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Summary of the Series

(Based on Colby Dickinson’s guide)

Frameing the Homo Sacer Series

• Agamben’s concept of being captures and divides human existence to dominate existence.
• Language and other apparatuses, such as potential and actual, divide being to control and dominate.
• The sovereign figure creates a dichotomy between sovereign power and ‘bare life’ to legitimize its rule.
• Overcoming this division of being becomes the recurring leitmotif throughout the series.
• This subject is introduced in the first volume, Homo Sacer, and recurs with increasing significance throughout subsequent volumes.

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen

• The book explores the concept of the homo sacer, a figure of Roman law who exists both inside and outside society.
• The homo sacer’s life cannot be accepted by the gods or protected from violence, leading to the existence of ‘bare life’.
• The homo sacer is the excluded life upon which the sovereign depends to establish any political relations.
• The sovereign is both inside and outside the law, a state of existence that allows them to declare exceptions to the rule of law.
• The camp, a biopolitical tool to sequester unwanted bodies, is a concept that demonstrates how bare life involves the removal of one’s form of life from it.
• Agamben discusses several significant distinctions related to the division of human existence, including the distinction between an exception as an ‘inclusive exclusion’ and the example as an ‘exclusive inclusion’.
• He also discusses the tension between constituting power and constituted power as it exists, paralleling Aristotle’s philosophical distinction between potentiality and actuality.
• The figure of the homo sacer is outside both human and divine law and approaches a zone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, religious and juridical.
• The modern transference of the sacred into all of our bodies has placed our bodies at the center of Western politics, making the ‘capacity to be killed’ the ‘new political body of the West’.
• Agamben seeks alternative forms of political resistance, referencing Melville’s figure of Bartleby, the Scrivener, whose response becomes a form of resistance.
• Messianism is developed as a theory of the state of exception, suspending even the sovereign’s emergency powers.

“State of Exception” translated by Kevin Attell

• The state of exception is a key political, philosophical, and metaphysical concept, residing in a zone of indistinction between law and lawlessness.
• Agamben explores this zone, comparing it to civil war, insurrection, and resistance.
• The state of exception is seen as an attempt to include the exception within the juridical order, creating a zone of indistinction where fact and law coincide.
• The state of exception is a ‘fictitious lacuna’ that safeguards the existence of the norm.
• Agamben explores the possibility of including the right to resistance in the constitution, suggesting some form of lawlessness is inscribed within law and order.
• He examines the nature of revolutionary violence in Schmitt and Benjamin, suggesting that a theory of sovereign indecision could create a messianic force that disrupts the correspondence between sovereignty and transcendence.
• Agamben critiques the Schmittian inheritance, arguing that the state of exception is often associated with sovereign dictatorships.
• Agamben suggests that the West maintains a tension between the normative/juridical (potestas) and the anomic/metajuridical (auctoritas) where auctoritas can only assert itself in the suspension of potestas, fragilizing law itself.
• The state of exception is ultimately an empty space where a human action with no relation to law stands before a norm with no relation to life.
• Despite the current tension, Agamben suggests that a pure law, pure language, pure violence, or pure means without ends could illuminate a new use of human praxis and new uses of law.

Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm translated by Nicholas Heron

• The book focuses on the theory of civil war, highlighting the state of exception as a threshold between the family and the polis.
• It explores the tension between the sovereign and the multitude that constitutes the political body, a concept explored in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.
• The ‘people’ is a body always divided against itself, representing a body that cannot be present and must always be represented.
• Agamben reveals the modern roots of politics are tied to a theological-eschatological tension between the ‘lawless’ one and the ‘one who restrains’.
• The book suggests that understanding the theological origins of modern political concepts can help humanity rethink political relations.
• Agamben’s understanding of theological concepts and histories is also highlighted in the book.

“The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath” translated by Adam Kotsko

• The book investigates the origins and use of the oath in the West, aiming to illuminate the modern crisis in language and authority.
• The oath is a rhetorical device that allows language to appear truthful and part of its actualisation.
• The oath helps deal with a fundamental weakness in language by establishing a bond through the use of language itself.
• The quest to discover a more archaic stage of human language is not a search for a historical stage but a force working within history.
• The oath is seen as a sacrament of power made possible through the sacrament of language.
• The decline in the legitimacy of the oath in the West is labelled the ‘death of God’, which is the death of the name of God.
• Living without the force of the oath in the modern era changes the usual political associations based upon oaths.
• Philosophy critiques the primacy of names to critique the oath and implement specific forms of resistance.
• Language becomes the site where human beings are put at stake, as per Agamben.

“The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government” translated by Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini

Theological Foundation of Political Concepts

• Agamben’s work explores the Trinitarian uses of oikonomia (economy) as a tool to observe the governmental machine.
• The book reveals a bipolar machine, a split Kingdom and Government, and the tension between glory and oikonomia.

The Role of Western Christian Liturgies

• Western Christian liturgies provide unique insights into political operations.
• The nature of acclamations, doxologies, and the Eucharistic sacrifice link liturgy and oikonomia, revealing the juridical nature of liturgies in Christian celebrations.

The Shift in Political Theology

• Early Christian theologians reverted the Pauline ‘economy of the mystery’ into ‘the mystery of the economy’, emphasizing the role of economy over divine mystery.
• This shift led to a focus on economic ordering over divine being, leading to new religious and political forms.

The Role of Oikonomia in Western Politics and Theology

• Oikonomia becomes the central concept of Western politics and theology, joining the paradigm of government and the state of exception.
• Divine being is not split but divided on the level of oikonomia, not regarding its being.

The Paradox of Glory

• Glory is manifest within the circular logic of glorifying God, as God is deserving of glory.
• Glory takes the place of the inoperativity of power, symbolizing the empty throne.
• The Sabbath, as the historical marker of inoperativity, is revealed as being’most proper to God’ and marks an understanding of the Kingdom in Christianity.

Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty translated by Adam Kotsko

• Explores the link between liturgy and office in the Western theological tradition.
• The’ministry of the mystery’ merges with the mystery of liturgy as the’mystery of effectiveness’.
• The office, often referred to as the ‘divine office’, becomes more efficacious than the law and more effective than any ordinary human action.
• The mystery of effectiveness coincides with the mystery of operativity, equating office with ontology and duty with ethics.
• Liturgical mystery exists because of ‘an economy of divine being’, oikonomia, an operativity of the divine being.
• The mystery of praxis and operativity allows Agamben to re-address the nature of substantiality and effectiveness.
• The office of the human is distinguished from that of the animal, rendering life governable for humans.
• Agamben aims to think beyond the links between duty, office, effectiveness, and the will, aiming to formulate an ‘ontology beyond operativity and command’.

“Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive” translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen

• Agamben’s investigation of the figure of the homo sacer, the Muselmann, in Nazi concentration camps.
• Discusses the formation of subjectivity through witnessing desubjectification processes.
• Introduces a modal ontology based on potentiality/actuality and incapacity/capacity for subjectivity.
• Examines the concept of the remnant, allowing for a reconsideration of significant testimonies of those who suffered in the camps.
• Analyzes the figure of the Muselmann as a unique case of anthropological insight.
• Reflects on the limits of language in establishing the human being.
• Highlights the potential and failure of the human to distinguish itself from the animal world.
• Discusses how the concentration camps provide insight into the nature of the human being.
• Discusses the possible testimony of victims to Nazi destruction who could not testify for themselves.

“The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life” translated by Adam Kotsko

• Explores the concept of a ‘form-of-life’ in monasticism, a life inseparable from its form, through the relationship between rule and life.
• The form-of-life is often the ‘third thing’ sought after in the Franciscan movement, but it often fails to be realized.
• Monasticism attempts to merge life and time through manual labor and prayer, presenting constant meditation as a fundamental duty.
• The monk’s life becomes an ‘uninterrupted Office’, leading to a total liturgicization of life and vivification of liturgy.
• The Franciscan order aims to’reclaim a life, not a rule’, identifying with life and living the Gospel.
• The book centers on Francis of Assisi’s attempts to live a forma vitae as a life that cannot be separated from its form.
• Francis’ search for a ‘third thing’ between doctrine and law, as well as between rule and dogma, illustrates how normative rules cannot capture the essence of this third thing.
• The Franciscans tried to develop an ‘ontology of use’, where being and becoming, existence and time seem to coincide, to bring use and time together.
• Agamben demonstrates how the radicality of the order’s founder avoided rendering faith into a habit or custom, relying on use over possession.

“The Use of Bodies” translated by Adam Kotsko

• Agamben’s research on the role of the body in Western thought and the nature of an instrumental logic in relation to our bodily being.
• The book explores the role of one’s private, autobiographical life in philosophical conversation, providing insights into Agamben’s own history and the personal lives of philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, and Emmanuel Levinas.
• Agamben critiques the notion of possession and its alternative, the ‘originary ontological relation’ that ‘has the form of a use’.
• The book emphasizes contemplation as a ‘use-of-oneself’ and the experience of the world as ‘absolutely inappropriable’.
• The book explores how one might define a form-of-life as hidden within the present and not lived outside of it.
• Living beyond all inscribed forms of life means living too beyond the identities that have been placed upon humanity, allowing for new forms-of-life lived beyond the law.
• Agamben promotes a constructivist approach to identity over an essentialist notion of identity.
• The book highlights new possibilities for the human being and emphasizes use, contemplation, inoperativity, the poverty of being, and potentiality as the fundamental ontological category.

“The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans” translated by Patricia Dailey

• Agamben views Paul’s letter to the Romans as the fundamental messianic text of the West.
• Messianic time is not added to normal time, but is Sabbath time, interrupting secular time.
• The concept of kairos, present within chronos, is used to divide chronos from within, leading to the division of division.
• The division of division introduces a ‘zone of undecidability’, presenting the messianic vocation as the revocation of all vocations.
• Agamben presents Paul as a philosopher of the highest order, linking him to Walter Benjamin’s thought.
• The messianic becomes a crisis in the separation between law and religion, leaving grace as an excess in relation to law.
• The form of life lived beyond the law is difficult to achieve within Christianity, leading to a split within faith.
• There is no doctrine content to faith, but only the messianic suspension of all identities, a task the Church has denied throughout its history.
• The Time that Remains aligns with larger arguments in the Homo Sacer series, making it an unofficial part of the series.

“The Open: Man and Animal” translated by Kevin Attell

• The book explores the suspension of the identity of the subject, a concept not formally part of the Homo Sacer series.
• It argues that humans struggle to articulate what distinguishes them from other animals.
• Agamben develops a concept of ‘the open’, a space where the human subject is developed by excluding its own animality.
• This distinction is fabricated by the presupposition of being that captures and divides it to dominate human existence.
• The book suggests that by ignoring the animal’s poverty, humans create themselves in the void, creating a’suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man’.
• The book suggests that letting the anthropological machinery idle allows for new uses for humanity beyond its attempts to define and identify beyond poverty.