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The Political Function of Agamben’s “Stoic Providence-Fate Apparatus” in Seneca’s Ad Polybium de consolatione

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Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer project uses a wealth of resources from the Western

philosophical and theological traditions in order to advance a radical critique of present

political conditions. How this critique draws upon ancient Stoicism, developing its latent

potentialities towards a “new, possible use” of Stoic thought, is my task today. This use takes

Agamben’s own invocations of the Stoics as its example, so that one must evaluate where

and how he himself employs Stoicism. In fact, Stoicism stands out among the ancient schools

as central to Agamben’s project in Homo Sacer, insofar as the problematic operation of

sovereign power, biopolitics, and economic governmentality meet with an answer through

Agamben’s reading of Stoic ethics.

I’ll divide my presentation today into two halves. In the first, I show how, in “The

Providential Machine,” the fifth chapter from The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben

criticizes Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality through a reading of the ancient debate on

Stoic providence.1 This is only the first of three extended discussions featured in the Homo

Sacer series;2 I will touch on the other two discussions in the second part of my paper, which

will be devoted to a critical reading of a Stoic text, Seneca’s eleventh dialogue, the

Consolation to Polybius.3 In this text, Seneca takes up a number of themes near to

Agamben’s work—sovereign power and bare life,4 the rule of law and the exception,5

providential government and negative collateral effects,6 duty and the government of self and

others,7 and finally oikeiosis and the use of the self.8 The challenge here will be to see how

virtualities of the text’s meaning may be developed for contemporary “common use,” taking

Agamben’s philosophy and his commentary on Stoicism as a guide.9


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Part I: Agamben’s Conception of the “Stoic Providence-Fate Apparatus”

1.1 Dispositif, Dispositio, and Oikonomia in “What is an apparatus?”

In “The Providential Machine” Agamben deploys the Foucauldian concept of a

dispositif, or an “apparatus,” in the context of an analysis of what Agamben calls the “Stoic

Providence-Fate apparatus.”10 To make sense of this notion, one must turn to his essay “What

is an apparatus?”, where Agamben explains how he redefines Foucault’s concept as a

strategy of governance through which operations of power, lacking any foundation in being,

capture living beings as subjects.11

Agamben derives a Foucauldian definition of governmentality from some criteria

provided in a 1977 interview:12 first, an apparatus “is a heterogeneous set that includes

virtually anything, linguistic and non-linguistic, under the same heading: discourses,

institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on;” in other

words, “the apparatus itself is the network…established between these elements;” second,

“an apparatus has a concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation;”

and third, [an apparatus] appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of

knowledge.”13 He then follows a genealogy for the term “apparatus” through Foucault’s

earlier use of the term positivité, Jean Hyppolite’s use of the same term,14 Hegel’s account of

“positive or natural religion,”15 and the Church Fathers’ debates over a divine “dispositio,”16

which translates the Greek term oikonomia into Latin. He arrives finally at Aristotle’s

Politics, where the philosopher uses the term oikonomia in a strictly practical sense, to

characterize the “management of domestic affairs.”17 The decisive transformation comes,

Agamben explains, in the second century AD, when the Church Fathers extended the sense of

the term oikonomia to express the separation of the Father and the Son as an “economy of

redemption and salvation,” so that a fracture within the divine being was resolved only by

relocating itself as an irreparable division between God’s being as the reigning Father and his


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praxis as the Son and the Spirit governing in the world, a dividsion that ultimately conditions

the later terms of this genealogy.18 Agamben concludes, “The term apparatus designates that

in which, and through which, “a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in

being,” is realized. “This is the reason why apparatuses must always imply a process of

subjectification, that is to say, they must also produce their subject.”19

This genealogy only gets Agamben so far. In fact, by clarifying that all the multivalent

apparatuses Foucault discusses in his lectures can be traced to a paradigmatic original, he

places his own definition beyond the theological oikonomia and its secularization in Hegel,

Hyppolite, and Foucault, so that he can situate it within a bipolar relation: on one side of a

“massive partitioning of beings,” there are living beings or substances, and on the other there

are “the apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured.” Subjectivity intervenes

as a third term here, insofar as Agamben calls a subject “that which results from the relation

and…the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses.”

1.2 Stoic physics and the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” in “The Providential Machine”

Now it is possible to return to Agamben’s discussion of the “Stoic providence-fate

apparatus” in “The Providential Machine,” and to clarify how the Stoics, by correlating

providence and fate, constructed an apparatus of the kind Agamben describes. Agamben will

conclude here that—this is the first item on the handout—the Stoics, by initiating a debate

that coordinated fate and providence in “a bipolar system,” “produc[ed] a…zone of

indifference between what is primary and what is secondary, the general and the particular,

the final cause and the effects;” and that the “effectual ontology” elaborated through that

debate, which only ever worked toward a “functional correlation” of these indifferent


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oppositions, “in a way contains the condition of possibility” for modern governmentality.20 If

an apparatus, as I have already argued, means for Agamben a strategy of governance through

which operations of power, lacking any foundation in being, capture living beings as

subjects, then the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” is that original modality of

“governance,” through which operations of power capture all living beings as subjects of a

fate lacking a sure foundation in being and a divine providence only ever coordinated with

that fate.21

[This position bears some resemblance to Victor Goldschmidt’s description of Stoic

providence.22 Agamben’s argument also aims to correct Foucault’s genealogy of

governmentality, pushing it back from the Early Modern period to antiquity.]

In sections 5.3-5.6 of “The Providential Machine,” Agamben argues that the ancient

debate over providence was not concerned primarily to show that man is free, but rather to

explain how “a divine government of the world,” the paradigmatic form of governmentality,

is possible.23 As evidence that the Stoics, in order to produce a theory of a government of the

world, first advanced a philosophical “coordination and articulation of special [providence],”

which attends to particular things and events, and general providence,”24 which attends to the

general order of things, Agamben relies primarily upon three texts: a fragment of Chrysippus’

Peri Pronoias quoted in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights, Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On

Providence, and Plutarch’s De Fato.

Agamben only references the passage from Chrysippus, the second item on your

handout, but actually quotes Leibniz, who is in turn quoting from his Theodicy a paraphrase

Bayle had made of the passage from the Attic Nights [this is the handout 2, which appears

with the original text]. He argues that the passage shows how Stoic thought forged “the

strategic conjunction of two apparently different problems: that of the origin and justification

of evil, and that of the government of the world.”25 In response to the question whether


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providence is responsible for such apparent afflictions to mankind as diseases, Chrysippus

seems to have said that “Nature, in preparing and producing many great things excellently

ordered and of great usefulness, found that some drawbacks came as a result, and thus these

were not in conformity with the original design and purpose; they came about as a sequel to

the work, they existed only as consequences which were somehow necessary, and which

Chrysippus defined as kata parakolouthēsin [according to concomitance].”26 This

rationalization of such apparent afflictions to humanity, which accounts for the fragility of

the human skull as a seemingly negative, but unavoidable “concomitant effect” of a primarily

positive design, introduces a gap between one order of providential causality and a second,

unintentional causality that unfolds “according to concomitance.”

For Chrysippus, these seem to be two ways of looking at the same providence,27 but

through the centuries the gap widened into the distinction “general providence” and “special

providence.” Agamben introduces Alexander of Aphrodisias, an Aristotelian commentator

opposed to the Stoics’ account of providence, because his account is essential for

understanding how the apparatus the Stoics constructed would come to involve both

providence and fate. Specifically, where Alexander objects to the Stoics’ view is their

confidence that God’s providence “looks after both the world in general and particular

things.”28 In the passage quoted at handout 3, Alexander holds that, since God must be

greater than a master of an oikos or a king, he must only “prefer to exercise his providence in

a universal and general way,” not intervening in particular circumstances. Were he to attend

to every particular substance and event, the deity’s practice of oikonomia would be more

slavish even than a mere human’s.29

A division is apparent here, Agamben suggests, between providence “kat’hauto,” or

providence “in itself,” and providence “kata symbebēkos,” or providence “by accident,”—

terms Alexander defines in the passages at handout 4. Providence “in itself” “sets as [its] aim


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to benefit the object in question, and in view of this benefit he acts and carries out actions by

means of which he considers himself to be able to achieve the aim that he has set;”

providence “by accident” occurs “when the one that is said to be providing for does not do

anything to benefit the one which he provides for, but it happens that the latter takes some

benefit from the thing the other does.”30 This second, accidental providence involves a

problem, though, because, although God cannot be so low as to fuss over particulars, he also

cannot be “completely unaware of this accidental consequence.”

Alexander resorts to another explanation for God’s knowing neglect of particulars; on

this model, described at handout 5 the divine being may not knowingly make provision for

particular cases, but “the divine power which is also called “nature” makes subsist the things

in which it is found and gives them a form according to a certain ordered connection, but this

does not happen in virtue of some decision. Nature does not exercise decision and rational

reflection with regard to all the things it does, since nature is an irrational power.”31

Intermediate between “for itself” and “by accident,” nature thus appears to be unwilled by

God and to act involuntarily, yet it is not accidental. Through what Alexander calls a “divine

technique” (149), nature acts independently of providence in general to realize an accord with

that providence, so that their separation is nevertheless correlated and coordinated without

“eliminating [the] accidental character” of particular events. In the sixth passage on the

handout, Alexander concludes that “the being that does not act in view of something, but

knows that it benefits and wants it, can be said to provide for it, but neither by itself nor by

accident.” According to Alexander, God, or any being providing for another accidentally,

does not take the benefit achieved as a final cause, but the end is nevertheless achieved;

insofar as nature intervenes, he is also not the efficient cause, but the sequence of events is all

the same coordinated with God’s will and his knowledge of the outcomes.


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Agamben concludes his discussion of Alexander by remarking how this theory of

providence was not meant to describe a government of the world, but that it nevertheless

develops in a contingent way a correlation of the general and particular that amounts to this.

He explains at handout 7 that, “Whether providence manifests itself only in the universal

principles,” as Alexander has it, “or descends to earth to look after the lowest particular

things,” as the Stoics argue,32 “it will in any case need to pass through the very nature of

things and follow their immanent ‘economy.’” For Alexander, though, “the government of

the world occurs neither by means of the tyrannical imposition of an external general will,

nor by accident, but through the knowing anticipation of the collateral effects that arise from

the very nature of things and remain absolutely contingent in their singularity.”33

Turning to Plutarch, Agamben explains how providence “by accident” comes to be

theorized not simply as natural contingency, but as “heimarmenē” or “fate.” He says that

Plutarch, in the De Fato, is “following a Stoic model” that “redouble[s] ontology into a

pragmatics,” so that fate must be understood both as ousia (substance) and as energeia

(activity).34 As ousia, fate is “the soul of the world…divided spatially into…the heaven of the

fixed stars, the part containing the “errant” planets, and the part located beneath the heavens

in the terrestrial region.” As energeia, fate is assimilated by Plutarch to the nomos

“determining the course of everything that must come to pass”—in other words, he

assimilates it to the law of nature.35

Agamben stresses that, once the paradigm of law governs the connection between fate

in general (kata meros) and fate in particular (kath’ ekasta), particular facts can only be

regarded as the result of efficient causes that follow a general law.36 He explains, “Plutarch

thus identifies what pertains to destiny”—and I should add that destiny is used here as

another word for fate—“with what is effectual or conditional (to ex hypotheseōs),”37 or, as he

quotes Plutarch’s own words at handout 8, “with that which is not laid down independently,


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but in some fashion is really “subjoined” to something else, wherever there is an expression

implying that if one is true, another follows.”38 According to this account, the claim that

“everything happens according to destiny” (panta kath’ heimarmenēn, 570c) applies only to

consequences and effects, never to these conditional antecedents, which have the character of

hypothetical laws or of “what has been established primarily [proēgēsamenois] in the divine

appointment of things.”39 Agamben concludes that “destiny” or fate “divides what is real into

two different levels: that of the proēgoumena, general antecedents, and that of the particular

effects. The former are somehow in destiny” or fate, “but do not occur according to destiny,

and destiny is that which results effectually from the correlation between the two levels.”40

Plutarch also describes three levels of providence. A first providence is identified, as in

Alexander, with the intellection and will of the primary god (572f); only this providence

should be considered providence in the true sense (573b). This first providence also generates

a second providence, though, “created together with destiny” or fate and “included in the first

providence” (574b)—these are the secondary gods who dwell in the heavens. Then, as the

third providence, there is the whole array of demonic beings, “who are commissioned to

oversee and order the individual actions of men.” Plutarch draws an analogy, according to

which fate or destiny is ultimately comparable to the law, just as the first providence is

comparable to law-giving or “the political legislation appropriate to the soul’s of men”

(573d). This analogy leads Agamben to the conclusion he intends to derive from this

analysis. As we have seen, the law of fate proceeds from proēgoumena, or primary

antecedents of a hypothetical and general character, which are in fate but do not occur

according to fate, to consequences or effects of the proēgoumena, while providence presides

over that fate as a legislating will and intelligence that gives birth to that law. In other words,

Agamben argues that providence stands in relation to fate as a proēgoumenon or a primary

antecedent does with respect to its consequence or effect, so that fate must be considered a


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consequence of providence. This duplicity of fate, consequent with respect to providence but

primary with respect to its particular effects, shows how the providence-fate apparatus

coordinates a bipolar system that produces a zone of indifference between antecedent and

consequent, general and particular, final cause and effects.

Part II: Agamben’s “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” in Seneca’s Dialogorum liber XI

2.1 Introduction

To enable his interpretation of others’ texts, Agamben often employs in his analyses the

concept of Entwicklungsfähigkeit, which he sometimes credits to Feuerbach and translates as

“capacity for development.”41 At this point, I’ll take Agamben’s analysis in another direction,

and consider its exemplarity for reading other Stoic texts upon which Agamben himself has

never commented. My assumption here is that, in Agamben’s writings which demonstrate the

Entwicklungsfahigkeit of ancient Stoicism, one discovers also a certain way of reading which

highlights the “capacity for the development” of both Agamben’s own philosophy and

contemporary Stoicism. I’ve chosen the Consolation to Polybius because it stages the

principal theme of the Homo Sacer series, that is, the violent intimacy shared between

sovereign power and what Agamben calls bare life, or life void of any “form” or “way” of

life, of any “bios,” life reduced only to its mere biological existence or its “zoē.”42 Because

the Consolation to Polybius positions Seneca, the author composing this text in exile, as bare

life, his very act of writing the text itself becomes an expression of bare life’s intimate

relation with sovereign power.

In my reading I’ll examine three topics which illustrate how each of Agamben’s

analyses of Stoicism in the Homo Sacer series may be brought to bear upon the Consolation

to Polybius. I argue that the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” functions in this text according

to the logic that Agamben describes, creating “a zone of indifference” between “primary and


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secondary, general and particular, and efficient and final causes.” Because of this, Seneca, as

bare life separated from all social relations but nevertheless subject to power relations with

the emperor, may seem a mere “secondary agent” of Claudius’ will, performing the officia of

a consolator within the government of self and others established by Claudius’ sovereignty;

but he may also make use of himself to establish a certain primacy over Claudius, using him

as a means to secure support for his return from exile.

2.2 Nature, Fate, and Fortune in Seneca’s Consolation to Polybius

Seneca’s Consolation to Polybius, composed sometime between the end of February in

41 and mid-year in 43 CE, takes the form of an open letter to a fellow court attendant,

philosopher, and literary author whose brother has suffered an untimely death.43 As a

consolation, the text necessarily deals with an economy of loss, wherein the aim of the

consolator is to compensate a consolandus’ experience of loss with arguments that

rationalize the loss. To understand why Seneca, an exile in need of consolation himself, turns

to writing a consolation to Polybius, I’ll show how both Polybius’ experience of loss and

Seneca’s attempt to console him for that loss are situated in the text within a “providence-fate

apparatus” of the kind which Agamben describes. The guiding insight here is that terms such

as nature and fate, employed everywhere in the consolation, should have a strategic function,

in the sense that they must “capture living beings” within “operations of power,” inscribing

those living beings as “subjects.”

According to the classical Stoic position, providence, fate, and nature are all one and

the same thing, so that they should be the only “operation of power.”44 As we saw in the

fragment of Chrysippus, the Stoics allow no separation of providence and fate; there are only

providence’s perfect action and the potentially negative, “concomitant effects” of that action.

Viewed from the sage’s horizon, it is impossible to regard these as negative. Much of


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Seneca’s consolatory argumentation will be aimed at establishing this position. In the first

paragraph, the surviving text begins by advancing natural law’s universality as a source of

consolation. Seneca describes the rise and fall of all generated things, even advancing the

prospect of universal conflagration, and concludes at handout 9 that, “It is the greatest

consolation to consider that, that which has happened to him, all before have suffered and all

will suffer; and thus nature, “rerum natura,” seems to me to have made common what it has

made difficult, so that the equality [of fate] might console the cruelty of fate.” Already here

one can see that fate and nature are assimilated, treated in fact as interchangeable. But

moreover nature-fate is characterized both as a constructive force, and at least some of the

Latin suggests that it is also conceived as a legal apparatus. Seneca will return to this idea

several times, and I have included further evidence on the handout at 10-13. I will forego

working through them though. The point to take away is that throughout the consolation

Seneca presents nature and fate as interchangeable terms for identifying the necessity that

governs the world with a perfectly consistent legal order.

Along the way, though, a third term is also introduced, which presses against the

coherent and complete necessity of fate and nature. That is fortune. As Kajanto has

explained, “It is problematic how immovable and inexorable Fate may be reconciled with a

fickle power which is its very opposite.”45 The Consolation to Polybius is no exception. In

fact, the text begins with two long laments at 2.2-7 and 3.4-5, in which Seneca protests

against fortune’s injustice to Polybius, now blaming her for bringing death upon Polybius’

brother. Accusations against her persist nearly to the end of the text: at 4.1, reason must bring

weeping to an end, because fortune will not do so. At 5.4, Polybius may show his other

brothers an example of courage by enduring this assault from fortune. At 13.2, Seneca

himself explains that, when the senate sentenced him to death, it was fortune who had

brought him to this disaster. And at 17.1, she is so bold even to intrude upon Caesar’s palace,


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bringing the misfortune of death upon them. Fortune, the very personification of

unpredictable contingency, appears in this text as an enemy who brings death and loss

without regard for what is orderly, consistent, and good. How can she be understood to

coexist with fate and nature, whose providence is universal, legally consistent, and good?

At 18.3, number 14 on the handout, Seneca suggests that fate, nature, and fortune could

perhaps be reconciled; As for Fortune herself, he writes, “even if it is not possible now before

you to plead her case…still at some time I must defend her, as soon as the day which will

have made you a more balanced judge of her. For she provides many things to you, with

which she may repair this injury, even now she will give many things, by which she redeems

herself; finally, that itself, which she has taken away, she herself had given to you.” So here it

is Fortune who has given Polybius his brother, but just a moment ago I read a passage from

paragraph 10 in which “the nature of things” had given Polybius his brother. This passage

introduces a problem of perspective: Polybius may not appreciate that Fortune offers him

favors in his present condition. It’s helpful to introduce here Elizabeth Asmis’s recent

suggestion that Fortune herself may well be only a vanishing presence, a force who seems to

be real from the Stoic progressor’s perspective, but, from the point of view of the sage, who

knows that there are no misfortunes, must vanish from all causal accounts as nothing more

than a false judgment.46 This would explain how, first, Seneca could give Fortune and nature

equal credit for giving Polybius his brother, second, how Fortune and nature could cooperate,

since they are ultimately two ways of looking at the same thing, just as nature and fate are

two different conceptions of the same thing,47 and finally how Fortune could be said to

“provide” for Polybius in this passage with other compensations. All of these agents, nature,

fate, and fortune, are ultimately so many proxies for providence.


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2.3 Subjectivity and Officium of Subjects of the Providence-Fate Apparatus

There is a danger that, if Fortune is too quickly assimilated to nature and fate, Polybius’

“progressor’s view” of her is simply discounted. Here Agamben’s account of the “Stoic

providence-fate apparatus” is especially helpful, even if Seneca identifies all these (only

apparently) negative concomitant effects of providence with Fortune, not Nature or Fate. So,

only as long as one keeps Fortune in view can one, with Agamben, speak of a “Stoic

providence-fate apparatus;” from the sage’s point of view everything collapses into a

perfectly coherent causal order in which there is only nature, fate, and providence. The

progressor’s view of reality is then a partial view, but one which records an important fact:

the separation between the order of providence or fate and the seeming contingency of

fortune. It is in this sense that the subjectivity of living beings is essential to the providence-

fate apparatus, which by definition involves providence and fate as operations of power that

come into existence by capturing living beings as subjects.

Up to now, I’ve proceeded as if Seneca has at his command the sage’s awareness of the

illusory nature of Fortune. In truth, it’s not so simple. At times, as in the passage on Fortune’s

defensibility (18.3), he seems to transcend every finite horizon of understanding and to

recognize fortune and nature’s unity, as a sage would; at other times, he seems to be even

more dismayed by his bad fortune than Polybius, so that he is unreliable as a consoler. For

example, he concludes the consolation with a pitiful recusatio—this is handout 15, where

Seneca confesses that his “worn-out and dulled mind… cannot be free to attend to the

consolation of another, because his own troubles keep him occupied.” This is hardly the

pschological repose of the sapiens.48 His mental fragility is also apparent in his account of

how he arrived at this condition; there, he digresses to touch upon the circumstances of a trial

before the senate in which Seneca himself was sentenced to death. In paragraph 13.2-3,

handout 16, he writes that “[Caesar] has not so cast me down, that he would not want me to


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rise up again—or he has not cast me down at all, but he has supported me, when I have been

struck by Fortune and I have fallen, and, as I was rushing headlong, the application [usus] of

his divine hand has gently put me in my place [deposuit] with restraint. He interceded with

the Senate on my behalf and not only gave me life but also petitioned it for me.” So here we

have an account of how Seneca’s punishment was reduced to relegation to Corsica, the status

and place from which he writes. This passage clarifies how Seneca is an example of bare life:

having passed through a social death, Claudius restores him to the security of his biological

life but deprives him of his social identity. The more specific point I am making about

Seneca’s subjectivity is that his account is both lucid and delusional, at once reporting the

true sequence of causality and mistaking Fortune as the cause of his exile.49 Still, that Seneca

may mistake Fortune as the agent who punished him, and that now it is Claudius who, like

nature or fortune elsewhere in the letter, gives life,50 may indicate a deeper relationship

between Claudius and Fortune, as if contingency and negative concomitant effects actually

fall to him.

But Seneca’s confusion about his circumstances is nevertheless evident, and his

capacity to act as a consoler for Polybius should thus be regarded with at least moderate

suspicion. So, if Seneca is a Stoic progressor who may even be more compromised by his

grief for his exile than Polybius is by his grief for his brother’s death, then why has he

appointed himself the task of consoling Polybius? The answer can also be found in paragraph

13, number 17 on your handout, where Seneca explains that he is trying to make himself

useful to the emperor, saying that, Claudius “knows best the time at which he ought to help

anyone; I will apply all my effort, so that he may not blush to rescue me.” Though Seneca, as

bare life, has been separated from every social relation, he nevertheless persists as a subject

of power relations with the emperor. According to Agamben’s argument in the first volume

of the Homo Sacer series, sovereign power and bare life are conjoined with each other, since


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sovereign power only comes into existence by extracting a remainder of sacred life, detached

from those subjects over whom he holds the power of life and death;51 in other words, the

princeps, explicitly mentioned at 16.6 when Seneca pleads with Fortune to leave untested the

emperor’s inviolability, only derives his sacred status from the accursed status of bare life.

So, his subjection to the emperor’s power relations are the only connection to social relations

left to him; because of this, if he wants to make the most of his situation, he must somehow

make himself worthy of the emperor’s clemency.

At this point, Seneca is faced with a problem. To act in the service of the emperor, one

must have officia, or duties, the fulfillment of which would be useful to the emperor. Here

again we may turn to Agamben for help, this time to “The Genealogy of Office.” I don’t have

time to go through Agamben’s discussion, which revisits Foucault’s late analyses of the

government of self and others, but there are a couple points that I will borrow from his

analysis. In this chapter from Opus Dei, Agamben argues that Cicero’s translation of the

Stoic term kathēkonta with the Latin officia transformed the meaning of the kathēkonta,

which Agamben follows Victor Goldschmidt in regarding as “devoir des situations,” or

“what is respectable and appropriate to do according to the circumstances, above all taking

account of the agent’s social condition.”52 Polybius, for example, has a definable social

position as the secretary a libellis—or the official charged with responsibility for receiving

and reviewing petitions to the emperor.

In paragraph 6, on your handout at 18, Seneca explains how Polybius’ “great persona”

disallows certain actions and requires others; that this paragraph concerns officia is clear

from the use of the word at 6.4 (although I haven’t included that sentence). I note once again

the proximity of Fortune and Claudius, who are both said to have elevated Polybius to his

status. The officia assigned by Caesar or Fortune come into focus, though, especially at the

end of the paragraph where Seneca contrasts the advantages and disadvantages of his and


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Polybius’ respective positions: “Many things are not allowed to you, which are allowed to the

lowest and to those cast into some corner of the world…It is not allowed to you to do

anything according to your own judgment: so many thousands of men must be heard, so

many applications must be disposed [disponendi], so great a mass of affairs gathering from

the whole world is to be dispatched, so that it is can be subjected to the princeps’ most

excellent soul to according to its order. It is not allowed to you, I say, to weep: so that you

can hear the many weeping, so that you may hear the prayers of those petitioning and

desiring to receive the pity of the mildest Caesar, you must dry your own tears.” Note here

the use of the gerundive form of dispono, from which dispositio is derived as a deverbative;

what Seneca describes here is something like Polybius’ precise contribution to the functional

oikonomia coordinated with Claudius’ providential sovereignty in the empire; it is almost as

if Claudius’ role as princeps stands with respect to the palatine functionaries, the senate, and

the equestrians and legions scattered through the empire as providence operates in

coordination with fate in the passage from Plutarch’s De Fato. The passage also clarifies how

Polybius’ self-governance makes possible his governance of others, precisely Agamben’s

point when he glosses Cicero by saying: “If human beings do not simply live their lives like

the animals, but “conduct” and “govern” life, officium is that by means of which human life

is “instituted” and “formed.””53 In order to fulfill the duties that fall to him as the emperor’s

secretary a libellis, Polybius must rationally manage his grief, governing his life in

accordance with what his status demands. A collateral effect of this self-government is, then,

that Polybius may be able to secure Seneca’s recall from exile.

“The Genealogy of Office” also shows how Cicero’s use of officium as a translation for

kathēkonta transformed the concept. He continues, “What is decisive… is that…the politician

and the jurist’s attention is shifted from the carrying out of individual acts,” that is, from the

devoirs des situations, “to the “use of life” as a whole; that is, it is identified with the


Robinson 17

“institution of life” as such, with the condition and the status that define the very existence of

human beings in society.” The concept of officium, unlike the concept of kathēkonta, may

apply to human life as such, so that Agamben can write that, “It is from this perspective that

Seneca can speak of an officium humanum, of an office that applies to human beings insofar

as they are bound with their fellow humans in a relationship of sociabilitas…” With this

expansion of the Stoic concept through Cicero’s translation, it is possible to search for an

officium humanum that would be proper to Seneca even as bare life. That is, he need not have

a defined social position to have the officium of sociabilitas, which marks the human

“capacity for socialization.” Seneca’s appointment of consolation as a task for himself now

can be made clear: though he may not be as well positioned to console Polybius as he could

be, as a “member of the great body” of humankind, he still possesses the potential for social

interaction necessary to the execution of this officium.54

It would seem then that the challenge for Seneca will be to comport himself and

“conform the use of his life” in such a way that he might be able to console Polybius. As a

human he has the potential for this officium, but he has only the necessary condition for the

performance of this task, but no guarantee that he will be effective. Beyond disparaging his

attempt at 18.9, he even makes clear his confidence that Claudius will be a better consoler at

12.4 and 14.1-2. Seneca’s strategy, then, to perform his officium as a consolator effectively is

in fact to vanish behind the voice of Claudius, which he features in a consolatory

prosopopoeia from 14.2-16.3. Once again, Agamben’s comments in “The Genealogy of

Office” can explain this strategy. Quoting a passage in which Varro distinguishes three

modalities of human action, “agere, facere, and gerere” (De lingua latina 6.77.245),

Agamben observes that the first two terms correspond to the Aristotelian notions of praxis,

action with an aim inherent to its performance, and poiesis, action with an aim in the finished

product, while gerere has no Greek equivalent. Instead, it “designates…the specifically


Robinson 18

Roman concept of the activity of one who is invested with a public function of

governance.”55 He concludes that officium involves action of this kind, not praxis or poiesis.

He will finally compare this “sustaining” action to the function of the minister in the

sacrament, who does not act in the sense of praxis or poiesis, but rather “supports” the action

of the principal agent in the manner of an instrumental cause. I suggest that this way of

conceiving the action involved in officium illuminates not only the officia of Polybius, who

acts on behalf of Claudius, but also Seneca, who even assumes the role of a kind of priestly

interpres with respect to Claudius, who is characterized at 14.2 as an oracle: handout 19,

“When he speaks, his words, delivered as if from some oracle, will have an impressive

weight; his divine authority will beat the entire force of your grief.” In order to achieve the

goal of consolation, to perform an officium humanum, Seneca becomes a means with respect

to an end of which he imagines Claudius would approve.

2.4 Conclusion: Use of the Self and Oikeiosis; Contingency and Freedom

Searching in this way to find a place for himself within the apparatus, Seneca strives to

become an operative subject, to have a function in the relations of power, to comport himself

and his discourse as an effective medium supportive of Claudius’ divine, salvific action. In

his commentary on the Stoic providence-fate apparatus, and especially in his discussion of

Plutarch’s De Fato, Agamben establishes that the apparatus only achieves a “functional

correlation” of several bipolarities: efficient and final causes, means and ends, consequences

and antecedents, the general and the particular. Because the apparatus does not go beyond

correlating these terms, they are given to a kind of reversibility or even become reducible, so

that ends can become means, final causes can become efficient causes, and antecedent terms

can become consequent, as if they exist only in “a zone of indifference.” In the Consolation

to Polybius, Fortune names a similar mutability intruding among the coherence and


Robinson 19

consistency of nature and fate. It is therefore possible to identify in her a point of reversal in

the text of the Consolation, an element of contingency that allows the text to be legible from

another point of view. On this reading, Seneca would be “making use of himself,” Claudius,

and the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus,” in order to reverse the poles, so that what seems to

be the consequent and end of this discourse, consoling Polybius, may itself become primary

and the means of another end: namely, securing his recall from exile. In this way, Seneca

would take advantage of the apparatus and its zones of indifference.

In “L’uso di sé,” the fifth chapter of L’uso dei corpi, Agamben’s most recent discussion

of Stoicism supports “the hypothesis,” on your handout at 20, “that, well beyond a simple

intersection [linking oikeiosis to the use of the self], the doctrine of oikeiosis becomes

intelligible only if it is intended as a doctrine of the use of the self.” Agamben’s argument

pushes Thomas Bénatouïl’s work on use into a dispute with Foucault and Heidegger on the

primacy of use over care, in order to establish two points: first, through a reading of Diogenes

Laertius VII.85 (SVF 3, 178) that a living being cannot be made extraneous or unfamiliar to

itself, in other words, that living beings are inalienably themselves; and second, through

Seneca’s Epistle 121 that oikeiosis does not aim to constitute the individual, but rather “the

self itself.” 56 This “relational conception” of the self, furthermore, is not “something

substantial,” nor does it have a “preestablished end” in filling out our “innate knowledge;”

rather, because the use of the body proceeds from a natural predisposition and involves

synaesthesia, or simultaneous awareness, of the body’s constitution and the self, “it coincides

entirely with the use which the living being makes [of itself].”57

If the living being is inalienable to himself, then Seneca’s assumption of the voice of

Claudius appears in a different light. Perhaps the prosopopoeia at 14.2-16.3 can be read not

as a ritual act whereby Seneca becomes the medium for Claudius’ oracular presence, but

rather as an act of oikeiosis or appropriation. This would not rule out the possibility that


Robinson 20

Seneca performs an officium, but it would change the purpose of that performance. By

identifying with Claudius’ voice, assuming it, and using it to console Polybius, Seneca can

reverse the poles of the apparatus and make himself the end of Polybius’ consolation, which

then becomes a means. That is to say, by introducing the emperor’s authority to bring

consolation to Polybius, Seneca can restore Polybius to his proper officium as secretary a

libellis; if Polybius is restored to his operativity and resumes his function within the

oikonomia of the palace administration, then having received a benefit from Seneca, he may

be inclined to hear Seneca’s case for clemency favorably. In this way, Seneca can make use

of the apparatus’s inversions of means and ends, efficient and final causes.

This reading will only be convincing if there is some textual support for it. I think there

is in the figure of Fortuna. Twice now I have indicated that Fortuna and Claudius share a

certain virtual identity. Furthermore, in the prosopopoeia at paragraphs 14.2-16.3, it is once

again Fortune who intrudes upon the sacred person of the princeps by attacking members of

his family, just as she has attacked Polybius’ brother. But if Claudius can be assimilated to

Fortune, if they can be regarded as interchangeable in some sense, just as fortune, fate, and

nature are so many names for general providence, then the contingency that divides and

functionally correlates providence and fate also divides Claudius’ mastery in his domus and

his sovereignty in the empire before it correlates it. Claudius’ consolatory speech exposes the

fracture in his own palace between Julians and Claudians, most dramatically exemplified

when Claudius comes to his own grandfather, Mark Antony, who, as Seneca’s Claudius puts

it at paragraph 16, sacrificed twenty legions at the battle of Actium to his brother Lucius,

whom Octavian had killed. At once highlighting the violence which the Julio-Claudians

regularly inflicted on each other—and which brought Seneca to ruin—and associating that

violence with the contingency of Claudius’ rule, Seneca would seem to be presenting the

emperor Claudius’ mastery within his palatial domus, which is somehow itself a microcosm


Robinson 21

of providential government, subordinate to the macrocosmic providence of nature or fate, as

unstable, reversible, and contingent. Claudius’ proximity to nature, fate, and providence

likewise destabilizes their generality; the “special providence” that his reign represents can

unsettle the unity of nature and fate’s “general providence,” once he is associated with

Fortune. In this way, these seemingly cosmic forces can be considered as contingent

consequences of his primary, antecedent role within an apparatus of power/knowledge. In

other words, the introduction of an element of contingency, namely, a personified Fortune,

into the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus” leaves an opening for Seneca to “make use” of his

situation and his intimate power relation with Claudius.

If the political present, as Agamben has explained, is characterized by a massive

proliferation of apparatuses, through which subjectivities rise and fall, then perhaps other

Stoic texts, like Seneca’s Consolation to Polybius, can be appropriated for a common use in

the present, as a kind of lesson in making use of ourselves, our situations, and the apparatuses

that bind us.

1 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population : Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977-78 (Basingstoke ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan : République Française, 2007). 2 Each is identified at fns. 7, 8, and 9. 3 L.D. Reynolds, ed., L. Annaei Senecae dialogorum libri duodecim (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 266-290. For comparanda, I have relied upon the standard references works by von Arnim (abbreviated SVF) and Long & Sedley (abbreviated LS). 4 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 71-115. 5 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 15-66. 6 Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Homo Sacer Ii, 2), trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (with Matteo Mandarini) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 109-43. 7 Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty, trans. Adam Kotsko (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 65-86. 8 Giorgio Agamben, L’uso dei corpi (Homo Sacer, IV, 2) (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2014), 78-87. 9 The term “common use” is Agamben’s. Giorgio Agamben, "What Is an Apparatus?," in What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 24. 10 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 123. 11 This is a paraphrase of Agamben’s definition; see fn. 20 below. 12 E.g. Foucault, Security, territory, population. Agamben, “What is an apparatus?”, 1. 13 “What is an apparatus?”, 1-2. 14 Ibid., 3-4. 15 Ibid., 4-6. 16 Ibid., 8-12. 17 Ibid., 9; Politics 1255b21.


Robinson 22

18 “What is an apparatus?”, 10-12. 19 Agamben, “What is an apparatus?”, 11. 20 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 122. 21 This would seem to imply that in the time between when Agamben published “What is an apparatus?” and when he published The Kingdom and the Glory, he had considerably altered his thinking on the origin of apparatuses. But we should not confuse the concept of an apparatus, that is, a dispositif, dispositio, or oikonomia, with the concept of governmentality, which Agamben understands as originally expressed through the paradigm of gubernatio mundi, but he also conceives as an oikonomia, insofar as it is guided by providence. The Kingdom and the Glory, 111. 22 Victor Goldschmidt. Le système stoïcien et l’idée de temps, 3rd edition (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1977) 48. “Si, à la place des Formes et du Premier Moteur, les Stoïciens mettent le Monde et le Dieu corporel, ils ne remplacent pas seulement l’idée par le corps, mais la cause finale par la cause motrice, c’est-à-dire, à leur gré, le projet par l’activité. A cela est liée la deuxième transformation dont nous avons déjà parlé : l’éternité qui convenait à la remplacée par un rythme périodique ; l’éternité invertébrée, tout près du non-être, par un temps articulé. La troisième transformation consiste à remplacer le présent des philosophies éternitaires dans le temps réel, à en faire même le seul temps réel (donc à conférer desnité et épaisseur à l’instant mathématique d’Aristote), mais précisément du temps, et non plus l’éternité. Il fallait alors protéger ce présent temporel contre les ratifiées par Platon, en transportant au présent temporel toute la consistance que les anciens avaient attribuée à l’éternité.” 23 Cf. LS 46G 3 (Aristocles in Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica 15.14.2; SVF 1.98), 55M (Stobaeus I.79,1-12; SVF 2.913), 55N (Alexander, On Fate, 191,30-192,28; SVF 2.945), 57F 3 (Cicero De finibus 3.62-8) 67K (Seneca De otio, 4.1), and 67L (Arius Didymus in Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica 15.15.3-5; SVF 2.528). 24 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 114. 25 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 115. 26 Leibniz, Theodicy, 258; reproduced in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 115. 27 Cf. Stobaeus I.79,1-12 (SVF 2.913): “(I) Chrysippus calls the substance of fate a power of breath, carrying out the orderly government of all [...] (2) But in On seasons book 2, in On fate, and here nad there in other works, he expresses a variety of views: ‘Fate is the rationale of the world,’ or ‘the rationale of providence’s acts of government in the world’, or the rationale in accordance with which past events have happened, present events are happening, and future events will happen’. (3) And as substitute [sic] for ‘rationale’ he uses ‘truth’, ‘explanation’, ‘nature’, ‘necessity’, and further terms, taking these to apply to the same substance from different points of view.” (my italics; LS, 55M). 28 Alexander of Aphrodisias, La Provvidenza, 102-103; quoted in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 115. 29 Alexander of Aphrodisias, La Provvidenza, 117-119; quoted in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 116. 30 Alexander of Aphrodisias, La Provvidenza, 236, quoted in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 117-118. 31 Alexander of Aphrodisias, La Provvidenza, 151, quoted in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 117. 32 Cf. LS 54T (Plutarch, On Stoic self-contradictions 1050c-d; SVF 2.937). There Chrysippus’ position clearly actively involves providence in every sequence of causes, every chance event, and every particular movement. Calcidius 144 contrasts Chrysippus’ view, that providence as God’s active willing each event and circumstance that comes about is also fate, so that the two refer to the same thing by different names, with Cleanthes’ view, who holds that “the dictates of providence come about by fate,” but also that “things which come about by fate” are not necessarily “the product of providence” (LS 54U; SVF 2.933). Chrysippus can be understood to take a similar view at LS 54S (Plutarch, On Stoic self-contradictions 1051b-c; SVF 2.1178). All of this would indicate that the kind of position Alexander takes was already potentially available to the Old Stoa. 33 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 118-119. 34 Ibid., 120. 35 De Fato, 568d; Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 120. 36 De Fato, 569d; Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 120. 37 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 120. 38 De Fato, 570a; quoted in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 121. 39 De Fato, 570e; Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 121. 40 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 121. 41 Agamben, “What is an apparatus?”, 13. 42 In Agamben’s writings, bare life has numerous figures, but he exemplifies it most frequently with the Roman homo sacer, who gives his status as the name for Agamben’s Homo Sacer series. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 71-103. 43 Few take seriously Diderot’s notorious attempt to undermine the authenticity of this work, although K. Buresch seems to have supported it, arguing that the forger must have read Dio Cassius LXI 10.2, placing the date of the forged letter to the third century CE. Denis Diderot, "La Consolation À Polybe," in Essai Sur Les


Robinson 23

Règnes De Claude Et De Néron Et Sur Les Moeurs Et Les Écrits De Sénèque, ed. J. Assézat (Paris: 1875; reprint, Oeuvres complètes), 345-53; Carolus Buresch, Consolationum a Graecis Romanisque Scriptarum Historia Critica, vol. 9, 1, Leipziger Studien (Leipzig 1887), 114; J. E. Atkinson, "Seneca's 'Consolatio Ad Polybium'," in Principat: Sprache und Literatur (Literatur der Julisch-Claudischen und der Flavischen Zeit [Forts.]), ed. Wolfgang Haase (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 861; Karlhans Abel, "Das Problem Der Faktizität Der Senecanischen Korrespondenz," Hermes 109(1981): 472-99. On the question of the letter’s authenticity and possible later revisions, see especially Miriam T. Griffin, Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics, 2nd, enlarged ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 415, 27; W. H. Alexander, "Seneca's Ad Polybium De Consolatione: A Reappraisal," Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 37, no. 3.2 (1943): 35-36; Francesco Giancotti, "La Consolazione Di Seneca a Polibio in Cassio Dione Lxi, 10, 2," Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica 84(1956): 32-33; K. Münscher, "Senecas Werk. Untersuchungen Zur Abfassungszeit Und Echtheit," Philologus 16 (Supplement), no. 1 (1922): esp. 31; W. Isleib, "De Senecae Dialogo Undecimo Qui Est Ad Polybium De Consolatione" (diss., 1906), 2, where he cites Cicero, Ad Atticum XIII, 13.1, and Ovid, Trist. I.7.13 and 23. 44 See fns. 28 and 33 above. 45 I. Kajanto, "Fortuna," ANRW II.17.1(1981): 542. He is less on track in what follows, when he says, “It is, however, futile to expect excessive consistency in a writer like Seneca, who was not so much an original thinker as a disseminator of Stoic doctrines.” This view of Seneca’s work has fallen out of fashion to the extent that originality in the creation of new philosophical arguments is not the sole measure of a philosopher’s worth, and an appreciation of literary method has shown how consistency may be achieved through a variety of strategies beyond discursive presentation bound by logical sequence. Kajanto is closer to the right track when he points out, “The ancient Stoics, who defined tyche as ‘indiscernable cause’, also asserted that “the sage is unhurt by tyche.”” "Fortuna," ANRW II.17.1(1981): 543. 46 Elizabeth Asmis, “Seneca on fortune and the kingdom of God,” in Seneca and the Self, ed. by Shadi Bartsch and David Wray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 115-138. 47 Cf. fns 28, 33, and 45 above. 48 Contrast Ep. 9.16 (LS 46O; SVF 2.1065). 49 Giardina argues on the basis of this passage that Claudius did not appear in court as princeps senatus when Seneca was tried, that he was at least “formally” unaware of the circumstances of Seneca’s trial. Substantially, he may have actually orchestrated the trial, but he maintained distance from it publicly. She holds that a senator, at the urging of Messalina, must have introduced the charges against Seneca. Andrea Giardina, "Storie Riflesse: Claudio E Seneca," in Seneca E Il Suo Tempo, ed. Piergiorgio Parroni (Rome: Salerno editrice, 2000), 77-79. Still, Seneca holds Claudius responsible for the decision, even if he seems to place the blame on “Fortune,” so there must have been some basis for assuming his knowledge of and even responsibility for the trial and its decisions. Besides, one way or another Claudius did intervene to overrule the Senate’s decision on Seneca’s life. 50 Cf. my comments on 10.4-5 (handout 12) and 18.3 (handout 14) above. 51 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 91-103. 52 Agamben, Opus Dei, 67 53 Agamben, Opus Dei, 74-75. 54 That “consolation” fell among the officia is most evident in Cicero’s writings, e.g. De oratore II.15.64, Fam. 4.5 and 4.6. 55 Agamben, Opus Dei, 82-83. 56 Agamben, L’uso dei corpi, 84. 57 Ibid.

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