Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life

Giorgio Agamben (philosophy, European Graduate School) presents a study of Christian monasticism focusing on the ethical and ontological stakes in constructing a "form of life." He examines the history of monastic rule-making, but focuses primarily on St. Francis and the religious order he inspired. He considers what a rule is and what a human life is when indistinguishable from rules, arguing that as rule and life lose their familiar meaning in one another that a third thing emerges. To this end, he considers St. Francis's notion of the "use" and "the highest poverty" as a dual strategy for constructing a form-of-life "situated outside the law" and beyond the ethical demands of property. While interested in Francis's strategy, Agamben also underscores problems with what "use" means outside the paradigm of ownership. He draws on not just Francis, but ancient philosophers and other medieval theologians and clergy. The text is organized in three sections of three chapters, each with a concluding argument. There is no index. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
In this book, Agamben investigates monasticism from its beginnings up through the Franciscan movement in an attempt to find a new form-of-life that escapes from the logic of Western politics as put forth in his Homo Sacer series.
What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule?It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben's thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which "life" as such, perhaps for the first time, is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the "highest poverty" and "use" challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today.How can we think a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation? How can we think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use?