Before the factory, the school, and the prison there was the monastery of the Middle Ages. None of these Modern institutions ever attained the “implacable and consistent temporal articulation” as rigorously as the monks. This temporal articulation was so thorough and complete that “time and life were for the first time intimately superimposed to the point of nearly coinciding” (1.9). In doing so, the monk’s asceticism finds new ways of being separated from the rule of law and convention not by trying to escape time, but by embracing it more deeply than had ever been tried or even conceived.

It is clear that this is part of Agamben’s larger project of conceiving of subjectivity that is not essentially tied to juridical language games. The regula vitae (Rule of Life) is not a juridical Rule of Life that would emphasize obligations and actions as the foundation for politics and community. This is Modernity’s view of relationships among ourselves, others, and the State. The notion of the contract can help us understand this. A contract structures obligations between people as the actions that they owe to each other, and it is Modernity’s fundamental metaphor and practice for Society.

The monks reversed this relationship between life and obligations such that life is not reduced to the mere execution of juridical obligations like contracts and obeying codified commandments. This is what “modernity has failed to recognize about monasticism”: it is a way of living that uses obligations and rules as a means to a life that is beyond the law yet it is a life that is far from nihilistic and anarchic. This beyond-the-law is not a Hobbesian state of nature that requires the intervention of laws and obligations to overcome violence. In Hobbesian contracts, the law and obligations become the end of Modern Society and not a means. For the monks, obligations were a means to achieving a communal life, which required a transformation as a form of exile from the situation in which one was raised: “the transformation that is in question is the passage from ‘promising the rule’ to ‘promising to live according to the rule’ (promising life). The object of the promise is here no longer a legal text to observe a certain action or a series of determinate behaviors, but the subject’s very forma vivendi” (56).

Agamben makes much of this difference between “promising the rule” and “living according to the rule.” The latter phrase is the more positive phrase for Agamben as it represents a way of passing through the law so that one achieves a higher form of living — “a habitus in the will” — that is not reducible to the law: “the Christian vow is, so to speak, objectively vowed and has not other content than the production of a habitus in the will, whose ultimate result will be a certain common form of life…” (57). Paul becomes a key figure here. Quoting Romans 3:31, Agamben finds the root of this regula vitae in Paul’s notion of “the telos nomous, end and fulfillment of the law” (46).

“Do we render the law inoperative by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law”), it is nonetheless certain that the Christian life is no longer “under the law” (nomoi apethanon; Gal. 2:19), and lives in the freedom of spirit…. It is in this context that one must situate monastic rules. (46)

This is not merely an academic exercise in close reading of the monastic rules and of Paul. This has real consequences for how we live today and how we think about enacting change in a world that has no idea how to make its Modern Institutions address its problems. It’s pretty clear that evangelical Christianity finds is ideological home in Donald Trump and Fox News. This unholy alliance is based on “law and order” and is juridical to the core. It is from this camp that immigration is most vilified, and separation of families at the southern border is a matter of racism masquerading as legal rights and moral outrage. It is a ressentiment-fueld approach to religion that Nietzsche hated (rightly) and that must be reformed and rethought and re-practiced in order to do the work that needs to be done today — in the time that remains, to borrow a title from an earlier Agamben work.

Christianity, in Agamben’s view (and as exemplified by medieval monasticism), is not contained by or within juridical and legal concepts. It is not just the same form of subjectivity obeying a different set of laws and rules. It is a form of life that transcends laws because it is not reducible to only the observances of precepts, vows, and contracts. That is not the substance of monastic life. The substance is beyond these strictures, even as it embraces them deeply, and is defined more as a disposition to others that finds ways of living together that are not fundamentally based on “law and order.” This way of living must be found where Paul found it — in the threshold condition where the law is both deactivated and fulfilled simultaneously, where the letter of the law becomes the activation of the Spirit of the law that is both its death (as merely letter) and its fulfillment (as a spirit, disposition, feeling without definitive content).

__________

For Agamben, the form of life that was experimentally worked out in medieval monasticism marked a historical moment when Christianity was carving out an entirely new way of being in the world. This experimentation occurred amid “the fading of the classical world and the beginning of the Christian era.” This “crisis” created “an unheard-of and aporetic figure that human existence assumes…”

What is in question . . . is a progressive and symmetrical cancellation of the difference between being and acting and between law (writing) and life, as if the indetermination of being into acting and of life into writing that the Church liturgy operatively achieves functions in the monastic liturgy in an inverted sense, moving from writing (from the law) toward life and from being toward acting. (87)

This tension within Christianity between what the Church was trying to do with the formalization of a liturgy and what the monks were trying to do with the invention of a total way of living is at the heart of Christianity’s medieval innovations. The result is a new mode of human experience not previously available in the West:

It is in this field of historical tension that, close to the liturgy and almost in competition with it, something like a new level of consistency of the human experience slowly begins to clear a path for itself. It is as if the form-of-life into which liturgy has been transformed sought progressively to emancipate itself from liturgy and — while unceasingly collapsing back into it and just as obstinately liberating itself from it — allows us to glimpse another, uncertain dimension of acting and being. (87)

This form of life is “the novelty of monasticism” (88). To make this clear, it is a form of life that embraces laws, regulations, and obligations but without reducing the definition of human relationships to them. Agamben is resolutely anti-Kantian in the sense that “the Kantian model of determinate judgment” is “a merely logical operation” (72). In this sense, Christianity (and not just the monks) sought another mode of subjectivation (using Foucault’s positive sense of that term, to whom Agamben is closely aligned). This mode of subjectivation “cohabits perfectly well with subterranean continuities and abrupt convergences, so that in unforeseen ways Christianity is seen to unite with Stoic ethics and late Platonism, Jewish traditions, and pagan cults” (87). Yet it unites with these movements without simply becoming the same mode of subjectivation that defines itself only in relation to its ability to follow moral and juridical procedures. In other words, this new mode of subjectivation seeks to do away with the juridical and procedural baggage of “the Roman patricians, to scrupulously follow a juridical prescription and a ritual formalism.” Nor does the monk “act, like the Stoic philosopher, to observe a moral law that is also a cosmic order” (87).

Agamben seeks to recover, in The Highest Poverty, this mode of subjectivation through a genealogy of the Franciscan struggle to activate this form of life in the middle ages. It is a form of life that Modernity cannot grasp because Modernity has reduced knowledge and subjectivity to living in accordance with laws and procedures. Philosophical movements that seek to reform institutions (i.e., Habermasian proceduralism) only get us so far without a reinvigoration of spirituality that transforms the subjectivities who are executing those procedures: you must state your validity claims in ways that everyone can understand and judge. If all we do is install these new procedures and hope that those procedures help us collaboratively solve the massive problems we face as a species, not only are we are sorely mistaken, but we are dangerously deluded. Change happens at the level of subjectivation and works its way through networks of connections that are not reducible to the procedures we institute to make public policy. When we reduce life to conformity with procedures, we are truly off the rails. We will live with either ressentiment — why must I follow the rules? why are they not following the rules? — or moral indifference — the use of moral laws as mechanisms of personal atomization and moral smugness (modern Stoicism). For Agamben, the Church must reform itself and get back to activating the powerful experiment in subjectivation that it undertook in the middle ages.

This is the only way to make the law work for humanity. It requires reactivating an orientation to an apocalyptic eschaton (the global climate crisis) and jettisoning any notion of sin as an inherent evil in the human condition, as well as Gnostic commitments to individualized salvation as an eternal afterlife. Such commitments orient ourselves away from the problems of this world as irretrievable and irredeemable.

But how do we envision alternatives that are not nihilistic and anarchic in that they seek a form of subjectivity that is completely disdainful of public policy and law-making? The Highest Poverty does not answer these questions. It ends in aporia. The Franciscan form of life “ended up being characterized only negatively with respect to the law” (144). This problem of only being able to renounce all that makes us who we are so that something else can emerge that is more just, more fair, more merciful, and more attuned to the time that remains, is at the heart of Agamben’s long-term project, of which The Highest Poverty is a key work. He ends where he will pick up: with “the inappropriable”:

But what is a life outside of the law, if it is defined as that form of life that makes use of things without ever appropriating them? And what is use, if one ceases to define it solely negatively with respect to ownership?
It is the problem of the essential connection between use and form of life that is becoming undeferrable at this point. How can use — that is, a relation to the world insofar as it is inappropriable — be translated into an ethos and a form of life?

So long as this form of life starts with renunciation as negation, it finds itself caught up in a negativity that is untenable. Our challenge is to think through a mode of subjectivation that can never be accused of nihilism or anarchy that was so much part of the criticism of poststructuralism of the 1980s and 1990s. He is one of the most compelling and effective thinkers in this realm today.