Introduction
You live in a political reality where your biological survival is constantly managed and threatened by sovereign power. Western politics depends on a foundational split between qualified political existence and mere biological life. You find yourself subject to a system that captures living bodies into legal mechanisms through a permanent state of exception. Giorgio Agamben investigates how this biopolitical machine operates from ancient law to modern totalitarianism.
Western political power rests on the original inclusion of bare life through a state of exception, requiring a destituent potential and a new form-of-life.
The book traces this trajectory across several domains.
- How ancient philosophy and law define human activity through bodily use and slavery.
- How ontological structures and theological apparatuses separate existence from essence.
- How you can overcome this division through messianic practice and modal ontology.
- How a destituent potential frees life from sovereign capture.
How does sovereign power reduce you to bare life? What is the ontological status of human use? Can you practice a form-of-life that resists all legal capture?
1. The Human Being and Use
Classical philosophy and ancient law establish human activity through the physical use of the body and the figure of the slave.
Aristotle defines the slave as a human being whose proper work or function is exclusively the use of the body.
In reference 1254b 18 of Politics, Aristotle contrasts the free human being with the slave. The proper work of a free human being is the being-at-work of the soul according to reason. The slave represents a dimension where the best work is the use of the body, functioning as an animate instrument or household equipment.
You encounter this structure through the distinction between productive and practical instruments. A productive instrument leaves behind an external product. A practical instrument like a bed or clothing has its sole purpose in use.
- Productive instruments yield an external item.
- Practical instruments tie their role directly to use.
The slave operates as an animate instrument of action. This practical instrument assists directly in praxis rather than poiesis.
Aristotle treats the existence of slavery through a physical inquiry rather than a dialectical one. Nature desires to distinguish physically between the robust bodies of slaves and the upright bodies of freemen, though this physical distinction frequently fails in reality.
Sade later adopts this physical foundation unreservedly, asserting through a libertine character that masters and slaves possess entirely different bodily conformations from birth.
The syntagma use of the body creates a point of indifference between the master's body and the slave's body. By utilizing the slave's body, the master is in reality using his own body because the slave is constitutively a part of the master.
Roman law isolated the concept of labor specifically through legal instruments concerning the slave. Jurists eventually distinguished between the personal use of a slave's body which could not be leased and the alienable operae that could be rented out for monetary profit on the market.
Ulpian notes that an heir who inherits the use of service personnel can use them personally for relatives but cannot lease their work to others.
Sexual relations with slaves formed an ordinary, non-abusive counterpart to marriage. Artemidorus's Interpretation of Dreams classifies sexual relations with slaves as natural, legal, and customary, symbolizing the dreamer successfully drawing pleasure from their equipment.
The slave represents a non-properly human life whose exclusion enables others to engage in truly human political life. By absorbing the bare necessities of bodily reproduction and physical labor, the slave frees the master from survival and allows citizens to realize the bios politikos.
2. Semantics and Ontology of Use
The ancient Greek verb chresthai resists simple translation into modern utilitarian terms. Georges Redard collected twenty-three meanings for chresthai, ranging from consulting an oracle to feeling nostalgia or speaking.
The Greek verb chresthai and the middle voice reveal an immanent relation where the subject is both agent and the place of occurrence.
Redard's lexical examples include chresthai theoi meaning to consult an oracle, chresthai nostou meaning to feel nostalgia, and chresthai logoi meaning to speak. Because the object appears in the dative or genitive rather than the accusative, the subject acts as the seat of the process rather than targeting an external object.
The middle voice establishes a singular topology where the agent achieves an action while simultaneously affecting itself. This linguistic structure involves an action where the subject is both agent and the very place of occurrence, encapsulated by the formula il effectue en s'affectant.
Spinoza analyzed reflexive active Hebrew verbs to demonstrate an ontology of immanence where agent and patient are identical. He used the Ladino term pasearse, meaning to walk-oneself, as an example of an action of the self on the self. This movement of autoconstitution and autopresentation places agent and patient in a threshold of absolute indistinction.
Foucault's reading of Plato's Alcibiades identifies care-of-oneself not with soul-substance, but with taking care of the subject of a series of uses. Socrates uses chresthai to distinguish between the one who uses the body and the body itself, concluding that the user is the soul. Foucault interprets this to mean that the ethical subject is the subject of chresis, encompassing instrumental action, relationships, behavior, and attitudes.
Sadomasochistic practices reveal the truth of use by suspending the scissions between subject and object, agent and patient. Foucault described his experiences in California bathhouses as a creative enterprise involving the desexualization of pleasure and encounters with fleeting, present bodies.
3. Use of Oneself and Messianic Theory
Stoic self-familiarity and the Pauline messianic formula of the as not provide the paradigm for a non-proprietary use of life.
Stoic ethics functions as a doctrine of the use of life. Nature renders a living thing familiar to its own constitution through self-preservation. Con-sensation or synaisthesis proves this familiarity when humans and animals instinctively direct eyes to see.
Galen observes an elephant's proboscis. He realizes its perfection when seeing the animal use it like a hand and cross deep water.
Seneca argues in Letter 121 that infants and animals possess an innate capacity for use-of-oneself. This internal care and self-sensation forms the core of non-substantial selfhood. A child learning to stand falls and cries repeatedly until it trains itself to carry its own weight.
The Apostle Paul outlines a messianic theory of use that counterposes usus to dominium. You must inhabit socio-political conditions without claiming them as property.
Paul advises believers to apply specific rules:
- Do not be overly concerned about holding the social condition of a slave if called in it; rather make use of it.
- Live so that those who have wives are as not having them.
- Live so that those who mourn are as not mourning.
- Live so that those who rejoice are as not rejoicing.
- Live so that those who buy are as not possessing.
- Live so that those who use the world do so as not abusing it.
By treating conditions without possessing them, you deactivate and disappropriate the current form of the world.
4. Slavery and Technology
Medieval Scholastic theology invented the concept of the instrumental cause as a distinct category. The thirteenth century emergence of instrumental cause split the efficient cause into principal and instrumental agents. An axe used by a carpenter cuts wood by virtue of its sharpness while serving the carpenter's end of making a bed.
The theological paradigm of instrumental cause and the animate instrument provide the structural symmetry uniting ancient slavery and modern technology.
Thomas Aquinas applied the instrumental cause to the sacraments. Question 62 of the third part of the Summa Theologica outlines how water in baptism cleanses the physical body according to its proper power and simultaneously cleanses the soul as an instrument of divine power.
Aquinas explicitly equates the definition of the minister of a sacrament to Aristotle's animate instrument or slave. Assistants of a craftsman and slaves in a household operate as organum animatum. Unlike inanimate instruments, the animate instrument moves its own bodily members by will while remaining entirely subjected to another's end.
Francisco Suárez argued that divine instruments work through an unlimited obediential potential. This absolute instrumental efficacy serves as the conceptual model for modern technologies that incorporate commands into predetermined programs.
Slavery and technology form a structural symmetry in human history, both acting as thresholds of bare life that allow access to the truly human condition. Aristotle observed that if instruments could achieve work by themselves, masters would have no need of slaves. Ancient slavery provided living machines that temporarily blocked the development of technological instruments. The abolition of slavery in modernity freed up technology. Modern human beings have grown estranged from their animality and organic life, leading the hypertrophy of technological apparatuses to produce a new form of slavery.
5. The Inappropriable and Inoperativity
Justice and landscape emerge as an inoperative praxis where the world and the human body are experienced as fundamentally inappropriable.
Walter Benjamin jotted down notes on justice in 1916. He presented justice as an ethical category of the existent rather than the demanded. You can define use not as a negation born from voluntary renunciation, but as the direct relation to an inappropriable state of the world.
Husserl, Edith Stein, and Theodor Lipps attempted to defend the originarity of the body proper. Empathetic experiences show that impropriety and transcendence are co-originary with the body proper. Your body always casts an unshakeable shadow of foreignness.
You can observe acrobats walking suspended in the void and feel their bodies as if they were your own, a phenomenon discussed in Theodor Lipps's 1903 book Leitfaden der Psychologie and studied by Husserl.
Bodily experiences reveal a double movement where you are irremissibly consigned to the body yet incapable of assuming it. Emmanuel Levinas examined this condition in his 1935 book On Escape. Acute shame due to nudity and the desperate grip of nausea demonstrate that your most intimate part is foreign.
Language functions like the body through a polar tension between style and manner. While your mother tongue feels intimate, it is imposed from the outside. Poets must make language foreign through arbitrary rules, relying on a divine muse.
Landscape is an essential phenomenon of deactivation and inoperativity. You share a passion for elevated contemplation with animals. In landscape, environment elements are deactivated, transforming the world into an absolutely inappropriable dwelling place.
Petrarch's ascent of Mount Ventoux and Pliny's accounts of ancient Roman landscape appreciation illustrate classical topiographia and scenography. Augustine cited ancient humans contemplating landscapes during the fourth century. Heidegger taught these concepts during the winter semester of 1929-30 at Freiburg.
Modern privacy transforms your inappropriable relation to the self into a jealous possession. Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom and The 120 Days of Sodom expose how this biopolitical substance becomes an object of dominion.
Use is constitutively an inoperative praxis that deactivates the Aristotelian primacy of act over potential, allowing a human body to be opened to a new possible use.
By suspending potential rather than consuming it in an act, inoperativity exposes the pure potential of an activity. The operation of poetry exposes the potential of language, while painting exposes the potential of looking on canvas.
6. An Archeology of Ontology
First philosophy and ontology are not mere abstract doctrines. They open the originary historical space of human action and knowing through the articulation between language and world. Ontology carries the historical destiny of the West because it preserves the memory of anthropogenesis, the ongoing process by which human beings continuously become human or inhuman.
Western ontology is founded on an apparatus of being's division that separates primary essence from secondary essences.
Aristotelian ontology originates from distinguishing primary ousia, which is not said of a subject nor in a subject, from secondary essences like species and genera. This division of being into existence and essence forms the ontological difference that defines Western metaphysics. In the Categories, references such as 2a 10–15 and 2a 19–25 establish primary and secondary essences alongside the predication of names and definitions.
In Aristotle's Categories, logic and ontology are inextricably intertwined because being is always already in language. Ancient commentators debated whether the skopos of the Categories was words, things, or concepts, concluding that it deals with words insofar as they signify things by means of concepts. Consequently, categories function simultaneously as classes of predication and classes of being.
The promiscuity between the existentive and predicative meanings of the verb to be creates a double machine that generates aporias in Western ontology. Indo-European languages conflate the lexical function of expressing existence with the logico-grammatical function of the copula denoting identity. Western philosophy inherits this duality, struggling to reconcile existence and predication within a unified framework.
Human language possesses a presuppositional power that posits a non-linguistic referent as the underlying subject of discourse. When language names something, it presupposes a non-linguistic singular existent as a hypokeimenon that lies under every predication. The unsayable non-linguistic is actually a product of this linguistic category, functioning as the foundation upon which discourse is built.
Ontological apparatuses and political apparatuses correspond directly because the scission of being mirrors the division of life in the city. Just as being is divided into an inessential existent and an inexistent essence, living is divided into nutritive zoè and politically qualified bios. The historical failure of the ontological apparatus to articulate these divisions manifests today as the bare life of homo sacer, reflecting the De anima axiom at 415b 13 that being for the living is to live.
7. Theory of Hypostases and Modal Ontology
Late ancient hypostases and Spinoza's modal ontology replace static substance with immanent modifications and rhythmic temporality.
In classical writers like Hippocrates and Aristotle, the term hypostasis and its related verb referred to the solid residue left by liquids. Aristotle uses the term to signify the sediment of a physiological process in On the Parts of Animals at 677a 15 and excrement as the remainder of nourishment at 647b 28.
An epochal shift occurred between the second and third centuries CE when the term hypostasis entered first philosophy to designate existence as a fashionable term. Neoplatonic ontology replaced Aristotelian horizontality with a vertical structure where hypostases emanate from a transcendent One through a process of emanation called proodos. Plotinus describes in the fifth Ennead how the One abides unchanged while generating existence in act.
Trinitarian theology crystallized the hypostatic formula of one substance in three hypostases, shaping modern notions of individuality. Gregory of Nazianzus explains in Oration 21, 35 that the difference between Greek and Latin terminology was merely linguistic rather than a difference in faith. Augustine analyzes in book VII of De Trinitate VII.1 whether attributes and names refer to the Trinity in itself or to each singular divine person.
Spinoza established a radical modal ontology where substance and modes are the only existing realities, with God acting as an immanent cause expressing itself through modifications. Bayle's critique illustrated the pantheistic implication that God modified in ten thousand Turks kills God modified in Germans. Leibniz proposed the substantial bond on February 15, 1712 as an active ontological principle that unites monads into a corporeal substance without altering them internally.
Demand functions as a primary ontological category that unites and separates the logical and the real, acting as the tension between an entity and its sayability. Leibniz formulated the concept of existurientia in 1689 to show that existence is a demand of essence.
You can trace how a correctly understood modal ontology collapses the division between ontology and ethics. Heidegger's summer semester lectures at Marburg in 1928 emphasized that Dasein designates a being for which its own proper mode of being is never indifferent.
8. Form-of-Life and Destituent Potential
By disjoining bare life from sovereign power and exercising a destituent potential, human beings can attain an inseparable form-of-life.
A form-of-life is defined as a life that can never be separated from its form or reduced to bare life. Unlike modern concepts that isolate bare life from social identities, form-of-life is a life where singular modes of living are always possibilities and potential. This potential coincides directly with its essence, making happiness and politics immediately at stake.
Western politics is originally founded on the inclusive exclusion of human life in the form of bare life. Natural life is initially excluded from the city, but through this very exclusion-inclusion, known as exceptio, it becomes the foundation and prime referent of politics. Sovereign power operates by producing bare life as the originary political element, acting as a threshold between natural life and politically qualified life.
The Western juridico-political machine relies on a state of exception to articulate normative power and extrajuridical authority. The machine combines a normative element called potestas with an anomic, extrajuridical element called auctoritas. The state of exception establishes a threshold of undecidability between them. When these elements collapse into a single person and the exception becomes the rule, the system transforms into a killing machine.
Access to a different figure of politics requires destituent potential rather than constituent power, which remains trapped in a dialectic with constituted power. Constituent power always ends up captured and neutralized within the constituted power it creates. Destituent potential deposes the juridical order once and for all without aiming to establish a new law.
Walter Benjamin identified pure violence and destituent power in the proletarian general strike, which completes a subversion rather than merely inducing external modifications. Unlike political strikes that use violence as a means to force external concessions regarding working conditions, the proletarian general strike acts as a pure means. It rejects the cyclical dialectic of law-making and law-preserving violence by deposing the juridical order unconditionally.
Political emancipation requires the disconnection and disjunction of coupled elements rather than investigating the metaphysical mystery of their conjunction. Western politics traditionally links heterogeneous pairs such as bare life and power, or anomie and law. A destituent potential deposes these relations to produce a contact between elements characterized by an absence of representation and the exhibition of their null bond.
Saint Paul uses the verb katargein to mean rendering a power or the law ineffective and inoperative without abolishing its holy character. The as not formula describes a form-of-life that deposes social, juridical, and economic conditions simply by making use of them without founding a new identity.
Form-of-life coincides with the immanent inoperativity that deposes factical vocations. By rendering specific biological and social functions inoperative, contemplation frees human potential and makes humans available for politics and art.
10 Key Ideas
- Western politics depends on a foundational split between qualified political existence and mere biological life through a permanent state of exception.
- Aristotle defines the slave as a human being whose proper work or function is exclusively the use of the body.
- The Greek verb chresthai and the middle voice reveal an immanent relation where the subject is both agent and the place of occurrence.
- Stoic self-familiarity and the Pauline messianic formula of the as not provide the paradigm for a non-proprietary use of life.
- The theological paradigm of instrumental cause and the animate instrument provide the structural symmetry uniting ancient slavery and modern technology.
- Justice and landscape emerge as an inoperative praxis where the world and the human body are experienced as fundamentally inappropriable.
- Western ontology is founded on an apparatus of being's division that separates primary essence from secondary essences.
- Late ancient hypostases and Spinoza's modal ontology replace static substance with immanent modifications and rhythmic temporality.
- By disjoining bare life from sovereign power and exercising a destituent potential, human beings can attain an inseparable form-of-life.
- A destituent potential deposes the juridical order once and for all without aiming to establish a new law, freeing human potential for a new form-of-life.