【阿甘本研究】Literary_Agamben__Adventures_in_Logopoiesis

THE LITERARY AGAMBEN

Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory Series Editor: Hugh J. Silverman, Stony Brook University, USA The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory series examines the encounter between contemporary Continental philosophy and aesthetic and cultural theory. Each book in the series explores an exciting new direction in philosophical aesthetics or cultural theory, identifying the most important and pressing issues in Continental philosophy today. Derrida, Literature and War, Sean Gaston Foucaults Philosophy of Art, Joseph J. Tanke Philosophy and the Book, Daniel Selcer

THE LITERARY AGAMBENADVENTURES IN LOGOPOIESISWILLIAM WATKIN

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com William Watkin 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-8470-6452-3 PB: 978-0-8264-4324-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Watkin, William, 1970 The literary Agamben: adventures in logopoiesis / William Watkin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-1-84706-452-3 (hbk.) ISBN-10: 1-84706-452-3 (hbk.) ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-4324-3 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-8264-4324-9 (pbk.) 1. Agamben, Giorgio, 1942KnowledgeLiterature. 2. LiteraturePhilosophy. I. Title. B3611.A44W37 2010 2009030741 195dc22

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a Emilia e Luca Long have we laboured in miracle realms

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Exoteric Dossier: The Literary Agamben Projection: There is Language Infancy: Animals and Children Ineffability and Experience The Stanza The Sign Negating Negation Subjective Enunciation The Semiotic Poetic Dictation FIRST EPISODE: ON THE WAY TO LOGOPOIESIS Chapter 1 Logos, Thinking Thought Poetic Thinking Poetry and Philosophy Communicability, The Thing Itself The Idea of Language Communicability, The Idea of Prose Poetic Gestures The Tablet, Philosophical Gesturality Potentiality

x xi 1 4 6 9 13 17 20 23 26 32

41 41 44 48 52 54 58 61 63

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Chapter 2 Poiesis, Thinking through Making Poiesis Praxis Techne The Art Thing Finitude Morphe, Shape Entelechy Arche, Modern Anti-Poiesis Chapter 3 Modernity, Productive Anti-poiesis Living As If or As Not Auratic Twilight Shock! Profaning Scission Taste and Terror How to Exit Art Modern Aesthetic Desubjectivization

69 69 71 73 75 77 79 81 83 87 88 92 94 97 99 103 107

SECOND EPISODE: ADVENTURES IN LOGOPOIESIS Chapter 4 Logopoiesis, Thinking Tautology The Logo-Poiesis Tautology The Exemplary Tautology of Logopoiesis Infinite Poetry The Habits of the Muse Chapter 5 Enjambement, the Turn of Verse The Definition of Poetry Boustrophedonics Kle sis, The Messianic As Not Messianic Kairos Messianic Rhyme An Endless Falling Into Silence Tension: The One Line Chapter 6 Caesura, the Space of Thought The Caesura Apotropaics 117 119 122 124 129 135 135 139 144 149 153 155 162 166 166 174

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Ease: The Proximate Space Corn: In The Corner of The Room Rhythm Recursion, the Turn of Thinking Notes Bibliography Index

180 186 189 194 203 218 229

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to my editors Hugh Silverman, the title of this book is his, and Sarah Campbell, whose careful stewardship of the book in its latter stages was much appreciated. I must also thank Brunel University for granting me a year-long sabbatical to complete this work. Chapter Two was presented as a seminar at Brunel University in March 2009. I greatly appreciate the questions and remarks that followed which encouraged but also challenged me. Excerpts from Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, and Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. Reprint of the final stanza from Down By the Station Early in the Morning from A WAVE by John Ashbery. Copyright 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 by John Ashbery, granted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. Permission to use Warrant granted by Charles Bernstein. Excerpts from Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death 1991 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Finally, the writing of this book coincided with the birth of my daughter . . . and my son. So it is that the last but also always the first expression of gratitude as ever goes to my wife, Barbara Montanari, not merely because of the incredible support she has given me over this past, intense, miraculous year, but also for her many comments, suggestions, and aids to translation. Obvious it is that sharing a house with an Italian is useful when writing a book on Agamben, more unexpected it was that sharing a home with a theoretical physicist would open up for me the very structural basis of poetry and thinking. Dearest Barbara, living with someone so much more intelligent than I, that is truly living.x

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AP BT C CC

EHP EP HI

HS

IH

IP IPP

Leland De La Durantaye, Agambens Potential, Diacritics 30, no. 2 (2000), 324. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1953), trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). Alain Badiou, The Century (2005), trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (1990), trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Elucidations of Hlderlins Poetry (1981), trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000). Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem (1996), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998), trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (1978), trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993). Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose (1985), trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). William Watkin, In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001).

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LAS

Jean-Franois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991), trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). LD Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (1982), trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). LPN Shane Weller, Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). M Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (1972), trans. Alan Bass (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982). MA Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts, Muses II, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). MP Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy (1989), trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY, 1999). MofP William Watkin, The Materialization of Prose: Poiesis versus Dianoia in the Work of Godzich & Kittay, Shklovsky, Silliman and Agamben, Paragraph 31, no. 3 (2008), 344364. MWC Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content (1970), trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). MWE Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends (1996), trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). N Giorgio Agamben, Ninfe (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). O Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (2002), trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). OM William Watkin, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). OWL Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (1959), trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1971). P Potentialities (1999), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). PA Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield: Acumen Press, 2008). Para Paragraph 25, no. 2 (2002). PMD Andrew Norris ed., Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). PLT Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).xii


Prof

Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (2005), trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007). QCT Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (London: Harper Perennial, 1977). R Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Winterfield (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008). RA Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002). RP Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Lvinas, Blanchot and Agamben (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). SAQ The South Atlantic Quarterly 107,no. 1 (2008). SE Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2003), trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). SL Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli eds, Sovereignty and Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). SP Alexander Pope, Selected Poetry (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008). ST Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977), trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). TP John Ashbery, Three Poems (New York: Penguin, 1993). TTR The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2000), trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). WGA Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron, and Alex Murray eds., The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). WWB William Watkin, William Watkins Blog, http://williamwatkin. blogspot.com/.

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EXOTERIC DOSSIER: THE LITERARY AGAMBEN

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) first came to prominence in the field of political philosophy with the publication in 1995 of his explosive book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. In this work Agamben presents his critique of our political modernity as a permanent state of exception/emergency. This state of exception, through which he likens our advanced democracies to living in a camp, is overseen by sovereign power. The sovereigns legitimacy extends from the power of the state to reduce our existence to bare life or life as mere survival. Living perpetually in this denuded zone of indistinction between biological existence as such (zo) and our social life (bios), what Agamben calls the biopolitical, makes of us that most despised figure from Roman law, the homo sacer. Like the homo sacer, whose sacred life was the possession and legitimization of the sovereign ready to be forfeited at any point without fear of legal repercussion, our bare life can be taken from us at any point without the state having to answer to the very apparatus of law from which is gains legitimated power through its right of occasional exception from legal norms. That exception has become the norm is the basis of Agambens savage attack on our biopolitical modernity. This extended study of the categories of the political and modernity continues apace, now stretched to six volumes or around a third of his total published output. In the complex and, typically, confrontational studies that make up the ongoing Homo Sacer project Agamben proposes a radical, often unremittingly negative critique of our Western modernity in terms of the political and its relation to life. In particular through the consideration of sovereignty, bare life, the homo sacer and our current state of exception, he presents a convincing cartography of the political in our age that is, perhaps,1


the leading revolutionary political theory that we have. This is the Agamben we are most familiar with, and the one about whom I will have the least to say in the chapters that follow. Away from the political/materialist Agamben there is another Agamben. Numerous critics have noted a seemingly contradictory bifurcation in the Agamben methodology, sometimes so marked it is suggestive of the possibility that there are more Agambens out there writing philosophy than was first assumed.1 Antonio Negri, for example, one of Agambens great productive antagonists, ponders, rather infamously:2 It seems there are two Agambens. There is the one who lingers in the existential, destining, and terrifying shadows, where he is perpetually forced into a confrontation with the idea of death. And there is another Agamben, who, through immersion in the work of philology and linguistic analysis, attains the power of being (that is, he rediscovers pieces or elements of being, by manipulating and constructing them).3 Negri is far from alone in asserting that Agamben is a homonymic moniker referring to two thinkers of radical dissimilarity, one a philosopher of negative being and the other an etymo-philologer and habitu of material clues. These are the metaphysical and the political Agambens respectively.4 This enforced subjective scission is strategic. As is often the case with the dual structures of metaphysics the energy between two terms leaves little space for the imposition of a third, unless under the auspices of dialectical resolution or archeunity. Thus Negri is canny enoughwell aware as he is that even though he dismisses the three books preceding Language and Death (1982) as a literary apprenticeship (SL, 111), the literary Agamben is not mere youthful promiscuousness but a serious and lifelong affair for his compatriotto retain the propensity for plenitude to be found in dualistic metaphysics at the same time as he praises Agamben for finally putting an end to this tradition. Canny enough perhaps, but no one can fully suppress the ability of the uncanny to undermine studiously erected structures of identity.5 Thus Negri, so desperate to negate the third Agamben, the literary Agamben, the uncanny unwelcome guest at the intimate if troubled feast that rages still tte--tte between metaphysics and politics, instead opens the door to just such a possibility of tertiary ruination.2

EXOTERIC DOSSIER: THE LITERARY AGAMBEN

Speaking of Agambens oft-cited application of the voice as such emptied of content as a solution for post-metaphysical negativity he concedes: this nihilistic self-dissolution of being frees the voice but another voice, an absolute voice, absolved of the negativity of which it had been the bearer. Effectively, it is now poiesis, inasmuch as it endures as the only power of this dissolved universe (SL, 11314). It is this voice, intimidated by the sovereignty of metaphysical thought, muted by the clamour of the bios, and yet always persistent and quietly insistent, that the following pages wish to augment. Attend then, if you will, beyond the learnd and almost overwhelming conversation between the two Agambens and his many critics, to the tones of the tern, the literary Agamben, adventurer in poiesis.6

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PROJECTION: THERE IS LANGUAGE

(The cricket, clearly, cannot think its chirping.)1 At the age of 36, in the preface to his third book, a characteristically confident Giorgio Agamben declares: In both my written and unwritten books, I have stubbornly pursued only one train of thought: what is the meaning of there is language [vi il linguaggio]; what is the meaning of I speak?2 This may seem like youthful exuberance and in the mouths of others at similarly early stages in their career might strike the seasoned observer as a touch hubristic. Who, after all, is able to predict the guiding topic of all ones books, past and future, written and unwritten?3 Now, however, 30 years later one has to concede that the young thinker was either preternaturally prescient or, over the years, unbelievably obdurate for it is undoubtedly true that the questioning of the presence of language remains at the heart of Agambens political thinking, his metaphysics and, most pertinent to our study here, the centrality of literature to his work. This risk-bound declaration of intent occurs in the short piece that prefaces Infancy and History (1978) entitled Experimentum Linguae. In this thin sheaf of pages he explains that he is undertaking an experiment with language in the true meaning of the words, in which what is experienced is language itself. Such an experience, he suggests, requires that one venture into a perfectly empty dimension . . . in which one can encounter the pure exteriority of language (IH, 5). Such a pure exteriority of an empty language which yet still speaks is both the basis of Agambens metaphysics and of my claim that the literary Agamben is an essential element of that mode of thinking.4 To see language as it is, to make language appear before us such as it is, in its full material yet voided exteriority, to let language speak4


itself without being exhausted through its enunciation is the experiment Agamben conducts on thought as such in all his written works thus far. As for the unwritten, one will take his word for it that this is also the case. An adventure in the mind and in the word is how I would term such an experiment that can only commence through access to the singular nature of the relation between literature and linguistic exteriority that philosophy has traditionally termed poiesis. To understand the relation between thought and literature through their complex, differential, and yet related responses when confronted with the empty plane of language or the sheerness of its suddenly uprearing edifice is our simple mode of conceptual transport here in this now-written work. The projection of the problem of empty linguistic exteriority from the experiments with language the youthful Agamben had been performing in the laboratory of his mind allows him to address with great speed in the pages which follow some of the major problems of philosophy. The first of these is extrapolated from an, up to this point, unpublished fragment of another great work Agamben never wrote, La voce umana (the human voice). In this incorporated and yet incorporeal work he asks: Is there a human voice, a voice that is the voice of man as the chirp is the voice of the cricket . . .? (IH, 3). This unusual rumination leads to a series of related questions such as, if there is a human voice, is this what we humans mean by language, what is the relationship between voice and language in this regard, and if we do not find a human voice, and Agamben has indeed not yet done so, where does this lead the classic philosophical definition of the human as zoon logon echon or the living being which has language? (IH, 4). This theme, or better drama, the possession of voice/language by the animal and the privation of voice in the human, returns again and again in Agambens early work.5 It is the nexus wherein his great ontological question, what does it mean to live as a human being,6 not posed until many years later, oversteps the threshold of his other great demand that primarily occupies the first two decades or so of his career, what does it mean to have language. The two interlocutions are, in effect, bundled together in what might be termed his interim request, what is the meaning of I speak? or at the very least this demand will eventually lead Agamben to consider the political and anthropological implications of this assertion for the Western definition of human being in works such as Homo Sacer and The Open (2002).5


Consistent with Negris remark and the critical communitys claims of the two Agambens, my contention is that in order to take up a position in relation to the literary in Agamben one must come to terms with language. Aside from the obvious fact that literature is composed of language and constitutes a profound experience with language, what if anything does the literary have to contribute to the arrival at the sheer face of the outcrop that is languages exteriority? The answer resides in Agambens complex investigation of language as such through ideas pertaining to the acquisition of human voice, the dependence of metaphysical definitions of language on division and negation, the role of language in subjective enunciation, and languages materiality. Acquisition of voice, scission, negation, enunciation, and semiotic materiality therefore form the five arms of the guiding star of the Agambenian ontological constellation that shines above the empty and literally unwelcoming, purely exterior landscape of language as such. The cold light cast by this stelliform compound reveals for us linguistic exteriority defined as the very existence, or as-such-ness, of language: communicability or a language that communicates itself without communicating any specific thing.7 What kind of language, what order of communication, is this solipsistic, tautological, and self-regarding entity?INFANCY: ANIMALS AND CHILDREN

One of the earliest postings into the vast dossier of Agambens great experimentum primarily concerns what he calls human linguistic infancy or how we humans are expelled from language as such into linguistic and metaphysical scission. Agamben uses the term infancy in his early work to describe an interim state between our pure state of grace in language, echoing that of the animal, and our acquisition of a voice. Infancy as a concept originates in the observable phenomenon that humans learn to speak whereas animals do not in two significant ways. First, they do not actually speak although they do possess language, and second they are pre-possessed of their voice as soon as they come into being. (The difference between speech, language, and voice is therefore foundational.) Infancy does not describe our actual early childhood, however, but is an ontological term for a state of being indicating a compound of questions pertaining to how humans have language and how this relates to their

6


apparently not having a voice of their own such as one finds in the cricket. In this way the term infancy describes having language and privation of voice as fundamental conditions for human being establishing an important interplay between possession and privation that echoes throughout the whole of Agambens work.8 In one basic sense infancy captures the process wherein human animals learn, acquire, or have speech foisted upon them. If humans, of all animals, are the only beings that are not born with a clearly identifiable voice then they must come to their voice or arrive at speech, as indeed developmentally we seem to do, and chimpanzees, regardless of our tireless encouragement, thus far have not. This could be taken to mean how we come to language but this is not how Agamben views infancy. Unlike the metaphysical tradition Agamben is not at ease with the Aristotelian definition of human being as zoon logon echon, or at least he is uncomfortable with the uncritical acceptance of this formulation within philosophy. In disputation with the Aristotelian inheritance Agamben does not accept that animals are without language which, by implication, means they cannot be appropriated by we who do as a means of securing subjective self-definition:9 Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary, they are always and totally language . . . Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of languagehe has to say I. Thus, if language is truly mans nature . . . then mans nature is split at its source, for infancy brings it discontinuity and the difference between language and discourse. The historicity of the human being has its basis in this difference and discontinuity. (IH, 59) Infancy in this instance names the fact that human animals are the only ones to emerge from language into the ambiguity of the unidentifiable sound of the human voice. For the animal, language and speech are indivisible and when one speaks of an animal voice, a dogs bark, for example, or a crickets chirping one also names the animals language and, for that matter, their being.10 In contrast to this, first, as we saw, the human has no voice of its own. One can say the cricket chirps but not the human . . . Second, as humans acquire

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their voice a clear division between speech and language in the human animal develops. Third, this division and our awareness of it define human being as self-consciously different from all other beings. Thus, as Agamben is at pains to show, it is not the fact that we have language that defines our humanity, but the way in which we come to have itnot the zoon or the logon but the generally ignored echon that matters. Fourth, the way we have language is first as bifurcation, language-speech; then as subordination, speech over language; and finally as negation, speech denies any experience of the nature of language as such comparable to the manner in which animals experience language, first silencing language and then, eventually, voice itself. This is effectively the argument of Language and Death, the follow-up text to Infancy and History, and as a critique of the basis of modern thinking on negation, voice, and silence, that forms the bedrock of Agambens attack on metaphysics and modern ontology upon which all the various edifices of the numerous Agambens are placed. Our entrance into this philosophical cul-de-sac is the fact that we humans have infancy, a period wherein we acquire speech. The only way out of this metaphysical dead end, Agamben argues, is infancy, a return to a pre-divided idea of a pure language. Infancy submits us to history expelling us from language as such and propelling us into a bifurcated sense of language as phone and logos. Yet it also involves us, and this is a profoundly Heideggerian gesture, in a destinal and possibly liberationist historicization.11 It is only because we have infancy that we have a history and it is only because we have a history that we are human and possess the potential to access the full meaning of this by a recuperation of our infancy. It would seem, from this, that there are two infancies: infancy as that which we have lost, and infancy as that which we must recuperate. In reality these two nascent states are simply two elements of an overall infancy as an ongoing process of being. In losing language we become a human being and alive, in seeking to regain language we create the possibility of becoming something like a post-human.12 Thus one could put together the three great questions of Agambenian ontology by exclaiming that what it means for human beings to live is the fact that they have language as a silenced potential embedded within the human voice, or lack of it, forming the basis of the meaning of our possession of voice. Life, language, and voice are therefore separate yet inseparable terms within Agambens thought.8


INEFFABILITY AND EXPERIENCE

Infancy solves another problem for Agamben beyond that of the relation of the human to the animal via the faculty of speech as a negation of language, namely that of the ineffable. If every thought can be classified according to the way in which it articulates the question of the limits of language, the concept of infancy is then an attempt to think through these limits in a direction other than that of the vulgarly ineffable (IH, 4). Agamben goes on to read the experience of the ineffable in the work of Kant and German historian Carl Erdmann as an attempt to think a concept that can be known but which has no referent in the world. Kant calls this the transcendental experience of pure thought, Erdmann knowledge independent of sensibility (see IH, 46). Accepting this to be the case the ineffable can be said to come to presence in that it only exists as pure thought or what language cannot say. It is a concept without a name and knowledge without an object. Ironically, the ineffable in philosophy, which seems to direct us towards pure thinking without language, actually comes to name language for this tradition. As Agamben says, the unsaid and the ineffable, far from indicating the limit of language, a place where thought can go and language cannot, instead express its invincible power of presupposition, the unsayable being precisely what language must presuppose in order to signify (IH, 4). For language to signify and thus become the human language we are all familiar with, post-vocal divided language, there must be reference to something that is not language that it signifies, a thing or a truth to be known. In Language and Death specifically Agamben identifies a metaphysical reliance on ineffable unsayability as modern thinkings greatest weakness leading philosophy into a reification of the unsayable as the negative basis for being in language. Thought has become embroiled in thinking language in terms not of what it can say but of what it cannot, defining being and thinking along the way as first, based on language, and second, presuppositionally negative (see LD, 5465). In contrast to this tradition of negation Agamben involves himself in an experiment, after Benjamin, to identify the singularity of language as such, as not something ineffable but something superlatively sayable: the thing of language (IH, 4). This is our old friend the experimentum linguae which Agamben renames here infancy, in which the limits of language are to be found not outside language,9


in the direction of its referent, but in an experience of language as such, in its pure self-reference (IH, 6). Rather than, as a thinker, in response to the problem that there is an object, that we need language to name it, but in naming it we find that the name never entirely renders the object, thus concluding that language always remains insufficient to name objects, forcing the thinker to seek for a concept that cannot be named, for if it is not named there can be no shortfall of plenitude, only to find that the name for such an experience is the ineffable or un-named as such, a morass it has proven impossible to escape from; Agamben instead simply introjects the problem. Language as the basis of thought should be considered not in terms of what it cannot say, that which is outside of it (the referent), but in terms of what it can say if it does not refer to that which is outside of itself. But what can an experience of this kind be? How can there be an experience not of an object but of language itself . . . as the pure fact that one speaks, that language exists (IH, 6)? This then is a second issue: Can one testify in thought to the significance of the fact that one speaks or that language exists without recourse to referential exteriority and difference? Can there be an experience of language as speaking but saying nothing in particular? This is not language as the ineffable, a reification of the unspeakable, or a typical conversation in a British pub towards closing time, rather it is language that is content-less speech, pre- or ir- referential language, language that says nothing other than here I am, I am language, experience me. This great quest to move beyond modern philosophical ineffability isolates a third and final issue in relation to infancy. Infancy first names our coming away from being animal. It then indicates our ability to conceive of a pure thinking not in terms of what cannot be said but what can, even if all one is saying is that one can say something. Finally, infancy names the problem of human experience. The subtitle of Infancy and History is On the Destruction of Experience and a significant portion of the book is a response to the philosophical belief that in modernity one does not go through an experience but merely observes events as spectacle from the outside (see IH, 1549).13 This problem has afflicted language for a good deal of time naming a clear division in philosophy between knowledge and experience. Important in this regard is the fact that the words experiment and experience share the same Latin root and consequently the meaning of experience for Agamben originates not only in the act of sustaining or going through something, but also testing.10


Thus Agambens expressed project or experimentum linguae suggests that to understand the fact that there is language one must conduct an experiment on and undergo an experience with language. In the modern age the division between the two meanings of experience is most profoundly felt. Either our experiences are so unique that they are one-off events that can hold no meaning for the human experience at large, evidenced by our endless pursuit of novel and new experiences, or we observe events from the outside as judgemental critics, denying that the event in question actually pertains to how we live.14 For Agamben the experience of language, which he takes to be the experience of experience itself, cannot be undertaken exterior to language as he contends some philosophers have attempted. Yet nor can it be experienced entirely from the inside as in some imagined, primordial being for whom the division between phone and logos has not yet come about. Human language, he concedes, is by definition bifurcated, defining human being as neither Homo sapiens nor Homo loquens, but Homo sapiens loquendi (IH, 8). To live as a human being means to live both from the outside of language as the being who knows but does not speak and from the inside as the being that speaks but does not know. Maintaining the false division, as Agamben sees it, between experience as knowledge and as going through, and then imposing unworkable unities to heal this rift is a habitual failing of Western thought. As he says: In this sense what is experienced in the experimentum linguae is not merely an impossibility of saying: rather, it is an impossibility of speaking from the basis of a language, it is an experience, via that infancy that dwells in the margin between language and discourse, of the very faculty or power of speech (IH, 8). Infancy names this third possibility: to maintain experience as knowing and as undergoing. It is what Agamben means by thinking and what he takes to be the truth of the very existence of the possessed faculty of language as such. Infancy reveals the confluence of language, thinking, and being human within the very faculty of language that says nothing specifically but merely enacts the experience of having language before one succumbs to the way in which our tradition has chosen to possess this faculty, namely as the imposition of scission as a means of creating human, self-conscious subjectivity. To undergo an experience with language, therefore, is to undergo a new form of experience as testing or thinking, a form of thinking that does not look at language11


from the outside, or occupy language and seek for exterior referents, but which accepts the presence of language as such as exteriority as such. Infancy allows Agamben to name this alternative mode of thinking in relation to three key metaphysical problems for conventional thought: what is the human animal, what does language say, and what does it mean to experience something? Most specifically, it opens up a zone that exists for thought and being between language as such and discourse, accepting their division as a fact of our ontological Geschichte or deep history (see QCT, 24), yet refusing to succumb to the various aporias that have traditionally arrested the progression of thought on this matter. If Heideggers critique of metaphysics resides in the traditions obfuscation of authentic Being, and Derridas on its privileging of speech over writing, Agambens rests in large part within the silence as regards how we have language and the assumption that the human ontological relation to language depends on the voice to such a degree that the truth of human being, said relation to language, is silenced. In a way, therefore, while Agamben is critical of both Heidegger and Derrida,15 his own philosophy is partly a colloquium of his two great predecessors: an attack on the metaphysical occlusion of being (in language) that was actuated historically by the prioritization of speech in the form of the voice. Infancy, therefore, provokes our attention back to the quasi-mythological moment before the acquisition of speech when human beings had a more direct line of sight to language in that they did not possess language but were rather possessed or captivated by language (see O, 3962). This is not to be conceived of as a return to a pre-human animal stage but is rather a moment between our emergence from the animal in our realization that we have no voice to speak of, and the imposition of a voice through the agency of speech. One issue here is that the very choice of the name infancy is as confusing as it is illustrative, suggesting a developmental, zoological, or psychosomatic empiricism behind our being with or having language, which is not only impossible to ascertain but also not what Agamben intends. While infancy is observable in children it would be a mistake to suggest that infancy is a psychosomatic or neonatal stage of our development (see IH, 545). If anything, our actual infancy is merely a useful developmental analogue for an ontological temporality of development that presupposes a pre-human, a human defined as life, and an in-between and constantly emergent human being, which we might call infant being.12


Nor should one suggest that Agamben is recounting an actual historical series: animal-infant-human. Rather, infancy is to be found within the human at all stages as both remnant of the animal and potential for the post-human. This is perhaps best illustrated by the etymological root of the word wherein fans originates from fari or to speak. Thus in-fancy, Agamben sometimes writes it like this, is nonspeech (see LD, 91), and as such is an ontological state of speechlessness within language that precedes the potential human beings emergence into actual humanity. It is our existence in language before the primary scission of language into phone and logos, although the term before needs careful reconsideration within what might be termed an ontological rather than historiographic or teleological temporality. Infancy has little, in other words, to do with babies.THE STANZA

In relation to Heidegger people often speak of the ontico-ontological difference between actual being-in-the-world, Dasein, and being as such, capitalized Being.16 In a sense Derridas critical investigation of this difference, reconfigured as the term diffrance, collapses the last great frontier of metaphysics, the only remnant of the tradition that Heidegger leaves standing.17 This difference is not simply the difference between different technical senses of being in the work of one philosopher however, but is the reliance of metaphysics on difference as such. Certainly there are many forms of difference, or better there are myriad differentiations to be made, but the asymmetric difference between experience, the ontic, and knowing, the ontological, is an ancient problem relating to how language names truth. If infancy is to resolve this difference then its hands are tied to some degree. It cannot unify language and discourse into a single entity. We must stress this is not the intention of infancy. Nor can it choose language over discourse, much as Agamben might wish, for we are always in the world operating as already pre-divided beings. To live as human means, simply put, to live our division. Human being is this ontological caesura (see O, 1316 & 212). In some way Agambens thought must enter into the scission of being and resolve the conflict therein without recourse to pre-human unity, endless deferral, or the eradication of difference.18 He thus designates for himself an immensely difficult task and he sets about it by returning to the scission inherent in language through the theory of signification.13


Agambens first major intervention on language concerns linguistic scission as the precondition for the later establishment of infancy. The 1977 volume Stanzas, although taking as its main area of concern the art object, brackets this fascinating topic in major statements on language and philosophy. Again in the prefaceAgamben has a penchant for the exoteric as well as the esoteric statementhe considers the various significances of the term stanza for poets of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century troubadour tradition, which he regularly cites along with that of the stil novists as the origin of all modern poetics. For the troubadour poets the stanza was not just a structural designation but the nucleus of their poetry, defined as a capacious dwelling, receptacle (ST, xvi). The space of the stanza, in its capacity, dwelling-stability, and open reception not only holds the words contained in the poems structural segmentation but also conveys the unique object of all the poetry of this period, namely the joi damor or unattainable joy of love. By conflating a formal technique with a meta-thematic concern the troubadour stanza takes on the quality in poetry of a receptive womb (ST, xvi), for the entire tradition. In addition, the troubadour concept of the stanza provides a model for discovering metaphysical truths within the very prosodic operations of the poem itself, a process Agamben emulates in his own work on the metaphysics of enjambement, caesura, and his considerations of poetic space and rhyme. The majority of the book proceeds to investigate the object of love ever since in the arts and has little to say about the stanza as such, but in response to this ancient quest for the missing womb of art in our culture Agamben states that access to the destination of this labour is barred by the forgetfulness of a scission so ingrained in our culture that it goes without saying, when in fact it is the only thing truly worth interrogating (ST, xvi). Students of Heidegger will immediately recognize this structure of imposed forgetting of the most important thing due to its assumed obviousness as Being. In a way this is true although Agamben prefers to call it scission: The scission in question is that between poetry and philosophy, between the poetic word and the word of thought. The split is so fundamental to our cultural tradition that Plato could already declare it an ancient enemy. According to a conception that is only implicitly contained in the Platonic critique of poetry, but that has in modern times acquired a hegemonic character, the14


scission of the word is construed to mean that poetry possesses its object without knowing it while philosophy knows its object without possessing it. (ST, xvixvii) These thoughts on the stanza in relation to unattainability and scission compose one of the first occasions that Agamben names the role of poetry within his overall experiment in language and is the open door for my own contention that the literary Agamben is essential to an understanding of Agambens work as a whole.19 Here he effectively substitutes poetry for a number of termslanguage as such, prose, experiencesome of which we have already considered. The poetic word, for example, is now named as the closest we can get to an experience of language that speaks itself while not necessarily saying anything specific. Having said this, Agamben clearly does not hypostatize poetry as an ideal, infant form of language. This is particularly because infancy resides between the poetic and philosophic word or, as we saw earlier, between language and discourse. In the West, the word is thus divided between a word that is unaware, as if fallen from the sky, and enjoys the object of knowledge by representing it in beautiful form. We will take this word from now on to be the poetic word. And a word that has all seriousness and consciousness for itself but does not enjoy its object because it does not know how to represent it (ST, xvii). This grave, dissatisfied word is the immaterialized insensible word of Western philosophy. Poetrys tragedy is possession of the thing without knowledge of the thing, the thing here being language as such whose forbears can be found in the troubadour quest for the joi damour represented by the stanza. Poetry does not know what it has, a direct experience of language as such within which resides the meaning of human being, because it can only experience language as going through or sustaining. In contrast, while philosophy is able to test language it has no direct experience with language. Within our tradition, therefore, poetry exists entirely in language on one side of the scission of the word, and philosophy entirely outside on the opposing side. Both are victims of the cruel scission at the heart of human language and neither, alone, holds the key to languages capacious inner chamber. Agamben, very early on in his career, therefore, locates his philosophy within this scission between poetic joy and philosophical knowing in the capacious dwelling of the stanza as opened up and yet closed off, stanza in Italian means room of course, by knowledge of what15


cannot be possessed and/or possession of that which can never be known. Further, he states most openly that the assumed problem of metaphysics is to be revealed there in that room, and directs a large part of his energy to resolving what he sees as the false caesura at the founding of our philosophy and culture which effectively cuts the room in two, both revealing it and rendering it inoperative. For Agamben, metaphysical scission represented in the thirteenthcentury European culture by the poetic stanza reaches its apotheosis and crisis point within the epoch of modernity in the rather different form of criticism: Criticism is born at the moment when the scission reaches its extreme point (ST, xvii). The power of criticism emerges out of its collapsing and nihilization of the category of art, so it is an ambiguous strength to say the least, and we will investigate it in detail in the chapters to come. While criticism differs in kind to the stanza, one a modern quasi-philosophical discourse the other a historical prosodic-structural effect, Agamben explains that criticism is marked by a formula according to which it neither represents nor knows, but knows the representation. To appropriation without consciousness and to consciousness without enjoyment criticism opposes the enjoyment of what cannot be possessed and the possession of what cannot be enjoyed (ST, xvii). The stanza of criticism, as Agamben calls it in relation to modern poetry and art, contains nothing, a nothingness that protects arts most precious object, that which it cannot possess. Just as the ancient stanza manifests, through its empty capaciousness, the missing thing of poetry via scission, so modern criticism reveals the emptiness of the modern category of art by its imposition of a division between the artist as maker and the critic as she who judges creation. The stanza, criticism, and infancy are all manifestations of the tendency towards scission in Western thought imposed between two central modes of thinking language as such: philosophy and poetry. Agamben is widely critical of the modern nihilistic tradition of valorizing negation, whether in philosophy or, here, in modern aesthetics, but he is also something of a fatalistic thinker. What he reveals for us in these early pages is the state of aesthetics in the modern age whether he likes it or not. He does not. Yet he also begins a complex journey out of the abyss of philosophical nihilism onto the plain of a Benjaminian messianic positive philosophy to come through his approach to language.20 We are presented with a model

16


of generic languages, poetic and philosophic, but they are not genres at all. Rather their generic subdivision courtesy first of Plato and then of Aristotle, is an attempt to veil the truth of the basis of all thought, art, and being, on language. Language as such, Agambens great project, or that there is language, or how we have language, which all amount to the same thing, is, like being, because it is Being, currently withheld from view. What language is is portrayed in this impossibly contracted history of everything, or at least everything in metaphysics since the Greeks, that is disguised, almost, as a philological consideration of the troubadours idea of the stanza. The stanza is nothing other than a pure, neutral medium. It exists as a containment space between opposing forces occupying the same zone of indifferent indistinction as infancy. This location contains nothing specifically and in our age we have made the error of assuming that, because of this indistinction, one must valorize negation as such, an error for which we suffer but which may also be a productive and generative errancy. Because we see that the room is empty we assume that first there is nothing in the room, second that there never was, and third there never can be. Yet there is something in the room, namely the room as such and while to us this appears as an empty and, in terms of the future, hopeless space, this is just the inheritance of negativity from the metaphysics of scission. Agamben uses the figure of the stanza to bring this complex logic into relief, reveal its ubiquity across our culture, and finally indicate the role poetry has to play in any future comments on metaphysics. On one side of the stanza is the poetic word. This word is pure, meaningless pleasure: phone. On the other is the philosophical word, this is pure, if disgruntled, knowing: logos. The division between the two words is not so much imposed by Plato as reified, leaving us with a dark legacy, language as scission, and a possible solution, scission as stanza.THE SIGN

Agamben himself imposes a dividing caesura of over a hundred pages before he finally attends to the issue of linguistic scission in Stanzas through a consideration of the sign. Saussures development of the idea of the sign first divides the sign in a classic metaphysical gesture and then places the two components of the sign in an essential

17


yet profoundly heterogeneous relation: S/s (with S representing meaning and s the material signifier). In this algorithm the phonic element of the word, the signifier, is located below the meaning of the word, and the two are separated by a bar. All three gestures are typical of the metaphysical scission represented by Platos banning of poetry from the republic. Meaning is separated from, then placed above material noise, before access to materiality or intercourse between the two values is literally banned or barred.21 Agamben comes to this original fracture of presence that is inseparable from the Western experience of being, meaning that all that comes to presence comes there as to the place of a deferral and an exclusion, in the sense that its manifestation is simultaneously a concealment, and its being present, a lack (ST, 136), through a consideration of the aesthetics of the symbolic emblem. The symbol, he argues, has been a source of metaphysical unease, especially for Hegel, primarily because the symbol brings together S/s into a single unified entity. In so doing it naturally foregrounds the imposition of false scission: The symbolic, the act of recognition that reunites what is divided, is also the diabolic that continually transgresses and exposes the truth of this knowledge (ST, 136). Symbolic acts, therefore, temporarily or artificially impose a unity on the primacy of scission in metaphysics, yet the effect is not actual reconciliation but a painful reminder of this most destructive caesura. In this way all signs can be said to be part-symbolic or, as he says: Only because presence is divided and unglued is something like signifying possible. In other words, our conception of language as a mode of signification reliant on the sign is not actually language at all but the historical solution to this primary scission of presence from absence. For that matter, not only does this scission produce the sign, it also creates the discipline of thinking called philosophy: only because there is at the origin not plenitude but deferral . . . is there the need to philosophize (ST, 136). Justifying this claim, completing his narrative, and ejecting us for now from the spacious medium of Stanzas Agamben explains that while said scission is foundational and its resolution our only possible, positive destiny, it has been widely ignored by classic metaphysical strategies. These strategies, familiar to us now, rest in establishing one half of the division as more true than the other, in the model of paradigm and copy, and the relation of latent to sensible

18


manifestation. In the reflection on language, which has always been par excellence the plane on which the experience of the original fracture is represented, this interpretation is crystallized in the notion of the sign as the expressive unity of the signifier and signified (ST, 136). Again here we can see the quasi-symbolic nature of the sign. Not only does it present a unity to mask the primary scission of language-thought, it contains within its own boundaries a sensuous representation of both unity and scission in the form of the bar. As Agamben presciently states: In modern semiology, the forgetting of the original fracture of presence is manifested precisely in what ought to betray it, that is, the bar (/) of the graphic S/s . . . Every semiology that fails to ask why the barrier that establishes the possibility of signifying should itself be resistant to signification, falsifies, with that omission, its own authentic intention (ST, 137). Aside from his regular use of the term semiotics, Agamben is not an adherent to the science of signification. The sign represents for him the ultimate in metaphysical amnesia and until we overcome signification we remain trapped in a failed project of thinking that imposes false unities to obscure the original scission at the heart of thought. This scission is not specifically a division between one thing and another, although the scission between presence and absence comes very close to being archetypal for Agamben, but rather, as in Derrida, it is the structuring of thought qua scission. It is therefore metaphysical structural scission that Agamben consistently takes to task. Unlike Derrida, however, Agamben believes one can overcome scission, deferral, or Derridean diffrance without succumbing to said division, as Agamben believes contentiously that Derrida has (ST, 156). If the sign is a source of displeasure for Agamben, within its graphicality in the figuration of the bar, itself supposedly a symbol of unity, it betrays through its symbol-status the division at the heart of metaphysical systems of unity, in particular here language. Our idea of language as signification is false, but the barrier within the sign functions as metaphysics betrayer. In a Lacanian gesture, Stanzas is by far Agambens most sustained engagement with psychoanalysis, the very thing the philosophy of language does not see, the bar, is the very thing that is the source of its inauthenticity and possible rehabilitation. The bar is language as pure, insignificant, and ultimately indifferent mediality. It exists in the form of a cancelled stanza more accurately represented as S [ / ] s than the Saussurian S/s.22

19


NEGATING NEGATION

Agambens first sustained engagement with the metaphysical tradition, Language and Death, continues the development of the idea of infancy through a radical critique of the dependence of modern thought on negativity. Reading Hegel and Heidegger he strives to demonstrate how nihilism dominates their thought in three ways. The first of these is a reliance on death as a means of defining being, most famously in Heideggers being-towards-death (LD, 15 & 5960). The second is the retention of ineffability within thought. For Hegel this is the inability of the sensuous sign to render in full the material realm (LD, 1314).23 For Heidegger it is the impossibility of Dasein to ever actually occupy the space of its own being (LD, 45). The third is the reliance of both thinkers on deixis when trying to express languages necessary insufficiency in relation to knowledge. Each of these three themes is of no small relevance to what we have already learnt of infancy. The dependency of our concept of being on finitude or death is usually taken alongside our having language as the basis of the fundamental difference between humans and animals. As we have already dealt with the issue of the ineffable through an analysis of unsayability we are left with the third, most surprising and technical part of this critique, philosophys reliance on deixis or pronouns to manifest being and the concomitant dissatisfaction they draw from this procedure. Deixis is a term used in linguistics to indicate the point of reference of a statement that relies absolutely on context. These are most commonly personal pronouns, I, you, it; but other pronouns indicative of space and time are also deictic: now, then, here, there, this, that.24 Deixis as a form of indication can be described as exophoric in that it refers to extra-linguistic material. This exophoric capability explains the rise of deixis as a literary device from the twelfth century onwards, according to Godzich and Kittay, wherein the possibility of having an intra-textual technique for referring to assumed extra linguistic material or presences was developed.25 Up to this point the normative mode of literature was performed poetry and if someone other than the narrator spoke, or something was referred to over there, the jongleur or performer used a series of gestures known to his mime-literate audience to show that he was speaking as someone else, or of something else. With the slow but inexorable rise of prose this bringing in of the outside into the text, an assumed quality of20


prose that differentiates it from the so-called univocality of the poem,26 was facilitated by simple phrases such as he said, that door, and so on.27 Deixis is also regularly utilized as a form of anaphora or internal reference that refers back to a subject, noun, and so on previously mentioned: The gun, give it to me. The it in this sentence is both deictic and anaphoric, referring to the previously mentioned firearm (firearm in this sentence is anaphoric but not deictic). Finally, it can also function cataphorically such as in the opening of Paradise Lost wherein the subject of the opening sentence is not known until the very end of the long, inaugural syntagm: And justify the ways of God to man.28 All three elements of deixis, exophoric context-dependent indication, anaphoric recursive reference,29 and cataphoric projective reference, will come to hold a central importance in Agambens thought and its relation to poetry. In Language and Death Agamben foregrounds the importance of deixis for modern philosophy specifically in the use of the German words diese (this) in Hegel and da (there) in Heidegger (LD, 1926). Agamben is most interested in how both thinkers by definition place being in negation by utilizing deictic pronouns to indicate an absence at the heart of language. They effectively use anaphoric/cataphoric deixis as shorthand for an already uttered or to be uttered authentic name of being. Naturally, the brevity and baldness of the pronominal will fail to convey the full complexity of a sensuous presence for Hegel, and in its anaphoric/cataphoric mode it is indeed nothing other than a convenience of abbreviation. Imagine Islamic art, Venice, or the work of Lyn Hejinian, and then replace each with the reductive this. Similarly, there does little to convey, for Heidegger, the complexity of either the world being occupies or how it occupies that world. There-being or being-the-there as Agamben re-translates Dasein (LD, 4), by definition disappoints. It tells us where being is but says nothing of how or why it is, or indeed anything of use about the where or the there. Working at opposite ends of the rather colourless deictic spectrum, Hegels interest in the sensuous versus Heideggers in ontological topography, both writers find that while language is essential to access truth the insufficiencies of the signifier mean that something in language always remains unsaid of the thing expressed: the world and our being in it. For both authors this referential shortfall is represented by the silent voice at the heart of being; the very thing21


that enunciates being and yet leaves its truth unsaid. To sum up in more familiar terms, both Hegel and Heidegger succumb to a primary scission in the word between signifier, this or there, and signified, the world or being. They then, classically, valorize and exteriorize the signified only to discover a profound asymmetry in signification, which one could describe as the problem that a word does not totally contain its meaning or referent. One might then ask the question why thinkers of such sophistication resort to deictic indicators at all. This returns us to the philosophical tendency to view language in terms of exterior objectivity due to the split assumed within the sign between language and discourse. Deixis is always used to indicate something exterior to language and so is shorthand for all the failings of languages referential shortfall. This may not capture Venice but nor will the prose of Ruskin, however diligently Proust attended to it. If one demands of language that it is a tool for reference one consigns language to inevitable failure as regards knowledge. The only solution to this problem, Agamben believes, is not to try and render experience through language but to render experience as language, through the idea of human infancy. The tripartite critique of modern thought enacted in Language and Death, a work every bit as important to the collapsing of metaphysics as Being and Time or Of Grammatology, relies in each instance on an assault on the voice. Agamben systematically attacks the idea that human voice emerges from the animal, that the voice is defined by what it cannot say (the ineffable), and the failure of speech to evince knowledge. Agambens relation to the voice is complex. While he blames the valorization of the voice for the dominance of negativity in metaphysics, in reality a synecdochic anamorphism wherein one element of linguistic scission comes to stand in for language as a whole, he also seeks for solutions to negativity ostensibly through the voice. In effect there are numerous voices in Language and Death. There is the voice of the animal (especially in death), the human voice as lack, the metaphysical capitalization of the Voice as a condition of being in withdrawal, and then perhaps the Voice under negation, Voice, although Agamben does not write it like this, which results in the negation of philosophical negativity by the end of the final seminar (LD, 106). If language as pure mediality has been artificially and with violence bifurcated in metaphysics into phone (voice) and logos (language as discourse), with the voice being set up as the failure to speak or the failure to mean within thoughts reliance on22


language, then the voice is always both the villain and victim of philosophy. To exit metaphysics, therefore, one must pass through the negative abyssal gullet of the voice. As we saw, language is seen in modern philosophy as essential to thinking and yet source of thinkings deficiency. The problem is that either language fails to convey the profound texturality and diversity of the sensuous, this thing is always a privation of the plenitude of the actual thing, or it struggles to sum up our whole world and our place within it, there-being. Language brings to presence, for Hegel and Heidegger, but brings to presence truth or being as privation. Agamben calls this exasperation, this plangent insufficiency, the Voice.SUBJECTIVE ENUNCIATION

It might appear from Agambens critique of metaphysics that deixis is, in part, culpable for modern negative metaphysics and this is correct. Yet it is central to his methodology to look for a productive projection out from the very heart of the source of negation and this is precisely the case with deixis as regards his theory of subjective enunciation. Rather than attempt to remove the reliance of objective and ontological referentiality on deixis, instead he uses this very dependence to present a combined theory of referential ontology that he calls desubjectivization. Agamben is inspired in particular by the ontological turn in the work of French structural linguist Emile Benveniste, specifically his theories of the subject of enunciation and the semiotic.30 The first theory allows us to think again about subjectivity, albeit under negation, the second about the scission at the heart of metaphysics between language and discourse that will ultimately lead us to view what Agamben believes philosophy has occluded, not being as such but language as such. One can see therefore that Benveniste allows Agamben to, in part, synthesize his ideas on negation and scission in direct relation to language. I will deal with each idea in turn. Benvenistes theory of subjectivity is based on the idea of linguistic enunciation and specifically how this relies on deixis. Benveniste defines the condition of the human subject by its being able to, or having to, enunciate its own self through language. The possession of an articulated or bifurcated system of differential referentiality which we term, mistakenly, language, means that we come to be human by23


our possession of self-consciousness and our ability to speak of this. Thus we can announce I am and in so doing we enunciate our subjectivity. Important in this regard is Benvenistes conception that while the subject can enunciate its presence, speak its being, this act does not proceed from an already existent central being or subject. I in the phrase I am is a form of (de)subjectifying deixis. It appears to refer to an exterior presence, but, as Benveniste explains and indeed as my own work has investigated elsewhere (MofP, 3479), deixis as a form of indicative reference does not refer to an actual exteriority but simply to the instance of reference as such. Accepting this to be the case, the I of I am only comes into existence in the act of enunciation via what Jacobson calls the power of pronominal shifting, or a movement from langue, the whole system and existence of language, to parole, a local instance of discourse. While in Saussure it is essential that langue and parole remain heterogeneous, deictic shifters present an opportunity to move from indication to signification, a journey that defines these two faculties, their complex interrelationship and, ultimately, undermines all our presuppositions about language and being. Agamben concludes from this: The sphere of utterance thus includes that which, in every speech act, refers exclusively to its taking place, to its instance, independently and prior to what is said and meant in it. Pronouns and the other indicators of the utterance, before they designate real objects, indicate precisely that language takes place. In this way, still prior to the word of meanings, they permit the reference to the very event of language . . . (LD, 25)31 Modern philosophy is already well aware of the ontological implications of the deictic phrase I am. It is, for example, central to one of Derridas most influential essays Signature Event Context. There we find that the subjects capacity to enunciate itself reveals the subjects ability to come into existence through the revelation of the division between presence and voice. That the subject can enunciate existence means they can step out of the experience of being, of being captivated like an animal,32 and self-consciously comment on said experience. This emergence from captivation to self-consciousness is the movement from language to speech in Agamben which is both the precondition for, and problem of, human being. The power of the24


subject to enunciate itself is brought to the fore in Derridas work more piquantly by his work on the sister phrase to I am, I am not.33 Not only can the subject enunciate presence, therefore, in so doing they also precipitate their lasting absence. Enunciation marks the advent of being and, simultaneously, its finitude. For Derrida this enunciative advent of finite being ruins any transcendental sense of subjectivity in that the subject dies as self-presence at the very moment it enunciates its existence and thus comes to life;34 one way of reading Heideggers being-towards-death. However, for Agamben, as soon as the subject comes to presence it is desubjectified and this is, in fact, its subjectivity. Subjectivity is not negated by enunciation as Derrida seems to suggest but actually founded through this process of negation. This reformulation of the theory of the subject allows Agamben to state that the transcendental subject is nothing other than the enunciator (IH, 53). If one can say I am one has already entered into a productively alienating subjectivity in language (RP, 1289). Yet if one cannot say I am, within metaphysics at least, one cannot exist as the human is emergent from the biological indeterminacy of the animal precisely because they have the dubious power of self-conscious enunciation. As a realist Agamben cannot deny the fact that subjectivity is founded on its negation, but as the declared enemy of metaphysical nihilism he is unable to simply accept this. If one could isolate the moment, ontologically speaking, before the subject speaks but after they acquire language, what Agamben calls infancy, then one could perhaps instigate an alternative mode of being that is based on language but not on the voice as negation. This is Agambens intention. Before we get to that, and we may never in our epoch, we must accept the fact that, for Agamben, the subject of enunciation, once spoken, is the result of a permanent desubjectivization. At the moment the subject says I am, subjectivity comes to presence as nothing other than an instance of empty, technical indication. As he says: Benvenistes studies . . . show that it is in and through language that the individual is constituted as a subject. Subjectivity is nothing other than the speakers capacity to posit him or herself as an ego, and cannot in any way be defined through some wordless sense of being oneself, nor by deferral to some ineffable psychic experience of the ego, but only through a linguistic I transcending any possible experience. (IH, 52)25


Mills interpretation of this is especially strong in the manner of how she first shows that in taking the place of I as speaking subject, the speaker must effectively alienate him/herself as a phenomenal or empirical individual and her realization that by entering into language as a mode of communicative action, the speaker loses touch with the mute experience of language as such (PA, 25). Thus enunciation denies the subject both its subjectivity and its infancy. However, because infancy is not a stage in a developmental teleology, no more is subjectivity or being human, none of these possibilities are lost for good when one says I am. In fact, they only come about because of enunciation, even if their happening takes place in an instant before, or due to, their negation. Agamben is treading a very treacherous and perhaps impossibly fine line here. Infancy is the precondition of subjectivity only in that it allows for desubjectivization through the act of losing or emerging out of infancy. It appears that Agambens childhood is potentially a troubled, but ultimately liberating time.THE SEMIOTIC

The powerful malleability of the deictic pronoun Iis well known allowing for any number of ontological compressions, of selfpresence I am, self negation I am not, and self-alienation I is another. The last of these is a famous promulgation by Rimbaud often analysed by philosophers, but initially it is to English poetry and Keats missives on deictic desubjectivization that Agamben turns to in his own work in the field. In the dense, remarkable, and troubling book Remnants of Auschwitz (1999), Agamben finds himself reading Keats letter to Richard Woodhouse on 27 October 1818. As he does so he isolates four themes of poetic, deictic desubjectivization. These are not unfamiliar, so I will merely summarize them here: (1) the poetic I is not an I nor is it identical to itself, (2) the poet is therefore the most unpoetical of things, (3) the statement I am a poet is not a statement but a contradiction in terms, and (4) poetic experience is that of desubjectivization. The third of these, I am a poet, is contradictory because, as Keats argues, if he has no self, and I am a Poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more?35 Here Keats encounters the universal condition of enunciative desubjectivization but, significantly, he poses it as a poetically contingent experience. The poet is, by definition, always other to26


himself, an experience confirmed by Rimbaud, Eliot, and the anticonfessionalism of poetry from the so-called New York, Language, and Cambridge schools. As Agamben says with misleading lucidity: In the Western literary tradition, the act of poetic creation, and indeed every act of speech, implies something like a desubjectivization (poets have named this desubjectivization the Muse) (RA, 113). Agamben will also go on in his work to regularly refer to this as poetic dictation, but before we get to that let us concentrate on that almost offhand remark and indeed every act of speech. While fascinated by poetic desubjectivization one can perceive from his comments here that he is most interested in it as a form of general ontology. Indeed it is true that all acts of enunciation utilizing the pronoun I in the moment of indicating subjective presence negate its ever coming to presence as we saw in his analysis of Benveniste. All speech acts are in this way poetic. The experience of the subject coming to being by negating its own subjectivity is, according to Agamben and innumerable poets, a poetic experience, justifying once again my claim that any analysis of the philosophy of Agamben, so centrally located on the movement beyond negative metaphysics through a theory of language and desubjectivization, is meaningless without recourse to the literary Agamben. However determined this study may be to prove the importance of poiesis to Agambenian ontology it would be disingenuous to ignore the most obvious question that comes to mind at this stage: How can Agamben begin to argue that every act of speech is an instance of poetic desubjectivization via the universal category of deictic desubjectivization? Rather the opposite must be seen to be the case: poetic desubjectivization ought to be simply an example of general, ontological enunciative desubjectivization. To justify Agambens and Keats claim on behalf of poetry, namely that the essence of modern ontology resides therein, we must now return briefly to Benvenistes other great ontological development, the idea of the semiotic. In his work on the semiotic Benveniste, on the surface, does little more than refine the terminology of Saussure. The well-known terms langue and parole become semiotic and semantic, while the arbitrary nature of the sign becomes the semiotic definition of the sign. This definition has a familiar ontological ring to it in that it consists of two preconditions. Benvenistes appropriation of the sign develops the law of the semiotic as first, existing, and second, not being any other sign. The sign as semiotic is defined as that it is,27


and then that which it is by virtue of comparison with all that it is not which, admittedly by negation, matches precisely Heideggers ontological pairing of that there is something and how it is. Here how a sign comes to presence in the world (langue) is by not being any other sign replacing being-in-the-world with not-being-anywhere-elsein-the-world and opening up a space for linguistic being which, by its being uninsurable and subject to general negation, matches precisely the space of the stanzaic sign: S [/] s. The semiotic, therefore, is another name for language as a whole, as material presence (phone) and code (logos), before it means anything and yet always already available to mean. Its basic preconditions are presence and difference under the sign of a negation. It matters not how it exists, in terms of meaning or reference, or in which way specifically it is not other signs. Rather, for the semiotic, all that counts is that it can be identified as present and placed in a situation of quasi-singularity by one confirming it is what it is by its not being any other sign. This is structurally, at least, exactly the same as modern ontology. Being is proven by its existence and by its mode of being in the world but not being other beings. While Benveniste maintains his predecessors conviction that the semiotic and the semantic cannot meet one can see from his revisions that the semantic is seemingly dependent on a semiotic, quasi-presuppositional precondition. Discourse needs language as semiotic, material, yet neutral, presence to come into being. That said language only occurs to allow discourse to happen specifically as a mode of emergent human being through the process of desubjectivization which Agamben identifies as poetic. Further, it is only through discourse that language as such under negation courtesy of the voice of discourse becomes unconcealed for modern ontology. Language is the precondition for a discursive negation which precedes it. While the relation between poetry and desubjectivization becomes ever clearer, we still cannot be at peace with the assertion that modern ontological alienation is the result of contingent poetic alienation. To assist us in this regard we must return to Agambens consideration of poetic desubjectivization in Remnants of Auschwitz, which leads him into a wider philological consideration of a fully desubjectivized experience in the act of speech within the Western religious traditions, bringing poetic and ontological desubjectivization into more intimate proximity. Such a foray allows Agamben to make direct links between that other famous missive of modern poetic28


desubjectivization, Rimbauds letter to P. Demeny (for I is another), and another more ancient missive, Pauls first letter to the Corinthians where he speaks of lalein glosse or speaking in tongues (wherein the speaker speaks with no understanding of what they say) (RA, 114). The modern term for this experience or event of language as such, devoid of meaning, is glossolalia and it has risen to prominence in investigations of the outer limits of poetic experience and experimentation.36 Due to its Greek provenance, glossolalia has associations with the term barbarism on which our preciously held concept of civilization hangs.37 Additionally, it hints at all post-Adorno poetics of responsibility that can be located in the work of Derrida, Agamben, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe, and which is aggressively attacked by the work of Badiou.38 Bar-bar, as we know, is the phonetic transcription of languages the Greeks did not understand, thus establishing a tradition of civilization based on xenoglossia as a form of glossolalia, which still has aesthetic and political repercussions for us today.39 As Agamben explains: The experience of glossolalia merely radicalizes a desubjectifying experience implicit in the simplest act of speech (RA, 115). It is, in effect, the process of pushing discourse to its limit or the retention of a remnant of pre-discursive pure language. Glossolalia and xenoglossia are, in some ways, opposite and revelatory experiences of the nature of language as such, before and as precondition for discourse. In glossolalia we encounter the pure materiality of language away from any possible meaning. In xenoglossia we do not understand an act of speech but we assume it has communicative and referential meaning for the barbarians which speak it within their context. Thus glossolalia confirms the first condition of the semiotic, it simply and materially is, while xenoglossia gives us an experience of the second condition, signs that we know are meaningful in a context but whose specific meaning we cannot glean. If we now combine the theory of the semiotic with that of enunciative deixis we can see that enunciation also partakes of the two sides of the semiotic. Deixis and types of indicative linguistic technique such as anaphora work differently to all other forms of signification. In that they are entirely context dependentit in conversation, it in poetry, it in narrative, it in philosophical discourse all have very different potential usagesindicative forms operate at the semantic level of discursive meaning. Yet at the same time such terms29


are devoid of specific meaning. Therefore deixis stages not a fixed meaning in language but language as such as medium for meanings transmission. Indicative forms of this order are not pure noise but nor are they meaningful, they instead refer neutrally to the event of speech and language or what might be termed its passive taking place.40 In one sense deixis is meaningless and empty reference, for example I out of context means nothing and is basically glossolalic. In another it is pure contextual differentiation in that it is potentially referential but is always awaiting a context to come to mean. Glossolalia, xenoglossia, poetic desubjectivization, deictic desubjectivization, and the semiotic are all examples of a possible experience of pure language or a language which speaks before voice and says nothing other than it exists as pure exterior presence. This language as such is ruined by our having infancy and the concomitant desubjectivization of differential scission, but infancy also allows us a possible route back to language. Just as, in Heidegger, the historical fall of being is both the loss of being and its potential recuperation, so for Agamben infancy operates in the same god-like way echoing almost the sentiments of Brownings Caliban as regards his sovereign dominion over crabs: Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, / Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.41 The conclusion of the updating of Infancy and History, which is what the later sections of Remnants of Auschwitz constitute, is so rich that it needs must be quoted in its entirety. However, to break this task down I will progress through the page-long summary step by step, loving not, hating not, just choosing so. Agamben begins by expressing the contradiction at the heart of enunciation: the passage from language to discourse appears as a paradoxical act that simultaneously implies both subjectification and desubjectivization (RA, 116). He then proceeds to bulldozer and flatten both sides of this impasse with a Calibanesque heavy-handedness: On the one hand, the psychosomatic individual must fully abolish himself and desubjectify himself as a real individual to become the subject of enunciation. (The becoming impersonal is a central moment in Agambens theory of the roots of poetry in desubjectifying dictation from the mouth of the muse.) But, once stripped of all extralinguistic meaning and constituted as a subject of enunciation, the subject discovers that he has gained access not so much to a possibility of speaking as to an impossibility of speakingor, rather, that he has gained access to being always already anticipated by a glossolalic30


potentiality over which he has neither control nor mastery (RA, 116). Setebos to the subjects Caliban. This rather terrifying observation is crucial in our adventures under the leadership of the literary Agamben. Here, the subject, in seeming to access discourse (meaning) through the xenophora of deixis, instead finds not meaning but the very absence of meaning, which is the event of language as such. In enunciating the I, the subject becomes, as Paul terms it, him that speaketh a barbarian (cited in RA, 114). This is the one and only moment that the radical difference between semiotic and semantic linguistic modes that Agamben locates at the root of Western metaphysics is, if not removed, blurred or suspended as the subject uses deixis to access discourse only to find in place of discourse pure noise. Here she tunes in to white noise, feedback, wailing; an isle full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. The sound of language as such. This leads Agamben to a three-part, profound, and potentially devastating conclusion. In appropriating the formal instruments of discourse, such as deixis, instead the subject finds himself expropriated of all referential reality, letting himself be defined solely through the pure and empty relation to the event of discourse (RA, 116). This being the case, while as Agamben explains the subject of enunciation is composed entirely of discourse, once he is inside of discourse he becomes expropriated. He cannot speak; rather he is spoken in the glossolalic language of barbarians. Those well-versed in contemporary philosophy may recognize this speck of alterity at the heart of self-presence from, for example, Lvinas and Derrida, and Agamben is well aware of the tradition he is potentially entering here.42 However, the final facet of his conclusion makes the radical step away from alterity and the philosophy of responsibility, which locates his work alongside Badiou as the only potential, post-alterity, and thus affirmative philosophy of our age.43 Explaining that I speak is as meaningless as I am a poet, for what I hope now are clear reasons in that I is always other, he concedes that it makes no more sense to say this I-other speaks: For, insofar as it is solely sustained in a pure event of language, independent of every meaning, this I-other stands in an impossibility of speakinghe has nothing to say. In the absolute present of the event of discourse, subjectification and desubjectivization coincide at every point, and both the flesh and blood individual31


and the subject of enunciation are perfectly silent. This can also be expressed by saying that the one who speaks is not the individual, but language . . . (RA, 117) This experience of the powerful depersonalization of being spoken by language is a profoundly literary one, often called inspiration or the muse. Agamben prefers the term poetic dictation.POETIC DICTATION

At the end of this remarkable passage of Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben then brings us back to our main project here, poetry, when he mentions that it is not surprising in the face of this intimate extraneousness implicit in the act of speech that poets feel a sense of responsibility and shame. I wont speak of the complex theory of shame Agamben mounts here as this has been done very well elsewhere.44 Repeating a quote from Dantes Vita nuova, which also finds great utility in The End of the Poem (1996), that poets need to be willing to open to prose the reasons for their poetry or face shame (his version of the troubadour razo de trobar or narrating of the inspiration for the composition of the work), Agamben proffers the touchstone to my whole study, namely the relationship between discursive prose and poetry: logo-poiesis. This relationship is marked by the experience of becoming impersonal that Agamben terms the poetic experience of ontological desubjectivization, or what he often refers to simply as poetic dictation when, rather than speaking of the poeticization of thought, he instead commits himself to thoughts about poetry. Staying with Dante, an early theorization of poetic dictation can be found in the pages of Stanzas circulating about a tercet from Dantes Purgatorio that goes as follows: I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and in the manner that he dictates within I go signifying (cited in ST, 124). Agamben notes that while on the surface this tercet

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【阿甘本研究】Literary_Agamben__Adventures_in_Logopoiesis