Office and Agamben’s genealogy of economy and government Open Access

The question of why read Giorgio Agamben is perhaps no longer on the agenda. The question of how to read him, however, most definitely is. It is what is at stake in the discussion between Ian Hunter and myself. I read the work under discussion, Opus Dei: An archaeology of duty (hereafter OD) as a part of the wider Homo Sacer project initiated, developed, and concluded – or rather as ‘one that cannot be concluded but only abandoned’ as Agamben puts it (2016, p. xiii) – over nine volumes. I read that project as a multifaceted one that can form a resource for many areas of the human sciences including and particularly cultural and political sociology. It is certainly concerned with foundations or archai, first philosophy or ontology, and Heidegger’s metaphysics as a history of Being; but it also addresses the nature of law and politics, religion and theology, forms of governmentality and economic management, social and cultural practices, and religious and political liturgy and ritual. It draws attention to forgotten and obscure debates that address the meaning of rationalisation and secularisation, and the problem of modernity and the idea of the new. It helps us reconsider how we write history and utilise historical materials and what we mean by genealogy and archaeology. In all these ways, his work addresses the concerns of classical sociology of Weber, Durkheim, and Mauss and the more recent problematics of Foucault.

An examination of these themes in relation to the notion of ‘office’ today could not be more timely. The notion of public office is in deep crisis on two fronts. In relation to the public office of the official as bureaucrat, ‘neoliberal’, ‘new public managerial’, and ‘democratising’ reforms have undermined the very ‘ethos of office’ at the same time as they have sought to critique, limit, and deconstruct the notion of the territorial and welfare states such officials would serve. In respect to political office, we have seen the accession to the highest offices of those states by such figures, often lazily called ‘populist’, who forge an identification with citizens through a-rational, often cultic and liturgical means. Today, this occurs no longer simply by traditional forms of public assembly but also by new forms of social and digital media identification (on which see Dean, 2016). Moreover, these means are continuous with those of established liberal-democratic political culture. Thus, despite his critique of conventional Washington politics as usual, it would be unthinkable for Donald Trump to neglect to swear a solemn Oath of Office before acceding to the presidency of the United States and receiving the acclamations of the assembled public at the National Mall. On both the state-official and political fronts, the question of what Max Weber (1978 , pp. 1139–1141) called the ‘charisma of office’, its destruction by liberal-managerial rationalities, and its production by cultic, ritual, and ceremonial means is once again sharply posed.

In 1972, Foucault would accept Deleuze’s designation of theory as ‘tool box’, an explicit image of utility and functionality, which would appear several times in Foucault’s later work and in much commentary on it (Deleuze, in Foucault, 1977, p. 208). Just as surely as the image does not exhaust what is significant about Foucault’s work, it is, from Agamben’s perspective, too close to the very political-ontological machinery of effectivity and operativity he seems to challenge and dismantle. I would like to replace the image with one of a ‘jewel box’, as less immediately practical and useful, but filled with insights that can lead us beyond the utilitarian imaginary. Indeed Agamben’s own lapidary analyses seize upon these precious moments into how we might make intelligible and challenge sovereign and economic-governmental powers and their fields of interconnection and indeterminacy. This, at least, is the way I have approached the reading of Agamben (e.g. Dean, 2012).

In the accompanying article, and the seminar on which it is based, Ian Hunter offers a forceful reading of this challenging book, OD. While perspicacious, valuable, and useful, if highly critical of Agamben’s work, at its heart is the view that Agamben can be reduced to the single figure of an instance of ‘allegoresis’ modelled on Heidegger’s metaphysics. While I disagree with much of such a reading, it provides an excellent occasion to clarify the status of this book and where it fits into Agamben’s work more broadly. This article engages with Hunter’s criticism as far as it can, and, in so doing, elaborates an alternative reading of this book in the terms I have just given. Rather than view Agamben’s work as a manifestation of a particular Heideggerian problematic, it considers aspects of his Homo Sacer project germane to the fields of cultural and political sociology. This project is, rather like Foucault’s various analyses, a resource that enables us to pose provocative questions and envisage new, and sometimes quite old, research agendas, for these fields, even while it retains its own often difficult philosophical concerns. It focuses attention on often little known twentieth-century debates, such as that concerning the Liturgical Movement in this book, and relatively specialist archives, such as those known previously only to theologians. None of this requires a commitment to an ‘Agambenian’ theory (if indeed one could be identified) but suggests an affinity between his own problematics and the founding concerns of cultural and political sociology.

This article first identifies some points of agreement and disagreement with Hunter’s reading. Second, it places this book in the context of Agamben’s own work and in particular the Homo Sacer series, which alone now includes nine books over twenty years. This allows it, third, to identify this work as a component of Agamben’s project of a ‘theological genealogy of government and economy’ and as an ‘archaeology of duty’ rather than a ‘metaphysics’ or ‘theology’ of office or even a ‘genealogy of office’. Fourth, the article suggests that his analysis of liturgy and the sacraments should be understood less as allegorical manifestations of the structure of Heideggerian metaphysics than as a critique of the latter’s complicity with these religious practices. This enables it, fifth, to address the political implications of these concerns. Finally, it places the office of priesthood within Agamben’s wider theological genealogy and indications about office. In conclusion, Agamben’s contribution is located in a rather different and more disenchanted context than Hunter’s that parallels the framework of Weber and other thinkers on rationalisation and secularisation. Agamben’s theological genealogy is important because it addresses key problems of the rationalities through which power and government are exercised in the present as it returns us to classical sociology’s concern with the sacred and the ceremonial in the formation of political and communal identity.

This response concurs with key aspects of Hunter’s critique of OD:

(1) It is extremely problematic to view the medieval and Scholastic theory of the priesthood as ‘animate instrument’ as a template for all other offices and for the notion of ‘office’ per se. By focusing on the priest as an instrument of God’s power who nonetheless makes that power effective in the performance of the liturgy and the sacraments, Agamben largely ignores potentially interesting mundane social discourses on the office of the priest itself, and as but one office among various others.

(2) It is undoubtedly the case that Heidegger is a key interlocutor for Agamben and that reflections, figures, and traces of Heidegger’s metaphysical schemata can be found within Agamben’s work, including in his understanding of the office of the priesthood.

(3) The brief discussion in Chapter 4 of OD of Pufendorf and Kant does not do justice to the ethics of office of the former or the differences between that and the latter’s moral philosophy of the rational subject. Concerned as it is with the history of ontology and the coming to dominance of an ‘ontology of command’, it is indeed deficient from the perspective of the intellectual history of the concept of office.

In addition to these problems, Agamben does not address the contemporary critique of notions of ‘office’ from anti-bureaucrats and anti-statists of all types and thus risks being viewed among them. Nor does he address the transformation of liturgy with Protestantism and its notions of ministry or the relationship between the theory of the sacramental efficacy he discusses here and contemporary Catholic theory. Yet, despite these areas of concordance with Hunter, the rest of this paper departs from the thrust of his argument along the following lines:

(1) Agamben’s work, of which this book forms a small part, constitutes a considerable contribution to the genealogy of government and economic management, and to our understanding of forms of power more generally. It does this by illuminating the intimate interrelation between sovereignty and government – perhaps the central problem of modern democratic political thought as Richard Tuck (2016) has recently argued – from the vantage point of a range of theological sources treated as paradigms.

(2) It is not the case that Agamben endorses the divine ontology he discusses in either a Catholic or a secularised Heideggerian form. If anything, Agamben radically rejects the juridical and institutional form of the Church legitimated by the liturgy and the sacraments of which the priest is the instrumental agent. He can be read not as endorsing the moral ontologies he uncovers but as examining them in order to seek to understand our present, and thus his work can be placed in the intellectual lineage of Michel Foucault’s diagnostics of the present.

(3) This book cannot be characterised as a ‘theology of office’: It is a book on the theology of office. Agamben’s ultimate aspirations may involve a rethinking of ontology, ethics, and politics, but that does not lead him to endorse the ontologies he uncovers in theology. Agamben seeks to ‘profane’ rather than to endorse the ontologies of theology, to open them up to ‘common use’, as he puts it elsewhere (2007, p. 77).

(4) It would be reductive to read Agamben through the template of the Heideggerian history of Being, on the one hand, and to judge him by the canons of historical inquiry, on the other. He poses philosophical problems to historical materials without demanding that history answers them – and in this respect, he is very like Foucault (e.g. Foucault, 1991, p. 86).

The key terms of Agamben’s wider philosophy are those of ‘use’, ‘inoperativity’, and ‘form-of-life’, a life that cannot be separated from its form, of which the Franciscans’ idea of ‘the highest poverty’ is for him but an ultimately compromised expression. A central inspiration, which underlies his own critique of institutional religious practice, is found in the messianism of St Paul and Walter Benjamin. With this framework, Agamben seeks to recast ontology, politics, and ethics, and their relationship. In the current work, this framework is most clearly present in the final pages of the fourth and final chapter, and the ensuing ‘Threshold’, which concludes:

The starting point for such a project are texts in the history of Western metaphysics, from Aristotle to Heidegger. Agamben departs from Foucault in that he argues that the central problem of the latter’s understanding of ethics as a form of ‘relation to self’ is that it requires a rethinking and overhaul of ontology outside the idea of a ‘subject’ (2016, p. 108). Nevertheless, there is also a genealogical dimension to his work. The bulk of Agamben’s philological and historical work concerns classical ancient Greek and Roman texts, early and medieval Christian texts, and early modern moral and political philosophy and political economy. These are refracted through a non-sectarian engagement with modern theology: not only that of Odo Casel and the Benedictine Liturgical Movement in this text, but also, among others, the Catholic convert Erik Peterson, Protestant Karl Barth, and the rabbis, Gershom Scholem and Jacob Taubes. He is also among the most sociologically literate of philosophers. In respect to what might be called ‘classical modern’ social and political thought alone, Agamben’s recent work contains significant engagements with Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Claude Levi-Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Max Weber.

The question of the relationship between Agamben’s general philosophical framework and his genealogical work is far from settled. There is no doubt that he offers a more affirmative reconstruction of ontology, and of ethics and politics, than found in the previous poststructuralist generation. But the conclusions that one can draw from his genealogical work are relatively separate and irreducible to this ontology. That genealogical work can be of assistance in rethinking the analytical framework concerning the relationship between forms of power such as sovereignty and government (Dean, 2013), and the characterisation of general processes that help make aspects of the present thinkable, e.g. the rationalisation of liturgical practices in contemporary forms of public opinion and political acclamation (Dean, 2016). Agamben thus has much potential for analytical development and empirical socio-cultural study and this potential should not be foreclosed by too narrow a reading of his work.

The central aim here then is to alert those interested in cultural and political sociology to the resources made available by Agamben’s theological genealogy, the problems he raises through historical sources and debates, and the openings for new analytical strategies and empirical analysis.

Opus Dei (2013b) was first published in 2012 in Italy. It is part of the Homo Sacer series that was initiated with the now famous book of that title published in Italy in 1995 (1998) on the capture and abandonment of life by political power, and brought to a conclusion some twenty years later by The use of bodies (2016), a text that sets out Agamben’s ‘modal ontology’. In all there are nine books in the series divided into four groups. Opus Dei is numbered 2.5, and is grouped with five genealogical/archaeological texts. The early books in this group are more on political concepts: essays on the state of exception (2005a), stasis as civil war and a reading of the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan (Agamben, 2015). However, Opus Dei immediately follows a book, translated as The kingdom and the glory: For a theological genealogy of economy and government (2011a), first published in Italy in 2007, and another, The sacrament of language: An archaeology of the oath (2011b), from 2008. These three books, and a further volume, The highest poverty: Monastic rules and form-of-life (2013a), published in 2011, constitute something of an explicitly theological turn in the Homo Sacer series. The latter book, however, is not a part of the genealogical/archaeological series and is grouped with The use of bodies in the more philosophical-programmatic texts of part 4. The three genealogical or archaeological texts mentioned, however, are a part of theological turn in that they take seriously the conceptual architecture of texts concerning the divine government of both celestial and earthly worlds, and of the implications for human life.

Agamben makes the point that discourses on civil government and public administration are relative newcomers compared to the work of theologians on the providential government of the world (see 2011a, p. 142). He thus indicates the need to extend Foucault’s genealogy of government and economy to include a millennium and a half of thinking about divine government and ‘divine economy’. There is no sense, however, in which Agamben is endorsing any theological position, or longing for a return of the lost world of transcendence or urging us to adopt a sectarian position. In this respect, Agamben does not share the same problematic as that of Catholic moral philosophers or Radical Orthodoxy of a critique of secular modernity as the loss of transcendent ontological foundations. Even his attempts to outline a new ontology remain an ‘ontology of immanence’, while rejecting the affirmations of vitalism (Agamben, 2016, p. 29).

During this turn, Agamben’s work has been drawn into a more explicit relation to Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality and use of Foucauldian vocabulary. This is particularly true of The kingdom and the glory (2011a), the major work that initiates this ‘theological genealogy of economy and government’. Foucault joins Heidegger and Walter Benjamin as perhaps the central interlocutors in Agamben’s work and to some extent displaces or cuts across Heidegger. It is noteworthy that Agamben (2009a, 2009b) has in the last decade produced methodological essays on archaeology, the apparatus (dispositif), the paradigm, and the signature, all at least partially in relation to Foucault’s work. His theological genealogy of government and economy can thus be read as contributing to the theological part of that genealogy. While the genealogical project is similar to Foucault in that it traces trajectories without finalities that might allow us to question the taken-for-granted, his archaeological investigations differ from Foucault in that they search for a number of archai (both as ‘foundation’ and ‘command’) that neutralise presuppositions rather than describe the forms of dispersion of statements.

Opus Dei, then, is a part of a series of texts that use the Foucauldian vocabulary of genealogy/archaeology in their titles, and thus would be best understood as a small part of a wider ‘theological genealogy of economy and government’. Whether or not there are parts of his work that qualify as properly ‘theological’, Agamben’s is not a ‘theology of office’. A theological genealogy is not a theology in the sense of a study of the nature of God or of divine laws but rather a part of an attempt to trace the theological conditions by which contemporary government conceived as a form of economic management becomes thinkable. This is consistent with the practice of profanation for Agamben. In this case, it is returning theological concepts to common use so that we might enrich our understanding of, for example, the vocabulary of politics, government, and economy through this theological genealogy.

Much of Agamben’s addition to Foucault’s genealogy is to show unexpected continuities between theological concepts of oikonomia, order and providence in modern rationalities of government, on the one hand, and the role of ceremony and liturgy in the constitution of divine and worldly sovereignty, on the other. The discovery of unexpected continuities can be as much a part of the de-familiarisation strategies of genealogy as the marking of discontinuity, and it can be argued that in this respect it is consistent with Foucauldian/Nietzschean conceptions of genealogy. While OD contributes something to this genealogy, we should ask whether it could be described as a stand-alone genealogy, that is, as a ‘genealogy of office’.

To make this point, it is thus worth distinguishing archaeology and genealogy for Agamben. The present text is subtitled Archeologia dell’ufficio in its Italian version and only one chapter is called a ‘genealogy of office’. What is the relationship between these two terms? Genealogy seems to be very similar to Foucault and it remains relatively unspecified for that reason: a diachronic trajectory with continuities and discontinuities but without determinative origins or necessary ends. In contrast, for Agamben, archaeology seeks an archē, and thus focuses on the emergence or ‘moment of arising’ (Nietzsche’s Enstehung) of a distinction that is also operative as a tendency or a field of currents in the present (see, for instance, 2009a, pp. 82–84). In a question that could be directed towards Foucault’s penchant for identifying ‘births’ while disavowing the continued effectivity of origins, Agamben asks, ‘Where are “descent” (Herkunft) and “moment of arising” or emergence (Entstehung) located, if they are not and can never be in the position of the origin?’ (p. 84). Agamben’s answer to this is not a simple one, as we shall see.

The current book is in this sense a chapter in, or even an ‘off-cut’ of, the theological genealogy found in The kingdom and the glory. It is perhaps best read as not seeking to fulfil the task of a genealogy of ufficio (It.); rather, as an archaeology, it uses historical materials to identify a set of present and operative currents within the broad task of the theological genealogy of economy and government. There are, however, fragments of a theological genealogy of ufficio here and elsewhere, which we shall return to shortly.

If we need to be careful about the status and type of investigation in this book, we need also to be careful about its topic. According to the English translator (Adam Kotsko, in OD, p. ix), ufficio primarily connotes duty and only secondarily ‘office’. So the difference in object between the subtitle of ‘an archaeology of duty’ and the chapter entitled ‘A Genealogy of Office’ is introduced by the translator, while the difference in mode of analysis is the author’s. However, the translator’s choices do seem warranted. The chapter deals with a limited episode in the genealogy: the shifts introduced by Ambrose’s theory of priestly office into Cicero’s conception of office. Given that both are addressing what are recognisably organisational roles, then ‘office’ does seem attested here. Given that the book seeks an archē within a range of sources some of which are not directly concerned with ‘office’, and, as Hunter shows, inimical to it (e.g. Kant), then ‘duty’ does seem warranted in the subtitle of the book as a whole.

To sum this up, what is offered here is not at all a genealogy of office but an archaeology of duty that is part of a theological genealogy of government and economy. Agamben’s ‘philosophical archaeology’ might be described as a ‘philosophical hermeneutics’. He himself, however, conceives of his task as one that approaches texts to discover that which is irreducible to both hermeneutics (practices of interpretation) and semiology (the science of signs) but nonetheless binds them in definite configurations that make signs speak (Agamben, 2009a, pp. 58–59). Agamben calls the function that places concepts or signs in, and enables movement across, determinate fields of relations (sacred or profane, religious or political), ‘signatures’.

More broadly, however, we can say that genealogy studies moral, political, or theological ontologies but does not endorse them. There is no strict opposition between these ontologies and social and political practices. As social, cultural, and political analysts, we can remain agnostic towards ontology, but after Foucault, know that governmental and ethical practices, presuppose and engender definite analysable ontologies. In this sense, whether we accept Agamben’s particular analysis of the theory of the priest or of its significance, we can still read it as part of what after Foucault might be called a critical ontology of ourselves and our present. As we have already noted, this is not to say that other aspects of Agamben’s work do not search for an alternative ontology that he himself affirms, which he recently calls a ‘modal ontology’ (2016, pp. 159–161).

There is no doubt that Agamben’s engagement with Heidegger leaves deep traces in his work. There is also no doubt that Heidegger’s influence, particularly the view of the West as an unproblematic unity that reaches a certain extremity in modernity, certainly pulls in a different direction to the more careful genealogical aspiration in parts of his work. However, we should not read his work as simply a dressing up of the Heideggerian secular ontological paradigm of the circular relations between Being and beings in theological clothes. In fact as his work has become more genealogical, it has become more critical of Heidegger. At a minimum Agamben’s work is more multiple and tensional than a reduction to the Heideggerian metaphysical template would suggest. At a maximum, much of it is taking leave, not without a reminiscence of the seminars in Thor-en-Province that the young Agamben attended in 1966 and 1968 (OD, p. 95), of the ultimately ‘aporetic’ or problematic character of Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein. He rarely goes to Heidegger without a critical gaze in the latter volumes of Homo Sacer. Two examples will suffice.

In the final volume of the Homo Sacer series, The use of bodies, there are two intermezzi: one takes stock of Foucault’s ethics of the self and the notion of the constitution of the subject based solely on the relationship of self to self; and the second takes stock of Heidegger’s conception of the relation between human being, animality, and Dasein. In regard to the latter, Agamben argues that Heidegger’s notion of ‘thrown-ness’ fails to break with a ‘metaphysical definition of the human being’ as a supervention upon animality or anything else and assigns the human being a task that can always be mistaken for a political one (2016, p. 188). Earlier in the same book, he asks along similar lines the question with regard to the ‘fall’ of Dasein into the improper:

Agamben thus rejects the metaphysics of fallen-ness, and the exclusion of impropriety that results. Indeed, from the beginning of the Homo Sacer series, he follows thought-figures of how that which is excluded, deemed an exception, or abandoned comes to constitute political identity, community, sovereignty, and law: for instance, ‘bare life’, homo sacer, the Muselmann, and the slave in Greece. He goes on to note that, while Heidegger cautions against reading this fall in theological terms of the status corruptionis, the shift from the ontic to the ontological level ‘often coincides not with a weakening but with an absolutization of the secularized paradigm’. Here he strikes at both the verticality and the constitutive exclusions of Heidegger’s conception of Dasein and the hubris of his ontology – its complicity with the technological modernity it claims to contest. Agamben thinks with Heidegger, no doubt, sometimes suggesting that his is a ‘completion’ of the latter’s project (OD, p. 60), but in an extremely critical way.

Another example of this from the current work: while Agamben often describes his logic as ‘analogical’ (see 2009a, p. 20), working by analogies between theological and philosophical thought-figures, or between religious ceremonies and political practices, it would be a mistake to view his analysis of liturgy as simply an allegorical iteration of the Heideggerian figure. At least in the first instance, the reverse is the case: here he views Heidegger as problematically reiterating the figure of the Catholic liturgy. The analogy between Heidegger’s ontology and liturgy in found in one of Agamben’s extended ‘footnotes’, which are interpolated into the text in smaller font (OD, p. 62). It comes immediately after a critique of Heidegger’s view of the metaphysics of technology as ultimately within a creationist paradigm, thereby ignoring the role of governance and the oikonomia (economy) in the management of human life (p. 61). Rather than the template for reading the theory of priesthood, Agamben offers us here the hidden complicity between Heidegger’s ontology and the theory of these sacramental practices and, more strongly, a critique of his accession to the ‘ontology of operativity’ in his description of technology.

Does this amount to the presupposition of a Heideggerian history of Being in which Odo Casel and the Liturgical Movement and Heidegger himself appear among the cast of characters and in which the history of liturgy can be retroactively understood in terms of a Heideggerian metaphysics? As noted above, Agamben is concerned to elucidate an alternative ontology and thus his reading of liturgy and the doctrines of Church figures such as Ambrose, Augustine, and Aquinas will be shaped by that part of the project. In that sense, we can concede the Heideggerian project is something of a ‘shadow’ of his account of the theories of liturgy. Secondly, it is worth noting that Agamben seeks in his work a kind of neutralisation of a series of oppositions between the theological and political, spiritual and profane power, and so on, and thus wants to be able to invoke continuities or, better still, ‘indistinctions’ between the sacred and the profane, or public rite and cultic practice, without reaffirming or simply presupposing these distinctions. Agamben’s project is concerned with ‘thresholds of indetermination’, as he puts it elsewhere (2011a, p. 194) where it is not easy to make such distinctions, precisely because he wants to attend to that which has been excluded – bare life, the refugee, the sacred – in the creation of political community, nation, and the secular state. Whatever his ambitions with respect to Heidegger’s metaphysics, Agamben’s actual analysis seeks methods and concepts to illuminate the relationship between juridical-political and religious-theological theories and practices. And unlike Schmitt’s political theology, which (in part, at least) seeks to read political concepts by simple analogy with theological ones, Agamben sets out to find sites and spaces where the political and theological co-mingle, such as in the political and public character of the Church in its liturgy, and the cultic, acclamatory and doxological character of the ceremonies and rituals of the State.

Finally, Agamben characterises the project undertaken here as an archaeology and not as a genealogy. This enables us to modify the argument that he simply projects Heidegger’s metaphysical template retroactively onto historical materials such as those concerning the theory of sacramental effectiveness. This archaeology is a kind of double project for him. It first strives to find an archē, or primitive foundation. Among other examples, Agamben cites George Dumézil’s search for the proto-Indo-European language from the comparative grammar of existing and known historical languages at what he called the ‘fringe of ultra-history’, or Louis Gernet’s search for the most ancient Greek law, which he calls ‘pre-law’, and exists prior to the emergence of a distinction between law and religion (Agamben, 2009a, pp. 90–91). Agamben searches for such archai but denies that they simply exist in an ‘ultra-past’. This is because he also seeks to discover a ‘present and operative tendency’, or a field of currents in the present. Thus, the discovery of the root forms of Indo-European language does not exist apart from and can only be derived from the forms of existing and known historical languages. While this is clearly not a Foucauldian conception of archaeology (nor is it the assiduous contextualisation of the intellectual historian), it is an attempt to understand how epistemic, political, and social innovation keeps reactivating that which it leaves out or leaves behind in a remote past without the assumption either of a pure and still determinative origin or the ruptural and linear versions of genealogy and, we might add, sociology that opposed past and present, theological and political, and tradition and modernity. Even Foucault’s historical a priori of an epistemē (e.g. of the Renaissance or classical epistemēs) can only be known from the vantage point of the present. The concept of a ‘historical a priori’ thus ‘realizes the paradox of an a priori condition that is inscribed within a history and that can only constitute itself a posteriori with respect to this history in which inquiry – in Foucault’s case, archaeology – must discover it’ (p. 94).

Archaeology in Agamben’s sense then rests on a double strategy which undertakes a historical analysis on the basis of present concerns (from the Liturgical movement to the history of the theory of the sacraments) in order to return to the intelligibility of the present and the future, and yet refuses the initial distinction between the sacred and the profane, between the history of theology and ecclesiology and the history of politics, philosophy, and ontology. It is this dual strategy that gives his work a strangely predictive quality so that the search at the ‘fringe of ultra-history’ for the emergence of a political management of life in the Greek polis portends our present and a future in which, as he wrote in 1994, ‘the camp … is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet’ (Agamben, 2000, p. 44). Whatever the epistemological status of the last observation, it certainly presented and continues to present a radically challenging counter-hypothesis to those of globalisation and the attenuation of sovereign borders and territories.

Given the discussion of genealogy and archaeology, it would be incorrect to suppose that Agamben either supports a liturgical understanding of the Christian tradition or that he reads that tradition through liturgy. Agamben is aware that liturgy is a particular standpoint from which the Christian tradition is interpreted, one which quite recently became highly influential in modern Catholicism. In fact, he traces it to a modern movement, the Benedictine Liturgical Movement of the early twentieth century and the monk, Odo Casel, and its enshrinement in a 1947 encyclical, Mediator Dei (OD, pp. 19–20, 29–30). This is a common feature of Agamben’s genealogical and archaeological approach: he starts with a debate or intellectual intervention that is still eminent in the present, before setting off on his research path. Just as his genealogy of government started with Foucault’s 1978 lectures (Agamben, 2011a, p. xi), his discussion of economic theology with the Schmitt/Peterson debate on the closure of political theology (Agamben, 2011a, pp. 6–16), and his archaeology of the oath with Paolo Prodi’s thesis on the emergence of a new form of political association with the decline of the oath (2011b, pp. 1–2), so the Liturgical Movement forms the point of entry in this case. The search for the archē of office in the doctrines concerning the priest then seeks to understand certain religious and political currents operative in the present.

What is striking about the Liturgical Movement is that it emphasises the public and cultic character of the Church particularly in relation to the mystery of the presence of Christ’s unrepeatable sacrifice in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Casel and the Movement therefore are combatting not only the individualism, humanism, and rationalism of modern societies but also the very idea that faith or inner belief is at the heart of the Christian religion. This is certainly directed towards Protestantism, which by denying the effective presence of Christ’s sacrifice destroys ‘the most proper force of the Catholic liturgy, which is that of being the objective mystery, full of effectiveness [wirklichkeitserfülltes], of Christ’s salvific action’ (Casel, in OD, p. 38). But it is also directed towards the Catholic faithful, who are not spared the Church’s admonishment. In Pope Pius XII’s 1947 encyclical, Mediator Dei, their private prayers and acts of piety are ‘sterile and deserve to be condemned’ if they do not serve as a preparation for the public liturgy of the sacrament (p. 27).

Far from ignoring Judaism and other religions, Agamben situates this liturgical orientation in relation to them. He is aware of and points to the continuities and discontinuities with Judaism at the earliest moments of his investigation. After noting that leitourgia is Greek for ‘public work’ or ‘public services’ (OD, pp. xi, 1), he also views it as a translation of the Hebrew šeret, meaning to serve in a cultic sense (pp. 3–4). Further, Agamben notes that while Christ would come to be viewed by the early Church as a high priest according to an ancient Judaic order, Judaism transformed itself into a non-sacrificial religion with the study of the Torah (p. 13). In The kingdom and the glory (2011a), in addition to the political and religious liturgies of the Western and Eastern Roman empire, he discusses the anthropological and theological literature devoted to the biblical kabhod owed to YHVH (pp. 198–201), the medieval Kabbalah (pp. 227–229), the notion of nourishment in the Brahmana (pp. 232–234), and the oral rites of Central Australian aboriginal people as discussed in Mauss and Durkheim (pp. 224–226), amongst other instances. Agamben’s argument through these examples is in some respects an extension of Durkheim’s view that at the heart of religious practice is the recognition that the gods would die if not for constant cultic and liturgical worship (p. 227; Durkheim, 1995, p. 350).

In casting this wide net, Agamben was concerned with the constitution of the ‘transcendent’ or sovereign aspect of divine and secular power through practices of glorification, that is, through ceremonies and rituals, hymns, doxologies, and acclamations that constitute liturgy. The concern with the glorious and ultimately empty core of the political complements, in The kingdom and the glory, the understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity as a form ‘economic’ management of human redemption. In Opus Dei (p. xi) he explicitly narrows the focus to the priest as the subject of the practice that constitutes the very transcendence of which he is but an ‘animate instrument’. The sacraments become effective ex opere operato rather than opus operantis, from the acts themselves rather than through the qualities of their instrumental agent. This means that the virtues, or lack thereof, and even the intentions of the priest are irrelevant to the effectivity of the cultic acts (pp. 18–19), the effectus by which the celebration of the Mass makes present Christ’s unrepeatable sacrifice (pp. 39–45). While some of his formulations might support the interpretation of Agamben as claiming that the priest is the laboratory for all modern offices, this is ultimately a one-sided reading. Rather, he finds in the office of the priest a certain archē or even paradigm that is still a set of tendencies in the present. Agamben is more clear, and more in keeping with his own methods, when he writes of the paradigm of Opus Dei as ‘a constant and pervasive pole of attraction in the secular culture of the West’ (p. xii). This formulation is certainly strong and even overstates the position of the paradigm in the present. Yet, it is only one ‘pole of attraction’ that is meant to indicate the dangers that arise from an ethic contingent upon the particular effectivity of an office organised around a particular persona or habitus within a given juridical-institutional order and not in any respect grounded in the virtues of the individual occupying that office or in a more fundamental conception of virtue.

This has a number of implications for how we might think about politics. Firstly, we can say that the Church and its cultic practices are always already conceived in political (and economic) terms. Similar to the writings of Erik Peterson (2011), the political is not a separate sphere from the theological, but already present in the language by which the Christian ecclesia and its worship is itself described (OD, p. 27). In the present book, Agamben recovers traces of both political/sovereign and economic/administrative forms of power from the Trinitarian discussions of the role of Christ. Here, this Christology works on two interrelated axes: Christ as a high priest who sacrifices himself for human redemption – the charismatic political figure, and Christ as administrator and dispenser of salvation – the economic administrator. Discussing Christ’s sacrifice, and invoking the phrase of early theologians to describe the mystery of the Trinity, Agamben suggests the ‘mystery of the economy, insofar as it is an economy of salvation, is fulfilled in and transformed into a liturgical mystery, in which the economic metaphor and political metaphor are identified’ (OD, p. 18). The liturgy is the political action of the Church in its earthly and celestial assembly that celebrates the unrepeatable act that makes possible the ‘economic’ management – the salvation – of humankind.

In a more specific sense, part of Agamben’s interest in the Liturgical Movement concerns its relation to the ‘age of movements’ of the early twentieth century, which encompassed not only political and social movements but movements in the arts, sciences, and every sphere of life – including apparently, organised Christianity (OD, p. 31). It shared with many of these movements a ‘reaction against humanist individualism and the rationalization of the world’ (p. 31). This extends his earlier analysis in which he notes the Liturgical Movement’s parallels with the emergence of liturgical features in populist, nationalist, and fascist, movements at the same time. In The kingdom and the glory (2011a, pp. 192–194), he follows up and underlines E. H. Kantorowicz’s insight in his book on the medieval laudes (1946) into the parallel revival of religious and political acclamations in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, their collusions and rivalries. The movements and currents within the sphere of religion are viewed as paralleling and entering into contestation with those of the secular political sphere. This insight into recent historical events drives Agamben’s interest in the symbolic and ceremonial side of politics, and its role in the constitution of sovereignty and political identity. This would seem at a minimum pertinent to current liberal-democratic politics, and the rise of what are loosely described as ‘populist’ parties and factions in Europe and North America. Agamben’s claim is that the Liturgical Movement and these political formations are indicators of a series of more fundamental operative currents in the present – the archai he here seeks to investigate.

According to Agamben, the great achievement of the early institutionalisation of the Church, however, is not its incorporation of the language of public service into the sacrifice of Christ, but of linking Christ’s priesthood to the cultic celebration of that sacrifice by a definite and hierarchical body of the clergy and so thereby giving rise to the hierocratic rule of the clergy over the laity.

Hunter argues that Agamben overplays his hand in two ways: by turning the priest into a paradigm of other historical offices; and by ignoring those more worldly discourses in which the priest is discussed as a social role. These two points are certainly correct, but with the following qualifications. First, we need to specify what is meant by a paradigm. As he argues in his methodological essay on the topic (Agamben, 2009a, pp. 9–32), it is not a template for all other cases; it is a case that stands besides and illuminates a set that it constitutes and belongs to but does not exhaust. For Agamben, after Thomas Kuhn’s second sense of the term (pp. 10–11), a paradigm is not a simple shared model or set of rules accepted by a community but an exemplar that makes possible innovation and change. Second, in respect to the social discourses of the priest, we should recall this discussion is part of a specifically theological genealogy of government and economy and not an empirical intellectual history of office. In this regard, as is clear from what we have just noted about liturgy, the theory of the Catholic priest deserves the attention Agamben gives it because it can act as the most intense and clear exemplar of a form of social practice no matter how far other cases mitigate its features or make innovations on them. The ‘paradigm’ has a similar function in Agamben’s work to the ‘diagrams’ of Foucault, such as the Panopticon, the Great Confinement, the confession, and so forth.

To be clear, then, Agamben is far from offering an endorsement of the moral ontology of the priestly office in either a liturgical form or as forming the circular nexus between the divine Being and human existence and action, its Heideggerian equivalent. Rather he seeks to make intelligible the priesthood as the subject of a cultic practice, and in terms of the theory of the priest as an ‘animate instrument’ of the divinity (OD, pp. 22, 25, 28) similar to Aristotle’s account of the slave (see Agamben, 2016, pp. 10–11). Such an analysis could be viewed as seeking to make intelligible a particular practice in the manner of Marcel Mauss’s analysis of prayer as a ‘religious rite which is oral and bears directly upon the sacred’ (2003, p. 57, original emphasis). The sacrament of the Eucharist is thus an assemblage of oral and manual rites, which constitutes a collective entity (the ecclesia, the Church) through public prayers and acclamations that effect the ‘transubstantiation’ of profane things, bread and wine, to recreate an unrepeatable sacrificial event as a means of individual salvation. The designation of the priest as the privileged and sole legitimate agent of this marks the move from a charismatic and messianic community to a hierocratic and institutionalised Church (OD, pp. 9–10).

The priest is only one component of Agamben’s theological genealogy devoted to office, which is more multiple than the impression one gets from reading Opus Dei. Another line of this genealogy traces the Roman distinction between auctoritas and potestas (2005a, pp. 74–88), the pope and emperor as ‘vicarious’ offices (2011a, pp. 137–139) and the medieval notions of the wounded, idle, or useless king (pp. 68–69). The latter rests on a distinction between the dignitas of the office and the administratio, the activity to which it is attached (pp. 97–99). Further, one chapter of The kingdom and the glory (pp. 144–166) engages with Erik Peterson’s Book on the angels and investigates the latter’s claims, against Schmitt’s political theology, that the real Christian political action is liturgy and that this consists of the glorious worship conducted not only by the members of the earthly Christian ecclesia but the angels and saints of the celestial city. Another part of the theological genealogy of office then would consist of the distinction in Aquinas and others between assisting angels and administering angels, those who attend to the glorification of God and those who execute his works of grace (pp. 148–151). In short, it might be possible to construct fragments of a theological genealogy of office from Agamben’s work but the current work does not claim to constitute that theological genealogy.

There are clear and explicit parallels between Agamben’s understanding of the glorious, cultic, and doxological foundations of sovereignty and political identity and the themes of the classical sociology of religion of Durkheim and Mauss, particularly in his The kingdom and the glory (2011a, pp. 224–229). In regard to the current text, however, one way of reading Agamben’s project would be to compare it to the work of Max Weber. Weber too focuses on the theory of the priest and what he called his character indelebilis, which enabled a strict distinction between the ‘charisma of office and the worthiness of the person occupying it’, which he saw as the polar opposite of the Protestant view that office was a business like any other (1978, p. 1141). This conception of office allowed the bureaucratisation of the Church, its conversion from a charismatic or messianic community into a hierocratic order. Basing himself on jurist and Church historian, Rudolf Sohm, Weber generalised this view as a model of his notions of routinisation and rationalisation. Agamben (OD, p. 9) also draws on Sohm to indicate the transformation of the Catholic Church from an ‘original charismatic community into the juridical organization that is familiar to us’.

In such passages, it would appear that Agamben, like Weber, is interested in rationalisation: how we find ourselves in a disenchanted world in which the exercise of power and authority takes an economic, governmental, or managerial form, and yet constitutes as its foundations, in an ambiguous way, elements or fragments of transcendent authority and metaphysical legitimations. Office charisma is one version of this for Weber (1978, pp. 1139–1141), who notes the persistence of political acclamation in modern democratic forms such as the American presidential nomination system (p. 1127), a point not irrelevant to the recent US presidential election. Agamben (2011a, pp. 168–175) similarly seeks to understand why political power takes a liturgical form: of ceremonies, protocols, and acclamations.

Both Weber and Agamben are also interested in the relation between vocation, the inner calling to a life activity that could be and has been viewed as a divine calling, and office, the socially and institutionally embedded ethic immanent to a position. They both trace the genealogy of vocation to Luther’s Beruf, which is his translation of Paul’s klesis (Agamben, 2005b, pp. 20–23; Weber, 1985, p. 204n). It is intriguing that Weber’s lectures in Munich concern science and politics as Beruf, as vocations rather than as offices. Weber does not rule out the problem of the relationship between an inner calling and the performance of duty, in the way that the politician’s ethic of responsibility finally cannot make sense without the ethic of conviction that, nevertheless, should not become dominant (Weber, 1994, pp. 367–368). The remarks Agamben makes in relation to Pufendorf and Kant, whatever their deficiencies, are in much the same vein. For Kant, according to Agamben (OD, pp. 114–117), the rational moral subject is animated by a completely inexplicable feeling, ‘respect for the law’, which he compares to Suarez’s reverentia, the legal bond that binds humans to God, and it is this respect that has precedence over duty. And for Pufendorf, the array of worldly constituted offices still presupposes the action of divine providence (p. 110). No doubt these are partial readings of both these thinkers, which serve the purpose of a general argument about the coming to dominance of an ontology of command over an ontology of being (pp. 120–121), but they are not without relevance to Agamben’s theological genealogy.

In the Protestant ethic, Weber sought to show that modern capitalist behaviour is the economic rationalisation of Protestant asceticism and its notion of a calling. As he points out in the later ‘Author’s Introduction’, there are multiple rationalisations with many different sources going in very different directions (Weber, 1985, p. 26). Agamben is contributing to something akin to this task in the theological genealogy of economy and government. Having shown that modern political economy and public administration is a kind of social rationalisation of the providential oikonomia, he here continues the task of showing how modern practices of sovereignty and its administration can be viewed – at least in part – as a kind of rationalisation of the agents and practices of the glorious and mysterious liturgies of the Church.

On a broader front, Agamben’s diagnosis makes him heir to not only Weber, but also to a range of thinkers concerned with the multiple rationalisations and secularisations that constitute our present. One could cite Carl Schmitt’s (1996) view of state law as an heir to canon law and Foucault’s (2001, pp. 332–335) view of modern expertise as descended from the Judaeo-Christian pastorate. One could also cite the fierce debates among post-war German historians of ideas from Karl Löwith (1949) to Hans Blumenberg (1985) over the character of modernity and the role of theological concepts and religious practices in its formation. These, then, are the type of texts and debates we should locate Agamben’s book within, allowing for the larger project of which it is a part. At the least, we can read Agamben as enjoining us to re-examine the foundational concepts upon which our present systems of politics and government have been built. We could also read it as an opportunity to renew the task, which sociology seems often to have forgotten, of making intelligible religious, political, and social practices such as liturgy, acclamation, and the oath, in the formation of organisational and collective identities, political movements, and what we have come to call the public sphere.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.