Giorgio Agamben

This slim volume is reliant on the lines of thought explored previously by Agamben in The Sacrament of Language and The Kingdom and the Glory, although it might be approachable on its own by a generally well-read and determined reader. I found it slow going, requiring as much as five minutes per page.

The first chapter is on "Liturgy and Politics," but mostly liturgy. It focuses on the emergence and development of a distinction between opus operans and opus operatum in sacramental activity. show more Only at the very end does Agamben remark that he considers this instrument for the "effectiveness of the cult" to be a "theological model ... which has made a lasting mark on praxis in the Marxist tradition" (26).

The first part of Chapter 2 "From Mystery to Effect" should be read in dialogue with Drudgery Divine by Jonathan Z. Smith. It is somewhat amusing that Agamben should take the side of the (anti-pagan) Protestants in the relevant questions about Christian liturgical origins, while Smith assails it. "Effect" is concerned with the "transformation of being into operativity" that results from the "ontological-practical paradigm ... of effectiveness" (63) which Agamben identifies with sacerdotal mystery.

The third chapter offers "A Genealogy of Office," which begins to focus on the historically articulated nature of ministry as a duty and a function. This interesting study culminates in a declaration that "[T]he priesthood, of which the character is the cipher, is not a real predicate but a pure signature, which manifests only the constitutive excess of effectiveness over being" (87). (There is also an interesting mention of Varro's three modalities agere, facere, and gerere, which seem to correspond to the offices of Cancellarius, Praemonstrator, and Imperator, respectively. 82)

"The Two Ontologies" of the fourth chapter are the philosophical-scientific and the religious-juridical. The former is characterized by the indicative mood and the latter by the imperative. Agamben illustrates various ways in which these two oppose one another and yet have become intertwined and reliant upon one another, with the tendency to privilege the religious-juridical under the cover of the philosophical-scientific reaching an acme in the 18th century. His account here makes solid sense out of Kant, and it almost re-interested me in Heidegger. The alignment of liturgy and ethics is witnessed through the concept of pious "devotion." Agamben writes, "Theologians never lost awareness of the pagan origin of devotio, with which the commander consecrated his own life to the infernal gods in order to obtain victory in a battle" (103).

The close of the book offers a discussion of the metaphysics of will, which arrives at remarks perfectly congruent with Beyond Good and Evil section 19, although Agamben never cites Nietzsche in the whole book. And then I was perplexed to read the final sentence, for which he never seemed to have supplied the motivation: "The problem of the coming philosophy is that of thinking an ontology beyond operativity and command and an ethics and a politics entirely liberated from the concepts of duty and will." As usual, Agamben gives me useful insights and leaves me scratching my head. show less

"And when, after all the phantoms are vanished shall appear that holy and formless fire, that fire which darts and flashes throughout the depths of the universe -- hear thou the voice of the fire!" (The Chaldean Oracles)

This small book by contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben is made up of a heterogenous mix of essays relating to literary creation and interpretation. About half of them were originally presented as talks in various venues, and only one was previously published when the show more book was assembled in the original Italian.

For my reading, the best of the lot was the eponymous first piece, despite its indulgence in a sort of metaphysical nostalgia. It orients not to the Chaldean Oracles, nor even to Deuteronomy 4 nor 1 Kings 19 (nor Exodus 3) which were the likely literary background for the Oracles. Instead, it grounds itself in a Hasidic parable communicated by Gershom Scholem from Yosef Agnon. The text relates the degeneration of religious praxis from an oblationary fire to a commemorative tale, and Agamben identifies these with mystery and literature respectively. By "mystery," he means the archaic participatory drama of numinous experience, for which Eleusis supplied the paragon. Writing in Italian about literature, Agamben used the ambivalence of storia, which like the German Geschichte fully embraces the meanings of both the English words "story" and "history."

Two of the essays are titled with questions. "What Is the Act of Creation?" explores ideas around potentiality and manifestation. "In the Name of What?" is another valuable essay, which ponders the nature of discursive authorization in a post-theological modernity.

In some cases, the titles promised (me) more than I found in the text. "Vortexes" had nothing to do with Fourier's tourbillons. And "Easter in Egypt" was unsurprisingly yet still disappointingly unrelated to Easter of 1904. In fact, it was an unusual use of "Easter" to refer to the Hebrew Pesach only, because the essay chiefly concerns a sort of Jewish identity "extraneous to the Zionist ideal" (73).

The final piece in the book is "Opus Alchymicum," and it uses the alchemical Great Work as an interpretive frame for the inflexion of artistic striving from the production of works to the "work on oneself." This text picks up some threads from "What Is the Act of Creation?" and it is the longest chapter of the book, covering a wide range of figures as proponents or demonstrators of the principles Agamben is considering.

On the whole, these presentations struck me as a mixed bag, but some of them were very lucid, and in general they spoke not only to durable intellectual concerns from history, but to a necessary conscience of our period. show less

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is the first of seven (and counting) volumes in a large project by contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben. (I have previously read the fourth, The Sacrament of Language.) Homo Sacer was first published in 1995, and some have suggested that it was serendipity that the political developments of the early 21st century have been so vulnerable to the tools of analysis that Agamben began to formulate here. Such judgments rest on the dubious view that the show more events in the US of September 2001, along with the political and governmental reactions to them, were some sort of freak accident alien to the cultivated soil of Western polity.

The point of departure in this book is the antique idea of the homo sacer, a declared outlaw who cannot be "sacrificed," but can be killed without repercussion. Agamben places this figure at the opposite pole from that of the sovereign, in the constitution of the paradoxical "state of exception" -- a concept that he takes from the Nazi jurist and theorist of "political theology" Carl Schmitt, and advances as the principal germ of government, newly exposed in the modern phenomena of "biopolitics" (this latter term from Michel Foucault). Agamben insists -- quite credibly -- that a common biopolitical skeleton lies under the skin of both mass democracies and the notorious totalitarianisms of the 20th century.

Agamben identifies the homo sacer "bandit" (i.e. one under a ban) with "bare life," and this condition is explored through tangent human realities such as subjects of medical experimentation (especially Nazi Versuchspersonen), prisoners condemned to capital punishment, euthanasia candidates, and the "overcomatose," relating these also to the deprecated and disenfranchised classes confined and condemned in totalitarian states. The book is a declared inquiry into the genealogy of the idea of the sanctity of life, and the complicity of this idea with forms of biopolitical oppression and even "thanatopolitical" extermination. It seems a curious oversight that the category of the sovereign fetus is never raised in this survey, given its relationship to the "sanctity of life" in US political rhetoric. (Prohibiting abortion was, of course, a conspicuous biopolitical initiative of Nazi rule.) On a more speculative note, the "ectogene" (a parentless "test tube baby") plays into the nexus of concerns raised in the closing chapters of the book.

One of the chief claims of the book is that human polity should no longer be investigated under the sign of the city, as understood in centuries past, but rather that of the concentration camp. Agamben extends the term to cover all sites of detention, where civil dignities are suspended in consideration of political priorities: refugee quarantine areas, prisons holding aliens to be deported, and so on. Instances of the type have multiplied virally in the last twenty years: the "free speech zones" to divert and suppress street protest in the US, CIA "black sites," and the Homan Square "off-the-books interrogation compound" run by Chicago police are a few that occur to my mind.

Homo Sacer brought ideas together from many other thinkers who have been objects of my attention. Agamben also characterizes the book as an effort to synthesize the political realizations of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault (120). Scholars of religion should attend to the theoretical critique bodied forth in the chapter on "The Ambivalence of the Sacred." Thelemites can find ideas worth pondering regarding "pure will" in the Kantian ruminations of the chapter on the "Form of Law." Agamben's work was not a flawless performance, though. Humanistic scholars should probably avoid mathematical or scientific metaphors when they are only superficially familiar with the relevant concepts; he unaccountably wrote "Leyden jar" where he evidently intended "Klein bottle" (37).

Overall, this book was well worth my time, and I expect to read further in the Homo Sacer project, and possibly in some of the secondary literature reacting to Agamben's ideas. show less

I have no prior orientation to the larger Homo Sacer project of Giorgio Agamben, in which The Sacrament of Language constitutes part II.3, and it might be argued that this brief text--a mere 72 pages in Adam Kotsko's translation from the Italian--should have been published with other sections in order to justify its standing as an independent volume. But the topic, sufficiently attractive to get me to read this book, does stand on its own, and Agamben's treatment is fascinating, albeit show more distinctly chewy.

Rather than accepting the centuries-long tradition of viewing the oath as a rhetorical artifact of a primitive "magico-religious" culture, Agamben insists that the discursive spheres of religion and law were themselves produced by reactions to an essential experience of the oath, which he characterizes as "verediction." (57) Although unremarked as such by Agamben, this state is also the point of departure for "How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable" in Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols: "I, Plato, am the truth."

The Sacrament of Language is crucially concerned with the coeval origins of law and religion; it contemplates the tripartite anatomy of the oath as invocation, affirmation, and curse; it details the relationship of the oath to the archaic functions of [con]sacratio and devotio; and it presents the oath and blasphemy as the two sides of a single coin. The theological observations of the book should be of great interest to Thelemites: among other interesting notes about pagan and Abrahamic religions, Agamben references Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas regarding the deity (qui es) invoked in the original anthem of the Gnostic Mass (53).

The supposed context for this entire discussion of the Archaeology of the Oath is a claim advanced by Paolo Prodi in a 1992 work (Il sacramento del potere) that recent generations of the West are participating in "the irreversible decline of the oath" (1). In the final sections of Agamben's book, he outlines a scenario in which the postmodern condition dissolves the substance of Western ethics, and he proposes "philosophy" as the locus of instruction regarding our possible escape from the dilemma. I certainly appreciate and recommend his speculative philosophy, but it will be in vain unless it is seized by ones who are in fact consecrated and devoted, and put to use in the operative philosophy better known as magick. show less