What Is Philosophy? 9781503604056

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What is philosophy?

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MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher Editor

Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California 2018

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

Giorgio Agamben

Stanford University Press Stanford, California English translation © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. What Is Philosophy? was originally published in Italian in 2016 under the title Che cos’ è la filosofia? © 2016 by Giorgio Agamben. Originally published by Quodlibet Srl., Macerata, Italia. This book was negotiated through Agnese Incisa Agenzia Letteraria, Torino. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free, archival-­quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Agamben, Giorgio, 1942– author. Title: What is philosophy? / Giorgio Agamben ; translated by Lorenzo Chiesa. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Series: Meridian: crossing aesthetics | Originally published in Italian in 2016 under the title Che cos’è la filosofia? | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017008916 (print) | LCCN 2017011540 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503602205 ­(cloth :­a lk. paper) | ISBN 9781503602212­ (pbk. :­a lk. paper) | ISBN 9781503604056 (ebook) | Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy. | Language and languages—Philosophy. Classification: LCC B87 (ebook) | LCC B87 .A4613 2017 (print) | DDC 100—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008916

Contents

Translator’s Note

ix

Foreword xi Experimentum Vocis

1

On the Concept of Demand

29

On the Sayable and the Idea

35

On Writing Proems

91

Appendix: The Supreme Music. Music and Politics

97

Bibliography

109

Index of Names

113

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Translator’s Note

Throughout the text I have rendered both linguaggio and lingua as “language,” specifying the occurrences of lingua (which is used less often) in brackets. Following Agamben, Saussure’s notion of langue has been left in the French original. Parola is translated as “speech” or “word,” depending on the context. In agreement with the author, atto di parola has been rendered as “act of speech” so as not to create any confusion with Austin’s “speech act” theory. Significato is generally translated as “meaning”; in some cases I have opted for “signified,” for instance, when it is paired with significante (“signifier”). Senso is always translated as “sense” when used as a linguistic concept. In line with my translation of Agamben’s The Fire and the Tale (Stanford, 2017) and with Adam Kotsko’s translation of his The Use of Bodies (Stanford, 2015), I have rendered the technical term esigenza as “demand.” The reader should however bear in mind that esigenza also overlaps with “requirement” and the etymologically proximate “exigency.” Where necessary, citations are adapted to Agamben’s own citations in Italian. Existing English translations have been consulted and incorporated as far as possible. Bibliographical references are provided only when Agamben himself provides them.

ix

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Foreword

The sense in which the five texts collected here contain an idea of philosophy, one that somehow answers the question of the title of the book, will become evident—­if at all—­only to those who read them in a spirit of friendship. As has been said, those who find themselves writing in an age that, rightly or wrongly, appears to them to be barbaric, must know that their strength and capacity for expression are not for this reason increased, but rather diminished and depleted. Since he has no other choice, however, and pessimism is alien to his nature—­nor does he seem to recall with certainty a better time—­the author cannot but rely on those who have experienced the same difficulties—­and in that sense, on friends. Unlike the four other texts, which were written over the past two years, “Experimentum Vocis” resumes and develops in a new direction notes I took in the second half of the 1980s. It therefore belongs to the same context as my essays “The Thing Itself,” “Tradition of the Immemorial,” and “*Se: Hegel’s Absolute and Heidegger’s Ereignis” (subsequently collected in Potentialities [Stanford, 1999]), as well as “Experimentum Linguae,” which was reprinted as a preface to the new [2001] edition of my book Infanzia e storia.1 1. The first edition of Agamben’s Infanzia e storia: distruzione dell’esperienza e origine della storia (1978) did not contain “Experimentum linguae,” but it was included in the 2001 edition (both published in Turin by Einaudi) and also in the English translation (London: Verso, 1993).—­Translator.

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What is philosophy?

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Experimentum Vocis

1 We should never tire of reflecting on the following fact: although there were and are, in every age and place, societies whose customs appear to us to be barbaric, or anyway unacceptable, and more or less numerous human groups willing to question every rule, culture, and tradition; although wholly criminal societies have existed and exist, moreover, and, after all, there is no norm or value whose legitimacy everyone could unanimously agree about, there nonetheless never is or ever was any community, or society, or group that purely and simply chose to renounce language. The risks and damages implicit in the use of language have been perceived several times in the course of history: religious and philosophical communities in both West and East practiced silence—­or “aphasia,” as the ancient skeptics called it—­ but silence and aphasia were only a trial aimed at a better use of language and reason, and not an unconditional dismissal of the faculty of speech, which in all traditions seems inseparable from what is human. Questions have thus often been raised concerning the way in which humans began to speak, proposing hypotheses on the origins of language that are manifestly unverifiable and lacking rigor; but nobody has ever wondered why they continue to speak. And yet in practice things are simple: it is well known that 

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if a child is not somehow exposed to language before the age of eleven, he irreversibly loses the capacity of acquiring it. Medieval sources inform us that Frederick II attempted an experiment of this kind, but its goal was completely different: not the renunciation of transmitting language, but a desire to know what the natural language [lingua] of humanity was. The result of the experiment by itself invalidates the sources in question: the children thoroughly deprived of any contact with language spontaneously spoke Hebrew (or, according to other sources, Arabic). The fact that the experiment of abolishing language was attempted neither in Nazi concentration camps nor even in the most radical and innovative utopian communities; the fact that nobody ever dared to take responsibility for doing so—­not even among those who never hesitated for a moment to take lives—­ seems to prove beyond any doubt the inseparable link that appears to bind humanity to speech. In the definition according to which man is the living being that has language, the decisive element is clearly not life, but language [lingua]. And yet humans are unable to say what is involved for them in language as such, in the sheer fact that they speak. Although they more or less obscurely sense how inane it is to use speech in the way they mostly use it—­often at random and without having anything to say, or to hurt each other—­they obstinately continue to speak and transmit language to their progeny, without knowing whether this is the highest good or the worst of misfortunes.

2 Let us begin with the idea of the incomprehensible, of a being that is entirely without relation to language and reason, absolutely indiscernible and unconnected. How could this kind of idea emerge? In what way can we think it? Could a wolf, a porcupine, or a cricket perhaps have conceived it? Would we say that the animal moves in a world that is incomprehensible to it? Just as the animal does not reflect on the unsayable, so its environment cannot appear to it as unsayable: everything in the animal’s

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environment is a sign for it and speaks to it, everything can be selected and integrated, and what does not concern it in any way is simply nonexistent for it. On the other hand, by definition, the divine mind does not know anything impenetrable, its knowledge does not have limits, and everything—­even humanity and inert matter—­is for it intelligible and transparent. We therefore need to consider the incomprehensible as an exclusive acquisition of Homo sapiens, and the unsayable as a category that belongs solely to human language. The very nature of this language is that it establishes a particular relation with the being of which it speaks, however it names and qualifies it. Anything we name or conceive of is already somehow pre-­supposed in language and knowledge by reason of the simple fact of being named. This is the fundamental intentionality of human speech, which is always already in relation to something that it presupposes as unrelated. Every positing of an absolute principle or of a beyond of thought and language must deal with this presupposing character of language: being always a relation, it refers back to an unrelated principle that it itself presupposes as such (in Mallarmé’s words: “The Word is a principle that develops through the negation of all principles”—­that is, through the transformation of the principle into a presupposition, of the ἀρχή into a hypothesis). This is the original mythologem and, at the same time, the aporia the speaking subject clashes with: language presupposes something nonlinguistic, and this something unrelated is presupposed, however, by giving it a name. The tree presupposed in the name “tree” cannot be expressed in language; we can only speak of it starting from its having a name. But what do we then think when we think a being that is entirely without relation to language? When thought tries to grasp the incomprehensible and the unsayable, it actually tries to grasp the presupposing structure of language, its intentionality, and its being in relation to something that is supposed to exist outside the relation. We can think a being entirely without relation to language only through a language without any relation to being.

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3 The interweaving of being and language, world and speech, ontology and logic that constitutes Western metaphysics is articulated in the structure of the presupposition. Here, the term “presupposition” designates the “subject” in its original meaning: the sub-­iectum, the being that, lying first and at the bottom, constitutes that on which—­on whose pre-­sup-­position—­we speak and say, and which, in turn, cannot be said on anything (Aristotle’s πρώτη οὐσία or ὑποκείμενον). The term “presupposition” is pertinent: ὑποκεῖσθαι is indeed the perfect passive of ὑποτιθέναι, literally, “to put under,” and ὑποκείμενον therefore means “that which, having been sup-­posed, or put under, lies at the foundation of a predication.” In this sense, questioning linguistic signification, Plato could write: “To each of these names is presupposed [ὑπόκειταί] a distinct substance [οὐσία]” (Protagoras 349b); and: “How can the earliest names, which do not at all presuppose any others [οἷς οὔπω ἕτερα ὑπόκειται], make clear to us entities?” (Cratylus 422d). Being is what is presupposed in language (in the name that manifests it), it is that on whose presupposition we say what we say. The presupposition therefore expresses the original relation between language and being, between names and things, and the first presupposition is that there is such a relation. Positing a relation between language and the world—­positing the pre-­ supposition—­is the constitutive operation of human language as conceived of by Western philosophy: onto-­logy, the fact that being is said and that saying refers to being. Predication and discourse are possible only on this presupposition: the latter is the “on-­which” of predication understood as λέγειν τι κατά τινος, saying something on something. The “on something” (κατά τινος) is not homogeneous with “saying something” but expresses and, at the same time, hides the fact that the onto-­logical nexus between language and being has always already been presupposed in it—­or, that language always rests on something and does not speak emptily.

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4 The interweaving of being and language takes the constitutive form of the presupposition in Aristotle’s Categories. As ancient commentators perfectly understood when they defined the object of the book (that is, whether it concerns words, or entities, or concepts), in the Categories, Aristotle does not simply treat words, or only entities, or exclusively concepts, but “terms insofar as they mean entities through concepts.” In the words of an Arabic commentator: “Logical investigation concerns objects insofar as they are designated through terms [ . . . ] the logician does not deal with substance or the body insofar as it is separated from matter or insofar as it is in movement or has a size and dimension, but rather insofar as it is designated by a term, for instance ‘substance.’” What is in question in this “insofar as,” what happens to the entity for being designated by a name: this is—­or should be—­ the topic of logic. But this means that the real place of the Categories and of any logic is the implication of language and being—­ the onto-­logic—­and that it is not possible to separate logic from ontology. The entity as entity (ὂν ᾗ ὄν) and the entity insofar as it is said to be an entity are inseparable. It is only this implication that enables us to comprehend the ambiguity of the οὐσία πρώτη, the first substance of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, an ambiguity that the Latin translation of οὐσία as substantia has consolidated and bequeathed to Western philosophy, which has not managed to cope with it. The οὐσία πρώτη, which initially refers to a singularity, can become substantia, what “lies under” predications, under the “saying something on something,” only because what is at stake in it is the ontological structure of the presupposition. But what is the structure of this implication? How is it possible that a singular existence turned into the substratum that we presuppose to say what we say? Being is not presupposed because it is always already given to us in a sort of prelinguistic intuition; rather, it is language that is articulated—­or split—­in such a way that it has always already encountered and presupposed in the name the being that is

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given to it. In other words, the prae-­and the sub­-­belong to the very form of intentionality, of the relation between being and language.

5 The double status of the οὐσία πρώτη as singular existence and as substance reflects the twofold articulation of language, which is always already split into name and discourse, langue and parole, semiotic and semantic, sense and denotation. The identification of these differences is not a discovery of modern linguistics, but the constitutive experience of the Greek reflection on being. If Plato already clearly opposed the level of the name (ὅνομα) to that of discourse (λόγος), the foundation on which the Aristotelian list of categories rests is the distinction between λεγόμενα ἄνευ συμπλοκῆς, what we say without a connection (“man,” “ox,” “runs,” “wins”) and the λεγόμενα κατὰ συμπλοκήν, discourse as a connection of terms (“the man walks”; “the man wins” [Categories 1a16–­19]). The first level corresponds to language [lingua] (Saussure’s langue; Benveniste’s “semiotic”) as distinct from actual discourse (Saussure’s parole; Benveniste’s “semantic”). We are so used to the existence of an entity called “language” [lingua], and the isolation of a level of signification distinct from actual discourse is for us so familiar, that we do not realize that what is brought to light for the first time in this distinction is a fundamental structure of human language that distinguishes it from any other language, and that it is only starting from this structure that something like a science and a philosophy become possible. If Plato and Aristotle have been considered the founders of grammar, this is because their reflection on language laid the basis on which grammarians later managed to construct—­ through an analysis of discourse—­what we call language [lingua], and interpret the act of speech—­which is the only real experience—­a s the implementation of an entity of reason called language [lingua] (such as the Greek language; the Italian language; etc.).

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It is only because it rests on this fundamental splitting of language that being is always already divided between essence and existence, quid est and quod est, potentiality and act; the ontological difference is first of all founded on the possibility of distinguishing a level of language [lingua] and names—­which is not said in a discourse—­a nd a level of discourse—­which is said on the presupposition of the former. And the ultimate problem that every metaphysical reflection needs to confront is the same that constitutes the stumbling block where every theory of language runs the risk of failing; if the being that is said is always already split into essence and existence, potentiality and act, and the language that says it is always already divided into language as langue and discourse, sense and denotation, how is the passage from one level to the other possible? And why are being and language constituted in a way that originally entails this gap?

6 Anthropogenesis has not been accomplished instantaneously once and for all with the event of language, that is, with the fact that the primate of the homo genus became a speaker. Rather, a patient, long, and obstinate process of analysis, interpretation, and construction of what is in question in this event was necessary. In other words, for something like Western civilization to emerge, it was first necessary to understand—­or to decide to understand—­ that what we speak, what we do by speaking, is a language [lingua], and that this language [lingua] is formed by words, which—­ thanks to a property that remains unexplainable unless we resort to utterly unlikely hypotheses—­refer to the world and things. This implies that, in the uninterrupted flux of sounds produced by using organs mostly borrowed from other functional systems (the majority of which are linked with nutrition), parts endowed with an autonomous signification (μέρη τῆς λέξεως, the words) are first recognized, and, in these, indivisible elements (στοιχεῖα, the letters) whose combinations form these parts. The civilization we know is first and foremost founded on an “interpretation”

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(ἑρμηνεία) of the act of speech, on the “development” of cognitive possibilities that we regard as contained and “implied” in language [lingua]. For this reason, Aristotle’s treatise On Interpretation (Περὶ ἑρμηνείας), which in fact begins with the hypothesis that what we do by speaking is a signifying connection of words, letters, concepts, and things, has had a decisive function in the history of Western thought; for this reason, grammar, which is now taught in primary schools, has been, and to a certain extent is still, the foundational discipline of knowledge. (It goes without saying that grammatical reflection has also a political meaning in addition to the epistemic-­cognitive one: if what humans speak is a language [lingua], and if there is not only one language [lingua] but many, then the plurality of languages [lingue] corresponds to the plurality of people and political communities.)

7 Let us consider the paradoxical nature of the entity of reason called language [lingua] (we say “entity of reason” because it is unclear whether it exists in the mind, in actual discourses, or only in grammar books and dictionaries). It has been constructed by means of a patient and meticulous analysis of the act of speech, supposing that speaking is possible only on the presupposition of a language [lingua], and that things are always already named (even though it is impossible to explain—­if not in a mythological way—­how and by whom) in a system of signs that refers to things potentially and not only actually. The word “tree” can denote the tree in a discursive act insofar as we presuppose that the word “tree,” taken as such before and beyond any actual denotation, means “tree.” In other words, language would have the capacity of suspending its denotative power in discourse, in order to signify things in a purely virtual way in the form of a lexicon. This is the difference between langue and parole, semiotic and semantic, sense and denotation that we have already evoked and that irrevocably splits language into two distinct levels, which, however, mysteriously communicate with each other.

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The nexus between this linguistic splitting and the ontological caesura “potentiality/act,” δὐναμις/ἐνέργεια through which Aristotle divides and articulates the level of being is all the more evident if we recall that, already in Plato, one of the fundamental meanings of the term δὐναμις is “semantic value of a word.” The ontological movement of the presupposition corresponds to the articulation of linguistic signification on two distinct levels: sense is a presupposition of denotation and langue is a presupposition of parole, just as essence is a presupposition of existence and potentiality is a presupposition of the act. But here everything gets more complicated. Sense and denotation, language [lingua] and discourse lie in fact on two different levels and no passage seems to lead from one to the other. We can speak only on the presupposition of a language [lingua], but saying in a discourse what has been “called” and named in language [lingua] is properly impossible. This is the insurmountable opposition between semiotic and semantic where Benveniste’s extreme thought foundered (“The world of the sign is closed. From the sign to the sentence there is no transition [ . . . ] a gap separates them”), or, in Wittgenstein, the opposition between names and proposition (“I can only name objects. Signs represent them. I can only speak about them: I cannot express them”). All we know of language [lingua] has been learnt starting from speech, and all we comprehend of speech is understood starting from language [lingua]; and, yet, the interpretation (the ἑρμηνεία) of the act of speech through language [lingua], which makes knowledge possible, ultimately leads to an impossibility of speaking.

8 To this presupposing structure of language corresponds the specificity of its way of being, which amounts to the fact that it must remove itself in order to make the named thing be. This is the nature of language Duns Scotus has in mind when he defines the relation as ens debilissimum and adds that it is for this reason so difficult to know. Language is ontologically very weak, in the

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sense that it cannot but disappear in the thing it names, otherwise, rather than designating or unveiling the thing, it would hinder its comprehension. And yet it is precisely in this that its specific potentiality lies—­in its remaining unperceived and unsaid in what it names and says. As Meister Eckhart writes, if the form through which we know a thing were itself something, it would lead us to its knowledge and turn away from the knowledge of the thing. The risk of being itself perceived as a thing, and of separating us from what it should reveal to us, is until the end consubstantial with language. Not being able to say itself while it says other things, that is, its being always ecstatically in the place of the other, is the unmistakable signature and, at the same time, the original taint of human language. Not only language but the subject itself is a very weak being—­ the subject that is produced in language and that must somehow cope with it. In fact, subjectivity emerges each time that the living being encounters language, each time in which it says “I.” But precisely because it is generated in it and through it, it is so difficult for the subject to grasp its own taking place. On the other hand, language—­t he langue—­comes to life and lives only if a speaker assumes it in an act of speech. Western philosophy originates from the hand-­to-­hand combat between these two very weak beings that consist of and take place in each other, and in each other incessantly founder—­for this reason, they also obstinately try to grasp and comprehend each other.

9 Precisely because being gives itself in language, but language remains unsaid in what it says and manifests, being destines itself and unveils itself for speakers in an epochal history. The historicizing and chronogenetic power of the λόγος is a function of its presupposing structure and its ontological weakness. Insofar as it remains hidden in what it reveals, that which reveals constitutes being as what unveils itself historically by remaining unattainable and untouched in each of its epochal unveilings. And insofar as

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language [lingua] is, in this sense, a historical being, the ἑρμηνεία that has been dominating Western philosophy for two thousand years is an interpretation of language, which, having split it into langue and parole, synchrony and diachrony, can never cope with it once and for all. And just as being and language [lingua] remain presupposed in their historical unfolding, so the presupposition determines also the way in which the West has thought politics. The community that is in question in language is in fact presupposed in the guise of a historical a priori or foundation: whether it is an ethnic substance, a language [lingua], or a contract, in any case the common takes the shape of an unattainable past, which defines the political as a “state.” There are many signs suggesting that this fundamental structure of Western ontology and politics exhausted its vital strength. Formulating thematically the obvious fact according to which “the being that can be understood is language,” twentieth-­century thought only asserted the inherence of language “to every relation or natural activity of man, to his feeling, intuiting, desiring, and to each of his needs and instincts” that German idealism had already affirmed and brought to awareness without reservation. In this perspective, the fact that the birth of comparative grammar and the hypothesis about the Indo-­European language are contemporary with Hegel’s philosophy—­that, actually, the last book of the Science of Logic was published in the same year (1816) as Franz Bopp’s Konjugationssystem—­is certainly not a mere coincidence. The Indo-­European language—­which linguists have reconstructed (or, rather, produced) through a patient morphological and phonological analysis of historical languages [lingue]—­is not a language [lingua] homogeneous to the others, only more ancient: it is something like an absolute langue that nobody ever spoke or will ever speak, but constitutes as such the historical and political a priori of the West, which guarantees the unity and the reciprocal intelligibility of its many languages [lingue] and its many peoples. Just as Hegel stated that the historical destiny of humanity had reached its fulfillment and that the historical potentialities of religion, art, and philosophy had been dissolved

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and realized in the absolute, so the process that had brought the West to full awareness of the cognitive potentialities contained in its language [lingua] culminated in the construction of the Indo-­ European language. Linguistics thus became the pilot discipline for the human sciences between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its sudden withering away and foundering in the work of Benveniste coincides with an epochal mutation in the historical destiny of the West. The West, which realized and brought to completion the potentiality it had inscribed in its language [lingua], must now open itself to a globalization that simultaneously marks its triumph and its end.

10 At this stage, we can advance a hypothesis on the origin of language that is not more mythological than others (philosophical hypotheses necessarily have a mythical character, that is, they are always “narrations,” and the rigor of thought consists precisely in recognizing them as such, not confusing them with principles). Like all animals, the primate that was going to develop into Homo sapiens was always endowed with a language, which was certainly different but perhaps not so dissimilar from the one we know. What happened was that at a certain point—­coinciding with anthropogenesis—­the primate of the genus homo became aware of having a language [lingua], that is, he separated it from himself and exteriorized it out of himself as an object, and then began to consider, analyze, and elaborate it in an incessant process—­in which philosophy, grammar, logic, psychology, and computer science followed one another with many twists and turns—­a process that has perhaps not yet been accomplished. And since he had expelled his language out of himself, unlike other animals, man had to learn to transmit it exosomatically, from mother to son, in such a way that in the course of generations language [lingua] was chaotically divided and increasingly changed according to places and times. And, having separated his language [lingua]

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from himself to entrust it to a historical tradition, for the speaking man, life and language, nature and history were divided and, at the same time, articulated with each other. Language [lingua], which had been expelled outside, was reinscribed in the voice through phonemes, letters, and syllables, and the analysis of language [lingua] coincided with the articulation of the voice (the ϕωνὴ ἔναρθρος, the articulated voice of humans as opposed to the disarticulated voice of the animal). This means that language is neither a human invention nor a divine gift, but a middle term between them, which is located in a zone of indifference between nature and culture, endosomatic and exosomatic (the splitting of human language into langue and speech, semiotic and semantic, synchrony and diachrony corresponds to this bipolarity). This also means that man is not simply homo sapiens, but first and foremost homo sapiens loquendi, the living being that does not merely speak, but knows how to speak, in the sense that the knowledge of language [lingua]—­even in its most elementary form—­must necessarily precede any other knowledge. What is now happening before our eyes is that language, which was exteriorized as the thing—­that is, according to etymology, the “cause”—­par excellence of humanity, seems to have accomplished its anthropogenetic itinerary and want to go back to the nature from which it comes. The exhaustion of the project of a comparative grammar—­that is, of the knowledge that was supposed to guarantee the intelligibility of language [lingua]—­was in fact followed by the emergence of generative grammar, in other words, of a conception of language [lingua] whose horizon is no longer historical and exosomatic, but, ultimately, biological and innatist. And the promotion of the historical potentiality of language [lingua] seems to be replaced by the project of a computerization of human language that fixes it in a communicative code that rather recalls that of animal languages.

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11 We then understand why, since its origin, human language has experienced a series of splits, which are not paralleled in any animal language. I am referring to the names/discourse fracture, which was already clear to the Greeks (ὅνομα / λόγος in Plato; λεγόμενα ἄνευ συμπλοκῆς / λεγόμενα κατὰ συμπλοκήν in Aristotle, Categories 1a16–­18) and the Romans (nominum impositio / declinatio in Varro, On the Latin Language 8.5–­6), up to the fractures—­which somehow correspond to it—­between langue and parole in Saussure and between semiotic and semantic in Benveniste. The speaking man does not invent names, nor do they arise from him as an animal voice: he can only receive them through an exosomatic transmission and a teaching; on the other hand, in discourse men understand each other without need for explanation. The consequence of this split between two levels of language is a series of aporias: on the one hand, language cannot cope with its relation with the world, which is conditioned by names (and the meaning of names—­W ittgenstein writes [1961, p. 21]—­needs to be explained to us for us to understand them); on the other hand, following Benveniste, there is no passage from the semiotic level of names to the semantic level of propositions, hence the act of speech turns out to be impossible. We should reflect on the particular character of the anthropogenetic event of which these fractures are the consequence: man has access to his own nature—­to language, which defines him as ζῶον λόγον ἔχον and animal rationale—­only historically, that is, through an exosomatic transmission. If, in fact, he cannot access it, he loses the faculty of learning language and presents itself as a being that is not properly or not yet human (one need only think of the enfants sauvages and the wolf-­children that so much troubled the Age of Reason). This means that in man—­that is, in the living being that has access to its nature only through history—­ the human and the inhuman face each other without any natural articulation, and that something like a civilization can originate only starting from the invention and the construction of a

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historical articulation between them. The specific service of philosophy and grammatical reflection is that of individuating and constructing in the voice the place of this articulation. It is not a coincidence if the collection of Aristotle’s logical writings, that is, of the first and broadest interpretation of language [lingua] as an “instrument” of knowledge, was entitled Ὄργανον, which means both a technical instrument and a part of the body. Referring to language at the beginning of Περὶ ἑρμηνείας (On Interpretation 16a3 ff.), Aristotle in fact uses the expression τὰ ἐν τῇ ϕωνῇ, “what is in the voice,” and not simply, as one might have expected, and as he would later write, ϕωναί, “terms” (he writes that “what is in the voice” symbolizes the impressions of the soul—­παθήματα ἐν τῇ ϕωνῇ—­a nd the written letters symbolize “what is in the voice”). Language is in the voice, but is not the voice: it is at its place and in place of it. For this reason, in Politics (1253a10–­18), Aristotle explicitly opposes the animal ϕωνή, which is immediately a sign of pleasure and pain, to human λόγος, which can manifest justice and injustice, good and evil, and lies at the foundation of the political community. Anthropogenesis coincided with a splitting of the animal voice and with the positioning of λόγος in the very place of ϕωνή. Language takes place in the non-­place of the voice and this aporetic situation is what makes language extremely close to the living being and, at the same time, separated from it by an unbridgeable gap.

12 An analysis of the particular situation of the λόγος in the ϕωνή—­and, thus, of the relation between voice and language—­is a precondition for understanding the way in which the West has thought language, that is, the fact that the human living being is a speaking being. This means that the aim of Aristotle’s treatise On Interpretation was not only to ensure the nexus between words, concepts, and things, but prior to that—­by locating language in the voice—­to ensure the nexus between the living being and its

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language [lingua]. The analysis of language [lingua] presupposes an analysis of the voice. Ancient commentators already questioned the meaning of the expression τὰ ἐν τῇ ϕωνῇ. Asking why Aristotle wrote that “what is in the voice is the symbol of the affections of the soul,” Ammonius answers that the philosopher said “what is in the voice” and not “voices” (ϕωναί) “in order to show that saying ‘voice’ is not the same as saying ‘name and verb,’ and that being a symbol by convention does not rest with the bare voice (τῇ ϕωνῇ ἁπλῶς), but with the name and the verb; by nature (ϕύσει) we can produce voices (ϕωνεῖν), just as we can see and hear, but names and verbs are rather produced by our intelligence, using the voice as matter (ὕλῃ κεχρημένα τῇ ϕωνῇ)” (Ammonius 1897, p. 22). Ammonius—­who seems here faithfully to be following Aristotle’s intention—­suggests that the capacity for signifying things (by convention and not by nature) does not rest with the animal voice (the “bare voice”) but with language, which is formed by names and verbs; and, yet, language takes place in the voice; what is by convention dwells in what is by nature. In On Interpretation, after describing the semantic intertwining of language, the affections of the soul, letters, and things, Aristotle suddenly interrupts his discussion and refers to his book On the Soul (“with these points, however, I dealt in my treatise concerning the soul; they belong to a different inquiry—­ἄλλης γὰρ πραγματείας”; On Interpretation 16a9). Here he defined the voice as “the sound produced by a creature possessing a soul” (ψόφος ἐμψύχου), specifying that “inanimate things never have a voice; they can only metaphorically be said to give voice, e.g., a flute or a lyre” (On the Soul 420b5). A few lines below the definition is repeated and substantiated: “Voice, then, is a sound made by a living creature (ζῴου ψόφος), and that not with any part of it indiscriminately. But, since sound only occurs when something strikes something else in a certain medium, and this medium is the air, it is natural that only those things should have voice which admit the air” (ibid., 14–­16). It is likely that Aristotle deemed this definition to be unsatisfying, since at this stage he

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enunciates a new one, which has then exercised a decisive influence on the history of thinking language: “As we have said, not every sound made by a living creature is a voice (for one can make a sound even with the tongue, or as in coughing), but that which even causes the impact, must have a soul, and use some imagination (μετὰ φαντασίας τινός). For the voice is a signifying sound (σημαντικὸς ψόφος)” (ibid., 29–­32). If what distinguishes language from the voice is its semantic character (that is, its being associated with the affections of the soul, here called “imaginations”), Aristotle does not specify what turns the animal voice into a signifying language. And it is here that letters (γράμματα) acquire a crucial function, which On Interpretation lists in the semantic knot only as signs of what lies in the voice. Letters are not simply signs, but elements (στοιχεῖα, the other Greek term that designates letters) of the voice, which render it signifying and comprehensible. In Poetics, Aristotle clearly states that “a letter (στοιχεῖον) is an indivisible voice, not any voice but one through which a voice becomes intelligible (συνθετὴ γίγνεσθαι φωνή). Animals utter indivisible voices but none that I should call a letter. The parts of the intelligible voice are the vowel (φωνῆεν), the semi-­vowel (ἡμίφωνον), and the mute (ἄφωνον)” (Poetics 1456b22–­25). This definition is confirmed in Metaphysics: “The elements (στοιχεῖα) of the voice are that of which the voice is composed (σύγκειται) and the ultimate parts into which it is divisible” (Metaphysics 1014a26); and in Problems: “Humans produce many letters (γράμματα), but other living creatures no letters, or, at most, two or three consonants. Consonants combined with vowels produce discourse. Language (λόγος) is signifying something not by the voice but by certain affections (πάθεσιν) of it. And the letters are affections of the voice” (Problems 10.39.895a7 ff.). The writings on animals stress the function of the tongue and the lips in the production of letters: “Language, through the voice, is composed of letters (ἐκ τῶν γραμμάτων σύγκειται); and if the lips were not supple, or if the tongue were other than it is, the greater parts of letters could not possibly be pronounced, since some of them result from an impact

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of the tongue and the closing of the lips” (On the Parts of Animals 659b30 ff.). Using a word that grammarians would then establish as a properly technical term of their science, this constitutive inscription of letters in the voice is defined as an “articulation” (διάρθρωσις): “Voice (ϕωνή) differs from sound (ψόϕος), and language (λόγος) from both. [ . . . ] Language is the articulation of the voice by means of the tongue (γλώττῃ). Now vowel sounds are produced by the voice and the larynx; consonantal sounds by the tongue and the lips. And these produce language” (History of Animals 535a ff.). If we now return to the statement that opens On Interpretation, we can say that Aristotle here defines an ἑρμηνεία, a process of interpretation that is unfolded between what is in the voice, the letters, the affections of the soul, and things; but the decisive function—­that which makes the voice capable of signifying—­ rests precisely with the letters; the first and ultimate hermeneut is the γράμμα.

13 Let us dwell on the crucial operation that is accomplished in these writings for the history of Western culture—­u nder the appearance of a description that time has made obvious. Φωνή and λόγος, the animal voice and human language are distinct, but coincide locally in man, in the sense that language is produced through an “articulation” of the voice, which is nothing else than the inscription of letters (γράμματα) in it, whereby letters are entrusted with the privileged status of being, at the same time, signs and elements (στοιχεῖα) of the voice (in this sense, the letter is an index of itself, index sui). Aristotle’s definition was adopted by ancient grammarians who turned the observations of the philosophers into a systematic science between the first and second centuries CE. Grammarians too begin their analysis from the definition of the voice, distinguishing the “confused voice” (ϕωνὴ συγκεχυμένη) of animals from the “articulated voice” (ϕωνὴ ἔναρθρος, vox articulata) of humans. But if, at this point,

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we ask of what the articulated character of the human voice consists, grammarians answer that ϕωνὴ ἔναρθρος simply means ϕωνὴ ἐγγράμματος, that is, translated into Latin, vox quae scribi potest or quae litteris comprehendi potest—­a voice that can be written, “grammaticized,” and that can be comprehended through letters. The confused voice is the unwritable voice of animals (“the neighing of horses, the rage of dogs, the roaring of wild beasts”) or also that part of the human voice that cannot be written, “such as laughter, whistling, or hiccup[s]” (to which one can add the timbre of the voice, which the ear perceives but cannot formalize into a writing). Therefore, the articulated voice is nothing other than ϕωνὴ ἐγγράμματος, a voice that has been transcribed and com-­ prehended—­that is, captured—­by means of letters. In other words, human language is constituted through an operation on the animal voice, which inscribes in it the letters (γράμματα) as elements (στοιχεῖα). We find here again the structure of the exceptio—­the inclusive exclusion—­that makes possible the capture of life into politics. Just as the natural life of man is included in politics through its very exclusion in the form of bare life, so human language (which, after all, according to Aristotle, founds the political community [Politics 1253a18]) takes place through an exclusion-­inclusion of the “bare voice” (ϕωνὴ ἁπλῶς in Ammonius’s words) in the λόγος. In this way, history takes root in nature, the exosomatic tradition in the endosomatic tradition, and the political community in the natural community. ‫א‬. At the beginning of Grammatology, after enunciating the program of a claim of writing against the privilege of the voice, Jacques Derrida quotes the passage from On Interpretation in which Aristotle affirms the “original link” and the “essential proximity” between the voice and the λόγος, which define Western metaphysics: “If, for Aristotle, for example, ‘the sounds produced by the voice’ (τά ἐν τῇ ϕωνῇ) are the symbols of the states of the soul (παθήματα ἐν τῇ ϕωνῇ) and written words the symbols of the words produced by the voice, it is that the voice, productive of the first symbols, has a relation of essential and immediate proximity with the soul” (Derrida 1967,

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pp. 22–­23). If our analysis of the condition of the letters in the voice is correct, this means that Western metaphysics sets in its original place the γράμμα and not the voice. The Derridean critique of metaphysics is therefore founded on an insufficient reading of Aristotle, which fails to question precisely the original status of the γράμμα in On Interpretation. Metaphysics is always already a grammatology and the latter is a fundamentology, in the sense that, since the λόγος takes place in the non-­place of the ϕωνή, the function of negative ontological foundation belongs to the letter and not to the voice.

14 We can here grasp the fundamental influence of alphabetic writing on our culture and on the way in which it has conceived of language. It is in fact only alphabetic writing—­whose invention the Greeks attributed to two civilizing heroes, Cadmus and Palamedes—­that can generate the illusion of capturing the voice, of having com-­prehended and transcribed it in the γράμματα. To fully realize the—­in every sense foundational—­importance of the capture of language [lingua] that was made possible by alphabetic writing and by its ἑρμηνεία carried out first by philosophers and then by grammarians, we need to free ourselves from the naïve representation—­produced by two millennia of grammatical education—­according to which the letters are perfectly recognizable in the voice as its elements. In this perspective, there is nothing more instructive than the history of that part of grammar—­phonetics—­t hat deals with the sounds of language (as, indeed, an “articulated voice”). At first, modern phonetics focused on the analysis of the γράμματα according to their modality of articulation, distinguishing them as labials, dentals, palatals, velars, labiovelars, laryngeal, and so on—­w ith such a descriptive thoroughness that a phonetician who was also a physician could write that if a speaking subject really articulated a given laryngeal sound in the way described by phonetics treatises, this would cause his death by suffocation. Articulatory phonetics descended into crisis when it was noticed that, in the presence of a lesion of the organ of articulation,

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the speaker could equally articulate the sound following other modalities. Abandoning the analysis of sounds according to their point of articulation, phonetics then focused on their strictly acoustic consistence, and thus managed to decompose and analyze the auditory texture of language into a multiplicity of scientifically controllable data. But the more the analysis of the sound wave produced by the voice evolved, the more it became impossible to clearly separate the elements (the γράμματα-­σ τοιχεῖα) that the grammatical tradition had identified. In 1916, Saussure had already observed that if we could reproduce through a film the movements of the mouth, the tongue, and the vocal cords of a speaker who produces what appears to us as the series of sounds F-­A-­L , it would be impossible to divide the three elements that compose it—­which actually present themselves as so indissolubly interwoven that one cannot isolate the point at which F ends and A begins. A film made in 1933 by the German phonetician Paul Menzerath confirmed Saussure’s observation also from the acoustic standpoint. In the act of speech, sounds do not follow each other, but become so intimately entangled and bound to each other that the unities we assume ourselves to be able to distinguish both at the morphological and phonetic levels actually constitute a perfectly continuous flux. The awareness of the impossibility of distinguishing the sounds of language from both an articulatory and an acoustic standpoint made necessary the emergence of phonology, which neatly separates the sounds of words (which was studied by phonetics) from the sounds of language [lingua] (the phonemes, that is, pure and immaterial oppositions, which are the object of phonology). With the severance of the link between language [lingua] and the voice—­which was out of question from ancient thought to the phonetics of the Neogrammarians—­the autonomy of language [lingua] with regard to the act of speech becomes evident. But although phonology acknowledges that γράμματα are not the trace and the written transcription of the voice, on the one hand, it treats the phoneme as a sort of purely negative and differential

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archigram [arcigramma], on the other. With this move, the difficulty caused by the aporetic situation of the λόγος in the ϕωνή is not solved, but only proposed again at the level of the impossible articulation between langue and parole, or between semiotic and semantic. ‫א‬. The ungraspable character of the human voice and the vanity of any attempt to make it somehow comprehensible through the letters were already observed by Plato, on whom, even in this case, the Aristotelian ἑρμηνεία of language and the condition of the λόγος in the γράμματα depend. In the Philebus, Socrates says: “When someone, whether god or godlike man—­t here is an Egyptian story that his name was Theuth—­observed that the voice was infinite (φωνὴν ἄπειρον—­ἄπειρον literally means “indemonstrable, impracticable, with no way out”), he was the first to notice that the vowel sounds in that indemonstrable (ἐν τῷ ἀπείρῳ) were not one, but many, and again that there were other elements that do not properly belong to the voice but did have a sonant quality, and that these also had a definite number; and he distinguished a third kind of letters (γραμμάτων) which we now call mutes (ἄφωνα). Then he divided the mutes until he distinguished each individual one, and he treated the vowels and semivowels in the same way, until he knew the number of them and gave to each and all the name of στοιχεῖον. Perceiving, however, that none of us could learn any one of them alone by itself without learning them all, and considering that this was a common bond (δεσμὸν) which made them in a way all one, he assigned to them all a single science and called it grammar” (Philebus 18b5–­d2). From this indemonstrability of the voice, Plato deduces, not the need for the γράμματα , but rather that for a theory of ideas (indeed, in the Phaedrus, he blames Theuth’s invention for causing loss of memory); on the other hand, Aristotle unreservedly follows Theuth’s Egyptian paradigm and accordingly excludes ideas from the semantic knot as redundant.

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15 If anthropogenesis—­and the philosophy that recalls, protects, and incessantly reactualizes it—­coincide with an experimentum linguae that aporetically situates the λόγος in the voice; and if the ἑρμηνεία, the interpretation of this experience that has dominated the history of the West, seems to have reached its limit, then what cannot but be questioned today in thought is an experimentum vocis, in which humans radically question the role of language in the voice and try to assume being a speaker anew. What has reached completion is in fact not the natural history of humanity, but that most special epochal history in which the ἑρμηνεία of speech as a language [lingua]—­that is, as an intentional intertwining of terms, concepts, things, and letters that takes place in the voice through the γράμματα—­had destined the West. It is therefore necessary always again to interrogate the possibility and meaning of the experimentum, investigating its place and genealogy in order to investigate whether there is, with respect to the γράμματα and the knowledge based on them, another way of addressing the indemonstrability of the voice. In our culture, the experimentum is not an eccentric or marginal phenomenon, which, trying to say what cannot be said, necessarily falls into contradictions; rather, it is the very thing of thought, the constitutive fact of what we call philosophy. In the same years in which he formulated the insurmountable fracture between semiotic and semantic, Benveniste wrote an essay on the “Formal Apparatus of Enunciation,” where he investigated the capacity of language to refer, through the shifters “I,” “you,” “here,” “now,” “this,” and so forth, not to lexical reality but to its own pure taking place. “I” does not indicate a substance, but the person who utters the instance of discourse containing “I,” just as “this” can only be the object of “an ostension that is simultaneous with the present instance of discourse,” and “here” and “now” “delimit the spatial and temporal instance that is contemporaneous with the instance of discourse containing the pronoun ‘I.’” This is not the place to retrace these rightly celebrated

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analyses, which have transformed the traditional theory of pronouns and defined the philosophical problem of the subject in a new way. What interests us here is rather asking in what way we can understand the “contemporaneity” and the “simultaneity” between the shifter and the instance of discourse (in this regard, Jakobson speaks also of an “existential relation” between the pronoun “I” and “enunciation”) without resorting to the voice. Enunciation and the instance of discourse are not identifiable as such, if not by means of the voice that utters them. But, insofar as it refers to the taking place of discourse, the voice that is here in question cannot be the animal voice, but, once again, the voice as what necessarily needs to be removed so that the γράμματα, and discourse with them, can take place in its non-­place. In other words, enunciation locates the subject, the one who says “I,” “here,” and “now,” in the articulation between the voice and language, between the “no longer” of the animal ϕωνή and the “not yet” of the λόγος. It is in this negative articulation that letters are situated. The voice is written, becomes ἐγγράμματος, at the point where the subject, the one who says “I,” becomes aware of being in place of the voice. For this reason, as Hegel has shown in The Phenomenology of Spirit, it is sufficient to transcribe the sense certainty that is affirmed in the pronoun “this” and in the adverbs “here” and “now” to see it vanish (“here” is no longer here; “now” is no longer now), to see the voice on which it was founded definitively disappear. The building of Western knowledge rests in the last resort on a voice that is removed, on a voice that writes itself. This is its fragile but tenacious founding myth.

16 Is it possible to think the relationship between the voice and language otherwise than through the letters? Ammonius suggests a possible hypothesis when, in his commentary, he fleetingly hints at the voice as the matter (ὕλη) of language [lingua]. Before trying to follow this hypothesis, we need to confront the thesis, articulated by Jean-­Claude Milner, according to which the letter and

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matter are synonymous, since matter—­understood in the sense of modern science—­is eminently translittérable, transcribable into letters (Milner 1985, p. 8). Milner adds to this thesis the corollary according to which the letter and the signifier are different and it is precisely their undue confusion that induced Saussure to attribute the properties of the signifier to the letter—­in the Anagrams—­a nd the characteristics of the letter to the signifier—­in the Course. We can then say, in Milner’s words, that Aristotle’s operation amounts precisely to identifying the letter—­the γράμμα—­with the signifier, with the becoming semantic of the ϕωνή. On condition of adding, against Milner’s thesis, that matter—­at least if we refer it back to the Platonic paradigm of a χώρα, of a pure taking-­ place—­is never something that can be transliterated, that is, it can never be a letter or a writing. Let us consider, in the Timaeus, the definition of the third kind of being, along with the sensible and the intelligible, which Plato calls χώρα. It is the receptacle (ὑποδοχή) or an imprint-­ bearer (ἐκμαγεῖον) that offers a place to all sensible forms, yet without ever blending with them. It is neither properly sensible nor properly intelligible, but is perceived as in a dream “through a kind of bastard reasoning accompanied by an absence of sensation.” If, developing the analogy suggested by Ammonius, we consider the voice as the χώρα of language [lingua], it will then not be grammatically linked to the latter in a relation as a sign or element: rather, the voice is that which, in the taking-­place of the λόγος, we perceive as irreducible to it, as the indemonstrable (ἄπειρον) that incessantly accompanies it, which, as neither pure sound nor signifying discourse, we perceive at their intersection with an absence of sensation and with a reasoning without meaning. Abandoning every founding mythology, we can then say that, as χώρα and matter, it is a voice that has never been written in language, an un-­w ritable that, in the incessant historical transmission of grammatical writing, obstinately remains such. There is no articulation between the living and the speaking being. The letter—­t he γράμμα that claims to posit

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itself as the having-­been or trace of the voice—­is neither in the voice nor in its place.

17 The “ancient struggle” (παλαιὰ διαφορὰ [Plato, Republic 607b]) between poetry and philosophy needs then to be thought anew from this perspective. In twentieth-­century thought, the separation between these two discourses—­and, at the same time, the attempt to reunite them—­has reached its highest tension: if, on the one hand, logic has tried to purify language [lingua] of any poetic excess, on the other, there have been a number of philosophers who have invoked poetry where it seemed that concepts were insufficient. Actually, these are neither two rival options nor two alternative possibilities without relation, as if the speaker could arbitrarily choose between one or the other: poetry and philosophy rather represent two inseparable and irreducible tensions within the single field of human language; in this sense, as long as there is language, there will also be poetry and thought. In fact, their duality witnesses once again to the splitting that, according to our hypothesis, was produced in the voice—­at the moment of anthropogenesis—­between what remained of animal language and the language [lingua] that was developing in its place as an organ of knowledge. The positioning of language [lingua] in the place of the voice is in fact the cause of another irreducible splitting that runs through human language, that between sound and sense, phonic and musical series and semantic series. These two series, which coincided in the animal voice, separate at each turn and oppose each other in discourse following a twofold and inverse tension, in such a way that their coincidence is impossible and, at the same time, irrevocable. What we call poetry and what we call philosophy name the two polarities of this opposition in language. Poetry could thus be defined as the attempt to maximally stretch the differences between the semiotic and the semantic series, sound and sense, ϕωνή and λόγος toward a pure sound, through the rhyme

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and the enjambement; conversely, philosophical prose could then appear as tending toward the fulfillment of these differences in a pure sense. Against this lectio facilior of the relation between poetry and philosophy, we rather need to recall that what is decisive for both is the moment when ϕωνή and λόγος, sound and sense are in contact—­ where, following Giorgio Colli, contact should not be understood as a tangential point, but as the moment in which two entities are united (or, rather, separated) only by an absence of representation. If we call thought this moment of contact, we can then say that poetry and philosophy are actually internal to each other, in the sense that the properly poetic experience of speech is accomplished in thought and the properly thinking experience of language [lingua] takes place in poetry. That is to say, philosophy is a search for and a commemoration of the voice, just as poetry—­as poets continually remind us—­is a love and search for language [lingua]. Philosophical prose, in which sound and sense seem to coincide in discourse, thus runs the risk of lacking thought, just as poetry, which continually opposes sound and sense, runs the risk of lacking the voice. For this reason, as Wittgenstein wrote, “philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry” (“Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten,” Wittgenstein 1977, p. 58), on condition of adding that poetry ought really to be written only as a form of philosophy. Philosophy is always and constitutively philosophy of—­subjective genitive—­poetry, and poetry is always and originally poetry of philosophy.

18 If we call factum loquendi the fact of the pure and simple existence of language, independently of its emergence in this or that language [lingua], in this or that grammar, in this or that signifying proposition, we can then say that modern linguistics and logic have been able to constitute themselves as sciences only by leaving aside as an unthought presupposition the factum loquendi—­the pure fact that we speak—­in order to deal only with language as

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describable in terms of real properties—­in other words, as what this or that language [lingua] is, employing this or that “grammar” and communicating this or that semantic content. We always speak within language and through language, and by speaking of this or that topic, predicating something about something, we keep on forgetting the simple fact that we are speaking about it. However, at the moment of enunciation language does not refer to any lexical reality or to the text of the statement, but solely to its own taking place. It refers only to its taking place [aver luogo] in the voice that removes itself; it maintains a negative relation with the voice that, according to the myth, gives rise to it [gli dà luogo] by disappearing. If this is the case, we can then define the task of philosophy as the attempt to exhibit and experience the factum that metaphysics and the science of language must limit themselves to presupposing; that is, the attempt to become aware of the pure fact that we speak and that the event of speech occurs for the living being in the place of the voice, but without any articulation of this event with the voice. Where the voice and language are in contact without any articulation, a subject comes about and witnesses to this contact. The thought that wants to risk itself in this experience has to resolutely situate itself not only in the gap—­or contact—­between language [lingua] and speech, semiotic and semantic, but also in that between the ϕωνή and the λόγος. The thought that—­between speech and language [lingua], existence and essence, potentiality and act—­risks itself in this experience must accept to find itself at each turn facing the voice without language [lingua] and facing language [lingua] without the voice.

On the Concept of Demand

Philosophy always again finds itself facing the task of rigorously defining the concept of demand. This definition is all the more urgent, since we can say—­without any play on words—­that philosophy demands this definition and that its possibility fully coincides with this demand. If there were no demand, but only necessity, there could not be philosophy. The element of philosophy is not what obliges us but what demands of us; not what must-­be or mere factual reality, but the demand. But, because of demand, even possibility and contingency transform and modify themselves. That is to say, a definition of demand implies as a preliminary task a redefinition of the categories of modality. Leibniz thought of demand as an attribute of possibility: omne possibile exigit existiturire, “every possibility demands to exist.” What the possible demands is to become real; potentiality—­or essence—­demands existence. For this reason, Leibniz defines existence as a demand of essence: “Si existentia esset aliud quiddam quam essentiae exigentia, sequeretur ipsam habere quandam essentiam, seu aliquid novum superadditum rebus, de quo rursus quaeri potest, an haec essentia existat, et cur ista potius quam alia” (“If existence were something other than what is demanded by essence, it would follow that it too would have a certain essence, that is, something that would be added to things; and then it 

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On the Concept of Demand

might be asked again whether this essence in turn exists, and why that one rather than another”). In the same sense, Thomas Aquinas ironically wrote that “just as we cannot say that running runs, so we cannot say that existence exists.” Existence is not a quid, something other with respect to essence or possibility; it is only a demand contained in essence. But how should we understand this demand? In a fragment written in 1689, Leibniz calls this demand existiturientia (a term formed from the future infinitive of existere) and it is by means of it that he tries to make the principle of reason comprehensible. The reason why something exists rather than nothing “consists in the prevalence of reasons to exist (ad existendum) over those to not exist, that is, if it is permissible to say it with one word, of the demand to exist of essence (in existiturientia essentiae).” The ultimate root of this demand is God (“for the demand of essences to exist—­existituritionis essentiarum—­it is necessary that there be a root a parte rei, and this root can only be the necessary entity, the foundation—­fundus—­of essences and source—­fons—­of existences, namely, God. . . . Essences could never find a way to existence—­ad existendum—­if not in God and through God”). One of the paradigms of demand is memory. Walter Benjamin once wrote that in remembering we experience how what seems to be absolutely accomplished—­the past—­suddenly becomes again unaccomplished. Even memory, insofar as it gives incompleteness back to the past and thus somehow makes it still possible for us, is something similar to demand. Leibniz’s stance on the problem of demand is here reversed: it is not the possible that demands to exist, but the real—­what has already been—­that demands its own possibility. And what is thinking if not the capacity to give possibility back to reality, to belie the false claim of opinion that it is founded only on facts? To think means first and foremost to perceive the demand of what is real to become possible again, to do justice not only to things but also to their tears. In the same sense, Benjamin wrote that the life of Prince Myshkin demands to remain unforgettable. This does not mean that

On the Concept of Demand

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something that has been forgotten now demands to come back to memory: demand concerns the unforgettable as such, even when everybody has forgotten it forever. The unforgettable is, in this sense, the very form of demand. And this is not the claim of a subject; it is a state of the world, an attribute of substance—­that is, in Spinoza’s words, something that the mind conceives of substance as constituting its essence. Demand is therefore, like justice, a category of ontology, and not of morality. Nor is it a logical category, insofar as it does not imply its object, in the way in which the nature of a triangle implies that the sum of its angles equals two right angles. In other words, we say that something demands something else if the first thing is and the second will be, but the former does not logically imply the latter or contain it in its concept, nor does it force it to exist on the level of facts. This definition should be followed by a revision of ontological categories, which philosophers refrain from undertaking. Leibniz attributes demand to essence (or possibility) and makes existence the object of demand. That is to say, his thought still remains a tributary of the ontological apparatus, which divides essence and existence, potentiality and act in being, and sees in God their point of indifference, the “existentifying” (existentificans) principle, in which essence becomes existent. But what is a possibility that contains a demand? And how should we think of existence, if it is nothing other than a demand? What if demand were more original than the very distinction between essence and existence, possibility and reality? What if being itself were to be thought of as a demand, of which the categories of modality (possibility, contingency, necessity) are only the inadequate specifications, which we decidedly need to call into question? From the fact that demand is not a moral category, it follows that no imperative can derive from it, that is, that it has nothing to do with a must-­be. But, if this is the case, modern morality, which claims to be alien to happiness and loves to present itself in the categorical form of an injunction, is condemned without reservations.

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On the Concept of Demand

Paul defines faith (πίστις) as the existence (ὑπόστασις) of the things we hope for. That is, faith provides a reality and a substance to what does not exist. In this sense, faith is similar to demand, yet on condition of specifying that it is not the anticipation of something to come (as it is for the believer) or that needs to be realized (as it is for the political militant): the thing we hope for is already completely present as demand. For this reason, faith cannot be a property of the believer, but a demand that does not belong to him and reaches him from the outside, from the things he hopes for. When Spinoza defines essence as conatus, he means something like a demand. This is why, in Proposition 7 of Part III of the Ethics (“Conatus, quo unaquaeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est praeter ipsius rei actualis essentia”), the term conatus should not be translated, as is usually done, as “striving,” but as “demand”: “The demand through which each thing demands to persevere in its being is nothing but its actual essence.” The fact that being demands (or desires: the scolium specifies that desire—­ cupiditas—­is one of the names of the conatus) means that it is not exhausted in factual reality, but contains a demand that goes beyond it. It is not that being simply is: it demands to be. Once again, this means that desire does not belong to the subject, but to being. Just as someone who has dreamt something has actually already had it, desire brings with it its satisfaction. Demand coincides neither with the sphere of facts nor with that of ideals: rather, it is matter, in the sense in which Plato defines it in the Timaeus as a third kind of being between the idea and the sensible, “which offers a place (χώρα) and an abode to things that come into being.” For this reason, as in the case of χώρα, we can say of demand that we perceive it “with an absence of sensation” (μετ’ ἀναισθησίας—­not “without sensation,” but “with an anesthesia”) and with a “bastard reasoning that is barely credible”: in other words, we can say that demand has the evidence of a sensation without sensation (as happens in dreams, Plato says) and the intelligibility of thought, yet without any possible definition. In

On the Concept of Demand

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this sense, matter is the demand that interrupts the false alternative between the sensible and the intelligible, the linguistic and the non-­ linguistic: there is a materiality of thought and language [lingua], just as there is an intelligibility in sensation. It is this third undetermined that Aristotle calls ὕλη and medieval philosophers silva, “colorless face of substance” and “indefatigable womb of generation,” and of which Plotinus says that it is like “a track of the formless.” We need to think of matter not as a substratum, but as a demand of bodies: it is what a body demands and what we perceive as its most intimate potentiality. We then better understand the nexus that has always linked matter to possibility (for this reason, the Chartres Platonists defined the ὕλη as the “absolute possibility, which keeps all thing implied in itself”); what the possible demands is not to pass to the act, but to materialize itself [materiarsi], to become matter. It is in this sense that we should interpret the scandalous theses of those medieval materialists, such as Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant, who identified God with matter (yle mundi este ipse deus): God is the taking place of bodies, the demand that marks and materializes them. Just as, according to one of Benjamin’s theorems, the messianic Kingdom can only be present in history in ridiculous and infamous forms, so, on the level of facts, demand manifests itself in the most insignificant places and according to modalities that in current circumstances may appear despicable and incongruous. With respect to demand, every fact is inadequate, and every fulfillment insufficient. And this is not because it exceeds every possible realization, but simply because it can never be placed on the level of a realization. In the mind of God—­that is, in the state of the mind that corresponds to demand as the state of being—­ demands have already been fulfilled since all eternity. Insofar as it is projected onto time, the messianic presents itself as another world that demands to exist in this world, but cannot do so except in a parodic and approximate way, as if it were a—­not always edifying—­distortion of the world. In this sense, parody is the only possible expression of demand.

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On the Concept of Demand

For this reason, demand has found a sublime expression in the Gospels’ Beatitudes, in the extreme tension that separates the Kingdom from the world: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. [ . . . ] Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. [ . . . ] Blessed are those who are persecuted [ . . . ], for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It is significant that, in the privileged case of the poor and the persecuted—­that is, of the two conditions that are most infamous in the eyes of the world—­the verb is in the present tense: the kingdom of heaven is here and now for those who are farthest from it. The extraneousness of demand from any future factual realization is here affirmed in the purest way: and, yet, precisely because of this, it now finds its real name. Demand is—­in its essence—­beatitude. Demand is the state of extreme complication of a being that implies in itself all its possibilities. This means that demand entertains a privileged relation with the idea; that, in demand, things are contemplated sub quadam aeternitatis specie.1 Just as when we contemplate our beloved while she sleeps; she is there—­but as if suspended from all her acts, involute, and wrapped around herself. Like an idea, she is there, and at the same time, she is not there. She lies before our eyes, but in order for her to really be there we would have to wake her up, and, in so doing, we would lose her. The idea—­and demand—­is the sleep of the act, the dormition of life. All the possibilities are now gathered in a single complication, which life will gradually explicate—­and has already in part explicated. But, hand in hand with the process of explication, the inexplicable idea goes always deeper and complicates itself. It is the demand that remains untainted in all its realizations, the sleep that knows no awakening.

1. “Under a certain species of eternity.”—­Translator.

On the Sayable and the Idea

1 It is not the unsayable but the sayable that constitutes the problem philosophy must at each turn confront again. The unsayable is in fact nothing else than a presupposition of language. As soon as there is language, the named thing is presupposed as the non-­ linguistic or the unrelated with which language has established its relation. This presupposing power is so strong that we imagine the non-­linguistic as something unsayable and unrelated, which we somehow try to grasp as such, without realizing that in this way we are simply trying to grasp the shadow of language. In this sense, the unsayable is a genuinely linguistic category, which can be conceived only by a speaking being. This is why, in a letter to Martin Buber of July 1916, Walter Benjamin could speak of a “crystalline elimination of the unsayable in language”: the unsayable does not take place outside of language as something obscure that is presupposed, but, as such, it can be eliminated only in language. I shall try to show that, on the other hand, the sayable is a non-­ linguistic but genuinely ontological category. The elimination of the unsayable in language coincides with the exhibition of the sayable as a philosophical task. For this reason, unlike the unsayable, the sayable can never be given before or after language: it arises together with it and, however, remains irreducible to it. 

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On the Sayable and the Idea

2 The Stoics designated an essential element of their doctrine of the incorporeals with the term sayable, λεκτόν, on the definition of which the historians of philosophy have not yet reached an agreement. Before starting an investigation of this concept, we should therefore first locate it in the philosophical context that pertains to it. Modern scholars tend anachronistically to convert ancient categories and classifications into modern ones and to treat sayability as a logical concept. At the same time, they know perfectly well that the division of philosophy into logic, ontology, physics, metaphysics, and so on, by the grammarians and the scholiasts of late antiquity lends itself to all sorts of equivocations and misunderstandings. Let us consider Aristotle’s treatise on Categories, or predications (but the Greek term κατηγορίαι means in juridical language “charges, accusations”), which is traditionally classified among his logical works. However, it contains theses that undoubtedly have an ontological character. Ancient commentators therefore debated what the object (σκοπός, the purpose) of the treatise was: words (ϕωναί), things (πράγματα), or concepts (νοήματα). In the prologue to his commentary, repeating arguments by his teacher Ammonius, Philoponus writes that according to some (such as Alexander of Aphrodisias) the object of the treatise is only words, according to others (such as Eustatius), only things, and according to still others (such as Porphyry), only concepts. According to Philoponus, Iamblichus’s thesis (which he accepts with some specifications) for which the σκοπός of the treatise is the words insofar as they mean things through concepts (ϕωνῶν σημαινουσῶν πράγματα διὰ μέσον νοημάτων [Philoponus 1898, pp. 8–­9]) is more correct. From here follows the impossibility of distinguishing logic from ontology, in the Categories, where Aristotle treats things and entities insofar as they are signified by language, and language insofar as it refers to things. His ontology presupposes that being is said (τὸ ὂν λέγεται . . .) and is always already in language, he stresses continually. The ambiguity between logical and

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ontological is so consubstantial in the treatise that, in the history of Western philosophy, categories will be presented both as kinds of predication and as kinds of being. ‫א‬. Our classification of Aristotle’s works derives from the edition Andronicus of Rhodes produced between 40 and 20 BC. We owe to him both the collection of Aristotle’s so-­called logical writings in an Organon and the notorious location μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ of the lectures and notes we today call Metaphysics. Andronicus was convinced that Aristotle was a deliberately systematic thinker and that his edition thus faithfully reflected the author’s intention, but we know that he projected onto Aristotle Hellenistic ideas that were totally alien to a classical mind. The modern editions of Aristotle, however philologically updated, unfortunately still mirror Andronicus’s erroneous conception. We thus continue to read Aristotle as if he really systematically composed a logical ὄργανον, treatises on physics, politics, and ethics, and, finally, the Metaphysics. It is possible to read Aristotle only starting from the destruction of this canonical articulation of his thought.

3 Similar considerations apply to the Stoics’ notion of the sayable. In modern studies, it is taken for granted that the λεκτόν belongs to the sphere of logic, but this makes assumptions (such as the identity between σημαινόμενον and λεκτόν, meaning and sayable) that are far from certain. Let us consider Ammonius’s remarks, who critically defines the λεκτόν from an Aristotelian standpoint: “Aristotle teaches what the things primarily and immediately signified (σημαινόμενα, that is, by names and verbs) and the concepts (νοήματα) are, and, through them, the things (πράγματα), and affirms that we should not think another intermediary in addition to them (that is, the νόημα and the πρᾶγμα), such as that which the Stoics suppose by the name of sayable (λεκτόν)” (Ammonius 1897, p. 5). That is, Ammonius informs us that the Stoics inserted—­ uselessly, in his opinion—­a third element between the concept and the thing, which they called sayable.

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On the Sayable and the Idea

The passage in question comes from Ammonius’s commentary on Περὶ ἑρμηνείας. Here Aristotle defined the process of “interpretation” by means of three elements: words (τὰ ἐν τῇ ϕωνῇ), concepts (or, more precisely, the affections of the soul, τὰ παθήματα ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ)—­of which words are the signs—­and things (τὰ πράγματα)—­of which concepts are the resemblances. Ammonius suggests that the sayable of the Stoics is not only not linguistic, but neither a concept nor a thing. It does not take place in the mind or simply in reality; it does not belong to either logic or physics, but somehow lies between them. We should map out this specific location between the mind and things as it may properly be the space of being and the sayable may coincide with the ontological.

4 The richest and, at the same time, most problematic source with which every interpretation of the doctrine of the sayable should begin is a passage from Sextus Empiricus’s Against the Logicians: Some placed the true and false in the signified thing (περὶ τῷ σημαινομένῷ), others in the word (περὶ τῇ ϕωνῇ), and still others in the motion of thought (περὶ τῇ κινήσει τῆς διανοίας). And the Stoics stood for the first opinion, saying that three [things] were connected with one another, the signified (σημαινόμενον), the signifier (σημαῖνον), and the object (τυγχάνον, “what happens to be,” the existing thing that is at each turn in question). The signifier is the word (ϕωνή)—­for example, “Dion”; the signified is the thing itself insofar as it is manifested by it (αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα τὸ ὑπ’ αὐτῆς δηλούμενον), which we apprehend as what subsists beside (παρυϕισταμένου) our thought, and which foreigners do not understand even when they hear the word; the object is the externally existing substance (τὸ ἐκτὸς ὑποκείμενον) (e.g., Dion himself). And of these, two are bodies, namely, the word and the object, while one is incorporeal, namely, the signified and sayable thing (τὸ σημαινόμενον πρᾶγμα καὶ λεκτόν), which becomes true or false. (8.2 ff.; 1842, p. 291)

On the Sayable and the Idea

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The signifier (the signifying word) and the object (the thing that corresponds to it in reality; the referent in modern terms) are evident. What is more problematic is the status of the incorporeal σημαινόμενον, which modern scholars have identified with the concept present in the mind of a subject (like the Aristotelian νόημα, according to Ammonius) or with the objective content of a thought, which exists independently of the mental activity of a subject (like Frege’s “thought”—­Gedanke) (Schubert 1994, pp. 15–­16). Both interpretations project onto Stoicism the modern theory of signification and, in this way, omit to tackle a philologically correct reading of the text. The fact that foreigners do not understand the σημαινόμενον when they hear the word could lead us to assimilate it to sense or a mental image (in Frege’s sense); but, opposing the Stoics to those who place the true and the false “in the motion of thought,” Sextus implicitly rules out that the σημαινόμενον could be identified with the thought of a subject. After all, the text clearly says that the σημαινόμενον is not identical with thought, but “subsists beside” it. Even the following passage, which seems to evoke something similar to what moderns call meaning (at least in the sense of Bedeutung or denotation), requires a more careful interpretation. The σημαινόμενον is here defined as the “thing itself” (αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα) insofar as it is manifested by the word (τὸ ὑπ αὐτῆς δελούμενον—­we should notice the repetition of the article τὸ, which I have rendered as “insofar as”). Like the Latin res, πρᾶγμα means first and foremost “what is in question; what is at stake in a trial or in a discussion” (from here follows its Italian translation into cosa, which derives from the Latin causa), and only subsequently also “thing” or “state of affairs”; but the fact that this passage is not about a thing in this second sense is clear because of its difference from the τυγχάνον, what at each turn happens to be (ἃ τυγχάνει ὄντα), the event or the real object. However, this does not mean that the “thing itself ” is simply the meaning, or the signified, in the modern sense, that is, the conceptual content or the intentional object

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On the Sayable and the Idea

indicated by the word. The thing itself, αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα, indicates what is in question in the word and in thought; the res that, through thought and the word—­but without coinciding with them—­is at stake [è in causa]1 between humans and the world. As Émile Bréhier observed, the specification “the signified and sayable thing” does not imply that σημαινόμενον and λεκτόν are the same thing, and that the fact of being sayable is the same as the fact of being signified. In his edition of the fragment, Armin inserted a comma between τὸ σημαινόμενον πρᾶγμα and καὶ λεκτόν, which enables us to affirm both the identity and the difference of the two terms. Bréhier in fact concludes that “in general, if the signified is something expressible (this is how he translates λεκτόν), it does not follow in any way that everything expressible is also a signified” (Bréhier 1997, p. 15). Here the interpretation of the syntagm “the thing itself ” (αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα) becomes all the more decisive: what is in question is the thing itself in its being manifested and sayable; but how should we understand and where should we locate such a “thing itself”? ‫א‬. Augustine’s Dialectic bequeathed to us an analysis of linguistic signification in which the influence of Varro and Stoicism is evident. Augustine (Dialectic, 5) distinguishes in the word (verbum)—­which “in spite of being a sign, does not stop being a thing”—­four possible elements. The first is given when the word is uttered with reference to itself, as in a grammatical discourse (in this case verbum and res coincide); in the second—­which Augustine calls dictio—­t he word is not uttered to signify itself, but something else (non propter se, sed propter aliquid significandum); the third is the res, that is, the external object, “which is not the word or the concept of the word in the mind [verbi in mente conceptio]”; the fourth, which translating literally the Stoic term Augustine calls dicibile—­“sayable”—­is “whatever

1. Agamben is here using the expression essere in causa, “being at stake” or “being in question,” which contains the term causa, “cause.” What is at stake is in the position of the cause, or literally, “in cause.” The paragraph began with a reference to the derivation of the Italian cosa, “thing,” from the Latin causa.—­Translator.

On the Sayable and the Idea

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is perceived from the word by the mind, not the ears [quicquid autem ex verbo non auris, sed animo sentit et ipso animo continetur inclusum].” Augustine must have found it hard to distinguish between the dictio (the word in its semantic aspect) and the dicibile, since he soon after tries to clarify the difference without really succeeding: “What I have called dicibile is a word, and yet it is not a word, but what is understood in the word and is contained in the mind [verbum est nec tamen verbum, sed quod in verbo intelligitur et animo continetur]. What I have called dictio is a word, which, however, signifies at the same time two [things], that is, both the word itself and what is produced in the mind through the word [verbum est, sed quod iam illa duo simul, id est et ipsum verbum et quod fit in animo per verbum significat]” (ibid.). We should not lose sight of the nuances through which Augustine tries to define this difference—­for instance, resorting to different prepositions. What is question in dictio is something (the signified, or meaning) that remains inextricably linked to the signifying word (it is a word—­verbum est—­and, at the same time, what is produced in the mind—­in animo—­through the word—­per verbum); on the other hand, the sayable is not properly a word (verbum est nec tamen verbum), but rather what is perceived from the word (ex verbo) by the mind. The aporetic location of the sayable between the signified and the thing is here evident.

5 The phrase “the thing itself ” appears in a decisive passage of Plato’s Seventh Letter, a text whose influence on the history of philosophy we are still far from appreciating. A comparison of the Stoic source quoted by Sextus with the philosophical digression of the Letter shows surprising affinities. For convenience, let us here refer to the text of the digression: For every entity there are three [things] through which science is necessarily generated; fourth is science itself, and as fifth we must posit that same thing through which (each entity) is knowable (γνωστόν) and truly is. The first is the name, the second the defining discourse (λόγος), the third the image (εἴδωλον), and the fourth science. If

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On the Sayable and the Idea

you wish to understand what I have just said, consider an example, and thereby think about all things. There is something called a circle (κυκλός ἐστί τι λεγόμενον), whose name is the same we have just uttered; second is its λόγος, made of names and verbs: “that which at all points has the same distance from the extremes to the center”: here is the λόγος of what is named “round,” “circumference,” or “circle.” Third comes that which is drawn and rubbed out, or turned on a lathe and broken up—­none of which things can befall the circle itself (αὐτὸς ὁ κύκλος), around which the other things mentioned have reference, for it is something of a different order from them. Fourth comes science, the intellect, and true opinion about these things; and all this should be thought of as a single thing, which does not dwell in words (ἐν φωναῖς), or in bodily shapes, but in souls (ἐν ψυχαῖς), from which it is clear that it is something different from the nature of the circle itself and from the three [things] mentioned above. (342a8–­d1)

Not only do the words that open the digression—­“ for every entity there are three [things] through which science is necessarily generated”—­duly correspond to the “three [things that] were connected with one another” with which Sextus’s Stoic quotation begins, but the “three” here mentioned (the σημαῖνον or the signifying word—­e.g., “Dion”—­the real object, τυγχάνον, and the σημαινόμενον) correspond to just as many elements present in Plato’s list. The first, the signifying word (φωνή), corresponds exactly to what Plato calls the “name” (ὄνομα; e.g., “circle,” which he in fact locates ἐν φωναῖς); the second, the τυγχάνον, corresponds to the circle that “is drawn and rubbed out, or turned on a lathe and broken up,” that is, to what at each turn presents itself and happens. The identification of what, in Plato’s list, corresponds to the σημαινόμενον and the sayable is more problematic. If we identify it with the fourth element, which “does not dwell in words, or in bodily shapes, but in souls,” this would be consonant with the incorporeal status of the “signified thing,” but would entail that it should be identified with thought or the mind of a subject—­ whereas the Stoic source rules out any coincidence with a “motion

On the Sayable and the Idea

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of thought.” We are left with the fifth element—­the idea—­whose technical denomination (the circle itself, αὐτὸς ὁ κύκλος) the Stoic source seems to recall explicitly by using the phrase “the thing itself ” (αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα). If it is true that the history of philosophy after Plato, and starting already with Aristotle, is the history of the different attempts to eliminate the idea or think it otherwise, the hypothesis I am putting forward here is that the Stoics substituted the sayable for the idea, or—­at least—­located the sayable in the place of the idea. ‫א‬. I have shown elsewhere (Agamben 1999, pp. 32–­34) the usefulness of reestablishing the text of manuscripts: “Fifth, we must posit that same thing through which (δἰ ὅ) (each entity) is knowable” as opposed to the majority of modern editions that render this as “we must posit that same thing which is knowable.” ‫א‬. The fact that the Stoic source quoted by Sextus is articulated in direct relation with the digression of the Seventh Letter is discreetly suggested by the replacement of the name of the character in the example, which in Aristotle is usually Choriscus or Callias, with “Dion,” that is precisely the name of the friend Plato continuously evokes in the letter.

6 The hypothesis that the sayable might have something to do with the Platonic idea is evoked only negatively by modern scholars, for instance, when one of them writes that the λεκτά, “in spite of not being Platonic entities, can nonetheless have the value of objective contents of thought and language” (Schubert 1994, p. 15). As always, negation is significant; it is in fact precisely a reading of the doctrine of the sayable in an accurate and critical relation to the theory of ideas that allows us to clarify its nature (and, at the same time, such a reading throws new light on Plato’s invention of the idea, so often misunderstood). Like the idea, the sayable is neither in the mind nor in sensible things, neither in thought nor in the object, but between them. In this sense, what

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On the Sayable and the Idea

is enlightening is the Stoics’ use of the verb παρυϕίστασθαι with reference to the sayables: they do not exist but “subsist beside” (this is the literal meaning of the verb) thought or logical representation, just as the idea is the paradigm, that which shows itself beside (παρά-­δειγμα) things. In other words, the Stoics mediate from Plato the special mode of existence of the idea and shape on it that of the λεκτόν; they however maintain it in such a close relation to thought and language that it has often been confused with one or the other. That is, the Stoics try to think together (without confusing them—­if Bréhier’s remark on the non-­coincidence of σημαινόμενον and λεκτόν is correct) the fourth and fifth elements of the Platonic digression. From this follows the claim, often repeated in the sources, that the Stoics would identify ideas with concepts (ἐννοήματα τὰς ἰδέας ἔϕασαν [Arnim 1903, 2: 360; see also ibid., 1: 65]). The sayable does, however, always remain not simply linguistic but strongly objective. In this perspective, it is important to read together the two passages that seem to confuse the sphere of the sayable with that of language, but that actually keep them clearly separate. “Every sayable (λεκτόν) must be said (λέγεσθαι δεῖ), and from this it has derived its name” (Sextus Empiricus 8.80; 1842, p. 304 = Arnim 1903, 2: 167); “Saying (λέγειν) and uttering (προϕέρεσθαι) are different: we utter words (ϕωναί), but we say things (λέγεται τὰ πράγματα), which happen to be sayable (λεκτὰ τυγχάνει)” (Diogenes Laertius 7.56 = Arnim 1903, 3: 20). What can be said not only, obviously, does not coincide with what is said, but uttering and saying, ϕωνή and πρᾶγμα, the act of speech and what is in question in it are different. The λεκτόν is neither the thing nor the word: it is the thing in its sayability, in its being at stake [essere in causa] in the word, just as in the Seventh Letter the idea is not simply the thing, but the “thing itself” in its being knowable (γνωστόν, knowable, corresponds here exactly to λεκτόν, sayable). ‫א‬. Heidegger rightly stresses many times that λέγειν is not simply the same as “to say,” but etymologically means “to gather together into presence” (Heidegger 1987, pp. 266–­69: “Ver-­sammlung ist

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das ursprüngliche Einbehalten in einer Gesammelheit”). Λέγεται τὰ πράγματα does not mean “things are expressed in words by a speaking subject,” but “things manifest and gather themselves into presence.” That is to say, we are dealing with an ontological thesis and not simply a logical one. In the same way, when Aristotle writes that τὸ ὂν λέγεται πολλαχῶς, we need to translate it not simply, as is usually done, as “the term being is said in many senses, has many meanings,” but as “being gathers itself (‘reads’ itself) into presence in many ways.”

7 Before the Stoics, Aristotle already confronted the theory of knowledge contained in the Seventh Letter. In Περὶ ἑρμηνείας, a work that has for centuries influenced every reflection on language in the West, he defines the process of linguistic signification in a way that must be read as a precise counterpoint to the text of the digression—­a lthough it seems unrelated to it. What is in the word (τὰ ἐν τῇ ϕωνῇ) is the sign of the impressions in the soul (ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ), and what is written is the sign of what is in the word. Just as the letters are not the same for all men, so neither are the words; that of which they are primarily signs, that is, the impressions of the soul, are the same for the whole of mankind; and even things (πράγματα), of which these are the resemblances, are the same for all. (Aristotle, On Interpretation 16a3–­7)

The tripartition into which Aristotle articulates comprehension (in the word, in the soul, and in things) in fact exactly follows the Platonic distinction between what is ἐν ϕωναῖς, in the words (the name and the defining discourse), what is ἐν ψυχαῖς, in the souls (knowledge, intellect, and opinion), and what is ἐν σομάτων σχήμασιν (sensible objects). Consistently with Aristotle’s tenacious critique of the theory of ideas, on the other hand, the thing itself has disappeared. The resumption of Plato’s list is actually a refutation of his teacher’s thought, which removes the idea from the process of the ἑρμηνεία, that is, of the interpretation of the world by means of words

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and concepts. The—­otherwise inexplicable—­appearance of a fourth element, the letter, beside words, concepts, and things is a polemical allusion—­ discreet, but evident to a careful reader—­to the teacher’s text. While the digression of the Seventh Letter was aimed precisely at showing the insufficiency of writing with respect to the thing itself, the letter, as sign and also element of the word, is here the first guarantee of the intelligibility of the λόγος. ‫א‬. Let us list together the elements of knowledge in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics: Plato

Aristotle

Stoics

name

words

signifier

defining discourse

impressions in the soul

signified

bodies and shapes

things

object (τυγχάνον)

science, concept

letters

thing itself (idea)

sayable (thing itself )

While in Aristotle the idea is simply removed, the Stoics replace it with the sayable. It is important to remark that, insofar as it includes science among its elements, the Platonic list is not limited to a theory of knowledge and aims at something—­the idea—­that does not belong to knowledge, but makes it possible.

8 I have so far tried to show the analogies and possible relations with the Platonic idea in order to clarify the Stoic concept of λεκτόν. But, if my hypothesis is correct, we should ask why the Stoics decided to call “sayable” something they intended to locate in place—­or, at least, in the place—­of the idea. Does this denomination not contradict the text of the digression, where, affirming that what he seriously deals with “is not in any way sayable

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(ῥητόν) like the other notions (μαθήματα),” Plato seems to confer the status of unsayability on the thing itself? It suffices to situate this claim in its context in the digression in order to grasp that what is in question is, not so much an absolute unsayability, but rather a special status of sayability, different from that which applies to the “other μαθήματα.” Shortly afterwards, Plato in fact affirms that “if we have not grasped the first four” (among which the name and the λόγος appear), we shall not fully know the fifth; he then adds that the knowledge of the thing itself occurs by “rubbing one against the other names, λόγοι, visions, and sense-­perceptions, and testing them in kindly refutations and discussions led without envy” (344b4–­7). After all, this is in agreement with the unambiguous claim made in the Parmenides (135e3) according to which the ideas are what “can be seized most entirely by the λόγος [ἐκεῖνα ἃ μάλιστά τις ἂν λόγῳ λάβοι].” An understanding of the digression thus entails a neutralization of the opposition between sayable and unsayable, and, at the same time, a rethinking of the relation between the idea and language.

9 An exposition of the relationship between the idea and language must start off from the, apparently obvious, observation that the idea and the sensible things are homonymous, that is, that although they are different, they have the same name. It is precisely on this curious homonymy that Aristotle focuses his summary of Plato’s philosophy in Metaphysics 987b: “He [Plato] then called these entities ideas and [held] that all sensible things are said beside them and according to them [τὰ δ᾽ αἰσθητὰ παρὰ ταῦτα κατὰ ταῦτα λέγεσθαι πάντα]; in fact, according to participation, the multiplicity of synonyms is homonymous with the ideas [κατὰ μέθεξιν γὰρ εἶναι τὰ πολλὰ ὁμώνυμα τοῖς εἴδεσιν]” (ibid., 8–­10). (According to Aristotle [Categories 1a1–­11], the entities that have the same name and the same definition are synonymous, whereas those that have the same name but a different definition are homonymous).

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The fact that sensible things and the idea are homonymous, and that things thus receive their names from participating in the ideas is restated many times in Plato. For instance: “What shall we say of the manifold things, such as men, horses, cloaks [ . . . ] and all those homonymous with ideas?” (Phaedo 78e); “The other things, participating in ideas, receive from them their denomination” (Phaedo 102b1) (ἐπωνυμίαν means “name derived from something else”; Plato uses almost the same words in Parmenides 130e: “There are such ideas, participating in which they receive the denomination”); and in Republic 596a: “We are in the habit of positing a single idea for each multiplicity to which we give the same name.” It is precisely with this homonymy that Aristotle would reproach his teacher, writing that “if the form of ideas and that of things is not the same, they will simply be homonymous; just though one were to call ‘Callias’ both a man of flesh and blood and a piece of wood, without remarking anything common to them [μηδεμίαν κοινωνίαν]” (Metaphysics 991a5–­8). ‫א‬. The comprehension of the quoted passage from Aristotle (Metaphysics 987b8–­10) has been partly compromised by a correction in the Bekker edition that suppressed ὁμώνυμα, although this term is present in the most authoritative codex (the Parisinus 1853) and in all others (with only two exceptions, the Laurentianus 87.12 and the Parisinus 1876). Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg aptly observed that, as we have seen, Plato speaks of homonymy and never of synonymy. The Jaeger edition (1957) thus reintroduced ὁμώνυμα, yet putting into brackets τῶν συνωνίμων. The text of the manuscripts is perfectly clear and does not need any amendment: Aristotle, who was here faithful to Plato, intends to say that the multiplicity of sensible things that bear the same name (and are therefore synonymous: e.g., the flesh-­a nd-­blood horses) becomes homonymous with respect to the ideas (horses have the name in common with the idea, but not the definition). As for the sentence τὰ δ᾽ αἰσθητὰ παρὰ ταῦτα κατὰ ταῦτα λέγεσθαι πάντα, Harold Cherniss and W. D. Ross rightly remarked that the usual translation “sensible things exist as separate from them and are all named after them” is inexact and requires the insertion of an εἶναι that is missing in the manuscripts (Cherniss 1944, p. 178).

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10 The idea is therefore the unitary principle from which sensible things derive their name, or, more precisely, what makes it possible for a multiplicity of sensible things to constitute a set that has the same name. For things, the first consequence of their participation in the idea is denomination. If there is, in this sense, an essential relation between the name and the idea, the latter is nonetheless not identified with the name, but rather seems to be the principle of nominability, that through which, by participating in it, sensible things find their denomination. But how should we conceive such a principle? And is it possible to think its consistency independently of the relation with the sensible things, which derive from it their homonymy? Precisely because Aristotle’s critiques of the theory of ideas revolve around this point, it is appropriate to first examine them. Aristotle interprets the relation between the idea and the sensible things starting from the relation between “what is said according to the whole” (τὰ καθόλου = τὰ καθ’ ὅλου λεγόμενα; Aristotle also uses the expression τὸ ἓν ἐπὶ πολλῶν, the one over the many) and what is said according to singularities (καθ’ ἕκαστα). We refrained from translating καθόλου as “the universal” because this very identification of the problem of ideas with the quaestio de universalibus has marked the history of the reception of the theory of ideas and its misunderstanding, starting from Aristotle and up to the commentators of late antiquity, and then the Scholastics. Aristotle in fact writes (Metaphysics 1078b18 ff.) that Socrates was the first who tried to find definitions according to the whole, “but while he did not posit what is said according to the whole [τὰ καθόλου] as separate [χωριστὰ], the Platonists separated it and called these entities ideas; from this, they inferred the consequence that there are ideas of all the things that are said according to the whole [τῶν καθόλου λεγομένων].” In the short history of philosophical doctrines covered in the first book of the Metaphysics, Aristotle summarizes the Platonic theory of ideas thus:

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On the Sayable and the Idea

Those who posited ideas in the first place, in their attempt to grasp the causes of sensible entities, introduced an equal number of other entities—­as though a man who wishes to count things that are small in number supposed he could do it only by enlarging their number. For the ideas are in fact of a roughly equal number as, and certainly not fewer than those entities in search of whose causes these thinkers set off from. For each single entity of which there is a unity over multiplicities [ἓν ἐπὶ πολλῶν] there exists an homonym beyond substances, both for things of our everyday world and for eternal ones. (990a34–­b8)

For Aristotle, the error of the Platonists lies precisely in this separation of the καθόλου: And since the one is said in the same way as being [τὸ ἓν λέγεται ὥσπερ καὶ τὸ ὄν], and the substance [οὐσία] of the one is one, and since things whose substance is numerically one are numerically one, evidently neither the one nor being can be the substance of things, just as neither the essence of the element or of the principle [τὸ στοιχείῳ εἶναι ἢ ἀρχῇ] can be the substance [ . . . ]. Being and the one should be more nearly substance than are the principle [ἀρχή], the element, and the cause; but they are not, since nothing that is common [κοινὸν] is substance. In fact substance cannot be predicated of anything except itself and that which has it and of which it is the substance. The one cannot be at the same time in many ways [πολλαχῇ], while that which is common can be predicated at the same time in many ways. Hence it is clear that nothing that is predicated according to the whole exists beside and separately from singular things [παρὰ τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστα χωρίς]. Those who uphold ideas [τὰ εἴδη] are right in saying that they are separate, since for them they are substances; but they are actually wrong, since they call idea [εἶδος] the one over the many [τὸ ἓν ἐπὶ πολλῶν]. The reason for this is that they cannot explain what are the imperishable substances which exists beside those that are singular and sensible [παρὰ τὰς καθ᾽ ἕκαστα καὶ αἰσθητάς]. They posit these [the ideas] as, according to εἶδος, equal to perishable things (for these we know), and [say] “sameman” [αὐτοάνθρωπον] and “‘samehorse” [αὐτόϊππον], adding the word “same” [αὐτό] to the name of sensible things. (1040b16–­1041a5)

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Aristotle thus reproaches the Platonists for having given a separate substance and existence to what is predicated according to the whole, whereas it is for him evident that the universal—­a s τὸ καθόλου was to be translated into Latin—­can never be a substance, and only exists in individual sensible things. Plato would have therefore substantialized the general term “the man”—­or “the horse”—­and distinguished it from individual men and individual horses; in order to refer to it in its homonymy with respect to sensible things, he would have added to the common noun the pronoun αὐτό: αὐτοάνθρωπος, αὐτόϊππος.

11 It is precisely starting from an analysis of the linguistic expression of the idea that it is possible to show the inadequacy of Aristotle’s interpretation and, at the same time, gain access to a more correct understanding of Plato’s theory. The linguistic expression of the idea through the anaphoric pronoun αὐτό must have been problematic for Aristotle, since in Nicomachean Ethics he states that “those who raise the question as to what precisely they [the Platonists] mean by their expression αὐτοέκαστον would be embarrassed [ἀπορήσειε], since for both man himself [αὐτοάνθρωπος]2 and man [ἄνθρωπος] there is only one defining discourse [λόγος], that of man” (1096a34–­ b1). And, in Metaphysics 1035b 1–­3, evidently alluding to the circle discussed in Plato’s digression, Aristotle writes in the same sense that “we speak homonymously of both the absolute circle [ἁπλῶς λεγόμενος] and the individual circle, since there is no proper name [ἴδιον ὄνομα] for each of them.” It is precisely the use of the pronoun αὐτό, which was aporetic for Aristotle, that enables us to 2. Agamben here translates αὐτοάνθρωπος as uomo stesso; in the previous quotation, he translated it with the neologism stessouomo, “sameman.” Uomo stesso has in Italian the straightforward meaning of “man himself”—­in the sense of his idea, given the Platonic context—­ but the reader should bear in mind that stesso primarily means “same.”—­Translator.

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On the Sayable and the Idea

both mitigate the homonymy between ideas and sensible things and comprehend what was at stake for Plato in the idea. Let us return to the expression that exemplifies the idea in the Seventh Letter: αὐτὸς ὁ κύκλος, the circle itself (and not αὐτόκυκλος, as suggested by Aristotle). The idea does not have a proper name, but neither does it simply coincide with the name. It is rather designated by the adjectival use of the anaphoric pronoun αὐτός, “same.” Unlike names, pronouns do not have a lexical meaning (a sense, Sinn, in Frege’s terms, or a “virtual reference,” in Milner’s). What defines an anaphoric pronoun (such as αὐτός) is that it can designate a segment of reality only insofar as this has already been signified by means of another term endowed with sense. In other words, it implies a relation of co-­reference and of resumption between a term that is lacking virtual reference—­the anaphorizing pronoun—­a nd a term endowed with virtual reference—­ the anaphorized name (Milner 1982, p. 19). Following one of the meanings of the verb ἀναϕέρω, it “resumes” the thing in its having been designated by an antecedent name. Let us consider the following example: “I see a circle. Do you see it too?” The anaphoric pronoun “it,” as such devoid of a virtual reference, acquires a reference through the relation with the term “circle” that precedes it. Let us now reread the passage from the digression: There is something called a circle [κύκλος ἐστί τι λεγόμενον], whose name is the same we have just uttered; second is its λόγος made of names and verbs: “that which at all points has the same distance from the extremes to the center”: here is the λόγος of what is named “round,” “circumference,” or “circle.” Third comes that which is drawn and rubbed out, or turned on a lathe and broken up—­none of which things can befall the circle itself [αυτὸς ὁ κύκλος], around which the other things mentioned have reference, for it is something of a different order from them.

What does the αὐτός refer to? What is “resumed” in it, and in what way? First of all, what is in question here is not simply a

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relation of identity. This is ruled out, not only by Plato’s explicit statement, but also by the grammatical structure of the syntagm. The pronoun αὐτός (juxtaposed to a name in the sense of “same”) is constructed in Greek in two ways, depending on whether it expresses identity (idem in Latin) or ipseity (ipse in Latin): ὁ αὐτὸς κύκλος means “the same circle” (in the sense of identity); on the other hand, αυτὸς ὁ κύκλος means “the circle itself,” in the special sense that I shall now try to clarify, which is the one Plato uses for the idea. While in ὁ αὐτὸς κύκλος the pronoun is in fact inserted between the article and the name, and thus directly refers to the name, in αυτὸς ὁ κύκλος it refers to a syntagm formed by the article and the name. The Greek article “ὁ” originally has the value of an anaphoric pronoun and means the thing insofar as it has been said and named. It is only subsequently that, for this reason, it can acquire the value of the designation Aristotle calls καθ’ ὅλου: “the circle” in general, the universal, as opposed to the individual circle. (The Latins, whose language lacks articles, therefore found it difficult to specify the expression of general terms.) It is moreover evident that the fifth element, the circle itself (αυτὸς ὁ κύκλος), cannot refer—­as Plato keeps on stressing—­to any of the three elements listed in the digression: it refers neither to the name “circle” nor to its virtual reference (which is identical to the definition, corresponding to the universal term “the circle”) or the individual sensible circle (the actual reference). Nor can it refer to the knowledge or the concept that we form out of it in our mind—­Plato is careful to specify this shortly afterwards (Seventh Letter 342c8). What the syntagm resumes can then only be contained in the phrase that opens the list and, at the same time, remains out of it: κύκλος ἐστί τι λεγόμενον (“there is something called a circle,” or, literally, “circle is something said”). That this phrase lies outside of the list, that it is, as it were, prior to the first element, is proved beyond doubt by the fact that the name, which is responsible for the first rank, must refer to it through anaphoric pronouns ᾧ τοῦτ᾽ αὐτό ἐστιν ὄνομα ὃ νῦν ἐφθέγμεθα—­literally, “to which is name that same we have just uttered.”

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‫א‬. Benveniste showed that the original meaning of the Latin potis (and of the Indo-­European pot, from which it derives), which means “master,” actually refers to personal identity, as expressed by a particle (often an adjective or a pronoun, like the Latin ipse) that means “precisely that, he himself ” (like the Hittite pet, an enclitic particle “that returns to the object that was in question in discourse,” or the Latin utpote, “precisely inasmuch,” which designates somebody insofar as he is designated by a given predicate) (Benveniste 1973, p. 74). “While it is difficult to see how a word meaning ‘the master’ could become so weakened in force as to signify ‘himself ’, it is easy to understand how an adjective denoting the identity of a person, signifying ‘him-­self ’, could acquire the sense of ‘master’” (ibid). Benveniste thus shows how the same semantic movement can be found in many languages: not only does the Latin ipsissimus mean “the master” in Plautus, but even in Greek, in the Pythagorean community, αὐτὸς ἔϕα, “he himself has said it,” designated Pythagoras, the teacher par excellence (ibid.). We can supplement Benveniste’s definition by specifying that potis means “something or somebody inasmuch as he assumes the name by which he is nominated or the predicate that is referred to him.” The Platonic use of αὐτός is in this way further clarified: the identity in question here is not numerical or substantial identity, but identity (or, rather, ipseity) insofar as it is defined by having a certain name, by having been said in language in a certain way.

12 Identifying the anaphorized term is, however, far from simple. If we locate it in the term κύκλος, there is a confusion between the circle and the name “circle,” and the sentence that follows (“whose name is the same we have just uttered”) turns out to be superfluous. We are left with the indefinite pronoun τι, which the Stoics would transform into their fundamental ontological category: but, as a pronoun devoid of virtual reference, in order to be resumed anaphorically, it cannot be isolated from the terms that precede and follow it. In all likelihood, it is because he intended

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to stress this inseparability that, instead of using the obvious formulation ἐστί τι κύκλος λεγόμενον, Plato rather writes: κύκλος ἐστίν τι λεγόμενον (Seventh Letter 342b), “circle is something said.” A careful analysis shows that the sentence forms an indivisible whole, in which what is at stake is neither the circle, nor the something, nor the said, but “being-­the said-­circle.” In other words, Plato does not start off from something immediate, but from a being that is already in language, and he then refers back dialectically to the thing itself by means of language. Following the well-­k nown definition of the dialectical method in Republic 511b3–­c2, the non-­presupposed principle (ἀρχὴ ἀνυπόθετος) is reached only through the patient dialectical elimination of what is presupposed (“taking hypotheses not as principles-­ἀρχαί, but as hypotheses”). The circle itself—­which Plato also calls the “birth” (φύσις) of the circle (τοῦ κύκλου τῆς φύσεως [Seventh Letter 342c8])—­is not an unsayable or something that is merely linguistic: it is the circle resumed in and from his being-­said-­circle. What is in question in the syntagm through which Plato designates the idea—­αὐτὸς ὁ κύκλος, the circle itself—­is therefore not, as Aristotle believed, simply a universal “the circle” (ὁ κύκλος): the αὐτός, insofar as it refers to a term already anaphorized by the article, resumes the circle in and from its being-­said, in and from its being of language, and the term circle in and from its designating the circle. For this reason, the “circle” itself, the idea or birth of the circle is not and cannot be any of the four elements. And yet, neither is it simply other than them. It is that which is at each turn in question in each of the four and, at the same time, remains irreducible to them: it is that through which the circle is sayable and knowable. If, as Aristotle claimed, it is true that the idea does not have a proper name, thanks to the αὐτός it is nonetheless not perfectly homonymous with the thing: as “thing itself,” the idea signifies the thing in its pure sayability and the name in its pure naming the thing. As such, that is, insofar as in it the thing and the name are inseparably together within and without every signification, the idea is neither universal nor particular, but, as a third, it neutralizes this opposition.

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On the Sayable and the Idea ‫א‬. In Phaedo (76e), Plato explicitly mentions the anaphoric movement that defines the idea: “If the things of which we always speak do exist, the beautiful, the good, and every essence of that kind, and if we refer back [ἀναφέρομεν] sensible things to them . . .” Plotinus affirms the ontological irreducibility of the anaphor αὐτός, which is thus paradoxically posited as prior to substance, in a particularly clear way: “Knowing is something unitary [ἕν τι], but the one is without the something [ἄνευ τοῦ τι ἕν]. If it were something, it would not be the one itself [αυτοέν], since the ‘itself’ [αὐτό] is prior to the something [πρὸ τοῦ τὶ]” (Plotinus, Enneads 5.3.12).

‫א‬. Frege, who claims that every sign has a sense (Sinn) and a meaning (Bedeutung), observes that sometimes we use a term intending to speak not of its meaning, but of the material reality of that very term (as when we say “the word ‘rose’ has four letters”) or of its sense, independently of its actual referring to a real meaning. It is in order to indicate this special use of the word that we use quotation marks. But what happens if we try to designate the term not in its materiality or sense, but in its meaning something, that is, the name “rose” insofar as it means a rose? Here language comes up against a limit, which no use of quotation marks can claim to bypass: we can name the name “rose” as an object (nomen nominatum), but not the name itself in its actual designating a rose (nomen nominans). This is the sense of the paradox that Frege expressed in the formula “the concept ‘horse’ is not a concept,” and Milner in the axiom “the linguistic term does not have a proper name.” Wittgenstein proposes something similar when he writes that “the name shows that it signifies an object,” but it cannot say the fact that it is signifying it (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus 4.126). What is in question in the idea of the rose, in the rose itself, is this anonymity of the name “rose” (which is why the idea of the rose is homonymous with the rose). Inasmuch as it expresses the impossibility of naming the name “rose” if not by resuming it in the form of the anaphoric pronoun αὐτός, the idea marks the point where the naming power of language must stop and the name’s impossibility of naming itself as naming lets transpire the rose itself, the rose that is purely sayable.

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13 From this perspective one better understands Walter Benjamin’s reading of the idea as a name. According to Benjamin, ideas, which are withdrawn from the sphere of phenomena, are only given in the sphere of their name (or of their having a name): The structure of truth demands a being which in its lack of intentionality resembles that of simple things, but which is superior in its permanence [ . . . ]. Being withdrawn from all phenomenality, the only being to which this power belongs is that of the name. It determines the manner in which ideas are given. But they are not so much given in a primordial language (Ursprache) as in a primordial perception (Urvernehmen), in which words preserve their own naming nobility, as yet not lost in cognitive meaning [ . . . ]. The idea is something linguistic, and more precisely, it is, in the essence of the word, that moment at which the latter is at each turn a symbol. (Benjamin 1977, p. 36)

What is at stake is not simply, as suggested by the quotation from Hermann Güntert that immediately follows this passage, a “deification of words,” but the isolation in language of a sphere alien to signification and irreducible to it: that of the name—­or, rather, of naming, which Benjamin exemplifies by referring back to Adam: “This is not only the attitude of Plato, but the attitude of Adam, the father of the human race as the father of philosophy. Adam’s naming is so far removed from play or chance that it actually affirms the state of paradise as such, a state in which there is as yet no need to struggle with communicative meaning” (ibid., p. 37). The first philosopher who insisted on the radical dissymmetry between the two planes of language—­name and discourse—­ was Antisthenes; he claimed that there cannot be a λόγος, or discourse, of primary and simple substances, but only a name. In Theaetetus, Socrates explicitly refers to this hypothesis, and, speaking about primary elements, he claims the following: “Each in itself and for itself [αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ] can only be named, and no qualification can be added, neither that it is nor that it is not [ . . . ] not even ‘itself ’ [τὸ αὐτὸ], or ‘that’ [ἐκεῖνο], or ‘each’

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[ἕκαστον], or ‘alone’ [μόνον], or ‘this’ [τοῦτο] [ . . . ] It is impossible to say in a discourse one of the primary elements, since it only has a name [ὄνομα γὰρ μόνον ἔχειν]” (Theaetetus 201e ff.). (Proposition 3.221 of the Tractatus makes the same point: “Objects can only be named [ . . . ] I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words”). Plato seeks to confront this dissymmetry. Being located on the plane of language [lingua] in which there are only names, the idea tries to think what happens to individual things for the fact of being named, and becoming homonymous. In other words, the ideas are the opposite of a generality, and yet one can at the same time understand why they have been misunderstood in this sense as a universal. Naming a singularity, the word constitutes it as homonymous, as defined—­prior to its acquisition of any other characteristic or quality—­exclusively by the fact of bearing the same name. The relation between phenomena and the idea is defined not by the participation in common traits, but by homonymy, the pure having a name. And it is this dwelling of the thing beside itself in a pure having a name that Plato tries to designate, against Antisthenes, through the anaphor αὐτό: the “circle itself” (αὐτὸς ὁ κύκλος) seizes the circle not at the level of signification but in its pure having a name, in that pure sayability that alone makes discourse and knowledge possible.

14 In his book Götternamen (On the Names of Gods), Hermann Usener showed the close implication between the formation of religious concepts and that of the names of gods. For Usener, the name is not “a conventional sign of a concept (νόμῳ), or a denomination that grasps the thing in itself and its essence (ϕύσει)”: the name is the precipitate of an impression produced by the sudden clash “with something that is not the self” (Usener 2000 [1896], p. 46). The formation of the name of gods reflects the formation of these linguistic concepts, which proceeds from absolute singularity to the particular and its setting into a concept of kind. The

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event of the name—­the “coinage” of words, following the image Usener prefers to use—­is therefore, especially with regard to the most remote ages, the essential tool for investigating the formation of the concepts and the religious representations of a people. Usener thus shows how for each thing and each important action a “momentary god” (Augenblicksgott) is created in language, a god whose name coincides with that of the act and who, through regular repetition, is transformed into a “particular god” (Sondergott) and later into a personal god. The Roman indigitamenta have preserved the names of divinities that correspond to individual acts or moments of agriculture—­Vervactor, which names the first plowing of fallow land (vervactum); Insitor, which names the act of sowing; Occator, which corresponds to the harrowing of the field; Sterculinus, which refers to fertilization . . . Usener was influenced by the psychological theories of his time, which conceived of knowledge as a process that through repetition and abstraction leads from the particular to the general concept. However, he mentions several times that, with the crystallization of a proper name, the particular god freely expands himself according to his own law, which leads to the formation of always new denominations. In Usener’s research, the divine name thus becomes something similar to the cipher or the internal law of the birth and the historical becoming of divine figures. Developing Usener’s hypothesis perhaps beyond his intentions, we could say that the event of the name and the event of god coincide. The god is the thing or action at the instant of its appearing in the name. In the form of a nomen agentis, it is, in this sense, homonymous with the individual action: Occator is homonymous with harrowing the field; Insitor is homonymous with the act of sowing; Sterculinus is homonymous with the fertilization of the land through manure, and so on; as shown by their evolution into an autonomous figure, they, however, do not simply coincide with the individual act, but rather with its being named. What clearly emerges here is the analogy between Usener’s doctrine and Plato’s theory of ideas: just as, originally, the name does not name a thing through a concept, but a god, so too, in Plato,

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the name does not only name the sensible thing (or a concept), but, first and foremost, its sayability: the idea. The momentary god, like the idea, is a pure sayability.

15 Here the whole modern theory of signification is called into question. This theory is founded on the articulation of three elements: the signifier, the sense (Sinn), and the signified or denotation (Bedeutung), which in turn presupposes the linguistic-­ semantic knot of Aristotle’s On Interpretation: words/concepts/ things (“words insofar as they signify things through concepts,” as the commentators of late antiquity put it). Today, linguists prefer to call sense “virtual reference” and denotation “actual reference,” and admit that, while the definition of the former does not involve any difficulty, explaining in what way a term actually refers to a concrete object is basically impossible. Here the fact that the work of the late Émile Benveniste concluded with the diagnosis—­which somehow stands as a failure for the science of language—­according to which language [lingua] is divided into two separate planes that do not communicate with each other—­ the semiotic and the semantic—­a nd between which there is no passage acquires its full meaning: “The world of the sign is closed. From the sign to the sentence there is no transition, neither through syntagmatization nor otherwise. A moat separates them” (Benveniste 1974,2: 65). Given the sign with its virtual reference, in what way does the latter, actualizing itself, refer to an individual object? (In a letter to Marcus Herz of 21 February 1772, Kant already asked: “How do our representations manage to refer to objects?”). At this point, the question we need to ask is rather: How is it possible that modern logic and psychology have accepted without reservation a completely arbitrary apparatus, as is the Aristotelian one, which consists of introducing in the mind as a concept a character that actually belongs to the name? The inaugural moment of naming—­which is at the origins of the concept and, as such, in the knot of On Interpretation, is mentioned first—­is

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left aside, with a peculiar ἐποχή, as a mere sign. In this way the ontological nexus being-­language—­the fact that being is said in names—­is transposed onto a psychology and a semantics, and, in this way, always already obliterated. Following a process that has long marked the history of Western philosophy, ontology is always already modulated as a gnoseology. On the other hand, the Platonic model, which is not exhausted by a word-­concept-­thing nexus, entails an element—­the idea—­ that expresses the pure fact that being is said. Here knowledge does not need to be explained by means of a psychological process—­which is actually a mythology—­one that starting from the particular, through the repetition of the same sensation and the abstraction of a concept, leads to the general: particular and universal, sensible and intelligible are immediately united in the name through the idea. Ontology does not coincide with the theory of knowledge, but precedes and conditions it (the idea is “that through which every entity is knowable and true,” Plato could thus write in the Seventh Letter, and specify that “knowledge is something different from the nature of the circle itself ” (342a)). In this way, following Benjamin’s profound characterization of Plato’s intention, the idea guarantees at each turn that the object of knowledge cannot coincide with truth. For this, resuming Plato’s gesture, the Stoics therefore added the “sayable” to their theory of signification. For the term “rose” and the concept “the rose” to be able to refer to the individual existing rose, we need to suppose the idea of the rose, the rose in its pure sayability and in its “birth.” Following the correct poetic intuition of the most Platonic of modern poets, “Je dis: une fleur! et hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que le calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets” (Mallarmé 1945, p. 368).3 3. “I say: a flower! and out of the oblivion into which my voice consigns any real shape, as something other than known calyces, there arises musically, the very idea and delicate, the one absent from all bouquets.”—­Translator.

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‫א‬. We always again need to ponder on the division of the plane of language [lingua] into semiotic and semantic, whose philosophical relevance cannot be overestimated. Benveniste, who resumes and develops the Saussurean opposition between langue and parole, characterizes it in the following way: “Semiotics designates the mode of signification proper to the linguistic sign that establishes it as a unit. For the purpose of analysis, it is possible to consider separately the two sides of the sign, but from the stance of signification it is and remains a unit. The only question to which a sign gives rise is that of its existence, which is answered yes or no: tree—­song—­to wash—­ nerve— ­yellow— ­on . . . and not *tro—­* rong—­*dawsh—­*derve—­ *ullow—­*en . . . Taken in itself the sign is pure identity with itself, and pure difference in relation to any other sign [ . . . ]. With the semantic, we enter into the specific mode of signification generated by discourse. The problems raised here are functions of language [langue] as producer of messages. Now the message is not reducible to a succession of units to be separately identified; it is not the addition of signs that produces meaning, rather, it is the meaning conceived globally, which realizes itself and divides itself into particular signs, which are words [ . . . ]. At issue are two distinct orders of notions and two conceptual universes, and this can be further shown by the difference in criteria of validity required by the one and the other. The semiotic (the sign) must be recognized; the semantic (discourse) must be understood. The difference between recognition and understanding entails two separate faculties of the mind [ . . . ]” (Benveniste 1974,2: 225). Every attempt at understanding linguistic signification without taking into account this splitting that divides language is doomed to fail—­and that is the current attempt of semiology and logic, which are ultimately founded on the Aristotelian paradigm. It is in fact totally illegitimate to transfer meaning, which is a property of the sign, to the mind or the soul, nor is it possible to articulate—­as Aristotle does in On Interpretation—­a theory of the proposition—­that is, of the semantic—­starting from a purely semiotic definition of language [lingua]. Plato’s idea has to do with this splitting, of which he was aware in his own way, and which he expresses, for instance, in the opposition between name (ὄνομα) and discourse (λόγος). In the idea, which is homonymous with sensible things and stands as the origins of

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their naming, the sign reaches a threshold, where it crosses into the semantic. The perception of the fracture of the plane of language between the semiotic and the semantic coincides, in this sense, with the origins of Greek philosophy. If Ernst Hoffmann’s interpretation of Heraclitus’s fragment 1 is correct—­a s we think is the case, following Enzo Melandri (2004, pp. 162–­64)—­such a fracture is expressed with clarity precisely at the beginning of the Heraclitean συγγραϕή in the opposition between λόγος (discourse) and ἔπεα (terms, words). Here we read that men do not grasp the λόγος both before and after hearing it, because they stop at the semiotic level of words (ἔπεα) and do not experience what is at stake in the fact of speaking, in language as such.

16 Plato’s strategy becomes at this point more comprehensible. He did not substantialize or separate a generality—­a s Aristotle assumed—­but tried to think a pure sayability, without any conceptual determination. The subsequent passage of the digression clearly specifies it: “The first four [elements] express the quality [τὸ ποῖόν τι] of each thing no less than its being [τὸ ὂν], owing to the weakness inherent in language [ . . . ] of the two things—­ being and the quality—­the soul seeks to know not the quality [τὸ ποιόν τι] but the what [τὸ δὲ τί], while each of the four [elements] proffers to the soul that which it does not seek” (Seventh Letter 342e–­343a; 343b–­c). For this reason, trying to express pure being, or the “birth” of something, Plato had to resort to a pronoun; in fact, ancient grammarians already defined the pronoun as that part of discourse that expresses the substance without quality (Priscian: the pronoun substantiam significat sine aliqua certa qualitate). Yet, unlike Aristotle, Plato did not opt for a deictic pronoun (“every substance signifies a this-­something [πᾶσα ουσία δοκεῖ τόδε τι σημαίνειν]” (Categories 3b10) but for the anaphoric αὐτός. In the quoted passage from Categories, Aristotle distinguishes the primary substance, which signifies a “this,” since it manifests

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something that is one and indivisible (this given man; this given horse), from secondary substances (the man; the horse), which do not imply a deixis, but rather signify a quality (ποιόν τι σημαίνει) (ibid., 12–­16). In any case, the fact is that, for Aristotle, there is a point at which language signifies one (ἓν σημαίνει), that is, unequivocally touches its referent. On the other hand, for Plato, due to the “weakness of language” (τῶν λόγων ἀσθενές [Seventh Letter 343a1]), the only—­ albeit insufficient—­way of manifesting a purely existent thing in its birth is not by indicating it, but by resuming it in and from language through the anaphor αὐτός. In the Timaeus (49d4–­6), the impossibility of designating sensible entities through a deictic and the necessity of using an anaphor to designate them are affirmed without reservation: “Whatsoever sensible thing we perceive to be constantly changing from one state to another, like fire or water, we must never describe as ‘this’ [τοῦτο] but as ‘suchlike’ [τοιοῦτον].” Aristotelian ontology ultimately rests on a deixis; Platonic ontology on an anaphor. But it is precisely this that allows Plato to invoke, through the idea, an ἀρχὴ ἀνυπόθετος, a principle that is not presupposed and beyond being. If the name “circle” predicates both the being and the quality of the circle, in the idea (in the “circle itself ”) the name is resumed from its signifying function and oriented toward the manifestation of the pure being-­said-­circle, that is, toward its sayability. This means that not only the Kantian thesis according to which being is not a real predicate (that is, “the concept of something that is added to the concept of a thing”) is valid also for the Platonic idea, but that Plato never substantialized the idea as a universal—­which could be located somewhere, in heaven or in the mind (following a Platonic doctrine reported by Simplicius, ideas “are nowhere” [Simplicius 1882, p. 453]). What is at stake in a pure sayability; what is disclosed only through a slow and patient anaphoric work that “rubs one against the other names, discourse, visions, and sense-­perceptions” (Seventh Letter 344b4) is nothing other than the event of an opening of the soul, which the digression effectively compares with a light that is kindled by a leaping

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spark: “As a result of continued coexistence with the thing itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself” (ibid., 341c6–­d2). ‫א‬. Why is Plato concerned with the “thing itself ”? Why is it “that which he seriously deals with”? If what is in question in being is the primordial articulation between language and world—­t he fact that “being is said” (τὸ ὂν λέγεται)—­we should then say that, while for Aristotle the articulation takes place between words, things, and concepts, by introducing the idea beyond them, Plato tries to problematize the very fact that the thing is said and named. If thought always already moves from a named world, it can nonetheless refer back to the thing itself in its pure being said, that is, in its sayability, through the anaphoric gesture of the idea. In this way, Plato problematizes the pure and irreducible givenness of language. At this point—­where the name is resumed from and in its naming the thing, and the thing is resumed from and in its being named by the name—­the world and language are in contact, that is, they are united only by an absence of representation.

17 The transposition of the doctrine of ideas into the quaestio de universalibus pursued in late antiquity from Porphyry to Boethius, and then in medieval logic—­is in this sense the worst misunderstanding of Plato’s intention, precisely because, while it seems to affirm the “logical” nature of the idea, it actually severs the particular nexus with the linguistic element that was still evident in the term “sayable.” In Boethius’s commentary on On Interpretation, this separation is completed. The Aristotelian παθήματα τῆς ψυχῆς, which Boethius significantly renders in Latin as intellectus, become the primary object of the vis significativa of language, while the relation to things becomes secondary or derivative: “In fact, while the things that are in the voice mean the things and the concepts [res intellectusque significent], concepts are meant in a primary way, and things, which intelligence comprehends, in

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a secondary way through the mediation of concepts [per intellectum medietatem]” (In Peri Hermeneias 2.33.27). On the other hand, developing the Aristotelian claim according to which the παθήματα and things are the same for all, while words and letters are different, Boethius specifies that, out of the four elements that form the linguistic-­semantic knot, two (res and intellectus) are by nature (naturaliter) and two (nomina and litterae) are by convention (positione). This is the beginning of the process that will lead to the primacy of the concept and to the transformation of the sayable into a mental reality whose identity is totally independent of the word in its auditory materiality. The process of de-­linguisticization of knowledge that would lead to modern science is possible only if the conceptual meaning of the word is, in this way, made autonomous from its variable signifier. As Ruprecht Paqué has shown (1970), this is the case because modern science did not simply originate from the observation of nature, but was first of all made possible by the investigations of Ockham and the medieval logicians who isolated, in the experience of language, the suppositio personalis—­in which the word refers in the act and only as a pure sign to a res extra animam—­and privileged it over all those cases in which the word somehow refers to itself (suppositio materialis). The ancient world could not and did not aspire to have access to modern science, since, in spite of the development of mathematics (significantly in a non-­a lgebraic form), its experience of language—­its ontology—­d id not allow for a reference to the world in a way that could claim to be independent from how it manifested itself in language [lingua]. For this reason, in the excursus of the Seventh Letter, Plato does not in any way privilege the concept, which, like the name, is variable and unstable; and, in the Cratylus, he prefers to leave open the question of whether names are by nature or by convention. Only the reduction of language [lingua] to a neutral signifying tool by Ockham and late nominalism enabled the expunction from linguistic signification of all those aspects—­beginning with self-­reference—­that had

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always been considered as consubstantial with it and that were later relegated to rhetoric and poetry. This does not at all mean that Plato simply intended to conform to reality as it manifested itself through language [lingua] (in his case, the Greek language). It is here that the homonymy between the idea and sensible things shows its full richness. The idea is different from sensible things, but it shares the name with them. The idea, as such invisible and unperceivable, nonetheless irreducibly maintains itself in relation to a sensible linguistic element—­the name—­a nd, by means of it, to the individual sensible entities. For this reason, in the aporetic explanation of the theory of ideas contained in the Parmenides, which calls into question all possible relations between ideas and sensible things—­ separation, participation, and resemblance—­homonymy is the only relation that can never be refuted. Among the absurd consequences entailed by the affirmation of an absolute separation between the ideas and sensible things, Parmenides in fact explicitly mentions that according to which “concrete things, which are for us homonymous with the ideas, are in relation with themselves but not with the ideas, and derive their name from themselves and not from the ideas” (Parmenides 133d). It is only through its relation of homonymy with things that the idea can legitimately claim to put an end to the “civil war names fight with each other” (ὀνομάτων οὖν στασιασάντων [Cratylus 438d]), and not through the generality of the concept, or searching for “other names, different from these”; it is only by showing, through the name itself, “what the truth of entities is” (ibid.). The fifth element of the ontological knot, which Plato by means of the anaphoric syntagm calls the “thing itself,” is not nameable through another name of language [lingua] (I cannot call the idea of the circle “kuboa”; I can only say it “the circle itself ”). What cannot have a proper name is the sayability that is expressed in the name. As purely and unnameably sayable, the thing itself is “beyond names [πλὴν ὀνομάτων, literally, ‘excepted in all names’; πλήν etymologically means ‘near’]” (ibid.).

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‫א‬. The problem of the relationship between the doctrine of the universals and nominalism is complex, and it is not possible—­a s happened at times in philosophical historiography—­to reduce nominalism—­at least prior to Ockham—­to a specific conception of the universals in mente. The stance of the princeps Nominalium of the twelfth century, Peter Abelard, is particularly significant. Abelard’s theory is not a theory of the universal, but of the name, which is different from both the thing (res) and the word (vox), as well as from the concept (intellectus). Like other contemporary logicians, he in fact affirms the unity of the name (unitas nominis) with respect to the variety of paronymous words (adjectives, verbs, etc.). While verbs and terms vary according to tenses and modalities, what is signified in the name is one and immutable in time. This logical thesis had consequences even in the theological field, since it implied that the statement “Christ being born” (Christum esse natum) is true at all times, both before and after his birth. In Bonaventure’s words, who thus summarizes the nominalist theses: “Others claimed that the enunciable [enuntiabile] that is true at one time is always true and is always known in the same way [ . . . ] in this way, some claim that albus, alba, and album, which are three different words and have three different ways of signifying [modi significandi], nonetheless imply the same meaning [unam significationem important], and are one name. That is, they maintain that the unity of the enunciable should be understood not on the side of the word or the way of signifying, but on the side of the signified thing. One and the same thing is first future, then present, and then past; therefore enunciating that this given thing is first future, then present, and then past does not imply any difference of the enunciables, but only of the words [non facit diversitatem enuntiabilium, sed vocum].” As has been observed (Courtenay 1991, pp. 11–­4 8), Abelard’s nominalist theory has in this sense an evident Platonic origin, and an equally evident (even terminological) connection with the doctrine of the sayable, which Abelard calls “enunciable.” For Abelard, the object of knowledge is neither the word, nor the concept, nor simply the thing, but the thing as it is signified by the name: “Certainly, when we maintain that they [the common forms of things] are different from the concepts [ab intellectibus], we introduce as a third element between the thing and the concept the meaning of the names [praeter rem et intellectum tertia exiit nominum significatio]” (Abelard

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1919, p. 18). In this sense, he can write that logic “treats things not considered as such but insofar as they have a name [non propter se, sed propter nomina]” (Rijk 1956, p. 99), and that, nonetheless, logic and physics are inseparable, since it is necessary to investigate whether “the nature of things agrees with the statement [rei natura consentiat enuntiationi]” (ibid., p. 286).

‫א‬. The idea carries the sayable toward the utmost abstraction with respect to language [lingua], but this abstraction is not that of the concept, but rather that which still keeps the sayable in relation to that truth of the entity toward which all the names and all the languages [lingue] tend without ever reaching it—­and not to the names of a language [lingua]. The idea is the purely sayable, which is what is meant by all names, but which no name or concept of a language [lingua] can reach by itself. Arnaldo Momigliano claimed that the limit of the Greeks was that they did not speak foreign languages [lingue]—­which is true, up to a certain point; however, Plato and Aristotle perfectly well knew that one and the same thing is named in different ways according to the various languages [lingue] (this is implicit in the passage of the Seventh Letter in which Plato says that names have no stability, and in the thesis of On Interpretation according to which words are not the same for all men). The name κύκλος names the same thing that is meant by the Latin circulus and by the Italian cerchio: but the circle itself is in each language [lingua] named only homonymously. We could then say that, after all, the linguistic element that belongs to the idea—­the sayable—­is not simply the name, but the translation, or what is translatable in the name. Benveniste identified in translation the point at which one grasps the difference between semiotic and semantic. In fact, we can transpose the semantism of a language [lingua] into that of another (this is the possibility of translation), but not the semiotism of a language [lingua] into that of another (this is the impossibility of translation). At the crossroad between a possibility and an impossibility, translatability is thus located on the threshold that unites and divides the two planes of language. From here follows its philosophical relevance, which Benjamin highlighted. The arduous passage from the semiotic to the semantic is here looked for not within a language [lingua], but, through the plurality of languages [lingue], in the accomplished

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totality of their intentions. For this reason, as Mallarmé sensed, with respect to the idea a perfect language is inevitably lacking (les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieures, manque la suprême). According to Plato, what replaces it is the logos of philosophy, which takes every language [lingua] back to its museic roots, philosophy being “the supreme music” (φιλοσοφίας [ . . . ] οὔσης μεγίστης μουσικῆς [Phaedo 61a]), if not indeed “the muse herself” (αὕτη ἡ Μοῦσα [Republic 499d]).

18 The problem of the idea cannot be separated from the problem of its place. The fact that the ideas have their place (ἔχει τὸν τόπον) “beyond heaven” (ὑπερουράνιον τόπον [Phaedrus 247c]) can only mean that they “are not in a place,” Aristotle (οὐκ ἐν τόπῳ [Physics 209b34]) and Simplicius (μηδὲ ὅλως ἐν τόπῳ [1882, p. 453]) observe. And yet, although they do not have a place and, for this reason, run the risk of not being (“that which is neither in heaven nor on earth is nothing” [Timaeus 52b], ideas are essentially linked—­a lbeit in a “very aporetic way [ἀπορώτατά, literally, ‘wholly impracticable’],” which is “most difficult to grasp [δυσαλωτότατον (Timaeus 51b]”—­with the taking place of sensible entities, which are imprinted by them [τυπωθέντα ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν] in a manner that is “difficult to express and wonderful [δύσφραστον καὶ θαυμαστόν (Timaeus 50c)].” Given that the theory of place (χώρα) developed in the Timaeus has been read in the history of philosophy—­at least starting from Aristotle—­as a doctrine of matter, the question is here, on the same terms, that of the relation between the ideas and matter. Let us briefly summarize the exposition of the Timaeus. Plato begins with the acknowledgment of the insufficiency of the positing of two kinds of being, the intelligible and eternal paradigm (the idea), and its imitation, the sensible. A “third and different kind” (τρίτον ἄλλο γένος [48e]) is therefore introduced as a requirement or an indispensable postulate (the λόγος “compels”—­ εἰσαναγκάζειν—­u s to “make it appear”—­ἐμφανίσαι [49a]). Its nature, “difficult and obscure,” is not properly defined, but

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described through a series of successive qualifications. First of all, it is the “receptacle” (ὑποδοχή) of every generation. All sensible things, which are incessantly generated and destroyed, need something “wherein” (ἐν ᾧ) to appear, just as figures modeled out of gold need metal in order to take shape (from this image, Aristotle probably deduced that what is in question here is the matter of bodies). This “nature that receives all bodies” is always the same and must be in itself devoid of form; it is amorphous, like a “coining material” (ἐκμαγεῖον [50c]; the term contains the idea of a “mixture,” see μάσσω, μάκτρα) that can assume the imprints of all the forms that it receives. This imprint-­bearer is thus compared with a “mother”; that from which it receives the imprint with the “father”; and the intermediate nature between the two with a “son.” If the mother were not devoid of her own form, the imprint (ἐκτυπώμα) that she receives would not be visible, since her own form “would be shown beside” (παρεμϕαινόμενον; Aristotle uses the same verb in On the Soul 429a20 to specify that if the material intellect showed its own form beside that of the intelligible intellect, it would hinder comprehension). The third kind, the mother—­a receptacle and imprint-­bearer—­is therefore an “invisible species” (ἀνόρατον εἶδός; in Greek the term is somehow contradictory) and lies “by nature outside the forms or ideas [ἐκτὸς εἰδῶν (51a)]”; and yet it “participates in a very aporetic way, which is most difficult to grasp” in the intelligible. At this stage, in a sort of vertiginous recapitulation, Plato concludes that we have to admit to (ὁμολογητέον; the verb ὁμολογεῖν, to confess, designates a truth that must be acknowledged) three kinds of being: (1) an ungenerated, incorruptible kind that does not receive anything in it, is never transferred into something else, and is invisible and non-­sensible (ἀναίσθητον), but can be contemplated by the intelligence; (2) a kind homonymous with and similar to the first that is incessantly generated and destroyed somewhere (ἔν τινι τόπῳ) and can be apprehended by opinion accompanied by sensation (μετ᾽ αἰσθήσεως); and (3) eternal, indestructible space (χώρα), which makes room (ἕδρα) for generated things and is “tangible through a kind of

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bastard reasoning accompanied by an absence of sensation [μετ᾽ ἀναισθησίας ἁπτὸν λογισμῷ τινι νόθῳ], which is barely credible. Looking at it as if dreaming, we affirm that it is necessary that everything that is must be in some place and occupy some space [ἔν τινι τόπῳ καὶ κατέχον χώραν] and that that which is neither in heaven nor on earth is nothing” (52a–­b).

19 Carlo Diano was the first to notice that Plato designates the knowableness of the χώρα in a very peculiar way. Not only because “tangible” (an adjective he elsewhere uses exclusively with reference to sensible bodies) strongly contrasts with “anaesthesia”—­or absence of sensation—­but also and especially because rather than using one of the usual formulas “χωρίς” or “ἄνευ αἰσθήσεως”—­ without sensation—­he prefers the paradoxical expression “with anaesthesia; accompanied by an absence of sensation” (Diano 1973). What do we perceive when we perceive an “absence of sensation”? What does Plato mean when he writes that perceiving the taking place of something does not simply entail not perceiving, but perceiving an absence of sensation, feeling an anaesthesia? While the idea is simply non-­sensible (ἀναίσθητον), anaesthesia becomes tangible here, and is perceived as such. The “bastard” character of the reasoning that perceives the χώρα, as if dreaming, derives from the fact that it seems to mix the first two forms of knowableness, the intelligible and the sensible. If Plato can write that the χώρα participates in the intelligible—­a lbeit in a way that is difficult to grasp—­this is because the idea and space communicate with each other via the absence of sensation, as if the anaesthesia that negatively defines the idea acquired here a positive character and became a very special form of perception. Commenting on this passage from the Timaeus, Plotinus specifies that when the soul perceives matter through a bastard reasoning, it nonetheless does not think nothing, but receives and suffers something: “Is this πάθος, this passion of the soul the same as when it thinks nothing? No, since when it thinks nothing, it does

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not say or even suffer anything. When instead it thinks matter, it suffers an affection that is like the imprint of shapelessness [τύπον τοῦ ἀμόρϕου]” (Enneads 2.4.10). If Plato used the metaphor of the imprint, writing that the χώρα—­in a way that is most difficult to explain and wonderful—­“receives an imprint” (τυπωθέντα [Timaeus 50c]) from the ideas, here the relation is inverted: it is the ideas that receive an imprint from what is amorphous. Leaving aside the mystical nuance that Plotinus seems to confer on it, what is decisive here is that the χώρα questions and neutralizes the simple opposition between the intelligible and the sensible, which turns out to be inadequate. In the aporetic explanation of the theory of ideas in the Parmenides, Plato showed how the absolute separation between ideas and sensible things (thinking of them χωρίς, that is, separately; resuming this argument for his critique, Aristotle speaks of a χωρισμός, a separation) leads to absurd consequences. Perhaps replying to critiques already circulating in the Academy, Plato ingeniously answers the aporias of the χωρίς and the χωρισμός with the felicitous pun of the χώρα. At the point where we manage to perceive anaesthetically and impurely not only the sensible but its taking place, the intelligible and the sensible communicate with each other. The idea, which does not take place either in heaven or on earth, takes place in the taking place of bodies, with which it coincides. This is what Plato says with unusual resoluteness a few lines later: “To the aid of what really is there comes the actually true discourse, showing that so long as one thing is separated from another [that is, the idea and the sensible], neither of the two can enter into the other to become one thing and, at the same time, two things [ἓν ἅμα ταὐτὸν καὶ δύο γενήσεσθον]” (Timaeus 52 c–­d). ‫א‬. The term χώρα means the unoccupied place or space that a body can occupy. It is etymologically connected with words that involve a privation, what is left when something is taken away: χήρα, widow, and χῆρος, void. The verb χωρέω means “making space, giving room.” The meaning “to separate” in χωρίς, χωρισμός, and χωρίζειν

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can easily be explained: making space or giving room to something means separating it. ‫א‬. Plotinus dedicated an entire treatise to the Platonic theory of space, which ancient editions already catalogued as On Matter or On the Two Matters (Enneads 2.4). He in fact accepts the Aristotelian proposition that Plato identifies space with matter (“In the Timaeus, Plato says that matter—­ὕλη—­a nd the χώρα are the same thing” [Aristotle, Physics 209b13]); but since he realizes that the χώρα questions the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, he has to admit the existence of two matters, one intelligible, which concerns the ideas, the other earthly, which concerns sensible things. In the “bastard reasoning” of the Timaeus, Plotinus sees an attempt to think the absence of form of the χώρα through the idea of the undefined (ἀοριστία). The resulting reasoning is of a “bastard” kind because it is, to the same extent, a non-­k nowledge (ἄνοια) and an aphasia (ἀϕασία); and yet it still contains something positive: “What is this indeterminateness of the soul? Perhaps a non-­k nowledge and an aphasia? Or rather indeterminateness consists of a certain positive discourse [ἐν καταϕάσει τίνί], and, just as for the eye obscurity is the matter of every visible colour, so the soul, taking away, so to speak, every light from sensible things, and being no longer able to define what is left, becomes similar to the vision one has in darkness and identifies itself with that darkness of which it has a sort of vision” (Enneads 2.4.10). A few pages earlier, Plotinus stresses the impervious character of thinking matter as a process that takes us to the abyss of every being. If every being is composed of matter and form, the thought that tries to think matter “divides this duality until it reaches something simple that it can no longer divide and, to the extent that it is possible, it separates it, it gives it room up to the abyss [χωρεῖ εἰς τὸ βάθος]. The abyss of each thing is matter. For this, every matter is obscure, because language is light and thought is language. And since thought sees language on all things, it deems that what lies beneath it is darkness, just as the eye, which has the form of light, looking at light and colours, deems what is hidden by colours to be obscure and material” (2.4.5). In what seems to be an accurate description of a mystical experience, Plotinus actually seizes the irrefutable fact that the bastard λογισμός that gives access to the χώρα is still an experience

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of language [lingua] (κατάϕασίς is the logical term for affirmation, for saying something about something). Going through signifying language up to its limit—­the abyss—­thought touches the χώρα, that is, the pure taking place (in Plotinus’s term, the matter) of each entity. The pure taking place of things corresponds to the pure dwelling of language [lingua] at the limit of signification, and to language’s [lingua] bare giving of itself.

20 Just as the misunderstanding of the idea as a “universal” has compromised the possibility of its correct interpretation, so the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic identification of the χώρα with matter has lastingly influenced the history of its reception. It is significant that the misunderstanding of the idea coincides with its confusion with abstraction (ἀϕαίρεσις) in the same way as the χώρα is understood as what is left of a body if it is abstracted from its affections. Aristotle writes in Physics that “insofar as place seems to be the extension [διάστημα] of size, it is matter [ὕλη], which is different from size. It is what is surrounded and defined by form, as if it were a plane or limit. And this is precisely matter and the undefined [τὸ ἀόριστον]. If we in fact take away [ἀϕαιρηθῇ] the limit and the affections of a sphere, what is left is nothing other than matter. For this, in the Timaeus, Plato says that matter and the χώρα are the same thing” (209b6–­11). It is beyond doubt that Aristotle is here misunderstanding Plato: not only does Plato not use an abstractive process to define the χώρα, but Aristotle himself knows perfectly well that, as he writes shortly afterwards, unlike matter, place can be separated from the thing (“the form and matter cannot be separated—­οὐ χωρίζεται—­from the thing, place can” [209b22–­23]. Plato is likewise always careful to distinguish the third kind from the second, that is, space from the sensible bodies that are generated in it. It is however the case that the Aristotelian conception of matter has been so influenced by the Platonic doctrine of the χώρα,

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that it tends to overlap with it in many regards; but even if we were happy to incautiously accept—­as subsequent tradition did, from the Neoplatonists to Descartes—­the hypothesis of their identification, we should nonetheless specify that Plato thinks of matter not as a res extensa, but as the taking place of every body. The taking place of a body is that which, distinct from the body, somehow relates it to the intelligible: for this reason, the idea—­the intelligibility or sayability of every entity—­takes place in the taking place of the sensible. ‫א‬. Soon after the passage we quoted, Aristotle adds that “what is capable of participating [τὸ μεταληπτίκόν] and the χώρα are the same thing. Although [Plato] calls in different ways what is capable of participating in the Timaeus and in the so-­c alled unwritten teachings [ἐν τοῖς λεγομένοις ἀγράϕοις δόγμασιν], he nonetheless claimed that the place and the χώρα are the same thing. Everybody claims that the place is something, but he is the only one who tried to say what it is” (Physics 209b10–­16). Even though the term μεταληπτίκόν does not appear in the Timaeus (as we have seen, however, with respect to the participation of the χώρα in intelligibility, Plato uses a similar term: μεταλάμβανον), Aristotle seems here to refer to a terminology that was current in the Academy for designating the χώρα as that which enables the participation of the sensible in the intelligible. Soon afterwards, he again uses the same term, this time in order to formulate an objection: “If we are allowed a digression, we should ask Plato why the ideas and numbers are not in a place, if place is what is capable of participating, whether this is the big and small or matter, as written in the Timaeus” (209b33–­210a1). If Plato does not deny the hypothesis according to which the idea has no place—­in spite of affirming that the χώρα enables a “very aporetic” participation of the sensible in the intelligible—­this is because, if the idea took place in the χώρα, it would then be another sensible thing beside the generated bodies—­which is what Aristotle believes; he in fact sees in the ideas a useless duplicate of sensible things. If, on the other hand, one says that the idea does not have its own place, but takes place in the taking place of sensible things, the idea and the sensible will then be, at the same time, two and one (ἅμα ταὐτὸν καὶ δύο). The idea is neither the thing nor another thing: it is the thing itself.

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21 In the section of his Système du monde dedicated to the Platonic theory of space, Pierre Duhem suggests that the “bastard reasoning” at stake in the Timaeus is nothing other than “geometrical reasoning, which is founded both on the νόησις and, through the imagination that accompanies it, on the αἴσθησις” (Duhem 1913, p. 37). Duhem’s extraordinary knowledge of scientific theories has here grasped, against the mystical interpretation of the Neoplatonists, an essential point of the theory of the χώρα. In fact, it goes without saying that, like Archytas and the geometers of his age, Plato knew perfectly well that space is what makes possible the construction of geometry, whose knowledge he set as one of the necessary preconditions for entering the Academy. For this reason, shortly after defining the χώρα, he shows how the demiurge produces in it the elements through isosceles and scalene triangles and following precise numerical ratios (Timaeus 53a–­55c). We reach here the notions that lie at the basis of the Platonic conception of science. The “reasoning” of the geometer (following the prevalent meaning of the term both in Greek and in Plato’s own use, λογισμός should more exactly be translated as “calculation”) is a bastard one—­that is, it pertains at the same time to the intelligible and the sensible—­since it does not immediately refer to the sensible bodies, but to their pure taking place in space. Unlike the λόγος of natural languages [lingue]—­and yet contiguously to it—­the λογισμός of mathematics enables us to overcome the “weakness” of names—­which always give us the being and the quality of the thing together—­thanks to a pure quantum of signification, which, however, does not signify a thing or a concept, but only the giving itself, the pure “taking place” of something. The essential connection between the χώρα and language [lingua] is here clearly shown: the χώρα—­the space and the taking place of each thing—­is what appears when we take away, one after the other, the semantic elements of discourse, and move toward a purely semiotic dimension of language [lingua], not in the direction of a writing but in that of a voice. In other words, the χώρα is

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the threshold at which the semiotic and the semantic, the sensible and the intelligible, numbers and ideas seem to coincide for an instant. If the idea grasps, in the name, the limit of the semantic, the μάθημα touches, in the χώρα, the limit of the semiotic.

22 A terminological analysis of Greek geometry provides us with enlightening results. Let us turn to the definition that opens Euclid’s Elements: σημεῖόν ἐστιν, οὗ μέρος οὐθέν. The current translation “a point is that which has no part” does not enable us to grasp the decisive fact—­in all senses—­t hat, in Greek, the “point” is called “sign” (σημεῖον). A correct translation would therefore be: “There is a sign, of which there is no part.” That is, the notion that founds geometry is that of a “quantum of signification” (with his usual clarity, Bernhard Riemann says: “The determined parts of a set, distinguished by a note or a demarcation, are called quanta”). This is all the more relevant since we know it was precisely Plato and the members of his school who claimed the necessity of replacing the more ancient term for “point,” στιγμή (the trace left by an object through the act of στίζειν, “stinging”) with σημεῖον, in order to stress the connection with linguistic signification: the point is not a material entity, but a quantum of signification (see Mugler 1959). In Plato’s intention, this implies that while philosophy can reach the idea—­which is homonymous with sensible things—­ only by patiently going through names, propositions, and concepts (the Seventh Letter says “rubbing one against the other”), mathematics rather moves on a “bastard” level, in which quanta of signification—­not of words, but of numbers—­enable us to keep together aporetically intelligible and sensible elements. What is involved for the geometer is not a sensible body in its name and its qualities, but its pure taking place indicated by the way a pure signifier (a “sign of which there is no part”) gives itself.

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‫א‬. An examination of the definition of the monad in book 7 (definition 1) of Euclid’s Elements—­μονάς ἐστιν, καθ᾽ ἣν ἕκαστον τῶν ὄντων ἓν λέγεται—­yields an analogous outcome. Let us ponder on the peculiar tautology present in the current translation: “A unity is that by virtue of which each entity is said to be one.” The definition stops being tautological only if we understand that what is decisive here is the “being said”: the monad is not a real entity, but what results from the pure signifying relation between the word and the thing. “One” is what is said, if we consider in itself the pure relation between language and its reference. For this reason, Aristotle could write that the mathematician “contemplates the attributes, but not insofar as they refer to a substance: that is, he separates [χωρίζει] them. By means of thought they are separable from movement”; and added that the supporters of the theory of ideas do the same thing without realizing it: “They separate natural things, which are less separable than mathematical ones” (Physics 193b32–­194a1). Separating the attributes from their reference to a substance means having at one’s disposal a language—­the mathematical language—­capable of suspending its denotation, that is, its referring to a given real object, while nonetheless preserving the bare form of the relation.

23 In this perspective, it is possible to understand why the ideal of Platonic science could be expressed—­following Simplicius’s testimony—­through the phrase “saving appearances” (τὰ ϕαινόμενα σῴζειν). In his commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens, Simplicius describes the problem that Plato assigned to science (in this case, astronomy) in the following terms: “Having admitted in principle that celestial bodies move according to a circular movement, which is uniform and constantly regular, Plato posed the following problem to mathematicians: ‘What are the circular, uniform and perfectly regular movements that we need to take as a hypothesis in order to save the appearances of errant planets [διασῳθῆναι τὰ περὶ τοὺς πλανομένους ϕαινόμενα]?’” (Duhem 1908, p. 3).

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If the task of the mathematician is completed with the saving of appearances, this means that, once this aim is reached, he should refrain from identifying the supposed movements of the stars with the real ones. As Duhem writes, “astronomy does not grasp the essence of celestial things, but provides us only with an image. And this image is not exact, but approximate [ . . . ] The geometrical artifices that we need as hypotheses to save the apparent movements of the stars are neither true nor plausible. They are pure concepts that cannot be transformed into reality without formulating absurdities” (ibid., p. 23). Simplicius can thus affirm that the fact that astronomers propose different hypotheses to explain the same phenomenon does not amount to a problem: It is evident that the fact that opinions regarding hypotheses diverge is not an objection. The aim we have is to know which hypotheses manage to save appearances. We should not be surprised if other astronomers have tried to save phenomena starting from different hypotheses [ . . . ]. To save irregularity, astronomers imagine that each star moves with many movements; some hypothesize eccentric or epicyclical movements, other invoke homocentric spheres [ . . . ]. But just as the stillness and retrograde movements of planets or the addition and subtraction of numbers found in the study of movement are not considered to be real, so an exposition conforming to truth does not consider its hypotheses as if they were real [ . . . ]. Astronomers are happy to conclude that it is possible, through circular and uniform movements that always go in the same direction, to save the appearances of errant stars. (ibid., pp. 25–­27)

If, from the stance of Platonic science, mathematical hypotheses should be satisfied with saving appearances and not claim to be identical with reality, this is because, in the end, mathematics refers to quanta of signification and not to real entities. It locates itself on the semiotic threshold of language [lingua], but cannot claim to overcome it.

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24 It is only this location of numbers and ideas with respect to language that enables us to put the controversial issue of how Plato understood the relation between ideas and numbers into some order. As in all instances in which the so-­called unwritten teachings are at stake, ancient testimonies are no less contrasting than the opinions of modern scholars. Aristotle himself—­who at any rate informs us that Plato distinguished “beside sensible objects and ideas, as an intermediate [μεταξύ] between them, the mathematical elements of things [τὰ μαθηματικὰ τῶν πραγμάτων], which differ from sensible things since they are motionless and eternal, and from ideas since there are many alike, while every idea is in itself one and singular”—­seems to put numbers and ideas into contact up to the point of confusing them. He affirms that “like the Pythagoreans, Plato said that numbers are the cause of the οὐσία of other things” (Metaphysics 987b14–­25). In his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Alexander of Aphrodisias decidedly identifies ideas with numbers: “Numbers are the first entities. And since forms are primary and ideas come before the things that exist in relation to them and draw being from them [ . . . ] [Plato] said that ideas are number [τὰ εἴδη ἀριθμοὺς ἔλεγεν] [ . . . ]. Moreover, ideas are the principles of other things, while the principles of ideas, which are numbers, are the principles of numbers, and he said that the principles of numbers are unity and duality” (Alexander of Aphrodisias 1891, p. 56). Not without reason, Simplicius objects to Alexander that “while it is very likely that Plato said that the principles of all things are the one and undetermined duality [ . . . ] from this cannot follow that he said that undetermined duality, which he called big and small in referring to matter, is also the principle of ideas, for he limited matter to the sensible world [ . . . ] and after all he also said that ideas are knowable through thought while matter is ‘credible through a bastard reasoning’” (Simplicius 1882, p. 151). The neutralization of the dichotomy between ideas and sensible things made possible by the χώρα—­which is also the condition of possibility for geometry

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and mathematics—­leads Alexander to reduce numbers to ideas, and Simplicius firmly reacts against this. Contradictions can be solved if we observe that ideas and numbers—­which are ontologically proximate—­are however clearly distinct insofar as they are located in two different regions with regard to language. While ideas cannot fully be detached from names, mathematical symbols are what result from language’s pure giving of itself, that is, they are quanta of signification that express the way the signifying relation between language and the world gives itself, without any concrete denotation. In other words, idea and number, philosophy and mathematics, are located in different experiences of the limits of language; the idea is the limit of the semantic, whereas the number is the limit of the semiotic. In this sense—­insofar as it expresses the bare semiotic relation between language and the world without any semantic reference to a determined real object—­mathematics may appear as the purest form of ontology. From here follow the recurrent attempts to identify ontology with mathematics, a recent example of which is Alain Badiou’s thesis that, given that “mathematics is ontology” (2005, p. 4), it is possible to rewrite first philosophy in terms of set theory. Against this confusion of two close, yet different, planes, we need to recall that, for Plato, ontology—­a ssuming that it makes sense to define in his thought something like an ontology—­properly begins only with the plane of names. His philosophy, at least to the best of our knowledge, is decidedly situated on the plane of natural language [lingua] and tries to orient itself in it, without ever abandoning it, through a patient and prolonged dialectical exercise aimed in the end at returning to the ideas, which are and remain homonymous with sensible things. Obviously, mathematics too presupposes language (we strictly know nothing of the mathematics of a world without language); however, it is not simply located—­like dialectic—­within language, but maintains itself in the pure relation between language and the world, in the bare signification without meaning. Sensible bodies giving themselves in the name is matched by their pure position

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(θέσις), their taking place in the χώρα. Insofar as they both look at the knowableness of the world, the mathematician and the philosopher are close neighbors: yet, as is the case with the poet and the philosopher, the experiences of language in which the mathematician and the philosopher move are different and hardly communicate with each other.

25 If science and philosophy lose consciousness of their proximity and difference, they to the same extent also lose the awareness of their respective tasks. For, if the Platonic definition of their aporetic relation is valid, they can pursue their ends only by maintaining themselves in reciprocal tension. As a contemplation of ideas in names, philosophy most constantly moves itself beyond them toward the limits of language, which, however, it cannot overcome with its terminology, just as science, which tries to save phenomena that are continuously mixed and confused by the “errant cause” (πλανομένη αἰτία [Timaeus 48a]), can only tend—­ without ever fully succeeding—­to translate its discourse into that of natural languages [lingue]; the experiment is the place in which this translation is carried out. Today, the paradigm of Platonic science, which has never fully disappeared in Western science, is going through a crisis we seem unable to unravel. Science’s renunciation of a linguistic exposition—­which has become evident in post-­quantum physics—­goes together with philosophy’s inability to confront the limits of language. A philosophy without ideas, that is, a purely conceptual philosophy, which thus becomes an always less useful ancilla scientiae, is matched by a science that is unable to think its relation with the truth that dwells in natural languages. The division of philosophy into two fields—­e ven institutionally and geographically non-­communicating—­that we take for granted reflects the loss of the element—­the χώρα of language [lingua]—­in which philosophy and science could have communicated. On the one hand, one tries at all costs to formalize natural

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language [lingua], excluding from it as “poetical” what constitutively belongs to it; on the other hand—­forgetting that philosophy, although it dwells in language [lingua], must incessantly question the limits of language precisely insofar as it goes back to its museic roots (it is, actually, itself a Muse: αὕτη ἡ Μοῦσα)—­ one ends up invoking, in a symmetrically opposite gesture, the deus ex machina of poetry as if it were an external principle. It is only starting from this aporia, that is, from the loss of the passage (πόρος) and the experience (πεῖρα) that could reconnect philosophy and science, that we can explain the apparently unlimited domination of a technology that both philosophers and scientists seem to observe in dismay. Technology is not an “application” of science: it is the consequential product of a science that no longer can or wants to save appearances, but obstinately tends to replace its hypotheses with reality, to “realize” them. The transformation of the experiment—­which now takes place through machines that are so complex that they do not have anything to do with real conditions, but purport to force them—­eloquently shows that the translation between languages is no longer at stake. A science that renounces saving appearances can only aim at their destruction; a philosophy that no longer calls itself into question, through the ideas, in language [lingua], loses its necessary connection with the sensible world.

26 The theory of the χώρα reemerges in the seventeenth century with the Cambridge Platonists at a peculiar crossroad between theology and science. In the correspondence between the most visionary of them, Henry More, and Descartes, the term χώρα is never uttered, and yet, for More, it is indeed a question of vindicating against Descartes the irreducibility of space to matter. If, as Descartes does, we identify extension with matter, there is no longer room for God in the world. On the other hand, there rather exists an immaterial extension that is an attribute of being as such. Appropriating his definition of matter in order to

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overturn it, More writes to Descartes: “Reason makes me believe that God is, in his own way, extended, and that he is everywhere present and intimately fills the whole machinery of the world and each of its parts. How could he in fact communicate movement to matter [ . . . ] if he, so to speak, did not touch it, or had once not touched it? [ . . . ] God is therefore extended and in his own way expanded: God is, consequently, an extended thing [Deus igitur suo modo extenditur atque expanditur; ac proinde est res extensa]” (Descartes 1953, pp. 96–­98). In other words, for More, there is a “divine extension [divina extensio],” and to characterize it he invokes, “along with the Platonists [cum platonicis suis],” the verses by Virgil that will later become the insignia of pantheism: “totamque infusa per artus / mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet” (ibid., p. 100).4 This absolute space, infinite and immobile, in which, like in the Platonic χώρα, all movements and all phenomena are produced, is something that we cannot imagine not to exist (“disimagine” [More 1655, p. 335]), and, in More’s thought, it increasingly tends to be identified with God: “This infinite and immobile Extension is something that is not only real but divine [Divinum quiddam].” Not without irony, he observes that in this way he “gets God back in the world by the same door through which Cartesian philosophy thought to chase him away,” that is, the res extensa (More 1671, p. 69). At this point metaphysics and theology coincide, and More can list a series of divine “names” or “titles” that perfectly suit the deified space: One, Simple, Immobile, Eternal, Perfect, Independent, Existing in itself, Subsisting by itself, Incorruptible, Necessary, Immense, Uncreated, Omnipresent, Incorporeal, All-­penetrating, All-­embracing. And he adds: “Moreover, I omit that God is called by the cabbalists Makom, that is, Place” (p. 71). It is legitimate to discern in the definition of this deified space something more than an echo of the words that conclude the Timaeus, where the χώρα, “that has received in itself all living creatures both mortal and immortal,” is described as “a perceptible 4. “The mind that is diffused throughout the limbs activates the whole mass and mingles with the vast body.”—­Translator.

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god [θεὸς αἰσθητός], image of the intelligible,” that “embraces all visible things” and is “most great and supremely good, fair, and perfect” (92c). It is this divine place of all beings, this absolute space that, a few years later, and using an inventive image, Newton will define in his Optics as God’s sensorium: “There is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space, as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to him” (Newton 1730, p. 370; see also Koyré 1962, p. 201).

27 Four centuries earlier, two exceptional minds, about whom we know little more than the name, already unreservedly identified God with the χώρα. No work by Amalric of Bena has been preserved; however, we know from indirect sources and citations that he interpreted the Pauline statement according to which “God is fully in everything” in a radically pantheistic sense and, at the same time, as a theological unfolding of the Platonic doctrine of the χώρα. The source that attributes the pantheistic thesis to Amalric derides its consequences: if God is fully in everything, then God is a stone in the stone, a mole in the mole, a bat in the bat, and we should then worship the mole and the bat. However, the anonymous polemicist shortly afterwards quotes Amalric’s theses, which enable us to interpret correctly his intuition and refer it back to their Platonic source: “Everything that is in God is God; but all things are in God [ . . . ] hence God is everything.” God is everything since, like the χώρα, he is the place of everything. God is in each thing as the place in which each thing is: he is the taking-­place of every entity and, for this reason, and this only, identifies with them. It is not the mole and the stone that are divine: what is divine is the being mole of the mole; the being stone of the stone; their pure taking place in God. An extraordinary fragment by David of Dinant—­whose work was prohibited in 1215 by the Statutes of the University of Paris

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together with that of the Amalricians—­has been preserved among the papers of his Quaternuli (which mostly concern questions of physics and medicine). The editors have entitled it “Hyle, mens, deus,” “Matter, Mind, God.” Here, with a stroke of genius that Thomas Aquinas calls “madness,” and invoking the authority of the above-­mentioned passage from the Timaeus, David affirms the absolute identity between God, mind, and matter (following the post-­A ristotelian tradition, ὕλη here signifies the χώρα): From this we deduce that the mind and matter are the same thing. Plato agrees with that, when he says that the world is a perceptible god. The mind of which I speak, and which I claim to be one and unmoved, is nothing other than God. If the world is God himself as accessible to the senses beyond himself—­a s Plato, Zeno, Socrates, and many others have said—­then the matter of the world is God himself, and the form that befalls matter is nothing other than God making himself perceptible.

Through matter—­χώρα—­God and the mind become identical. The theory of the χώρα finds its ultimate truth only from the pantheistic stance of the waiving of the opposition between God and the world; and, conversely, pantheism acquires its authentic and unmatchable meaning only if it is founded on the theory of the χώρα.

28 The sayable experienced a lasting resurgence in the fourteenth century through the work of Gregory of Rimini. Philosophers and theologians discussed whether the object of knowledge was the proposition (the linguistic-­mental knot in which it is expressed) or an extra animam reality. Gregory brilliantly inserts a tertium between the two terms of this false alternative: the true object of knowledge—­a nd, consequently, the truth that is at stake in language—­is neither the proposition (the enuntiatum) nor the object that exists outside the mind, but the enuntiabile—­or the complexe significabile, or also the meaning (significato) of the

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proposition—­whose specific mode of being Gregory attempts to define beyond being and nonbeing, mind and extra-­mental reality. In a passage from Categories (12b5–­16), Aristotle wrote that while affirmation and negation (e.g., “he sits” or “he does not sit”) are discourses (λόγοι), the thing (πρᾶγμα) that is in question in them (which Aristotle expresses through the infinitive: “being sit” or “not being sit”) is not a discourse. Commenting on this passage, Gregory infers that it is neither propositions nor real things that are true or false, but the enunciable or signifiable, which, following Aristotle, he expresses through an infinitive proposition: “man being an ass” or “man not being an ass.” What is decisive here is the way in which Gregory conceives the being of this tertium, which, insofar as it does not coincide with either the proposition or the external object, runs the risk of seeming to be nothing. Gregory suggests that the “thing” that is in question in the true proposition “man is white” is neither the thing “man” nor the thing “white,” nor their logical conjunction through the copula, but rather a res sui generis—­“man being white,” which lies neither in the mind nor in reality, but is somehow beyond existence and nonexistence. In the same way, even in the case of the metaphysical thesis “God is” (Deus est), the enunciable (or complexe significabile) that corresponds to it—­ “God being” (Deus esse)—­“is not something else, that is, another entity with respect to God [alia entitas quam Deus], and yet, it is not God, nor in general any entity” (Gregory of Rimini, Sentences 1.1.1.1; see Dal Pra 1974, p. 146). It is curious that the historians of philosophy who tackled this issue did not notice the evident terminological connection with the λεκτόν and with the sayable of the Stoic tradition (which through Augustine’s Dialectic were not unknown to the Middle Ages). They claim that Gregory’s significabile implies a very specific kind of existence, which “does not coincide with either the entities of the external world or with the simple mental entities constituted by the terms or the propositions, but gives rise to a world of meanings [significati]” (Dal Pra 1974, p. 145). These historians do not realize that what resurfaces here in terms of

On the Sayable and the Idea

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philosophical awareness is the same problem that Plato tackled through the ideas and the Stoics resumed with their “sayable.” The truth that is expressed in language—­a nd given that we do not have other ways of expressing it, the truth that is at stake for us as speaking humans—­is neither a real fact nor an exclusively mental entity, nor “a world of meanings”; rather, it is an idea, something purely sayable, that radically neutralizes the sterile oppositions mental/real, existent/nonexistent, signifier/signified [significato]. This—­and nothing else—­is the object of philosophy and thought. ‫א‬. After many centuries, Gregory’s complexe significabile reappears in Alexius Meinong—­a rguably in its terminologically most inventive formulation. This disciple of Franz Brentano’s—­who chose the pseudonym Meinong to hide his belonging to nobility—­intends to define a discipline “that was never conceived before,” that is, a science “that elaborates its objects without limiting itself to the particular case of their existence” (Meinong 1921, p. 82). He calls these pure objects of knowledge “objectives” (Objektive); they delimit a region of reality indifferent to the problem of existence (daseinsfrei) for which the following axiom is therefore valid: “Objects are given for which it is true that objects of that kind are not given.” Even if Meinong chooses at times his examples among impossible concepts such as “golden mountain,” “square circle,” or “chimera,” he calls “objectives” par excellence those contents of propositions (“the snow is white” or “the blue does not exist”) whose consistency he, like his medieval predecessors, locates neither in re nor in the mind, but in a no-­man’s-­land he calls “almostbeing” (Quasisein) or “outsidebeing” (Aussersein). What is at stake in language is a thing “without fatherland” (heimatlos) that belongs neither to being nor to nonbeing. The science of the object, which, as a general science of the nonreal, we might suppose to be complementary to metaphysics as a general science of the real (as its inventor suggests), certainly resembles pataphysics, which, in the very same years, Alfred Jarry defined as the “science of what is added to metaphysics.” In any case, it is significant that, at the end of the history of Western philosophy, the survival of what at its outset defined the object par excellence

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On the Sayable and the Idea

of thought must be looked for in conceptions that philosophical historiography catalogues in a position that is, to say the least, marginal. And yet in Meinong’s “outsidebeing” there is certainly an—­ephemeral, subdued, and probably unwitting—­echo of the intention Plato entrusted to his ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας.

On Writing Proems

In the Third Letter (316a), Plato states that he “gave a fair amount of attention to the proems to the laws [περὶ τῶν νόμων προοίμια σπουδάσαντα μετρίως].” That he is referring to an actual act of writing is confirmed, since he adds: “I am told that some of you afterwards revised my proems, but the difference between these two parts [that written by Plato and that revised by others] will be evident to those who are competent to recognize my style [τὸ ἐμὸν ἦθος].” If we consider that, in the Seventh Letter, Plato seems to suspect all attempts at writing philosophical arguments to be insufficiently accurate (which could equally apply to his own dialogues), he may have regarded the drafting of those proems (which, he asserts, were unmistakably his work) as one of the few serious acts of writings he produced in his long life. Unfortunately, these writings have been lost. In the Laws, one of his late works, playing on the double meaning of νόμος (“musical composition sung in honor of a god” and “law”), Plato returns to the problem of the proems to the laws (and this makes us believe that the letter is authentic). The interlocutor of the dialogue designated as “the Athenian” says: Every discourse and everything in which the voice participates has proems [προοίμιά] and tunings-­up [ἀνακινήσεις], as one might call them, which contain a kind of attempt at beginning in conformity with the art [ἔντεχνον], and assist toward what will follow. Indeed, admirably





On Writing Proems

elaborated proems precede even the so-­called citharoedic νόμοι and musical compositions of every description. But for the actual νόμοι [that is, the laws], which we designate as “political,” no one has ever started by making a proem, or, having composed it, brought it to light, just as though this would not conform to nature. But, in my opinion, the conversation we have had proves that it does conform to nature and that the laws we were then speaking about [those pertaining to free men], which seemed to me to be double, are not simply such, but are two things: laws and proems to the laws. The tyrannical commandment [ἐπίταγμα], which we have compared to the prescriptions of those doctors we called not free, is indeed pure law [ἄκρατος, unblended]; the part which precedes this, which we have called the persuasive [πειστικὸν] element, insofar as it is used to persuade, has the same function as the proems one makes in discourses. The entire discourse the lawgiver makes trying to persuade seems to me aimed at preparing the one to whom he addresses the law to benevolently accept his commandment, that is, the law. Hence the right term for it would be “proem” [προοιμίον] and not “discourse” [λόγος] of the law [ . . . ]. The lawgiver must take care of furnishing proems before every law and for each of them, whereby they differ from each other like the two laws of which we spoke earlier. (722d–­23b)

The allusion to discourse in general (“everything in which the voice participates”) and to musical νόμοι makes us infer that the special status Plato assigns to the proem here goes beyond the sphere of legislation in a strict sense. This is what the Athenian appears to be suggesting shortly afterwards, presenting the whole dialogue that will follow as a proem: “But let us not spend more time in delay, but return to our subject, and start afresh, if you agree, from the statements I made above—­and made not by way of a proem. Let us, then, repeat from the start—­to quote the players’ proverb, the second attempt is better than the first—­and make a proem, and not a chance discourse (λόγος). And let us agree that we begin with a proem” (723 d–­e). If the conversation that took place up to this point was already actually only a proem, now the purpose is intentionally to make a proem and not a discourse. Just as, according to Plato, we must distinguish in a good law a proem and a λόγος in a strict sense (a commandment), so it

On Writing Proems

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is possible to distinguish in every human discourse a proemial element from a properly discursive or prescriptive element. Every human word is a proem (προοιμίον) or a discourse (λόγος), persuasion or commandment, and it may be appropriate to mix the two elements or keep them separate when speaking. If human language consists of two different elements, to which of them does philosophical discourse belong? The Athenian’s words (“make a proem and not a discourse”) seem to suggest without reservation that the dialogue of the Laws—­and thus perhaps every dialogue that Plato has left us—­should simply be considered as a proem. Just as a pure (ἄκρατος, unblended) law, that is, a law without a proem, is tyrannical, so a discourse devoid of proems that is limited to formulating theories—­however correct they might be—­is also tyrannical. This would explain Plato’s hostility to enunciating theories and true opinions, and his preference for resorting to myths rather than logical argumentation. The philosophical word is essentially and constitutively proemial. It is the proemial element that must be present in every human discourse. But if the proem of the law precedes and introduces the normative part of the law—­prescriptions and prohibitions—­of what is the philosophical word the proem? According to a tradition that modern scholars have resumed, esoteric doctrines circulated in the Academy along with Plato’s exoteric writings—­t he dialogues—­a nd the philosopher would have formulated these doctrines in an assertive manner. In this perspective, the dialogues we know could be considered as proems and introductions to the esoteric doctrines that scholars try to reconstruct in a necessarily discursive form. However, if what Plato says in the Laws is to be taken seriously, and the character of proemiality is consubstantial with philosophy, then it is unlikely that he formulated the doctrines he cared the most about in an assertive form. Provided that they existed, the esoteric doctrines

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On Writing Proems

must themselves have had a proemial form. In the Seventh Letter —­t he only surviving text in which Plato addresses his intimate followers in order to reveal his thought—­not only does he rule out being able to write or even just communicate what he really cared about in the form of a science, but the well-­k nown philosophical digression (which he calls “true discourse,” but also “myth and detour [μῦθος καὶ πλάνος]”) that he introduces at this stage to explain why this is impossible is formulated in such a non-­a rgumentative manner that it has always been considered—­w hether rightly or wrongly—­a s a particularly obscure mystical text. The proemial character of the philosophical word does not therefore mean that it refers to a post-­proemial philosophical discourse; it rather refers to the very nature of language, to its “weakness” (διὰ τὸ τῶν λόγων ἀσθενές [Seventh Letter 343a1]), whenever it is called upon to confront the most serious problems. That is to say, philosophy is not a proem to another more philosophical discourse, but, so to speak, to language itself and its inappropriateness. But, precisely for this reason—­insofar as it possesses its own linguistic consistency, the proemial one—­philosophical discourse is not a mystical discourse, which, going against language, sides with the ineffable. In other words, philosophy is the discourse that limits itself to serving as a proem to non-­philosophical discourse, showing the latter’s insufficiency. Let us now try to develop the thesis about the proemial nature of philosophical discourse beyond the Platonic context. Philosophy is the discourse that brings back every discourse to the proem. Generalizing, we could say that philosophy identifies with the proemial element of language and rigorously abides by it. In other words, it avoids turning into a discourse or a commandment, and seriously enunciating theses or prohibitions. (The criticism of the “commandment”—­έντολή—­of the law in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans can be seen as an attempt to purify the law from commandment and restore it to its proemial, or persuasive, nature). The

On Writing Proems

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use of the myth and of irony in Plato is to be seen in this perspective: it reminds those who speak or listen the necessarily proemial character of every human discourse that cares about truth. The philosophical element in a discourse is that which witnesses to this awareness, not in the sense of skepticism, which questions truth itself, but in that of the firm intention to abide by the necessarily proemial and preparatory character of what one is saying. And yet, however scrupulously it tries to keep within its limits, even the proem can in the end only show its insufficiency, which after all coincides with its preliminary and thus inevitably inconclusive nature. This clearly appears at the very end of the Laws, when, after having apparently treated every detail of the constitution of the city and of the life of the citizens, the dialogue concludes with the awareness that what matters most remains to be done. Following a characteristic gesture of the late Plato, this thesis is formulated in the ironical form of a joke and of a pun: the Athenian explains that “it is not possible to legislate over these things before they have been duly framed; only then will it be possible to legislate over who must have supreme authority. The doctrine of the preparation of these things can in fact succeed only after being together for a prolonged time [πολλὴν συνουσίαν, the same words with which the Seventh Letter summarizes the condition of the attainment of truth] [ . . . ]. However, it would not be correct to say that things concerning this matter are unsayable [ἀπόρρητα]: they are rather un-­pre-­sayable [ἀπρόρρητα; that which cannot be said in advance], insofar as pre-­saying them [προρρηθέντα] nothing is clarified” (968c–­e). The proemial nature of the dialogue is thus restated, but, at the same time, it is maintained that only a discourse that comes after—­that is, an epilogue—­is decisive. Philosophy is constitutively a proem, and yet the topic of philosophy is not the unsayable, but the un-­pre-­sayable, that which cannot be said in a proem; only an epilogue would be fit for the purpose, that is, truly philosophical. The proem must be transformed into an epilogue, the prelude into a postlude: however, in any case, the λόγος is absent, the ludus-­ludic can only be missing.



On Writing Proems

Everything that the philosopher writes—­everything that I have written—­is only a proem to an unwritten work or—­what is in the end the same—­a postlude whose ludus-­ludic is absent. Philosophical writing can only have the nature of a proem or of an epilogue. Perhaps, this means that it does not deal with what can be said through language, but with the λόγος itself, with language’s pure giving of itself as such. The event that is in question in language can only be announced or parted from, but it can never be said (which does not mean that it is unsayable—­unsayable really means un-­presayable; it rather coincides with the way discourses give themselves, with the fact that humans do not stop speaking with one another). What can be said of language is only a preface or a postil, and philosophers are distinguished according to whether they prefer the former or the latter, abide by the poetic moment of thought (poetry is always an announcement) or by the gesture of those who at last lay down the lyre and contemplate. In any case, what is contemplated is the un-­said; the parting from the word coincides with its announcement.

Appendix The Supreme Music. Music and Politics

1 Philosophy is today possible only as a reformation of music. If we call music the experience of the Muse, that is, of the origins and the taking place of the word, then in a given society and at a given time music expresses and governs the relation humans have with the event of the word. In fact, this event—­that is, the arche-­ event that constitutes humans as speaking beings—­cannot be said within language: it can only be evoked and reminisced museically or musically. In Greece, the muses expressed this primordial articulation of the event of the word, which, by occurring, destines and divides itself into nine forms or modalities, without it being possible for the speaker to go back beyond them. This impossibility of accessing the primordial place of the word is music. In it something comes to expression that cannot be said in language. As is immediately evident when we play or listen to music, singing first and foremost celebrates and laments an impossibility of saying, the—­painful or joyous; hymnic or elegiac—­impossibility of accessing the event of the word that constitutes humans as humans. ‫א‬. The hymn to the Muses that functions as a proem to Hesiod’s Theogony shows that poets are readily aware of the problem posed

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Appendix

by the beginning of a song in a museic context. The double structure of the proem, which twice repeats the opening (verse 1: “From the Heliconian Muses let us begin”; verse 36: “Let us begin with the Muses”), is due not only to the necessity of introducing the unprecedented episode of the poet’s encounter with the Muses in a traditional hymnic structure in which it was absolutely unexpected—­a s Paul Friedländer has perceptively suggested (1914, pp. 14–­16). There is another and more significant reason for this unforeseen repetition, which concerns the poet’s very taking the floor [presa di parola], or, more precisely, the position of the agency of enunciation in a field where it is unclear whether it rests with the poet or the Muses. Verses 22–­25 are decisive; here, as scholars have not failed to notice, discourse abruptly moves from a narration in the third person to an agency of enunciation that contains the shifter “I” (the first time in the accusative—­μ ε—­a nd then, in the following verses, in the dative—­μοι): And one day [ποτε] they [the Muses] taught Hesiod a glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under Holy Helicon: and this discourse first [πρώτιστα] the goddesses said to me [με] [ . . . ] It is evidently a matter of introducing the I of the poet as the subject of enunciation in a context where the beginning of the song indisputably belongs to the Muses, and yet is uttered by the poet: μουσάων ἀρχώμεθα, “let us begin with the Muses”—­or, better, if we pay attention to the intermediate and non-­active form of the verb: “The beginning is from the Muses, we begin and are initiated by the Muses”; in fact, the Muses tell with consenting voice “things that are and shall be and that were aforetime,” and “unwearying flows the sweet sound from their lips” (verses 38–­40). The contrast between the museic origins of the word and the subjective agency of enunciation is strengthened by the fact that the rest of the hymn (and of the whole poem, with the exception of the poet’s declarative reprise in verses 963–­965: “And now farewell to you . . .”) recounts in a narrative form the birth of the Muses, with Mnemosyne coupling with Zeus for nine nights, lists their names—­ which, at that stage, did not yet correspond to specific literary genres (“Clio and Euterpe and Thalia and Melpomene / Terpsichore and Erato and Polyhymnia and Urania / and Calliope, the most illustrious of them all”)—­and describes their relation with the bards (verses

Appendix

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94–­97: “For it is through the Muses and far-­shooting Apollo / that there are singers and harpers [ . . . ] / happy is he whom the Muses love / sweet flows speech from his mouth”). The origins of the word is museically—­that is, musically—­ determined and the speaking subject—­the poet—­must at each turn confront the problematicity of his beginnings. Even if the Muse has lost the religious meaning she had in the ancient world, the rank of poetry still depends on the way in which the poet manages to give musical shape to the difficulty of his taking the floor—­t hat is, on how he succeeds in appropriating a word that does not belong to him and to which he limits himself to lending his voice.

2 The Muse sings and gives singing to man, since she symbolizes the speaking being’s impossibility of integrally appropriating the language in which he has made his vital abode. This extraneousness marks the distance that separates human singing from that of other living beings. There is music; man does not limit himself to speaking, and rather feels the need to sing because language is not his voice, and because he dwells in language without being able to turn it into his voice. Singing, man celebrates and commemorates the voice he no longer has, which, as taught by the myth of the cicadas in the Phaedrus, he could find again only if he ceased to be human and became animal (“When the Muses were born and song appeared, some of the men were so overcome with delight that they sang and sang, forgetting food and drink, until at last unconsciously they died. From them the cicada tribe afterwards arose [ . . . ]” (259b–­c). For this reason, emotional moods necessarily belong to music before belonging to words: balanced, courageous, and strict in the Doric mode; mournful and languid in the Ionic and the Lydian (Republic 398e–­399a). It is peculiar that still in the masterpiece of twentieth-­century philosophy, Being and Time, the original opening of man to the world does not take place through rational knowledge and language, but through a Stimmung, an

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Appendix

emotional mood that this very term refers back to the acoustic sphere (Stimme means voice). The Muse—­music—­marks the splitting between man and his language, between the voice and the logos. The primary opening of man to the world is not logical but musical. ‫א‬. From here follows the insistence with which Plato and Aristotle, but also musicologists such as Damon and even the legislators, affirm the necessity of not separating music and word. In the Republic, Socrates argues that “what is language in the song in no manner differs from words not sung [μὴ ᾀδομένου λόγου] and needs to conform to the same models” (398d); soon afterwards, he resolutely enunciates the theorem according to which “harmony and rhythm must follow discourse [ἀκολουθεῖν τῷ λόγῳ]” (ibid.). However, the same formulation, “what is language in the song,” entails that there is something in it that is irreducible to the word, just as the insistence on sanctioning its inseparability betrays the awareness that music is eminently separable. Precisely insofar as music marks the extraneousness of the original place of the word, it is perfectly comprehensible that it may tend to exacerbate its autonomy with respect to language; and yet, for the same reasons, the concern about not fully severing the nexus that kept them together is equally comprehensible. Between the end of the fifth century and the first decades of the fourth, Greece in fact witnessed an actual revolution in musical styles, linked to the names of Melanippides, Cinesias, and especially Timotheus of Miletus. The fracture between linguistic and musical systems becomes progressively unbridgeable, and by the third century music ends up clearly dominating over the word. But a careful observer like Aristophanes could realize—­by parodying this in the Frogs—­that the relation of subordination of melody to its metric support in the verse had already been subverted in Euripides’ tragedies. In Aristophanes’ parody, the multiplication of notes with respect to syllables is vividly expressed through the transformation of the verb εἱλίσσω (to turn) into εἱειειειλίσσω. In any case, in spite of the philosophers’ tenacious resistance, in his works on music, Aristoxenus—­who was a disciple of Aristotle and criticized the changes introduced by the new music—­no longer lays at the foundations of singing the phonemic unity of the metrical foot, but a purely musical unity, independent of the syllable, which he calls “first time” (χρόνος πρῶτος).

Appendix

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In the history of music the critiques of the philosophers seemed excessively conservative (and yet they were repeated many centuries later in the rediscovery of classical monody by the Florentine Camerata and Vincenzo Galilei and in Charles Borromeo’s peremptory provision “cantum ita temperari, ut verba intelligerentur”). But what interests us here are rather the profound reasons for their opposition, of which they were themselves not always aware. If, as it seems to be the case today, music breaks its necessary relation with the word, this means that, on the one hand, it loses the awareness of its museic nature (that is, of its being located in the original place of the word) and, on the other, that the speaker forgets that his being always already musically inclined has constitutively to do with the impossibility of accessing the museic place of the word. Homo canens and homo loquens part ways and forget the relation that bound them to the Muse.

3 If the access to the word is, in this sense, museically determined, we understand that for the Greeks, the nexus between music and politics was so evident that Plato and Aristotle treat musical questions only in the works they consecrate to politics. The relation of what they called μουσική (which included poetry, music in a strict sense, and dance) with politics was so close that in the Republic, Plato could subscribe to Damon’s aphorism according to which “musical modes cannot be changed without changing the fundamental laws of the city” (424c). Men come together and organize the constitutions of their cities through language, but the experience of language—­insofar as it is not possible to grasp and master its origin—­is in turn always already conditioned musically. The groundlessness of the λόγος grounds the primacy of music and makes it possible that every discourse is always already museically tuned. For this reason, in every age, humans are always more or less intentionally educated to politics and prepared for it through music, even before this happens through traditions and precepts that are transmitted by means of language [lingua]. The

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Appendix

Greeks knew perfectly well what we pretend to ignore, namely, that it is possible to manipulate and control a society not only through language, but first and foremost through music. Just as, for a soldier, the trumpet blast or the drumbeat is as effective as the order of a superior (or even more than it), so in every field and before every discourse, the feelings and moods that precede action and thought are musically determined and oriented. In this sense, the state of music (including in this term the entire sphere we inaccurately define as “art”) defines the political condition of a given society better than and prior to any other index; and if we truly want to modify the rules of a city, it is first of all necessary to reform its music. The bad music that today pervades our cities at every moment and in every place is inseparable from the bad politics that governs them. ‫א‬. It is significant that Aristotle’s Politics closes with an actual treatise on music—­or, rather, on the importance of music for the political education of citizens. Aristotle in fact begins by announcing that he will deal with music, not as a form of entertainment (παιδιά), but as an essential part of education (παιδεία), that is, to the extent that it has virtue as its goal: “Just as gymnastics are capable of producing a certain quality of body, so music is capable of producing a certain ethos” (1339a24). The central motif of Aristotle’s conception of music is the influence it exercises on the soul: “But it is clear that we are affected and transformed in a certain manner, both by the different kinds of music and not least by the melodies of the Olympus; for these admittedly make our soul enthusiastic [ποιεῖ τὰς ψυχὰς ἐνθουσιαστικάς], and enthusiasm is a passion [πάθος] of the ethos with respect to the soul. And, moreover, everybody when listening to [musical] imitations is thrown into an empathic state of feeling [γίγνονται συμπαθεῖς] thanks to rhythms and tunes, even in the absence of words” (1340a5–­11). Aristotle explains that this happens because rhythms and tunes contain images (ὁμοιώματα) and imitations (μιμήματα) of anger, mildness, courage, prudence and the other ethical qualities. For this reason, when we listen to them, the soul is affected in different forms matching different musical modes: in a “mournful and restrained” mode in the Mixolydian; in a “composed [μέσως] and firmer” mode in the Doric; in an enthusiastic

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mode in the Phrygian (1340b1–­5). He thus accepts the classification of tunes and melodies as ethical, practical, and enthusiastic, and recommends the Doric mode for the education of the young, since it is “firmer” (στασιμώτερον) and of a virile (ἀνδρεῖον [1342b14]) character. Like Plato before him, Aristotle refers here to an ancient tradition that identified the political meaning of music in its ability to put order in the soul (or, on the contrary, to excite and confuse it). Sources inform us that in the seventh century, when Sparta was in a state of civil discord, the oracle suggested summoning Terpander, the “bard from Lesbos,” who, with his singing, gave back order to the city. The same was said of Stesichorus with regard to internal fighting in the city of Locris.

4 With Plato, philosophy emerges as a critique and an overcoming of the musical organization of the Athenian polis. The latter, embodied by Ion, the possessed rhapsode who is suspended from the Muse like a metal ring from a magnet, involves the impossibility of accounting for one’s knowledge and one’s action, that is, of “thinking” them. “For this stone [the magnet] not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a power whereby they in turn are able to do the very same thing as the stone and attract other rings; so that sometimes there is formed quite a long chain of rings, suspended one from another; and they all depend for this power on that one stone. In the same manner also the Muse divinely inspires men herself, and then by means of them the inspiration spreads to others, and holds them in a connected chain. [ . . . ] The spectator is only the last of the rings [ . . . ] and you, the rhapsode, are the middle ring, while the poet is the first [ . . . ] and a poet is suspended from a certain Muse, another poet from another Muse, and in this case we say that he is possessed [ . . . ] in fact you do not say what you say of Homer out of your art or science, but out of divine destiny [θείᾳ μοίρᾳ]” (Plato, Ion 533d–­34c). Against the museic παιδεία, the claim of philosophy as the “true Muse” (Republic 548b8) and “supreme music” (Phaedo 61a)

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Appendix

involves the attempt to go back beyond inspiration toward that event of the word whose threshold is shielded and barred by the Muse. While poets, rhapsodes, and, more generally, every virtuous man, act according to a θείᾳ μοίρᾳ, a divine destiny that they cannot account for, it is here a matter of founding discourses and actions in a place that is more primordial than museic inspiration and its μανία. For this reason, in the Republic (499d), Plato can define philosophy as αὐτὴ ἡ Μοῦσα, the Muse herself (or the idea of the Muse—­αὐτός followed by the article is the technical term that expresses the idea). What is in question here is the proper place of philosophy: it coincides with that of the Muse, that is, with the origins of the word—­a nd is, in this sense, necessarily proemial. Locating himself in this way in the original event of language, the philosopher brings man back to the place of his becoming human, the only place from which he can remember the time in which he was not yet a man (Meno 86a: ὁ χρόνος ὅτ᾽ οὐκ ἦν ἄνθρωπος). Philosophy trespasses the museic principle in the direction of memory, of Mnemosyne as the mother of the Muses, and in this way frees man from the θείᾳ μοίρᾳ and makes thought possible. In fact, thought is the dimension that is opened when, going back beyond the museic inspiration that does not allow him to know what he says, man somehow becomes auctor, that is, a guarantor of and a witness to his own words and his own actions. ‫א‬. It is however decisive that, in the Phaedrus, the philosophical task is not simply entrusted to a knowledge, but to a special form of mania, similar to the others and at the same time different from them. In fact, this fourth kind of mania—­the erotic mania—­is not homogeneous with the other three (prophetic, telestic, and poetic), and is essentially identified by two traits. It is first and foremost conjoined with the self-­movement of the soul (αὑτοκίνητον [245c]), with its not being moved by something else and with its being, for this reason, immortal; furthermore, it is an operation of the memory, which remembers what the soul saw in its divine flight (“this is a reminiscence [ἀνάμνησις] of what our soul once saw” [249c]), and it is this anamnesis that defines its nature (“this is the final point of

Appendix



the whole discourse about the fourth mania, when seeing something beautiful and remembering the true beauty [ . . . ]” [249d]). These two characteristics are what oppose it to the other forms of mania, in which the principle of movement is exterior (in the case of poetic folly, it is the Muse) and inspiration is unable to go back through memory toward what determines it and makes it speak. Here, it is no longer the Muses who inspire, but their mother, Mnemosyne. In other words, Plato reverses inspiration into memory, and this reversal of the θείᾳ μοίρᾳ—­of destiny—­into memory defines his philosophical gesture. As a mania that moves and inspires itself, philosophical mania (since this is what is at stake: “only the mind of the philosopher has wings” [249c]) is, so to speak, a mania of mania, a mania that has as its object mania or inspiration themselves, and therefore draws from the very place of the museic principle. When, at the end of the Meno (99e–­100b), Socrates affirms that political virtue is neither according to nature (ϕύσει) nor transmissible by way of teaching (διδακτόν), but produced through a θείᾳ μοίρᾳ without awareness, and that for this reason politicians are incapable of communicating it to other citizens, he is implicitly presenting philosophy as something that, without following either divine fate or science, is capable of producing political virtue in the minds. But this can only mean that it is situated in the place of the Muse and replaces it. More to the point, Walter Otto has rightly observed that “the voice that precedes the human word belongs to the very being of things, like a divine revelation that lets it come to light in its essence and glory” (Otto 1954, p. 71). The word that the Muse offers to the poet comes from the things themselves, and the Muse is, in this sense, nothing else than being that discloses and communicates itself. For this reason, the most ancient depictions of the Muse, such as the wonderful Melpomene at the National Museum of Palazzo Massimo in Rome, simply present her as a girl in her nymphean plenitude. Going back to the museic principle, the philosopher must confront, not only something linguistic, but also and especially being itself as revealed by the word.



Appendix

5 If music is constitutively bound to the experience of the limits of language, and if, vice versa, the experience of the limits of language—­and politics with it—­is musically conditioned, then an analysis of the music of our times should begin by noting that it is precisely this experience of the museic limits that music is now missing. Language is today given as a chatter that never clashes with its limit and seems to have lost all awareness of its intimate nexus with what cannot be said, that is, with the time when man was not yet a speaker. A language without margins and frontiers corresponds to a music that is no longer museically tuned, and a music that has turned its back on its origins corresponds to a politics without consistency and place. When it seems everything can indifferently be said, singing disappears and, with it, the emotional moods that articulate it museically. Our society—­in which music seems frenetically to pervade every place—­is actually the first human community that is not museically (or amuseically) tuned. The general feeling of depression and apathy only registers the loss of the museic nexus with language, disguising as a medical syndrome the eclipse of the political that results from it. This means that the museic nexus, which has lost its relation with the limits of language, no longer produces a θείᾳ μοίρᾳ, but a sort of blank mission or inspiration, that is no longer articulated according to the plurality of museic contents, but, so to speak, goes round in circles. Forgetful of their original solidarity, language and music separate their destinies and yet remain united in the same vacuity. ‫א‬. It is in this sense that philosophy is today possible only as a reformation of music. Given that the eclipse of politics goes together with the loss of the experience of the museic, the political task is today constitutively a poetic task, with regard to which it is necessary that artists and philosophers join forces. Current politicians are unable to think, since both their language and their music go amuseically round in circles. If we call thought the space that is opened each time we access the experience of the museic principle of the word,

Appendix

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then it is the current inability to think that we need to tackle. And if, following Hannah Arendt’s suggestion, thought coincides with the ability to interrupt the meaningless flux of sentences and sounds, stopping this flux in order to give it back to its museic place is today the ultimate philosophical task.

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Index of Names

Abelard, Peter, 68–69 Alexander of Aphrodisias, 36, 81–82 Amalric of Bena, 33, 86–87 Ammonius of Hermiae, 16, 19, 24–25, 36, 37–38, 39 Andronicus of Rhodes, 37 Antisthenes, 57, 58 Arendt, Hannah, 107 Aristophanes, 100 Aristotle, 4, 5–6, 8, 9, 14, 15–20, 22, 25, 33, 36–38, 39, 43, 45–52, 53, 55, 60, 62, 63–66, 69, 70–71, 73, 74, 75–76, 79, 81, 87, 88, 100, 101, 102–103 Arnim, Hans von, 44 Augustine of Hippo, 40–41, 88 Badiou, Alain, 82 Bekker, August Immanuel, 48 Benjamin, Walter, 30–31, 33, 35, 57, 61, 69 Benveniste, Émile, 6, 9, 12, 14, 23–24, 54, 60, 62, 69 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 65–66 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, 68 Bopp, Franz, 11

Borromeo, Charles, 101 Bréhier, Émile, 40, 44 Brentano, Franz, 89 Buber, Martin, 35 Cherniss, Harold F., 48 Cinesias, 100 Colli, Giorgio, 27 Courtenay, William J., 68 Dal Pra, Mario, 88–89 Damon, 100, 101 David of Dinant, 33, 86–87 Derrida, Jacques, 19 Descartes, René, 76, 84–85 Diano, Carlo, 72 Diogenes Laertius, 44 Duhem, Pierre Maurice Marie, 77, 79–80 Duns Scotus, 9–10 Eckhart von Hochheim (Meister Eckhart), 10 Euclid, 78–79 Eustatius, 36 Frederick II, 2 Frege, Gottlob, 39, 52, 56

113

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Index of Names

Friedländer, Paul, 98 Galilei, Vincenzo, 101 Gregory of Rimini, 87–89 Güntert, Hermann, 57 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xi, 11–12, 24 Heidegger, Martin, xi, 44–45 Heraclitus, 63 Herz, Marcus, 60 Hoffmann, Ernst, 63 Homer, 103 Iamblichus, 36 Jaeger, Werner Wilhelm, 48 Jakobson, Roman, 24 Jarry, Alfred, 89 Kant, Immanuel, 60, 64 Koyré, Alexandre, 86 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 29–31 Mallarmé, Stephane, 3, 61, 70 Meinong, Alexius, 89–90 Melandri, Enzo, 63 Melanippides, 100 Menzerath, Paul, 21 Milner, Jean-Claude, 24–25, 52, 56 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 69 More, Henry, 84–85 Mugler, Charles, 78 Myshkin, Lev Nikolaevich, prince, 30

Paqué, Ruprecht, 66 Paul of Tarsus, 32, 86, 94 Philoponus, Johannes, 36 Plato, 4, 6, 9, 14, 22, 25, 26, 32, 41–59, 61, 62–67, 68–74, 75–83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91–95, 100, 101, 103–105 Plautus, 54 Plotinus, 33, 56, 72–75 Porphyry, 36, 65 Priscian, 63 Pythagoras, 54, 81 Riemann, Georg Friedrich Bernhard, 78 Rijk, Lambertus Marie de, 69 Ross, William David, 48 Saussure, Ferdinand de, ix, 6, 14, 21, 25, 62 Schubert, Andreas, 39, 43 Sextus Empiricus, 38–39, 41–42, 43, 44 Simplicius, 64, 70, 79–80, 81–82 Socrates, 22, 49, 57–58, 87, 100, 105 Spinoza, Baruch, 31, 32 Stesichorus, 103 Terpander, 103 Thomas Aquinas, 30, 87 Timotheus of Miletus, 100 Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf, 48 Usener, Hermann, 58–59 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 14, 40 Virgil, Maro Publius, 85

Newton, Isaac, 86 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9, 14, 27, 56 Ockham, William of, 66, 68 Otto, Walter, 105

Zeno of Citium, 87

M e r i d i a n

Crossing Aesthetics

Ethan Kleinberg, Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer Giorgio Agamben, The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days Giorgio Agamben, The Fire and the Tale Eyal Peretz, The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm Paul North, The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation Giorgio Agamben, Pilate and Jesus Kevin McLaughlin, Poetic Force: Poetry After Kant Barbara Johnson, A Life with Mary Shelley Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-ofLife Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government Paul Celan, The Meridian

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath Peter Fenves: The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time Giorgio Agamben, Nudities Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations Ruth Stein, For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out Susan Bernstein, Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience Jean-Luc Nancy, The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus Carol Jacobs, Skirting the Ethical: Sophocles, Plato, Hamann, Sebald, Campion Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable

Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, 2 volumes, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Literature and Law in the Time of a Truth Commission Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, edited by Thomas Albrecht, with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rottenberg Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, edited by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb Alan Bass, Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care Jacques Derrida, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . Ernst Bloch, Traces Elizabeth Rottenberg, Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy

Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness: (Literature/Philosophy/ Psychoanalysis) Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages Peter Szondi, Celan Studies Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, edited by Peggy Kamuf Cornelius Castoriadis, On Plato’s ‘Statesman’ Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1 Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic Peter Fenves, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin Jill Robbins, ed. Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas Louis Marin, Of Representation Daniel Payot, The Architect and the Philosopher J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature Maurice Blanchot, Faux pas Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural Maurice Blanchot / Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System

Emmanual Levinas, God, Death, and Time Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy Ellen S. Burt, Poetry’s Appeal: French Nineteenth-Century Lyric and the Political Space Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book Deborah Esch, In the Event: Reading Journalism, Reading Theory Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics Francis Ponge, Soap Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus

Werner Hamacher, pleroma—Reading in Hegel Serge Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter Serge Leclaire, A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus Maurice Blanchot, Friendship Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion Hans-Jost Frey, Studies in Poetic Discourse: Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hölderlin Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field Nicolas Abraham, Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis Jacques Derrida, On the Name

David Wills, Prosthesis Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire Jacques Derrida, Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994 J. Hillis Miller, Topographies Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner) Jacques Derrida, Aporias Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime Peter Fenves, “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence