1984_The Idea of Language. Some Difficulties in Speaking About Language

Graduate Faculty Philosophy JournalVolume 10, Number 1Spring 1984

The Idea of Language:Some Difficulties in SpeakingAbout Language

Giorgio Agamben

ANYONE who has been educated—or has lived—in a Christian orJewish environment is familiar with the word: revelation. Such familiarity, however, does not necessarily entail the ability to define itsmeaning. I would like to begin my reflections with an attempt to definethe term. Naturally, I don't mean to bring up a theological problem. Onthe contrary, I am convinced that a correct definition of this term isneither irrelevant to the theme of our meeting nor alien to the study ofphilosophy: to that discourse which, it has been said, can speak of everything, provided that it speak first of all of the fact that it is speakingof it.

The constant feature that characterizes every concept of revelation isits heterogeneity with respect to reason. This does not simply meanthat the content of revelation must necessarily strike reason as absurd—even though the Church fathers often insisted on this point. Thedifference in question is far more radical; it involves the very nature ofrevelation: its very structure.

If the content of a revelation—no matter how absurd, for example,that pink donkeys sing in the Venusian sky—were something thathuman reason and language could still know and say through theirown power, it would in itself cease to be a revelation. What it tells usmust therefore be something that not only could not be known withoutsuch revelation, but further, it must be something that conditions thevery possibility of knowledge in general.

It is this radical difference at the level of revelation that Christiantheologians express, saying that the sole content of revelation is Christhimself, that is, the word of God. Jewish theologians affirm, similarly,

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that the revelation of God is his name. When Saint Paul wants to explain to the Colossians the economy of divine revelation, he writes:"...to fulfill the word of God, even the mystery which hath been hid fromages and from generations, but is now made manifest to his saints"(Col.1, 26-27). In these lines, "the mystery" is in apposition to "the wordof God" (6 Xoyoq xou ©sou). The mystery that was hidden and is nowrevealed does not concern this or that natural or supernatural event,but simply the word of God.

So if the theological tradition has always understood revelation assomething human reason cannot know on its own, this means only thatthe content of revelation is not a truth that can be expressed in the formof linguistic propositions regarding that which exists (even if a supreme being), but is rather a truth that concerns language itself: thevery fact that language (and hence knowledge) exists. The meaning ofrevelation is that man can reveal what exists through language, butcannot reveal language itself. In other words, man sees the worldthrough language, but does not see language. This invisibility of the revealing in what it reveals is the word of God, it is revelation.

Therefore theologians say that the revelation of God is at the sametime his concealment or, further, that in the word God is revealed in hisvery incomprehensibility. It is not simply a matter of a negative determination or of a lack of knowledge, but of an essential determination ofdivine revelation, which a theologian has expressed in these terms: "supreme visibility in the deepest obscurity" and "revelation of somethingunknowable." Once again, this simply means, what is here revealed isnot an object about which there would be much to be known, but thatcannot be known for lack of adequate instruments of knowledge. Whatis revealed here is the unveiling itself, the very fact that knowledgeand the opening of a world exist.

In this horizon, the construction of trinitarian theology seems to bethe most rigorous and coherent attempt to conceive the paradox of thatprimordial statute of the word that the prologue of the Gospel accordingto John expresses by saying: tv Ctpxtl T\v 6 Xovoq , In the beginningwas the Word. The unitrinitarian movement of God that has becomefamiliar to us through the Nicaean symbol {Credo in unum DominumIesum Christum filium dei unigenitum et ex patre natum ante omniasaecula, Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine ... genitum non factum, con-substantialem Patri ...") says nothing about worldly reality, has noontic content, but takes into account the new experience of the wordwhich Christianity has brought to the world. To use Wittgenstein'sterms, the symbol says nothing about how the world is, but reveals thatthe world is, that there is language. The word, which is absolutely in

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the beginning, which is therefore the absolute presupposition, only presupposes itself, it has no precursor that can explain it or reveal it inturn (there is no word for the word!); and the trinitarian structure of theword is only the word's self-revelation. Now this revelation of the word,this presupposing nothing—which is the only presupposition—is God:"and the word was ... God."

The real meaning of revelation, therefore, is to show that every wordand every human cognition have roots and a foundation in an openingthat transcends them infinitely; yet at the same time, this apertureconcerns only language itself, the possibility and existence of language.As the great Jewish theologian and leader of the neo-Kantian school,Hermann Cohen, said: the meaning of revelation is that God is not revealed in something, but to something, and that, therefore, his revelation is simply die Schopfung der Vernunft, the creation of reason. Revelation does not mean this or that statement about the world, nor whatcan be said through language, but that there is the world, that there islanguage.

There is language — what can such a statement mean?

It is from this point of view that we must take a look at the locus clas-sicus wherein the problem of the relationship between revelation andreason has been debated: namely, the ontological argument of Anselm.For, as many promptly pointed out to him, it is not true that the mereuttering of the name God, of quid maius cogitari nequit, necessarily implies the existence of God. Yet a being whose mere linguistic namingimplies existence does exist, and this being is language. The fact that Ispeak and someone listens does not imply the existence of anything —except of language. Language is that which must necessarily presuppose itself. What the ontological argument proves, therefore, is that ifmen speak, if there are reasoning animals, then there is a divine word.Which means simply that the signifying function always pre-exists.(Provided that God is the name of the pre-existence of language, of itsdwelling in the arche — then, and only then, does the ontological argument prove the existence of God.) But this pre-existence, contrary towhat Anselm thought, does not belong to the realm of significantspeech; it is not a proposition endowed with meaning, but a pure eventof language before or beyond all particular meaning. In this light, it isuseful to reread the objection that a great but little-known logician ofthe eleventh century, Gaunilo, opposes to Anselm's argument. WhenAnselm declared that the uttering of the word God necessarily impliesfor the person who understands it the existence of God, Guanilo posited,in objection, the experience of an ignoramus (an idiot, as he says) or a

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barbarian who, faced by signifying speech, surely understands thatthere Us an event of language, that there is, Gaunilo says, a vox, ahuman voice, but can in no way grasp the meaning of the utterance.This idiot or this barbarian, Gaunilo continues, does not conceive of

the voice itself, that is, the sound of the syllables and of the letters,which is a thing somehow true, so much as he thinks of the meaning ofthe heard voice; and not as it is conceived of by those who know whatis usually signified by that voice (and who conceived of it, therefore,according to the thing [secundum rem]); but rather, he thinks of it asit is thought of by those who do not know the meaning and who thinkonly according to the movement of the mind that tries to represent toitself the effect and the meaning of the heard voice.

The perception no more of a mere sound but not yet of a meaning, this"thought of the voice alone" (cogitatio secundum vocem solam, asGaunilo calls it) opens up a primeval logical dimension that, denotingthe pure "taking place" of language, without any specific event ofmeaning, shows that there is still a possibility of thought beyond signifying propositions. The most original logical dimension that is involved in revelation is not, therefore, that of the signifying word, butthat of a voice which, without signifying anything, signifies significance itself. (This is the sense of theories like that of Roscellinus, ofwhom it was said that he had discovered "the meaning of the voice" andhad affirmed that the universal essences were only flatus vocis. Hereflatus vocis is not the simple sound, but in the sense explained above,the voice as a pure indication of an event of language. And this voicecoincides with the most universal dimension of meaning, with being.)This endowment of a voice for language is God; is the divine word. Thename of God, that is, the name that names language, is hence (as themystical tradition has never tired of repeating) a meaningless word.

In the terms of contemporary logic, we could then say that revelationmeans that, if such a thing as a metalanguage exists, it is not a signifying statement, but a pure non-signifying voice. That there is languageis equally certain and incomprehensible, and this incomprehensibilityand this certainty constitute faith and revelation.

The chief difficulty inherent in philosophical exposition involves thissame order of problems. In fact philosophy is not concerned only withwhat is revealed through language, but also with the revelation of language itself. A philosophical exposition is, in other words, one that,whatever it speaks of, must take into account the fact that it is speaking of it; a philosophical statement is one that, in everything that it

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says, says above all language itself. (Hence the proximity, but also theseparation, between philosophy and theology, a link at least as old asthe Aristotelian definition of first philosophy as 9eo\oyiKr|, theological.)

All of this could also be expressed by saying that philosophy is not aview of the world, but a view of language, and, in fact, contemporarythought has followed this path with all too much enthusiasm. However,a difficulty arises here from the fact that (as is implicit in Gaunilo's definition of voice) a philosophical exposition cannot be simply a discoursethat has language as its subject, a metalanguage that speaks of language. The voice says nothing, but shows itself precisely as logicalform, according to Wittgenstein, and therefore cannot become the subject of discourse. Philosophy can lead thought only to the boundaries ofthe voice: it cannot say the voice (or at least, so it seems).

Contemporary thought is resolutely aware of the fact that an ultimate and absolute metalanguage does not exist and that any construction of a metalanguage remains trapped in a regression to infinity. All the same, the paradox of philosophy's intention is precisely thatof an utterance that would speak of language and show its limits without having a metalanguage at its disposal. In this way, philosophycomes up against what is represented as the essential content of revelation (and, perhaps, also of poetry): logos en arche, the word is absolutelyin the beginning, it is the absolute premise, or, as Mallarme once wrote,"the word is the beginning developed through the negation of every beginning." And it is against this dwelling of the word in the beginningthat a logic and a philosophy (as well as a poetry) aware of their tasksmust always again be measured.

If there is a point on which contemporary philosophies seem to agree,it is precisely the acknowledgement of this premise. And so hermeneu-tics assumes the irreducible priority of the signifying function, affirming (according to the declaration of Schleiermacher that stands as amotto to Wahrheit und Methode) that "in hermeneutics there is onlyone presupposition: language"; or else by understanding, as Apel does,the concept of Wittgenstein's "language game" as a transcendental condition of all knowledge. This a priori is, for hermeneutics, the absolutepremise which can be reconstructed and be made self-conscious, butcannot be overcome. Coherently with these premises, hermeneutics canset itself up only as the horizon of an infinite tradition and interpretation whose ultimate meaning and foundation must necessarily remainunsaid. It can question itself about how comprehension occurs, but thefact that there is comprehension is what, remaining unthought, makes

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all comprehension possible. "Every act of the word," Gadamer writes,"in the act of its occurence, makes at once present the unsaid to whichit, as reply and reference, refers." It is therefore clear that hermeneutics, though harking back to Hegel and Heidegger, tends to neglect thevery aspect of these philosophers' thought concerning, on the one hand,absolute knowledge and the end of history and, on the other, the Ereig-nis and the end of the history of being.

In this sense, hermeneutics is opposed — but not so radically as itmight seem — to such languages as science and ideology which, whilepresupposing more or less knowingly the pre-existence of the signifying function, ignore this premise and allow its productivity and nullifying power to operate without constraint. And, in truth, it is difficult tosee how hermeneutics could convince the advocates of these attitudes torenounce their positions. If the foundation is, in any case, unsayableand irreducible, if it always anticipates speaking man, casting him intoa history and a destiny, then a thought that recalls and deals with thispresupposition seems ethically the equivalent of one which, abandoning itself to its fate, carries out to the end (and there is, actually, noend) the violence and lack of foundation of such a thought.

It is therefore no accident if, according to an authoritative current ofcontempory French thought, language is, indeed, maintained in the beginning, but this dwelling of the logos in the arche has the negativestructure of writing and of gramme. There is no voice for language;rather, from the start, language is a trace and an infinite self-transcendence. In other words, language, which is in the beginning, is the nullification and the deferment of itself, and significance is only the inexhaustible cypher of this lack of foundation.

It is legitimate to ask oneself whether this awareness of the pre-existence of language that characterizes contemporary thought can reallyfulfill the task of philosophy. It could be said that here thought considers its task done by the very acknowledgement of what constituted themore genuine content of faith and revelation: the embeddedness of thelogos in the arche. What theology declared incomprehensible to reasonis now accepted by reason as its premise. All comprehension is foundedon the incomprehensible. But, in this way, isn't the very thing thatshould be the philosophic task par excellence abandoned—namely thedissolution of the presupposition? Wasn't philosophy the utterance thatwas meant to be free of all premises, even of the most universal premiseexpressed in the formula: there is language? For isn't philosophy a matter of comprehending the incomprehensible? Perhaps in the very abandoning of this task, which sentences the handmaiden philosophy to asecret marriage with her mistress theology, lies the present difficulty of

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philosophy, just as the difficulty of faith coincides with its acceptanceby reason. The abolition of the frontiers between faith and reason alsomarks their crisis, that is, their reciprocal judgment.

Contemporary thought has come close to that limit, beyond which anew unveiling of language seems no longer possible. The arche character of the logos is now completely revealed, and no new figure of the divine, no new historic destiny can arise from language. Language, in thevery moment it is located in the beginning, also reveals its absoluteanonymity. There is no name for the name, there is no metalanguage,not even in the form of a non-signifying voice. If God was the name ofthe language, "God is dead" can mean only that there is no longer aname for language. The fulfilled revelation of language is a word completely abandoned by God. Man is cast into language without having avoice or a divine word that guarantees him a possibility of escape fromthe infinite play of signifying propositions. And so, at last, we are leftalone with our words, alone for the first time with language, abandonedby any further foundation. This is the Copernican revolution that thethought of our time has inherited from nihilism: we are the first peoplewho have become completely aware of language. What previous generations thought of as Muse, God, Being, Spirit, Unconscious, we seeclearly for the first time for what they are: names of language. Thus allphilosophies, all religions and all knowledge that have not becomeaware of this turning point, belong for us irrevocably to the past. Theveils that theology, poetry, ontology, and psychology have drawn overwhat is human have now fallen and, one by one, we restore them totheir proper place in language, which has dispelled from itself everything divine, everything unsayable: it stands entirely revealed, absolutely in the beginning. Just like a poet who can finally see the face ofhis muse, so the philosopher now looks at language face to face (that'swhy — muse being the name of the most original experience of language — Plato says that philosophy is "the supreme music").

Nihilism undergoes this same experience of a word abandoned byGod; but it interprets the ultimate revelation of language from thestandpoint that there is nothing to reveal, that the truth of languageattests to the nothingness of every thing. The absence of a metalanguage thus becomes the negative form of a foundation, and nothingnessthe last veil, the last name for language.

If, at this point, we take up Wittgenstein's image of the fly trapped ina bottle, we could say that contemporary thought has finally acknowledged the inevitability of the bottle whose prisoner the fly is. The pre-existence and the anonymity of the signifying function constitute the

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presupposition that always anticipates the speaking man and fromwhich there seem to be no exits of any kind. Men are doomed to understand each other in language. But, once again, the actual project thatwas originally entrusted to that image is thus neglected: the possibilitythat the fly could escape from the bottle.

The task of philosophy, therefore, must be resumed at the very pointwhere contemporary philosophy seems to abandon it. If it is true, infact, that the fly must begin by seeing the bottle within which it is trapped, what can such a vision signify: What does seeing the boundaries oflanguage mean? (The bottle, indeed, is not a thing for the fly, but whatit sees things through.) Is it possible to conceive of an utterance which,without being metalinguistic and plunging into the unsayable, sayslanguage itself and shows its limits?

An ancient tradition of thought locates this possibility in the theoryof ideas. Contrary to the interpretation that sees in it the unsayablefoundation of a metalanguage, at the basis of the Platonic theory ofideas lies an acceptance without reservations of the anonymity of language and of the homonymy that governs it (this is how we must understand Plato's insistence on the homonymy between ideas and things aswell as Sqcrates' rejection of all misology). This same finiteness andambiguity of human language opens the way to a "dialectical journey"of thought. For, if every human word presupposed another word, thatis, if the presupposing power of language never ended, then truly therecould be no experience of the boundaries of language. A perfect language, on the other hand, from which all homonymy had disappearedand in which all signs were univocal, would be a language with no ideaswhatsoever.

The idea lies entirely in the play between the anonymity and thehomonymy of language. Neither does the One exist and have a name,nor does it not exist and not have a name. The idea is not a word (ametalanguage) nor is it the vision of an object outside language: it isthe vision U&eTv) of language itself. (This is the genuine content of everyaporia, which makes it a pattern of philosophical exposition). For language, which mediates all things and all knowledge for man, is itselfimmediate. Nothing immediate can be reached by speaking men — except language itself, except mediation itself. This immediate mediationrepresents for man the only possibility of reaching a beginning freedfrom all presupposition, even from the presupposition of language itself; of reaching, in other words, that dp/r) dvuii60£Toq which Plato,in The Republic, presents as the xeXoq , as the fulfillment and end ofccOtoc; 6 Xoyoq, of language itself, and at the same time as the "thingitself and the concern of man.

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No true human community can, in fact, rise on the basis of a presupposition — whether it be that of a nation or a tongue or even the a prioriof communication of which hermeneutics speaks. What unifies men isnot a nature or a divine voice or the common imprisonment in signifying language, but the vision of language itself— and, therefore, the experience of its boundaries, of its end. The only true community is a community without presupposition. Pure philosophical exposition therefore cannot be the exposition of one's own ideas on language or on theworld, but an exposition of the idea of language.

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1984_The Idea of Language. Some Difficulties in Speaking About Language