Foucault and Agamben on Augustine, Paradise and the Politics of Human Nature

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Foucault and Agamben on Augustine, Paradise and the Politics of Human Nature © The Author(s) 2023 Published version Prozorov, Sergei Prozorov, S. (2024). Foucault and Agamben on Augustine, Paradise and the Politics of Human Nature. Theory, Culture and Society, 41(1), 23-37. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764221140811 2024 https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764221140811 Theory, Culture & Society 1 –15 © The Author(s) 2023 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/02632764221140811 journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs Foucault and Agamben on Augustine, Paradise and the Politics of Human Nature Sergei Prozorov University of Jyväskylä Abstract This article focuses on Foucault’s and Agamben’s readings of Augustine’s account of human nature and original sin. Foucault’s analysis of Augustine’s account of sexual acts in paradise, subordinated to will and devoid of lust, highlights the way it constitutes the model for the married couple, whose sexual acts are only acceptable if diverted by the will away from desire and towards the tasks of procreation. While Agamben rejects Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and reclaims paradise as the original homeland of humanity, his reappropriation of paradise remains conditioned by our turn towards our true nature, from which we have been estranged by sin. Agamben’s politics of reclaiming paradise necessarily involves the demand for obedience to this originary model of human nature. It therefore follows to the letter Augustine’s description of paradisiacal sex, in which the will prevails over desire by applying itself to and curtailing itself. Keywords Giorgio Agamben, Augustine, Michel Foucault, messianism, nature, obedience, paradise Introduction Giorgio Agamben’s (1998: 9) claim in the first volume of the Homo Sacer series to correct and complete Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics gave rise to prolific commentary in philosophy and political theory that sought to elucidate the relation between the theoretical orientations and methodological approaches of the two authors (Ojakangas, 2005; Snoek, 2010). Besides the two authors’ common interest in divergent approaches to biopolitics, Foucault has also influenced Agamben’s work in other fields, most notably the method of archaeology (Agamben, 2009b; see Frost, 2019), the focus on styles of Corresponding author: Sergei Prozorov. Email: [email protected] TCS Online Forum: https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/ 1140811TCS0010.1177/02632764221140811Theory, Culture & SocietyProzorov research-article2023 Article 2 Theory, Culture & Society existence (Agamben, 2016; see Van der Heiden, 2020) and truth-telling (Agamben, 2009a; see Crosato, 2020). What has received less attention in this discussion is the relation of the two authors to questions of political theology. The interest in theology is of course more explicit in the case of Agamben than Foucault, despite the latter’s turn to ‘political spirituality’ in his later work (Foucault, 2005: 15; Foucault and Bremner, 2020). Nonetheless, the recent publication of the fourth volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh (2021) and Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Garden (2020) permits us to analyse in more detail the two authors’ approaches to the Christian theological tradition, and specifically Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. In their readings of Augustine, Foucault and Agamben address the same set of questions: what is the human nature that was lost with original sin and the expulsion from paradise, how did the loss take place, and can its outcome be mitigated or even overcome? Nonetheless, they pose these questions in the context of rather different theoretical projects, respectively genealogical and messianic. For Foucault, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin marks a key episode in the genealogy of the subject of desire in the Western tradition, whereby sexual relations became the site for both the ‘veridictive’ interrogation of the subject’s inner truth and the ‘jurisdictive’ regulation of its behaviour. Agamben is interested less in charting the role of the idea of sin in the constitution of the subject than in the possibilities of overcoming sin as such and reclaiming paradise for humanity. He therefore opposes to Augustine’s doctrine the more affirmative visions of human nature developed by Eriugena and Dante. Despite these divergent orientations, addressing the two readings together is highly instructive insofar as it illuminates the problems involved in Agamben’s attempt at the messianic politics of the return to paradise. As we shall demonstrate in this article, Agamben’s attempted refutation of Augustine maintains his identification of sin with disobedience, which entails that the project of reclaiming paradise must presuppose the requirement of obedience that characterized human behaviour before the fall. Agamben’s vision of paradise regained carries an uncanny resemblance to Foucault’s image of the Christian marital couple whose sexual life imitates what Augustine thought sex was like in paradise: obedient, reasonable and wholly subject to the will. Foucault’s genealogical approach thus offers a sobering corrective to Agamben’s enthusiastic affirmation of the ‘cancellation of sin’ that leaves its logic intact. Our argument in this article unfolds in three steps. Firstly, we shall address Foucault’s reading of Augustine’s account of original sin, starting from his unorthodox interpretation of sexual acts in paradise, devoid of desire and entirely controlled by the will. The disobedience of God in original sin puts an end to this sexual experience, introducing into human nature involuntary sexual urges (concupiscence). The expulsion from paradise thus entails a split in the will that can never be entirely overcome but only mitigated in the context of marriage by diverting one’s will from desire in one’s sexual acts, subjecting them entirely to the legitimate tasks of procreation and avoidance of fornication. While original sin cannot be cancelled in this life, it can be tempered by practising sexual acts in a voluntarist and dutiful manner, as Adam and Eve did before sinning. In the second section, we turn to Agamben’s reading of Augustine’s doctrine, which, similar to that of Foucault, highlights Augustine’s rejection of any possibility of Prozorov 3 overcoming original sin in this life and thereby reclaiming the earthly paradise. Agamben opposes this doctrine with the more heterodox approaches to paradise developed by Eriugena and Dante, for whom human nature has not been corrupted by sin but only deviated from in our acts of will, and that paradise, consequently, remains accessible to us, perhaps as a metaphor for our human nature itself, which may be abused and distorted by will but can always be recovered by applying the will against itself. In the final section, we shall discuss the way Agamben posits this recovery as the task of a messianic politics that identifies the advent of the Kingdom, which the theological tradition has deferred to heaven after the end of time, with the return to the Garden. Insofar as this return presupposes the cancellation of sin, which for Augustine consists of disobedience, we shall conclude that Agamben’s messianic politics is necessarily characterized by the requirement of obedience, which Foucault analysed as the key feature of subjectivation in early Christianity. The Will (Not) to Sin: Foucault on Paradisiacal and Marital Sex Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh is the concluding volume in his History of Sexuality project. Foucault’s original plan for the six-volume series devoted to the regulation of sexual practices in 17th–19th century Europe was abandoned after the publication of the introductory volume (Foucault, 1990a) in favour of a much longer historical perspective, going back to ancient Greek (Foucault, 1990b), Roman (Foucault, 1990c) and early Christian (Foucault, 2021) sources. The focus of the study also shifts from the ‘objectifying’ regulation of sexual behaviours towards the emergence of the subject of desire in various technologies of the self. Although it is the final volume in the series, Confessions of the Flesh was actually completed before the second and third volumes (Elden, 2018; Gros, 2021: x–xi) and is thematically closest to the problematic of the first volume, which also addressed confession as the key technology of subjectivation in the Western tradition (Foucault, 1990a: 60–63). In Confessions, Foucault addresses three episodes in the genealogy of the subject of desire: the emergence of the notion of the ‘flesh’ in the Christian tradition that supplants the idea of pleasure (aphrodisia) in antiquity, the formation of the practice of virginity in monastic settings and the procedures of truthtelling associated with it, and, finally, the problematization of sexual acts in the marital relationship. In our analysis of Foucault’s reading of Augustine we shall focus on the concluding chapter of Confessions of the Flesh, in which Foucault addresses the question of the ‘libidinization’ of sex, its constitution as no longer merely a bodily pleasure, but rather as an experience of lust or concupiscence. In order to understand the formation of this experience we must first consider the possibility of sexual relations deprived of it, which leads Foucault to Augustine’s description of prelapsarian sexuality. In his Reply to Two Letters of Pelagians, Augustine discusses four possible forms that sexual relations could take place in paradise. [While] maintaining, you Pelagians, the honorableness and fruitfulness of marriage, determine, if nobody had sinned, what you would wish to consider the life of those people in Paradise, and 4 Theory, Culture & Society choose one of these four things. For beyond a doubt, either as often as ever they pleased they would have had intercourse; or they would bridle lust when intercourse was not necessary; or lust would arise at the summons of will, just at the time when chaste prudence would have perceived beforehand that intercourse was necessary; or, with no lust existing at all, as every other member served for its own work, so for its own work the organs of generation also would obey the commands of those that willed, without any difficulty. (Augustine, 1887a: 1.34) The first two possibilities are immediately ruled out by Augustine. The first of these would render God’s creatures enslaved to lust, while the second would be incompatible with the understanding of paradise as a place of bliss due to the emphasis it places on selfrestraint. This leaves two options, the sole difference between which concerns desire. In the third option, humans could, of their own volition, bring forth desire at the appropriate moment. In the fourth option, humans could have sexual relations in the absence of any desire and only obeying the orders of the will so that ‘there is the highest tranquility of all the obedient members without any lust’ (Augustine, 1887a[c. 380–410]: 1.35). In Foucault’s argument, Augustine clearly prefers the fourth option and only mentions the third as a concession to his Pelagian adversaries. Yet, even in the third option, the desire in question is produced by the will. In both of these variants we are therefore dealing with an activity that is entirely voluntary and hence can be contrasted with fallen humanity’s experience of concupiscence as involuntary desire that the subject must confront and struggle with. Foucault (2021: 261) takes particular care to differentiate this understanding of the sexual act from any idea of natural spontaneity: [Now], if this absence [of desire] is assumed, what would the sexual act consist in? In a natural and spontaneous unfolding that nothing would disturb? Not at all. The text says it without any ambiguity: one must imagine an act whose every element is placed under the exact and unfailing control of the will. Let us not imagine man, in the sexual union of paradise, as a clueless being moved by the urges whose innocence is guaranteed insofar as they are beyond his grasp, but as a skilful artisan who knows how to use his hands. Ars sexualis. If sin had left him the time, he would have been, in the Garden, a diligent sower. Paradisiacal sex was obedient and reasonable like the fingers of the hand. Even when Augustine concedes to his interlocutors the possibility of humans developing ‘sexual urges’ by their own volition, the sexual act remains ‘subject to the empire of the will’ (p. 262), which alone decides when these urges are appropriate. As the title of Chapter 35 of the Reply clearly indicates, ‘desire in paradise was either none at all or it was obedient to the impulse of the will’ (Augustine, 1887a[c. 380–410]: 1.35). The voluntarist character of paradise sex distinguishes it from sexual acts after the fall, which are characterized by involuntary urges of concupiscence. This involuntary character, addressed at length in Book XIV of The City of God, is itself a result of the fateful act of will on the part of Adam and Eve, i.e. the original sin. For Augustine, the original sin did not consist of eating the forbidden fruit as such, which was of no particular importance either to God or to Adam and Eve, but in the rebellion against God that this act manifested. Consequently, the punishment that God imposed on the disobedient humans is ‘exactly fitted to the sin’ (Foucault, 2021: 262): the disobedience that the first Prozorov 5 humans showed to God will be replicated within human existence itself, which will from now be split between the will and what escapes it. The sexual act is a prime site for the manifestation of this split, insofar as it is now characterized by involuntary urges, the ‘rush of concupiscence’ that the first humans never experienced before (p. 264). This is why Adam and Eve blush when observing each other naked for the first time: not merely because their genitals were formerly covered by a ‘garment of grace’ (Augustine, 1993[412 and 426 CE]: XIV 17), but also because, having been stripped of it, they now experience previously unfamiliar urges arising from them. But when they were stripped of this grace, that their disobedience might be punished by fit retribution, there began in the movement of their bodily members a shameless novelty, which made nakedness indecent: it at once made them observant and made them ashamed. (Augustine 1993: XIV 17) The familiar activity of sex, wholly subjected to the will and devoid of all desire, is now subverted by the involuntary aspect that does not contribute anything to it but functions solely as punishment, showing human beings, who have already learned how to disobey, what it is like to be disobeyed. ‘In short, sex “springs forth”, arisen in its insurrection and offered to the gaze. It is for man what man is for God: a rebel’ (Foucault, 2021: 264). What is shameful is neither the organ, which was fully formed and active before, nor the act, which was already practised wilfully, but the urge of the organ to act: ‘the involuntary form of a movement is what makes the sexual organ the subject of an insurrection and the object of the eye’s gaze. Visible and unpredictable erection’ (p. 265). It is notable that, while it is manifested in the sexual act, concupiscence is not intrinsically tied to it: ‘it is an element which the transgression, the fall and the principle of “reciprocity of disobedience” tied to the act synthetically’ (p. 266). Thus, sin has nothing to do with sexual difference or the sexual act, which both pre-existed it, but consists entirely of the disobedience of God, which is in turn punished by resigning man to the resurrection of the sexual organs against their will. The origin of desire is therefore not to be found in the body but in the will itself, which makes human beings want to be their own masters, turning away from God, who made them what they are. This excess of the will ultimately leads to the degradation of human nature itself, which becomes all the more deficient the more it disobeys its creator (p. 269). Thus, the line separating the voluntary and the involuntary does not pass between soul and body, subject and nature, but rather is from the outset placed within the subject’s will itself. While animal acts of copulation are at first glance similar to human sexual acts in being involuntary, the involuntariness in animals is of a different kind, since it does not mark a division in the soul. It is only human desire that divides the self against itself, resigning the human to involuntarily imitating the movements of animal copulation. ‘What is involved is a will whose voluntary deviation from what maintains it in being allows it to exist in the element that tends to destroy it – the involuntary’ (p. 270). Desire is the very form of the will insofar as, by willing itself, it ends up willing the opposite. This is why Augustine can view concupiscence as at once sui juris and imputable to the subject: ‘the “autonomy” of concupiscence is the law of the subject when it wills its own will. And the subject’s powerlessness is the law of concupiscence. This is the general form of imputability, or rather its general condition’ (p. 271). 6 Theory, Culture & Society The establishment of this general condition of imputability permits the emergence of an entirely new rationality of governing sexual behaviours, no longer in terms of excess and continence as in antiquity, but in terms of the individual’s relationship to his or her own concupiscence. Foucault traces two consequences of Augustine’s theory of concupiscence for the government of sexuality. Firstly, the notion of consent (consensus) makes it possible to impute the act to the subject. Even if all subjects exist under the law of desire, it takes a certain exercise of the will on itself to bring the sexual act to presence. In this exercise of consent, the will ‘wills that will that has the form of concupiscence; it takes itself for an end as fallen will; it assumes its own condition as concupiscent will’ (p. 279). Consent is not simply a matter of actualizing desire but of the constitution and confirmation of oneself as the desiring subject, to whom its involuntary movements may now be imputed. This emergence is a crucial episode in Foucault’s history of sexuality since it also marks a point of descent of the subject of law (p. 280). Secondly, the notion of use (usus) permits us to rethink the regulation of sex in marriage, which becomes no longer a matter of the exercise of the right of the use of the body of the other, but instead a matter of the use of one’s own concupiscence in the manner that is different from the volition of one’s concupiscence. While the form of the sexual act will remain the same, its ends can be diverted from consenting to one’s desire and instead consist in engendering children or keeping one’s partner from falling into fornication – both legitimate objectives of sexual acts for Augustine. In this manner, one can make use of an evil in a good or an evil manner and it is this manner of usage that will determine whether an act is sinful: It is possible to make an utterly non-concupiscent use of concupiscence, but the latter will not be done away with for all that. It often happens that one makes use of it just for concupiscence, so that the latter seems to carry the day, but this usage will nonetheless remain a specific and imputable act. (p. 283) Foucault concludes that this separation between the evil of concupiscence and the manner of its use opens a range of possibilities for the juridification of marital sexual relations that in the period of antiquity were viewed as the least problematic and therefore remained the least regulated (p. 284). As sexual acts are neither a good in itself (to be regulated by their ‘natural’ function) or simply evil (to be regulated by strict demands for continence), they can be classified and codified according to their use, ends, circumstances, etc. (p. 283). Of course, this codification actually took place hundreds of years after Augustine (from the 13th century onwards), yet, in Foucault’s view, it was nonetheless prepared by Augustine’s theory of concupiscence, which made possible [a] very precise codification of the moments, the initiatives, the invitations, the acceptances, the refusals, the positions, the gestures, the caresses, even the words that can take place in sexual relations. Sex in marriage thus becomes the object of juridiction and veridiction. (p. 284) Moreover, since the notions of consent and use do not define the relations between the spouses directly but rather define the relation each spouse establishes to their own desire, the regulation of sexual behaviours ultimately ends up founded on the relationship the individual maintains with themselves, not with others. This is how the ‘problematization Prozorov 7 of sexual behaviours . . . becomes a problem of the subject’ (p. 285), the subject of desire who is at once the subject of law, both the truth of its desire and the goodness of its actions discoverable on the basis of its relation with itself. Augustine’s idiosyncratic conception of paradisiacal sex marks an essential moment in the genealogy of this subject. Entirely devoid of desire and thoroughly subjected to will, it demonstrates the possibility of sex without sin, albeit a possibility that is no longer available to fallen humanity, for whom sexual acts will always be accompanied by involuntary movements of desire that mark them as evil. And yet, while this evil cannot be effaced entirely, it can be mitigated, not only through the simple cessation of all sexual activity (pp. 117–134), but also, in the context of marriage, through the redirection of one’s will to concupiscence towards the legitimate ends of procreation and avoiding fornication. The sin of disobedience that resulted from the abuse of the will is thus tempered, but not effaced, by the exercise of the will on itself that diverts desire from willing only itself towards more respectable ends. In this manner, marital sex may acquire at least a partial resemblance to sex in paradise: while it might not be entirely devoid of desire, it nonetheless remains subjected to the will and is hence just as ‘diligent’ and ‘obedient’ as the sex enjoyed, if the word is appropriate, by Adam and Eve prior to their expulsion from paradise. Tormented by the urges of concupiscence, the subject of desire may at least find consolation in the fact that, by directing these urges to the tasks of procreation and avoidance of fornication, one gets as close as possible to returning to paradise. Untouched and Pure: Agamben on Paradise and Human Nature Whereas Foucault’s aim in the reading of Augustine is to trace the emergence of the subject of desire, Agamben’s (2020) reading of the doctrine of original sin in The Kingdom and the Garden raises the stakes in seeking nothing less than the reappropriation by humanity of the paradise that according to Augustine it has lost forever. If paradise is no longer accessible due to original sin, the entire promise of redemption is deferred both temporally (to the afterlife) and spatially (to heaven). The only way this deferral can be halted and reversed is through the demonstration of the possibility for human nature to free itself from original sin in this life. This, according to Agamben, is the meaning of Bosch’s famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. While the left panel of the painting shows God introducing Eve to Adam in paradise and the right panel depicts the torments of sinners in hell, the central panel features an expansive landscape of the Garden teeming with human and animal figures engaged in various amorous activities. While this central panel has been interpreted in various ways, Agamben follows Wilhelm Fränger’s reading in approaching it as a depiction of the ‘restoration of the Edenic innocence, which humanity had enjoyed in the earthly paradise’ (Agamben, 2020: 2; see Fränger, 1951). In The Kingdom and the Garden, Agamben (2020) draws on a variety of sources, of which Eriugena and Dante are the most important, to affirm the possibility of such a restoration and refute Augustine’s doctrine of the original sin. As we have seen, for Augustine the original transgression of the first men is transmitted to all of humanity both synchronically, from Adam to all men, and diachronically, 8 Theory, Culture & Society from the parents to children (cf. Foucault, 2021: 272–273). Thus, sin no longer pertains to a person’s acts or even their character, but to their very life and nature: [That] wound, which has the name of sin, wounds the very life, which was being righteously lived. This wound was at that fatal moment of the fall inflicted by the devil to a vastly wider and deeper extent than are the sins which are known among men. Whence it came to pass, that our nature having then and there been deteriorated by that great sin of the first man, not only was made a sinner, but also generates sinners; and yet the very weakness, under which the virtue of a holy life has drooped and died, is not really nature, but corruption; precisely as a bad state of health is not a bodily substance or nature, but disorder; very often, indeed, if not always, the ailing character of parents is in a certain way implanted, and reappears in the bodies of their children. (Augustine, 1887b[c. 380–410]: 2.57) Adam’s sin produces a change in human nature itself, substituting a lapsed and corrupt nature for the original Edenic nature. This change cannot be healed without God’s grace, yet even after such an intervention in the form of baptism, this corruption remains in human nature in the form of the above-discussed urges of concupiscence that drive human beings to sin in the involuntary manner, the disobedience of their organs recalling Adam’s original disobedience to God. Agamben (2020: 31) notes that this reading endows human will with the extraordinary power of transforming the nature created by God, but gives it no power whatsoever to reverse or negate this transformation: Man is the living being that can corrupt its nature but not heal it, thus consigning himself to a history and to an economy of salvation, in which the divine grace dispensed by the Church through its sacraments becomes essential. In the aftermath of the first man’s disobedience, human nature remains corrupt and can only be remedied in this life through divine grace dispensed by the Church. Indeed, this dispensation is the only justification for the very existence of the Church: ‘if human nature were capable of not sinning without grace, then the Church, which dispenses it through its sacraments, would not be necessary’ (p. 34). From this perspective, paradise now appears forever lost and, if it exists at all in the present time, it can only exist in vain, forever devoid of human dwellers. At the moment of Judgement, human beings will either be transported to the Kingdom in heaven or spend eternity in hell. Messianic hope is thus relegated from reclaiming paradise on earth towards attaining a Kingdom in heaven: ‘while the Kingdom to come is the central paradigm of the history of humanity, the Garden is deprived of any meaning whatsoever for that history’ (p. 50). It stands vacant as testimony to man’s originary transgression and ‘the cherubim with the flaming sword keeps watch so that man does not seek to penetrate it undeservedly’ (p. 73). Faced with this paradoxical status of the Garden, Agamben chooses to entertain an alternative hypothesis: ‘[If] the human soul has preserved its possibility of not sinning, then man is in some way still in relation with the originary justice that he had possessed in paradise’ (p. 50). In order to investigate this possibility, Agamben turns to Joannes Scotus Eriugena’s (John the Scot’s) Periphyseon (John the Scot, 2011[c. Prozorov 15 Augustine (1887a[c. 380–410]) Against two letters of the Pelagians. In: Schaff, Philip (ed.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 5. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co. New Advent. Available at: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/15091.htm (accessed 16 November 2022). Augustine (1887b[c. 380–410]) ‘On marriage and concupiscence’, Book II. In: Schaff, Philip (ed.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 5. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co. New Advent. 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Van der Heiden, Gert-Jan (2020) Exile, use, and form-of-life: On the conclusion of Agamben’s Homo Sacer series. Theory, Culture & Society 37(2): 61–78. Sergei Prozorov is Professor of Political Science at the University of Jyväskylä. He is the author of nine books including Biopolitics after Truth (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Democratic Biopolitics (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Agamben and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). His research interests include continental political thought, theories of democracy and totalitarianism, biopolitics and governance.