The highest poverty

What is a rule if it seems to merge with life without a trace? And what is human life, if in every gesture, in every word, in every silence it cannot be different from the rule?
It is to these questions that the new book of Agamben seeks to give an answer with the help of a passionate over -processing of that exciting and bottomless phenomenon, which is a Western monasticism from Pachomy to St. Francis. Although the book reconstructs the life of the monks in detail with its obsessive attention to counting time and the rule, to ascetic techniques and the liturgy, Agamben"s thesis is nevertheless that the genuine novelty of monasticism is not in a mixture of life and norms, but in the opening of a new dimension, in Which, perhaps for the first time "life" as such is affirmed in its autonomy, and the claim to the “highest poverty” and "use" quit the right to call, with which our time will still have to meet face to face