Prospectuss

The Homo Sacer project has been concerned so far with the political phenomena that offer case studies of the homo sacer and the broader cross-disciplinary schematism of inclusive exclusion and suspension of force that characterizes much of Agamben's thought.

According to the numbering of this project, we have proceeded from the state of exception through the civil war to the oath to see how these forces play out in different spheres.

II.4 is a turning point in which the relatively isolated episodic studies that have joined us previously are subsumed into a larger continuous narrative that carries us through II.4, II.5, IV.1, and IV.2.

Agamben's starting point in this continuous thread is a technical sense of the economic and how its foundations have shaped theology and politics across the Western tradition. This paves the way for much of the study to follow, as we shall soon see.

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Homo Sacer II.4 - The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government

Western power consistently assumes the form of oikonomia. Foucault had opened this thread though left it unexplored in his investigations of governmentality.

We can trace this back to the debates of Trinitarian theology which articulates the double structure of auctoritas and potestas explored in II.2 but now forms a distinction between Kingdom and Government.

The ink spilled over discursive analysis of popular sovereignty and rule of law is ultimately beside the point, and we can find in the Christian liturgy itself the dynamics of power and glory that found Western politics, most especially modern democracy and its empty throne.

This framing has blinded us to our true potential and by profaning this empty throne of Glory, we can make room for something new, an inoperative form of life.

This is the course of Agamben's argument as he lays it out in the introduction.

To do this we must draw out the distinction between political theology which grounds earthly sovereignty in transcendent divine authority while economic theology is concerned with the immanent ordering of local phenomena and activity. The former is the traditional theory of sovereignty, the latter is the basis of biopolitics.

A starting point is one debate between Erich Peterson and Carl Schmitt that took place across articles and books spread across decades over the nature of political theology.

Both thinkers were Catholics with ties to National Socialism. Both believed in the Second Coming, and both believed this eschatological end of time was suspended. The cause of this suspension was where they differed.

Schmitt believed it was the lack of a total Christian Empire while Peterson believed it was the Jews' refusal to convert to Christianity. Furthermore, Peterson believes political theology for Christianity is impossible.

He establishes this argument by affirming with Aristotle that the principle of all things must be single and unitary, unlike a pluralist thinker like Speusippus who believed in competing original principles. In this vein, we must see God as the archetype of theological monarchy, a transcendent agent who sits unmoved behind the scenes.

It was the Jewish thinker Philo, in Peterson's view, who invented political theology by reducing God's sovereignty to earthly sovereignty with geopolitical interests and constraints.

This framework entered Christianity through the Arianism debate and a split between a theological-political, monarchic paradigm and a Trinitarian one. Agamben finds this conclusion abruptly brief considering the pacing the larger book, and he turns to one specific citation Peterson draws from Gregory of Nazianzus. Ironically this same passage is cited by Schmitt to make the exact opposite claim.

The three most ancient opinions concerning God are Anarchia, Polyarchia, and Monarchia. The first two are the sport of the children of Hellas, and may they continue to be so. For Anarchy is a thing without order; and Polyarchy is like civil war, and thus anarchical, and thus disorderly. For both of these tend toward the same thing, namely disorder; and this to dissolution, for disorder is the first step to dissolution. But Monarchy is that which we hold in honor. It is, however, a Monarchy that is not limited to one Person, for it is possible for Unity if [it is] at war with itself to come into a condition of plurality; but one which is made of an equality of Nature and a Union of mind, and an identity of motion, and a convergence of its elements to unity—a thing which is impossible to the created nature—so that although numerically distinct there is no severance of Essence. Therefore Unity having from all eternity arrived at Duality by motion, found its rest in Trinity. This is what we mean by Father and Son and Holy Spirit. The Father is the Begetter and the Emitter; without passion of course, and without reference to time, and not in a corporeal manner. (Select Orations XXIX, 2, p. 301)

Agamben points out that Nazianzus' main concern here is the reconciliation of the metaphysical terminology of substance as a unity with the threefold nature of the Trinity.

To do so, he elaborates a stasiology which explains the Trinity in political terms.

What Peterson does not mention is that Nazianzus concludes that the discourse of economy is the way to understand God's revealed nature, an economy designed to prevent a stasiological fracture.

What Peterson neglects over the course of his whole study is the economic language so frequently invoked across the patristic writers.

Instead he passes over to Trinitarianism as only possible foundation for politics, and liturgy as political action.

It is prudent then to understand what the economic (oikonomia) meant for these writers.

In Pseudo-Aristotle's treatise on Economy, he defines oikonomia as administration of the house, completely distinct from political science.

Economic relations are determined by activity, not by strict causal rules as in science. The Greeks used oikonomia to refer to the internally driven self-regulating force of the world, the homeostasis of the human body, or within rhetoric to describe the organization of a speech.

It is the rhetorical sense that first is transposed into Chrisitanity in describing the economy of the divine plan of salvation like a masterpiece in rhetoric. It does not gain an independent theological sense here but is only denoted from the meaning of other domains.

Scholars claim that Paul is the first theologian of oikonomia in a technical sense, but this does not bear out in Agamben's reading as he simply employs the metaphorical meaning of divine plan or the domestic organization of the messianic community (rather than as a political community). This falls in line with his typical and frequent usage of household language. Agamben then reviews the usages of the term across Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Tatian, Athenagoras, and Irenaeus arguing that they use this term in a generic, non-technical sense, borrowing its semantic meaning from broader cultural usage.

The first true technical, theological articulations of oikonomia emerge with Hippolytus and Tertullian even if they themselves do not seem cognizant of it. Hippolytus' usage adopts a Stoic understanding of being where God is a monadic power of various activities (dynamis). Tertullian without any explanation flips Paul's expression "economy of the mystery" (cf. Ephesians 3:9, Colossians 1:25, 1 Corinthians 4:1) and describes it as "mystery of the economy".

In context, Tertullian is attempting to establish an analogy which rejects the anti-Trinitarian monarchical language of his opponents, and so he resorts to the language of household administration to describe the simultaneous unity yet distinct activity of the Trinity. He then extends this concept of administration to refer to angels as ministers of God's will, thus establishing a compatibility between monarchy (God as head of household) and economy (the active execution of God's will).

This economic paradigm would become more decisively integrated into Christian terminology through Clement of Alexandria who speaks very frequently in terms of oikonomia, including the "economy of the savior" which binds economy and providence together through the salvific work. Unlike pagan mythology where the nature of the gods directly flows into the causal chain of the world, Christian theology interjects a divine will that is distinct from nature. The Christian God has immediately both economy and providence. He wills actions such as self-revelation, salvation, adn government of the world. This is critical for Clement who juxtaposes this to the inert, pantheistic God of Gnosticism.

However, while oikonomia was introduced to avoid a fracture between God as one and the Trinity as three, this merely defers the ontological fracture by moving it from the level of being to the level of God's relation to his activity.

Aristotle's unmoved mover by contrast has no split between being and praxis. One simply results from the other. But now that the Christian God as an economic unity is entirely different from the government of the world, we have to account for new problems that pantheistic frameworks do not have. How can a transcendent God thus relate to an immanent world? How does he govern the world? This is the mystery, the mystery revealed through Christ as salvific praxis.

Free will and the question of God's will now becomes the central problematic of Christian thought. God's will seems to be stronger than his omnipotence. How can being and action be related to one another in the Godhead? This would continue to evolve through Aquinas' idea of God as pure act further through Schelling and Nietzsche in their totalization of the will, as Heidegger points out. A concept of will that was born out of Neoplatonism and the Christian orthodox reply to Gnostic thought.

This new dichotomy illustrates far more clearly the true issue of the Arian debate. Arius was not arguing about when the Son is generated or where he ranks in the Trinity, but rather how he is generated. Is Christ generated from the Father or is he without principle (anarchos). Arius pushes for a Christ who is generated before all time out of the principle (arche) of the Father. The Nicene thesis by contrast affirms Christ as anarchic like the Father. If Christ is anarchic, then language and praxis are not founded in being but rather in economy.

Later, Gregory of Nazianzus would introduce a distinction into the logos a distinction between economy and theology, arguing that the confusion of the two would amount of the heresy of Monophysitism. This distinction emerges again in modern theology in the categories of immanent and economic Trinity, and the underlying tensions between them. Monotheletism also indicated the difficulty of thinking this problem by trying to reunite a single operative will in Christ, while Maximus the Confessor affirmed the necessary distinction between theology and economy in the two wills of Christ so that the unity of Christ is not undermined. Theology is forced to grapple with this dualism at every turn.

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The myth of the Fisher King exemplifies a paradigm of divided, impotent sovereignty. A king who reigns in a theoretical sense but is excluded from concrete acts of governance. This image is a starting point for a new understanding of the political.

Peterson and Schmitt both had their interpretations on this idea of a king who reigns but does not govern. Petersen affirms it through casting God as the strategist or general operating behind the schemes in his general reign over the world, insparable from his power, Peterson's portrait bearing deep parallels with Patristic oikonomia. Schmitt is deeply committed to the rejection of the idea of a king who reigns but does not govern. He argues that Peterson has unwittingly articulated liberalism's detachment of kingdom and government through the theological distinction of arche and dynamis. Schmitt believes the two must be kept undivided, power cannot be divided from its exeuction. Anticipating Foucault, Schmitt seeks to rehabilitate a Catholic sense of government as taking care of the populace.

How did this split of Kingdom and Government come about?

Theologically, it begins with Numenius who was a major influence on Eusebius. Numenius argued that there is a fully inoperative, transcendent god and a second, lower god who is active in the government of the world. This is a reflection of Gnosticism's dualism between the inactive God and active demiurge. Numenius derives this regal metaphor of divinity from Platonism in thinking through the links between divinity and kingship. The active god is dependent upon the inoperative god, the Son who carries out the salvific work is dependent upon the will of the Father. Christian oikonomia is the attempt to incorporate this Gnostic dualism into orthodoxy and overcome it.

Philosophically, it begins with Aristotle's Metaphysics L where Aristotle's final chapter confusingly moves from discussing the name of theology to the problem of how the good and the world are related. Commentators such as Aquinas and William D. Ross have their interpretations but both miss how Aristotle is attempting to coordinate transcendence and immanence in a single bipolar system that is fundamentally economic. A power that holds transcendence and immanence together.

What is key to this passage is the term taxis. Aristotle does not provide a definition of this term but offers two metaphors, one of an army and one of a house. The idea is that order necessarily implies an immanent, reciprocal relation. It is in this section that Aristotle is concerned with the object of metaphysics as separate being versus the question of being qua being. Order remains the mechanism that relates these two objects. To coordinate transcendence and immanence, one must split the object of metaphysics by displacing the category of substance to a practical layer built on the category of relation. This works because relation is not defined scientifically according to binding rules but through the exemplified interactions of economic activity.

It is from this starting point that Christianity would enshroud order as the central concept of transcendent being, particularly in Aquinas who inadvertently discovered its most radical aporia. By making order the fundamental ontological concept, Aquinas is not able to establish a clear founding relation between the two and falls into circular reasoning. Things are ordered in that they have a specific relation among themselves, however that relation can only be understood in terms of how an individual things is related to the divine. Things are ordered because they are related to God, but that relation can only be expressed through how things are reciprocally related to one another. The transcendent and immanent thus refer back to one another in a perfect circle that is the foundation of medieval ontology.

As an aside, Augustine had presaged this problem in his commentary on Genesis where he points out that God's rest on the seventh day of creation entails a special kind of inoperativity as a complete supsension of God's activity would cause creation to buckle. It is this attempt to think through the senses in which God does and does not act that stumps successive theologians and by extension the political theorists of modernity.

The distinction between Kingdom and Government emerges in full force with Aquinas' twofold distinction between creation as the act of first cause and the conservation of creation through occasional, secondary causes. Primary causes are those general principles that govern the laws of nature. Secondary causes are downstream of first causes and render specific effects. God can intervene and directly will a secondary causes to create a miracle. It is in this Thomist sense of primary and secondary causes that the doctrine of general and special providence would emerge, following the Neoplatonic distinction between transcendence and immanence. God reigns through general providence but does not govern except through exceptional intervention in special providence.

The political sense of this distinction emerges in the concept of rex inutilis in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In a letter from Pope Gregory VII to Hermann of Metz, they discuss the deposition of Childeric III, the last Merovingian king known for his incompetence. This debate would continue with Hugh of Pisa justifying certain forms of quiet deposition by arguing that the office (dignitas) of the monarch was separate from its activity (administratio). An insane or useless king could still bear the title even if others governed on his behalf.

Alongside this, the debates of the period between secular and ecclesiastical power never questioned the fact that they should be split, only their respective jurisdictions. The two swords, Giles of Rome argued, indicate the twofold nature of power as (1) the drawn sword of executed spiritual power and (2) the sheathed sword as the commander. One sword is kept sheathed so that it is not tainted with earthly affairs. The drawn sword takes the earthly into its care.

Another example of this split is the distinction between absolute and ordered power in God where God has absolute omnipotence to do anything he wants but restricts what he can actually do into ordered power so that he does not violate his nature. Matthew of Acquasparta went as far to say that God was unable to create man unless man were able to sin because it would compromise his providential government of the world. God's ordered impotence makes a righteous government of the world possible.

It is this framework that clarifies Ockham's position that God's power is undivided but articulated in two different aspects: absolute and ordered. The absolute power of the Kingdom goes beyond the ordered power of Government, a difference that Scotus will elaborate for describing exceptional powers both divine and political.

With this double aspect of Kingdom and Government articulated, it is time to return to Foucault who posed the question of governmentality in his course "Security, Territory, Population". He argues there are three primary modes of power for the territorial state: the legal system with normative codes and force, the disciplinary devices correspond to modern decentralized institutions of discipline, and the security apparatus that manages populations through goverment. Foucault derives the governmental dimension from Christian pastoral care which is concerned both with the people as a whole as well as of individuals. This is the foundation of the totalization of hte modern State.

Agamben points out that while Gregory of Nazianzus is quoted in this lecture to describe the economic pastorate, Foucault completely bypasses the theological implications of this statement. The rupture of being and praxis does not occur in modern science and the State as Foucault opines but in the ontology of God himself. Aquinas can only push this division out to the transcendent and immanent orders aligned within ordinatio and executio powers. Even though Foucault does cite Aquinas' De Regno he neglects Aquinas' primary treatment of governmentality in De gubernatione Dei. He never mentions the concept of providence at all even though it is the New Science which radicalizes it through the works of Kepler, Galileo, and Ray.

Foucault's thesis that political government emerges from counter-practices to the pastorate is not convincing for Agamben who believes it is much better formulated through the theory of the bipolar machine of divine government which simply passes over from theology to politics. Archeological research needs to take into account the genealogical account of a political concept or institution even if this is a cross-disciplinary investigation. Theology and political theory feed into each other in the medieval mind, and so any analysis of medieval or early modern political thought depends upon a robust understanding of theological foundations.

The question of providence is pertinent here in that the debate ranged over whether God governs through the universal laws of nature without the exertion of his divine will or if God's provision extends down to particular and individual things. Deism evolved out of a rejection of special providence to solve these questions while theism has held on to it which issues in its own set of problems. If Kingdom and Government are divided within God, he would have an impotent sovereignty on the one hand and an infinite series of particular acts of providence on the other. They must be coordinated on some level in the bipolar governmental machine.

The relation of providence to the existence of evil is a parallel question which was first formulated by Chrysippus who was even cited by Leibniz in his much later debate with Bayle on this subject.

Christian thought has wrestled this out in relation to Stoicism. Alexander of Aphrodisias problematizes providence by arguing that a deity who is serving the needs of creatures would be a lower rank than they are and this would compromise his majesty. God is too high to play this role. Jerome also argued this as well, albeit in an aside.

Alexander introduces a third kind of providence, that of a calculated, collateral effect. God knows how causes play out and he can calculate the care of the world through the arrangement of causes. This preserves his transcendence but maintains a certain level of activity in government.

By contrast, Stoicism links providence to fate which itself is both a substance and an activity (energeia), at least in Plutarch's view. Plutarch employs a legal analogy to relate general and particular fate, arguing that civil law does not address individual scenarios but arranges the adjudication of all cases under universal conditions and principles, just as fate establishes the general natural laws by which particular events occur. Everything conforms to destiny in this sense but because phenomena necessarily are derived from their results but rather from their calculated cause and effect.

Plutarch then extends this into providence which he places on three layers: the intellection of the primary god, the providential god of destiny and the minor gods, and the providence created after destiny which is carried out by the daemons who oversee human actions. The splicing of these levels of providence introduce ambiguity which in turn problematizes the concepts of the colateral and efficacy, replacing the Aristotelian notion of final cause. A zone of indifference is created between primary and secondary prvoidence, general and special. It is worth noting that modern science is predication upon this juxtaposition of first cause and laws of nature resulting in the continuou unfolding of proximate events in their absolute contingency.

Alexander refutes the Stoic determinist position by arguing that human tics or random events do not fit into anything that could be regarded as a final, cosmic plan. Furthermore, even one single un-accounted for movement or change could destroy this entire framework planned from the beginning of time which cannot accept a single iota of deviation.

This question is again picked up by Proclus who affirms divine knowledge and government of both the whole of creation and of individuals, believing that angels provide ministerial administration to the execution of particular acts of God. Boethius would prepurpose this in his own writings which would then be cemented as the given of medieval philosophy.

Aquinas establishes a theological paradigm of government from this model, arguing that because governmental order is opposed to random chance, things need to be governed in order to have material conservation but also to reach their teleological ends. If nature was fully self-sufficient independent of God's government, then there would be no need for government, so it must play some role.

The two questions for Aquinas are to identify if God is active in every agentic cause and if God has the power to do something outside the created order. His answer is that God does not modify first causes (the Kingdom) but through the contingency of creation (Government). He can thus remain both immanent and transcendent.

From this bipolar articulation comes the split where executive power is delegated through angelic ministers. Divine knowledge may continue down to the smallest particulars but the execution of government requires subordinate agents to God's will.

Aquinas frames these exceptional acts as dispositio that stem from an economic sense of relation rather than substance. And when it comes to rational creatures, God operates through grace so that he does not violate the rational nature of human beings.

From this foundation would come centuries of debate on the nuances and kinds of grace.

From all this we see that both ecclesiastical and secular power reflect the vicarious non-presence of God's governance in a pre-eschatological time. The anarchic Son is not ontologically grounded in the Father yet remains essential to the Trinitarian oikonomia.

The providential apparatus is the theoretical foundation of the modern State where government can only achieve its ends through proximate means. If the transcendent aspect of the State diminshes then the State is collapsed into the modern rule of law, where the law regulates administration and administration applies the law. Contemporary democracy has inherited this.

The question remains, what is the nature of angelic ministers who are these administrators of God's government?

According to Gregory the Great, angels have a twofold function as messengers that carry out God's will and worshippers that give God his glory. Bonaventure and Aquinas both frame the angelic mission in terms of administration and governance, thought most centrally through the notion of hierarchy.

Hierarchy comes to us from Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite who is also cited by Aquinas. In Pseudo-Dionysus' treatment mysterium and ministerium are used almost interchangeably in describing the bureaucratic hierarchy of angels in heaven that mirrors and is mirrored by the angelic hierarchy of church offices on Earth.

He grounds regality in hierarchy, arguing that sovereignty is ineffable and cast in the hymns and anthems of angels. Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian had already spoken of the administrative dimensions of angels, but it was Pseudo-Dionysus who extended this to conceptualize profane, secular power as well.

Aquinas raises the question, will angelic hierarchies remain after the Second Coming? This is the eschatological problem of oikonomia. What happens to God's governmental machine when the earth is restored under his direct rule?

Will angels have work to do? How can God remain inoperative?

The messenger aspect of angels will be deactivated and they will remain as glorifiers of God. No providential operation remains so they will sing God's praises.

So what then is glory when it comes to God? Why does he need glory after the Second Coming, particularly if he did not need it before creation?

Gnostic and Jewish thought are not troubled by this question because they did not internalize oikonomia (i.e. activity) within the Godhead. So what then can God do?

Glory is nothing less but the shroud to cover up God's inoperativity.

Ironically, Aquinas' one exception for the administrative work of heavenly creatures is that demons will remain active following the Day of Judgment as the caretakers of the tortures of hell. Providential operation remains alive only in hell in the end of times.

This means that eternal government is truly infernal and penitentiary, and Foucault's panopticon is extended to the saints who watch the tortured of the damned.

Yet at the same time Paul's Messiah is the one who renders the law inoperative to reconcile his people to God. This is the answer to the law that is deactivated but remains to be studied in I.2, the glorious telos of the law.

This division of beatific contemplation and angelic administration aligns to the dual figure of political power. Returning again to Schmitt and Peterson, Agamben points to Peterson's dissertation which details the use of heis theos in ancient and patristic literature. Many scholars had thought its purpose was liturgical but Peterson argues they are acclamatory in nature which would then push back to their origin to the pagan emperors of Rome and the Dionysian rite.

Although Peterson glides over it, acclamation had definitive political force and decision-making power, particularly in democratic Athens. Schmitt points out that the public acclamation is an immediate and pure expression of the democratic people in a way the private ballot can never capture.

The earliest Christian liturgy emerged from psalmody and doxology during the Eucharist, forming a single body that is internally indistinct. Liturgy and oikonomia are linked through the economy of the Savior's body.

Many German scholars with ties to National Socialism had analyzed extensively the symbols and insignias of Roman power in the Roman Empire and Republic. The fasces which ironically Schramm nor Amira had even mentioned was not merely a symbol but a performative tool which could be used to flog or decapitate. It provided a physical articulation of the magisterial office, requiring the lictores to follow the magistrate wherever he went.

Only during a triumph could the fasces be displayed inside the walls of Rome, and it is a useful heuristic for the operation of acclamation and glory.

The acclamation could be found in both profane and spiritual domains, rendering the two indistinct as the language and terminology bled over into each other when it comes to the acclamation. Glory is the zone by which theology and politics depend upon one another, and it is more original and decisive than these two generally opposed spheres.

So what then is the relation between power and glory? Why does operative power depend upon glory?

It cannot be for the sake of cultivating fear or mystique in the minds of subjects. There are far cheaper and more expedient ways to accomplish this.

It cannot be merely a dramatic performance of a society in microcosm either.

Now Agamben turns to an archeology of glory to conclude this volume. Hans Urs von Balthasar, he argues, has clouded the true nature of glory by casting it in an aesthetic lens which is hardly biblical at all. The Bible speaks of glory in terms of awe and reverence.

So what then is glory?

Maimonides breaks it into three senses: (1) the created light that descends upon a place, (2) the essence of God, and (3) the glorification os God by creation through acclamation. Jewish and Christian sources since Maimonides have merely reiterated this tripartite structure.

What is clear is that there is homonymy taking place between objective glory and subjective glorification. How does the human activity of worship relate to God's glorious essence?

The New Testament was the first to internalize glory within the Godhead, thematizing glory as an economic relationship between the persons of the Trinity, but this glory is extended to men as well who in some sense inherit God's glory through adoption as Paul elaborates in 2 Corinthians.

The Patristics treat glory in economic terms (cf. Irenaeus) or through divine self-knowledge (cf. Origen) The economy of the passion and of revlation coincide in glory. As Moltmann notes, the fracture of Kingdom and Government in ontology and theology and be reunited through glory which rethinks the trinity as unity.

This aporia of glory is also apparent in Balthasar's opponent Karl Barth who neutralizes glory and reduces sovereignty to omnipotent force. If this is the case, then beauty is an attempt to depoliticize and mask the violent, brute force of power.

More than that, the aestheticization of glory is a strategy to disguise the confusion surrounding how glorification relates to God's glory itself. The only repsonse theologians are able to give is that subjective, creaturely glorification is a response to the pre-existing objective glory of God. A perfect circularity of reasoning that even Barth's solution cannot escape.

The circularity of glory is thus articulated as becoming free from sin for the sake of the glorification of God. We as humans are constituted by God's glory to in turn celebrate it. We as creatures are essentially the glorification of glory, operationalized through the institution of the Church. The same goes for politics where the highest dignity of the political subject is to glorify the sovereign through acclamation.

Yet in all this, it is maintained that God's glory cannot be increased or decreased, intensified or reduced, but we still perpetually owe God glory. How can we owe God what he already has? God has accomplished the works of creation and salvation for his glory, and yet we owe him glory.

The Jesuits first modified this theory through Ignatius of Loyola's motto "ad maiorem Dei gloriam" by introducing an impossible task that creatures must work to the increase of the glory of God, a shift toward the subjective influence upon the objective volume of God's glory.

Leonard Lessius attempts to solve this by distinguishing between God's internal and external glory, but this moves the emphasis even further toward subjective glorification.

For Eric Mascall writing centuries later, neither God nor man can derive utility from glory. But glory is also not extrinsic to God. If this is the case, Agamben argues, then God is literally composed of praise. By praising God, we can participate immediately in his existence.

Why must God be continuously praised even if we are assured by theologians he has no need of it? The explanation of internal and external glory does not suffice. It is rather an embarrassed attempt to hide the fact that God is dependent upon praise.

In a posthumously published essay, Mauss defined prayer as an oral rite that has effective power over the sacred, an idea no doubt bequeathed to him by his Indology instructor Sylvain Levi who argued that the Hindu religious rites are performative in the sense that they create their gods. In this light, the glorification of God produces glory, and God's essential substance is his glory.

It is this relationship between God and his glorification that is confirmed in the raibbinical literature and Kabbalah. Ibn Gabbai for example expresses God's need for worship so that he may be maintained.

Agamben admits it was not his intent to explore glory creates God but asserts such a conclusion is necessary to understand the originary bipolar structure of the governmental machine through an archeology of glory.

The amen and the ancient hymn are the performative affirmation of glory and constitutive glorification of God. They are denotative in nature. However, dogmaticians have corrupted the tradition of hymn and the amen by desemanticizing it of all content, creating words to chant and assert meaninglessly.

Glory coincides with the deactivation of all operativity after the oikonomia is completed. This is mirrored in Judaism which places inoperativity as the dimension most proper to both God and man, hench the Sabbath. What this eternal inoperativity is, is unclear, as even Augustine struggled to articulate it coherently, though many Christian thinkers affirm the primacy of the Sabbatical.

For Agamben, human life is itself inoperative. It lacks concrete purpose, but this is what creates the drive for productive labor. Since man has no opus in his core, he is the Sabbatical animal. This is mirrored in the empty throne of the governmental apparatus which reigns but does not govern. At the center of God and of man is inoperativity. Praise and acclamation as extensions of inoperativiy are the nutrients that feed both in glory.

Eternal life is the promise that nourishes power. Eternal life deactivates biological functions and activity (bios). Paul's Messiah activates zoe in our lives. Eternal life is thus a form of glory.

In closing, Agamben turns to a scholium of Spinoza's Ethics Book V, Proposition 36 where Spinoza describes the mind's love for God in a way that reflects the sabbatical connection between glory and inoperativity. This inoperativity is not inertia nor inactivity but action that requires neither suffering nor effort. In inoperativity, bios and zoe coincide without remainder. It is fully aligned with beatific contemplation. Eternal life is the inoperative center of the human, and the poem is the model of inoperative deactivation.

Today's ceremonies and liturgies are greatly reduced to a minimum, while at the same time the spectacle-ism of modern global society is positing glory at the center of all democracy's affairs.

Appendix: The Economy of the Moderns

As governmental practice and power expanded in early modern Europe, the theory of providence became overloaded almost to the point of absurdity. While Pascal and Jansenism articulated a rigorous critique of mainstream Catholic understandings of grace, no one was prepared to accept an absolute government that determined all human action.

Malebranche offered his own position along the lines of first and second causes with God's particular will being the miracle and God's general will is the law of nature. He interprets the Trinitarian oikonomia of Christ's atonement as the occasional cause of grace which renders effective the general laws of grace.

Alongside this, the best government is the one that economizes between the wisdom of order and fecundity of prosperity. So Malebranche's true question is if it is possible to govern the world throug this relation of general and particular will. Rousseau would then appropriate these two kinds of will and reassign them to the popular will.

Foucault cites this briefly in his lecture but it is theological foundation that has made it unthinkable for us to consider the two institutions of government and economy in democracy. Rousseau makes government the essential political problem but minimizes the problem of its nature and foundation.

Another thread is that of oikonomia which lost its technical meaning over the course of the Middle Ages.

It re-emerged in early modernity without reference to its antecedents but almost completing recreating the concepts of economy as the activity and dispensations of the Creator. Quesnay and the Physiocrats reconciled Malebranche's "economy of nature" with their own economic policies of ordered state mercantilism.

Political economy is the social rationalization of providential oikonomia. Adam Smith would then infuse the providential apparatus in his Invisible Hand which he linked to Hume's naturalism. Liberalism is this tendency to push to an extreme the supremacy of the immanent, governmental order to the exclusion of transcendence, of kingdom.

Modern economy is merely the theological model made universal under secular pretenses, and this rather than causing theology to fail, leads it to its completion.

---

In Review

II.4, alongside II.5, is one of the strongest volumes of Homo Sacer. Perhaps it is because it is one of the last published entries from a chronological perspective and is thus more mature.

Its strength lies in the novelty of its analysis and the remarkable source material pulled together, all to extend the theme of the Foucauldian project. The terminological catalogues of this volume make one wonder how such frequently discussed concepts can be left so abandoned by the theological tradition, if what Agamben presents us with is true.

This volume also has sufficient length to successfully develop, at least in a speculative sense, a number of various ideas related through the bipolar governmental machine. This marks a strong improvement over the briefer surveys that came before that seemed to end before they really got going.

Yet at the same time II.4 suffers from the same characteristic Agamben weaknesses that we have already encountered elsewhere. We will only consider some of these here.

First is the thematic treatment of oikonomia. While the survey Agamben provides is far richer and more detailed than in his other investigations, it does suffer from somewhat bizarre pacing choices. He allocates roughly twenty pages to cataloguing seemingly every usage of the term oikonomia in the New Testament and the ante-Nicene fathers, merely to argue that each and every usage is merely a metaphorical sense derived from rhetoric or a domestic metaphor even if it may seem otherwise. He takes us through Paul, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Tatian, Athenagoras, and Irenaeus to repeat this claim. He then claims that Hippolytus and Tertullian are the first to give oikonomia a special meaning.

Although this may be tedious in some sense, it is at least more disciplined scholarship than Agamben has previously offered in his etymological work. Bracketing the soundness and validity of his readings, which I do not feel sufficiently knowledgable to comment upon, there is no issue here.

But he then contends that nearly every major theological controversy is downstream of this problem of divine economy, yet allocating only the briefest of attention to making this case.

For example, his treatment of the Arian controversy offers an intriguing, novel reading of the debate that supposedly in truth is centered on the economic nature of the Trinity. Agamben cites Arian's main argument as not about when the Son is generated or where he ranks in the Trinity, but whether or not he comes from the Father. Arius thought Christ was generated before all time out of the Father's arche, while Nicene orthodoxy would reject this and say that Christ is like the Father an-archic, that is without foundation.

While this would be interesting if true, this is a misreading of Nicene theology. It is very hard to get around the textual statements by both Arius and the Council that Arius affirmed that the Son was created while the Nicene Council rejected this arguing that the Son is eternally begotten. Agamben's interpretative wordplay around achronos does not diminish this point.

Furthermore, the Nicene position affirms that the Son is ontologically grounded in the Father, participating in his essence through virtue of being eternally begotten of the Father. There is a sense in which the Son is an-archic with respect to time but not ontologically in the way that Agamben characterizes the debate.

The question of Christ as begotten versus generated is such an elementary point to anyone even superficially familiar with the Arian debate that it is surprising that Agamben could make such a basic mistake.

If he is deliberately offering an alternative reading that would run up against the historical reading of what Nicaea affirms, he needs more than two pages to make such a case which would turn a central creed on its head. Jean-Luc Nancy has attempted such revisionist readings, if Agamben means to do so here, he should put in the work.

If he is insinuating that Nicaea may ostensibly claim Christ is begotten of the Father but cannot tenably do so and lapses back into an an-archic view, then he should articulate and account for that.

What is not clear is why Agamben dedicates twenty pages to cataloguing citations where oikonomia is used but not in any particularly meaningful way (i.e. "Look, nothing is happening here either in this seventeenth spot") but would glide so surreptitiously past perhaps the most central debate where this supposed originary paradigm of all government is cast in stone. It is also not clear why he would misstate the actual teachings of Nicaea in a way that is surprisingly convenient for his new interpretation of Christian theology as oikonomia.

This is compounded by the fact that, by his own admission, Agamben does not consider or catalogue the post-Nicene Patristic references to oikonomia, which renders the assumption that Tertullian and Hippolytus are the only two theologians in the entire tradition to have a technical treatment of oikonomia. In this framing, it was at that precise moment where this technical foundation for all government was formed into being and then sealed away invisibly for the rest of time. Which seems rather absurd.

Another brief note is that the decisive formula for Agamben is Tertullian's flip of Paul's "economy of the mystery" to "mystery of the economy" and yet outside of brief gestures, Agamben does not bother to thematize the term "mystery" and consider its etymological meaning or importance in situtation, which is important for his work here. He defers this until II.5 where we may look at it further.

One cannot help but wonder if Agamben had simply dedicated so much research time to the ante-Nicene tradition that he had exhausted too much of a research grant or book contract window and felt compelled to resume at a logical galloping pace which meant skipping over other relevant source material.

This seems even more plausible when the second half of the appendix argues that modernity picks up the "forgotten" oikonomia and reinstitutionalizes it in modern political economy through Linnaeus, Malebranche, and Adam Smith. He even claims that though modern economy was not derived textually from ancient or medieval sources it emerged the same as before already fully conceived. This raises other questions but for sake of space let us move on.

Second is something we have not reviewed much if at all, but it is how Agamben gives pride of place to the "originary".

Whether it be homo sacer, zoe, state of exception, stasis, the oath, or sacratio, Agamben repeatedly employs an ambiguous assumption that an entity or concept is in some way determined by its foundation. This is not unique to Agamben but is symptomatic of problematic and often contradictory assumptions regarding conceptual history or the genealogies of power. The idea that there is a hidden origin that needs to be uncovered and disclosed which then leads to a liberation of sorts, so that something new can occur. Heidegger can operate in this mode often, but heuristically one can say it is Freudian therapy applied to philosophical theory.

It is this unarticulated original piece that is a dark, nefarious shadow that fetters us to the past and somehow prevents us from moving on. We must be able to say what it is before we can be free.

It is possible this is the case, but it rarely if ever is worked out in systematic detail.

Some basic questions around this principle would include the following. How is "the originary" guaranteed interminable power even if the conceptual foundations are no longer at play? Can the unconscious originary or its superstructure undergo sufficient mutations or modifications that it can lose its grip on the present concept even if there is no conscious effort to do so? What gives historical thinkers and writers the power to dictate (usually unwittingly) the course of terminological and systematic history but we have no such power unless we return to them? Is it possible for these conceptual prehistorical hooks to simply be forgotten and float away even without deliberate recovery? Is it possible that recovery and disenchantment of the hidden originary root could only destabilize our thought and ideas in a bad way?

Emerson and Nietzsche have each commented upon this yoke of the past preventing us from having new ideas, but I have found the most interesting and analytically rigorous critique of "originary therapeutics" to be Deleuze who takes Freud as his starting point but then applies it to other thinkers like Marx who predicate a perceived present slavery upon the past. Agamben certainly takes this tendency to an extreme in his rather unsystematic blotching of archaic concepts to the post 9/11 global order, or the strange gesture in Homo Sacer I to the Holocaust as an outworking of bad Aristotelian ontology (this will surface again in III).

Third, in a move reminiscient of yet in apparent contradiction to II.3, Agamben argues that God is literally constituted by the activity of glorification. Much like before where he had argued that God's existence is the human experience of language.

Because this follows the standard Agamben playbook, it does not seem necessary to review this too extensively, so we will address it in broad stokes.

The chapter had opened with a strong philosophical thematization of the nature of glory, particularly how God can be glorified is he already has seeming infinite glory. This is a valid and provocative question particularly as Reformed thought tends to render glory as God's central essence around which man is created.

However his handling of the subject after this introduction seems astonishingly clumsy.

Is it really true that all Jewish and Christian thought has no further articulation of God's glory beyond Maimonides' tripartite definition? There are no potential counter examples even countenanced.

Conversely, the history of theological glory begins for some reason begins with the Septuagint translation of kabhod as doxa but there is no systematic consideration of what glory meant in the Old Testament. Agamben summarily dismisses it as "non-technical" until it reaches the New Testament.

He also alludes to how New Testament doxa is distinct from Homeric kleos but this is also a fairly brusque assertion that could be handled with more interest and aplomb.

This pales in comparison with the strange rebuttal he levels against von Balthasar and Barth's debate on glory. These two theologians do represent a strong starting point for surveying twentieth century debates on the subject, but Agamben does not indicate any familiarity with their thought or strategy beyond their commments specifically on glory.

Would not Barth's core themes of God's self-revelation and sovereign activity be pertinent to an analysis which has dedicated hundreds of pages to the oikonomia of divine salvific work, the paradigm of providence, and divine self-knowledge?

Agamben rejects von Balthasar's "aestheticization" of glory by arguing that God's glory is never presented in terms of beauty or aesthetics in the Bible so this is a mere projection of subsequent philosophical categories.

This is a weak argument if it is meant to be a serious one. There are many references to the beauty of God's glory throughout the Old Testament (Psalm 27:4 to just name one). The aesthetic dimension is furthermore no stranger to the Patristic tradition which we had just spent significant time in, so it is not clear why they are no longer material now. Furthermore, beatific contemplation has been a recurring topic throughout this investigation which is deeply linked to any notion of God as beautiful, so it is not clear why Agamben would pretend that aesthetics are completely decoupled from God now.

There are of course valid critiques of von Balthasar, but this is certainly not one of them.

This analytic sloppiness further deterioriates in a seemingly random mention of Barth as von Balthasar's opponent but only to contend that Barth's strategy can be reduced to an attempt to render God's glory as brute sovereign force while attempting to depoliticize aesthetics.

It is a bizarrely caustic (and muddled) remark that shows far less care for close reading than Foucault whom Agamben has already respectfully criticized for not reading closely enough. And it is far more polemical.

A strange polemic that also shows its face in a subsequent passage where Agamben offers an aside that hymns have irretrievably deterioriated and vanished following Franciscan Laudes creaturarum, only emerging in Rilke and to some extent Holderlin. There is no mention of any religious music or hymnody beyond this "end of time" moment. But it should be noted that the hymn also has a distinct technical sense for Agamben aligned with the inoperative poem. However these technical senses Agamben himself can tend to forget when he launches a pointed attack against particular institutions or phenomena he has a personal distaste for.

Let us return to the circularity of glory question. Again this is an interesting ontological problem. One that honestly deserves rigorous treatment that it has not received.

But Agamben's treatment is anything but rigorous.

At first through seeming innocuous insinuation, Agamben asks why God keeps asking for glory or will punish people for withholding it. What could be going on here?

After approaching it sideways from several angles, he recapitulates a subversive reversal from II.3 There he claimed it was not God who grounds language but language which grounds God.

Now it is not God which grounds glory but glory which grounds God.

He makes this pronouncement after citing an eighteenth century French Indologist essay on Hinduism where the speech act of prayer produces gods.

This is the first time Indian thought or practice has ever appeared in Homo Sacer. Why is it only material now? If the archeology of religious institutions was Western in focus as it had been up to this point, it would make sense to not enter Indian discourse into the conversation.

Agamben has already played fast and loose with Germanic sources to make claims about Roman institutions. Here he extends the length of the measuring stick to Hinduism's polytheistic theology to then derive conclusions regarding Christianity's monotheistic God without any accounting for the divergences and deviations between such categorically different sets of entities.

He lapses into clumsy structuralist claims that also ignore what Hindu writings or contemporary scholars may have to say on the subject. He merely pulls in a French colonial commentator as authoritative proof.

He then supplements this with rabbinic theology to contend that God does in fact need glory or he will in a sense "go out" like a flame.

Again, the entire exclusive focus has been on the Western or Occidental governmental apparatus derived from Chalcedonian Christian sources (and their interlocutors in late antiquity). The scope of the analysis had been relatively stable up to this point but as soon as Agamben hopes to make his own assertive claims, he jumps to categorically different source material which is uncritically absorbed as decisively true. He makes no indpendent logical or analytical gestures to support this radical claim.

Its strangeness is amplified an additional degree when it is remembered that Agamben has already mentioned one quite easy, elementary argument why this cannot be the case.

If God existed for all eternity before the creation of the world, he would have no glory fuel to keep him going. How can one claim not just his glory but his existence is dependent on glory if this is also the case. Agamben brings up God's eternal existence before creation as a mark of suspicion (what was he doing for all that time?) but then says that God cannot persist without the worship of creation. If Agamben hopes to inveigh against God as much as his occasional insinuations indicate, he should try to avoid doing so from contradictory points.

Agamben does sheepishly admit that he had not intended to comment upon the "theurgic" elements of glory and acclamation, but it is necessary in order to properly articulate the bipolar governmental machine that the archeology of glory is concerned with.

This does not offer sufficient justification for why Agamben identifies his research as archeological but then fairly frequently employs paralipsis, the rhetorical strategy which brings up a claim or insinuates a question but then sidesteps it to avoid responsibility for defending the argument.

It is a strategic ploy to plant a seed in the audience mind while avoiding accountability for such innuendo.

When he does not derive his own assertoric claims from textual sources, Agamben more often than not employs paralipsis to gently broach his actual view several times before further down the line he will announce it as his own conclusion, a conclusion which is claimed to be warranted because it has been covered earlier (which it has but through mere asides and intimations that maintain a facade of plausible deniability).

It is this sophistical lack of forthrightness that leads us to our fourth point which: the equivocal use of method. We have just seen this in II.3 but it is even more blatant here.

Specifically, Agamben tends to shuffle between invoking archeology and genealogy indiscriminately, and it is not clear if he understands the nuances or differences between the two as they are invoked generally interchangeably. (And if he believes there is no difference, then he should come out and say so.)

He introduces the volume by describing his investigation as an archeology of oikonomia and in closing he describes it as an archeology of glory. The subtitle of the volume is "For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government"

In response to Foucault's lectures which pass over oikonomia in silence, he argues that archeology needs to take into account the genealogy of a concept which may flow from a different institution or knowledge domain. Archeology, Agamben argues, needs to follow signatures across this domain, something Foucault fails to do.

Whether or not Foucault fails to trace his subject matter effectively is another question, but it is not clear if Agamben is able to keep his own methodologies straight. It is of course fully possible that on a closer reading he is juggling these two respective methods with surreptitious agility, but the cursory nods to these methodological terms do not indicate that he is.

Archeology should be concerned with the neutral assessment of statements and their accompanying institutions and practices. The reflections on political acclamation and hymnody are therefore proper subjects of investigation as carried out here.

What is not appropriate for the archeological method is the pivot to speculative or polemical philosophy which Agamben employs here with even more frequency than before and which ultimately does more to discredit his archeological analysis and normative assertions when they are jumbled together than if he had exercised restraint and presented them thoughtfully in discrete and judiciously choreographed progression.

This ties to our fifth point of consideration, and that is homo sacer. As we have mentioned in each section following the first, there seems to be no technical or systematic elaboration of this ambiguous term homo sacer and its connection to bare life (zoe).

The same can be said here, where it seems almost forgotten, until Agamben interjects a chunk of his last chapter to the theological concept of "eternal life" as a solution where law will be deactivated as we sought in II.1.

The concept of "eternal life" deserves more attention and methodical analysis than Agamben provides here. A number of his digressions could easily have been subtracted to give this important concept more energy.

I will not invest space here in the many useful directions Agamben could have employed this for the sake of his own project, but not only does this mention of eternal life seem like an appended afterthought, but it also amplifies the ambivalence Agamben seems to show around zoe.

There are many cases where zoe is presented as a Holocaust-tier level reduction to bare life, excluded from the political community. The logical end of global democracy based on how political ontology is grounded. An utter dystopian reduction.

Yet here as in other places zoe is a messianic, salvific end state where we are freed of normative laws and obligations and can live as we please. At times, it is a mirror of an Edenic innocence yet there are moments where Agamben definitively states it is not the same.

Halfway through Homo Sacer we continue to see an ardent refusal to systematically develop or clarify what this originary political structure is, alongside all the other originary political structures we have uncovered along the way.

This is a marker of two other key weaknesses of Agamben's work so far.

One, the overly episodic stratification of Homo Sacer lends itself to much deeper disconnects and ruptures than should be contained in a single project, at least one that is intended to be more than an encyclopedia of eclectic philosophical curiosities.

There are nods to the other volumes. Stasis is mentioned briefly here and there throughout II.4. Homo Sacer I is explicitly cited. But there is surprisingly little done to either build upon the studies conducted previously, to rectify potential areas of conflict, or to even reinforce the current work using evidence from earlier.

It is too uncoordinated for a project which has as many architectonic aspirations as this one does. Kant also struggled with this across the three Critiques but still handled the assemblage far better than Agamben has up to this point.

Yet, even if the studies live in their respective siloes, there are still core themes, strategies, and terms which Agamben does consistently recapitulate as the studies develop. It is as if each volume is a self-contained cycle which through each iteration progressively moves toward an eschatological articulation.

Two, one such key theme is the threshold of indistinction. This is in all earnestness an important philosophical contribution. It is far too common for philosophers to proliferate categories and concepts, yet far rarer for the genealogy of concepts to recognize convergence. Agamben recognizes that ideas once distinct can collapse into one another.

Unfortunately, he applies this assessment far too liberally, and even to levels of self-parody such as when he argues glory is a zone of indistinction that is originary for both religion and politics. There are reasons that nuances and subtleties exist in theological and philosophical traditions, and Agamben does not often exemplify a care for the hard-thinking and precision that have teased out these questions before. Such as his readings of Arianism and other heresies.

Postmodern and continental readings often present novel, revisionist interpretations of traditional questions and topics, and while that is enjoyable, this comes at the risk of eschewing any and all logical rigor in favor of wordplay and semantic association. It is far easier to skip over the careful logic and reasoning of millennia if you have a novel definition that can topple the edifice, but it can also mask a lack of analytic ability to truly wrestle with the reasoning of the original writers.

Agamben has many strengths in his ability to comb through and identify relevant passages in source material, but he has not demonstrated an analytic proficiency to engage with or reason with arguments except through interpretive sparring with his sources. Aquinas and Scotus both demonstrated remarkable erudition but this was paired with systematic and analytic subtlety which vigorously worked to keep all things consistent. This is not demonstrated in Homo Sacer.

Still, philosophers have long struggled with the judicious management of empirical source material and knowledge, to incorporate them within their theories. The reader is reminded of this when considering how cursory and anecdotal Foucault's reading of texts seems to be, as Agamben points out here. Agamben is several gradations superior to many other master philosophers in this regard, and he deserves acclamation for this and the arrangement of his sources even if his philosophical acumen is not generally balanced.

He has rehabilitated with far more philological rigor the patristic and medieval tradition than many others of the continental tradition. His command of the appropriate languages should not be discounted either.

What is perhaps one of the most interesting problems presented here is that of God's transcendence versus immanence as it manifests across various moments.

His treatment of the issue is where he first begins to show his hand as a Spinozist, which we shall see far more definitively when inoperativity becomes a central theme of IV.2, and where we ourselves shall explore it in more detail.

One item I shall state here is that Agamben's discussions of how Christian theology tends to kick the can of ontological fracture down the road by situating it between being and action is not an accusation he is immune from.

A modal ontology which tries to immanentize all by wraping substance into a single causal web with its modes does not eliminate this presupposed evil of transcendence that needs rooted out. There is still an unreciprocated dependence of modes upon substance.

Substance still has priority over modes, even in modal ontology.

Another, perhaps more careful, reader of Spinoza identified this issue in modal ontology. Deleuze sought to bring absolute immanence completion by rendering it as a total plane with currents and folds. Not a single entity can be absolutely prior in the plane itself which can thus allegedly escape the label of transcendental foundationalism.

We shall return to this, as we continue through the paths of Homo Sacer.