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Title: Form-of-Life Author: Giorgio Agamben Date: 2000 Language: en Topics: Tiqqun, philosophy, not anarchist Source: Means without End
The ancient Greeks did not have only one term to express what we mean by
the word life. They used two semantically and morphologically distinct
terms: zoé, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all
living beings (animals, humans, or gods), and bios, which signified the
form or manner of living peculiar to a single individual or group. In
modern languages this opposition has gradually disappeared from the
lexicon (and where it is retained, as in biology and zoology, it no
longer indicates any substantial difference); one term only – the
opacity of which increases in proportion to the sacralization of its
referent – designates that naked presupposed common element that it is
always possible to isolate in each of the numerous forms of life.
By the term form-of-life, on the other hand, I mean a life that can
never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible
to isolate something such as naked life.
A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what
is at stake in its way of living is living itself. What does this
formulation mean? It defines a life – human life – in which the single
ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always
and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power
(potenza). Each behavior and each form of human living is never
prescribed by a specific biological vocation, nor is it assigned by
whatever necessity; instead, no matter how customary, repeated, and
socially compulsory, it always retains the character of a possibility;
that is, it always puts at stake living itself. That is why human beings
– as beings of power who can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose
themselves or find themselves – are the only beings for whom happiness
is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose lives are
irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness. But this immediately
constitutes the form-of-life as political life. "Civitatem...
communitatem esse institutam propter vivere et bene vivere hominum in ea
[The State is a community instituted for the sake of the living and the
well living of men in it]."
Political power (potere) as we know it, on the other hand, always founds
itself – in the last instance – on the separation of a sphere of naked
life from the context of the forms of life. In Roman law, vita (life) is
not a juridical concept, but rather indicates the simple fact of living
or a particular way of life. There is only one case in which the term
life acquires a juridical meaning that transforms it into a veritable
terminus technicus, and that is in the expression vitae necisque
potestas, which designates the pater's power of life and death over the
male son. J. Thomas has shown that, in this formula, que does not have
disjunctive function and vita is nothing but a corollary of nex, the
power to kill.
Life, thus, originally appears in law only as the counterpart of a power
that threatens death. But what is valid for the pater's right of life
and death is even more valid for sovereign power (imperium), of which
the former constitutes the originary cell. Thus, in the Hobbesian
foundation of sovereignty, life in the state of nature is defined only
by its being unconditionally exposed to a death threat (the limitless
right of everybody over everything) and political life – that is, the
life that unfolds under the protection of the Leviathan – is nothing but
this very same life always exposed to a threat that now rests
exclusively in the hands of the sovereign. The puissance absolue et
perpetuelle, which defines State power, is not founded – in the last
instance – on a political will but rather on naked life, which is kept
safe and protected only to the degree to which it submits itself to the
sovereign's (or the law's) right of life and death. (This is precisely
the originary meaning of the adjective sacer [sacred] when used to refer
to human life.) The state of exception, which is what the sovereign each
and every time decides, takes place precisely when naked life – which
normally appears rejoined to the multifarious forms of social life – is
explicitly put into question and revoked as the ultimate foundation of
political power. The ultimate subject that needs to be at once turned
into the exception and included in the city is always naked life.
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency'
in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a
conception of history that is in keeping with this insight." Walter
Benjamin's diagnosis, which by now is more than fifty years old, has
lost none of its relevance. And that is so not really or not only
because power (potere) no longer has today any form of legitimation
other than emergency, and because power everywhere and continuously
refers and appeals to emergency as well as laboring secretly to produce
it. (How could we not think that a system that can no longer function at
all but on the basis of emergency would not also be interested in
preserving such an emergency at any price?) This is the case also and
above all because naked life, which was the hidden foundation of
sovereignty, has become, in the meanwhile, the dominant form of life
everywhere. Life – in its state of exception that has now become the
norm – is the naked life that in every context separates the forms of
life from their cohering into a form-of-life. The Marxian division
between man and citizen is thus superseded by the division between naked
life (ultimate and opaque bearer of sovereignty) and the multifarious
forms of life abstractly recodified as social-juridical identities (the
voter, the worker, the journalist, the student, but also the
HIV-positive, the transvestite, the porno star, the elderly, the parent,
the woman) that all rest on naked life. (To have mistaken such a naked
life separate from its form, in its abjection, for a superior principle
– sovereignty or the sacred – is the limit of Bataille's thought, which
makes it useless to us.)
Foucault's thesis – according to which "what is at stake today is life"
and hence politics has become biopolitics – is, in this sense,
substantially correct. What is decisive, however, is the way in which
one understands the sense of this transformation. What is left
unquestioned in the contemporary debates on bioethics and biopolitics,
in fact, is precisely what would deserve to be questioned before
anything else, that is, the very biological concept of life. Paul
Rabinow conceives of two models of life as symmetrical opposites: on the
one hand, the experimental life of the scientist who is ill with
leukemia and who turns his very life into a laboratory for unlimited
research and experimentation, and, on the other hand, the one who, in
the name of life's sacredness, exasperates the antinomy between
individual ethics and techno-science. Both models, however, participate
without being aware in the same concept of naked life. This concept –
which today presents itself under the guises of a scientific notion – is
actually a secularized political concept. (From a strictly scientific
point of view, the concept of life makes no sense. Peter and Jean
Medawar tell us that in biology, discussions about the real meaning of
the words life and death are an index of a low level of conversation.
Such words have no intrinsic meaning and such a meaning, hence, cannot
be clarified by deeper and more careful studies.)
Such is the provenance of the (often unperceived and yet decisive)
function of medical-scientific ideology within the system of power and
the increasing use of pseudoscientific concepts for ends of political
control. That same withdrawal of naked life that, in certain
circumstances, the sovereign used to be able to exact from the forms of
life is now massively and daily exacted by the pseudoscientific
representations of the body, illness, and health, and by the
"medicalization" of ever-widening spheres of life and individual
imagination. Biological life, which is the secularized form of naked
life and which shares its unutterability and impenetrability, thus
constitutes the real forms of life literally as forms of survival:
biological life remains inviolate in such forms as that obscure threat
that can suddenly actualize itself in violence, in extraneity, in
illnesses, in accidents. It is the invisible sovereign that stares at us
behind the dull-witted masks of the powerful, who, whether or not they
realize it, govern us in its name.
A political life, that is, a life directed toward the idea of happiness
and cohesive with a form-of-life, is thinkable only starting with the
emancipation from such a division, with the irrevocable exodus from any
sovereignty. The question about the possibility of a non-Statist
politics necessarily takes this form: Is today something like a
form-of-life, a life for which living itself would be at stake in its
own living, possible? Is today a life of power (potenza) available?
I call thought the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an
inseparable context as form-of-life. I do not mean by this the
individual exercise of an organ or a psychic faculty, but rather an
experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential
character of life and human intelligence. To think does not mean merely
to be affected by this or that thing, by this or that content of enacted
thought, but rather at once to be affected by one's own receptiveness
and experience in each and every thing that is thought a pure power of
thinking. ("When thought has become each thing in the way in which a man
who actually knows is said to do so... its condition is still one of
potentiality... and thought is then able to think of itself.")
Only if I am not always already and solely enacted, but rather delivered
to a possibility and a power, only if living and intending and
apprehending themselves are at stake each time in what I live and intend
and apprehend – only if, in other words, there is thought – only then a
form of life can become, in its own factness and thingness,
form-of-life, in which it is never possible to isolate something like
naked life.
The experience of thought that is here in question is always the
experience of a common power. Community and power identify one with the
other completely, without residue, because the inherence of a
communitarian principle to any power is a function of the necessarily
potential character of any community. Among beings who would always
already be enacted, who would always already be this or that thing, this
or that identity, and who would have entirely exhausted their power in
these things and identities – among such beings there could not be any
community but only coincidences and factual partitions. We can
communicate with others only through what in us – as much as in others –
has remained potential, and any communication (as Benjamin perceives for
language) is first of all communication not of something in common but
of communicability itself. After all, if there existed one and only one
being, it would be absolutely impotent. (That is why theologians affirm
that God created the world ex nihilo, in other words, absolutely without
power.) Where I have power, we are always already many (just like when,
if there is a language, that is, a power of speech, there cannot be then
one and only one being who speaks it).
That is why modern political philosophy does not begin with classical
thought, which had made of contemplation, of the bios theoreticos, a
separate and solitary activity ("exile of the alone to the alone"), but
rather only with Averroism, that is, with the thought of the one and
only possible intellect common to all human beings, and, crucially, with
Dante's affirmation – in De Monarchia – of the inherence of a multitude
to the very power of thought: “It is clear that man's basic capacity is
to have a potentiality or power for being intellectual. And since this
power cannot be completely actualized in a single man or in any of the
particular communities of men above mentioned, there must be a multitude
in mankind through whom this whole power can be actualized… the proper
work of mankind taken as a whole is to exercise continually its entire
capacity for intellectual growth, first, in theoretical matters, and,
secondarily, as an extension of theory, in practice.”
The diffuse intellectuality I am talking about and the Marxian notion of
a "general intellect" acquire their meaning only within the perspective
of this experience. They name the multitude that inheres to the power of
thought as such. Intellectuality and thought are not a form of life
among others in which life and social production articulate themselves,
but they are rather the unitary power that constitutes the multiple
forms of life as form-of-life. In the face of State sovereignty, which
can affirm itself only by separating in every context naked life from
its form, they are the power that incessantly reunites life to its form
or prevents it from being dissociated from its form. The act of
distinguishing between the mere, massive inscription of social knowledge
into the productive processes (an inscription that characterizes the
contemporary phase of capitalism, the society of the spectacle) and
intellectuality as antagonistic power and form-of-life – such an act
passes through the experience of this cohesion and this inseparability.
Thought is form-of-life, life that cannot be segregated from its form;
and anywhere the intimacy of this inseparable life appears, in the
materiality of corporeal processes and habitual ways of life no less
than in theory, there and only there is there thought. And it is this
thought, this form-of-life, that, abandoning naked life to "Man" and to
the "Citizen" who clothe it temporarily and represent it with their
"rights," must become the guiding concept and the unitary center of the
coming politics.