thomas 5, 8, 40–41, 105, 106–112, 113, 114, 116, 123, 128, 129, 150, 160, 167 Hoff meister, Johannes 229n56 Hollier, Denis 214n45 Humbert, Michel 220n8, 220n14, 225n2 Hume, David 118, 196–197 Huvelin, Paul 137

Engelhardt, Hugo Tristram 9, 130–133 Epimetheus (collective name) 219n5 Eschweiler, Karl 58 Esposito, Roberto 230n91, 233n14, 233n19 Eusebius of Caesarea 58, 59, 61, 71, 78, 80, 99 Ezekiel 68 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 169 Ficino, Marsilio 156 Fieschi, Sinibaldo. See Innocent IV Filoramo, Giovanni 212n1, 221n28 Firpo, Luigi 227n21 Flavius Josephus 68 Flores d’Arcais, Paolo 222n40 Foucault, Michel 2, 8, 16, 17, 21, 72, 106, 207 Frederick II (Hohenstaufen), Emperor 51, 52 Freud, Sigmund 49, 205 Freund, Julien 213n25 Gagliardi, Antonio 227n15 Gaius 89–90, 104 Galli, Carlo 214n32, 222n43 Gelasius I, Pope 79 Gentile, Giovanni 190

236

Illuminati, Augusto 226n3, 226n8, 226n10 Innocent IV (Sinibaldo Fieschi), Pope 100 Irenaeus of Lyons 86 Jesus Christ 38, 85, 88 John of Salisbury 54 John the Evangelist 84–85 John XXI (Pedro Julião), Pope 144 Jollivet, Servanne 211n6 Junger, Ernst 64 Justel, Henri 228n32 Justin I, Emperor of the East 142 Justinian I, Emperor of the East 55, 142 Kafk a, Franz 199 Kant, Immanuel 7, 8, 10, 103, 118–125, 127, 130, 132, 164, 169, 197 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 4, 50–56, 58, 84, 108 Kelsen, Hans 41, 102 Klauser, Theodor 53

Index

153-61106_ch02_3P.indd 236

6/20/15 10:55 AM

Koyré, Alexandre 228n36 Kroppenberg, Inge 225n2 La Boetie, Étienne de 105 La Piana, George 51 Law, Edmund 223n61 Lazzarato, Mauritius 207 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 7, 11, 103, 109, 118, 144, 153, 159, 160, 199 Lemm, Vanessa 230n88 Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold 62 Lessay, Franck 222n53 Lettieri, Gaetano 221n28 Libera, Alain de 221n34, 223n57, 226n1 Lisciani-Petrini, Enrica 231n97 Livy (Titus Livius Patavinus) 138 Locke, John 8, 10, 41, 109, 112–118, 119, 125, 130, 131, 133, 149, 164, 194 Lotito, Leonardo 229n64 Luisetti, Federico 231n111 Maitland, Frederic William 56 Maraviglia, Massimo 218n1 Maritain, Jacques 105, 216n73 Marmasse, Gilles 224n97 Marramao, Giacomo 212n3 Marrati, Paola 231n113 Marx, Karl 207 Matheron, Alexandre 222n50 Matthew, the Evangelist 80 Mauss, Marcel 45, 137 McClintock, Aglaia 220n16 Meier, Christian 70 Meier, Heinrich 216n75 Mendieta, Eduardo 212n1 Meunier, Bernard 220n18 Mill, John Stuart 9, 117, 130 Mitchell-Innes, Alfred 206 Mohler, Armin 64 Mohrmann, Christine 220 Moingt, Joseph 84 Molesworth, William 222n41 Monod, Jean-Claude 212n3 Montag, Warren 228n45 Morfi no, Vittorio 228n31, 228n45 Moscati, Antonella 229n55 Moses 68, 109, 110 Muhammad 38 Muller-Lauter, Wolfgang 179 Mussolini, Benito 48 Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French 36 Nardi, Bruno 151 Navarrete, Roberto 212n1

Negri, Antonio 228n45 Negri, Giovanni 220n8, 220n14, 225n2 Nicoletti, Michele 218n1 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 10, 13, 14, 16, 25, 142, 176–185, 192, 195, 200, 201, 205, 206, 207 Noetus, Bishop 85 Nye, Stephen 109 Orestano, Riccardo 221n33 Origen of Alexandria 71, 95 Orléan, André 207 Orosius, Paulus 99 Otto, Rudolf 45 Overbeck, Franz 59 Pace, Giacomo 226n10 Paganini, Gianni 222n50 Panattoni, Riccardo 216n75 Pareyson, Luigi 228n48, 229n60 Paul (Saul of Tarsus), Apostle 37, 57, 63, 67–69, 76–77, 80, 81, 86 Peppe, Leo 220n14 Peterson, Erik 3, 4, 52, 56–66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 86, 99 Petrarca, Giacomo 212n1 Petrarch, Francesco 144 Philip II of Habsburg, King of Spain 203 Philo of Alexandria 71 Pierre de Jean Olieu 103 Pinaud, Pierre-François 232n2 Plato 168 Pomponazzi, Pietro 148 Porro, Pasquale 226n11 Post, Gaines 215n60 Pothier, Robert Joseph 101 Praxeas, Greek theologian 83, 85 Pseudo Augustine 60 Pufendorf, Samuel 120 Purpura, Gianfranco 225n8 Quadrato, Renato 220n11 Quatrefages, Michel 220n18 Quervain, Alfred de 58 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) 138, 141 Ramin, Jacques 225n7 Renan, Ernest 144 Reynolds, Robert 215n60 Reynolds, Stephen 217n84 Ritter, Joachim 224n93 Rizzi, Marco 219n11 Rocco, Valerio 212n1 Rodotà, Stefano 221n35

Index 237

153-61106_ch02_3P.indd 237

6/20/15 10:55 AM

Ronchi, Rocco 231n104 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 41, 106, 129 Sacerdoti, Gilberto 227n18 Sauvagnargues, Anne 231n113 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von 89, 102, 124 Say, Léon 232n3 Scarpat, Giuseppe 219n6 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 168–176, 179–180 Schiavone, Aldo 224n91, 225n6 Schlossmann, Siegmund 83, 89 Schmitt, Carl 3, 4, 5–6, 8, 36, 39, 41, 42–45, 47, 56, 57, 58–67, 69–70, 72, 76–80, 99, 130, 204 Scholem, Gershom 217n98 Schramm, Percy Ernst 53 Schrijnen, Joseph 220n17 Schweppenhauser, Hermann 217n98 Sciacca, Fabrizio 223n70 Scotus, Michael 143 Sherlock, William 109 Siger of Brabant 144, 148 Singer, Peter 130–131, 133–135 Sloterdijk, Peter 9, 130–135 Sohm, Rudolph 37 South, Robert 109 Spampanato, Vincenzo 227n19 Spinoza, Baruch de 10, 12, 159–172, 176, 179–181, 192, 201 Stimilli, Elettra 217n96, 233n13 Stolfi, Emanuele 219–220n8 Strobel, August 219n7 Strummiello, Giusi 229n67 Sturlese, Rita 227n15

Themistius, Political orator 145 Th iers, Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe 59 Thomas Aquinas 11, 54, 94, 103, 104, 107, 147, 150, 154 Thomas, Yan 221n31 Thurneysen, Eduard 57 Tiedemann, Rolf 217n98 Tomatis, Francis 229n60 Troplong, Raymond Théodore 136, 138, 141 Urvoy, Dominique 226n2 Valla, Lorenzo 144 Van Antwerpen, Jonathan 212n1 Varro, Marcus Terentius 99, 141 Vatter, Miguel 212n1 Vattimo, Gianni 17 Veyne, Paul 225n7 Vincenti, Umberto 220n8 Vinnen, Arnold 102 Volpi, Franco 211n6 Wagner, Herbert 220n12 Weber, Max 5, 25, 33–40, 42, 45–47, 52 Wellhausen, Julius 218n104 Woehl, Hermann (Hermann Vulteius) 101 Wolf, Joseph Georg 220n15 Wolff, Christian 119, 120, 223n70, 223n71, 223n72 Worms, Frédéric 231n106 Wright, George 222n50 Xifaras, Mikhail 224n97

Taubes, Jacob 3, 4–5, 63–71, 73 Tempier, Étienne 144 Tertullian, Quintus Septimius Florens 6, 60, 78, 84–89, 130, 138, 153

238

Zarathustra 38 Zarka, Yves Charles 222n50, 222n53 Zourabichvili, Francis 231n113

Index

153-61106_ch02_3P.indd 238

6/20/15 10:55 AM

Commonalities Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. Translated by Rhiannon Noel Welch. Introduction by Vanessa Lemm. Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. Translated by Richard Davies. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence. Anne Emmanuelle Berger, The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender. Translated by Catherine Porter. James D. Lilley, Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity. Jean-Luc Nancy, Identity: Fragments, Frankness. Translated by François Raffoul. Miguel Vatter, Between Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom. Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society. Maurizio Ferraris, Where Are You? An Ontology of the Cell Phone. Translated by Sarah De Sanctis. Irving Goh, The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject. Kevin Attell, Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction. J. Hillis Miller, Communities in Fiction.

153-61106_ch03_3P.indd 239

6/20/15 10:55 AM

Remo Bodei, The Life of Things, the Love of Things. Translated by Murtha Baca. Gabriela Basterra, The Subject of Freedom: Kant, Levinas. Roberto Esposito, Categories of the Impolitical. Translated by Connal Parsley. Roberto Esposito, Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Akiba J. Lerner, Redemptive Hope: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Obama. Adriana Cavarero and Angelo Scola, Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Political and Theological Dialogue. Translated by Margaret Adams Groesbeck and Adam Sitze. Massimo Cacciari, Europe and Empire: On the Political Forms of Globalization. Edited by Alessandro Carrera, Translated by Massimo Verdicchio. Emanuele Coccia, Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image. Translated by Scott Stuart, Introduction by Kevin Attell.

153-61106_ch03_3P.indd 240

6/20/15 10:55 AM