PHILOSOPHY INTERRUPTED

Abstract

The Unspeakable Girl is more important for Agamben’s thought than its short length, antiquarianism, and belletristic format suggest. In discussing ancient initiation rites through an analysis of the figure of the Kore – the unspeakable girl – it suggests how we might conceive of initiation into form-of-life, thus addressing a pressing question that emerges from Agamben’s Homo Sacer project: if Agamben’s thought aims at the demystification of philosophy, yet mystery is the essence of philosophical initiation as traditionally conceived and philosophy needs some kind of initiation, how could one conceive of an initiation into that which is without mystery – into the profane. Yet by insisting on an opposition between “authentic” interior gestures and their vulgar betrayal, Agamben undermines his own most radical insight. Such a distinction can never be drawn, and hence a different kind of initiation must be envisioned: not into the critical spectatorship of the dance, but into the dance itself.

Keywords:

• dance
• silence
• Nymphs
• Aby Warburg
• Carl Jung
• Károly Kerényi

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For an account of the role that Jung has played in New Age spirituality, see Tacey.

2 For an alternative account of the significance of initiation for Agamben’s text, see Bordeleau.

3 Significantly, the short essay “Image and Silence,” published in Diacritics in 2012 almost as a “teaser” for the English translation of The Unspeakable Girl, addresses nearly all the major themes of the book – the mysteries, initiation, silence, painting – save one: the girl. Despite invoking several goddesses and mortal women from Greek and Roman mythology – Angerona, Lara, Persephone – there is no talk, only silence, about the girl as such.

4 For a detailed account of the mechanisms of Nazi censorship in the Netherlands, see Renders.

5 For a nuanced discussion of changing discourse surrounding pedophilia, child molestation, and childhood sexuality in the English-speaking world, see Angelides.

6 The concept of form-of-life, which plays an increasingly prominent role in the final volumes of Homo Sacer, is treated thematically by Agamben in the short essay that begins Means without Ends, first published in Italian in 1996. For a lucid discussion of the significance of form-of-life for Agamben, see Prozorov.

7 Sara Guyer draws an intriguing connection between this passage and the figure of the girl, though principally in connection with Deleuze’s reading of Alice in Wonderland. Her reading, moreover, while not addressed to Agamben’s Unspeakable Girl – it, of course, had not yet been published – suggests the limit of Agamben’s reading. Most suggestive, in this regard, are the concluding lines of her essay:

However, it is also this opening – the unaccountable opening of the mouth – that might indicate another history, not only a history in which *bha and *mu, open and closed mouths, are confused, but in which the open mouth recalls the confusion of eating and speaking. (Guyer 163)

The complex relation between eating and initiation remains largely unthought, and unproblematized, in Agamben’s account.

8 It is worth noting, in this connection, that, as Luce Irigaray (22, 234) argues, the exclusion of women in the Western philosophical tradition assumes the form of both silence and idle chatter, such that these may be understood as correlative phenomenon. This suggests that Agamben’s understanding of the girl as a figure of initiation, far from challenging the philosophical exclusion of the feminine as Other, absolutizes it. Nor, I think, does it matter much that he seems to stress the hermaphroditic and pluripotent nature of the figure of the girl; much as in the case of the Platonic khōra, absolute indeterminacy is itself also simultaneously marked as an excluded feminine. For an incisive discussion of feminist philosophical accounts of the silencing of woman in philosophy, see Walker (“Silence and Reason”; Philosophy). In an essay published in a collection devoted to Tillie Olsen’s legacy, Patricia Laurence argues that there is also a different conception of women’s silence that can be found in the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf. Silence, in these works, functions not as the mark of “passivity, submission and oppression,” but as “enlightened presence” (Laurence 156). While this opens up the possibility of a more affirmative reading of Agamben’s figure of the silent girl, it might lead to the conclusion that even this “ritual function” of silence belongs within the horizon of a “phallocentric” metaphysics.