A ‘criminal’ like Bradley Manning today is a criminal only to the status quo acting against the people’s right to transparency, that is, to know what those in power are doing against human beings no matter in what corner of the Earth. The United States government stands against Manning’s act because his act reveals their actions against other human beings in other parts of the world. With that action Bradley Manning stands as human consciousness beyond national consciousness and in it resides its legitimacy. It must be so in the wake of globalization and consciousness of our selves as human beings.
71
Sacred Substance versus Zone of Indistinction
Agamben draws on Benveniste’s re-interpretation of the Greek term for oath, ὅρκος, horkos,
via ὅρκον ὄμνυμαι, horkon omnumai (to swear an oath, call to witness),
as ‛sacred substance,‛
rather than the traditional etymology in terms of ἕρκος, herkos, which means ‛fence, barrier,
bond,‛ in order to clear the ground of a ‛prejudicial misinterpretation‛ that he says impedes
the archaeology of the oath.72 Benveniste writes that horkos signifies, via his alternate etymo-
logy, ‛not a word or an act, but a thing, the material invested with the malevolent potency
which confers to the promise its binding power.‛73 This would seem to be attested given that
one of the meanings of horkos (Horkos the son of Eris) is ‛the witness of an oath, the power or
object abjured.‛74 Nevertheless,
____________
Agamben wishes to counter the almost-unanimous interpre-
tation according to which the ‛force and efficacy of the oath are sought in the sphere of
magico-religious ‘powers’ to which it belongs in origin and which is presupposed as the most
archaic: they derive from it and decline with the decline of religious faith.‛75 He finds this
unsatisfying since it relies on an ‛imaginary‛ notion of the homo religiosus, a ‛primitive‛ hu-
66
Ibid., 14.
67
Ibid.,
68
Ibid., 16.
69
Ibid.
70
Ibid.
71
Further consideration on this is contained in the ‛What is a Dispositive?‛ article in this issue, especially
Section 1 on ‛Foucault’s Usage of the Concept.‛
72
Ibid., 17.
73
Ibid.
74
Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, Abridged Edition, Oxford, Oxford, 1997, (1891), 498.
75
Ibid., 18.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
123
man intimidated by the forces of nature and the divine. This is unsatisfying because the sour-
ces treated, Agamben points out, present a human who is both religious and irreligious—both
loyal to the oath and capable of perjury.
___________
76 Thus he believes that this traditional explanation is
in need of further exploration, and in particular he wishes to dispel the interpretation in terms
of recourse to a ‛magico-religious sphere.‛
Agamben notes that even scholars as ‛perspicacious‛ as Benveniste and Bickermann
have erred in uncritically repeating the explanation by recourse to the sacred, indicating that
they several times refer to that explanation as one which is ‛always and everywhere‛ given to
account for the oath.77 The problem with this explanation refers back to Agamben’s earlier
work on the sacred (sacer), especially in Homo sacer: il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. At issue are
the insufficiency and the contradictions of the doctrine of the ‘sacred’ elaborated in the scien-
tific and historical studies of religion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of the
confusion, he says, comes from the encounter and uncritical mixing between the Latin sacer
and the Melanesian concept of mana seized upon by anthropologists. Citing Robert Henry
Coddington and Max Müller, Agamben indicates that mana became the way in which ‛the
idea of the infinite, of the invisible, and of that which we will later call the divine, can appear
in vague and nebulous terms among the most primitive peoples.‛78 Agamben attributes this
to a lack of historical and interpretive knowledge on the part of the scholars, rather than to any
actually-existing concept or category. He also points out that, by uncritically joining the con-
cepts (sacer and mana), such commentators failed to pay heed to both contexts of study.
He says that mana pertained to contexts outside the cultural frame of reference of these
European scholars and sacer to contexts beyond their historical knowledge (often, specifically,
as that which was cast as ‛pre-history‛ or ‛pre-law‛ or the like). As, by the end of the 19th
century and for those seeking to establish a science or history of it, religion in Europe had be-
come something so ‛extraneous and indecipherable,‛ these scholars sought the keys to it in
concepts such as mana.79 They found it easier to assume that the ‛primordial‛ religious con-
texts of Europe must be similar to the ‛magico-religious‛ life of the so-called ‛primitives,‛
thus failing carefully to examine the historically specific genealogy of religion in each context.
Because of this he says that ‛they could not help but to reestablish, as if in a specter, the same
extravagant and contradictory imagination that these scholars had projected.‛80 A more fruit-
ful understanding of the concept, he says, would await the pivotal interpretation of Claude
Levi-Strauss.
Agamben maintains that Levi-Strauss put the understanding of the concept of mana
(and associated ones like orenda and manitou) on new ground because, unencumbered by the
same attachment to the notion of the ‛sacred substance,‛ he was able to recognize the crucial
facet of the concept: its indeterminateness. Levi-Strauss equates the term to those such as truc
and machin in French (which Agamben renders as coso and affare in Italian)—‛thing‛ and
76
Agamben, Sacramento, 18.
77
Ibid., 19.
78
Ibid., 20.
79
Ibid., 22.
80
Ibid. He says that the sway of this interpretation was such that it manifests in different ways in the work of
Durkheim, Freud, Rudolf, Otto, and Mauss (page 21).
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
124
‛contraption, thingamajig, doohickey, gadget‛ in English—words which, notably, stand in for
something else, or refer to an unspecified quality. Agamben says they are ‛unknown objects
or objects whose use we can’t explain... a void of meaning or an indeterminate value of signi-
fication... whose sole function is to fill a gap between signifier and signified.‛81 So, rather than
a pervasive magical force, Agamben, following Levi-Strauss, thinks that such concepts have
more to do with an indeterminate, ad hoc, function in language on the part of anthropologists
and historians of religion. It is on this basis that Levi-Strauss commented that in the thinking
of the scholars, mana really is mana, implying that there it did function as a pervasive magical
force.
Citing Louis Gernet’s concept of pre-law and Paolo Prodi’s ‛primordial indistinction,‛
________
fuller understanding is given to the ‛ultra-historical fringe‛ as a phase in which law and reli-
gion were indistinct.
________
The difficult part, says Agamben, is using these concepts in a way that
doesn’t simply involve the simple retrospective projection of current notions of religion and
politics onto this fringe, such that we see it as the simple addition of two parts. He recom-
mends ‛a type of archeological epoché to suspend, at least provisionally, the attribution of
predicates with which we usually define religion and law.‛82 Instead he’d like to pay heed to
the zone of indistinction between them, trying to understand this as an internal limit that may
give rise to a new interpretation.
As against the interpretations of the oath that distinguish between an ancient religious
rite and a modern inclusion in law,
________
Agamben notes that the oldest documents in our posses-
sion show it to have an unmistakably juridical function, even if also serving religious ones.
83
He says that ‛in the oldest sources the Latin tradition allows us to reach, the oath is a verbal
act destined to guarantee the verity of a promise or an assertion,‛ and that the ‛same goes for
the Greek tradition.‛84 He also reminds us that for the Romans the sacred sphere was con-
sidered an integral part of law. On the basis of several examples he maintains that
the entire problem of the distinction between the juridical and the religious, in particular for
the oath is, therefore, wrongly put. Not only do we not have grounds to postulate a pre-
juridical phase in which the oath belonged only to a religious sphere, but perhaps our whole
habitual mode of representing to ourselves the chronological and conceptual relation
between law and religion should be reexamined.
__________
Elena: It’s good to find this unity in religion and the juridical. I think I’ve been looking for it all along! I don’t quite understand his argument against previous researchers on the exclusively religious and mana, it seems that if the oath is indeed both religious and juridical it would not stop the connection with the religious and would in fact presuppose it. “Agamben indicates that mana became the way in which ‛the
idea of the infinite, of the invisible, and of that which we will later call the divine, can appear
in vague and nebulous terms among the most primitive peoples.”
What all that is telling me is that they are both dealing with the dimension of the sacred and the dimension of the juridical and that there is no opposition in that continuity. They are the same “lawfulness” in different dimensions and are ‘connected’ by the human being. In the realm of the sacred, the infinite dimension, ‘world 1’ within each and every human being, in the realm of the juridical, society, the lawfulness with which the individual from his inner connectedness with the ‘divine’, acts in the plane of the earthly: in 'society': the divine divided into multiple human entities acting on each other, ‘climbing’ towards self consciousness. But why? If the human being already possesses the divine within why do we have to ‘climb’ towards its consciousness? Is it a ‘climbing’ or an ‘actualizing’? And then the possibility of ‘failing’, of ‘falling’, in breaking the oath and attracting ‘the malevolent potency’ in the religious sphere and ‘crime’ in the juridical sphere. They do not contradict each other, on the contrary, they would attest for the fact that the individual commits an act of crime only when he or she “falls” outside of the ‘infinite’ ‘invisible’ ‘divine’ or the ‘whole’ ‘God’. The homo sacer is outside of the law because he has fallen out of the circle and death inflicted on him is ‘lawful’ but when those inflicting death on the homo sacer are themselves outside of the circle killing what is inside the circle, when the status quo is upside down and backwards to lawfulness, then the human being has turned against his and her own integrity and is in a process of destruction. In suicide cults the self-annihilation shows the inability of the people to affirm the process of life and hold to its legitimacy. In the process of unhealthily separating from the rest of mankind, cult members gradually implode: they condemn themselves to the homo sacer status and self annihilate. It is interesting that as a reaction (meaning a mechanical response to the status quo), cults tend to self annihilate although the initial aim is to recover the lost integrity that people perceive in the status quo.
Interesting also that the hero usually stands against a status quo that has turned against the integrity of the whole and privileges a few. The hero re-invokes the whole and calls on the spirit of the people to reinstate it in society overthrowing the status quo.
All that would bring us back to the circle, the whole. What those in power appropriate is the ‘whole’ represented in the divine authority with which they claim to act in ‘governing’ the people. Their acts are justified because they are supposed to own the sovereignty to exercise, ‘own’ it in their personal qualification: their ‘being’. ‘Sovereignty’ implies the lawful connectedness with the ‘whole’ ‘God’ and it is what gives legitimacy to the ‘rule’ and its expression in the earthly sphere: the juridical status quo. When those in power lack the consciousness of the whole and appropriate a great deal for themselves against the well being of the many, they are acting without the ‘being’, that is, the consciousness of the whole and consequently, their acts are in themselves, outside of the whole: criminal. “Criminal” is each and every act that is performed outside of consciousness and consciousness is the awareness of the whole. The capacity of the human being to ‘fall’ out of consciousness and act against the ‘whole’ whether it is acting against their own self or that of others is ‘apparently’ what we are here to check! The ‘oath’ would come in as the “intention” to act lawfully and accept ‘punishment’ if unable to. This reminds me of the practice of suicide in high-ranking Japanese culture in which it is legitimate to take one’s life if one has dishonored the sovereignty of ones role.
All these would bring us to further questions on the meaning of life itself. Is life meant to be a process of realizing consciousness? Of walking from one’s self to our selves? That is, from individuality to sociability through one’s work? Is that not education? The preparation to legitimately participate in society through one’s work? Is that not what people are ‘prepared’ for, educated for? At birth, is the human being an individuality with the potential of becoming conscious of ‘the human’ in his own particular reality as much as internalizing and externalizing the reality of all human beings? Is ‘essence’, that is, all that is innately human at birth, the seed of consciousness but only the seed? Is life the road between the ego and the self? “Life”, the social earth on which the individual actualizes the human, the soil on which consciousness is developed through the actualization of the infinite wholeness within every individual in the practice and experience of a lawful life? What is a ‘lawful life’ if not the capacity of the individual to strengthen the whole through his and her life’s work? The ‘community’, NOT the status quo that acts against it but the integrity of the people that co-participate in it. A ‘criminal’ like Bradley Manning today is a criminal only to the status quo acting against the people’s right to transparency, that is, to know what those in power are doing against human beings no matter in what corner of the Earth. The United States government stands against Manning’s act because his act reveals their actions against other human beings in other parts of the world. With that action Bradley Manning stands as human consciousness beyond national consciousness and in it resides its legitimacy. It must be so in the wake of globalization and consciousness of our selves as human beings.
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