Elena: I continue to study the article on Agamben, here I've taken the following paragraph from where I'd left off. You can look at the whole article in Giorgio Agamben a few posts below.
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.
Elena:
I do not know if Agamben is understanding the problem here because if it had been the churches aim to re-articulate the fracture between “being” and “governance” or as he puts it “essence” and “activity” that would have been a promising aim but in the long run what happens is that the church removes the divine quality from every human being, makes itself the intermediary between God and mankind and establishes a structure that in the long run, is most probably the cause for the development of dictatorship: authority without being: power through force, unquestionable “divine sovereign”.
It’s interesting to observe this paragraph from the perspective of the enneagram in which the law of three is embraced by the circle and the law of seven runs through its points of development. If the circle represents unity, The Law of Three is described by Gurdjieff as "the second fundamental cosmic law". This law states that every whole phenomenon is composed of three separate sources, which are Active, Passive and Reconciling or Neutral. This law applies to everything in the universe and humanity, as well as all the structures and processes. The Law of Seven is described by Gurdjieff as "the first fundamental cosmic law". This law is used to explain processes. The basic use of the law of seven is to explain why nothing in nature and in life constantly occurs in a straight line, that is to say that there are always ups and downs in life which occur lawfully. Examples of this can be noticed in athletic performances, where a high ranked athlete always has periodic downfalls, as well as in nearly all graphs that plot topics that occur over time, such as the economic graphs, population graphs, death-rate graphs and so on. All show parabolic periods that keep rising and falling. Gurdjieff claimed that since these periods occur lawfully based on the law of seven that it is possible to keep a process in a straight line if the necessary shocks were introduced at the right time. A piano keyboard is an example of the law of seven, as the seven notes of the major scale correspond exactly to it.
Elena: What I find of value to understand is that there is a structure here that corresponds to the structure of what Agamben is trying to convey about God as sovereign and God as government. If we think of the enneagram as the representation of a cosmos and its cosmic laws, then we can understand or intuit the complex unity of its functioning and if what the church was trying to reproduce in its inception was an analogous structure in its order, it failed to do so in that it appropriated the laws, the knowledge and the “action” and took it away from the people declaring itself as intermediary between human beings and God. In so doing it began the schizophrenic process in which we are now drowning! It raised itself to a divine position as intermediary between man and God and took away the divine essence of each human being and the capacity and ability to act consciously and without submission or dependence to the king or the church.
The question would then be, was this process necessary? If the rule of the king was a legitimate institution in the wake of our civilizations and kings were meant to play that role in the consciousness of their being and gradually lost it as consciousness moved from the king to the people, have all the struggles been necessary for that process to occur “organically”? That is, in a coherent and very real process subject to the laws?
The other question, during that period in which war between clans was vivid, were the people united under the king’s instinctive protection and was that not only necessary but right for the times? Did we have an instinctive period of evolution that strengthened our instinctive capacity to survive in the physical realm? A sort of “development of the body” of the social organization?
I must continue to study this carefully but my joy in finding Agamben is that he is certainly concerned with the things I’ve been interested in exploring all throughout these blogs.
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