Prospectus

We have seen several new horizons of the political. Bare life. Homo Sacer, that killable yet unsacrificeable man. The state of exception. Civil war.

Along the way, Agamben has provided us with nods to the analogue of language that maps with surprising symmetry on the framework of the political. The use of language is bound up with the state of exception and the homo sacer in this lens.

This volume thematizes language specifically for the first time in the Homo Sacer, a foretaste of the culminating convergences of these various themes that will ultimately take place when we reach IV.2.

Here we find the union of language, things, and God. An ambitious study, and all the more tantalizing for it.

---

Homo Sacer II.3: The Sacrament of Language

Paolo Prodi is the forerunner for this study along with, as it turns out, Emile Benveniste. Prodi's The Sacrament of the Oath proclaimed that the most central element to Western political history is the oath. Agamben finds this provocative statement inspiring but finds Prodi's study is undermined by the baggage of all the various disciplines it tries to accommodate and appease.

What is needed is a philosophical archeology of the oath.

Agamben turns first to excerpts from Lycurgus and Hierocles who argued more or less that oath has a power to hold all government together, not through virtue of creation, but through conservation and guarantee of what has already been brought into being.

This gestures toward the oath as a performative speech act which Beveniste had observed when he wrote on the nature of the oath. Even Cicero had described the oath in these terms, as providing a non-material force. The oath is concerned with the efficacy of a statement, its actualization.

Philo and the New Testament venerate the oath in the same way, where it became codified in church structures, leading to both Pufendorf and Hobbes claiming that the oath is the foundation of all law, being able to guarantee agreements. Hobbes argues that the assertative oath (testament of past events) is in fact merely a kind of promissory oath (guarantee of future events).

So the oath may be central to Western politics, but its origin remains nebulous.

Next Agamben turns to Dumézil. In his taxonomy of societal classes as priests, soldiers, and farmers, Dumézil argues that the scourge specific to the priestly caste is perjury--the dissolution of oral contracts.

The oath is then, as Hesiod observes, a necessary evil to alleviate (but not to fully remedy) perjury. For this scourge is not due to the weakness of men but of language itself, at least in how Agamben reads Hesiod.

This is when the method of philosophical archeology becomes pertinent. For a long time, this study had been determined and misled by linguistics and comparative grammar, striving to reach the earliest fringes of the past through language, such as the speculative constructions of proto Indo-European. But this arche in archeology, this beginning principle that is sought after, cannot be placed either within a chronological history or outside of time in a metahistorical frame contrasted to the historical narrative. Instead, the arche is a force working in history itself, living through its currents, and not fixated in one moment.

It because of this that the oath can only be understood if it is situated in a perspective that puts into question human essence as its capacity for language.

To better understand this, it should be recognized that historical linguistics is caught up in a dual method of (1) etymology on the one hand and (2) technical analysis on the other. Etymologically, the oath (horkos) is an enclosure, a barrier, and bond but technically is the forceful seizure of a sacralizing object. But Louis Gernet in taking up this investigation has stumbled where so many others have: by attributing an unknown given to magico-religious origins.

This is the primary point of contention Agamben takes up with prior scholarship which essentially cops out on a wide variety of questions of origins by attributing anything vaguely confusing to magic, religion, or sacred substance. In Agamben's view, this is a fairly common move among anthropologists but has bled over into historical linguistics and even Benvensite and Dumézil have not been able to keep themselves fully clear of this confusion.

We should not presuppose an ultimate primordial religious tendency of man because man has an equally primoridal tendency toward irreligion.

This unquestioned assumption stems from the missionary Codrington's visit to Melanesia rendering mana a mysterious mist to explain away much that exceeds the limits of Western comprehension.

There is no such thing as pre-law or pre-religion as domains that exist before the historical record begins. These are anachronistic projections. Rather one must posit that some x existed in this prior time which most likely had elements of what we would now associate with religion and law. However we must be extremely cautious in advancing any assertions about this primoridal x. Agamben notes that Mauss himself understood this quite well in identifying peculiar phenomena as something undecidable between the bounds of religion and law.

So what then is the origin of the oath? The first inscription, from the vase of Dvenos from the sixth century pledges a woman to her future husband, by swearing to the gods as witnesses. The oath from the beginning is an oath that guarantees the truth of an assertion, and this can be seen in Homer with Achilles' oath or when Aristotle testifies the first philosophers posited the river Styx as the oath of the gods.

Even the gods themselves are subject to the oath. It is not some sacred substance but rather a first principle that puts into question the conventional coordination of law and religion.

But we have yet to advance the question of this study. Agamben recommends two texts to assist in this.

First, Philo's Legum allegoriae which offers five theses in regards to the oath that God swears to Abraham in the Abrahamic covenant.

1. The oath is defined by the verification of words via facts
2. The words of God are oaths
3. The oath is the logos of God
4. Men do not swear by God but by his name
5. We know nothing God, only he is the being whose logoi are also his horkoi

This not only defines God but ties human language to divine language. The oath is the human attempt to speak as God speaks. God himself guarantees his word, so he is thus subject to the oath by anything that he says. It raises the question, is God reliable because of the oath or is the oath reliable because of God? Which has the greater power?

Second, Cicero's De Officiis 3.102-7 offers a commentary on Attilio Regolo who had been taken prisoners but had sworn to his captors that he would return to them if they let him free to return to Rome. In analyzing the ethical dilemma of breaking such an oath made under coercion, Cicero frames the primary principle not as a fear of incurring the gods' wrath if the oath is broken but of the breaking of trust. For Cicero, it is trust and faith (fides) which is the more fundamental institution.

The Roman religion is not a religion as we conceive but simply the removal of things from profane or commercial use, to be set asside for rituals that must be observed like the oath, so as to buttress the foundations of fides which undergird Roman society.

The oath is deeply linked to the notion of faith in the Greco-Roman world (pistis and fides). It is a trust that can be active or passive as we can accord it or receive it from someone. Fides is a verbal act, a rule and an oath where the sworn to abandons themselves to the trust of someone else. This concept became divinized through Numa Pompilius, again demonstrating the problematic conventional chronology of religion and law.

Aside from the institution of fides is the Roman institution of sacratio by which an oath is divinized in the sense that the words are excluded from the earthly world and consecrated to the gods. One can see here the parallels to homo sacer and the sacred as such.

Yet alongside the oath is always an implicit or explicit curse. To violate an oath is to submit oneself to a curse. There is always the threat of punishment when one makes an oath.

So the oath is composed of (1) an affirmation of some thing, (2) the invocation of gods as witnesses, and (3) a curse against perjury. As demonstrated in Plato's Critias, trust (pistis) and curse (sacratio-devotio) are tightly joined together.

Even if nearly all philosophical treatments of the oath contain some mention of the gods as witnesses, it is not altogether clear that they are in fact essential. Sometimes it is likened to a legal testimony, but an oath is not identical to the legal testimony as one does not take the stand when creating an oath. It is simply created and exhausted in the same moment. Neither can one claim that the gods guarantee the oath, for they do not operatively enforce it.

Rather, the oath is a verbal act which accomplishes the testimony by the mere fact of taking place, independently of gods or witnesses. The testimony of the oath is concerned with the very signification of language, the fact that words and things can and must be united for the oath to be fulfilled.

So if the gods do not belong by necessity in an oath, it is equally unclear how they participate in the curse. All such analyses of the divinized curse connection are stuck in the presupposition that the oath emerges from a magico-religious lens. Such spiritual dimensions are taken for granted, and authors do not seem to agree if the curse is its own institution, if it is subsidiary to teh oath, or if it is a form of dedication (devotio).

If is the case, we should bracket the gods from the definition of the curse. What then is truly at stake in a curse? For Ziebarth, the curse is manifested through the homo sacer as the scope of the law's reach. If this is so, then we must explore the genealogy of penal punishment.

But another angle should consider the double meaning of the divine names in the oath. On the one hand, the gods are witnesses of the oath but on the other the agents of punishment if such an oath were violated. We can best understand this through the concept of blasphemy. To blaspheme is to render the name of a god an interjection. There is no semantic content when stating the god's name in outrage, only intensity.

To pronounce the name of God in such a way is a form of perjury in that it separates words from things.

So in this light the curse sanctions the loosening of the correspondence between words and things through a broken oath. If the oath affirms the unity of words and things, its violation undermines it. The name of God which ordinarily guarantees this connection thus becomes the name of a curse. Hence why magical spells and incantations are words emptied of sense and chanted for nefarious purposes, devoid of meaning but imbued with power.

Conversely, religion and law are born as the attempt to secure and force trust by separating these institutions of blessing, sacrartio, oath, and perjury from one another.

Hermann Usener's Gotternamen in 1896 has come closest in interrogating the meaning behind the names of the gods. His study argues that the etymology of the divine names can be found in the activities that they oversee. The god merely becomes the name of the activity. The act of nomination (i.e. the naming of things) is divinized. Nomen is also numen.

Therefore the god is not the witness of the oath as much as the very event of language itself.

With the advent of monotheism, we see that the singular God is language itself. The name of God is language, as we see in Exodus. God is simply the experience of language. This is why Catholic theology ties the name of God to absolute, prue being itself as we see in Anselm's ontological argument and radicalized further by Alain of Lilla.

If this is the case, every oath is an affirmation of predication itself, a swearing on the name of God.

We must now rethink entirely the theory of speech acts. The performative produces a fact, thus the connection between words and things is not merely semantic or denotative as previously thought but performative in a self-referential way. Just as in the state of exception where the law susepnds its application to be in force, so language suspends it denotation (application) because it is in force through being connected with the things themselves.

Anselm's ontological argument is simply the statement that if speech exists then God exists through virtue of being language. Kant's pejorative ontotheology turns out to be the performative expression that the world as such exists. Metaphysics becomes the historical science of pure beign through the experience of the event of language. If God is dead, and his name withdraws from language, then words and things can no longer connect.

It is this introduced distinction between assertorial and promissory oaths that corresponds to the loss of the experience of speech. Foucault had labeled such things "veridictions", statements whose criterion is not logical but efficacy. If what it claims happens, it is valid. By making an oaht, the speaker stakes themselves in the truth of hte sworn assertion, as in a profession of faith.

However when veridiction is reduced to assertion, when the oath is converted to denotation, then the profession of faith becomes split. This is where perjury springs up. It is only because of this transformation that religion and law were invented to guarantee the trustworthiness of the word.

What then is vindicta in light of the oath? It comes etymologically from vim dicere (to show force). Yet, schoalrs are not clear on what exactly this force is. Given the findings of this investigation, it is clear that the force is none other than performantive speech. The veridiction of the oath.

So we can draw three conclusions from this study:

1. The oath is the original performative experience of the word. It can explain the origins of religion and law.
2. The oath is properly contextualized in trust. Monotheistic religions centralize faith in the word as the heart of religious experience. Yet when that performative experience of the profession of faith is converted into dogma, into creeds that are recited as assertions, it undergoes decline and perjury springs up. In reaction to this, the church has made use of violence and curses to solve for this perjury.
3. Oath and sacratio are related in their essence. Sacertas is the original performance of power which produces the killable and unsacrificable bare life. The oath is the consecration of a living human being through the word. The oath is not just a sacrament of language but a sacrament of power. Consequently, law is constitutively linked to the curse. Only a politics that can sever the word from the curse will be able to find new horizons for speech and law.

Levi-Strauss wrote in his study on Mauss that rupture between singifier and signified has created a tragic loss in the experience of language. As it turns out the false paradigm of the primoridal magico-religious force represents this rupture of language itself.

The problem is the efficacy and truthfulness of the word. Foucault once said that man is an animal whose politics place his existence as living being into question, so too is man the living being whose langauge places his life into question. The oath is situated at this intersection. It is when the living being for the first time is exposed to a choice between truth and lie, that it can swear an oath and thus stake itself in trustworthiness.

Every naming is a blessing or a curse, tied to the faithfulness of the oaht. It is the performative experience of the word that isolates the sacrament of language and can obligate living beings through force of law. The oath compels us to act in such and such a way.

But this modern age is the first without oaths in the historical sense. It loosens the bond which unites living beings to language which can mean both that the living being is reduced more and more to bare life while the spekaing being experiences the loose slippage of the word with ever greater precariousness. It is the breaking of the bond of life and langauge that causes perjury and lies to abound. So in response legislation is enacted to increasingly constrict and suffocate all life through strict reulation.

In all this, we can remember philosophy. Philosophy begins when it questions the primacy of names, when it asks "what is it", when it critiques the oath, and undermines this sacramental bond of power that links human beings to language.

---

In Review

Even in this volume as in the ones before and after, Agamben continues to employ an enviable breadth of source material, even if the engagement with these sources is from an analytical perspective superficial and reductive.

If the summary above feels disorganized and frenetically paced, it is because it mirrors the writing of this Homo Sacer volume which bounces around sources, ideas, and observations at various intervals before advancing the broader schema of the argument. If one were to subtract all the extraneous source material from this summary, they would have far a cleaner summary but far more denuded for it. One of Agamben's main advantages to the readers is the number of bibliographic touchpoints he offers, the number of themes and texts he ties together.

For today, let us consider four aspects of the archeology that leave room to be desired.

First, the selection of method.

Philosophical archeology is an intriguing choice to requisition from the Foucauldian arsenal, in light of how Foucault himself abandoned it for genealogy as his writings evolved.

So the deliberate choice to forego the supposedly more robust methodological successor for an earlier iteration seems indicative of a deeper strategic move.

To explain their respective differences relatively briefly, archeology is concerned with the conditions that form knowledge and kinds of discourse, categorized according to ruptures that break up the epochs of a discourse. For example the ways different eras discuss the existence of God or the ethics of wealth. Genealogy by contrast is concerned how power structures themselves shape not just knowledge but practices and day-to-day life. The subjection of bodies in biopolitics.

Archeology is a wise choice of method in order to bracket off certain kinds of questions and to scope an investigation down to a particular form of inquiry. It comes across as more neutral than the more critical and radical tendencies of genealogy. It frees you up from having to account for ethical or broader practical concerns, lending itself to precision.

On the whole, Agamben does execute upon the tenets of archeology in this volume. He selects an amalgam of documentary and textual evidence to analyze the formation of their statements from an action-producing standpoint, through the lens of the oath and the curse. He is not burdened by the vestiges of Victorian truisms and un-truisms like the anthropologists and linguists he is repsonding to. This is good and is the intended goal of pursuing archeology.

Yet it falls short methodologically in a number of other ways that are more central to the success of this endeavor.

Like in Homo Sacer I it is not clear if Agamben is scoping the philosophical archeology as a Western phenomenon, a Greco-Roman, or Greek vs. Roman. Most of the time, it seems like he is opting either to identify the Greek and Roman oath as one and the same but there are consistent homages to Hebraic or Germanic source material introduced in a sense that indicates they are in fact binding to determing the archeology of the oath. These various cultures seem to be collapsed into a unitary thing when convenient but without an attendant consideration of source material that would indicate the incumbent varieties that exist between these societies.

Despite the archeological focus on the analysis of statements and points of disruptions, what is strange is that Agamben does indeed analyze the oath in the tripartite (later bipartite) definition, but without any mention of an epochal shift that is typical of archeology. There is no specified point of disruption that would break this earlier episteme of the oath from a later one, although he gestures rather vaguely at such things in his conclusions.

At the end, Agamben simply asserts that the church creeds dogmatize and thus split the oath from its original purpose without any citation or reference to the statements of the creeds themselves. Nor does he offer a consideration of the contexts in which such creeds were spoken or how those would have developed, nor even less how such creeds structured knowledges and rules of discourse. All of which are extremely rich fields of investigation as one considers the church history of "orthodoxy". What is even more sloppy (and habitual) is the sanctimonious conclusion cited from Prodi how this is the first generation where we do not have an oath. Is this a third episteme? Why is such a claim exempt from archeological consideration? After all, archeology is considered with how the present is grounded through vestigial layers of past discourse.

This looseness is compounded by abrupt speculative gestures toward a sacrament of power and how this ties to biopolitics and bare life. The idea is that because the oath compels its speaker to keeping their promise, it is bound up with force and biopolitics by extension.

Philosophical archeology explicitly brackets such power-relation or normative considerations as out of the question in the interest of neutrality, but these pretensions are expediently cast aside by Agamben when they can be tied to the homo sacer's biopolitical stake, even though such a consideration is tied to genealogy, rather than archeology. It is a clumsy methodological jump which makes one wonder why archeology was selected in the first place.

Internal to the standards of philosophical archeology, this investigation seems far from complete or authoritative. Its integrity deteriorates further if we consider some of the reasons why Foucault abandoned archeology and moved toward genealogy. Part of this was its agnostic or deliberately blind view toward power structures, but even more than that is the ambiguity around what constitutes a "statement", its disinterest in embodied practice and tradition, its structuralist universalizing that ignores historical diversity or contingency, or human agency. All of which Dreyfus and Rabinow have treated with more suitable depth in their book on Foucault than I dare recapitulate here. All of these weaknesses seem applicable to evaluating the strength of this study of the oath.

Second, laying aside the methodological confusion and substandard selection of source material in establishing anything beyond speculative prolegomena, there is perhaps the single most incongruous piece of argumentation to grace the pages of Homo Sacer.

Agamben advances an enticingly ambitious contention that the gods/God mark the union of words and things as we see through the oath. The problem of signification and loss of trust thus extends from the death of God in modernity.

The champion argument of this contention is that a god's name is nothing but a linguistic variation of the activity they oversee (e.g. surmised from Usener's 1896 monograph), and because a god's being is simply their name, then the name of God is being itself, since God only exists in his name as the experience of language. At least in Agamben's telling.

It is a bizarrely disjointed syllogism whose individual parts do not subsist that well in themselves, and even less when linked together. Unfortunately, the argumentation is as equally fragmented in the original text as it must seem here in summary.

How can we be so deductively certain that a god's name is merely a linguistic variation of their jurisdiction? Does this hold for all gods? Are "gods" substantively the same across all cultures? How can we pass this principle from polytheistic paganism to monotheism? Why is all monotheism subsumed under the Judeo-Christian God?

It is not clear how one can begin to make the logical migration from "a thing is named for what it does" the "thing is nothing but its name" as Agamben does here when simultaneously he shifts from paganism to the Judeo-Christian God. Most charitably, there is likely an unarticulated premise here that is tied to Agamben's elevation of language as an ultimate principle. That somehow the name of the divine is equatable to the being itself. This is in fact what he claims is the real force of Anselm's ontological argument, and Kant's pejorative ontotheology, but this seems a strained Heideggerean twist, of the vein that asserts that nothing exists outside language.

Less charitably though more understandably, this logical twist if the lynchpin of the main argument that drives the entire investigation of Homo Sacer II.3, that language is the true divine that precedes religion and law through the oath which binds language and things. To reach the conclusion that Agamben is committed to insofar as it fits into his particular schematism (sacrament of langauge, the inclusive exclusion of language as parallel to law), he needs to arrive at a place where language is God, and this is how he accomplishes it.

Beyond the thrust of this volume, there are broader stakes at well. Looking ahead, Homoe Sacer II.4 will be concerned with an "economic reading of God", i.e. the Trinity as an internal administration defined by the logic of domestic relations rather than political logic. An emphasis on action not unlike performative speech, a de-emphasis on indeterminate being. Agamben will derive early Christian thought from Stoic theology, particularly how it frames the modes or ways of God as an acting being, a providential God. Before he proceeds to explore the "aporias" of monotheistic providence. Then in IV.2, Agamben will attribute greatest ultimacy to im-potentiality, the ability to not become.

If Agamben is thinking of the Thomist formula of actus essendi, that act is the fundamental principle of being where God is actus purus, it is perhaps this linguistic determination that God is only the language of action that he is seeking for here in II.3 to frame as the anti-norm juxtaposed to the Spinozist God he prefers, the God who does not act but who is in all things. Part and parcel of the modal ontology Agamben is ultimately committed to. Yet if the ideas of II.4 are held up to the conclusions in II.3, it does not seem like their respective considerations of divine action have intentional or even incidental overlap. Some of these may be similar terms and concepts, but the questions are markedly different and the considerations of the respective studies are not brought to bear upon one another.

None of this justifies the execution of the argument, but it does give shape to perhaps what Agamben imagined in outline.

In either case, it is a shame that while Agamben does tease us with a very fruitful set of questions regarding the meaning of God's name and how God relates to the oath, the fruit is a somewhat vacuous and non-descript study whose questions are far more interesting than its answers.

Peculiarly, he also ignores what his sources explicitly say on these questions. Though he quotes from Hesiod and Plato's Critias, he passes over in complete silence Hesiod's Theogeny which provides an extensive catalogue of the names of Gods and their functions. Also unmentioned is Plato's Cratylus which is solely concerned with the question whether names are due to nature or arbritrary convention, also providing a catalogue on the linguistic etymology of divine names.

Agamben gestures to a need for a science of names--onomastics--but such questions have clearly been explored in the philosophical tradition. This would make sense if this were a strict philosophical archeology which is concerned with statements rather than philosophical assertions, but Agamben draws upon an electric range of assertions of selective ancient philosophical and literary texts far too frequently for this to be the case.

To make such grand sweeping claims about the ontology of the divine names without at least surveying or mentioning Pseudo-Dionysius' The Divine Names (which he does reference in II.4, chapter 6) or the work of Henry of Ghent or the incredibly nuanced and sophisticated treatment of Duns Scotus is rather surprising. It would be more understandable if he were an analytic thinker or concerned with modern thought but because he is very familiar with these writers who do treat this question (he will provide us with an exhaustive review of patristic literature in II.4), and even quoting them in future volumes, the oversight is less understandable.

Beyond this mis-executed logicla lynchpin though there are two overarching dimensions of this volume we will assess.

Third, the problems surrounding Agamben's rendering of the sacred.

This is a continuation of a theme first begun in Homo Sacer I.2 where Agamben reviewed the conventional scholarly conception of "the sacred", begun first in Victorian anthropology and inherited through French sociology, even surfacing in "postmodern" figures such as Bataille and Benveniste.

The main idea of Agamben's critique is that there a largely uninterrupted tradition across multiple disciplines which consistently traces historical, linguistic, sociological, etc. phenomena to a "magico-religious" root that lies beyond the limit of investigation. It is a presumption that every social phenomenon is grounded on this time out of mind backdrop which is necessarily spiritual, nebulous, and inexplicable.

In Homo Sacer I he attributes this to William Robertson Smith, but here he points to the missionary work of Codrington who spun up the mystical term mana as a catch-all term for phenomena incomprehensible to Western ears. He finds it to be an incredibly weak and disruptive presence in true scholarly work.

There is no doubt that, if Agamben is fair in his presentation of the views of the cited scholars, then he is absolutely correct in the unwarranted position that the "magico-religious" holds as the ultimate explanatory mechanism for all cultural phenomena that seem resistant to analysis. This is in fact a worthy position to launch an investigation from, and it is clear here more so than in Homo Sacer I why he has taken up the specific task of finding a new meaning for sacer.

That being said, his attempts to displace this originary magico-religious principle are nearly as loaded with presumptions as the tradition he wishes to correct.

In the context of this investigation, Agamben offers various arguments against this scholarly mystique.

The first argument he states is that man is as prone to irreligion as he is to religion. Depending on whether he means religion in the conventional or in his technical sense he introduces later, there is perhaps a case to be made for this perspective, but it should not be left at brute assertion as he does here. This would amount to attacking one foundational presupposition with another.

It also would not immediately follow that a tendency toward irreligion would produce the same effects (i.e. institutions) as a tendency toward religion. Not all human tendencies are alike.

The second argument is based on a questionable rescoping of his definition of the oath to exclude the spiritual, moving from a threefold to a twofold definition.

Agamben initally offers a tripartite definition of the oath as (1) an affirmation of something (2) with the gods invoked as witnesses (3) where a curse will befall the speaker if the oath is broken. From here he provides a large catalog of ancient authors' definitions of the oath, nearly all of whom explicit include the criterion of divine witness to make an oath an oath.

Yet, Agamben removes the definitional requirement of divine witness based on the following reasons.

One, these authors treat the oath like a testimony. But this is not a testimony at all. A testimony requires someone to "take the stand" and pronounce their words. The oath does not have such a moment as the performative affirmation occurs in the utterance of the oath itself, regardless of taking a stand.

Two, if one claims that the gods function as guarantors of the oath, this is illogical because they do not enforce the fruition of the oath.

Three, if one claims that the gods operate as enforcers against perjury by punishing the oath-breaker with a curse, this is also false because ancient sources are not in agreement on whether the gods do this.

These are odd reasons. The first seems to rest upon an unarticulated or uncited semantic overlap between how authors in antiquity discuss or perhaps conflate the "oath" or "testimony". But this is not ennumerated with sufficient clarity to accept on its own. The second is a fair critique if one assumes that to be a witness of the oath means you must be bound up with ensuring its completion, but this is an assumption, and this reason on its own does not dismiss ancient testimonies that the oath must invoke divine witness.

The third reason is weakest of all because it is predicated on the logical inference that if multiple authors spread across cultures and centuries disagree on one question (i.e. do the gods inflict a curse for oath-breaking?), then the question itself is invalidated.

Outside of these reasons, Agamben fails to sufficiently argue why we can simply choose to ignore the divine witness as part of the oath-making process when it is so ubiquitous not only in the textual but also the practical tradition. It is effectively a deliberate avoidance of "practices" which is supposed to be a neutral foundation for archeological analysis.

It is clear to see from the broader architecture of Agamben's argument which hopes to prioritize language over the spiritual, why it would be important to de-spiritualize the essence of the oath to support this jump, but the lack of effort in establishing such a philosophical shift is disappointing even if it is an intriguing thesis.

This lack of effort is more striking once again when it comes to the handling of the sacred, particular in reference to its source material.

Much could be said on how the spiritual is precluded altogether in Agamben's frame with a degree of narrowness comparable to the Victorian rationalism he seeks to dethrone. Or how the edge case of homo sacer is granted undisputed decision-making power over the definition of the sacred, without any acknowledgement of how ancients and medievals employed such terminology, before the invention of modern anthropology.

All questions that ought to be considered if Agamben aspires to advance his theory of the sacred beyond speculative philosophy.

Even interpreting this volume as a form of prologue, what remains a deeply missed opportunity is Agamben's treatment of sacramentum. We have a brief glance at the Roman sacratio as it ties to the institution of course, but very strangely, we have no etymological analysis of the functional usage of the Roman sacramentum, and how Tertullian explicitly founds Christian sacramentology upon the Roman soldier's oath (sacramentum). Even more curious considering Tertullian will be one of the most cited authors of Homo Sacer II.4.

Although Agamben espouses that he will surmount the heights of this concept of the sacred, he contents himself with a side slope, and the peak never reaches his field of vision, though he concludes that he has reached it because he can see past the other side of this illusion.

For an author so schematically focused like Agamben, he has missed an excellent opportunity to capitalize on his own themes by calling attention to the Roman roots of Christian sacramentology, particularly as he could not only leverage it to describing institutions and practices of the sacrament of power, but it would neatly dovetail into the foremost concern of Homo Sacer II.4 which is concerned with the administrative activity of God and the distinction between Kingdom and Government. We will not revisit this missed point in that investigation, but he simply leaves the sacramentology theme undeveloped in that volume as well as this.

The "sacrament" of Homo Sacer II.3 is its own form of given, in some ways worse off than the magico-religious given of prior thinkers. For at least the magico-religious given was received from tradition, from precedent even if a blind one. The meta-historical linguistic turn is wrapped in an equally mystique-cloaked assemblage, but an enigma produced from the Agambenic mind.

And this brings us to the last dimension we should consider, the linguistic turn.

To reiterate, Agamben states that the monotheistic God (embarrassingly structuralist assumptions here) is merely a product of the experience of the event of language. It is the oath as the originary element which produces law and religion, not the other way around.

Whether from Benveniste or Heidegger, there is clearly much here, but it is a cosmic paradign shift attempted with little direct effort beforehand to support the vaulting leap nor much subsequent effort to stabilize the landing. One can only assume the foreground and background of this venture.

It should be obvious at this stage to any reader why such a move is attempted with so little dexterity or rigor: to fill the needs of Agamben's broader schematic.

It is an extremely cursory dodge that shoe-horns this entire volume into the "investigation of bare life" project, but that aside, it is clear that much of this study has already been presupposed because of the conclusions that Agamben needs to reach by the end which extend the paradigm of law and state of exception to language, something he has fairly frequently hinted at preceding volumes. That there is an inclusive exclusion occurring in language as in the bare life of law.

Which of course is an additional problem that not only ignores the empirical variety of what is out there, but is overly determined in its theoretical structure in such a way that directly contradicts the Foucauldian mission statement of philosophical archeology. Archeology as a neutral assessment of statements and the conditions of knowledge production, free of presumption and theoretical end-goals. The very method Agamben claims to leverage as an independent "veridiction" of his own claims.

Beyond that, the privileging of denotative language over "assertion" is fairly standard in late continental theory, but the philosophical pretensions of such claims here remain not only unexamined but unexplained.

To be more specific, Agamben gives a nearly total form of ultimate priority to the performative speech act but without any in-depth consideration of what constitutes performative speech. Not to be glib, but there is a sense in which any and all language is performative.

Is Agamben merely opting to inherit a pre-establish speech act theory, and its concomitant baggage, that one finds with early Foucault or Benveniste or even Searle?

The performative is not given or self-evident in the way that Agamben describes, and it does not help that he provides no paradigmmatic examples of ancient oaths in an archeological sense so that we can examine production of these statements. He examines the utterances briefly of an inscription, of Achilles, and a handful of others cases, but these are fundamentally decontextualized.From there he could tease out, even if briefly, the theoretical parallels between philosophical archeology and speech act theory.

This is not to say that Agamben is uniquely at fault for such ambiguity as the early Foucault equally struggles on this front. Yet the ambiguity is more decisive for Agamben because of the tantamount importance he gives this linguistic turn in overturning the magico-religiou paradigm and the activity of naming which he considers theogeny. Everything comes to rest on it.

The last issue to end on is the same problem we have found in the concluding remarks of other volumes before this one. Whatever the fruit of Agamben's studies, he never ceases to take it as an opportunity to call for something vaguely radical to overcome what he has uncovered in the study.

Deactivating the law by decoupling it from force. Acceding to terrorism to balance the duality of economy and polity.

Here, Agamben makes two normative claims.

First, the transition from denotative, skin-in-the game oath language to creedal assertion is the tragic cause of perjury. Lies abound when people are reduced to using assertion-based language. The sacrament of power is the forced recitation of church creeds, and this is the root cause of perjury.

Second, the oath is bound to the curse which introduces coercion and power which forces the speaker to keep their word. It is only by unbinding the curse from the oath, to make the word non-binding, that we can explore a new world much like how the deactivation of the law will render new possibilities for us.

Neither of these conclusions make functional or theoretical sense, but they are fairly standard for how Agamben likes to conclude things. As before, they contradict key claims or themes introduced throughout the study. In this iteration, while Agamben offers rhetorical laments for the decline and fall of high trust societies as the oath is abandoned, yet at the same time he wishes for the oath to be deconstructed to free us of the "sacrament of power". It is not quite clear what Agamben genuinely views as normative unless these concluding asides are bracketed. Which we can do here again until a superior explanation presents itself.

Despite the critiques presented of this volume, it should not go unacknowledged that Agamben has truly pioneered some ground-breaking questions and has drawn attention to a fundamentally problematic scholarly presupposition. It is this with his refreshing introduction of new source material that we can find a task sufficiently formulated to explore. What cannot be said is that the source material, method, or conclusions Agamben has employed can be anything decisive.