1

The True World

The whole attitude of ‘man against the world’, of man as a ‘world-negating’ principle, of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who finally places existence itself upon his scales and finds it too light [. . .] We laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of ‘man and world’

(Nietzsche 2001: 204)

What is the true world? Nietzsche argues that the true world appears first in Platonism as a supersensory world that is defined as true because, unlike the sensory world, it is not subject to change. In Plato’s Phaedo, for example, Socrates reassures his friends that the invisible world above to which he is about to depart is many times more beautiful than the world below. The precious stones that gleam in this world are but a pale imitation of the jewels in the next world since these are ‘not damaged by decay’ (1993: 174). Platonism, for Nietzsche (2014: 2), would be this supersensory realm as the real truth of this world; Christianity, as Platonism for the people, would be this supersensory world as the world beyond. The metaphysics thus bequeathed to European history would thereby devalue our world, a world that is now deemed false in some way. This loss of world is the condition of nihilism.

It is important to recall that for Nietzsche this alienation from the world is also the condition of our finding it: nihilism provides the opportunity for its own overcoming. The world that is lost to us is a world we can finally love because only now does it appear as that with which we can be reconciled as our very own fate – amor fati.

The two worlds

For now a more basic question remains: why must the world remain lost to us in the first place? If nihilism is wrapped up in the two-worlds problem then why not simply abolish the supersensory (true) world of metaphysics and get back to the one world that metaphysics divided into two? Indeed, the supersensory world is long gone; Nietzsche already announced its departure, ‘the death of God’, well over a century ago. And yet nihilism, the negation of world, continues by the light of many leading philosophies to characterize, perhaps even to define, modernity. Heidegger’s analysis of technology as an experience of beings as so many objects for utilization by a human subject is the most well known of these diagnoses. ‘Homelessness’ is thus the destiny of the modern world, a world in which human beings, along with all beings, have been abandoned by Being (which for Heidegger means the same as world, as we shall see) (Heidegger 1998b: 258). Nihilism would also be the modern condition for Giorgio Agamben (2011: 140), for whom our fundamental extraneousness to the world is reflected in practices as quotidian as tourism. For Alain Badiou (2012: 55–6), meanwhile, the radicalism of nihilism today is such that there is no longer any ‘world’ at all. Instead there is only either a libertarian delinking from the world or the liberal attempt to purchase it. But a world is only a system of links and the events that occur in it, being incalculable, can never be bought or sold.

How, then, might we explain this ongoing loss of world given that the true world is now a pale shadow of its former self? Released from the grip of the timeless world beyond, why have we not thereby regained this world? But as we began to see in the Introduction, when considering the crisis (as Heidegger saw it) facing Nietzsche in 1888, how could we even get to this world without that supersensory world by which ‘this world’ was first defined as lack? Paradoxically, this world as final ground is the outcome of the groundless world beyond, and not its precondition. Once having lost the world beyond we cannot simply revert back to this world since, prior to the beyond, it was not there! Undermining Heidegger’s claim that Nietzsche only realizes this at the end, this is no doubt why Zarathustra (Nietzsche 2006: 6) says that the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth even as he also beseeches his brothers to remain faithful to this earth by disbelieving those who speak of extraterrestrial hopes. After Zarathustra, the confidence of Schelling in a new golden age inspired by a return to the one, true world seems forlorn, even though it is separated by only seventy years:

The most supersensible thoughts now receive physical power and life and, vice versa, nature becomes ever more the visible imprint of the highest concepts. Soon the contempt with which only the ignorant still look down on everything physical will cease and once again the following saying will be true: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Then [. . .] there will no longer be a distinction between the world of thought and the world of actuality. There will be one world and the peace of the golden age heralds itself first in the concordant conjunction of the sciences. (Schelling 2000: p. xl)

Such is the scale of the challenge of worldlessness following the death of God that, for Nietzsche, it will take nothing less than the Overman as creator of a meaning for the earth to rise to it. The death of God does not allow us to reinherit the earth since we did not previously possess it. We have lost what we never had and cannot then rediscover it. The death of God was the advent of nihilism only in the sense that it was the moment at which we began to realize how radically world-less our condition really is. We are extraneous to all worlds, the true (ideal, eternal) and the illusory (material, transient). The death of God merely switched these worlds around such that the true world of metaphysics became the illusory world, while the illusory world of metaphysics became the true world. But the true world below, as true world, is still a metaphysical world.

When the sensory world of change becomes the true world then, like the supersensory world that it swapped places with, it is defined as that which is changeless. Now it is change that is changeless. The true world, now this world of becoming, is thereby still a realm wherein nothing can really happen.

***

The true world is explicit in the philosophical tradition right up to Kant. Kant’s division in Critique of Pure Reason between the world of sensory appearance (phenomena) and the world of things in themselves (noumena) remains within the two worlds problematic (even as the noumenal true world, which unlike the world of sense is beyond all possible experience, becomes inaccessible to us in Kant’s critical schema).¹ Although in his critique of metaphysics the supersensory world is for Kant strictly an idea of reason rather than a substance or higher reality, nonetheless, when asking

whether there is anything different from the world which contains the ground of the world order and its connection according to universal laws, then the answer is: Without a doubt. For the world is a [unified] sum of appearances, and so there has to be some transcendental ground for it, i.e., a ground thinkable merely by the pure understanding. (Kant 1998: 618–19)²

Thus despite Kant’s prohibition on forsaking the ground of experience, the world conceived as a totality, which precisely makes this mistake of speculatively rising above possible experience, nonetheless survives as a ‘regulative idea’ along with the soul and God (Kant 1998: 613). In this way Kant excludes the world as totality from time, since time is a feature of human consciousness of the world rather than of the world in itself. With the idea of world, ‘we should proceed as if we did not have before us an object of sense’, a phenomenon, but rather ‘one of pure understanding’. Here the conditions of human sensibility, namely space and time, ‘can no longer be posited in the series of appearances’ that constitutes the world for us, but must instead be placed outside it (Kant 1998: 613, emphasis added). A world exposed to the negation of time could not even be a totality, since it could never be given in a complete or final form (Hägglund 2008: 30).

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel seeks to overcome Kant’s distinction between the (phenomenal) world as it appears for us and the world as it is (appears) in itself, which for Hegel is still to know the world only on the surface or as if from the outside. There are no appearances for themselves – appearance just is the showing of something other than what is shown. Appearance is also not only that which appears but, as appearing, that which will disappear. Appearance is in movement: each appearance gives way to another, being negated in the process. Understood positively, this movement of negation is dialectics, the negation of the negation. There are thus not mere appearances behind which a true world lies unreachable but, instead, appearing is the way, the truth, of the world. The sensory and supersensory worlds that still remain separate in Kant are unified in Hegel:

The supersensible is the sensuous and perceived posited as it is in truth; but the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance. The supersensible is therefore appearance qua appearance. [. . .] It is often said that the supersensible world is not appearance; but what is here understood by appearance is not appearance, but rather the sensuous world as itself the really actual. (Hegel 1977: 89)

From the elevation of the sensible to the actual it seems to follow that the truth of the world is captured in the idea of the true (or ‘inner’) world as a world in which nothing endures unchanged – plus ça change. But in anticipation of Heidegger’s dismissal of Nietzsche’s world of becoming as still a metaphysical true world, Hegel (1977: 90) notes that when flux is posited in the ‘inner world’ of things as their truth, then this world is received as that which ‘is absolutely at rest and remains self-same’. In short, difference is expressed as law-like, as the ‘stable image of unstable appearance’.³ This supersensory or true world as an ‘inert realm of laws’ (ibid.) is merely the ‘direct tranquil image’ of the sensory world as a world of flux. As such, this difference is only an ‘inner difference’ – ‘each of the two worlds is really the opposite of itself’ – since the sensory world of flux identifies itself in its constant change while the supersensory world of law differentiates itself by being a law of nothing static but rather of dynamic force: it ‘exhibits law only through incessant change’ (Hegel 1977: 96 and 91). The timelessly true world, then, as only the ‘imperfect appearance of Reason’, has its necessary counterpart in the world of appearance since this latter world retains ‘for itself the principle of change and alteration’ (Hegel 1977: 88 and 97).

Hegel’s ‘inverted world’ (verkeherte Welt),⁴ to the contrary, seeks to think the true world dynamically: ‘We have to think pure change’, change in itself (Hegel 1977: 99). Hegel seeks to take the principle of change and alteration up from the world of appearance into the truth of the world in such a way that change is not only an external description of what, described as constant change as if from the outside, stays the same (law-like), but as that which really changes: ‘The kingdom of laws lacked that principle [of change], but obtains it as an inverted world’ (Hegel 1977: 97). The inverted world is then the true (supersensory) world turned in on itself, or rather the true world and its opposite (the world of appearance/phenomena) ‘in one unity’ (Hegel 1977: 99).⁵ This inverted world is thus not the true world turned upside down – the ‘inverted world’ is not a mere return to the sensory world of perception.⁶ Rather, the inverted world is a dialectical reversal of the supersensory world which, as a world of law, remains an abstraction from the ‘absolute unrest of pure self-movement’ of the world, or life itself (Hegel 1977: 101). ‘This simple infinity, or the absolute Notion [Concept], may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipotence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by any difference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their suppression; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest’ (Hegel 1977: 100).

The inverted world, as the true ‘true world’, is not a world set over against the knower; knowledge must rather be understood as dynamically in-the-world. Indeed, the entire thrust of the Phenomenology is to demonstrate that consciousness is not consciousness of some external thing but truly self-consciousness, a consciousness of life of itself.⁷ The idea of the inverted world seeks to capture this idea since invertedness, as invertedness not of two worlds that swap places but as the inversion of what is one unity, ‘means to turn against one’s self to relate to oneself – that is, to be alive’ (Gadamer 1975: 414).⁸ For consciousness of being a self has exactly this ‘structure of being a distinction which is no distinction’ (Gadamer 1975: 421).

Hegel’s true world as absolute restlessness, self-movement – as a living world – is beyond both the timeless world and the world of flux. But it is, of course, still a true world. For difference in itself is the undifferentiated. Dissimilarity has its condition of possibility, thereby its essence, in the similar, in the unity of the same (Heidegger 1988: 134). In this essential sense, worldly difference is identity, the world as an unconditioned universality – infinity or the Absolute. Although the Absolute must be conceived as spirit (Geist), the being of spirit is eternity or, to say the same thing, the ‘absolute presence’ (Gegenwart) that was also the Greek understanding of being (Heidegger 2002b: 77). Thus for Heidegger (1988: 12, 82, 98), even though Hegel thinks the world as movement, he nonetheless fails to think time (Being) as something other than beings (namely as that which is present) and thereby remains stuck with metaphysical timelessness. Hegelian being, as the pure concept, is the power of time rather than time ‘itself’. In other words, the problem of being in Hegel ‘is properly conceived only when time is made to disappear’, or, to say the same thing, time in Hegel ‘is unfolded from out of the problem of being itself’. This is what allows Hegelian philosophy to be conceived as absolute knowledge: ‘the genuine concept of being ... is nothing less than leaving time behind on the road to spirit, which is eternal’ (Heidegger 1988: 147). It is also why Heidegger (1988: 100, 145–6) is able to say that the difference between his thought of being and time and Hegel’s is that the latter sees being as the essence of time while Heidegger reverses this.⁹ With such a reversal, the very possibility of absolute knowledge becomes unthinkable – all comprehension of the world is relative, and indeed necessarily (constitutively) so, to our understanding of being. Being is no longer the movement of the Same and so historical in only a penultimate sense, but is rather ultimately historical (historical all the way down). An understanding of being can only be an understanding of the history of being with nothing in addition. Being, or world, is essentially finite, not the infinity of the absolute that it is for Hegel.

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The true world, as Nietzsche argued, is not true. There is no world of immutable being. Contra Nietzsche, however, neither is there only a world of blind becoming – chaosmos. As Heidegger asked (1991, III: 72): where is this chaos?¹⁰ Our experience of world is that it is ordered even though it is also a world of time and change. Being, for Heidegger, is not pure predation of time but historical being-in-the-world. Not only is there no true world in the metaphysical sense of eternity, but neither is there a true world as historical becoming (Spirit), as for example in Hegel’s ‘inverted world’ of real appearance (or appearance as real). There can in fact be no true world at all absent metaphysics. To break with metaphysics we need a truth detached from the way in which the world is. The world can only be this way for a subject somehow outside of the world, when human being is always already thrown and thrown-ness is being-in-the-world. We find ourselves radically in the world, not as those who look down on it (indeed, neither as those who, though immanent to the world, are nonetheless able to gain a total perspective on it, which amounts to the same thing).

Whence worldlessness?

If nihilism is the forgetting of being-in-the-world that the true world stands for, then this means that any history of nihilism cannot start with the modern death of God, which would involve taking the consequences of nihilism for nihilism ‘itself’. We must instead follow the trace of the emergence in Greek Antiquity of the true world.

Kosmos, as timeless and static good order of the world, was a Greek invention, one by which the Greeks left behind the eternal return of other ancient cosmologies, in which the order of the world was precisely the rise and fall of good order that the sovereign might ameliorate but could never control. This shift has been given an idealist reading: as the emergence in Greek thought of the subject for whom world then became object (Brague 2003). And it has been given a materialist reading: as driven by the class struggle connected to the rise of the polis in the sixth century BCE in which the ideology of different shares for different classes legitimated itself by reference to the – now frozen – order of the heavens (Foucault 2013). But in either case the order of the world, perhaps for the first time, became knowable. There was now an objective world given to a subject that grasps it, and who is thereby somehow set apart from it. For Heidegger, this worldless metaphysical subject is the subject of ancient and modern nihilism; the world as object for a subject is the very ground of western man’s technological domination of nature, and even of evil itself: ‘Self-will can elevate itself above everything and only will to determine the unity of the principles in terms of itself. This ability is the faculty of evil’ (2006: 142).

Nihilism is thus not a uniquely modern problem for Heidegger, as also for Nietzsche before him. Ancient cosmos, as eternal order of the world, is still inside the two-worlds problem, even though in Antiquity it is viewed as the only world. In other words, we do not need the world beyond of Christianity to have the two worlds. Cosmos is already the two-worlds problem since it is the supersensuous world as the truth of this world. This world, in the cosmic vision, is the timeless (heavenly) order of the world within which the (earthly) time of mortal life takes place, only this time as lack. So the supersensuous and sensuous worlds are already in place in cosmos and it is only a short step from here to their complete separation in Ancient Gnosis and their only partial reconciliation in the heaven/earth distinction of Christianity (in which the Son governs the world on behalf of a Father who is effectively absent from it). By the same token, overcoming the two-worlds distinction will certainly not happen simply by retreating from Christianity back to the seemingly unified, but actually always already fractured, world of cosmic totality. Though they are undoubtedly nostalgic for the age of the Greeks, neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger thinks nihilism can be answered by any kind of return.

If the true world is a world of sovereign self-sameness, a world which, being identical with itself, cannot change (what Derrida always called ‘the worst’), then the historical impetus for this, Foucault argued (2013), was the rise of a new form of sovereignty in the ancient polis based on a corrective rather than a constitutive principle of justice. Thus did the lawgiver replace the hero. Foucault identifies this new justice with the requirement of the polis for a legitimation of shares. While constitutive justice must always begin again, corrective justice must refer to something already constituted. That reference point was the (true) world understood as a cosmic order. And it was from this fixing of the order of the world that the metaphysical subject who knows that order, as if from the outside, was derived.

Foucault’s analysis, being a genealogy rather than a history of Being as in Heidegger, understands the true world as contingency rather than destiny. For Foucault, the polis is the site for the emergence of the nomos (law) of metaphysics, for the idea of the ‘permanence of distributions among things and men’ and of a knowing subject ‘no longer connected to the repetition of an event, but to the discovery and maintenance of an order’, which is the true world (2013: 163). Nomos is the law of the city by which the unequal shares brought into the polis are naturalized by their alignment with the very structure of the world, which itself is newly subject to nomos rather than chaos.

In his Lectures on the Will to Know (2013), Foucault shows how the function of juridical judgement in Greek Antiquity came to lose its decisionistic character in which the judge constituted law by deciding for one party, replacing this allocative function with a corrective one. Corrective judgement was linked to the rise of the polis and to the need to establish order in the city. The judge must now see ‘to it that the place of each is in harmonious balance with that of others’ (2013: 95). And because this judging was corrective rather than constitutive, it needed to refer to a higher order.

But a problem arises. What is this truth in the form of knowledge that [this justice] needs? Following Hesiod, but also his successors, it is the truth of days and dates; of favourable times; of the movements and conjunctions of the stars; of climates, winds, and seasons: that is to say, it is the whole body of cosmological knowledge. It is also the truth of the genesis of the gods and the world, of their order of succession and precedence, of their organization as system of the world. Theogony. Knowledge of the calendar and of the origin; knowledge of cycles and of the beginning. (2013: 111)

This knowledge was not originally Greek. Truth understood as knowledge of the cosmos formed in the empires of the Hittites, Assyrians and Babylonians. ‘And their formation there is linked directly with the form of political power’ (ibid.). Why was this? These ancient empires tied their statecraft closely to an official-religious calendar in order, first, to manage widely dispersed territories, second, to establish systems of equivalence for the raising of taxes and the like and, third, because the magical-religious basis of royal power was regularly renewed by ceremonies that would recite the genealogy of the king (‘a sort of new beginning on the basis of the beginning’, ibid.).

Though such a connection arose with the political needs of empire (as the cosmological ‘secrets of effective power’), justice in the Greek polis also comes to be identified with cosmos: ‘The lawmaker will be [. . .] one who speaks of the order of the world [. . .] Conversely, someone who knows the order of the world [the sage] will be able to say what is most just for men and cities’ (ibid.). Foucault argues that this initial connection in Greek Antiquity between political justice (nomos) and the discourse of knowledge as understanding of the order of the world (cosmos) established a dynasty to which the West belongs even today (2013: 96). In particular, this nomos–cosmos axis, as Nietzsche intuited, signalled ‘the first great defeat of the aristocratic and warrior justice dispensed on the basis of decisive moments’ rather than according to the order of the world (ibid.).

Also lost in this epoch-making moment of Greek Antiquity is any idea of truth as the always singular truth of a subject (a truth that will preoccupy Foucault in his last lectures on the courage of truth). Truth, and the justice which refers to it, had consisted in the heroic action by which a subject ties his destiny to the truth. Through a close reading of the Homeric texts, Foucault shows that this had been the principal mode of justice in Greek prehistory. Here, justice was served when a warrior stated the truth on oath; and this oath was its own guarantee since it bound the one who uttered it to the justice of the gods which, though it might be delayed, was sure to be meted out eventually, to his descendants if need be. But with the rise of the polis, this singular subject of truth was eclipsed by the deployment of an imperial truth as knowledge of the order of the world. Although this new political truth did not render such cosmic knowledge in the arcane manner of the empires to its east, it reproduced the essential link found in them between truth and the order of things. Justice in the city would now take the form of nomos, which itself would only truly be law if acting in conformity with the cosmos (Foucault 2013: 120).

Foucault carries out his own etymology of nomos, arguing along similar lines to Carl Schmitt (2003) and others that it stems from the root NEM, which is to distribute or divide up (2013: 156). However, Foucault adds a novel twist, suggesting that nomos as institution breaks off from the earlier principle of eunomia, which Foucault translates as ‘just distribution’. ‘It is from this demand for eunomia that nomos will arise as the juridico-political structure of the city’ (ibid.). Whereas in Nomos of the Earth Schmitt was content to link nomos to any apportioning of land that establishes order, Foucault uncovers the primordial importance of the justice of these shares. Turning to Solon’s account of his law-giving role in Athens, Foucault (2013: 157) draws attention to the fact that, for Solon, dusnomia is not only the dispossession of property owners but also the sending of the property-less poor into slavery because of their debts. Dusnomia is more than appropriation, being also the expulsion from just shares. A just distribution will give to each his due, apportioning political power on the basis of the distribution of wealth.

Nomos as appropriation is not, as Schmitt imagined (2003), the primordial basis of law; rather, the polis derives law from the cosmic order of rank or station. Contra Schmitt, it is order (cosmos) that founds spatial orientation (nomos), not orientation that founds order. Just as the distribution of wealth, and the power that flows from it, is seen as natural, so too the law that preserves this distribution is in accordance with nature. For sure, nomos naturalizes appropriation to the extent that it fixes inequalities of wealth by writing them into the political order, but this order is not arbitrary since it reflects the just deserts of hierarchical cosmos. It is not that this ‘cosmic’ justification of ordering was the real driver of that order, of course. In fact, Foucault argues that giving the right of attendance of the Assembly to all citizens was legislated by Solon (himself of the line of the last king of Athens) first and foremost in order that the demand for the redistribution of land could be neutralized: ‘where land was demanded, power was given’, ‘substituting political for economic sharing’ in the process (2013: 159). The idea of justice as conformity with the order of the world was what allowed the revolutionary demand for a fair share to be deflected by the limited sharing of power (four political classes fixed by a property qualification, and with high office drawn only from the top tier, remained despite the equal right of membership of the Assembly). With Solon’s reforms the polis began to constrain the formal-legal inequalities characteristic of the empires to its east, but it was unable to tackle the substantive idea of station on which they were based:

What makes one rich or poor remains outside euonomia (justice); it is luck, chance or fate, it is the will of the Gods. On the other hand, what determines that one exercises more power when one is rich than when one is poor is the principle that we finally encounter: nomos [. . .] Nomos is the name given to a principle of the distribution of power which serves to preserve (but [while] hiding) the principles of the allocation of wealth. (2013: 160–1)

Nomos, for Foucault, is the ‘fiction of a real break’ between economic and political power. Indeed, inasmuch as it hardly touches wealth and station while yet appearing to meet the requirements of justice for a fair share, nomos actually serves to renew the link between wealth and power. Nomos is the rule of the rich armed with the law.

Yet inasmuch as nomos appeals to the principle of a just distribution that leaves everything in its place, it cannot but sing of cosmos, of the very ‘principle of distribution, its value and wisdom, the origins on which it is founded, and the order whose reign it establishes not only over men, but over the stars, seas, animals, and plants’ (Foucault 2013: 163). In this sense, Foucault sees nomos as nothing other than the material basis of the true world, of the idea of the ‘permanence of distributions among things and men’ and of a knowing subject ‘no longer connected to the repetition of an event, but to the discovery and maintenance of an order’ (ibid.). Metaphysics is founded in Greek Antiquity not on the forgetting of Being but on the forgetting of the class struggle behind the veil of the stations of the true world.

Nomos as the just principle of distribution in the city, a distribution that echoes the tiered places of cosmos (but in truth projects these ranks from the city to the heavens), is also a principle of purity. Right distribution is a separation of what should not be mixed, it is a proper and necessary distribution of inside and outside (Foucault 2013: 187). The new impurity structured by nomos is no longer that of the Homeric hero who has provoked the anger of the gods; it is now the culpable transgression of the laws of the city which, since they manifest the order of nature, are known to everyone (2013: 188). The impure status of the anomos (lawless one) is that his blindness to nomos makes him a threat to the city. But that he cannot or will not conform his actions to the order of things means that the transgressor of nomos must have already been impure. Impure in his very being as well as in his effects on the polis, the anomos must be exiled from the city.

But the impure individual who denies the order of things is not the only anomos. Popular power does not know the nomos either and is thus not only ignorant but also impure. It is this impurity that is reflected in its murderous acts towards those sages, exemplified by Socrates, who do know the order of the world and therefore the true law, which is inscribed in nature and has nothing to do with popular decision. The rule of the demos is thus criminal; it is precisely a crime against nature because it rejects the expression of nature’s order in the nomos of the city (Foucault 2013: 190). For Foucault (2013: 193), the institution of nomos, arsing in the context of the class struggle in Greece in the sixth century, is pure ideology. Its function: to divert the popular demand for an egalitarian redistribution of land by establishing the ‘fictitious place’ of a neutral, objective and natural truth, a truth independent from political struggle or the economic interests that this struggle relays. The remarkable thing is that this fictitious place of nomos went on to be the privileged site for the production of knowledge of the world, of the polis, and of men from that day to this: over two and a half millennia of the lie:

[Freud] thought that Oedipus was speaking to him about the universal form of desire, whereas, in lowered voice, the Oedipus fable was recounting to him the historical constraint weighing on our system of truth, on that system to which Freud himself belonged. [. . .] Freud thought that Oedipus spoke to him about desire, whereas Oedipus, himself, was talking about the truth [. . .] [W]‌hat Oedipus recounts is simply the history of our truth and not the destiny of our instincts. (Foucault 2013: 196–7)

Oedipus became the impure anomos because he was ‘blind to the most fundamental nomos – father and mother’ (Foucault 2013: 191). In falling into impurity thus, Oedipus had to be put out of the city.

Foucault’s genealogy of the true world establishes a political point of emergence for the idea of cosmos, which prior to the polis had been for the Greeks too, as seen in Homer, the non-totalizable ‘heavens and the earth’. There is no kosmos in Homer (Brague 2003). The true world as tied to a cosmos that is itself epiphenomenal on the emergence of a new form of sovereign power is a reversal of Heidegger’s order of priority. Heidegger (2002c: 165), by contrast, identifies the ordo, or hierarchical order of beings, as a fundamental structure first ‘established through Plato’. If Plato’s ideas are the primordial expression of the hierarchy of beings, then Aristotle gives the rational necessity of this order perhaps its clearest statement in his Metaphysics (2001a: Book 12, ch. 7). The movement of the world is itself moved by the stars of the ‘first heaven’, which, revolving in fixed orbit, are eternal (the only motion that can be everlasting is motion in a circle) but not for all that uncaused – since what moves must itself be moved. That which keeps the heavens, and thereafter the sublunary world of nature, in motion must itself be eternally at rest and unchanging (indeed only that which is at rest can be unchanging: ‘For motion in space is the first of the kinds of change’; ‘all the other changes are posterior to change of place’). This ‘impassive and unalterable’ being is Aristotle’s God, the ‘unmoved mover’ which, as final cause of the cosmos, moves the world by being its aim (telos), its object of love or desire (os eromenon).¹¹

This Greek hierarchy of beings – kosmos – emerges, for Heidegger (2003: 22–4), because of the Greek will to know, namely thanks to philosophy. Here, only what always is can really be known. That which becomes, meanwhile, is outside of knowledge since it will change during the intervals in which I catch sight of it such that my former view is now false. True beings, by contrast, can be known because they are always the same regardless of my regard of them. I do not have to keep coming back to them. This means that, for the Greeks, true being is defined as changeless because only this being can be known. Being is ranked on the basis of the knowing subject, on the basis of what this subject can have at its disposal.¹²

Once true being is defined as permanent presence a logic is set to work which ranks being first and becoming second. For what always is must come earlier than what is perishable.¹³ And indeed for Aristotle in Book 4 (ch. 12) of Physics, the world, in the sense of the heavens, is what is eternal. It was not created and it will not pass away: ‘It suffers nothing from time.’ All beings in this way can be led back to an everlasting being, hence the coincidence of ontology with theology in Greek thought: for theology considers ‘what constitutes, in the most proper and highest sense, the presence of the world’, namely the unmoved mover and the heavens, which are the pre-eminent place for all beings that are placed below them (Heidegger 2003: 154 and 74). Indeed, in the theological vision of the world, place is what constitutes the being of beings itself as presence. Beings are not first existent and thereafter placed, but place belongs to beings as such, to their ‘very capacity to be present, a possibility which is constitutive of their Being’ (2003: 75). Place is the being-there of a being.

For Heidegger, the hierarchy of beings which inaugurates the true world, and with it theology, is simply an expression of the metaphysical forgetting of Being, of mortal time or finitude: ‘For Aristotle and the Greeks, as well as for the tradition, beings in the proper sense are what exists always, what is constantly already there ... On the other hand ... [h]‌uman Dasein is not [aei], always; the Being of man arises and passes away; it has its determinate time, its [aion]’ (2003: 94).

The heavenly bodies as the highest – because eternal – beings emerge as world is forgotten. This forgetting of Being reaches its apogee in the great chain of being of medieval Aristotelianism, where, as Thomas Aquinas argues in De Substantiis Separatis, the heavenly beings are highest because they exist in pure act (i.e. form), without any potentiality (i.e. matter) to take other forms; in short because they are immutable: ‘The more imperfect is in potency in relation to the more perfect and so on upward to the first Form, which is act only, namely, God’ (Aquinas 1959: 38).

For Heidegger, the highest being can only be highest because the ‘equiprimordiality’ of being, that every being, even the lowliest, is just as much as any other, has dropped out of sight.¹⁴ Indeed, it is Being ‘itself’ that withdraws, as the concealment necessary to the unconcealment of beings. Beings are only given as beings because that ‘in’ which beings appear – world – is no-thing (though not for all that nothing). Given that speaking is always speaking about something, gaining access to that which is not a being, to the non-being that nonetheless pre-eminently is in some way, is always closed off from logos (2003: 292). Whether it is the Presocratics explaining being on the basis of a being such as water, air or fire (notwithstanding Parmenides’s claim that ‘beings are’, which Heidegger concedes is at least on the way to thinking about Being), or Aristotle’s ousia (being) as derived from parousia (presence), Greek being is that which is there. To be is to be present (2003: 275, 302, 323). More than this, ousia for the Greeks is constant presence, it is what, as fixed and stable, is always readily available – what remains. How else to explain that ousia names both being and house/home? Possessions are exemplary beings because of this quality of Greek being as always at our disposal (2002b: 36–8). Thus it is the destiny of Being, which is precisely not present, not there ready at hand, to be forgotten.¹⁵

But as Heidegger argues at length in What is Metaphysics? (1978), metaphysics is not just the thought of beings as such, but also as a whole. Theology arrives along with metaphysics just as much as ontology also for this reason – metaphysics is onto-theo-logic, as Heidegger will later say (1969). Indeed, the ‘deity enters into philosophy’, by which Heidegger clearly means that thought of the highest being is invited by metaphysics. This is confirmed when Heidegger suggests that the question of why the deity enters into philosophy can be answered ‘only when that to which the deity is to come has become sufficiently clear: that is, philosophy itself’ (1969: 55). Accounting for beings within the whole – the thinking of cosmos – leads the Being of beings to be represented as causa sui. ‘This is the metaphysical concept of God. Metaphysics must think in the direction of the deity because the matter of thinking is Being’ (1969: 60, emphasis added). The thinking of Being is not just a concern with the ground as what is lowest (‘universal and primal’) in beings but also with ground as the ‘highest and ultimate’ of what is in Being. Indeed, the one supports the other: the primal accounts for the ultimate (1969: 61), but it is just as true that the primal ground appears ‘as something that is, thus itself as a being that requires the corresponding accounting for through a being, that is, causation, and indeed causation by the highest cause’ (1969: 70). God lies in wait for all those who pursue the metaphysical concern with grounding. This God, the causa sui, Heidegger calls the god of philosophy, a god before which it is possible neither to fall to one’s knees in awe nor to dance. The god-less thinking that abandons this philosophers’ God ‘is thus perhaps closer to the divine God’ than onto-theo-logians would care to admit (1969: 72).

It has been over for the olds gods for a long time now – and truly, they had a good cheerful gods’ end!

They did not ‘twilight’ themselves to death – that is surely a lie! Instead they just one day up and laughed themselves to death!

This happened when the most godless words were uttered by a god himself – the words: ‘There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god before me!’

(Zarathustra III ‘On Apostates’)¹⁶

The Christian world

Before turning from the world as given in Antiquity to the Christian experience of the world it is necessary first to consider the world as seen in Neoplatonism. Given the influence of Neoplatonism on the Church Fathers, this Neoplatonic world is profoundly knotted up with both the world of Plato before it and the Christian world after it. It is not for nothing that Nietzsche held Christianity to be Platonism for the plebs.

Although the true world and the material world both emanate from the same One, the two-worlds division is ever-present in Plotinus (204–270 CE). And yet there is much in the Enneads to suggest that the timeless true world is not other than the world that passes away. This is particularly apparent in Plotinus’s denunciation of the Gnostics in the ninth tractate of the second Ennead. In defending the demiurge, the creative agent of the world (which Plotinus sees as a creative principle against the anthropomorphism of Plato’s Timaeus), from Gnostic attack, Plotinus finds the world innocent – there is no deficit of worldly existence. In this, as we shall see, he shares the same delight in the way things are as Spinoza and Nietzsche after him: it is not that this world is good because it conforms to some higher principle of goodness; rather, ‘it is because things are the way they are that they are good’ (Plotinus, in Hadot 1993: 39). The true world of forms does not have to be explained by way of something else – ‘it is enough for one to posit it as holding the first place’ (Plotinus in Hadot 1993: 40). The forms do not carry out some higher plan; as living beings (not the inert and lifeless ideas of Platonism) they are the causes of themselves and therefore self-justifying. They did not have to be the way they are; rather, it is because they are what they are that they must be that way (Hadot 1993: 39). The forms are not merely ideas in the mind of God, rather these ideas are what the mind of God is made of. ‘Thinker and thought are one’, as Plotinus (1991: 3) puts it.

Holding the creative principle to be itself divine, Plotinus (1991: 5) asks how the demiurge could have created the world if, as the Gnostics held, his creation is proof of his forgetting of the Divine. There are indeed many confronting things in the world, but to find the origin of the world unhappy because of these would be to confuse the sensible world with the intelligible (true) world of which the former is merely the reflection. That it is a reflection, however, does not condemn the world of appearance since ‘what reflection of that [true] world could be conceived more beautiful than this of ours? [. . .] Or what other earth than this could have been modelled after that earth? [. . .] And for a sun figuring the Divine sphere, if it to be more splendid than the sun visible to us, what a sun it must be’ (Plotinus 1991: 6; see also 23–4). Moreover, that this world is not an original but a copy of the true world of forms is not a condemnation of this world but its very nature. This world cannot be at once symbol and reality, but, as reality, it is as perfect a representation as can be. More than this: such a real representation is necessary for the higher symbol to be a symbol. The true world cannot be true without that which is its copy (1991: 11). Nor can it be perfect unless its image is also: ‘if this world has no beauty, neither has its Source’ (1991: 24). It follows that ‘Nothing is to be blamed for being inferior to the First’ (1991: 18, emphasis added).

All of this makes it strange to Plotinus that the Gnostics should seek to leave this world and depart to the true world, given that the true world is the archetype of the world that is so abhorrent to them (Plotinus 1991: 7). The world that is despised must always be the starting point of otherworldliness (1991: 21); even the sweet, seductive poisons of the true world are taken from the earth, as Nietzsche (2006: 37) put it.

Besides, how could the God that cares for the soul of the Gnostic be so indifferent to the cosmos in which it exists? Who dares to make the Divine ‘stop short of earthly concerns or set any limit to it whatsoever?’ ‘If He is absent from the Universe, He is absent from yourselves, and you can have nothing to tell about Him’ (Plotinus 1991: 14, 22, 23). For if the world really contains shards of Divine light (the souls of the Gnostics), then either this light is part of the eternal order of things, in which case it must be included more generally in the created world, or, if it is against the order of things, then this breach exists in the Divine also and the cause of evil is no longer the world but the Divine itself: ‘a Providence watching entires is more likely than one over fragments only’ (Plotinus 1991: 18, 23).

In Hadot’s study of Plotinus (1993), the gulf between Plotinus’s otherworldliness and the nihilistic beyond-ness of Gnosticism comes through with exceptional clarity. As Hadot (1993: 25) notes, the true world, for Plotinus, does not wait for the end of the world; nor does it remain inaccessible from before the world began. Not being separated in time, neither is the true world separated by space. The true world is no eighth heaven, no supra-cosmic realm. Indeed, ‘The more we seek it the less we find’ for, ‘although it was right there, you will not have seen it, because you were looking elsewhere’ (Plotinus in Hadot 1993: 46). The true world is nothing other than this world at its deepest level, a world that can be reached immediately by returning within oneself (a self that, at this level, is the identity of the self thinking the divine and the divine Thought of the self) (Hadot 1993: 28). As later in Spinoza, for Plotinus ‘We are always in God’ (Hadot 1993: 27).

***

If Heidegger, after Nietzsche, tends towards viewing the nihilism of the true world as stretching back more or less continuously to Plato, Agamben, by contrast, has argued that the true world was given a fundamentally new inflection in Christianity. Agamben’s genealogies tie modern nihilism specifically to Christian ontology and the impetus this gave to government. For the world is only governable from the outside and in accordance with a plan of salvation that finds the world wanting. Thus as the Homo Sacer series of books has progressed, Agamben has shifted attention from his genealogy of sovereign power since the Greek polis to focus on what he sees as a largely separate genealogy of modern governmentality, one which he believes Foucault (2014) did not trace back far enough when highlighting the rise of the Christian pastorate, the government of souls (On the Government of the Living). Differently from Foucault’s emphasis on Ecclesiastical practices, Agamben’s genealogy of government takes him to the ontological stakes of the emergence of Christianity itself.

Before considering Agamben’s genealogy of government, it is important first to understand his method and its difference of emphasis from Nietzschean and Foucauldian genealogy. For Nietzsche, paradigmatically in his Genealogy of Morality, noble ideas turn out to have ignoble origins and, in this sense, Nietzsche’s genealogy, and following him Foucault’s too, focuses on the accidental and contingent – eschewing notions of origin and teleology. Nietzsche saw genealogy as the only way to rid thinking about the past from the vestiges of God – we must get over the idea of any providential ordering, of any sense of destiny or purpose. Even Darwinism forgets this with its assumption of the survival of the fittest when European civilization, for Nietzsche (2003: 85), is rather built on the defeat of the strong and the triumph of the weak.

Is this concern with accident and contingency in history also Agamben’s approach to genealogy? There is no doubt that Agamben sees himself as a genealogist. After all, the subtitle of a major recent work The Kingdom and the Glory, for example, is: ‘for a theological genealogy of economy and government’. But in eschewing universals Foucauldian genealogy (see Foucault 1977) raises new problems for Agamben. Although the ‘origin’ does not come ‘before’ the present it remains determinative of it, and this is why Agamben prefers the term ‘archaeology’ (itself Foucauldian, of course) to describe his histories and his etymologies. In an interview Agamben makes the reasons for this clear:

Q:What is this archaeological method?

Agamben:It is a search for the archè, which in Greek means ‘beginning’ and ‘commandment’. In our tradition, the beginning is both that which gives birth to something and that which commands its history. But this origin cannot be dated or chronologically situated: it is a force that continues to act in the present, just as infancy, according to psychoanalysis, determines the mental activity of the adult, or like how the big bang, which, according to astrophysicists, gave birth to the Universe, continues expanding even today. The example typifying this method would be the transformation of the animal into the human (anthropogenesis), that is, an event that we imagine necessarily must have taken place, but has not finished once and for all: man is always becoming human, and thus also remains inhuman, animal. [. . .] The present is the most difficult thing for us to live. Because an origin, I repeat, is not confined to the past: it is a whirlwind, in Benjamin’s very fine image, a chasm in the present. And we are drawn into this abyss. That is why the present is, par excellence, the thing that is left unlived.¹⁷

The past, in this approach, is not past at all, but continues to operate in the present and, thereby, to determine the future. Analogously to psychoanalysis, we are talking about a past that, precisely because it has not been lived (which is why it is not really past), continues to be present in some way (Agamben 2009: 225). Archaeology, like genealogy, is really a history of the present. Yet this is a history of the present with the intent to open, not the future as in deconstruction, but, similarly to psychoanalysis, the past.¹⁸ Unlike psychoanalysis, however, the intent is not to re-present the symptom’s origin but to demote or decentre it – finally to bypass it. Strictly opposed to the eternal return, the archaeological method does not consent to the past, refusing to turn the ‘so it was’ into a ‘so I wanted it’. What it wants, to the contrary, is to be rid of the past so as to gain access to what has never been. Archaeology seeks to enable access to the present for the first time (Agamben 2009: 225, 227). In this it is a method appropriate to Agamben’s notion of messianic time, which, in recapitulating what is past, enables the past to regain a certain possibility; the present, meanwhile, thereby acquires completeness rather than the undecidability it has in deconstruction (Agamben 2005: 24).¹⁹

Agamben’s archaeology of government, then, is not content only to reveal government’s pudenda origo. This ‘origin’ is still a force that must be reckoned with and, in so reckoning, deactivated – which means not so much overcome as opened up for a new use. Thus in The Kingdom and the Glory (2011), Agamben’s overarching question is as much critical as historical: ‘Why has power in the West assumed the form of an “economy”, that is, of a government of men and things?’ Just as, for Heidegger, the essence of technology is nothing technological so, for Agamben, the essence of government is nothing governmental. Agamben finds its point of emergence to be the entry of economy (oikonomia – the government of the household) into theology with the rise of Christianity. Though the meaning of oikonomia remains basically unchanged with this shift, the change in its field of application is decisive. Agamben, ever the philologist, finds evidence of this in the transition from the Pauline construction ‘economy of the mystery’ (Ephesians 3.9, where salvation is what is mysterious) to the ‘mystery of the economy’ in Hippolytus and Tertullian in the third century. The classical administration of the household now becomes the obscure principle of government both of God himself (who is internally organized both as three hypostases, ‘persons’, and as one being) but also of his actions, namely his government of the world. And if classical oikonomia managed beings that were given, for example Aristotle’s natural slaves, then Christian divine oikonomia governs the household of the world according to a plan (oikonomia) of salvation, which implies that the beings being governed shall now become other.

That God now governs the world through Christ according to a plan of salvation implies a number of aporias in the Christian experience of the world, aporias which remain operative to this day. First, God remains other than the world that he governs. This division between the divine and the world and, concurrently, between being and existence, is already well under way in Neoplatonism, as for example in the God of Philo, who exists in being even while his being is not in existence (in the manner of lowly beings) (2016: 137).²⁰ But a God entirely other than and uninvolved in the world is specifically the contribution of Gnosticism and, for Agamben (2011: 53), this nihilistic ‘Gnostic germ’ continues to infect Christianity despite its attempt to overcome the Gnostic deus alienus. For in order to resolve the Gnostic rupture between God and world while resisting Stoic pantheism, Christian theology (which was shaped decisively by its attempt to exclude Gnosis) ended up introducing a division in God himself – a division which made God both transcendent to the world (Father) and actively involved in it (Son) at the same time.

Though the Father governs the world through Christ he does not appear in it as such. And this empty throne of the sovereign is, for Agamben (2011), the secret of governmental power to this day in popular regimes. For the popular sovereign, like God the Father, never appears as such in the world, referring only to its government. In its turn, government seeks its ground in the sovereign, referring itself back to it at every turn. This ‘governmental machine’, as Agamben calls it, works only because at its heart there is nothing. The movement from groundless government to the empty throne and back again operates precisely because it finds no ground at either pole, ceaselessly rebounding from one to the other. But in its effects, the governmental machine increasingly refers the political history of the West to government. This is why the problems of sovereignty become steadily more opaque in modernity while at the same time there is an exponential growth in the arts of government. Foucault seized on this difference in modernity with his famous quip that political theorists must learn to chop the king’s head off in their thinking. However, Agamben implies that while Foucault could describe this shift he could not explain it, as Agamben believes he has been able to.

Second, if God created the world ex nihilo and now plans to save it then his actions are not reducible to his being – there is freedom in God and thereby in his government of the world.²¹ (The difference here from Aristotle’s unmoved mover, a transcendent first principle that is not directly involved in the world, is obvious.) This is the anarchism of government, its being anarche, without first principle or ground in the being of God. After all, Christ, as the one given the government of the world by the Father, is himself anarche, being begotten and not created, as the Nicene Creed emphasizes. Christ is from before the creation of the world – having no ground in it.

That the world is other than God and requires salvation also implies a freedom of the world, even if this freedom is cast negatively. And indeed, government presupposes free beings in order to be what it is. There cannot be government without freedom, recalling the etymology of the word in kubernáō – namely to pilot a ship on what are precisely the open seas. The Stoic cosmos, by contrast, was necessary; there is nothing here to govern. Government presupposes, and thereby can be even said to constitute, free beings. But if Christian theology marks the epoch within which free beings first come to be, the initial reason for this appearing remains contingent. Free beings only call for government from the perspective of a God other to the world who plans to save it. Absent this God, free beings remain but the providential government of the world loses its justification (and this is what Nietzsche meant with his suggestion that the death of God is dead is itself the liberation: the death of God creates freedom rather than restoring something that God took from us). Free beings do not call forth government unless there is a divine plan to be accomplished. This means that providence is the secret driver of government. However, the idea of a divine plan of salvation that will be accomplished makes Christian theology pose the question of government but also of its overcoming – hence the rebound in Occidental societies between ever evolving arts of government and the perennial desire for their ruination.

The inexorable rise of government in the Occident is therefore to be understood on the ontological level as the shift from the substantial ontology of the ancients – for whom being is ‘to be’ – to the imperative ontology of the Christian world, an ontology expressed with the intensification of the idea of providence. Now the world, being no longer necessary in the manner of ancient cosmos, ‘is’ not but ‘has to be’, an ontological shift that calls for, indeed calls forth, both government (Agamben 2013b: 119) and the free beings government presupposes. From out of this ontology of ‘must be’, an ontology that finds the world wanting, Agamben traces the evolution of ethics to Kant, an ethics which remains linked to command and, at bottom, to that which the command presupposes, namely the will.²² In this sense it is perhaps not surprising that, working in the wake of Kant, Schelling (2006: 231) finds that ‘In the final and highest instance, there is no other being than will. Will is original being, and to it alone all predicates of being apply: groundlessness, eternality, independence of time, self-affirmation’. In this tradition of thinking, Nietzsche’s ontology of will to power does seem like the culmination of metaphysics, more specifically of the transcendental freedom of the Christian God, rather than its overcoming, as Heidegger argued.

The reverse side of God’s otherness from the world, as we have seen, is his radical freedom with regard to his government of it. While the deus alienus of the Gnostics was also foreign to the world, he did not govern it in any way. In Gnosticism, the demiurge is both the god of this world and the one that rules it. But in bringing the two gods of Gnosticism together in the one God, Christianity created a God that governs the world freely. This, for Agamben, is why decisionism, from the sovereign deciding on the exception in Schmitt to its deconstructionist version in Derrida, remains problematic. Decisionsim is a pathology of the ‘Gnostic germ’ that was transmitted to Christian ontology. For the pure decision is unthinkable without our estrangement from the world: the unfounded decision only makes sense in a situation of radical undecidability. With Agamben’s form-of-life, by contrast (and, as with Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, the hyphens are crucial here, neither term being separable from the other), this possibility of an unfounded decision is itself void. If my life is inseparable from its form then I decide from out of it, not from some nowhere.²³ And this life that cannot be separated from its form also cannot be cast as anything like an indeterminate or bare life.²⁴ Which is to say that it cannot be a matter for government, remaining essentially ungovernable. Form-of-life, like Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, is never a norm imposed on life from the outside.²⁵ Absent the indeterminate existence of bare life, a life separated from its form by sovereign power, there is nothing to govern.

***

The critical edge of Agamben’s genealogy of government – what it seeks a way out from – is freedom understood as arbitrariness, which is the freedom that government presupposes. The Christian God creates and governs the world for no reason at all (at least nothing related to his being but only according to his will) and Agamben, after Spinoza and Heidegger, seeks an understanding of freedom as rather that which arises from how things are (‘freedom is something binding, indeed obligation in general’ writes Heidegger [1995: 127] in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics). Spinoza, to whom we will turn in a moment, is the forefather of this revaluation of Christian ontology and of an apparent return to an ancient ontology of necessity (explanations of the way of the world that seek refuge in the will of God are, for Spinoza [2007: 29], Asylum Ignorantiae – a sanctuary of ignorance). For Spinoza, a thoroughgoing determinist, an action is ‘free’ not because it could be otherwise but rather because it arises necessarily from the essence of a being: ‘That thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone’ (Ethics, Definition 7). Thus a man can be free when, unconstrained by any external cause, he nonetheless acts as he must, namely in accordance with his essential drive to preserve in his being (conatus), which for Spinoza is the very being of beings (1996: 75).

Nietzsche (1962: 63), echoing Spinoza, is also contemptuous of notions of human freedom as choice: ‘Man is necessity down to his last fibre, and totally “unfree”, that is if one means by freedom the foolish demand to be able to change one’s essentia arbitrarily, like a garment’. Heidegger, in his lectures on Schelling for example (2006: 102), similarly dismisses any notion of freedom as arbitrary choice, which would have nothing to orient it, nothing to be free for:

If freedom means man’s complete indeterminacy, neither for good nor for evil, then freedom is conceived merely negatively, as mere indecisiveness, behind which and before which stands nothing. This in-decisiveness thus remains nugatory, a freedom which is anything else but a ground of determination; it is complete indeterminacy which can never get beyond itself. This concept of freedom is again a negative one.²⁶

For Heidegger this does not imply a return to ancient necessity since what human being is, though it is thereby not arbitrary, is essentially open (for good and evil in this discussion, in which Heidegger uses Schelling’s terms). We must be this openness that we are. Our existence does not precede our essence, as Heidegger famously corrected Sartre in the former’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1998a; see also Heidegger 1990: 157), but rather is our essence.²⁷ Our existence, by which Heidegger means our Dasein, our being-there, is undetermined but for that very reason is not thereby indeterminate; we are, determinately, our indetermination, our thrown-ness or our ‘destinal sending’ – our historicity (Heidegger 1998a: 249). Given that ‘finitude completely determines the human being from the ground up’, as Heidegger argues in his book on Kant, ‘it is precisely a question of becoming certain of this finitude in order to hold oneself in it’ (Heidegger 1990: 150 and 148, emphasis added). Being determined by finitude – by time – we are determined by no-thing and need to seize this openness that we determinately are.

Agamben expresses this idea of essential human potentiality somewhat differently. For potentiality, as Aristotle noticed (Metaphysics, Book 9), is always also impotential of the same – the possibility not to be.²⁸ While other living beings must be their particular potential, must be this or that, only human animals are ‘capable of their own impotentiality’, of not being this or that (Agamben 1999a: 182).²⁹ Agamben has latterly (2011) come to express this same idea through the image of ‘man’ not as the political animal, the man of action, he was for Aristotle but as the Sabbath animal who desists from all works.³⁰ Our human being is such that we have nothing to do, no telos. Our work is inoperativity, the absence of work.

Yet although inoperativity is how human being is given ontologically, this does not mean that there is something like a subject lurking in inoperativity which, like the theologians’ God, can will in all freedom to act or not to act. The other of metaphysical operativity is not metaphysical inoperativity but rather inoperative praxis, or habit. As a practice that is not consumed in the act and so remains internal to potential, habit is beyond the abstract Aristotelian opposition between potential and act (Agamben 2016: 93–4). And the subject of habit is constituted only by way of habitual use; it in no way precedes that use – as Nietzsche (2014: 236) said, there is no doer behind the deed. The subject and its world is a matter only of living bodies that put their body parts, as also the world around them, to use (Agamben 2016: 60–2). Both subject and world are found solely in use, in what is habitual.³¹

Bringing these reflections back to the theme of world, we find that Agamben himself has expressed them in this way. In The Coming Community (2003: 90–2), an earlier work from before the Homo Sacer series, what Agamben calls the Irreparable ‘is that things are just as they are, in this or that mode, consigned without remedy to their way of being’. This means that ‘How you are, how the world is – this is the Irreparable’. In a move that is very close to Nietzsche, revelation, for Agamben, is revelation not of the world’s sacredness but of its ‘irreparably profane character’. It is only at the point that we see the world in this light that it is saved. Indeed, to the extent that wanting something just as it is, with all of its predicates, is love, it is only thus that we can love the world. I love the world, as I love anything or anybody at all, because it is thus and no other way. That it is thus is contingent but still absolutely necessary for it to be what it is; it is necessarily its contingency.

The revelation that the world is profane is also the realization that the world – is God (ibid.). Agamben writes that ‘At the point you perceive the irreparability of the world, at that point it is transcendent’ (2003: 105). This proposition is expressed by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus (2013: 91) as follows: ‘that God is not revealed in the world could also be expressed by the following statement: What is properly divine is that the world does not reveal God’.³² For Nietzsche too in The Gay Science (2001: 204), the realization that the way of world is anything but divine does not lead to its being worth less – and this is why Cynicism is ‘the highest elevation you will find anywhere on earth’ (Nietzsche 2005: 103). Agamben, after both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, is saying something similar: that the world is thus is still in the world, but ‘that this thus is without remedy, that we can contemplate it as such – this is the only passage outside the world’ (Agamben 2003: 102).

Agamben acknowledges Spinoza as a forerunner of this thought – the world is not that in which a God somehow separate from it is revealed; the world is God. Agamben’s modal ontology (see 2016: 164, 172 and 223) builds on Spinoza’s modes of Deus sive Natura (God or Nature). What is divine is not being in itself but its sive; its always and only being expressed in the modes. Being does not have but is its modes, its way of being. Nothing pre-exists the way in which being is. As modal, being constitutes itself only in being modified, is ‘nothing other than its modifications’ (Agamben 2016: 170). In this way Agamben’s modal ontology is a development of Spinoza’s monism, which rather describes substance (being) as something separate from its modes (Spinoza 1996: 10, 19). Agamben is actually following Deleuze here, who concludes Difference and Repetition by arguing that (1994: 304): ‘All that Spinozism needed to do for the univocal to become an object of pure affirmation was to make substance turn around the modes – in other words, to realize univocity in the form of repetition [of difference] in the eternal return’.

Ontology has incessantly questioned only what or, starting with Descartes,³³ that being is when what is properly divine is how being is (neither its essence nor its existence but its mode or habit).³⁴ From the standpoint of this ontology, the source of all true joy and sadness is that the world is as it is, that it is how we find it to be (which is not the same as to say that it cannot change). Joy or sadness that arises from the world being other than it seems or than we want it to be is, to the contrary, false. After Spinoza, what matters is not joy or sadness themselves, but that these affects are true, namely that they arise because all trace of doubt is gone and because we know with complete certainty that the world is thus (Agamben 2003). As Spinoza makes this point in his Ethics (1996: 169):

But it can be objected, while we understand God to be the cause of all things, we thereby consider God to be the cause of sadness. To this I reply that insofar as we understand the cause of sadness, it ceases to be a passion, that is, to that extent it ceases to be sadness. And so, insofar as we understand God to be the cause of sadness, we rejoice.

The ‘so be it’ said to the world, echoing Nietzsche’s amor fati, is when we no longer hope for anything other than a world without God; when all doubt is gone – ‘What! Did the world not become perfect just now?’ (Nietzsche 2006: 224). This is why the world of the saved is identical to the world of the damned in terms of its being; what changes for the saved is not the things themselves but their limits (Agamben 2003: 92). This is also why, although there is no world beyond, nonetheless, how it is with the world is outside of the world, as Wittgenstein argued (2003: 105).

Agamben returns to this theme in a recent essay (2015) on the encounter between Pontius Pilate and Jesus. In Agamben’s restaging of this encounter, Jesus is defined as the one who, in refusing to judge the world, comes instead to save it (Jn 3.17), while Pilate is the one who, being only a man and invested with a purely earthly power, must come to a judgement on Jesus but finds he cannot. Jesus represents a messianic power that, by contrast to Pilate’s, is not worldly and yet is immediately at hand (Lk. 17.21): the ‘so be it’ to the world which, though it refuses another world, as world-blessing is neither of the world.

Spinoza’s world

Spinoza’s world is completely necessary. The world is not the way that it is according to some external measure of what must be, but rather it is immediately – immanently – necessary. For this reason, like the world of Epicurus (‘never suppose the atoms had a plan’, as Lucretius [1968: 172] writes of the Epicurean world), Spinoza’s world knows nothing of providence.³⁵ Indeed, accusations of atheism levelled at Spinoza in his day related precisely to this denial of providence, which, in ridding the world of a telos, rids the world of lack: ‘By reality and perfection I understand the same thing’ (Spinoza 1996: 32). ‘I do not know why [matter] would be unworthy of the divine nature’, writes Spinoza (1996: 13), in a decisive break with Platonism. When Nietzsche (2006: 131) invokes those who ‘smile down cloudlessly from bright eyes and from a distance of miles, while beneath us pressure and purpose and guilt steam like rain’, he is looking out from a peak scaled by Spinoza before him.

So necessary is Spinoza’s world that it is freed of the free beings that make the world governable and human beings responsible. Only because ‘men think themselves free’, have notions of ‘praise and blame, sin and merit’ arisen, states the Ethics (Spinoza 1996: 29); only because men imagine that they disturb, rather than follow, the order of nature that human nature is subject to laughter and disdain (1996: 68–9). As the Theological-Political Treatise (Spinoza 2007: 45) clarifies, we follow the laws of nature from necessity rather than volition:

[G]‌iven that nobody does anything except by the predetermined order of nature, that is, by the eternal decree and direction of God, it follows that no one chooses any way of life for himself nor brings anything about, except via the particular summons of God, who chose this man in preference to others for this task or that way of life.

Spinoza famously draws a radical indistinction between God and Nature (Deus sive Natura), which is above all why we must briefly consider what appears like perhaps the first attempt from within the metaphysical tradition to overcome the two-worlds distinction that arises from the true world.³⁶ Spinoza finds the world’s plan to be purely immanent to the world, something that even the Stoic cosmos does not do. Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus, for example (Cleanthes was a student of Zeno, the father of Stoicism), identifies god as the world soul who nonetheless is not identical with the universe, which he directs: ‘The whole universe, spinning around the earth/goes wherever you lead it and is willingly guided by you’. For Spinoza, by contrast, as Deleuze (1988: 128) puts it: ‘a plane of immanence has no supplementary dimension; the process of composition must be apprehended for itself, through that which it gives, in that which it gives. It is a plan of composition, not a plan of organisation and development’.

Spinoza rejects any notion of a transcendent God, of God as a sovereign or legislator somehow separate from his creation (Spinoza 2007: 64–5). God is not other than the world but is the world, which is thereby necessary or predetermined in every degree: ‘In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way’ (Spinoza 1996: 20). If we call a thing contingent, then, it is only because we do not understand it sufficiently (1996: 23). God is immediately and necessarily given in the world in the manner of a mathematical truth (and we should not forget that this is Spinoza’s criterion of truth, as the Appendix to Book I of the Ethics makes clear), which is similarly unconcerned with ends.

There is no freedom because there is no will in Spinoza’s God – a most radical undoing of the split between the being and activity of God that Agamben identifies as the ontological shift that characterized the demise of Antiquity and rise of the Christian era. Even Plotinus’s emanation from the One, where it is also the case that the hypostases (existences) are necessary rather than a willed creation, yet moves out from God. Spinoza’s modes of God/Nature, by contrast, remain entirely in God (Agamben 2016: 162): ‘That eternal and infinite being we call God or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists’ (Spinoza 1996: 114). Being the immanent rather than the transitive cause of all things, ‘neither intellect nor will pertain to God’s nature’ (1996: 16, 14). Rather, ‘all things have been predetermined by God, not from freedom of the will or absolute good pleasure, but from God’s absolute nature’ (1996: 25).³⁷ This is not Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds, a world which a transcendent God has willed having considered all possible alternatives.

Spinoza’s radical monism rules out any idea of a division between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. There is nothing beyond the world (1996: 13) and therefore no providential government of it, either. Spinoza is insistent (1996: 25–6) that all the prejudices he seeks to expose in the Ethics ‘depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all things act, as men do, on account of an end’. He corrects this illusion decisively: ‘Nature has no end set before it, and [. . .] all final causes are nothing but human fictions.’

As he [God or Nature] exists for the sake of no end, he also acts for the sake of no end. Rather, as he has no principle or end of existing, so also he has none of acting. What is called a final cause is nothing but a human appetite insofar as it is considered as a principle, or primary cause, of some thing. (Spinoza 1996: 114)

We see here that Spinoza dispenses not only with a creator God separate from his creation but also with the Philosopher’s God, the Prime Mover. If Aristotle’s world requires this ultimate final cause, Spinoza’s world requires nothing. What Spinoza’s world lacks is only a telos, a telos that constitutes the two worlds by finding this world as not yet brought to completion or as caused by something beyond itself. This means not only that the world needs no justification but also that it is perfect. Providential teleology, by contrast, ‘turns Nature completely upside down’, making what is most perfect imperfect:

[For] that effect is most perfect which is produced immediately by God, and the more something requires several intermediate cause to produce it, the more imperfect it is. But if the things which have been produced immediately by God had been made so that God would achieve his end, then the last things, for the sake of which the first would have been made, would be the most excellent of all. Again, this doctrine takes away God’s perfection. For if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something which he lacks. (Spinoza 1996: 28)

Given that the eternal necessity and the greatest perfection of Nature are one and the same – ‘Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced’ (Spinoza 1996: 22; see also 154) – neither can there be any moral law hanging over the world by which the world is judged. Spinoza’s world, long before Nietzsche’s, is beyond good and evil: ‘I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies’ (1996: 69). Appetite is ‘the very essence of man’ such that what we call the good is what we strive for, rather than our striving aiming at something good in itself (1996: 76).³⁸ Thus the free man, living according to reason alone, knows that everything is necessary and so cannot even conceive of evil; for ‘if the human mind had only adequate ideas, it would form no notion of evil’ (1996: 150). And, since good and evil are correlates, the free man, like God, neither conceives of the good (1996: 151–2). If God acted for the sake of the good then something would be placed ‘outside God, which does not depend on God, to which God attends, as a model, in what he does, and at which he aims, as a certain goal’ (1996: 25).

It is in this sense, argues Spinoza (1996: 152), that the Biblical story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil should be understood. God prohibited the fruit of this tree because he knew that Adam, created a free man in the determination of his essence, would lose this freedom upon obtaining knowledge of good and evil, whereby things appear as if they are contingent. From the false knowledge of contingency comes the fear of death in place of the desire to live, and, according to the Ethics (1996: 151): ‘A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death.’ The life that the free man meditates on could not be otherwise than it is; it is free through the necessity of its nature alone. This is why Spinoza (1996: 70) describes our actions not in terms of us leading but rather as something following from our nature. The free man is free not in the sense of having choices (only the infant believes it freely wants milk), but in his contemplation of the divine necessity of all things. In this sense the free man is not born but becomes free; he frees himself when his being (unlike that of the belligerent, the coward or the drunk) is determined not by illusions of free will but by adequate ideas. This self-determination that is in no way a choice is freedom itself once we understand that freedom is destiny, a coming into possession of our essential (i.e. necessary and determined) power of acting (Deleuze 1988: 70; see also 1994: 83).³⁹ As Deleuze (1988: 69, 97) says, nothing less than the ‘whole effort’ of the Ethics is directed at severing the link between freedom and will, and in God no less than in us.

The notion of a purely immanent necessity also drives out the idea of a good order of the world, an order which, in implying the possibility of disorder, suggests that the world can take on different states – can be other than it is. The idea of a good order of the world could then only be a human, all too human, projection onto Nature that has no need of it (Spinoza 1996: 29–30):

[Men] firmly believe, in their ignorance of things and of their own nature, that there is an order in things. For when things are so disposed that, when they are presented to us through the senses, we can easily imagine them [. . .] we say that they are well-ordered; but if the opposite is true, we say that they are badly ordered, or confused [. . .] as if order were anything in Nature more than a relation to our imagination. [. . .] Men have been so mad as to believe that God is pleased by harmony. Indeed there are philosophers who have persuaded themselves that the motions of the heavens produce a harmony.

Spinoza here singles out the Pythagorean ‘harmony of the spheres’ for ridicule, but his attack is really much broader: aimed at all imaginations of the world as a cosmos, whereby the necessity of the world is only its good order as established in the superlunary realm. This apotheosis of the celestial bodies, of the heavens over the earth, robs the terrestrial sphere of its necessity and thereby allows it to appear as flawed. But once we see that Nature’s apparent imperfection is only our feeble estimation of the world according to how it pleases or offends us (Spinoza 1996: 31; 120), the earth is redeemed: ‘nothing happens in Nature which can be attributed to any defect in it, for nature is always the same’ (1996: 69).

The unity in perfection of heaven and earth, God and man, is expressed in the proposition (1996: 176) that ‘The mind’s intellectual love of God [amor intellectualis dei] is the very love of God by which God loves himself’. Thus our salvation or freedom consists ‘in a constant and eternal love of God, or in God’s love for men. And this love, or blessedness, is called glory in the Sacred Scriptures – not without reason’ (1996: 176–7). This glory, which, as in Plotinus, is the indistinction of our love for God and God’s love for us, is a glory quite other than that of the ‘governmental machine’, which is dependent upon the separation between sovereign principle and world. In this machine glory functions to veil the empty throne, thus enabling the reproduction of the Gnostic separation of God and world.

That which is recovered in the identification of God and Nature is human potentiality. It seems strange that a philosopher that emphasizes necessity in all things, including in us, should restore our freedom. But in returning us to what is necessary, Spinoza believes that he enables us to overcome the sadness that is being cut off from what we can do. Sadness is a passage from greater to lesser perfection, not the privation of perfection itself, as if human perfection was somehow separate from human activity. Sadness is the loss of the power of acting rather than anything external, any telos, lost. Sadness is thereby ‘an act by which man’s power of acting is diminished or restrained’ (Spinoza 1996: 104). By the same token, the opposite of sadness, which Spinoza calls joy, ‘is not perfection itself, but passing from less to more of it’. Perfection is not something apart from our existence, ‘but on the contrary asserts it’ (1996: 8). The more reality the more perfection, and vice versa (1996: 33). But given that ‘no one has yet determined what the body can do’ (1996: 71–2) what this reality is capable of remains an open question. Spinoza anticipates Nietzsche’s disdain for a fixed realism. Spinoza would not disagree with Zarathustra’s injunction (Nietzsche 2006: 235) to ‘Will nothing beyond your capacity’, because, like Zarathustra, he knows that this capacity is not a known quantity but rather a matter of forces, a matter of the capacity for being affected in ways which either increase or decrease the power of acting (Spinoza 1996: 70).

For all that it is still unknown what exactly it can accomplish, what does the passage to a greater perfection consist in? Blessedness. Since all things are in God, all is conceived through God, and it follows from this (1996: 61) that ‘The human mind has an adequate knowledge of God’s eternal and infinite essence’, which is known to all, even if mostly unclearly. Blessedness, then, is a gain in understanding by which all doubt is banished as it is understood that ‘we act only from God’s command, that we share in the divine nature’, and this ‘the more and more we understand God’. Understanding thereby brings us ‘complete peace of mind’ by teaching us ‘wherein our greatest happiness, or blessedness consists: namely, in the knowledge of God alone’ (1996: 67). In the perfection of the mind through understanding we thereby pass from hope, which is only an incomplete joy, to the confidence that is hope with all doubt removed, namely completeness of joy (1996: 81, 106).

In addition to our own blessedness, true understanding also contributes to blessing our life with others ‘insofar as it teaches us to hate no one, to disesteem no one, to mock no one, to be angry at no one, to envy no one’ (1996: 68). For those who understand ‘that all things follow from the necessity of divine nature’ will ‘surely find nothing worthy of hate, mockery, or disdain’ (1996: 142). Once we have understood that our neighbour is caused rather than free we have less reason to hate him when he harms us (1996: 95). If we keep in mind ‘that men, like other things, act from the necessity of nature, then the wrong, or the hate usually arising from it, will occupy a very small part of the imagination, and will easily be overcome’ (1996: 167). The man of ressentiment, by contrast, will be happy with nothing less than sinners, with people who are responsible and therefore guilty (Deleuze 1983: 119).

Similarly where we ourselves are concerned, if repentance is a sadness occasioned by the idea of something we believe ourselves to have done from a free decision (Spinoza 1996: 108), then upon the realization that there are no free decisions, neither must we repent. ‘Repentance is not a virtue, or does not arise from reason; instead, he who repents what he has done is twice wretched’ (1996: 144). A man whose deeds are not attributable to him is no longer guilty. The Moral Law has no hold on him.⁴⁰

Spinoza’s belief in the divine necessity of the world allows him to posit that reason demands that: we love and esteem ourselves (1996: 125, 143), want nothing that we do not desire also for others (1996: 126, 134), and, insofar as we live according to reason, agree in very nature with other men and thereby always find agreement with them. For ‘it is not by accident that man’s greatest good is common to all; rather it arises from the very nature of reason’ (1996: 132–3). Indeed, such is Spinoza’s confidence in self, others and what we can do together that he is able to displace the ancient claim that ‘man is a wolf to man’ with ‘man is a God to man’ (ibid.). While this reversal is occasioned only in the light of reason that few men in practice follow, it nonetheless remains the case that faith in man is built on the ultimate foundation of Nature itself:

So let the satirists laugh as much as they like at human affairs, let the theologians curse them, let melancholics praise as much as they can a life that is uncultivated and wild, let them disdain men and admire the lower animals. Men still find from experience that by helping one another they can provide themselves much more easily with the things they require, and that only by joining forces can they avoid the dangers which threaten on all sides. (1996: 133)

The free man, living according to reason, ‘strives to join other men to him in friendship’ and, indeed, free men, being very useful to one another, are ‘joined to one another by the closest bond of friendship and strive to benefit one another with equal eagerness for love’ (1996: 153).

Spinoza thinks the world as divine not in the sense that it is a providential order, but immediately so, just as it is – hence his amor intellectualis dei, the mind’s love of God/Nature. Of course, inasmuch as he is telling the timeless truth of the world, Spinoza remains wholly within the metaphysical tradition⁴¹ – as Nietzsche often reminds us, seeking above all not to be confused with his predecessor in world-affirmation (Urs Sommer). But something interesting happens when this truth of the world is held to be purely immanent to the world that it claims correspondence to. For the true world disappears from view just at the point in which it coincides entirely with the world as we find it, without remainder. That Spinoza thought this world as necessary being contra Nietzsche’s world of blind becoming is only a matter of emphasis when we recall that, in Nietzsche’s eternal return, the becoming of the will to power is also forever the same in the eternal return. Neither is this difference of emphasis between a necessary world and a contingent world significant from the standpoint of Nietzsche’s own concern with the overcoming of nihilism – after all, Spinoza’s world passes the most important test there is for Nietzsche: the test of the affirmation of our world. And just as much as Nietzsche, Spinoza accomplishes the negation of providence, which always presupposes an outside – namely the true world. For Nietzsche, as for Spinoza, the absence of providence is also, positively, that the world needs no justification. In this sense the amor intellectualis dei and amor fati are not as far apart as Nietzsche protested they are.⁴²

***

As our overview of the metaphysics of the true world has indicated, the shift in emphasis from truth as truth of the world to truth as immanent in the world is usually seen as a modern accomplishment, in particular one due to Heidegger. Yet Spinoza can be read as anticipating this same theme through his refusal of a providential ordering of the world, which takes him, like Nietzsche and Heidegger, beyond cosmic necessity and its idea of the truth of the world as somehow above the world. Spinoza’s world is necessary not only at the cosmic level, in the order of the heavens, but all the way down. And only absent any primary cause of things, as Nietzsche (2005: 182) argued much later, can it be that nobody is held responsible any longer. This is the great liberation.

Having considered the true world as a problem, we now turn in the rest of the book to attempts to think, and indeed to live, beyond the true world. Spinoza thinks the true world in its identity with this world, and this enables him also to conceive the true life as immanent rather than transcendent to the world. It is nonetheless the case that Spinoza has to go by way of metaphysical speculation on the truth of the world in order to get to this point: Spinoza seeks, after all, ‘true knowledge of things’ or ‘to explain Nature’ (Ethics Book I, Appendix). As we shall see in the next chapter, the Cynics of Antiquity rather believed that the true life of philosophy had no need whatever of the true world, even defining themselves through their exclusion of speculative philosophy, which they deemed unnecessary for living the life of truth.

¹‘What the things may be in themselves I do not know, and also do not need to know, since a thing can never come before me except in appearance’ (Kant 1998: 375).

²This unifying ground of the world also leads Kant (1998: 619) to posit ‘a unique wise and all-powerful world author’. Indeed, not only can we posit such a supreme being but we must do so.

³Despite his loathing of Hegelianism, Deleuze makes a similar point in Difference and Repetition (1994: 2): ‘As an empty form of difference, an invariable form of variation, a law compels its subjects to illustrate it only at the cost of their own change.’

⁴Commentators (e.g. Hyppolite 1974: 135; Gadamer 1975: 401; and Flay 1970: 662) agree that the section of the Phenomenology on the ‘inverted world’ is one of the most obscure but also one of the most important passages of the entire work.

⁵‘The Understanding falls short of infinity as such, since it [. . .] apportions to two worlds, or to two substantial elements, that which is a difference in itself – the self-repulsion of the selfsame and the self-attraction of the unlike’ (Hegel 1977: 102).

⁶‘It is evident that we cannot without much ado go straightaway behind appearance’ (Hegel 1977: 103).

⁷‘Consciousness is for its own self, it is a distinguishing of that which contains no difference, or self-consciousness’ (§164). Thus, famously: ‘It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner [true] world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen’ (Hegel 1977: 102 and 103).

⁸Or as Hyppolite (1974: 138) makes the same point: ‘The inverted world, therefore, is not to be sought in another world. It is present in this world, which is simultaneously itself and its other and which is grasped in its phenomenal entirety as “absolute concept”, or infinity.’

⁹Hegel’s ontology in the Phenomenology is thereby an onto-theo-logy: it is from the being of the absolute – God – that beings are determined (Heidegger 1988: 99). Heidegger sees his contribution inBeing and Time as rather an onto-chrony (1988: 100). Exchanging chronos for logos is more than a simple switching of places, since when time replaces reason as the ground of being then being becomes a question again.

¹⁰More recently, Badiou (2009a: 118) has affirmed that ‘Appearing in a given world is never chaotic’. If appearing were chaotic, then beings could not be thought. Deleuze’s Bergson (1991: 98–9) also argues against any purely accidental differences in the world, since such differences, however small, would thereby remain external and thus indifferent to each other: ‘There would be no reason why [they] should link up and add together in the same direction; nor any reason for sudden and simultaneous variations to be coordinated into a liveable whole.’ In Deleuze’s Bergsonism (1991: 106) there is finality rather than chaos ‘because life does not operate without directions’, but at the same time no telos ‘because these directions do not pre-exist ready-made’.

¹¹If the unmoved mover moved the world as its efficient cause – that is, by starting the movement of the world off – then he would be changed by his action. God is the eternal purpose of the Universe, not its big bang.

¹²This knowing subject placed over against its objects is the basic structure of representational thinking, which forgets that Being and human being belong together, indeed are inextricably intertwined (Heidegger 1969: 32).

¹³An irony of the metaphysical framing of the Being of beings as permanent presence is that it is a frame that ‘no longer concerns us as something that is present’ (Heidegger 1969: 36, emphasis added). It is only mortal – namely impermanent – human being that allows Being to appear: ‘being is present and abides only as it concerns man through the claim it makes on him. For it is man, open towards Being, who alone lets Being arrive as presence. Such becoming present needs the openness of a clearing, and by this remains appropriated to human being’ (1969: 31); Heidegger also wants to put this the other way round, namely to say that human being is appropriated to Being. It is not at all the case that ‘Being is posited first and only by man’ (ibid.).

¹⁴Deleuze says something similar in Difference and Repetition (1994: 36–7): ‘Being is the same for all [. . .] modalities, but these modalities are not the same. It is ‘equal’ for all, but they themselves are not equal. It is said of all in a single sense, but they themselves do not have the same sense.’ ‘The words “everything is equal” may therefore resound joyfully, on condition that they are said of that which is not equal in this equal, univocal Being [. . .] [W]‌hether they are large or small, inferior or superior, none of them participates more or less in being, nor receives it by analogy. Univocity of being thus also signifies equality of being.’

¹⁵Although even being understood as presence is conceivable only on the basis of temporality: presence is a characteristic of time. True being is that which endures in every now. This is why in enquiring into being we are compelled to ask about time and, thereby, about ourselves (given that time is not to be found among beings but only in human being). The question of being ‘leads to the question of man’ (Heidegger 2002b: 80; 83–4).

¹⁶See also ‘On Old and New Tablets’ where Zarathustra (Nietzsche 2006: 162) says ‘Precisely that is godliness, that there are gods but no God!’

¹⁷‘Thought is the courage of hopelessness: an interview with philosopher Giorgio Agamben’, Jordan Skinner, 17 June 2014 (available at: www.versobooks.com/blogs/1612-thought-is-the- courage-of-hopelessness-an-interview-with-philosopher-giorgio-agamben).

¹⁸Heidegger (2003: 286) has something similar to say on this point: ‘Philosophical questioning ... is not concerned with freeing us from the past but, on the contrary, with making the past free for us, free to liberate us from the tradition. ’

¹⁹That messianic time, for Agamben, is wholly other than the time of deconstruction is made absolutely clear in a short text on Pilate and Jesus (2015: 14). Jesus, as the Messiah, comes to save the world and not to judge it, so he has nothing to decide. Pilate, on the other hand, seeks to arrive at a judgement on Jesus but finds he cannot. Moving on and off the bēma, the seat of judgement, in the end he simply washes his hands of the whole affair. Pilate, deciding differently each time, properly decides nothing.

²⁰That the chasm between Being (as originating from the One beyond being) and beings (hypostases) is Neoplatonic in origin means that the later Heidegger’s notion of the abandonment of beings by Being finds its point of emergence here (Agamben 2016: 145).

²¹The idea of the creation of the world is already enough to raise the problem of God’s freedom, as Schelling (2006: 5) argued:

Everyone recognizes that God would not have been able to create beings outside of itself from a blind necessity in God’s nature, but rather with the highest voluntarism. To speak even more exactly, if it were left to the mere capacity of God’s necessity, then there would be no creatures because necessity refers only to God’s existence as God’s own existence. Therefore, in creation, God overcomes the necessity of its nature through freedom and it is freedom that comes above necessity not necessity that comes above freedom.

²²Heidegger (2002b: 191) also emphasizes that ‘the pure law-giving of the will’ in Kant ‘has the character of a command or imperative, i.e. of a “you ought”’. He (2002b: 186–201) discusses the connection between will and the moral law in Kant at length in this text, dismissing Kant’s idea that we discover the categorical imperative within us (2002b: 194–5).

²³Agamben’s form-of-life is the attempt to think beyond any subject which might pre-exist living and to articulate, instead, only that form that is generated in living and only that life that takes its form (Agamben 2016: 224). In this approach the vitalisms (Nietzsche; Deleuze) that give priority to ‘life’ are being rejected just as much as any metaphysical-humanist prioritization of form. It is rather the inseparability of a life from its form and a form from its being lived that is decisive.

²⁴Bare life in Agamben is not natural life but a life that has been cut off from its form (paradigmatically the bare life that has been captured, in the form of its exclusion, in the polis).

²⁵Unlike Heidegger’s Dasein, however, form-of-life is a living, a living that ‘gives itself and makes itself a form’ (Agamben 2013a: 105, emphasis added). This giving and making, this fabrication or living of form-of-life seeks to escape the paganism of place, as Levinas memorably called it, that arguably thwarts Heidegger’s being-in-the-world as rather a dwelling.

²⁶See also Heidegger (1998c: 170): ‘Authentic liberation is the steadiness of being oriented.’

²⁷‘By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing’ is in fact the very first definition of Spinoza’s Ethics (1996: 1) and is one of the definitions of God.

²⁸The possibility not to be – impotentiality – can be realized in its very non-actualization. The impotential is thus different from the possible which, as Deleuze notes in Bergsonism (1991: 96), has no such reality (though it might be actualized). The possible in Bergson is a false notion in the sense that it is only the real projected backwards. Paradoxically, then, possibility, is of the order of that which ‘is already completely given’ (1991: 98).

²⁹This expresses Heidegger’s notion that man is rich in world while the animal is poor in world in apophatic terms.

³⁰Heidegger (2006: 136–7) had already called the primacy of action into question in his lectures on Schelling’s Essence of Human Freedom.

³¹Agamben gets onto habit by way of Deleuze. The absolute immanence of habit – in which no subject, no transcendence, is doing the using but rather the use is effecting the subject, makes it rich pickings for Deleuze, the thinker par excellence of immanence. Deleuze’s subject is only ‘a habitus, a habit, nothing but a habit in a field of immanence, the habit of saying I’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 48). Deleuze, in turn, gets onto habit by way of Hume.

³²That the world needs no justification and that God is not revealed in the world is something like the mirror image of Hegel’s world, which demands a theodicy, a justification of the evil to be found in it: ‘That the History of the World, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development and the realization of Spirit – this is the true Theodicaea, the justification of God in History’ (Hegel 1980: 477).

³³Descartes’s doubt concerning the tradition’s definition of what man is leads him to the realization: ‘Am I not that being who now doubts nearly everything ... Is there nothing in all this which is as true as it is certain that I exist’ (1911: 10; emphasis added).

³⁴Agamben acknowledges that Heidegger also provides a modal ontology inasmuch as Dasein’s essence is only its existence (i.e. that Dasein is always and only its mode of being – as thrown, Dasein, in seizing its existence, seizes only this very thrown-ness and its possibilities). Yet, for Agamben, this ontology is never expressed explicitly as an ontology by Heidegger, something that a confrontation with Spinoza, which Heidegger always avoids, might have brought to light (Agamben 2016: 175). Be that as it may, Heidegger is not in any doubt that the question of being and time is a question neither of being nor of time in isolation but rather of the ‘and’ of their relation: ‘The “and” signifies a primordial co-belongingness of being and time from the ground of their essence’ (2002b: 82). Heidegger is saying that being is always only how being is given in time (namely, as history). This does not seem far from Agamben’s modal ontology.

³⁵In Lucretius’s (1968: 183) account of the Epicurean world, chance rather than necessity takes the place of providence – the world is made up of atoms that randomly ‘swerve’ in the void. This means that ‘time does change/ The nature of the whole wide world; one state/ Develops from another; not one thing/ Is like itself forever; all things move,/ All things are nature’s wanderers, whom she gives/ no rest; ebb follows flow, disdain succeeds/ On admiration. Time indeed does change/ The nature of the whole wide world; one state/ Of generation follows on another,/ So earth no more has power to produce/ What once she bore, but can give birth to things/ Impossible before’.

³⁶Yes, Spinoza is a metaphysician and was criticized, by Nietzsche for one, of providing a timeless image of the world by emphasising its necessity at every point. Spinoza’s substance is also infinite, unlike Nietzsche’s world. However, none of this should blind us to the many similarities between Nietzsche’s post-metaphysical thought and Spinoza’s. Nietzsche (2014: 16) dismisses Spinoza’s conatus, arguing that its identification of the desire for self-preservation as the fundamental character of being is dependent on a metaphysical ‘self’ that survives becoming and which, by thereby re-positing the thing in itself, is incompatible with Nietzsche’s (2006: 129) own post-metaphysical ontology of will to power as self-overcoming: ‘Desire – to me that means: to have lost myself’. Yet Nietzsche would have known from his own sources on Spinoza (whom he seems never to have read directly) that Spinoza’s conatus is no stagnant preservation in being but rather a striving or insistence of being. How this differs in the fundamentals from Nietzsche’s own will to power is a moot point (Urs Sommer 2012).

³⁷Taubes (2004: 79) believed that Spinoza’s emphasis on predetermination drew on the theology of predestination in Paul’s letters to the Romans.

³⁸Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (2007: 40) calls on Paul in support of this thesis, claiming that Paul ‘teaches nothing more plainly than that men have no power over the temptations of the flesh except by the calling and grace of God alone’.

³⁹‘The entire Ethics presents itself as a theory of power, in opposition to morality as a theory of obligations’ (Deleuze 1988: 104).

⁴⁰Compare this with Kant where, as Heidegger notes (2002b: 155; see also 179–80), ‘we decide for freedom as the condition of the possibility of responsibility and thus of morality’. Kant requires freedom for the sake of his Moral Law. In the Critique of Practical Reason (Kant 2002: 124–5), we read: ‘Let a human being use what art he wants in order to paint to himself a remembered unlawful behavior as an unintentional oversight [. . .] and to declare himself innocent of it; he nonetheless finds that the lawyer who speaks in his favor can in no way silence the prosecutor in him, if only he is conscious that at the time when he committed the wrong he was in his senses, i.e., had the use of his freedom.’

⁴¹‘Being finite is really, in part, a negation, and being infinite is an absolute affirmation of the existence of some nature’ (Spinoza 1996: 4).

⁴²Hence his overwrought dismissals (Nietzsche 2003: 226–7) of Spinoza’s love for the world as drained of blood by Spinoza’s insipid rationalism in contrast to Nietzsche’s return to pathos – to the affirmation of a world of suffering (Urs Sommer, 2012: 170).