Giorgio Agamben - POTENTIALITIES Collected Essays in Philosophy.doc

POTENTIALITIES

Collected Essays in Philosophy

Giorgio Agamben

Contents

Editor's Note

English passages cited from French, German, Greek, Italian, or Latin editions identified in the text or notes are my own translations. Passages cited from published English translations identified in the notes are the work of those translators unless otherwise indicated. I have on occasion silently modified the quotations from these published translations.

"The Thing Itself" was published in Di-segno: La giustizia nel discorso ( Milan: Jaca, 1984), ed. Gianfranco Dalmasso, pp. 1-12. "The Idea of Language" appeared in aut-aut 201 ( 1984), pp. 67-74. "Language and History: Linguistic Categories and Historical Categories in Benjamin's Thought" was first published in Walter Benjamin: Tempo storia linguaggio, ed. Lucio Belloi and Lorenzina Lotti ( Roma: Riuniti, 1983), pp. 65-82. "Philosophy and Linguistics" appeared in Annuaire philosophique ( Paris: Seuil, 1990), pp. 97-116. "Kommerell, or On Gesture" was written as an introduction to Max Kommerell, Il poeta e líindicibile: Saggi di letteratura tedesca, ed. Giorgio Agamben and trans. Gino Giometti ( Genova: Marietti, 1991), pp. vii-xv. "Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science" first appeared in Prospettive Settanta, July-September 1975, pp. 3-18; it was reprinted, with the "Postilla" published here, in aut-aut 199-200 ( 1984), pp. 51-66. "Tradition of the Immemorial" first appeared in Il centauro 13-14 ( 1985), pp. 3-12. "*Se: Hegel's Absolute and Heidegger's Ereignis" was published in aut-aut 187-88 ( 1982), pp. 39-58. "Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption" was first published in aut-aut 189-90 ( 1982), pp. 143-163. "The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin" was given as a lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in July 1992 and was published in Anima e paura: Studi in onore di Michele Ranchetti ( Macerata: Quodlibet, 1998), pp. 11-22. "On Potentiality" was held as a lecture in Lisbon, 1986, in the context of conference organized by the Collage international de philosophie; it appears in this volume for the first time. "The Passion of Facticity" was published in Heidegger: Questions ouvertes, Cahiers du CIPH ( Paris: Osiris, 1988), pp. 63-84. "Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality" appeared in Revue philosophique 2 ( 1990), pp. 131-45. "Absolute Immanence" was published in aut-aut 276 ( 1996), pp. 39-57. "Bartleby, or On Contingency" first appeared in Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze, Bartleby: La formula della creazione ( Macerata: Quodlibet, 1993), pp. 47-92.

D. H.-R.

POTENTIALITIES

Editor's Introduction
"To Read What Was Never Written"

I

Among the notes and sketches for Walter Benjamin's last work, the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," we find the following statement: "Historical method is philological method, a method that has as its foundation the book of life. 'To read what was never written,' is what Hofmannsthal calls it. The reader referred to here is the true historian." 1 Giorgio Agamben is perhaps the only contemporary thinker to have assumed as a philosophical problem the task that Benjamin, in these words, sets for historical and philological "method." What does it mean to confront history as a reader, "to read what was never written"? And what is it that "was never written" in the "book of life"? The question concerns the event that Benjamin throughout his works calls "redemption." The essays collected in this volume can be said to elaborate a philosophy of language and history adequate to the concept of this event. A single matter, truly something like the "thing itself" of which Agamben writes in his essay on Plato's Seventh Letter, animates the works gathered together here. Whether the subject is Aristotle or Spinoza, Heidegger or Benjamin, what is at issue is always a messianic moment of thinking, in which the practice of the "historian" and the practice of the "philologist," the experience of tradition and the experience of language, cannot be told apart. It is in this moment that the past is saved, not in being returned to what once existed but, instead, precisely in being transformed into something that never was: in being read, in the words of Hofmannsthal, as what was never written.

But what is it that, in the course of history, never was? What is it that, in the text of tradition, remains in some way present yet forever unwritten? Agamben essay "Tradition of the Immemorial" (Chapter 7 in this volume) helps address the question. "Every reflection on tradition," we read at the beginning of that essay, "must begin with the assertion that before transmitting anything else, human beings must first of all transmit language to themselves. Every specific tradition, every determinate cultural patrimony, presupposes the transmission of that alone through which something like a tradition is possible." The statement concerns linguistic signification and historical transmission alike, since the presupposition at issue is common to both. The fact of the transmission of language or, more simply, that there is language, is what every communication must have always presupposed, for without it there would be neither transmission nor signification; and it is this fact, Agamben argues, that cannot be communicated in the form of a particular statement or series of statements. Actual utterances, after all, are possible only where speech has already begun, and the very affirmation of the existence of language-"there is language"--only renders explicit what is, in effect, implied by the fact of its own utterance.

That language must already have taken place for linguistic acts to be performed is not a fact without relation to forms of actual communication. The presuppositional structure of language is clearly registered first of all in the classical form of linguistic signification, the predicative assertion. According to Aristotle's canonical definition of the statement as a "saying something about something" (legein ti kata tinos), 2 what is said in the proposition is necessarily divided into a first "something" and a second "something," and the proposition appears as a meaningful statement only on condition that the first "something," the subject, already be given. The distinction between the predicate and its subject thus has the form of a presupposition, and it is precisely this presupposition that renders predication possible. Were a thing not already manifest in language, it could not be qualified in any way through the form of attribution; were the identity of a first "something" not presupposed in the form of an absolutely simple and indefinable subject, or hypokeimenon, the predication of a second "something" (legein kat' hypokeimenou) could not be accomplished. "To speak of a being," Agamben thus writes in "Tradition of the Immemorial,""human language supposes and distances what it brings to light, in the very act in which it brings it to light."

The necessary logical division of the proposition into a presupposed subject and an attributed predicate has its correlate, in the field of linguistic elements, in the traditional philosophical distinction between name and discourse. All discourse (logos), according to a doctrine that Agamben finds expressed as early as Antisthenes, necessarily presupposes the existence of names (onomata), which, precisely because they found the possibility of all articulated speech, can themselves have no definition. Varro, in his De lingua latina, places a thesis of this kind at the foundation of his study of language when, following the linguists of the Stoa, he distinguishes a moment of pure naming (impositio, quemadmodum vocabula rebus essent imposita) from that of actual discourse; 3 and JeanClaude Milner, who writes in his Introduction à une science du langage that "linguistic entities are of two kinds," "terms" and syntactical "positions," can be said to reinstate the Sophist's distinction at the heart of contemporary linguistics. 4 In each case, Agamben argues, the name appears as the cipher of the event of language that must always already be presupposed in actual signification. "Discourse," we read in "Tradition of the Immemorial,""cannot say what is named by the name. . . . Names certainly enter into propositions, but what is said in propositions can be said only thanks to the presupposition of names." It is this fundamental difference between names and discourse that appears in Wittgenstcen's determination of names as "simple signs" (Urzeichen) 5 and, most clearly, in his position of a radical disjunction between naming and assertion: "I can only name objects," we read in the Tractatus. 6 "Signs represent them. I can only speak of them. I cannot assert them. A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is." 7

Strictly speaking, however, it is not only the subject of the judgment and the name that have the peculiar characteristic of constituting logical and linguistic elements that are, in some sense, unsayable in language. Any linguistic term, insofar as it expresses an object, cannot itself be expressed. This is the principle that Agamben, referring to an episode in Through the Looking-Glass 8 in his essay on Derrida ( "Pardes," Chapter 13 in this volume), calls "the White Knight's theorem" and expresses in the following Carrollian formula: "The name of the name is not a name." Agamben explains the theorem by means of the medieval distinction between an intentio prima, a sign signifying an object, and an intentio secunda, a sign signifying an intentio prima, another sign. The crux of the matter lies in how one understands the nature of an intentio secunda: "What does it mean," Agamben asks, "to signify a sign, to intend an intentio?" The difficulty here is that whenever one sign signifies another sign, it signifies the second sign not as a mere signifier, an intentio, but only as a signified, an intentum. It is thus possible for one word to refer to another word, but only insofar as the second word is referred to as an object, an acoustically or graphically determined entity (the suppositio materialis of medieval logic); the word insofar as it is a nomen nominans, and not a nomen nominatum, necessarily escapes the possibility of nomination. Agamben notes in "Pardes" that the "logicians' expedients to avoid the consequences of this radical anonymity of the name are destined to fail," as in the case of Rudolf Carnap's project to resolve the paradox by means of quotation marks, which K. Reach proved to be unsuccessful. 9 In natural language, at least, it is simply not possible for one linguistic term to signify another without the second as a result losing its character of being a linguistic term and appearing as a mere object.

It is this impossibility that Agamben, in "Pardes," finds clearly formulated in Frege's statement that "the concept 'horse' is not a concept," 10 in Wittgenstein's thesis that "we cannot express through language what expresses itself in language," 11 and in Milner's axiom that "the linguistic term has no proper name." 12 Perhaps closest to Agamben is Heidegger discussion in On the Way to Language of "the word for the word" (das Wort für das Wort), which "is to be found nowhere." 13 What is essential, for Agamben, is that the "anonymity" of language at stake in each case acquires its full sense only when referred to the presuppositional structure of language. The linguistic element cannot be said as such, Agamben explains, for the simple reason that what is at issue in it--the making manifest of something in language--is always presupposed in everything said; the intention to signify always exceeds the possibility of itself being signified precisely because it always already anticipates and renders possible signification in general. Only because they always presuppose the fact that there is language are statements necessarily incapable of saying the event of language, of naming the word's power to name; only because language, as actual discourse, always presupposes itself as having taken place can language not say itself. Preceding and exceeding every proposition is not something unsayable and ineffable but, rather, an event presupposed in every utterance, a factum linguae to which all actual speech incessantly, necessarily bears witness.

In his one French aphorism, Paul Celan remarks: "Poetry no longer imposes itself; it exposes itself" (La poésie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose). 14 It could be said that Agamben attempts to accomplish in philosophy a movement close to the one Celan, in these words, ascribes to poetry: to conceive of the event of language in the form not of its presupposition but of its exposition. "Exposed," the taking place of language no longer appears as an event accomplished in ille tempore, once and for all, before the commencement of actual speech acts. It emerges, rather, as a dimension immanent in every utterance. Here Agamben, having followed the presuppositional structure of language to its limit, displaces the question into an altogether novel region, in which what is most philosophically radical in his thought comes fully to light: the problem of the mode of existence of language. The aporia, or, literally, "lack of way," inherent in any attempt to grasp the essence of language is thus resolved, as Agamben writes in "Pardes," into a euporia, a felicitous way, and a new question is posed: in what sense does language exist in all actual transmission, and in what sense does all transmission communicate the fact that there is language? It is at this point that Agamben's work fully inherits the task set by Benjamin when he called for thought to experience an "involuntary memory" of something "never seen before," 15 and thereby to "read" in all transmission "what was never written."

II

The ways in which figures in the history of philosophy consider the problem of the existence of language remain, to a large extent, to be investigated. Agamben essay "The Thing Itself," which opens this collection, suggests that a point of departure can be found in Plato's Seventh Letter. Here Agamben considers the philosophical excursus at the center of the Platonic epistle, in which the philosopher recounts how he attempted to show Dionysus, the tyrant of Syracuse, the essence of philosopy and the "whole thing" (pan to pragma) with which it is concerned. Plato writes to the friends and family of his follower Dion:

This, then, was what I said to Dionysius on that occasion. I did not, however, expound the matter fully, nor did Dionysius ask me to do so. . . . There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing with this thing. For it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other disciplines [mathēmata], but, after having dwelt for a long time close to the thing itself [peri to pragma auto] and in communion with it, it is suddenly brought to birth in the soul, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark; and then it nourishes itself. 16

In the passage that he describes as a "story and wandering" (mythos kai planos...