Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) by Agamben Giorgio

Author:Agamben, Giorgio [Agamben, Giorgio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

Threshold

Perhaps the most decisive influence that officium as the paradigm of priestly praxis has exercised on Western ontology is the transformation of being into having-to-be and the consequent introduction of duty into ethics as a fundamental concept.

Let us reflect on the striking circularity that we have seen to define officium. The priest must carry out his office insofar as he is a priest and he is a priest insofar as he carries out his office. Being prescribes action, but action completely defines being: “having-to-be” means this and nothing else. The priest is that being whose being is immediately a carrying out and a service—a liturgy.

This insubstantiality of the priest, in which ontology and praxis, being and having-to-be enter into an enduring threshold of indifference, is proven by the doctrine of the character indelebile that confirms priestly ordination starting with Augustine. As the absolute impossibility of identifying any substantial content for it shows, the character expresses nothing but a zero degree of liturgical effectiveness, which is attested as such even when the priest has been suspended a divinis. This means that the priesthood, of which the character is the cipher, is not a real predicate but a pure signature, which manifests only the constitutive excess of effectiveness over being.

Hence the tendentially vanishing quality of the subject whom the signature marks and constitutes. Since he has to be what he does and does what he is, the subject of a liturgical act is not truly a subject (on the theological level this is expressed in the thesis according to which his action, as opus operatum, is done by another, namely Christ). In reality, whoever believes himself to have to perform an act claims not to be, but to have to be. He claims, that is, to dissolve himself entirely into a liturgy. Action as liturgy, and the latter as a circular relation between being and praxis, between being and having-to-be: this is the disquieting inheritance that modernity, from the moment it put duty and office at the center of its ethics and its politics, has more or less consciously accepted without the benefit of an inventory. It is toward this transformation of being into having-to-be—and the ontological proximity between command and office implied in it—that we must now orient our investigation.

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