GIORGIO AGAMBEN - Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

PART ONE
Language

§ 2 The Idea of Language

Whoever has been raised or has simply lived in a Christian or Jewish environment has some familiarity with the word revelation. This familiarity, however, does not imply a capacity to define the word's meaning. I would like to begin my reflections with an attempt to define this term. I am convinced that its correct definition is not irrelevant to the subject of philosophical discourse, which, it has been said, may speak of everything on condition of first speaking of the fact that it does so. The constant trait that characterizes every conception of revelation is its heterogeneity with respect to reason. This is not simply to say--even if the Church Fathers often insisted on this point--that the content of revelation must necessarily appear ridiculous to reason. The difference at issue here is more radical, and it concerns the plane on which revelation is situated as well as the precise structure of revelation itself.
If the content of a revelation were something, however absurd, that human reason and language could still say and know with their own strength (for example, that "pink donkeys sing in the sky of Venus"), this would not be revelation. What revelation allows us to know must, therefore, be something not only that we could not know without revelation but also that conditions the very possibility of knowledge in general.
It is this radical difference of the plane of revelation that Christian theologians express by saying that the sole content of revelation is Christ himself, that is, the Word of God, and that Jewish theologians affirm in stating that God's revelation is his name. When St. Paul wanted to explain to the Colossians the sense of the economy of divine revelation, he wrote: "Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from gen erations . . . now is made manifest" ( Col. 1:26). The word "mystery" (to mysterion) in this phrase is placed in apposition to "the word of God" (ton logon tou theou), which ends the previous verse ("Whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfill the word of God"). The mystery that was hidden and that is now made manifest concerns not this or that worldly or otherworldly event but, simply, the word of God.
If the theological tradition has therefore always understood revelation as something that human reason cannot know on its own, this can only mean the following: the content of revelation is not a truth that can be expressed in the form of linguistic propositions about a being (even about a supreme being) but is, instead, a truth that concerns language itself, the very fact that language (and therefore knowledge) exists. The meaning of revelation is that humans can reveal beings through language but cannot reveal language itself. In other words: humans see the world through language but do not see language. This invisibility of the revealer in what is revealed is the word of God; it is revelation.
This is why theologians say that the revelation of God is also His concealment, or to put it differently, that God reveals himself in the word as incomprehensible. It is a matter not simply of a negative determination or a defect in knowledge but of an essential determination of divine revelation, which one theologian expressed in the following terms: "supreme visibility in the deepest darkness," and "revelation of an unknowable." Once again, this can only mean that what is revealed here is not an object concerning which there would be much to know, if it were not for the lack of adequate instruments of knowledge. Instead what is revealed here is unveiling itself, the very fact that there is openness to a world and knowledge.
From this perspective, the construction of Trinitarian theology appears as the most rigorous and coherent way to consider the paradox of the word's primordial status, which the prologue to the Gospel of John expresses in stating, en arkhē ēn ho logos, "In the beginning was the Word." The Trinitarian movement of God that has become familiar to us through the Nicene Creed ("Credo in unum dominum. . .," "I believe in one Lord . . .") says nothing about worldly reality; it has no ontic content. Instead, it registers the new experience of the word that Christianity brought to the world. To use Wittgenstein's terms, it says nothing about how the world is, but rather reveals that the world is, that language exists. The word that is absolutely in the beginning, that is therefore the absolute presupposition, presupposes nothing if not itself; it has nothing before itself that can explain it or reveal it in turn (there is no word for the word); its Trinitarian structure is nothing other than the movement of its own selfrevelation. And this revelation of the word, this presupposition of nothing, which is the sole presupposition, is God: "and the Word was God."
The proper sense of revelation is therefore that all human speech and knowledge has at its root and foundation an openness that infinitely transcends it. But at the same time, this openness concerns only language itself, its possibility and its existence. As the great Jewish theologian and neo-Kantian philosopherHermann Cohen said, the meaning of revelation is that God reveals himself not in something but to something, and that his revelation is therefore nothing other than die Schöpfung der Vernunft, the creation of reason. Revelation does not mean this or that statement about the world, nor does it indicate something that could be said through language; it concerns the fact that the word, that language, exists.
But what is the meaning of a statement such as "language exists"?
It is from this perspective that we must examine the locus classicus of the problem of the relation of reason and revelation, namely, Anselm's ontological argument. For, as was immediately objected to Anselm, it is not true that the simple utterance of the word "God," "that of which one cannot think anything greater" (quod maius cogitari nequit), necessarily implies the existence of God. But there is a being whose nomination implies its existence, and that being is language. The fact that I speak and that someone listens implies the existence of nothing-other than language. Language is what must necessarily presuppose itself. What the ontological argument proves is therefore that the speech of human beings and existence of rational animals necessarily imply the divine word, in the sense that they presuppose the signifying function and openness to revelation (only in this sense does the ontological argument prove the existence of God--only, that is, if God is the name of the preexistence of language, or his dwelling in the arkhē). But this openness, contrary to what Anselm thought, does not belong to the domain of signifying discourse; it is not a proposition that bears meaning but rather a pure event of language be fore or beyond all particular meaning. From this perspective, it is worth rereading the objection that a great and misunderstood logician, Gaunilo, raises against Anselm's argument. Anselm argues that to utter the word "God" is, for whoever understands the word, necessarily to imply God's own existence. But Gaunilo opposes Anselm's argument with the experience of an idiot or a barbarian who, in the face of signifying discourse, certainly understands that there is an event of language--that, as Gaunilo says, there is a vox, a human voice--but cannot in any way grasp the meaning of the statement. Such an idiot or barbarian, Gaunilo writes, considers
not so much the voice itself, which is something somehow true, that is, the sound of the syllables and letters, as the signification of the voice that is heard; not, however, as it is conceived by him who knows what is usually signified by that voice, but rather as it is conceived by him who does not know its signification and thinks only according to the movement of the soul, which seeks to represent the signification of the voice that is perceived.
No longer the experience of mere sound and not yet the experience of a meaning, this "thought of the voice alone" (cogitatio secundum vocem solam) opens thinking to an originary logical dimension that, indicating the pure taking place of language without any determinate event of meaning, shows that there is still a possibility of thought beyond meaningful propositions. The most original logical dimension at issue in revelation is therefore not that of meaningful speech but rather that of a voice that, without signifying anything, signifies signification itself. (It is in this sense that we should understand those thinkers, such as Roscelin, who were said to have discovered "the meaning of the voice" and who stated that universal essences were only flatus vocis. Here flatus vocis is not mere sound but, rather, in the sense which we have seen, voice as pure indication of an event of language. And this voice coincides with the most universal dimension of meaning, Being.) This gift of the voice by language is God, the divine word. The name of God, that is, the name that names language, is therefore a word without meaning.
In the terms of contemporary logic, we can then say that the sense of revelation is that if there is a metalanguage, it is not a meaningful discourse but rather a pure, insignificant voice. That there is language is as certain as it is incomprehensible, and this incomprehensibility and this certainty constitute faith and revelation.
The principal difficulty inherent in philosophical presentation concerns this very order of problems. Philosophy considers not merely what is revealed through language, but also the revelation of language itself. A philosophical presentation is thus one that, regardless of what it speaks about, must also take into account the fact that it speaks of it; it must first of all say language itself (Hence the essential proximity--but also the distance--between philosophy and theology, a proximity that is at least as ancient as Aristotle's definition of first philosophy as theologikē).
This can also be expressed by saying that philosophy is not a vision of the world but a vision of language; and contemporary thought, indeed, has followed this path all too zealously. Here a difficulty arises, however, from the fact that--as is implicit in Gaunilo's definition of the voice-what is at issue in a philosophical presentation cannot be simply a discourse that has language as its subject, a metalanguage that speaks of language. The voice says nothing; instead, it shows itself, precisely like logical form according to Wittgenstein. It therefore cannot become the subject of discourse. Philosophy can only lead thought to the limit of the voice; it cannot say the voice (or, at least, so it seems).
Contemporary thought has become resolutely conscious that a final and absolute metalanguage does not exist and that every construction of a metalanguage is caught in an infinite regress. Yet the paradox of pure philosophical intention is precisely that of a discourse that must speak of language, exposing its limits without making use of a metalanguage. Philosophy thus encounters what constituted the essential content of revelation, logos en arkhē: the fact that the word is essentially in the beginning, that language is the absolute presupposition (or as Mallarmé once wrote, the word is a principle that develops through the negation of all principles). And it is with this dwelling of the word in the beginning that philosophy and logic must always reckon, if they are to be conscious of their task.
If there is one point of agreement among contemporary philosophies, it is precisely their recognition of this presupposition. Hermeneutics thus founds itself on this irreducible priority of the signifying function, staring--according to the citation from Friedrich Schleiermacher that opens Truth and Method--that "in hermeneutics there is only one presupposition: language," or interpreting, as does Karl-Otto Apel, the concept of "language game" in Wittgenstein as a transcendental condition of all knowledge. For hermeneutics, this a priori is the absolute presupposition, which can be reconstructed and rendered explicit but not transcended. Inaccordance with these principles, hermeneutics is capable of nothing other than positing a horizon of infinite tradition and interpretation whose final meaning and foundation must remain unsaid. It can question itself on how understanding takes place, but that there is understanding is what, remaining unthought, renders all understanding possible. "In taking place," Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, "every act of speech also renders present the unsaid to which it refers, as an answer and a recollection." (It is therefore possible to understand how hermeneutics, while referring to Hegel and Heidegger, leaves unexamined precisely those aspects of their thought that involve absolute knowledge and the end of history, on the one hand, and Ereignis and the end of the history of Being, on the other.)
In this sense, hermeneutics is opposed--though not as radically as it might seem--to those discourses, like science and ideology, that more or less consciously presuppose the preexistence of the signifying function and, nevertheless, repress this presupposition and leave it in force in its productivity and nullifying power. And, in truth, it is difficult to see how hermeneutics could convince these discourses to renounce their position, at least insofar as they have become nihilistically conscious of their own lack of foundation. But if the foundation is unsayable and irreducible, if it always already anticipates speaking beings, throwing them into history and epochal destiny, then a thought that records and shelters this presupposition seems ethically equivalent to one that fully experiences the violence and bottomlessness of its own destiny.
It is hardly an accident, therefore, that an authoritative current of contemporary French thought posits language in the beginning and yet conceives of this dwelling in the arkhē according to the negative structure of writing and the gramma. There is no voice for language; rather, language is always already trace and infinite self-transcendence. In other words: language, which is in the beginning, is the nullification and deferral of itself, and the signifier is nothing other than the irreducible cipher of this ungroundedness.
It is legitimate to ask oneself if the recognition of the presupposition of language that characterizes contemporary thought truly exhausts the task of philosophy. It could be said that here thought believes that its task consists simply in recognizing what constituted the most proper content of faith and revelation: the dwelling of the logos in the beginning. What theology proclaimed to be incomprehensible to reason is now recognized by reason as its presupposition. All comprehension is grounded in the incomprehensible.
But does such a thought not obscure precisely what should be the philosophical task par excellence, that is, the elimination and "absolution" of presuppositions? Was philosophy not perhaps the discourse that wanted to free itself of all presuppositions, even the most universal presupposition, which is expressed in the formula "there is language"? Is philosophy not concerned precisely with comprehending the incomprehensible? The fact that current philosophy has abandoned this task may constitute its fundamental difficulty, condemning the handmaiden to a marriage with its theological master, even as the difficulty of faith coincides with its acceptance by reason. The abolition of the boundaries between faith and reason also marks their crisis, that is, their reciprocal judgment.
Contemporary thought has approached a limit beyond which a new epochal-religious unveiling of the word no longer seems possible. The primordial character of the word is now completely revealed, and no new figure of the divine, no new historical destiny can lift itself out of language. At the point where it shows itself to be absolutely in the beginning, language also reveals its absolute anonymity. There is no name for the name, and there is no metalanguage, not even in the form of an insignificant voice. If God was the name of language, "God is dead" can only mean that there is no longer a name for language. The fulfilled revelation of language is a word completely abandoned by God. And human beings are thrown into language without having a voice or a divine word to guarantee them a possibility of escape from the infinite play of meaningful propositions. Thus we finally find ourselves alone with our words; for the first time we are truly alone with language, abandoned without any final foundation. This is the Copernican revolution that the thought of our time inherits from nihilism: we are the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language. For the first time, what preceding generations called God, Being, spirit, unconscious appear to us as what they are: names for language. This is why for us, any philosophy, any religion, or any knowledge that has not become conscious of this turn belongs irrevocably to the past. The veils that theology, ontology, and psychology cast over the human have now fallen away, and we can return them to their proper place in language. We now look without veils upon language, which, having breathed out all divinity and all unsayability, is now wholly revealed, absolutely in the beginning. Like a poet who finally sees the face of his Muse, philosophy now stands face to face with language (this is why--because "Muse" names the most originary experience of language--Plato can say that philosophy is the "supreme music").
Nihilism experiences this very abandonment of the word by God. But it interprets the extreme revelation of language in the sense that there is nothing to reveal, that the truth of language is that it unveils the Nothing of all things. The absence of a metalanguage thus appears as the negative form of the presupposition, and the Nothing as the final veil, the final name of language.
If, at this point, we take up Wittgenstein's image of the fly imprisoned in the glass, we can say that contemporary thought has finally recognized the inevitability, for the fly, of the glass in which it is imprisoned. The preexistence and anonymity of the signifying function constitute the insuperable presupposition that always already anticipates speaking beings. Human beings are condemned to understand each other in language. But, once again, what is left aside is precisely the original project assigned to this image: the possibility that the fly might leave the glass.
The task of philosophy is therefore to be assumed exactly at the point at which contemporary thought seems to abandon it. If it is true that the fly must begin by seeing the glass in which it is enclosed, what can such a vision mean? What does it mean to see and to expose the limits of language? (For the fly, the glass is not a thing but rather that through which it sees things.) Can there be a discourse that, without being a metalanguage or sinking into the unsayable, says language itself and exposes its limits?
An ancient tradition of thought formulates this possibility as a theory of Ideas. Contrary to the interpretation that sees in it the unsayable founration of a metalanguage, at the basis of the theory of Ideas lies a full acacceptance of the anonymity of language and the homonymy that governs its field (it is in this sense that one should understand Plato's insistence on the homonymy between Ideas and things, as well as the Socratic reejection of the hatred of language). Yet precisely the finitude and polysemy of human language becomes the path opened for the "dialectical voyage" of thought. If every human word always presupposed another word, if the presuppositional power of language knew no limits, then there would truly be no possible experience of the limits of language. On the other hand, a perfect language purged of all homonymy and composed solely of univocal signs would be a language absolutely without Ideas.
The Idea is fully contained in the play between the anonymity and the homonymy of language. The Idea neither is and has a name nor is not and does not have a name. The Idea is not a word (a metalanguage), nor is it a vision of an object outside language (there is no such object, no such unsayable thing); it is a vision of language itself. Language, which for human beings mediates all things and all knowledge, is itself immediate. Nothing immediate can be reached by speaking beings--nothing, that is, except language itself, mediation itself. For human beings, such an immediate mediation constitutes the sole possibility of reaching a principle freed of every presupposition, including self-presupposition. Such an immediate mediation alone, in other words, allows human beings to reach that arkhē anypothetos, that "unpresupposed principle" that Plato, in the Republic, presents as the telos, fulfillment and end of autos ho logos, language itself: the "thing itself" and essential matter of human beings.
There can be no true human community on the basis of a presupposition--be it a nation, a language, or even the a priori of communication of which hermeneutics speaks. What unites human beings among themselves is not a nature, a voice, or a common imprisonment in signifying language; it is the vision of language itself and, therefore, the experience of language's limits, its end. A true community can only be a community that is not presupposed. Pure philosophical presentation, therefore, cannot merely be the presentation of ideas about language or the world; instead, it must above all be the presentation of the Idea of language.