85
Credence and credibility: language and action
Agamben identifies two texts which allow the study of the oath to be taken up on new
grounds. He writes that a passage from Philo’s Legum Allegoriae is
important because it ‛puts
the oath into constitutive relation with the word of god.‛86 In the passage, due to our igno-
rance of god, the only definition we can give is ‛the being whose logoi are horkoi, whose words
81
Ibid., 21.
82
Ibid., 24.
83
Ibid., 25.
84
Ibid., 26.
85
Ibid., 27.
86
Ibid., 28.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
125
attest with absolute certainty of themselves.‛87 This is relevant since it is the reliability of the
words given in the oath that is always potentially at issue. Human language, both in terms of
its description of the world and its veracity, is subject to a persistent doubt. The oath offers a
possibility to join the realms of divine and human language, ‛rendering it possible, pistos,
credible.‛88
The second text identified by Agamben for putting the analysis of the oath on new
grounds is Cicero, in a famous passage from De Officiis. In his own investigation of the oath,
asking why Attilio Regolo would keep an oath to enemies even though knowing they’d kill
him, Cicero wrote that: ‛In the oath it is important to understand not so much the fear it
generated, but its efficacity.‛ This is why Regolo would return to his enemies despite certain
death—the obligation to maintain ones word. Agamben says that this is the vis (strength) of
the oath, according to Cicero, and that it derives not from the fear of the gods, but from fides
(credence, credibility). He says that the obligation of the oath is ‛found in a vaster institution,
fides, which governs as much the relations between humans as it does those between the
people and the city.
Elena: We cannot but stop here and look at other aspects of Fides which if I am correct are much more strongly connected to Trust, Faith, Fidelity and from there their credence and credibility.
Fides
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fides may refer to:
Agenzia Fides, a news agency of the Vatican
THE ROMAN CONCEPT OF FIDES
"FIDES" is often (and wrongly) translated 'faith', but it has nothing to do with the word as used by Christians writing in Latin about the Christian virute (St. Paul Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13). For the Romans, FIDES was an essential element in the character of a man of public affairs, and a necessary constituent element of all social and political transactions (perhaps = 'good faith'). FIDES meant 'reliablilty', a sense of trust between two parties if a relationship between them was to exist. FIDES was always reciprocal and mutual, and implied both privileges and responsibilities on both sides. In both public and private life the violation of FIDES was considered a serious matter, with both legal and religious consequences. FIDES, in fact, was one of the first of the 'virtues' to be considered an actual divinity at Rome. The Romans had a saying, "Punica fides" (the reliability of a Carthaginian) which for them represented the highest degree of treachery: the word of a Carthaginian (like Hannibal) was not to be trusted, nor could a Carthaginian be relied on to maintain his political elationships.
________
Elena: The power the oath gives is the ‘affirmation’ that is backed up by the ‘being’ pronouncing it through the volition of his inner will and his ability to , that will in practice uniting both dimensions, the sacred and the juridical throughout life. In fides, the ‘being of the individual’ is invested with ‘fidelity’ for the commitment they are swearing upon. The church must have changed that fidelity for faith after appropriating the intermediateness between God and the human being and made the people live on faith through the church’s representatives without the fidelity of their own conviction.
_________________
‛89 This credence is also said to be ‛essentially the correspondence be-
tween language and actions,‛ which supports the argument that the oath addresses the fealty
of language itself and our status as speaking beings.90
______________
Elena: The way credence is being talked about here is similar to how ‘being’ was talked about in the Fellowship cult. It was understood as the ‘being’, the level of consciousness with which an individual acted which would indeed coincide with what gives credibility to the words or actions of the said individual.
Interesting to note the modern “credentials” to perform. Which do not mean this connectedness with the sacred but the approval of the status quo.
________________
Agamben says that the relation between credence and the oath has long been noted by
scholars (as the prior argument by Cicero shows). Dumézil and Benveniste studied personal
credibility in concepts such as fides, the Greek pistis, and the Sanskrit sraddha. They emphasize
the lines of attachment and lines of obligation entailed in these ideas. In a particularly
interesting interpretation, Meillet notes that the Italian credere, like its Latin antecedent, are
formed from ‛dare il *kred‛ to give credibility or trust to something.91 It is precisely this turn
in interpretation that is important for Agamben, deemphasizing the explanation of the oath in
terms of a nebulous religious force, or fear of the gods, and replacing it with attention to the
institution of fides, credibility and trust. This turn foregrounds the fundamental relation to
words and things in the oath,92 the social ties of obligation and power attendant in it,93 and
how it necessitates a reconsideration of our conceptions of law and religion.
____________
Elena: Wonderful! Yes! Now we are on the same wavelength. This ‘reconsiderations’ of law and religion is what I’ve been attempting to do with this blogs. The continuity of dimensions is given in the human being our selves! I am purposefully using our selves instead of himself, the male appropriation of “his” that we have gotten so use to is actually neglecting half of our nature, I think I’ll replace he, him and his for our selves every time it’s necessary from now on.
___________
94 He even
maintains that the oath is ‛the threshold through which language enters into law and reli-
gion.‛
_______________
Elena: I am afraid that I don’t understand very well why Agamben would need the Oath to be the threshold through which language enters into law and religion instead of the human being our selves being that threshold. It is not the Oath what is the continuity between the sphere of the sacred and the sphere of the juridical, (sphere or dimension), the continuity is in the ‘being’ of the human being. The actual individual is what carries the continuity ‘within’ in the consciousness we hold and without through the ability to ‘act’ that consciousness out, to exercise it, to practice it in our social life through the lawfulness of the juridical system. The Oath is the commitment by word but what gives credibility is not the Oath as much as the individual, it is in ‘us’ that the fides or reliability falls upon. The ‘wonder’ of the Oath is that as a sacred ritual, it incarnates in the earthly, physical sphere the reality of the ‘inner’, ‘religious’, ‘conscious’ dimension that is its source and ‘unifies’ both realms in the ‘act’.
In modern times, we have left ourselves with the ritual without the consciousness or the being, performing in a world in which the most physically powerful can kill whoever disagrees, or hold them in jail until they wither away.
________________
95 These aspects indicate why the oath is so intimately related to veridiction; the study
of the oath casts valuable light upon the understanding of veridiction and truth telling in
Foucault.
Indicating the complicated interrelation of religion and the law in the oath, Agamben
notes that it was, in early sources, considered a sacred institution (as much as it had clearly
87
Ibid., 30.
88
Ibid.
89
Ibid., 32.
90
Ibid.
91
Ibid., 36.
92
Ibid., 37.
93
Ibid., 35-7.
94
Ibid., 38.
95
Ibid., 39.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
126
juridical functions). In fact, revisiting some of his earlier considerations about the sacer, he
says (drawing on Hirzel) that perjury, breaking the oath, was ‛none other than the Roman
sacer... able to be excluded from every religious or civil community‛ on account of breaking
the oath.96 It is as such that he highlights the central importance of the ‛curse‛ (maledizione) in
the oath, as that which demonstrates the consequences of breaking it. Incidentally, this also
helps to explain why terms such as ‛oath‛ and ‛curse‛ have to do with blasphemy and
profanity—as those utterances which cancel out the divine function of language and break the
relation between words and things inherent in credibility.
Plutarch held that ‛all oaths conclude with a curse against perjury.‛97 And Schrader
that ‛to swear an oath means first of all to curse, to curse oneself in the event that one should
tell a lie, or not maintain that which is promised.‛98 Agamben mentions a type of standard
benediction/malediction attached to an oath—that the one who follows the oath should pros-
per while the one who breaks it should suffer ruin—and says that, although the benediction
can be omitted, the curse remained an invariant. He also cites such a standard formulation in
Faraone, ‛If I swear well, many goods to me; if I swear badly, by contrast, many evils in place
of many goods.‛99 This is the rule in Homer, and he calls attention to the exchange of oaths
between the Trojans and the Greeks before the duel between Paris and Menelaus: ‛To those
who should first transgress these oaths, that their brains should pour out on the ground like
this wine.‛100 Although the benediction may be omitted, it is nonetheless implied, and Agam-
ben holds that the benediction and the curse are co-original and constitutively co-present in
the oath.101
On the bases of these analyses, Agamben says that the ‛oath would seem, then, to
result from three elements: an affirmation, the invocation of the gods to witness, and a curse
directed against perjury.‛102 He says that scholars treat these three things as a single insti-
tution (perhaps similar to the unity-in-division of the trinitarian doctrine discussed in Il Regno
e la Gloria), and that they are strictly linked factually and discursively (in the series pistos-
horkos-ara in the Greek world and fides-sacramentum in the Roman one). He points out that
these series ‛lead back to a single institution, certainly archaic, both juridical and religious (or
pre-juridical and pre-religious) the meaning and function of which we are trying to under-
stand.‛103
In this light Agamben thinks that the supposed link to the divine word in the oath
can be better understood as the appeal to an account that can’t be contested or verified, or as
the performance of a guarantee. He says that the institution ‛of which the gods are witnesses
and caretakers cannot but be that which joins words and things, that is logos as such.‛104
96
Ibid., 41.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid., 42.
99
Ibid., 50.
100
Ibid., 43.
101
Ibid., 50.
102
Ibid., 43.
103
Ibid., 43.
104
Ibid., 46.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
127
Warning once again about the importance of avoiding recourse to the ‛magico-reli-
gious sphere,‛ this time in the explanation of the curse, Agamben says that it should be under-
stood on its own terms. He notes that it concerns, ‛the relations between words and the facts
(or actions) which define the oath. In one case the name of god expresses the positive force of
language, the just relation between words (parole) and things (cose), in the second case a
weakness of logos, which is the breaking of this relation.‛105 Underneath the common recourse
to magic or a simple religious explanation Agamben sees a more fundamental relation be-
tween words and things. The oath plays a decisive role as that which continually strives per-
formatively to guarantee this relationship, while the curse breaks it.
Via Ziebarth, Agamben points out the political role of the curse in Greek legislation. It
served to support the efficacy of the law by subjecting transgressors to the political curse. The
homo sacer is an example of one who is subjected to a political curse—outside and inside the
political community, killable and inappropriate for sacrifice. This aspect of the curse is impor-
tant in political terms because it has to do with ‛the sanction that sets down the structure of
the law itself, its way of referring to reality (talio esto/sacer esto).‛106 Like the decision on the
exception, this involves determining the applicability and span of the law, as a development
‛of the curse through which the law defines its environment. The ‘political’ curse delimits,
then, the locus in which penal law will be, even if in a subsequent period, established.‛107
To further investigate the political function of the oath, Agamben points out the often-
discussed relation between the curse and blasphemy. Citing Benveniste he notes that just as
the oath is a sacramentum, an appeal to a god, so is blasphemy, which also calls upon a god to
witness. He calls blasphemy an ‛oath of outrage.‛108 Blasphemy plays into Agamben’s ac-
count because it is the literal taking of god’s name in vain. If the function of the oath disclosed
in the archaeology is to performatively join words and things through the invocation of the
name of a god, blasphemy undoes that work by offending the god and breaking the relation.
He says that ‛blasphemy is an oath in which the name of god has been removed from its
assertive or promissary context and is offered by itself, in a void, independent of a semantic
context... isolated and pronounced ‘in vain,’ it corresponds symmetrically to perjury, which
separates words from things.‛109 As a result the oath and blasphemy are co-present and im-
plicit in the same act of language. He also notes that certain forms of magic and incantations
are born from the oath, or better from perjury. The name of god, separated from the oath and
from things, becomes a word of power or maleficence.110
Performative aspects of the oath: veridiction
Taking stock of the aspects of the archeology of the oath so far, Agamben further clarifies the
reach and implications of the study, that the oath is not merely a dusty archaic tradition that
amounts to a curiosity, but that:
105
Ibid., 50.
106
Ibid., 52.
107
Ibid.
108
Ibid., 54.
109
Ibid., 56.
110
Ibid., 59-61.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
128
Every naming, every act of language is, in this sense, an oath, in which the logos (the speaker
in logos) pledges to fulfil her word, swearing on her truthfulness, on the correspondence
between words and things which is realized in it.111
If he is interested in the oath it is because he sees it as related to this fundamental issue of
veridiction—the seeable and the sayable. The relationship between words and things entailed
in our position as speaking beings, and the political consequences of it.
Further following Benveniste, Agamben notes that blasphemy has been treated as an
exclamation or an interjection, and that as such it functions differently than declarative speech.
These types of speech, like insults, are performative rather than descriptive, ‛can be opposed
point for point to normal classificatory terms... and produce, through their simple pronun-
ciation, particular pragmatic effects.‛112 The performative power of these utterances was illu-
strated in Roman warfare, where it was sometimes believed that uttering the name of a city’s
deity could reduce the city to dependence on invaders (by ‛evoking‛ the loyalty of the deity).
For this reason Rome had a secret name for its patron deity, and Dionysus in the mysteries
was called Pyrigenes. In monotheism Agamben says that ‛the name of god names language
itself... the divinization of the logos itself, to the name of god as archi-event of language.‛113
Pronouncing the name of god is to recall that experience of language in which it is impossible
to separate name and essence, words and things.114
Drawing on Wittgenstein, Agamben wonders further about the nature of this security
between words and things. Here he observes that, in light of the considerations on language
in the archaeology of the oath, the theory of the performative, and of speech acts, must be
reread: ‛The performative is a linguistic proposition which does not describe a state of things,
but immediately produces a fact, achieving its significance.‛ The study of the oath bears on
the theory of the performative since it relates to a stage of language in which the relationship
between words and things was performative rather than denotative. It is not a throwback to a
magico-religious sphere, but points to ‛a structure antecedent (or contemporary) to the dis-
tinction between meaning and denotation.‛115 It is not an original and eternal aspect of human
language, but a historical production. The performative, as in the oath, also has a self-refe-
rential quality, which comes by result of the suspension of the normal denotative character of
language (dictum). In this way he relates the oath to the state of exception where the law’s ap-
plication is suspended in order to demonstrate its force.116
Agamben relates the oath specifically to Foucault’s concept of veridiction. Setting aside
predominant views on the nature of the oath, he clarifies that it is ‛neither an assertion nor a
promise, but something which, taking up a Foucaldian term, we could call ‘veridiction,’ which
111
Ibid., 63.
112
Ibid., 65.
113
Ibid., 68.
114
Ibid., 71.
115
Ibid., 75.
116
Ibid., 76.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
129
has to the subject that pronounces it the sole criterion of its performative efficacy.‛117 Recalling
the subjectivizing effects that are discussed in Foucault and that he has discussed elsewhere,
for instance in the
Dispositive essay, Agamben indicates that ‛in veridiction the subject is
formed and put at stake as such in being performatively tied to truth of its own affirmation.‛118
In this respect he says that the oath resembles the affirmation of faith. It is here that he makes
the significant observation, mentioned earlier in the review, that religion and law do not
preexist the performative experience of language in the oath, but are invented to guarantee its
truth and reliability. He says that,
from veridiction come, even if through crossing and overlapping of every kind... law,
religion, poetry, and literature. Their medium is philosophy which, holding them together
in truth and error, seeks to safeguard the performative experience of language without
giving over to the possibility of the lie and, in every assertive discourse, experiences first off
the veridiction which has a place in it.119
He says that the performative power of the oath was shown in the form of the trial in both
Greece and Rome, where it took the shape of two opposing oaths presented against one
another. Judgement lay in deciding between the competing claims. The sacramentum was the
central decisive point of the trial.
On this basis Agamben returns again to the question of what precisely this ‛force‛ of
the oath is that has been considered. Recalling a frequent citation of this force as vis, he notes
that this term (and related vindicta, vindex, vindicere) ‛come according to the usual etymology
from vim dicere, or to ‘say or show force.’‛120 In analyzing this winning side of the sacramen-
tum, he cites Noailles who recalls that the interpretation of this has overwhelmingly empha-
sized ‛force or violence, that is force put materially into action... It is not clear, in fact, if the
force or violence which it expresses is his (the victor’s) own, put at the service of law, or vio-
lence of the adversary, which is denounced as against justice.‛121 This is another way of sho-
wing the constitutive relation between violence and politics studied elsewhere. Noailles none-
theless maintains that the force at issue must be the force of the ritual. Developing this,
Agamben claims that it is the force of the effective performative word. This effective word
that names, also has the power of delimiting and circumscribing—deciding upon applicability
as in the law and the exception. Naming is the original form of the command.122
In a fascinating etymological turn, sacramentum was not immediately synonymous with
the oath but was in fact, originally, the sum of money that was put up ‛at stake‛ in the trial by
each party, and which was held in abeyance as sacro during the process. The winner would
receive their stake back, while the loser’s would join the state funds.123
117
Ibid., 78.
118
Ibid.
119
Ibid., 81.
120
Ibid., 84.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid., 87.
123
Ibid., 88.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
130
Agamben encapsulates much of the archaeology of the oath in a series of theses. First
he recalls that scholars have tended to treat the oath in terms of a nebulous magico-religious
sphere or an ill-defined religious power. His concept is precisely opposite: the oath is more
primordial and can explain the emergence of religion and law.124 Second, he maintains that
the proper place of analysis for the oath is in terms of wider institutions like fides, or cre-
dibility, which have widespread social and political dimensions, and whose function is perfor-
matively to affirm the veracity and the reliability of language. Third, the close relation be-
tween the oath and sacratio must be understood in terms of the fundamental relation between
words and things. This is of import because:
Law is, in this way, constitutively linked to the curse, and only a politics which has broken
this original nexus with the oath can eventually one day permit another use of language and
of law.125
This obscured yet persistent relation still functions powerfully and primordially in the law,
and must be understood in the terms laid out by Agamben to disengage it.
On this basis Agamben returns to the question of anthropogenesis, and notes that it has
often been considered as an exclusively cognitive problem, having only to do with intelligence
or brain size. For him, by contrast, it is fundamentally an issue about guaranteeing the nexus
between words and things and as such it presents problems of the ethical and political order.
Reprising Benveniste’s (and others’) question about what makes human language different
from nonhuman animal language, he returns to the biopolitical point: language has put
human nature into question. He refers to Foucault’s concept that humans are animals whose
politics come from their life as living beings, and adds that we are animals whose language
comes from our lives as living beings. He says that for such speaking beings as us, the oath is
possible, indeed necessary, because (like the trinity) it ‛distinguishes, and articulates in some
way together, life and language, actions and words--and this is precisely that which the
animal, for which language is still part of its vital practices, cannot do.‛126 Drawing explicitly
on Heidegger’s notion of the animal here Agamben makes a distinction in terms of bioploitics
between human and nonhuman animals.
Just when it seems, though, that he may be losing some ground on the animal question
with relation to earlier work, he concludes with a series of considerations about language, ani-
mals, and politics. Apparently not wishing further to underscore the notion of language as the
elevating mark of the human, he writes that:
It is perhaps time to put into question the prestige which language has held and holds in our
culture, inasmuch as instrument of incomparable power, efficacity, and beauty. Rather,
considered in itself, it is not more beautiful than the songs of birds, more effective than the
signals which insects exchange, not more powerful than the roar with which the lion an-
124
Ibid., 89.
125
Ibid., 90.
126
Ibid., 94.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
131
nounces her reign. The decisive element which confers human language its peculiar virtue
is not in the instrument itself, but in the place that it leaves to the speaker.127
With this turn it is evident that he has indeed been seeking to analyze the sacrament of lan-
guage through his archaeology of the oath. If it is time to put the prestige of human language
into question, this is because, as he notes, it is deeply tied to a subjectivizing process which
leaves the speaker in an untenable relation between words and things, but institutes a sacra-
ment of power. It is precisely this ethos, this ethical relation, that language constituted along
the lines he analyzes—in the shape of the oath which attempts to suture the rift between
words and things—cannot apprehend and describe.
He maintains that philosophy begins, contrary to the ritual formula of the religio, when
the speaker calls into question the primacy of names, an operation he saw at work in
Heraclitus: ‛philosophy is, in this way, constitutively critical of the oath: that is to say it puts
into question the sacramental victory which ties humans to language, without by this simply
speaking into a void, or falling into the vanity of language.‛128 He finds this operation to be all
the more important when politics cannot but assume the form of an oikonomia, or a govern-
ment of the empty word over bare life. He seeks for a line of resistance and of turning away.
Elena: I must admit the multiple limitations I have to fully understand these texts that I try to work with reading the first time. It is too possible that I don’t understand them so the questions I raise might be erased when I actually read Agamben fully. For all we know Bussolini might be misinterpreting him. That said, I can’t agree with Agamben. He seems adamant at separating the magico-religious sphere to the juridical sphere and playing around the animal and the human to finally decide that the difference between them lies in philosophy, a philosophy disconnected to the religious dimension and held only to the power of words themselves. I hope I am misunderstanding because if that is what he is actually pretending, it’s quite shocking to me!
The difference between man and animal is not only the religious dimension within the human being but the juridical dimension that actualizes the former. The difference lies in the will and the possibility to err. Animals do not have that. They cannot will “good” or “evil”, they cannot fall into crime. They live on other animal’s lives which is the same act that human beings do in the lowest sphere of their consciousness but while that is ‘right’ in the realm of nature, it is inhuman in the realm of humanity. The capitalist structure of society even in communist orders, in which a few are privileged by the work of the many, is no other than alpha males in control of the herd. It is an instinctive order for humanity that obeys more to the animal order than to a human order. The hierarchization of power denotes the unconsciousness of the society exercising it although in the cradle of civilization the ‘King’ had the ‘consciousness’ to protect and nurture the people. What was right for the cradle of civilization is not necessarily right today. The interiorization of the ‘king’ in the process of self consciousness of the human being as an individual versus the clan consciousness is yet to be deeply explored to be able to understand why consciousness must necessarily move us from private property to consciousness of the whole with each individual responsible for the integrity of things as much as human beings.
The destruction of nature by man in our times is not ‘animal’ consciousness. Animals do not destroy nature, they are in this aspect, way superior to human beings for they are inherently connected with its laws, instinctively- naturally part and parcel of the whole. The human being’s inception in nature depends not on our instinctive connectedness with it but in our conscious connectedness with it and in our unconsciousness of our selves as much as ‘it’, we are destroying it. In our ‘individualism’ we are ‘appropriating’ nature with the same instinctive seal that an animal appropriates a territory far from the consciousness of a human being that ‘shares’ the territory with our kindred. The clan consciousness is still ‘animal’ consciousness in the human being and we can see its expression in every conflict of our times. People claiming ‘ownership’ of no matter what part of the physical world are people who in their consciousness cannot conceive of the whole of the human being as One Being divided into multiple entities. We are in our unconsciousness like illnesses in an individual that claim parts of a human body as their personal property: cancers that end up killing the organism on which they nest. Each nation is for the human entity, like a kidney, a liver or a lung in a human body. Nationalities are imaginary pictures of clan consciousness but beyond nationalities with each and all their worth and value, is the human being. One Earth, One People. We are at a point in time in which if we do not learn to share the house on which we stand, we’ll tear it apart. The hierarchic institutionalization of sovereignty has fallen and every individual on Earth today is claiming his and her rights to participate and in so doing claiming speech’s freedom as an inherent quality of our humaneness. Speech’s freedom as much as the right to the satisfaction of basic needs, the right to study, work and keep healthy together with all other civil rights present in most constitutions. The power of speech is that it unites us above the animal sphere and allows us to actualize our consciousness through dialogue. The power of speech means the End of War and the beginning of the Human: the ability to resolve our conflicts over who, when, where, what and how through a democratic process of SHARING with the willingness to sacrifice our individualities for the well being of the whole and not the willingness to sacrifice the whole for the well being of a few. War is the actualization of instinctive consciousness in the human realm, the resolution of human conflicts with animal consciousness and WE ARE NOT ANIMALS beautiful as animals are in their own realm. The sole fact that cow dung is one of the worst causes of pollution in our world today should start telling us a little about our ignorance in our past and present dealings with nature and animal life.
It seems to me that Agamben does not understand the meaning of the Oath in its aspect of swearing. Swearing is the other side of the coin of the Oath like pride is the other side of the coin of dignity and just like false pride can bring dignity to its knees, a false oath can bring the truth to its misery. In disconnecting the oath to the sphere of the sacred, Agamben fails to value the power behind the Oath: the being in which it resides and the consciousness that acts along with it. As he acknowledges, the Oath brings curse to the one who breaks it because he carries within his own self the consciousness of the betrayal even if there is no law to charge him or her with it. When others are aware of the betrayal, they can swear and curse at us and we indeed become the homo sacer but not only because we betrayed our word but because we betrayed our “consciousness”. It is not the word that gives power to the Oath but the consciousness with which it is expressed.
It’s interesting that in these texts what seems to be most lacking is the understanding of ‘being’. The ‘being’ or ‘consciousness’ of the individual acting: the human being in question. As if philosophy or at least Agamben here had had to avoid the state of consciousness of the individual human being to understand the context in which the act is performed. What gives power to the act is the individual performing it. Without consciousness the act has no power and the process or ‘octave’ will necessarily ‘involve’ into crime, with consciousness it will develop into ‘humaneness’, ‘life’, ‘culture’ ‘legitimacy’.
I do wonder if what we are seeing here is the schizophrenic separation of philosophy from religion and politics claiming its own leadership in the race as if there needed to be a race and a separation when what is most needed is a unification of all spheres of our life in the reality of our Oneness.
I should go and leave corrections for later. Thank you for sharing.
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