The following meditation on renunciation was written on the Feast of St Francis of Assisi according to the Liturgical Calendar. St. Francis is a major figure for Agamben in The Highest Poverty, his book largely on the monasticism of St. Francis. Luke 9:57-62 is prescribed reading for this day according to the Liturgical Calendar.

In this meditation on Luke 9:57-62, I want to focus on the problem of renunciation and its relation to the form of life that Giorgio Agamben writes of throughout his work. In “The Inappropriable” (Creation and Anarchy) he closely aligns the problem of renunciation with the problem of maintaining our selves in relation to Otherness as that which cannot be defined ahead of our encounter with it. In this meditation, I want to look closely at the challenges of renunciation particularly with respect to what it means in Luke 9:57-62 to follow Jesus. A close reading of these verses and what follows in Luke chapter 10 provides clarity on what Agamben means by St. Francis’ phrase vivere sine proprio (living without property):

As the Franciscans said, poverty is expropriative not because it implies a renunciation of ownership, but because it risks itself in relation with the inappropriable and remains in it. This is what Francis’ vivere sine proprio means: not so much or not only an act of renouncing juridical ownership, but a form of life that, insofar as it maintains itself in relation with an inappropriable, is always already constitutively outside the law and can never appropriate anything to itself. (37)

This form of life of which Agamben writes is closely tied to renunciation but cannot be practiced only as renunciation. To renounce requires an act of naming the thing that one renounces. This act of naming seeks to negate, but the consequence of negation is to hold close that which is named in the act of negating it. For example, any act of dieting that depends on renouncing desires for certain foods (e.g., excessive carbohydrates) will have a tendency to rekindle those desires because the diet is defined in relation to that which is denied. This is what makes renunciation so difficult and problematic as a starting point for a form of life. The challenge comes when we translate the starting point into an end point — when we go from renunciation-as-means to negation-as-end.

This problem of renunciation-as-means that becomes negation-as-end is fundamental to the Gospels, especially with respect to what it means to follow Jesus. I’ve already covered this problem in Matthew 16:24-26 and all of Matthew19 where the problem of following is temporalized as “coming after” Jesus who exists before the imposition of cultural categories. My point in that essay was to dwell a bit on Nietzsche’s line about Jesus: “Denial was the one thing entirely impossible for him.” Denial was entirely impossible because Nietzsche’s Jesus (and Matthew’s) comes before the imposition of cultural categories can take hold in his personality. There is, therefore, nothing to deny. Yet for his followers, they exist after the imposition of those categories, which means that their following of Jesus is a “coming after” him (16:24) that inhabits a different temporality. Matthew’s problem of renunciation is therefore a problem of how to undo one’s ways of thinking after those ways of thinking have taken hold in a way that they did not for Jesus. The imitatio Christi cannot be a strict imitatio. To drive home the difference, verses of 19:13-15 emphasize this childlike quality of Jesus as existing before the imposition of categories. The children “come to him,” not after him, and when Jesus lays his hands on them there is no need for healing.

Luke 9:57-62 presents a different take on this problem and is specifically tied to the requirement of renunciation in order to follow Jesus. For Luke, the problem of following is “going ahead” of Jesus, not “coming after” him, which is why so much of Luke takes place on the road. Let’s look at 9:57-62 in its entirety:

As they were walking along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus said to him, “Foxes have dens and the birds in the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Jesus said to another, “Follow me.” But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say goodbye to my family.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” (9:57-62)

This is a tough passage as it seems to demand a complete renunciation of one’s family and friends in order to follow Jesus. This following even seems to require ignoring the proper respect for those who have died. But let us read this through the temporal lens of renunciation and orientation that is at the heart of what Luke means by following Jesus. In Matthew, the emphasis was on following as “coming after” and what it would mean to take up the messianic example. In Luke, the emphasis is on “going ahead” of Jesus and preparing the way for him. This movement through the landscape is fundamental to the author we call Luke, which is why so much of this Gospel takes place on the road. It is fundamental to the movement of Luke’s Gospel as well as Acts. The Gospel’s spatial movement is toward Jerusalem while Acts moves away from Jerusalem and into the larger context of the Mediterranean world. As we see at the beginning of this passage, it takes place “along the road,” and the following story (10:1-24) is about sending the 72 followers ahead of Jesus to prepare the way: “After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him two by two into every town and place where he himself was about to go” (10:1). For Luke, to follow Jesus is to be sent ahead of him. Geographically and temporally considered, to follow Jesus is to physically move away from him as a bearer of the messianic message. This will all take place on the roads that lead to Jerusalem (Luke) and away from it (Acts).

It would be easy to read 9:57-62 as requiring hard and negative renunciation in order to become a follower who is “sent ahead of him.” Rather, Luke’s message (at least in these verses) seems to be a quite different requirement of renunciation than simply negating one’s past. It can be thought of as a warning to remain attentive to a fundamental problem at the heart of following as going ahead: as we say our goodbyes we risk holding onto the past as we are sent ahead into the future. Such a practice of renunciation can lead in two nihilistic directions: 1) ressentiment and 2) indifference. The first, ressentiment, results from the need to render a definitive judgement against the Other. The second, indifference, is the Stoic danger of evacuating meaning altogether. We may harbor judgements about what is happening to us, but to treat those moments with meaningless indifference can be just as nihilistic as holding a permanent grudge against them.

Luke Chapter 10 addresses how a follower is to go ahead into the world carrying this messianic message. As we’ll quickly see, this message is nothing other than a disposition, or, to use Agamben’s phrase, a form of life. Luke’s Jesus has precious little to say about the informational content of the message and far more to say about the disposition required by a follower to how the message is conveyed. Chapter 10 is all about delivery, listening, and reception. In more modern terms, Luke’s Jesus shows us how to “read the room” as one is delivering a message. In this movement out into the world (along the roads), followers will need to be attentive to how the message is received and how to respond. “Go! I am sending you out like lambs surrounded by wolves” (10:3). He instructs them on how to first understand how the message will be received, not to walk into the middle of the city and start preaching. The paradigm for delivery is not public preaching but private conversation: “Whenever you enter a house, first say, ‘May peace be on this house!’ And if a peace-loving person is there, your peace will remain on him, but if not, it will return to you” (10:5-6). While the first part of this line is a customary greeting, the force of Jesus instruction is how to receive the response. The emphasis is on the disposition that channels a flow of positive energy through the customary salutation toward the Other while remaining attentive to the energy that is returned. How one responds from there depends on the energy returned.

Luke’s Jesus is describing a crucial disposition within a form of life that goes into the world as a follower of Jesus armed only with this disposition to Otherness and nothing else: “Do not carry a money bag, a traveler’s bag, or sandals, and greet no one on the road” (10:4). The disposition is inseparable from the delivery of the message. How the message is listened to and therefore received is dependent on the disposition and demeanor of the delivery. 10:16 describes how the energy will flow based on this disposition: “The one who listens to you listens to me, and the one who rejects you rejects me, and the one who rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”

To make this clear, Luke’s Jesus is far less about the content of a message than the disposition required to move out into the world as an advocate for the message. If 10:1-24 isn’t enough, Luke follows up with The Parable of the Good Samaritan, which makes the message itself into the disposition to Others who we will inevitably encounter on the roads we travel — a road that has already been defined as a problematic renunciation that says goodbye to what one has known. In other words, the disposition is the message. There simply is no way to understand this parable other than as an example of the disposition. In fact, the disposition is how the priest and the Levite, who are indifferent to the tragedy before them, are differentiated from the Samaritan who “when he saw him, felt compassion for him.” The feeling of compassion is the operative term in the parable and marks the difference of the Samaritan from the priest and the Levite. The six compassionate acts of the Samaritan in the following verse are simply the examples of how compassion can be enacted. The Samaritan sizes up the situation and responds compassionately to the Other in need of help. There is no dogmatic, informational message here. The message only lives in the demonstration of a disposition to the suffering of an Other. Jesus ends the parable by saying to the scribe, who originally asked what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself” (10:29), “Go and do the same” (10:37). The messianic message can only be understood only as the adoption of a disposition that travels with us as we move along the road of life.

The setting of the road is crucial to this parable. It represents the renunciative movement away from that which is comfortable and convenient — the saying of our goodbyes of 9:61. As one moves away from the goodbyes and is sent into the world, we go armed only with a disposition that is an openness to what will come. To put this in Agamben’s terms: to maintain oneself in relationship to this inappropriable Otherness is to adopt a form of life that does not experience an imperative to resolve, reify, or renounce this Otherness but to live with it as constitutive of our experience. This is also Nietzsche’s notion of the tragic.