FROM VOICE TO INFANCY giorgio agamben on the existence of language

Abstract

The main concern of Agamben's work, prior to the Homo Sacer project, is how to understand the existence of or potentiality for language. Contemporary philosophy casts language as the unsayable presupposition of discourse. Agamben criticises this as an incomplete nihilism that remains within the horizon of metaphysics, and attempts to think the experience of language without an unsayable ground. I examine Agamben's critique of the role of the ineffable in the theory of the subject, and in the thought of Heidegger and Derrida. I contrast this with his account of infancy as an experience that fully assumes the groundlessness of language.

Keywords:

• Agamben
• Derrida
• Heidegger
• language
• infancy
• potentiality

Notes

I would like to thank Paul Patton for his time, his critical eye, and his constructive comments in the development of this paper.

1 I focus on Heidegger due to Agamben's profound intellectual debt to his former teacher. I focus on Derrida due to the influence of his account of language and the end of metaphysics. Agamben is both indebted to and consistently critical of Derrida, and the critique of linguistic presupposition and the ineffable articulated here is the key to this relationship. The other decisive thinker for Agamben's critique of negativity and the ineffable is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Agamben also makes similar but far less detailed critiques of the problem of presupposition in Hans-Georg Gadamer and a number of thinkers who have been influential for analytic philosophy, such as Frege and Wittgenstein (Potentialities 68–70).

2 As Agamben consistently points out, ontology and politics are, for him, deeply interwoven (Homo Sacer 44, 182). This fact is being addressed by an increasing number of commentators: see, for example, Murray; Deladurantaye, Giorgio Agamben; Mills; and Clemens, Heron, and Murray. Although this paper focuses exclusively on Agamben's work on language and ontology, it contributes to the debates around Agamben's better known political works by providing a detailed account of some of the principal concepts and concerns that drive his thought prior to his turn to explicitly political matters. I have drawn on aspects of the reading developed here to analyse specific aspects of Agamben's political thought (see McLoughlin, “The Politics of Caesura”; and “The Sacred and the Unspeakable”). However, a full analysis of the political implications for the reading of Agamben's ontology that I develop here remains a task for the future.

3 Agamben is quoting Foucault (174).

4 Agamben often uses Benveniste's distinction between semiotic and semantic relatively interchangeably with Saussure's distinction between parole and langue. In Infancy and History, however, he does note that Benveniste's distinction is “very different” from Saussure's. This is because Saussure's distinction is usually understood as that between the collective and the individual: langue as the collective system of signs, parole as the individual use of this system (Infancy 61).

5 As Mills points out, Agamben derives the term from the Latin infans, “in which ‘fans’ is the present participle of ‘fari’, meaning ‘to speak’. Etymologically, then, ‘in-fancy’ means being unable or unwilling to speak” (Mills 24).

6 In support of this he locates the Voice in the reflection on Being by medieval thinkers such as Aquinas, John of Salisbury, Roscelin, and the aforementioned passage from Guanilo (Language 32–35).

7 Agamben comments on his participation in Heidegger's seminars in an interview with the French daily newspaper Libération on 1 April 1999. Agamben states that at this time “philosophy became possible” for him (qtd in Deladurantaye, “Agamben's Potential” 8).

8 For one of Heidegger's most important criticisms of the metaphysical definition of the human over against a presupposed animality, see his “Letter on Humanism.”

9 Heidegger's most comprehensive treatment of the relationship between human as world-forming and the animal as poor in world appears in his Fundamental Concepts.

10 Stimmung is conventionally translated as mood, but Agamben insists that this should be stripped of its psychological connotations, noting the etymological connection with Stimme (voice) that restores it to its “originary acoustic-musical dimension” (Language 56).