)RUPVRI3RZHU)RUPVRI/LIH$JDPEHQ૷V)UDQFLVFDQ

7XUQ
:6FRWW%ODQFKDUG

New Literary History, Volume 46, Number 3, Summer 2015, pp. 525-548
(Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2015.0026

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v046/46.3.blanchard.html

Access provided by University of Nebraska - Lincoln (5 Dec 2015 04:52 GMT)

 Forms of Power, Forms of Life: Agamben’s
Franciscan Turn
W. Scott Blanchard

T
he critical interventions and philosophical explorations of
Giorgio Agamben in the many installments of his project, Homo
sacer, have just recently come to an end with the publication of
L’uso dei corpi in the autumn of 2014. Beginning with reflections on the
Roman practice of asserting a sovereign or legal ban on the Homo sacer,
a figure who stands outside of the juridical order as a sort of nonper-
son, Agamben has since the first installment of his project carried out a
deep archeology of the ways in which the classical world, and later the
ascetic traditions of Christianity, established boundaries between the
human and the nonhuman, and the consequences that such bound-
aries or their elision have had for the “forms of life” (an expression
borrowed from Wittgenstein, but one with very deep roots in monastic
texts and commentaries) that have emerged in a variety of historical
and social contexts in the West. In what follows, I examine some of the
more exciting possibilities that emerge from Agamben’s exploration of
the notion of a “form of life,” particularly in the context of economic
and social relations, and the ways in which increased attention to the
Spiritual Franciscan tradition can provide models for human behavior
and subjectivity that can further our theoretical understanding of the
contemporary notion of “sustainability.”
Like Foucault, Agamben in the later stages of his career has been
drawn to study the ascetic tradition, though the final installment of
his work, which he had indicated in a previous work would likely be
oriented toward a deeper investigation of the nature of consumption
and “use” in common, has instead turned in this final work to examine
the notion of the “use of the body” and the quite different understand-
ing of human labor that modernity has developed in contradistinction
to the ancient Greek world, where “labor” seems not to have been a
functioning category at all, and where the absence of such a mental
construct seems to have allowed slavery to exist without troubling the
consciences of an otherwise highly ethically oriented Greek philosophical
tradition focused on establishing the requirements for living the free,

New Literary History, 2015, 46: 525–548

526 new literary history

politically engaged life.1 The present essay seeks to engage primarily

with Agamben’s Altissima povertà (2011), a late installment of the overall
project of Homo sacer, where Agamben has sought to explore the ways in
which Franciscan thinkers and practitioners expressed a “form of life”
that challenged normative constructions of the human subject in a late-
medieval historical context, but where “bare life”—a central concept in
Agamben’s development of Foucault’s notion of “biopolitics”—becomes
a more positively imagined, albeit decidedly nonjuridical and anarchi-
cal, “form of life.” Let me begin, therefore, by mentioning several works
that preceded Altissima povertà in order to situate Agamben’s important
reflections on medieval Franciscan spirituality in the context of his
overall project.
While it has now become commonplace in literary and cultural stud-
ies to invoke the concept of “political theology,” in many of the critical
contexts where theological and political ideas have been conjoined, the
specifically theological genealogy of a political idea or framework has
received less attention. This is not at all the case, however, for Agamben.
In two earlier installments of Homo sacer (The Kingdom and the Glory and
Opus Dei), Agamben delved into a number of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century debates over liturgical and theological issues while at
the same time excavating from a host of much earlier patristic sources
the origins of these debates in ecclesiastical history. In his more recent
work, Altissima povertà, Agamben has continued to emphasize theological
frameworks, in this case turning to the Franciscan tradition to elucidate
a theory of potentiality rooted in negation by recourse to the late thir-
teenth- and early fourteenth-century debates over so-called “restricted
consumption” (usus pauper), where the concept of the right to repudiate a
right, assumed to derive from natural law and further codified by positive
law, figured in debates in which the Franciscan scholastic philosopher
Pierre Olivi and others enunciated a variety of theological and political
positions for the rigorist wing of the order—those who have come to
be known as the Spiritual Franciscans.
In an earlier work on the apostle Paul (The Time that Remains [2000;
trans. 2005]), Agamben indicated a glancing familiarity with the litera-
ture associated with usus pauper, but with the publication of Altissima
povertà he has demonstrated a more decided commitment to this rich
literature of controversy.2 Though the final volume of Homo sacer does
not, indeed, investigate these medieval Franciscan sources more fully,
I think that we can extrapolate from Agamben’s very fruitful engage-
ment with a number of Franciscan intellectuals that this tradition has
nevertheless assisted his more speculative project, sketched out in the
somewhat less academic work, The Coming Community—a work that is not
forms of power, forms of life 527

part of Homo sacer—of considering the forms of life that he imagines

future Western communities will display as they outgrow their current
shapes and develop more cosmopolitan conceptions of human belong-
ing and a more fully engaged commitment to emancipation.
Beneath many of the concerns addressed in Agamben’s work as a
whole lies the figure of Walter Benjamin, so it is not by chance that
Agamben’s attention was drawn to a Franciscan tradition with strong
tendencies toward embracing a messianic conception of human history
and with clear connections to Joachim of Fiore. Of course, Benjamin’s
recourse to a messianic vision of history was a partially secularized one,
but at least one of the notions that informed his use of the term “mes-
sianic” was the idea that the critic living in the present could experience
or discern a portion of messianic fulfillment (at least in the form of
“splinters,” as he suggested in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, an
experience we might best characterize as one of a revelatory but frag-
mentary intuition that the present moment is the unfolding of a future
that has a prophetic nature or that appears to fulfill a prophecy). To
evoke from a text or work of art in the past a meaning or significance
that is only revealed as a possible or potential meaning in the present
context is, we might suggest, a critical method of sorts, in whatever way
it might sometimes disconcert us as tantamount to a claim to prophecy
itself. To take an example from material that will be the later focus of
this essay, we might say that Agamben, in the present, reveals in his work
a significance for the Franciscan conception of usus pauper of which the
Franciscan thinkers and their opponents in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries were not themselves fully aware and that therefore possessed
only potential significance.3
The standard term for this deferred experience of historical fulfill-
ment in Biblical hermeneutics is typology: figures in the Old Testament,
unaware of the true significance of their actions, prefigure or anticipate
New Testament events in a proleptic manner (to take the classic example,
Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac prefigures God’s sacrifice of his son,
Jesus, in the New Testament). The “type,” as the Old Testament event
is called, contains the potential fulfillment that becomes actual only in
the unfolding patterns of history, in the final shapes that time itself is to
assume. In typological interpretation, quarrels over the meaning of texts
can develop over what the actual outcomes of these potentialities have
turned out to be, but they cannot develop over the existence of their
potentiality, or so at least appears to be the case in the Judeo-Christian
tradition. So it is in this typological conception of the patterning of
Western history that Benjamin’s messianism and Agamben’s Aristotelian
emphasis on the category of potential being find their connection, and it
528 new literary history

is this connection that in turn has motivated Agamben to investigate the

Franciscan definitions of the “forms of life” that can potentially inform,
if not anticipate, those of the “coming community” of the future. What
can only be called a preposterous thesis, from the vantage point of the
postmodern subject whose identity seems so intimately bound up with
limitless desire and consumption, will become less so as we investigate
the degree to which Agamben’s imagined return to a state of usus pauper
becomes a thought experiment concerning the shape that an unspon-
sored freedom might take in the future, one that is rooted in a form of
life that seeks its “perfection” in restricted consumption, the abolition
of private ownership, and a nonjuridical conception of citizenship or
community belonging.
A further shared outlook that characterizes the criticism of Benjamin
and Agamben is the more despairing sensibility that sees in the late
capitalist world an impossible-to-retrieve loss of human authenticity, a
blockage of the path to a “form of life” that one can honestly sanction as
ethical, free, and uncompromised. The late work of Foucault has clarified
the degree to which such a quest for the “true life” was a characteristic
of certain strains of ancient philosophical ways of life, particularly those
explored by the Cynics, and he has further noted the stubborn resiliency
of a form of life lived in opposition to the normative conventions of
the social world in the late-medieval movements studied by the German
scholar Walter Grundmann, the most fully theorized of which was the
autre vie of the Spiritual Franciscans.4 In Agamben’s view of history, the
achievement of such a form of life remains a potential, of course, but
it is a potential that must be constantly deferred to a later, messianic
fulfillment, so that the experience of actual individuals struggling to
overcome alienation and achieve an authentic life (what goes by the name
of “spirituality” in our current volgare) can only be partial and sporadic,
a waiting game that takes place during “the time that remains.” However
frustrating and ephemeral such “authentic life” might remain (for which
Agamben has created the antonym “bare life,” itself serving dialectically
as a negation that might in turn be the guarantor of “authentic life”), it
is clear that Agamben sees the Spiritual Franciscan tradition as one that
contains in it a great deal of possibility and potential, perhaps even for
inaugurating practical changes in the twenty-first century, especially in
reimagining such dominant, foundational notions as private property,
wealth, and human belonging or citizenship in a cosmopolitan world,
where “restricted consumption” takes on a more urgent resonance in a
world groping (or slouching?) its way toward a sustainable future.
In what follows, I would like to delineate with some care a number of
features of several Franciscan authors who have been traditionally linked
forms of power, forms of life 529

together as Spiritual Franciscans (in the mid-fourteenth century they

would be formally separated, by papal decree, from their less rigorous
brothers, as Observants) and who shared in the belief that the Franciscan
practicing restricted consumption most closely approximated the form
of life of Jesus and his apostles, fashioning their lives so as to achieve
a state of intellectual development that Saint Bonaventure (for several
decades the spokesman for the radical Franciscan theological positions)
and others after him termed a mens libera, an autonomous mind.5 The
Franciscan form of life as imagined by its most rigorist theorists held out
the possibility of a nearly perfected spirituality achieved in compensa-
tion for worldly withdrawal, one that would especially take the form of
a deepened understanding of scriptural texts and their meanings. The
great appeal to medieval individuals of the hugely popular Franciscan
movement was no doubt owing to a number of factors, and anglophone
readers influenced by the sharply critical portrait of Franciscans in
Chaucer are often unaware of the degree to which Franciscan resistance
to ecclesiastical control forms a sort of prehistory to the more militant
challenges represented by the Reformation. The movement’s origins were
decidedly populist in nature, even though its later development saw a
degree of institutionalization and (necessarily) compromised sponsor-
ship by ecclesiastical authorities. But just as it is Agamben’s optimistic
imagining of a stateless, postjuridical social order that makes his work
so appealing and provocative today, so it was that the first generations
of Franciscan followers, who first claimed the right to teach theology at
the University of Paris, created a following that would develop, in certain
places, in radical directions (the Fraticelli in Italy are one example of
this) and that would pursue a form of life standing in stark contrast to
the mercantile culture of early capitalism, which was the socioeconomic
context for the movement’s birth. As I intend to demonstrate, the asser-
tion that the practice of the deepest poverty (altissima paupertas) consti-
tuted a claim of spiritual freedom from the constraints and obligations
entailed by ordinary life as it is lived from within networks of commerce
and economic exchange is an assertion with powerful consequences for
our postmodern understanding of alternative subjectivities, and it may
serve to assist in the exploration of potential forms of life that would
replace contemporary notions of success and fulfillment with a notion
of human happiness and freedom consonant with more moderate con-
sumption and with greater attention to the implications of resource
scarcity that have now begun to weigh heavily on the economies and
polities of modern nation-states.
The vertiginous potentialities that Agamben or the Spiritual Franciscan
might foresee would require attention, above all, to vocation, to a new
530 new literary history

form of life that can frame a new social reality, rather than a socially
constructed subject living at the mercy of a social reality that defines
for him or her the acceptable shapes that freedom, or a “true life,” is
capable of taking. It is here that we see the importance of Agamben’s
argument, in Altissima povertà, stressing the difference between a monastic
or ascetic “rule” and a “form of life”: Franciscans do not so much follow
a rule as they commit to a form of life, so that their ethical demeanor
follows from their vocational identity as Franciscans, rather than their
observance of a set of rules or precepts resulting in their self-definition. It
is at times a subtle distinction, but one to which the Franciscans devoted
a good deal of debate and for which they created a literary subgenre,
the rule commentary. Agamben has invoked a number of Franciscan
texts as a means of refining his conception of that form of life most
distanced from worldly influences, a twenty-first-century reimagining of
medieval “world-flight” that takes as its most characteristic gesture the
repudiation and negation of that form of life lived under a regime of
maximal consumption. While I would not agree with his assertion that
a “theory of consumption” has not yet been imagined in the West (A
10)—the precocious reflections of Thorstein Veblen, however tongue-in-
cheek they can often be, are not mentioned by Agamben and still bear
re-reading—I believe that this late installment of Homo sacer promises to
become a significant moment in the reawakening of an ethical tradition
forced into near invisibility in subsequent centuries, a process that began
quite precisely in 1322 with the promulgation of an official church teach-
ing that insisted on defining, in juridical terms, the Franciscan form of
life as no different from that of the lay consumer: John XXII’s bull Ad
conditorem canonum, which insisted that the Franciscans both possessed
ownership of those things that were consumed in use (food, clothing)
and owned in common (the material structures and lands built for them
or donated on their behalf).

Forms of Life and Care of the Self

In Altissima povertà, Agamben’s analysis begins with an overview of the

ascetic form of life and demonstrates the degree to which the ascetic
vow is one that directs the confessor to accept a rule that is nevertheless
not a set of precepts that is reducible to law, whether civil or canonical;
he suggests, furthermore, that the earliest codifiers of ascetic practice
among the desert fathers were perfectly aware that their “flight from the
world” constituted a political act that at the same time created a space
for living—within the constraints of a vow—that was walled off from the
forms of power, forms of life 531

juridical order (A 41-63). He even suggests, in a manner reminiscent of

Foucault’s analysis of monastic traditions, that such a new space for life—
canonists will speak of a novitas in describing Franciscan practices, but it
is a form of life that begins to emerge in its later history as early as the
eleventh century in devotees of an apostolic lifestyle such as Romualdo
and his biographer Pietro Damiani—provides the background necessary
for constituting a “new public sphere” (A 68). Foucault, who suggested
that monasticism could often become a form of “counter-conduct”
practiced in opposition to the prevailing values of the social order, was
aware of the degree to which ascetic practices, focusing on achieving
the true life, could “tear the self from itself.”6 Both he and Agamben
are also aware of the degree to which such practices as fasting, incessant
prayer, and self-denial can easily be perceived as an almost totalitarian
regimen—an escape from the juridical order of society, perhaps, but one
that hardly constitutes an emancipation of the individual practitioner so
that he can “do as he wishes” (A 15-17; Agamben cites Rabelais’s parody
of monastic rules in Gargantua and Pantagruel). Importantly, for Agamben
as for his Franciscan sources, the central commitment of the ascetic is
to voluntary poverty, highlighting the degree to which individual agency
shapes the Franciscan form of life and the deliberateness with which this
form of life is embraced, often in the face of opposition from worldly
sectors (one’s family, the secular clergy, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, etc.).
Foucault’s important conception of “care of the self,” with its emphasis
on the various forms of discipline necessary for sustaining the struggle
to live the “true” rather than the ordinary or conformist life, certainly
lies behind some of Agamben’s analysis, even though the latter distances
himself from the Foucauldian conception of a pastoral power emerg-
ing in early Christianity as an institution that will ultimately serve only
as an alternative to, or displacement of, state power—in other words,
that remains indirectly subject to the relations of power. But if “care”
(or what is the same thing in Christian contexts, potential “salvation”)
governs the subject’s relation to himself and others rather than the law,
where Agamben seems to depart from Foucault is in orienting his un-
derstanding of the unique subjectivity acquired by such counterpractices
as asceticism toward potentiality rather than actuality, toward a utopian
conception of world-flight rather than toward Foucault’s more historically
grounded trajectory, where pastoral power becomes inexorably co-opted
by the “governmentality” emergent in the European Enlightenment and
eventually normative for modern/postmodern lives, which become main-
tained by the various therapeutic practices of psychiatry, psychotherapy,
and confessional or self-help programs. Where Foucault’s argument for
authentic life is made along a diachronic axis, Agamben chooses instead
532 new literary history

to take a synchronic approach, so that “potential” forms of community

and vocation remain just as immanent now as they might have been for
thirteenth-century Franciscan Spirituals.
For Agamben, it is the possibility of imagining a form of life that is
contemplative and suprapolitical, rather than the possibility of living a
life that is unadministered, that appears to be the desideratum; where
Agamben seeks for how true lives are to be lived, Foucault searches
for the truth to be spoken about the world (a new truth presumably
without historical precedents).7 And where Foucault still appears in his
late works to be questing for the “unthought,” as he described this criti-
cal goal in the closing pages of The Order of Things, Agamben is more
loyal to his philological training and his scholarly vocation, a trait of
his work that, as we shall see, makes his alignment with the Franciscan
tradition, which very early on developed a highly intellectual culture in
direct proportion to its deepening of commitment to altissima pauper-
tas, more understandable in light of the definition of the Franciscan’s
ethical identity as a “true despiser of the world”—the brokenness of which
can only be replaced, not reformed, by something utterly different.8 Foucault’s
more activist orientation of speaking truth to power and of stressing the
transformational character of truth becomes, for Agamben, deactivated
through his invocation of inoperosità, the resigned Bartlebean response
of nonaction, of turning one’s back upon a world where, to be blunt,
the truth has long ago been told, whether by Old Testament prophets,
Christ and the apostles, the early desert fathers, or Francis himself (as
an alter Christus), and where an attitude of contempt comes naturally.
The adoption of a resigned disposition (Foucault could speak, it is
true, of a bios adiaphoros, an indifferent life), a habitus or form of life
that refuses to acknowledge the existing relations of power as binding
upon all individuals, is the only possible ethical stance for Agamben,
even if it takes the Bartlebean form of an insistence upon nonaction,
a resignation from the social order. Perhaps Agamben’s position is not
an activist one because he can perceive the tendency for activism to
generate reactionary responses—indeed, to strengthen opposition to
progressive ideologies—and to thereby achieve only further obstruction
and create an impasse for political change. Whereas Foucault sees the
most recent historical examples of the “true life” in the revolutionary
types of the European nineteenth century, Agamben’s vision is less
historicized, insofar as he moves further back in history to idealize an
intellectual type that is, for him, an endpoint or “consummation” of
the spiritual development of Western culture.9 By contrast, Foucault’s
deep archeology of the notion of parrhēsia, a freedom of speech that
he connects to ascetic practice, stresses the enunciation of truth as the
forms of power, forms of life 533

means by which a specific form of life engages the world to achieve a

counterpractice become scandalous and revolutionary, especially in the
case of the ancient Cynics. In Agamben’s idiosyncratic notion of critical
response, disengagement and a sort of passive-aggressive personality
type lie at the center of his theory of resistance, while his conception of
freedom would appear to require turning the clocks back, in economic
terms, to the times of primitive accumulation when it was still possible
for fairly large sectors of society to maintain vows that would reject the
very concept of the surplus. For it is precisely the emergence of a prac-
tical (though not theoretical) commitment to surplus that defines, by
negation, the disposition of the Franciscan brother: as Ugo di Digne
remarks, “superfluity,” the avoidance of which constitutes usus pauper,
can be circumscribed by defining it as “that which, when taken away,
leaves enough to suffice.”10 Franciscan economic theorists, one of whom,
Olivi, was the first to use the term “capital” in its modern sense, turn out
to have been already resisting the emerging logic of the marketplace and
the primitive institution of surplus value, obedience to which created
the need for superfluous consumption.11
Furthermore, Agamben has an ear better-trained to pick up the ju-
ridical resonances in his texts, and he rightly focuses in Altissima povertà
on voluntary poverty as the concept around which the subjectivity of
the Franciscan vocation centers.12 The term “evangelical perfection”
became the defining conceptual ideal of the Spiritual Franciscans—an
ideal apparently first expressed by Cassian in his third Collatio—and
connotes not merely a commitment to the Gospel and to the practice of
preaching, which was of course the most visible change that the ordines
praedicatorum, the Dominican and Franciscans, wrought in the urban
contexts of late-medieval culture, but also to a quite stringent vow of
poverty, the profound elaboration of which became the defining feature
of the Spirituals.13 It also implies that a “true form of life” has been to
a great extent revealed, and that, as Agamben reminds us in The Time
that Remains, there is little to do but to adopt an (inward) apostolic
vocation rooted in intentional poverty and wait during the “time that
remains.” The familial resemblance between Agamben and the Spiritual
Franciscans thus extends not simply to their penchant for a typological
interpretation of history that links past to future through sameness rather
than difference, through an ultimately conservative ascetic commitment
rather than through “progressive” historical change, but also for the
shape that a chiliastic view of history takes in their hands: for certain of
the more radical Spirituals, the “time that remains” is the sixth age of
history, one that for some commentators will see the increasing growth
of Franciscan spirituality, the conversion of the Jews, and the appearance
534 new literary history

of the Antichrist (in a variety of shapes). Agamben has even delivered a

homily in Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris in which he has chastised the
Catholic Church for not placing at the center of its theological agenda
the Pauline conception of this backward-glancing eschatological reality.
He asks, “Will the Church finally grasp the historical occasion and recover
its messianic vocation?”14 The growing commercialism and ostentation
of wealth perceived by Franciscans in the context of early capitalism and
its innovations find their modern counterparts in Agamben’s critique of
the present, where, in the United States, talk is of the one percent and
the ninety-nine percent, while for Agamben in Europe, “the complete
juridification and commodification of human relations . . . are signs
not only of crises of law and state, but also, and above all, of crises of
the Church.”15 This rare instance of contextualizing his own work for
contemporary relevance makes it clear that Agamben sees in the mes-
sianic gestures of medieval Franciscan intellectuals a potentiality that is
not “progressive” in any Marxian sense, but that we must now struggle
to imagine or reframe for the demands of a twenty-first-century world.

Usus Pauper

These are extremely bold claims, so we need to be clear about what the
central issue in the usus pauper controversy was; the amount of polemic
generated over the issue in early Franciscan discourse would at first blush
appear to be highly overdetermined. Franciscans of a less rigorist inclina-
tion were concerned over whether or not their monastic vow included an
obligation to usus pauper and, if so, whether or not violations of the rule
would constitute mortal sin. “Restricted consumption” might provide a
better guide to the individual who had taken a vow of poverty, encour-
aging behaviors that went well beyond the vow to repudiate ownership.
But how was one to define restricted use? Was eating a nicely prepared
meal as a guest a violation? Some, such as Olivi, appealed to common
sense: usus pauper was any use or consumption that did not rise to the
level of usus dives, that is, consumption in the manner of one who was
wealthy. At the same time, Olivi was a rigorist, which meant that he did
believe that the commitment to the form of life of Franciscanism was a
commitment to restricted consumption as well as a choice not to own
anything. The growth of the order in the two generations subsequent
to Francis’s life had of course made it necessary to transform the primi-
tive simplicity aimed at by the first generation of brothers: Franciscans
were now bishops and university masters, and their lifestyle would on
occasion demand some closer contact with worldly customs. Moreover,
forms of power, forms of life 535

as the order grew in size and geographical scope, the need for long
journeys might mean providing for the future, even though imitation
of the apostolic ideal would technically demand an attitude of taking
no thought for the next day. These sorts of consideration were under-
standable, and in practical terms Olivi and others were committed to a
fairly lenient interpretation of usus pauper; but what gave to the debates
over usus pauper their particular urgency and overdetermined nature?16
Clearly there was an issue of rivalry with other orders (especially
Dominicans) and constituencies (the secular masters at the University
of Paris) that stretched back into the mid-thirteenth century. But what
Agamben seems to have decided is that it was the very indeterminacy
of restricted consumption that made it such a scandal. Ultimately, it is
precisely because restricted consumption was a contingent concept more
dependent on the intentions of the confessor than on a set of rules
(however difficult to define with precision) external to his conscience
that made the concept so subjective rather than dependent on, or con-
sonant with, actual practices. The conundrum is similar to the so-called
problem of the heap in logic: at what point does a pile of beans become
a “heap”? When there are one hundred beans? If so, does the removal
of one bean make the pile no longer a “heap”? Five beans? Ten? In
similar fashion, Olivi would argue that the parameters of usus pauper
were dependent on circumstances. Was the Franciscan brother sick?
Would a sparse meal endanger the health of the brother at this stage of
his life or health? Olivi was able to chart an area of human experience
that was not truly codifiable according to rules, where discretion (a key
monastic virtue for one of the earliest of the desert fathers, Cassian) had
to take precedence over precept. We might say that usus pauper was not,
in the end, something that could be handled by legal prescription, even
though the debate ended with the absorption of most of its provocative
thrust by the legal arguments of a trained canon lawyer, John XXII.
Furthermore, the commitment to restricted use marks “evangelical
poverty” as both a repudiation of a right guaranteed by natural law
and a subjective state of mind or affectus that lies at the heart of the
Franciscan form of life. If my reading of Agamben’s Altissima povertà is
correct, it seems to me that there is in this second point an important
innovation—perhaps the most important innovation to arise from the
debate—in Olivi’s stress, borrowed from his predecessor Bonaventure,
upon the role of the inner disposition (habitus, state of mind, or affectus),
the significance of which has not been pointed out by Agamben, and the
significance of which has not yet been revealed in all of its potentiality for
the postmodern world. An affectus that has been shaped into inoperosità
by the Franciscan “form of life” may not have been as game-changing a
536 new literary history

notion in the thirteenth century for its practitioners, but it clearly does
have tremendous significance in a world where the human desire to
consume has reached perverse and environmentally threatening dimen-
sions. For it will not be through legal prescriptions, but through new cognitive
“dispositions” or “states of mind” that global transformation and salvation can
become a potentiality turned into a reality. And there can be no “regulations”
that define it. Put another way, it is as if the Franciscan polemicists were
to have seen the future ethical distortions that accompanied the rise of
capitalism and to have chosen to change themselves rather than to at-
tempt to modify the economic basis of their world.17 The Franciscan who
repudiates his (Hobbesian) right to maximal consumption and resource
allocation is, in effect, one who boycotts the system simply through
negation, a Bartlebean gesture that simply eliminates the possibility of
economic participation as a consumer. This gesture, which was termed
abiurisdictio iuris by Olivi, now needs to be examined with some care.
It is from Bonaventure that Olivi was able to borrow the concept of
the Franciscan brother as a nonjuridical subject whose claim of abiuris-
dictio iuris marks him off as a subject separate from the conventional
social order as a person living in a state of nonconformity. Olivi writes,
“The high degree [of poverty] does not transcend every material
thing, and every sense and every inner disposition, and all the power
of our freedom that we can have in relation to things, unless restricted
consumption and a passionate love for it is present there, nor does
it ascend without it, just as there is the possibility for the refusal of
any [material] substance, when the senses themselves and the sensual
dispositions are not per se oriented towards legal control [iurisdictio]
but rather towards consumption [usus].”18 Olivi’s argument relies on a
recognition that one’s intentions or desires are not necessarily (per se)
directed toward possession or control, and while he does not directly
invoke an analogy from the animal world to minimize the need for
ownership or dominium, other Franciscans did. Olivi presents the reader
with a sort of “physics of desire”: material objects in the world act as a
pressure upon the consciousness of the subject, provoking responses
(affectus) that in turn must be resisted and transformed by the spiritual
powers of altissima paupertas, constrained to that point where material
objects meet necessary requirements alone. The practicing Franciscan
must not allow his desire for material objects, including food, clothing,
and shelter, to exceed the minimum requirements of necessity, what is
needed to sustain life, and he must resist the process of the distortion
or escalation of his sensual dispositions whereby the need to consume
(necessities) is transformed into a desire to possess. Later in the same
treatise he quotes Bonaventure, who likewise treated the inner need or
forms of power, forms of life 537

feeling preceding consumption as the point of departure for theorizing

concerning usus pauper:

But evangelical poverty, for the reason that it raises up the spirit to eternal things,
as well as storing them in heaven as treasures, persuades the one professing it
perfectly that he must strip himself [debere nudari] of all temporal relations, as
far as inner disposition and legal ownership are concerned, and be content with
a restricted sustenance for necessity, as far as consumption is concerned, and
this manner or moderation of consumption, one that thus refuses legal owner-
ship [dominium] but does not refuse consumption will in this manner provide
for a restriction of consumption that will not prohibit the needed sustenance of
nature, such that it [i.e., moderate consumption] would give relief for necessity
but would not depart from restriction.19

The need to consume precedes the desire to possess: Olivi’s citation

of Bonaventure partly assists his complaint about certain Franciscans
who have not led lives in keeping with the practices of usus pauper, but
what is reinforced in this citation is precisely the distinction between
one’s inclination or disposition toward material goods and one’s legal
capacity to control or maintain ownership of them. Put another way—
and this is, I believe, why Agamben provides such a lengthy discussion
of the difference between “following a rule” and practicing a “form of
life”—restricted consumption is a teaching that must become a disposi-
tion, a way of life or form of life, and such an intentional (or cognitive)
disposition can preclude the disposition or habitus to legal ownership.20
Cast in the terms of a Marxian analysis, there can be no change to the
economic or political structure without first changing the cultural de-
velopment of individuals so that they can manage their affects, manage
those inner feelings or dispositions (envy, pride, gluttony, and so forth)
that drive the desire to consume (or possess) by maintaining a strict
difference between natural necessity and artificial or cultural stimuli.
The cultural superstructure, through individual acts of intentional free
choice, can alter the economic base. It will be a new “disposition” or
“state of mind” (affectus) that will form the basis of one’s relation to
the world, not necessarily a new economic relation (though it is obvi-
ous that if vast numbers of individuals today were to choose to practice
usus pauper, revolutionary political and economic effects would shortly
follow). Here, “bare life” (debere nudari, for Bonaventure) as Agamben
has delineated it in his other works plays the virtuous role of setting
boundaries to consumption and negating the influence that cultural
forces can have in instigating the desire to own or control. Rather than
defining a dehumanized biopolitical subject, Agamben’s Franciscan
ascetic practicing a “bare life” has carved out a space for living that is
538 new literary history

extra legem, ecologically sensitive, and ethically identified with the poor-
est members of society.

Forms of Power: The Right to a Bare Life?

In some ways, the Franciscan practitioner/confessor, in renouncing

the right to ownership, acquires thereby a certain measure of power over
his own right to life, or over himself as an owner of only his own “bare
life” and body. Put another way, his choice not to participate in the in-
stitution of private property exempts him from any role that sovereignty
might play in defining his identity, since power’s main purpose is the
protection of the social order and the juridical framework of meum et
tuum that sustains it. The Franciscan is not really a homo sacer (though
there have been Franciscan instances of martyrdom, and Olivi spent two
years in exile in Florence following his condemnation by superiors of
his order in France—he may have even been one of Dante’s teachers
at Santa Croce), but the Franciscan does succeed in recusing himself,
so to speak, from the juridical order.21 In relation to the sovereign, he
has preempted the power over his bare life by seizing it for himself and,
through his mendicity, by exercising his natural right to resources pro-
vided by the community at large, resources over which he at the same
time asserts no control or positive legal right (ideally, his mendicity
does not coerce the voluntary offerings of other persons; in Franciscan
legal thought and among most early canonists, natural law sanctioned
the practice of recognizing all goods as common possessions and had
been normative in the prelapsarian world). Furthermore, in the case
of Olivi’s penetrating analysis in the short but brilliant treatise Quid
ponat, the exposure of sovereign power as an emperor without clothes,
as an institution that can claim no substantive material reality in the
world apart from its nominal value as a sign, as a discursive value that
operates only as an instrument of coercion and persuasion, necessarily
deepens the Franciscan conception of human freedom from institu-
tional constraint. Like other early Franciscans, Olivi was fully aware of
the novitas that Franciscanism and the example of Francis’s life could
promise in shaping the future and in challenging the emerging norms
of juridical capitalism; Agamben cites sources in contemporary canon
law that indicate just how difficult it was for legal specialists of the time
to categorize the vocations of the new fraternal orders or to regulate
their lives in an unequivocal manner.
Olivi’s Quid ponat is cited by Agamben to point out that Franciscan
thought tends toward a strongly voluntarist direction, since notions of
forms of power, forms of life 539

ius and dominium become efficacious only through the (contingent) le-
gitimacy of a sovereign authority capable of guaranteeing or legitimating
their validity.22 But Olivi’s analysis goes much further in demystifying the
operations of power and the relations of power with its subjects. Granting
that Olivi in the personal drama of his own life heeded the warnings and
censures of his superiors, and granting that he never truly questioned
the important principle of hierarchy that so dominated the sociopolitical
structures of his time, Quid ponat nevertheless comes quite close to the
sort of radical nominalism we encounter in the later Franciscan, William
of Ockham. Indeed, Ockham is clearly both an intellectual and spiritual
descendant of Olivi and eventually carried out one of the lengthiest and
most impassioned critiques of institutional authority and legitimacy in
his polemical works composed against the papacy.
Olivi’s thinking in Quid ponat is oddly “materialist” in exactly the
manner of Ockham’s focus on “individual” objects: he asks how in fact
power or the coercion of subjects actually works realiter (an adverb that
punctuates the work insistently). Since “possessing” a right or owner-
ship over a material good “in reality adds nothing [of substance] to that
good,” the very notion of a right or of ownership is a fictional construct;
such a construct is, like a sign in language, a mark of the intention or
will of the claimant, but it can possess no material reality.23 Similarly,
what makes a king a king is the consensus of the subjects, not any real (or,
presumably, supernatural) change to his person through the ceremony
of being anointed so as to “become” a mystical body. It is the artificial
nature of the king’s official body (as signifier of the “whole nation,” or
of the collectivity of the people) that makes of it a construction of posi-
tive law, not a factum derivable from natural law, whatever might be said
of its legitimation through the authority of divine law. Ockham would
argue precisely the same thing in suggesting that what we call a corpo-
rate body is a fictum, a man-made construct with no physical presence
or reality.24 Olivi’s thinking here is antinomian in its force—in a state of
nature the juridical order of positive law, with its various artifices and
verbal distinctions, is seen for what it is—le roi mis à nu. That Olivi him-
self never explicitly rejects the legitimacy that such an artificial process
of acclamation or affirmation by consensus confers does not mean that
his analysis is any less radical or revealing.
The later history of the poverty debates of the late thirteenth century
became, in effect, a struggle between emerging and existing institu-
tions, with the papacy finally victorious over the Franciscan innovators.
Agamben wishes, therefore, to excavate from this episode of ecclesiasti-
cal history the viewpoint that did not survive the debates. When John
XXII declared by papal bull that the Franciscans, in enjoying the use of
540 new literary history

such consumable items as food and clothing, necessarily possessed both

dominium and usus over those goods, a chapter in ecclesiastical history
did not just come to a close, but so did an entire way of conceptualiz-
ing forms of life and juridical constructs, a shift in thinking absolutely
necessary to capitalism’s emerging categories, institutions, and forms
of life. To many, John XXII’s declaration may appear to be a victory
for common sense—isn’t it obvious that a meal, once eaten, must have
been “possessed” by its eater just prior to its being consumed? —but
to thinkers like Olivi, the doctrine of usus pauper lay at the heart of
Franciscan identity, and especially in the Spirituals’ insistence that the
coveting of material possessions amounted to a most profound obstruc-
tion to spiritual development. What Agamben, I believe, has helped
us to understand, is the cognitive dimensions of the debate over usus
pauper, the distortions that the common sense argumentation of canon
lawyers managed to bring to the debate that obscure the profound and
innovative revelations of thinkers like Olivi and Ockham. I would add to
Agamben’s perceptive focus upon Ad conditorem canonum the reminder
that the Franciscan claim that deepened ascetic practice would allow for more
penetrating practices of reading, interpretation, and understanding—however
magical or “new age” a concept that may appear to be at first glance—
had in fact been realized, however sporadically, at certain junctures of
Western cultural development, above all from within the ascetic tradi-
tion. In this sense, Benjamin’s belief in moments of messianic rupture,
moments when a text written in the past reveals its meaning only in
the present context, amounts to a sort of “close reading” (the medieval
term for which was lectio divina) that can achieve prophetic status—the
authentic vox clamantis in deserto of the New Testament heritage, where
the desert spaces can be figuratively interpreted to be equivalent to the
juridical and economic statuses of abiurisdictio iuris and usus pauper. The
vox, that is, that defines the vocation of radical Franciscanism is a form
of life that claims a state of exception from the juridical order at the
same time that it claims a capacity for an innovative, virtually anarchic
form of lectio divina. And it is here, in the greatly deepening (altissima)
practice of lectio divina, that Agamben appears to be leveraging philo-
logical practices for emancipatory purposes.

The Franciscan Sixth Stage of Millenial History

In closing I would like to turn briefly to an even more provocative

text of the same period, the anonymous Meditatio pauperis in solitudine,
where we discover that in the minds of some Franciscan intellectuals
forms of power, forms of life 541

such a conception of living outside of a network of power and juridical

constructs can amount to the construction of an alternate universe.
Olivi could speak of voluntary poverty as having a certain latitudo in its
interpretation, and insist upon abdicatio iuris as “the deepest foundation
and the most spacious matter for [restricted consumption’s] greatest
manifestation and circumference,” where usus pauper plays the role of
a form giving shape to matter in the spatial metaphors of the “greatest”
ambitus and existentia (i.e., a fabrication of one’s being or form of life
through a process that requires the individual to ex-sistere, “to stand out”
or make manifest).25 Yet for the author of this substantial treatise, the
construction of a “form of life” centered on voluntary poverty delivers
in its wake a full-blown Franciscan imaginary. In some poetic passages
filled with allegory, the author draws on Augustine’s On the Gospel’s Grace
to link the “length, breadth, and height” of Jesus’s virtues, identified
as his “charity,” “poverty,” and “humility,” with the Franciscan ideal of
“evangelical perfection.” It was on the cross that Jesus exhibited these
most fully, since he was virtually naked, absolutely powerless, and marked
out as the “least” of all men (novissimus [M 87]).26
When it comes to relations of power in human communities, the author
of the Meditatio is among the boldest of Franciscan apologists. The Fran-
ciscan commitment to a form of life that is enacted outside of juridically
codified relations is potentially a move in the direction of political quiet-
ism, but this is not really the case. In fact, the pose of absolute humility
enables a critique of existing institutions of power that can amount to
a withering attack on establishment conformity and what we have come
to know as bourgeois invidiousness. Humility’s mighty opposite, pride,
is precisely defined as an effect of power relations, of the worldly need
for humans to project their superiority onto others: Augustine is cited
twice to the effect that “Pride is a desire for a perverse superiority” (M
236), a definition that the author then reinforces with a passage from
The City of God: “Pride is a vice of the soul of one perversely loving his
own power, a contempt for justice in the one holding more power” (M
239). There is substantial criticism in the treatise in a number of places
of prelates in the ecclesiastical hierarchy who, “because they do not have
the inner workings of charity, have desired to appear as masters, not
recognizing themselves as fathers, exchanging the role of humility for
the intoxication of power” (elatio dominationis [M 61]). The treatise in
this instance shows greater egalitarian emphases than we encounter in
Olivi’s theology, even though some of the impetus behind its composi-
tion likely grew out of a need to distinguish Franciscans from other
competing monastic groups (the Secular/Mendicant controversy at the
University of Paris in the mid-thirteenth century and a later quarrel with
542 new literary history

the Dominicans in the Correctorium controversy may have influenced the

anonymous author to emphasize the virtuous behavior of the practicing
Franciscan; both controversies had required a measure of assertiveness
that may have ultimately led to increased Franciscan influence over hu-
man institutions and an inevitable backsliding of Spiritual Franciscans
from ideals of powerlessness and humility in human relations).27 Nev-
ertheless, the author reminds the reader that ecclesiastical personnel,
especially those with the “care of souls” (i.e., secular clergy) fall in love
with their power and “are on fire [with a desire] for their subjects to
be harmed, to produce a dread of their power, and do harm to those
whom they ought to help” (M 61).
The author recalls an episode from the life of Saint Francis by Thomas
Celano, the dream of Francis’s companion concerning the empty thrones.
Agamben includes a reproduction of the Giottesque fresco in Assisi
portraying this episode in his earlier work on the liturgical practices and
symbolism of “glory” in the early Church (The Kingdom and the Glory),
focusing attention on the iconographical tradition of the hetoimasia,
the empty throne that to his mind was an apt pictorial analogue for his
notion of inoperosità, or inertial potentiality.28 While Agamben suggests
that the hetoimasia was a suitable image for the expectant condition that
characterizes humanity between its creation and its final end, a sabatismo
or state of rest in which the workings of the divine economy carry out
their functions with bureaucratic regularity with an absent God, whose
presence is created only through occasional liturgical performance, the
Franciscan author of the Meditatio pauperis finds greater relevance for
the dream of Francis’s companion in seeing it as a throne prepared for
Francis himself, the alter Christus who has replaced a prideful humanity
(in the figure of Lucifer) with a new, humble leader for the final sixth
age for humanity, where lives that are lived in conformity with evangeli-
cal perfection will abound. The complex allegory begins with the story
of two brothers, Jacob and Esau, and first identifies Esau, the firstborn
twin, with Lucifer, while reserving Jacob, the “lesser brother” (minor)
to serve as a type of Francis and as one who necessarily overthrew the
law of primogeniture:

If we understand in place of Esau that first angel [Lucifer], who was swollen with
pride, filled with envy for God, depraved in his greed for glory, he rightly lost
the delights of Paradise that had been prepared for him and was hurled into
hell; in place of Jacob his younger brother we rightly recognize holy Francis,
who because of his highest poverty, extraordinary charity, and profound humility
deserved to inherit the birthright of his older brother. Whence it happened that
once when he was praying in a certain church with his companion, his compan-
ion was struck with an ecstatic vision and saw in a celestial court an empty seat
forms of power, forms of life 543

towering on high, shining in all its glory, and when he asked whose throne it
was, he heard a voice saying to him: “This was the seat of a fallen angel, which
he lost through pride, and now it will be preserved for Francis, the frater minor,
because his humility has earned him this”; because, just as our glorious Virgin
sang, “he has displaced the proud from their thrones to raise the humble up to
them” (Luke 1:52), and that Saint Ann likewise sang, “The Lord raises up the
poor man from the dust, and the beggar from the ditch, so that he might sit
with princes and possess the throne of glory” (I Kings 2:8; M 88-9).

The “glory seat” (sedes praecelsa vacans omni gloria refulgens in the Meditatio)
is luminous but empty; Agamben is suggesting that the seat is not so
much a symbol of power as of empty power, of a “glory,” that is, created
by those who glorify or praise the one in power, and that this fabricated
“glory,” like the artificial concept of “power” that lies beneath it, is re-
ally no different from the notion of the “spectacle” in the thought of
Guy Debord.29 The shekinah, the luminous phenomenon of the empty
seat, is of course also a figure connoting enlightenment, but its capac-
ity to fill up/blind the vision of those who gaze upon it gives to it an
ambivalence, as it can also be taken as a totalizing presence that prevents
accurate vision. A potential symbol of ridicule, like an emperor without
clothes, the glory seat can also become a deadly serious enterprise, a
throne awaiting the coming of the sixth age of Franciscan history, where
Franciscanism’s commitments to a radical voluntary poverty, a heightened
and expanded practice of lectio divina, and a repudiation of legal institu-
tions that hitherto have only guaranteed a hierarchical structuring of
power relations, will define the end-time. In Bonaventure’s Legenda maior,
Francis would appear not so much to want to occupy the glory seat as to
alter its defining character, from a place of (hidden) power, of arcana,
to a seat of mercy. But what nearly all Franciscan texts that broach the
apocalyptic future assert is that the sixth age of the world will see the
coming of a world order that appears to postmodern understandings as
a paradox but that, if we can unthink or deconstruct certain categories
of juridical and economic thought, will be revealed as both sensible
and sustainable: “an ascetic utopia” in which the relations of power, the
orientation of the proud to the humble, the wealthy to the poor, will
undergo a fundamental upending.30 It is this more hopeful context of
the “sixth age” of Franciscanism, presided over by a soon-to-be regnant
Saint Francis, that Agamben seems not to have completely accounted
for in his analysis of the economies of power and sovereignty developed
in the early centuries of Christianity.
544 new literary history

Conclusion

What, finally, are we to make of Agamben’s most recent explora-

tions? I would like to pose two possible interpretations of this turn to
Franciscan sources in his work. The late-medieval literature of contro-
versy surrounding “restricted consumption” obviously provides an op-
portunity for Agamben to explore the deeper spiritual economies that
probably saw their last moments of flourishing in the late Middle Ages.
He correctly, and with great insight, points to the bull of John XXII, Ad
conditorem canonum, of 1322 as marking the first signs of a future world
of mass consumption in which one can no longer separate ownership
from consumption, despite the arguments of Franciscan intellectuals
who pleaded that, just like animals, humans had a “simple right of
use” that had nothing to do with ownership, but that nevertheless was
grounded in natural law and could be both repudiated and avoided by
the practicing (and strong-willed) Franciscan. The arguments made by
those intellectuals appear to have appealed to Agamben because they
form a sort of loophole in the law, framing the existence of a category
of persons who, in abdicating their rights of ownership, nevertheless
gain a freedom from those very foundational structures of positive and
even natural law. Such individuals resemble to some extent Agamben’s
notion of the homo sacer in that they have excepted themselves, or re-
cused themselves, from the political economy of their time, but with
the crucial difference that they have done so willingly, unlike the homo
sacer, whose exilic status is pronounced by a sovereign authority. This
is clearly one reason for Agamben’s sustained interest in the novel sort
of vocations that came to be defined from the time of Romualdo and
Pietro Damiani—their capacity to frame self-definitions of themselves that
defied the dominant modes of subjectivity in the Middle Ages. Here, in
reimagining a form of life that is so antithetical to current trends toward
consumption-based economic growth in the West, the Franciscan prac-
ticing usus pauper becomes an antitype or negation of Bourgeois Man,
who is by definition shaped by the Enlightenment project of expansive
rights and by his own consumptive behaviors.
But there is another, more disturbing element to Agamben’s interest
in figures like Ugo di Digne and Olivi. This is his more messianic stance,
one that can at times be catastrophically indifferent in a Bartlebean sense,
powerless to perform any other critical or communicative role than that
of witness—witness to, as he has said, “the complete commodification of
human relations.” Here Agamben plays the role of the critic as prophet,
writing studies predictive of a future shape for humanity that comes
perilously close to the attitude that lies behind the pejorative Italian
forms of power, forms of life 545

expressions menefreghismo and qualunquismo, a corrosive political indif-

ference and resignation in the face of worldly frustration, a caving-in to
political quietism and a somewhat selfish turn toward a contemplative
existence spent in largely intellectual labors that are, practically speaking,
simply not available options for most in contemporary society. The Fran-
ciscans were aware that in their communities a diversity of occupations
would be necessary, as all are not called to the vocation of lectio divina
and the acquired taste of savoring the fruits of scriptural commentary
and exegesis, spiritually rich as these practices might be. The brothers
sanctified manual labor, too, and their communities were, according
to one of the rules suggested by Francis himself, obligated to include
idiotae, the illiterate and unread. While Francis was not anti-intellectual
in demeanor, some recent scholarship on his life and teachings has
emphasized not his commitment to poverty, but rather his commitment
to simplicity, manual labor, and—perhaps an unfortunate trait to some
modern sensibilities—eucharistic devotion.31
Agamben’s invocation of a new conceptual category, that of inoperosità,
is a useful means of forcing us to rethink the ideology of progress, the
Protestant work ethic, and other notions of the liberal, Enlightenment
tradition, but as the twenty-first century begins to grapple with the
equally novel notion of sustainability, it is clear that more than a cogni-
tive reshaping of our categories will be needed, that transformed inner
dispositions provoked by a deepened commitment to the vita contemplativa
will need to be accompanied by the vigorous embracing of a vita activa
that must also make a robust commitment to embracing alternative
forms of community and less costly and harmful infrastructures for the
physical and economic world. New forms of life will not just require
new forms of thinking, but also new forms of action itself. We should
be deeply thankful to Agamben, however, for opening the way to a new
conception of human identity and a belonging-to-the-world that, while
taking many of its cues from ascetic forms of world-flight, is nevertheless
philosophically committed and spiritually inspiring.32

Misericordia University

Notes

1 Giorgio Agamben, L’uso dei corpi. Homo sacer IV, 2 (Neri Pozza: Vicenza, 2014). In
Altissima povertà: Regole monastiche e forma di vita. Homo sacer IV, 1 (Neri Pozza: Vicenza,
2011) (hereafter cited as A), Agamben indicated that his final volume would focus on
“the elaboration of a theory of use (uso),” which in the context of his prefatory remarks
would be a theory that “considers life as something that one is never given ownership of,
but only a use in common” (A 10). “Use” thus contrasts with “ownership,” especially in
the legal tradition, but in the ascetic tradition “use” always seems to imply the necessary
546 new literary history

connection that one leading a spiritual existence must maintain with the material world
of life-sustaining needs, and it is therefore often apt to translate it as “consumption,” as
in the English phrase “used up.” It is hard to find the same focus on this sense of “use” in
the final installment of Homo sacer, where a host of meanings seems to surround the term
in a more patently Heideggerian analysis that connects “use” to Dasein in a complicated
(and not always clear) manner.
2 Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia
Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005), 27.
3 Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford,
CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2011) has examined the early writings of Walter Benjamin and
found there intimations of his later remarks in Theses on the Philosophy of History; see espe-
cially his discussion of Benjamin’s definition of time as “the coming world,” 227–44.
4 Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1982–1983, Part 2, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Frédéric Gros (Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 182ff.
5 Bonaventura da Bagnoregio, De perfectione evangelica, in Opera (Quaracchi: College
of Saint Bonaventure, 1882–1902), 5:140. Bonaventure may have here been relying on
the biography of Francis by Thomas of Celano, the so-called Vita prima, where Francis’s
“freedom of mind” (liber ingenio) forms part of the portrait of his personality; my atten-
tion was drawn to this latter text by Alfonso Marini, Francesco d’Assisi, il mercante del regno
(Rome: Carocci, 2015), 120.
6 As cited in the second epigraph to Benjamin S. Pryor, “On the ‘Perfect Time of Hu-
man Experience’: Agamben and Foucault,” Epoché 16, no. 1 (2011): 65–78.
7 It is significant, in my opinion, that in L’uso dei corpi Agamben ends the project of
Homo sacer with an eloquent defense of the vita contemplativa as an instance of “inoperosità”
(350ff.).
8 Meditatio pauperis in solitudine, ed. P. Ferdinand DeLorme, O.F.M. (Florence/Quarac-
chi: College of Saint Bonaventure, 1929), 116 (hereafter cited as M).
9 A 175: “The deepest poverty, with its consumption of things, is the form of life that
begins when all the forms of life in the West have arrived at their historical consumma-
tion.” [“L’altissima povertà, col suo uso delle cose, è la forma-di-vita che comincia quando
tutte le forme di vita dell’Occidente sono giunte alla loro consumazione storica.”]
10 As cited in David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century
after Saint Francis (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2001), 23.
11 For Pierre Olivi’s “precocious” use of the term “capital” in his works on usury, see Joel
Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence
of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 117–27.
12 Among historians of early Franciscanism, there is no agreement as to how central
poverty was to the self-definition of the early Franciscans. For background and a critique
of the tendency to over-emphasize poverty in the first generations of Franciscans, see
Neslihan S enocak, “The Making of Franciscan Poverty,” Revue Mabillon, n.s., t. 24 (= t.
85), 2013: 5–26. See, however, for a recent defense of the centrality of poverty as more
consistent across the first three generations of Franciscans, Marini’s recent biography of
Francis (above, n. 5).
13 John Cassian, John Cassian: The Conferences [Collationes], trans. and ed. Boniface Ramsey,
O.P. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1997), 127 (= Collatio 3.7.8).
14 Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, trans. Leland de la Durantaye (London, New
York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012), 41.
15 Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 40.
16 For Olivi’s interpretation of the “rigorist” Franciscan position, see his “Quaestio de
usu paupere,” ed. Burr, in Petrus Iohannis Olivi, De usu paupere: The “Quaestio” and the
“Tractatus” (Florence: Olschki, 1992).
forms of power, forms of life 547

17 If I may be allowed to pass on a proverb I have encountered in an oral tradition, “It

is easier to wear slippers than to carpet the world.”
18 Olivi, De usu pauper, 26. The Latin reads: “Non enim eius altitudo transcendit omne
sensibile et omnem sensum et sensibilem affectum et totum nostre libertatis dominium
quod in rebus habere possumus, nisi ibi adsit pauper usus et fervens amor eius, nec sine
eo ascendit prout est possibile ad negationem omnis entis, cum ipsi sensus et sensibiles
affectus per se non ferantur ad iurisdictionem sed potius ad usum.” The translation is
mine.
19 Olivi, De usu pauper, 34.“Sic ait [Bonaventure], Evangelica vero paupertas pro eo
quod ad eterna spiritum sublevat tanquam ea que in celis totaliter thesaurizat perfecte
ipsam profitenti suadet omnibus temporalibus debere nudari quantum ad affectum atque
dominium, et arta sustentatione necessitatis esse contentum quantum ad usum, et hic
est ipsius modus sive medietas, quod sic relinquat dominium quod non reiciat usum, sic
artitudinem usus servet quod sustentationem nature necessariam non devitet, sic neces-
sitati subveniat quod ab artitudine non recedat.” The translation is mine; the passage Olivi
quotes is from Bonaventure’s Apologia pauperum, chap. 7.
20 In William of Ockham’s Early Theory of Property Rights in Context (Boston: Brill Publishers,
2013), 79n67, Jonathan Robinson usefully points to the possibility of sometimes render-
ing affectus as “attachment,” or perhaps, I would suggest, “emotional attachment,” insofar
as the desire for ownership in the canonist tradition originated with the expulsion from
paradise and the consequent emergence of the passions, as Robinson elsewhere makes
clear in his valuable study.
21 See Nick Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the “Commedia”
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004) and Raoul Manselli, “Firenze nel Trecento:
Santa Croce e la cultura Francescana,” in Manselli, Da Gioacchino de Fiore a Cristoforo Colombo:
Studi sul Francescanesimo spirituale, sull’ecclesiologia e sull’escatologismo bassomedievali, ed. Paola
Vian (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1997), 257-73.
22 DeLorme, ed., “Question de P. J. Olivi ‘Quid ponat ius vel dominium’ ou encore ‘De
signis voluntariis,’” Antonianum 20 (1945): 309–30.
23 DeLorme, “Question,” 320f.
24 Jeannine Quillet, “Community, Counsel, and Representation,” in The Cambridge History
of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1988), 520–72; for Ockham, see esp. 561–65.
25 Quaestio de usu paupere, 35.
26 Here and elsewhere, Franciscan novitas connotes both a transformational and in-
novative order attempting to define itself as categorically different, but also “the last”
or “least” in social status and economic standing and “the most recent” in the historical
progression of the Church militant—“the first shall be last, and the last, first,” where the
Vulgate speaks of novissimi, “the most recent.”
27 Something like this trajectory is suggested by Şenocak, The Poor and the Perfect: The
Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order, 1209–1310 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2012),
esp. 243–52.
28 Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria: Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo. Homo
sacer II, 2 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2009), pl. 15; the discussion of the hetoimasia is at
265ff.
29 Agamben, Il Regno, 280.
30 For the phrase “ascetic utopia” used in a somewhat different context to demarcate
the unique space constructed by Bartleby’s demurral in Herman Melville’s Bartleby the
Scrivener, see Gilles Deleuze and Agamben, Bartleby, La formula della creazione (Macerata:
Quodlibet, 1993; originally published in French, 1989). In Agamben’s essay, the author
uses the phrase “ascetico Scharaffenland” [sic] and suggests that Bartleby is “at home” in
548 new literary history

such a place (A 71). The German Schlaraffenland is equivalent to the French “Land of
Cockaigne,” a place of mythical and paradisal abundance in the medieval imagination.
31 Şenocak, “The Making of Franciscan Poverty,” esp. 7–10.
32 I would like to thank Jon Robinson, Tricia Brady, and Melanie Shepherd for comment-
ing on a draft of this essay. At a late stage of drafting I was fortunate to have discussions
with Neslihan Şenocak, whom I would like to thank. I would also like to acknowledge a
debt to the work of Arthur Stephen McGrade, whose inquiries into the political thought
of Ockham have not been a direct influence on my thinking in this essay and so do not
appear in the footnotes. It was McGrade, however, who pointed out that Ockham’s under-
standing of the “individual” necessitated his developing a “model . . . who virtually ceases
to be an individual in the acquisitive, right-possessing, power-claiming senses of individu-
alism central to modern secular thought”; furthermore, Ockham ironically developed a
theory of rights driven by a need to prove “the theological right of the Franciscan not to
have legal rights or private (or even common) property.” See McGrade, “Ockham and the
Birth of Individual Rights,” in Authority and Power: Studies on Medieval Law and Government
Presented to Walter Ullmann on his Seventieth Birthday (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1980), 149–65 (quotations at 164, 152).