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Homo Sacer #II.5
Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty
In this book, Agamben investigates the roots of the modern moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy.
164 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
About the author
Giorgio Agamben
271 books1,012 followersGiorgio 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.
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.
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August 7, 2015
Continuing his recent engagement with the rich and labyrinthine inheritance of the Christian tradition, in Opus Dei (‘work of God’), Giorgio Agamben traces the way in which, from its obscure origins in the early institutionalization of the Church, the concept of ‘duty’ was incorporated into the sphere of modern ethics. While it’s clear that Agamben is no fan of duty (referring to its appropriation in Kant as an ‘aberrant idea’), his antipathy towards the notion doesn’t hamper the sensitivity and subtlety with which he explores its modulations from Aristotle to Kant via doctrinal teachings of the Church. Indeed, although Kant marks the zenith point at which duty and ethics become inseparably bound, Agamben argues that it’s only thanks to a ‘centuries-long praxis and theorization’ on the part of the Church that Kant was able to get his ethical project off the ground to begin with. And it's just to this historically extended elaboration that Opus Dei investigates.
Specifically, Agamben traces the germinal seeds of ethical duty to the way in which the ‘priesthood’ of Jesus – in whom the work of salvation coincided with his deific person – was slowly but surely transformed by the Church in order to define the function of the clergy – whose priestly ‘office’, by contrast, remained utterly indifferent to his individual character or person. In this way, the priest becomes something like an instrument of God, in whom and through which God works. As a result, the office of the priest in turn becomes conceived of in terms of duty: the priest is the one who, occupying the office of the priest, carries out his duty as a priest (Christ, by comparison, was anything but duty-bound: as Word made flesh, his very being coincided without remainder to his salvific action - a coincidence of which the monastic orders attempted to emulate with mixed results, as charted by Agamben's previous offering, The Highest Poverty).
Key for Agamben here is the circular structure that defines the function of the priest; obligated to carry out his office as a priest, he is nonetheless a priest only insofar as he carries out his office. This circularity - between 'being' (a priest) on the one hand, and 'acting' (as a priest) on the other - is paradigmatic of what Agamben understands to be the defining ontology of modernity, an ontology of 'effectivity'. Such an ontology - the introduction of which is tracked by Agamben (in a move very reminiscent of Heidegger) to the fickle translation of key Greek philosophical terms into the Latin vocabulary - is one in which being (ontology) and praxis (action) slowly resolve themselves into indistinguishability. Placed beside Agamben's analysis of power in The Kingdom and the Glory (in which power analogously shuttles endlessly and circuitously between the 'being' of the divine Kingdom and the praxis of the sublunary 'government'), Opus Dei's full import can be seen to lie in its isolation of the sort of 'ethical fall out' that results from just such an articulation of power and being.
If it isn't clear by now, there is simply a massive deal of philosophical work that Opus Dei juggles with in its slim 130 or so pages. And indeed, it's easily - in my opinion - one of the most challenging of Agamben's recent books. Not only because of its cross-fertilisation of ideas with Agamben's other works (anyone looking for clarification on his frequent but enigmatic use of the term 'operativity' absolutely needs to read this book), but also because of its rather strange structure, which shuffles between reflections on the Christian liturgy, scholastic interpretations of Aristotle's doctrines of potentiality and virtue, a genealogy of 'office', and a reading of Kant's ethics, in a way that can be frankly bewildering to anyone without a prior background into Agamben's general project. Still, insofar as it constitutes an extension and deepening of the Homo Sacer series, Opus Dei does its job admirably, and is a welcome addition to the Agambinian reserve.
Specifically, Agamben traces the germinal seeds of ethical duty to the way in which the ‘priesthood’ of Jesus – in whom the work of salvation coincided with his deific person – was slowly but surely transformed by the Church in order to define the function of the clergy – whose priestly ‘office’, by contrast, remained utterly indifferent to his individual character or person. In this way, the priest becomes something like an instrument of God, in whom and through which God works. As a result, the office of the priest in turn becomes conceived of in terms of duty: the priest is the one who, occupying the office of the priest, carries out his duty as a priest (Christ, by comparison, was anything but duty-bound: as Word made flesh, his very being coincided without remainder to his salvific action - a coincidence of which the monastic orders attempted to emulate with mixed results, as charted by Agamben's previous offering, The Highest Poverty).
Key for Agamben here is the circular structure that defines the function of the priest; obligated to carry out his office as a priest, he is nonetheless a priest only insofar as he carries out his office. This circularity - between 'being' (a priest) on the one hand, and 'acting' (as a priest) on the other - is paradigmatic of what Agamben understands to be the defining ontology of modernity, an ontology of 'effectivity'. Such an ontology - the introduction of which is tracked by Agamben (in a move very reminiscent of Heidegger) to the fickle translation of key Greek philosophical terms into the Latin vocabulary - is one in which being (ontology) and praxis (action) slowly resolve themselves into indistinguishability. Placed beside Agamben's analysis of power in The Kingdom and the Glory (in which power analogously shuttles endlessly and circuitously between the 'being' of the divine Kingdom and the praxis of the sublunary 'government'), Opus Dei's full import can be seen to lie in its isolation of the sort of 'ethical fall out' that results from just such an articulation of power and being.
If it isn't clear by now, there is simply a massive deal of philosophical work that Opus Dei juggles with in its slim 130 or so pages. And indeed, it's easily - in my opinion - one of the most challenging of Agamben's recent books. Not only because of its cross-fertilisation of ideas with Agamben's other works (anyone looking for clarification on his frequent but enigmatic use of the term 'operativity' absolutely needs to read this book), but also because of its rather strange structure, which shuffles between reflections on the Christian liturgy, scholastic interpretations of Aristotle's doctrines of potentiality and virtue, a genealogy of 'office', and a reading of Kant's ethics, in a way that can be frankly bewildering to anyone without a prior background into Agamben's general project. Still, insofar as it constitutes an extension and deepening of the Homo Sacer series, Opus Dei does its job admirably, and is a welcome addition to the Agambinian reserve.
October 2, 2026
Agamben and Conceptual Necromancy
A Quaestio on Political Theology
Giorgio Agamben’s atheist reconstruction of political theology proceeds genealogically, concepts drawn from distant theological traditions are reassembled within a new architecture of power. The result is brilliant and provocative. Yet the procedure raises a question about the ontological and teleological status of the concepts it conjures. My argumentation unfolds in a way not unlike a medieval quaestio, confronting Agamben’s illustrative "ontology” with the theological and political conjectures they affirm.
Agamben exhumates patristic concepts, renders them ontologically inoperative, and transforms them into procedural non-sequitur tokens, much for the delight of pedantic textualism. The genealogy often presents hidden continuity as explanation, allowing distant epochs to appear as if they converged upon a single mechanism of government. Parallelism becomes the guise of insight, with sovereignty, administration, exception, and rule arranged into a bipolar structure repeating across centuries. Interestingly enough, for Agamben, exceptions make more than a rule.
A scholarly reading of Agamben observes that, particularly in Opus Dei, his analysis of officium and liturgy centres on the separation of the person from the function he performs, through which he traces the genealogy of function and government. His entire project can be deciphered through this enchanted keystone, which turns historical analysis into “genealogical evidence” for these operations. In his view, there is a separation between the office and the exercise of its function, and, at the level of political power, between sovereignty (legitimacy/ ontology/ transcendence) and governance (management/ economy/ immanence).
In The Kingdom and the Glory, this latter distinction takes the form of the articulation between Kingdom and Government. This distinction is genealogically traced by Agamben to oikonomia, which he reads as the theological paradigm through which the possibility of administration and governance apart from the sovereign unity of God becomes intelligible. This separation is manifested through a certain nakedness, as well as through a shroud that conceals its irreducible distinction. He uses the Christian iconography of Hetoimasia, the empty throne, as a metaphor for the "governmental machine" of the West. It symbolizes that the ultimate seat of power is vacant. As he puts it, "Doxology (glory) constitutes a threshold of indifference between politics and theology"; but just so, Agamben's analysis also comes to the conclusion that "Glory is the place where theology attempts to think the difficult conciliation between immanent trinity and economic trinity, theologia and oikonomia, being and praxis, God in himself and God for us".
Thus power needs glory, the immanent and economic Trinities are held as one and the same in the moment of doxology, of praise. Because there is nothing at the absolute centre of power, the machine requires rituals, ceremonies, and "glory", acclamations, media spectacles, to continuously mask and manage this central void. Glory, once the radiance of divine presence, becomes a device for administering and stabilizing power. Some readers therefore describe Agamben’s project as a form of “profane theology”. The theological vocabulary survives, but only as conceptual equipment. What remains is a hollow brilliance, the choreography of transcendence without transcendence itself. From a Christian perspective, however, this operation is necromantic. The divine spark of life is snuffed while the conceptual machinery continues to hum with eerie coherence.
In early Christian theology, particularly among the Cappadocians, for Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil the Great, oikonomia signifies the "dispensatio salutis", the historical self-communication of the Triune God through incarnation, redemption, and sanctification. Agamben treats this theological economy as genealogically continuous with, and structurally legible through, forms of bureaucratic management. Angels, in his reading, become an administrative hierarchy transmitting commands, and liturgical glory becomes the acclamation that stabilizes authority. The Trinity is transformed from the revelation of divine communion into an archetype of distributed governance and functional mediation. The two share a vocabulary but not an ontology. Confusing them produces a conceptual category mistake, where the drama of salvation is reduced to the diagram of a modern office.
Karl Schmitt famously argued that modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts. Sovereignty mirrors divine omnipotence, while the state of exception mirrors the miracle. Theology still possesses ontological weight and the possibility of divine interruption remains. For Agamben, the state of exception is no longer a juridical anomaly, a temporary suspension of order, but the hidden paradigm of modern governance itself which takes form as a historical ‘’gigantomachy’’, a space devoid of law. Inside this void, the law applies by ‘’not applying’’, allowing sovereign violence to act directly on human bodies, creating ‘’bare life’’ (homo sacer). For him, the dual structure of governance which typically relies upon the relationship between auctoritas and potentas, transforms the miracle into administration, and the economy of salvation becomes its management. Unlike Schmitt, Agamben does not juggle with ontological distinctions, he offers the machine without its pulse; or he transcribes the pulse, while denying the reality of the machine that produced the signal in the first place.
Where Schmitt understands modern political concepts as secularized theological forms, Karl Barth insists that theology begins not with human categories but with divine Revelation, that theological concepts are not emptied of their reference once they assume historical form; their meaning remains in identical ontological status with the reality to which they bear witness. Oikonomia, in this perspective, cannot simply be described as a paradigm of administration, because its meaning is inseparable from the self-communication of God in Christ.
Agamben interprets concepts primarily through their function within historical configurations of power rather than through their truth claims. The move appears to abolish metaphysics, yet metaphysics, and politics as choreography, quietly return through the back door as a philosophical decision. The reduction of ontology to function is itself a metaphysical choice, a metaphysics with ontology as pocket change. Agamben thus performs a kind of mirror-image spell, not unlike the much-maligned Marxian reduction of ideal structures to social relations.
Agamben’s sovereignly governed, yet deceptively restrictive theoretical framework of historical genealogy uses also Walter Benjamin's theological and political paradigmatic concept of the ‘’mesianic time’’ as a foreshadowing of his own state of exception; he uses it for its extractive political gain, as an anti-end of time, anti-ethical paralysis; a fortuitous break from the continuity of Christian teleological time and a push towards revolutionary action. Within this anti-linear, anti-traditionalist, notion of messianic time, one can find a political strategy that is not about awaiting a future saviour but about acting in the present, a time of "divestment" from the values of capitalist time and accumulation, leading to a standstill in the ongoing flow of historical injustices.
Agamben seeks to move beyond the entire ends-means opposition as the dominant framework for understanding political action. In The Coming Community, he defines politics as a sphere of ‘’pure mediality without end’’. Political action becomes significant when it exposes its own mediality rather than being subordinated to an external purpose. He touches on ‘’whatever singularity’’ (quodlibet), which represents a form of being that rejects fixed identity or social belonging, existing instead as a pure, exposed threshold or void. By occupying the void without allowing the state to capture or define it, humanity can achieve a "form-of-life" that is free from sovereign violence. Agamben points to the gesture as the ultimate embodiment of pure means. Situated between acting and intending, the gesture neither serves an external end nor becomes an end in itself, it is an expression of pure mediality. Pure means operate by releasing potentiality (dynamis), exposing and rendering the power machine inoperative (inoperosità), the only way to genuinely deactivate and depose sovereign power.
In theory, this yields a powerful diagnosis of modernity. In practice, it renders Agamben’s thought strangely gratuitous, incapable of intervention or ethical stake, remaining largely speculative, rather than enacted in the real world. It is telling that Agamben’s search for a “form-of-life” beyond sovereign capture leads him back, almost inevitably, into the theological vocabulary of kenosis. Agamben finds in this language a suggestive grammar for imagining a life no longer organized by sovereign command, retaining the gesture of self-emptying while leaving aside the rather inconvenient question of who is giving himself, to whom, and for what end.
By binding Glory to the Cross, Hans Urs von Balthasar does not turn divine power into mere weakness or defenselessness; he discloses a form of sovereignty whose very mode of being is self-giving love. For Balthasar, self-emptying is personal, relational, and teleological; the Son gives Himself to the Father, in the Spirit, for the reconciliation of the world. Divine fullness is therefore not the accumulation of power over the other, but the paradoxical freedom to give Himself without reserve. True divine Glory (doxa/Herrlichkeit) is not domination or the spectacle of omnipotence, but the radiant splendour of this Trinitarian self-giving. Kenosis is therefore neither a political technique nor a metaphor for governance, but belongs to the mystery of divine life itself, becoming visible in history through the person and mission of Christ.
His concepts - bare life, the state of exception - belong to what he calls political ontology. They are not sociological descriptions but philosophical diagnoses of the metaphysical structure of modernity. In this interpretation, his work attempts to chart a third path between nihilism and religious restoration, a radical disenchantment of the world. If one challenges the empirical claims, Agamben answers that the argument is ontological; if one challenges the ontology, he answers that it is merely genealogical, that he is only describing how concepts appear within history. The corresponding possibility of escape from this structure is articulated through concepts such as pure means, inoperativity, destituent power, and form-of-life, all of which point toward the deactivation of the political separation between zoē (mere biological life) and bios (politically qualified life).
The ambiguity of the system is captured in the image with which his reconstruction of political theology concludes. If the throne is full, glory answers the divine presence it celebrates. If the throne is empty, glory nevertheless sustains it through its managerial theological politics. The apparatus functions in either case. What emerges is an implicit ontology of the Void, a vision in which reality itself is gradually replaced by the operations that claim to govern it. The conceptual machine becomes suffocatingly coherent - Giorgio Agamben, the Necromancer Supreme.
But the price of this disenchantment is high. If the divine is reduced to symbolic representation, transcendence becomes merely another instrument within the machinery of power. The mechanism thus acquires a strange hermeneutical suspiciousness, it can testify only to the persistence of historical illusion; it represents the paradox of a hollowed out messianic condition that suspends the creative vocation of human beings. Here, action no longer unfolds within a triumphant or providential logic, nor according to the beautiful, the good, or the divine. What remains is a humanity inhabiting the final remnants of historical time, dwelling among the exhausted inheritances of a past whose conceptual promises have already been spent.
A cautionary reminder that even the most brilliant Necromancer, Nietzsche, could only offer his genealogy of morals and his lament over the exhaustion of culture and civilization. Democracy, stripped of glory, increasingly becomes an economy of proliferating claims, factions and popular banalities, where entitlement displaces virtue and every singularity becomes a demand upon the whole. The Other is increasingly encountered through suspicion, competition and resentment. When severed from its theological economy, sovereignty retains power without measure and seeks through violence what it has lost in transcendence.
Only God can be sovereign without danger, because His wisdom and justice are equal to His power. Human sovereignty cannot sustain itself as an absolute, nor can political virtue survive indefinitely without an economy beyond itself. If the patristic vision is correct, if oikonomia is not administration but the historical self-communication of the Triune life, then the apparatus is not the last word. The world is not merely governed, it is redeemed. And glory, in its true sense, is not the acclamation that sustains power, but the radiance of a presence that no apparatus can manufacture.
A Quaestio on Political Theology
Giorgio Agamben’s atheist reconstruction of political theology proceeds genealogically, concepts drawn from distant theological traditions are reassembled within a new architecture of power. The result is brilliant and provocative. Yet the procedure raises a question about the ontological and teleological status of the concepts it conjures. My argumentation unfolds in a way not unlike a medieval quaestio, confronting Agamben’s illustrative "ontology” with the theological and political conjectures they affirm.
Agamben exhumates patristic concepts, renders them ontologically inoperative, and transforms them into procedural non-sequitur tokens, much for the delight of pedantic textualism. The genealogy often presents hidden continuity as explanation, allowing distant epochs to appear as if they converged upon a single mechanism of government. Parallelism becomes the guise of insight, with sovereignty, administration, exception, and rule arranged into a bipolar structure repeating across centuries. Interestingly enough, for Agamben, exceptions make more than a rule.
A scholarly reading of Agamben observes that, particularly in Opus Dei, his analysis of officium and liturgy centres on the separation of the person from the function he performs, through which he traces the genealogy of function and government. His entire project can be deciphered through this enchanted keystone, which turns historical analysis into “genealogical evidence” for these operations. In his view, there is a separation between the office and the exercise of its function, and, at the level of political power, between sovereignty (legitimacy/ ontology/ transcendence) and governance (management/ economy/ immanence).
In The Kingdom and the Glory, this latter distinction takes the form of the articulation between Kingdom and Government. This distinction is genealogically traced by Agamben to oikonomia, which he reads as the theological paradigm through which the possibility of administration and governance apart from the sovereign unity of God becomes intelligible. This separation is manifested through a certain nakedness, as well as through a shroud that conceals its irreducible distinction. He uses the Christian iconography of Hetoimasia, the empty throne, as a metaphor for the "governmental machine" of the West. It symbolizes that the ultimate seat of power is vacant. As he puts it, "Doxology (glory) constitutes a threshold of indifference between politics and theology"; but just so, Agamben's analysis also comes to the conclusion that "Glory is the place where theology attempts to think the difficult conciliation between immanent trinity and economic trinity, theologia and oikonomia, being and praxis, God in himself and God for us".
Thus power needs glory, the immanent and economic Trinities are held as one and the same in the moment of doxology, of praise. Because there is nothing at the absolute centre of power, the machine requires rituals, ceremonies, and "glory", acclamations, media spectacles, to continuously mask and manage this central void. Glory, once the radiance of divine presence, becomes a device for administering and stabilizing power. Some readers therefore describe Agamben’s project as a form of “profane theology”. The theological vocabulary survives, but only as conceptual equipment. What remains is a hollow brilliance, the choreography of transcendence without transcendence itself. From a Christian perspective, however, this operation is necromantic. The divine spark of life is snuffed while the conceptual machinery continues to hum with eerie coherence.
In early Christian theology, particularly among the Cappadocians, for Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil the Great, oikonomia signifies the "dispensatio salutis", the historical self-communication of the Triune God through incarnation, redemption, and sanctification. Agamben treats this theological economy as genealogically continuous with, and structurally legible through, forms of bureaucratic management. Angels, in his reading, become an administrative hierarchy transmitting commands, and liturgical glory becomes the acclamation that stabilizes authority. The Trinity is transformed from the revelation of divine communion into an archetype of distributed governance and functional mediation. The two share a vocabulary but not an ontology. Confusing them produces a conceptual category mistake, where the drama of salvation is reduced to the diagram of a modern office.
Karl Schmitt famously argued that modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts. Sovereignty mirrors divine omnipotence, while the state of exception mirrors the miracle. Theology still possesses ontological weight and the possibility of divine interruption remains. For Agamben, the state of exception is no longer a juridical anomaly, a temporary suspension of order, but the hidden paradigm of modern governance itself which takes form as a historical ‘’gigantomachy’’, a space devoid of law. Inside this void, the law applies by ‘’not applying’’, allowing sovereign violence to act directly on human bodies, creating ‘’bare life’’ (homo sacer). For him, the dual structure of governance which typically relies upon the relationship between auctoritas and potentas, transforms the miracle into administration, and the economy of salvation becomes its management. Unlike Schmitt, Agamben does not juggle with ontological distinctions, he offers the machine without its pulse; or he transcribes the pulse, while denying the reality of the machine that produced the signal in the first place.
Where Schmitt understands modern political concepts as secularized theological forms, Karl Barth insists that theology begins not with human categories but with divine Revelation, that theological concepts are not emptied of their reference once they assume historical form; their meaning remains in identical ontological status with the reality to which they bear witness. Oikonomia, in this perspective, cannot simply be described as a paradigm of administration, because its meaning is inseparable from the self-communication of God in Christ.
Agamben interprets concepts primarily through their function within historical configurations of power rather than through their truth claims. The move appears to abolish metaphysics, yet metaphysics, and politics as choreography, quietly return through the back door as a philosophical decision. The reduction of ontology to function is itself a metaphysical choice, a metaphysics with ontology as pocket change. Agamben thus performs a kind of mirror-image spell, not unlike the much-maligned Marxian reduction of ideal structures to social relations.
Agamben’s sovereignly governed, yet deceptively restrictive theoretical framework of historical genealogy uses also Walter Benjamin's theological and political paradigmatic concept of the ‘’mesianic time’’ as a foreshadowing of his own state of exception; he uses it for its extractive political gain, as an anti-end of time, anti-ethical paralysis; a fortuitous break from the continuity of Christian teleological time and a push towards revolutionary action. Within this anti-linear, anti-traditionalist, notion of messianic time, one can find a political strategy that is not about awaiting a future saviour but about acting in the present, a time of "divestment" from the values of capitalist time and accumulation, leading to a standstill in the ongoing flow of historical injustices.
Agamben seeks to move beyond the entire ends-means opposition as the dominant framework for understanding political action. In The Coming Community, he defines politics as a sphere of ‘’pure mediality without end’’. Political action becomes significant when it exposes its own mediality rather than being subordinated to an external purpose. He touches on ‘’whatever singularity’’ (quodlibet), which represents a form of being that rejects fixed identity or social belonging, existing instead as a pure, exposed threshold or void. By occupying the void without allowing the state to capture or define it, humanity can achieve a "form-of-life" that is free from sovereign violence. Agamben points to the gesture as the ultimate embodiment of pure means. Situated between acting and intending, the gesture neither serves an external end nor becomes an end in itself, it is an expression of pure mediality. Pure means operate by releasing potentiality (dynamis), exposing and rendering the power machine inoperative (inoperosità), the only way to genuinely deactivate and depose sovereign power.
In theory, this yields a powerful diagnosis of modernity. In practice, it renders Agamben’s thought strangely gratuitous, incapable of intervention or ethical stake, remaining largely speculative, rather than enacted in the real world. It is telling that Agamben’s search for a “form-of-life” beyond sovereign capture leads him back, almost inevitably, into the theological vocabulary of kenosis. Agamben finds in this language a suggestive grammar for imagining a life no longer organized by sovereign command, retaining the gesture of self-emptying while leaving aside the rather inconvenient question of who is giving himself, to whom, and for what end.
By binding Glory to the Cross, Hans Urs von Balthasar does not turn divine power into mere weakness or defenselessness; he discloses a form of sovereignty whose very mode of being is self-giving love. For Balthasar, self-emptying is personal, relational, and teleological; the Son gives Himself to the Father, in the Spirit, for the reconciliation of the world. Divine fullness is therefore not the accumulation of power over the other, but the paradoxical freedom to give Himself without reserve. True divine Glory (doxa/Herrlichkeit) is not domination or the spectacle of omnipotence, but the radiant splendour of this Trinitarian self-giving. Kenosis is therefore neither a political technique nor a metaphor for governance, but belongs to the mystery of divine life itself, becoming visible in history through the person and mission of Christ.
His concepts - bare life, the state of exception - belong to what he calls political ontology. They are not sociological descriptions but philosophical diagnoses of the metaphysical structure of modernity. In this interpretation, his work attempts to chart a third path between nihilism and religious restoration, a radical disenchantment of the world. If one challenges the empirical claims, Agamben answers that the argument is ontological; if one challenges the ontology, he answers that it is merely genealogical, that he is only describing how concepts appear within history. The corresponding possibility of escape from this structure is articulated through concepts such as pure means, inoperativity, destituent power, and form-of-life, all of which point toward the deactivation of the political separation between zoē (mere biological life) and bios (politically qualified life).
The ambiguity of the system is captured in the image with which his reconstruction of political theology concludes. If the throne is full, glory answers the divine presence it celebrates. If the throne is empty, glory nevertheless sustains it through its managerial theological politics. The apparatus functions in either case. What emerges is an implicit ontology of the Void, a vision in which reality itself is gradually replaced by the operations that claim to govern it. The conceptual machine becomes suffocatingly coherent - Giorgio Agamben, the Necromancer Supreme.
But the price of this disenchantment is high. If the divine is reduced to symbolic representation, transcendence becomes merely another instrument within the machinery of power. The mechanism thus acquires a strange hermeneutical suspiciousness, it can testify only to the persistence of historical illusion; it represents the paradox of a hollowed out messianic condition that suspends the creative vocation of human beings. Here, action no longer unfolds within a triumphant or providential logic, nor according to the beautiful, the good, or the divine. What remains is a humanity inhabiting the final remnants of historical time, dwelling among the exhausted inheritances of a past whose conceptual promises have already been spent.
A cautionary reminder that even the most brilliant Necromancer, Nietzsche, could only offer his genealogy of morals and his lament over the exhaustion of culture and civilization. Democracy, stripped of glory, increasingly becomes an economy of proliferating claims, factions and popular banalities, where entitlement displaces virtue and every singularity becomes a demand upon the whole. The Other is increasingly encountered through suspicion, competition and resentment. When severed from its theological economy, sovereignty retains power without measure and seeks through violence what it has lost in transcendence.
Only God can be sovereign without danger, because His wisdom and justice are equal to His power. Human sovereignty cannot sustain itself as an absolute, nor can political virtue survive indefinitely without an economy beyond itself. If the patristic vision is correct, if oikonomia is not administration but the historical self-communication of the Triune life, then the apparatus is not the last word. The world is not merely governed, it is redeemed. And glory, in its true sense, is not the acclamation that sustains power, but the radiance of a presence that no apparatus can manufacture.
January 8, 2017
Honestamente, el que menos me ha convencido de toda la saga Homo Sacer. Interpretación de Heidegger dudosa y uso permanente de referencias y conceptos centrales de forma ambigua (algo significativo, según señala él mismo cuando habla de Nietzsche).
December 9, 2021
Πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα αναφορά στην αντίληψη που είχε και έχει ο άνθρωπος για τον χρόνο, από την κλασική αρχαιότητα, στον χριστιανισμό και από τον Έγελο, στον Μαρξ, τον Μπένγιαμιν και τον Χάιντεγκερ. Ορισμένα σημεία είναι δυσκολονόητα, όπως και το πρώτο επίμετρο από τα δυο.
February 18, 2019
The way Agamben finds major conceptuel turns of our modernity in micro theological tricks is always stunning...
May 7, 2020
Some really magnificent stuff, gets really knotty at the end and I'll have to return to it at some point.
October 14, 2024
Este libro de Agamben es sorprendentemente audaz. En muy pocas páginas, presenta numerosas ideas impactantes. Para él, la “ontología de la Modernidad” aparece con claridad en el pensamiento de Kant, para quien el Ser y el Deber ser son lo mismo. Esto muy obviamente es para Agamben una “aberración”. Su prueba más convincente es la banalidad del mal que se manifestó en el juicio en contra de Adolf Eichmann.
Siguiendo su viejo método, Agamben quiere encontrar las raíces profundas de la equivalencia entre el Ser y el Deber. Por eso, se propone hacer, como su título lo muestra, una “Arqueología del Deber”. Aunque nunca lo dice en este libro, Agamben se inspira en la Teología Política de Carl Schmitt. Por eso, intenta probar —a mi juicio, con mucho esfuerzo y confusiones— que la raíz se encuentra en la liturgia católica.
Si es que lo entiendo bien, Agamben argumenta lo siguiente. En la misa, el “oficiante” actualiza, o reactiva, el sacrificio salvador de Jesucristo. El sacerdote se vuelve un instrumento en el que opera la eficacia de la salvación. Independientemente de quién sea el sacerdote, en su consagración eucarística se “opera” los “efectos” de la Salvación. Lo que sucede en la Eucaristía, entonces, es la “operatividad” del Ser. En esto se basa, principalmente, la tesis de Agamben.
Como la Eucaristía recibía el nombre de “Oficio”, y el “Oficio” fue lo que llegó a traducirse como “Deber”, entonces Agamben establece una conexión entre la misa y el Deber moderno. En el capítulo 3, “Una genealogía del Oficio”, Agamben se enreda mucho para comprobar el vínculo. Intenta ver cómo es que el concepto de “Oficio” se usaba entre los autores romanos y los Padres de la Iglesia. Sin mucho éxito, Agamben intentó probar que la operatividad de la Eucaristía se mezcló con la operatividad del Deber. El último capítulo lo vuelve todo más embrollado: aquí empieza a hablar del “Deber” en Kant, luego se regresa a los Neo-Platónicos, pasa por autores como Suárez, Pufendorf y Spinoza, para afirmar que se hizo una equivalencia entre el “Deber” y el “Ser”.
La verdad es que, aunque haya ideas estimulantes, no me parece que Agamben haya demostrado eficazmente que el Deber de la Modernidad se origine en la Eucaristía. Además de lo abigarrado y desordenado de su argumentación, es perceptible una escritura llena de entimemas: se salta muchos pasos para llegar a sus conclusiones. Entre muchas partes donde se captan sus entimemas, yo lo percibí cuando analiza el concepto de “liturgia”.
Agamben afirma que hay una especie de desviación en la idea sacramental, o sacrificial, del “sacerdocio” en la Iglesia. Según él, esto empieza a desarrollarse en tiempos de la Epístola a los Corintios de san Clemente de Roma. Su fundamento es que en este documento aparece la palabra griega “liturgia” en un sentido más legal que cuando aparece en el Nuevo Testamento. Lamentablemente, Agamben no hace una revisión cuidadosa del vocablo “liturgia” en el Nuevo Testamento. Se conforma con decir que “liturgia” conserva el significado que tenía en tiempos de Aristóteles, como una “función pública”, sin tener una connotación ceremonial o ritual. Pero el mismo Agamben había afirmado antes que en la Septuaginta se usó el concepto de “liturgia” para hablar del ministerio de los sacerdotes del Templo de Jerusalén. Si esto es así, entonces resulta muy necesaria una aegumentación más cuidadosa. Tuvo que haber respondido a esta pregunta: ¿por qué, si el Nuevo Testamento usa un griego, generalmente, inspirado en la Septuaginta, no usó su concepto de “liturgia”? O formulado de otra forma: ¿por qué usar un significado pagano de “liturgia” y no uno propiamente judío? De la manera como está presentado, el argumento es entimemático. Por eso, parece como si Agamben hubiera dado por sentada esta importante premisa para acomodarla a sus hipótesis.
En resumen, el libro de Agamben es una invitación a reflexionar en los orígenes profundos del mundo moderno, que de alguna manera tienen un estrato cristiano. Pero no basta con hacer conexiones lingüísticas, y asumir que una cosa viene de otra cosa sólo por usar la misma palabra (en este caso, “Oficio”). Cualquier lingüista experimentado sabe que las palabras son polisémicas y sus significados pueden rastrearse a una multiplicidad de orígenes. Quizás Agamben esté en lo cierto, pero para eso debe hacer un análisis más cuidadoso y no saltarse las conexiones tan precipitadamente.
Siguiendo su viejo método, Agamben quiere encontrar las raíces profundas de la equivalencia entre el Ser y el Deber. Por eso, se propone hacer, como su título lo muestra, una “Arqueología del Deber”. Aunque nunca lo dice en este libro, Agamben se inspira en la Teología Política de Carl Schmitt. Por eso, intenta probar —a mi juicio, con mucho esfuerzo y confusiones— que la raíz se encuentra en la liturgia católica.
Si es que lo entiendo bien, Agamben argumenta lo siguiente. En la misa, el “oficiante” actualiza, o reactiva, el sacrificio salvador de Jesucristo. El sacerdote se vuelve un instrumento en el que opera la eficacia de la salvación. Independientemente de quién sea el sacerdote, en su consagración eucarística se “opera” los “efectos” de la Salvación. Lo que sucede en la Eucaristía, entonces, es la “operatividad” del Ser. En esto se basa, principalmente, la tesis de Agamben.
Como la Eucaristía recibía el nombre de “Oficio”, y el “Oficio” fue lo que llegó a traducirse como “Deber”, entonces Agamben establece una conexión entre la misa y el Deber moderno. En el capítulo 3, “Una genealogía del Oficio”, Agamben se enreda mucho para comprobar el vínculo. Intenta ver cómo es que el concepto de “Oficio” se usaba entre los autores romanos y los Padres de la Iglesia. Sin mucho éxito, Agamben intentó probar que la operatividad de la Eucaristía se mezcló con la operatividad del Deber. El último capítulo lo vuelve todo más embrollado: aquí empieza a hablar del “Deber” en Kant, luego se regresa a los Neo-Platónicos, pasa por autores como Suárez, Pufendorf y Spinoza, para afirmar que se hizo una equivalencia entre el “Deber” y el “Ser”.
La verdad es que, aunque haya ideas estimulantes, no me parece que Agamben haya demostrado eficazmente que el Deber de la Modernidad se origine en la Eucaristía. Además de lo abigarrado y desordenado de su argumentación, es perceptible una escritura llena de entimemas: se salta muchos pasos para llegar a sus conclusiones. Entre muchas partes donde se captan sus entimemas, yo lo percibí cuando analiza el concepto de “liturgia”.
Agamben afirma que hay una especie de desviación en la idea sacramental, o sacrificial, del “sacerdocio” en la Iglesia. Según él, esto empieza a desarrollarse en tiempos de la Epístola a los Corintios de san Clemente de Roma. Su fundamento es que en este documento aparece la palabra griega “liturgia” en un sentido más legal que cuando aparece en el Nuevo Testamento. Lamentablemente, Agamben no hace una revisión cuidadosa del vocablo “liturgia” en el Nuevo Testamento. Se conforma con decir que “liturgia” conserva el significado que tenía en tiempos de Aristóteles, como una “función pública”, sin tener una connotación ceremonial o ritual. Pero el mismo Agamben había afirmado antes que en la Septuaginta se usó el concepto de “liturgia” para hablar del ministerio de los sacerdotes del Templo de Jerusalén. Si esto es así, entonces resulta muy necesaria una aegumentación más cuidadosa. Tuvo que haber respondido a esta pregunta: ¿por qué, si el Nuevo Testamento usa un griego, generalmente, inspirado en la Septuaginta, no usó su concepto de “liturgia”? O formulado de otra forma: ¿por qué usar un significado pagano de “liturgia” y no uno propiamente judío? De la manera como está presentado, el argumento es entimemático. Por eso, parece como si Agamben hubiera dado por sentada esta importante premisa para acomodarla a sus hipótesis.
En resumen, el libro de Agamben es una invitación a reflexionar en los orígenes profundos del mundo moderno, que de alguna manera tienen un estrato cristiano. Pero no basta con hacer conexiones lingüísticas, y asumir que una cosa viene de otra cosa sólo por usar la misma palabra (en este caso, “Oficio”). Cualquier lingüista experimentado sabe que las palabras son polisémicas y sus significados pueden rastrearse a una multiplicidad de orígenes. Quizás Agamben esté en lo cierto, pero para eso debe hacer un análisis más cuidadoso y no saltarse las conexiones tan precipitadamente.
June 20, 2018
El autor desarrolla una arqueología en la que descubre la función paradigmática del oficio (officium) en las definiciones del ser y el deber en la ética moderna. Inicialmente, rastrea la historia del término liturgia, en griego leiturgía (de laós, pueblo, y érgon, obra), servicio público. Estudia su aparición en Aristóteles, algunos libros apócrifos y las epístolas paulinas; para demostrar cómo su significado antiguo de servicio público pagano adquiere, ya en la carta de Clemente I a los corintios, un significado asociado a las funciones sacerdotales de Cristo (liturgo). Posteriormente, Ambrosio y Agustín, entre otros, reforzarán el carácter fundacional y eterno del sacerdocio de Cristo, y la dinámica trinitaria que ello activaría. Parafraseando a Tomás de Aquino: la comprensión teológica del oficio del sacerdote se entiende como opus operatum (obra obrada) y opus operans (obra obrante), es decir, el sacerdote como instrumento para la obra efectiva de Dios en el misterio eucarístico. Aquí, el carácter operativo o performativo del término oficio implicaría que la potencia (δύναμις) y el acto (ἐνέργεια) sean indiscernibles.
La eficacia de la palabra de Dios se entiende mejor a través de la historia del término latino effectus. Para lo cual, Agamben parte de la bifurcación que Odo Casel hace del término efecto en alemán: en la que Wirkung es efecto causado y realidad aparente, mientras que Wirklichkeit, involucraría "un modo eminente de la realidad y de la presencia [...] que es indiscernible de sus efectos" (p. 90). Sólo como Wirklichkeit se puede entender la operatividad inserta en el effectus de la eucaristía en la que se renueva la presencia misteriosa de Cristo por la operación de la potencia de su fortaleza (cf. Efesios 1:19-20)
Además, siguiendo a Cicerón, Agamben puede deducir que el oficio (officium) se da cuando no se presenta obligación ni deber (jurídico o moral), ni cuando existe necesidad (necessitas) natural. Se usa en contextos socialmente codificados, y por tanto su significado implica la vida en comunidad de un grupo de sujetos capaces de prever las consecuencias de sus acciones, haciendo uso de su razón. Es decir, de gobernar su vida (cf. pp. 117-118). Así, se desplaza el cumplimiento del deber a la totalidad de la vida.
Agamben dedica la última tercera parte del libro a la filosofía de la moral en Kant, y al umbral de indiferenciación que este introduce entre el deber-ser y el ser. Lo que llama "dos ontologías distintas y relacionadas: la primera la ontología del mando, es propia del ámbito jurídico-religioso, se expresa en imperativo [sé] y tiene carácter performativo. [Y] la segunda, propia de la tradición filosófico-científica, se expresa en la forma de indicativo [es]." (p. 183). Y con esta observación arguye que Kant consiguió preservar la lógica operativa del oficio (officium) cristiano incrustada dentro de su definición del deber, en la que el hombre se ve constantemente remitido al plano irreal del deber-ser. Dinámica que se activa, ya no por la palabra divina, sino por la voluntad humana.
La eficacia de la palabra de Dios se entiende mejor a través de la historia del término latino effectus. Para lo cual, Agamben parte de la bifurcación que Odo Casel hace del término efecto en alemán: en la que Wirkung es efecto causado y realidad aparente, mientras que Wirklichkeit, involucraría "un modo eminente de la realidad y de la presencia [...] que es indiscernible de sus efectos" (p. 90). Sólo como Wirklichkeit se puede entender la operatividad inserta en el effectus de la eucaristía en la que se renueva la presencia misteriosa de Cristo por la operación de la potencia de su fortaleza (cf. Efesios 1:19-20)
Además, siguiendo a Cicerón, Agamben puede deducir que el oficio (officium) se da cuando no se presenta obligación ni deber (jurídico o moral), ni cuando existe necesidad (necessitas) natural. Se usa en contextos socialmente codificados, y por tanto su significado implica la vida en comunidad de un grupo de sujetos capaces de prever las consecuencias de sus acciones, haciendo uso de su razón. Es decir, de gobernar su vida (cf. pp. 117-118). Así, se desplaza el cumplimiento del deber a la totalidad de la vida.
Agamben dedica la última tercera parte del libro a la filosofía de la moral en Kant, y al umbral de indiferenciación que este introduce entre el deber-ser y el ser. Lo que llama "dos ontologías distintas y relacionadas: la primera la ontología del mando, es propia del ámbito jurídico-religioso, se expresa en imperativo [sé] y tiene carácter performativo. [Y] la segunda, propia de la tradición filosófico-científica, se expresa en la forma de indicativo [es]." (p. 183). Y con esta observación arguye que Kant consiguió preservar la lógica operativa del oficio (officium) cristiano incrustada dentro de su definición del deber, en la que el hombre se ve constantemente remitido al plano irreal del deber-ser. Dinámica que se activa, ya no por la palabra divina, sino por la voluntad humana.
August 25, 2020
Como comenté hacia la mitad de mi lectura, este libro es un verdadero combo en el hocico de patrística y de teología católico-medieval. En este libro, Agamben apunta a una historia de la ontología moderna, cristalizada en la moral kantiana, pero cuya historia se remonta a los primeros Padres de la Iglesia, los cuales motivaron un cambio respecto a la ontología clásica aristotélica hacia lo que el italiano llamó una ontología de la operatividad y que lograría su primera gran concreción en la idea de officium. Es el officium el paradigma que comienza a regir en la liturgia cristiana como el momento performativo en el que el sacerdote, ministro de Dios, renueva la voluntad salvífica de Dios en el sacrificio del Hijo. De este modo, el sacerdote "es" tal en cuanto realiza el oficio divino, encomendado por Dios, de la liturgia y, al mismo tiempo, solo puede realizar su oficio en tanto "es sacerdote", produciéndose así una dinámica circular en la que prima la operatividad y la "realizabilidad" de los actos por sobre la sustancia y el ser. Es este paradigma cristiano, para Agamben, el que modela la ontología de la modernidad del ser como un "deber-ser", es decir, se es solo en cuanto se realiza lo que se debe --el deber, en este caso, siempre dictado por una ley trascendente que con Kant se seculariza--.
Claramente, lo escrito anteriormente solo es lo que logré captar dentro de toda la densidad conceptual de Giorgio Agamben. Sin embargo, lo que hace que sus libros sean una delicia es la prosa en la que escribe y la aparente simpleza con la que dispone la complejidad de la historia de la filosofía sobre la que trabaja. Lo que me gusta de su método es su rigor, con citas en latín y griego clásico, que garantizan toda su elaboración teórica. No se le puede achacar pereza o laxitud respecto a las fuentes con las que trabaja.
[Adviértase desde ya que el libro no tiene nada que ver con la prelatura católica del mismo nombre].
Claramente, lo escrito anteriormente solo es lo que logré captar dentro de toda la densidad conceptual de Giorgio Agamben. Sin embargo, lo que hace que sus libros sean una delicia es la prosa en la que escribe y la aparente simpleza con la que dispone la complejidad de la historia de la filosofía sobre la que trabaja. Lo que me gusta de su método es su rigor, con citas en latín y griego clásico, que garantizan toda su elaboración teórica. No se le puede achacar pereza o laxitud respecto a las fuentes con las que trabaja.
[Adviértase desde ya que el libro no tiene nada que ver con la prelatura católica del mismo nombre].
October 25, 2025
A strange book, it is to kingdom and the glory, what state of exception is to Homo sacer. A small companion piece that digs in on a connected issue. Unfortunately the Kingdom and the glory is the book by Agamben I have as of now understood the least. This section of the project clearly leaves the zone of being unambiguously political or philosophical, delving deep into theology.
It is no wonder this period is where praise for agamben and his readership seemed to rapidly decline. The touchstones needed to understand homo Sacer, remnants of Auschwitz, and state of exception are broadly, Aristotle, Plato, Schmitt, Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Arendt. Major figures in philosophy and of recent philosophy. These books are also clearly articulated in their aims even to those mostly unfamiliar with the authors.
In Kingdom and the glory Agamben is trying to flesh out the concept of Oikonomia in Christian theology and the idea of rest/silence. He does this to explain the nature of glory in politics and power, but his argument is so complex, has so little immediate applicability, and goes through every Christian theorist and father I can think of. His goal is obscure and seemingly trivial and many of his influences are even more obscure.
Opus Dei has many of these same things, but ties up nicely in the end, in a way Kingdom doesn't. I did not dislike or even disagree with kingdom I was just completely out of my depth.
The goal of these two books seems to be showing that power comes from doing nothing, the empty throne or the crown, or the title actually hold all the power and the action is not by power but by someone connected to powers signature. (I think?) The parade or these symbolic processes and objects are their own entities that actually hold the power that is then used by actual people. To sum up what I think they are saying is that power is connected to, it's not actually held by someone. This follows his argument in sacrament of logic that the need for the divine is for something to connect word to body. (Christ is the word etc)
There is lots of interesting stuff such as the Sabbath in judaism and its analogous nature to christian heaven and why this tradition had to be done away with for christian theology to work. (again this is what I think was said)
Overall just too dense and requires more than my extremely basic understanding of theology. I also believe he makes his case best in the sacrament of language which is the shortest book in the whole project, while Kingdom is the longest.
My understanding is that the final two books are of more of a return in format, philosophy, politics, and obvious goals than the incredibly interesting but almost unintelligible middle period.
It is no wonder this period is where praise for agamben and his readership seemed to rapidly decline. The touchstones needed to understand homo Sacer, remnants of Auschwitz, and state of exception are broadly, Aristotle, Plato, Schmitt, Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Arendt. Major figures in philosophy and of recent philosophy. These books are also clearly articulated in their aims even to those mostly unfamiliar with the authors.
In Kingdom and the glory Agamben is trying to flesh out the concept of Oikonomia in Christian theology and the idea of rest/silence. He does this to explain the nature of glory in politics and power, but his argument is so complex, has so little immediate applicability, and goes through every Christian theorist and father I can think of. His goal is obscure and seemingly trivial and many of his influences are even more obscure.
Opus Dei has many of these same things, but ties up nicely in the end, in a way Kingdom doesn't. I did not dislike or even disagree with kingdom I was just completely out of my depth.
The goal of these two books seems to be showing that power comes from doing nothing, the empty throne or the crown, or the title actually hold all the power and the action is not by power but by someone connected to powers signature. (I think?) The parade or these symbolic processes and objects are their own entities that actually hold the power that is then used by actual people. To sum up what I think they are saying is that power is connected to, it's not actually held by someone. This follows his argument in sacrament of logic that the need for the divine is for something to connect word to body. (Christ is the word etc)
There is lots of interesting stuff such as the Sabbath in judaism and its analogous nature to christian heaven and why this tradition had to be done away with for christian theology to work. (again this is what I think was said)
Overall just too dense and requires more than my extremely basic understanding of theology. I also believe he makes his case best in the sacrament of language which is the shortest book in the whole project, while Kingdom is the longest.
My understanding is that the final two books are of more of a return in format, philosophy, politics, and obvious goals than the incredibly interesting but almost unintelligible middle period.
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