Profanations

Giorgio Agamben, Jeff Fort

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781942130567
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has always been an original reader of texts, understanding their many rich and multiple historical, aesthetic, and political meanings and effects. In Profanations, Agamben has assembled for the first time some of his most pivotal essays on photography, the novel, and film. A meditation on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains, Profanations proves yet again that Agamben is one of the most provocative writers of our times.In ten essays, Agamben rethinks approaches to a series of literary and philosophical problems: the relation between genius, ego, and theories of subjectivity; the problem of messianic time as explicated in both images and lived experience; parody as a literary paradigm; the potential of magic to provide an ethical canon.The range of topics and themes addressed here attest to the very creativity of Agamben's singular mode of thought and his persistent pursuit to grasp the act of witnessing, sometimes futile, sometimes earth-shattering — the talking cricket in Pinocchio; "helpers" in Kafka's novels; pictorial representations of the Last Judgment, of anonymous female faces, and of Orson Wells's infamous object of obsession Rosebud. "In Praise of Profanity, " the central essay of this small but dense book, confronts the question of profanity as the crucial political task of the moment.An act of resistance to every form of separation, the concept of profanation — as both the "return to common usage" and "sacrifice" — reorients perceptions of how power, consumption, and use interweave to produce an urgent political modality and desire: to profane the unprofanable. In short, Agamben provides not only a new and potent theoretical model but also a writerly style that itself forges inescapable links between literature, politics, and philosophy.

CHAPTER NINE

In Praise of Profanation

The Roman jurists knew perfectly well what it meant to “profane.” Sacred or religious were the things that in some way belonged to the gods. As such, they were removed from the free use and commerce of men; they could be neither sold nor held in lien, neither given for usufruct nor burdened by servitude. Any act that violated or transgressed this special unavailability, which reserved these things exclusively for the celestial gods (in which case they were properly called “sacred”) or for the gods of the underworld (in which case they were simply called “religious”), was sacrilegious. And if “to consecrate” (sacrare) was the term that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law, “to profane” meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men. The great jurist Trebatius thus wrote, “In the strict sense, profane is the term for something that was once sacred or religious and is returned to the use and property of men.” And “pure” was the place that was no longer allotted to the gods of the dead and was now “neither sacred, nor holy, nor religious, freed from all names of this sort.”¹

The thing that is returned to the common use of men is pure, profane, free of sacred names. But use does not appear here as something natural: rather, one arrives at it only by means of profanation. There seems to be a peculiar relationship between “using” and “profaning” that we must clarify.

---

Religion can be defined as that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere. Not only is there no religion without separation, but every separation also contains or preserves within itself a genuinely religious core. The apparatus that effects and regulates the separation is sacrifice: through a series of meticulous rituals, which differ in various cultures and which Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss have patiently inventoried, sacrifice always sanctions the passage of something from the profane to the sacred, from the human sphere to the divine.² What is essential is the caesura that divides the two spheres, the threshold that the victim must cross, no matter in which direction. That which has been ritually separated can be returned from the rite to the profane sphere. Thus one of the simplest forms of profanation occurs through contact (contagione) during the same sacrifice that effects and regulates the passage of the victim from the human to the divine sphere. One part of the victim (the entrails, or exta: the liver, heart, gallbladder, lungs) is reserved for the gods, while the rest can be consumed by men. The participants in the rite need only touch these organs for them to become profane and edible. There is a profane contagion, a touch that disenchants and returns to use what the sacred had separated and petrified.

---

The term religio does not derive, as an insipid and incorrect etymology would have it, from religare (that which binds and unites the human and the divine). It comes instead from relegere, which indicates the stance of scrupulousness and attention that must be adopted in relations with the gods, the uneasy hesitation (the “rereading [rileggere]”) before forms — and formulae — that must be observed in order to respect the separation between the sacred and the profane. Religio is not what unites men and gods but what ensures they remain distinct. It is not disbelief and indifference toward the divine, therefore, that stand in opposition to religion, but “negligence,” that is, a behavior that is free and “distracted” (that is to say, released from the religio of norms) before things and their use, before forms of separation and their meaning. To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use.

---

The passage from the sacred to the profane can, in fact, also come about by means of an entirely inappropriate use (or, rather, reuse) of the sacred: namely, play. It is well known that the spheres of play and the sacred are closely connected. Most of the games with which we are familiar derive from ancient sacred ceremonies, from divinatory practices and rituals that once belonged, broadly speaking, to the religious sphere. The girotondo was originally a marriage rite; playing with a ball reproduces the struggle of the gods for possession of the sun; games of chance derive from oracular practices; the spinning top and the chessboard were instruments of divination. In analyzing the relationship between games and rites, Emile Benveniste shows that play not only derives from the sphere of the sacred but also in some ways represents its overturning. The power of the sacred act, he writes, lies in the conjunction of the myth that tells the story and the rite that reproduces and stages it. Play breaks up this unity: as ludus, or physical play, it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as iocus, or wordplay, it effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive. “If the sacred can be defined through the consubstantial unity of myth and rite, we can say that one has play when only half of the sacred operation is completed, translating only the myth into words or only the rite into actions.”³

This means that play frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it. The use to which the sacred is returned is a special one that does not coincide with utilitarian consumption. In fact, the “profanation” of play does not solely concern the religious sphere. Children, who play with whatever old thing falls into their hands, make toys out of things that also belong to the spheres of economics, war, law, and other activities that we are used to thinking of as serious. All of a sudden, a car, a firearm, or a legal contract becomes a toy. What is common to these cases and the profanation of the sacred is the passage from a religio that is now felt to be false or oppressive to negligence as vera religio. This, however, does not mean neglect (no kind of attention can compare to that of a child at play) but a new dimension of use, which children and philosophers give to humanity. It is the sort of use that Benjamin must have had in mind when he wrote of Kafka’s The New Attorney that the law that is no longer applied but only studied is the gate to justice.⁴ Just as the religio that is played with but no longer observed opens the gate to use, so the powers [potenze] of economics, law, and politics, deactivated in play, can become the gateways to a new happiness.

---

Play as an organ of profanation is in decline everywhere. Modern man proves he no longer knows how to play precisely through the vertiginous proliferation of new and old games. Indeed, at parties, in dances, and at play, he desperately and stubbornly seeks exactly the opposite of what he could find there: the possibility of reentering the lost feast, returning to the sacred and its rites, even in the form of the inane ceremonies of the new spectacular religion or a tango lesson in a provincial dance hall. In this sense, televised game shows are part of a new liturgy; they secularize an unconsciously religious intention. To return to play its purely profane vocation is a political task.

In this sense, we must distinguish between secularization and profanation. Secularization is a form of repression. It leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another. Thus the political secularization of theological concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power) does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact.

Profanation, however, neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura and is returned to use. Both are political operations: the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized.

---

Philologists never cease to be surprised by the double, contradictory meaning that the verb profanare seems to have in Latin: it means, on the one hand, to render profane and, on the other (in only a few cases) to sacrifice. It is an ambiguity that seems inherent in the vocabulary of the sacred as such: the adjective sacer means both “august, consecrated to the gods,” and (as Freud noted) “cursed, excluded from the community.” The ambiguity at issue here does not arise solely out of a misunderstanding but is, so to speak, constitutive of the profanatory operation — or, inversely, of the consecratory one. Insofar as these operations refer to a single object that must pass from the profane to the sacred and from the sacred to the profane, they must every time reckon with something like a residue of profanity in every consecrated thing and a remnant of sacredness in every profaned object.

The same is true of the term sacer. It indicates that which, through the solemn act of sacratio or devotio (when a commander consecrates his life to the gods of the underworld in order to ensure victory), has been given over to the gods and belongs exclusively to them. And yet, in the expression homo sacer, the adjective seems to indicate an individual who, having been excluded from the community, can be killed with impunity but cannot be sacrificed to the gods. What exactly has occurred here? A sacred man, one who belongs to the gods, has survived the rite that separated him from other men and continues to lead an apparently profane existence among them. Although he lives in the profane world, there inheres in his body an irreducible residue of sacredness. This removes him from normal commerce with his kind and exposes him to the possibility of violent death, which returns him to the gods to whom he truly belongs. As for his fate in the divine sphere, he cannot be sacrificed and is excluded from the cult because his life is already the property of the gods, and yet, insofar as it survives itself, so to speak, it introduces an incongruous remnant of profanity into the domain of the sacred. That is to say, in the machine of sacrifice, sacred and profane represent the two poles of a system in which a floating signifier travels from one domain to the other without ceasing to refer to the same object. This is precisely how the machine ensures the distribution of use among humans and divine beings and can eventually return what had been consecrated to the gods to men. Hence the mingling of the two operations in Roman sacrifice, in which one part of the same consecrated victim is profaned by contagion and consumed by men, while another is assigned to the gods.

---

From this perspective, it becomes easier to understand why, in the Christian religion, theologians, pontiffs, and emperors had to show such obsessive care and implacable seriousness in ensuring, as far as possible, the coherence and intelligibility of the notions of transubstantiation in the sacrifice of the mass and incarnation and homousia in the dogma of the trinity. What was at stake here was nothing less than the survival of a religious system that had involved God himself as the victim of the sacrifice and, in this way, introduced in him that separation which in paganism concerned only human things. That is to say, the idea of the simultaneous presence of two natures in a single person or victim was an effort to cope with confusion between divine and human that threatened to paralyze the sacrificial machine of Christianity. The doctrine of incarnation guaranteed that divine and human nature were both present without ambiguity in the same person, just as transubstantiation ensured that the species of bread and wine were transformed without remainder into the body of Christ. Nevertheless, in Christianity, with the entrance of God as the victim of sacrifice and with the strong presence of messianic tendencies that put the distinction between sacred and profane into crisis, the religious machine seems to reach a limit point or zone of undecidability, where the divine sphere is always in the process of collapsing into the human sphere and man always already passes over into the divine.

---

“Capitalism as Religion” is the title of one of Benjamin’s most penetrating posthumous fragments. According to Benjamin, capitalism is not solely a secularization of the Protestant faith, as it is for Max Weber, but is itself essentially a religious phenomenon, which develops parasitically from Christianity. As the religion of modernity, it is defined by three characteristics: first, it is a cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme and absolute one that has ever existed. In it, everything has meaning only in reference to the fulfillment of a cult, not in relation to a dogma or an idea. Second, this cult is permanent; it is “the celebration of a cult sans trêve et sans merci.”⁵ Here it is not possible to distinguish between workdays and holidays; rather, there is a single, uninterrupted holiday, in which work coincides with the celebration of the cult. Third, the capitalist cult is not directed toward redemption from or atonement for guilt, but toward guilt itself. “Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. … A monstrous sense of guilt that knows no redemption becomes the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal … and to once and for all include God in this guilt. … [God] is not dead; he has been incorporated into the destiny of man.”⁶

Precisely because it strives with all its might not toward redemption but toward guilt, not toward hope but toward despair, capitalism as religion does not aim at the transformation of the world but at its destruction. And in our time its dominion is so complete that, according to Benjamin, even the three great prophets of modernity (Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud) conspire with it; they are, in some way, on the side of the religion of despair. “This passage of the planet ‘Man’ through the house of despair in the absolute loneliness of his path is the ethos that Nietzsche defined. This man is the superman, the first to recognize the religion of capitalism and begin to bring it to fulfillment.”⁷ Freudian theory, too, belongs to the priesthood of the capitalist cult: “What has been repressed, the idea of sin, is capital itself, which pays interest on the hell of the unconscious.”⁸ And for Marx, capitalism “becomes socialism by means of the simple and compound interest that are functions of Schuld [guilt/debt].”⁹

---

Let ...