1. Language and Metaphysics

"As Agamben indicates in the 1989 preface to the English translation of Infancy and History, the key question that unites his disparate explorations is that of what it means for language to exist, what it means that “I speak.” In taking up this question throughout his work, and most explicitly in texts such as Infancy and History, Language and Death, and most recently, The Open, Agamben reinvigorates consideration of philosophical anthropology through a critical questioning of the metaphysical presuppositions that inform it, and in particular, the claim that the defining essence of man is that of having language. In taking up this question, Agamben proposes the necessity of an“experimentum linguae” in which what is experienced is language itself, and the limits of language become apparent not in the relation of language to a referent outside of it, but in the experience of language as pure self-reference.

Published in Italian in 1978, Infancy and History constitutes one of Agamben’s earliest attempts to grasp and articulate the implications of such an as experience of language as such. Consisting of a series on interconnected essays on concepts such as history, temporality, play, and gesture, Infancy and History provides an importance entrance to Agamben’s later work on politics and ethics, particularly in the eponymous essay of the edition on the concept of infancy understood as an experiment of language as such. In this, Agamben argues that the contemporary age is marked by the destruction or loss of experience, in which the banality of everyday life cannot be experienced per se but only undergone, a condition which is in part brought about by the rise of modern science and the split between the subject of experience and of knowledge that it entails. Against this destruction of experience, which is also extended in modern philosophies of the subject such as Kant and Husserl, Agamben argues that the recuperation of experience entails a radical rethinking of experience as a question of language rather than of consciousness, since it is only in language that the subject has its site and origin. Infancy, then, conceptualizes an experience of being without language, not in a temporal or developmental sense of preceding the acquisition of language in childhood, but rather, as a condition of experience that precedes and continues to reside in any appropriation of language.

Agamben continues this reflection on the self-referentiality of language as a means of transforming the link between language and metaphysics that underpins Western philosophical anthropology in Language and Death, originally published in 1982. Beginning from Heidegger’s suggestion of an essential relation between language and death, Agamben argues that Western metaphysics have been fundamentally tied to a negativity that is increasingly evident at the heart of the ethos of humanity. While this collapse of metaphysics into ethics is increasingly evident as nihilism, contemporary thought has yet to escape from this condition. Agamben seeks to understand and ultimately escape this collapse through a rigorous philosophy of the experience of language suggested in Infancy and History. In his analysis of Heidegger and Hegel, Agamben isolates their reliance upon and indeed radicalization of negativity, by casting Da and Diese as grammatical shifters that refer to the pure taking place of language. Here, Agamben draws upon the linguistic notion of deixis to isolate the self-referentiality of language in pronouns or grammatical shifters, which he argues do not refer to anything beyond themselves but only to their own utterance (LD, 16-26). The problem for Agamben, though, is that both Hegel and Heidegger ultimately maintain a split within language – which he sees as a consistent element of Western thought from Aristotle to Wittgenstein – in their identification of an ineffability or unspeakability that cannot be brought into human discourse but which is nevertheless its condition. Agamben calls this mute condition of language “Voice,” and concludes that a philosophy that thinks only from the foundation of Voice cannot deliver the resolution of metaphysics that the nihilism toward which we are moving demands. Instead, he suggests, this is only possible in an experience of infancy that has never yet been: it is only in existing “in language without being called there by any Voice” and dying “without being called by death” (LD 96) that humanity can return to its proper dwelling place or ethos, to which it has never been and from which it has never left.

One further dimension of Agamben’s engagement with Western metaphysics and attempt to develop an alternative ontology is worth mentioning here, since it is one of the most consistent threads throughout his work. This is the problem of potentiality, the rethinking of which Agamben takes to be central to the task of overcoming contemporary nihilism. Citing Aristotle’s proposal in Book Theta of his Metaphysics, that “a thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing im-potential (“that is, there will be nothing able not to be,” (in HS, 45) Agamben argues that this ought not be taken to mean simply that “what is not impossible is possible” but rather, highlights the suspension or setting aside of im-potentiality in the passage to actuality. This suspension, though, does not amount to a destruction of im-potentiality, but rather to its fulfilment; that is, through the turning back of potentiality upon itself, which amounts to its “giving of itself to itself,” im-potentiality, or the potentiality to not be, is fully realized in its own suspension such that actuality appears as nothing other than the potentiality to not not-be. While this relation is central to the passage of voice to speech or signification and to attaining toward the experience of language as such, Agamben also claims that in this formulation Aristotle bequeaths to Western philosophy the paradigm of sovereignty, since it reveals the undetermined or sovereign founding of being. As Agamben concludes, ‘“an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself’” (HS 46). In this way then, the relation of potentiality to actuality described by Aristotle accords perfectly with the logic of the ban that Agamben argues is characteristic of sovereign power, thereby revealing the fundamental integration of metaphysics and politics.

These reflections on metaphysics and language thus yield two inter-related problems for Agamben, which he addresses in his subsequent work; the first of these lies in the broad domain of aesthetics, in which Agamben considers the stakes of the appropriation of language in prose and poetry in order to further critically interrogate the distinction between philosophy and poetry. The second lies in the domains of politics and ethics, for Agamben’s conception of the destruction of experience and of potentiality directly feed into an analysis of the political spectacle and of sovereignty. These also necessitate, according to Agamben, a reformulation of ethics as ethos, which in turn requires rethinking community".

IEP