I Nomi Degli Dei: A Reconsideration of Agamben’s Oath Complex

Abstract

This essay offers an exegesis and critique of the moment of community formation in Agamben’s Homo Sacer Project. In The Sacrament of Language, Agamben searches for the site of a non-sovereign community founded upon the oath [horkos, sacramentum]: an ancient institution of language that produces and guarantees the connection between speech and the order of things by calling the god as a witness to the speaker’s fidelity. I argue that Agamben’s account ultimately falls short of subverting sovereignty, however, because the sacramentum derives its power, at a fundamental level, from the ‘monothetic’ structure of truth—what Agamben calls ‘the name of God’ [il nome di Dio]. I propose we may yet salvage the oath as a means of subverting sovereignty, however, if we reconsider it in the context of polytheism, where the names of the gods [i nomi degli dei] can be many, while remaining powerful. First, through a reading of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, I argue that the Greeks understood the oath to function even where truth and falsity were inherently undecidable. Second, I argue that if we separate the truth and power functions interwoven in the sacramentum, we find a second formula, the decisory oath, which can be taken in order to produce a community even in the absence of one sovereign truth. As a kind of magical speech, the decisory oath provides the limit conditions for the possibility of distinguishing true from false in the sacramentum, and thus founds it.