The Highest Poverty Author: [Italy] Giorgio Agamben Translator: Qiu Jie Guangxi Normal University Press

◎ Introduction

In this book, Agamben attempts to examine a life closely related to form by studying typical cases of the monastic system, and to reconstruct the important concept of "form-life" (forma-di-vita). The author first faces the question of the relationship between rules and life. The dialectical relationship between the two points to the rituals that have long occupied a core position in church history. "Rituals and rules" becomes the theme of the second part of this book. The religious movement in the 12th and 13th centuries, represented by St. Francis, posed new challenges to the church tradition since the Middle Ages; the Franciscans no longer defined their experience from the perspective of doctrine and canon law, but from the perspective of life. Therefore, the rediscovery and exploration of the concepts of "supreme poverty" and "use" constitute the wonderful finale of this book and also open up new topics. This book was translated from the original Italian by Qiu Jie, a senior Italian translator, and necessary annotations were made.

◎ Editor's Recommendation

How to conceive of a form—life—of the use of body and world that never degenerates into possession? How to think of life as something that is never owned but only used in common?

If rules are completely confused with life, then what are rules? If life cannot be distinguished from rules, then what is human life?

This is the question that Agamben’s book attempts to answer through a passionate reinterpretation of the fascinating but extinct phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. If the book recreates the life of the monks in details of timekeeping and rules, ascetic techniques and liturgy, Agamben’s argument is that the real innovation of monasticism is not the confusion of life and rules but the discovery of a new dimension in which, perhaps for the first time, such “life” affirms itself autonomously, and the claims of “absolute poverty” and “use” have challenged “the law.”

When all forms of life in Western history declined, it was the "form-life" of "supreme poverty", together with the use of things, that opened a new chapter.

◎ Recommendation

Agamben demonstrates an uncanny ability to find enduring significance in corners of the Western tradition while doing justice to their historicity.

—Brian Hamilton, Modern Theology

Agamben knows literature, language, and the nuances required for any deep understanding. This book is not written for monastic and monastic spirituality or theological nourishment, it is written as a political philosophy, concerned with the expendable nature of current rules and the impact they have on our lives.

—Eugene Hensel, The American Benedictine Review

The Highest Poverty offers a fruitful lens through which to examine modernity, its antecedents, and its globally reimagined future. Particularly salient for anthropologists is the book’s focus on practice theory and its important theorizing about the ways in which life is not entirely defined by the logic of capital and institutions.

—Kerry Chance, Anthropology of Southern Africa

Agamben's work is a thought-provoking and rigorously written work. For scholars of monasticism, The Highest Poverty will present old texts in a fruitful new light; for scholars of philosophy and other disciplines, it will suggest new methods and tools that can be applied to different areas of research.

—Joshua Campbell, Journal of Medieval Monarchy Studies

Like much of Agamben’s work, The Highest Poverty combines historical, philosophical, and literary discourse with impressive skill. Agamben’s book provokes insights through juxtapositions, analogies, and acts of theoretical imagination.

--Brian Britt, Religion Magazine

◎ Wonderful book excerpts

Preface

The purpose of this study is to try to construct a "form-life" by clarifying the typical cases of monasticism, a "life" so closely related to its "form" that the two are inseparable. Because of this perspective, the research work first faces the problem of the relationship between rules and life, which defines the mechanism that the monks rely on to achieve their ideal, that is, a common form of life. The strict and complex precepts and ascetic techniques, the cloisters, the chronology, the temptation of solitude, the choral rituals, the admonitions of fellow monks or the severe punishments of superiors, in order to obtain salvation from sin and the world, the monasteries use them to constitute their "regular life"; but what we want to explore is not or not only these, but what we must first understand is the dialectic between the two terms "rules" and "life". In fact, the relationship of unity of opposites grows so closely and intricately between the two that sometimes it melts into a perfect identity in the eyes of modern scholars: "Life is rule" (vita vel regula), which is the statement in the preface of "Regola dei Padri"; for example, the Franciscans said in their "Unmarked Rule": "This is the rule and life of the friars of the Minor Fraternity..." (haec est regula et vita fratrum minorum...) Here, people do not have to worry about whether the conjunctions "vel" and "et" cause semantic ambiguity. Instead, they can regard the monastery as a force field, watching it being penetrated by two opposing and intertwined forces, and in the mutual tension of this pair of forces, some unheard-of new thing, a "form-life", stubbornly approaches its realization, but falls short with the same stubbornness. What monasticism innovated was neither the confusion of life and norms nor the new transformation of the relationship between facts and rights, but the identification of a certain state of life that had never been thought of and that is perhaps unimaginable today, but it is what phrases such as "vita vel regula", "regula and life" (regula et vita), "forma vivendi", and "format vitae" have racked their brains to name. In the expression of these phrases, in order to become signals leading to a third meaning, "rules" and "life" have lost their original familiar meanings, and that third meaning is precisely the mystery that we have to reveal.

But something seems to have prevented the emergence of this third meaning and its understanding throughout the research, and this obstacle is not the insistence on any link, such as vows, declarations, and other arrangements that have a judicial meaning in the modern mind, but the obscurity of an absolutely central phenomenon in the history of the Church, the Eucharist. As for the great temptation faced by monks, it is not what fifteenth-century paintings used to express in half-naked women, nor is it the grotesque demons that entangled the hermit Saint Anthony in paintings; it is the desire to make one's life an integral part of the liturgy, indispensable and uninterrupted. Thus, this study, which originally proposed to define "form-life" through the analysis of monastic institutions, had to work for an unforeseen, at least apparently misleading and irrelevant task, which is an archaeology of liturgical duties, which has been published in a separate book entitled "The Work of God: The Archaeology of Liturgical Duties".

This paradigm, which is both ontological and practical, interweaves existence and action, divinity and humanity, and is what the Church has never stopped shaping and expressing in the course of its history, from the early Apostolic Constitutions (Costituzioni apostoliche) which did not have many precise provisions, to the Rationale divinorum officiorum (Rationale divinorum officiorum) carefully conceived by Guillaume Durand in the 13th century, to the carefully worded papal encyclical Mediator Dei (Mediator of God) in 1947. However, only by completing a preliminary definition of this paradigm can we actually understand the near and far experience involved in "form-life".

If the way of life of monks can only be understood through the assiduous comparison of ritual paradigms, then the key experiment in the research work must be to analyze the religious movements of the 12th and 13th centuries, and Franciscanism is the representative of these movements reaching their peak. The main practice of religious movements no longer stays at the level of doctrine and law, but enters life itself. From this perspective, religious movements represent in every sense that the monastic system has reached a decisive historical node. The strengths, weaknesses, victories and defeats of monasticism have reached the limit of tension at this moment.

To this end, this book will interpret the revelations of Francis and Franciscan theorists on "poverty" and "use", and end with this. Regarding interpretation, one type is early legends and a large amount of saint literature, which whitewashes the masks of either too human madmen and fools or inhuman new Christs, which together cover up the theory of "poverty" and "use"; the other type is annotations such as the Bible or legal texts, which focus on facts rather than the theoretical meaning attached to or contained in the facts, and they limit the Franciscan message to the disciplines of legal history and church history. No matter which type of interpretation, what has not been touched so far may be the most valuable legacy left by the Franciscans. Like a task that cannot be postponed, the Western world will have to go back and confront it again and again: how to think about a "form-life", a human life that is completely out of the control of the law, a use of the body and the world that will never become possession. In other words: think about life, it is never a transfer of ownership, but a common use.

As for such a task, it is necessary to elaborate a theory of "use", which is missing from the Western philosophical system and does not even exist in the most basic principles. From this theory, it is also necessary to criticize the ontology of "operation" and "government", which, under various disguises, continues to determine the fate of mankind. Let us leave this homework to the last volume of "Homo Sacer".

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