The Use of Bodies

Giorgio Agamben, Adam Kotsko

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804798617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer was one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. It was also the beginning of a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope, investigating the deepest foundations of Western politics and thought.

The Use of Bodies represents the ninth and final volume in this twenty-year undertaking, breaking considerable new ground while clarifying the stakes and implications of the project as a whole. It comprises three major sections. The first uses Aristotle's discussion of slavery as a starting point for radically rethinking notions of selfhood; the second calls for a complete reworking of Western ontology; and the third explores the enigmatic concept of "form-of-life, " which is in many ways the motivating force behind the entire Homo Sacer project. Interwoven between these major sections are shorter reflections on individual thinkers (Debord, Foucault, and Heidegger), while the epilogue pushes toward a new approach to political life that breaks with the destructive deadlocks of Western thought. The Use of Bodies represents a true masterwork by one of our greatest living philosophers.

PART I

The Use of Bodies

§ 1

The Human Being without Work

1.1. The expression “the use of the body” (he tou somatos chresis) is found at the beginning of Aristotle’s Politics (1254b 18), at the point where it is a question of defining the nature of the slave. Aristotle has just affirmed that the city is composed of families or households (oikiai) and that the family, in its perfect form, is composed of slaves and free people (ek doulon kai eleutheron—the slaves are mentioned before the free; 1253b 3–5). Three types of relations define the family: the despotic (despotikè) relation between the master (despotes) and the slaves, the matrimonial (gamikè) relation between the husband and wife, and the parental (technopoietikè) relation between the father and the children (7–11). That the master/slave relation is in some way, if not the most important, at least the most evident is suggested—aside from its being named first—by the fact that Aristotle specifies that the latter two relations are “nameless,” lacking a proper name (which seems to imply that the adjectives gamikè and technopoietikè are only improper denominations devised by Aristotle, while everyone knows what a “despotic” relation is).

In any case, the analysis of the first relation, which immediately follows, in some way constitutes the introductory threshold of the treatise, almost as if only a correct preliminary understanding of the despotic relation would allow access to the properly political dimension. Aristotle begins by defining the slave as a being that, “while being human, is by its nature of another and not of itself,” asking himself immediately after “if a similar being exists by nature or if, by contrast, slavery is always contrary to nature” (1254a 15–18).

The answer proceeds by means of a justification of the command (“to command and be commanded are not only necessary parts of things but also expedient”; 21–22), which in living beings are distinguished into despotic commands (archè despotikè) and political commands (archè politikè), exemplified respectively in the command of the soul over the body and that of the intelligence over the appetite. And just as in the preceding paragraph he had affirmed in general the necessity and natural (physei) character of command not only among animate beings but also in inanimate things (in Greek, the musical mode is the archè of the harmony), now he seeks to justify the command of some men over others:

The soul commands the body with a despotic command, whereas the intellect commands the appetites with a political and royal command. And it is clear that the command of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient; whereas the equality of the two or the command of the inferior is always hurtful. . . . The same must therefore also happen among human beings. . . . (1254b 5–16)

. The idea that the soul makes use of the body as an instrument and at the same time commands it was formulated by Plato in a passage of the Alcibiades (130a 1) that Aristotle very likely must have in mind when he is seeking to found the dominion of the master over the slave through that of the soul over the body.

What is decisive, however, is the genuinely Aristotelian specification, according to which the command that the soul exercises over the body is not of a political nature (the “despotic” relation between master and slave is after all, as we have seen, one of the three relations that, according to Aristotle, define the oikia, the household). This means—according to the clear distinction that separates the household (oikia) from the city (polis) in Aristotle’s thought—that the relationship soul/body (like master/slave) is an economic-domestic relationship and not a political one, as is, by contrast, that between intellect and appetite. But this also means that the relation between master and slave and that between soul and body are defined by one another and even that we must attend to the first if we want to understand the second. The soul is to the body as the master is to the slave. The caesura that divides the household from the city persists in the same threshold that separates and at the same time unites body and soul, master and slave. And it is only by interrogating this threshold that the relationship between economy and politics among the Greeks can become truly intelligible.

1.2. It is at this point that there appears, almost in the form of a parenthesis, the definition of the slave as “the being whose work is the use of the body”:

These human beings differ among themselves like the soul from the body or the human from the animal—as in the case of those whose work is the use of the body [oson esti ergon he tou somatos chresis], and this is the best [that can come] from them [ap’auton beltiston]—the lower sort are by nature slaves, for whom it is better to be commanded with this command, as said above. (1254b 17–20)

The problem of what is the ergon, the work and proper function of the human being, had been posed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. To the question of whether there was something like a work of the human being as such (and not simply of the carpenter, the tanner, or the shoemaker), or whether the human being was not instead born without work (argos), Aristotle had there responded by affirming that “the work of the human being is the being-at-work of the soul according to the logos” (ergon anthropou psyches energeia kata logon; 1098a 7). All the more striking, then, is the definition of the slave as the human being whose work consists only in the use of the body. That the slave is and remains a human being is, for Aristotle, beyond question (anthropos on, “while being a human being”; 1254a 16). This means, however, that there are some human beings whose ergon is not properly human or is different from that of other human beings.

Already Plato had written that the work of each being (whether it is a matter of a human being, a horse, of or whatever other living thing) is “what it alone does or what it does better than anything else” (monon ti e kallista ton allon apergazetai; Republic, 353a 10). Slaves represent the emergence of a dimension of human beings in which the best work (“the best for them”—the beltiston of the Politics probably refers to the kallista of the Republic) is not the being-at-work (energeia) of the soul according to the logos but something for which Aristotle can find no other denomination than “the use of the body.”

In the two symmetrical formulas—

ergon anthropou psyches energeia kata logon

ergon (doulou) he tou somatos chresis

the work of the human being is the being-in-action of the soul according to the logos

the work of the slave is the use of the body

—energeia and chresis, being-at-work and use, seem to be juxtaposed precisely as are psychè and soma, soul and body.

1.3. The correspondence is all the more significant since we know that in Aristotle’s thought there is a strict and complex relation between the two terms energeia and chresis. In an important study, Strycker (pp. 159–160) has shown that the classical Aristotelian opposition of potential (dynamis) and act (energeia, literally “being-at-work”) originally had the form of an opposition between dynamis and chresis (being in potential and being in use). The paradigm of the opposition is found in Plato’s Euthydemus (280d), which distinguishes between possession (ktesis) of a technique and the appropriate instruments without making use of them and their active employment (chresis). According to Strycker, Aristotle had begun, based on his master’s example, by distinguishing (for example, in Topics, 130a 19–24) between possessing a science (epistemen echein) and using it (epistemei chresthai) and had later technicalized the opposition by substituting for the common chresis a word of his own invention, unknown to Plato: energeia, being-at-work.

In effect, in his early works, Aristotle made use of chresis and chresthai in a sense similar to that of the later energeia. Thus, in the Protrepticus, where philosophy is defined as ktesis kai chresis sophias, “possession and use of wisdom” (Düring, fragment B8), Aristotle carefully distinguishes between those who possess vision while keeping their eyes closed and those who effectively use it and, in the same way, between those who make use of science and whose who simply possess it (ibid., fragment B79). That use here has an ethical connotation and not only an ontological one in a technical sense is obvious in the passage in which the philosopher seeks to specify the meaning of the verb chresthai:

To use [chresthai] anything, then, is this: if the capacity [dynamis] is for a single thing, then it is doing just that thing; if it is for several things, then it is doing whichever is best of these, as happens in the use of flutes, when someone uses the flute in the only and best way. . . . One must say, therefore, that the one who uses uses correctly, since for the one who uses correctly uses for the natural end and in the natural way. (fragment B84)

In the later works, Aristotle continues to make use of the term chresis in a sense similar to that of energeia, and yet the two terms are not simply synonymous but are often placed side by side as if to include and complete one another. Thus, in the Magna Moralia, after having affirmed that “use is more desirable than habit” (hexis, which indicates the possession of a dynamis or of a techne) and that “no one would care to have sight, if he were destined never to see but always to have his eyes shut,” Aristotle writes that “happiness consists in a certain use and in energeia” (en chresei tini kai energeiai; 1184b 13–32). The formula, which is also found in the Politics (estin eudaimonia aretes energeia kai chresis tis teleios, “happiness is a being-at-work and a certain perfect use of virtue”; 1328a 38), shows that for Aristotle, the two terms are at once similar and distinct. In the definition of happiness, being-at-work and being-in-use, an ontological perspective and an ethical perspective, include and condition one another.

Since Aristotle does not define the term energeia except in a negative way with respect to potential (esti d’ he energeia to hyparchein to pragma me outos hosper legomen dynamei, “energeia is the existing of a thing, but not in the sense in which we say that it is in potential”; Metaphysics, 1048a 31), it is all the more urgent to try to understand the meaning of the term chresis (and of the corresponding verb chresthai) in this context. It is certain, in any case, that Aristotle’s abandonment of the term chresis in favor of energeia as key term of ontology has determined to some extent the way in which Western philosophy has thought being as actuality.

. Like keeping one’s eyes closed, so also is sleep the paradigm par excellence of potential and hexis for Aristotle, and in this sense, it is counterposed and subordinated to use, which by contrast is assimilated to wakefulness: “for both sleeping and waking presuppose the existence of the soul, but waking corresponds to knowing in act, sleeping to a having without exercising” (echein kai me energein; On the Soul, 412a 25). The inferiority of sleep, as figure of potential, with respect to energeia is affirmed even more decisively in the ethical works: “That happiness is an energeia can be seen also from the following consideration. For supposing someone to be asleep all his life, we should hardly consent to call such a person happy. Life indeed he has, but life according to virtue he has not” (Magna Moralia, 1185a 9–14).

1.4. In modern studies of slavery in the ancient world, the problem—with a striking anachronism, seeing that the ancients lacked even the corresponding term—is considered solely from the point of view of “labor” and production. That the Greeks and Romans saw in it a phenomenon of another order, which called for a conceptualization completely different from ours, seems irrelevant. It thus appears all the more scandalous to moderns that ancient philosophers not only did not problematize slavery but seemed to accept it as obvious and natural. Hence it is unsurprising to read, in the preamble of a recent exposition of Aristotle’s theory of slavery, that this presents frankly “despicable” aspects, while the most elementary methodological caution would have suggested, in place of outrage, a preliminary analysis of the problematic context in which the philosopher inscribes the question and the conceptuality through which he seeks to define its nature.

There fortunately exists an exemplary reading of Aristotle’s theory of slavery, which focuses on the entirely special character of the treatment that the philosopher makes of the problem. In a 1973 study, Victor Goldschmidt shows that Aristotle here reverses his habitual methodology, according to which, when confronted with a phenomenon, it is first necessary to ask oneself if it exists and only subsequently to attempt to define its essence. With respect to slavery, he does exactly the opposite: first he defines—in truth, much too hastily—its essence (the slave is a human being who is not of himself but of another) in order to then pass over into interrogating its existence, but also does this latter in a completely peculiar way. The question does not in fact concern the existence and legitimacy of slavery as such but the “physical problem” of slavery (Goldschmidt, p. 75): that is to say, it is a matter of establishing whether there exists in nature a body corresponding to the definition of the slave. Thus, the inquiry is not dialectical but physical, in the sense in which Aristotle distinguishes in On the Soul (403a 29) the method of the dialectic, which defines, for example, anger as a desire for vengeance, from that of physics, which will see in it only a boiling of blood in the heart.

Taking up and developing Goldschmidt’s suggestion, we can thus affirm that the novelty and specificity of Aristotle’s thesis is that the foundation of slavery is of a strictly “physical” and non-dialectical order, that is to say, that it can consist only in a bodily difference with respect to the body of the free person. The question becomes at this point: “does there exist something like a body (of the) slave?” The response is affirmative, but with such restriction that it has legitimately been asked whether the doctrine of Aristotle, which the moderns have always understood as a justification of slavery, would not have had to appear to his contemporaries as an attack (Barker, p. 369). “Nature,” writes Aristotle,

would like [bouletai] to distinguish between the bodies of freemen and slaves, making the one strong for the necessary use [pros ten anankaian chresin], the other upright, and though useless for such services, useful for political life. . . . But the opposite often happens—that some have the souls and others the bodies of freemen. And doubtless if human beings differed from one another in the mere forms of their bodies as much as the statues of the gods do from human beings, all would acknowledge that the inferior class should be slaves of the superior. And if this is true of the body, how much more just that a similar distinction should exist in the soul? But the beauty of the soul is not as easy to see as that of the body. (Politics, 1254b 28ff.)

The conclusion that Aristotle immediately draws from it is therefore uncertain and partial: “It is clear, then [phaneron, which here in no way indicates a logical conclusion, but means rather: ‘it is a fact’], that there are some [tines] who are free by nature and others who are slaves, and for these latter to serve is both expedient and just [sympherei to douleuein kai dikaion estin]” (1255a 1–2). As he repeats a few lines later: “nature wants [bouletai] to do this [scil. that from a noble and good father comes a son similar to him], but it often cannot [dynatai]” (1255b 4).

Far from securing a certain foundation for it, the “physical” treatment of slavery leaves unanswered the only question that could have founded it: “does a bodily difference between the slave and the master exist or not?” Thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Translator’s Note
• Prefatory Note
• Prologue
• I. The Use of Bodies
• II. An Archeology of Ontology
• III. Form-of-Life
• Epilogue: Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential
• Bibliography
• Series List