The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life

Homo Sacer #IV.1

by Giorgio Agamben, Adam Kotsko (Translator)

What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule?

It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben's thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which "life" as such, perhaps for the first time, is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the "highest poverty" and "use" challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today.

How can we think a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation? How can we think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use?

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Theology, Theory, History, Italy

178 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.

In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.

He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Medieval Hippies

Poverty in the modern world is perceived as a sin - either because poverty is 'enjoyed' at the expense of others (by recipients of public assistance), or because it is the result of a lack of ambition sufficient to mitigate it (by the ‘losers’ in capitalist society). In this regard, at least, the Christian message of 'blessed are the poor' has been entirely obliterated.

The modern evangelical prosperity gospel - God wants you to have all you might want materially - has turned the biblical message inside out as writers like Chris Lehmann in The Money Cult [ https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...] have shown so effectively. To recapture the virtuous character of poverty it is necessary to get beyond our contemporary rationalisation of wealth. And there is no better place to look for some really alternative thinking than the Franciscans of the 13th century.

The real point of Franciscan (and other contemporary movements') attitudes toward poverty was not simply mortification, that is, suffering. Such mortification as one might desire was available in monasticism, not to say in normal medieval life generally. Rather the larger goal was of living a way and form of life that involves removal of oneself completely from the protection and the restrictions of the law.

This ideal culminated in the Franciscan creation of a legal non-person without any rights whatsoever. This legal solution followed precisely the directive in the writings of Paul of Tarsus to abjure not just religious law but legal remedies in civil law as well. As Agamben notes about the early Franciscans:

"...the principle that remains immutable and non-negotiable for then from beginning to end can be summarized in these terms: what is in question , for the order as well as its founder, is the abdicatio omnis iuris ("abdication of every right"), that is, the possibility of human existence beyond the law....Franciscanism can be defined - and in this consists its novelty, even today unthought, and in the present conditions of society totally unthinkable - as the attempt to realize a human life and practice absolutely outside the determination of the law."

This is the ultimate conclusion of Pauline logic: non-persons had no legal standing and therefore could not demand redress through the law. Understanding of this position requires an appreciation of the profound distinction between the regula, or rule, and the law. The Rule of the Order, properly speaking, becomes indistinguishable from a mode of living. It is internalised, one might say institutionalised, routine. Through constant practice it becomes 'law written on the heart.'

But the rule is also externalised as the 'liturgy' of the day in work and prayer and mutual care. Differing from Jewish Talmudic rule, mainly in its brevity and absence of formal analysis, the monastic rule was based on a similar spiritual method: Faith creates the rule which then guides life which generates the rule. So an escape from law is an escape into instinctive obedience to the divine will. Frying pans and fires come to mind, but greater detail is best left to theologians.

Agamben makes the questionable claim that the rule is very different from the idea of law in Jewish law. Jewish law is a component of the pact, the covenant, with God, he says. The covenant is manifest in law and in behaviour that conforms to it. Monasticism, and especially the 'new' monasticism of the 13th C is, he believes, in direct conflict with this Judaic conception. I believe this is a (likely unintentional) slur on Judaic spirituality which has frequently been held as formulaic and 'pharisaic', that is, merely a matter of external form. I think it likely that Agamben is generalising the practices of assimilated Jews who to some extent imitated Christian ritualism. Certainly no such theory as Agamben's applies to pious Jews begging forgiveness from their creator, isolated against the bare wall of a cramped prayerhouse; or to Talmudic scholars concentrating on the hidden intention within the 613 divine commandments in a dismal ghetto shul!

In fact, I believe, the Franciscan motivation was not the possible deficiencies of Jewish ritual but the increasingly hierarchical, dogmatic, imperial, autocratic and legally driven Church of the 12th and 13th centuries. Part of this 'legalisation' of the Church was the standardisation of the sacraments including their exclusive provision through the clergy. The Liturgy of the Mass, for example, was re-established both dogmatically and legally. This central ritual of the Church had become far more a matter of public display and an affirmation of docile obedience than a spiritual act. In any case, the Mass is merely periodic and does not consume the entire continuous being of its participants.

The 'old' monastic rule of the Benedictines and their various reformed offshoots had been a failure in a specific sense. Although the Benedictine Rule had demanded strict poverty from its individual members, there was no such requirement for the monastic houses as such. As these establishments grew and prospered, they accumulated substantial wealth. Inevitably this wealth benefitted individual members - in proportion to their rank and station, to be sure, but nonetheless systematically. Individual members inevitably became corrupt, and whole monastic communities repeatedly had to be reformed. Individual ownership matters little when the entire group enjoys tremendous relative wealth. The Franciscan goal was to close this loophole in curtain wall of Christian poverty.

This Franciscan quest, as well as the wider poverty movement of the 13th century, was facilitated by the same explosive growth in law since the 11th century that had created a tighter legal structure of the Church. The Franciscans used the new vitality in legal thought to undermine a basic principle of established Church Law that was derived from Roman Law, namely that he who enjoys the benefit (usufructus) of an asset is the one who owns (has dominium over) that asset. According to this principle, if a group of friars got the benefit of, say, a building or a farm, they owned it without question no matter whose name was on the deed. Hence the Benedictine problem. So how could they get around this legal dead end?

Through the crafty use of a very rare exception to this principle of Roman Law, the so-called Peculium, by which agents took temporary control of another's property, the Franciscans, after a 100 year battle with the Roman Curia, achieved their goal. Their arguments in fact employed otherwise inscrutable texts from the Pauline epistles to establish scriptural precedents. The result was that the Franciscans were the first to successfully separate dominium from usufructus. This was a legal revolution.

The poverty-seeking Franciscans had fostered the creation of an institution that had the capacity to 'own', that is, to possess property as a legal person, but not to be owned by its members - or owned by anyone else, including its temporary agents. This new legal form was adopted not only by the Franciscans but by the Dominicans and the other mendicant orders as well.

We know this innovative institution as the corporation. The new religious orders were not only the first formally established corporate entities, they were also the first multi-nationals. Even today Benedictine houses are partnerships while friaries are established in an entirely different way with central world-wide management and corporate ownership of property.

The fame of this new form of entity spread rapidly throughout Christendom since Church law was universal law and the Roman Curia was the European Supreme Court. The dissemination of the corporate idea was not energised by the interests of Christian poverty, of course, but rather by the desire to subvert many of the lingering but inconvenient legal restrictions on sovereign power. In England, for example, it was successfully used by Henry VI to generate funds from Crown lands which, like Church assets, could not be 'alienated', that is, sold. He got Parliament to incorporate the Duchy of Lancaster, which he then asset-stripped with impunity.

From this, with some 19th century jiggery-pokery, emerged the modern corporation, with all its profound absurdities, absurdities that had been anticipated and successfully avoided by the Romans. From the point of view of Agamben's thesis, the most glaring of these absurdities is that the corporation is used not to promote poverty but to protect wealth.

Oh well, the hippies of the 1960's are now the retired CEO's of the corporate world. Nothing works out quite how it ought. Bugger.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

The radical invention of the Franciscans is the form-of-life, or life that perfectly coincides with the rule to the point of cancelling the difference between the two into a "third" thing between presciption and mere advice. The RULE derives immanently from LIFE; the latter is applied to the former or so the Franciscan friars held.

Agamben stresses the fact that, unlike other contemporaneous religious movements of 12th and 13rd centuries that also caught the ire of the Catholic Church, the Franciscan monks insisted not on celebrating life as a liturgy but of living liturgy as a life (vivification) and identifying with the form of life of the Gospel, rather than the form of life of the Church. They insisted on their own status as subsisting outside the field of law, canon law not excluding. What plays a prominent role in this Franciscan "renunciation" of law is the notion of nonappropriative (exappropriative) use.

According to the Franciscans, use is antecedent to ownership, common to all human beings and can be decoupled from it. It is possible to consume something without committing oneself therefore to ontologically owning the said consumable. Of course, this did not escape the attention of Pope John XXII who went on to contest the claim. Unfortunately, in response to this papal bull, the Franciscans ended up defending their radical notion of use in almost exclusively juridical and in negative (wrt ownership) terms instead of, as Agamaben suggests, grounding it in eschatological terms and finally buckled under pressure.

The translation reads fluidly but Agamben throws a shit-ton of citations at you so don't even bother keeping track of each individual author and treatise. Nonethelessly, there is a coherence and clarity as to his general thesis. This is my first time reading Agamben and I'm not disappointed, to say the least.

[my name is corey irl · Rating 4 out of 5]

it used to be you could lieve your life as a seculuded virgin in peace and even have the papal blessing but nowadays theres nothing to devote oneself to but vice documentaries and "noise shows" and disrespecting ones elders ...feudalism can't return soon enough!!

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part VIII of author's Homo Sacer project.

Statement of purpose: “to construct a form-of-life, that is to say [hoion], a life that is linked so closely to its form that it proves to be inseparable from it” (xi).

Monastic rules, “a peculiar literature” (3), as object of study. Some work early in distinguishing genre: monastic rules are not juridical, not history, not hagiography, not ecclesiastical, not hypomneumata (4). The texts are “monotonous” and “difficult to the modern reader,” and yet they embody a transformation, a “radical reformulation of the very conceptuality that up until that moment articulated the relationship between human action and norm, ‘life’ and ‘rule,’ and without which the political and ethical-juridical rationality of the modern world would be unthinkable” (id.). Therein the rule “seems to be mixed up with life without remainder” (id.), a hoion wherein life and rule are indistinguishable.

Oblique approach to the genre follows, analyzing express parodies of monastic rules in Rabelais and de Sade before actually getting to the rules themselves. In the former, the monastic rule is “do what you will” (6), which some have said establishes an antimonastery subject merely to anomia, but which Agamben reads as plainly within the ambit of cenoby (koinos bios [sic], the common life) (id.). Though it is Rabelaisian (and we should likely reference Bakhtin for this?), the passage traces back to Augustine, who read the Greek Scripture to enjoin the Christian life as “love and do what you wish” (7). For Agamben, “the common life, by identifying itself with the rule without remainder, abolishes and cancels it” (7).

By contrast, de Sade’s castle Silling, in the 120 Days of Sodom, features loser aristocrats who “promulgate the reglements (‘statutes’) that must govern their new common life” (7). In this setting, “corresponding to the unlimited obedience-unto-death of the monks toward the abbot […] there is the absolute malleability of the victims to their masters, including extreme torture” (8). The “cenobitic ideal is parodically maintained” (id.).

Despite an etymology suggesting ‘to live alone’ (in monazein), the ‘monastery,’ “born as an individual and solitary flight from the world, […] was equivalent in use to cenoby” (9). Solitude is not a good thing in the period of early Christianity, as one Rule warns against “the desolation fo the desert and the terror of various monsters” (id.), whereas the gifts of the eremite are “ineffectual through inoperativity.” The common life involves unanimity and communism (10), and is a “form of life” (11). Lots about clothing becoming habitus (13 ff), wherein clothing became “indiscernible [hoion] from a way of life” (17). (This is why clothing is otherwise inexplicably so seemingly important to the liberal bourgeois—it is habitus, a form of life.)

The cenobite is “a total hourly scansion of existence” (21), a “liturgy of hours.” It is a “total mobilization of existence through time” (23); it is a “significant precursor of the Protestant ascesis of labor, of which capitalism, according to Max Weber, represents the secularization” (24). Meditation as “the apparatus that permits the accomplishment of the totalitarian demands of the monastic institution” (26).

A central problem in the discussion is the “juridical nature of the monastic rules” (28); the notion that “the meticulous regulation of every detail of existence […] tends toward an undecidability of regula and vita” is alien to Roman law (29). What the rules have accomplished, however, is the “constitution of life as such as a juridical object” (29). Violation of the rules could be punished, up to excommunicatio, though “punishments had an essentially afflictive character” that is read as “essentially moral and amendatory” (31)—something of Menninger’s theory of punishments (as opposed to Bentham or Kant). Even the excommunicatio was mostly bluster, as certain rules confirm “that the delinquent monk must not be expelled,” but rather must be amended (34). Because of this, the “analogy between the judgment of the abbot and a penal process, though plausible at first glance, loses all credibility” (id.).

Some debate as to the nature of the obligation confected through application of monastic rules--ad culpam (whereunder transgression is mortal sin) or ad poenam (whereunder transgression is penalized but not mortal sin) (36). Different interlocutors have read monastic rules as both or either of these (37 e.g.). What complicates the analysis is that monastic rules become effective through the vow (Latin votum), “an institution that, like the oath [cf. volume IV], most likely belongs to that more archaic sphere in which it is impossible to distinguish between law and religion” (37) (that most fundamental hoion of all, surely). The vow works as “a form of consecration to the gods (sacratio), whose prototype is in the devotio through which the consul Decio Mure, on the eve of battle, decided to consecrate his life to the infernal gods to obtain victory” (37)—which pops us right the fuck back in volumes I and II: “the one who pronounces the vow, more than being obligated or condemned to execution, becomes, at least in the extreme case of the devotio of the consul, a homo sacer” (38). Some discussion thereafter concerning whether the vow constitutes a contract vel non. Whichever way we go on that issue, the question becomes whether the servitium of the monk is volume VI’s officium--“the monk’s life as an uninterrupted Office and liturgy” (43).

During Charlemagne’s time, the monastic rules were captured by Power insofar as the bishops supported their imposition, a “tendential juridicization of the monastic profession” (44), much as how Fletcher describes in his The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity how conversion was a top down affair through the aristocrats, who often initiated monasticism as a private initiative.

We are again in volume I with the Pauline suggestion that the Christian is “dead to the law and lives in the freedom of the spirit” (46). We must note “the irreducibility of the Christian form of life [sic] to the law” (id.).

Other things: exile/flight as “constitutive of monasticism” (50) (cf. Volume IX on intimacy and politics);

In distinction from the pagan devotio, in which the devotus consigned to the gods his body and his biological life, the Christian vow is, so to speak [hoion NB], objectively vowed and has no other content than the production of a habitus in the will, whose ultimate result will be a certain form of common life (or, from the liturgical perspective, the realization of a certain officium or a certain religio). (57)

We see that “a form of life would thus be the collection of constitutive rules that define it” (71)—cf. volume IX. Whereas there’s the normal agambenian zone of indifference between the rule and the life, they nevertheless “allow a third thing [derridean triton genus?] to appear, which the Franciscans, albeit without succeeding in defining it with precision, will call ‘use,’ as well will see” (71).

The most awesome moment of this volume is the analysis of chapter 24 of De ebdomadario lectore ad manses, which requires the “reading at table” of the rule (77). Agamben wonders

One must thus imagine that there will necessarily be a moment when the reader, having reached chapter 24, will read the passage that enjoins him to read the rule every day. What will happen at that moment? In reading the other passages of the rule, the reader executes the precept of reading, but does not actualize what the text enjoins him to do in that moment. In this case, however, the reading and putting into action of the rule coincide without remainder. (77)

We must further note that “while the unworthy priest remains in any case a priest [cf. volume VI], and the sacramental acts he carries out do not lose their validity, an unworthy monk is simply not a monk” (84).

The notion of ‘use’ is affirmed otherwise as “the inseparability of use from ownership” (110). Much thereafter about “simplex usus” (125).

Volume II: we see an “absolutization of the state exception” (115) in the application of the rules--which is fucking ominous, considering that similar language was used in volume VII regarding Auschwitz.

Cool little argument recalling how liturgical action might be read (as in volume VI) as either a poiesis or a praxis (i.e., latinate artes in effectu or artes actuosae), which makes the monastery “perhaps the first place in which life itself—and not only the ascetic techniques that form and regulate it—was presented as an art” (33).

Recommended for readers who sacrifice the life of their objects of pleasure, persons who pick up on the totalitarian demand proper to the monastic cult, and those who insist on the expropriative character of poverty.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Among the many questions that have animated Giorgio Agamben’s now-hulking ‘Homo Sacer’ series through the years, one in particular stands out: what is the relation between law and life? Or more precisely, how has the relation between each evolved though the ages, from the annals of ancient Greece to the horrors of the modern concentration camp? In The Highest Poverty, Agamben’s project makes a pit stop amongst the monasteries and monks of medieval Europe, finding within the monastic orders a privileged prism through which to investigate the ever changing articulation between life and law. Where the early works (Homo Sacer, State of Exception) investigated the liminal situation in which law maintained only the most tenuous (if nonetheless devastating) relation to life, The Highest Poverty turns its attention instead to the monastic world in which life - the life of the monk - becomes indistinguishable from - not law - but the 'rule'. Indeed, the monastic attempt to distinguish between rule and law - and thus define a life outside of the strictures of the law - constitute a singular moment in the history of West which Agamben's book aims to detail.

But what then is a rule that is a not law? The answer lies in the rule's ability to constitute, rather than merely regulate, the very life it implicates. Which is to say that unlike laws which, belonging to the order of a generality which then applies to an already existing, particular case, rules produce and are generative of the very lives which attempt to 'live in accordance' with them. Marking the difference between the priest and the monk in terms of laws and rules respectively, Agamben thus notes that while the sacraments of an unworthy priest remain valid by virtue of his office rather than his person, an unworthy monk is simply not a monk at all. Unlike the priest's, the monk life thus totally coincides with the rules by which he lives (Opus Dei, Agamben's follow-up to The Highest Poverty, chases this line of thought through by tracing the genealogy of 'Office' - another worthy read in its own right). Calling into question then, the traditional dichotomies between life and rule, generality and particularity, the boundary-crossing cenobitic life reaches its apogee in what Agamben, following the Monastic fathers, calls the 'form-of-life' from which the book takes its subtitle.

Ultimately, it's in the Franciscan order in particular that Agamben sees the highest point of indistinciton between life and rule, an indistinction that results in a new and unprecedented theory of property and use; just as the form-of-life is defined by separation from the juridical sphere, so too is the Franciscan use of things defined by its renunciation of ownership and legal possession. The 'highest poverty' then, amounts to just this attempt to delineate a 'common use of things', not unlike the way in which "air and sunlight are common to all". Despite its radicality as a doctrine however, Agamben notes that the Franciscans were nonetheless unable, in the last instance, to give positive content to this manner of use, one which at the limit was only ever able to articulate itself negatively with respect to law (as with Hugh of Digne's paradoxical "right to have no rights"). This thwarted messianic movement nonetheless remains instructive for Agamben, who mines it in order to expose a site of thought and practice whose contours, today more than ever, demand to be reckoned with (a reckoning Agamben promises to properly undertake in the last volume of the Homo Sacer series - the yet untranslated 'The Use of Bodies').

[tout · Rating 5 out of 5]

Agamben elaborates an intensive exploration of the concept of form-of-life through a genealogy of early monastery life. One may often think of monasticism as a lonely dedication to study and hermitage. However there was a time when monastery meant and was synonymous with living in common, being a place where lives were put in common. What was called cenoby then could just as well be communism in the future. This life held in common by monks existed in a blurred space indistict of rule or life, where the life gives way to rule and rule to life, but where each co-determine and have an open character. This life for them was without property, existing in shared use. It was the highest poverty because they believed it grotesque to own anything as property, abdicating all rights to property, abdicating all law in its inherent conflict with life. This conflict could, in this view, explain the protestant reformation, sparked by the Franciscan monk Luther, as a conflict between the law of the church and the life of those who lived according to the gospel. Omnia sunt communia, translating to "all things in common" can only mean a life held in common, a life outside of property, outside of the law, and the elaboration of a communist form of life.

[aa]

I retained nothing

[dana · Rating 1 out of 5]

intellectual tour de force

[Garrett Mikulka · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, this book is an excellent example of taking theology seriously for philosophical purposes.

Agamben here explores the idea of life beyond (or before) the law. Using the Franciscans as his exemplary model, Agamben works towards a theory of use that is not tied to ownership. On his way to that conclusion, he works out complex relationships between text and life, liturgy and rules of living (playing with both the subjective and objective genitival construction of “forma vitae”). The monastic life, he argues, is one where life and rule are indistinguishable. Whereas a priest is a priest despite his actions, there is no such thing as a monk who does not abide by the rule (or rather, the one living in the monastery but refuses to change his/her life is not, in fact a monk, despite the fact that a priest who sucks is still, in theological as well as juridical terms, still just as much a priest as he would be if he were truly holy). Liturgy is not interested in refining actions as it is in refining one’s will, which is why true adherence to the monastic life culminates in the freedom to act beyond it, which is really the freedom of acting within it. Life and text become inseparable, and they ever inch each other forward, never static.

As the attention that I’ve paid in this review to different ideas suggests, I personally found the middle sections of the book, which deal with liturgy, more fascinating and compelling than the conclusions they help support. While the politico-economic conclusions were certainly meaningful and timely, the more fundamental relationship between text and life seems pregnant with meaning and possibility.

[Jem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always so satisfying and so boring to read Agamben—watching how his arguments move, the way everything hinges on a very few words from which an entire philosophical/juridical/theological theory unspools, looking back and seeing the mad-detective-red-thread-board of his thinking...exciting, and a good model to have for my own "scholarly production."

Found the beginning of this book (on law/life, and especially on meditatio/lectio/recitatio) to be more compelling that the later chapters on use.

Augustine’s Confessions 6.3: “his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” Text—memorized text—becomes “inseparable from [the monk’s] every gesture and his every activity” (25). Silent reading, memorization, and contemplation are expressed by the Rule, but through the Form-of-Life; ultimately Agamben finds both of these structural formations to be lacking, negated either by the essence of monasticism or by the "planetary dominion of the paradigm of operativity" (145). Whatever that means!

In any case—a helpful book for my current work & thinking, and of great benefit to my studies in Latin.

[Errol Orhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Agamben takes the analysis of the homo sacer and the situation in which he is created to a new level with his inquiry of the Franciscan doctrine. I enjoyed the description and synthesis of the doctrine itself and found myself highly excited with the meaning of it.

[Daniel Gutiérrez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Para una hermenéutica de las reglas monásticas, Agamben propone que la expresión latina "regula vitae" (regla de vida), se interprete como genitivo subjetivo, en la que el vocablo "vitae" es el elemento que subordina a “regula”, y no al contrario. Es decir, que la regla deriva del vivir, en contraposición a una regla que se impone a la vida como ley. "La nova lex [el nuevo testamento] no puede tener la forma de la ley, pero, como regula, se avecina a la forma misma de la vida que guía y orienta" (p. 77). O mejor, dice él, se debe considerar el umbral de indiferenciación que la forma de vida monástica establece entre regla y vida, donde "la regla se hace vida en la misma medida en que la vida se hace regla" (p. 104).

Para el profeso la regla está hecha entonces, como una guía de vida, pero nunca llega a ser una imposición, ni un sustituto de la única obligación real que es la consagración del cuerpo a Dios por medio de los hábitos (incesantes) que implican la vida en común. Dejando de lado, dice Agamben, el debate estéril sobre el carácter votivo o estipulatorio de la profesión monástica, los documentos de las reglas son verdaderas constituciones porque constituyen la vida en comunidad (cf. p. 86). Lamentablemente, el autor no explora a fondo el concepto de vida en común, más allá de mencionar el origen de la palabra convento (koinòs bíos: vida en común); y contar que en algunos textos de los siglos IV y V se puede percibir una tensión que opone la virtud de la vida conventual a la vida solitaria del eremita.

El autor hace un análisis textual de la Regla de San Francisco (S. XIII) demostrando que el sintagma latino "forma vitae" (forma-de-vida) se usa frecuentemente como contrapunto al vocablo “regula” (entendido como se expone en capítulos previos). El autor descubre la manera en que Francisco de Asís distingue las diferentes connotaciones del vivir cuando se habla de "vivir según el Evangelio" y de "vivir conforme a un precepto normativo". El santo entendió la vida de Cristo como LA FORMA de vida ejemplar que se subvierte de la esfera del derecho. Para él, no era posible hacer del Evangelio una REGLA, ya que sólo es posible vivirlo, vivir la forma-de-vida de Cristo. De la misma manera que opera la diferenciación entre ley y regla en la expresión “regula-vitae”, Francisco resalta la amplia connotación del vocablo FORMA cuando se usa en la unidad lingüística forma-de-vida.

La Regla de San Francisco renuncia al derecho a la propiedad y aboga por el retorno de los frailes al estado natural de los animales, quienes tienen derecho a habitar el mundo sin ser dueños de él (simplex facti usus). Durante los siglos XII y XIII, ya estando muerto Francisco, hubo un importante enfrentamiento entre la institución eclesiástica y los movimientos religiosos mendicantes. Los franciscanos, con el objetivo de defender su voto de pobreza y su abdicación de propiedad, lo explican por medio de una asociación al término legal “uso facti” (uso de hecho). Y en esta maniobra no prevén, como concluye Agamben, que quedarán atrapados en la jerga del derecho. Al contraponer el “uso de hecho” al “uso por derecho” (uso iuris), se desvían de la reivindicación original de Francisco: que era renunciar a la voluntad subjetiva, y así disfrutar de este mundo, como si no se disfrutase; porque la apariencia de este mundo se pasa. (cf. Cor. 7: 31).

[Ignacio Unamuno · Rating 5 out of 5]

En este libro, Giorgio Agamben confirma que es uno de los filósofos populares que sí estudian sus temas con rigor e irreprochable agudeza. Nuevamente, exhibe sus habilidades filológicas para revelar perspectivas muy novedosas. En este caso, Agamben descubre que las órdenes religiosas hicieron una aportación importante con el concepto de “forma de vida”. Entre los católicos, hablar de “forma de vida” es muy habitual. Pero Agamben va desentrañando el concepto para señalar sus verdaderas peculiaridades. Pacientemente, este filósofo va mostrando cómo el concepto de “vida” suele oponerse a la “ley”, de manera que una vida desde la ley resulta no ser “vida”, sino una “propiedad” de la vida humana, o una “apropiación”. Por eso, dirá Agamben, es frecuente que, cuando se afirma la “vida” exista un conflicto con la “ley”. En la Edad Media, en cambio, cuando las leyes se vuelven cada vez más poderosas, surge la resistencia a la Ley de la vida religiosa, y especialmente los franciscanos. Dice Agamben que el franciscanismo aportó algo que Occidente debería recordar constantemente: la posibilidad de “pensar la vida como algo que nunca se da como propiedad, sino sólo como uso común” (p. xiii).

La vida religiosa, las reglas de las órdenes monásticas y, específicamente, la Alta Pobreza de los franciscanos son explicadas por Agamben como una manera de vivir que tiene que despojarse de lo obligatorio y la coacción. No son simples mandatos, sino que se trata de insuflar vida a los mandatos mismos. Si es que lo entiendo bien, Agamben propone que las órdenes religiosas no regulan la vida (como leyes), sino que vivifican las reglas. Así se supera la relación conflictiva con las leyes, que prohíben, limitan y obstaculizan.

La última parte, aunque es muy clara y sugerente, creo que pudo haberse expandido más para ofrecer mayores perspectivas. En ella, Agamben va explorando las nociones sobre las “propiedades” y el “uso” de las cosas que hay entre los religiosos. Aunque se deja entender que la lógica vital detrás de los religiosos no consiste en apropiarse de las cosas, sino usarlas sin adueñarse de ellas, me hubiera gustado más análisis. Creo que eso lleva a que el estudio sobre la Pobreza franciscana sea demasiado rápido. Un poco más de lentitud dedicada a estos asuntos habría aventajado al libro. De todas maneras, es una excelente obra que debería leerse, sobre todo, entre los miembros del clero regular.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult. Demanding. Nuanced.

It is well to note that I lack theological or philosophical credentials. Though I undertook coursework in both throughout my academic education. And I think of myself as well-read on these and neighboring subjects.

That noted, this work is a demanding read. Prepare to investigate the meaning of terms, concepts, historical events / movements, and etc.

Having done that (in degree), the content opened up to me unanticipated insights, logic, and appreciation for the passionate, seemingly ever-continuing search for truth and understanding of humankind’s proper relationship with God.

[Sunblinding · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like a lot of the later entries in the Homo Sacer series ("The Use of Bodies" notwithstanding), this has some really interesting ideas that get unjustly stretched to book-length. SUP really needs to get the old boy to do a bit more editing, perhaps compiling all the banger ideas into a more concentrated volume. You have the respect the sheer scale of research Agamben does, however, and his attempt to displace the category of ownership with that of use is perennially compelling.

[jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually found this to be the slowest and most difficult in the series, as far as I've read it. If you can match his pace this is good reminder that Agamben (1) was trained in medieval philology, at which he excels, and (2) his best books are outside of Homo Sacer.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Agamben ciphers the tradition of Christian monasticism not as a question of duty, of the juridical, but rather as a question of liturgy, of communitarian life. "Rule" is thus subtended into monasticism as form-of-life.

[Jon Beadle · Rating 2 out of 5]

A sweeping approach to the Rule of Life as a dialectic of Rule/Life. It’s fascinating but extremely uninspired.

[Patrick Steadman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where on earth is there any use without abuse?

[agua · Rating 3 out of 5]

came for the highly-theorized outfit descriptions

[Merijn Kanters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult, but philosophical and interesting. Only when you are familiar with philosophy and Agamben.

[Blake Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still trying to figure out what I wanted from this book, what I actually learned, and why I spent time reading it at all.

[Pauljb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enlightening like all of his works. But you have to like his style.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I knew of this intellectual by reputation, and of his multi-work ambition to document legal shifts and the concept of how these define human dignity in Western culture, but this is very dry material. I expected a bit more verve. However, Agamben certainly digs into the monastic rules and their cenobitic orientation, before examining the Franciscan impact. I'd have liked more consideration of how a life lived not by the law but by a rule might have changed not only clerical but lay lives, for many "seculars" were also eager to ally with the priests, brothers, and nuns in this evangelical move.

[Douglas Boyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

a must read.