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The Political Function of Agamben’s “Stoic Providence-Fate Apparatus” in Seneca’s Ad Polybium de consolatione
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Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer project uses a wealth of resources from the Western
philosophical and theological traditions in order to advance a radical critique of present
political conditions. How this critique draws upon ancient Stoicism, developing its latent
potentialities towards a “new, possible use” of Stoic thought, is my task today. This use takes
Agamben’s own invocations of the Stoics as its example, so that one must evaluate where
and how he himself employs Stoicism. In fact, Stoicism stands out among the ancient schools
as central to Agamben’s project in Homo Sacer, insofar as the problematic operation of
sovereign power, biopolitics, and economic governmentality meet with an answer through
Agamben’s reading of Stoic ethics.
I’ll divide my presentation today into two halves. In the first, I show how, in “The
Providential Machine,” the fifth chapter from The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben
criticizes Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality through a reading of the ancient debate on
Stoic providence.1 This is only the first of three extended discussions featured in the Homo
Sacer series;2 I will touch on the other two discussions in the second part of my paper, which
will be devoted to a critical reading of a Stoic text, Seneca’s eleventh dialogue, the
Consolation to Polybius.3 In this text, Seneca takes up a number of themes near to
Agamben’s work—sovereign power and bare life,4 the rule of law and the exception,5
providential government and negative collateral effects,6 duty and the government of self and
others,7 and finally oikeiosis and the use of the self.8 The challenge here will be to see how
virtualities of the text’s meaning may be developed for contemporary “common use,” taking
Agamben’s philosophy and his commentary on Stoicism as a guide.9
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Part I: Agamben’s Conception of the “Stoic Providence-Fate Apparatus”
1.1 Dispositif, Dispositio, and Oikonomia in “What is an apparatus?”
In “The Providential Machine” Agamben deploys the Foucauldian concept of a
dispositif, or an “apparatus,” in the context of an analysis of what Agamben calls the “Stoic
Providence-Fate apparatus.”10 To make sense of this notion, one must turn to his essay “What
is an apparatus?”, where Agamben explains how he redefines Foucault’s concept as a
strategy of governance through which operations of power, lacking any foundation in being,
capture living beings as subjects.11
Agamben derives a Foucauldian definition of governmentality from some criteria
provided in a 1977 interview:12 first, an apparatus “is a heterogeneous set that includes
virtually anything, linguistic and non-linguistic, under the same heading: discourses,
institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on;” in other
words, “the apparatus itself is the network…established between these elements;” second,
“an apparatus has a concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation;”
and third, [an apparatus] appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of
knowledge.”13 He then follows a genealogy for the term “apparatus” through Foucault’s
earlier use of the term positivité, Jean Hyppolite’s use of the same term,14 Hegel’s account of
“positive or natural religion,”15 and the Church Fathers’ debates over a divine “dispositio,”16
which translates the Greek term oikonomia into Latin. He arrives finally at Aristotle’s
Politics, where the philosopher uses the term oikonomia in a strictly practical sense, to
characterize the “management of domestic affairs.”17 The decisive transformation comes,
Agamben explains, in the second century AD, when the Church Fathers extended the sense of
the term oikonomia to express the separation of the Father and the Son as an “economy of
redemption and salvation,” so that a fracture within the divine being was resolved only by
relocating itself as an irreparable division between God’s being as the reigning Father and his
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praxis as the Son and the Spirit governing in the world, a dividsion that ultimately conditions
the later terms of this genealogy.18 Agamben concludes, “The term apparatus designates that
in which, and through which, “a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in
being,” is realized. “This is the reason why apparatuses must always imply a process of
subjectification, that is to say, they must also produce their subject.”19
This genealogy only gets Agamben so far. In fact, by clarifying that all the multivalent
apparatuses Foucault discusses in his lectures can be traced to a paradigmatic original, he
places his own definition beyond the theological oikonomia and its secularization in Hegel,
Hyppolite, and Foucault, so that he can situate it within a bipolar relation: on one side of a
“massive partitioning of beings,” there are living beings or substances, and on the other there
are “the apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured.” Subjectivity intervenes
as a third term here, insofar as Agamben calls a subject “that which results from the relation
and…the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses.”
1.2 Stoic physics and the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” in “The Providential Machine”
Now it is possible to return to Agamben’s discussion of the “Stoic providence-fate
apparatus” in “The Providential Machine,” and to clarify how the Stoics, by correlating
providence and fate, constructed an apparatus of the kind Agamben describes. Agamben will
conclude here that—this is the first item on the handout—the Stoics, by initiating a debate
that coordinated fate and providence in “a bipolar system,” “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;” and that the “effectual ontology” elaborated through that
debate, which only ever worked toward a “functional correlation” of these indifferent
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oppositions, “in a way contains the condition of possibility” for modern governmentality.20 If
an apparatus, as I have already argued, means for Agamben a strategy of governance through
which operations of power, lacking any foundation in being, capture living beings as
subjects, then the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” is that original modality of
“governance,” through which operations of power capture all living beings as subjects of a
fate lacking a sure foundation in being and a divine providence only ever coordinated with
that fate.21
[This position bears some resemblance to Victor Goldschmidt’s description of Stoic
providence.22 Agamben’s argument also aims to correct Foucault’s genealogy of
governmentality, pushing it back from the Early Modern period to antiquity.]
In sections 5.3-5.6 of “The Providential Machine,” Agamben argues that the ancient
debate over providence was not concerned primarily to show that man is free, but rather to
explain how “a divine government of the world,” the paradigmatic form of governmentality,
is possible.23 As evidence that the Stoics, in order to produce a theory of a government of the
world, first advanced a philosophical “coordination and articulation of special [providence],”
which attends to particular things and events, and general providence,”24 which attends to the
general order of things, Agamben relies primarily upon three texts: a fragment of Chrysippus’
Peri Pronoias quoted in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights, Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On
Providence, and Plutarch’s De Fato.
Agamben only references the passage from Chrysippus, the second item on your
handout, but actually quotes Leibniz, who is in turn quoting from his Theodicy a paraphrase
Bayle had made of the passage from the Attic Nights [this is the handout 2, which appears
with the original text]. He argues that the passage shows how Stoic thought 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.”25 In response to the question whether
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providence is responsible for such apparent afflictions to mankind as diseases, 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; they came about as a sequel to
the work, they existed only as consequences which were somehow necessary, and which
Chrysippus defined as kata parakolouthēsin [according to concomitance].”26 This
rationalization of such apparent afflictions to humanity, which accounts for the fragility of
the human skull as a seemingly negative, but unavoidable “concomitant effect” of a primarily
positive design, introduces a gap between one order of providential causality and a second,
unintentional causality that unfolds “according to concomitance.”
For Chrysippus, these seem to be two ways of looking at the same providence,27 but
through the centuries the gap widened into the distinction “general providence” and “special
providence.” Agamben introduces Alexander of Aphrodisias, an Aristotelian commentator
opposed to the Stoics’ account of providence, because his account is essential for
understanding how the apparatus the Stoics constructed would come to involve both
providence and fate. Specifically, where Alexander objects to the Stoics’ view is their
confidence that God’s providence “looks after both the world in general and particular
things.”28 In the passage quoted at handout 3, Alexander holds that, since God must be
greater than a master of an oikos or a king, he must only “prefer to exercise his providence in
a universal and general way,” not intervening in particular circumstances. Were he to attend
to every particular substance and event, the deity’s practice of oikonomia would be more
slavish even than a mere human’s.29
A division is apparent here, Agamben suggests, between providence “kat’hauto,” or
providence “in itself,” and providence “kata symbebēkos,” or providence “by accident,”—
terms Alexander defines in the passages at handout 4. Providence “in itself” “sets as [its] aim
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to benefit the object in question, and in view of this benefit he acts and carries out actions by
means of which he considers himself to be able to achieve the aim that he has set;”
providence “by accident” occurs “when the one that is said to be providing for does not do
anything to benefit the one which he provides for, but it happens that the latter takes some
benefit from the thing the other does.”30 This second, accidental providence involves a
problem, though, because, although God cannot be so low as to fuss over particulars, he also
cannot be “completely unaware of this accidental consequence.”
Alexander resorts to another explanation for God’s knowing neglect of particulars; on
this model, described at handout 5 the divine being may not knowingly make provision for
particular cases, but “the divine power which is also called “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.”31
Intermediate between “for itself” and “by accident,” nature thus appears to be unwilled by
God and to act involuntarily, yet it is not accidental. Through what Alexander calls a “divine
technique” (149), nature acts independently of providence in general to realize an accord with
that providence, so that their separation is nevertheless correlated and coordinated without
“eliminating [the] accidental character” of particular events. In the sixth passage on the
handout, Alexander concludes that “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.” According to Alexander, God, or any being providing for another accidentally,
does not take the benefit achieved as a final cause, but the end is nevertheless achieved;
insofar as nature intervenes, he is also not the efficient cause, but the sequence of events is all
the same coordinated with God’s will and his knowledge of the outcomes.
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Agamben concludes his discussion of Alexander by remarking how this theory of
providence was not meant to describe a government of the world, but that it nevertheless
develops in a contingent way a correlation of the general and particular that amounts to this.
He explains at handout 7 that, “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,32 “it will in any case need to pass through the very nature of
things and follow their immanent ‘economy.’” 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.”33
Turning to Plutarch, Agamben explains how providence “by accident” comes to be
theorized not simply as natural contingency, but as “heimarmenē” or “fate.” He says that
Plutarch, in the De Fato, is “following a Stoic model” that “redouble[s] ontology into a
pragmatics,” so that fate must be understood both as ousia (substance) and as energeia
(activity).34 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.” As energeia, fate is assimilated by Plutarch to the nomos
“determining the course of everything that must come to pass”—in other words, he
assimilates it to the law of nature.35
Agamben stresses that, once the paradigm of law governs the connection between fate
in general (kata meros) and fate in particular (kath’ ekasta), particular facts can only be
regarded as the result of efficient causes that follow a general law.36 He explains, “Plutarch
thus identifies what pertains to destiny”—and I should add that destiny is used here as
another word for fate—“with what is effectual or conditional (to ex hypotheseōs),”37 or, as he
quotes Plutarch’s own words at handout 8, “with that which is not laid down independently,
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but in some fashion is really “subjoined” to something else, wherever there is an expression
implying that if one is true, another follows.”38 According to this account, the claim that
“everything happens according to destiny” (panta kath’ heimarmenēn, 570c) applies only to
consequences and effects, never to these conditional antecedents, which have the character of
hypothetical laws or of “what has been established primarily [proēgēsamenois] in the divine
appointment of things.”39 Agamben concludes that “destiny” or fate “divides what is real into
two different levels: that of the proēgoumena, general antecedents, 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.”40
Plutarch also describes three levels of providence. A first providence is identified, as in
Alexander, with the intellection and will of the primary god (572f); only this providence
should be considered providence in the true sense (573b). This first providence also generates
a second providence, though, “created together with destiny” or fate and “included in the first
providence” (574b)—these are the secondary gods who dwell in the heavens. Then, as the
third providence, there is the whole array of demonic beings, “who are commissioned to
oversee and order the individual actions of men.” 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 legislation appropriate to the soul’s of men”
(573d). This analogy leads Agamben to the conclusion he intends to derive from this
analysis. As we have seen, the law of fate proceeds from proēgoumena, or primary
antecedents of a hypothetical and general character, which are in fate but do not occur
according to fate, to consequences or effects of the proēgoumena, while providence presides
over that fate as a legislating will and intelligence that gives birth to that law. In other words,
Agamben argues that providence stands in relation to fate as a proēgoumenon or a primary
antecedent does with respect to its consequence or effect, so that fate must be considered a
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consequence of providence. This duplicity of fate, consequent with respect to providence but
primary with respect to its particular effects, shows how the providence-fate apparatus
coordinates a bipolar system that produces a zone of indifference between antecedent and
consequent, general and particular, final cause and effects.
Part II: Agamben’s “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” in Seneca’s Dialogorum liber XI
2.1 Introduction
To enable his interpretation of others’ texts, Agamben often employs in his analyses the
concept of Entwicklungsfähigkeit, which he sometimes credits to Feuerbach and translates as
“capacity for development.”41 At this point, I’ll take Agamben’s analysis in another direction,
and consider its exemplarity for reading other Stoic texts upon which Agamben himself has
never commented. My assumption here is that, in Agamben’s writings which demonstrate the
Entwicklungsfahigkeit of ancient Stoicism, one discovers also a certain way of reading which
highlights the “capacity for the development” of both Agamben’s own philosophy and
contemporary Stoicism. I’ve chosen the Consolation to Polybius because it stages the
principal theme of the Homo Sacer series, that is, the violent intimacy shared between
sovereign power and what Agamben calls bare life, or life void of any “form” or “way” of
life, of any “bios,” life reduced only to its mere biological existence or its “zoē.”42 Because
the Consolation to Polybius positions Seneca, the author composing this text in exile, as bare
life, his very act of writing the text itself becomes an expression of bare life’s intimate
relation with sovereign power.
In my reading I’ll examine three topics which illustrate how each of Agamben’s
analyses of Stoicism in the Homo Sacer series may be brought to bear upon the Consolation
to Polybius. I argue that the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” functions in this text according
to the logic that Agamben describes, creating “a zone of indifference” between “primary and
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secondary, general and particular, and efficient and final causes.” Because of this, Seneca, as
bare life separated from all social relations but nevertheless subject to power relations with
the emperor, may seem a mere “secondary agent” of Claudius’ will, performing the officia of
a consolator within the government of self and others established by Claudius’ sovereignty;
but he may also make use of himself to establish a certain primacy over Claudius, using him
as a means to secure support for his return from exile.
2.2 Nature, Fate, and Fortune in Seneca’s Consolation to Polybius
Seneca’s Consolation to Polybius, composed sometime between the end of February in
41 and mid-year in 43 CE, takes the form of an open letter to a fellow court attendant,
philosopher, and literary author whose brother has suffered an untimely death.43 As a
consolation, the text necessarily deals with an economy of loss, wherein the aim of the
consolator is to compensate a consolandus’ experience of loss with arguments that
rationalize the loss. To understand why Seneca, an exile in need of consolation himself, turns
to writing a consolation to Polybius, I’ll show how both Polybius’ experience of loss and
Seneca’s attempt to console him for that loss are situated in the text within a “providence-fate
apparatus” of the kind which Agamben describes. The guiding insight here is that terms such
as nature and fate, employed everywhere in the consolation, should have a strategic function,
in the sense that they must “capture living beings” within “operations of power,” inscribing
those living beings as “subjects.”
According to the classical Stoic position, providence, fate, and nature are all one and
the same thing, so that they should be the only “operation of power.”44 As we saw in the
fragment of Chrysippus, the Stoics allow no separation of providence and fate; there are only
providence’s perfect action and the potentially negative, “concomitant effects” of that action.
Viewed from the sage’s horizon, it is impossible to regard these as negative. Much of
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Seneca’s consolatory argumentation will be aimed at establishing this position. In the first
paragraph, the surviving text begins by advancing natural law’s universality as a source of
consolation. Seneca describes the rise and fall of all generated things, even advancing the
prospect of universal conflagration, and concludes at handout 9 that, “It is the greatest
consolation to consider that, that which has happened to him, all before have suffered and all
will suffer; and thus nature, “rerum natura,” seems to me to have made common what it has
made difficult, so that the equality [of fate] might console the cruelty of fate.” Already here
one can see that fate and nature are assimilated, treated in fact as interchangeable. But
moreover nature-fate is characterized both as a constructive force, and at least some of the
Latin suggests that it is also conceived as a legal apparatus. Seneca will return to this idea
several times, and I have included further evidence on the handout at 10-13. I will forego
working through them though. The point to take away is that throughout the consolation
Seneca presents nature and fate as interchangeable terms for identifying the necessity that
governs the world with a perfectly consistent legal order.
Along the way, though, a third term is also introduced, which presses against the
coherent and complete necessity of fate and nature. That is fortune. As Kajanto has
explained, “It is problematic how immovable and inexorable Fate may be reconciled with a
fickle power which is its very opposite.”45 The Consolation to Polybius is no exception. In
fact, the text begins with two long laments at 2.2-7 and 3.4-5, in which Seneca protests
against fortune’s injustice to Polybius, now blaming her for bringing death upon Polybius’
brother. 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
himself 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 even to intrude upon Caesar’s palace,
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bringing the misfortune of death upon them. Fortune, the very personification of
unpredictable contingency, appears in this text as an enemy who brings death and loss
without regard for what is orderly, consistent, and good. How can she be understood to
coexist with fate and nature, whose providence is universal, legally consistent, and good?
At 18.3, number 14 on the handout, Seneca suggests that fate, nature, and fortune could
perhaps be reconciled; As for Fortune herself, he writes, “even if it is not possible now before
you to plead her case…still at some time I must defend her, as soon as the day 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.” So here it
is Fortune who has given Polybius his brother, but just a moment ago I read a passage from
paragraph 10 in which “the nature of things” had given Polybius his brother. This passage
introduces a problem of perspective: Polybius may not appreciate that Fortune offers him
favors in his present condition. It’s helpful to introduce here Elizabeth Asmis’s recent
suggestion that Fortune herself may well be only a vanishing presence, a force 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, must vanish from all causal accounts as nothing more
than a false judgment.46 This would explain how, first, Seneca could give Fortune and nature
equal credit for giving Polybius his brother, second, how Fortune and nature could cooperate,
since they are ultimately two ways of looking at the same thing, just as nature and fate are
two different conceptions of the same thing,47 and finally how Fortune could be said to
“provide” for Polybius in this passage with other compensations. All of these agents, nature,
fate, and fortune, are ultimately so many proxies for providence.
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2.3 Subjectivity and Officium of Subjects of the Providence-Fate Apparatus
There is a danger that, if Fortune is too quickly assimilated to nature and fate, Polybius’
“progressor’s view” of her is simply discounted. Here Agamben’s account of the “Stoic
providence-fate apparatus” is especially helpful, even if Seneca identifies all these (only
apparently) negative concomitant effects of providence with Fortune, not Nature or Fate. So,
only as long as one keeps Fortune in view can one, with Agamben, 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 then a partial view, but one which records an important fact:
the separation between the order of providence or fate and the seeming contingency of
fortune. It is in this sense that the subjectivity of living beings is essential to the providence-
fate apparatus, which by definition involves providence and fate as operations of power that
come into existence by capturing living beings as subjects.
Up to now, I’ve proceeded as if Seneca has at his command the sage’s awareness of the
illusory nature of Fortune. In truth, it’s not so simple. At times, as in the passage on Fortune’s
defensibility (18.3), he seems to transcend every finite horizon of understanding and to
recognize fortune and nature’s unity, as a sage would; at other times, he seems to be even
more dismayed by his bad fortune than Polybius, so that he is unreliable as a consoler. For
example, he concludes the consolation with a pitiful recusatio—this is handout 15, where
Seneca confesses that his “worn-out and dulled mind… cannot be free to attend to the
consolation of another, because his own troubles keep him occupied.” This is hardly the
pschological repose of the sapiens.48 His mental fragility is also apparent in his account of
how he arrived at this condition; there, he digresses to touch upon the circumstances of a trial
before the senate in which Seneca himself was sentenced to death. In paragraph 13.2-3,
handout 16, he writes that “[Caesar] has not so cast me down, that he would not want me to
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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.” So here we
have an account of how Seneca’s punishment was reduced to relegation to Corsica, the status
and place from which he writes. This passage clarifies how Seneca is an example of bare life:
having passed through a social death, Claudius restores him to the security of his biological
life but deprives him of his social identity. The more specific point I am making about
Seneca’s subjectivity is that his account is both lucid and delusional, at once reporting the
true sequence of causality and mistaking Fortune as the cause of his exile.49 Still, that Seneca
may mistake Fortune as the agent who punished him, and that now it is Claudius who, like
nature or fortune elsewhere in the letter, gives life,50 may indicate a deeper relationship
between Claudius and Fortune, as if contingency and negative concomitant effects actually
fall to him.
But Seneca’s confusion about his circumstances is nevertheless evident, and his
capacity to act as a consoler for Polybius should thus be regarded with at least moderate
suspicion. So, if Seneca is a Stoic progressor who may even be more compromised by his
grief for his exile than Polybius is by his grief for his brother’s death, then why has he
appointed himself the task of consoling Polybius? The answer can also be found in paragraph
13, number 17 on your handout, where Seneca explains that he is trying to make himself
useful to the emperor, saying that, Claudius “knows best the time at which he ought to help
anyone; I will apply all my effort, so that he may not blush to rescue me.” Though Seneca, as
bare life, has been separated from every social relation, he nevertheless persists as a subject
of power relations with the emperor. According to Agamben’s argument in the first volume
of the Homo Sacer series, sovereign power and bare life are conjoined with each other, since
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sovereign power only comes into existence by extracting a remainder of sacred life, detached
from those subjects over whom he holds the power of life and death;51 in other words, the
princeps, explicitly mentioned at 16.6 when Seneca pleads with Fortune to leave untested the
emperor’s inviolability, only derives his sacred status from the accursed status of bare life.
So, his subjection to the emperor’s power relations are the only connection to social relations
left to him; because of this, if he wants to make the most of his situation, he must somehow
make himself worthy of the emperor’s clemency.
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 useful to the emperor. Here
again we may turn to Agamben for help, this time to “The Genealogy of Office.” I don’t have
time to go through Agamben’s discussion, which revisits Foucault’s late analyses of the
government of self and others, but there are a couple points that I will borrow from his
analysis. In this chapter from Opus Dei, Agamben argues that Cicero’s translation of the
Stoic term kathēkonta with the Latin officia transformed the meaning of the kathēkonta,
which Agamben follows Victor Goldschmidt in regarding as “devoir des situations,” or
“what is respectable and appropriate to do according to the circumstances, above all taking
account of the agent’s social condition.”52 Polybius, for example, has a definable social
position as the secretary a libellis—or the official charged with responsibility for receiving
and reviewing petitions to the emperor.
In paragraph 6, on your handout at 18, Seneca explains how Polybius’ “great persona”
disallows certain actions and requires others; that this paragraph concerns officia is clear
from the use of the word at 6.4 (although I haven’t included that sentence). I note once again
the proximity of Fortune and Claudius, who are both said to have elevated Polybius to his
status. The officia assigned by Caesar or Fortune come into focus, though, especially at the
end of the paragraph where Seneca contrasts the advantages and disadvantages of his and
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Polybius’ respective positions: “Many things are not allowed to you, which are allowed to the
lowest and to those cast into some corner of the world…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 great a mass of affairs gathering from
the whole world is to be dispatched, so that it is can be subjected to the princeps’ most
excellent soul to 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.” Note here
the use of the gerundive form of dispono, from which dispositio is derived as a deverbative;
what Seneca describes here is something like Polybius’ precise contribution to the functional
oikonomia coordinated with Claudius’ providential sovereignty in the empire; it is almost as
if Claudius’ role as princeps stands with respect to the palatine functionaries, the senate, and
the equestrians and legions scattered through the empire as providence operates in
coordination with fate in the passage from Plutarch’s De Fato. The passage also clarifies how
Polybius’ 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.””53 In order to fulfill the duties that fall to him as the emperor’s
secretary a libellis, Polybius must rationally manage his grief, governing his life in
accordance with what his status demands. A collateral effect of this self-government is, then,
that Polybius may be able to secure Seneca’s recall from exile.
“The Genealogy of Office” also shows how Cicero’s use of officium as a translation for
kathēkonta transformed the concept. He continues, “What is decisive… is that…the politician
and the jurist’s attention is shifted from the carrying out of individual acts,” that is, from the
devoirs des situations, “to the “use of life” as a whole; that is, it is identified with the
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“institution of life” as such, with the condition and the status that define the very existence of
human beings in society.” The concept of officium, unlike the concept of kathēkonta, may
apply to human life as such, so that Agamben can write that, “It is from this perspective that
Seneca 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…” With this
expansion of the Stoic concept through Cicero’s translation, it is possible to search for an
officium humanum that would be proper to Seneca even as bare life. That is, he need not have
a defined social position to have the officium of sociabilitas, which marks the human
“capacity for socialization.” Seneca’s appointment of consolation as a task for himself now
can be made clear: though he may not be as well positioned to console Polybius as he could
be, as a “member of the great body” of humankind, he still possesses the potential for social
interaction necessary to the execution of this officium.54
It would seem then that the challenge for Seneca will be to comport himself and
“conform the use of his life” 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, but no guarantee that he will be effective. Beyond disparaging his
attempt at 18.9, he even makes clear his confidence that Claudius will be a better consoler at
12.4 and 14.1-2. Seneca’s strategy, then, to perform his officium as a consolator effectively is
in fact to vanish behind the voice of Claudius, which he features in a consolatory
prosopopoeia from 14.2-16.3. Once again, Agamben’s comments in “The Genealogy of
Office” can explain 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 two terms correspond to the Aristotelian notions of praxis,
action with an aim inherent to its performance, and poiesis, action with an aim in the finished
product, while gerere has no Greek equivalent. Instead, it “designates…the specifically
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Roman concept of the activity of one who is invested with a public function of
governance.”55 He concludes that officium involves action of this kind, not praxis or poiesis.
He will finally compare this “sustaining” action to the function of the minister in the
sacrament, who does not act in the sense of praxis or poiesis, but rather “supports” the action
of the principal agent in the manner of an instrumental cause. I suggest that this way of
conceiving the action involved in officium illuminates not only the officia of Polybius, who
acts on behalf of Claudius, but also Seneca, who even assumes the role of a kind of priestly
interpres with respect to Claudius, who is characterized at 14.2 as an oracle: handout 19,
“When he speaks, his words, delivered as if from some oracle, will have an impressive
weight; his divine authority will beat the entire force of your grief.” In order to achieve the
goal of consolation, to perform an officium humanum, Seneca becomes a means with respect
to an end of which he imagines Claudius would approve.
2.4 Conclusion: Use of the Self and Oikeiosis; Contingency and Freedom
Searching in this way to find a place for himself within the apparatus, Seneca strives to
become an operative subject, to have a function in the relations of power, to comport himself
and his discourse as an effective medium supportive of Claudius’ divine, salvific action. In
his commentary on the Stoic providence-fate apparatus, and especially in his discussion of
Plutarch’s De Fato, Agamben establishes that the apparatus only achieves a “functional
correlation” of several bipolarities: efficient and final causes, means and ends, consequences
and antecedents, the general and the particular. Because the apparatus does not go beyond
correlating these terms, they are given to a kind of reversibility or even become reducible, so
that ends can become means, final causes can become efficient causes, and antecedent terms
can become consequent, as if they exist only in “a zone of indifference.” In the Consolation
to Polybius, Fortune names a similar mutability intruding among the coherence and
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consistency of nature and fate. It is therefore possible to identify in her a point of reversal in
the text of the Consolation, an element of contingency that allows the text to be legible from
another point of view. On this reading, Seneca would be “making use of himself,” Claudius,
and the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus,” in order to reverse the poles, so that what seems to
be the consequent and end of this discourse, consoling Polybius, may itself become primary
and the means of another end: namely, securing his recall from exile. In this way, Seneca
would take advantage of the apparatus and its zones of indifference.
In “L’uso di sé,” the fifth chapter of L’uso dei corpi, Agamben’s most recent discussion
of Stoicism supports “the hypothesis,” on your handout at 20, “that, well beyond a simple
intersection [linking oikeiosis to the use of the self], the doctrine of oikeiosis becomes
intelligible only if it is intended as a doctrine of the use of the self.” Agamben’s argument
pushes Thomas Bénatouïl’s work on use into a dispute with Foucault and Heidegger on the
primacy of use over care, in order to establish two points: first, through a reading of Diogenes
Laertius VII.85 (SVF 3, 178) that a living being cannot be made extraneous or unfamiliar to
itself, in other words, that living beings are inalienably themselves; and second, through
Seneca’s Epistle 121 that oikeiosis does not aim to constitute the individual, but rather “the
self itself.” 56 This “relational conception” of the self, furthermore, is not “something
substantial,” nor does it have a “preestablished end” in filling out our “innate knowledge;”
rather, because the use of the body proceeds from a natural predisposition and involves
synaesthesia, or simultaneous awareness, of the body’s constitution and the self, “it coincides
entirely with the use which the living being makes [of itself].”57
If the living being is inalienable to himself, then Seneca’s assumption of the voice of
Claudius appears in a different light. Perhaps the prosopopoeia at 14.2-16.3 can be read not
as a ritual act whereby Seneca becomes the medium for Claudius’ oracular presence, but
rather as an act of oikeiosis or appropriation. This would not rule out the possibility that
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Seneca performs an officium, but it would change the purpose of that performance. By
identifying with Claudius’ voice, assuming it, and using it to console Polybius, Seneca can
reverse the poles of the apparatus and make himself the end of Polybius’ consolation, which
then becomes a means. That is to say, by introducing the emperor’s authority to bring
consolation to Polybius, Seneca can restore Polybius to his proper officium as secretary a
libellis; if Polybius is restored to his operativity and resumes his function within the
oikonomia of the palace administration, then having received a benefit from Seneca, he may
be inclined to hear Seneca’s case for clemency favorably. In this way, Seneca can make use
of the apparatus’s inversions of means and ends, efficient and final causes.
This reading will only be convincing if there is some textual support for it. I think there
is in the figure of Fortuna. Twice now I have indicated that Fortuna and Claudius share a
certain virtual identity. Furthermore, in the prosopopoeia at paragraphs 14.2-16.3, it is once
again Fortune who intrudes upon the sacred person of the princeps by attacking members of
his family, just as she has attacked Polybius’ brother. But if Claudius can be assimilated to
Fortune, if they can be regarded as interchangeable in some sense, just as fortune, fate, and
nature are so many names for general providence, then the contingency that divides and
functionally correlates providence and fate also divides Claudius’ mastery in his domus and
his sovereignty in the empire before it correlates it. Claudius’ consolatory speech exposes the
fracture in his own palace between Julians and Claudians, most dramatically exemplified
when Claudius comes to his own grandfather, Mark Antony, who, as Seneca’s Claudius puts
it at paragraph 16, sacrificed twenty legions at the battle of Actium to his brother Lucius,
whom Octavian had killed. At once highlighting the violence which the Julio-Claudians
regularly inflicted on each other—and which brought Seneca to ruin—and associating that
violence with the contingency of Claudius’ rule, Seneca would seem to be presenting the
emperor Claudius’ mastery within his palatial domus, which is somehow itself a microcosm
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of providential government, subordinate to the macrocosmic providence of nature or fate, as
unstable, reversible, and contingent. Claudius’ proximity to nature, fate, and providence
likewise destabilizes their generality; the “special providence” that his reign represents can
unsettle the unity of nature and fate’s “general providence,” once he is associated with
Fortune. In this way, these seemingly cosmic forces can 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, namely, 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.
If the political present, as Agamben has explained, is characterized by a massive
proliferation of apparatuses, through which subjectivities rise and fall, then perhaps other
Stoic texts, like Seneca’s Consolation to Polybius, can be appropriated for a common use in
the present, as a kind of lesson in making use of ourselves, our situations, and the apparatuses
that bind us.
1 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population : Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977-78 (Basingstoke ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan : République Française, 2007). 2 Each is identified at fns. 7, 8, and 9. 3 L.D. Reynolds, ed., L. Annaei Senecae dialogorum libri duodecim (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 266-290. For comparanda, I have relied upon the standard references works by von Arnim (abbreviated SVF) and Long & Sedley (abbreviated LS). 4 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 71-115. 5 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 15-66. 6 Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Homo Sacer Ii, 2), trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (with Matteo Mandarini) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 109-43. 7 Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty, trans. Adam Kotsko (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 65-86. 8 Giorgio Agamben, L’uso dei corpi (Homo Sacer, IV, 2) (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2014), 78-87. 9 The term “common use” is Agamben’s. Giorgio Agamben, "What Is an Apparatus?," in What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 24. 10 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 123. 11 This is a paraphrase of Agamben’s definition; see fn. 20 below. 12 E.g. Foucault, Security, territory, population. Agamben, “What is an apparatus?”, 1. 13 “What is an apparatus?”, 1-2. 14 Ibid., 3-4. 15 Ibid., 4-6. 16 Ibid., 8-12. 17 Ibid., 9; Politics 1255b21.
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18 “What is an apparatus?”, 10-12. 19 Agamben, “What is an apparatus?”, 11. 20 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 122. 21 This would seem to imply that in the time between when Agamben published “What is an apparatus?” and when he published The Kingdom and the Glory, he had considerably altered his thinking on the origin of apparatuses. But we should not confuse the concept of an apparatus, that is, a dispositif, dispositio, or oikonomia, with the concept of governmentality, which Agamben understands as originally expressed through the paradigm of gubernatio mundi, but he also conceives as an oikonomia, insofar as it is guided by providence. The Kingdom and the Glory, 111. 22 Victor Goldschmidt. Le système stoïcien et l’idée de temps, 3rd edition (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1977) 48. “Si, à la place des Formes et du Premier Moteur, les Stoïciens mettent le Monde et le Dieu corporel, ils ne remplacent pas seulement l’idée par le corps, mais la cause finale par la cause motrice, c’est-à-dire, à leur gré, le projet par l’activité. A cela est liée la deuxième transformation dont nous avons déjà parlé : l’éternité qui convenait à la remplacée par un rythme périodique ; l’éternité invertébrée, tout près du non-être, par un temps articulé. La troisième transformation consiste à remplacer le présent des philosophies éternitaires dans le temps réel, à en faire même le seul temps réel (donc à conférer desnité et épaisseur à l’instant mathématique d’Aristote), mais précisément du temps, et non plus l’éternité. Il fallait alors protéger ce présent temporel contre les ratifiées par Platon, en transportant au présent temporel toute la consistance que les anciens avaient attribuée à l’éternité.” 23 Cf. LS 46G 3 (Aristocles in Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica 15.14.2; SVF 1.98), 55M (Stobaeus I.79,1-12; SVF 2.913), 55N (Alexander, On Fate, 191,30-192,28; SVF 2.945), 57F 3 (Cicero De finibus 3.62-8) 67K (Seneca De otio, 4.1), and 67L (Arius Didymus in Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica 15.15.3-5; SVF 2.528). 24 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 114. 25 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 115. 26 Leibniz, Theodicy, 258; reproduced in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 115. 27 Cf. Stobaeus I.79,1-12 (SVF 2.913): “(I) Chrysippus calls the substance of fate a power of breath, carrying out the orderly government of all [...] (2) But in On seasons book 2, in On fate, and here nad there in other works, he expresses a variety of views: ‘Fate is the rationale of the world,’ or ‘the rationale of providence’s acts of government in the world’, or the rationale in accordance with which past events have happened, present events are happening, and future events will happen’. (3) And as substitute [sic] for ‘rationale’ he uses ‘truth’, ‘explanation’, ‘nature’, ‘necessity’, and further terms, taking these to apply to the same substance from different points of view.” (my italics; LS, 55M). 28 Alexander of Aphrodisias, La Provvidenza, 102-103; quoted in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 115. 29 Alexander of Aphrodisias, La Provvidenza, 117-119; quoted in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 116. 30 Alexander of Aphrodisias, La Provvidenza, 236, quoted in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 117-118. 31 Alexander of Aphrodisias, La Provvidenza, 151, quoted in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 117. 32 Cf. LS 54T (Plutarch, On Stoic self-contradictions 1050c-d; SVF 2.937). There Chrysippus’ position clearly actively involves providence in every sequence of causes, every chance event, and every particular movement. Calcidius 144 contrasts Chrysippus’ view, that providence as God’s active willing each event and circumstance that comes about is also fate, so that the two refer to the same thing by different names, with Cleanthes’ view, who holds 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” (LS 54U; SVF 2.933). Chrysippus can be understood to take a similar view at LS 54S (Plutarch, On Stoic self-contradictions 1051b-c; SVF 2.1178). All of this would indicate that the kind of position Alexander takes was already potentially available to the Old Stoa. 33 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 118-119. 34 Ibid., 120. 35 De Fato, 568d; Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 120. 36 De Fato, 569d; Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 120. 37 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 120. 38 De Fato, 570a; quoted in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 121. 39 De Fato, 570e; Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 121. 40 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 121. 41 Agamben, “What is an apparatus?”, 13. 42 In Agamben’s writings, bare life has numerous figures, but he exemplifies it most frequently with the Roman homo sacer, who gives his status as the name for Agamben’s Homo Sacer series. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 71-103. 43 Few take seriously Diderot’s notorious attempt to undermine the authenticity of this work, although K. Buresch seems to have supported it, arguing that the forger must have read Dio Cassius LXI 10.2, placing the date of the forged letter to the third century CE. Denis Diderot, "La Consolation À Polybe," in Essai Sur Les
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Règnes De Claude Et De Néron Et Sur Les Moeurs Et Les Écrits De Sénèque, ed. J. Assézat (Paris: 1875; reprint, Oeuvres complètes), 345-53; Carolus Buresch, Consolationum a Graecis Romanisque Scriptarum Historia Critica, vol. 9, 1, Leipziger Studien (Leipzig 1887), 114; J. E. Atkinson, "Seneca's 'Consolatio Ad Polybium'," in Principat: Sprache und Literatur (Literatur der Julisch-Claudischen und der Flavischen Zeit [Forts.]), ed. Wolfgang Haase (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 861; Karlhans Abel, "Das Problem Der Faktizität Der Senecanischen Korrespondenz," Hermes 109(1981): 472-99. On the question of the letter’s authenticity and possible later revisions, see especially Miriam T. Griffin, Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics, 2nd, enlarged ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 415, 27; W. H. Alexander, "Seneca's Ad Polybium De Consolatione: A Reappraisal," Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 37, no. 3.2 (1943): 35-36; Francesco Giancotti, "La Consolazione Di Seneca a Polibio in Cassio Dione Lxi, 10, 2," Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica 84(1956): 32-33; K. Münscher, "Senecas Werk. Untersuchungen Zur Abfassungszeit Und Echtheit," Philologus 16 (Supplement), no. 1 (1922): esp. 31; W. Isleib, "De Senecae Dialogo Undecimo Qui Est Ad Polybium De Consolatione" (diss., 1906), 2, where he cites Cicero, Ad Atticum XIII, 13.1, and Ovid, Trist. I.7.13 and 23. 44 See fns. 28 and 33 above. 45 I. Kajanto, "Fortuna," ANRW II.17.1(1981): 542. He is less on track in what follows, when he says, “It is, however, futile to expect excessive consistency in a writer like Seneca, who was not so much an original thinker as a disseminator of Stoic doctrines.” This view of Seneca’s work has fallen out of fashion to the extent that originality in the creation of new philosophical arguments is not the sole measure of a philosopher’s worth, and an appreciation of literary method has shown how consistency may be achieved through a variety of strategies beyond discursive presentation bound by logical sequence. Kajanto is closer to the right track when he points out, “The ancient Stoics, who defined tyche as ‘indiscernable cause’, also asserted that “the sage is unhurt by tyche.”” "Fortuna," ANRW II.17.1(1981): 543. 46 Elizabeth Asmis, “Seneca on fortune and the kingdom of God,” in Seneca and the Self, ed. by Shadi Bartsch and David Wray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 115-138. 47 Cf. fns 28, 33, and 45 above. 48 Contrast Ep. 9.16 (LS 46O; SVF 2.1065). 49 Giardina argues on the basis of this passage that Claudius did not appear in court as princeps senatus when Seneca was tried, that he was at least “formally” unaware of the circumstances of Seneca’s trial. Substantially, he may have actually orchestrated the trial, but he maintained distance from it publicly. She holds that a senator, at the urging of Messalina, must have introduced the charges against Seneca. Andrea Giardina, "Storie Riflesse: Claudio E Seneca," in Seneca E Il Suo Tempo, ed. Piergiorgio Parroni (Rome: Salerno editrice, 2000), 77-79. Still, Seneca holds Claudius responsible for the decision, even if he seems to place the blame on “Fortune,” so there must have been some basis for assuming his knowledge of and even responsibility for the trial and its decisions. Besides, one way or another Claudius did intervene to overrule the Senate’s decision on Seneca’s life. 50 Cf. my comments on 10.4-5 (handout 12) and 18.3 (handout 14) above. 51 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 91-103. 52 Agamben, Opus Dei, 67 53 Agamben, Opus Dei, 74-75. 54 That “consolation” fell among the officia is most evident in Cicero’s writings, e.g. De oratore II.15.64, Fam. 4.5 and 4.6. 55 Agamben, Opus Dei, 82-83. 56 Agamben, L’uso dei corpi, 84. 57 Ibid.