Language, if we can âradicalizeâ the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben , is not just a historical but also a living âbeingâ (cf. Agamben 2016, 25). Not only should the human being be considered as the âanimalâ that has languageâman is not just homo sapiens, according to Agamben, but, above all, homo sapiens loquendi, the living being that can talk (cf. Agamben 2016, 27â28)âbut language itself should be considered as a living âbeingâ (language has a history that does not coincide with humanâs history). However, not always does human language and languages being coincide. These are (at least philosophically speaking) the most interesting moments. They constitute the limit-moments of insanity, when pure language is being spoken through a language-less human or when a human being is speaking non-language (not always is this reducible to nonsense). This non-coinciding is also the cause of the more common phenomenon where not the whole of language âgoes missingâ, but merely words. Very few people, in fact, have not directly or indirectly experienced moments or events that are considered to go âbeyond wordsâ. Love, hate, joy , evil, but also art (beauty) seem to all be categories that vouch for and can produce âbeyond wordâ experiences. Although more often than not these âbeyond wordâ experiences can be reduced to wordy-experience suffered by people who lack the adequate vocabulary, this is not always the case. Certain âbeyond wordsâ experiences are, in fact, merely caused by the lack of a vocabulary (still) in use.
Let me try to make this rather enigmatic statement somewhat clearer by turning to the example of evil as it was presented in the text that constituted a major influence in the coming about of this book: Gordon Graham âs Evil and Christian Ethics (2003). In the fourth chapter of this very provocative book, Graham, daringly, corners the topic of the great evils. These evils are great violent excesses of war, the atrocious criminal murders of the likes of Charles Manson, and the more recent school massacres in the USA. What strikes Graham, is that when these massacres happen, or when more general judgement is offered on the perpetrators of past warlike atrocities, is that the first thing that is done is âto condemn the perpetrators as evil; the second is to declare them mad or mentally illâ (Graham 2003, 122). As Graham correctly remarks, for these particular cases of âmental illnessâ âthere is virtually no theoretical understanding of the physical basis of these, and ⊠there is neither effective drug therapy nor even the beginnings of a neurophysiological explanationâ (Graham 2003, 125). If all of this did not suffice already, as the anthropologist Elliot Leyton put it, âif the killers are merely insane, why do they in fact so rarely display the cluster of identifiable clinical symptomsâ of those few mental diseases of which the âpsychiatrists agreeâ (proposed in Graham 2003, 127)? For as much as these atrocious evils almost oblige one to auto-protectively judge them as âabnormalâ, it has to be acknowledgedâeven by the fiercest positivist or advocate of exclusivist scientific researchâthat âscientific sensibility lacks an adequate explanation of evilâ, and â[H]umanism cannot explain the evil of evil, and naturalistic science, even of a well-informed psychological kind, cannot explain its occurrenceâ (Graham 2003, 154). What does have an adequate sensibility of evil is not scientific language but religious language. In fact, when confronted with these cases of pure evil, it was, at least in the past, the language of the daemonic that took over. And this language would have offered explanations both of âthe degree of evilâ and of âthe sense of compulsionâ with which the perpetrator would have acted (Graham 2003, 138). Graham postulates from this, and we think correctly, a hypothesis of the supernatural in which our (moral) lives are set in. This would then provide us with a much better explanation of evil than the purely scientific one that clearly fails in these cases of evil.
This (the conclusion) is obviously not what is of interest to this book. What is, however, of absolute interest to us, as Susan Sontag phrased her encounter with a very similar problem, is that âwe have a sense of evil but no longer the ⊠language to talk intelligently about [it]â (Sontag 1978, 85). Said differently and more generally, and this is where we wanted to arrive at, regarding certain problems we no longer have the language to talk intelligently about them. We have all kinds of intelligent theories and (pseudo-)scientific explanations that at times fail to live up to their promise of being the most accurate or most appropriate to turn to regarding certain phenomena. And even when they are worthy candidates for the âthroneâ of explanation and clarification, sometimes they would (and we are appositely changing the time of the verb) have been easily passed over, were it not that we no longer have that particular type of language anymore. On many occasions, the type of language that has gone missing is religious or even philosophical language, overpowered as it has been by the secular language of the secularized world. Also regarding the case that is of interest to this book, it is religious language that has gone missing. And the âcaseâ that would have befitted so much by the usage of a certain type of religious language is nothing other than the interpretation of the times, âour timesâ, we live in. The aim of this volume is, first of all, to bring back to life this particular religious discourse (something we will do in the Visual Anteprima Chap. 2 and the third section of this book) and, secondly, to read âthe signs of our timesâ with it (to which section four and five are dedicated). The religious discourse we will bring back in the pages that follow is that regarding one of the more enigmatic realms of the afterlife, namely Limbo. As we will attempt to demonstrate, it is not sociology, not economy, not politics, but religionâthat is, the particular religious discourse about Limboâthat is best at explaining and making us understand our modern epoch.
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In an interesting little booklet called Living in Limbo: Life in the Midst of Uncertainty (Capps and Carlin 2010) a variety of types of situations in our daily lives are described as âLimbo-experiencesâ. According to the two editors of this volume, there are two different types of these âLimbo-experiencesâ (cf. Capps and Carlin 2010, 3). On the one hand, there are the chronic and very basic Limbo-experiences where oneâs life is sensed or understood as being indeterminate or also intermediate. These experiences mainly involve waiting: waiting in line, waiting for e-mail, etc. On the other hand, there are also times in our lives where a much more acute form of âLimboâ is experienced. This second category can, according to Capps and Carlin, be further subdivided into five different categories. They regard cases of acute Limbo-experiences that relate to youth, relations, work, illness, and immigration. And even though the scope of this book is on a completely different plane, and we disagree with a number of aspects of the understanding of Limbo as introduced by the editorsâthey, for example, consider âtransitionâ as a good synonym for Limbo (Capps and Carlin 2010, 8â9), something which, as we will come to see, it is notâthe idea that Limbo is not just something related to the afterlife but is intertwined with our life now, here, today, in an immanent way is something we agree with and will investigate in the pages of this book.
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We are, obviously, not the first to try to re-introduce older (religious) concepts into an explicative discourse foreign to it while claiming its highly productive contribution in the understanding of that particular discourse. We already referred to Gordon Graham âs work, but other examples, such as Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben (among others), can be brought forward. Toward the end of her The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt thus presents us with the intriguing analogy of the division of the concentration camps as corresponding to three types of realms of the afterlife: Hades , Purgatory , and Hell (cf. Arendt 1973, 445). Arendt even adds intriguingly that â[S]uddenly it becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufactured right here on earth, âŠâ (Arendt 1973, 446)âconfirming, as such, the thesis we are trying to establish here. Giorgio Agamben âwhose influence on the pages that follow cannot be ignoredâhas made of these more isolated events in Arendt a more consistent characteristic of his work. For Agamben, to offer only one, but very significant, example (which also evinces the divergence of the thesis of this book from Agambenâs main political thesis), it is Hell, characterized as it is by eternal government, that is the true paradigm of modern politics (cf. Agamben 2011, 164).
For as much as we are offering a reading, through Limboic glasses, of our modern epoch, this reading does not claim to be an all-encompassing one (something which is far beyond our capacities and which, more than probably, is not even possible). The proposed reading of the âsigns of our timesâ, an expression that will return and be explained in the course of this text, will focus on what has become the quintessential characteristic, the cipher, of our times. This characteristic is the âcrisisâ. As we are all familiar with, the past decade(s) have been characterized ever more frequently by this word crisis. Crisis is everywhere and everything is in crisis; all types of crisis have been reported, going from political, financial, climatic, social/societal, cultural, intellectual, and educational crisis, to even an anthropological crisis. However, crisis is, as we will demonstrate in due course, not just a ârecentâ phenomenon or qualifier of the times we live in. It was from the very beginning of our modern period considered one of its main features. The focus of our reading will thus be our modern times, understood as times of a crisis which, as we will discover, will have taken on the features of lastingness, of being a âperennial crisis â. In fact, as Michel Serres , the French philosopher and member of the AcadĂ©mie Française, wrote recently in a small booklet on the crisis that struck the Western world some years ago: the current crisis ânot only touches the financial markets, work and industry, but the whole of society and all of humanityâ. Serres goes even so far to claim that what is at stake is âthe essential relation of humans to the worldâ (Serres 2014, Chapter 1, Sect. 2). It seems as if Serresâs friend, the French scholar Bruno Latour , was correct when he denounced, already more than two decades ago, our âmorose delight in being in perpetual crisisâ (Latour 1993, 114). What if being in a perennial crisis was, however, not some dour glee but a structural feature of modernity?
As can be deduced from the just-mentioned orientation on the concept of (perennial) crisis, the Limboic reading we propose will not engage or participate in what can be considered the monotonous or even trite âexistentialâ question regarding a crisisâsomething which has characterized the recent literature on âcrisisâ. Whether or not there is a crisis is not the question that will be asked in this book. In fact, we consider the question regarding the actuality of a crisis or not (something which is almost impossible to âobjectivelyâ verify during its course, and which is even afterward difficult to establish once and for all due to its extreme sensitivity to partisanship) as a redundant duality that needs to be surpassed if one wants to take the concept of crisis truly seriously and understand what is at stake in its usage (for too long has this concept been among us for it not to have become suspicious, but this does not seem to be the case). What we intend to do, and this is the quest into which we thus embark in this volume, is ...