40.2.2014

Vocation and VoiceAuthor(s): Giorgio AgambenSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Winter 2014), pp. 492-501Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/674125 .

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Vocation and Voice

Giorgio Agamben

Translated by Kalpana Seshadri

The title of my essay attempts, with its etymological figure, to think inItalian a German term as it is presented at many decisive points in the workof Friedrich Hölderlin and Martin Heidegger. This term is the noun Stim-mung. If it is true that to think is something we are capable of only inlanguage; if, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said, every philosophical question canbe presented as an interrogation on the meaning of words, then translationis one of the eminent ways in which man thinks his word.

Now, as has once been noted by a great philologist, Stimmung is exactlyone of those German words that is usually defined as untranslatable:

This does not mean that phrases such as in guter (schlechter) Stim-mung sein could not easily be rendered by Fr etre en bonne (mauvaise)humeur [essere di buon umore, in Italian] . . . ; [that] die Stimmung indiesem Bilde (Zimmer) by l’atmosphere de ce tableau (cette chamber)[l’atmosfera di questa stanza] . . . ; Stimmung hervorrufen by to create,to give atmosphere, creer une atmosphere [con creare una atmosfera];die Seele zu Traurigkeit stimmen by dispoer l’ame a la tristesse, [comedisporre l’anima alla tristezza] etc. But what is missing in the mainEuropean languages is a term that would express the unity of feelingsexperienced by man face to face with his environment (a landscape,nature, one’s fellow man), and would comprehend and weld togetherthe objective (factual) and the subjective (psychological) into oneharmonious unity . . . . The Frenchman can neither say l’humeur d’unpaysage nor mon atmosphere . . . , whereas the German has at his dis-posal both “the Stimmung of a landscape” and “my Stimmung.” Andthere is also in the German word a constant relationship with

Critical Inquiry 40 (Winter 2014)

English translation © 2014 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/14/4002-0009$10.00. All rights reserved.

Used with permission from Giorgio Agamben.

492



gestimmt sein, “to be tuned,” which, with its inference of a relativesolidarity or agreement with something more comprehensive . . . ,differentiates it from state of mind.1

The word Stimmung, as is evident in its proximity to Stimme (voice),originally belonged to the sphere of musical acoustics. It is semanticallylinked to the Latin words concentus and temperamentum and the Greekharmonia and originally means intonation, chord, harmony. This musicalsignification develops, without ever completely losing contact with theoriginal sense, into the modern meaning of mood [stato d’animo]. It deals,namely, with a word whose meaning has been displaced, in the course oftime, from the sphere of the acoustic-musical—to which it is bound by itsproximity to the voice—to that of psychology.

It would not be useless to reflect for a few moments on this displace-ment. The history of human culture is indeed often the history of suchdisplacements and dislocations, and this is typical because one does notoften call attention to that which in the interpretations of categories andconcepts of the past produced such misunderstandings. A simple exampleclarifies what I mean. We know that love in Greek is ero�s. However, for us,love is an emotion, namely, something that by definition is unclear yetbelongs, however indubitably, to the sphere of psychology, to individualpsychosomatic interior experience. We know instead that for the ancientGreeks Eros was a god, something that belonged not to human psychologybut to theology. The transformation implies that the passage of eros to lovedoes not so much concern a singularly unchanging phenomenology oflove as its migration from one sphere to another. In this migration, thepantheon of the Greek gods—or, much later, the trinity of the ChristianGod—is displaced within us; this dislocation of theology is what we callpsychology. And it is to this dislocation that we must pay attention whenwe translate eros as “love” if we do not wish to fall into equivocation. This

1. Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore, 1963), pp. 5–6.See also Spitzer, L’armonia del mondo: Storia semantica di un’idea, trans. Valentina Poggi(Bologna, 1967), pp. 9–10. The Italian translation alters Spitzer’s references to the French intoItalian and makes a few small omissions. The quotation here is from the original English text.—TRANS.

G I O R G I O A G A M B E N is an Italian philosopher and author of numerous books,including the recent series in economic theology The Kingdom and the Glory(2011), The Highest Poverty (2013), and Opus Dei (2013). K A L P A N A S E S H A D R I

is professor of English at Boston College and author most recently ofHumAnimal: Race, Law, Language (2012).

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2014 493



is why the Provencal amor—and also the love of the stilnovisti—that onefinds on the edge between theology and psychology allows for frequentmisunderstandings. It is not clear, in fact, if what we have in front of us isa religious-soteriological ceremony or, in the modern sense, an amorousadventure.

You comprehend therefore how important it is in our case to determinethe place in which we must situate Stimmung. In section 29 of Sein undZeit, Heidegger introduces Stimmung—which the Italian translator ren-ders as “emotive tonality”—as the “fundamental existential way” throughwhich Dasein opens itself to itself. Insofar as it originarily carries Dasein inits Da, the being-there in its there, it accomplishes the “primary disclosureof the world” (die primäre Entdeckung der Welt). That which in it is inquestion pertains therefore first of all not to the ontical plane—that whichwe can know and feel within the world, the worldly entities—but the on-tological plane—the self-opening of the world. (In Wittgenstein’s terms,we could say “not as the world is, but that the world is” or, rather, “not thatwhich is said in propositions within language but that language is.”)Moreover, Heidegger writes, “it does not come from the outside nor fromthe inside but arises in being-in the-world itself.”2 “To be in a Stimmung,”Heidegger adds, “does not entail any primary reference to the psyche: itdoes concern an interior state that could externalize itself mysteriously tocolorize things or people.”3 The place of Stimmung—we could say—is notin interiority, nor in the world, but at its limit. This is why being-there,insofar as it is essentially its own opening, is always already in a Stimmungand always already emotionally oriented; this orientation is anterior toevery conscious knowledge just as to every sensible perception, to everyWissen as to every Wahrnehmen. Before each knowing and each sensibleperception, the world therefore opens itself to man in a Stimmung. “Onlydue to the ontologically own of an entity,” writes Heidegger, “that has themode of being of being-in-the-world in an emotional situation, the‘senses’ can be ‘affects’ and ‘have sensitivity’ as that which manifests itselfin affection.”4 We could say then that more than being is itself in a place,

2. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit,” trans. JoanStambaugh (New York, 1996); hereafter abbreviated as BT. My translations of Agamben’s use ofHeidegger’s Being and Time are often accompanied in the notes by BT. Stambaugh renders thispassage as follows: “It comes neither from ‘without’ nor from ‘within,’ but rises from being-in-the-world itself as a mode of that being” (BT, p. 129).—TRANS.

3. “Being attuned is not initially related to something psychical, it is itself not an innercondition which then in some mysterious way reaches out and leaves its mark on things andpersons” (BT, p. 129).—TRANS.

4. “And only because the ‘senses’ belong ontologically to a being which has the kind of

494 Giorgio Agamben / Vocation and Voice



Stimmung is itself the place of the opening of the world, the place of beingitself.

Stimmung, however, brings Dasein in the opening of its Da, discloses atthe same time to Dasein its own being as thrown in this Da, its being alwaysalready consigned (delivered over) to itself. The originary disclosure of theworld that takes place in Stimmung is, namely, always already disclosure—says Heidegger—of a Geworfenheit (of a being-thrown) to whose structureinheres an essential negativity. In section 40 of Sein und Zeit, analyzinganxiety as fundamental Stimmung, Heidegger specifies the characteristicsof this negativity. First of all, that which anxiety reveals is not some worldlydetermined object:

The face-to-face of anxiety is completely undetermined. . . . Thereforeanxiety does not have eyes to see a determination here or there fromwhich that which threatens approaches. That which characterizes theface to face of anxiety is the fact that the threat is not in any place . . . [;] itis already there, but is not in any place; it is so close that it oppresses usand it takes our breath away, yet it is not in any place. In the face-of-which the “it is not nothing and nowhere [nirgends]” is disclosed.5

At the same point at which Dasein therefore accedes to its ownmostopening and, in anxiety, places itself before the world as world—this open-ing discloses always already a passage from a negativity and from an un-ease. If, as Heidegger writes, the Da is now before Dasein as “an inexorableenigma,” it is because Stimmung, discovering man as always alreadythrown and consigned to his opening, discloses to him that he did not onhis own bring himself to his Da. “Being,” writes Heidegger, “Dasein isthrown, and is not brought by itself to its Da. . . . Existing, it never goesback to its being thrown. . . . Since it itself does not have a basis, it restsupon its own weight, which the Stimmung discloses to him as a burden.”6

being attuned to being-in-the-world, can they be ‘touched’ and ‘have a sense’ for something sothat what touches them shows itself in an affect” (BT, p. 129)—TRANS.

5.

What Angst is about is completely indefinite. . . . Thus neither does Angst “see” a definite“there” and “over here” from which what is threatening approaches. The fact that what isthreatening is nowhere characterizes what Angst is about . . . , it is already “there”—and yetnowhere. It is so near that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath—and yet it is nowhere.

In what Angst is about, the “it is nothing and nowhere” becomes manifest. [BT, pp.174–75]—TRANS.

6. “Da-sein exists as thrown, brought into its there not of its own accord. . . . Existing, itnever gets back behind its thrownness. . . . Because it has not laid the ground itself, it rests in theweight of it, which [the Stimmung] reveals to it as a burden” (BT, p. 262).—TRANS.




It is exactly because Dasein is open to the world in such a way that it isnever master of its own opening; this opening to the world has the char-acter of unhomeliness. “Anxiety,” writes Heidegger, “brings being backfrom its feeling itself at home in the world and has therefore first of all thecharacter of un-homeliness” (of not feeling at home; zu Haus).

Here you must think of a poetic text that Heidegger constantly has inmind while writing Sein und Zeit, namely, Rainer Maria Rilke’s DuinoElegies. Already in the first elegy, after the tremendous apparition of theangel, Rilke writes that the animals know that:

how little at home we arein the interpreted world.[wir nicht sehr verlä�lich zu Haus sindin der gedeuteten Welt.]7

It is in the eighth elegy, evoking the idea of the Open (das Offene) inwhich the animal sees with all its eyes, that Rilke writes:

We though: never, not for a single day, do wehave that pure space ahead of us into which flowersendlessly open. What we have is Worldand always World and never Nowhere-Without-Not[Nirgends ohne Nicht].8

Let us try now to recapitulate the characteristics of this Stimmung, ofthis originary opening to the world that constitutes Dasein and—if wecan—situate its place. Stimmung is the originary place of the opening tothe world, a place such as is not in the same place but rather coincides withthe ownmost place of the being of man, with his Da. Man—Dasein—is thisopening. And, however, this Stimmung, this originary attunement and thisconsonance between Dasein and world is, together, a dissonance and aforgetting [scordatura], a being-out-of-place and thrownness. Thus man isalways already anticipated by his own opening to the world.

Why, we wonder now, does the opening of Stimmung have this charac-teristic of scission and of dissonance? What is at play in it? What does itdeal with in terms of accordance and attunement, if the only “intonation”possible has the form of dissonance?

Let us reflect for a moment on the fundamental character, on the char-acter of the arch �e that Sein und Zeit assigns to Stimmung and to anxietyinsofar as it is the fundamental Stimmung. A single state of mind, a single

7. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Edward Snow (New York,2001), pp. 5, 4.

8. Ibid., p. 46.




passion, a single Stimmung has in antiquity a similar privilege and a similarprincipal character: thaumazein, “wonder,” that which—according to anancient and consistent tradition—is the arch �e of philosophy. Let us note,first of all, in passing, a fundamental difference: the original opening be-longs for the Greeks to the optical sphere—thaumazein is theasthai, “tolook”—while for Heidegger and, in general, for us moderns, it is situatedin the acoustic sphere (Stimmung from Stimme, voice). This is modernity’sdebt to Judaism, in which the revelation is always an acoustic phenome-non. Remember that in the Bible one reads: “The Eternal spoke to youfrom the fire. You heard a voice of the word, without form, figure unseen,except the voice” (Deut. 4:12).

In what sense should we understand the acoustic character of Stimmungand its relationship with wonder and with its other path �e of Greek philos-ophy? Heidegger himself relates his treatment of Stimmung with the theoryof path �e in classical Greece, underlining that the first systematic treatmentof the emotions was conducted not within the realm of psychology but inthe Rhetoric of Aristotle. In the Rhetoric, the treatment of the passions isnaturally conducted within a theory of the discourse of persuasion and is,therefore, in a close relation to language. But the intuition of this proxim-ity between passions of the soul and language, between pathos and logos,characterizes also the most expansive reflection that post-AristotelianGreek thought dedicated to the problem: that of the Stoics. One must go toChrysippus for the radical formulation, at first perplexing, according towhom the passions, insofar as they are in an essential relation to the logos,can emerge only in man. Man falls into passions because he is a speakinganimal; he is a passionate animal because he is an animal rationale. Thepassions are not indeed in any way, according to the Stoics, a naturalphenomenon but a form of krisis, of judgment, and, therefore, of dis-course. Assuming these premises, let us examine now the definition thatthe Stoics give to the passions: pleonazousa horm �e �e hyperteinousa ta kataton logon m �etra. The current translation renders this as: “Excessive impulsethat transgresses the measure of language.” Hormc comes from ornymi,which has the same etymology in Latin orior and origo and means: “I issueforth, I was born, I originate.” The definition presents therefore an issuingforth, an origin that surpasses the measure of language. The Stoics say thatthis horm �e is apeithcs logo (inconvincible by language) and affirm thatevery pathos is biastikon (violent). But what is in question in this issuingforth and in this violence? If we remember that, for the Stoics, pathos is nota natural, irrational element but is tied to logos, then that which exercisesviolence cannot be but the same language; the excessive origin cannot but bethat same language. In the fragments of the Stoics, where this was con-




served, we cannot find in any place an affirmation so explicit, yet it alonedoes not contradict the premises of their theory of the passions, of the“rational animal” as the only “passionate animal.” In any case, as the Stim-mung in the same moment leads Dasein to his opening it discloses to himhis being out of place in it, so the Stoic theory of the passions marks adisconnection, an excess that emerges in the relationship between manand that which belongs most to him as his own, namely, logos, language.9

We can, at this point, formulate the following hypothesis: the theory ofthe passions, of Stimmungen, is always the place from which Western manthinks his own fundamental relation to language. Through it, Westernman—who defines himself as animal rationale, the living being that haslanguage—seeks to gather arthros, the same articulation between livingbeing and language, between zoon and logos, between nature and cul-ture. But this connection is, at the same time, a disconnection; thisarticulation is, in the same measure, a disarticulation. And the pas-sions, the Stimmungen, are that which arise in this disconnection, thatwhich reveal this disparity.

And if the voice is—according to an ancient tradition that defines hu-man language as phonc enarthos, articulated (enunciated) voice—the placein which occurs this articulation between living being and language, thenthat which is in question in Stimmung, that which one stages in the pas-sions, is, we could say, the in-vocation of language, in the double sense ofsituation in a voice and of the call, of the historical vocation that languageaddresses to man. Man has Stimmung, he is impassioned and anxiousbecause he holds himself without a voice in the place of language. He is inthe opening of being and of language without any voice, without any na-ture; he is thrown and abandoned in this opening and of this abandon hemust make his world, of language his own voice.

If we return at this point to Heidegger’s text from which we began, thetheme of Stimmung as much as the appearance of a Voice of conscience areilluminated in a new way. The etymological connection between Stim-mung and Stimme, vocation and voice, acquires here its own meaning. Inthe same original opening of Dasein appears now the silent call of a Voiceof conscience that enjoins an understanding more original of this sameopening than that which had been determined through the analysis ofStimmung. Later, in Was ist Metaphysik? and above all in the Nachwort

9. Hyperteino is not “transgression,” but first of all: “I stretch to excess, I place in maximumstate of tension.” The literal translation of the stoic definition is thus: “excessive origin thatstretches to the extreme the measure of the logos.” In hyperteino (compare teino, tonos) there istherefore an acoustic-musical image (tonos, a tension of the chord that corresponds to the pitchof the sound).




added to the fourth edition of the lecture, the recuperation of the theme ofvoice is by now complete. The Stimmung of anxiety here seems under-standable only with reference to a lautlose Stimme, a voice without soundthat “is attuned to the terror of the abyss.” Anxiety is not indeed other thandie von jene Stimme gestimmt Stimmung (the vocation attuned from thatvoice). And the voice without sound is the voice of being that calls man tothe experience “of the wonder of wonders: that being [essente] is.”

Now, over to the second text on Stimmung that we had proposed toquestion. It deals with Hölderlin’s prose work Uber die Verfahrungsweisedes poetischen Geistes, which we can translate: “On the Proceeding of thePoetic Spirit”; more precisely this text’s brief appendix bears the sameindication “Wink fur die Darstellung und Sprache” (“Hint for Represen-tation and Language”).10 As the title suggests, Hölderlin reflects in this texton his own poetics and presents, we might say, a phenomenology of thespirit of poetizing. This has nothing to do however with what one tradi-tionally means by the poetics of an author. In the art of poetry, the poettakes his poetry as a theme and this determines its form and content.Poetics situates itself in the dimension of a program and presupposestherefore the place of the poem as already open and the composing I asalready constituted, as something that can only be born from a program oran intention. The dimension that this text leads us to is more originarythan that of a poetics because what is in question is the self-advent of thepoetic word, its taking place. And it is in this dimension and not simply inthe dimension of language that we encounter once again a decisive func-tion of the concept of Stimmung. Here Hölderlin distinguishes from thematter and the form of the work a dimension that he defines as “formmatter” or “spiritual-sensible.” This is called Grund des Gedichts, reason orfoundation of poetry, which we can translate as razo de trobar, retrievingan antique Provencal poetic vocabulary (let us recall that the Germanlanguage is most faithful in conserving the medieval poetic vocabulary inits own terms and with which it designates the poetic activity as dichten andGedicht—deriving from medieval Latin dictare, dictamen—which indicatethe same center of poetic composition). Of this dimension, Hölderlin saysthat he must constitute the passage (Ubergang) among sensible matter—that which comes to be expressed and represented—the spirit (Geist), andthe ideal elaboration. It is only this intermediate element that, writesHölderlin, “gives to the poetic composition its rigor, its steadfastness and

10. For an English translation, see Friedrich Hölderlin, “Hint for Representation andLanguage,” Essays and Letters, trans. and ed. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (New York, 2009),pp. 277–98—TRANS.




its truth, and preserves it from the danger that the free elaboration of theideal may become empty manner and the expressive exposition of simplyvanity.” In order to define this dimension that does not properly belong tolived experience nor is simply language but constitutes the center onlyfrom which one may produce the poetic work, Hölderlin intervenes in theconcept of Stimmung. Man—he says—must exit from the simple life, fromthe original infancy (ursprungliche Kindheit) and arise to the pure echo(reine Widerklang) of this life and of this infancy that he exactly defines asa pure Stimmung and without matter (stofflose reine Stimmung) or also asa transcendental emotion (tranzendental Empfindung). It is at this centralmoment that he opens the space in which he situates the proper advent ofthe poetic word. “Exactly in this instant,” writes Hölderlin, “the originalliving emotion, purified finally to becoming pure Stimmung open to aninfinite, . . . finds itself as infinite in the infinite, as an all spiritual within alllife, and it is in this instant that one can say that it intimates language.” Andas life was spiritualized in pure Stimmung and in pure emotion, so too nowStimmung makes the word alive and real “where,” writes Hölderlin, “spiritand life are equal from two sides,” and as “work results and creates” it“finds the originary life in the highest form and knows that which it hasfound.”

As much as the determination of this one and only dimension in which thepure word of poetry arrives is essential for Hölderlin, it is a fact that in order todefine it he feels the necessity to oppose it to specific categories of thought oftwo of his friends at Tubingen, G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. Hewrites in fact that as it cannot be mere vital tension, cannot even be conscious-ness and reflection (because life should be so lost—and here Hölderlin takesaim at Hegel), nor an “intellectual intuition with its mythic, plastic subject-object” (because so lost should be the consciousness—and here he takesaim at Schelling), but a pure Stimmung, a pure transcendental feeling. Forthis it is important that this Stimmung stands pure against every externalintrusion. As Hölderlin writes, the poet

in this moment does not take anything as given, does not begin fromanything positive, that nature and art . . . may not speak before it is alanguage for him, worth saying before that which now in its world isunknown and without name becomes known and assumes for him aname, specifically because it was compared and recognized in concor-dance [ubereinstimmend] with its Stimmung. If in fact first . . . it werealready in a determined form as some language of nature and of art,then due to this he would not find his sphere of action, he would exit




from his creation and the language of nature and art . . . would comefirst, in as much as it is not his language.

Also in this exceptional document of the Western poetic tradition, as inHeidegger’s text that we have just now examined, Stimmung is the condi-tion because man can, without being always already anticipated by anexternal language, proffer his own voice and find his own word. Already atthe beginning of the modern lyrical tradition—in Provencal poetry andthe stilnovisti and Minnesänger—this condition is situated in a Stimmung.That this is called amor, love or Minne in each case designates the experi-ence of dwelling in the origin of the word, the situation of logos in arch �e.That which in Stimmung is the possibility for speaking man, of an experi-ence of the birth of his own word, of gathering, that is, the very taking placeof that language that constantly anticipates him, throws and destines manoutside of himself into a history and a tradition. Only if man could gatherthe same origin of the signifying function that always anticipates himcould it open for him the possibility of a free word, of a language that mightbe truly and integrally his language. Only such a word could give meaningand reality to the philosophical project of a thought without presupposi-tions and to the poetics of a word absolutely original and one’s own. Free-dom can in fact mean only liberty from nature and from language. Iflanguage frees us from nature only to throw us into a historical destiny inwhich the destined incessantly anticipates and escapes us, freedom wouldnot be possible for man. Freedom is possible for speaking man only if hecan come into the clearing of language and, grasping the origin, find aword that is truly and wholly his—that is human. A word that is his voice,just as the song is the voice of the birds, the chirp is the voice of the cicada,and the bray is the voice of the ass.

But can the Stimmung, becoming Stimme, give place to language and inthis way appropriate it to man, to the animal without voice? Can the im-passioned historical vocation that man receives from language transformitself into voice? Can history become the nature of man? Or, not limitingitself, can it instead bring before man’s absence of voice his aphonia, thusplacing him, purely and immediately, before language?




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