Time, Language, and Visuality in Agamben's Philosophy

J. Doussan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137286246
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher both celebrated and reviled, is among the prominent voices in contemporary Italian thought today. His work, which touches upon fields as diverse as aesthetics and biopolitics, is often understood within a framework of Aristotelian potentiality. With this incisive critique, Doussan identifies a different tendency in the philosopher's work, an engagement with the problem of time that is inextricably bound up with language and visuality. Founded in his early writings on metaphysics and continuing to his present occupation with inoperativity, Time, Language and Visuality in Agamben's Philosophy forges an original path through Agamben's extensive commentary on the linguistic and the visual to illuminate the recurrent temporal theme of capture and evasion the cat-and-mouse game that bears the foundational violence of not just representation but concept-formation itself. In the process, Doussan both reveals its limit and establishes a ground for future engagements.

1

The Problem with Metaphysics: Taking Place

Terminology: the poetic moment of thought

In the essay ‘Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality’ (1990), Giorgio Agamben digresses from his critique of Jacques Derrida to define terminology as ‘the proper element of thought’, in which philosophy thinks itself at the limit of reference and self-reference. In his words, ‘Terms, indeed, become the place of a genuine experimentum linguae’.¹ We may read this proposition literally by studying Agamben’s usage of the term taking place, aver luogo, in its various manifestations, which span his many years of scholarship, beginning with its foundation in linguistic theory in Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (1978) in order to determine a structure through which the philosopher’s own experimentum linguae might be gleaned.

The concept makes an early appearance in the seminal text Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (1982) in which Agamben defines the taking place of language as an isolated and ineffable self-referentiality that runs through the Western metaphysical tradition as the negative foundation of being, and ultimately calls for its cessation. Approximately ten years later in The Coming Community (1990), the term’s usage undergoes a significant change as, following his reading of the Platonic Idea, Agamben recasts the taking place as ‘the pure transcendent’ and ‘the innermost exteriority’ of an entity. In both instances, the conception of the taking place is more or less restricted to a linguistic register and language’s relation to being generally. However, in the later work, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1998), Agamben introduces the taking place of language as marking the precariousness of subjectivity, which founds itself in the enunciative act of a singular subject comprising the indivisible fracture between living and speaking being. Between these three vastly divergent usages, Agamben’s terminology reveals a progression of thought that, beyond a persistent engagement with language, indicates a greater problem with which he has been occupied and to which other elements of his work may be related, the self-stated ‘fundamental metaphysical problem’.

The taking place of violence and what remains to be thought

The most comprehensive outline of the taking place as a concept in its own right appears in Agamben’s 1979–80 survey of Western metaphysics published in 1982, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. In this text, an attempt to establish the idea of a negative ground as exemplary of the problem of metaphysics common to the thought of G.W.F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger, Agamben develops the taking place of language with a detailed exegesis of the Western metaphysical tradition beginning with Aristotle’s categories through the development of Latin grammar and on to contemporary linguistics, locating this negativity at the basis of each.

Exemplified by the indexical function of the pronoun, the taking place of language marks the passage from the mere glyph of the letter to the embodiment of an idea through the act of speech. Irreducible to either, the taking place of language is the self-reflexive articulation from one mode to the other in the temporally specific instant of discourse that Agamben defines as pure negativity. It is Agamben’s contention that this scission between the two, the location of the taking place, is the paramount structure of Western thought: ‘This fracture traverses the whole history of metaphysics, and without it, the ontological problem itself cannot be formulated. Every ontology (every metaphysics, but also every science that moves, whether consciously or not, in the field of metaphysics) presupposes the difference between indicating and signifying, and is defined, precisely, as situated at the very limit between these two acts’.²

The cornerstone of Agamben’s elaboration of this scissione upon which being is situated is linguist Émile Benveniste’s theory of the double signification of language. While Agamben states early on in Language and Death that the taking place implicates every science that moves, consciously or not, within the field of metaphysics, Benveniste’s theory of semiology from which the aver luogo is derived is not so general. Agamben bases the originary scission between signifying and indicating on this theory, which divides human communication into the two categories of the semiotic and the semantic as articulated by Benveniste in his 1969 essay ‘The Semiology of Language’. The semiotic mode is constituted by the sign, the material foundation of signification based on a consensus of recognition by a majority of individuals in a community, while the semantic mode, related to comprehension, is generated in discourse. Benveniste explains, ‘Semiotics (the sign) must be recognized; semantics (the discourse) must be understood’.³ Agamben’s formulation of signification and indication corresponds to this distinction with which it shares the original influence of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of langue and parole presented in the posthumous Course in General Linguistics (1916).

In Benveniste’s thought, all signifying systems can be classified by either of these modes with only language operating through both. For this reason, he describes language as the omni-signifying system, ‘the great semiotic matrix, the modeling structure from which other structures reproduce its features and its mode of action’.⁴ In all of its permutations, Agamben’s concept of the taking place of language is in accord with this characterization, and, expanding upon Benveniste’s original contention, it becomes the general metaphysical operator, and the original determination of the semiotic and semantic as distinct modes of signification becomes obscure.

Just prior to this moment in Agamben’s thought, this theory, to which he has returned time and again, appears at a critical juncture in the text Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (1978), his critique of the transcendental subjectivity of Immanuel Kant.⁵ Foreshadowing the privileged role of this structure as it will feature in Language and Death, Agamben here calls upon Benveniste’s distinction between the semiotic and the semantic to propose the concept of infancy as the linguistic experience of man that renders him a historic being, the split between language and discourse indicated by our infantile will to speech that precedes speech. Agamben writes,

It is the fact of man’s infancy (in other words, in order to speak, he needs to be constituted as a subject within language by removing himself from infancy) which breaks the closed world of the sign and transforms pure language into human discourse, the semiotic into the semantic ...

It thus becomes clear in what sense Benveniste’s ‘double signification’ should be construed. Semiotic and semantic are not in substance two realities, but are, rather, the two transcendental limits which define and simultaneously are defined by man’s infancy. The semiotic is nothing other than the pure pre-babble language of nature, in which man shares in order to speak, but from which the Babel of infancy perpetually withdraws him. The semantic does not exist except in its momentary emergence [emergenza momentanea] from the semiotic in the instance of discourse [istanza del discorso], whose elements, once uttered, fall back into pure language, which reassembles them in its mute dictionary of signs. Like dolphins, for a mere instant [soltanto per un istante] human language lifts its head from the semiotic sea of nature. But the human is nothing other than this very passage from pure language to discourse; and this transition, this instant, is history.⁶

As the driver that withdraws man from the tranquillity of the semiotic, here likened to pure language [pura lingua], and inserts him in the instant of enunciation into the semantic, infancy thus performs a mediating function that defines the limit of each mode of signification. This function, understood as an emergence and withdrawal, both an enrichment and an impoverishment of language, happens in time thus inscribing itself through time as history.

In Language and Death, it is precisely this threshold around which Agamben constructs a genealogy, determining the fundamental structure of metaphysics to be the scission between signification and indication, or saying [dire] and showing [mostrare]. Given the intensely grammatical framing within which Agamben situates his problem, it is worth proceeding through his argument, step by step, beginning with Aristotle’s division of the ousia into primary and secondary being. Primary being, or prote ousia, translated by Agamben most frequently as ‘primary substance [sostanza prima]’ or ‘pure being [puro essere]’ but also as ‘primary essence [essenza prima]’ following the original Latin translation of ousia [οὐσία] as essentia, is that absolute singular quality which cannot be reduced to other secondary essences. As Agamben defines it, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Problem with Metaphysics: Taking Place
• 2  From Means Without End to the State of Exception
• 3  From the Meta - to the Para -: On Method
• 4  Cat-and-Mouse Game
• 5  Tabula Ocularia
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Index