Elena: It's with delight that I am presenting more of Agamben's work. What I begin to find is the meticulous connection between Gurdjieff's System and other structures of thought more dedicated to "life" and accepted and approved by the institutions of the times.
These texts help me put into words what I am, myself, trying to convey. It's interesting to see us all trying to put into words the structures of the universe that are in themselves immutable! As if we used new language to say the same things in different periods and at the same time were able to reveal more of what we actually understand as time passes not only in our words but our actions. Not only in our actions but our being. "Being" should be marked by the consciousness of the times and the consciousness of our times is that of Oneness. How that Oneness will shift from the "focalized" authority into the authority of the people is to be seen but the struggle itself is worth attending for it is inevitable that in doing so, we'll have to not only move power to the people but we'll have to actualize the law in our lives. The legitimacy of power is in its actualization and we can have no power our selves unless we can legitimize it. To be able to make it "legitimate" we have to be legitimate our selves, we have to understand that the world is not a stage on which we are playing a role but The Stage on which We are playing Our Selves.
I use to think that one needed to go out and look for adventures but now realize that those are only micro-plays of the adventure of life itself. Each life is the adventure from the one who is born to the one who dies! As if we were given only so much time to become our selves more fully.
But the real adventure happens in many dimensions and THAT is what we need to bring home to people. Individualism is not individuality but the dark side of it. We are many and in multiple dimensions at the same time and there is nothing linear about existence but the linearity of it is as necessary as the dimensionality.
Perhaps that is the main characteristic of "essence": that it is unable to perceive the dimensions at play while at the same time it "incarnates" them, unconscious of it. Like ALL of nature that is "unconscious" and yet mathematically exact!
I've only read this text as far as the economy is put next to the logos and rejoiced in the comparison because if we take that a step further we realize that what we are talking about is the economy of all worlds. In the instinctive realm: the market; In the sociall realm: culture; in the political realm: the law; in the spiritual realm: the logos: the "life" of the "soul", of the many, multiple, separated individuals connecting in the sphere of the soul, the realm of death actualizing itself in life, but death understood as the dimension of the spirit, its actualization in "life". Please understand the word death properly, not in the black context of our time's "finite death", but in the sense of death as the spiritual dimension of life. As I understand the logos, it is the language of the spirit and it is as alive in our lives as the earth we walk on. It is in every action we perform as much as in the dialogue between us. It is what gives LIFE to life. "It" is the "language" of our Oneness and in that dialogue it is our self what is touched upon, not our minds. The mind is the mirror on which the self's consciousness is projected. In the unconscious state, the "economy" of life is determined by the instinctive possessive: individualism. In the conscious state it is determined by the economy of the whole. La Economía del Todo! The Economy of the Whole.
In the schizophrenic status quo of our times we have become used to the economy of the parts with a few taking what belongs to the whole but consciousness of our selves must necessarily bring us to an Economy of the Whole: a rational distribution of what is with everyone involved. We will feel so much more human when we come to that! __________
Jeffrey Bussolini 2010
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143, November 2010
REVIEW ESSAY
Critical Encounter Between Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault: Review of Recent
Works of Agamben: Il Regno e la Gloria: per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del
governo, Il sacramento del linguaggio: Archeologia del giuramento, and Signatura rerum:
Sul metodo1
Jeffrey Bussolini, City University of New York
Following the trajectory of Giorgio Agamben’s work since the mid-1990s not only offers a fas-
cinating exposure to this productive period, and an important political turn, in his work, it
also makes evident that it is proceeding by an ongoing interpretation of the thought of Michel
Foucault. This review offers a chance to evaluate several of his texts, including the most recent
ones, together in a manner that allows at least a partial exposition of Agamben’s engagement
with Foucault. These texts, some long translated in English, some newly translated (with at-
tendant considerations that are noted here), and some not yet translated from Italian, show an
intellectual itinerary followed in the developing work of Giorgio Agamben: one which, by his
own insistence, is heavily indebted to Foucault.
These texts also indicate that Foucault scholarship will continue to be influenced by the
interpretations carried out in them—with the associated benefit of clarifying some of the
earlier speculations about the relation between these two thinkers (which has often, as in the
case of writing about the first volume of Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita {Homo Sacer:
Sove-reign Power and Bare Life},2 lacked subtlety in insisting on an absolute difference between
them while failing to pay heed to significant overlap and theoretical engagement).
Agamben himself has revisited and revised some of his earlier accounts (such as the
omission of any reference to Foucault’s analysis of the camp figure or of the Nazi state which
he had earlier insisted upon in 1995) as he has read and drawn upon the Collège de France
lecture courses at the IMEC and included them increasingly in his writings.3 While he has not
penned tomes analogous to the Nietzsche volumes in their size and focus, Agamben’s inter-
pretation of Foucault might in some respects be compared to Martin Heidegger’s engagement
with Friedrich Nietzsche. Agamben frequently returns to the texts of Foucault and places a
premium upon the philosophical interpretation of certain concepts and passages. Also, like
1
The Reign and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, The Sacrament of Language:
Archaeology of the Oath, Signatura rerum (The Signature of All Things): On Method.
2
Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Torino: Einaudi, 1995).
3
Anecdotal accounts indicate that Agamben has frequently visited the Foucault Archives and worked his
way through the lecture courses in the span of the last decade or so.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
109
Heidegger (with whom, like Gilles Deleuze, he studied),4 he sometimes reads the works to fit
within his own philosophical trajectory in ways that subtly or profoundly challenge the ori-
ginal texts.
This review picks up with Agamben’s pronounced shift toward Foucault in 1995 in the
first volume of Homo sacer, where he begins an ongoing and repeated interpretation of Fou-
cault’s thought. This review does not formally consider at length that book, nor the second
volume Stato di eccezione (HS II,1) {State of Exception},5 or the third part Quel che resta di
Auschwitz: L’archivo e il testimone (HS III) {The Remnants of Auschwitz: The Archive and
Testimony}, as there has already been ample attention to them in English language scholarship,
except as the decisive first points in the Homo sacer series. That series now has five parts, all of
which seem to be heavily indebted to Foucault.6 This raises the salient questions of whether
these parts are intended to be read together as a single work, and regarding the manner in
which it should be interpreted vis-à-vis Foucault. Thus this review considers the two other
parts of the Homo sacer series (Il Regno e la Gloria: per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del
governo (HS II, 2) {The Reign and the Glory: for a Theological Genealogy of Economy and
Government}, Il sacramento del linguaggio: Archeologia del guiramento (HS II,3) {The Sacrament of
Language: Archaeology of the Oath}),7 as well as the methodological treatise Signatura rerum: sul
metodo {The Signature of All Things: On Method}.8 The essay Che cos’è un dispositivo?, is con-
sidered at length in the essay ‚What is a Dispositive?‛ in this issue. The English translations
of the last two Agamben works are only tangentially considered here, partly in terms of speci-
ficities of translation that English readers should be aware of due to important conceptual
issues at stake. Agamben’s recent book Nudità will not be considered here, although it does
have a brief engagement with Foucault’s thought about confession, which seems conceptually
important to Agamben’s enterprise in that book.
By way of a general characterization, one might break down the Foucauldian concepts
taken up in Agamben’s works in the following way, with the caveat that several of the con-
cepts do cross over or crop up in several texts. The first two volumes (sequentially) of Homo
sacer, Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita {Sovereign Power and Bare Life} and Stato di eccezione {State of
Exception}, are primarily concerned with taking up, exploring, and critically engaging with the
concepts of biopolitics, sovereignty, and biopower. The particular claims about biopolitics and
sovereignty in the first volume have both been modified by Agamben in later texts and have
been seized upon and amplified in too-uncritical ways by a passel of commentators. While
explicit analysis of biopolitics is less present (although certainly not absent) in the second
4
Correspondence with Giorgio Agamben July 2010.
5
Giorgio Agamben, Stato di eccezione: Homo sacer II, 1 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).
6
Agamben has indicated that he plans a sixth part, formally called Part IV, dealing with what he calls ‘form
of life’ and ‘use,’ after which ‛the decisive significance of ‘inoperosità’ (inactivity, inoperativity) as properly
human and political practice will be able to appear in its appropriate light‛ (Regno e la Gloria, 11).
7
Giorgio Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria: per una geneologia teologica dell’economia e del governo (Milano: Neri
Pozza, 2007); Giorgio Agamben, Il sacramento del linguaggio: Archeologia del giuramento (Bari-Roma: Editori
Laterza, 2008).
8
Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo? (Roma: Nottetempo, 2006); Giorgio Agamben, Signatura rerum:
sul metodo (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008).
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
110
volume, the overall thrust of the book is concerned with the articulation of sovereignty and
biopolitics.
In Quel che resta di Auschwitz {The Remnants of Auschwitz}, published earlier (1998) than
Stato di eccezione {State of Exception} (2003) but designated as the third volume of Homo sacer,
Agamben partly corrects an earlier oversight he had made in claiming that Foucault had
considered neither the concentration camp nor the Nazi state in terms of biopolitics—this is
largely due to his exposure to Foucault’s lecture course Il faut défendre la société {Society Must Be
Defended} in the intervening period.9 Consideration of Foucault’s course Naissance de la bio-
politique {The Birth of Biopolitics} might well result in further interesting emendation on this ac-
count, though Agamben has not yet commented on that course in writing.10 In the Auschwitz
book Agamben is concerned to elucidate the actions and effects of biopolitics in terms of
subjects and state sovereignty. In Che cos’è un dispositivo? {What is a Dispositive?} Agamben sets
out precisely to analyze the term dispositif as it is used in Foucault, much as Gilles Deleuze had
done earlier.11 Agamben focuses on the dispositive concept as both a continuous development
in Foucault’s thought and a key turn in the mid 1970s as Foucault began to focus more
explicitly on biopolitics and considerations of sovereignty.
In Il Regno e la Gloria {The Reign and the Glory} Agamben is concerned especially with
governmentality, and with interpreting and furthering Foucault’s concept of it. For him, the
correct understanding of governmentality is also indispensable to understanding properly the
articulation of biopolitics and sovereignty. Signatura rerum: sul metodo {The Signature of All
Things: On Method} takes up Foucault’s concepts of the signature and the énoncé in Les mots et les
choses {The Order of Things}, and L’Archéologie du savoir {The Archaeology of Knowledge} to form
what Agamben identifies as a more ontologically robust concept of analysis in his signatura.
That book is also characterized by the explicit fealty that Agamben identifies between his
method and those of Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin. Agamben devotes the
three chapters of the book to the paradigm, the signatura, and archaeology, clearly situating
the analysis within a Foucauldian frame. Il Sacramento del linguaggio: archeologia del giuramento
{The Sacrament of Language: Archaeology of the Oath} makes use especially of Foucault’s concept
of veridiction, and furthers the linguistic and ontological exposition of the prior works in ex-
ploring it. He is interested in the relationship between words and things (parole and cose, mots
and choses), and ‛the consistency of human language and even human nature as ‘speaking
animals.’‛12 All of the works mentioned here in one way or another bear upon Agamben’s on-
going considerations and theorization about secularization and secularism. In general, he is
much more in a Foucauldian line of considering earlier religious traditions as exerting a con-
tinuing influence through the inertia of political institutions and practices, despite important
and pronounced ‘breaks’ and transformations.
9
Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France, 1976 (Paris: EHESS, 1997).
10
Naissance de la biopolitique would also, it seems, contain interesting points of comparison for Agamben’s
treatment of economy in Il Regno e la Gloria. Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de
France, 1978-1979 (Paris: EHESS, 2004).
11
Deleuze had done so in ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?,’ in Michel Foucault: Philosophe (Paris: Seuil, 1989).
12
Agamben, Sacramento, 12. All renderings from Italian or French sources are by me.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
111
Il Regno e la Gloria (Homo sacer II, 2)
Il Regno e la Gloria, the English title of which should be The Reign and the Glory: for a theological
genealogy of economy and government, was published in Italian in 2007. Although ‛kingdom‛ is
attested, Regno in this context is more accurately rendered by ‛reign,‛ which maintains ties to
the French règne, an important term in Rousseau and Foucault, and resonant concept in Erik
Peterson, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Kantorowicz, and others—kingdom is a more limited term refer-
ring to the geographical and temporal extent of monarchical authority; reign, while encom-
passing this, also includes wider concerns about sovereignty and power. While kingdom
figures substantially in the concepts of the Kingdom of god and the Kingdom of heaven, at
least as prominent are references to god’s reign. Indeed, notions of divine reign seem to have
more to do with the engagement and administration of the world.
Il Regno e la Gloria is one of Agamben’s longest books, perhaps his longest, and it pri-
marily concerns the early centuries of the Christian church and the emergence of the trinita-
rian doctrine, although it also, as a genealogy of the present, does contain considerations on
public opinion and contemporary mass media. Much of the book is devoted to a meticulous
interpretation of early Christian sources, though the book opens with Agamben indicating that
he sees it as located ‛in line with the work of Michel Foucault on the genealogy of govern-
mentality.‛13 Indeed, Agamben’s claim is that the trinitarian model is a crucial point in the
genealogy of governmentality, as it concerns the articulation of transcendent authority with
the administrative management of populations. In this respect he also sees the trinitarian mo-
del as decisive for understanding the complicated articulation of sovereignty and biopolitics, a
concern that has drawn a great deal of attention from Foucault and other thinkers. Further,
Agamben maintains that this is an important field of consideration since the genealogical
horizon should be pushed back further than Foucault had done, to the earliest centuries of the
Christian era, claiming that ‛the shadow of the theoretical investigation of the present pro-
jected on the past here reaches, in fact well beyond the chronological limits Foucault had
assigned to his genealogy, the first centuries of Christian theology, which see the first,
uncertain elaboration of the trinitarian doctrine in the form of an oikonomia.‛14
Economy
Agamben’s account is important for the way in which it foregrounds ‛economy‛ (οἰκονομία),
a concept also decisively used by Foucault. His claim is that this ‛divine economy‛ is impor-
tant for understanding the distribution of powers and authority in governmentality; and, in
fact, that governmentality and the particular combination of sovereignty and administration in
it cannot be understood without attention to the trinitarian economy. While Foucault was in-
terested in the ‛economy of power,‛ and he devoted attention to the οἰκονομία ψυχῶν
(oikonomia psuchon), especially as an aspect of the pastorate, Agamben’s claim is that he could
13
Agamben, Regno, 9.
14
Ibid. Of course Foucault himself had done this in several locations, including Les aveux de la chair and Du
gouvernment des vivants, but I take Agamben’s point here to be that Foucault identifies a crucial political tur-
ning point with respect to the pastorate in the 16th century in Sécurité, territoire, population, which Agamben
sees as somewhat inadequate to a fuller account of governmentality.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
112
have delved even further into this concept as a crucial aspect, perhaps the crucial aspect, of
governmentality. This is even more the case given that, when he takes up the οἰκονομία
ψυχῶν (oikonomia psuchôn, regimen animarum, l’économie des âmes, ‛the economy of souls‛),
Foucault makes the point that he believes the French term économie is poorly suited as a trans-
lation, and he proposes the term conduite as a better one, opening the way to his considerations
about conduct.15 At just the point where he most decisively takes up the concept of economy,
he immediately makes a shift from it, rather than performing an exhaustive genealogy of
‛economy‛ itself. Agamben believes that this track of economic genealogy is important to fol-
low, and he seeks ‛to understand the internal reasons for which it (Foucault’s research on
governmentality) did not reach a conclusion.‛16 Agamben considers some of the same sources
as Foucault, for instance Gregory of Nazianzus, but maintains that Foucault devoted insuf-
ficient attention to this tradition.
The first chapter of Il Regno e la Gloria identifies what Agamben refers to as ‛the two
paradigms‛ which ‛derive from Christian theology... in a broad, antinomous but functionally
connected way: political theology, which founds in the one god the transcendence of
sovereign power, and economic theology, which substitutes for this the idea of an oikonmia,
conceived as an immanent order—domestic and not political in the strict sense—as much of
the divine life as of the human one. From the first derives political philosophy and the mo-
dern theory of sovereignty; from the second, modern biopolitics up to the current triumph of
economy and government over every other aspect of social life.‛17 He maintains that econo-
mic theology, despite its importance in the second to fifth centuries of the church, has re-
mained understudied by intellectual historians and theologians to the point that it has almost
been forgotten. As such he believes that its constitutive influence has been made even more
obscure, with neither its proximity to Aristotelean economy nor its connection to 17th century
political economy being noted.
Agamben points out that his theological genealogy is closely related to considerations
about secularization, and indicates that he is closer to Carl Schmitt than to Max Weber
(‛theology continues to be present and to act in the modern world in an eminent way‛ versus
the progressive disenchantment of the world). He also identifies secularization as ‛not a con-
cept, but a segnatura in the sense of Foucault and Melandri,‛ and says that ‛signatures defer
and dislocate concepts and signs from one sphere to another (in this case, from sacred to
profane or vice-versa) without redefining them semantically.‛18 Agamben describes a tradi-
tion of ‛sciences of the signature, which run parallel to the history of ideas and concepts, and
must not be confused with it.‛19 He says that ‛The archaeology of Foucault and the genealogy
of Nietzsche (and, in a different sense, also Derrida’s deconstruction and Benjamin’s theory of
dialectical images) are sciences of the signature.‛20 This is an important addition to the litera-
ture on the signature inasmuch as it considers theology and secularization.
15
Michel Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977-8, 196.
16
Agamben, Regno, 9.
17
Ibid., 13.
18
Ibid., 16.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
113
As Agamben further lays out the economic theology paradigm, he identifies several
key issues and several key debates that establish the content of much of the rest of the book.
He refers to a debate about secularization in Germany in the 1960s involving Hans Blumen-
burg, Karl Löwith, Odo Marquard, and Carl Schmitt, and via Schelling he draws on an impor-
tant distinction: ‛the ancient theologians distinguished between akratos thelogia and oikonomia.
They belong together. It is toward this process of domestic economy (oikonomia) that we have
wanted to point‛.21 This interrelated distinction between theologia and oikonomia, the being and
the activity of god, is decisive in Schelling who ‛introduces personality and action into the
being of god, and renders him this way ‘the lord of being’‛.22 The articulation is crucial for
Agamben’s pushing back of the horizon of Foucault’s governmentality, and for understanding
the articulation between sovereignty and governmentality—something that has also heavily
concerned Foucault, and in relation to theology and economy, in the Collège de France lec-
tures recently released and upcoming. It relates to theological debates about divine monarchy,
and whether god, as the presupposed entity for any action and power in the universe, is also
in essence synonymous with this force. Drawing on a favorite phrase of Schmitt, Peterson
says that here ‛the king reigns but he does not govern.‛
The split between reign and government, authority and rule, has been a decisive com-
ponent in different formulations of the state of exception. Here Agamben sees a theological
signatura or underpinning for such concerns, in the earlier considerations as to god’s being,
god’s authority, and god’s action. If god, creator and ruler of the universe, were to be directly
involved in the affairs of humans, in their direction and bodily management, would it taint
god’s ultimate authority and essence? Such concerns give rise to intense debates in the early
centuries of the church, particularly in the 3rd century, over the monotheistic or polytheistic
characteristics of god.
In addition to defining a kind of middle way between one and many gods, there was a
pressing concern to preserve the transcendent authority and essence of god from the debase-
ment of actual involvement in the fallen world and flesh. Hence the motivation to split god
into a transcendent authority and first cause on the one hand, and a god responsible for the
administration of the human flock on the other. However, as Agamben points out, these theo-
logical discussions were in turn heavily influenced by very real political concerns. He quotes
several passages indicating that fear of stasis, civil uprising or strife, within god was a key
consideration in the early formulators of trinitarian doctrine. While the civil uprising or re-
volt, along with the event of external invasion, is part of the notion of the state of exception
since its inception, it is in a sense the ‘true’ state of exception since, as a number of com-
mentators have noted, it involves the direct attack of state institutions and authority: they are
immediately called into question.23
Agamben quotes several passages from Gregory of Nazianzus indicating how seriously
the fear of civil war and strife within god animated the discussions around the trinity. This
21
Ibid., 17.
22
Ibid., 18.
23
I write more about this relation to civil war in ‛Ongoing Founding Events in Giorgio Agamben and Carl
Schmitt,‛ Telos, Winter 2011.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
114
was so much the case that Carl Schmitt claimed Gregory ‛had introduced a real theory of civil
war into the heart of trinitarian doctrine.‛24 Gregory argues that there have been three main
conceptions about god: anarchy, polyarchy, and monarchy. He notes that anarchy is truly
without order, and that polyarchy is in civil war, so anarchic and without order. Both these
lead to dissolution. There remains monarchy, which he says if conceived as one only could be
at war with itself, and still in a state of civil war. Thus he advocates for the trinity, which
would seem to divide and balance the forces and authorities in a way to mutually enhance
them, rather than letting them fight and diminish one another:
But that which is held together by an equal dignity of nature, by an accord of thought, of
identity, and of movement, to converge in the unity of that which come from it, in a way
that is impossible for generated nature. Thus, even though it differs in number, as substance
it is not divided. In this way the monad, in principle moving toward the dyad, stops at the
triad.25
Agamben further notes that Gregory makes use of an already-established discursive frame-
work to say that such concerns could only be properly understood by someone who had lear-
ned to distinguish between the ‛discourse of nature and the discourse of economy.‛26 Agam-
ben interprets this and other passages to mean that in Gregory ‛economy‛ has the specific
function of avoiding, through the trinity, the introduction of a civil war or ‛stasiological
fracture‛ in god, and that the only way of truly doing so is to shift from a political rationality
to an ‛economy.‛
Having laid out some of the primary concerns and methodological and theological
foundations, Agamben proceeds to interpret and expand the theological genealogy of eco-
nomy. Starting from the definition of oikonomia as ‛administration of the house,‛ he traces the
significations and understandings that this term has borne. In addition to this administration
of the household, he notes that the concept has to do with an ordered functioning, and has
often been associated with a managerial or operational focus. All of these aspects illustrate
why he sees oikonomia as a valid object of study in the genealogy of governmentality. He says
that the term keeps the sense of ordered disposition of material in other contexts including
rhetoric. He points out that Cicero translated the term as dispositio which strengthens his argu-
ment in Che cosè un dispositivo? that there is an important tie to the concept of the dispositive in
his work and Foucault’s.
Although the concept of oikonomia never fully loses its association with the organization
of the domestic space, it takes on the meaning of ‛the divine plan of salvation‛ when it is
transposed into a theological context in Christianity. Nevertheless, it also has the meaning of a
task or assignment in the theological context, and of a kind of administration or ordering (as in
the task of stewardship and ordering of the earth assigned to humans by god). The term also
comes to be associated closely with ‛mystery,‛ so much so that it is frequently referred to as
‛the mystery of economy.‛ Agamben shows that this may be apocryphal, resulting from the
24
Ibid., 24.
25
Ibid., 25.
26
Ibid., 26.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
115
contraction of the longer phrase ‛the oikonomia of god, that given to me to complete the word
of god, the mystery hidden for eons,‛ and that in any event it does not lose its administrative
denotation even in this association with mystery.27
Although it can be applied at different levels (the household, matter, the human body,
the earth, humanity in general, the universe), ‛economy‛ maintains a central tie to ordered or-
ganization and management. Hence its ready association with political concerns, where dis-
order (inherent in the anarchic and polyarchic views of god) threatens civil war, while the
monarchic view of god (understood properly as the trinitarian three-as-one) is meant to gua-
rantee a check against this internal strife. Oikonomia, adapted from the Gnostic context into
trinitarian formulations, is presented as crucial for understanding the articulation of trans-
cendent authority and worldly administration.
Having noted that oikonomia is etymologically and conceptually linked to ‛dispositive‛
through the Latin dispositio and dispensatio, Agamben also notes the crucial, and somewhat
shocking, valence of the term as ‛exception.‛28 Here oikonomia signifies not only the myste-
rious incarnation of the Logos, but also the ‛occasional restriction or suspension of the effective
rigor of the law and the introduction of attenuations which ‘economize’ the command of the
law.‛29 With this accumulation of exegeses it is clear that the concept of oikonomia is not an in-
cidental or a fashionable one picked up by Agamben, but one that hovers in important relation
to key thinkers who have influenced him, among them Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt.
Essence and activity: sovereignty and governmentality
Via chapters on ‛Being and Acting‛ and ‛Reign and Government,‛ Agamben further eluci-
dates the complex articulation between essence and activity, between sovereign authority and
engaged worldly management. Originally revolving around the theological impetus to avoid
a fracture in monotheism, which would have reintroduced polytheism and civil strife,
oikonomia, and the ‛mystery of economy‛ are crucial to explaining the simultaneous split-and-
unity in god, and as such the doctrine received a great deal of attention. Agamben says that
this was less concerned with the split between two divine figures than with the split between
god and god’s government of the world. Further he notes that the real weight of the ‛mys-
tery‛ was not as much in the being of god as in god’s salvific practices and their action in the
world. Further, he argues that this fracture is the ‛anarchic character of oikonomia‛ since a
providential government of the world can have no foundation in being, and since oikonomia is
intrinsically anarchic—anarchy is that which government must presuppose as its origin and
horizon.30 Disorder is that which must be administered in ordering activity. Agamben says
that the management paradigm of the oikonomia was used to re-articulate this fracture and
argue for a complex joining-in-division of being and acting.
Agamben draws on the figure of the Roi mehaignié, the wounded or ailing king, who
reigns over a devastated land, to illustrate the ready political translation of this theology of the
27
Ibid., 37.
28
Ibid., 63.
29
Agamben quoting Photios, Ibid.
30
Ibid., 80.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
116
fracture. He is a mutilated and impotent king, a divided sovereign who is separated from his
powers and activity and reduced to impotence, prefiguring the modern sovereign. He notes
that Carl Schmitt was hostile to any attempt to divide reign and government, and this
heightened his concerns about the liberal-democratic doctrine of the separation of powers.
Agamben interprets this distinction between the king as full sovereign and the ‛wounded
king‛ in terms of his thinking of operativity and inoperativity, which he plans further to
develop in the last part of the Homo sacer series, though it has a sustained presence in this book
as well.
Agamben further considers the parallel and founding debates in theology that underlie
these political issues, studying a form of theology, originally heavily influenced by
Gnosticism, that posited a division between Reign and Government. This theology recognized
two gods, one external to the world, transcendent, and inoperative; the other god was held to
be active, concerned with the government of the world. He says that this ‛opposition between
Reign and Government is part of the gnostic heredity of modern politics,‛31 and sees clear
political implications to this account as in the distinction between the basileus and the hege-
monein. The first referred to the first god, while the second pertained to the second god and
had to do with a specific function of guidance and command—the root hegemon meant animal
that guided the flock, the driver of a cart, a military commander, or the governor of a province.
Connections with Foucault’s accounts of pastoral power and of ‛conduct‛ are certainly inten-
ded here.
Via an interpretation of Aristotle and his influence, Agamben indicates the importance
of the concept taxis, order, to these formulations of government. Taxis is understood as a ‛reci-
procal order‛ or ‛the idea of an immanent reciprocal relation,‛ and is therefore seen as ‛a rela-
tion and not a substance.‛32 He calls ‛order‛ a signatura that deals with genuinely ontological
concepts, crediting it with producing a shift in ontology from the category of substance to that
of relations and practices.33
In addition, order has a quite important place in thinking oikonomia and the trinity. He
says that ‛taxis, order, is the dispositive which renders possible the articulation of separate
substance and being, of god and the world. It names their aporetical relation.‛34 Interpreting
Augustine he draws on a model of god defined by activity and ordering. But he specifies that
this ordering is in the sense of disporre, or setting out and arranging, an activity rather than a
substance. He says that the dispositio (which is the Latin translation for oikonomia and, in turn,
the root for Italian dispositivo, French dispositif, and English ‛dispositive‛), the arrangement or
setting of things in order signifies nothing else than the dispositio of things in god.35
As such Agamben says that Ordo refers to an incessant ‛activity of government which
presupposes, and at the same time continually recomposes (ricomporre), the fracture between
transcendence and immanence, between god and world‛.36 Divine governance acts to cover
31
Ibid., 92.
32
Ibid., 97.
33
Ibid., 102.
34
Ibid., 98-9.
35
Ibid., 104.
36
Ibid., 105. Foucault’s interpretation of the Ordoliberal economists is in this respect salient.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
117
over, or fill, the split between being and acting, transcendent god and immanent-active god,
just as, he says, government as ordering is pursued to cover over the primordial split in sove-
reignty and the constitutive relation to anarchy. On this basis he says that oikonomia, ordo, and
gubernatio belong together as a triad. He relates the split between being and acting to creation
and conservation of the world, and thus to the distinction between constituting and consti-
tuted power via Carl Schmitt’s quasi-Spinozistic formulation as ordo ordinans and ordo ordi-
natus. Agamben says that this relation defines what he calls the ‛providential machine‛ of di-
vine government.
In describing the providential machine Agamben closely interprets parts of Foucault’s
1977-1978 lecture course Sécurité, territoire, population, paying attention to the way that Fou-
cault specifies that the three modalities of power (sovereignty, disciplinary mechanisms, and
dispositives of security) do not absolutely succeed or exclude one another, but coexist and arti-
culate. Agamben finds Foucault’s description of the way that pastoral power takes charge of
humans omnes et singulatim to be of import. He says that this double-articulation, both
individualizing and totalizing, was transmitted to the governing activity of the modern states.
Furthermore, at around the same point in the lecture Foucault discusses the pastorate as an
economy and makes the famous point that the introduction of economy into political practice
will constitute the decisive scope of government—he speaks of exercising power in the form of
an economy.37
While Agamben agrees with much of Foucault’s formulation—enough, as we know, to
situate his own work in the same track—he believes that Foucault did not go far enough in his
historical exegesis of the pastorate. Agamben points out that Foucault does cite Gregory of
Nazianzus for his economic definition of the pastorate, however, he writes that Foucault
‛seems entirely to ignore the theological implications of the term oikonomia.‛38 He finds it
strange that, in his genealogy of pastoral power and governmentality, Foucault does not
mention or analyze providence. As Agamben puts it, ‛Providence is the name of ‘oikonomia’
when it is presented as government of the world.‛39 He indicates that gubernatio, to govern, is
also synonymous with providence. Providence is concerned with god’s government of the
world, the management and direction of humans and other living beings, and it is part of a
‛binary ontology‛ of the transcendent and the immanent. As such it is part of the older de-
bates he referred to over the essence and action of god.
However, Agamben also considers this providential machine to be the paradigm for
the modern doctrine of the separation of powers. Beyond this he also claims that the modern
distinction between legitimacy and legality has its archetype in the double structure of
providence. And, that which Schmitt calls the ‛legislative state,‛ presented as application and
execution of impersonal law, is seen as the extreme unfolding of the ‛providential paradigm
in which Reign and Government, legitimacy and legality coincide.‛40 Agamben thus holds
that the split between general power of administration and executive power appears first in a
37
Ibid., 126.
38
Ibid., 127.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 152.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
118
theological context and later in a political one. He says that this is something like an ontology of
the acts of governing, and that, therefore, the economic-providential paradigm is essentially the
paradigm of democratic government.41
In a chapter on ‛Angelology and Bureaucracy,‛ Agamben says that Angels were the
guarantee of the original relation between the Church and the political sphere, because of the
public and politico-religious character they were charged with administering. As the people
of the ‛flock‛ constituted both the ekklesia, the church, and the denizens of the city of god, one
can see the important role that angels would play in the articulation of the two sides of god at
issue in the fracture discussed above. Nonetheless, the split shows up in taxonomies of the
angels as well, into those concerned with glory and those concerned with execution. He notes,
too, that this draws in the figure of the ‛inoperative angel,‛ whose powers will cease, along
with human power, when Christ consigns Reign to god and to the Father. Hell, according to
one interpretation, would be the lack of such an event, and the permanent providential
government of the world.
Glory
Agamben analyzes the important practice and figure of the acclimation, drawing on research
by Peterson, Kantorowicz, and others in which they see a parallel between political ceremony
and ecclesiastical liturgy.42 Agamben says that Peterson, in his dissertation, had studied the
history of the ceremonial aspects of power and public right, ‛a sort of political archaeology of
liturgy and of protocol... ’archaeology of glory’.‛43 The acclimation is an exclamation of laud
or disapproval, and a performative utterance that could have juridical significance, as in the
Roman republican troops who accorded their victorious commander the title of Emperor. It
was accompanied by gestures such as raising the right hand.
Peterson argues that the acclamation carries power because it expresses the consensus
of the people, and a number of commentators write about the connection between people and
acclamation. Peterson holds that the acclamation and the doxological liturgies express the
juridical and public character of the people, while for Schmitt the acclamation is an immediate
expression of the people as constituent democratic power. Following Kantorowicz, Agamben
writes that the ‛imperial ceremony of pagan Rome was progressively ‘litanized’ and trans-
formed into a type of divine service, of which acclamations were an integral part.‛44 He main-
tains that the theology of glory is the secret point of contact through which theology and
politics incessantly communicate and change places, and identifies glory as a segnatura.
If glory has occupied such a special place, theologically and politically, Agamben
argues this is because it permits the holding together of the essence and action of god, Reign
and Government, and the father and the son.45 Noting a link between glory and the Sabbath,
he argues that the center of the governmental dispositive, where Reign and Government com-
41
Ibid., 157-8.
42
This study of the acclimation will find some parallel in his analysis of the oath in Il sacramento del
linguaggio.
43
Ibid., 188.
44
Ibid., 210.
45
Ibid., 253, 223.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
119
municate and are distinguished, is in fact void due to the inoperativity of glory, which must be
kept at the center of the machine. As such he calls oikonomia the ‛theological dispositive of the
government of the world,‛ and says that ordering is governmentality.46 He also explicitly
relates the acclamation, and therefore glory, to the contemporary realms of public opinion and
media, arguing via Schmitt that opinion polls are a modern version of acclamation, noting that
it is no coincidence that the Greek term for glory, doxa, means also ‛public opinion.‛47 He
maintains that ‛consensual democracy, also known as the society of the spectacle, is a glorious
democracy, in which oikonomia has resolved into glory and the doxological function, freeing
itself from liturgy and ceremonies, has absolutized itself to an undreamed of degree and
penetrated into every aspect of social life.‛48
In two dense and suggestive appendices, Agamben develops concepts which are of
importance to the work as a whole: the relationship between law and miracle, and the in-
visible hand. Rousseau and Schmitt had earlier cited the miracle as the theological paradigm
for the state of exception—a situation in which god decides to suspend or contravene the nor-
mally-operating laws of nature. Agamben draws on Foucault’s interpretation of Rousseau’s
political project from Sécurité, territoire, population to show that the problem of sovereignty did
not go away when the arts of government came to the fore in Europe, but instead became
more intense.49 The distinction and articulation of sovereignty and government becomes de-
cisive in Rousseau.
In the section on the invisible hand Agamben traces the reemergence of the term ‛eco-
nomy,‛ this time under the Latin form oeconomia in the 18th century, concerning the ‛manage-
ment and government of things and people‛.50 Although presented at the time as something
new, Agamben argues that this ‛re-presentation‛ of economy was heavily indebted to the
Greek and theological traditions studied in the book. Citing Linnaeus’ pursuit of an economy
of nature which would discern the aspects of natural beings put there by god, he indicates that
this new ‛economy‛ had plenty to do with the former one. He notes that a similar notion of
the economy of nature was pursued by the physiocrats, but with the crucial shift of object
from the natural order to the government of society.51 He writes that the modern oikonomia
has assumed its own sovereignty separate from its divine origins, but that in doing so it
maintains the theological model of the government of the world. In this sense, of the ongoing
ordering and administration of the world, he says that ‛modernity, while taking god from the
world, has brought the project of providential oikonomia to a completion.‛52
Il sacramento del linguaggio: Archeologia del giuramento (Homo sacer II, 3)
The next book in the Homo Sacer series as they are numbered is Il sacramento del linguaggio:
archeologia del giuramento {The Sacrament of Language: Archeology of the Oath}. As noted pre-
46
Ibid., 275.
47
Ibid., 280.
48
Ibid., 283.
49
Ibid., 299.
50
Ibid., 305.
51
Ibid., 312.
52
Ibid., 314.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
120
viously, Agamben’s analysis here clearly crosses over in important respects with that of the
acclamation in Il Regno e la Gloria. The primary Foucauldian concept that he draws upon here
is that of veridiction. This book is decisive, too, because, although he analyzes religious
usages and aspects of the concept, Agamben here points toward a more-primordial rela-
tionship of language and naming that undergirds even religion and politics in important
respects. This shifts some of the focus away from the notion that he grounds everything in
some kind of unavoidable theological regress. He says that ‛Religion and law do not preexist
the performative experience of language which is in question in the oath, rather they were
invented to guarantee the truth and the trustworthiness of logos through a series of dis-
positives, among which the technicization of the oath in a specific ‘sacrament’—the ‘sacrament
of power’—occupies a central place‛.53
Agamben describes how the oath is at the intersection point between religion and
politics, and how it is the foundation of the political pact in the history of the West.54 High-
lighting the decline of the oath in our times, he sees this inquiry as opening up the possibility
for new forms of political association. He specifies that the method of this inquiry is ‛not an
inquiry into the origin, but a philosophical archeology of the oath.‛55 As such he says, fol-
lowing Foucault, that it cannot help but put the present into question. Building upon his ana-
lysis of oikonomia in Il Regno e la Gloria, he explains, via exegeses of Paolo Prodi and Hierocles,
that the oath does not create or originally set in place (drawing on the verb porre which is the
root for disporre and dispositivo), but that it is concerned with holding together, maintaining
unity, and conserving that which someone else has set into being.56
Citing Émile Benveniste he notes that the oath’s function consists in the relation that it
institutes between words and power, rather than in the affirmation it produces. Above all,
Agamben writes, ancient and modern commentators agree that the oath has the function of
guaranteeing the truth and the efficacy of language.57 Initially and for the most part, this
seems to be concerned with guaranteeing the trustworthiness of humans, who are notoriously
capable of deception and lack of faith. As such, many emphasize the oath as an institution de-
signed to confirm this faith in the fallible word of one human or another.
Citing Samuel Pufendorf from 1672, Agamben points out another related line of inter-
pretation in terms of the reliability of language itself, which Pufendorf says undergirds (neces-
sarily) the oath.58 Confirmed in the oath are not only political pacts, but our simple language
and its fealty to ‛reality.‛ Citing Nicole Loraux and Plato, he notes that the oath is ill-suited as
a measure against lying (Plato advised against its use in trials as it would reveal half the citi-
zenry to be perjurers). This points to the likelihood that the oath is aimed more at a specific
weakness of language itself: ‛the ability of words to refer to things, and that of humans to take
cognizance of their condition as speaking beings.‛59 It is clear, in this respect, why the concept
53
Agamben, Sacramento, 80.
54
Ibid., 3.
55
Ibid., 4.
56
Ibid., 6.
57
Ibid., 7.
58
Ibid., 8.
59
Ibid., 12.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
121
of veridiction from Foucault is of importance to Agamben, as that which guarantees or main-
tains the truth and efficacy of language, or that which permits certain things to be seen or said.
The oath would seem to consist of three elements: an affirmation, an invocation of the
gods, and a curse against perjury (in the event that one should break the oath). It is this inclu-
sion of the threatened curse that has resulted in the interesting double-meaning to ‛oath‛
present in several languages considered, according to which it can mean either a solemn vow
or denunciation, profanity, and the like. Since they were part of the same performative decla-
ration, this association has persisted.
The oath has a crucial verbal dimension (even though, like the acclamation, it was often
accompanied by a gesture such as raising the right hand). Agamben says that Georges Dumé-
zil noted three decisive realms or fundamental functions in his study of myth and epics:
religion (the sacred), war (the warriors), and economy (the farmers or shepherds). He analy-
zes the ‛plagues‛ or ‛scourges‛ which can befall each of these, noting that the pestilence
which can afflict religion (and obviously by association the other two) is the dissolution of oral
contracts, lying, and not keeping to the spoken word.60 This can in some respect be compared
to the plagues and afflictions, including plague itself, smallpox, and famine, which Foucault
analyzes in Sécurité, territoire, population in terms of their influence on the formation and
development of dispositives of security. Yet Foucault himself draws on a different text of Du-
mézil’s in Le courage de la vérité {The Courage of Truth} to discuss the ‛malady‛ which threatens
veridiction through false or inaccurate speaking.61 While it might appear, as Agamben notes,
that the fundamental problem is one of dishonesty and lying, in fact the issue is one that lies
deeper than that: ‛a weakness that afflicts language itself, the capacity of words to refer to
things and that of humans to take account of their condition as speaking beings.‛62 Echoing
Foucault’s descriptions of biopolitics in relation to Aristotle, he writes that the oath ‛contains
the memory of a more archaic stage, which had to do with the consistency of human language
itself and the nature of humans as ‘speaking animals’.‛63 He also notes that in the Metaphysics,
Aristotle ‛situates the oath among the ‘first principles’ of pre-Socratic philosophy, almost as if
the origins of the universe and of thinking it covers entail the oath in some way.‛64
Asking how the arché of this archaeology of the oath is to be understood, Agamben
draws upon a concept from linguistics and comparative grammar, that for certain questions
the only sources of information we have are based on the analysis of language, and that, like
the theoretical Indo-European word forms denoted with an asterisk like *deiwos, it would be
‛possible, through etymology and the analysis of signification, to go back to stages otherwise
inaccessible to the history of social institutions.‛65 He also draws in part upon Dumézil’s
characterization of his own work as history ‛of the oldest history and of the ultra-historical
60
Ibid., 10.
61
Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vérité (Paris: Seuil, 2009), 87-105.
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid., 27.
65
Ibid., 13-4.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
122
fringe.‛66 But, he notes that the ‛consistency‛ of this fringe is ‛only an algorithm that expres-
ses a system of correspondence between the existing forms in historical languages.‛67
On the basis of such concerns, Agamben says that this arché cannot be understood as a
chronological date: ‛it is clear that the arché towards which the archaeologist seeks to reach
can not be understood in any way as a date situated on a chronology‛ nor an ‛intemporal
metahistorical structure,‛ but a ‛force operating in history‛ like the Indo-European words, the
baby in psychoanalysis, or the big bang.68 As such it concerns not just ‘closed-off’ historical
events, but those which have a dynamic relation to the present. He describes it as ‛not a date,
a substance, or an event, but a field of historical currents held between anthropogenesis and
the present, ultra-history and history.‛69 The resonances with Foucault’s historical reflections
on the archaeological method are evident here. Although this is a method which can allow the
decipherment of historical phenomena, it is also and especially one which is about history of
the present. This is in part because these elements of ‛ultra-history‛ are not ‛finished once
and for all, but are still ongoing, as homo sapiens never ceases becoming human, is still not
finished acceding to language and swearing on its nature as a speaking being.‛70 Agamben’s
description of the dynamic historical relation and the ongoing performance of historical trans-
formations relates strongly to Foucault’s description and analytical use of the dispositive.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.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.‛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
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.94 He even
maintains that the oath is ‛the threshold through which language enters into law and reli-
gion.‛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.
Signatura rerum: Sul metodo:
Agamben’s recently-published methodological treatise, the collection of three lectures and
essays on method he had given over the prior years, indicates an unmistakable indebtedness
to the work of Michel Foucault in terms of the development and practice of Agamben’s me-
thod. While he also points out that Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin have been deeply
influential on his thought and his method, it is Foucault who accounts for the deepest
influence, and to whom Agamben constantly returns when elaborating his own project. As
mentioned previously, the three essays of the book, ‛What is a Paradigm?‛, the ‛Theory of the
Signature,‛ and ‛Philosophical Archaeology,‛ all draw upon significant methodological con-
cepts from Foucault. Outside of the political appropriations of Foucault by Agamben which
some have found controversial (themselves interpreted differently in light of newer works in
this review), here he demonstrates a deep and meticulous attentiveness to Foucault, and a
particular allegiance to some of Foucault’s methods of analysis. Although the strict attestation
of the Latin title Signatura rerum would be ‛the signature of things (or of the thing)‛ the Eng-
lish version was rendered as The Signature of All Things in keeping with the translation of the
book by Jakob Böhme named De Signatura rerum, which is also an important source for Agam-
ben.
Agamben says that the three essays bear on three specific methodological problems.
He highlights the relationship between archaeology and history at hand in the third essay.
While he notes that all three essays show clearly the influence of Foucault, this is in part
because a methodological idea of Benjamin’s is not explicitly discussed here, though it is
applied in the analyses: namely that this form of work can be legitimately expressed only in
127
Ibid., 97.
128
Ibid., 98.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
132
the form of interpretation.129 He points out that reflection on method in the human sciences
frequently comes after, rather than preceding, empirical research. Like Foucault, he seems to
be interested in devoting serious attention to methods of inquiry that is not simply a poste-
riori, but integrally related to the conduct of research itself. He says that there is no single,
universally-valid method, and that the method of inquiry cannot be separated from the con-
text in which it operates. In this respect he follows Foucault’s ‛Rule of Immanence‛ that he
describes in the ‛Dispositive of Sexuality‛ chapter of Histoire de la sexualité I: La volonté de savoir
{History of Sexuality I: The Will to Knowledge}.130 Although he is deeply indebted to Foucault
here, Agamben also follows the strategy he borrows from Feuerbach of the Entwicklungs-
fähigkeit, that is, of drawing especially on those aspects with the capacity to be developed
further in the work of other thinkers.131 As such, his interpretations of Foucault, like those of
Benjamin, Arendt, Benveniste, and others, demonstrate both a fealty and a departure—or a
development—which may disgruntle some commentators.
Paradigm
Agamben indicates that he has studied a number of paradigms in his work, such as the homo
sacer, the Muslim, the state of exception, and the concentration camp. He says that a certain
amount of confusion has arisen among critics because he does not treat these as positive
historical phenomena, but as paradigms, ‛the function of which was to build or to render
intelligible an entire, more vast historical-problematic context.‛132 While he has found the use
of these paradigms to be illuminating for deciphering certain problems, he also believes that
they can be elucidated further by treating some aspects of the philosophical function of the
paradigm. Although Foucault frequently used the term, Agamben says that he never fully or
systematically defined it. He did, however, use a number of other terms to distinguish the
objects of his research from those of the historical discipline, traditionally defined. Among
these other terms are: ‛‘positivity,’ ‘problematization,’ ‘dispositives,’ ‘discursive formations,’
and more generally ‘knowledges’.‛133 To define these ‛knowledges‛ he indicates that they
‛indicate all the procedures and all the effects of understanding/awareness that a specific field
is disposed to accept at a certain time.‛134 Thus these are contingent relations, subject to con-
tinual change and perpetual inventiveness over time, but which produce tangible material
effects—in the forms of subjectivation and in terms of specific modes of construction (of buil-
dings, etc.) and treatment (of people, environment, etc.).
It is frequently observed that there is an analogy between Foucault’s concept and that
of Thomas Kuhn. Noting Kuhn’s development of Fleck’s Denkstil and emphasis on prac-
129
Agamben, Signatura, 7.
130
See the discussion of this in the ‘Foucault’s Usage,’ section (especially the parts on History and Power) of
the essay ‛What is a Dispositive?‛ in this issue.
131
See the discussion of this concept and its application in the essay by Anke Snoek in this issue.
132
Agamben, Signatura, 11.
133
Ibid.
134
Ibid., 11-2.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
133
tices,135 Agamben illustrates some points of similarity between Kuhn and Foucault. However,
ultimately he thinks that the comparison is based on a confusion, with important differences
existing between the paradigm concepts of the respective thinkers. Foucault explicitly op-
poses the paradigm to ‛discursive regimes‛ in a 1976 interview.136 Agamben says that the
decisive thing for Foucault is, ‛the movement from the epistemological paradigm to the politi-
cal one, its dislocation on the basis of a politics of propositions and discursive regimes.‛137
One of the most constant features of Foucault’s research is the setting aside of the traditional
analysis of power in terms of institutions and universals (law, the State, the theory of sove-
reignty) in favor of ‛an analysis of concrete dispositives through which power penetrates the
bodies of subjects, and governs their forms of life.‛138 Agamben says that Foucault’s attention
especially was on ‛the multiple disciplines and political technologies through which the State
integrates in itself the care of the lives of individuals.‛139 Thus it seems that it is this dimen-
sion of bio-political analysis that makes Foucault’s concept of the paradigm distinct.
In seeking to elaborate a concept able to accommodate this particular view of power
and of politics, Agamben says that Foucault used terms such as ‛epistemological figure‛ and
‛threshold of epistemologization‛ resonant with his concept of the episteme. Defining the epi-
steme in L’Archéologie du savoir {The Archaeology of Knowledge} Foucault calls it a ‛set of relations
able to bring together, in a given epoch, the discursive practices which give place to
epistemological figures, to sciences, at times to formalized systems.‛140 Within the horizon of
analysis of power in terms of multiple forces and changing application in different configura-
tions, Agamben observes that Foucault seems to be interested above all in ‛the positive exis-
tence of ‘figures’ and series.”141
Agamben takes the Panopticon as a concrete example of this. Recalling Foucault’s
description from the third part of Surveiller et punir {Discipline and Punish} and quoting from it
at length, Agamben says that the Panopticon is ‛a singular historic phenomenon,‛ and that it
is, ‛also, a ‘generalizable model of function,’ ‘panoptism,’ ‘principle of a set,’ and ‘panoptic
modality of power’.‛142 Quoting Foucault to show that the Panopticon is a figure of techno-
logical power and a diagram of a mechanism of power in its ideal form, he then observes that
‛it functions in brief as a paradigm in the strict sense: a single object which, together with all
the others of the same class, define the intelligibility of the set of which they are part of and, at
the same time, create.‛143
The paradigm is a concept to give methodological and theoretical purchase in the
research of Foucault. But it also follows his ‛Rule of Immanence‛ in terms of relating to cer-
135
For more on this point see Babette Babich, ‚From Fleck’s Denkstil to Kuhn's paradigm: conceptual schemes
and incommensurability,‛ International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 17, no. 1, 2003, 75-92.
136
Ibid., 15-6.
137
Ibid., 16.
138
Ibid., 14.
139
Ibid.
140
Ibid., 17.
141
Ibid., 18.
142
Ibid.
143
Ibid., 19.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
134
tain determinate contexts. Despite their specificity, Agamben says that paradigms are not iso-
lated instances in Foucault, and that ‛on the contrary that the paradigm defines, in this sense,
the Foucauldian method in its most characteristic gesture. The great confinement, confession,
the inquest, the examination, the care of the self(...). Paradigms which shape a vaster proble-
matic context that they also constitute and render intelligible.‛144 Agamben maintains that the
epistemological status of the paradigm will be made more incisive through radicalizing Aris-
totle’s notion of the paradigm and realizing that it calls into question the dichotomy between
the particular and the universal.145
As illustrative of this concept Agamben takes up the example of the ‛rule.‛ From a
form of life or example to follow in monastic settings, it becomes more formalized as a written
text, such that the life of each monk becomes paradigmatic, constituted as a form of life. No-
ting the methodological implications of this, he notes:
This signifies that, uniting the considerations of Aristotle and of Kant, we can say that the
paradigm involves a movement which goes from singularity to singularity and which, with-
out exiting from this, transforms each single case into an exemplar of a general rule which it
is never possible to formulate a priori.146
Drawing on Victor Goldschmitt’s interpretation of the paradigm, and the ‛paradigm of para-
digms,‛ in Plato, Agamben points out that the paradigm is a relation between the sensible and
the mental, and that the ‛paradigmatic relationship‛ runs between a singularity and its expo-
sition.147
Agamben maintains that only the concept of the paradigm properly treated can yield
the correct understanding of Book VI of Plato’s Republic, where Plato indicates that the para-
digm has its place in dialectics, and that dialectics is where hypotheses are treated properly as
hypotheses. Agamben says that, following Plato’s explanation, this means they are treated as
paradigms. He emphasizes the aspect of intelligibility that Foucault noted in relation to the
paradigm.148 Similarly, he holds that the method of the human sciences, the hermeneutic cir-
cle, can only be properly understood as a paradigmatic one against this philosophical back-
drop. He says that the hermeneutic circle is in fact a paradigmatic circle, and that intelligi-
bility does not precede the phenomenon, but that they are nearby or contiguous with one
another.149 He also considers the nymph as a kind or paradigm, or ur-phenomenon.150
Agamben draws the main lines of his inquiry on the paradigm into a series of theses
that define the paradigm. First, the paradigm is neither inductive nor deductive as know-
ledge, but moves from singularity to singularity. Second, it suspends the dichotomy between
general and particular and substitutes an analogical bipolar model. Third, it is never possible
144
Ibid.
145
Ibid., 21.
146
Ibid., 24.
147
Ibid., 25.
148
Ibid., 26-7.
149
Ibid., 28-9.
150
Ibid., 30-1.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
135
to separate exemplarity and singularity in the paradigm. Fourth, Foucault’s ‛Rule of Imma-
nence‛ is to be applied to paradigms in terms of their cohesion and form. Five, there is not an
origin or arché to the paradigm. And six, the historicity of the paradigm is based upon a
crossing of the diachronic and the synchronic.151 In these ways he thinks that the sense of wor-
king through paradigms, for him and Foucault, becomes clearer. It is important because of its
capacity to ‛render intelligible a series of phenomena, the relationship of which has slipped or
could slip from the view of the historian.‛152
Noting that the use of the paradigm is an ontological method, a paradigmatic ontology,
Agamben leaves this as a concept which is best summed up in a poem from Wallace Stevens:
It is possible that to seem — it is to be,
As the sun is something seeming and it is.
The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.153
Theory of the Signature
In Paracelsus’ episteme everything carries a sign that points to its invisible qualities, and
‛nothing is without a sign.‛154 According to him the signatura is the science of deciphering and
interpreting them. The science of these signs can reveal valuable knowledge, but like all
knowledge, it is ‛a consequence of sin, since Adam in Eden was absolutely ‘non-signed’ and
would have remained so if not for the ‘fall into nature,’ which ‘leaves nothing unsigned.‛155
Paracelsus speaks of three ‛signifiers:‛ humans, the Archeus, and the stars.156 He also names
a Kunst Signatura which Agamben describes as a paradigm for every signature—a first signa-
ture.
This first signature is language, which Adam used to give things their right names.
The relationship between signature and signified should be seen as one of similarity. This
similarity is not physical but ‛analogical and immaterial. Language, which is the custodian of
the archive of immaterial similarities, is also the case (frame) of the signatures.‛157 Agamben
makes a fascinating exposition of Paracelsus’ medicine, in which plants, via a signature, could
be read to indicate their effect on the body—such as the image of an eye on a leaf indicating
that the plant could be used to treat maladies of the eyes.
Agamben says that Paracelsus contributed a major aspect to the concept of the
signature, a decisive place for humans as signifiers, that had gone largely unnoticed until
some discussion by Foucault and by Melandri.158 Agamben cites two examples of human sig-
natures: the signing of works of art by artists and the stamping of metal to make coins. One
151
Ibid., 33.
152
Ibid.
153
Ibid., 34.
154
Ibid., 35.
155
Ibid.
156
Ibid., 36.
157
Ibid., 38.
158
Ibid., 39.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
136
serves to put a painting into relation with the name of a person, and the other determines the
value of the coin.159 He also notes that the knowledge of the inadequacy of the sign to take
account of the situation has long been evident in the study of the signature, and that it is no
longer just that which points to hidden qualities, but ‛the decisive operator of every
consciousness, that which renders the world intelligible, that is, in itself, silent and without
reason.‛160 For some thinkers such as Böhme, the signature was essential to animating and
qualifying the signs. He even describes it musically as that which must be played like a lute.161
Agamben notes that the aporia of the theory of the signature echoes that of the trinity—just as
god could shape everything through the word, which is an instrument of creation, the
signatura is that which, staying in itself, makes silent signs speak.
The theory of the signature was so widespread and persistent that it figures pro-
minently in the work of Leibniz and Kepler, for instance. Agamben argues that the concept
has its locus not in medicine or magic, but in theology, in terms of the theory of the sacraments,
which were early conceived of in general as those things in us that can unite us with god or
the divine.162 Here again the sign is inadequate to explain the experience or issue at hand.
Thomas Aquinas considers this lack of fit in his Summa Theologica. The sign by itself cannot
transmit or cause grace or character: for these the operation of another operator, a signifier, is
necessary in order to animate the signs and make the dynamic into a signature.163 Sacrament
for him thus functions as a signature.
The considerations in Aquinas give rise to a fascinating debate in the semiotics of the
sacrament according to whether a sacrament can be legitimately performed or passed on by
someone who is lacking grace (a heretic). While one side maintained that it could not be, the
sacrament would be invalidated by the impurity of the performer, another strain held that the
sacrament held its own type of signification, and that it would mark the soul of the recipient
regardless of the purity of the performer of the sacrament. Like the signs awaiting their ani-
mation by the signature, these marks on the soul would be laid down and could be later acted
upon, sounded, or activated, by the spirit. This led to the fascinating notion of the ‛zero
signature,‛ which was ‛a pure identity without content,‛ and which ‛expressed the event of a
sign without meaning.‛164 This relates to a line of interpretation in Aquinas and others about
the ‛special signature,‛ a sign which exceeds the sign and a relation that exceeds and founds
every relation.165 Resonances to Roland Barthes and a whole set of semiotic analysis are pre-
sent here.
Agamben notes that this idea of the effect of practices and signs independent of the
subjects involved predates Augustine. He cites Iamblichus’ De mysteriis as a clear example of
this, and indicates that theological doctrine of the sacramental character and the medical
159
Ibid., 41-2.
160
Ibid., 43.
161
Ibid., 44.
162
Ibid., 45.
163
Ibid., 47-8.
164
Ibid., 50.
165
Ibid., 50-2.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
137
doctrine of signatures both likely owe their origin to a magical-theurgical tradition.166 This
proximity is indicated in the history of baptismal rites. Magical images and talismans were
baptized in order to increase their potency. This posed a threat structurally similar to that of
perjury or blasphemy vis-à-vis the oath; while breaking the oath ruptures the performative
linkage of words and things in it, baptizing idols profanes the sacrament and produces demo-
nic power.167
In noting that astrology has been an important place for the signature, he notes that the
ymagines described in the Picatrix article act as signatures—the forces of the heavenly bodies
are aligned and concentrated in such a way as to act on terrestrial bodies.168 Just as the signa-
ture that makes the signs sing, here the celestial forces make earthly ones speak. Agamben
points out that ‛this means that the signature is the place where the gesture of reading and
that of writing invert their relationship and enter into a zone of undecideability.‛169 High-
lighting Aby Warburg’s work Bilderatlas Mnemosyne and his associated concept of Pathosformel,
Agamben says that it functions as a signature which is the object of a ‛science without name‛
and an ‛archaeology of the signature.‛170
Referring to Foucault’s citation of Paracelsus in Les Mots et les choses, Agamben notes
that it occurs when he is describing the theory of the signature in the Renaissance episteme. He
recalls how Foucault looks in particular at the role of similarity, observing that ‛there is no
similarity without a signature. The world of the similar cannot but be a signed world.‛171
Foucualt speaks of a hermeneutics of similarity and a semiology of the signature, and of the
oscillation between them—if they were to coincide perfectly all would be evident, but as they
oscillate we are in a perpetual zigzag between them.172 Melandri picked up on this discon-
nection between hermeneutics and semiology and related it to the signature: ‛The signature is
a kind of sign of the sign; it is that index that, in the context of a given semiology, refers univo-
cally to a given interpretation.‛173 While the Renaissance episteme emphasized similarity be-
tween sign and signified, modern science is more interested in its relation to other signs. But,
in ‛each case ‘the type of episteme depends on that of the signature,’‛ and that ‛this is ‘that
character of the sign, or of the system of signs, which gives away, by means of its crafting, the
relation that it holds to the signified.’‛174 Agamben notes that Benveniste also pointed out this
disconnection between hermeneutics and semiology—he called it that between the semiotic
and the semantic.175 On this basis he argued against Saussure that the interpretation of lan-
guage only in terms of signs couldn’t account for the passage from sign to word (language).
166
Ibid., 52-3.
167
Ibid., 54-5.
168
Ibid., 55-7.
169
Ibid., 57.
170
Ibid., 58-9.
171
Ibid., 59.
172
Ibid., 60.
173
Ibid., 61.
174
Ibid.
175
Ibid., 61-2.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
138
Agamben holds that the incomparable novelty of Foucault’s L’Archéologie du savoir is to
have taken ‛statements‛ explicitly as its objects of inquiry. Foucault described the statement
in terms reminiscent of the dispositive or the paradigm, as heterogeneous assemblages:
The statement does not exist either in the form of a language (though it is made up of signs
which, in their individuality, are not definable except inside a system of a natural or artificial
language), nor in the form of objects given to perception (though always given to a certain
materiality and always able to be situated according to spatio-temporal coordinates) ...the
statement is not a unity of the same type as sentences, propositions, or the linguistic act; it is
not definable with the same criteria, but nonetheless it is something like a material object
with its limits and its independence.176
Echoing the analysis of the signature in Paracelsus as making the signs sing, Foucault de-
scribes the statement as ‛making sense‛ of the sign according to a certain field of inter-
pretation.
Given that the statement is difficult to recognize, Foucault indicates that it should be
investigated where signification takes place and that it is necessary to ‛interrogate language
not in the direction that it points, but in terms of its givenness.‛177 He looks for a certain con-
tingent configuration, line of force, or heterogeneous network that is constituted of that ‛set of
anonymous rules, histories, always determinate in time and space, which define, in a certain
epoch and a certain social, economic, geographical and linguistic environment, the conditions
of exercise of the enunciative function.‛178 This is designed to remedy the insufficiency of a
purely semiotic analysis. The signs themselves can’t be accounted for, in terms of their sense,
sounds, and meaning, without the signature. It is as such that Foucault insists upon the exis-
tential character of the statement. He says that it is not a structure, but a ‛function of exis-
tence.‛179 Agamben says that the ‛statement is the signature that marks language by the pure
fact of its givenness.‛180
Agamben notes other attempts to link the doctrine of the signature to ontology, such as
in Herbert of Cherbury, and prominent strands of theology in several religions. He also points
out the dispersion and influence of the concept of the signature, explicitly or implicitly, in
locations as diverse as the Morelli method, the techniques of Sherlock Holmes, the methods of
Freud, and the notions of Galton and Bertillon.181 All of them in one way or another focused
on a signature that exceeded the semiotic frame in order to make sense of a determinate phe-
nomenon.
Agamben argues that a philosophy of the signature is contained in the two brief pieces
of Benjamin’s on the mimetic function. That which Benjamin calls the ‛mimetic element‛ or
the ‛immaterial similarity,‛ refers explicitly to the sphere of the signature.182 This immaterial
176
Ibid., 64.
177
Ibid., 65.
178
Ibid.
179
Ibid., 66.
180
Ibid.
181
Ibid., 71.
182
Ibid., 72.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
139
similarity, reminiscent of the considerations in Paracelsus, is important for Benjamin because
for him ‛it functions like an irreducible complement to the semiotic element of language, with-
out which the passage to discourse would be incomprehensible.‛183 However for Benjamin, he
says, at least from starting upon his arcades project, the proper locus for the signature is his-
tory. He speaks of ‛‘indices’ (‘secret,’ ‘historic,’ or ‘temporal’) or of ‘images’ (Bilder), often
qualified as ‘dialectical’.‛184 Benjamin’s description of the dialectical images is consonant with
the fluid ontology of Foucault’s description of the episteme: ‛It is not that the past casts light
on the present nor that the present its light on the past, but the image is that in which that
which was unites as if in a flash of lightning with the now in a constellation. In other words:
image is the dialectic in a stalled position.‛185 A consequence of this is that a historical object is
never given neutrally, but always accompanied by a signature, which forms it as an image and
determines its intelligibility in time. Benjamin believes that it takes a certain practice, or being,
as a researcher to read these ephemeral phenomena.
In an interesting observation, Agamben writes that fashion is an important site for the
signature, and that we can understand its genuinely historical nature in that way. He says
that fashion is devoted to a certain type of innovation—or perpetual production and manage-
ment of the new—so that it introduces a peculiar discontinuity in time. This division has to do
with that which is, or is not, in fashion, and whether it is ‛now.‛186 Within each quasi-determi-
nate frame (the twenties, the seventies, the eighties) there is a certain signature, or set of signa-
tures, that permits the meaning of certain signs and gestures to seem to belong to the present.
Agamben points out that ‛index‛ derives from the Latin dico which means ‛to show,‛
and that it has frequently been noted that this is part of the same lexical family as diritto, law
or right.187 He refers to other related concepts such as iudex, vindex, and vim dicere, and, in an
analysis that parallels part of his Sacramento book, he draws on Pierre Noailles who pointed
out that these had to do especially with showing or demonstrating force. Noailles specified
that this was not any force or simple violence, but that it referred to the force of the rite, that is,
the force of the effective word and the ability for words to refer to things. Agamben says that
this shows the law to be the place of the signature par excellence (in which the efficacy of
words prompts action) and that all of language shows its relation to the signature.188 He says,
too, that all of the human sciences—especially those dealing with history—have to do with the
signature. Noting that Deleuze wrote that philosophical research involves the elements of
identifying a problem and choosing which concepts are appropriate to it, Agamben adds that
concepts imply signature, without which they’d remain inert.
Agamben points out so many uses and aspects of the theory of the signature in the 20th
century that he says that ‛we might even be able to speak of something like an absolutization
of the signature.‛189 Among a number of approaches that recognize and depart from the ex-
183
Ibid., 73.
184
Ibid., 73.
185
Ibid., 73-4.
186
Ibid., 75.
187
Ibid.
188
Ibid., 77.
189
Ibid., 79.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
140
cess of the signifier over the signified, he returns to Foucault’s archaeology, where, as there is
never a pure sign without a signature, it is also never possible to extract the signature and put
it in an originary position. It concerns the historical conditions of veridiction that enable cer-
tain signs to become animated and to make sense. It concerns ‛the non-semantic inscribed in
every signifying discourse and surrounds and limits acts of language like an obscure and
unsignifying margin. It defines, however, also the set of rules which decide the conditions of
existence and exercise for signs.‛190 Referring to Foucault’s essay ‛Nietzsche, Genealogy, His-
tory‛ and to Nietzsche’s own genealogy, Agamben repeats that this archaeology is not con-
cerned with seeking out an origin, but in ‛maintaining events in their dispersion.‛191 For him
this is intimately tied to the theory, the study, of the signature, since archeology looks in any
event for the signature that determines it and in the signature for the events that condition it.
Philosophical Archaeology
The concept of philosophical archaeology first appears in Kant, according to Agamben, where
he seeks for the possibility of ‛a philosophical history of philosophy,‛ which ‛must treat the
nature of human reason as a philosophical archeology.‛192 It enters early into a peculiar rela-
tionship where it is also a ‛history of things that didn’t happen,‛ as Kant, after warning of the
difficulties of writing a history of that which did not happen, notes that in the history of philo-
sophy, ‛nothing can be said about that which happened, without first knowing what should
have or could have happened.‛193 Agamben characterizes Kant’s archaeology as a ‛science of
the ruins, or a ‘ruinology,’‛194 As such this means that here the archai is the ruins of what
should have or could have been, that which could return one day but is presently ruined.
A different conception of the arche emerges in Foucault’s ‛Nietzsche, Genealogy, His-
tory.‛ Here the idea is an ‛essential dishomogeneity present in every authentic historical
practice.‛195 Agamben says that Foucault’s strategy in the essay is to redirect Nietzsche’s gene-
alogy against every research of an origin. Interpreting the concepts used in Nietzsche, Fou-
cault likewise sets aside Ursprung, ‘origin,’ for Herkunft, ‘provenance,’ and Entstehung, ‘point
of emergence.’ He also wants to be able to take account of the constitution of knowledges, dis-
courses, and the like without recourse to an origin or to a subject.
Although it exists in his work, Agamben notes that the identification of a hetero-
geneous aspect to all historical research is not so much due to Nietzsche as to his friend Franz
Overbeck.196 He called ‛prehistoric‛ this aspect that all historical research would have to con-
front. It doesn’t simply equate to the chronologically older. It is a constitutive heterogeneity
rather than an objective date, yet it has a special relationship to the past. Agamben says that
all historical research eventually confronts this constitutive heterogeneity in the form of a
190
Ibid., 80.
191
Ibid., 81.
192
Ibid., 82.
193
Ibid., 82-3.
194
Ibid., 83.
195
Ibid., 84.
196
Ibid., 86.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
141
critique of tradition and of the sources.197 He mentions Heidegger’s ‛destruction of the tra-
dition‛ in Chapter 6 Book I of Sein und Zeit. There Heidegger differentiates between history
and historicity. Overbeck, for his part, ‛calls ‘canonization’ the dispositive through which tra-
dition impedes access to the sources.‛198
On the basis of these considerations of other thinkers, especially Foucault, Nietzsche,
Overbeck, and Heidegger, Agamben comes to a provisional definition of archaeology as ‛that
practice which, in every historical investigation, has to do not with the origin, but with the
point of emergence of a phenomenon and must, therefore, come to grips again with the sour-
ces and the tradition.‛199 This operation on the origin is equally an operation on the subject.
Noting another possible pitfall in this historical research, Agamben echoes a concern he raised
in Il sacramento del linguaggio, namely that in research involving the so-called ‘pre-historic,’ for
instance the period before the distinction between religion and law, care must be taken not to
project the added visions of our religious and legal spheres onto this ‛primordial indi-
stinction.‛200 He recommends a kind of archaeological epoché to prevent this projection.
Via exposition of Dumézil and Meillet on the ‛ultra-historical fringe,‛ Agamben takes
note of developments in comparative mythology of value to archaeological research. He says
that: ‛The ‘oldest history’ and the ‘ultra-historical fringe’ that archaeology seeks to reach can-
not be located in chronology, in a remote past, but neither, beyond this, in an intemporal meta-
historical structure.‛201 Dumézil jokes presciently about locating it in the ‛hominid neural
structure,‛ precisely what Agamben points out has happened in cognitive approaches.
Agamben indicates that the term ‛archaeology‛ is tied to Foucault’s research. He says
that Foucault was already developing this line of thinking in Les Mots et les choses, where Fou-
cault calls the episteme ‛an epistemological field in which knowledges, considered outside of
every criteria which refers to their rational value or their objective form, emphasizes their
positivity and sets up this way a history which is not that of their progressive perfection, but
that of their conditions of possibility.‛202 He relates this to Foucault’s thought about the histo-
rical a priori. He notes that this too would be inscribed in a certain historical constellation.
This would ‛make true the paradox of an a priori condition inscribed in a history which cannot
be constituted except as a posteriori with respect to this and which research—in the case of
Foucault, archaeology—must discover.‛203
To try to understand better the temporal structure in this archaeological relation Agam-
ben turns to a brief and fascinating exposition of Henri Bergson’s explanation of déjà vu as a
peculiar moment when, rather than memory following perception, instead the two are simul-
taneous, leading to false recognition. To account for this Bergson says that the memory ‛be-
longs to the past in terms of form and to the present in terms of material.‛204 In the same way
197
Ibid., 88.
198
Ibid., 89.
199
Ibid., 90.
200
Ibid., 91.
201
Ibid., 93.
202
Ibid., 93-4.
203
Ibid., 95.
204
Ibid., 96.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
142
Agamben says that the conditions of possibility for a piece of historical research are contem-
porary to the real and the present and immanent to it, once again emphasizing Foucault’s
‛Rule of Immanence.‛
Agamben credits Enzo Melandri with having early on understood the philosophical
relevance of Foucault’s archaeology. Commenting on the temporal and immanent aspects of it
Melandri commented that, against the search for the origin ‛archaeological research sets
instead to overturn the process or, better, to render the explication of phenomena immanent to
their description.‛205 Melandri relates it to Freud’s schema of the conscious and the uncon-
scious, as Ricoeur had done in his ‛archaeology of the subject.‛ He explicitly relates the pro-
cess of archaeological research to regression analysis. Agamben contrasts Melandri’s figure of
‛dionysiac‛ regression, which moves toward the past with its gaze set on the future, with Ben-
jamin’s angel, which moves toward the future looking at the past.206
Despite some similarities, Agamben ultimately highlights a distinction between regres-
sion and archaeology. He says that rather than seeking to bring back a preceding state, ar-
chaeology seeks ‛to decompose it, to move it, or to bypass it, to go back to, not its contents but
to the modalities, the circumstances, and the moments of tension which, obliterating them,
constituted it as an origin.‛207 Agamben says that the text which best describes the gestures
and strategies of archaeology may be the first one published by Foucault, his long preface to
Ludwig Binswanger’s Dream and Existence. He highlights Foucault’s descriptions of the dream
and imagination, indicating that they are aimed toward a ‛movement of liberty.‛208 Foucault
says that the dream fragments the world of reality and allows imagination more ground. This
emphasis on the imagination is key to a transition from anthropology to ontology, and
‛existence itself, in the fundamental direction of the imagination, shows its own ontological
foundation.‛209 Imagination is integral to a movement beyond images and fantasies.
Attempting to think the temporal structure in archaeological philosophy, which has to
do not with a past but with a point of emergence, Agamben proposes the concept of the future
anterior. It is ‛that which will be, which will become accessible and present, only when the
archaeological operation will have completed its operation.‛210 This is also related to Fou-
cault’s introduction to Binswanger’s text, where the dream is oriented toward the future and it
anticipates the moment of liberation. The future anterior which is in question in archeology is
‛that past which will have been, when the gesture of the archaeologist (or the power of imagi-
nation) will have cleared out the field of the phantasms of the unconscious and the hairshirt of
tradition that impede access to history.‛211
Agamben closes by noting the way in which comparative grammar, so influential in the
first half of the 20th century, has been all but totally eclipsed by generative grammar. He
points out that the human sciences underwent a period of growth and expansion while
205
Ibid., 97.
206
Ibid., 99.
207
Ibid., 103.
208
Ibid., 104.
209
Ibid.,
210
Ibid., 106.
211
Ibid., 107.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
143
comparative grammar was popular. However, he writes that both comparative grammar and
generative grammar pay insufficient attention to the issues of ‛ontological anchorage‛ and
‛the tie to ontological underpinnings implicit‛ in them.212 While he thinks that further atten-
tion to this ontological dimension, along the lines that he has indicated, is necessary, Agamben
also clearly wants to hold on to, or to re-value some aspects from comparative grammar, such
as the idea of performing historical, or archaeological, research on the basis of linguistic analy-
sis and etymology. He closes on terms that indicate his hope for future research even as he
underscores again the fluid, multiplicitous ontological philosophy he draws from Foucault:
‛The human sciences will regain their decisive epistemological threshold, however, only when
they will have rethought altogether the idea of the ontological anchorage to see existence as a
field of essentially historical tensions.‛213
Jeffrey Bussolini
Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work Department
City University of New York, College of Staten Island
2800 Victory Blvd., Bldg 4S-232
Staten Island, NY 10314
USA
212
Ibid., 110.
213
Ibid., 111.
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