Making Use of Agamben’s “Stoic Providence-Fate Apparatus”
A Reading of Seneca’s Consolation to Polybius1
Clifford A. Robinson
1 Introduction
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series uses a wealth of resources from Western poetry, philosophy, and theology to advance a radical critique of present political conditions. My argument proceeds from that critique toward an appreciation of the contribution that ancient Stoicism makes to Agamben’s project. I draw upon Agamben’s three discussions of Stoicism in the Homo Sacer series, while giving priority to the fifth chapter from The Kingdom and the Glory (2011), “The Providential Machine,” where Agamben discusses the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus.” There, Agamben criticizes Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality through a reading of the ancient debate on the Stoic theory of providence, highlighting how the Stoics introduced a decisive split into the being and praxis of God’s nature—a separation that ultimately conditions the development of modern governmentality.2 Agamben’s two further discussions of Stoicism in Opus Dei (2013) and The Use of Bodies (2015) complicate the relationship between his critical, genealogical engagement with Stoic legacies in The Kingdom and the Glory and his increasingly affirmative view of Stoic ethical theory. For Agamben, Stoicism stands out among the ancient philosophical schools, insofar as Stoic ethical paradigms render inoperative the problematic operation of sovereign power and economic governmentality.
One difficulty with Agamben’s analysis of a “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” arises from his selection of evidence: none of the texts he introduces is simply Stoic. Since Agamben traces the genealogy of governmentality back to the Stoics and their arguments on providence, one would expect that his analysis should deploy Stoic texts as evidence of this philosophical archaeology. The first source he introduces, a close paraphrase of a fragment from Chrysippus’s On Providence (SVF II.1170) exchanged between Leibniz and Bayle (Leibniz 1951: 258), does at least focus Agamben’s analysis of the connection between early modern theodicy and an ancient text fundamental to Stoic arguments on providence (Agamben 2011: 114–15). The other passages from which he develops his argument all involve distinct philosophical persuasions, from Aristotelianism or Middle Platonism to Neoplatonism or Scholasticism (Agamben 2011: 115–39).3 Agamben’s choice may be justified in part by his concern to demonstrate not only how “the immense debate on providence . . . began with the Stoics” but also how that debate “reached almost without interruption the threshold of modernity” (Agamben 2011: 113). Nevertheless, to the extent that Agamben foregoes analysis of ancient Stoic evidence, it remains unsettled whether or not the Stoics can be considered the point of origin for the debate which Agamben’s chapter recounts. At the very least, investigation of a surviving Stoic text could support Agamben’s genealogy tracing a Stoic origin of the providence-fate apparatus.4
For this reason, in the second part of this chapter, I focus on the exemplarity of Agamben’s analyses for reading another Stoic text upon which Agamben has never commented. The challenge here is not simply to analyze whether Agamben’s theory achieves a historically reliable reading of a Stoic text; rather, the goal is to reveal how unrealized powers of the text’s political force, or, as Agamben might put it, its destituent potential (Agamben 2015: 263–79) may be located and developed. Taking direction from Agamben’s commentary on Stoicism, I show how Seneca’s Dialogus XI, the Consolation to Polybius, supports Agamben’s suggestion of a Stoic origin for the providence-fate apparatus, even as Agamben’s thought makes available a contempo rary, “common use” of an ancient Stoic source.
I have selected the Consolation for this experiment of excavating the destituent potential of a Stoic text because it foregrounds the principal theme of the first volume of the Homo Sacer series (Agamben 1998): the constituting relationship through which sovereign power inaugurates itself by exposing what Agamben calls “bare life,” that is, life reduced to its mere biological existence, its “zoē,” or life void of any “form” or “way” of life, of any “bios” (Agamben 1998: 15–67). In the Consolation, Seneca treats numerous themes near to Agamben’s work—the rule of law and the exception, providential government and negative collateral effects, duty to others and the government of self and others, and finally oikeiosis and the use of the self. But, because the Consolation situates its author as composing this address sometime between 41 and 43 CE from an exile imposed by the emperor in 41 CE, his very act of writing and the text itself are expressions of bare life exposed to the violence of the sovereign ban (Agamben 1998: 58–67).
By confronting Seneca’s text with categories derived from Agamben’s Homo Sacer series, it may also be possible to reconceive Seneca’s political strategy in the Consolation. Others have argued that, beyond the apparent purpose of consoling Polybius, whose brother had suffered an untimely death, Seneca must have had some additional political purpose in writing to him: Polybius was after all a freedman of the emperor Claudius and, as seems likely, the secretary a libellis, the official charged with receiving and reviewing petitions to the emperor.5 But beyond this point, scholarly opinion is divided. Some scholars, following Cassius Dio’s criticism of Seneca (61.10.2), have taken Seneca’s purpose as obsequious flattery designed to secure his recall from Corsica; others have seen an ironic, satirical message in Seneca’s text, so that his purpose was to ridicule the Princeps and his supporters (Atkinson 1985: 872–9). I argue that Seneca’s performance in this Consolation, understood in light of Agamben’s philosophy, appears as a subtle deposing of the emperor’s power to command and a destabilizing reorientation of its anarchic potential.
2 The Stoic Providence-Fate Apparatus in “The Providential Machine”
In “The Providential Machine,” Agamben shows that the Stoics, by initiating a debate that coordinated fate and providence into “a bipolar system” or a subjectifying apparatus, “produc[ed] a . . . zone of indifference between what is primary and what is secondary, the general and the particular, the final cause and the effects” (2011: 122). The “effectual ontology” elaborated through that debate, which only ever worked toward a “functional correlation” of these indifferent oppositions, he claims, “in a way contains the condition of possibility for modern governmentality” (2011: 122). If, as Agamben argues, an apparatus acts as a strategy of governance through which operations of power, lacking any foundation in being, capture living beings as subjects,6 then the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” captures all living beings as subjects of a bipolar coordination of divine providence and fate.
In “The Providential Machine,” Agamben argues that the ancient debate over providence was concerned to explain how “a divine government of the world” (2011: 114), the paradigmatic form of governmentality, is possible. Agamben’s problem here is that “if the Kingdom and the Government are separated by a clear opposition, then no government of the world is actually possible” (2011: 114). There would remain only “an impotent sovereignty and . . . the infinite and chaotic series of particular (and violent) acts of providence,” but the divine government of the world only becomes possible when “the Kingdom and the Government are correlated in a bipolar machine: the government is precisely what results from the coordination and articulation of special and general providence” (2011: 114). So here Agamben contrasts two models of cosmological order passed from the Stoics down to Aquinas. On the one hand, there is “the Kingdom” or the regnum that Agamben understands with Foucault as the paradigm of sovereign power (Foucault 2009: 227–54; Agamben 2011: 109–13). On the other, there is the “Government” or the gubernatio mundi, which Agamben associates with special providence, the series of particular providential actions undertaken by intermediate causes on behalf of the sovereign. This specialized providential action can also be understood as the dispositio through which general providence is realized, so that this coordination of special providence with the sovereign’s will, understood as general providence, becomes an apparatus, a relation of power through which living beings are captured as subjects.
Through commentary upon three texts, a fragment of Chrysippus’s On Providence quoted in Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, Alexander of Aphrodisias’s On Providence, and the essay On Fate included among Plutarch’s Moralia, Agamben establishes that the Stoics first coordinated providence and fate into a subjectifying apparatus. His strategy works analogically across the genealogy through which ancient accounts of providence condition the later possibility of arguments over theodicy. Accordingly, Agamben refers specifically to a paraphrase Bayle had made of this passage of Chrysippus from Aulus Gellius, to show how the Stoics forged “the strategic conjunction of two apparently different problems: that of the origin and justification of evil, and that of the government of the world” (Agamben 2011: 114). In response to the question of whether providence is responsible for such an apparent affliction to humans as disease, Chrysippus seems to have said that “Nature, in preparing and producing many great things excellently ordered and of great usefulness, found that some drawbacks came as a result, and thus these were not in conformity with the original design and purpose” (Aul. Gell. 7.1.7; SVF II.1170; Leibniz 1951: 258; Agamben 2011: 115). These drawbacks, Chrysippus held, “came about as a sequel to the work” and “existed only as consequences which were somehow necessary,” but also occurred only “kata parakolouthēsin [according to concomitance]” (Aul. Gell. 7.1.7; SVF II.1170; Leibniz 1951: 258; Agamben 2011: 115). This rationalization of afflictions to humanity such as disease or natural disasters opens up a cleavage between one order of providential causality and a second, unintentional order of unavoidable effects.
For Chrysippus, the order of causality and its unintended effects seem to be only two ways of looking at the same providence.7 The separation between providence and consequences according to concomitance only gradually became a more radical division between general and special providence, as Agamben reveals though his discussion of Alexander of Aphrodisias, an Aristotelian commentator opposed to the Stoics’ account of providence. Agamben introduces Alexander because his account reveals how the apparatus which the Stoics constructed would come to involve two distinct but correlated orders of causality: providence as a general cause and fate as a series of specific causes. Alexander objects to the Stoic view that God’s providence “looks after both the world in general and particular things” (Agamben 2011: 115), since God must be greater than a master of an estate or a king, neither of whom would trouble himself to manage every trivial matter concerning his property or kingdom. God too must only “prefer to exercise his providence in a universal and general way” (Alexander 1999: 117; in Agamben 2011: 116), not intervening in particular circumstances. Alexander thus argues that, since God “is too high for us to say of him that he looks after men, mice, and ants . . . he rather needs to take into consideration the most important things, while these” particulars “should remain irrelevant for him” (Alexander 1999: 119; Agamben 2011: 116).
A division becomes necessary, Agamben suggests, between providence “in itself” (kath’ hauto) and providence “by accident” (kata symbebēkos) (Alexander 1999: 236; Agamben 2011: 116–18). Providence “by accident” presents a problem, because, although God cannot be so lowly as to fuss over particulars, he also cannot be entirely ignorant of the effect of his general providence on particular things. Alexander resorts to another explanation for God’s knowing neglect of particulars; on this model, the divine being may not intentionally make provision for particular cases, but
the divine power which we also call “nature” makes subsist the things in which it is found and gives them a form according to a certain ordered connection, but this does not happen in virtue of some decision. Nature does not exercise decision and rational reflection with regard to all the things it does, since nature is an irrational power. (Alexander 1999: 151; in Agamben 2011: 117)
Intermediate between “for itself” and “by accident,” Nature acts without volition, yet not accidentally. Through what Alexander calls a “divine technique” (Alexander 1999: 151; in Agamben 2011: 117), nature proceeds independently of general providence to realize an accord with ge neral providence, so that their separation is correlated and coordinated. In this way, unintentional and yet natural consequences may be known by God without “eliminat[ing] their accidental character” (Alexander 1999: 236–40; Agamben 2011: 118). Alexander finally claims, “The being that does not act in view of something, but knows that it benefits and wants it, can be said to provide for it, but neither by itself nor by accident” (Alexander 1999: 236; in Agamben 2011: 117–18).
God’s knowing expectation of specific effects caused correlatively by general providence is thus for Alexander the paradigm of governmental action (Agamben 2011: 118–19). Agamben establishes that this theory of providence develops in a contingent way a correlation of the general and particular that amounts to a theorization of the government of the world (gubernatio mundi): “Whether providence manifests itself only in the universal principles,” as Alexander has it, “or descends to earth to look after the lowest particular things,” as the Stoics argue,8 “it will in any case need to pass through the very nature of things and follow their immanent ‘economy’” (2011: 118). For Alexander, though, “the government of the world occurs neither by means of the tyrannical imposition of an external general will, nor by accident, but through the knowing anticipation of the collateral effects that arise from the very nature of things and remain absolutely contingent in their singularity” (Agamben 2011: 118–19). Thus it becomes clear how two correlated causal frameworks form a subjectifying apparatus: general providence anticipates special, collateral effects unfolding according to the contingent series of natural events.
Turning to Plutarch’s corpus for a theorization of fate,9 the last undefined term in the expression “providence-fate apparatus,” Agamben explains how providence “by accident” comes to be theorized not simply as natural contingency, but as heimarmenē or “fate.” Agamben claims that the Platonist author of the essay On Fate “follow[s] a Stoic model” that “redouble[s]” ontology into a pragmatics, so that fate must be understood both as ousia (substance) and as energeia (activity) (Agamben 2011: 120). As ousia, fate is “the soul of the world . . . divided spatially into . . . the heaven of the fixed stars, the part containing the ‘errant’ planets, and the part located beneath the heavens in the terrestrial region” (Agamben 2011: 120). As energeia, fate is assimilated by Plutarch to the law of nature (nomos), the series of natural causes “determining the course of everything that must come to pass” (On Fate 568d; Agamben 2011: 120).
If the paradigm of law governs the connection between fate in general and fate “in particular” (that is, fate kata meros or kath' hekasta, On Fate 569d), particular facts, Agamben holds, can only be regarded as the result of efficient causes that follow a general law. He explains, “Plutarch thus identifies what pertains to destiny”—destiny is used as another word for heimarmenē or “fate” in the translation—”with what is effectual or conditional (to ex hypotheseōs),” or, as he quotes from Plutarch, “with that which is not laid down independently, but in some fashion is really ‘subjoined’ to something else, wherever there is an expression implying that if one is true, another follows” (De fato 570a; in Agamben 2011: 121). According to this account, the claim that “everything happens according to destiny” (panta kath’ heimarmenēn, 570c) applies only to consequences and effects, never to antecedents, which have the character of hypothetical laws or of “what has been established primarily [proēgēsamenois] in the divine appointment of things” (570e). Agamben concludes, “destiny divides what is real into two different levels: that of the general antecedents (proēgoumena) and that of the particular effects. The former are somehow in destiny” or fate, “but do not occur according to destiny, and destiny is that which results effectually from the correlation between the two levels” (2011: 121).
Agamben observes a formal symmetry between the three levels of fate considered as a substance and the three levels of providence. A first providence, providence in the precise sense (573b), is identified as the intellection and will of the primary god (572f). This first providence generates a second providence, “created together with destiny” or fate and “included in the first providence” (574b)—these are the secondary gods who dwell in the heavens. As the third providence, there is the whole array of demonic beings “commissioned to oversee and order the individual actions of men” (Agamben 2011: 121). Plutarch draws an analogy, according to which fate or destiny is ultimately comparable to the law, just as the first providence is comparable to law-giving or “the political le gislation appropriate to the souls of men” (573d). The law of fate thus proceeds primarily as proēgoumena, primary antecedents, of a hypothetical and general character, which are in fate but do not occur according to fate, and only secondarily as consequences or effects of the proēgoumena. Meanwhile, providence presides over that fate as a legislating will and intelligence that gives birth to that law. In other words, Agamben argues that providence in the precise sense stands in relation to fate as a proēgoumenon or as a primary antecedent with respect to its consequence or effect, so that fate must be considered a consequence of primary providence.
The ambiguous position of fate, consequent with respect to providence but primary with respect to its particular effects, leads to Agamben’s conclusion. He writes of a “functional correlation” through which the general and the particular, the primary and the consequent, and the end and the means are brought into a “zone of indifference,” laying the conceptual foundation for what would become modern governmentality. Just as solving the problem of evil was not really in view when Chrysippus characterized god’s immanent providence in the world as “government of the world,” but the problem of evil nevertheless sprung up once he took his position on providence, so too was the bipolarization of final and efficient causes, means and ends, primary and antecedent, and general and particular not necessarily intended by the participants in this debate, but nevertheless this bipolarization was accomplished.
3 The Stoic Providence-Fate Apparatus in Seneca’s Consolation to Polybius
Agamben’s “providence-fate apparatus” can be located in Seneca’s Consolation through the three terms which Agamben considers crucial to any apparatus: first, the living being an apparatus aims to capture; second, the operations of power, cut off from being but nevertheless active among beings; and, third, the subjectivity constructed by the operation of power on the living being.10 I contend that certain personifications typical of declamatory practice in the first century CE become in Seneca’s philosophical rhetoric the operating terms of a providence-fate apparatus: Nature and Fate as providential action, but also Fortune as concomitant effect of providence.11 Meanwhile, Seneca’s persona can be understood through Seneca’s notion of bare life, the remainder of life produced by the sovereign ban as an exclusive inclusion from the political order (Agamben 1998: 15–29). His persona is thus particularly worthy of attention here, insofar as he brings the relation between sovereign power and bare life into focus.
The providence-fate apparatus in which Seneca situates himself also involves other subjects, namely, the freedman Polybius, bereaved of his brother and acting as the secretary a libellis, and the emperor Claudius, presented as a consoler of Polybius, a champion in the battle against Fortune, and, paradoxically, a coagent of Fortune. Seneca, as bare life separated from all social relations but nevertheless subject to power relations with the emperor, may seem simply to be a mere “secondary effect” of Claudius’s will, a mediator performing the officia of a consoler within the government of self and others established by Claudius’s sovereignty. However, Seneca also makes use of himself, his remaining capacities, and the ambiguities of the providence-fate apparatus to expose—or, even as Agamben might say, to depose—the anarchic potential of the imperial command to which he remains subject even in his exile.
3.1 Seneca’s Use of Nature, Fate, and Fortune as a Providence-Fate Apparatus
Chrysippus’s providential theology allows for no fracture separating providence and fate; rather, there are only providence’s perfect action and the seemingly negative, “concomitant effects” of that action. Much of Seneca’s consolatory argumentation is aimed at establishing this position through the dual alliance of Nature and Fate; yet, at the same time, Seneca foregrounds the concomitant effects of providential governance with Fortune’s persona and her unpredictably contingent actions. Seneca ultimately provides a perspective in which these personified forces can be reconciled into one paradigm of providential governance.
Seneca’s surviving text begins by advancing natural law’s universality as a source of consolation and coordinating Nature and Fate as agents of justice, order, causality, and right legal judgment in the cosmos. “The greatest source of consolation,” he writes, “is to contemplate that everyone before you has suffered and everyone will suffer what has happened to you; and thus Nature [rerum natura] seems to me to have made common what it has made hardest, so that Fate’s equality might offer consolation for its cruelty” (1.4).12 Fate and Nature are conformed to one another, perhaps even treated as interchangeable, so that Nature-Fate is characterized as both a constructive force and as a legal apparatus. Seneca returns to this idea at several other points in the consolation. In the fourth paragraph, advocating that Polybius give up all lamentation, he explains that the “Fates . . . stand hard and inexorable; no one can move them with reproaches, no one with tears, no one with their just cause; they never spare anyone from anything, nor do they relent” (4.1). He also joins this mercilessness to Nature, arguing that “the kind of life Nature has promised us” is evident from the fact that “weeping is the first thing humans do after being born” (4.3). Later in the tenth paragraph, Seneca challenges Polybius’s claim to possess his deceased brother in terms borrowed from economic exchange and property law: “The Nature of things gave him to you not for legal possession, in the same way she gave to others their own brothers; rather she loaned him. When it seems good to her then, she reclaims him and she does not pursue your satisfaction with him, but rather her own law” (10.4). Again, in paragraph 11, against the claim that an unexpected death is painful, Seneca excuses “Nature,” saying that humans must know better or blame themselves, since she “testifies that she will make an exception from her necessity for no one” (1 1.1). Seneca thus presents Nature and Fate as interchangeable terms for the necessity that governs the world through a consistent legal order.
Fortune is introduced as a third term that challenges the coherence and completeness of Fate and Nature’s necessity. In fact, the surviving text begins with two long laments at 2.2-7 and 3.4-5, in which Seneca protests against Fortune’s injustice to Polybius and blames her for Polybius’s brother’s death. Accusations against her persist nearly to the end of the text: at 4.1, reason must bring weeping to an end, because Fortune will not do so; at 5.4, Polybius may show his other brothers an example of courage by enduring this assault from Fortune; at 13.2, Seneca explains that, when the Senate sentenced him to death, it was Fortune who had brought him to this disaster; and at 17.1, she is so bold as to intrude upon Caesar’s imperial family by bringing death upon them. Fortune is thus the very personification of recklessly contingent action, appearing in this text as an enemy who brings death and loss without regard for what is orderly, consistent, and good. How can such a force be understood to coexist with Nature and Fate, which supposedly govern the world through universal, legally consistent, and good providential action?
Near the end of the text, Seneca suggests that Fate, Nature, and Fortune could perhaps be reconciled. He writes:
What pertains to Fortune herself, even if it is not possible now to plead her case before you . . . still at some later time I must defend her, as soon as that day comes which will have made you a more balanced judge of her. . . . For she provides many things to you, with which she may repair this injury. Even now she will give many things, by which she redeems herself. Finally, that itself which she has taken away, she herself had given to you. (18.3)
This passage introduces two problems. First, there is a limitation of perspective which Seneca’s discourse takes into consideration: Polybius in his present condition may not be able to appreciate that, though Fortune has deprived him of his brother, she continues to offer him other favors. Second, and more problematically, here Fortune has given Polybius his brother, but in paragraph 10 it was Nature who had given Polybius and his brother their lives (10.4-5). Seneca thus confuses Fortune with Nature so that the incompatibility of their coexistence comes to the fore. Asmis has suggested that Fortune herself may well be only a vanishing reality, a persona who seems to be real from the Stoic progressor’s perspective, but, from the point of view of the sage, who knows that there are no misfortunes, her persona must vanish from all causal accounts as nothing more than an imaginary construct (Asmis 2009: 115–27). Asmis’s analysis explains how Seneca could credit Fortune and Nature for giving Polybius’s brother to him, how Fortune and Nature could cooperate, and, finally, how Fortune could be among the beings who “provides” for Polybius with other compensations. All of these agents—Nature, Fate, and Fortune—are ultimately so many names for providence.
Fortune should not be too quickly assimilated to Nature and Fate, though, so that Polybius’s progressor’s view of her is simply disregarded. It is here that Agamben’s account of the Stoic providence-fate apparatus is especially helpful for reckoning with subjectivities intruding upon the text. Where Alexander associates particular natures with a realm of natural contingency, and where Plutarch establishes a middle zone of primary and secondary causes in which their actions upon particulars are overdetermined, Seneca divides providential action into the actions of Nature, Fate, Fortune, or providence indifferently, even as he identifies the apparently negative concomitant effects of providence with the actions of Fortune. It is only as long as one keeps Fortune’s distinction in view that it is possible, with Agamben, to speak of a “Stoic providence-fate apparatus.” From the sage’s point of view everything collapses into a perfectly coherent causal order in which there is only nature, fate, and providence. The progressor’s view of reality is a partial view which records an important fact: the separation between the order of providence and the contingency of fortune. The analysis of perspective has thus brought the argument to a second aspect of the providence-fate apparatus. Beyond the apparatus correlating providence and fate into a bipolarity, the Stoic providence-fate apparatus must also involve living beings captured as subjects through the operations of power.
3.2 Seneca as Bare Life and the Exposure to Sovereign Violence
Up to now I have proceeded as if Seneca has at his command the sage’s awareness of the illusory nature of Fortune. In fact, his persona is quite inconsistent. At some times, he transcends every limited perspective and recognizes Fortune and Nature’s unity as a sage would; at others, he is so dismayed by the contingency of his bad Fortune that he must be considered unreliable as a consoler. For example, a pitiful recusatio highlighting Seneca’s diminished capabilities concludes the text: “These things . . . I have composed in a distant region with a worn out and dulled mind. If they seem to answer too little to your intellect or to heal your grief too little, consider that a man cannot be free to attend to the consolation of another, if that man’s own troubles keep him occupied” (18.9). Going on to explain how his Latin eloquence has diminished amid the “barbarians’ rude grunting” (18.9), Seneca shows himself as clinging to what little humanity he can preserve following his separation from the Roman social order. Taken together with the laments of Fortune’s violence which he voices at 2.2-7 and 3.4-5, this complaint at the text’s conclusion presents Seneca as a man incapable of reconciling Fate and Fortune, as a subject so downtrodden by the concomitant effects of providence on his fortune that he cannot see beyond her persona.
Though Seneca’s posturing reflects a rhetorical strategy rather than a real loss of his expressive powers, it is helpful to understand Seneca’s position external to the social order as what Agamben calls bare life (1998: 63–7). Agamben complicates Schmitt’s influential definition of sovereignty as both internal and external to the juridical order, insofar as the sovereign decides at the limit of constitutional order on the state of exception, by refocusing his argument on “the relation of exception” between the sovereign and the bare life (Agamben 1998: 15–29). Agamben defines the sovereign exception as an operation performed upon living beings which transforms them by separating their form or way of life from their purely biological existence, their bare life (1998: 25–7, 63–67). Sovereign power thus sustains itself by positing an “exclusive inclusion” of bare life (Agamben 1998: 21–2), a suspended relation or “ban” (Agamben 1998: 28–9) enforced upon the living being by sovereign po wer.
That Seneca’s diminished powers of expression and cognition may involve sovereign violence exacted upon him by the emperor Claudius’ decision becomes clear in paragraph 13, as Seneca digresses to mention a trial before the Senate in which he was sentenced to death:
[Caesar] has not so cast me down, that he would not want me to rise up again—or he has not cast me down at all, but he has supported me, when I have been struck by Fortune and I have fallen, and, as I was rushing headlong, the application [usus] of his divine hand has gently put me in my place [deposuit] with restraint. He interceded with the Senate on my behalf and not only gave me life but also petitioned it for me. (13.2)
Seneca reveals that, following the Senate’s decision to consign him to death, the emperor Claudius interceded so that Seneca was spared (Giardina 2000: 77–9). From external sources it can be established that Seneca’s punishment was reduced to relegation, a common form of exile in the imperial period.13 Situated in this way as beyond the protections of the law and yet not fully outside of its reach, Seneca can be considered bare life in Agamben’s precise sense: having been consigned to a social death, Seneca is both restored to the precarity of biological life and deprived of his social identity by the emperor Claudius’s decision.
Somewhat surprising, then, is the substitution of Fortune for Claudius as the agent who “cast down” Seneca (13.2). The convict’s attitude toward his trial involves this confusion about his position within the providence-fate apparatus: just as Fortune can represent the contingent, concomitant effects of providence, here too she can substitute for the sovereign who reduced Seneca to his bare, biological life through a decision, perhaps indicating a deeper relationship between Claudius’s imperium and Fortune’s contingent action.14 She represents an anarchic element active within the providence-fate apparatus that upsets the coherence of Nature and Fate, just as Claudius’s imperium can frustrate the constitutional power of the Senate and its legal and juridical authority. For this reason, Fortune too can exercise sovereign violence upon living beings, when Fortune not only attacks the likes of Seneca and Polybius’s brother or leading Republican families (14.2-15.2), but dares “to bring mourning upon” the Caesars by claiming lives from the imperial household (15.2-16.3). Seneca’s decline to the non-status of bare life compromises his powers of intellection and expression, so that, like Polybius, he cannot see beyond his grief and mourning to situate Fortune correctly as a concomitant effect of providential action.
3.3 Subject Formation and the Duties of the Consoler
Seneca’s diminished condition raises an important question: If Seneca, like Polybius, is a Stoic progressor so compromised by grief for his exile that he cannot see the truth about his situation, why has he appointed himself the task of consoling Polybius, a task to which “a man cannot be free to attend . . . if that man’s own troubles keep him occupied” (18.9)? Seneca answers this question at paragraph 13, explaining that he “will apply all [his] effort, so that [Claudius] may not blush to rescue [him],” since the emperor “knows best the time at which he ought to help anyone” (13.3). Though Seneca, as bare life, has been separated from every social relation through the sovereign ban, he nevertheless persists as a subject of power relations with the emperor. His subjection to the emperor’s power relations is the only connection to social relations left to him, so, if Seneca wants to make the most of his situation, he must somehow make himself worthy of further clemency from the emperor.
At this point, Seneca is faced with a problem. To act in the service of the emperor, one must have officia, or “duties,” the fulfillment of which would be well regarded by the emperor, but his relegation to Corsica would have removed him from all conceivable duties. For help here we may turn to Agamben’s “The Genealogy of Office” (2013: 65–88), where Agamben argues that Cicero’s translation of the Stoic term kathēkonta with the Latin officia transformed the meaning of kathēkonta, which Agamben understands as “what is respectable and appropriate to do according to the circumstances, above all taking account of the agent’s social condition” (Agamben 2013: 67). Polybius, for example, has a definable social position as the secretary a libellis—the official charged with reviewing petitions to the emperor.15 In paragraph 6, Seneca explains how Polybius’s “great persona” disallows certain actions and requires others; that this paragraph concerns officia is clear from the use of the word at 6.4. Important here is how the officia assigned by Caesar and Fortune indifferently come into focus at the end of this paragraph, where Seneca contrasts the advantages and disadvantages of his and Polybius’s respective positions:
Many things are not allowed to you, which are allowed to the lowest and to those lying in some corner of the world; great fortune is great slavery. It is not allowed to you to do anything according to your own judgment: so many thousands of men must be heard, so many applications must be disposed [disponendi] . . . so that it can be subjected to the princeps’ most excellent soul according to its order. It is not allowed to you, I say, to weep: so that you can hear the many weeping, so that you may hear the prayers of those petitioning and desiring to receive the pity of the mildest Caesar, you must dry your own tears. (6.4-5)
What Seneca describes here is Polybius’s contribution to the functional apparatus coordinated with Claudius’s sovereign power. He clarifies how Polybius’s self-governance makes possible his governance of others, precisely Agamben’s point when he glosses Cicero by saying, “If human beings do not simply live their lives like the animals, but ‘conduct’ and ‘govern’ life, officium is that by means of which human life is ‘instituted’ and ‘formed’” (Agamben 2013: 74–5). In order to fulfill his duties, Polybius must manage his grief, governing his life in accordance with what his status demands.
Agamben’s “The Genealogy of Office” also shows how Cicero’s use of officium as a translation for kathēkonta extended its application to the entire lifespan: “What is decisive,” he explains, “is that . . . the politician and the jurist’s attention is shifted from the carrying out of individual acts to the ‘use of life’ as a whole; that is, it is identified with the ‘institution of life’ as such” (Agamben 2013: 74–5). Officium may apply to “the condition and the status that define the very existence of human beings in society,” so that “from this perspective . . . Seneca” in his Ep. 95 “can speak of an officium humanum, of an office that applies to human beings insofar as they are bound with their fellow humans in a relationship of sociabilitas” (2013: 75). With this expansion of the Stoic concept through Cicero’s translation, it is possible to identify an officium humanum that could, even in diminishing degrees, belong to Seneca even as bare life. He need not have a defined social position to have the existential officium of sociabilitas or “a capacity for socialization.” His appointment of consolation as a task for himself now can be understood: though he may not be as well positioned to console Polybius as he could be, as a “member of the great body” of humankind (Sen. Ep. 95.51–52; Agamben 2013: 75), he still possesses the potential for social interaction necessary to the execution of this task.
The challenge for Seneca will then be to comport himself in such a way that he might be able to console Polybius. As a human he has the potential for this officium, but he has only the necessary condition for the performance of this task, no guarantee that he will be effective. Moreover, he also expresses doubt about himself at 18.9, and even places his confidence in a greater consoler at 12.4 and 14.1-2: the emperor Claudius himself. Seneca’s strategy, then, is to vanish behind the voice of Claudius, which he features in an impressive consolatory prosopopoeia from 14.2 to 16.3. Once again, Agamben’s comments in “The Genealogy of Office” can elucidate this strategy. Quoting a passage in which Varro distinguishes three modalities of human action, “agere, facere, and gerere” (De lingua latina 6.77.245), Agamben observes that the first term corresponds to the Aristotelian notion of praxis, action with an aim inherent to its performance, and the second conforms to Aristotelian poiesis, action with an aim in the finished product. Gerere has no Greek equivalent, and instead it “designates . . . the specifically Roman concept of the activity of one who is invested with a public function of governance” (Agamben 2013: 82–3). Officium, Agamben contends, involves action of this kind, not praxis or poiesis. This way of conceiving the action involved in officium illuminates not only the officia of Polybius, who acts on behalf of Claudius, but also of Seneca, who conforms “the use of his life” and comports himself as a priestly medium with respect to Claudius, characterized just before the prosopopoeia at 14.2 as an oracle: “When [Claudius] speaks, his words, delivered as if from some oracle (velut ab oraculo missa), will have an impressive weight; his divine authority will beat the entire force of your grief.” To console Polybius effectively, to perform this officium humanum, Seneca becomes a means with respect to the end for which he casts Claudius as the primary agent.
Finding a place for himself within the apparatus, Seneca subjectifies himself to Claudius’s agency, so that he might have a function in the relations of power and he might comport himself, “the use of his life,” and his discourse as an effective medium supportive of Claudius’ divine, salvific action. One may thus understand Seneca, Polybius, and Claudius as subordinate, localized causes within the providence-fate apparatus where Nature and Fate are the primary agents, and Fortune is conceived as a secondary providence “by accident.” Within this broader, theological apparatus, Seneca’s bad fortune—that is, Claudius’s decision on his life—may have reduced him to the bare life of an exile, but he still participates in the government of the world as an instrument of primary causes. This potential may seem to subject Seneca so fully to the will of Claudius that the exiled author not only suffers as the bare life excluded through the sovereign ban, but even more he identifies with that subjection as his only potential for right and good action. But, as Agamben observes, “the most ambiguous legacy” of Cicero’s On Duties arises from his treatment of “the duties . . . as virtues and the virtues as duties”: only to the extent that the virtues, understood as an apparatus here, are reduced to the duties does “the life of human beings” become “governable” (Agamben 2013: 76). Agamben does not spell out precisely wherein this ambiguity lies or what it implies, though he does indicate a circularity in which the “effective ontology” deriving from this treatment of the virtues as duty confounds being and praxis (Agamben 2013: 87–8), concealing the possibility of “an ontology of substance” in favor of an “ontology of command” (Agamben 2013: 97–9). On this account, this ambiguity perhaps lies in the unrealized potential for the duties to have been resolved into the virtues, so that the “effective ontology” according to which the subject dutifully becomes “what he has to be” could be rendered inoperative through the tension with the virtues into which the duties were drawn. To comprehend how the virtues may override duties, how this unrealized potential of the tradition might bear upon the Consolation and Seneca’s choice to perform as an effective medium for the consoling voice of Claudius, it will be necessary to examine the contents of Claudius’s speech in light of Agamben’s final discussion of Stoicism in the Homo Sacer series.
3.4 Prosopopoeia and Making Use of the Emperor’s Voice
In “Use-of-Oneself,” the fifth chapter of The Use of Bodies, Agamben’s discussion of Stoic, Epicurean, and Christian sources supports “the hypothesis that . . . the [Stoic] doctrine of oikeiosis becomes intelligible only if one understands it as a doctrine of the use-of-oneself” (2015: 49). Agamben’s purpose here is to show that the concept of oikeiosis depends upon the concept of use, in that it is “only because the animal makes use of its body parts,” as he argues, that “something like self-awareness and therefore a familiarity with itself [can] be attributed to it” (2015: 51). Through commentary on Seneca’s Ep. 112, Agamben explains that the self must be understood “not” as “something substantial or” as “a preestablished end,” but rather as “the use that the living being makes of it[self]” (2015: 54). The self is thus the use which the living being makes of itself, of its relations, and of its world. This primordial self-relation, which defines oikeiosis primarily as the living being’s use of its body, must continue to define the self-relation of the living being in every situation. Even bare life, the condition to which Claudius and Fortune have reduced Seneca, must maintain its own self-relation, its own capacity for oikeiosis, and its power to make use of itself. This clarification of Seneca’s condition reframes the prosopopoeia at 14.2-16.3 as more than an act of interpretation through which Seneca becomes the medium for Claudius’s oracular voice; his use of Claudius’s persona rather involves oikeiosis, the appropriation of Claudius’s authority, and his power to command.
If this hypothesis can be sustained, there should be some discernible evidence that Seneca’s use of Claudius’s voice reveals a secondary purpose beyond delivering consolation. At two points the speech seems to reveal the decisive truth about the emperor’s reign that it does not rest upon the emperor’s virtue and above all his merciful power, celebrated by Seneca at 13.2 and 16.6; rather the source of his power is founding violence and the extra-legal exception. Claudius begins his speech by explaining that Fortune’s violence afflicts all alike, so that no house has ever been spared from mourning; the rest of his speech catalogs examples in evidence of this indictment of Fortune. Two examples, Mark Antony and Germanicus, are discussed with irony worthy of further consideration. Introducing Mark Antony as “his own grandfather,” Seneca’s Claudius portrays the triumvir in a disturbingly tyrannical manner: that is, Antony mourns his brother Lucius Antonius’s death—a death inflicted by none other than the first emperor Augustus—by pouring “the blood of twenty legions” (16.2). Along the way, Seneca’s Claudius calls out to Fortuna at 16.2, saying, “Insolent Fortuna, what games you make for yourself from human misery!” This exclamation anticipates the lament that just when Antony sat as the “arbiter of life and death over all of his own fellow citizens” (civium suorum vitae . . . mortisque arbiter) his own brother was sent to his execution (16.2). Though Claudius does not identify Augustus as the executioner, the irony in which one triumvir decides on the life of the brother of another is precisely what Claudius’s exclamation is designed to both highlight and obscure. For, just as Seneca introduces Fortuna to complicate Claudius’s role in his exile, so too does Claudius obscure Augustus’s agency by crediting Lucius Antonius’s death to Fortuna. The violence of the Principate is thus both raised and concealed, while the sovereign power exercised mercilessly by Claudius’s own grandfather is likewise misrepresented as Fortune’s play.
As Claudius comes to his last words on this subject, he discusses his deceased siblings as examples of his own bereavement. The emperor is strangely elusive in his presentation of these losses, however, opening with two examples of praeteritio as he “pass[es] over all the other examples” and “remain[s] silent . . . about the other funerals” to focus on one example (16.3). These pregnant silences suggest that Claudius’s rhetoric may parade as brevity, only to omit uncomfortable details about the Principate’s history. He acknowledges that Fortune has deprived his own house of two siblings, but names only the celebrated general Germanicus. Claudius’s sister who died in 31 CE, Livilla or Julia Livia,16 only comes up anonymously, as a second unnamed sibling for whom Claudius once had to mourn. It is possible that Claudius has not named her simply because he is consoling Polybius for the loss of a brother and Livilla was a sister. But his sister’s nickname, Livilla, would have also raised unhappy associations with Germanicus’s daughter and Claudius’s niece, Julia Livilla,17 named after this sister of the emperor and recently sent into exile and forcibly starved (in truth because of dynastic struggles, but officially for an affair with Seneca, whose own exile also resulted from this alleged affair). Claudius declares that, in mourning for Germanicus, he had “so ruled over his feelings, that he neither left anything undone, which ought to be done by a good brother, nor did he do anything which could be reprimanded in a princeps” (16.3). From this perspective, the ironic subtext of Claudius’s last claim that he did nothing inappropriate to a Princeps can be felt and the violence founding Claudius’s power is cautiously but legibly inscribed in his speech.
4 Conclusion
These prominent examples of irony underlining Claudius’s sovereign violence show that Seneca is not merely performing as an effective medium for Claudius’s divine speech. He also makes use of himself to appropriate the emperor’s voice for a new purpose. I conclude by emphasizing two aspects of this act of appropriation: first, how the introduction of a secondary purpose redirects and subverts the providence-fate apparatus in which Seneca situates himself; and second, to what new purpose Seneca consigns Claudius’s consolation.
In The Use of Bodies, Agamben argues that the most promising way to interact with the apparatuses in which living beings are captured is not to flee them, but rather to advance a new use of these apparatuses which “revokes” and “deactivates” their factical conditions without altering their form (2015: 56–7). The gesture which Agamben advances leaves the apparatus intact, but discovers within it a certain anarchic, “destituent potential” through which the relations posited within an apparatus are deposed and rendered inoperative (2015: 272–4).18 Agamben reinterprets the factical situation of bare life “beyond every figure of relation” (1998: 55/47), so that its “destituent potential exhibits the nullity of the bond that pretended to hold them together” and “bare life and sovereign power, anomie and nomos, constituent power and constituted power are shown to be in contact without any relation” (Agamben 2015: 272–3). Through his commentary on the Stoic providence-fate apparatus, Agamben establishes that the apparatus only ever achieves a “functional correlation” of several bipolarities: final and efficient causes, means and ends, consequences and antecedents, and general and particular. Because the apparatus does not go beyond correlating these terms, they are given to a kind of reversibility or, better, to indifference, so that ends can become means, final causes can become efficient causes, and antecedent terms can become consequent. In the Consolation, Fortune names a similar indifference intruding among the coherence and the consistency of Nature, Fate, and, as we have seen, the emperor Claudius’s sovereignty. Both in his own speech at 16.1-3 and in Seneca’s account of his trial at 13.2, the agency of Fortune substitutes for the agency of various bearers of sovereign power, whether it falls to Mark Antony, the emperor Augustus, or Claudius himself. Claudius’s proximity to Nature, Fate, and providence destabilizes the generality of these personified universals; once Claudius is identified with Fortune, the “special providence” that his sovereignty represents can unsettle the unity of Nature and Fate’s “general providence.” These seemingly cosmic agents can even be considered as contingent consequences of his primary, antecedent role within an apparatus of power/knowledge. In other words, the introduction of an element of contingency—a personified Fortune—into the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” leaves an opening for Seneca to “make use” of his situation and his intimate power relation with Claudius.
From this perspective, it is possible to understand Seneca’s purpose in this consolatory text anew. Far from simply consoling Polybius, Seneca draws attention to his own dubious capacities and his relationship to the emperor perhaps to expose the anarchic potential of that power itself. The emperor’s sovereign power to command, to decide on the state of exception, to take or give life, all of these capacities stand revealed for the anarchic, uncontrolled elements which they are. The emperor’s “divine authority” may command Polybius’s grief into diminution, but it is also beyond even Claudius’s control and open to reuse as in Seneca’s prosopopoeia. Perhaps Seneca’s purpose in the consolation is then to reveal this potential for reuse and appropriation even in the worst of circumstances: leaving the apparatus just as it is, he shows its relations to be reversible, indifferent, perhaps even inoperative.
Notes
1 My participation in the Bristol conference would not have been possible without support from the Irish Research Council’s Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship. I also thank Kurt Lampe, Janae Sholtz, John Sellars, Thomas Benatouïl, Carolyn Laferrière, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive critiques and questions.
2 All of Agamben’s discussions of Stoicism in the Homo Sacer series cross-examine Foucault. In Opus Dei (2013), he critiques Foucault’s analyses of self-government in The Government of Self and Others (2010) and in The Use of Bodies (2015) he challenges arguments on the care of the self from The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005).
3 Agamben’s entire argument also involves significant passages from Philo, Proclus, Boethius, and Thomas Aquinas (2011: 119–43).
4 I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that Agamben’s rigorous approach to ancient sources, as demonstrated by Nicoletta di Vita in Chapter 11 of this volume, may indicate that he knowingly employed an early modern source instead of an ancient one, in order to develop an argument concerning the reception of ancient sources among early modern political theorists. Though Agamben’s use of ancient evidence from rival philosophical schools suggests that he is not exclusively concerned with early modern reception (2011: 119–43), he quite clearly means to take Leibniz and Bayle alongside ancient sources such as Alexander or Proclus, in order to investigate an evolving problematic. In any case, Agamben’s philological acumen is not really in doubt here; instead I am concerned to develop lines of argument which his essay leaves unexplored.
5 The authors of Polybius’s Oxford Classical Dictionary entry hesitate to consider Polybius secretary a libellis, preferring instead secretary a studiis (OCD 4 s.v. Polybius (2)). It seems evident from the Consolation (6.2-5) that Seneca considered Polybius capable of receiving petitions and interceding with the emperor.
It would be illuminating to know whether Polybius’s brother came to his death in 42 or 43 CE due to political intrigue, just as Polybius lost his life by 46 or 47 CE to Messalina’s machinations, revealing just how exposed to the vicissitudes of imperial favor powerful freedmen were.
6 Agamben pursues a genealogy of the term apparatus in “What is an Apparatus?” (2009). Proceeding from Foucault and Hyppolite’s use of the term positivité, Hegel’s account of “positive or natural religion,” and the Church Fathers’ commentary upon a divine dispositio, which translates the Greek term oikonomia into Latin (Agamben 2009: 3–12), Agamben arrives at Aristotle’s Politics, where the philosopher uses oikonomia exclusively for the management of domestic affairs (Agamben 2009: 8–9). The decisive transformation came, Agamben explains, in the second century CE, when the Church Fathers extended the sense of oikonomia to express the Father and the Son’s separation as an “economy of redemption and salvation,” so that a fracture within the divine being was resolved into a division between God’s being and praxis (2009: 9–10). Political and economic action were thus sundered from God’s being, and the oikonomia or dispositio, positive religion, and dispositifs could act independently of any “foundation in [the divine] being” (2009: 11). Agamben concludes, “The term apparatus designates that in which, and through which, one realizes a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in being. This is the reason why apparatuses . . . must also produce their subject” (2009: 11).
The second half of Agamben’s essay redefines apparatuses against the living being. Subjectivity, “that which results from the relation and . . . the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses” (2009: 14), intervenes as a third term connecting a “massive partitioning of beings” into living beings and “the apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured” (2009: 13).
7 Cf. Stobaeus I.79.1-12 (SVF 2.913; LS 55M).
8 Plutarch’s On Stoic Self-Contradictions (1050c-d; SVF 2.937; LS 54T) shows that Chrysippus’s position actively involves providence in every causal sequence, particular movement, and chance event. Chalcidius’s In Timaeum 144 contrasts Chrysippus’s view that providence just is fate by another name with Cleanthes’s view that “the dictates of providence come about by fate,” but also that “things which come about by fate” are not necessarily “the product of providence” (SVF 2.933; LS 54U). The position Alexander takes was then already available to the Old Stoa. In Plutarch’s On Stoic self-contradictions at 1051b-c (SVF 2.1178; LS 54S), Chrysippus can even be read as yielding to Cleanthes’s position.
9 Since it is accepted that De fato (On Fate) was not composed by Plutarch, I refer to the author as Plutarch only for ease of reference.
10 See note 5 above.
11 On the use of these personifications in declamation, see Herington (1982: 529–37).
12 All translations from Reynolds’s (1977) edition of Seneca’s text are my own. In many places I have checked my interpretation against Basore’s (1932) Loeb volume and some of my phrasing may therefore reflect that translation of the text.
13 OCD 4 s.v. Annaeus Seneca (2); OCD 4 s.v. “relegation.”
14 At 6.2, Seneca treats Fortune and Claudius interchangeably, noting how “Fortune positioned [Polybius] in a great light” and how “love of Caesar carried [Polybius] to a higher rank.”
15 See note 4 above.
16 OCD 4 s.v. Livia Iulia.
17 OCD 4 s.v. Iulia (5).
18 Agamben introduced the concept of “destituent potential” to the Homo Sacer series only in the epilogue to its final volume (2015: 263–79). Between the lines one can read a dispute with Antonio Negri concerning his and Agamben’s differing views on the prospects for revolutionary political action in the present. Negri (1999) has placed an emphasis on “constituent power” as the ever-decisive source of constituted political order, whereas Agamben claims “destituent potential” is the key to a “coming politics” which will untangle the violent dialectic of constituent and constituted power (2015: 266–7).
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