The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis 9781472545916, 9781847064523, 9780826443243

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a Emilia e Luca “Long have we laboured in miracle realms”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to my editors Hugh Silverman, the title of this book is his, and Sarah Campbell, whose careful stewardship of the book in its latter stages was much appreciated. I must also thank Brunel University for granting me a year-long sabbatical to complete this work. Chapter Two was presented as a seminar at Brunel University in March 2009. I greatly appreciate the questions and remarks that followed which encouraged but also challenged me. Excerpts from Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, and Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy © 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. Reprint of the final stanza from “Down By the Station Early in the Morning” from A WAVE by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 by John Ashbery, granted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. Permission to use “Warrant” granted by Charles Bernstein. Excerpts from Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death © 1991 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Finally, the writing of this book coincided with the birth of my daughter . . . and my son. So it is that the last but also always the first expression of gratitude as ever goes to my wife, Barbara Montanari, not merely because of the incredible support she has given me over this past, intense, miraculous year, but also for her many comments, suggestions, and aids to translation. Obvious it is that sharing a house with an Italian is useful when writing a book on Agamben, more unexpected it was that sharing a home with a theoretical physicist would open up for me the very structural basis of poetry and thinking. Dearest Barbara, living with someone so much more intelligent than I, that is truly living. x

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AP BT C CC

EHP EP HI

HS

IH

IP IPP

Leland De La Durantaye, “Agamben’s Potential,” Diacritics 30, no. 2 (2000), 3–24. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1953), trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). Alain Badiou, The Century (2005), trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (1990), trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (1981), trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000). Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem (1996), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998), trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (1978), trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993). Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose (1985), trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). William Watkin, In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001).

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

LAS

Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991), trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). LD Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (1982), trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). LPN Shane Weller, Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). M Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (1972), trans. Alan Bass (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982). MA Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts, Muses II, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). MP Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy (1989), trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY, 1999). MofP William Watkin, “The Materialization of Prose: Poiesis versus Dianoia in the Work of Godzich & Kittay, Shklovsky, Silliman and Agamben,” Paragraph 31, no. 3 (2008), 344–364. MWC Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content (1970), trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). MWE Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends (1996), trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). N Giorgio Agamben, Ninfe (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). O Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (2002), trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). OM William Watkin, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). OWL Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (1959), trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1971). P Potentialities (1999), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). PA Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield: Acumen Press, 2008). Para Paragraph 25, no. 2 (2002). PMD Andrew Norris ed., Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). PLT Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). xii

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Prof

Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (2005), trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007). QCT Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (London: Harper Perennial, 1977). R Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Winterfield (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008). RA Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002). RP Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Lévinas, Blanchot and Agamben (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). SAQ The South Atlantic Quarterly 107,no. 1 (2008). SE Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2003), trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). SL Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli eds, Sovereignty and Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). SP Alexander Pope, Selected Poetry (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008). ST Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977), trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). TP John Ashbery, Three Poems (New York: Penguin, 1993). TTR The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2000), trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). WGA Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron, and Alex Murray eds., The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). WWB William Watkin, William Watkin’s Blog, http://williamwatkin. blogspot.com/.

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EXOTERIC DOSSIER: THE LITERARY AGAMBEN

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) first came to prominence in the field of political philosophy with the publication in 1995 of his explosive book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. In this work Agamben presents his critique of our political modernity as a permanent state of exception/emergency. This state of exception, through which he likens our advanced democracies to living in a camp, is overseen by sovereign power. The sovereign’s legitimacy extends from the power of the state to reduce our existence to bare life or life as mere survival. Living perpetually in this denuded zone of indistinction between biological existence as such (zoé) and our social life (bios), what Agamben calls the biopolitical, makes of us that most despised figure from Roman law, the homo sacer. Like the homo sacer, whose sacred life was the possession and legitimization of the sovereign ready to be forfeited at any point without fear of legal repercussion, our bare life can be taken from us at any point without the state having to answer to the very apparatus of law from which is gains legitimated power through its right of occasional exception from legal norms. That exception has become the norm is the basis of Agamben’s savage attack on our biopolitical modernity. This extended study of the categories of the political and modernity continues apace, now stretched to six volumes or around a third of his total published output. In the complex and, typically, confrontational studies that make up the ongoing Homo Sacer project Agamben proposes a radical, often unremittingly negative critique of our Western modernity in terms of the political and its relation to life. In particular through the consideration of sovereignty, bare life, the homo sacer and our current “state of exception,” he presents a convincing cartography of the political in our age that is, perhaps, 1

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THE LITERARY AGAMBEN

the leading revolutionary political theory that we have. This is the Agamben we are most familiar with, and the one about whom I will have the least to say in the chapters that follow. Away from the political/materialist Agamben there is another Agamben. Numerous critics have noted a seemingly contradictory bifurcation in the Agamben methodology, sometimes so marked it is suggestive of the possibility that there are more Agambens out there writing philosophy than was first assumed.1 Antonio Negri, for example, one of Agamben’s great productive antagonists, ponders, rather infamously:2 It seems there are two Agambens. There is the one who lingers in the existential, destining, and terrifying shadows, where he is perpetually forced into a confrontation with the idea of death. And there is another Agamben, who, through immersion in the work of philology and linguistic analysis, attains the power of being (that is, he rediscovers pieces or elements of being, by manipulating and constructing them).3 Negri is far from alone in asserting that “Agamben” is a homonymic moniker referring to two thinkers of radical dissimilarity, one a philosopher of negative being and the other an etymo-philologer and habitué of material clues. These are the metaphysical and the political Agambens respectively.4 This enforced subjective scission is strategic. As is often the case with the dual structures of metaphysics the energy between two terms leaves little space for the imposition of a third, unless under the auspices of dialectical resolution or archeunity. Thus Negri is canny enough—well aware as he is that even though he dismisses the three books preceding Language and Death (1982) as a “literary apprenticeship” (SL, 111), the “literary” Agamben is not mere youthful promiscuousness but a serious and lifelong affair for his compatriot—to retain the propensity for plenitude to be found in dualistic metaphysics at the same time as he praises Agamben for finally putting an end to this tradition. Canny enough perhaps, but no one can fully suppress the ability of the uncanny to undermine studiously erected structures of identity.5 Thus Negri, so desperate to negate the third Agamben, the literary Agamben, the uncanny unwelcome guest at the intimate if troubled feast that rages still tête-à-tête between metaphysics and politics, instead opens the door to just such a possibility of tertiary ruination. 2

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EXOTERIC DOSSIER: THE LITERARY AGAMBEN

Speaking of Agamben’s oft-cited application of the voice as such emptied of content as a solution for post-metaphysical negativity he concedes: “this nihilistic self-dissolution of being frees the voice— but another voice, an absolute voice, absolved of the negativity of which it had been the bearer. Effectively, it is now poiesis, inasmuch as it endures as the only power of this dissolved universe” (SL, 113–14). It is this voice, intimidated by the sovereignty of metaphysical thought, muted by the clamour of the bios, and yet always persistent and quietly insistent, that the following pages wish to augment. Attend then, if you will, beyond the learnéd and almost overwhelming conversation between the two Agambens and his many critics, to the tones of the tern, the literary Agamben, adventurer in poiesis.6

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PROJECTION: THERE IS LANGUAGE

(The cricket, clearly, cannot think its chirping.)1 At the age of 36, in the preface to his third book, a characteristically confident Giorgio Agamben declares: “In both my written and unwritten books, I have stubbornly pursued only one train of thought: what is the meaning of ‘there is language’ [vi è il linguaggio]; what is the meaning of ‘I speak’?”2 This may seem like youthful exuberance and in the mouths of others at similarly early stages in their career might strike the seasoned observer as a touch hubristic. Who, after all, is able to predict the guiding topic of all one’s books, past and future, written and unwritten?3 Now, however, 30 years later one has to concede that the young thinker was either preternaturally prescient or, over the years, unbelievably obdurate for it is undoubtedly true that the questioning of the presence of language remains at the heart of Agamben’s political thinking, his metaphysics and, most pertinent to our study here, the centrality of literature to his work. This risk-bound declaration of intent occurs in the short piece that prefaces Infancy and History (1978) entitled “Experimentum Linguae.” In this thin sheaf of pages he explains that he is undertaking an experiment with language “in the true meaning of the words, in which what is experienced is language itself.” Such an experience, he suggests, requires that one “venture into a perfectly empty dimension . . . in which one can encounter the pure exteriority of language” (IH, 5). Such a pure exteriority of an empty language which yet still speaks is both the basis of Agamben’s “metaphysics” and of my claim that the literary Agamben is an essential element of that mode of thinking.4 To see language as it is, to make language appear before us such as it is, in its full material yet voided exteriority, to let language speak 4

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itself without being exhausted through its enunciation is the experiment Agamben conducts on thought as such in all his written works thus far. As for the unwritten, one will take his word for it that this is also the case. An adventure in the mind and in the word is how I would term such an experiment that can only commence through access to the singular nature of the relation between literature and linguistic exteriority that philosophy has traditionally termed poiesis. To understand the relation between thought and literature through their complex, differential, and yet related responses when confronted with the empty plane of language or the sheerness of its suddenly uprearing edifice is our simple mode of conceptual transport here in this now-written work. The projection of the “problem” of empty linguistic exteriority from the experiments with language the youthful Agamben had been performing in the laboratory of his mind allows him to address with great speed in the pages which follow some of the major problems of philosophy. The first of these is extrapolated from an, up to this point, unpublished fragment of another great work Agamben never wrote, La voce umana (the human voice). In this incorporated and yet incorporeal work he asks: “Is there a human voice, a voice that is the voice of man as the chirp is the voice of the cricket . . .?” (IH, 3). This unusual rumination leads to a series of related questions such as, if there is a human voice, is this what we humans mean by language, what is the relationship between voice and language in this regard, and if we do not find a human voice, and Agamben has indeed not yet done so, where does this lead the classic philosophical definition of the human as zo¯on logon echo¯n or “the living being which has language”? (IH, 4). This theme, or better drama, the possession of voice/language by the animal and the privation of voice in the human, returns again and again in Agamben’s early work.5 It is the nexus wherein his great ontological question, what does it mean to live as a human being,6 not posed until many years later, oversteps the threshold of his other great demand that primarily occupies the first two decades or so of his career, what does it mean to have language. The two interlocutions are, in effect, bundled together in what might be termed his interim request, what is the meaning of “I speak”? or at the very least this demand will eventually lead Agamben to consider the political and anthropological implications of this assertion for the Western definition of human being in works such as Homo Sacer and The Open (2002). 5

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THE LITERARY AGAMBEN

Consistent with Negri’s remark and the critical community’s claims of the two Agambens, my contention is that in order to take up a position in relation to the literary in Agamben one must come to terms with language. Aside from the obvious fact that literature is composed of language and constitutes a profound experience with language, what if anything does the literary have to contribute to the arrival at the sheer face of the outcrop that is language’s exteriority? The answer resides in Agamben’s complex investigation of language as such through ideas pertaining to the acquisition of human voice, the dependence of metaphysical definitions of language on division and negation, the role of language in subjective enunciation, and language’s materiality. Acquisition of voice, scission, negation, enunciation, and semiotic materiality therefore form the five arms of the guiding star of the Agambenian ontological constellation that shines above the empty and literally unwelcoming, purely exterior landscape of language as such. The cold light cast by this stelliform compound reveals for us linguistic exteriority defined as the very existence, or as-such-ness, of language: communicability or a language that communicates itself without communicating any specific thing.7 What kind of language, what order of communication, is this solipsistic, tautological, and self-regarding entity? INFANCY: ANIMALS AND CHILDREN

One of the earliest postings into the vast dossier of Agamben’s great experimentum primarily concerns what he calls human linguistic infancy or how we humans are expelled from language as such into linguistic and metaphysical scission. Agamben uses the term infancy in his early work to describe an interim state between our pure state of grace in language, echoing that of the animal, and our acquisition of a voice. Infancy as a concept originates in the observable phenomenon that humans learn to speak whereas animals do not in two significant ways. First, they do not actually speak although they do possess language, and second they are pre-possessed of their voice as soon as they come into being. (The difference between speech, language, and voice is therefore foundational.) Infancy does not describe our actual early childhood, however, but is an ontological term for a state of being indicating a compound of questions pertaining to how humans have language and how this relates to their

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apparently not having a voice of their own such as one finds in the cricket. In this way the term infancy describes having language and privation of voice as fundamental conditions for human being establishing an important interplay between possession and privation that echoes throughout the whole of Agamben’s work.8 In one basic sense infancy captures the process wherein human animals learn, acquire, or have speech foisted upon them. If humans, of all animals, are the only beings that are not born with a clearly identifiable voice then they must come to their voice or arrive at speech, as indeed developmentally we seem to do, and chimpanzees, regardless of our tireless encouragement, thus far have not. This could be taken to mean how we come to language but this is not how Agamben views infancy. Unlike the metaphysical tradition Agamben is not at ease with the Aristotelian definition of human being as zoo¯n logon echo¯n, or at least he is uncomfortable with the uncritical acceptance of this formulation within philosophy. In disputation with the Aristotelian inheritance Agamben does not accept that animals are without language which, by implication, means they cannot be appropriated by “we who do” as a means of securing subjective self-definition:9 Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary, they are always and totally language . . . Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language–he has to say I. Thus, if language is truly man’s nature . . . then man’s nature is split at its source, for infancy brings it discontinuity and the difference between language and discourse. The historicity of the human being has its basis in this difference and discontinuity. (IH, 59) Infancy in this instance names the fact that human animals are the only ones to emerge from language into the ambiguity of the unidentifiable sound of the human voice. For the animal, language and speech are indivisible and when one speaks of an animal voice, a dog’s bark, for example, or a cricket’s chirping one also names the animal’s language and, for that matter, their being.10 In contrast to this, first, as we saw, the human has no voice of its own. One can say the cricket chirps but not the human “. . .” Second, as humans acquire

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their voice a clear division between speech and language in the human animal develops. Third, this division and our awareness of it define human being as self-consciously different from all other beings. Thus, as Agamben is at pains to show, it is not the fact that we have language that defines our humanity, but the way in which we come to have it—not the zoo¯n or the logon but the generally ignored echo¯n that matters. Fourth, the way we have language is first as bifurcation, language-speech; then as subordination, speech over language; and finally as negation, speech denies any experience of the nature of language as such comparable to the manner in which animals experience language, first silencing language and then, eventually, voice itself. This is effectively the argument of Language and Death, the follow-up text to Infancy and History, and as a critique of the basis of modern thinking on negation, voice, and silence, that forms the bedrock of Agamben’s attack on metaphysics and modern ontology upon which all the various edifices of the numerous Agamben’s are placed. Our entrance into this philosophical cul-de-sac is the fact that we humans have infancy, a period wherein we acquire speech. The only way out of this metaphysical dead end, Agamben argues, is infancy, a return to a pre-divided idea of a pure language. Infancy submits us to history expelling us from language as such and propelling us into a bifurcated sense of language as phone and logos. Yet it also involves us, and this is a profoundly Heideggerian gesture, in a destinal and possibly liberationist historicization.11 It is only because we have infancy that we have a history and it is only because we have a history that we are human and possess the potential to access the full meaning of this by a recuperation of our infancy. It would seem, from this, that there are two infancies: infancy as that which we have lost, and infancy as that which we must recuperate. In reality these two nascent states are simply two elements of an overall infancy as an ongoing process of being. In losing language we become a human being and alive, in seeking to regain language we create the possibility of becoming something like a post-human.12 Thus one could put together the three great questions of Agambenian ontology by exclaiming that what it means for human beings to live is the fact that they “have” language as a silenced potential embedded within the human voice, or lack of it, forming the basis of the meaning of our possession of voice. Life, language, and voice are therefore separate yet inseparable terms within Agamben’s thought. 8

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INEFFABILITY AND EXPERIENCE

Infancy solves another problem for Agamben beyond that of the relation of the human to the animal via the faculty of speech as a negation of language, namely that of the ineffable. “If every thought can be classified according to the way in which it articulates the question of the limits of language, the concept of infancy is then an attempt to think through these limits in a direction other than that of the vulgarly ineffable” (IH, 4). Agamben goes on to read the experience of the ineffable in the work of Kant and German historian Carl Erdmann as an attempt to think a concept that can be known but which has no referent in the world. Kant calls this the “transcendental experience” of pure thought, Erdmann knowledge independent of sensibility (see IH, 4–6). Accepting this to be the case the ineffable can be said to come to presence in that it only exists as pure thought or what language cannot say. It is a concept without a name and knowledge without an object. Ironically, the ineffable in philosophy, which seems to direct us towards pure thinking without language, actually comes to name language for this tradition. As Agamben says, the unsaid and the ineffable, “far from indicating the limit of language,” a place where thought can go and language cannot, instead “express its invincible power of presupposition, the unsayable being precisely what language must presuppose in order to signify” (IH, 4). For language to signify and thus become the human language we are all familiar with, post-vocal divided language, there must be reference to something that is not language that it signifies, a thing or a truth to be known. In Language and Death specifically Agamben identifies a metaphysical reliance on ineffable unsayability as modern thinking’s greatest weakness leading philosophy into a reification of the unsayable as the negative basis for being in language. Thought has become embroiled in thinking language in terms not of what it can say but of what it cannot, defining being and thinking along the way as first, based on language, and second, presuppositionally negative (see LD, 54–65). In contrast to this tradition of negation Agamben involves himself in an experiment, after Benjamin, to identify the singularity of language as such, as “not something ineffable but something superlatively sayable: the thing of language” (IH, 4). This is our old friend the experimentum linguae which Agamben renames here infancy, “in which the limits of language are to be found not outside language, 9

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THE LITERARY AGAMBEN

in the direction of its referent, but in an experience of language as such, in its pure self-reference” (IH, 6). Rather than, as a thinker, in response to the problem that there is an object, that we need language to name it, but in naming it we find that the name never entirely renders the object, thus concluding that language always remains insufficient to name objects, forcing the thinker to seek for a concept that cannot be named, for if it is not named there can be no shortfall of plenitude, only to find that the name for such an experience is the ineffable or un-named as such, a morass it has proven impossible to escape from; Agamben instead simply introjects the problem. Language as the basis of thought should be considered not in terms of what it cannot say, that which is outside of it (the referent), but in terms of what it can say if it does not refer to that which is outside of itself. “But what can an experience of this kind be? How can there be an experience not of an object but of language itself . . . as the pure fact that one speaks, that language exists” (IH, 6)? This then is a second issue: Can one testify in thought to the significance of the fact that one speaks or that language exists without recourse to referential exteriority and difference? Can there be an experience of language as speaking but saying nothing in particular? This is not language as the ineffable, a reification of the unspeakable, or a typical conversation in a British pub towards closing time, rather it is language that is content-less speech, pre- or ir- referential language, language that says nothing other than here I am, I am language, experience me. This great quest to move beyond modern philosophical ineffability isolates a third and final issue in relation to infancy. Infancy first names our coming away from being animal. It then indicates our ability to conceive of a pure thinking not in terms of what cannot be said but what can, even if all one is saying is that one can say something. Finally, infancy names the problem of human experience. The subtitle of Infancy and History is On the Destruction of Experience and a significant portion of the book is a response to the philosophical belief that in modernity one does not go through an experience but merely observes events as spectacle from the outside (see IH, 15–49).13 This problem has afflicted language for a good deal of time naming a clear division in philosophy between knowledge and experience. Important in this regard is the fact that the words “experiment” and “experience” share the same Latin root and consequently the meaning of experience for Agamben originates not only in the act of sustaining or going through something, but also testing. 10

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PROJECTION: THERE IS LANGUAGE

Thus Agamben’s expressed project or experimentum linguae suggests that to understand the fact that there is language one must conduct an experiment on and undergo an experience with language. In the modern age the division between the two meanings of experience is most profoundly felt. Either our experiences are so unique that they are one-off events that can hold no meaning for “the human experience” at large, evidenced by our endless pursuit of novel and new experiences, or we observe events from the outside as judgemental critics, denying that the event in question actually pertains to how we live.14 For Agamben the experience of language, which he takes to be the experience of experience itself, cannot be undertaken exterior to language as he contends some philosophers have attempted. Yet nor can it be experienced entirely from the inside as in some imagined, primordial being for whom the division between phone and logos has not yet come about. Human language, he concedes, is by definition bifurcated, defining human being as “neither Homo sapiens nor Homo loquens, but Homo sapiens loquendi” (IH, 8). To live as a human being means to live both from the outside of language as the being who knows but does not speak and from the inside as the being that speaks but does not know. Maintaining the false division, as Agamben sees it, between experience as knowledge and as going through, and then imposing unworkable unities to heal this rift is a habitual failing of Western thought. As he says: “In this sense what is experienced in the experimentum linguae is not merely an impossibility of saying: rather, it is an impossibility of speaking from the basis of a language, it is an experience, via that infancy that dwells in the margin between language and discourse, of the very faculty or power of speech” (IH, 8). Infancy names this third possibility: to maintain experience as knowing and as undergoing. It is what Agamben means by thinking and what he takes to be the truth of the very existence of the possessed faculty of language as such. Infancy reveals the confluence of language, thinking, and being human within the very faculty of language that says nothing specifically but merely enacts the experience of having language before one succumbs to the way in which our tradition has chosen to possess this faculty, namely as the imposition of scission as a means of creating human, self-conscious subjectivity. To undergo an experience with language, therefore, is to undergo a new form of experience as testing or thinking, a form of thinking that does not look at language 11

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from the outside, or occupy language and seek for exterior referents, but which accepts the presence of language as such as exteriority as such. Infancy allows Agamben to name this alternative mode of thinking in relation to three key metaphysical problems for conventional thought: what is the human animal, what does language say, and what does it mean to experience something? Most specifically, it opens up a zone that exists for thought and being between language as such and discourse, accepting their division as a fact of our ontological Geschichte or deep history (see QCT, 24), yet refusing to succumb to the various aporias that have traditionally arrested the progression of thought on this matter. If Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics resides in the tradition’s obfuscation of authentic Being, and Derrida’s on its privileging of speech over writing, Agamben’s rests in large part within the silence as regards how we have language and the assumption that the human ontological relation to language depends on the voice to such a degree that the truth of human being, said relation to language, is silenced. In a way, therefore, while Agamben is critical of both Heidegger and Derrida,15 his own philosophy is partly a colloquium of his two great predecessors: an attack on the metaphysical occlusion of being (in language) that was actuated historically by the prioritization of speech in the form of the voice. Infancy, therefore, provokes our attention back to the quasi-mythological “moment” before the acquisition of speech when human beings had a more direct line of sight to language in that they did not possess language but were rather possessed or captivated by language (see O, 39–62). This is not to be conceived of as a return to a pre-human animal stage but is rather a moment between our emergence from the animal in our realization that we have no voice to speak of, and the imposition of a voice through the agency of speech. One issue here is that the very choice of the name infancy is as confusing as it is illustrative, suggesting a developmental, zoological, or psychosomatic empiricism behind our being with or having language, which is not only impossible to ascertain but also not what Agamben intends. While infancy is observable in children it would be a mistake to suggest that infancy is a psychosomatic or neonatal stage of our development (see IH, 54–5). If anything, our actual infancy is merely a useful developmental analogue for an ontological temporality of development that presupposes a pre-human, a human defined as life, and an in-between and constantly emergent human being, which we might call infant being. 12

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Nor should one suggest that Agamben is recounting an actual historical series: animal-infant-human. Rather, infancy is to be found within the human at all stages as both remnant of the animal and potential for the post-human. This is perhaps best illustrated by the etymological root of the word wherein fans originates from fari or to speak. Thus in-fancy, Agamben sometimes writes it like this, is nonspeech (see LD, 91), and as such is an ontological state of speechlessness within language that precedes the potential human being’s emergence into actual humanity. It is our existence in language before the primary scission of language into phone and logos, although the term “before” needs careful reconsideration within what might be termed an ontological rather than historiographic or teleological temporality. Infancy has little, in other words, to do with babies. THE STANZA

In relation to Heidegger people often speak of the ontico-ontological difference between actual being-in-the-world, Dasein, and being as such, capitalized Being.16 In a sense Derrida’s critical investigation of this difference, reconfigured as the term différance, collapses the last great frontier of metaphysics, the only remnant of the tradition that Heidegger leaves standing.17 This difference is not simply the difference between different technical senses of being in the work of one philosopher however, but is the reliance of metaphysics on difference as such. Certainly there are many forms of difference, or better there are myriad differentiations to be made, but the asymmetric difference between experience, the ontic, and knowing, the ontological, is an ancient problem relating to how language names truth. If infancy is to resolve this difference then its hands are tied to some degree. It cannot unify language and discourse into a single entity. We must stress this is not the intention of infancy. Nor can it choose language over discourse, much as Agamben might wish, for we are always in the world operating as already pre-divided beings. To live as human means, simply put, to live our division. Human being is this ontological caesura (see O, 13–16 & 21–2). In some way Agamben’s thought must enter into the scission of being and resolve the conflict therein without recourse to pre-human unity, endless deferral, or the eradication of difference.18 He thus designates for himself an immensely difficult task and he sets about it by returning to the scission inherent in language through the theory of signification. 13

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Agamben’s first major intervention on language concerns linguistic scission as the precondition for the later establishment of infancy. The 1977 volume Stanzas, although taking as its main area of concern the art object, brackets this fascinating topic in major statements on language and philosophy. Again in the preface—Agamben has a penchant for the exoteric as well as the esoteric statement—he considers the various significances of the term stanza for poets of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century troubadour tradition, which he regularly cites along with that of the stil novists as the origin of all modern poetics. For the troubadour poets the stanza was not just a structural designation but the “nucleus” of their poetry, defined as a “capacious dwelling, receptacle” (ST, xvi). The space of the stanza, in its capacity, dwelling-stability, and open reception not only holds the words contained in the poem’s structural segmentation but also conveys the unique object of all the poetry of this period, namely the joi d’amor or unattainable joy of love. By conflating a formal technique with a meta-thematic concern the troubadour stanza takes on the quality in poetry of a “receptive ‘womb’” (ST, xvi), for the entire tradition. In addition, the troubadour concept of the stanza provides a model for discovering metaphysical truths within the very prosodic operations of the poem itself, a process Agamben emulates in his own work on the metaphysics of enjambement, caesura, and his considerations of poetic space and rhyme. The majority of the book proceeds to investigate the object of love ever since in the arts and has little to say about the stanza as such, but in response to this ancient quest for the missing womb of art in our culture Agamben states that access to the destination of this labour is “barred by the forgetfulness of a scission” so ingrained in our culture that it goes without saying, “when in fact it is the only thing truly worth interrogating” (ST, xvi). Students of Heidegger will immediately recognize this structure of imposed forgetting of the most important thing due to its assumed obviousness as Being. In a way this is true although Agamben prefers to call it scission: The scission in question is that between poetry and philosophy, between the poetic word and the word of thought. The split is so fundamental to our cultural tradition that Plato could already declare it “an ancient enemy.” According to a conception that is only implicitly contained in the Platonic critique of poetry, but that has in modern times acquired a hegemonic character, the 14

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scission of the word is construed to mean that poetry possesses its object without knowing it while philosophy knows its object without possessing it. (ST, xvi–xvii) These thoughts on the stanza in relation to unattainability and scission compose one of the first occasions that Agamben names the role of poetry within his overall experiment in language and is the open door for my own contention that the literary Agamben is essential to an understanding of Agamben’s work as a whole.19 Here he effectively substitutes poetry for a number of terms—language as such, prose, experience—some of which we have already considered. The poetic word, for example, is now named as the closest we can get to an experience of language that speaks itself while not necessarily saying anything specific. Having said this, Agamben clearly does not hypostatize poetry as an ideal, infant form of language. This is particularly because infancy resides between the poetic and philosophic word or, as we saw earlier, between language and discourse. “In the West, the word is thus divided between a word that is unaware, as if fallen from the sky, and enjoys the object of knowledge by representing it in beautiful form.” We will take this word from now on to be the poetic word. “And a word that has all seriousness and consciousness for itself but does not enjoy its object because it does not know how to represent it” (ST, xvii). This grave, dissatisfied word is the immaterialized insensible word of Western philosophy. Poetry’s tragedy is possession of the thing without knowledge of the thing, the thing here being language as such whose forbears can be found in the troubadour quest for the joi d’amour represented by the stanza. Poetry does not know what it has, a direct experience of language as such within which resides the meaning of human being, because it can only experience language as going through or sustaining. In contrast, while philosophy is able to test language it has no direct experience with language. Within our tradition, therefore, poetry exists entirely in language on one side of the scission of the word, and philosophy entirely outside on the opposing side. Both are victims of the cruel scission at the heart of human language and neither, alone, holds the key to language’s capacious inner chamber. Agamben, very early on in his career, therefore, locates his philosophy within this scission between poetic joy and philosophical knowing in the capacious dwelling of the stanza as opened up and yet closed off, stanza in Italian means room of course, by knowledge of what 15

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cannot be possessed and/or possession of that which can never be known. Further, he states most openly that the assumed problem of metaphysics is to be revealed there in that room, and directs a large part of his energy to resolving what he sees as the false caesura at the founding of our philosophy and culture which effectively cuts the room in two, both revealing it and rendering it inoperative. For Agamben, metaphysical scission represented in the thirteenthcentury European culture by the poetic stanza reaches its apotheosis and crisis point within the epoch of modernity in the rather different form of criticism: “Criticism is born at the moment when the scission reaches its extreme point” (ST, xvii). The power of criticism emerges out of its collapsing and nihilization of the category of art, so it is an ambiguous strength to say the least, and we will investigate it in detail in the chapters to come. While criticism differs in kind to the stanza, one a modern quasi-philosophical discourse the other a historical prosodic-structural effect, Agamben explains that criticism is marked by a formula “according to which it neither represents nor knows, but knows the representation. To appropriation without consciousness and to consciousness without enjoyment criticism opposes the enjoyment of what cannot be possessed and the possession of what cannot be enjoyed” (ST, xvii). The stanza of criticism, as Agamben calls it in relation to modern poetry and art, contains nothing, a nothingness that protects art’s most precious object, that which it cannot possess. Just as the ancient stanza manifests, through its empty capaciousness, the missing thing of poetry via scission, so modern criticism reveals the emptiness of the modern category of art by its imposition of a division between the artist as maker and the critic as she who judges creation. The stanza, criticism, and infancy are all manifestations of the tendency towards scission in Western thought imposed between two central modes of thinking language as such: philosophy and poetry. Agamben is widely critical of the modern nihilistic tradition of valorizing negation, whether in philosophy or, here, in modern aesthetics, but he is also something of a fatalistic thinker. What he reveals for us in these early pages is the state of aesthetics in the modern age whether he likes it or not. He does not. Yet he also begins a complex journey out of the abyss of philosophical nihilism onto the plain of a Benjaminian messianic positive philosophy to come through his approach to language.20 We are presented with a model

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of generic languages, poetic and philosophic, but they are not genres at all. Rather their generic subdivision courtesy first of Plato and then of Aristotle, is an attempt to veil the truth of the basis of all thought, art, and being, on language. Language as such, Agamben’s great project, or that there is language, or how we have language, which all amount to the same thing, is, like being, because it is Being, currently withheld from view. What language is is portrayed in this impossibly contracted history of everything, or at least everything in metaphysics since the Greeks, that is disguised, almost, as a philological consideration of the troubadours’ idea of the stanza. The stanza is nothing other than a pure, neutral medium. It exists as a containment space between opposing forces occupying the same zone of indifferent indistinction as infancy. This location contains nothing specifically and in our age we have made the error of assuming that, because of this indistinction, one must valorize negation as such, an error for which we suffer but which may also be a productive and generative errancy. Because we see that the room is empty we assume that first there is nothing in the room, second that there never was, and third there never can be. Yet there is something “in the room,” namely the room as such and while to us this appears as an empty and, in terms of the future, hopeless space, this is just the inheritance of negativity from the metaphysics of scission. Agamben uses the figure of the stanza to bring this complex logic into relief, reveal its ubiquity across our culture, and finally indicate the role poetry has to play in any future comments on metaphysics. On one side of the stanza is the poetic word. This word is pure, meaningless pleasure: phone. On the other is the philosophical word, this is pure, if disgruntled, knowing: logos. The division between the two “words” is not so much imposed by Plato as reified, leaving us with a dark legacy, language as scission, and a possible solution, scission as stanza. THE SIGN

Agamben himself imposes a dividing caesura of over a hundred pages before he finally attends to the issue of linguistic scission in Stanzas through a consideration of the sign. Saussure’s development of the idea of the sign first divides the sign in a classic metaphysical gesture and then places the two components of the sign in an essential

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yet profoundly heterogeneous relation: S/s (with S representing meaning and s the material signifier). In this algorithm the phonic element of the word, the signifier, is located below the meaning of the word, and the two are separated by a bar. All three gestures are typical of the metaphysical scission represented by Plato’s banning of poetry from the republic. Meaning is separated from, then placed above material noise, before access to materiality or intercourse between the two values is literally banned or barred.21 Agamben comes to this “original fracture of presence that is inseparable from the Western experience of being,” meaning that “all that comes to presence comes there as to the place of a deferral and an exclusion, in the sense that its manifestation is simultaneously a concealment, and its being present, a lack” (ST, 136), through a consideration of the aesthetics of the symbolic emblem. The symbol, he argues, has been a source of metaphysical unease, especially for Hegel, primarily because the symbol brings together S/s into a single unified entity. In so doing it naturally foregrounds the imposition of false scission: “The symbolic, the act of recognition that reunites what is divided, is also the diabolic that continually transgresses and exposes the truth of this knowledge” (ST, 136). Symbolic acts, therefore, temporarily or artificially impose a unity on the primacy of scission in metaphysics, yet the effect is not actual reconciliation but a painful reminder of this most destructive caesura. In this way all signs can be said to be part-symbolic or, as he says: “Only because presence is divided and unglued is something like ‘signifying’ possible.” In other words, our conception of language as a mode of signification reliant on the sign is not actually language at all but the historical solution to this primary scission of presence from absence. For that matter, not only does this scission produce the sign, it also creates the discipline of thinking called philosophy: “only because there is at the origin not plenitude but deferral . . . is there the need to philosophize” (ST, 136). Justifying this claim, completing his narrative, and ejecting us for now from the spacious medium of Stanzas Agamben explains that while said scission is foundational and its “resolution” our only possible, positive destiny, it has been widely ignored by classic metaphysical strategies. These strategies, familiar to us now, rest in establishing one half of the division as more true than the other, in the model of paradigm and copy, and the relation of latent to sensible

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manifestation. “In the reflection on language, which has always been par excellence the plane on which the experience of the original fracture is represented, this interpretation is crystallized in the notion of the sign as the expressive unity of the signifier and signified” (ST, 136). Again here we can see the quasi-symbolic nature of the sign. Not only does it present a unity to mask the primary scission of language-thought, it contains within its own boundaries a sensuous representation of both unity and scission in the form of the bar. As Agamben presciently states: “In modern semiology, the forgetting of the original fracture of presence is manifested precisely in what ought to betray it, that is, the bar (/) of the graphic S/s . . . Every semiology that fails to ask why the barrier that establishes the possibility of signifying should itself be resistant to signification, falsifies, with that omission, its own authentic intention” (ST, 137). Aside from his regular use of the term semiotics, Agamben is not an adherent to the science of signification. The sign represents for him the ultimate in metaphysical amnesia and until we overcome signification we remain trapped in a failed project of thinking that imposes false unities to obscure the original scission at the heart of thought. This scission is not specifically a division between one thing and another, although the scission between presence and absence comes very close to being archetypal for Agamben, but rather, as in Derrida, it is the structuring of thought qua scission. It is therefore metaphysical structural scission that Agamben consistently takes to task. Unlike Derrida, however, Agamben believes one can overcome scission, deferral, or Derridean différance without succumbing to said division, as Agamben believes contentiously that Derrida has (ST, 156). If the sign is a source of displeasure for Agamben, within its graphicality in the figuration of the bar, itself supposedly a symbol of unity, it betrays through its symbol-status the division at the heart of metaphysical systems of unity, in particular here “language.” Our idea of language as signification is false, but the barrier within the sign functions as metaphysic’s betrayer. In a Lacanian gesture, Stanzas is by far Agamben’s most sustained engagement with psychoanalysis, the very thing the philosophy of language does not see, the bar, is the very thing that is the source of its inauthenticity and possible rehabilitation. The bar is language as pure, insignificant, and ultimately indifferent mediality. It exists in the form of a cancelled stanza more accurately represented as S [ / ] s than the Saussurian S/s.22

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NEGATING NEGATION

Agamben’s first sustained engagement with the metaphysical tradition, Language and Death, continues the development of the idea of infancy through a radical critique of the dependence of modern thought on negativity. Reading Hegel and Heidegger he strives to demonstrate how nihilism dominates their thought in three ways. The first of these is a reliance on death as a means of defining being, most famously in Heidegger’s being-towards-death (LD, 1–5 & 59–60). The second is the retention of ineffability within thought. For Hegel this is the inability of the sensuous sign to render in full the material realm (LD, 13–14).23 For Heidegger it is the impossibility of Dasein to ever actually occupy the space of its own being (LD, 4–5). The third is the reliance of both thinkers on deixis when trying to express language’s necessary insufficiency in relation to knowledge. Each of these three themes is of no small relevance to what we have already learnt of infancy. The dependency of our concept of being on finitude or death is usually taken alongside our having language as the basis of the fundamental difference between humans and animals. As we have already dealt with the issue of the ineffable through an analysis of unsayability we are left with the third, most surprising and technical part of this critique, philosophy’s reliance on deixis or pronouns to manifest being and the concomitant dissatisfaction they draw from this procedure. Deixis is a term used in linguistics to indicate the point of reference of a statement that relies absolutely on context. These are most commonly personal pronouns, I, you, it; but other pronouns indicative of space and time are also deictic: now, then, here, there, this, that.24 Deixis as a form of indication can be described as exophoric in that it refers to extra-linguistic material. This exophoric capability explains the rise of deixis as a literary device from the twelfth century onwards, according to Godzich and Kittay, wherein the possibility of having an intra-textual technique for referring to assumed extra linguistic material or presences was developed.25 Up to this point the normative mode of literature was performed poetry and if someone other than the narrator spoke, or something was referred to over there, the jongleur or performer used a series of gestures known to his mime-literate audience to show that he was speaking as someone else, or of something else. With the slow but inexorable rise of prose this bringing in of the outside into the text, an assumed quality of 20

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prose that differentiates it from the so-called “univocality” of the poem,26 was facilitated by simple phrases such as “he said,” “that door,” and so on.27 Deixis is also regularly utilized as a form of anaphora or internal reference that refers back to a subject, noun, and so on previously mentioned: “The gun, give it to me.” The “it” in this sentence is both deictic and anaphoric, referring to the previously mentioned firearm (“firearm” in this sentence is anaphoric but not deictic). Finally, it can also function cataphorically such as in the opening of Paradise Lost wherein the subject of the opening sentence is not known until the very end of the long, inaugural syntagm: “And justify the ways of God to man.”28 All three elements of deixis, exophoric context-dependent indication, anaphoric recursive reference,29 and cataphoric projective reference, will come to hold a central importance in Agamben’s thought and its relation to poetry. In Language and Death Agamben foregrounds the importance of deixis for modern philosophy specifically in the use of the German words diese (this) in Hegel and da (there) in Heidegger (LD, 19–26). Agamben is most interested in how both thinkers by definition place being in negation by utilizing deictic pronouns to indicate an absence at the heart of language. They effectively use anaphoric/cataphoric deixis as shorthand for an already uttered or to be uttered authentic name of being. Naturally, the brevity and baldness of the pronominal will fail to convey the full complexity of a sensuous presence for Hegel, and in its anaphoric/cataphoric mode it is indeed nothing other than a convenience of abbreviation. Imagine Islamic art, Venice, or the work of Lyn Hejinian, and then replace each with the reductive “this.” Similarly, “there” does little to convey, for Heidegger, the complexity of either the world being occupies or how it occupies that world. There-being or being-the-there as Agamben re-translates Dasein (LD, 4), by definition disappoints. It tells us where being is but says nothing of how or why it is, or indeed anything of use about the where or the there. Working at opposite ends of the rather colourless deictic spectrum, Hegel’s interest in the sensuous versus Heidegger’s in ontological topography, both writers find that while language is essential to access truth the insufficiencies of the signifier mean that something in language always remains unsaid of the thing expressed: the world and our being in it. For both authors this referential shortfall is represented by the silent voice at the heart of being; the very thing 21

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that enunciates being and yet leaves its truth unsaid. To sum up in more familiar terms, both Hegel and Heidegger succumb to a primary scission in the word between signifier, this or there, and signified, the world or being. They then, classically, valorize and exteriorize the signified only to discover a profound asymmetry in signification, which one could describe as the problem that a word does not totally contain its meaning or referent. One might then ask the question why thinkers of such sophistication resort to deictic indicators at all. This returns us to the philosophical tendency to view language in terms of exterior objectivity due to the split assumed within the sign between language and discourse. Deixis is always used to indicate something exterior to language and so is shorthand for all the failings of language’s referential shortfall. “This” may not capture Venice but nor will the prose of Ruskin, however diligently Proust attended to it. If one demands of language that it is a tool for reference one consigns language to inevitable failure as regards knowledge. The only solution to this problem, Agamben believes, is not to try and render experience through language but to render experience as language, through the idea of human infancy. The tripartite critique of modern thought enacted in Language and Death, a work every bit as important to the collapsing of metaphysics as Being and Time or Of Grammatology, relies in each instance on an assault on the voice. Agamben systematically attacks the idea that human voice emerges from the animal, that the voice is defined by what it cannot say (the ineffable), and the failure of speech to evince knowledge. Agamben’s relation to the voice is complex. While he blames the valorization of the voice for the dominance of negativity in metaphysics, in reality a synecdochic anamorphism wherein one element of linguistic scission comes to stand in for language as a whole, he also seeks for solutions to negativity ostensibly through the voice. In effect there are numerous voices in Language and Death. There is the voice of the animal (especially in death), the human voice as lack, the metaphysical capitalization of the Voice as a condition of being in withdrawal, and then perhaps the Voice under negation, Voice, although Agamben does not write it like this, which results in the negation of philosophical negativity by the end of the final seminar (LD, 106). If language as pure mediality has been artificially and with violence bifurcated in metaphysics into phone (voice) and logos (language as discourse), with the voice being set up as the failure to speak or the failure to mean within thought’s reliance on 22

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language, then the voice is always both the villain and victim of philosophy. To exit metaphysics, therefore, one must pass through the negative abyssal gullet of the voice. As we saw, language is seen in modern philosophy as essential to thinking and yet source of thinking’s deficiency. The problem is that either language fails to convey the profound texturality and diversity of the sensuous, “this” thing is always a privation of the plenitude of the actual thing, or it struggles to sum up our whole world and our place within it, there-being. Language brings to presence, for Hegel and Heidegger, but brings to presence truth or being as privation. Agamben calls this exasperation, this plangent insufficiency, the Voice. SUBJECTIVE ENUNCIATION

It might appear from Agamben’s critique of metaphysics that deixis is, in part, culpable for modern negative metaphysics and this is correct. Yet it is central to his methodology to look for a productive projection out from the very heart of the source of negation and this is precisely the case with deixis as regards his theory of subjective enunciation. Rather than attempt to remove the reliance of objective and ontological referentiality on deixis, instead he uses this very dependence to present a combined theory of referential ontology that he calls desubjectivization. Agamben is inspired in particular by the ontological turn in the work of French structural linguist Emile Benveniste, specifically his theories of the subject of enunciation and the semiotic.30 The first theory allows us to think again about subjectivity, albeit under negation, the second about the scission at the heart of metaphysics between language and discourse that will ultimately lead us to view what Agamben believes philosophy has occluded, not being as such but language as such. One can see therefore that Benveniste allows Agamben to, in part, synthesize his ideas on negation and scission in direct relation to language. I will deal with each idea in turn. Benveniste’s theory of subjectivity is based on the idea of linguistic enunciation and specifically how this relies on deixis. Benveniste defines the condition of the human subject by its being able to, or having to, enunciate its own self through language. The possession of an articulated or bifurcated system of differential referentiality which we term, mistakenly, language, means that we come to be human by 23

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our possession of self-consciousness and our ability to speak of this. Thus we can announce “I am” and in so doing we enunciate our subjectivity. Important in this regard is Benveniste’s conception that while the subject can enunciate its presence, speak its being, this act does not proceed from an already existent central being or subject. “I” in the phrase “I am” is a form of (de)subjectifying deixis. It appears to refer to an exterior presence, but, as Benveniste explains and indeed as my own work has investigated elsewhere (MofP, 347–9), deixis as a form of indicative reference does not refer to an actual exteriority but simply to the instance of reference as such. Accepting this to be the case, the “I” of “I am” only comes into existence in the act of enunciation via what Jacobson calls the power of pronominal shifting, or a movement from langue, the whole system and existence of language, to parole, a local instance of discourse. While in Saussure it is essential that langue and parole remain heterogeneous, deictic shifters present an opportunity to move from indication to signification, a journey that defines these two faculties, their complex interrelationship and, ultimately, undermines all our presuppositions about language and being. Agamben concludes from this: The sphere of utterance thus includes that which, in every speech act, refers exclusively to its taking place, to its instance, independently and prior to what is said and meant in it. Pronouns and the other indicators of the utterance, before they designate real objects, indicate precisely that language takes place. In this way, still prior to the word of meanings, they permit the reference to the very event of language . . . (LD, 25)31 Modern philosophy is already well aware of the ontological implications of the deictic phrase “I am.” It is, for example, central to one of Derrida’s most influential essays “Signature Event Context.” There we find that the subject’s capacity to enunciate itself reveals the subject’s ability to come into existence through the revelation of the division between presence and voice. That the subject can enunciate existence means they can step out of the experience of being, of being captivated like an animal,32 and self-consciously comment on said experience. This emergence from captivation to self-consciousness is the movement from language to speech in Agamben which is both the precondition for, and problem of, human being. The power of the 24

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subject to enunciate itself is brought to the fore in Derrida’s work more piquantly by his work on the sister phrase to “I am,” “I am not.”33 Not only can the subject enunciate presence, therefore, in so doing they also precipitate their lasting absence. Enunciation marks the advent of being and, simultaneously, its finitude. For Derrida this enunciative advent of finite being ruins any transcendental sense of subjectivity in that the subject dies as self-presence at the very moment it enunciates its existence and thus comes to life;34 one way of reading Heidegger’s being-towards-death. However, for Agamben, as soon as the subject comes to presence it is desubjectified and this is, in fact, its subjectivity. Subjectivity is not negated by enunciation as Derrida seems to suggest but actually founded through this process of negation. This reformulation of the theory of the subject allows Agamben to state that “the transcendental subject is nothing other than the ‘enunciator’” (IH, 53). If one can say “I am” one has already entered into a productively alienating subjectivity in language (RP, 128–9). Yet if one cannot say “I am,” within metaphysics at least, one cannot exist as the human is emergent from the biological indeterminacy of the animal precisely because they have the dubious power of self-conscious enunciation. As a realist Agamben cannot deny the fact that subjectivity is founded on its negation, but as the declared enemy of metaphysical nihilism he is unable to simply accept this. If one could isolate the moment, ontologically speaking, before the subject speaks but after they acquire language, what Agamben calls infancy, then one could perhaps instigate an alternative mode of being that is based on language but not on the voice as negation. This is Agamben’s intention. Before we get to that, and we may never in our epoch, we must accept the fact that, for Agamben, the subject of enunciation, once spoken, is the result of a permanent desubjectivization. At the moment the subject says “I am,” subjectivity comes to presence as nothing other than an instance of empty, technical indication. As he says: Benveniste’s studies . . . show that it is in and through language that the individual is constituted as a subject. Subjectivity is nothing other than the speaker’s capacity to posit him or herself as an ego, and cannot in any way be defined through some wordless sense of being oneself, nor by deferral to some ineffable psychic experience of the ego, but only through a linguistic I transcending any possible experience. (IH, 52) 25

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Mills’ interpretation of this is especially strong in the manner of how she first shows that “in taking the place of ‘I’ as speaking subject, the speaker must effectively alienate him/herself as a phenomenal or empirical individual” and her realization that “by entering into language as a mode of ‘communicative action,’ the speaker loses touch with the mute experience of language as such” (PA, 25). Thus enunciation denies the subject both its subjectivity and its infancy. However, because infancy is not a stage in a developmental teleology, no more is subjectivity or being human, none of these possibilities are lost for good when one says “I am.” In fact, they only come about because of enunciation, even if their happening takes place in an instant before, or due to, their negation. Agamben is treading a very treacherous and perhaps impossibly fine line here. Infancy is the precondition of subjectivity only in that it allows for desubjectivization through the act of losing or emerging out of infancy. It appears that Agamben’s childhood is potentially a troubled, but ultimately liberating time. THE SEMIOTIC

The powerful malleability of the deictic pronoun “I”is well known allowing for any number of ontological compressions, of selfpresence “I am,” self negation “I am not,” and self-alienation “I is another.” The last of these is a famous promulgation by Rimbaud often analysed by philosophers, but initially it is to English poetry and Keats’ missives on deictic desubjectivization that Agamben turns to in his own work in the field. In the dense, remarkable, and troubling book Remnants of Auschwitz (1999), Agamben finds himself reading Keats’ letter to Richard Woodhouse on 27 October 1818. As he does so he isolates four themes of poetic, deictic desubjectivization. These are not unfamiliar, so I will merely summarize them here: (1) the poetic I is not an I nor is it identical to itself, (2) the poet is therefore the most unpoetical of things, (3) the statement “I am a poet” is not a statement but a contradiction in terms, and (4) poetic experience is that of desubjectivization. The third of these, “I am a poet,” is contradictory because, as Keats argues, “if he has no self, and I am a Poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more?”35 Here Keats encounters the universal condition of enunciative desubjectivization but, significantly, he poses it as a poetically contingent experience. The poet is, by definition, always other to 26

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himself, an experience confirmed by Rimbaud, Eliot, and the anticonfessionalism of poetry from the so-called New York, Language, and Cambridge schools. As Agamben says with misleading lucidity: “In the Western literary tradition, the act of poetic creation, and indeed every act of speech, implies something like a desubjectivization (poets have named this desubjectivization the ‘Muse’)” (RA, 113). Agamben will also go on in his work to regularly refer to this as poetic dictation, but before we get to that let us concentrate on that almost offhand remark “and indeed every act of speech.” While fascinated by poetic desubjectivization one can perceive from his comments here that he is most interested in it as a form of general ontology. Indeed it is true that all acts of enunciation utilizing the pronoun “I” in the moment of indicating subjective presence negate its ever coming to presence as we saw in his analysis of Benveniste. All speech acts are in this way “poetic.” The experience of the subject coming to being by negating its own subjectivity is, according to Agamben and innumerable poets, a poetic experience, justifying once again my claim that any analysis of the philosophy of Agamben, so centrally located on the movement beyond negative metaphysics through a theory of language and desubjectivization, is meaningless without recourse to the literary Agamben. However determined this study may be to prove the importance of poiesis to Agambenian ontology it would be disingenuous to ignore the most obvious question that comes to mind at this stage: How can Agamben begin to argue that every act of speech is an instance of poetic desubjectivization via the universal category of deictic desubjectivization? Rather the opposite must be seen to be the case: poetic desubjectivization ought to be simply an example of general, ontological enunciative desubjectivization. To justify Agamben’s and Keats’ claim on behalf of poetry, namely that the essence of modern ontology resides therein, we must now return briefly to Benveniste’s other great ontological development, the idea of the semiotic. In his work on the semiotic Benveniste, on the surface, does little more than refine the terminology of Saussure. The well-known terms langue and parole become semiotic and semantic, while the arbitrary nature of the sign becomes the semiotic definition of the sign. This definition has a familiar ontological ring to it in that it consists of two preconditions. Benveniste’s appropriation of the sign develops the law of the semiotic as first, existing, and second, not being any other sign. The sign as semiotic is defined as that it is, 27

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and then that which it is by virtue of comparison with all that it is not which, admittedly by negation, matches precisely Heidegger’s ontological pairing of that there is something and how it is. Here how a sign comes to presence in the world (langue) is by not being any other sign replacing being-in-the-world with not-being-anywhere-elsein-the-world and opening up a space for linguistic being which, by its being uninsurable and subject to general negation, matches precisely the space of the stanzaic sign: S [/] s. The semiotic, therefore, is another name for language as a whole, as material presence (phone) and code (logos), before it means anything and yet always already available to mean. Its basic preconditions are presence and difference under the sign of a negation. It matters not how it exists, in terms of meaning or reference, or in which way specifically it is not other signs. Rather, for the semiotic, all that counts is that it can be identified as present and placed in a situation of quasi-singularity by one confirming it is what it is by its not being any other sign. This is structurally, at least, exactly the same as modern ontology. Being is proven by its existence and by its mode of being in the world but not being other beings. While Benveniste maintains his predecessor’s conviction that the semiotic and the semantic cannot meet one can see from his revisions that the semantic is seemingly dependent on a semiotic, quasi-presuppositional precondition. Discourse needs language as semiotic, material, yet neutral, presence to come into being. That said language only occurs to allow discourse to happen specifically as a mode of emergent human being through the process of desubjectivization which Agamben identifies as poetic. Further, it is only through discourse that language as such under negation courtesy of the voice of discourse becomes unconcealed for modern ontology. Language is the precondition for a discursive negation which precedes it. While the relation between poetry and desubjectivization becomes ever clearer, we still cannot be at peace with the assertion that modern ontological alienation is the result of contingent poetic alienation. To assist us in this regard we must return to Agamben’s consideration of poetic desubjectivization in Remnants of Auschwitz, which leads him into a wider philological consideration of “a fully desubjectivized experience in the act of speech” within the Western religious traditions, bringing poetic and ontological desubjectivization into more intimate proximity. Such a foray allows Agamben to make direct links between that other famous missive of modern poetic 28

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desubjectivization, Rimbaud’s letter to P. Demeny (“for I is another”), and another more ancient missive, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians where he speaks of “lalein glo¯sse¯ ” or speaking in tongues (wherein the speaker speaks with no understanding of what they say) (RA, 114). The modern term for this experience or event of language as such, devoid of meaning, is glossolalia and it has risen to prominence in investigations of the outer limits of poetic experience and experimentation.36 Due to its Greek provenance, glossolalia has associations with the term barbarism on which our preciously held concept of civilization hangs.37 Additionally, it hints at all post-Adorno poetics of responsibility that can be located in the work of Derrida, Agamben, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe, and which is aggressively attacked by the work of Badiou.38 Bar-bar, as we know, is the phonetic transcription of languages the Greeks did not understand, thus establishing a tradition of civilization based on xenoglossia as a form of glossolalia, which still has aesthetic and political repercussions for us today.39 As Agamben explains: “The experience of glossolalia merely radicalizes a desubjectifying experience implicit in the simplest act of speech” (RA, 115). It is, in effect, the process of pushing discourse to its limit or the retention of a remnant of pre-discursive “pure” language. Glossolalia and xenoglossia are, in some ways, opposite and revelatory experiences of the nature of language as such, before and as precondition for discourse. In glossolalia we encounter the pure materiality of language away from any possible meaning. In xenoglossia we do not understand an act of speech but we assume it has communicative and referential meaning for the barbarians which speak it within their context. Thus glossolalia confirms the first condition of the semiotic, it simply and materially is, while xenoglossia gives us an experience of the second condition, signs that we know are meaningful in a context but whose specific meaning we cannot glean. If we now combine the theory of the semiotic with that of enunciative deixis we can see that enunciation also partakes of the two sides of the semiotic. Deixis and types of indicative linguistic technique such as anaphora work differently to all other forms of signification. In that they are entirely context dependent—“it” in conversation, “it” in poetry, “it” in narrative, “it” in philosophical discourse all have very different potential usages—indicative forms operate at the semantic level of discursive meaning. Yet at the same time such terms 29

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are devoid of specific meaning. Therefore deixis stages not a fixed meaning in language but language as such as medium for meaning’s transmission. Indicative forms of this order are not pure noise but nor are they meaningful, they instead refer neutrally to the event of speech and language or what might be termed its passive taking place.40 In one sense deixis is meaningless and empty reference, for example “I” out of context means nothing and is basically glossolalic. In another it is pure contextual differentiation in that it is potentially referential but is always awaiting a context to come to mean. Glossolalia, xenoglossia, poetic desubjectivization, deictic desubjectivization, and the semiotic are all examples of a possible experience of pure language or a language which speaks before voice and says nothing other than it exists as pure exterior presence. This language as such is ruined by our having infancy and the concomitant desubjectivization of differential scission, but infancy also allows us a possible route back to language. Just as, in Heidegger, the historical “fall” of being is both the loss of being and its potential recuperation, so for Agamben infancy operates in the same god-like way echoing almost the sentiments of Browning’s Caliban as regards his sovereign dominion over crabs: “Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, / Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.”41 The conclusion of the updating of Infancy and History, which is what the later sections of Remnants of Auschwitz constitute, is so rich that it needs must be quoted in its entirety. However, to break this task down I will progress through the page-long summary step by step, loving not, hating not, just choosing so. Agamben begins by expressing the contradiction at the heart of enunciation: “the passage from language to discourse appears as a paradoxical act that simultaneously implies both subjectification and desubjectivization” (RA, 116). He then proceeds to bulldozer and flatten both sides of this impasse with a Calibanesque heavy-handedness: “On the one hand, the psychosomatic individual must fully abolish himself and desubjectify himself as a real individual to become the subject of enunciation.” (The becoming impersonal is a central moment in Agamben’s theory of the roots of poetry in desubjectifying dictation from the mouth of the muse.) “But, once stripped of all extralinguistic meaning and constituted as a subject of enunciation, the subject discovers that he has gained access not so much to a possibility of speaking as to an impossibility of speaking—or, rather, that he has gained access to being always already anticipated by a glossolalic 30

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potentiality over which he has neither control nor mastery” (RA, 116). Setebos to the subject’s Caliban. This rather terrifying observation is crucial in our adventures under the leadership of the literary Agamben. Here, the subject, in seeming to access discourse (meaning) through the xenophora of deixis, instead finds not meaning but the very absence of meaning, which is the event of language as such. In enunciating the I, the subject becomes, as Paul terms it, “him that speaketh a barbarian” (cited in RA, 114). This is the one and only moment that the radical difference between semiotic and semantic linguistic modes that Agamben locates at the root of Western metaphysics is, if not removed, blurred or suspended as the subject uses deixis to access discourse only to find in place of discourse pure noise. Here she tunes in to white noise, feedback, wailing; an isle full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. The sound of language as such. This leads Agamben to a three-part, profound, and potentially devastating conclusion. In appropriating the “formal instruments” of discourse, such as deixis, instead the subject finds himself “expropriated of all referential reality, letting himself be defined solely through the pure and empty relation to the event of discourse” (RA, 116). This being the case, while as Agamben explains the subject of enunciation is composed entirely of discourse, once he is inside of discourse he becomes expropriated. He cannot speak; rather he is spoken in the glossolalic language of barbarians. Those well-versed in contemporary philosophy may recognize this speck of alterity at the heart of self-presence from, for example, Lévinas and Derrida, and Agamben is well aware of the tradition he is potentially entering here.42 However, the final facet of his conclusion makes the radical step away from alterity and the philosophy of responsibility, which locates his work alongside Badiou as the only potential, post-alterity, and thus affirmative philosophy of our age.43 Explaining that “I speak” is as meaningless as “I am a poet,” for what I hope now are clear reasons in that I is always other, he concedes that it makes no more sense to say “this I-other speaks”: For, insofar as it is solely sustained in a pure event of language, independent of every meaning, this I-other stands in an impossibility of speaking—he has nothing to say. In the absolute present of the event of discourse, subjectification and desubjectivization coincide at every point, and both the flesh and blood individual 31

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and the subject of enunciation are perfectly silent. This can also be expressed by saying that the one who speaks is not the individual, but language . . . (RA, 117) This experience of the powerful depersonalization of being spoken by language is a profoundly literary one, often called inspiration or the muse. Agamben prefers the term poetic dictation. POETIC DICTATION

At the end of this remarkable passage of Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben then brings us back to our main project here, poetry, when he mentions that it is not surprising “in the face of this intimate extraneousness implicit in the act of speech” that poets feel a sense of responsibility and shame. I won’t speak of the complex theory of shame Agamben mounts here as this has been done very well elsewhere.44 Repeating a quote from Dante’s Vita nuova, which also finds great utility in The End of the Poem (1996), that poets need to be willing to “open to prose” the reasons for their poetry or face shame (his version of the troubadour razo de trobar or narrating of the inspiration for the composition of the work), Agamben proffers the touchstone to my whole study, namely the relationship between discursive prose and poetry: logo-poiesis. This relationship is marked by the experience of becoming impersonal that Agamben terms the poetic experience of ontological desubjectivization, or what he often refers to simply as poetic dictation when, rather than speaking of the poeticization of thought, he instead commits himself to thoughts about poetry. Staying with Dante, an early theorization of poetic dictation can be found in the pages of Stanzas circulating about a tercet from Dante’s Purgatorio that goes as follows: “I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and in the manner that he dictates within I go signifying” (cited in ST, 124). Agamben notes that while on the surface this tercet conforms to the scholastic definition of language as “notation and sign of a passion of the soul” (ST, 127), in fact it radically calls into question the idea of language as a notation of intellection. “Dante instead characterized poetic expression precisely as the dictation of an inspiring love” (ST, 127). Love, as we know, is not a modality of intellection but the combinatory theory of language as such in the European tradition as an unattainable yet present generative space for intellection represented by the prosodic 32

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conception of the stanza.45 Poetry, therefore, is not a form of notation of thinking yet it is a form of notation and it does have a direct relation to thinking through its direct experience of language. The theme of poetic dictation stays with Agamben coming to dominate the early pages of Idea of Prose (1985) through a series of considerations of the challenge of the poet’s intimate experience of their ability to speak of language as such. Knowing already that philosophy has fallen into the trap of misconstruing language’s neutral inexpressiveness as ineffability, we now battle alongside the poet as she attempts to find a voice for her experience of the poetic word. The main body of the book commences with the essay “The idea of Matter,” where Agamben considers enigmatically what he calls decisive experience, what one might term a truly defining subjective event for which subjects habitually lack words. Agamben says of this experience of an event that it is neither experience nor event in actual fact but matter nothing more than the point at which we touch the limits of language . . . Where language stops is not where the unsayable occurs, but rather where the matter of words begins. Those who have not reached, as in a dream, this woody substance of language, which the ancients called silva (wildwood), are prisoners of representation, even when they keep silent. (IP, 37) Having proposed a potentiality for a silent experience of materiality as such which is not unsayable but simply inexpressive and nonrepresentable presence, matter or wildwood,46 in the essay “The Idea of the Unique” Agamben then goes on to consider in greater depth a conception of speechlessness in the face of language that is not simply unsayability. Glossing on Celan’s assertion as to the uniqueness of poetic language, Agamben reveals that the experience of language is always doubled: There is, in fact, the experience of language that forever presupposes words . . . Contrariwise there is another experience in which man remains absolutely without words in the face of language. The language for which we have no words, which doesn’t pretend, like grammatical language, to be there before being . . . [is] the language of poetry. (IP, 48) It can be deduced from this that within our tradition there are two types of language-experience/usage in accordance with the 33

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traditional roles of philosophy and poetry respectively. Discursive grammatical prose does not concern itself with the semiotic and has, therefore, no means of cutting a path through the wildwood of matter to an encounter of the forest as something composed of wood. Only the poet, it would seem, can experience the tree in terms of what it is made of, irrespective of the form it takes. Philosophy already has the words to convey the experience and thus can never undergo the experience. Poetry is always in the experience, and so lacks access to the language needed to express the nature of the matter of language as such. Having asserted this, Agamben realizes immediately the aporia at the heart of any conception of a unique language accorded to poetic dictation. He explains “the unique language is not one language” in that it is always already split between words without language (philosophy) and being wordless in front of language (poetry). If, as Celan argues, uniqueness is the destiny of language, of what order is such a destiny in that, as Agamben responds, it precedes words as vehicles for meaning and to whom can it occur if we are not yet speakers? Agamben, of course, calls this state of speechlessness before a language that precedes words infancy, and reflects that such a state knows nothing of destiny. “Destiny is concerned only with the language that, faced with the infancy of the world, vows to be able to encounter it, to have forever . . . something to say of it” (IP, 49). Such a destiny is, as we have repeatedly seen, a false eschatology for in speaking of the uniqueness of language one proves its impossibility, and if one has words to speak of language one no longer has language before one of which to speak. Faced with the impossibility of seeing either wood or tree, Agamben’s great innovation here is to turn a dead end into a new clearing for thought: This vain promise of a meaning in language is its destiny, which is to say, its grammar and its tradition. The poet is the infant who piously receives this promise and who, through avowing its emptiness, decides for truth, and decides to remember that emptiness and fill it. But at that point, language stands before him, so alone, so abandoned to itself that it can no longer in any way impose: “la poésie ne s’impose plus. Elle s’expose,” so Celan writes . . . (IP, 49) The easiest summation of this is that the poet would like to testify to their experience of pure language as such but they cannot because 34

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their experience of pure language cannot translate beyond that experience. Such a poetic experience of language cannot impose itself in prose, cannot be narrated after the fact, but only occurs in the instance of its exposition. The combination of ideas of pure linguistic matter and language as subsequent philosophical discourse combine in “The Idea of Dictation.” A useful translator’s footnote in the English tradition explains that the Italian for dictation, dettato, retains an element from late Latin culture wherein the term refers to writing a literary work, a sense also to be found in the German word Dichtung that Heidegger often prefers in reference to poetry. Dictation, therefore, means both an authoritative declaration intended for preserving transcription and a mode of poiesis. The essay begins with the tradition of the razo or ability to recount after the fact how the poet came to compose/dictate their work. This tradition still holds for Dante, finds significant examples in the modern tradition in works such as Coleridge’s famous narrative of the composition of “Kubla Khan,” and is analyzed here in relation to twentieth-century Italian poet Delfini. As Agamben notes more than once elsewhere, while the razo of a poem (and a razo can often be internal to the poem such as one finds in works such as Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” and “The Solitary Reaper,” or works such as Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter”)47 is presented as the ontico-experiential basis of a work of poiesis describing, say, the events that led to the dictation of a poem, it is always written after the fact and so is obviously dictated by the already existent presence of the poem. Reading Delfini and Campana Agamben summarizes dictation as the space or locale, stanza, between the experience of dictation as inspiration courtesy of the muse, and that of the subsequent declamation of the experience in discursive prose: “Between the impossibility of thinking . . . and a power of only thinking, between the inability to remember in the perfect, amorous attachment to the present, and the memory that arises precisely out of the impossibility of this love, poetry is always divided, and this intimate divergence is its dictation” (IP, 52). Dictation therefore names a midway point or tension between being as the intimacy of undergoing an experience of language, channelling the muse, and the distanciation of a proceeding recollection of the experience, testing the experience through thoughtful prose. This mediality of poetic dictation explains why “the lyric—which uniquely keeps to such dictation—is necessarily 35

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empty; it is always transfixed on the verge of a day that has always already set . . .” (IP, 52). What I hope becomes clear by virtue of this positioning of the lyric at a moment of linguistic twilight is that like infancy, the stanza, and love, poetic dictation exposes for view the speechlessness of a direct experience of language that is itself not the result of the ineffability of that experience per se, but a discovery through the belatedness of the razo or recounting of experience that yes, said experience cannot be recounted, but in this failure to recollect one is exposed to the dictatorial truth of poetry: recount and recall what cannot be said or remembered. While one is in the moment of inspiration one lacks the space to speak, and once one is abandoned by the muse the only tale to tell is of said abandonment. Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep? This problem is reformulated in the essay “The Dictation of Poetry” in terms of the relationship between poetry and life. As I have been arguing, poetry is central to the work of Agamben, and as his main theme is of course the political determinations of the category life, it is perhaps not surprising that Agamben more than once asks as to the direct relation between poetry and life going so far as to argue that: “The poet is he who, in the word, produces life. Life, which the poet produces in the poem, withdraws from both the lived experience of the psychosomatic individual and the biological unsayability of the species” (EP, 93).48 In “The Dictation of Poetry” the relation of poetry to life is expressed in the more familiar and relevant question for us here: “What does it mean for a living being to speak?” (EP, 76), suggesting that while it makes sense that life is the product of language it is predominantly the case these days that the obverse is taken to be true. Agamben supports his claim that language precedes life with citations from the theological tradition of the West, for example the Gospel of John, before honing in on the specificity of the relation between poetry and the poet’s life in the development of the razo de trobar. Agamben notes that in ancient rhetoric ratio or ars invendiendi (inventive art/argument) was juxtaposed with ratio iudicandi or truthful, correctly spoken discourse. That said, inventive art was given the title argumentum because it was supposed that invention gave one access to the very place of speech as such, the source from which all arguments originate. This ancient rhetoric of topics however became watered down over centuries so that the place of speech 36

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as arche-source simply became conventional arguments used as mnemonic techniques in oral cultures. The brilliance of the troubadours is that they return the idea of topos back to its fundamental fount: “the troubadours want not to recall arguments consigned to a topos but instead to experience the very event of language as original topos” (EP, 79). This allows Agamben to now explain once and for all the role of the razo in poetry: “The razo, which lies at the foundation of poetry and which constitutes what the poet calls its dictation (dictamen), is therefore neither a biographical nor a linguistic event. Rather, the razo is a zone of indifference, so to speak, between lived experience and what is poeticized . . .” (LD, 79). Clearly there is something about the original place of language, what the troubadours called the stanza of love, that defies definition, for again over time the meaning of the razo was diluted in the same manner as was observed in topics so that “What for the troubadours was an experience of the razo—that is, an experience of the event of language as love, as the tight unity of what is lived and what is poeticized—now becomes a giving of reasons for experience” (EP, 80). More interesting than the slippery nature of topics/razo perhaps is the relation between lived experience and the experience of language which typifies dictation.49 Agamben notes that over centuries this has given birth to the art of biography, then fable, and finally the novel. Modern versions of the razo can be found in the work of Freud as much as in Joyce for example. That psychology and narrative have taken over the razo simply deflects attention from the fact that poetry presents for us the central ontological problematic of our age, and indeed our whole tradition. How can life emerge from language in such a way that it is neither the specificity of a life (biography) or the unsayable nature of biological life, which we share in common with all life? How, in other words, can there be an experience of language as the basis of thinking being that retains language as a thing that can be said but which itself is not reduced to merely saying something? Poetic dictation, caught as it is between the wordless experience of language as such and the language-less process of language about language, not only dramatizes the problematic of the emergence of human life out of language, but also that of philosophy, ratio iudicandi, from the poetic experience of language as such, ratio iveniendi. The impersonality of dictation becoming the personal element of biography, or the experience of inspiration becoming the tale of 37

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inspiration, is precisely the zone of indistinction between language and life that Agamben repeatedly seeks to reveal as the very place of a speechless language as such: dictated, poeticized, ontological, indifferent, in-fancy. This is why the fact that there is language, which is the basis of human being as both divided and potentially redeemed, cannot be addressed unless one listens with care to the dictates of the many pages that comprise the work of the literary Agamben.

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CHAPTER 1

LOGOS, THINKING THOUGHT

POETIC THINKING

Going against the grain of the Platonic tradition and accepting as a given that poetry thinks, in a recent essay “The Author as Gesture” included in the collection Profanations (2005), Agamben wonders where precisely the thought of the poem occurs. Accepting Foucault’s dictum that the author as creating subject is dead and replaced by the author-function,1 a functionality that attenuates the presence of creative agency to a mere support for discursive distributions of power along lines of ownership rights and so on, Agamben is however unable to concede that there is no author as such in the text. Instead he retains a vestigial role for creative agency in defining the perished author as a gesture: “If we call ‘gesture’ what remains unexpressed in each expressive act, we can say that . . . the author is present in the text only as a gesture that makes expression possible precisely by establishing a central emptiness within this expression.”2 Naturally, the location of poetic thinking would ordinarily be seen to take place in the mind of an author. Yet if the author is merely a functional facilitation or a supporting inexpressive gesture then it makes little sense to suggest that the thoughts of a poem or indeed any work of literature take place in the “mind” of said gesture. The gesture in question is, after all, empty, a place-holder for a subjective category convenience, not a person as such who has the capacity for thought. Gesture is rather an unconscious occupancy of the hands in conversation, a meaningless action. From the Latin gerere it is a type of bearing or carrying. Foraging for the place of poetic thinking Agamben reads a poem by the famous author-function César Vallejo, “Father dust who rises 41

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from Spain” (Prof, 98 fn. 12), speculating as to the exact location of the thoughts and sentiments contained in the work. Influenced no doubt by his own views on dictation he refutes the possibility that they simply blew in to the poet who then wrote them down, suggesting rather that they most probably only came to be known to the author as he was writing, or indeed even later as he was rereading his work. Aside from it being almost impossible to stipulate the exact moment that a poet “thought” what they wrote, if the thoughts of a poem are not in the mind of the author-function as they cannot be, the author-function does not think but is a collaborating facilitator of social forces, then can they ever even be said to be the thoughts of the poet? It would seem not. “Does this mean that the place of thought and feeling is in the poem itself . . .?” (Prof, 71). Agamben adroitly comes to realize that this is equally impossible for thoughts imply by definition a thinking subject. The only outstanding thinking subject involved in poetry, therefore, must be the reader who, in taking up the poem to read, “will occupy the empty place in the poem left by the author; he will repeat the same inexpressive gesture the author used to testify to his absence in the work” (Prof, 71). Here Agamben realizes that the reader, in occupying the space vacated by the author becomes, at this point, a similarly evacuated subjectivity. The reader becomes, in effect, a reader-function.3 The place of the poem, Agamben is forced to conclude, its actual taking place as a mode of thinking-feeling, can be located neither in the poem nor the author/reader-function.4 Instead, poetic thinking must be, contrary to one’s assumptions, “in the gesture through which the author and reader put themselves into play in the text and, at the same time, are infinitely withdrawn from it. The author is only the witness or guarantor of his own absence in the work in which he is put into play . . .” (Prof, 71). Author-functions play tag with the text, in effect, touching the text into being through an act of empty, gestural agency whose sole function is to come to presence as the “creator”’ of a poem through the marked presence of their absenting themselves from the work as subjective, creative, Nietzschean, willing agency. This being the case the author-function does not facilitate ownership or authority, as Foucault would have it, but desubjectivized ontology. If the poem “thinks” or presents thoughts and this thinking is not to be located in the mind of an actual, thinking subject, nor can a poem as object be said to think either, then thought occurs at the 42

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moment that subject and object, thought and its expression, touch upon each other, bring each other into presence then immediately withdraw. The result is that the author and reader exist within the work as available subjects to facilitate thought not as actual present and thinking beings but gestures of being. They point to the presence of beings but they do not possess actual being. They are examples of ontological deixis. In contrast, the work becomes the place of thought without one personifying the poem in some absurd way by declaring that it is an autonomous, paternal, and thus thinking being. The author can only come to being as the supporting gesture of the text, but the text “has no other light than the opaque one that radiates from the testimony of his [the author’s] absence” (Prof, 72). Through this Cimmerian light one is able to discern the topos of a poetic thinking. In an earlier piece “Bartleby, or On Contingency” Agamben is again attempting to think the place of thought through a consideration of literature, this time the more familiar discipline of philosophical thought or thinking as such. Reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics Agamben presents the aporia of what thought actually thinks in terms of issues of potentiality and actuality. If thought were simply the neutral potential to think something then, Aristotle contends, thought would effectively think nothing as such. Such a thought is obviously meaningless. Yet if thought instead comes to actuality and thinks something, then paradoxically it ceases to be thought as such but a category subordinate to the thing. From being the presupposition of a thing’s truth the thing becomes the presuppositional necessity of thinking. Each time thought thinks some thing therefore, thought no longer thinks some thing in its advent of singularity but is effectively what must be thought about some already presupposed thing. At this impossible point thought is reduced to being a presuppositional representation of the thing, which for Agamben is a form of language. Does thought actually exist as such as a general, potential, available medium “to think” something, anything, but nothing specific? Aristotle believes so and proves this by defining thought as the thinking of thinking which “is a kind of mean between thinking nothing and thinking something, between potentiality and actuality. Thought that thinks itself neither thinks of an object nor thinks nothing. It thinks a pure potentiality (to think and not to think)” (P, 250–1).5 Aristotle illustrates this rather abstract point with reference to the 43

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figure of a blank tablet upon which thought can be written but on which it has not yet been written, a bolstering figuration that shares a clear equivalency to Agamben’s idea of gesture as an empty facilitation of thinking.6 Let us dwell momentarily on a common, surprising, yet generally ignored problem shared by poetic and philosophical thinking. Both seem to founder on an aporia between potentiality and actuality. The author in a text is a potential to be while the realization of her thoughts in the text seems to be an actualization. Yet if, as we saw, the author as individual does not exist as such in a text, of what potential is a poem the actualization of ? By definition potential must be the actualization of the potential to be and yet not be the author–reader of a thought expressed in the poem body. The same is true for the philosopher. If the philosopher’s vocation is to think then naturally to think what thought is would be their highest calling, or at least Aristotle passes this belief on to Western metaphysics. Yet to think thought as potentiality leaves thought with nothing to think, while to think of thought as a thing in the world and thus actualize it is to subordinate the process of thinking to an actual object and demote thinking to a form of representation or writing. Thus to think thought is to think both the absence of thought as a thing to be thought, and its presence as a coming to be a thing to be thought, which at the same time negates thinking as such. The poem and the philosopheme share powerful affiliation at this exact point in terms of their both coming to being at the moment of a productive negation. They touch on being and, hand-in-hand, coyly withdraw, producing an ontological caress. POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY

Yet one would be wrong if one then declared some kind of lasting amity between poetry and philosophy. In his treatise on how to establish the ideal totalitarian state Plato immortally excludes poets from the republic, seemingly accusing them of false mimesis and warning of their power to convince the citizenry that their creations are better than reality itself: “the issue of poetry is the main consideration . . . which convinces me that the way we were trying to found our community was along absolutely the right lines . . . That we flatly refused to admit representational poetry.”7 Thus began proceedings for what Agamben translates as the “divorce” between poetry and prose 44

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(MWC, 52), that not only typifies our culture’s response to the arts, but has also introduced a disastrous aporia into Western metaphysics based around the presupposed difference between poetry and thinking which, inevitably, came to remove from poetry thinking as a form of authentic modality. Not that philosophy then neglected poetry. Aristotle was more than happy to begin the discipline of aesthetics or philosophical categorical thinking about the arts spawning a long and illustrious tradition. But on the whole poetry as a form of thinking, or even poetry’s role in thinking was, until Hegel, primarily excluded from the philosophical canon. So much so that today it seems strange perhaps to even argue a role for poetry as a mode of thinking. Poetry is a form of expression, of mimesis, of material pleasure, even radical disjuncture, but for most it is not a form of thought. Agamben returns to the division imposed by Plato many times in his own work whenever he speaks of the abyss between language and thought or poetry and philosophy. In Language and Death, in particular, this abyss weighs heavy upon our philosopher’s mind. Defining philosophy as “the unspeakable experience of the Voice” (LD, 66), he wonders, is there is another experience of language that does not depend on a foundation of unspeakability? “If philosophy is presented from the beginning as a ‘confrontation’ with (enantiosis) and a divergence from (diaphora, Plato, Republic 607b–c) poetry . . ., then what is the extreme experience of language within the poetic tradition?” (LD, 66). Perhaps it is in poetry that we find a concept of language that is not that of negation but rather a “reflection on the taking place of language” (LD, 66). Agamben suspects as much when he presents just such a possibility at the foundation of modern poetics in the razo de trobar. The stated intention of the Provençal poets’ razo de trobar was “to experience the topos of all topoi, that is, the very taking place of language as originary argument” (LD, 68) as we have already seen. They named the experience of the very advent of the poetic word, the place from which all places emerge, love. Although Troubadour love constitutes a promising avenue of inquiry, an attempt to experience the very taking place of the poetic word in the form of the joy of love seems a long way from nihilism, for example, Agamben soon uncovers a dark truth at the heart of troubadour poetics. Love is not only the term for the very event and advent of the poetic word it also comes to stand for the unattainable. “And if love is presented in the 45

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Provençal lyric as a desperate adventure whose object is far away, unattainable, and yet accessible only in this distance, that is because the experience of the taking place of language is at stake here, and this experience, as such, seems necessarily to be marked by negativity” (LD, 69). These two traditions and experiences of the word as negativity, modern metaphysics and Provençal poetics are, Agamben admits, seemingly divergent yet, in as much as the roots of European poetics lie precisely in the empty loveless stanzas of the troubadour lyric they mark the origin of an experience of poetic negativity which echoes that of modern metaphysics. I showed this in the previous chapter by drawing parallels between algorithms for the sign S/s, and the stanza S [/] s. The two empty resonators, philosophy and poetry, come together within the modern experience of metaphysics as negation detailed in Language and Death, and modern art and aesthetics as nihilism, the subject of The Man Without Content (1970). Thus while poetry comes very close to an originary experience of language as such, so much so that Agamben is willing to hand over ontology to the “poetic” experience of desubjectivization, he is forced to conclude: Even poetry seems here to experience the originary event of its own word as nothing. The poetic and philosophical experiences of language are thus not separated by an abyss, as an ancient tradition of thought would have it, but both rest originally in a common negative experience of the taking place of language. Perhaps, rather, only from this common negative experience is it possible to understand the meaning of that scission in the status of language that we are accustomed to call poetry and philosophy; and thus, to understand that which, while separating them, also holds them together and seems to point beyond their fracture. (LD, 74) There is encased in this citation the basic structure that explains Agamben’s repeated return to poetry as he tries to establish a post-nihilistic philosophy of negated scission, his philosophy of indifference. Both poetry and philosophy seek an indifferent experience of language as such before the moment of its division into language and voice. Neither is able, alone, to attain such an experience, resorting always to negative constructions of language as unattainability, nothingness, unspeakability, and so on. These issues come to full appearance for both disciplines during the period of 46

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modernity, yet the roots of their failure to find language go back several centuries at least. That poetry and philosophy share such commonalities is not a coincidence, but rather the result of a mutual origin in thinking as such that, however, has been obscured by the Platonic tradition that Agamben habitually calls the “abyss” between poetry and philosophy. He is not calling for a synthesis of poetry and philosophy here but a clear understanding of the actual conditions of their difference as opposed to those imposed upon them by Platonic exception. Again and again he returns to this theme. In Infancy and History, for example, in the “Project for a Review” he ends the volume by calling for a radicalization of the ancient science of philology which would, essentially, poeticize philology so that the site of the division between poetry and philosophy “becomes a conscious, problematic experience rather than an embarrassed repression” (IH, 163). Ending books on a call for the healing of the fracture between poetry and philosophy then becomes something of a habitual gesture. Stanzas concludes with an attempt to relocate a post-nihilistic idea of presence located in the very fold or articulation between signified and signifier. Tracing this articulation back to ancient Greek sources, he names this possibility harmonia or “the idea of a laceration that is also a suture, the idea of a tension that is both the articulation of a difference and a unity” (ST, 157). He cites Heraclitus in describing this harmonia as “invisible” harmony before exhorting that “the last Western philosopher recognized a hint of this harmony in a painting by Cézanne in the possible rediscovered community of thought and poetry” (ST, 157). (He is referring here to Heidegger.) The abyss between poetry and philosophy occupies the last of Agamben’s thoughts in Language and Death (LD, 108) and forms the conclusion of two major essays in the collection Potentialities (1999). In “Kommerell, or On Gesture” he brings together poetry, politics, gesture, and philosophy in a characteristically ambitious denouement (P, 85), while in “Tradition of the Immemorial” he speaks of Hölderlin’s quest for an undivided being leading to his call for the abolishment of the “philosophy of the letter” in favour of a poetics of dictation.8 Agamben is moved to wonder in this regard: Are we capable today of no longer being philosophers of the letter . . . without thereby becoming either philosophers of the voice or mere enthusiasts? Are we capable of reckoning with the poetic 47

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presentation of the vocation that, as a nonpresupposed principle, emerges where no voice calls us? Only then would tradition cease to be the remission and betrayal of an unsayable transmission . . . (P, 115) I believe our point is well made. The destination of many major works by Agamben is the revocation of the divorce between poetry and philosophy instigated formally by Plato in Republic.9 This usually takes the form of a summons to poeticize philosophy and expose philosophic prose to the semiotic presence of the poetic word. However, while Agamben seeks for a true experience of language in poetry he is regularly disappointed. Poetry, therefore, provides an opening up of the pathway towards a future for philosophy but alone it is not the destination of this track. Conceding this point, in the “last” essay of The End of the Poem, citing the famous Wittgenstein declaration that philosophy should really only be poeticized, Agamben argues: “As for poetry, one could say, on the contrary, that it is threatened by an excess of tension and thought. Or, rather, paraphrasing Wittgenstein, that poetry should really only be philosophised” (EP, 115). The answer to the problem of Western metaphysics can only be approached by the rehabilitation of poetry as a form of thinking but its solution does not simply emerge from poetry. Rather, it resides somewhere in the division between poetry and philosophy, its resolution resting with neither party nor an idealized unity of the two but between them somehow, in the fold or invisible harmony that, Agamben believes, has always existed in the midst of the two fundamental experiences of language in our culture: language as sustaining (poetry) and as testing (philosophy). These two experiences form the basis of Agamben’s idea of the origin of all literature in dictation, but they also come together in Agamben’s idea of the communicability of language as such as the place between, within, and surrounding the two contesting ideas of thinking within our tradition. COMMUNICABILITY, THE THING ITSELF

In the opening essay of Potentialities entitled “The Thing Itself,” Agamben recounts a story told by Plato in one of his letters of how, pestered endlessly by the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius to once more attend his court, Plato devised an apotropaic pedagogical methodology. One presents to the apparently eager student the whole thing of 48

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thought and all difficulties attendant on that. If the student is sincere he or she will embrace this difficulty, otherwise those merely “tanned” by philosophy (P, 28) will realize the dolour of “the thing” and task their tutor no more. The thing itself, therefore, is the apotropaic heart of philosophy, the most difficult of all problems: the very thing of thought as such. The powerfully obscure nature of the thing dissuades the thinker but in so doing also attracts them to the very basis of philosophy’s being. This thing is not a thing in any ordinary sense of the term, a thing in the world or a thing than can be represented by language and thus known in this way. Yet, Plato concedes, while language cannot say the thing as such, the thing is “nevertheless possible only in language and by virtue of language: precisely the thing of language” (P, 31). Having presented this reading of Plato, Agamben then performs one of his classic gestures by rediscovering through his remarkable and controversial philological method that translations of Plato have perhaps misrepresented his thoughts on this most essential thing. Agamben’s translation finds that the four bases of being which define the Platonic theory of ideas, name (onama), definition (logos), image (eidolon), and knowledge, all are dependent on the thing as such. This thing then is not a fifth, additional recondite element as the tradition has it, but the very precondition of being: “no longer simply the being in its obscurity, as an object presupposed by language and the epistemological process,” but, “that by which the object is known, its own knowability and truth” (P, 32). Rather than the thing as such being an unsayable and inaccessible part of being, there but never to be made available to presence, Agamben reconstitutes the thing as such as the ground or support of knowability.10 In accordance with the logic of apotropaicism it is precisely the thing’s unknowability and nonrepresentability in language that defines not simply the thing’s obscurity, but the basis of knowledge on this very obscurity. If this thing is not a thing in the world nor is it, however, the obscure nature of the presupposition of a thing, an arche thing impossible to retrieve. Rather said thing is to be brought to light “in the very medium of its knowability, in the pure light of its self-manifestation and announcement to consciousness” (P, 33). Much of this comes down to the problem of presupposition. Knowledge presupposes something as already existing about which it has knowledge whose veracity it can vouchsafe through the idea truth as agreement. Modern science is the archetypal epistemology in 49

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this regard operating as the very opposite structure to that of an apotropaic thinking that is, I would argue, more typical of modern ontology. Such thinking, in using language as a means of accessing that about which one speaks, reveals that: “Language sup-poses and hides what it brings to light, in the very act in which it brings it to light” (P, 33). While language and knowledge presuppose the thing itself as already existing as a thing about which they can speak and have knowledge,11 their presupposition of the thing itself will always make said thing inaccessible, inscribing a myth of absence, privation, unsayability, and negation at the heart of epistemology. What is the very thing of thought itself ? this tradition seems to ask, why that which cannot be thought. The result is that the sayability of the thing said and the knowability of the thing known are both lost to presuppositional thinking. Agamben strongly refutes this history of the thing, declaring that the thing itself is not “something ineffable that must remain unsaid and hence sheltered” (P, 34), nor is it “horribly or beautifully unreachable in its obscurity” (P, 35). If the thing is not a thing in the world, nor a presupposition or hypothesis, nor even an arche thing forever lost to which thought aspires, what is the thing? “It is the very sayability, the very open-ness at issue in language, which, in language, we always presuppose and forget . . . it is what we are always disclosing in speaking, what we are always saying and communicating . . .” (P, 35). The thing itself of thought, therefore, is the communicability of the very language that cannot express the thing but, without which, the thing could not come to presence. One of the earliest and most important essays on Agamben’s work, Düttmann’s introduction to Idea of Prose, spends some considerable effort defining communicability through its source in Benjamin and establishing it as the heart of Agamben’s thought. Düttmann states: “Communicability always communicates itself, it is nothing but communication itself.” Communication and communicability, although not the same thing at all, cannot however be thought separately. Communicability divided from communication, an act of communication, would not name the thing being communicated and so said thing would not be produced into presence and communicability never invoked and revealed. Yet communicability cannot be collapsed into communication in that in itself it cannot be communicated: “if communicability let itself be communicated, it would take the form

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of a thing, and communication, reducing itself to the simple communication of something, would erase itself immediately.”12 Hence communicability is defined here as that which supports and facilitates communication but which itself is never communicated through an act of communication, a structure we recognize from our considerations of thinking as such. This does not mean communicability is unsayable or invisible, merely that the means of encountering it are not provided by communication of something specific. Returning to “The Thing Itself,” one ought to note that the explicit history of this term in Plato is of no small water to our own study, however far the thing as such is from Agamben’s ideas on enjambement or poetic rhythm. For example, Plato’s development of the thing itself as a concept is in response to the entreaties of the tyrant of Ortygia where Plato first travelled with the idea of setting up his republic and expelling, one presumes, a chattering mime of poets along the way. In addition, one can see here that the communicability of language, which is also essential to Agamben’s ideas on poetry, is not precisely a comment on language. It would not be possible to produce an Agambenian linguistics from it for example. Language is the very thing that allows thought to occur and it is thought that Agamben pursues. The means by which this occurs is apotropaic in a historical sense in that the thing’s unsayability in philosophical language gives birth to the tradition of negativity, but at the same time allows us access to a profound realization. Language cannot say the thing as such because the thing as such is the very sayability of language and knowability of knowledge (it cannot communicate communicability but it can pro-duce it, lead it forward into the light). Agamben’s analysis of the thing as such should therefore act as a warning. While he has a great deal to say of poetry that is philological, historiographic, and technical, and we as critics of literature can and must learn from him in these areas, Agamben’s interest in poetry and the literary in general is only as a means of bringing him closer to language, and his interest in language is piqued only as a way of revealing the very basis of thinking and being as such. Like Heidegger, and the logic of the thing as not an object of presupposition but the very basis of objectivity and subjectivity is directly inherited from “the last philosopher,” poetry is fundamentally important to thinking but not necessarily fundamentally important in itself.

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THE IDEA OF LANGUAGE

In the second essay Agamben has written under the title “The Idea of Language,” he considers the influence of the concept of revelation on the Western metaphysical ideas of linguistic unsayability. Revelation, it is noted, must contain within it not merely content that human ingenuity has not yet conceived of, a knowable thing that we did not previously know, but more than that something that totally exceeds the process of human reason: this can only mean the following: the content of revelation is not a truth that can be expressed in the form of linguistic propositions about a being . . . but is instead a truth that concerns language itself, the very fact that language (and therefore knowledge) exists. The meaning of revelation is that humans can reveal beings through language but cannot reveal language itself . . . humans see the world through language but do not see language. (P, 40) This transparency of language within our tradition has come to be the very quality of god’s invisibility, allowing Agamben to define that foundational theological declaration on language, en arkhe¯ e¯n ho logos (“In the beginning was the word”), as a statement on the ontology of language as such. Glossing on John, Agamben explains that the beginning word, the first word of god, can presuppose nothing. Like the quasi-theology of the “big bang” theory of our universe, nothing precedes the “big word” of God. The absolute presupposition is itself non-presuppositional. “There is,” Agamben says making a point he often returns to, “no word for the word” (P, 41). This is elsewhere reformulated as there being no name for the name.13 This word/name therefore cannot say something about something as there is no something that precedes it, meaning it also does not say some thing in the world. Instead it says the thing as such of language. Agamben calls this the movement of language’s “self-revelation,” or a heuristic tautegorical structure that says its essence through the act of saying but saying nothing as such. This diversion through the tautegorical revelation, or what Lyotard defines as thinking-feeling of something happening as the very happening in question,14 is a strategy on Agamben’s part to suggest that modern metaphysics is similarly dominated by the impossible 52

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logic of revelation. Agamben sees the modern presupposition of language as profoundly aporetic in that it posits language as the presupposition to thought, yet it provides no direct means of letting language speak itself, forcing it always to speak of something pertaining to the epochal closure of the metaphysical project. Thus, he wonders, “Can there be discourse that, without being a metalanguage or sinking into the unsayable, says language itself and exposes its limits?” (P, 46). The problem here is mapped out very succinctly. A metalinguistic approach to language is able to think language in its finitude as a thing of some order but it must lift itself from out of language as semiotic medium to do so. Yet the Derridean idea of language as subject to the logic of the trace, for example, as ever the quarry in Agamben’s sights here, while locating one irrevocably within language and its endless deferrals and referrals (it must be remembered that the trace defers forward by simultaneously referring back to historical contextual usages that presage its deferrals to come), does not, Agamben believes, allow one to think language as such. As Agamben says, “If every human word presupposed another word, if the presuppositional power of language knew no limits, then there would truly be no possible experience of the limits of language. On the other hand, a perfect language purged of all homonymy and composed solely of univocal signs would be a language absolutely without Ideas” (P, 46–7). Returning to Plato, Agamben believes that the Idea of Greek thought is one possible way of escaping the philosophical double bind of language’s polysemantic homonymy and its anonymous finitude. The Idea, and naturally enough he comes to call this the Idea of language, does not have a presence that can be named but nor is the Idea a nameless nothingness. The Greek sense of the Idea is not a word so cannot be named meta-linguistically, “this is an Idea,” but nor is an Idea some thing in the world outside: “it is a vision of language itself. Language, which for human beings mediates all things and all knowledge, is itself immediate. Nothing immediate can be reached by speaking beings—nothing, that is, except language itself, mediation itself ” (P, 47). Thus the conception of language as immediate mediation defines its communicability and reveals a possible way out of the nihilism of modern thought. Such language is not presupposed, however, as immediate mediation “constitutes the sole possibility of reaching a principle freed of every presupposition” (P, 47). Or what Plato calls the thing itself. 53

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COMMUNICABILITY, THE IDEA OF PROSE

While an essential element of Agamben’s thought critics have, perhaps, made over much of linguistic communicability, alone it tells us little. Similarly, in isolation poetry’s reserved role as the closest experience we can have of immediate mediation via dictation is not Agamben’s main point. He wishes, like a number of thinkers since Heidegger, to solve the problem of philosophy itself rather than use philosophy to solve problems. For example, he reminds us that the original task of thought was not to discern the presuppositional bases for thinking problems but the elimination of presuppositions. “Was philosophy not perhaps the discourse that wanted to free itself of all presuppositions, even the most universal presupposition, which is expressed in the formula ‘that there is language’? Is philosophy not concerned precisely with comprehending the incomprehensible?” (P, 45). In the pursuit of thought nothing is sacred. Even Agamben’s own, self-avowed project is negated here in true philosophical thought, or thought that does not find presuppositional commonalities but eliminates all presupposition leaving merely the great single object of true thinking. This object is the thing itself of thought defined by Agamben not by what it can know presuppositionally but what it cannot. Such a mode of thinking is not lost in the mire of unspeakability as one might assume and is silent on the subject about which it must speak only because it, as yet, does not understand what to say. True philosophy in this way ought to be doubly silent. Silent on the problems it has solved and silent as it comprehends the problems that remain. One name for this voluble silence in Agamben’s work is the Idea of Prose. Confusingly, the text Idea of Prose does not contain the source material of this intriguing construction that is to be found elsewhere in the third of our trinity of essays on communicability as such contained in Potentialities: “Language and History.” As the text opens we encounter Walter Benjamin speaking in notes for “Theses on the Philosophy of History” of the messianic world to come which he famously defines as one of integral actuality, or moment in history when all division is, for a second at least, suspended.15 Such a moment ought to be celebrated should it not, not in song but in a pure language?16 He says, via the mediation of Agamben’s text: “Its language is the idea of prose itself, which is understood by all humans

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just as the language of birds is understood by those born on Sunday” (cited in P, 48). At the moment that history is redeemed from division into integral actuality, humanity will resolve the issue of the Babelian profusion of languages, he writes, not by taking up one single language and rejecting all others, but in the integration of all languages into one pure language that is not written or spoken but simply celebrated. This Benjamin famously calls “freed prose,” a language not tied down to communication but existing rather as pure communicability.17 What would such prose consist of ? Primarily names. Benjamin, like many thinkers, accepts the scission at the heart of human language between pure signification, naming, and communication, discourse. Discursive language is widely seen as a necessary evil to redeem the fall of language over time from a pure system of transparent signification, naming the world, to an impure process of attempted communication or trying to render transparent once more the opacity of signs. In the Idea of Prose we would not return, however, simply to a universal system of nouns but to a totally transparent system of pure coincidence between sound and sense. If, as our tradition often has it, discourse presupposes names then a name cannot be anything that would ever need discourse again. Such a name cannot refer to things in the world, as confusion can of course lead again to a diversity of names for such things, nor can it refer to other names within language, as there would be no exteriority for such endless deferral. Thus the Idea of Prose is a system of pure and transparent naming that names one thing: the universal, integrated, and actual presence of language as such, or communicability. To put it succinctly, prose would name nothing other than the fact that it can name: nominal potentiality. “The status of this Adamic language is therefore of speech that does not communicate anything other than itself and in which spiritual essence and linguistic essence thus coincide. Such a language does not have a content and does not communicate objects through meanings; instead it is perfectly transparent to itself ” (P, 52). How can this be? Agamben himself poses this question. I believe we now have an answer that we can retrieve from the mysticism of Benjamin’s wonderful prose. Language as communicability is the moment of integral actuality when the thing as such of thought touches the medium of thinking, language. At this moment what is

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revealed is that the medium that allows one to produce or perceive the thing as such, language, is the thing of such of thought. Thought thinks how it is possible for thought to think away from presuppositionality, unity, and difference. In so doing it discovers this possibility through the very medium that momentarily facilitates this question. It has to be this way. A thought that precedes language simply reiterates the aporias of philosophy’s reliance on, yet disregard for, language as semiotic mediality. A language that precedes thought places language in a position of presupposition immediately negating its true essence and making it a philosophical concept. Language too requires immediate mediation as Agamben explains: “to say what they mean, languages would have to cease to mean it, that is, transmit it. But this is exactly what they cannot do without abolishing themselves” (P, 54). The very meaning of language is its transmission of meaning as such, but to say this it would have to cease transmitting immediately and choose a side, philosophy. At this point it would cease to be a sustaining experience of language as transmission and would instead be a specific transmissible meaning. Which is why, given the weak choice of poetry or philosophy in the interim while we await the arrival of the Idea of Prose, Agamben opts for poetry,18 choosing to stay within language rather than distance himself from the source of all thought, so to speak, by actually trying to think it. That said, ironically, Agamben is a philosopher and purveyor of philosophical prose. He is not a poet. He does not take dictation. Is his prose therefore close to the Idea of Prose? At the resolution of the essay Agamben returns to the citation that commenced the discussion and its proffering of the “Idea of Prose.” He finds precedents for this conception in Plato’s Idea of the thing as such that an uncited Aristotelian fragment describes as “a kind of mean between prose and poetry.”19 However, Benjamin’s choice of the confusing term prose, answering the very pertinent question why he did not describe an Idea of Poetry, seems to be promoted by an observation by Valéry that states “the essence of prose is to perish” (cited in P, 60). The destiny of perfect or pure prose, the poet says, is to be totally comprehended, or to leave no excessive, semiotic, or material remnant. This vision of prose’s total invisibility in the face of semantic transmission is part of a tradition that I have analysed elsewhere and has come to form the very frontier of the future of

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poetry itself; a poetry of materialized prose.20 Accepting that there are certain presuppositional and aporetic elements to this view, I will here concede however that at the very least it is the dream and beyond that also the Idea of Prose that its materiality should always finish in total immaterialization. As Agamben says of such prose: Insofar as it has reached perfect transparency to itself, insofar as it now says and understands only itself, speech restored to the Idea is immediately dispersed; it is “pure history”—history without grammar or transmission, which knows neither past nor repetition, resting solely on its own never having been. It is what is continually said and what continually takes place in every language not as an unsayable presupposition but as what, in never having been, sustains the life of language. The Idea of language is language that no longer presupposes any other language; it is the language that, having eliminated all of its presuppositions and names and no longer having anything to say, now simply speaks. (P, 60) A language of perfect transparency would accept no division and therefore can be described as totally indifferent. This indifference is not the result of unity or dialectic synthesis. It does not unify because it exists pre-divisively in a completely other order of thinking that has no conception of scission and opposition. Yet a pellucid language would not be reducible to dialectic either as the two elements, naming and signifying, are no longer in opposition but in a state of integral actuality. Agamben is reaching here, surely, for a messianic and impossible dream? Perhaps. But remnants of it can be perceived first in the very communicability of language as such or as pure medium, in the collapse of philosophy into a linguistic presupposition of unsayability which ironically allows us to finally think of a silent language that speaks itself, and finally in poetry and its complex presentation and experience of the materiality of language as such through dictation. Confusingly, but essentially, the Idea of Prose, if we are ever to arrive at that point, can no longer be pursued through philosophical prose, and thus Agamben, like Badiou, Nancy, Derrida, and Heidegger, is forced to turn to poetry. Only poetry, it would seem, can pro-duce perfect prose.

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POETIC GESTURES

Although Agamben consistently affirms a common history and destiny for poetry and philosophy, perhaps due to the Platonic inheritance, inbuilt scepticism, or simply the radical nature of Agamben’s claim, it remains difficult for us perhaps to see how poetry and philosophy could even begin to be said to share a common ground, however tense this dual occupancy may be. One solution to this problem resides in Agamben’s theory of the gesture with which we already have some familiarity from what is, in fact, Agamben’s third foray into the theory of gesture. He first raises the issue in an essay called “Notes on Gesture” inserted into the appendices of Infancy and History.21 This early work begins in characteristic fashion with the philosopher bemoaning the loss of gestures in modern life. He comes to define gesture, via the neo-Platonist Varro’s reading of Aristotle, as that which resides between the two sides of Aristotle’s famous distinction between action (praxis) and production (poiesis).22 He admits that Varro’s analysis of gesture as neither production nor enactment but “undertaking and supporting,” while owing much to Aristotle, presents a new, third kind of action: “if doing is a means in sight of an end and praxis is an end without a means, gesture breaks the false alternative between ends and means . . . and presents means which, as such, are removed from the sphere of mediation without thereby becoming ends” (IH, 154–5).23 This definition of a means without determinate ends, the basis of Agamben’s presentation of form-of-life as a new mode of thinking in Means Without Ends (1996),24 is what Agamben calls gesture: “Gesture is the display of mediation, the making visible of a means as such” (IH, 155). He feels confident at this stage to then immediately make the jump of almost two millennia from the Roman scholar Varro to the French poet Mallarmé and his concept of the milieu pur: “a sphere not of an end in itself, but of a kind of mediation that is pure and devoid of any end” (IH, 155). Astonishingly, and we will need to wait before we can fully comprehend this final leap of his imagination, this rapidly leads him to the conclusion that it is gesture as pure medium that allows us finally to understand the Kantian definition of beauty as “finality without purpose” or “without end” which is, “in a means, that potential for the gesture to interrupt it in its very being-means and only thus does it display it, does it turn a res into a res gesta” (IH, 155). This is vintage Agamben, combining Greek scholarship 58

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forays into the European avant-garde and radical re-readings of the foundations of modern philosophy all within a few sentences. The essay ends by explaining a relation the reader may already have discerned, namely that gesture is another name for the communicability of language as pure medium: “gesture is the communication of a potential to be communicated. In itself it has nothing to say, because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as a pure potential for mediation” (IH, 156). This nothing to say, which originates from the fact that pure mediality cannot be presented in the form of a proposition it being the unspoken base of all propositions, while yet another example of the mute voice within our tradition is, however, in gesture, a positive silence.25 Agamben calls such positive silence a “gag” playing on the double meaning of a hindrance to speech and an ad lib inserted into a speech by an actor unsure of her lines. Thus the muteness of philosophy, much reviled in Language and Death for example, here becomes a positive gagging or “an exposition of the human being’s being-in-language: pure gesturality” (IH, 156).26 It transpires that philosophy speaks of silence to fill in its memory lapse as regards its true subject for speech, language as such. Undeniably this silence muzzles the truth of human being but it is a mere interruption of amnesia whose very presence reveals the thing it promoted us to forget: language as pure medium. Gesture’s muteness, therefore, presents Agamben with a double negation typified by the use of the term gag. Lamentably the gag silences but it also inserts language into a hiatus which, while a distraction from the truth of language, is also a betrayal of its importance. The insertion of speech into silence, therefore, provides the potential for a silence to once more speak. Agamben describes philosophy’s gag as being akin to that of what he calls the gesturality of cinema, but in the aforementioned “Kommerell, or On Gesture” he brings philosophy closer to an art form more central to our study, poetry. Defining the great twentiethcentury German critic as a “gestic” critic, he reads Kommerell’s own comments on linguistic gesturality. The German defines gesture as closely tied but not reducible to, the linguistic. A presence in language more originary than conceptual expression, it is “the stratum of language that is not exhausted in communication and that captures language, so to speak, in its solitary moments” (P, 77). These comments mark a fairly recognizable presaging of Agamben’s early thoughts on gesture here brought into the sphere of poiesis. 59

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Kommerell, to better illustrate his point, compares gestural loneliness as akin to that found in lyric poetry. He defines language as primarily conceptual and mimetic, before assuring us that prose is essentially the conceptual component of language, and poetry the mimetic. If this is the case, there must always be something in the poem not exhausted by a reading of it in terms of meaning. This remaining mimetic element is its gesturality or what we can also call the semiotic. Kommerell defines speech as originary gesture leading Agamben to conclude: “If this is true . . . then what is at issue in gesture is not so much a prelinguistic content as, so to speak, the other side of language, the muteness inherent in humankind’s very capacity for language, its speechless dwelling in language” (P, 78). A proposition that allows one to draw the conclusion that in-fancy is also gestural. Kommerell proposes a decidedly odd equation of diminishing returns in this regard. He says the more we have language the greater the weight of the unsayable. Each word, it would seem, bears a quantum of gestic mass, its unspeakability as pure medium that Hegel identified in the inadequacy of the deictic diese. Thus for those possessed of the most words, poets, the weight of language’s gestic muteness, already heightened for them by their semiotic rather than semantic use of language, becomes almost unbearable. Like philosophy, therefore, according to Kommerell poetry is subject to the gestic gag or as Agamben says: “something put in someone’s mouth to keep him from speaking and, then, the actor’s improvisation to make up for an impossibility of speaking” (P, 78). Gesture is one name Agamben gives for the very mediality of language’s communicability. It speaks not of the pre- but sublinguistic support of the semiotic as such in language, language as pure, inexpressive materiality, graphicality, noise. Aside from the common history and destiny shared by poetry and philosophy, and a common if divergent response to their being “gagged” by language’s tendency towards muteness within our culture, the gestural is one of the means by which poetry and philosophy come together in Agamben’s work. Not that philosophy as such is gestural. Quite the opposite, it tends ever to the conceptual. Having said that there is one aspect of the philosophical tradition that echoes the pure mediality of gesturality in poiesis. Agamben calls this the tablet and our second encounter with it, remember we have already considered Aristotle’s blank tablet, requires that we leave Kommerell in Germany and travel 60

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back in time many hundreds of years to the court of Koshrau I of Persia where a respected and aged philosopher once set himself the task of finally resolving the remaining problems of philosophy . . . THE TABLET, PHILOSOPHICAL GESTURALITY

In the sixth century AD, in exile, the ageing philosopher Damascius decided to devote his last years to an impossible work entitled Aporias and Solutions Concerning First Principles. After three hundred days and three hundred nights of consideration, with many interruptions, he was in despair “because how can thought pose the question of the beginning of thought . . . how can one comprehend the incomprehensible” (IP, 32). Then, one night, an image occurred to him that would guide him towards the completion of this impossible task, “not an image, but something like the perfectly empty space in which only image, breath, or word might eventually take place . . . it was not even a space, but the site of a place” (IP, 33). This site of a place reminded him of nothing so much as the threshing floors of Damascus, the Syrian city where he was born many years before. “Wasn’t what he was searching for exactly like the threshing floor, itself unthinkable and unspeakable, where the winnowing fans of thought and language separated the grain and chaff of everything?” (IP, 33).27 From this charming story of ancient times, Agamben too finds the instigation of what he had been looking for since the inauguration of his great experimentum linguae, not the origin of first principles but the place where language can be thought without reducing it to mere discourse and named without tying it down to a fixed, particular referent. Describing Damascius setting about writing down the idea of the threshing floor, he narrates how, taking his hand from the writing tablet for a moment, in a flash the old philosopher realized the truth of thought: The uttermost limit thought can reach is not a being, not a place or thing, no matter how free of any quality, but rather, its own absolute potentiality, the pure potentiality of representation itself: the writing tablet! . . . The entire, lengthy volume that the hand of the scribe had crammed with characters was nothing other than the attempt to represent the perfectly bare writing tablet on which nothing had yet been written. (IP, 34) 61

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Courtesy of this epiphany Damascius understood that his work would be finished only at the moment he ceased writing and accordingly he broke the tablet in two. This allegorical provocation is the threshold of Agamben’s first attempt to bring together the millennial project of poetry and philosophy and heal their painful divorce in Idea of Prose. The tablet is, therefore, a version of a kind of gestural or poeticized thinking. As Damascius discerned, the precondition of all thought on the materiality of a non-expressive language, here represented by the medium of an as yet un-inscribed set of thoughts, means he is unable to reconcile the conflict between writing that does not think (poetry) and thinking that cannot be written (philosophy). Being a thinker not a poet he thus has no option but to break the tablet of material language and abandon his philosophical ambitions, no doubt with great bitterness (although the text of this great work was in fact written). Agamben has no such intentions towards a narrative of sour disavowal told by some future thinker fifteen hundred years hence and so alights with relish upon Benjamin’s Idea of Prose as a way out of perennial philosophical failure. Düttmann’s analysis of the translation of the key phrase from “The Idea of Prose” is important here. The closing words of the essay speak again of the enigmatic statement of Aristotle that Plato’s “idea del linguaggio” (“idea of language”), “non era, per lui, né poesia né prosa, ma il loro medio” (“was for him neither poetry nor prose, but their middle term”).28 Düttmann is somewhat dissatisfied with the translation of medio as “middle term” by Sullivan and Whitsitt, preferring the German translation “mitte” or midst, with its double sense of midst and milieu or “what takes place in the middle, what, not giving way to the extremes, remains surrounded by the milieu that characterizes such an intermediary state” (IP, 5). Medio in this way would mean to be both in the midst of something, in the midst of poetry and philosophy, and the medium created by the bringing together of these two terms. The term does not, as Düttmann correctly asserts, refer to an already presupposed medium waiting to be occupied, rather medio must signify being in the midst of a milieu and being a milieu of the midst. One can see why the rather bland and non-suggestive “middle term” then is not to his or indeed my own liking. That said Düttmann’s version seems to miss the most obvious translation of the term medio, namely mean. Mean here retains the sense of middleness and of sharing a common ground but 62

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importantly it adds a third sense: the average of two terms. Average is a most common meaning for medio in Italian. I believe that without the concomitant implication of averaging out, middleness (Wall’s aforementioned radical passivity), midst and milieu do not quite capture what is the essential experience of the Idea of Prose, namely balance, stillness, tension, suspension: “dialectic at a standstill.”29 The tablet, therefore, is an example of a potential medium for thinking the thing of thought as such dependent on precisely this (re)translation of Aristotle’s definition of said thing as pure mediality: “neither poetry nor prose, but their mean.” POTENTIALITY

To draw together the diverse strands of Agamben’s theory of the medio, or the mean of communicability between poetry and prose, it is time to tell another story, this time the tale of different form of tablet named “Bartleby the Scrivener.” It is a story Agamben has, aptly, told twice over first as part of a co-authored book with Deleuze translated as “Bartleby, or On Contingency” for Potentialities,30 and again in the lapidarianally entitled “Bartleby,” in The Coming Community (1990). This second volume, while a consideration of ethics and community, is also a delineation of potentiality in terms of ontology as the opening essay “Whatever” reveals. It commences with prophesy: “The coming being is whatever being” (CC, 1). This portentous rhetorical portal opens up a debate on the meaning of “whatever” in terms of identity and being,31 with Agamben explaining he does not mean an indifferent being in relation to a common property, being French or being Muslim, but indifferent being in that it is “such as it is. Singularity is thus freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal” (CC, 1). While Agamben is talking about being and ethics here we can now clearly see that he is also discoursing on the traditionally assumed qualities of poetry (ineffability) and philosophy (intelligibility). For that matter he is also speaking of language, specifically its ability to communicate nothing but its potential to communicate: whatever name. Excited by this formulation he goes on to name this the quodlibet or whatever character of being in relation to that complex philosophical term potential originating in the work of Aristotle and finding radical reinvention in Heidegger under the terms of possibility.32 63

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Agamben has said a number of times that the Western metaphysical tradition was part founded on the now generally ignored opposition between potentiality and actuality in Aristotle’s work.33 He notes that in Aristotle potentiality, for the sake of argument let us say the poet’s potential to make a poem, is developed from the debate over what it means to have a faculty to do something and yet not be doing it. To have a faculty to write a poem, Agamben uses here the example of Akhmatova’s avowal that she had the faculty to express the horror of the Russian purges before she had written a word, means that you can write a poem but not that you are writing one or even that you ever will. Thus, Agamben concludes, all potentiality is based on a choice not to do, so that potentiality is not simply actuality to be but also the refusal to actuate one’s potential. Indeed, at every moment that the poet is not writing a poem they are in a state of potential privation: they could write but they choose not to. “What is essential is that potentiality is not simply non-Being, simple privation, but rather the existence of non-Being, the presence of an absence . . .” (P, 179). The presence of an absence for Agamben is the true definition of potentiality, not the assumed movement from potentiality to actuality which we might call “creation” or “invention,” but the chance that potential will remain solely potential—potential inaction, in-creation, non-invention. Thus when Agamben goes on to define the artist, “‘in this sense, we say of the architect that he or she has the potential to build, of the poet that he or she has the potential to write poems,” the actual and surprising definition of poetic being is the possession of a faculty and not using it. “Thus the architect is potential insofar as he has the potential to not-build, the poet the potential to not-write poems” (P, 179). The poet here, as indeed all makers are, is defined in terms of being through negation or desubjectivization. Akhmatova is a poet at the moment of her not-yet-having-written and, in an odd way she is less of a poet when she is fulfilling her potential and writing poems. It ought now to be becoming increasingly clear how Agamben’s early ideas pertaining to authorial gesturality, tabularity, and communicability all come together here in a sustained consideration of potential as the desubjectivizing presence of absence in being, which comes to define being as the presence of the not to be, or whatever being. Being is defined in its singularity by precisely this ontological condition of neutrality and passivity, the simultaneous existence of not being within the very identity of one’s being. 64

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Akhmatova is a poet because she can write poems but she only has this faculty because she can also not write poems. “For if it is true that whatever being always has a potential character, it is equally certain that it is not capable of only this or that specific act, nor is it simply incapable . . . the being that is properly whatever is able to not-be; it is capable of its own impotence” (CC, 35). Such a being is located in the mean or medial position between potentiality, not yet being, and actuality, having been. Being, therefore, being in its potentiality, must retain a remnant in each of its two manifestations. Before being comes to be it already possess the remnant of a true being in that such a being is not full actualization but the retention of not-being even in the act of full coming to being. Once potential passes over into actualization however, there must be retained a part of potential being that is never fully realized, the potential not to be a poet as the very actualization of the poetic subjective state. Here gesture and tablet find a common medium in what I envisage as a tensile pairing that forms the communicability of language or the thing itself of thought. Gesture is the touch and withdrawal of being, the simultaneous coming to being and desubjectivization of identity that Agamben describes as the essence of the author-function. The tablet is the medium of this touch or what is touched, a blankness that is never entirely blank and that, even when written upon, retains the element of blankness. Returning to Bartleby, for those who are familiar with this remarkably prescient work by Melville, it should now be clear that the reluctant scribe is the manifestation of potentiality embedded in his apparently self-destructive and nihilistic riposte to any request for action, or to turn his potential into actuality, “I would prefer not to.”34 Agamben calls this supreme power using the figure of Glenn Gould to better illustrate the power of whatever being. Noting that true power comes from the capability for power and impotence, he celebrates Gould’s artistic power through a consideration of his potential to not not-play. Stating that any pianist can play or not play, Gould’s power is that “he plays, so to speak, with his potential to not-play” (CC, 36). Clearly Gould is a thinker in his playing potential for rather than simply being a pianist, he is able to consider his potential being beyond simply occupying this named position. As such he is an exemplar of Aristotelian thought as potential and his controversial and apparently unhinged performance choices are recognizable examples of masterful, modern “poetic” thinking. 65

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Reading De Anima, Agamben glosses again on Aristotle’s definition of thought, this time more centrally to its relation to potentiality: “If thought were in fact only the potentiality to think this or that intelligibility . . . it would always already have passed through to the act and it would remain necessarily inferior to its own object. But thought, in its essence, is pure potentiality; in other words, it is also the potentiality to not think, and, as such, as possible or material intellect, Aristotle compares it to a writing tablet on which nothing is written” (CC, 37). Having met with this tablet once before, we can now reveal that it is the famous tabula rasa, although Agamben notes that the correct term should be rasum tabulae or the layer of wax covering the tablet which the stylus engraves. This waxen screen allows thought to turn back on itself and think itself as the thought of thought, not thought considered as an object, “but that layer of wax, that rasum tabulae that is nothing but its own passivity” (CC, 37).35 Just as Gould can think his own potentiality by playing with its negation, stepping away from to play or not to play in favour of a position of playing to play and playing not to play, so thought can think itself as a pure medium, neither an object nor its negation. Thought is neither presence, therefore, nor some negative theological absence, but is the presence of absence within presence that both affirms and negates being. Being as pure absence remains nonbeing, but being as presence becomes unthinkable. Thought must have something to think, simply put, but not in actuality think it for as soon as it is thought, thought is no longer thought as such. This complex yet necessary logic not only dictates the potentiality of thought and willed creation but their interrelation through writing: “In the potentiality that thinks itself, action and passion coincide and the writing tablet writes by itself or, rather, writes its own passivity. The perfect act of writing comes not from a power to write, but from an impotence that turns back on itself and in this way comes to itself as pure act . . .” (CC, 37). And Bartleby, “a scribe who does not simply cease writing but ‘prefers not to’” (CC, 37), is the archetype of pure potentiality as the passive writing medium upon which thought could, but is not yet and may never be, written. Or, as Agamben states midway through “Bartleby, or On Contingency”: “In its deepest intention, philosophy is a firm assertion of potentiality; the construction of an experience of the possible as such. Not thought but the potential to think, not writing but the white sheet is what philosophy 66

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refuses at all costs to forget” (P, 249). This white sheet is yet another version of the tablet of philosophy and the empty inscriptions imprinted upon it the gesturality that is at the basis of poetry’s experience of language as such. Without being facetious, Agamben’s whole philosophical system of thinking as such could be reduced to the thoughtless doodling of ontology upon a blank sheet with an inkless pen. Or better a dot, a series of dots, as the poet sets pen to paper, changes her mind, withdraws the pen, changes her mind, commences writing, then opts not to . . .: “The ink, the drop of darkness with which the pen writes, is thought itself ” (P, 244). Or is it to be unearthed in his description of the capricious diffidence found at the desk of every writer of genius? “If in order to write you need—he needs!—a certain yellow paper, a certain special pen, a certain dim light shining from the left, it is useless to tell yourself that just any pen will do, that any paper and any light will suffice” (Prof, 10). Going on to describe the essence of the poetic as the tension between the demands of ego and genius, the personal and impersonal (Prof, 14), Agamben concludes: “To some extent we all come to terms with Genius, with what resides in us but does not belong to us. Each person’s character is engendered by the way he attempts to turn away from Genius, to flee from him” (Prof, 17).36 Potentiality in the writer is precisely this tension between genius and character, not to write and to write. The impersonal is negated in the personal act of writing something specific, yet each act of writing, as we saw, depersonalizes and desubjectivizes the writer. The experience of the poet can be defined in precisely these terms as poetic dictation direct from the muse or the greatest experience of potential impotentiality. Poets are called by the muse to write, but as they write they murder the muse and assume her garb. Looking in the mirror of their art, however, what do they see? Dressed in second-clothes, they have become someone they are not. Writer’s block is a phenomenon best explained by the ontology of potentiality, as is the writing of pure inspiration. There are the great books that were never written, and the works never created: Mallarmé’s Livre, Agamben’s La voce umana, the late Rimbaud, Duchamp, DeChirico. These works did not come into being because they were not possessed of genius. The author attempted to merely will them into existence. They are the art of pure character. Then there are the great works that were written purely through genius: “Kubla Khan,” The Magnetic Fields, On the Road, As I Lay Dying, 67

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Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On. Here the author seemingly had little or nothing to do with writing. Writer’s block and pure, inspired flow are two sides of an imbalance of writerly potentiality, too much character in one and overabundance of genius in the other. And what of when a writer simply ceases to write, when genius has abandoned them? “It is the late and final stage when the old artist lays down his pen—and contemplates. What does he contemplate? Gestures: for the first time truly his own, devoid of every charm . . . only now does the very long unlearning of the self begin . . .” (Prof, 18). Some do not write and could never do so. Their destiny is otherwise. There are those who can write and do so with facility and alacrity. They are happy with their lot and it would never occur to them not to write. Then there are the few, the great writers of genius. Their brilliance does not reside in what they write or what they excise or refute, but in their ongoing and self-conscious game with writing: to write, or not to write, or not to not write, or to write as not writing, and so on. The gesture alone is meaningless and sad. A blank tablet acting as mere reproach to the woman of genius. Gesturality signs the long and chequered history of one’s being with language, all one’s written and unwritten works as Agamben phrases it, that determine one’s subjective desubjectivity as a writer of potential. Does one fulfil one’s potential in the work? Never, and that is the only way. The pen that grazes the page, the brush as it is lifted from the canvas not when it is applied, fulfil, for Agamben, the powerful unfulfilment of true potential being.

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CHAPTER 2

POIESIS, THINKING THROUGH MAKING

POIESIS 1

The Greek word poiesis is the origin of our term poetry explaining why, for the modern philosophical tradition, poetry has come to be the archetype of all the arts, but its wider meaning is in fact creation. Plato famously says in the Symposium: “any cause that brings into existence something that was not there before is poiesis.”2 Within the period of aesthetic modernity extending from Romanticism to our contemporary moment it has been common to interpret this dictum in such a way that poiesis could be taken to mean simply the willed making of something: creation. Such a view confirms the ontotheological and masculine activity of god-like invention as creation ex nihilo that has dominated modern ideas of the artist-creator. This view of creativity finds its culmination in Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to Power as Art or maker as creative genius. Yet if we pay careful attention to Plato’s words here, poiesis is “any cause” that results in creation. This includes willed creative agency therefore, but is not limited to it. At the same time creation does not simply indicate the god-like making of a new object in the world, but the bringing into existence something that was not there before which could be an object, but could just as easily be a truth or observation. Finally, the process of actually making is rather less glamorous than that, say, of filmic presentations of creation such as the various versions of Frankenstein. A sweating, dark-browed genius does not necessarily have to work in the intermittent flashes of lightning accompanied by Wagnerian thunder and a rattling gurney to simply “bring something into presence.” Bringing something into presence could just as easily

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mean coaxing, guiding, or accompanying. Presence need not be awful. It may be timorous. For Heidegger, respecting the Greek provenance, poiesis makes something manifest to appearance that was not manifest before. Heidegger specifically defines the bringing-forth of poiesis as that which “lets what presences come forth into unconcealment,” a process he defines as “producing that brings forth—e.g., the erecting of a statue in the temple precinct . . .” (QCT, 21). Relying on the ancient Aristotelian four causes theory of philosophy—matter, form, purpose, and efficient cause (QCT 6–7)—he considers poiesis in terms of that which brings all these elements together into his chosen art object example: a silver chalice. Heidegger is careful to stipulate that the silversmith who makes the chalice is not the final and efficient cause of the chalice, at least not in the way in which they make the chalice. Rather, making the chalice is really an afterthought following on from deep consideration on the part of the maker as to how material, form, and purpose will all fit together causally. These four causes share the responsibility for “the silver chalice’s lying ready before us as a sacrificial vessel” (QCT, 9). Note the emphasis on the object’s availability for use here. The chalice is to hand or possesses Heideggerian equipmentality. It is what the chalice can produce for us as sacrificial vessel and all that entails, rather than the beauty of the chalice, that he presents as poiesis. Beauty may be a part of poiesis but it is not necessarily the purpose of poiesis. The same would be true of the statue, the temple, and so on, each of them must be made of matter that is formed to an end by a causality, but the causality that combines all the other elements together into the coming to presence of a truth is not someone deciding to make something but someone, through making, thinking deeply about the “that” and the “how” of material, form, purpose, and their causality in such a way as they will bring to presence a truth or being that was not available for view before. The chalice makes one think of certain things in relation to ceremony and sacrifice. The statue makes one think of the materialization of a god within a temple. The temple, the relationship between gods, and the people through a precinct where earth and sky are gathered and composed together into a world where the gods seem to dwell among us. Van Gogh’s peasant shoes “let us know what shoes are in truth” (PLT, 35), unveiling values such as equipmentality, reliability, soil, toil, and utility. 70

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PRAXIS

According to Agamben poiesis was opposed, for the Greeks, to praxis which meant to do something or to act in accordance with one’s will (MWC, 68). If praxis meant doing something through one’s will to do that thing, poiesis was, in contrast, an experience of the production of something absent into presence and from concealment into the light, which is the Greek sense of experiencing truth as unveiling or a-letheia (un-forgetting, un-concealment). As Agamben explains: “The essential character of poiesis was not its aspect as a practical and voluntary process but its being a mode of truth as unveiling” (MWC, 69). Poiesis does not share with praxis the element of practical, voluntary, wilful action, therefore yet today we often speak of creative production as practice and artists as practitioners. This slip of the tongue unfortunately confines creation to the very process, praxis, that for many thinkers constitutes the opposite of what creation actually is, poiesis. Over vast tracts of time within our culture creation has emerged from the original Greek sense of pro-duction as passive experience of something coming to presence (to pro-duce literally means to lead forward) to a definition resulting in a god-like act of will on the part of man to make something or bring about something in the world that was not there before. Poiesis has in the modern age been mistaken therefore for praxis. We ought not to feel excessive culpability or remorse in this regard. It is an easy mistake to make, to confuse poiesis with praxis, in that both seem to fulfil Plato’s stipulation that creation is bringing something new into existence. That said the difference between the two terms could not be clearer. Poiesis as pro-duction, essentially guide or facilitator of truth, lacks the subjective agency of an artist as a maker, a doer, a person able to bend their will to create themselves into being as The Artist, by making something new and wonderful in the world. Poiesis of this second, inaccurate order, what one might call modern “Romantic poiesis,” is god-like fiat and lacks the sense of passivity and modesty inherent in the term’s original definition. One of the reasons for this confusion between poiesis and praxis in the modern age relates to a third category, that of work.3 Work, for the Greeks, was directly tied into the biological processes of the human as animal and, due to the reliance on that culture on the sustaining activities of slaves, was a concept at one remove from their 71

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lives. That said, although the Greeks did not indulge habitually in work, they were able to realize that work was “bare, biological existence” in contrast to the way in which poiesis “constructs the space where man finds his certitude and where he ensures the freedom and duration of his action” (MWC, 69). Over the centuries the clear differentiation between poiesis, praxis, and work has been lost. At the same time a significant shift occurred typified by the modern period wherein “will” comes to overtake the unveiling of truth as the essence of artistic creation: The central experience of poiesis, pro-duction into presence, is replaced by the question of the “how,” that is, of the process through which the object has been produced . . . this means that the emphasis shifts away from what the Greeks considered the essence of the work—the fact that in it something passed from nonbeing into being, thus opening the space of truth (ά-λήθεια) and building a world for man’s dwelling on earth—and to the operari of the artist . . . (MWC, 70) As Agamben goes on to show through brief readings of Locke, Smith, Marx, and the materialists, the shift away from truth to genius facilitated the elevation of work, the lowest of the three categories for the Greeks to, eventually, the highest. For example, it is much easier to find common ground between praxis and work understood as the basic production of all material life, than between praxis as will and poiesis as almost passive experience. As this theme develops through materialism and then through philosophy, most notably in the work of Nietzsche, the original productive state of the work of art is all but forgotten except by certain poets and, eventually, Heidegger. Instead, “the point of arrival of Western aesthetics is a metaphysics of the will, that is, of life understood as energy and creative impulse” (MWC, 72). The predominance of will over creation taken as a value of will, Nietzsche’s definition of Will to Power as Art, is completely opposed to the Greek sense of poiesis and is perhaps best summarized in the shift from the subjective statement “this happened to me,” to simply “I made this.”4 However different they are, Greek and modern poiesis are both similarly ontological in basis in that both bring something into being and also operate as an act pertaining to one’s own being. For we “moderns” it would seem that making is something a subject does to 72

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being, it makes a new being, and this confirms the artist’s being as god-like maker. For the Greeks making is something that can happen to being or the subject to produce an authentic experience of truth, or as Heidegger interprets the Greek sense of truth as aletheia, the Being of beings. Modern making defines being as making something, Greek making defines being as the experience of making. The first is active participant, the second passive recipient. These stipulations allow Heidegger to re-translate Plato’s definition of poiesis so that “any cause that brings into existence something that was not there before is poiesis,” becomes, “Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth [Her-vor-bringen]” (QCT, 10). This retranslation in effect negates the possibility that creation as poiesis can be Nietzschean, willed creation ex nihilo, which is precisely the point.5 TECHNE

Staying with the Greeks a little longer one can see that the Nietzschean interpretation of poiesis as active, willed making into being is, as Heidegger suspects, a premature seizing of the seat of the gods by presumptuous man. For them, poiesis does not make anything new, it merely lifts the curtain to reveal what is behind. Most especially poiesis does not make what we would term “art.” As Heidegger exudes in the closing sections of his influential essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” during the halcyon days of Greek culture in its ascendancy the task granted to poiesis, the bringing to presence of the gods, meant that, “The arts were not derived from the artistic. Art works were not enjoyed aesthetically. Art was not a sector of cultural activity” (QCT, 34). This astounding declaration is partly founded on an earlier observation by Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that there is a good deal of evidence that the Greeks would not have used the term art in the context of making but would prefer techne or skill, making the artist a technites (PLT, 59). Bernard Stiegler in his influential study of Technics and Time Vol. 1 flags up this problematic synonymity between poiesis and technics citing Aristotle as claiming: “Every art [tekhne] is concerned with bringing something into being, and looks for technical and theoretical means of producing a thing which belongs to the category of possibility and the cause of which lies in the producer not in what is produced.”6 73

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If there was no term for art as we conceive of it, “the making of making as such” as Jean-Luc Nancy translates poiesis in its modern manifestation as poetry as the archetype of all arts, and the Greeks used instead the word skill, techne, instead of art, can one trace any actual, direct relation between poiesis and art as such? Heidegger believes so in that for him pure poiesis, while it does not always make art, makes art make being come to full, if fleeting, appearance. In this way poiesis is not making in the form of simple techne or skilful productivity—although the terms are necessarily linked and for Heidegger as for Stiegler ostensibly synonymous (chair makers for Heidegger have easily as much techne as Damien Hirst or Booker prize winning novelists)—but the activity of bringing to presence something that was not in a state of presence before: the truth of Being as such. Yet surely, is this not a definition of art but of philosophy? For poiesis to make any sense as creative act, therefore, we must come to terms with the making element of the term as well as the truth revealing or presencing element. Heidegger is helpful in this regard by asserting that there can be no poiesis without techne. Techne, he explains, is not simply craft or skill, but for the Greeks a specific type of knowing through creative making or as he says: “to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way. The Greeks conceive of techne, producing, in terms of letting appear” (PLT, 159). Therefore while one cannot assume that poiesis is definable as simply making something, a form of artistic production, there is no poiesis without making something. All of this hinges on a double sense of what it means to produce an art work with work referring both to the thing made and the process of its production. As Heidegger states: “to create is to cause something to emerge as a thing that has been brought forth. The work’s becoming a work is a way in which truth becomes and happens” (PLT, 60). I believe we must accept two things at this stage. First, our modern sense of creation is a muddle of these three Greek ideas, poiesis as production of presence, praxis as simply doing, and techne as skilled knowing through doing. Second, that for the Greeks the three terms were all elements of a process of what they called bringing something into presence or aletheia, the unveiling of truth. Poiesis is the experience of the production or facilitation of the coming into the light of a truth. Praxis is the physical activity and will necessary to bring this about, although alone making cannot simply will truth. Finally 74

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techne is an intermediary state dependent on real skill in pursuit of the truth. Knowing through skilled making prepares for the possibility of presencing in that it is a process of coming to know things about the world through skilful and directed making. There is no guarantee that techne will result in poiesis or the flashing bloom of truth, or that poiesis will result in art, but certainly for a work of art to happen there needs to be work as process and work as thing, and so poiesis and techne must function together for praxis in general to become artistic practice. THE ART THING

Taking all of this to be the case, the work of art, the art object in this context, is not poietic as such but resultant from poiesis. One might, therefore, after Heidegger makes this simple distinction: if an act of making produces being or truth by bringing it into the light, if only briefly and partially, then it can be termed poietic and as such art. If not then such a process is merely making something and is artisanal, instrumental, or mechanical production.7 Yet this bringing forth of truth cannot occur without making something so that the idea of the work of art must be taken simultaneously as an activity and an object or better thing.8 Heidegger is careful to state that art is not simply a delimited made object in the world, rather its thingly status depends on the truths it makes manifest for human beings on earth: sacrifice, the gods, the religious world, equipmentality, etc. Here Heidegger attentively distinguishes an object or something with clear limits that the subject can observe and indeed make, from a thing. A thing is something in the world that composes and gathers together truths in the world. It makes a small world effectively, or gathers a continuum around itself made up of all the elements of its truthpresencing. Thus Van Gogh’s shoes are not an object, indeed they are not they are a mere image, but they are a thing: a point of gathering of truths about what it means to be on this earth and work this earth using equipment. Even the chalice is not on object as such, but again a gathering of ancient ideas of sacrifice, ceremony, transmissible traditions, and so on. What is poietic about the shoes and the chalice is how they allow objects to become things through the process of making something. The art thing as one must now call it rather than the more common art object seems to negate one of the primary aesthetic aims 75

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of modern art: that the object made comes to stand in the world in a delimited and self-sufficient manner akin to that of rocks and flowers. Certainly, the poietic art thing is not art for art’s sake but art for the sake of truth and world composition. Its object-status is to some degree irrelevant. Conceptual art is as thingly as Westminster Abbey. That said the art thing must subsist in matter, stuff, and the sensuous realm. If poiesis is dependent on techne, techne is itself “something poietic,” a form of “knowing in the widest sense . . . to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it. Such knowing provides an opening up. As an opening up it is a revealing” (QCT, 13). Poiesis must be hands-on. One of the most transparent examples of the interdependence of poiesis and techne is the move over time towards abstraction in a work such as “Back” by Matisse. In “Back” four bronze reliefs of a back are displayed side by side, each showing increasing levels of abstraction from the first, realistic, representational bronze. Similar gradations of abstraction are observable in the art of Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock, even Turner. In each instance the artist’s technical virtuosity does not simply allow them to make beautiful things but provides an opportunity for profound artistic truths pertaining to dimensionality, abstraction, colour, composition, simplification, compression, representation, and so on, to be revealed as if for the first time through their ongoing skill and thoughtful experimentation. For critics this would be truth-revealing enough but it must be conceded that for thinkers of poiesis such as Heidegger and Agamben these quasi-truths would only be granted full truth status if they move the artist and observer towards greater truths such as the Being of beings for Heidegger or artistic desubjectivization for Agamben. We are now at the point where we can differentiate thinking, what Heidegger calls “Denken,” which is the bringing to presence of truth, from poiesis, which is the bringing to presence of truth through making. Both forms of thinking can often think the same things. Agamben notes how modern art has thought about being and subjectivity, effectively negating subjectivity and defining so-called desubjectivization as the modern experience of the poeticization of being. Alain Badiou speaks in a similar vein of poetry’s ability to negate the category of the object (MP, 89–96). Nancy speaks of poetry as the very moment of meta-making or thinking about making through making (MA, 3). Other philosophical themes are regularly addressed 76

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by the arts. Issues such as part and whole, causality, singularity, the human, being in the world, finitude, infinity, nature, propriety, law, happiness, death, and Being as such, are all thought by poietic activity, not through pedestrian description or disciplined argumentation but through a form of thinking that occurs courtesy of the activity of making. Such a procedure of thinking through making defines “poetic thinking” as Heidegger and Badiou have termed it,9 or what I will go on to name “logopoiesis.” Due to the provenance, contested status, subtlety, and complexity of the term poiesis the artist can now be described as a “maker-thinker.” FINITUDE

A central element of the activity of poiesis is the complex issue of finitude or formal completion. The maker-thinker, after all, makes a thing in the world in a way which provides a powerful point of difference between thinking as such and poietic thinking. Kant’s famous definition of the art work as that which has finitude without purpose is, ostensibly, a means by which to differentiate beauty made by human hands and the beauty of flowers and so on, which cannot be considered in terms of art even if, according to Heidegger, flowers are in possession of poiesis. His chosen example of poiesis in nature is “the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself ” (QCT, 10). A non-purposive finitude allows for the work of art to partake of the perfection of a completion that is not directed towards any ends other than finitude as such and the pleasure we habitually and inexplicably gain from perceiving perfectly finished, poised, and balanced made things. Rather than dwell here on the much-vaunted Wildean uselessness of modern art, I want to concentrate instead on the more complicated issue of its finitude. It seems obvious, intuitive even, that a flower is complete but its completion is not of the order of its physical borders, not least because a flower is a living, growing, mobile, and decaying thing. Thus a flower’s finitude is not its actual perfection but the perfection of flowers as such. If we are to believe the philosophers, this used to be, in part, the case with works of art as well. One could judge their completion against communally held values pertaining to what perfect and thus finished work was. The finitude of a work of art in a totally transmissible, traditional Greek culture such as that imagined by Hölderlin, Heidegger, and Agamben, 77

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was not to be found around the borders of the work but the means by which the work matched the transmissible model of what art, value, and truth was, had always been, and would unquestionably always remain. It was an act of mapping a perfect gestalt. For Agamben such a view is meaningless to modern, critical sensibility. In our epoch the value of a work of art is precisely the opposite, not how it conforms to the model but how it is an original work that confounds modelling as a cultural process of imposed convention and cliché. We are also more than ever attuned to the material problems of delineating the work of art in that the parerga, frames, or marginalia that surround the art object may indeed now constitute the art object. The frame may become the work or its faming in the museum its poiesis. It would be true to say that the modern art work lacks finitude in almost direct proportion to its attainment of ever new levels of non-purposiveness. There is no communally held view as to what a Work of Art in general should be. Further, we value art for not conforming to any such model if it did indeed exist which, with delicious paradox, it does not. Finally, material innovations in the performativity, virtuality, and conceptuality of art works mean it is now often impossible to determine the actual, objective, or material (even temporal) limits of a work of art. Taking all this into consideration one has to conclude we live in an age of very Greek art, for our ability to retain the term art at all is surely testimony to the means by which we consider art not as located within a carefully crafted, unique object, but in the endless process of the coming into presence of the being of art in a manner entirely separate from the simple activity of making something lovely. Here is the first stanza of a poem by Charles Bernstein entitled “Warrant”: I warrant that this poem is entirely my own work and that the underlying ideas concepts, and make-up of the poem have not been taken from any other source or any other poem but rather originate with this poem.10 78

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This is one of several examples of self-annihilating meta-poiesis in the work of the greatest conceptual poet writing today. The deixis of “this poem” immediately reveals pure indication, in that the poem being described and warranted does not exist except as something indicated within another “poem,” the one we are actually reading, either also called “Warrant” or perhaps nameless. There is, therefore, no actual delimited poem body here, beyond the deictic “this” as an indication of the presence of a poem in its legally, aesthetically, and ontologically warranted absence. As there is no poem object as such to view, and as the poetry on view is, in fact, lineated legal prose and not “poetic” at all in any sense of profound techne, if this is a work of art where does its artistic being emanate from? I would argue first that the poem is art and second that its art status comes from its poiesis, the process of a coming into being of an idea about art as object within the market place, law, aesthetic convention, and ontology. If modern and future art criticism and creation is based on a process of aesthetic judgement on nonpurposive non-objectal, illimited art things such as “Warrant,” then we need poiesis if only to keep hold of art. But what is the status of the ancient Greek term poiesis in a contemporary modern art environment? This is a question that Agamben in his work on poiesis has tried to answer. MORPHE, SHAPE

Agamben sides initially with Heidegger in calling for a return to and development of the original Greek sense of poiesis as production into presence. That said he does not simply accede to Heidegger’s reading of the term, but returns back to the Greek and applies his own philological skills in trying to resolve the complex problem of the exact relation of poiesis to human doing essential to his later formulations of potentiality as having the ability to do something. Thus he declares: “Poiesis, poetry, does not designate here an art among others, but is the very name of man’s doing, of that productive action of which artistic doing is only a privileged example . . .” (MWC, 59). Agamben is able to admit that even nature could come under the term poiesis if it were not for a careful stipulation of Aristotle between a natural act of creation that “contains in itself its own άρχή [arche], that is, the principle and origin of its entry into presence” (MWC, 60), and that which finds its principle through 79

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human productive activity instead. This second category enters into presence by virtue of techne or skill, especially at shaping, forming before our eyes the crux of the difference between nature and poiesis, and finally dispatching the idea to be found in Heidegger that nature is also poietic. Nature contains within itself the principle by which it enters into presence, what Kant terms purposiveness, while poiesis has the character of a hylomorphic and Aristotelian “installation into shape” (MWC, 60) by which Agamben explains it must take on a shape or form in order to make the transition from nonbeing into being—for example Bernstein’s ideas about the enframing of art by capital taking the shape of a poem. Poiesis then produces a shape or form but poiesis is not the creation of an object. If an art object is presented then this object is the result of poiesis. All art is, in this light, post-poietic waste product. The interrelationship between shape and poiesis production into presence is problematic for a theory of modern creation. The Greek word for shape, morphe, was associated with idea and image, as well as appearance, all essential components of the presencing or bringing forward of poiesis. What does it mean that coming to presence takes a shape in poiesis? For a Greek audience au fait with the concept of Ideal Forms perhaps such a question might never be raised. It is simply too obvious. The Form of nature which is outside of space and time comes to human perception, it appears, in particular instances of form all of which are representations, examples or manifestations of Form as such, but none of which constitute Form as such. Form, therefore, while appearing in many forms, is irreducible to its forms. Hence the question of shape/form, morphe, was easily resolved by reference back, up or out to a set of Ideal Forms for comparison. Yet within the epoch of modernity shape is not something one can have any confidence in as an unquestionable presence. Within English, for example, the many varied definitions of the term shape might lead one to conclude the term “shape” is itself rather baggy, a tad shapeless. It can mean creation and/or form, outline, the created universe as such, imaginary or ghostly forms, an indistinct person or form, the outward appearance of something, to mould, and to frame. There is as much definition in the term relating to framing and indistinctness as to moulding and forming, perhaps indicating a slow dissolution of Greek ideas of Ideal form over time resulting in a 80

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notable indistinctness surrounding the activity of formation. Spiralling out from this word are multiple possibilities that all indicate the problematic of taking on a Greek definition of poiesis without the concomitant intellectual architecture of a theory of Ideal Forms. If one believes in Forms then it is clear how poiesis can be said to produce presence through making without actually creating or making anything new in the world. The form one’s thing takes gives revelatory access to the Ideal Form which is at the root of the Being of all beings and this determines its shape. Yet without a sustained and secure theory of Form as the foundation or lit projection of formed shape as frame any modern theory of poiesis stutters to a degree however essential it is. How can production be the conferring of form onto a presence if the very conception of form undermines itself and thus provides nothing but a leaky container for the already slippery and dissolute matter of one’s making? If poiesis is making as such dependent on an idea of shape as truthful agreement with an already existent Ideal form, what is making for us today in a postFormal world? ENTELECHY

The question casts us back to and indeed brings together two key issues in Agamben’s philosophy: poetry and potentiality. Summarizing Aristotle, Agamben delineates how every act of pro-duction into presence, natural or man-made, has the character of what is usually translated as actual reality defined in contrast to potentiality. Agamben then explains that actual reality is a rather poor translation in that Aristotle also employs the term entelechy in relation to actuality. While entelechy is usually reserved for the very process wherein potentiality comes to actuality, Agamben philologically opens up the definition of entelechy as follows: “That which enters into presence and remains in presence, gathering itself, in an end-directed way, into a shape in which it finds its fullness, its completeness; that which, then, έν τέλι έχι, possesses itself in its own end, has the character of ενέργεια . . . means being-at-work, since the work, έργον, is precisely entelechy . . .” (MWC, 64–5). In contrast to entelechyactuality, Aristotle defines potential as that which, not (yet) being at work, doesn’t “possess itself in its own shape as its own end” but is merely available (MWC, 65). If this is the case, work as a result of poiesis cannot be simply potential because “it is precisely production 81

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into and station in a shape that possesses itself in its own end” (MWC, 65). Entelechy is the final element that allows us to recuperate poiesis as a term for creation. Poiesis is a work but, according to the passages just cited, it is also the result of work. Even so, apart from modern art it cannot actually be “at work.” Poiesis as creation is made up therefore of three elements. The first is potential, the availability-for of a material and a skill that, however, without techne, cannot come into actuality. The second is actuality, which is potentiality realized in the form of being-at-work. We must define this as not being continually at work, in process, never coming to an end, but that actuality is being at and in the form and station of a work. Thus work in which there is no being is not a real work and is represented by Agamben by the industrial object. In that all objects result from potential and end up in actuality, the third term in play here, entelechy, is that which differentiates making from creation-making. Agamben’s extended definition of entelechy is complex and remains without full development in his own work, presumably because the terms are all already in play in Aristotle, but it seems essential to fully understand poiesis that we spend some time explaining these issues. As becomes increasingly apparent, poiesis is the direct product of entelechy or that which negotiates between potential and actuality. Indeed poiesis is definable as the messianic formula: potential— (entelechy)—actuality.11 Entelechy determines something that both enters into and remains in presence. Thus entelechy must emanate from nonpresence and remain in a state of presence. The Heideggerian term “gathering” is instructive in this regard in that it suggests the nature of nonpresence as disseminated or dispersed and the coming to presence of poiesis as not so much the revelation of a form hiding in a substance but the attraction of things towards and composition around a substance. The way, for example, a jug attracts issues of containment, shoes in Van Gogh concepts of equipmentality, or a statue in the precinct of a Greek temple makes manifest an ideal of the gods. All this leads up to the crucial element of entelechy as that which allows a work to find absolute finitude. Being-at-work therefore means the total coincidence of being and form, the total realization of eidos that is, as Agamben says, both full and complete. Complete indeed because the moulded shape is replete with being. The shape of the work of art, then, is all important, as the only differentiation 82

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between potentiality and actuality is that potentiality does not possess a shape. Entelechy is the process of shape-making and shapefilling forcing upon us an unusual sense of creation. Making or poiesis consists of marshalling the energy of presence as potential work into presence-at-work or actuality. This is not the making of anything as such. Rather poiesis makes an outline or contour for being. One must presume that until entelechy is complete, and Agamben gives no definite time for this as clearly entelechy does not take a period of time but takes one from the atemporal zone of Forms to the temporality of work via his own conception of messianic temporality, this contour is not yet shaped. Until the impossible point of completion it remains shape in potential, an elasticity of an already closed but not yet finished line. As being makes its way into this lasso of work it comes to simultaneously fill and make the shape. When being touches every point internal to the line then the work is complete, full, and finished. Here we see a shift away from the definition of the work of art as the total coincidence of form and theme as is often stated, to that of an elastic and tensile coincidence of form and shape. Agamben names this “content” allowing him to define the modern artist, after Musil, as the man without content or creator away from form; shaper of shape as such; instigator of a pocket or gap within the tensile balloon of the work. Like Ulrich, such an artist is brimming over with abilities, but has no actual quality or content as he cannot apply his qualities to any one task and convert his potential into actual, subjective value and identity.12 His potential remains shapeless in other words, lacking in entelechy. ARCHE, MODERN ANTI-POIESIS

Speaking of the period of aesthetic modernity Agamben notes that during our epoch the conception of the shaping of a unitary set of objects which do not come from nature but which possess finitude through agreement between shape and form has been split by the rise of modern technology and capitalism. With the infamous division of labour came also the division of making, leading to a differentiation or scission between things “that enter into presence according to the statute of aesthetics and those that arise purely by way of τέχυη [techne]” (MWC, 60–1). This downgrading of techne to mere making without poiesis promotes Agamben to reconsider poiesis in terms of 83

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the modern doctrine of art being that which is original or authentic. He purports that within modern aesthetics any made thing that does not contain its own arche or origin within itself has been called original, the term meaning not so much unique but of proximity to an origin. During the modern period therefore: “The work of art is original because it maintains a particular relationship to its origin, to its formal άρχή, in the sense that it not only derives from the latter and conforms to it, but also remains in a relationship of permanent proximity to it” (MWC, 61). What this means in real terms is that poiesis refutes reproducibility through its claim to an originality that “maintains with its formal principle such a relation of proximity as excludes the possibility that its entry into presence may be in some way reproducible, almost as though the shape pro-duced itself into presence in the unrepeatable act of aesthetic creation” (MWC, 61). In other words, an original art work is pro-duced into the light from a proximate and preceding source. As soon as one reproduces the art work, one places it an extra remove from the source and indeed cancels out poiesis as pro-duction, for now it is re-pro-duction. And, for Agamben at least, that is not good at all. Agamben concludes that reproducibility is the essence of techne and originality the essence of the modern work of art. Yet, on the other hand, outside of Greek culture what does this modern quest for the origin actually consist of ? Agamben defines the arche as “the image, which governs and determines the entry into presence” (MWC, 61). In contrast, objects made simply according to techne do not have proximity to this image but rather the image preexists as an already pre-pro-duced mould with which the product must conform. Again, this issue depends on the presumption of an eidos or arche-image. In a transmissible culture, this eidos is the already existent content of any work of art that will be reproduced. In the Greek epoch of transmission, originality therefore is simply inconceivable in relation to creation. One does not create something new as in something novel but rather one creates a new body for an already existent idea which allows one to see this idea as if for the first time. Surprisingly, according to Agamben in the modern world, there is also no new work of art because there is no work or object that can be made that conforms both to the idea and the form of poiesis. Thus Agamben argues that originality totally destroyed the idea of the artist wherein “everything that in some way constituted the common space in which the personalities of different artists met 84

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in a living unity” (MWC, 62), became during our age simply the commonplace. While in the past traditional values and lack of originality determined greatness as being proximate to the source of poiesis, Ideas held in common, now the artist is defined as the person who makes things that don’t fit the mould but which break with moulding. Thus the artist brings to being the very end of the lasting concept of the artist as subject and this, in a sense, is modern art’s first and most lasting poiesis: artistic desubjectivization or creative self-alienation. Agamben demonstrates the paradox of modern originality brilliantly with reference to what he sees as the two most significant modern artistic investigations of the very presence of the art object, the ready-made and pop art. With the ready-made an industrial object is alienated from its context and thus raised up into the sphere of art. It is pure eidos for its form and shape are irrelevant. With pop art the situation is reversed in that an art object is made utilizing techne then reproduced using industrial processes. Pop art is all form with no proximity to the concept. These hybrid forms of poiesis are not simply two movements in modern art, they are, for Agamben, the only two movements available at present for modern acts of creation, leaving poiesis as such as a place-holder of negation somewhere in between the two options: In both cases—except for the instant of the alienation effect—the passage from the one to the other status is impossible: that which is reproducible cannot become original, and that which is irreproducible cannot be reproduced. The object cannot attain presence and remains enveloped in shadow, suspended in a kind of disquieting limbo between being and nonbeing. (MWC, 63–4) Modern art, therefore, is poiesis in suspension. The curtain is grasped but never raised. The brilliance of Bernstein’s poem now becomes even more apparent in that he is able to demonstrate both situations in one single work. On the one hand “Warrant” deals directly with the archepresence of the poem, testifying as it does to its singular originality, yet at the same time it is a comment on its rampant reproducibility. What need is there of a warrant if the work were not in danger of unwarranted reproducibility away from and damaging of the archepresence of the poem as such? The final brilliant twist being that 85

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arche-presence is undermined by there being no poem other than that indicated by the empty deixis of “this poem,” and thus there can be no reproduction of the work precisely because the warrant controlling this process is the work itself. Perhaps Agamben should have consulted with Bernstein for, in contrast to the poet, he seems locked here into a set of almost impossible aporias. Like most of his peers, Agamben’s conception of creation depends on the Greek concept of poiesis, meaning he accedes to the Greek world of Ideal Forms, arche-mimesis, and eidos. He is forced to take on the act of making as the transition from nonbeing into being and all that entails. Furthermore, unlike Plato and Aristotle, he is writing in an age where the shape of the work, its taking shape, its becoming something, is problematized because it is bifurcated. In modern aesthetic theory since Kant, the question shifts from the Greek inheritance of creation as the coming to presence of a being to the issue of being and nonbeing within coming to being, including the subjective nonbeing of the artist. The very shape of a work of modern art is permanently split, which is perhaps why shape bears close proximity to indistinctness. If it remains proximate to arche-presence it can take on no physical form and instead has to parasitically occupy an already existent, industrial form (urinals, wheels, and so on). If it comes to find a shape it must allow that form to succumb to the techne of modern reproducibility carrying it permanently away from its originary presence. Modern art is either poiesis without techne or techne without poiesis. While this is a lamentable state of affairs for a full, philosophical understanding of poiesis, in splitting poiesis, at the very least, modernity has turned poiesis into a problem and thus made it visible for us after many centuries of easeful, categorical amnesia. As Agamben says in reference to his chosen examples, modern art works such as these “constitute the most alienated (and thus most extreme) form of poiesis, the form in which privation itself comes into presence” (MWC, 64). Leading him, as ever, to an epochal apostrophe: “how is it possible to attain a new poiesis in an original way?” (MWC, 64). The answer to this question must lodge, in some fashion, within the dark defiles of modern art itself.

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CHAPTER 3

MODERNITY, PRODUCTIVE ANTI-POIESIS

Since Heidegger questions pertaining to being are traditionally posed through two temporalities. The coming to presence of being in aletheia or manifestation of truth as unveiling and bringing to light typical of poiesis is a type of sempiternal event. Yet, Heidegger argues, being is also profoundly historical in a deep destinal way he calls Geschichte. Being, he argues, is currently withheld from view in the modern age of instrumental technology because, historically, that is its destiny. This was not always the case and our dire situation will, at some juncture, change. This duality of temporality as regards being is the basis of what one might call ontological temporality, a time that is both out of time in that it is beyond everyday linear time, and “out of time” in that it sounds the death knell of the metaphysical project and dispatches being into hiding for an indefinite period of time. Agamben’s work on time is indebted to but not uncritical of this model of ontological time. He too sees the temporality of human being as both immemorial ecstasy and contingent historicity and, like his great forebear, he has a name for the coming together of the two elements of ontological time in a moment of crisis that is first, nihilistic, and then, potentially productive. He calls this epoch, the very epoch of the epoch, modernity. Agamben is one of the most aggressive and suggestive critics of modernism that we have or ever will encounter. The Homo Sacer project and the metaphysical considerations of works such as Language and Death construct critical theories of political and philosophical modernity that are proving impossible to ignore.1 Under pressure from such attacks modernity can barely be said to remain intact, and indeed one of Agamben’s aims is the bringing of modernity 87

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to a form of non-eschatological resolution.2 Yet Agamben’s realism, some might call it fatalism,3 and his complex revision of historiography, temporality, and ending, disallow him the simple act of finishing with the modern. Rather, his is a project that reoccupies the nihilised spaces of modernity through a productive negation of modern categories with the aim of moving beyond the modern by dividing it from itself internally. In this way, while modernity is a temporal epoch it demands a reconsideration of temporality in terms of ontological epochality that must replace a simple linear representation of modern time as moving towards the eschaton of completion. Agamben will never allow a movement from temporal modernity to ontological or subjective modernity. Rather, subjective modernization is the realization of the radical change in the conception of time followed by the occupation of that site of transmutation as the only time left to us on this earth. This time that remains, il tempo che resta, takes the form of a messianic contracted time of remnants (TTR, 5–6), which is a common representation of time within modernity (TTR, 62–3). That modernity allows us access to time as a remnant that will radically undermine the eschatological and chronological categories of modern time is both the tragedy of the modern and its lasting hope. For this reason, the issue of modern time is so central to Agamben’s work from his very earliest pronouncements to his most recent. Agamben will not, indeed cannot abandon the dark and divided epochality of our modern age of aesthetic modernity. LIVING AS IF OR AS NOT

In the early pages of The Time That Remains (2000) Agamben considers the Pauline call to a Messianic vocation through a philological reconsideration of the term kle¯sis (call or vocation). This call to vocation he defines as the “revocation of every vocation” (TTR, 23), or the condition of the ho¯s me¯, “as not.” When called by the messianic the subject is called out of its current position and then required to occupy the process of its desubjectivization as its new subjective existence. The messianic kle¯sis emulates many elements of Agamben’s earlier work on language, for example deixis, desubjectivization, and dictation, along with his mid-career investigations of the gesturality and the pure mediality of thought as potential. But more relevant to debates on modernity is the way in which the call to

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negation is not conceived by Agamben as just another form of modern nihilism but something potentially productive. The call does not negate subjectivity but calls subjectivity into presence through desubjectivity. The “as not” is not negation as such, therefore, but rather the now familiar suspension of actualization that exemplifies potentiality at its most powerful and creative. Finally, while messianic kle¯sis would seem to occupy a temporality of ending, the time that remains within temporal contraction, this is patently not the case as Agamben is at pains to demonstrate (TTR, 61–78). This may seem less that auspicious terrain to seek out ideas pertaining either to literature or modernity but it is typical of Agamben’s work that one encounters comments about poetics, aesthetics, and the arts in the most unexpected places. So when Agamben posits the “as not” as a positive alternative to what he calls the “as if,” typical of modern thought about aesthetics, one can begin to see how messianic time can be of great utility to ideas about modern art. The phrases “as not” and “as if ” both play games with the idea of negation and creation. If “as not” is a negation of being that presages a positive coming of being to presence “after” negation (the messianic time that remains), to live “as if ” sounds initially like a creative potentiality for being.4 This, however, has not been seen to be the case by the critical heritage. Rather, as Agamben shows, a number of thinkers of modernity have come to see “as if ” as the great failing of thought in the modern era expressly as regards its role in aestheticization (TTR, 35–40). Agamben details a history of the philosophy of “as if ” which need not concern us except that it originates in a critique by Taubes of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory which Taubes believes advocates thinking through the despair of the modern age only as if it could be redeemed, rather than aspiring towards actual redemption. This alerts Agamben’s interest, not least because he finds it hard to accept that Adorno advocates an aestheticization of thought after he famously designates aesthetic beauty as “a spell over spells.” All the same Agamben presents a full analysis of the twentieth-century tradition of thinking the “as if,” ending with Gaultier’s work Bovarysm, which considers fiction, the archetypal example of living as if, as an ontological condition.5 This has no small importance for while Agamben regularly resorts to telling stories as an alternative philosophical method he rarely speaks of the fictive and narrative as such.6 This then is a rare mention

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of the possibility that just as poetry and linguistics can be seen to enter the field of ontology, so too fiction might be a credible category of thinking about being. Gaultier defines the essence of human being as believing one is different to whom one is. This being man’s essence, he argues, ontology is reduced to pretending-to-be as a form of double ontological negation. First, one pretends to be someone else because one is no one, and second, in doing so one of course is pretending to be something other than what one is in that one is nothing, but pretends to be something. This ontological condition does not stand up to the test of modern ontological thinking perhaps, but we will come to see it as the specifically epochal manifestation of desubjectivization in general, and Gaultier himself suggests that Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome nihilism was little more than an attempt to live the “as if ” of absent being through wilful and creative appropriation. What is the Will to Power as Art except turning as-if-ness into creative, subjective agency value? In an age when god is dead, thinkers of the “as if ” live on the earth as if they were gods, bringing to mind Heidegger’s definition of poets as demi-gods,7 while it takes a truly brave thinker to live as one “who no longer knows the as if.” Such a subject “no longer has similitudes at his disposal . . . he must now really live in a world without God” (TTR, 42). All of these considerations return Agamben’s attention back to Adorno, specifically his contention that “philosophy lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” (cited in TTR, 37). This maudlin yet typically modern stance leads Agamben to conclude: “The fact of having missed the moment of its realization is what obliges philosophy to indefinitely contemplate the appearance of redemption. Aesthetic beauty is the chastisement, so to speak, of philosophy’s having missed its moment . . . That is why aesthetic beauty cannot be anything more than a spell over spells” (TTR, 37). Agamben is strongly critical of this stance rejecting immediately Adorno’s negative dialectics as typifying a defeatist “impotential” that is unable to find power in weakness that he feels the Pauline messianic tradition of potential excels in. Yet, at the same time this impotent turning to the aesthetic at the point of thought’s failure is more than acceptable to him as a definition of the modern era. Agamben’s consideration of “as if ” is a side issue in his attempt to present a credible messianic condition of living “as,” in this instance “as not” rather than “as if.” Yet it is significant. According to his

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reading, modern aesthetics has two potentialities available to it. The most familiar is the “as if.” Aesthetics becomes, under the spell of living “as if,” that dreaded term aestheticization: aestheticization of philosophy, aestheticization of politics, aestheticization of life, of art even. In each of these very modern formulations an assumed impropriety, the aesthetic, is added to the realm of the proper, thought, the State, living as such, creativity; proving destructive and nihilistic in each instance. Yet, considering the failure of modern thought and the horrendous nature of modern history how else can one live except “as if ?” One cannot live the truth for the truth is nothingness, the empty violence of The Real.8 Nor can one live life itself for that has been reduced to horror and bareness. Thus one lives as if one lives, as if one has being, as if the philosophical pursuits of truth and happiness could be realized. One lives as if one is a character in a great, tragic, but potentially redeeming modern novel. This as-if-ness requires that one ontologize the spell over spells that Agamben later says “may even aptly describe poetry” (TTR, 39). The life of the “as if ” is the modern condition of the handing over of the failure of thinking to the debilitating yet distracting pleasures of the text, or so the argument of aestheticization goes. The second option is to live “as not.” Living “as if,” while seemingly creative and thus an act of poiesis, turns out to be self-defeating both for thought and art. For not only does the spell over spells cast a false veil over thinking it also misrepresents the poetic as well. In contrast to this, to live the “as not” is far from being nihilistic. If “as if ” is a belated and blinded decadence, a living through thought as if thought could still redeem itself but also accepting that we will always miss it if it does (a subtle swipe at Badiou perhaps?), the “as not” depicts an alternate futural moment of authentic being. If “as not” involves negation, as indeed it does, it is itself the negation of modern negativity in the form of a messianic moment to come which is the true state of modern now-time. The great question for modern thought, therefore, is: How does one travel from “as if ” to “as not”? To do this, I would argue, one needs to traverse the problems of aestheticization and replace them with a radical poeticization. To get to a “new” poiesis, therefore, one first has to travel through the dread landscapes of aesthetic modernism, and this is what Agamben’s early tome The Man Without Content ventures as he makes the first of several attempts to negate negation.

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AURATIC TWILIGHT

As we saw, in the debate presented in Infancy and History on experience Agamben is quick to agree with Benjamin that one of the preconditions of modernity is the negation of experience (IH, 15). Experience, you will recall, has two meanings for Agamben, to go through and to test. What is lacking in modernity is not the element of testing, indeed criticism is in essence all that modernity has become, or the possibility of sustaining an experience, for modern life is replete with new and exciting experiences. Rather, what we miss is a common experience that the modern subject can undergo, test, and totally possess: “Thus experience is now definitively something one can only undergo but never have. Experience is never accessible as a totality and never complete except in the infinite approximation of the total social process . . .” (IH, 38). This consideration of the negation of experience in the modern is a development of what Agamben calls the end of the transmissibility of common values and experiences within our culture.9 The arrest of transmissibility is, he argues, due to two modern statements by the masters of modern thought, the Nietzschean idea that god is dead, and the Heideggerian adage that art no longer dwells among us. The essays that make up this remarkable study then primarily investigate the implications of the thesis of the end of cultural transmission. In the closing pages of The Man Without Content Agamben turns, as he so often does, to the work of Walter Benjamin, specifically here highlighting a profound aporia in Benjamin’s work on the fading of the aura in modern art and culture, another way of expressing the end of experience in post-transmissible cultures, an idea also taken from Benjamin. In a post-transmission, reproductive age—note here how reproduction does not aid transmission of cultural value but eliminates it—what dictates the exact rate of the fading of a work’s aura? Does aura dim in direct proportion to the numerical potentiality of a work’s reproducibility, a gradual decline that rapidly accelerates as the industrial process and consumer demand increases? Or would it be more accurate to state that a work is divested of its aura at the moment of its first reproduction, perhaps an engraving commissioned at some expense from a Parisian atelier or a detailed description in a traveller’s journal first handed round by close friends then published and a runaway success? In other words, one must 92

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determine if the auratic twilight of the modern is a historical process taking place over time or an a-chronological event. This problem is not lost on Agamben, probably Benjamin’s most astute and generous reader, when he argues that Benjamin’s discovery of the loss of the auratic value of art is, like so many of the German thinker’s eclectic projects, incomplete. The technical expertise that allowed for an industrial-scale reproducibility of art works thus removing from them their sacred quality, besmirching them in the profanity of repetition and excess did not, Agamben asserts, remove the aura from the work of art: Far from freeing the object from its authenticity, its technical reproducibility . . . carries authenticity to extremes: technical reproducibility is the moment when authenticity, by way of the multiplication of the original, becomes the very cipher of elusiveness. This is to say: the work of art loses the authority and the guarantees it derived from belonging to a tradition for which it built the places and objects that incessantly weld past and present together. (MWC, 106) It remains hard to tell if Agamben is glossing Benjamin here or totally dismissing his most influential theory, perhaps the most central theory in the canon of cultural studies. The more an art object is reproduced, Benjamin argues, the further away from the source of its authority it is carried. With each copy, one might presume, it moves one more step away. It becomes, in effect, a consumer item rather than a work of art. The best comparison here is made by Agamben himself elsewhere in this volume when he places together the two key examples of modern art, the ready-made and pop art. As we saw the ready-made confers aura to an industrial object, a urinal is signed into being singular and thus art. Pop art instead takes the process of industrial reproduction and applies it to the art object. Both are, seemingly, comments on aura, Duchamp questioning the authority of the creator, Warhol the singularity of the work. Agamben, however, states the opposite. Not until a work is reproducible can the question of authenticity be raised for the first time by the distance introduced between original and copy by the industrial process. Properly speaking this is not at odds with Benjamin but is in accord with what Agamben defines as his great forbear’s messianic hermeneutic principle: “every work, every text, contains a historical 93

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index which indicates both its belonging to a determinate epoch, as well as its only coming forth to full legibility at a determinate historical moment” (TTR, 145). What Agamben cannily reveals in reading Benjamin’s ideas on art under the heading of his ideas on history is that reproducibility is meaningless unless thought of in tandem with transmissibility. The authenticity and authority of the icon, the religious icon say, does not inhere solely in the work’s unique singularity, that there is only one or that it has the quality of a magical relic, it also depends on the transmissibility of this quality (by transmissibility here read unquestioned status). Modernists have often been called iconoclasts but according to Agamben this is literally true in that they take religious relics, works of auratic art, and deface them (think of Magritte’s infamous vandalization of a reproduction of the Mona Lisa). What Agamben realizes is that within the modern moment, the defacement of the icon simply adds aura to it within a transitional culture of transmissible intransmissibility wherein the potentiality or perhaps simply desire for authenticity still exists. If aura exists it only exists for us at the moment that we see it in accordance with Benjaminian hermeneutics. Myopically peering through the murk, the lights lowered to dissuade further fading, we strain to see what is left of the concept of an authentic and singular work of art and in not being able to see authenticity it comes to view for the first time in a moment of tenebrous, blinding anti-poiesis. SHOCK!

Reproducibility as mass phenomenon occurs simultaneous to the end of cultural transmissibility within Western societies in the form of the negation of common experience by the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, reproducibility along with communicability, both actual in terms of rail travel and virtual in terms of the mass media and new technologies such as the telegraph, occur together technically as the result of the same forces initially on these very islands from which I am transmitting my code to the world. The two great dicta of modern art’s destruction of tradition, god is dead and an art no longer dwells among us, are both comments on cultural intransmissibility. Reproducibility contributes to this malaise only by weakening the points wherein past and present meet, an activity that

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replaces the communal places of common art, temple or festival, with the famous Baudelaire lieu commun, or commonplace wherein modern shock can become what we hold in common. Baudelaire’s comments on modernity here, along with his rumination that the modern is “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable,”10 easily confer upon him the honour of being the great precursor to contemporary reappraisals of modernity and aesthetics. In both formulations, the lieu commun and the eternal transient, Baudelaire demonstrates the powerful forces at play in modernity’s embracing of reproducibility at the moment of intransmissibility by his creation of two impossible paradoxes. The paradox of the eternal transient is the more well known and its oxymoronic nature obvious. As regards the proposal of shock as the “common place” of a post-transmissible culture however, what Baudelaire attempts is to take the very value that ends tradition, the ability of modern life and art to shock (for shock is the result of a happening for which a culture is not preprepared) and make shock the new locale of a common, modern experience. The end of experience experienced as shocking is, in other words, our new, common experience. Baudelaire’s conception of shock, Agamben realizes, is the missing element of Benjamin’s great theory of aura. Face to face with the dissolution of aura within a society where the authority of tradition was daily under attack, Baudelaire was tasked with inventing a new source of authority for the art work. In effect, Baudelaire was confronted with the very collapse of art as a means for the transmissibility of common cultural values and thus the end of art as it had been conceived through the whole of transmissible Western culture. Having to “invent a new authority,” Baudelaire “fulfilled this task by making the very intransmissibility of culture a new value and putting the experience of shock at the center of his artistic labour” (MWC, 106). Shock is defined here as the “jolt power acquired by things when they lose their transmissibility and their comprehensibility within a given cultural order” (MWC, 106). At this juncture Agamben then begins to tinker ever so slightly with the terms in play when referring to the means by which Baudelaire saved art and created modernity. In order to bring this mammoth prophylaxis/invention into play “the artist had to attempt to reproduce in his work that very destruction of transmissibility

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that was at the origin of the experience of shock: in this way he would succeed in turning the work into the very vehicle of the intransmissible” (MWC, 106). Attend here to the means by which Agamben repositions the meaning of the terms reproducibility and transmissibility. Instead of a work of art being a thing in itself whose reproduction undermines its sacral singularity effectively profaning the work, reproduction is instead reserved for the praxis of the creator. The work of art must therefore cease to be an objectal work and become instead praxis or being at work whose materiality is reduced to the vehicular transportation of that which cannot be transported. The new work of art, in this light, must be defined as a process of transmitting the very quality of intransmissibility. It becomes, in effect, unrecognizable from the work of art which precedes it but at the same time it operates as the lens through which that work can be called art. Previous to the moment or epoch of shock there was in effect no “work of art” as art was environed seamlessly within the very culture it was able to transmit through time, linking tradition with the present age. Art did not act as a vehicle for transmission; art was transmission. With the rise of reproducibility the work of art becomes severed from this community and ceases to transmit so that reproducibility is not the cause of the diminishment of aura but merely facilitates what is in fact the revelation, expunging, and relighting of aura’s eternal flame through the epochal hiatus between transmissibility and the transmission of a communal intransmissible experience of culture. This event alone produces what we now call modern art. More than that, it forms the basis of the whole of the epoch of aesthetic modernity and modern aestheticization. The alienation experienced within art serves as nothing else but the dissolution of the borders of said work through the revelation of the finitude of the work at the moment of its collapse. The work becomes a moment of shock, absolutely and significantly finite, that dissolves the finitude of the art object as a delimited and valued thing through its reproducibility and conversion into praxis. Shock becomes not the collapse of meaning in art but the meaning of art as the collapse of meaning. At the same moment it brings the work of art into contact with history for the very first time: “The survival of the past in the imponderable instant of aesthetic epiphany is, in the final analysis, the alienation effected by the work of art, and this alienation is in its turn nothing other

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that the measure of the destruction of its transmissibility, that is, of tradition” (MWC, 107). Agamben’s contention here is that the work of art in space and time is experienced for the first time in the moment of shock at the realization that the work no longer exists in a time-space continuum but is expropriated from both. At this point, the arche-epoch of art’s very first coming into being or the conditions for art, singularity and transmissibility, each in violent contradiction—art is defined as the singular instance of the held in common—are seen critically for the first time. When the transmissible act of making something singular comes to replace the singularity of the work of transmissibility one is both exiting art and seeing it for the first time as art, turning back to gaze over one’s fleeing shoulder. This experience of aesthetic epoche¯ is Agamben’s definition of that epoch of epochs we call modernity. Epoch of epochs for, occupying both the position of an event of major transition and the creation, retrospectively, of both the premodern and modern epochs of transmissibility and intransmissibility respectively, it fulfils the double meaning of epoch to be found in its etymology: epoche¯, a point in time and a delimited period of time. Aesthetic modernity is the point in time when the epoch of the modern period of art is seen for the first time through its retrospective revelation via negation of the epoch of transmissibility which precedes it. Indeed one could go one step further here and propose that aesthetic modernity not only reveals tradition through negation but in fact invents it for the first time. Thus the end of art is a recursive glance back to the transmission of art through time that only comes into full view at the moment of its cessation, a recursiveprojective interplay that we will later come to term poetic structure. It would seem alienating shock is not the legacy of modern art but of self-satisfied traditional values. PROFANING SCISSION

Both transmission and reproduction are dependent on metaphysical conceptions of scission and separation. Transmissibility, for example, effectively eradicates separation, temporal and spatial, creating a continuum between tradition and the present that all but eradicates their difference. The “now” ceases to be a moment in time but rather is the endless extension of tradition into the future. In contrast,

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reproducibility removes the art object from its original authenticity establishing an impossible to traverse abyss between the idea of authenticity as origin and the work itself as literally present. Reproducibility, therefore, introduces an intransmissible space between poiesis and praxis working effectively as the destructive locum for anti-entelechy. Reproducibility is necessary for intransmissibility as such or the making permanently profane the sacred work which is the genius of modern art and its most valuable anti-poietic legacy. Yet, as we now know separation within Agamben is never straightforward and always to be questioned. In the essay “In Praise of Profanation,” for example, Agamben boldly declares that religion can be defined as “that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere. Not only is there no religion without separation, but every separation also contains or preserves within itself a genuinely religious core” (Prof, 74). While Agamben, reading the founders of modern anthropology, defines the sacred as this passage across the zone of separation, he concedes that the differentiation profane/sacred is less important than “the caesura that divides the two spheres, the threshold that the victim must cross . . .” (Prof, 74). One of the simplest forms of such a crossing is contagion, he notes, the transmission of a disease that threatens to reproduce out of control. The “contagious” nature of separation, whose etymology is to be found in the word contact, allows us to understand the very roots of our transmissible culture in religion. Later, in the same essay Agamben is again reading a Benjamin fragment, this time “Capitalism as Religion,” wherein he finds Benjamin’s suggestion that capitalism appropriates the separating ability that defines religion and generalizes it in all domains: Where sacrifice once marked the passage from the profane to the sacred and from the sacred to the profane, there is now a single, multiform, ceaseless process of separation that assails every thing, every place, every human activity in order to divide it from itself . . . In its extreme form, the capitalist religion realizes the pure form of separation, to the point that there is nothing left to separate. An absolute profanation without remainder . . . (Prof, 81)11 This is naturally a description of commodity culture or the paradox of the separation of separation where the object becomes so profaned that it becomes impossible to profane as separation as such 98

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is negated.12 In such a culture all objects are equally transmissible and therefore, in theory, equally sacred resulting in a sacralization of the profane. The consumer object is transmission’s evil doppelganger wherein the object no longer operates within transmissible, historically located cultural values, but instead all values become ahistorical products of the object defined purely as transmissible or exchangeable. TASTE AND TERROR

In an age of artistic singularity and transmissibility, which is not an age per se but the precursor to the age of art as art, taste and terror are not qualities that the spectator ought to admit to. Inclination and repulsion, although naturally qualities that are unavoidable when observing any phenomenon, could not, during the time of tradition, be admitted into the role of the spectator of particular art works. Certainly, one could love art and one could fear it, especially from the position of actual or aspirational sovereignty such as one finds in Plato, but always as a whole or single entity. Judging art in totality was possible and common in the form of censorship for example, however such sovereign decrees would not depend on personal inclination on what we call today taste. One could not, in a truly transmissible culture, judge a work of art or even perhaps identify it. Art would be, during such an age, extensible with culture as a whole and culture synonymous with the polis. To judge art as bad would be to judge bios as bad. Only a sovereign can do that. Like Nancy, I am uncertain if a totally transmissible culture is anything more than the nostalgic yearning of certain poets and philosophers.13 Yet, irrespective of whether a truly and totally transmissible culture ever existed without remainder, the transmissibility of art was an assumed characteristic up until the moment that the nexus between tradition and the present came under critical consideration in France in the eighteenth century with the debate between the ancients and the moderns. Kant’s third critique on judgement, of course, along with Hegel’s assertion that in the modern period art was at an end, contributed to the development of the category of taste which enters into common usage in English round about the eighteenth century. Agamben however traces its origins back to the middle of the previous century with the rise of the figure of the man of taste who was reputed to have a sixth sense for art which allowed 99

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him to identify the “point de perfection that is characteristic of every work of art” (MWC, 13). As taste develops as a concept Agamben notes how the roles of and relationship between the artist and spectator change accordingly: As the idea of taste increases in precision . . . the work of art (at least so long as it is not finished) starts to be regarded as the exclusive competence of the artist, whose creative imagination tolerates neither limits nor impositions. The non-artist, however, can only spectare, that is, transform himself into a less and less necessary and more and more passive partner, for whom the work of art is merely an occasion to practice his good taste. (MWC, 15) The resultant downgrading of the role of spectator in relation to transmissible art cultures is more than apparent here. From active participant in communal culture, of the same subjective value effectively as the artist, the spectator now becomes the one who sees, gazes, gawps from a distance and then, at the end, passes judgement. I like it/I don’t like it. In contrast, the artist’s role becomes far more pronounced for art made by such a creator cannot in effect be judged it being the very dismissal of all such strictures. It comes into being much as a Kantian flower might, and can no more be judged than a flower can or its creator, god. Finally, the relation between the creator and the spectator is now one of irrevocable disjunction. They are not participants in communal culture but two entirely different subjects in relation to a new, alien form. The artist invents so as to live, to attain subjectivity of a kind. The spectator merely observes with the aim of practising or perhaps better honing their new sixth sense: taste. While the rise of taste seems to provide the creator with a god-like power which Nietzsche comes to formulate as the Will to Power as Art, like all humans who attempt to emulate the gods the results are fearful and dangerous: “The artist, faced with a spectator who becomes more similar to an evanescent ghost the more refined his taste becomes, moves in an increasingly free and rarefied atmosphere and begins the voyage that will take him from the live tissue of society to the hyperborean no-man’s-land of aesthetics . . .” (MWC, 16). Taste and invention then seem to be bound together tragically by a rule of inverse proportions: “For, while the balanced figure of the man of taste becomes wide-spread in European society, the artist 100

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enters a dimension of imbalance and eccentricity” (MWC, 16). The critic, in other words, becomes a stabilized subject by his increasingly professionalized and technically refined inclinations. The poet is gripped by holy terror. While the spectator becomes spectral through a process of endless refinement, his corporeal presence is literally attenuated into a tissue-thin membrane of exquisite judgements, it is the freedom afforded to the artist by the rise of judgement over mutuality that really opens up an uncanny landscape of diaphanous presences and gloomy open plains. The origins of this differentiation lie, according to Agamben, initially with Plato and then more recently with Nietzsche. Indeed, while we may assume that the fear of art is a contemporary issue manifested in people’s suspicious dismissal of art not as bad or even not art but as rubbish, the Greeks too felt the terror of art. The Man Without Content begins with a large tranche of Genealogy of Morals wherein Nietzsche makes his famous attack on the conception of Kantian disinterestedness before making his own case for an interested art. After this greedy bite of Nietzsche, Agamben goes on to note that Nietzsche’s attack on disinterestedness was not designed to bring about an alternative aesthetics but to purify the concept of beauty by decanting it from the sensory involvement of the spectator, so as to serve it up entirely to the pleasure of the creator. In a prophesy of modern art which Agamben goes on to debate throughout the rest of the essays in the book, modern art comes to be defined in terms of the experience of creation rather than the sensible apprehension of the spectator, as had been the case for Kant and Hegel of course. Art becomes, at this point, invention; art becomes modernism; art becomes shock. As ever with Nietzsche this is all very thrilling but there were good reasons for an ideology of aesthetic disinterestedness.14 As Agamben notes, there is a long history of repulsion as regards the rich dish of an interested and interesting art from the decree to raze the Roman theatres, the attacks of Saint Augustine on scenic games, to what Agamben calls “the first time that something similar to an autonomous examination of the aesthetic phenomenon in European medieval society” (MWC, 3) occurred (it was primarily concerned with the dangers of ars nova distracting the laity). Agamben goes further noting the infamous section of Plato’s Republic and Sophocles’ Antigone as contributors to a decidedly Greek fear/awe of art as a form of profound and politically threatening interest. 101

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An art of interest is, primarily, an art of involvement, complicity, often an art of seduction. The distance of the spectator is devoured by the interest they share in the performance in front of them. They are no longer spectators but participants in the very act of pure creation. Possessed by art’s contagion they begin to live as if they were heroes, queens, gods, and monsters. While some remnant of the Greek idea of an art of interest remains in such concepts as, say, catharsis, which is the archetype of an interested experience of art, and modern debates on censorship, it is perhaps hard for us to conceive of a work by John Ashbery as capable of the literal magic, as Artaud expresses it, of an interested art. The term Plato uses to describe the inspired imagination is “divine terror” (MWC, 4), and Agamben concedes this is a rather tasteless overplaying of the effects of art on the modern spectator. That said, returning to Nietzsche and the various exponents of an interested art, terror was very much on the minds of the modern artist. Fatuous explanations for the prevalence of early death, tragedy, suicide, murder, madness, and renunciation among artists usually look to modern psychological models of manic depression and perhaps a disturbed childhood for good measure. Lautréamont, Woolf, Baudelaire, Proust, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Eliot, Pound; why did they lose their life, their health, their socialization, their minds? Agamben’s insight into the madness of modern art takes up an entirely different, unexpected and, for our understanding of the arts, profound recipe than that of simple psychology. At the same time as, in modern aesthetics, the spectator is able place art at one remove by virtue of disinterest: “For the one who creates it, art becomes an increasingly uncanny experience, with respect to which speaking of interest is at the very least a euphemism, because what is at stake seems to be not in any way the production of a beautiful work but instead the life and death of the author, or at least his spiritual health” (MWC, 5). This statement results in another equation wherein the increasing innocence of the spectator’s experience in front of the art work corresponds to the degree of danger central to the creator’s experience. Agamben backs this up with many now well-known expressions of the risk of art— Baudelaire, Hölderlin, Van Gogh, Rilke—suggesting an alternative messianism in his work, that of the self-sacrifice of the modern artist at the altar of an interested anti-aesthetics of creation as subjective state. 102

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The death of poets leads Agamben to a typically messianic conclusion which calls for the destruction of aesthetics, a destruction perhaps already in place: “If it is true that the fundamental problem becomes visible only in the house ravaged by fire, then perhaps we are today in a privileged position to understand the authentic significance of the Western aesthetic project” (MWC, 6). The landscapes of Agamben’s thinking are always appealing and slightly appalling. Having taken us across a ghostly plain we are now confronted with a burnt-out homestead. In this once rich land of cultural transmissibility a mismanagement of the environment has lead to barrenness and conflagrations on hill-sides once renowned for their fertility and festivals. The essay then ends by jettisoning us out onto this calcified outcrop with the words of a mad prophet, Nietzsche, whistling about our ears, calling for “another kind of art . . . an art for artists, for artists only” (MWC, 7). Here Agamben merely hints at the now classic definition of the avant-garde to be found in the work of Burger and others,15 but also easily identified in the statements of the artists themselves,16 a nihilistic art that seeks not so much innovation as is sometimes assumed (make it new), but a devastation of the distanciation between art and life imposed by the presence of the spectator and the institutions that have arisen to support this concept, not least literary criticism. Such mad artists do not want to move to a fresh plain, lay out foundations, and build a new home that perhaps over time could become a city, with a senate, statuary, commissions, museums, and artistic scandals. Rather they want to burn the very dwelling of art to the ground. This instigates a movement from the misty nostalgia of a Heideggerian art that dwells among us to a truly modern conception of art that immolates its very dwelling on this earth. These artists wish to make artists of us all. Yes, to return art to life, but not so as to make art transmissible in life again but rather to make life subject to the very alienation the artist feels when faced with the uncanny presence of pure poiesis. HOW TO EXIT ART

“How can art, this most innocent of occupations, pit man against Terror?” (MWC, 8) the philosopher asks, or perhaps more pungently, how can modern art subsist on the ambiguous fare of taste based on universal disinterest, and terror which is the result of interest? Taste seems to attract the spectator to participate in precisely 103

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what they cannot have, a kind of aesthetic wine-tasting where they can sample Picasso but cannot become drunk on Joyce. In direct contradistinction, the artist is allowed to be totally consumed by the desire to create and yet this same desire leads to the pure intoxicating terror of madness, silence, kitsch, and death. Agamben traces the relation between poiesis and terror to the distinction to be found in the mid-century French writer and critic Jean Paulhan between two types of writers, rhetoricians and terrorists. Loath as I am to succumb to the simple binary oppositions displayed in this, Agamben’s earliest work, the distinction is clearly reflective of a tendency within modern Western (anti)aesthetics or at the very least the two extremes of that most extreme epoch aesthetic modernity. The rhetorician wishes to “dissolve all meaning into form” (MWC, 8), while terrorists “refuse to bend to this law and pursue the opposite dream of a language that would be nothing but meaning, of a thought in whose flame the sign would be fully consumed, putting the writer face to face with the absolute” (MWC, 8). Agamben calls the terrorist a misologist, the dark face of his own beloved philology, who “does not recognize in the drop of water that remains on his fingertips the sea in which he thought he had immersed himself ” (MWC, 9). This remainder, of course, allows Agamben to begin to undermine not only the quest for the absolute in terror, but also to commence with breaking down the differentiation between rhetoric and terrorism. He notes, through a reading of the character of the artist Frenhofer in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece that the dream of the terrorist is to create a work that exists in the world in the same manner as objects do: block of stone or drop of water. “It is the dream of a product that exists according to the statute of the thing” (MWC, 9). Frenhofer labours at his masterpiece for ten years to create a work of art that negates art and becomes, like the Pygmalion myth, a “living reality.” Yet in reality the woman he has painted is reduced to mere colours and abstract forms: “a chaos of colors, tones, hesitating nuances, a kind of shapeless fog” leading the young Poussin to exclaim “but sooner or later he will have to realize there is nothing on the canvas!” (MWC, 9). As Agamben rightly indicates, in trying to create art that competes with, indeed becomes transmissible with life, an art which is auto-anthropophaganous or self-devouring, an art which exits art through the door marked “To Art,” Frenhofer invents a modern art. His is an art of abstraction which repulses 104

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the disinterested spectre of Poussin (literally spectral here, a mere representation of the artist in art). Agamben’s conclusion to the tale is a devastating and much overdue total foundering of the differentiation between form and thought, rhetoric and terror, set up by aesthetics. Speaking of Frenhofer’s ever-collapsing, unpalatable masterpiece he says: “The quest for absolute meaning has devoured all meaning, allowing only signs, meaningless forms, to survive. But, then, isn’t the unknown masterpiece instead the masterpiece of Rhetoric? Has the meaning erased the sign, or has the sign abolished the meaning?” (MWC, 10). Such confusion over the source of the conflagration of art’s dwelling place, form, or thought leads Agamben to posit the very paradox of the artist’s terror. “In order to leave the evanescent world of forms, he has no other means than form itself, and the more he wants to erase it, the more he has to concentrate on it to render it permeable to the inexpressible content he wants to express. But in the attempt, he ends up with nothing in his hands but signs . . .” (MWC, 10). The terrorist is left, agitated and enflamed, in the very apotropaic hall of mirrors that is modern art. Fleeing from rhetoric leads him to terror, terror flings him back into rhetoric. Misology becomes philology, the repulsion from signs becomes an impossible attraction, and the appetite for signs becomes a cause of disgust. There are many famous examples of terrorism in modern art. Gogol’s disappointment that Dead Souls did not liberate the peasants is matched by Mallarmé’s inability to complete Le Livre, Roussel’s collapse when La Doublure did not change the world, Rimbaud’s flight from art, De Chirico’s self-parody, and Duchamp’s silence. Returning to Rimbaud for a moment, Agamben mentions Mallarmé’s statement that the only gesture available to this terrorist of poetry was to have poetry surgically removed from himself while he was alive. To truly exit literature one cannot make literature into a thing, convert poiesis into fiat lux. Instead one can only escape the matter of art by removing it from oneself entirely. Yet, the ultimate paradox is that the act of greatest terror is precisely that of aestheticoamputation, which is the archetypal gesture of the modern artist: “But the paradox of the Terror is still present even in this extreme move. For what is the mystery we call Rimbaud if not the point where literature annexes its opposite, namely, silence? Isn’t Rimbaud’s fame divided, as Blanchot rightly observed, between ‘the poems that he wrote and those he did not deign to write?’” Agamben then 105

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finally and fatally enquires: “isn’t this the masterpiece of rhetoric?” (MWC, 11). I mention this rhetorical flourish because it touches on the importance of the potential not to write that is the heart of the act of poiesis. Rimbaud and Duchamp do not merely make and then choose not to make. In their choice not to make they make their greatest masterpieces: the pure rhetoric of the semiotics of the absent sign which is the sign under which all modern art is composed, decomposed, destroyed but, most potently, never made. Consider the gesture we call author-function Rimbaud and Duchamp against those we call Malevich or Beckett. Which is the greatest artist, the most eloquent rhetorician? Who has the most fiendish savour for violence and fear? While Malevich and (late) Beckett, as Badiou shows, manifest the very condition of acsesis as both testament to the lack of events and precursive preparation for the event to come,17 does not the material depiction of silence, over time, risk accusations of the obvious, becoming even kitsch? To paint absence is one thing, but surely the greatest works of modernism are those which were never created: Lautréamont’s third book, Bruno Schultz’s first novel, the final version of Le Livre, Nietzsche’s Will to Power? What confers true genius on the modern artist is the very failure of terror in the pure silence of an absolute and thus truly terrifying rhetoric: the work of pure silence. This is why Kafka casts such a shadow over Agamben’s work and the modern age as a whole.18 He sits, surely, at the very nexus between the terrorist become rhetorician and the rhetorician facing up to the terror of the absolute void. His decision to have all his works destroyed at his death, ignored by his “friend” Brod, makes him the most pathetic and powerful of all modern artists: the man who sought silence and was thus then forced to speak. This is the ultimate desubjectivization of the poet, for what else have we been debating here? Not the loss of being through the semiotic necessity of its enunciation but through the enunciative necessity of the semiotic. Even silence succumbs to speech it would seem. There is no resisting dictation in the modern age. The way out of art into language is permanently barred by the very sign that indicates “Exit from Art.” As soon as one speaks of the creation of art one enters subjective negation. As soon as one actively pursues the negation of art one creates anew an art of negation as such. Will there ever be an end to art that is itself not a work of art but a pure experience of the poetic? 106

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MODERN AESTHETIC DESUBJECTIVIZATION

The Man Without Content is effectively a conversation between Agamben and the three fathers of modern aesthetics: Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Kant’s theory of aesthetic disinterested judgement and Nietzsche’s conception of an interested art emanating from a god-like creator bracket the work of Hegel together forming a theory of modern, aesthetic double-desubjectivization which may be the only means by which art under negation during modernity might result in some form of pro-ductive poiesis after modernity. Hegel’s work is perhaps most central to Agamben’s reading of art under negation, art, through four central tenets to Hegel’s overall aesthetic theory. These are that art is the sensible presentation of the idea, that poetry is the archetypal art in that it exists between language (the sensible) and image (idea), that we currently live in the age of prose,19 and that this age is marked by its being the epoch of the end of art.20 The final element here is of greatest importance to aesthetic desubjectivization but this thesis makes little sense without all four elements of Hegelian proto-post-aesthetics. For Hegel modern art is a valorization of the sensible presentation of the idea. It arrives precisely at the moment that prose as bios or social ethics has inundated all during the period of Western, democratic, Enlightenment democracy. This means that, courtesy of philosophy, at the moment that poiesis becomes available for full view to us for the first time since the Platonic occlusion, poiesis arrives, as it were, at the presentation of its own dissolution: the collapse of poetry into prose. The modern art work becomes a means of presenting that there was once art but now such work is at an end. As one can see, at each level of Hegelian aesthetics modern art is denigrated. First it is subordinate to the idea. Second it is a mere prosaic remnant of the poetic art that once dwelled among us. Third its critical definition is also its negation. A choice lies before modern poiesis therefore, to accept its tripartite collapse or to turn these failings around and form from them a new lieu commun, or an art that celebrates subordination, the prosaic, and negation. As we have seen at some point or over time in Western culture, the power of art over the spectator collapsed into profane secularization only to rise again in the form of shock rather than awe. As Agamben shows in an extensive analysis of the history of the development of the museum from the ancient cabinet of wonder, once the space of 107

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display of a valued object changes and the object is placed under glass the relation of the spectator to the object also changes.21 They no longer pause in front of the object in religious awe but are as if rooted to the spot or transfixed by pure, autonomous, secular shock. At this moment works of modern art are produced through the profanation of the relic into an art object already suffering auratic aphasia. For Hegel this scission within the subjectivity of the spectator is first enacted within that of the creator and transmitted, as it were, contagiously through the art work. At the moment that the creator steps out of the transmissibility of cultural traditions her relation to her material changes. Previous to that she had no direct selfconsciousness of material or making. All of her acts were the result of her consciousness so that when she made something she made herself as a subject within a unified culture. In a very basic way this idealized act of creation was neither making something nor creating art as we moderns understand these terms, rather the subject-artist simply presented in sensible form the idea of her communally held spirit within an exterior form as a necessary step towards a final interiorization. This is the very essence of art as transmissibility. That Hegel placed art at the lowest level of the journey of the spirit from exteriority, the poem, through exterior interiority, religion, is revelatory in this regard. Art got one ready for god who in his turn prepared one for Geist. The definition of modern art at the point of its cessation in Hegel comes from the moment when the material of the work of art is seen by the artist as material as such and as art as such, or when the creator becomes critical spectator of their own work. At this moment the work of poiesis enters the world of prose: The artist then experiences a radical tearing or split, by which the inert world of contents in their indifferent, prosaic objectivity goes to one side, and to the other the free subjectivity of the artistic principle, which soars above the contents as over an immense repository of materials that it can evoke or reject at will. Art is now the absolute freedom that seeks its end and its foundation in itself, and does not need, substantially, any content, because it can only measure itself against the vertigo caused by its own abyss. (MWC, 35) Contained in the vaunting rhetoric here of Agamben’s reading of Hegel are the various stages of his complex ideas on poetry and 108

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modern art. Modern art, which is art as such defined by Agamben as art under erasure, is thus definable by a conglomeration of the following quasi-events. Scission: art is no longer defined through its place in the continuum but through its being excerpted from the continuum. Prose: at this juncture the meaning of the work becomes subject to the prose of the world. Height: the subjectivity of the artist is now defined as that of being above the territory of art’s dwelling on earth. Freedom: defined here in a Nancyian manner as a nonfoundational self-founding.22 Contentless-ness: what the work of art now contains as content is the work of art as such, so that the semantic is handed over to prose and meaning becomes the absence of meaning. Materiality: the work becomes a commodity fetish or non-utilitarian choice of the object purely for the sake of exchange. Incommensurability: the much touted incommensurability of postmodernity hounded by Habermas in particular23 is surely simply an overstatement of the spatio-philosophical paradox of sublating negation that Agamben sets up here through his reading of Hegel. The work of art is moved from being encased in a continuum to floating within the void, floating in the sense that it both soars above and is endlessly falling away. Art is no longer measurable against culture as either being of the same standard or co-extensive. Therefore, the only measure of art on earth is art itself, or the moment at which the artist becomes her own spectator or the spectator becomes the judge of art. At this point perhaps the greatest paradox of modern art comes into view as we float or plunge above the void of self-founding self-negation. Art becomes incommensurable in the moment that measuring art becomes possible through the Kantian discipline of criticism. Having set up Hegelian aesthetics as permanently under negation, Agamben then turns to the very aesthetic system from which Hegel’s work emanates but also seeks to depart from, namely that of Kant. Summarizing the four characteristics of aesthetic judgement as Kant delineates them he finds a single, confounding common denominator. Central to the definitions of the object of aesthetic judgement as disinterested satisfaction, universality apart from concepts, purposiveness without purpose, and normality without a norm “it seems . . . that every time aesthetic judgement attempts to determine what the beautiful is, it holds in its hands not the beautiful but its shadow, as though its true object were not so much what art is but what it is not” (MWC, 42). This shadow of art is the modern experience of 109

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inexperiencible art which is, for us, the only experience of art and also the first experience of art as a thing in itself. Agamben, therefore, presents a critical synthesis of Kant and Hegel here to provide a model for creation (Hegel) and judgement (Kant) that is based on the commencement of the art object from the moment of its selfnegation. He thus concludes that “our appreciation of art begins necessarily with the forgetting of art” (MWC, 43). The moment that we engage the faculty of judgement we are negating the very object we are judging. Considering Kant’s famous paradox that the judgement of taste is not based on concepts as it could be subject to proofs and yet that it must be based on concepts otherwise we would not quarrel about it (it would not in fact be taste), Agamben then moves to Kant’s dictum that judgement is “a concept . . . from which . . . nothing can be known” (MWC, 44). We can recognize in this concentration by Agamben on the paradox of judgement as a non-knowing concept parallels with Lyotard’s reading of reflective judgement as tautegorical. In Lyotard’s remarkably detailed reading of the third critique he begins by telling the traditional story of Kant’s theory of judgement as the bridge between theoretical and practical knowledge. This led to a widespread acceptance of the term judgement as finding the universal in the particular based on the regulative idea of the finality of nature, which is the quintessence of taste. This reading undermines the assumed legislative power of judgement and leaves it instead as a reflective faculty whose strength resides precisely in its legislative debilitation: because judgement cannot legislate it can supplement the contesting legislations, so to speak, of understanding and reason. In finding the universal in the particular, or of discovering natural beauty defined as finality without purpose (objective perfection without teleology), judgement merely operates between practical reason and understanding which is judgement’s famous heuristic capacity, or as Lyotard says: “The strength of reflective weakness can be explained by the heuristic function of reflection; the tautegorical aesthetic shares in the weakness of this strength” (LAS, 6). The tautegorical nature of reflective judgement is to be found in the relation of judgement to the sensation which, put simply, is that judgement is the affect of the sensation of thinking, which is the indication to thought that it is taking place. The act of judgement produces the feeling of the activity of judgement. Reflective thinking

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is, therefore, thought’s thinking of itself as thinking through sensation: “Any act of thinking is thus accompanied by a feeling that signals to thought its ‘state.’ But this state is nothing other than the feeling that signals it . . . Pure reflection is first and foremost the ability of thought to be immediately informed of its state by this state and without other means of measure than feeling itself ” (LAS, 11). Judgments of taste are based, therefore, not on thinking something, concepts that could be known, but on the sensation of thinking thinking. Having established this fundamental quality of the tautegorical nature of critical judgement Agamben then differentiates judgements of taste from those of natural beauty in Kant. Natural beauty does not require a regulative concept, indeed for Kant nature is the regulative concept for aesthetic beauty—the very thing Hegel takes issue with. In contrast, we do need a concept of what the work of artistic beauty should be “because the foundation of the work of art is something other than us, namely, the free creative-formal principle of the artist” (MWC, 45). At this juncture, Agamben identifies the central point of his thesis on modern art, the scission between genius and taste which defines aesthetic judgement and gives birth to modern criticism. This scission submits all art to the law of the “degradation of artistic energy” which states that once one has passed judgement on a work of art, “one can never return to it from a state posterior to its creation”; or “once the work of art has been produced, there is no way to return to it by way of the reverse path of taste” (MWC, 46). The person whose job it is to shed light on modern art, the spectator-critic, is the very person who commits art to the realm of dark non-art: “whenever he exercises his reflection, he brings with him nonbeing and shadow” (MWC, 46). Yet while judgement seems almost to blame for the end of art thesis, it is in fact the content-less nature of the modern work of art that results in perhaps the ultimate, most powerful irony of modern aesthetics wherein the critic sees in the work of art the very contentless-ness that defines the subjectivity of the modern man without content. “What he sees of himself in the work, that is, the content he perceives, appears to him no longer as a truth that finds its necessary expression in the work, but rather as something of which he is already perfectly aware as a thinking subject, and which therefore he can legitimately believe himself capable of expressing” (MWC, 47). The very self-presence of the spectator is the pre-condition of the work of

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art without content. What we can conclude from aesthetic modern contentlessness is that the moment the spectator and the artist become two separate entities (the archetypal event of modern aesthetic metaphysical scission) ironically the artist no longer has anything new to say to the spectator for the spectator was party to the very scission that facilitated the shift from art to nonart that the artist thought they had created ex nihilo. There is nothing the artist can teach the spectator, the critic knows all, but there is one simple fact separating the two. The genius makes art, the critic cannot. The result of this on all of us is devastating: “In the aesthetic judgement, being-for-itself has as its object its own being-for-itself, but as something absolutely Other, and at the same time immediately as itself; it is the pure split and lack of foundation that endlessly drifts on the ocean of form without ever reaching dry land” (MWC, 48). The subject of judgement finds itself both subject and predicate of their judgement, existing in both positions without any means of bringing the two together again. The critic identifies her being in the alienation of the work which rejects or, to use Hegel’s term, perverts any relationship between the genius of creation and the communality of culture. The pure creative principle results in the alienation of art and the critic not only recognizes this theme-less theme, they are of course part of what makes it possible. Thus the alienation of art is their subject, it belongs with them. Yet, at the same time the spectator is by definition not the artist. The annihilation of content may be familiar, as Agamben says both absolutely Other and immediately itself, but the critic cannot share in it. The presence of the critic makes possible modern art, but the critic does not make modern art placing them/us in a doubly untenable position. What they see in the work of art is what they already know, and yet what they know is what they can never be. Agamben’s explanation of this double negation, being-as-nonnart but not being art, is the very basis of his theory of the potentially productive nature of the historically contingent, desubjectivized being of the critic/spectator : If the spectator consents to the radical alienation of this experience, leaves behind all support, and agrees to enter the circle of absolute perversion, he has no other way of finding himself again than wholly to assume his contradiction. That is, he must split

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asunder his own split, negate his own negation . . . In this alienation he owns himself, and in owning himself he alienates himself. (MWC, 48) The position of the modern spectator, which is the subjective position all but of a few of us occupy in front of the art work (perhaps indeed all as in modernity even the artist becomes spectator to their own poiesis) is akin to that described by Hegel as the selfannihilating nothing of Romantic Irony. Yet here Agamben takes on critical desubjectivization and proposes at least a desire to convert ontological negation into a productive category. Having dealt with one half of modern aesthetic desubjectivization, however, he cannot neglect the other half: artist as god-like creator. Of the creative, Nietzschean genius he says: What the artist experiences in the work of art is, in fact, that artistic subjectivity is absolute essence, for which all subject matter is indifferent; however, the pure creative-formal principle, split from any content, is the absolute abstract inessence. Which annihilates and dissolves every content in its continuous effort to transcend and actualize itself. (MWC, 54) Such a dire conundrum strands the artistic subject in a doubly desubjectivizing quandary. If she places her faith in a specific content she realizes she is lying as her own pure subjectivity is everything. Yet, if she then embraces pure subjectivity and ceases to seek for content she finds herself embracing her subjective inessence: “content in what is mere form” (MWC, 54). Thus the modern artistic subject can be defined as a radical split, “outside of this split, everything is a lie” (MWC, 54). Faced with this alternative, to live the epoch or to live outside of it, the heroic modern artist, and Agamben here names Rimbaud and Artaud as exemplary in this regard, can attempt to totally inhabit the split and try to live this violence, “trying to make of the split that inhabits him the fundamental experience starting from which a new human station becomes possible” (MWC, 55). Yet even if one chooses to live the split, for Agamben at least, there is no escaping the fact that, without content, the artist is always living on what he calls “this side of his essence . . . beside his reality” (MWC, 55). Hence Agamben’s conclusion: “The artist is the

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man without content, who has no other identity than a perpetual emerging out of the nothingness of expression . . .” (MWC, 55). For Agamben, the critic/spectator and the artist are both examples of self-annihilating nothings, as is indeed, perhaps predictably, modern art. Modern art is art that is under negation through the act of coming to view, critically, for the very first time. This has various benefits of course. It opens up to us the importance of tradition and transmissibility which we now see, in accordance with Benjamin’s hermeneutic principle, as if for the first time. Yet, most significantly in a manner only hinted at in the pages of The Man Without Content but which comes to full fruition over the intervening decades, modern art presents us with the most credible and challenging model of “poetic” desubjectivization as a solution to the failings of nihilistic ontology.24 The end of art as art results in a double desubjectivization. The critic possesses knowledge of an entity they have no experience of and the artist experiences a process of which they can have no knowledge. Either art is pure content without form, thoughts about art, or all form without content, are as pure subjective inessence. Here one can see the importance of aesthetic modernity to Agamben’s wider philosophical project. Modern aesthetic double desubjectivization provides us with a prototype for the following three propositions in Agamben’s overall system. First as an example of poeticized desubjectivization. Second in revealing the structural interdependence of philosophy and poetry in this process: formless thought or contentless form. And finally third, how negation as such, and certainly there is no greater negation than self-annihilating nothingness,can result in a productive category hinted at in the terms of such a double negative: modern nonart as the potential for an exit from art into a futural and sustainable poiesis.

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CHAPTER 4

LOGOPOIESIS, THINKING TAUTOLOGY

The title of this volume proposes a compound construction or double thesis, that Agamben is “literary” and that the literary Agamben opens up a clearing around thinking through poetry/ poiesis that I am calling logopoiesis. Such a di-thetic approach runs the risk of being doubly unpopular in that for those who believe Agamben to be a philosopher or, more pointedly, a political philosopher, my suggestion that no understanding of Agamben’s indifferent ontology is possible without recourse to the literary might even seem frivolous. At the same time, the happy few who have come to understand that Agamben is one of the greatest thinkers of the arts in our tradition may be dismayed at the suggestion that all his talk of poetry, novels, and the visual arts is merely as a means of approaching a post-nihilistic metaphysics, an ancient by-way thicketed by prejudice. This cannot be helped. For reasons which I believe now are more than apparent it is not possible to overview the work of Agamben without accepting that his project will always resist being reducible to one side of the ancient division philosophy–poetry, while at the same time striving to reveal how both traditions first fail to lift thinking out of negation by virtue of their being subsumed by scission, and by their occlusion of the fact that their inter-division is a false divide which, however, they must accept and actively live through. The tension between the philosophical and the literary in Agamben is the central animator of his whole intra-metaphysical, expropriating appropriative methodology. Neither a thinker of philosophy nor poetry alone and unable to succumb to any of the traditional modes of thinking division, the compound, or as we will come to see him comparative, thinker requires a compound and demonstrative term to present these tonal issues. And so I present for general perusal and 117

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perhaps initial scepticism or even weary derision my theory of logo-poiesis. Having now dealt in some detail with logos, or thinking thought as such, and poiesis, or thinking through making, we are now in a position to propose logopoiesis as not merely a viable compound term but more significantly as a complementary coupling or comparative tonality. I will not here present a history of logopoiesis, indeed the inserts into such a narrative are sparse and inconclusive, beyond stating that it was the later work of Heidegger and its emphasis on poetry and poetic thinking that commenced the tradition that was able “to hand philosophy over to poetry” as Badiou states it (MP, 74). Badiou is also a great logopoietic thinker of course and he, like Heidegger before him, uses the term “poetic thinking” to describe the centrality of poiesis to a new form of thinking that exceeds that of Heidegger in some fashion (HI, 20). Other contemporary logopoietic thinkers therefore, thinkers who accept the centrality of Heidegger but also look to poetry as a way beyond his ontology, would include Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and, perhaps more contentiously, Jacques Derrida. A fully worked out vision of logopoiesis would require detailed reading of all their work in conjunction with that of Agamben. One would not want to neglect Blanchot in this regard also, and some comments would be reserved for the work of Deleuze. There may be others; I do not intend here to establish a strict canon as logopoiesis is still in its nascent stages and presented here as little more than a provocative, convenient possibility. Poetic thinking is not thinking about poetry, or not solely, nor is it a type of poetry that thinks, or not entirely, which is why logos and poiesis alone are not sufficient designations even if, as is now apparent, for Agamben at least thought is or must be poeticized and poiesis is a mode of material thinking. As we have seen, any designation of thought that hands over thinking either to philosophy or poetry is not properly “poetic” thinking but is in fact metaphysical thinking about poetry. The simplest definition of such poetic thinking is a turn to poetry to assist thinking to overcome the aporias of modern thought. While this gesture is important and marks the roots of the term in the work of Heidegger, it does not accurately reflect the sophistication and tensile balance I intend to convey in the term logopoiesis. While, as we saw, Agamben proposes various names for this alternate or “new” form of thinking, one which thinks the very basis of thinking as such in the pure mediality of language the most 118

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authentic experience of which is the poetic word (I hesitate to call it new, as its novelty resides in the manner in which something original has been totally forgotten and then rediscovered centuries later), he does not hone in on one particular name or ever actually advocate a “poetic thinking” at all. Certainly he does not use the term logopoiesis. None of the thinkers I have mentioned do so. Yet logopoiesis is not a neologism. It first came to the fore as a term for a thinking poetry in Pound’s ABC of Reading in contrast to melopoiesis or the poetry of pure semiosis.1 While sporadically mentioned by critics, however, logopoiesis has not come to be a developed rhetorical or critical term. In contrast “poetic thinking,” which would be the translation of logopoiesis, has found significant currency within philosophy. For this reason, and the fact that poetic thinking really names a form of philosophy that considers poetry, I have opted for the more obscure but also productively suggestive term. Poetic thinking ultimately stresses a form of thinking that relies on and appropriates poetry, witness Halliburton’s book on Heidegger of the same name, and neglects the possibility of a poetry that thinks.2 As such “poetic thinking” is destined to be a problematic and misleading designation whereas logopoiesis presents a balance between the philosophical and poetic elements of such modes of thinking even if the harmony is an uneasy one. Poetic thinking it could be logopoiesis it is. THE LOGO-POIESIS TAUTOLOGY

The creation of a compound term out of two ancient, much debated and contested terms is unwise. One cannot blithely produce neologisms and not expect certain repercussions. The definition of the terms in play, a full understanding of categorical thinking and the problems of naming, and how indeed two terms can be placed in relation to each other simply by spatio-linguistic proximity are all issues to be taken rather seriously. As should be the effect on both terms when placed in a zone of bound proximity, especially considering the dangers of duality inherent within our tradition. One term will naturally seek dominance over the other, balanced proximity giving way to a hierarchical topography and so on. The dangers are heightened further when it comes to the combination of two terms such as logos and poiesis which, Heidegger tells us, essentially name the same process of bringing to appearance. Thus logopoiesis is essentially tautological in essence. 119

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Heidegger explains that for the Greeks the term logos, which effectively means speech, has come to be translated/interpreted variously as reason, judgement, concept, definition, ground, and relation. How, he ponders, can speech be speech and also mean all of these other things that effectively form the very basis of discursive, presuppositional philosophical thought? The answer he gives is that logos really means deloun or to make manifest what is being talked about in speech. This is facilitated by the root of logos being Legein or the making present of something: “the simple apprehension of something objectively present in its pure objective presence” (BT, 22). Thus logos is definable as making something appear in speech, but what does it mean to make something appear and how is this affected by mediation through language? Heidegger believes that the term appearance in the context of “what shows itself, the self-showing, the manifest” (BT, 25) must be interpreted effectively as a symptom, meaning something that shows itself to indicate something else that does not show itself. Appearance, therefore, “does not mean that something shows itself; rather it means that something makes itself known which does not show itself. It makes itself known through something that does show itself ” (BT, 26). Logos makes appear something in precisely this way: “to take things that are being talked about in legein as apophainethai out of their concealment; to let them be seen as something unconcealed (alēthes); to discover them” (BT, 29). Logos means speech as a means of bringing something out of concealment and making it appear not as the thing as such but as the concealed thing. Therefore the fact that logos can simultaneously mean mediation and knowledge is revealed not as a possibility but in fact a necessity (it also negates once and for all the misconception that Heidegger is a thinker of revelation, quite the contrary he is a thinker of obfuscation). The knowledge generating powers of logos as reason, judgement, concept, relation, and so on, rely on the mediation of speech: making something appear which is hidden and remains so. If we now return briefly to Heidegger’s foundational work on the term poiesis, its definition as presencing, bringing forth, makes logos and poiesis appear as synonymous and thus the term logopoiesis as tautological. Like logos, poiesis makes something manifest to appearance that was not manifest before. Yet the means by which poiesis does this differ from those of logos. Heidegger specifically defines the bringing-forth of poiesis as producing something into presence, 120

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whereas logos mediates presencing. This difference becomes clearer if we re-consider the role of production or techne in relation to presencing. Techne is the active process of bringing something to presence through making. When one makes something the actual thing, one makes is not the thing produced by poiesis, rather in making something poiesis brings something that was hidden to presence. Thus logos means making something manifest through the mediation of speech, while poiesis means producing something into presence through the act of making. As Heidegger’s work progresses and he becomes convinced of the restrictions of producing based around enframing (Gestell) or a predisposition within production that forces techne to serve pre-ordained dictates rather than facilitate free appearing, he differentiates two forms of producing forth. Gestell is instrumental and pre-ordained production, production as instrumentality which he terms challenging-forth, while poiesis is that form of revealing that “ever so suddenly and inexplicably to all thinking, apportions itself into the revealing that brings forth and that also challenges . . .” (QCT, 29). Enframed techne produces something to the dictates of the age in which it is produced, while free techne or poiesis exceeds the frame and produces freed thinking. To sum up, logo-poiesis is primarily tautological as both logos and poiesis are mediating modes of producing truth. Yet logos merely utilizes speech as a mediation, and could indeed use another form of mediation. It could also be accused of using speech instrumentally as a form of Gestell. What is important here in early Heidegger is simply that the mediation indicates that the production of truth is not the production of a thing as such but of truth’s appearance as something concealed. Here language is merely symptomatic of truth. Yet in later Heidegger the emphasis has changed. Truth is now produced into presence by virtue of techne, making, which he also translates as presencing. The difference between philosophical and poetic thinking, therefore, is that in philosophy truths are produced through the support of linguistic mediation, while in poiesis they are produced through making. Most certainly thinking and poetry produce truth in a different manner, but ultimately logopoiesis says the same thing twice: the production of truth—the production of truth. Perhaps it is more illuminating to write the tautology out thus: (logos) the truth of production—(poiesis) the production of truth. Yet to do so runs the risk of obfuscating the truth that logopoiesis is essentially a form of tautological circular thinking. 121

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The tautology of the term is relevant for several reasons and thus must be retained. First, as I said, it disallows philosophy or poetry to totally appropriate the term. Second, tautology is true to the Heideggerian roots of the conception, emulating as it does Heidegger’s own late tautological style in such formulations as the “language itself is language” and a thing’s thinging (See PLT, 190 and OWL, 174 respectively) and indeed the centrality of the hermeneutic circle. Third, it touches on the debate as regards the tautegorical nature of logopoiesis. Finally, as we shall now go on to see, tautology names the specificity, perhaps indeed singularity of the projectiverecursive circular mode of thinking that is the quintessence of logopoietic thinking—itself a tautology we can now dispense with as logopoiesis names a modality of thought—and which, at the same time, is inimical to philosophical thought. THE EXEMPLARY TAUTOLOGY OF LOGOPOIESIS

We have already seen some examples of logopoietic thinking. Glenn Gould’s playing with not-playing, Damascius’ consciousness of the tablet, Akhmatova’s ability not to write and Benjamin’s Idea of Prose are all, in their way, models for logopoiesis. Perhaps it would be useful here to adumbrate a few more examples provided by Agamben in that central essay in the canon of logopoiesis, “Bartleby, or On Contingency.” Here he speaks of the prose of Robert Walser which the critic Walter Lüssi called “pure poetry” because it “refuses in the widest sense, to recognize the Being of something as something” (P, 260). Agamben declares that this ought to be the “paradigm for literary writing.” He then proceeds to explain: “Not only science but also poetry and thinking conduct experiments. These experiments do not simply concern the truth or falsity of hypotheses . . . rather, they call into question Being itself, before or beyond its determination as true or false. These experiences are without truth, for truth is what is at issue in them” (P, 260). I would also call this an archetypal definition of logopoiesis: a form of thinking that is without truthfulness, it cannot be proved right or wrong by testing it for agreement in relation to concepts or things in the world, but which produces truth as the very precondition for thinking. Such a truth resides in the fact that there is language as pure medium, the most profound experience of which belongs, we are repeatedly assured, with the poets. 122

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Agamben then goes on to list a history, effectively, of remarkable logopoietic thinkers. He mentions Avicenna’s imagining of an eviscerated and dismembered being that can still state “I am.” He speaks of Cavalcanti’s description of the poetic experience of being like an automaton. He describes Condillac’s introduction of a statue to the sense of smell and Dante’s desubjectification of the “I” of the poet into the third person. Of course he then recounts Rimbaud’s declaration “I is another” alongside Kleist’s use of the marionette as paradigm for the absolute. Finally, and most significantly, he ends with Heidegger, the father of logopoiesis, who “replaces the physical ‘I’ with an empty and inessential being that is only its own ways of Being and has possibility only in the impossible” (P, 260). Each of these thinkers conducts an experiment in being which we should now recognize as that of desubjectivization. This is not, I believe, the only experiment to be conducted by logo-poets, if I may but temporarily coin that rather horrendous-sounding neologism, but as we saw desubjectivization is a central tenet in Agamben’s conception of the relevancy of poetry to philosophy and being. Speaking of these notable poietic experiments with existence he says: “Whoever submits himself to these experiments jeopardizes not so much the truth of his own statements as the very mode of his existence; he undergoes an anthropological change that is just as decisive in the context of the individual’s natural history as the liberation of the hand by the erect position was for the primate or as was, for the reptile, the transformation of limbs that changed it into a bird” (P, 260). That Agamben uses precisely the same phrase when explaining that the importance of poetry is that it produces life (EP, 94) indicates how integral in actuality is his vision of thinking and poetry. All poetic thinking, all logopoiesis produces life out of desubjectivization or, as we saw, the moment when the subject “withdraws from both the lived experience of the psychosomatic individual and the biological unsayability of the species” (EP, 93).3 Agamben stresses that Bartleby’s experiment with being and potential is of this kind. He is a scrivener, this is his form of life, but when asked to copy or write by his boss he replies that he would “prefer not to.” Here he experiments with issues of will, power, being, and potential. It is not that he cannot copy. He is a scrivener. Rather he does not want to. He remains a scrivener with the potential to write mimetically, but a scrivener whose potential never arrives at actualization. This is what Agamben calls the “irreducibility of his ‘I would 123

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prefer not to’.” It is not that he does not want to copy, he would simply prefer not to. “The formula that he so obstinately repeats destroys all possibility of constructing a relation between being able and being willing, between potential absoluta and potential ordinate. It is the formula of potentiality” (P, 255). Agamben goes on to describe how the green screen (another version of the tablet perhaps) that isolates Bartleby’s desk “traces the borders of an experimental laboratory” wherein the scrivener who can copy but chooses not to frees himself from the principle of reason: either one is a scrivener and one copies or one is not and does not. “Emancipating itself from Being and non-Being alike, potentiality thus creates its own ontology” (P, 259). In that this ontology withdraws subjectivity from actual identity and biological indistinction, another name Agamben gives to this ontology is life, or better, form-of-life (HS, 188). The ontology of potentiality can also be termed that of logopoiesis confirmed by Agamben’s subsequent comments on the relation of the Bartleby’s formula to tautology “a proposition that is impenetrable to truth conditions on account of always being true” (P, 261). Similarly, he argues, Bartleby’s ontology of unfulfilled potential can not be submitted to truth conditions not because it is always true but because it is simultaneously true and not true. A tautology is a form of thinking whose truth cannot be tested because it is always true. Potential shares with tautology the same truth-testing aporetic base in that its truth cannot be appraised not because it is always true but because it constitutes the very experiment or test of truth. Such a process is in effect heuristically tautegorical in that one can only attest to the truth of its taking place through the sense of its taking place or not taking place. Logopoiesis therefore must be a construction dependent on the logic of potentiality as Agamben finesses it. Logopoiesis is a truth-testing tautology that can only occur outside the realms of philosophy. Philosophy cannot abide the tautology, but, as Keats demonstrates in the final line of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” poetry thrives on it.4 INFINITE POETRY

While illustrative these examples, as all illustrations are, are somewhat dissatisfying. For a start Melville’s story seems to merely recount the conditions of potential in an allegorical or analogous form. In the end there is little difference between this presentation of truth 124

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and that found in Plato’s dialogues or the fabulous Nietzsche. Narrative, poetry, and dialogue have all been used by philosophy to make a point. This is logopoiesis in its weakest state. Yet Agamben is not to be accused, as some have of Heidegger and Badiou, of merely allegorizing literature in the service of philosophy.5 His is a truly engaged logopoiesis that gives as much attention to the operations of poetic thinking as to philosophical thought processes, most specifically the circular tautological nature of thinking under the auspices of logopoiesis. This is best illustrated by the centrality he gives to poetry in Language and Death, in particular his reading of Leopardi’s poem “L’infinito” proceeding directly out of the analysis of the troubadours’ noble if failed attempt to think the place of language as such—the ultimate logopoietic adventure for Agamben I would suspect. “L’infinito” begins: “This lonely knoll was ever dear to me, / and this hedgerow that hides from view / so large a part of the remote horizon.” Author-function Leopardi is then struck by a sense of “interminable spaces” in the distant beyond, marked by “supernatural silences.” At this point, the impersonal genius of the wind interjects and “I find myself comparing to this voice / that infinite silence: and I recall eternity.” Naturally, faced with the “immensity” of both infinite space and infinite time, absolute silence and “the living presence and its sound” the poet is overwhelmed: “And so / in this immensity my thought is drowned: / and in this sea is foundering sweet to me.”6 Agamben’s analysis begins in technicalities which indicate the sincere philologer within him. He notes the deictic “this” is repeated six times in the poem’s fifteen lines, along with an interesting interchange between “this” and “that,” with “this hedgerow” becoming converted later into “that,” moving one from proximity to distance, specificity to generality, and back again. While the use of deixis is fascinating Agamben rightly asks what we can learn of the poem’s reliance on deixis as indicating the instance of discourse, which it undoubtedly does in the poem, that moves beyond what we have already learnt of deixis from other sources. And how, indeed, is this specific use of deixis singular to the poem when innumerable poems use the same technique? Agamben believes that Leopardi, like Hegel, always conceives of the sense-certainty assumed by the “this” as always already “universal and negative,” so that while we may assume that Leopardi did 125

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once perceive a knoll in his home town of Recanati, the knoll, the hedgerow, and the wind in the poem have immediately moved beyond referentiality to an existential fact, and into other realms of generality, converting with haste Leopardi the existent-being into Leopardi the author-function gesture. This, he believes, is indicated for example by how soon the “this” in the poem, already referentially deficient but still intimate, is modified to become the more vague and distant “that.” The rapidity and alacrity with which the poet abandons a noun for “this,” and then “this” for “that” suggests that, in the instance of discourse that the habitual use of deixis indicates, as in the Hegelian analysis of sense-certainty, here the This is always already a Not-this (a universal, a That). More precisely the instance of discourse is assigned to memory from the very beginning, in such a way, however, that the memorable is the very ungraspability of the instance of discourse as such (and not simply an instance of discourse determined historically and spatially), serving as the basis for the possibility of its infinite repetition. In the Leopardian idyll, the “this” points always already beyond the hedgerow, beyond the last horizon, toward an infinity of events of language. Poetic language takes place in such a way that its advent always already escapes both toward the future and toward the past. The place of poetry is therefore always a place of memory and repetition. (LD, 76) Although a consideration of one short lyric this is also an observation of great significance, first as regards the now fully fleshed-out conception of dictation, second as to how poetic structure, reference, and rhythm work, and third how poetic thinking differs totally from that of philosophy. Previously, Agamben’s use of prose was illustrative; here his analysis of poetry is exemplary and paradigmatic.7 He is reading a poem by Leopardi but, like the poet himself, he is immediately transforming the sense-certainty of the poem into a set of universal qualities revealing, I believe, that the procedure of author-function becoming reader-function, reducing both subjectivities to mere gesturality, also converts the ontic object of the text as such into mere text-function. What are these qualities that typify the place of poetry, in other words where and how poetry thinks? First, referentiality in poetry is always already moving away from reference to an actual thing towards 126

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the thing first standing for something else and then finally an indication of the thing of language as such. Reference in poetry therefore is always an indication of the taking place of language either in actuality through use of heightened semiotic devices, or conceptually through such considerations of space and time that we find in “L’infinito.” There was a knoll but in the poem there is no knoll, there was a Grecian urn but in the poem there is no Grecian urn, there was a solitary reaper but in the poem she has already fled. Second, poetic referentiality is always marked by a belatedness transferring all poetic temporality into memorialization. This is a point he also makes in reference to the razo de trobar. Although the lived experience always precedes the act of mimesis in our tradition, the fiction of the razo creates lived experience simply to support the event of writing a poem that is long past. This invention of an encounter or happening is in fact an act of false memory, a gesture conjured up to support to presence of the poem as such (LD, 69). Third, as the object referred to in the poem is the very ungraspability of existential reality the poem is quickly transferred from a specific description of a lived reality, something singular to the poet, to a universal precondition of experience as such. At this point the poem shifts from being a specific instance of discourse to the truth of discursive ungraspability ceasing to be singular in becoming general, universal, and thus available for perpetual repetition. Finally, fourth, this allows Agamben to make a truly profound revelation as to the nature of poetic structure. Its advent is both pre-cursive and reflective. The poem deals with a truth that is always already in place before the poet ever even wanders lonely as a cloud, and yet as soon as the poet encounters daffodils, frog-spawn, the uncertainties of memory down by the station early in the morning, they have already entered into a field of repetition. The event as such is either always already prepared for, or has always already been converted from singular event to universal quality. The poem, therefore, the poietic poem, is truly an event in that it negates the very possibility of its ever occupying this space and being termed as such. A poem can never be an event; a poem is therefore always profoundly evental. Agamben’s first conclusion from this astonishing reading is itself somewhat predictable but essential all the same. He says that the poem “expresses the same experience which we saw as constitutive of philosophy itself; namely, that the taking place of language is unspeakable and ungraspable,” located as it is beyond the knoll in 127

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interminable silence (LD, 77). He adds: “The word, taking place in time, comes about in such as way that its advent necessarily remains unsaid in that which is said” (LD, 77). This is, of course, Agamben’s definition of language’s sayability as pure medium being perpetually silenced by the instance of the Voice. Thus he is able to conclude in a phrase of some significance to my own theory of logopoiesis: “The poetic experience of dictation seems, thus, to coincide perfectly with the philosophical experience of language” (LD, 77). There are blessings and curses to be gleaned from this analysis. Poetry and philosophy are most certainly linked in terms of how they think language. That said if philosophy is marked by language as negation then poetry too cannot escape this metaphysical nihilism. In addition, if philosophy has already indicated this surely all that is left for poetry is to back philosophy up. Well, not quite. For a start Agamben excitedly notes in relation to Bartleby that Melville’s observations on will precede those of Nietzsche by three decades. Thus literature can get there first. However the true significance of poetry is not that of winning a metaphysical race but lies elsewhere in the semiotic element of verse that philosophy simply cannot match. This element is what he calls here poetry’s “super-shifter . . . the metrical-musical element” (LD, 77), although in later studies he refers to it as the semiotic. The utilization of metrical forms in poetry, in all poetry even contemporary mainstream free verse and experimental poetics, is an essential part of poetry. Its role as a functioning meta-deixis although not often enough remarked upon is central to the literary experience as a whole. Literature points to itself as an instance of discourse not merely when it plays games with reference and deixis but as soon as it takes place as a work. This is no more the case than in the poem which demands to be read then re-read, weaving a complex planar and tabular matrix of anaphoric and cataphoric elements that are the essence of its form.8 As Agamben says in response to this obvious yet seemingly invisible fact: The metrical-musical element demonstrates first of all the verse as a place of memory and repetition. The verse (versus, from verto, the act of turning, to return, as opposed to prorsus, to proceed directly, as in prose) signals for a reader that these words have always already come to be, that they will return again, and that the instance of the word that takes place in a poem is, for this reason, 128

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ungraspable. Through the musical element, poetic language commemorates its own inaccessible originary place and it says the unspeakability of the event of language (it attains, that is, the unattainable). (LD, 78) This is the essence of the nature of poetry for Agamben. While philosophy is able to speak of the unspeakable giving us insight into negativity but no means of overcoming it, in poetry the unattainable is its very essence. As the poem is always already in place before you even come upon it, and has always already taken place and then begun again before you even get to the end, it performs or at least demonstrates that the very place of poetry, where poetry thinks, is by definition a placeless one. But this placelessness has a place to be found in prosody itself. Thus the poem is able to take possession of the unattainable as the positive basis for its own self-generation, which is something philosophical language can never do unless it becomes poeticized. This is not the solution to our metaphysical problems, modern poetic dictation is just as marked by negation as modern philosophical thinking, but the commencement of a possible shift away from the aporias of both logos and poiesis, philosophy and poetry, in what I have called logopoiesis. THE HABITS OF THE MUSE

Agamben’s conclusion to his reading of Leopardi is complex and subtle, counting as one of the most profound reflections on the literary ever penned in any language at any time. You will recall that although poetry and philosophy both share as their object the unattainability of language as such, poetry seems to prepare a portal through which one could emerge into a post-nihilistic world or word that philosophy does not have at its disposal. This is prosody as such or poetry’s reliance on repetition in terms of stress, sound, lineation, reference and, finally, structure. This allows poetry to take possession of language’s unattainability in a way, he believes, philosophical discourse cannot. Philosophy’s prose proceeds but poetry’s verse returns and this constitutes their essential difference. Does it not, however, remain unclear in the detail as to why poetry’s reliance on semiotic repetition is able to potentially save the whole of Western metaphysics? I would suggest so. There is, indeed, no quick solution to this problem, and while my formulation of logopoiesis advocates 129

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this productive position for literature I cannot say at this point that call it anything more than a projection on my part, an adventure indeed. For now we must satisfy ourselves with Agamben’s final point in relation to “L’infinito” as regards what might be called poetic habit. All that Agamben is really looking for is an honest experience of linguistic/ontological unattainability or the definition of poeticphilosophical being as by definition the unattainable, combined with a positive potential. He thinks he finds this at the end of the poem where the poet admits his thought is drowned in the immensity of the unattainable before adding the proviso: “and in this sea is foundering sweet to me.” Two elements at the poem’s end recall, for Agamben, its advent, the use of “this,” “This lonely knoll” and “this sea,” and the emphasis on dearness/sweetness, “was ever dear to me” and “sweet to me.” This in fact is not a remarkable observation. First, so many lyrics, novels, symphonies, and films recall their commencement in their ending. This is not unique to this poem. Second, the poem form is dominated by the advent-finitude tabular matrix. The poem proceeds through verse, turning, going backwards to go forwards, progressing only to refer back. Consider rhyme as a simple example of this. Every couplet is in miniature the ontological potential of the poem to save thought. The first rhyme already recalls the second; the second harks back to the first. When is one ever in the poem spatially or temporally, if one is always proceeding and returning? One never is. This is the place of poetic thinking, its restless habitus, the habit of its reversal. In “L’infinito” the habitual, although always there in the metricalmusical element, is also referred to directly by the first line of the poem which in Italian reads: “Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle.” Here always, sempre, is, unlike in the English translation, placed at the head of the poem composing the poem’s advent word from which the verse is launched as always already being in place. Just as the poem never ends always returning our attention back to that first line, it never begins either commencing always on “always.” Agamben traces the etymology of sempre to the Latin semper which he first fractures into two elements, sem-per, of which he finds the sem- is the Indo-European word for single. Thus he defines the roots of always as meaning “once and for all,” a common enough construction of the experience of the always. He then suggests: “The sempre that opens the idyll thus points

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toward a habit, a having (habitus) that unifies (once) a multiplicity (all times): the having ever dear this knoll” (LD, 79). Agamben now rereads the whole poem as an attempt to seize the habitual, the perpetual place of always, by the poet’s trying to haveever-dear the experience of the knoll. Yet we know that in trying to have the knoll the poet is instead cast into the interminable space that dismays his heart. In trying to inhabit the experience of the knoll, to occupy its singular once-ness for all time indicated in the “this,” the poet instead founders in the multiplicity of potential experiences of the knoll, the that of the knoll or its endless repetition through its prophylactic and transmissible encounter in poetic language. This is in a way a restatement of the logic of the name in Heidegger, invention in Derrida, and the event in Badiou. The singular cannot be attained except through its being named in language, yet the process of being named is the very thing that robs any event of singularity for the name allows the event to be reiterated and transmitted through space and time. Agamben’s second conclusion on the poem therefore is as follows: “The experience at stake in the idyll is thus the breaking apart of a habit, the rupturing of a habitual dwelling into a ‘surprise’ . . . Habit cedes to a thought that ‘feigns’;9 that is, it represents the initial sempre as an interminable multiplicity . . . The thought is a movement that, fully experiencing the unattainable of the place of language, seeks to think, to hold this unattainability in suspense, to measure its dimensions” (LD, 80). Poetry, here, as is ever the case at least since Plato’s time, cedes to thought its sovereign power in affairs of the mind but is wrong to do so. This is perhaps why in an early letter Leopardi writes of the way in which thought makes him unhappy, will even kill him if he is unable to change his situation. Yet in a later poem, “Il pensiero dominante” he seems to embrace thinking which, although dominating is also sweet. Agamben believes this change in situation as regards thought is dramatized in “L’infinito” through the figure of drowning: “Thought drowns in that about which it thinks: the unattainable taking place of language. But the drowning of thought in ‘this’ sea now permits a return to the ‘ever dear’ of the first line, the habitual dwelling with which the idyll began” (LD, 80). This “voyage” taken in the poem is “truly more brief than any time or measure, because it leads into the heart of the Same. It departs from a habit and returns to the same habit” (LD, 80–1).

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In contrast to our previous definition of thought as that which takes measure of the dimensions of the unattainable, a project of which I think we can say Heidegger is the greatest master, here thought cannot measure trapped as it is in the tautology of the same, the habit. The name of this technique in poetry is the periplus, the circular journey immortalized by The Odyssey becoming a foundational recursive and tautological structure of so much Western art to follow. Periplus as a term marks the structural pointlessness or meaninglessness of art, that it takes us nowhere, just sails around, that it says nothing of worth, nothing new, nothing that can be tested as being true in terms of agreement or reasoning. The circular journey to nowhere brings to the fore the darkness of the poem, its utter, Wildean, radically productive uselessness. Periplus describes, therefore, the circular structural basis of all logopoiesis. Previous to this analysis Agamben draws ancient parallels between poetry and philosophy through the figure of the muse which as we know he also terms dictation. Muse, he claims, is the name the Greeks gave to the “ungraspability of the originary place of the poetic word” (LD, 78). Plato, he explains, in the Ion, is responsible for giving the poetic word the character of being an eurema Moisan or invention of the muses, “so that it necessarily escapes whoever tries to speak it” (LD, 78). Use of the poetic word in fact is an expropriated appropriation in that one is possessed by the muse, spoken by it. For Plato the meaning of the most beautiful song is “to demonstrate that poetic words do no originally belong to the people nor are they created by them” (LD, 78). In that “philosophy too experiences the place of language as its supreme problem (the problem of being)” (LD, 78), Agamben believes Plato is correct in his calling philosophy supreme music and its muse the true muse. Here, in a nutshell, one encounters Plato’s problem with poetry as identified by Lacoue-Labarthe in his recent response to Badiou’s critique of his work on poiesis: competition.10 Plato sees the community between poetry and philosophy, and instead of appreciating filiation, amity, philo-poiesis, he sees a rival to his claim for thought’s sovereignty, anti-poiesis. Agamben’s reading goes even further than this however: “The ‘confrontation’ that has always been under way between poetry and philosophy is, thus, much more than a simple rivalry. Both seek to grasp that original, inaccessible place of the word, which, for speaking man, is the highest stake” (LD, 78). Agamben believes philosophy was born out of the very need to 132

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liberate poetry from inspiration or to retrieve language from mystical music-making and return it to statements of truth. It does this, he argues, by transforming muse into spirit or Geist. Yet, Plato argues in Phaedrus, the most beautiful voice of the muse is voice without sound marking the origins of two essential and ultimately destructive events in Western thought. The first is the scission of poetry from philosophy echoed by the bifurcation of language in the theory of the sign and dramatized in poetics through the development of the stanza. The second the establishment of negative, vocal silence at the very heart of being. Who will save us: poetry or philosophy? The answer is neither and both. In parentheses as if an after thought which in fact is the advent of this whole impossible yet unavoidable enterprise, tautological logopoiesis, Agamben inserts the following: (For this reason, perhaps neither poetry nor philosophy, neither verse not prose, will ever be able to accomplish their millennial enterprise by themselves. Perhaps only language in which the pure prose of philosophy would intervene at a certain point to break apart the verse of the poetic word, and in which the verse of poetry would intervene to bend the prose of philosophy into a ring, would be the true human language). (LD, 78) With this parenthetical wondering Agamben gives birth to the new discipline of logopoiesis. Yet, no sooner launched the logopoietic bark is inundated by the cruel seas of the infinite and drowns. Returning one last time, once and for all time, to Leopardi Agamben ends what is surely one of the great additions to the science of aesthetics in considering a logopoietic thinking that finds no measure of the infinite but is captured instead, and thus freed, in the periplus logic of tautological habitudes. Thought in the poem, you recall, sets out from only to return back to the same. Yet, along the way, as is often the case in such salty tales of the sea, thought has many adventures during which thought’s silence and interminable nature miraculously ceases to be “a negative experience.”’ At sea, lost at sea as we say, thought “in its drowning” is “now truly lost forever . . . that is, once and for all.” Thought has been truly poeticized by being sucked into the vortex of poetic periplus, the trans-planar and tabular experience of the anaphoriccataphoric matrix of poetic recursiveness. Thought now experiences, 133

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in the poem, negativity as the breaking and making of the habit or of a poetic, literary singularity born out of structures of repetition. This logic is the tautological logic of poetic thinking, its habit and its versus, a truly original idea of language and thought that exceeds all the traditions of thinking from Plato as far as Heidegger by simply escaping the craft of thinking through drowning in equivalence and pointlessness. The result is the “extinguishing of thought,” its drowning and its tautological negation so that “in the negative dimensions of the event of language, its having-been and its coming to be . . . in the exhaustion of the dimension of being, the figure of humanity’s having emerges for the first time in its simple clarity: to have always dear as one’s habitual dwelling place, as the ethos of humanity” (LD, 81). Later when we return to poetic structure we will see how Agamben’s recent work has come to name this in-between time messianic time, time between times or between chronological time, its having been, and eschatological futural time, its coming to be. At this point the metaphysical and poetic Agamben will once more come together and take the measure of each other. For now, however, it suffices to pull ourselves from the ocean and back onto the shore, dry off, and reflect on how far we have come, and yet how much further we still have to travel. Logopoiesis in its tautology names a certain experience of truth that emulates that of potential. In both tautology and potentiality, for different yet related reasons, the truth of a statement cannot be tested. The result of this is a form of radical desubjectivization, the very testing of truth through its own alienation. Yet the circularity of logopoiesis goes even further than this. Through the projectiverecursive nature of poetic structure we are gifted with a model for a truly tautological mode of thought that draws together all the strands of Agamben’s attempt to think beyond the metaphysics of scission and negation, without resorting to arche-presence of the false imposition of unity. Everything hangs on the temporal-spatial essence of poetry, its versification of language. Logopoiesis is the turn of verse in all senses of the word. Both the ability of poetic language to turn (projective-recursion) as a potential for a pro-ductive philosophy to come, and the very turn of poetry as a formidable alternative to the traditional modes of thinking which renounce the circular in every instance in favour of moving ever forward towards the truth.

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THE DEFINITION OF POETRY

Bare space is still veiled. (BT, 96) If it were not already apparent that there is a profound interdependence in Agamben between thinking, language, and the arts, consider the conclusion of the short essay on poetics entitled “The End of the Poem.” Having spent several pages defining poetry in terms of lineation, interruption, recurrence, and finitude, he concludes on material seemingly at one removed from the technical concerns of prosody: “The poem thus reveals the goal of its proud strategy: to let language finally communicate itself, without remaining unsaid in what is said” (EP, 115). From this we are now in a position to ascertain that the prosodic element of poetry which concerns so much of Agamben’s work on literature, interests him only in as much as it provides singular and privileged access to thinking the thing of thought as such: language. Never more powerfully apparent than here is it that Agamben is both negligent of the singularity of literature and yet entirely dependent on it. All of which gives a certain piquancy to his avowed project here, the end of the poem. In Agamben’s hands the poem may be reborn into the service of a profound shift in metaphysics but at a certain cost to its own self-identity. Like all other identities in Agamben, the poem must die through a process of self-alienation to become what it is destined to be.

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The essay, which was originally a paper presented in French, begins in a rather pedestrian vein that gives little indication of the direction it will eventually take: My plan, as you can see summarized in the title of this lecture, is to define a poetic institution that has until now remained unidentified: the end of the poem. To do this, I will have to begin with a claim that, without being trivial, strikes me as obvious—namely that poetry lives only in the tension and difference (and hence also the virtual interference) between sound and sense, between the semiotic and the semantic sphere. (EP, 109) This deceptively simple definition of poetry as reducible to the prosodic technique of enjambement that does not even belong with Agamben1 establishes a set of preconditions for poetry which, we now realize, must also be those for thought. Thus we can see that differential opposition, here in the scission between phone and logos, although widely attacked by Agamben cannot simply be eradicated. Rather the definition of poetry exists precisely in the ambivalence to be found at the heart of all structures of differential scission, source of the tension he mentions here, namely that such a scission demands separation and relation. This may indeed be a truism for all entities the result of the metaphysical tradition, yet as we saw poetry has a special place in this tradition. This is not merely due to the repulsive attitude of first philosophy to poetry, but also that the specific tension of the poetic, that between the semiotic and the semantic, happens to emulate precisely the tension at the heart of modern, negative metaphysics. And so it becomes possible to see how this tension which occurs in the technicalities of prosody will open up for Agamben a possible route out of negation into pro-duction, not least because the non-relational relation between two terms in a zone of indistinction that typifies the Agambenian method is best described as a tension, and poetry is the archetypal tensile linguistic form. If this tension were easy to maintain, perhaps Agamben might rapidly find what he is looking for in poetry but, like all tension, this is, by definition, not the case. It is notable that the essay title and Agamben’s initial declaration both refer not to the internal tension of the poem but its cessation: the end of the poem is the true definition of poetry. The fact that the poem comes to an end both allows 136

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one to define the potential of its internal tensions and to understand how, while a potential for thought, poetry alone cannot be thought’s substitute. If poetry subsists in the tensions it calls up between semiotic and semantic forces, most marked at the end of the line where semiotic demands of metrical counting and rhyme undermine the semantic expectations set up within the progress of the serial syntax previous to this point of transition from one line to the next; if poetry is indeed this tension, not a preference for the semiotic over the semantic but the balancing of one precariously against the other, teetering on a ledge above an abyss of pure space or universal prose, then, Agamben wonders: what happens at the point which the poem ends? Clearly, here there can be no enjambement in the final verse of a poem. This fact is certainly trivial; yet it implies consequences that are as perplexing as they are necessary. For if poetry is defined precisely by the possibility of enjambement, it follows that the last verse of a poem is not a verse. Does this mean that the last verse trespasses into prose? (EP, 112) If something is defined by a tensile dynamic between arrest and sequential recommencement, it is inevitable that if the sequence cannot recommence then the thing in question at that point no longer exists. Thus the final “verse” of any poem cannot be poetry for the tension is asymmetrically poised above a permanent rather than transitory space. This space, the abyssal presence of absence edging all poetry into being, ceases to be a facilitator of poetic tension, a gap which words can pause before and then overleap as in enjambement, and instead becomes a true abyss of philosophical proportions. No wonder it is “as if for poetry the end implied a catastrophe and loss of identity” (EP, 115), because at this point the whole texture of poetry, carefully woven according to Agamben from the tensile interchange of semiotics and semantics, starts to unravel.2 Yet there would be no tension without this probable eventuality, not least because without finitude there can be no poem, only pure, ongoing poetry of an impossible or virtual nature. The poem is tense because it must end. Verse is verse because it will at some point cease to be verse defining a structure of identity based on self-alienation we are now more than familiar with under the wider ontological heading of desubjectivization. 137

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If, from this obvious if not trivial definition, questions begin to be asked of being, tension, and finitude, one might also wonder what happens at the point of incipit or the very birth of the poem. If space looms at the end of the poem, vacancy is just as present before the poem begins. Is the space before the poem the space between poems, meaning that poetry is the natural or normative state of language and prose merely its interim interruption? Such an argument is historically supportable in the work of Godzich and Kittay. Is prose, in other words, composed of alinear but sequential marks, or is it merely the period when there is no poetic tension? Where does this space end into, the beginning of the poem, before the title, between the title and the poem body, outside the collection or book? Is it actual space, or the fake space of the blank page, not space at all but un-inscribed or zero-marked matter, the famous Agamben tablet of potential? The end of the poem raises more questions than it answers but what is certain is that it is not precisely the tension between semiotics and semantics that allows the poem to come to presence, to be perpetually born to presence, but rather the already inscribed future failure of poetry. This other tension is the tension of philosophical finitude, inevitable at the poem’s final footing on the edge before the abyss, implied before the poem has even begun, if it indeed ever does begin as such and not simply strike up again on its guitar or lute, foreshadowed in the worrying gaps between stanzas, certainly suggested at the end of each line whether it runs on or not, but also disseminated or contaminated across the stretch of the line in the gaps between the words and the fading of certain syllables in the service of others. For poetry is perpetually fading, dissolving, losing its footing on a slippery way it must follow to its death. Surely the essay would be better named “The Death of the Poem,” because Agamben is speaking here of deathly negativity. He comes to define poetry, and hence poiesis, indeed all creation precisely in the terms of Heidegger’s beingtowards-death, which is also a being-away-from-birth. Poetry is not marked by finitude, by its ending, but rather is the experience of projective and imminent finitude as such. Just as being-in-the-world can only be disclosed through an admission of finitude so too the poem in the world is only a poem by virtue of its eventual negation by the Hegelian “prose of the world” of the everyday. This is the source of poetry’s Stimmung, its mood or attunement, its uncanny angst. Poetry is tense because it is permanently buffeted by recollected 138

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premonitions and intimations of mortality. None of which is at all trivial, however obvious it may seem to be. BOUSTROPHEDONICS

I will take Agamben at his word and read “The End of the Poem” as a plan for a poetic institution of foundational instability. A plan, after all, is a geometric term pertaining to the point where any two lines meet one’s line of sight at the perpendicular and form a twodimensional flat surface or plane diminishing in accordance with perspective. Such plans always implicate the formation of a plane. A plane occurs whenever there are three points or where there are two lines which are not parallel for, at some point of extension, those two lines each made of two points, will meet at a third and mutual point (in perspective the vanishing point). Any line therefore at a slant—tell the truth but tell it slant—holds within it an invitation to some future assignation wherein its linearity will become planar. A plan, among other things, for example, simply listing actions, maps out a planar surface, and Agamben’s plan for the institution of the end of the poem is born out of his obvious yet remarkable observation that: No definition of verse is perfectly satisfying unless it asserts an identity for poetry against prose through the possibility of enjambement. Quantity, rhythm, and the number of syllables—all elements that can equally well occur in prose—do not, from this standpoint, provide sufficient criteria. But we shall call poetry the discourse in which it is possible to set a metrical limit against a syntactic one (verse in which enjambement is not actually present is to be seen as verse with zero enjambement). Prose is the discourse in which this is impossible. (IP, 39) This is taken from Idea of Prose, and the intervening ten years between Agamben’s initial, quasi-scientific formulation and the more complex rhetoric of “The End of the Poem” allows Agamben to add 139

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one additional element to this formula, the adoption of the terms semantic and semiotic to place atop of the initial bare skeleton of prose and poetry.3 Let us scientifically and geometrically proceed with this for a moment. Western, alphabetic languages which are written although not necessarily spoken, a designation which includes Italian, English, Latin, and mathematics, are all composed of successive series, although of all of these mathematics also has a tabular potential. There is a fundamental disjuncture in such successive series between words as they are heard and how they are written, resulting in the perfectly sensible and violently contested idea that the voice precedes writing. Let us take a random and innocent syntagm in English to better illustrate the issue: “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, the lowing heard winds slowly o’er the lea, the ploughman homeward plods his weary way, and leaves the world to darkness and to me.” There are two clear levels of segmentation, difference, and articulation charted here: the space between the words, which is a grammatological differentiation, and the regular, metrical iambic rhythm, which is phonematic. The grammatological difference cannot contain the phonematic, by which I mean the simple appearance of the words does not reproduce stress, while the phonematic difference cannot contain the grammatological, in that speaking the words does not reproduce textual spacing or planar dimensionality. The first of these observations is, dare I say it, rather obvious. The second is less so and is based on scientific work on phonemes which establishes that when one speaks a stream of syntax, notice how hard is the conception of the phonetic as a line and the grammatological as a stream, one utters a single, undifferentiated utterance, at least until one pauses for breath. The brain that cuts up this continual stream into single units identified as “words.” They are not, however, words in any real sense, rather they are electrical impulses giving an impression of words.4 So in grammatology one cannot “see” stress, and in phonology one cannot hear “words.” These two realms rely on very different modes of sensation resulting in cognition of a language which remains permanently bifurcated and at odds with itself. There is, of course, a third level of segmentation available to only a very limited number of syntagms, although free verse has made the potential for this differentiation available in principle to all syntax with Agamben’s theory backing this up to some degree. This third difference is enjambement, for, as you may have recognized when you 140

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saw my example or felt when you read it, the extract in question is more traditionally inscribed thus: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.5 So goes famously the first stanza of Gray’s exemplary “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” There are two levels of analysis to present here. The first is the line taken by Agamben that without the line-breaks after every ten syllables this sentence is prose. The second takes us into a much more complex question as to what is actually meant by a line-break. Is such a break a grammatological or phonematic occurrence? The way Agamben presents it remains permanently unclear, so I have to extrapolate from his evidence the possibility that it is both and neither. While attestation suggests Agamben conceives of enjambement grammatologically, as proven by my example that until those breaks are spatially imposed the sentence in question holds off from become a verse, there are a number of reasons why this cannot be the case. The first pertains to Agamben’s more general work on language and in particular his radical critique of Derrida’s theory of the trace conducted through Agamben’s own problematization of the idea of the gramma. This leads to Agamben’s contention that gramma (writing) rather than destabilizing the pre-eminence of phone (voice) as full presence is actually the pre-condition or reverse face of such a pre-eminence: “the originary nucleus of signification is neither in the signifier or the signified, neither in writing nor in the voice, but in the fold of the presence on which they are established: the logos . . . is the fold that gathers and divides all things in the ‘putting together’ of presence. And the human is precisely this fracture of presence” (ST, 156). Agamben summarizes this ancient ontological counterpositioning in terms of the bar (/) that we found articulated the ban and articulation of the sign, revealing not simply Derridean différance but also the “topological game of putting things together and articulating” (ST, 156). The remaining evidence is much more empirical. As one can see from my little experiment in linguistic presentation, enjambement is neither purely grammatological nor phonological. True one needs in 141

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some sense the spatial presentation of the break for the poem to be immediately perceptible as the visual entity called poem. But if one reads the four lines as one line, one still finds oneself pausing every ten syllables. This is due to the perfection of the metrics here widely recognized as one of the most superlative and thus static examples of traditional English prosody, the use of zero enjambement facilitated by terminal caesurae at the end of every subsection of ten syllables, and perhaps finally, more intangibly, the almost genetic inclination of English speakers to allow their speech to fall into iambs organized into groups of ten syllables or so. In fact you do not need to read the poem to visually apprehend it is a poem nor do you need to see the poem when you are reading it to know or feel it is a poem. Enjambement therefore not only establishes a tension between semantics and semiotics but it simultaneously eases or even eradicates another ancient antagonism, this time not between poetry and prose (philosophy) but between speech and writing. Enjambement in this manner demonstrates perhaps the only instance in language where the rivalry between the immediacy of speech and the mediation of writing is transformed into a constructive, if strained, entente. Certainly you can see a line-break or feel it, but its full force comes through the combination of the two, for indeed one cannot understand enjambement unless one understands the semantic content of the lines in view, while at the same time one can feel enjambement but it remains as discarnate as a feeling or uncanny sensation, until one has one’s suspicions confirmed by the graphical plan of the poem before one. All of which brings us back to the poetic plane. Enjambement artificially breaks the sequential line of language at the right hand side of the page here.° .here page the of side hand left the at line the up takes then It This maps out three points: the beginning of the line, its ending, and its recommencement, which can be presented graphically as follows:

Geometrically speaking, poetry is the becoming planar of an endlessly extendable two-dimensional field we call prose. While prose fills a planar page space,6 this is not essential but merely a contingency of 142

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the development of the book as a technology for the preservation, organization, distribution, and transportation of prose writing. In abstract terms the line of prose is always one single line, interrupted by the paragraph certainly but never for anything other than stabilizing semantic dictates within this line. The paragraph, I would argue, although the closest entity in prose graphematically to the property of enjambement does not interrupt the dimensionality of the prose line into a poetic planar surface. Most avowedly the paragraph is not a stanza. Poetry is the moment in which the plane of writing is opened through the addition of an extra point to the bi-punctal line of prose. As Agamben argues: In the very moment that the verse affirms its own identity by breaking a syntactic link, it is irresistibly drawn into bending over into the next line to lay hold of what it has thrown out of itself. It hints at a passage of prose with the very gesture that attests its own versatility. By this headlong dive into the abyss of meaning, the purely sonic unit of verse transgresses its own identity as it does its own measure. In this way, enjambement brings to light the original gait, neither poetic nor prosaic, but boustrophedonic, as it were, of poetry . . . (IP, 40) Agamben’s phrasing itself constructs something of a boustrophedonic folding logic, referring to the rhetorical term echoing the passage of an oxen along and between the furrows it ploughs wherein you write first from right to left and then from left to right. Poetry affirms its identity at the very moment that it breaks the line indicating a preference for semiotic metrics and rhyme over semantic clarity and continuity. Here voice shouts down writing. Yet at the very point, and it is a point, that it abandons sense for the abyss of grammatical, spatial absence (the jagged abyss that looms at the right-hand edge of all poetry) the break is softened into a bend. Writing scribbles down voice. The cut folded back on itself always becomes a hinge except for the very last verse which remains severed not bent, and reclaims that which it had the temerity to eject, namely sense. Paradoxically Agamben terms this accommodating recuperation a “dive into the abyss of meaning” for in recovering a state of stable continuity through the renunciation of the cut for the hinge,7 the verse finds that its very identity as verse is lost at the precise point of its being 143

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founded. Between the cut and the fold, therefore, poetry is continually and permanently born to presence and withheld from view, revealed and concealed or vice versa. More importantly we find here in the becoming planar of the line of sense an internal bifurcation in the category poetry as Agamben shifts from the adjective poetic, to refer to the activity of enjambement, to poetry as the tensile effect of this activity. “Poetic” remains therefore at the level of praxis, something that writing does, while poetry as such is poiesis, or something that the poetic makes happen or brings into presence. What poetry “makes happen” geometrically is that it adds a third point, indeed poetry as such is based on the fundamental number three,8 opening up a planar space in writing that is the very basis of the grammatological. This plane of language first and foremost introduces writing to a fundamental experience of space as opposed to the simple activity of differential spacing: space as a second dimension, as a surround or framing device, as a threshold, and abyss. This experience of space produced by the boustrophedonic transition from line to plane, immediately closed down again by the cut becoming in an instant a fold, allows the poetic to become poetry. At the point in the line when the line becomes a part of a plane the poiesis of poetry is revealed. What poetry makes happen in the birth to plane is nothing other than thinking. – KLE SIS, THE MESSIANIC AS NOT

The space of thought within the poem, an essential logopoietic opening up of space for thought in a medium that, since Plato certainly, has suffered a ban, colonization, and finally excision of an opening for suprasensuous thinking within the sensible body of a “work” of art, cannot be cleared until the issue of time in poetry is resolved. Students of metaphysics will be more than aware of how considerations of time become those of space, and vice versa.9 Students of poetry will be more than aware of how considerations of space, such as the becoming planar of the cut/turn at the end of the poetic line, rely on temporality. If we take the structural shift of the metricalmusical element of the anaphora-cataphora projective recursive tabular matrix of poetic structure, the way it always refers both forwards and backwards, one can see a dramatization of this dynamic in the grammatological presentation of the work while partially occluded in the phonematic in which voice unfolds in time. One of 144

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the prime reasons for the retention of the gramma within the phone of the poem is to allow access to the spatiality within poetic temporality and resist poiesis becoming simply an apparent privileging of some arche-vocal presence. In our considerations of Agamben’s interventions on art in general we saw how in his critique of aesthetic modernism he was committed to a rather different temporality of epochal ending, negation, and the quest for a post-nihilistic theory of productive thought about art that did not succumb to the metaphysical-epochal designations of ending, silence, and so on. Finally, as regards Agamben’s own philosophy of indifference, the medium or supportive gesturality of language as such makes little reference to temporality. Yet its essential combination with the theory of potentiality is, of course, temporal. Indeed the whole project of the early formulation of the Idea of Prose depends upon complex interactions with temporality such as Benjaminian now-time and messianic redemption. Agamben has only been able to resolve these issues, space becoming time, poetic temporality, the epoch of modernity, and the messianic strand of potential, in one of his recent and most important works The Time That Remains. If we are to move from lineation to the space of poetry, resolve the aporias of modernity, and progress in our task of a logopoiesis in which poetry is an essential partner in the indifferential thought to come, we must pass through the distorting hall of temporal mirrors that is the complex and brilliant theory of messianic time to be found in this volume. There are two central epochal moments in Agamben’s messianic The Time That Remains which we are already, in part, familiar with. The first of these is kle¯sis or calling as a surrogate to epoch as event. The second is kairos as an alternative time to chronos presenting to us a possible historical existence that is neither chronological nor eschatological but between and incisive of both.10 The combination of these two terms not only involves an even more ontological radicalization of enjambement as the obvious definition of the poem, but also the possible solution as to how a future for thought can be found in the technicalities of prosody. To move from boustrophedonics to a logopoietic philosophy of indifference that finds its clearing in the very space of thought within the poem requires a considerable and remarkable diversion of the way through these entangled and ancient defiles. Yet such is the nature of the adventure. Map-less but with guidance we will commence with the call of the messianic vocation. 145

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Kle¯sis, the messianic “calling,” can be read intertextually in relation to three areas of concern for logopoiesis. Clearly it presents a modification of Heidegger’s idea of the poetic as the calling of calling (PLT, 198 & 209).11 In terms of it being the logic of “as not” it is a modification of the sceptical “no more than” that Agamben places at the heart of poetic potentiality and epochality (P, 257). Finally, messianic calling is first presented in the “Second Day” of The Time That Remains bracketing the debate of modern, fictive subjective as-if-ness that we have already delineated. The Time That Remains is a sustained philological analysis of the Pauline canon of messianic texts, and thus it is from Paul that Agamben extricates the idea of kle¯sis as the calling to the messianic vocation. Reading specifically a sentence from 1 Cor. 7:17: 17–22, “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called,” Agamben focuses on the seemingly tautological phrase en te¯ kle¯sei he ekle¯the¯, usually translated as “the same calling wherein he was called” (TTR, 19). While the tautology of this phrasing, the calling of being called, is one which commentators have struggled for centuries to render in their respective languages, Agamben argues the problem is that the phrase is not tautological, but a “peculiar tautegorical movement that comes from the call and returns back to it” (TTR, 22). This occurs through a technical application of that, now, most familiar linguistic operator, deixis. Here the “he” is an anaphoric designation of the previous kle¯sei, or the call of the previous calling. Such a use of anaphoric deixis is peculiarly tautegorical because not until the call is recalled, until the deictic indicator refers back to its previous referent, can the referent or call can be said to call at all. The call, therefore, is instigated and completed only after the fact of when it is called to call, repeating the same logic we found in play with aesthetic judgement, and establishing an impossible to ignore parallel between negative modern criticism and a possible positive outcome of this vocation through the act of messianic calling to the call. What deixis indicates here, therefore, is that the commencement and completion of the vocation of the messianic all occur within the temporality of the act of calling. To be called to the messianic vocation is to be called to the call, or to remain within the dynamic of calling indicated by the logical and linguistic operations of anaphoric deixis. Indeed, one might redefine this form of anaphora as tautegorical cataphoric anaphora, wherein the repeated term can only be presented as a term to be repeated

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after it has first been repeated, yet cannot be repeated until it has occurred. As Agamben says with more admirable clarity than I can muster: “Kle¯sis indicates the particular transformation that every juridical status and worldly condition undergoes because of, and only because of, its relation to the messianic event. We are faced here therefore not with a matter of eschatological indifference, but of change, almost an internal shifting between each and every single condition by virtue of being called” (TTR, 22). This being the case the messianic vocation has no specific content. You are not called from one vocation, Jew, to another, apostle, but instead are called into the nullification of one’s vocation as one’s vocation, for example called to criticism as the critical tautegorical nullification of criticism. Thus one is called to remain in the negation of vocation as a form of vocation. “Why remain then in this nothing?” Agamben asks, referring to the first half of the Pauline formulation. Precisely because such a remaining “signifies the immobile anaphoric gesture of the messianic calling, its being essentially and foremost a calling of the calling” (TTR, 23)— immobilized by the confounding circular logic of the tautegorical. Think of this if you will as anaphoric deixis that refers to no particular thing but merely refers to its own operations, the classic definition of deixis, a form of indication that “may apply to any condition; but for this same reason, it revokes a condition . . .” (TTR, 23). Tautegorical, negatively heuristic kle¯sis is the first part of the messianic which structurally and technically emulates the process of deictic desubjectivization we saw in Agamben’s appropriation of Benveniste, and indeed there is increasing room for Benveniste here and in other later works.12 Calling or kle¯sis is first of all an empty revocation of every vocation. One is called away from one’s vocation, but not called to a new vocation. Instead one is called into the subjective state of vocational desubjectivization (whatever vocation) as Agamben confirms in his follow-up analysis of the “as not” of the messianic vocation. Citing Paul when he says that kle¯sis involves operating “as not having” a condition, of having a condition as not having a condition, the “Ho¯ s me¯ ” of the Pauline text, Agamben calls this the “ultimate meaning of kle¯sis” (TTR, 23). “Vocation,” he says, “calls for nothing and to no place . . . The messianic vocation is the revocation of every vocation . . . the vocation calls the vocation itself, as though it were an urgency that works it from within and hollows it

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out, nullifying it in the very gesture of maintaining and dwelling in it” (TTR, 23–4). While apparent that Agamben here is speaking of the mediality of language in another register, that of the messianism of a temporality to come, not until he starts to speak of figurality is one able to see how these comments pertain to modern aesthetics. He first uses the example of the technique of comparison within Paul, “unless you become as children,” and how this form of comparison was analysed by Medieval grammarians in a particular fashion as not a form of identity or resemblance, “but rather they interpreted the comparative as an (intensive or remissive) tension that sets one concept against another” (TTR, 24). If this is true then for Paul men are not as children, they do not resemble children, but are placed alongside children. “The Pauline ho¯s me¯ seems to be a special type of tensor, for it does not push a concept’s semantic field toward that of another concept. Instead, it sets itself up against itself in the form of the as not: weeping as not weeping” (TTR, 24). The comparison, if it exists at all, is that of a thing with itself in the form of non-self-identity. In Paul’s comparative explanation of the subjective effect of kle¯sis weeping is pushed towards itself as not weeping, rejoicing pushed towards not rejoicing. Agamben concludes from this form of comparison: “In pushing each thing towards itself through the as not, the messianic does not simply cancel out this figure, but makes it pass, it prepares its end” (TTR, 24–5). At the end of this section Agamben speaks of the process “as not” in terms of another classic form of rhetoric, the parable, noting how in the Bible the parable comes to stand for the word of god itself or logos. Speaking specifically of the parable of the sower where seed represents logos of course, Agamben identifies how a whole tradition of the parable develops that takes paraballisation, if I may refer to such a thing, as the operation of language as such to such a degree that in many languages the word for language originates from the parable. Traditionally a parable is assumed to have a double meaning but Agamben views this not as a signifier having two signifieds, seed meaning seed and logos, but of the duality of language itself imposed upon it by human speech. As he says: “In the parable, the difference between the signum and res significa thus tends to annul itself without completely disappearing. . . . In the messianic parable signum and res significa approximate each other because language itself is what is signified.” Like the comparison the parable, from the Greek 148

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para-ballo to place one thing next to another, indicates a process of internal division (as well as creating tabular space). The messianic condition of “as not” is the movement of scission within language from being within the sign to being between the sign and itself. The sign is not a system of difference and similarity but of a non-selfcoincidence as identity. In the language of messianic time comparisons and parables exist not in terms of linguistic comparison, signifier and signified, but so as to put “each being and each term in tension with itself ” (TTR, 43). This shift from comparison to parable brackets, as I said, a consideration of a third form of figuration, the “as if.” The historical conflict he maps out between “as if ” and “as not” can now be situated around familiar territory pertaining to language and figuration. “As if ” would seem to be figuration as such. Language operates does it not as if it referred to the world at large when we discovered in fact that such deictic acts merely reveal is a temporal belatedness in terms of referentiality? “As not,” however, works in a manner which places figuration alongside itself. Language does not refer to the world but to language as such. The question therefore remains if modern “as if ” aesthetics finds its archetype in art for art’s sake, Agamben’s argument in The Man Without Content, how does that differ from the messianic figurality of anaphora, comparison, and parable? These constructions are also self-regarding but in a manner that Agamben believes is truly redemptive. To negotiate this subtle and complex difference will take the rest of my study here on the conception of poiesis, and to take us from negative modernity to productive poiesis we must turn to the second Pauline term, kairos. MESSIANIC KAIROS

Agamben first addresses the term kairos, occasion or now, in relation to what he sees as a common misrepresentation of apostolic messianic time as eschatological. He explains that while Paul regularly uses eschatological time when speaking of the two Jewish time traditions, that which stretches from creation to the end of time, chronos, and the atemporal eternity that extends after the end of time, eschaton, messianic time is neither of these epochal designations. Rather, “it is a remnant, the time that remains between these two times, when the division of time is itself divided . . .” (TTR, 62). Glossing on the traditional representation of time as a line along 149

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which one situates epochs, for example A—B—C wherein A is creation, B the messianic event, and C apocalypse, he explains that this linear model is, as ever, insufficient to capture the complexity of time, in this instance messianic time. Thus he reconstitutes the time line by adding a segmentation which removes position B from the line and instead locates it as a caesuric interruption of the line:

A

C

Of this model and its reappraisal of messianic time he suggests that we take “messianic time as a caesura which, in its dividing the division between two times, introduces a remainder [resto] into it that exceeds the division” (TTR, 64). Such caesuric time operates as part of the epoch of chronos while exceeding it, and as part of the eschaton while exceeding that. Kairos, therefore, here represented as between the two vertical dotted lines, extends epochal time into the postepochal and post-epochal time back into epochal time. The result is a caesuric division between an epoch’s cessation and the resumption of the new epoch. Kairos adds futurity to the past and pastness to the future but it is not the moment or instant, nor a synthesis of all three tenses in a manner that emulates Bergson’s influential theory of modern time. Messianic time, although the time of the now, is not a dot on the line of time but a segment or stanza within the divisions of epochs along this line. As such it operates with precisely the same logic as the term epoch, being neither point nor extension but the precondition and deconstruction of both. Be not afraid. Agamben is aware that this messianic time presents a powerful challenge to our human consciousness of time and indeed the general difficulty of thinking time. Of the time line consisting of assumed strings of points, the classic representation of time since Aristotle, he notes that such a line has never accorded with the human experience of time. As Agamben says, in regard of linear time, either we are confronted with a model that is representable but unthinkable as actual experience of time, or we concede the thinkable nature of time and all its complexities, stratifications, interruptions, reiterations, and dimensionalities, but accept such a time is unrepresentable. Agamben hones in on this gap between representable and thinkable time by adopting the linguistic concept of operational time. 150

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Operational time originates from the work of French linguist Gustave Guillaume. Guillaume ingeniously explains that the time line past—present—future is naturally too perfect and operates as if such a time line were always already constructed for the subject. Instead, as we know, the subject’s experience of time is constructed by the subject in accordance with this ideal representation. Whatever experience of time they undergo they are able to come to represent it as this idealized model in their minds subsequently. This process of temporal construction takes a period of time, perhaps only an instant but a period all the same, and Guillaume calls this operational time or “the time the mind takes to realize a time-image” (TTR, 66). The benefit of operational time is that it adds “a projection in which the process of forming the time-image is cast back onto the time image itself ” (TTR, 66) which, Agamben argues, converts time from a linear to “three-dimensional” entity by which he means it conveys the three moments of temporality: potentiality, formation, and having been constructed. Agamben concludes that In every representation we make of time and in every discourse by means of which we define and represent time, another time is implied that is not entirely consumed by representation. It is as though man, insofar as he is a thinking and speaking being, produced an additional time . . . that prevented him from perfectly coinciding with the time out of which he could make images and representations. (TTR, 67) Such an “ulterior time” as he initially calls it is not a supplemental time added onto the exterior of chronological time but a “time within time—not ulterior but interior” (TTR, 67). This interior time is what Agamben means by messianic time: “the time that time takes to come to an end, or, more precisely, the time we take to bring time to an end, to achieve our representation of time” (TTR, 67).13 He then adds a modification to this defining messianic time as “the time we need to make time end: the time that is left us” (TTR, 68). This time that remains is the messianic kairos. Kle¯sis and kairos, tautegorical calling and self-constructing temporal representation, are both examples of the figural nature of the messianic for Agamben. By this we do not mean they are simply rhetorical forms. Rather, for Agamben figuration is a structural 151

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process wherein two conditions are placed alongside each other in a nonrelational fashion, the two elements are heterogeneous, and yet in a manner in which their proximity naturally calls up some attempt at relation in the form of tension. This results in what might be called the relational tension of the nonrelational, the most famous example of which is that between zoe and bios in Homo Sacer. The calling of the “as not” places one’s subjectivity alongside its negation, while kairatic time places time’s constructed nature against its representation of non-constructed and proper perfection. We have already considered comparison and parable in this regard. Agamben is now able to add a third figural term, typos, as he considers Paul’s explanation of how all that is past will come to be taken into account at the end of time. A good example of this is Adam whose sin acts as a typos or prefiguration of the coming of the messiah and the negation of sin, the antitypos. This tendency to think of time as a past prefigurement of a future yet to arrive, typosantitypos, is not important as a “biunivocal correspondence” (TTR, 74), although, he tells us, such a correspondence existed prominently throughout the medieval period. Rather, what concerns us is “a tension that clasps together and transforms past and future, typos and antitypos, in an inseparable constellation. The messianic is not just one of two terms in this typological relation, it is the relation itself” (TTR, 74). This is the epoch of the messianic, not a third epoch following the past (typos) and future (antitypos) but the way in which these two epochs are brought face to face with each other by means of their caesura or “zone of indiscernibility, in which the past is dislocated into the present and the present is extended into the past” (TTR, 74). To this typological caesuric figuration, Agamben argues, Paul adds one more final figural notion, that of recapitulation. At this stage then our extended debate on the epochal time of the messianic and our technical considerations of prosody also start to turn to face each other at long last. Paul explains that at the messianic moment of total fulfilment of time, ple¯ro¯ma ton kairo¯n, all things are recapitulated in the messiah. Without getting too lost in the theology of this suffice it to say that if in the messianic kairos there is in the typos a prefigurement of the antitypos, so too in the antitypos there is a compacted summation of the typos or, as Agamben says, “messianic ple¯ro¯ma is therefore an abridgement and anticipation of eschatological fulfilment” (TTR, 76). This means that each instant of messianic 152

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kairos effectively fulfils the eschatological moment of immediacy with god rather than conforming to this as a one-off event that occurs at the end of time. If we step back now from theology entirely we can first explain this more generally in terms of our experience of operational time, and then in relation to poetry. In the kairos of operational time two incommensurable epochs or conceptions of epoch lie alongside each other, chronos or temporal extension, and eschaton or temporal finitude. The law of figuration means that because messianic kairatic time extends the eschaton into the chronos, each moment of chronological time is prefigured by its completion. The same goes for eschatological time. As messianic time extends chronos into the eschaton all narratives of completion, the greatest of which is surely modernity itself, must first consist of a summation of all that went before. One is, in fact, able to restate this fairly logically away from the theological philology of Agamben’s text. Any theory of temporal extended linearity must contain some idea of completion and any theory of temporal completion must complete on something, something that is now past. This situation is expressed by Agamben as Pauline messianic tension conveyed in the complex term epekteinomenos or straining forward in tension towards something which Paul uses to describe the effect on the subject of kairos due to kle¯sis. “The tension toward what lies ahead is produced on and out of what lies behind” prompting Agamben to call this the “double tension” of messianic calling, or an act that demands the called subject “seize hold of his own being seized” (TTR, 78). At this point Agamben wisely decides to give “something like a concrete example, a kind of small-scale model of messianic time” (TTR, 78). This example, and even he concedes this may be surprising, is the poetic convention of rhyme. MESSIANIC RHYME

Perhaps now it does not surprise us. Everything about messianic time recalls the figurality of the poetic, the temporality of poetry, and the structure of the poem. A structure such as the kairatic kle¯sis depends on the precise mix of occurrence and reiteration, anaphora and cataphora that is the basis of any poem structure and which we have already defined, by virtue of the metrical-musical element, as the very location of poetic thinking: logopoiesis. As soon as Agamben 153

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describes the poem, and he is truly gifted in his appreciation of the technicalities of prosody along with the implications of poetic ontology, one can begin to see how wonderfully this analogy works, although to describe it as analogy, example, or model is, in each case, insufficient. Thus he says of the closed rhyming lyric form, for example the sonnet, which necessarily will come to an end as determined by the rule of the form: “The poem is therefore an organism or a temporal machine that, from the very start, strains towards its end. A kind of eschatology occurs within the poem itself. But for the more or less brief time that the poem lasts, it has a specific and unmistakable temporality, it has its own time” (TTR, 79). This is especially true, he argues, in the case of rhyme, a fact made most apparent in that rather rare stanzaic form the sestina. A sestina is made up of seven stanzas. The first six stanzas are each six lines long and the six end words are always the same in each stanza, only organized in different combinations. The final stanza or tornada is then only three lines long but repeats all six end-words placing two per line and always ending on at least one of these. Agamben’s example is taken from the twelfth-century poet Arnaut Daniel but I have also written some years ago about the use of sestina in John Ashbery.14 The form still operates on occasion in modern poetry in other words. Agamben’s analysis of the rhythm of the sestina while most apparent in this poem form is, I have argued in my own study of this phenomena in modern experimental poetry, a foundational quality of all poetic structure. Put simply, every poem unfolds in linear time semiotically marking this out with great clarity by using artificially ended lines which graphically demonstrate chronos much more adeptly than in any other art form. That said every poem is also a recursive or reiterative structure. Thus in the sestina, as one moves towards the predictability of the end, the closed form means that in every line the end is prefigured. At the same “hermeneutic” time one also picks up on the interplay, repetition, and variance of the use of homologous rhyming end words. You begin to recognize the pattern, look to how the next stanza will recombine the six fixed elements and thus one is always reading both forwards and backwards. For example, in the penultimate stanza one can predict the distribution of the final end words without reading the stanza simply by looking back at their distribution in the previous six stanzas. This reading back however comes most to the fore in the tornada where, effectively, all usages of the words thus far are 154

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recalled in their final combination. This matrix I have called the anaphoric-cataphoric matrix of every poem, converting the poem from a linear-horizontal entity to a tabular planar form. While I have worked for some years on this project, and, of course, poetic structure is far from a mystery, Agamben’s insights take the tabularity of poetic structure far beyond anything anyone else could have imagined. First he notes how the poem produces an internal disruption of linear time that is not an alternative “poetic time” to replace chronological time, “on the contrary, what we have is the same time that organizes itself through its own somewhat hidden internal pulsation, in order to make place for the time of the poem” or what he also calls its “cruciform retrogradation” (TTR, 82).15 In miniature therefore we have the whole basis of Agamben’s logopoiesis. Poetry is not an example here or not solely exemplary. Nor is the philosophy of time handed over to poetic time. The poem does not create a new, post-chronological time, in any case the eschaton already fulfils that role, but it does have its own time. This is the time of the messiah. While Agamben calls the sestina a “model” of messianic time this same process is observable in the reiterations of symbols in Joyce’s work of novelistic epiphany, or indeed leitmotifs in Wagner. The same process is discernible in the rhythmic distribution of lines and colours in Pollock, and the narrative structures of the films of David Lynch, especially his most recent work Inland Empire whose very title expresses the reliance on his work on precisely this anaphoric-cataphoric internal matrix of developmental reiteration.16 This aside, model or not, Agamben explains: “The sestina—and, in this sense, every poem—is a soteriological device which, through the sophisticated mechane of the announcement and retrieval of rhyming end words (which correspond to typological relations between past and present), transforms chronological time into messianic time . . . the time of the end, the time that the poem takes to come to an end” (TTR, 83). AN ENDLESS FALLING INTO SILENCE

Agamben’s insights into the relation between poetic structural tabularity and a post-nihilistic modality of indifferent thinking depend, as we saw, on a shifting interrelational tensile comparative combination between temporal-structural projection and recursion. Such a tabular-planar structure, which I have already posed as the 155

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way in which poetry thinks, is dependent on the permanent tension within the poetic line certainly, but also structurally at the two extremes of the poem body. We must now remove ourselves from messianic time, for a time, and return to our original debate on poetic, recursive, advental finitude, in particular through a consideration of the ends or limits of the poem and their dependence on certain ideas of silence. Having assured us that poetry is a “prolonged hesitation” between sound and sense, Agamben immediately asks the question: What is a hesitation if one ceases to think of it psychologically? A hesitation of such an order, a philosophical hesitation, must surely be beyond an actually felt hesitation such as one experiences at the end of a line of poetry. Rather this felt hesitation moves one into another realm of hesitation as such. Yet philosophical, categorical hesitation, hesitation true for all time as it were, cannot be separated from the original experience of hesitation that one undergoes every time one reads poetry. For an unveiling of philosophical, quasi-universal, and propositional hesitation, for hesitation as theme and/or category, one must first experience hesitation as sensation. Then one must dismiss hesitation as sensation without entirely dispensing with it. It leaves, betimes, a trace of psychological pause, lodged within the trans-psychological definition of hesitation such as it is or ontological hesitation. Hesitation is not the localized emotional experience of hesitating yet, in a phenomenological reading, what is hesitation in thought without the knowledge of an experience of hesitation in the world? Or to pose the issue in different terms, you do not need to experience a linebreak every time you wish to think about prolonged hesitation, but you do need to have experienced a line-break to think this way and to be sure of experiencing it at least more than once, if only to confirm that enjambement is a recursive rather than unique, evental element. When one does experience a line-break one is likely to experience the opening up of the truth of hesitation, and when one wants philosophically to speak of hesitation as such, as a thinker, one is likely to have recourse to a line-break and an example.17 This difficulty pertaining to the actual nature of the experience of hesitation, affective or intellectual, stems for the most part from the well-documented and complex relation one finds in poetry between the sensuous and the suprasensuous which differentiates it from philosophy and other arts that share with poetry the emphasis on semiotics, tension, and tabular structure, most notably music. 156

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Heidegger clearly states that aletheia, truth, is not dependent on aiesthesis, sensation, and that aesthetics, the science of sensation, is not the name to be given to twentieth-century work on poiesis.18 Certainly truth precedes, in this way, sensation, yet truth always proceeds from the sensible at the same time. Poetry has nothing to do directly with the object, the poem, yet it always proceeds from a poem in Heidegger and all his students, definable at the very least as a thing.19 This is an unadmitted but now quite familiar aporia in modern philosophical work on poetry. The conceptualization of poetry in philosophy is never tied either to a particular poem or any one of its singular effects manifested in a clear set of differentiations: poetry is not in the poem per se, and poiesis is not necessarily poetry. Yet the pathway to poetry, say as an inventive mode of bringing truth to presence, is laid out through precisely the reading of specific poets and their singularly inventive effects. This is an issue that occurs repeatedly in Heidegger, Derrida, Badiou, and Nancy and their use of what one can term epistemological exemplarity in relation to their reading of certain poems by certain poets as exemplary of the general conditions of poiesis. Of all the philosophers in this rowdy school of logopoiesis Agamben carries the burden of post-Heideggerian tragic philosophy closest to the truth-freedoms of verse, while simultaneously sailing the ship of truth most perilously proximate to the ruining rocks of sensation. First by applying a philosophical category to the technical specifics of prosody, at which point he behaves almost like a literary critic, and then by using these techniques to mount a post-nihilistic metaphysics of indifference, a project so vast it all but overwhelms his slight work on prosody. He applies truth to poetic sensation so as to be able, from sensation, to clear a future pathway for truth in what is a high-risk yet now essential intellectual strategy. Although Agamben denies it, the two hesitations of verse, psychologically-actual and philosophical-conceptual, are not separated by a caesura or clear-edged cut but are two strands of a single folded line whose essence resides not in the event of a hesitation as such but in its prolongation. A prolonged hesitation between sound and sense, a word heard and its meaning, between the dying away of a voiced vibration, because after all sounds as such do not interest Agamben but voiced sounds, not literally from a voice, not a physiological voice imprinted on a psychological capability, but the Voice as such, such a delay between voice and meaning which Agamben likens to a katechon 157

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or “something which slows and delays the advent of the Messiah, that is, of him who, fulfilling the time of poetry and uniting its two eons, would destroy the poetic machine by hurling it into silence” (EP, 114); is silence. Poetry is not silence per se but instead consists of the abyss into which poetry is thrown by the very possibility of its own being, namely the opposition between metric and semantic pauses. Such an abyss is not to be mistaken for silence either for, as poets teach us, the sounding cataract is any thing but mute. This being the case poetry is not precisely the opposition between sound and sense but the possibility of the opposition between two types of hesitation, semiotic and semantic, as they pause on the precipice of their own self-conscious, self-willed, self-dissolution. Through such careful distinctions between orders of silence, differentiations between the poetic, poetry, and the poem, and between actual opposition and possible or potential opposition, Agamben progresses towards the point of silence that is the end of the poem. For example, having stated that “all poetic institutions participate in this noncoincidence” of which we speak here, between sound and sense, he points out that the poem is “grounded in the perception of the limits and endings that define— without ever fully coinciding with, and almost in intermittent dispute with—sonorous (or graphic) units and semantic units” (EP, 110). The poem is, according to this, a perception of the tension of poetry. Yet the poem is also an ergon, a single body of work which means that it must and indeed already has come to an end. Thus a poem, unlike poetry or at least its tension, is defined by a silence brought about by its finitude meaning that poetry is never silenced, for poetry cannot survive its own finitude. Instead poetry can be defined as the prolonged hesitation, between two units, that is rendered mute. If this is, as I contend, a kind of silence, nothing is said therein, then there must be at least two orders of silence. Poetry partakes of a local, repeatable, general but not universal silence, the poem of a silence which is not local but over there, singular and impossible to repeat, universal but not generalizable. This would require here a differentiation between what the poem is as ergon partaking of an impossible, self-negating finitude, and what poetry is as that which goes on in the poem but which is not susceptible to or reducible to the poem. Even as the poem is falling into a profound silence at its material and generic limits, it remains in full as the hesitant voice within these impossible limits. 158

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I must speak of silence but, like the poet, I am always delaying its arrival. This is another way in which one could read Agamben, that the poem body is constructed from the accumulation of poetry’s delaying of the arrival of silence at its limits from which the ergon is born. The ergon is nothing other than the production of delaying time-space within a space opened up and delimited by the imposition of an exterior to the poem in the form of the parergon of silent space. The body as such of poetry does not exist without that body suffering a moment of cutting or caesura, as if one has to somehow hack off a limb for the human body to be complete, or a tail, some remnant of our animalistic past. The poem must be cut-off in order to be complete. Poetry must be ceaselessly, hesitantly, and locally cutting off, for the poem to know of its finitude and be complete. We can deduce from this line of reasoning that the ergon of the poem is defined by two concepts uncomfortable in each other’s presence and yet not contradictory. First that ergon is brought to its limitation and finitude by the infinite presence of the parergonal space-place which is also the time of its completion. It may be useful analogously to think of this in relation to what physicists call a “boundary condition” when studying planes. A plane is always defined as being imaginary because it is infinitely extendable in every two-dimensional direction. A boundary condition of a hexagonal crystal, for example, states that if something enters through the top line of the structure, it simultaneously exists through the bottom line á la Pacman. A plane only becomes a surface when an actual cut is made in the infinitely extendable plane. As the physicist Pauli was fond of saying: “God made the bulk; surfaces were invented by the devil.” A plane becomes a surface when the boundary condition is suspended and the edge of a structure bounded by a vacuum occurs. Although, as I said, this can only be an illustrative analogy, all the same a space of a similar structural order can be said to exist in some form internal to the poem. Space must be present for enjambement to occur for example, but this space is of the order of a boundary condition: the line exits on the right and always enters to the left. This means that the second sense of ergon is continually born to presence from the already existent presence of the par-ergon. Without the internal space, that jagged chasm to the right of the poem, a space which is inarticulate, a silent space that is not silence, a part of the body of the poem on the page or in the book but not a part of the poem body as such, then the ergon could not continually come to 159

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being. The ergon of the poem body, it would seem, relies on two competing convocations with its borders. First, the final moment of finitude that is singular and plunges the ergon of poetry into infinite, silent sense. A finitude which, utilizing messianic time, the body puts off by its extension and yet invites by the structural necessity of its completion. This is the moment of the plane becoming a surface. Second, the potentially endless and thus infinite fake silence between one line and the next, which the poem invites into its body so as to expel it and thus allow itself to endlessly be born into being; enjambement as boundary condition. The perception of this double deconstructive presence of absence within the ergon of poetry is what the poem as such is reducible to. What is silence?

Was that it? Is it after the question mark or between these lines? Is it even possible to encounter silence within a text such as this so clearly an example of discursive quasi-philosophical, alinear prose? Agamben, while differentiating the semiotic and semantic unit does not make a clear distinction between sonorous or graphic semiotics unearthing a rare moment of indistinction in his meticulous work. In speaking of silence, however, this consonance which was previously forgivable is harder to support. Surely the silence of sound is an actual silence while the silence of the grapheme, by which one can only mean space, is not silent at all but simply unpronounced. Nor is it even space as such but simply the uninscribed medium, gestural support, or as-yet blank tablet. There is, then, either a profound error on the part of the philosopher or we are still considering silence psychologically and not philosophically. Is there any actual silence within the body of the text? I would argue not. There are pauses, the unpronounced and the uninscribed, but no silence as such; merely perceptions of silence, constructions of the representability of an idealized construction of a concept that, like time, is either thinkable and unrepresentable, or represented in unthinkable fashion. Agamben suggests that true silence only occurs once one has exited the text and entered the abyss of sense which has no requirement of 160

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textuality to exist at all. This silence is the silence of philosophy of which Agamben says, in what is almost a cryptogram: “In silence, philosophy stands exposed, absolutely without identity; it endures the without-name, without finding in this its own name. Silence is not its secret word—but rather, philosophy’s word leaves unsaid its own silence” (IP, 111). This complex negotiation with a silence which exposes philosophy to a period without name which is not, however, in a Heideggerian gesture, the name of poetry, is the conclusion of the essay “The Idea of Silence,” an essay which only speaks, to me at least, once the following essay, “The Idea of Language,” has engaged with the silence of philosophy. Here Agamben defines silence not as the suspension of discourse, not in other words as the cessation of speaking (surely what he means by a psychological hesitation), “but silence of the word itself, the becoming visible of the word: the idea of language” (IP, 113).20 This being the case one must engage with the profound and complex conception of the idea of word in Agamben, which is anything but a sign, or an utterance, an entity beyond the trivial differentiations of sonorous versus graphic. The word as such, the becoming visible but remaining silent word is, rather, human living being as such through the faculty of language: Only the word puts us in contact with mute things. While nature and animals are forever caught up in a language, incessantly speaking and responding to signs even while keeping silent, only man succeeds in interrupting, in the word, the infinite language of nature and placing himself for a moment in front of mute things. The inviolate rose, the idea of the rose, exists only for man. (IP, 113) Paradoxically, because man is the sole animal who learns language through infancy, he is the only creature capable of not having language, of interrupting words with the as-suchness of the word of language whose defining quality, by which I mean the quality which allows it definition and availability to our apprehension, is silence. Here then we finally understand what Agamben means when he states that animals are always within language. Only the human animal can establish the quality of exteriority as regards language, an exteriority of the word that Agamben, sensibly, describes as silence. Only the human knows of the quietude of the caesura. We now know that this encounter most powerfully occurs at the end of the poem. 161

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As Agamben says, the end of the poem is marked by a change in the tension between the units of semiotics and semantics which is poetry, for at the end of the poem, in the final verse, which is also always the final line, there is no enjambement. At this point where the semiotics of the poetic line are unable, after a prolonged hesitation, to resume the semantic stream, ironically pure semiotics does not hold sway, thus granting us finally access to the realm of pure poetry. There is, in fact, no pure poetry. Poetry, rather, is itself an impurity between poetic techniques and prose. TENSION: THE ONE LINE

The impurity of poetry surely seems an untenable position within a post-Heideggerian theorization of poetic singularity as a mode of thinking such as I am proposing here, but it is an unavoidable reality however unpleasant. If one were to think back to the Derridean conception of invention, one is struck by how singularity is always immediately ruined by its repeatability, one condition always simultaneously the pre-condition and impossibility of the other. Certainly Derrida is the thinker of a certain type of pure impurity, and Agamben’s work seems similar in the way he establishes two oppositional concepts, semiotics and semantics, and leaves them suspended in an almost endless dynamic of supersession and negation. One could almost argue that the concept of enjambement in Agamben’s work is a graphic and thus grammatological presentation of what is unpresentable in Derrida’s work as a whole, but which is often termed deconstruction as a form of intellectual short-hand in quasitranscendental self-critical thought. Poetry is literally elevated above its dyadic other at the end of the line, and literally collapses back into this alterity as the next line commences. Prose literally overwhelms poetry in the following line, only to be literally interrupted and superseded at the line’s outermost point. Left to its own devices the poetry machine, as I have termed it elsewhere,21 will continue its demonstration of deconstructive energies almost as an illustrative tool for Derrida’s work. Yet Agamben is a thinker of another order of perfect, pure impurity as indicated first by the way he structurally treats the semantic and the semiotic as ostensibly of the same order. They are both units within an “almost intermittent dispute.” While clear that the semiotic and the semantic are both radically heterogeneous and of differing 162

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orders of magnitude, issues that would be strongly foregrounded by Derrida, for Agamben they can both be fitted to a pattern of similar units. The semantic can just as easily occupy the unit of the line as the semiotic, which in reality means very uneasily. Both are equally out of their element in the line, suggesting that Agamben does not so much ignore the radical incommensurability between sense and matter, dianoia and poiesis, as commit an act of violence to both so as to make them enter into the prison of the line with the promise of parole (enjambement for the semiotic, the caesura for the semantic) constantly, but intermittently, rescinded. Agamben naturally frames the issues with greater facility when he eloquently states: Everything is complicated by the fact that in the poem there are not, strictly speaking, two series or lines in parallel flight. Rather, there is but one line that is simultaneously traversed by the semantic current and the semiotic current. And between these two currents lies the sharp interval obstinately maintained by poetic mechane. (Sound and sense are not two substances but two intensities, two tonoi of the same linguistic substance). (EP, 114) Here Agamben gives supporting evidence to my earlier claim that the planar essence of poetry means that it must always be thought of as a two-dimensional plane consisting of the three points of the poetic line, incipit-interruption-continuation, a model which echoes Agamben’s own description of operational time, potentialityformation-having been constructed, which somewhat misleadingly he calls three-dimensional. Without quibbling over an extra dimension here and there, what we can be certain of is Agamben seems to take the geometric presence of poetry backwards away from two (three) dimensions, favouring instead a one dimensional and yet also trans-dimensional single line, a line which metamorphoses first into a current, then a machine, and finally a tension or tone. The metaphor of flow is a well established one in reference to prosody and is essential to sustain the interruptive power of enjambement’s “sharp interval” in the form of mechane. The machine of poetry referred to here is not simply the technical, repetitious mechanistic element of prosody with which we are all familiar, but also the ancient Greek origin of the term in relation to the end of a play, at the moment of deus ex machina, for example. Interestingly, the machine 163

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of art was regularly used both to end the work and also to allow characters to fly, thus it allows a literalization of a kind of localized transcendence, flying, and a figuration of the literal implied transcendence at the end of every Greek work of art, or the moment when the material copy of essence is abandoned and essence alone remains: Deus. I am giddy. I feel the tension of the tonoi of the line of poetry as it suspends me above the plane of the stage below. I have forgotten everything, my lines and cues. I need a gag. Am I flying through the second act or being carried beyond the play entirely and into the realm of the gods at the end of the third? I look across and I see you also suspended by the bodiless limb of a crane. Don’t come too close. No wait, the lines with get entangled, they may form knots. We will plunge to our death unless the tension in the lines is maintained. Keep up the tension in the line, that way they can never become truly entangled. Tono in Latin is the tone, tension, and metre of verse, but what does Agamben mean by suggesting that the semiotic and the semantic are not radically heterogeneous and different also in magnitude, that instead they are two tones/tensions/stresses within the same linguistic substance? What linguistic substance can this be? Is this the language of which he speaks at the end of the poem, the zone wherein language can communicate itself “without remaining unsaid in what is said?” Is this a certain philosophical silence as linguistic substance as such? Agamben’s theory of enjambement is as complex as it is obvious. Obvious in two ways, first that it marks out an axiom for poetics which we scholars of poetry can recognize, enmeshed as it is into the very lines of prosody. Second that it is a theory of the obvious and its obviation, of the obstacle to sense that the premature line-ending constructs, and its obviation in the recommencement of the line within the planar territory I am calling the poem. Its complexities lie first in the apparent proximity of this theory and the work of Derrida, especially in relation to invention and the trace. Like invention, enjambement puts forward a theory of necessarily betrayed purity, and like the trace it is a theory of intermittent and almost interminable spacing.22 Yet unlike Derrida the impurity of the line is permanently under question. The semiotic and the semantic are not differential terms but two tones within one single linguistic substance. In addition, unlike the deconstructive mechane, the tonoi of poetry, which are separate strands but not different from each 164

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other, will come to an end as the poem must also come to an end. At which point, in the endless falling into silence that defines the end of the poem, and of which we have a local example at the end of each line that is a psychological hesitation different in kind from silence as such but somehow its key, unlike perhaps in the work of Derrida, something will happen. In a form of agreement with Badiou, therefore, for Agamben poetry is in preparation for the event to come. Unlike Badiou, who himself admits to a sparse number of events, for Agamben this event will be the final event, a messianic event. This is not to be conceived of eschatologically as one last event of course. Rather the messianic temporality of the interval is the interruptive event of the cessation of the temporal succession chronos-eschaton. Instead in each instance of time the time of the end, the time it takes for finitude to come to a point of tension or dissolution, is inserted into time as such or everyday vulgar temporality as Heidegger calls it. The poem excels in messianic temporality. Its unique combinatory structure of prefigured recursiveness is meaningless without a direct and complex relation with an absolute point of finitude: the end of the poem. This end, however, in enacting an endlessly falling into silence rather than a structural point of cessation, presents us with a messianic event of events, not the end of time or even the very last event, but the occupation of the time it takes time to end. For time to come to an end it must find within itself the interval between prefigurement and recursiveness brought about by the impossibility and yet necessity of a local and structurally final relationship with silence. Between silence in the line, chronological silence, and silence at the end of the poem, eschatological silence, we experience messianic silence as the prefigured anaphora of absolute finitude of each local ending, for example at the end of the line, and the recursive cataphora that the poem experiences at the very moment of its negation through finitude.

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CHAPTER 6

CAESURA, THE SPACE OF THOUGHT

THE CAESURA

The essay proceeding directly from “The Idea of Prose,” Agamben’s first attempt to define poetry in terms of enjambement is entitled “The Idea of Caesura.” Speaking specifically of the Italian poet Sandro Penna, Agamben remarks on the “breaking action of the caesura” (IP, 43) represented by the couplet from Penna “I go towards the river on a horse / which when I think a little a little stops.”1 Invoking an ancient European exegetical tradition which takes the horse to represent the “sound and vocal element of language” (IP, 43), Agamben declares this couplet to be a treatise on the subject of the caesura before composing one of his many allegories. He takes Penna’s horse to be the voice or the word as utterance whose measured equine progress can only be arrested by the logos. This allows Agamben to note that “For the poet, the element that arrests the metrical impetus of the voice, the caesura of verse, is thought” (IP, 43). We now have a clear answer to a question I posed earlier. The place of thought in the poem is the caesura. Yet thought within the context of the poetic line is not of equal measure to that of the thinking of philosophy one finds at the line’s limits as the semiotic steed of haltered poetics gives way to the license of discourse. Rather, this thought is another, more fundamental or alternate mode of thinking, namely thinking as such. As he says in caesuric cadence: “The rhythmic transport that gives the verse its impetus is empty, is only the transport of itself. And it is this emptiness which, as pure word, the caesura—for a little—thinks, holds in suspense, while for an instant the horse of poetry is stopped” (IP, 44). Voice here is not the transport 166

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of expression nor the silent Voice of metaphysical nihilism, but the infantile voice of language as such. Similarly, thought is not semantic discourse, prose as we might name it, but a much more “poeticized” idea of thinking. If the voice in the poem is gestic transport as such the interruption of pure transport by thought is simply a moment wherein thinking is able to think the pure word without the imposed differentiation of word and world that so troubles the end of the line. As we are well aware this is all Agamben craves and we might now name this as the essential precondition of all logopoiesis. “The poet, here asleep on his horse, awakens and contemplates for an instant the inspiration that carries him—he thinks nothing else but his voice”’ (IP, 44). Poetry is presented here as the sleep of thought and yet not until the poet is lulled by the cadence of hooves on grass and road can they be woken into thinking as such and that only when the horse of verse is arrested. Thus the interplay between flow, arrest, and ecstatic thinking is presented in such a way that later in the book, in the essay “The Idea of Thought,” Agamben is able to conclude thus on thinking: “Where the voice drops, where breath is lacking, a little sign remains suspended. On nothing other than that, hesitantly, thought ventures forth” (IP, 104). One such little sign in prosody is the comma, the most common representation of caesuric pausing itself often reproduced in prosody by the so-called double pipes ||. Yet the comma is not a necessary element of caesura. The classical definition of a caesura, for example, is any word ending that did not coincide with the cessation of a metrical foot. Thus caesura was originally any displaced footing within the seamlessness of prosodic flow, not a pause for thought so much as a slight stumble. However its most common usage is of course the imposition of an audible pause within a line often but not always indicated by punctuation (in the Penna verse not for reasons peculiar to Italian prosody). This pause most commonly occurs at the medial position, mid-line, but there are also initial caesura that are imposed close to the beginning of the line and terminal caesura which occur close to or at the end of the line. Surprisingly, considering that the Latin origins of the term caesura inculcate it into the violent rites of cutting and separation, and that it effects the ultimate violence to prosody by its interruption of linear flow, the only venues within a line of poetry inhospitable to the caesura are at the beginning of the line, including the poem’s incipit, and the end of the poem. This congeniality within prosodic flow to its own negation except at poetic 167

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advent and total formal finitude suggests that caesura is an internal concern of the poem body. Indeed the lack of caesura at the line’s incipit is simply a form of conventional display for, in effect, terminal caesura can also be taken for true initial caesura. Thus the place for thinking is a space within verse that works directly in opposition to enjambement. In enjambement flow overtakes meaning and the space at the right hand side of the poem is negated by linear, transversal exuberance. By contrast in the caesura the steady and irresistible progress of verse is suspended by the merest hint of a sign, enough to open a gap in flow, and in this momentary, ecstatic space, to allow time for thought to think the conditions of its own transport and its dependence on arrest. Over the many thousands of years of European prosody the caesura has been used to various effects, but its greatest application is surely the double duality of the classical couplet revived in the English tradition by Dryden and Pope as the Heroic and eventually antithetical couplet. Here is a particularly misogynistic and yet prosodically perfect example from Pope’s “Epistle to a Lady on the Characters of Women”: Men, some to Bus’ness, some to Pleasure take; But ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake; Men, some to Quiet, some to public Strife; But ev’ry Lady would be Queen for life.2 The first “male” line uses caesura to emulate the poise of the couplet unit within the line balancing the oppositions of eighteenth-century bios: business and pleasure, quiet and strife. Yet, demonstrating prosodic femininity here as “Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,” each “odd” line eradicates harmony in terms of balance by making demonstrative an excess of one quality (pleasure) or unrealistic demands for which there can be no compromise: all women would be sovereign over a kingdom devoid of subjects. In the ideal antithetical couplet a line is divided exactly in two by a caesura, then bound together by rhyme to a second line which may echo the antithesis of the first or, here, operate as antithesis to the antithesis. In a sense this is the most perfect example of the tonos of poetry. The presupposed flow of the poetic line is interrupted by the imposition internally of semantics so that stress is cut across by meaning through regularized and predictable caesurae. Then semiotics 168

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is reinstated as flow commences and the artificiality of the line ending reminds one that the poem is more horse than waking. At the same time, the implied separation between lines that occurs due to enjambement, even the zero, terminal enjambement of the perfectly balanced Heroic couplet designed to halt and formalize the profligacy of the endlessly over-running Miltonic couplet, is undermined by the coincidence of sound across two syllables and/or words located each time at the final point of the line. The verse unit is born of a tension first between flow and interruption, then between interruption and flow. Then, a temporal-spatial self-consciousness is mapped across the neutrality of these two terms, arrest and flow, with rhyme introducing a projective recursion that, as we now know, is indicative of messianic time but also the tabular trans-linear dimensionality not just of poetic structure but of poetic thinking as a whole. If flow is the presupposition of the poem then the first caesura negates the semiotic in favour of the semantic. Yet at the instance of the cut we now know that meaning is interrupted not prosody. The resumption of the line would then seem to be a victory for thinking, yet immediately in the second line flow inundates sense. When with the second cut discourse is able to impose a damn on flow and pause for thought, at the same juncture prosody, through the agency of rhyme, takes hold of the line and refers meaning back against the current to the preceding end word. Meanwhile, of course, the next line is ready to burst its stops and race ahead. This tension, a three-way tension indeed, between thought, its transport, and its temporal-spatial matrix is the ultimate tonos of poetry in the service of the transport and arrest of thinking. Agamben uses the term caesura regularly in his essays when speaking of the numerous and problematic acts of scission performed by negative metaphysics. The most fully developed and perhaps important of these caesurae is that to be found internal to the very definition of human ontology, life. As he says of the problematic of life as a definition of being in The Open: For anyone undertaking a genealogical study of the concept of “life” in our culture, one of the first and most instructive observations to be made is that the concept never gets defined as such. And yet, this thing that remains indeterminate gets articulated and divided time and again through a series of caesurae and oppositions . . . everything happens as if, in our culture, life were what 169

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cannot be defined, yet, precisely for this reason, must be ceaselessly articulated and divided. (O, 13) The caesura Agamben is considering here is that between the human and the animal, and yet as his comments show the essence of the caesura is not simply scission, something we observed in relation to the (/) or barred caesura in the sign between gramma and phone. Rather the caesura in separating a term off with the desire of imposing definitional distinction instead inculcates said term into a mechanism of division and articulation which, rather than defining the term life here, imposes upon it a permanent indistinction. The caesura initially performs a negative function directly at odds with his earlier valorization of the term as the basis for thinking thought. Yet, if we look again at the definition of life in terms of caesura we find a productive negation. Life ceases to be a definition of something and instead, through the operations of the caesura as that which both divides and conjoins, it comes to be the very definition of the problem of definition as such, namely in-definition or, as he more commonly terms it, indistinction. Life then comes to stand not so much for something like biological existence, and rather stands for its own inability to take on definition as the energetic source of its ongoing productive presence in ontology as the basis of that which both divides and articulates. Human life for Agamben, for example, does not define human life per se but the idea of human life as both separate from and intrinsically linked to the animal. This more developed definition of caesura as a mode of thinking division in terms of relation now allows us to return to prosodic caesura and see that when Agamben uses the term caesura in metaphysics he is being more than simply metaphorical. In terms of the act of caesura within the poem we perceive that there are always two cuts, the cut and the cut of the cut.3 First the caesura divides the line, then it articulates lineation as the transport of thinking. The interruption of thinking, the first division, is meaningless and indeed inoperative until that division is divided from itself and cast back into linear flow. The same indeed is true of the end of the line and its relation to enjambement. In the poem body suspension always results in resumption, resumption suspension, except at the moments of poetic advent and finitude. No caesura is, in this manner, permanent, yet at the same time no caesura is momentous either. The caesura is not possessed of finitude any more than of inventiveness or evental 170

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status. Rather, the caesura always cuts in the midst, the medio or mean point. This is both true of poetic caesurae and the general logic of the caesura such as one finds in The Open or indeed between zoe and bios in Homo Sacer and State of Exception (2003). One is always already in the midst of poetry, and the same is true of life. Unexpectedly perhaps, these two acts of violence, the cut and the cut of the cut, result in classical poetics in a perfectly balanced, harmonious whole. The tone of balance resides in the perfect tension of the four combined and yet separate units, all reliant on the counting and positioning of stress: (line a) caesura, enjambement, (line b) caesura, enjambement. This world of harmonious tension is both described and performed in the opening lines of Pope’s “Windsor Forest”: The groves of Eden, vanish’d now so long, Live in description, and look green in song: These, were my breast inspir’d with equal flame, Like them in beauty, should be like in fame. Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain, Here earth and water, seem to strive again; Not Chaos like together crush’d and bruis’d, But as the world, harmoniously confus’d: Where order in variety we see, And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree. (SP, 20) Here we can observe basic antithesis across a caesura, “like them in beauty, should be like in fame”; double caesuric antithesis, “Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain, / Here earth and water, seem to strive again”; harmonious oxymoronic implied semantic caesura “harmoniously confus’d: / Where order in variety we see”; and finally the caesuric cut of the cut internalized in the space of one line, “And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree.” This last is perhaps the best prosodic-graphematic demonstration of the stanza of messianic time in that the antithesis is embedded within an extended caesuric zone between the first and second comma. Aside from being a masterclass in the extendibility and power of caesuric prosody, the section in question also provides the perfect razo de trobar of prosody summarized by the phrase “harmoniously confused.” While Pope conjures for us a world of balance encased in the harmony of the bi-linear couplet, at the same time every two lines 171

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there is a moment of cataphoric recursion as the second rhyme is tabulated backwards to its previous rhyme partner, before the push and pull of lineation can continue. If every second caesura is more forceful in that it cataphorically holds back flow, concomitantly the first caesura is always a touch weakened in that one is already thinking ahead to its rhyme and also the strong sense of local completion the couplet always provides. Although Agamben does not consider it in these terms, the couplet contains the very basis of poetry’s capability to think through the tabular-planar metrical agency of a continuation that contains within it the projection of its ending and a cut or completion that, however, gathers within itself the recursion of that which went before. The caesura represents the eschaton, in that it interrupts the linear progression of the line, while enjambement is equal to chronos in that at the point of the line’s eschaton it overleaps finitude and imposes a retrograde return to sense. What is significant here is the means by which rhyme provides the potential solution to the tensile cut of the cut of the caesura– enjambement matrix. Left to their own devices, and indeed that is all they are gestic and meaningless prosodic devices, interruption and flow retain poetic tonos. Yet the inclusion of rhyme suggests instead a messianic moment that does not rise out of this stuttering continuum but uncovers a solution to the metaphysical logic of the caesura internal to the poem itself. For rhyme, while powerfully semiotic, is dependent on semantics to perform, and thus the shifting of the metrical–musical element between semiotics (langue) and semantics (parole) becomes the metrical–musical–semantic element. Unlike the caesura where thought interrupts poetry, or enjambement where the obverse is true, in rhyme thought and language combine to produce a word-based semiotics that is both predictive, it provides the semiotic rules to sense what the next rhyme might be, and yet also recursive, at the moment of reading on into meaning development one always lags behind in some manner in sonic, semiotic consonance. The caesura of classical prosody tends to what is called the medial but this is not compulsory as, say, in French Alexandrines. The caesura of English tends also to the medial rising to a degree of compulsarity in Old and Middle English verse, but in most sophisticated prosody there is a wide use of initial and terminal caesurae. The only place internal to the poem that a cae, sura cannot occur is within the word (as I have just demonstrated), unless one ends the poetic line with the first sy/Llable and commences the next with the second, but 172

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even this is that peculiar form of terminal caesura called enjambement. There are, therefore, only two operative interdictions on caesuric scission, these at the moment of advent and finitude. What does the terminally or edge-restricted mobility of the caesura tell us? Certainly that the poem’s advent is not a continuation or a type of universal poetic flow, even if the poem is part of a sequence. Similarly the end of the poem, as we have seen, is not a pause but an endless falling into the silence of philosophy on the part of poetry. Therefore, the presence of messianic time within the poem is dependent on a traditional and to some degree problematic designation of the poem as a strictly delimited body. Logopoiesis is an internal affair that occurs inside verse but which does not delimit verse. Also of some significance is the fact that all caesuric cuts occur “after” flow, never before it, so that the point of the end of the line is radically dissimilar to its incipit, a miniaturized rule of some value when one comes to consider the very limits of the ergon. The spacesilence made parergonal frame around the poem is not, in this light, a frame at all for it has no continuity. Just as the end of the line has no commonality to the incipit due to the ban on the caesura at the point of the line’s inception, so too the beginning of a poem does not take up the line from the end of the last poem, even if they are poems in a sequence. The poem as a whole or thing is not, contrary to its internal structure, a cyclical loop, or a meta-linear version of its localized prosodic effects of flow and interruption. Where the poem begins is of another order to where it ends and the two edges of its finitude will never meet. This is in contradistinction to the end of one line and the commencement of the next which are always in communion with each other, perpetually meeting and departing from their assignation. There are, therefore, two forms of exterior space to the poem body, and two forms of silence cocooning the voice. The two edges of a poem’s frame will never meet; the parergon will always slice open the finitude of the ergon. In this way, poems are not of the same order as flowers. Poems are not rocks. If they are in possession of finitude then not of this order. The caesura is the essential complement to enjambement. If enjambement instigates the event of the poetic by interrupting discourse with voice and semiotic material rhythm, similarly voice, or the line, is interrupted by thought or by the silence that is apparently endemic to contemporary thinking. For those of us well versed in prosody this is highly satisfying as it is true that an enjambement 173

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more likely than not either follows from or is followed by a caesura. As is regularly commented on, the ideal of the poetic line is the exact match between syllables and thought so that all caesurae occur at the end of the line. Enjambement only occurs at moments when the thought is too big for the line pushing the caesura into the middle of the next line, or the next, or even in the case of real thinkers such as Milton and Wordsworth, the next. Concomitantly, a caesura midline leaves few syllables in the line to commence a new thought making another enjambement very probable. Thus enjambement works like a stone cast into a still pool, its ripples spreading out through the lines and the calm surface of the poem taking some time/ lines to settle down once more. A control of this rhythmic effect is an additional prosody still relatively mysterious to literary criticism which I have termed “line measure” or the metrical counting of the line as a rhythmic unit rather than solely the syllable.4 Agamben’s reasoning for this symbiotic relation between interruption and overflowing would be that both caesura and enjambement stem from different pathways to the same, momentarily held, event: the prolonged hesitation between sound and sense that constitutes poetry. This hesitation is two-fold because the manner in which language has been lost to us is double, either to thought or to poetry. The line broken at the end then is the influx of the voice inundating thought and for a moment erasing it. The line arrested in the centre is the reversal of this flood of semiotics, stopping the flow and for a second eradicating the voice entirely with a momentary, intermittent and hesitant silence. APOTROPAICS

Lurking in the final words of Stanzas is Agamben’s early summation of his appreciation of the necessity to turn to poetry to resolve certain issues pertaining to negativity that had scuppered the great hulk of metaphysics in its journey towards the thing as such of thought. You will recall he is speaking here of the tensile harmony to be located in the work of Heraclitus, leading Agamben to look to the Greek sense of harmonia as “a laceration that is also a suture, the idea of a tension that is both the articulation of a difference and unitary” (ST, 157). This simple consonance of oppositions is now clearer to us being typical, for example, of the parallelism of the comparison. It also conveys the messianic moment of a stilled 174

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dialectic, not the eradication of division and unity but the tensile suspension of the metaphysical foundational categories of difference and identity. One can now also see that harmony not merely names an ideal state of being in the universe as it did for the Greeks, but also the rule of poetry which is defined by the tension between interruption and flow. Harmony names, therefore, the harmonious confusion of caesura as a division that combines; the cut that is cut. Speaking of the term harmony in Heraclitus Agamben notes that for the Greek the idea of harmony pertained precisely to its invisibility, locating harmony as a basis for being in concealment within the visible realm. He then adds: That this articulation, which, for Heraclitus, still belongs to the tactile-visible sphere, should then be transferred to the numericalacoustic sphere, testifies to a decisive turn in Western thought, where it is still possible to discern the solidarity between signification and metaphysical articulation, in the passage from the visible to the acoustic aspect of language. (ST, 157) There was a time, it transpires, when thought and poetry, the visible and the acoustic, were not placed on either side of a false bar or division as is articulated in the theory of the sign. There was, “back” then, if I read this compacted section correctly, a double harmony. Within the visible realm of being—being has always been confined in our tradition to a monstrative and (in)visible entity—there was the harmony between being as concealed and its momentarily appearing. While within the acoustical realm—the originary voice of poetry before it was split, appropriated, then silenced by philosophy—there was the harmony between interruption and flow. Then there was the harmony between the monstrative and acoustical harmonies with, I am speculating, philosophy playing the role of visibility/interruption, and poetry invisibility/flow. Thus there was philosophical harmony mirrored by poetic harmony and then a harmony between the two. This harmony of harmonies, and remember harmony here means just as much division as it does unification, is the Idea of Prose that is manifest in the early work and reconstituted first as potentiality and then as messianic time in the later. Of this Agamben says, speaking of Heidegger’s rediscovery of the harmony of harmonies between philosophy and poetry, “Faithful to this apotropaic project, whose signification had appeared to the dawning of Greek thought 175

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as a mode of speaking that was neither a gathering nor a concealment, we cannot but approach that which must, for the moment, remain at a distance” (ST, 157). The relation between poetry and thinking in Agamben, crucial to his overall overcoming of metaphysics as I hope I have now shown, which also explains why poetry matters to Agamben and also helps clarify his many valuable comments on the technicalities of prosody, is the apotropaic structure of all logopoiesis. Logopoiesis names little more than this at this stage in its development: an apotropaic harmony between poetic flow and philosophical interruption. The apotropaic, that which attracts and repels, shares a good deal in common with the more familiar rhetorical designation of the enigma. Considering the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx in Stanzas, Agamben is unhappy with the way that the enigma of the Sphinx has been placed beneath the transparent sign of the Oedipal interpretation: “What the Sphinx proposed was not simply something whose signified is hidden and veiled under an ‘enigmatic’ signifier, but a mode of speech in which the original fracture of presence was alluded to in the paradox of a word that approaches its object while keeping it indefinitely at a distance” (ST, 138).5 We are now more than familiar with the fracture of presence alluded to here. Speaking of the foundation of philosophy Agamben notes that the Western experience of being, ratified in the discipline of philosophy, is based on an impossible filiation therein to the fact that presence comes to philosophical thought as already divided. The sign is of the order of an enigma, the enigma of the order of a sign. It makes perfect sense. If there were no secret then there needs must be no solution. If the labyrinth is as an open plane then the thread of its solution and dissolution need not be painstakingly unspooled in the terror of darkness. The presence of the sign is, as Agamben concedes, called up at the moment that presence as such is split in two. In this instant full presence becomes unavailable to view and the Greek activity of aletheia commences the strange affiliation called philosophy. Aletheia’s unveiling of truth moves one to the very heart of the almost awkward formulation of truth as unconcealedness which so dominates Heidegger’s work. For truth to be unveiled it must first have been obscured by a sheet or material barrier. For the truth to be unveiled it must first be transmitted through a sheet or material barrier. Thus every truth is a form of enigma facilitated by the double 176

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hindrance of matter. The name of both these obstructions is rather obvious: the sign. Returning to the enigma now, Agamben goes on to state: The ainos (story, fable) of the ainigma is not only obscurity, but a more original mode of speaking. Like the labyrinth, like the Gorgon, and like the Sphinx that utters it, the enigma belongs to the sphere of the apotropaic, that is, to a protective power that repels the uncanny, by attracting it and assuming it within itself. The dancing path of the labyrinth, which leads to the heart of that which is held at a distance, is the model of this relation with the uncanny that is expressed in the enigma. (ST, 138) If this is the case, Agamben suggests, Oedipus’ sin was not incest but “hubris toward the power of the symbolic in general . . . which he has misinterpreted by interpreting its apotropaic intention as the relation of an oblique signifier and a hidden signified” (ST, 138). An apotropaic verse, therefore, is a poetics of the enigma as that which is not available for solution, or a maze which has no centre point or any point of exit/entrance. Oedipus, and Western thought since then, has valorized the very quality of interpretation over the fact of the enigma as such. Presupposing the enigma as a sign that needs to be made to signify, a philosophy dependent on an idea of language has totally missed the glaring fact that the power of the enigma lies elsewhere in the presence of the semiotic within the enigma of the sign. One of the great contemporary works of logopoietic apotropaicism is John Ashbery’s much-admired “Down by the Station, Early in the Morning,” that ends with a shocking apocalypse for such a poet of tonal, prosodic, structural, and conceptual even-ness: And so each day Culminates in merriment as well as a deep shock like an electric one, As the wrecking ball bursts through the wall with the book shelves Scattering the works of famous authors as well as those Of more obscure ones, and books with no author, letting in Space, and an extraneous babble from the street Confirming the new value the hollow core has again, the light From the lighthouse that protects as it pushes us away.6 177

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As can be seen here Ashbery’s verse has always been marked by that which Agamben terms the apotropaic order of the enigma. Indeed, for years, like Oedipus and Ariadne trapped in some terrible union neither dares to seek annulment for, I have laboured over both the enigma that is Ashbery, and more specifically in classrooms around the globe the enigma of the poem “Down by the station early in the morning.” This work, a deliberation on impermanence, memory, ontology, and the enigma of naming, “a dull crinkled leather that no longer exists. / And nothing does, until you name it, remembering, and even then / It may not have existed” (W, 14), always leads my students and myself interminably across two verses which, while dense, I feel I can guide a passage through, to the sudden collapse of all pedagogic certainty in the final stanza cited here. In some senses Ashbery has found the only solution to the paradox of the end of the poem. As the wrecking ball demolishes the walls of a book-lined labyrinth of enigmas one presumes is a library, Ashbery admits into the work the essence of the poetic: the semiotic. Here it takes the form of enjambement, space, and nonsense. The line break after “letting in” admits the essential material presence of space foundational to poetic tension. That the resumption of the semantic in the next line should comment directly on the semiotic “space” is typical of the profound boustrophedonic verse only rare writers can perform. Here, as the line folds back on itself, in a moment of supreme post-modern self-consciousness, form and theme merge into harmony precisely through their being manifestly at odds. Following on from space comes the loaded term “babble,” an extraneous pure semiotic noise the result of the collapse of the single, Babelian tower of language. The poem, it would appear, is a comment on the tension between the semiotic (enjambement, space, babble) and the semantic which typifies Agamben’s axiom, and yet the poem’s final image seems to resist an endless falling into silence. The manifestation of the lighthouse is a double enigma. Indeed are not all enigmas thus doubled-up? The image draws you in, as in all eidos it literally calls your attention to it and by implication suggests that it is a metaphor for the hollow core of the decimated, labyrinthine structure of the wrecked library. If the hollow core is as the lighthouse, and the almost enjambed terminal caesura in the penultimate line suggests precisely this, then one is drawn towards the core and simultaneously repelled. Or is Ashbery merely revealing the enigma of the very fact of the warning or the apotropaic nature of 178

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the enigma? In drawing attention to itself, the light of the lighthouse, which protects us and seems almost to gather us to its bosom, gathers us by actually rejecting us. I would attempt to say three things about this blinding moment of logopoiesis. The first is of the order of the enigma. The enigmatic in verse, of which Ashbery is the master, is indeed as Agamben suggests not there to be solved but persists so as to retain within itself the presence of the problem as such. In an enigma one encounters the mystery of the uncanny in the form of a rebus to which not only is there no solution but whose very puzzlement is its truth. What the uncanny unearths is not that there is no solution, nor that there is a solution, but that there can be an unresolved relation between the two. This leads to my second comment on the sign as fundamentally apotropaic in structure or, to be more precise, the bar within the sign between phone and logos. Certainly the bar divides poetry from thinking in a manner Agamben finds repulsive, but it also gathers them together in the same parallel space of stanzaic comparison revealing what may have already been suspected that the bar of the sign (/) and the double pipes of the caesura || are in fact of the same grammatological order. Ashbery’s comments on ontological inexistence are “instructive” in this regard in the way they maintain the impossible to resolve caesura between phone and logos to be found in the sign and emulated in prosody. He says in relation to that which no longer exists “And nothing does, until you name it, remembering . . . ,” combining the impossibility of logos preceding phone (nothing exists until you name it), and yet also the enigma of how phone can precede logos if it is a recursive act of memory: naming something as a prophylaxis against the inexistence we are all moving towards. The third and final point is that by ending with an apotropaic Ashbery is able to endlessly defer the end of the verse while simultaneously suspending the poem within the very tension that Agamben suggests it is impossible to be suspended within. The poem neither concludes nor, as many works do such as “L’infinito,” cyclically resumes at the poetic incipit. Rather, within the enigma one finds the only instance within signification wherein the semiotic and the semantic are suspended without falling into silence all due to the presence of the semiotic. As regards the apotropaic structure of the enigma the elegance of Agamben’s formulation remains a thing of beauty. Just as the issue of the suspense of the endless deferral of signification occurs within the poetic line expressly at the moment of its finitude, the possibility 179

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of this proposition rests upon a second line, that which exists between the signifier and the signified within the sign. Speaking of the inheritance of Oedipus Agamben divides our epoch into two tendencies. The first is more than familiar to we Oedipal decoders of poetic and literary Sphinxes. Those who seek to define signification as that which occurs as a relation between code and solution, signifier and signified, semiotics and semantics are post-Oedipal thinkers. They seek to exit the maze into which they wished they had never been entered by their masters. Meanwhile: “under the sign of the Sphinx must be placed every theory of the symbol that, refusing the model of Oedipus, focuses its attention above all on the barrier between signifier and signified that constitutes the original problem of signification” (ST, 138–9). Citing specifically the “Hericlitean project of an utterance that neither ‘hides’ nor ‘reveals’ but rather ‘signifies’ the unsignifiable conjunction (synapsis) between presence and absence” (ST, 139), Agamben in this early treatise provides a “glimpse of what a semiology freed from the mark of Oedipus and faithful to the Saussurian paradox would finally bring to the ‘barrier resistant to signification’” (ST, 139). This glimpse first opened up by the enigma is the very harmony between poetry and philosophy essential to prosodic harmony and the wider apotropaic comparison of logopoiesis as such. EASE: THE PROXIMATE SPACE

Thus far we have spoken of space in terms of that which surrounds borders the poem, that which can be found internal to the poem and of course Derridean spacing as such in the form of the trace. There is, however, a fourth order of space in Agamben’s work located to the side of the poem in a space that does not quite mark the limit of the text nor quite exist interior to the line either. This enigmatic, in the full sense of the term, space is what he describes as the space of ease. In The Coming Community the short essay “Ease” speaks of the Talmudic tradition of the reservation of two places for each person in Eden and Gehenna (Hell). Agamben notes that the topology of interest here resides not between Eden and Gehenna but within “the adjacent place that each person inevitably receives. At the point when one reaches one’s final state and fulfils one’s own destiny, one finds oneself for that very reason in the place of the neighbour. What is most proper to every creature is thus its substitutability, its being in 180

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any case in the place of the other” (CC, 23). He then traces this idea in reference to a Christian community founded in the last century by Arabist Louis Massignon called Badaliya whose name was derived from the Arabic for substitution. The ostensible purpose of this essay is clear within a collection on community that takes up dialogue with Nancy’s work on the coming community and being-with, as well as Derrida’s post-Lévinasian ethics of alterity and hospitality and, for good measure, the work of Blanchot. An avenue of enquiry that moves Agamben to a conclusion that Badaliya and the Talmud allow for a possibility of a community based not on non-substitutable individuality, but rather on the universal substitutability of singularity as non-representable (lacking in individuality). This leads to the potentiality of a new ethical topography no longer delineated around oppositions and individuals, but describing a complex, common space of singularity, “the coming to itself of each singularity, its being whatever—in other words, such as it is. Ease is the proper name of this unrepresentable space” (CC, 25). Forgive this digression into the biopolitical realm of the ethics of alterity, although I am sure these issues are not unfamiliar, but it is necessary to allow one to comprehend the centrality of space in Agamben’s ideas on poetry. One crucial factor is that the space of ease brings together the technical aspects of prosodic space as we have been analysing with earlier debates on poetic desubjectivization.7 In the space of ease, which soon enough we will locate within the poem, the subject as individual is alienated from identity without succumbing to biological indetermination. They move to one side of who they are to a space of singular self-negation. The space of ease delineates, therefore, the topography of kle¯sis or the vocation of subjective revocation. Further useful consonance between prosodic space and considerations of desubjectivization and language arrives in the mode in which Agamben goes on to describe the origins of the word ease: “The term ‘ease’ in fact designates, according to its etymology, the space adjacent (ad-jacens, adjacentia), the empty place where each can move freely, in a semantic constellation where spatial proximity borders on opportune time (ad-agio, moving at ease) and convenience borders on the correct relation” (CC, 25). This semantico-etymological constellation excavates for us the relation of the opportune to the location of the harbour in favourable winds to which one moves, under sail or beneath the effects of music, at one’s ease (slowly). 181

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It also presents the original meaning of convenience as coming together or natural fittedness of things with other things. Thus ease is a temporal, spatial space to the side that gives one time/space to come to things, to step to one side, gain time, make space and so on. This sense of ease as a proximation and facilitation, opening up, making space for space, taking time to experience time, explains the centrality of the term for the origins of European prosody. Agamben therefore goes on to explain: “The provençal poets (whose songs first introduce the term into Romance languages in the form aizi, aizimen) make ease a terminus technicus in their poetics, designating the very place of love…not so much the place of love, but rather love as the experience of taking-place in whatever singularity” (CC, 25). Now we can begin to see that ease is supportive facilitation in the manner in which we have come to see love for the troubadour tradition. Love here is unattainable precisely because it is the medium, support, or space to the side that facilitates attainment as such but which itself, therefore, can never be possessed. Agamben speaks of a similar experience when he considers stil novist poetics, in particular Dante’s famous pursuit of the subjectposition called Beatrice. Beatrice is the name of the amorous experience of the event of language at play in the poetic text itself. She is thus the name and the love of language, but of language understood not in its grammaticality but, rather, in its radical primordiality, as the emergence of verse from the pure Nothing . . . It is because of its absolute originality that speech is the supreme cause and object of love and, at the same time, necessarily transient and perishable. (EP, 58) Such an understanding of speech as primordial, transient, and perishable relates, in Agamben’s work, to Dante’s reformulation of a central Humanist debate over the vernacular and grammar “that is, between the experience of the originary and secondary status of the event of language (or again between love of language and knowledge of language)” (EP, 54).8 Moving backwards through the arguments of the essay “The Dream of Language” where these quotes are couched we find ourselves gazing on an obscure fifteenth-century text, the Hypnerotomachia Polifili (1499), an image from which adorns the English translation of The End of the Poem. Agamben

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focuses our attention on the later debate around the language of this text which seems to be made up from a fusion of grammar (Latin) and the vernacular (what was to become modern Italian). The result, he assures us, is an awkward mismatch of Latin grammar and vernacular lexicon of which Agamben comments that the singularity of this text “is a matter not of agrammatical discourse but rather of a language in which the resistance of names and words is not immediately dissolved and rendered transparent by the comprehension of the global meaning; hence the lexical element remains isolated and suspended for a few seconds, as dead material, before being articulated and dissolved in the fluid discourse of sense” (EP, 46). Agamben usefully likens this effect to the use of the word in Mallarmé before going on to note the qualities of the vernacular that make it so central to the role of the space of ease as love in all poetry. Glossing on Dante’s Convivio he remarks that “the vernacular can only follow ‘use’ not ‘art’; and it is, therefore, necessarily transient and subject to continual death. To speak in the vernacular is to precisely experience this incessant death and rebirth of words, which no grammar can fully treat” (EP, 54). What Agamben is tracing here along admittedly obscure defiles, aside from the complex simultaneous development of the idea of language and poetry within European culture from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, is the double stream of language which we have already become familiar with, only this time reconfigured away from the becoming-planar of the line towards the point of the word. The vernacular in the Hypnerotomachia Polifili resembles Mallarmé’s verse as I said in that “words stand out in isolation while their semantic values are suspended” (EP, 46), precisely because the vernacular lexicon has not yet been assimilated into a vernacular grammar. This will not happen until Latin truly becomes a dead language and the vernacular becomes a grammar at which point one gazes on two senses of what it means for a language to die. For Latin it means that it becomes a kind of pure langue or a complete grammar that has no actual usage. In contrast, the vernacular is pure parole in that words are used for the love of language, the words themselves, before they are reformulated in relation to definition and syntax. Love, therefore, is to experience the imminent vernacular in all language, a primordiality of pure usage before grammar died wherein words rise up and then die away again. This is an atactic language freed of grammar, for

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what is grammar but an obviation of the need for syntax? Grammar is pure structure in which the specificity of the sign is totally irrelevant. The development of the vernacular into grammar by the death of grammar in the form of Latin allows us to see, as if for the first time, words for their own sake as purely vernacular. All of which forces us to now reconsider Agamben’s definition of the stanza as the “capacious dwelling, receptacle,” or womb of art. The stanza like a room is gifted with a certain set of spatial co-ordinates it being an enclosed space within a wider enclosure of space, the house, which is itself an enclosure of space surrounded by an illimitable space, the world, founded on the earth. The stanza, therefore, is a ventricle within the very conception of interiority and just as lineation rehearses the abyssal event of the end of the poem, so the stanza seems to act out the irresolvable aporetic relationship between interiority and exteriority which is, of course, modern philosophy. The stanza contains within its walls a double paradox. It is the material marking of an enclosure of space and also occupies the inside of the inside providing us now with a third messianic structure, not that of time as such, nor poetic time, but the interiority of space between space as enclosure (“eschatological” space) and space as endless extension and continuum (“chronological” space). While Agamben calls this the womb, he could, of course, have designated it with the Greek name chora.9 Now we are at our ease, our work here nearly done. Primed as we are to exit art and finally crack the puzzle of the maze of thought, let us pause for a moment on the complex entity that is called, in our tradition, the poem. What is a poem? A poem is made up of poetry that exists within the tension between the semiotic and semantic that occurs at the premature interjection of space as both temporal pause and spatial presence creating the line. This gesture of interruption is then reversed in boustrophedonic mode so that the seamless flow of metre is interrupted by the caesuric pause of thought. Thus a poem consists of the movement between two syntaxes, ignoring for now which take precedence: prose—poetry—prose and poetry—prose— poetry. Also overlooking the further complexity that spacing is a precondition for all writing and exists in equal measure between each sign and within each sign, we now advance propositionally to the centrality of the end of the poem, wherein the micro tensile oscillation of poetry is writ large and catastrophic. Agamben is clear that

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the end of the poem is the end of verse which means also always the end of a verse or stanza. The end of the poem is, therefore, triply the end of poetry, the end of lineation, and the end of stanzation. As can be seen by this definition the end of the poem cannot come to an end as a propositional statement without a full understanding of the stanza. The first thing to note in this regard is that the end of the poem occurs, paradoxically, in a medial position by virtue of the stanza (as I said the end is central). The end of each line is different from the end of the last line, Agamben assures us, and so too must it be the case that the end of the stanza is an ending of a different order. It would be tempting to ascribe the end of the stanza as a miniature disaster and in a semiotic sense it can seem as such, but in fact the stanza is not a vertical form. The space at the end of the stanza is only one quarter of the relevant space for a stanza must have four walls revealing that the spatiality between stanzas is not one of finality but proximity. A stanza, in fact, is not a unit of poetry at all but a unit of sense, part of the syllogistic globalization of meaning promised by the poem and ruined by its finitude.10 As such there is a different relation to space in the stanza to that of the poem as verse or line. The stanza is known, therefore, for what it can contain, for its jug-like capaciousness, and as a receptacle it transcends or somehow avoids the temporal-spatial linearity of versification providing an internal, fractal, Chinese-box nested form of spatiality that endlessly defers ending by the act of turning in on itself in a process of almost endless reduction and insertion. The stanza provides the space of ease but where does this spatiality reside within the receptacle or around it? Is its spatiality that of the page/tablet, the parergonal forces of title, frame, and so on; or is it literally over there, to the side, located in the semi-mythical righthand margin of the Western poetic tradition?11 Thus far I have summarized the relation of poetry to space around four spatialities: frame space, the pause at the end of the line, spacing as such, and the space into which the poem is endlessly falling that Agamben terms silence. There is, however, a fifth space here located in no one location within the poem but which cuts across and is inserted into all spacing. This space is what I am terming the space of ease as facilitated by the technicus terminus of the poem as such as determined by the pure love of the word as such, as mere matter, pure signification, dead stuff . . .

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CORN: IN THE CORNER OF THE ROOM

In the essay “‘Corn’: from Anatomy to Poetics” Agamben traces the philology of an obscure term used in troubadour poetry: corn, or arse (specifically a woman’s). Agamben, alive to the rather suspect humour here, also shows that how, over time, a term referring to the female anatomy, corn, comes also, as cors, to represent the metrical unit of poetry as such. This odd transformation, although no odder than many similar semantic shifts, possibly stems from the tradition of equating the woman’s body to that of the poem, which we have already commented on in relation to the stanza as a kind of womb. Over time the term corn has come to stand for what is called the unrelated rhyme wherein an apparently unrhymed word in one stanza is later found to rhyme with a word in a subsequent stanza. This may seem obscure, indeed it is for Agamben the philologist who works hard to recuperate the meaning of this term, but as the essay progresses we come to realize that corn is an essential companion to the verse which, in relation to enjambement, has become so crucial to us in this discussion. If the etymological meanings of verse in the Latin versus explain so much about poetry, so too the potential meanings for corn as “tip,” “extremity,” “corner,” and “angle” open up a whole new aspect like an interior wall removed to flood a dull space with light. Now we can freely state that verse is the folding back of the line on itself, while corn is the retention of the line break as a break or exteriorized caesura. Corn allows one to see the extremity of the line at the same time as one sees it folding over to become, at least momentarily, prose. So what is corn? It is both verse and not verse, resembling something more like a remnant of verse at the moment of verse’s collapse into sense. Corn as a term retains the cut or tear in the fabric of meaning from which poetry attains its lasting power and significance but it is not verse as such. Corn is the corner of the room, what is left over as the line breaks. Undoubtedly it presents risk for the poem as it interrupts the semiotic precedence with that which is neither semantic nor apparently semiotic, which is why Agamben asserts that for the corn to function meta-strophically it must find its rhyme later in the poem. If corn did not find its rhyme it would cataphorically be revealed to be, after the end of the poem, in some sense a premature end resulting in the tension of verse dissipating prematurely and yet also, belatedly in its retrospective realization. 186

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Corn is the poetic term for what can otherwise be termed structure. As the corn delays rhyme until a later stanza it, by definition, weakens the rhyme. The greater the distance between the first instance of the rhyme and its second, the harder it becomes to hear the rhyme. The rhyme is still there but located at what has traditionally been called the harmonic rather than melodic level. Agamben proceeds to look at the work of Arnaut in this regard, a writer who elevated corn to a metastrophic dominance in the development of the stanzaic form of the sestina in which, of course, every rhyme is delayed. Of Arnaut’s sestina Agamben asserts “he is the poet who treats all verses as ‘corns’ and who, by thus rupturing the closed unity of the strophe, transforms the unrelated rhyme into the principle of a higher relation” (EP, 31). I am calling this higher relation structure here because it cuts across the localized effects of the semiotic/semantic tension. Structure is the trans-tensile containment of the obviousness of the poetic definition Agamben furnishes us with. Then again, the importance of corn is not merely related to the means by which we can bring structure into the work for it also ushers in the predominance of writing into poetry. The harmonic effects of corn, in a wider sense referring to any larger structural unity within a work, cannot be heard and therefore must ultimately be read. In addition, as Agamben goes on to concede an understanding of corn as a rupture of the poetic body based on disjuncture between first harmonic and melodic textures and then, because of this, between orality and writing, “cannot be understood if it is not situated in the context of a different formal register, namely, that between sound and sense” (EP, 34). One thing this observation allows is a more prominent place for rhyme within Agamben’s linear definition of poetry: “What is rhyme, if not a disjunction between semiotic event (the repetition of sounds) and semantic event, such that the mind searches for an analogy of sense in the very place where, disenchanted, it can find only a formal correspondence?” (EP, 35). Taken within this context corn becomes an essential point of transition not only for poetry but also Agamben’s overall philosophy. It takes us away from the localized issue of the line break versus the abyssal logic of the end of the poem, and allows us to move through the poem at a point between local and apocalyptic, opening up a level of harmony, structure, and graphematics. Corn distributes the tension of the poem across two different spatialities that accord, of course, with a wider understanding of what poetry is. No poem can 187

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be complete unless, along with the impact of lineation, one does not take into consideration the means by which words are distributed through the poem based on alternative patterns. With enjambement we have lineation, with the caesura we have discourse, and with corn we have the word. At this juncture we must return one more time to Dante and his discussion of the structure of the canzone cited by Agamben, where he opposes cantio as a unit of sense (sententia) to stanza as a purely metrical unit (ars). Overviewing Dante’s remarkably prescient comments Agamben, almost in astonishment, asserts: “Dante thus conceives of the structure of the canzone as founded on the relation between an essentially semantic, global unit and essentially metrical, partial units” (EP, 35). Based on two metaphors Dante utilizes, the bodily metaphor of the lap “For just as the canzone is in the lap of its subject-matter so the stanza enlaps its whole technique” (EP, 35), which of course calls to mind the womb; and his later choice to call the unrelated rhyme or corn the clavis or key, Agamben is finally able to conclude that “Insofar as it opens . . . the closed formal womb of the stanza, the unrelated rhyme (the corn!) constitutes a threshold of passage between the metrical unity of ars and the higher semantic unity of sententia” (EP, 36). To sum up this long and complex series of arguments, intellectual and aesthetic rooms within rooms, we can say that the space of ease opens the subject to the potentiality of their own singularity shared in common with all other self-alienated and thus singular beings. Ease is also a superlative example of logopoiesis. Ease requires the thinking of proximate space as precondition for singularity. This is most readily found in poetry specifically in the material presence of an articulate space at the right hand of every lineated poem. This space, the fifth trans-poetic tabular space, we are informed, is likened in traditional poetics to the spatiality of the womb or semiotic chora. Aside from the obvious observation that all poetry is embodied it leads one to a realization that there is a particular spatiality within the poem that simultaneously allows one to see the poem and to see language as such. This is the space of ease or that space into which the poem moves at the local, sequential level into the tabular, multi-dimensional, vertical space of the poem as a global entity. The unrelated rhyme forces one to concede that the poem exists in space and time beyond the power of its voicing, yet at the same time it requires that one consider the poem as consisting of lines within stanzas. 188

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RHYTHM

Agamben is a sporadic and yet profoundly consistent writer, and his most recent work on temporality harks back to his earliest work on the poem which itself presages the more sophisticated work to come. I am speaking here of the dense chapter in The Man Without Content entitled “The Original Structure of the Work of Art.” I am unable to assert that all the matters pertaining to poetic structure as a mode of thinking come together in this essay, they cannot as it precedes all such work, but rather we are able now to look back on that essay and see in it the basis of all that is to come. The essay is a fairly unreconstructed Heideggerian reading of poetic rhythm, however having come so far we can leave aside the Heideggerian terminology and concentrate instead on what this essay reveals in terms of a harmony of all the different elements pertaining to prosody and logopoiesis lodged within that most difficult yet essential poetic term: rhythm. Agamben begins his treatise on rhythm by considering the age-old problem as to what constitutes structure. Aristotle asks in The Metaphysics what causes a collection of elements to be more than a mere aggregate, in other words how do parts cohere into a unified structure: lines become a stanza, stanzas a poem, and so on? Structure is always a gestalt in that the parts cohere into something that is in excess of the particulate and yet which gives the particulate a single quantum: such and such a thing. The two traditional answers to this question are either that structure is an essential and irreducible element of the thing or it is what causes the “ensemble to be what it is” (MWC, 96). The first thing to accept here is that these contesting views of structure are either based on an internal, synecdochic view of a certain part of a collection of elements being the supra-elemental part, or an external gestalt-based view that structure is something outside of the ensemble that is added to it to make it what it is. Both positions are problematic. Internalized structure assumes structure to be something more than its elements and yet at the same time reduces this additional thing to the prime element “the ultimate quantum beyond which the object loses its reality” (MWC, 97). Yet the second view proposes that structure is something that is external to the ensemble in question which means first that one must go in search of it, second explain its essential role to the very collection it is radically exterior and other too, and third (a point central to the work of Badiou) explain how this element exterior to one’s set can be 189

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a set-defining element and yet itself escape the problems of infinite regression and bad infinity intrinsic to set theory. How can this “additional thing” exceed the very structure of aggregation it defines? After Aristotle, Agamben defines these two positions as number, “element and minimal quantum,” and rhythm “that which causes something to be what it is” (MWC, 98). This second element, the one preferred by Aristotle, the Greek philosopher renames Form. This debate is promoted by a comment by a momentarily lucid, decrepit Hölderlin: “Everything is rhythm . . . every work of art is one rhythm, and everything swings from the poeticizing lips of the god” (Cited in MWC, 94). Agamben, initially struggling to comprehend this statement, now feels after Aristotle that he can define rhythm as that which negotiates between the very principle of presence, that which is outside of a work and makes it what it is (Form), and measure as such as a calculable number. Rhythm, in other words, is a double measure, measure as the coming to presence of being on the earth (Heideggerian Measure) and measure as a countable number of units or quanta. One can already see here the value of such a definition of structure as rhythm at least for the art work. Rhythm is the unquantifiable “extra” element that makes a thing a work of art, yet at the same time rhythm is directly dependent on the elements that make up the work of art, for the sake of argument syllables, words, and lines in the poem. This centrality is further perpetuated when Agamben attempts to define the essential and original definition of rhythm by explaining how the interruption of flow in art is an ecstatic arrest of rhythm which, at the same time, inaugurates and announces the very existence of rhythm: “The word ‘rhythm’ comes from the Greek . . . to flow, as in the case of water. That which flows does so in a temporal dimension: it flows in time . . . Yet this rhythm—as we commonly understand it—appears to introduce into this eternal flow a split and a stop” (MWC, 99). At the point that the rhythm stops we are launched, for a moment, outside the work of art into the place of ecstasy and are gifted with a view of what art is before falling back into the incessant procession of the rhythm of the work below. This, Agamben argues, is the tantalizing gift and reserve of art, the very structure of art “that is at once as Gestalt and number” (MWC, 100). He gives examples here of music and painting, how in both cases the elements that function in harmony to create the work’s rhythm also provide us with an atemporal, supra-spatial ecstatic moment that he 190

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describes thus: “we perceive a stop in time . . . an interruption in the incessant flow in instants that, coming from the future, sinks into the past” (MWC, 99). Clearly rhythm conceived in this way is the basis for Agamben’s later construction of messianic time, as well as providing an early prototype for the Idea of Prose and its subsequent reformulation as potential. Yet rhythm is spoken of here in the very earliest work in terms of the Greek word epoch, both the cut in time and the definition of a period in time. Agamben translates epoch as meaning “both to hold back, to suspend, and to hand over, to present, to offer” (MWC, 100) before attempting a somewhat “violent” retranslation of the term as rhythm. Even if epoch and rhythm are not actually synonymous they hold clear structural synonymity in that both speak of a moment outside of something which confers on that something its unified thing-status. Both epoch and rhythm therefore are the making of a unity through a radical act of disjunctive ecstasy which, however, as soon it is raised up out of the structured continuum, falls back into said continuum. This being the case rhythm is not a single event, not on ongoing flow, but the ongoing process of the evental interruption of flow. The same is true of epoch in relation to the definition of a period, for example modernity. This then explains a final, third meaning for epochal rhythm in the Greek, namely “to be” in the sense of to dominate or to hold on to a place. Thus Agamben concludes: “rhythm holds, that is, gives and holds back . . . rhythm grants men both the ecstatic dwelling in a more original dimension and the fall into the flight of measurable time” (MWC, 100). As I mentioned, Agamben’s main argumentative thrust here is Heideggerian, centring in on issues of Measure, being-in-the-world, Being’s destiny and authenticity. What matters for us at this late hour however is how he relates rhythm to poiesis for, he argues, rhythm in defining art also defines the basis of being’s temporal existence in the world, namely the perpetual movement between time as origin, ecstasy, and as flow, day-to-day vulgar time. “In his authentic temporal dimension, the poetic status of man on earth finds its proper meaning. Man has on earth a poetic status, because it is poiesis that founds for him the original space of his world” (MWC, 101). Through the act of pro-duction via entelechy, as we saw, human being is able to exist in the transition from presence as origin to presence as thing in the world. Yet this process of pro-duction is not entirely processual. While it certainly takes time and is composed of three stages 191

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(poiesis–entelechy–praxis),the term process does not convey the complexity of its operations. Here is where poetic structure, itself simply archetypal of innumerable such structures across all the arts and beyond, is revealing. As we now know in terms of the spatiotemporality of the poem there is flow (enjambement), interruption (caesura), and there is the architectural organization of these two elements into a third element which is the projective-recursive spatiotemporality of structure (what Agamben terms the metrical–musical element). Poiesis, therefore, does not commence or cease but is perpetually in operation giving and holding back in a space or medial zone interior to the work of art. In one final report from the great Aristotle, Agamben names this overall combination of elements into the rhythmical structure of the work of art that also determines human being through the means by which they make a space for themselves on the earth as productive beings in and out of time, art’s architectonic basis. As he says: “That art is architectonic means, etymologically: art, poiesis, is pro-duction (τίκτω) of origin (άρχή), art is the gift of the original space of man, architectonics par excellence” (MWC, 101). Said architectonics is a structure now extremely familiar to us across all that we have perused here, a process wherein “in the work of art the continuum of linear time is broken, and man recovers, between past and future his present space” (MWC, 102). So that when Agamben concludes, still very much in a Heideggerian strain at this early phase in his career, “In the experience of the work of art, man stands in the truth that is, in the origin that has revealed itself to him in the poietic act” (MWC, 102), we can now reread this in a more Agambenian fashion. Poiesis is rhythmical structure. It dictates how human being exists in the essentiality of chronological time and space as a continuum. It determines how, at various points, being breaks with the continual and enters into the ecstatic, often by willed skilled acts of artistic making or artistic experience of the made thing. Yet this epochal moment, wherein the human sees its origins, does not dispense with the continuum below, any more than the continuum permanently disallows the epoch. Rather, rhythm is the perpetual interplay between flow and its arrest. This interplay, and perhaps this is the truly original and poetic part of Agamben’s thinking, is not however simply an erratic or intermittent, stuttering singular dimensionality, flowarrest-flow-arrest, which would simply carve time up into the traditional aporia of moments along a single line. Rather, poetic 192

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structure, particularly the tabular-planar element of anaphoric– cataphoric projection–recursion that one finds, for example, in rhyme but also in numerous other elements of poetry such as referentiality, association, patternation, recurrence with modification (torquing), and so on; negates simple processional temporality. Rather rhythm–, the name we now give to the whole structural process of logopoietic thinking, being, spatiality, and temporality–, defines poiesis as ongoing, projective, recursive, and suddenly surprising. Poiesis as the ultimate architectonic of our being on this earth as potentially productive beings within the supportive medium of language as such, is a tabular-planar dimensional way of being always already projected towards a finitude that in turn always casts us back to an origin. We rise, we fall, we progress, we return and in doing so, through poiesis, which is the name for this process, we make. If, in the modern epoch, being and thinking are under negation they are also, due to the very logic of the epoch, under pro-duction also. This, simply put, is why poetry matters to Giorgio Agamben. Poetry is able to save metaphysics from itself by providing another way of thinking. This projective-recursive, productive mode of tabular thinking is logopoiesis.

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At the end of a great adventure the intrepid in repose often set down their encounters and observations in the form of a book. Within our culture, for entirely mysterious and conventional reasons, every book demands a title: The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis. To propose a certain identity or division within Agambenian philosophy is ill-advised and, self-defeating. His is a philosophy that resists identity in favour of neutral singularity. And while he concedes the omnipresence of division, particularly metaphysical differential scission, he has made it his life’s work to overcome difference through the creation of a productive philosophy of indifference. Therefore as to the actual existence of a clearly definable “literary” Agamben, I must attest to being unhappy with such a designation even if it is my own. The enforcement of a “literary” Agamben is not simply reductive, it goes against the very spirit of his work. As would the designation the “political” or “metaphysical” Agamben or even a composite of the three. The inaccurate entitlement of this book, like so many titles, is as strategic as it is descriptive. The literary Agamben is simply a device to get the critical fraternity to take their eyes off the Homo Sacer project and its impressive extension. If I have neglected the political elements of Agamben’s work, as most assuredly I have, it is for this reason alone. This must now stand as my written book on Agamben. In my unwritten book I see that until the various strands of Agamben’s thought are presented as a whole, political, metaphysical, literary . . . (it would be premature and presumptuous to reduce his work to just three categorizations), our understanding of this most remarkable thinker is incomplete. Yet here at least I have made a start, commenced with the adventure of reinstating the literary in the form of 194

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a sustained analysis of poetry into the heart of Agamben’s indifferent thought. That must suffice. Sometimes when you set out on an adventure and you have a tight deadline, connections to make, visas to apply for, you forget to take the one thing you need most of all. Or in taking your leave, neglect to say the very thing that is most on your mind to your loved ones, the funding committee, or the press. Similarly I feel now that I never at any point clearly expressed why literature, why poetry in particular is of such importance to the work of Agamben. As our departure is delayed here a few more pages due to an oversight in some paperwork, I am fortunate enough to have the time and perspicacity to correct this. For Agamben there are five conditions of poetic language, experience, and structure that make it the essential complement to philosophy in the quest for the meaning of the existence of language as such as indifferent medium for thinking. Poetry produces the closest experience of language as such, or inexpressive medium for expression, that exists within our tradition. This being the case the fact that poetry and philosophy suffered a powerful separation at the hands of first philosophy means that philosophy’s attempt to think the very basis of its continuing existence through an investigation of language cannot be completed until this rift is once more bridged. The rift may indeed be part cause of the modern philosophical collapse into negativity. The fundamental experience of ontology via language being that of desubjectivization, a process of depersonalization at the hands of language, has for centuries being attributed to the poetic experience of inspiration. At the same time, the semiotic basis of depersonalizing desubjectivization is most readily presented and investigated by poetry’s emphasis on the material effects of language at the expense of rational discursive meaning. The predominance of semiotics in the poem is felt at the level of the syllable, word, and line, but also across the whole of the rhythm of poetic structure, providing an archetype for a mode of thinking dominated by naming that does not name anything specifically, extrapolated out across larger, discursive structures. These five conditions of poeticized ontology, proximity to language as such, historical relation between poetry and philosophy, desubjectivization due to linguistic depersonalization, intimacy with the semiotic, and rhythmical structure as an alternative model for thinking; combine together to establish poetry’s role as one half of a mode of post-nihilistic productive thought such as I have repeatedly presented in Agamben’s work. 195

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It is inevitable that one will lose one’s way and in losing it find one’s true way. All great adventures work this way. Mine has been no different. This is not the book I set out to write. The actual book was lost along the way. I dropped it. That book, “The Invention of Literary Singularity,” now forever unwritten, saw Agamben as a supporting figure in a grand narrative of the turn to poiesis in the work of Heidegger, Derrida, Badiou, Nancy, and ultimately Agamben. The Agamben chapter got out of hand, I admit that, and a character who at the beginning seemed one part of a great ensemble took over the story all but negating the early narrative. I am reminded of Ozu’s great film Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice where the story of the rebellious niece is supplanted by the consideration of her actions on the relationship between her aunt and uncle. An analysis so profound, real, and unexpectedly normal that when the niece and her new beau reappear back on screen at the film’s end you have all but forgotten who they are. I am certain many books are like this. In my case the usual: chapters which were central were removed entirely, thousands of words on the category life, museums, dictation in poetry, and the relation between the larynx and the syrinx. The order of the remaining chapters was endlessly changed. The initial interest I had in Agamben’s ideas on linguistic materiality faded from view until finally I understood what it was I was writing about: thinking as such through poetry, Logopoiesis. As this happened the previous disorder of the chapters froze into a pattern that came to seem as almost predestined. Language as such as neutral medium and support for thought and being allows Agamben to rethink the very thing of thought and move beyond productive metaphysical negation. His recourse to literary examples in this regard, the stanza and poetic dictation specifically, is not illustrative but a fundamental part of his thinking. The ancient antagonism established between poetry and philosophy is first revealed and then in part resolved by the rehabilitation of the category of poiesis. The history of modern metaphysical nihilism is matched by the history of aesthetic modernity dissuading us from looking for solutions in poiesis alone. However aesthetic modernity provides a strong example of anti-poiesis that has two key effects. It brings to presence the predominance of negation in all elements of metaphysics, suprasensuous and sensuous, as well as revealing a potential way out of this great abyss through the alternative modes of poietic thinking.1 196

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Bringing together thought and poetry I was able to propose the tautological compound logopoiesis. This is not simply thinking through the appropriation of the arts but the very structure of poiesis as an alternate and complimentary mode of thinking to that of the metaphysical tradition. The structure of this thinking, revealed by Agamben to be that of poetry as such, is a combination of the premature cessation of the flow of meaning through the imposition of a semiotic beak and the interruption of semiotic flow by the interjection of the space of thought. The tensile rhythmic interchange between enjambement and caesura provides the medium for logopoiesis, but as a mode of thought it is meaningless without the combination of these elements into a trans-linear anaphoric–cataphoric tabular-planar projective–recursive structure which Agamben names rhythm as such. Rhythm is the very ground upon which all future work on logopoiesis must be based. We have arrived at the quintessence of the logopoietic thought process. This conclusion voyages far from my original intention. Such a situation is, I suspect, as common as marriage when seen through the thinking lens of Ozu. People have called it thinking. Mostly writers recount their thoughts but not their thinking. However a powerful example of the presentation of thinking before thought exists in Heidegger’s unfinished work Being and Time. Heidegger of course casts an ambiguous shadow over the work of Agamben, like the dark and yellowing illumination of the sky above you as you set out, threatening a storm that in the midst of such a swashbuckling tale might indeed be welcomed even if it poses real danger. There are certain elements of Being and Time as a work of written thinking that tell us a good deal about thinking as such. The book essentially remains unfinished as the “third division” was never written and the second division was not all it could have been as Heidegger was forced to add it in haste. Indeed, it has been observed that the second division takes up the issues of the first and in reconsidering them undermines them so that the powerful forward thrust of Heidegger’s propositional, deductive, syllogistic, summarizing, culminating, narrativizing, and teleological thought is weakened as it progresses to its conclusions. Being and Time therefore, aside from its myriad other merits, is a powerful lesson in self-deconstruction in part obviating many of the critical studies of the work to come. That Heidegger then turns away entirely from the categories of this book in the later work on poetry, a turn or kehre he denies and 197

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yet which is all too apparent, suggests that turning away from and towards was, therefore, ever his method of thought and that the second division is not a failure but a triumph of recursive thought. In the 1949 essay “The Turning” Heidegger comes to define thinking precisely in terms of recursion. Speaking of the contemporary destiny of being in terms of instrumental, objectivizing, and framing technology, he defines this coming to presence of being as enframing as danger. He then adds: “As the danger, Being turns about into the oblivion of its coming to presence, turns away from this coming to presence, and in that way simultaneously turns counter to the truth of its coming to presence.” Although Heideggerian negativity is the destinal ontology Agamben wants expressly to turn away from, one can recognize here the basis of Agamben’s methodology.2 A similarity further confirmed when Heidegger adds: “In the coming to presence of the danger there conceals itself . . . the possibility of a turning in which the oblivion belonging to the coming to presence of Being will so turn itself that, with this turning, the truth of the coming to presence of Being will expressly turn in—turn homeward—into whatever is” (QCT, 41). Thus the act of turning is not simply turning back or away from the present but a turning in, an interiorization of thinking. Add into this Heidegger’s claim that language “is never primarily the expression of thinking, feeling, and willing,” but, “the primal dimension within which man’s essence is first able to correspond at all to Being . . . This primal corresponding . . . is thinking” (QCT, 41), and we can see the profound influence Heideggerian thinking has had on Agambenian thinking. The influence is neither negative nor positive, but the process of the turning from the negative to the positive by virtue of the negative. As the translator’s footnote informs the English edition of Heidegger’s text, the verb used here to express the activity of the “turn in” of thought, einkehren, means both to turn in and to put up at an inn, to alight, or stay. A turn from dispute into stasis and stillness. As they rightfully go on to explain this is of no small importance to Heidegger’s work on Hölderlin, particularly his study of the hymn “The Ister” and the periplus logic of the river developed there. In the text Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” Heidegger establishes an ontological rhythm of cruciform retrogradation that we found was central to Agamben’s theory of the relation of poetic rhythm to thinking as such. As the river departs from the source one can describe is as both homely and unhomely. It recalls always the source, 198

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the homely, but only in departing from it. Similarly as the river journeys it also provides the essential natural elements for settlement, the reason why so many great cities are on the banks of rivers. The river therefore is both a locality or founding of a place and an endless journeying. In attaching the river to the ancient sea-bound periplus, the river drains into the ocean whose amorphous nature recalls the installation into shape of the source, Heidegger brings another interiorization into poetic ontology and thinking, rhythm, which is also essential to Agamben’s theory of messianic time. Indeed much of Agamben’s work on poetry is prefigured in this text. The ocean works very well as the endless falling into silence of poetic finitude. The manner in which the river flows and yet is also arrested by locality echoes the stop–start interplay of caesura and enjambement in Agamben. While finally expression of the river as both flowing out into the uncanny and always being called back to the familiar source combines all these elements into an internalized poetic structural rhythmic periplus: Agambenian rhythm. This rhythm is the essence of thought as a form of turning embedded in my choice of the tautological term logopoiesis to express this mode of poetic thinking. Thinking as rhythmical turning by virtue of poetry is my first thesis in relation to logopoiesis. My contention here is not that Heidegger had already said what Agamben goes on to say. This is not the case. First because of Agamben’s powerful critique of Heideggerian Being as based on mute negation. And second because Agamben is able to draw out the turn of thinking in poetics through detailed analysis of prosody as such. In contrast Heidegger’s reading of “The Ister” concentrates on the meaning of the river as expressed by the semantic base of Hölderlin’s great hymn. Thus the poem remains, to a degree, illustrative, archetypal, allegorical, and specifically singular in relation to thought. It exemplifies thought but it is not thought as such in my opinion. In contrast Agamben demonstrates that the very definition of poetry in terms of semiotic rhythm is the quintessence of turning as a form of thinking in the form of the verse. This is an essential development in logopoietic thought from its origins in the later, great work of the last philosopher. From poetry, through philosophy to language, Agamben’s main concern is the definition of human being in terms of desubjectivization brought about by the profound depersonalization of the human being in the face of language as neutral medial support for thinking 199

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as such. This is not our concern. If for Agamben poetic thinking, logopoiesis, is a way-station along the obscured tracks of a greater mission, our aims are more modest. Logopoiesis names the rehabilitation, redefinition, and full development of what literature is through its definition as a means of thinking through intimate experience with the semiotic materiality of language as such. What I summarize as thinking through making. Thus if Agamben wishes to access the linguistic basis for all being, my own sensibly founded modesty forbids me from venturing any further than a total reappraisal of all the arts in terms of their being a form of thought. Certainly thought about being in terms of the subject, but also thought about other categories that I have yet to address such as objectivity, temporality, and the sensuous. Later, rummaging through my capacious pockets for some gizmo for gouging stones out of the hooves of horses, I find a postcard from Giorgio. On one side is a sepia image of the Rome of his childhood, desolated by modernity and yet still eternally wonderful. Written on the back in Italian is the following enigma that I have translated the best I can: As to your delightful tale of logopoiesis, I have understood it as the following: a modality of thinking through making and all that this entails. The first instalment of which is a consonance between the very structure of poetry and that of thinking. Rather than a syllogistic, deductive, progressive, objectal-instrumental, teleological, exhaustive, prosaic, and eventually conclusive mode of progression through logical cumulative analysis, logopoiesis is the tautological turn of thought. Such a thought is definable by precisely the same structure as that of the poem for which read all works of art. That is: a self-consciously self-indicative anaphoric-cataphoric tabularplanar field or linguistic medium for thinking that is a projective recursion. I can now understand why you coin the term logopoiesis to indicate this complex compound of ideas although initially I was unconvinced. In such a model, as far as I can tell, as the poemthought commences due to the presence of semiotic conventional rule-based constraint (I enjoyed very much your article on this by the way),3 it already prefigures its development and cessation. As it progresses it does so by always simultaneously going on and looking back, by flowing and interrupting said flow, by submitting thought to

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a constraining linearity and exploding linearity through a translinear tabular-planar rhythmic structure. Finally, as the poem ends it both comes to an end, never comes to an end, and perpetually ends (did I get this right?). It must end, as indeed must all logopoietic thinking, to come into existence. Just as human life can only come to life by ending the category of life and the tension therein. That said the poem never comes to an end because the cataphoric-recursive element always folds the poem back on itself, in on itself. In the same manner the poem never commences. Finally then in the tensile interchange between having to end and being unable to end you have the perpetually adventurous finitude of poetic thought as such. A poetic thinking shares this structure. Rather than defining a problem and then seeking to solve it conclusively, let’s say the problem of being, it is always already within the problem. By the same gesture as it seems to move towards its conclusions, it must at the same time be turning back on itself and away from summation. If traditional thought advances, poetic thought turns. Such a thought exists both in space and time you suggested at one point. Quite so. The linear extension of the semiotic and its interruption are both temporal. Yet the grammatological space required to actuate the caesura in the line reveals the dependence of linearity on not merely interruptive, mono-dimensional space but also architectonic, structural, trans-linear space. This rhythmical space is also the rhythmical temporality of thought, a moment wherein categories such as beginning and end, space and time, inside and outside, part and whole, subject and object, thought and language, philosophy and poetry, are suspended in every sense of this word; put on hold. As in thought so in art, we are held by that which possesses us, our habitual place, but which we cannot take hold of. As ever, language. In being dispossessed of the very thing which takes hold of us we turn from thinking about being to the turn of being as thinking. It is for this reason that we call poetry, indeed all the arts, verse. Philosophy has now passed. The last philosopher has spoken his final words. For now at least, but not for all time, it is the turn of verse. Very interesting. I will need time to think more about it. Not everything is as it should be. Some ideas seem out of place. You are not quite there yet but you are certainly moving towards very provocative territory. Beware the sloughs of negative despond by the

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way. Remember to take the right turn there. Hope we meet again some time in the future but I believe we may not as my destiny is beyond those cliffs which are treacherous, upon an empty plateau about which they say great danger finds its dwelling. Good luck with your next guide. He is a close associate of mine although we do not always see eye to eye. You will find his conversation and company very stimulating even if at first he seems obscure. By the way, ignore the example of Orpheus. There are always benefits to be accrued from looking back along the way you have come. There, I have finished what I have to say. It’s your turn now. Giorgio

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NOTES

EXOTERIC DOSSIER: THE LITERARY AGAMBEN 1

2

3

4

5

6

For various criticisms of Agamben’s supposedly dual methodology, see Erik Vogt, “S/Citing the Camp,” in Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, ed. Andrew Norris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 92, henceforth cited as PMD; Rainer Maria Kiesow, “Law and Life,” PMD, 254; Dominick LaCapra, “Approaching Limit Events; Siting Agamben,” in Sovereignty & Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 135, henceforth cited as SL; Catherine Mills, “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 1 (2008), 27, henceforth cited as SAQ; Benjamin Noys, “Time of Death,” Angelaki 7, no. 2 (2002), 57; and Ernesto Laclau, ‘Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy?’ SL, 11. Negri’s provocation has been picked up by Jenny Edkins, “Whatever Politics,” SL, 70; Colin McQuillan, ‘The Political Life in Giorgio Agamben,’ Kritikos 2 (2005), unpaginated; and Eleanor Kaufman, “The Saturday of Messianic Time,” SAQ, 44. Antonio Negri, “Giorgio Agamben: The Discreet Taste of the Dialectic,” SL, 117–18. Negri reiterates this critique in Antonio Negri, “The Ripe Fruit of Redemption,” trans. Arianna Bove. www.generation-online.org/t/ negriagamben.html; and Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York: Continuum, 2003), 112–13. See Adam Thurschwell, “Cutting the Branches for Akiba, Agamben’s Critique of Derrida,” PMD, 173; Kaufman, SAQ, 38; Jean-Philipe Deranty, “Witnessing the Inhuman: Agamben or Merleau-Ponty,” SAQ, 175; and Robert Buch, “Seeing the Impossibility of Seeing or the Visibility of the Undead: Giorgio Agamben’s Gorgon,” The Germanic Review 82, no. 2 (2007), 190. Agamben’s first published work begins with a consideration of the uncanny as the ability of literature to produce desubjectivization. See Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1–7. Henceforth cited as MWC. No study of the uncanny is complete without reference to Nicholas Royle’s magisterial and unsettling The Uncanny: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). The first critical concession of the three Agambens can be found in Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron, and Alex Murray, “The Enigma of Giorgio 203

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Agamben,” in The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, ed. Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron, and Alex Murray, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 3. Henceforth cited as WGA.

PROJECTION: THERE IS LANGUAGE 1

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5

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7

8

9

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Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 107. Henceforth cited as LD. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 6. Henceforth cited as IH. For a consideration of the status of the unwritten in Agamben see Andrew Dillon, “Introduction: The Interim,” Paragraph 25, no. 2 (2002), 3. Henceforth cited as Para. The importance of the literary has finally been conceded by some critics. See for example Justin Clemens, “The Role of the Shifter and the Problem of Reference in Giorgio Agamben,” WGA, 43. For example, later in the main body of the book, IH, 59; and again in LD, 84–5. It also forms the basis of a whole chapter in The End of the Poem, Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 62–75. Henceforth cited as EP. This is, essentially, the question behind the “political” texts comprising the Homo Sacer project in terms of the relation of the human to the animal, the inhuman, biological life, social life, bare life, and ontology. See Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 10. Henceforth cited as MWE. Mills defines as a crucial element of Agamben’s thought the faculty of having or capacity to do something. See Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield: Acumen Press, 2008), 29–30. Henceforth cited as PA. This is the function of the “anthropological machine” that Agamben describes in The Open. See Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 33–8. Henceforth cited as O. For more see Matthew Calarco, “Jamming the Anthropological Machine,” SL, 163–79. For more on the role of animal voice to poetry see William Watkin, “Article: Syrinx / Larynx: A Full-Throated Ease,” William Watkin’s Blog, http://williamwatkin. blogspot.com/. Henceforth cited as WWB. See “The Question Concerning Technology,” and “The Turning,” in the collection Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (London: Harper Perennial, 1977), 3–52. Henceforth cited as QCT. Lovitt’s introduction is also useful, see William Lovitt, “Introduction,” in QCT, xxviii–xxxvi. See for example Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–11, 90, 109, 119, 140, & 187–8. Henceforth cited as HS. 204

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Also Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 87–135. Henceforth cited as RA. The conclusion to The Open sets out a more positive, messianic conception of post-humanism: O, 90–2. For more on this topic see Catherine Mills, “Linguistic Survival and Ethicality: Biopolitics, Subjectivation, and Testimony in Remnants of Auschwitz,” in PMD, 200–2 and again Mills in PA, 110–14. See also Lee Spinks, “Thinking the Post-human: Literature, Affect and the Politics of Style,” Textual Practice 15, no. 1 (2001), 23–46; and Colin Davis, “Can the Dead Speak to Us? De Man, Lévinas and Agamben,” Culture, Theory & Critique 45, no. 1 (2004), 86–7. For a useful analysis of the relation of Agamben’s thought to that of Debord’s concept of the spectacle, see Alex Murray, “Beyond Spectacle and the Image: the Poetics of Guy Debord and Agamben,” WGA, 164–9. For a consideration of this argument see Thomas Docherty, “Potential European Democracy,” Para, 61–2. Agamben’s critique of Heidegger spans the volumes Language and Death (LD, 54–64), and The Open (O, 39–77), and is inevitably itself criticized by others, for example Krzysztof Ziarek, “After Humanism: Agamben and Heidegger,” SAQ, 187–210. His critique of Derrida is more sporadic yet insistent. Key moments come in the following texts Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 155–6, henceforth cited as ST; Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 103–4, henceforth cited as IP; RA, 129–30; HS, 53–7; Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 44–5, henceforth cited as P; and The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 102–4, henceforth cited as TTR. His most veiled but sustained critique is to be found in the essay “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality,” P, 205–19. For largely negative comments on Agamben’s critique of Derrida see Thurschwell, PMD, 173–97; David E. Johnson, “As If the Time Were Now: Deconstructing Agamben,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 2 (2007), 266–90; Mills, PA, 44–6; and Sean Gaston, “Absence as Pure Possibility,” in Derrida, Literature and War: Absence and the Chance of Meeting (London: Continuum, 2009), 34–53. The ontico-ontological difference refers to the division in Being and Time between Dasein or everyday being in the world and Being as such which he sees as epochally in withdrawal in the modern age. It is widely assumed that Heidegger’s interest in Dasein wanes as, post-kehre, his commitment to Being as such waxes, especially in the later texts on poetry. Heidegger disputes this easy division, see for example Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1971), 12, henceforth cited as OWL; but it is certainly true that analysis of the world gives way to considerations of earth in later texts such as “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 15–88. Henceforth cited as PLT. 205

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NOTES 17

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See Derrida’s two remarkable assaults on Heideggerian difference, Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989); and “Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” in Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. II, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7–26. This is Agamben’s specific criticism of Derrida in Stanzas. See ST, 152–8. Three essays which are not germane to my argument here in that they attempt to apply the ideas of Homo Sacer to literary analysis but still worth considering are Lee Spinks, “Except for Law: Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, and the Politics of Exception,” SAQ 121–44; Steven C. Caton, “Coetzee, Agamben, and the Passion of Abu Ghraib,” American Anthropologist 108, no.1 (2006), 114–23; and Barbara Formis, “Dismantling Theatricality: Aesthetics of Bare Life,” WGA, 181–92. Weller is somewhat scathing of this narrative of overcoming nihilism which he says typifies our tradition in relation to nihilism since Nietzsche. See Shane Weller, Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 137 & 159–62. Henceforth cited as LPN. The relationship between the banning of poets from the republic and the figure if the homo sacer as desubjectivization under the ban of the sovereign, is implied but never fully developed in Agamben’s work. See for example HS, 50. Agamben later speculates on various grammatological punctuation marks in relation to his theory of nonrelational harmonic articulation that is neither “hypotactic nor paratactic but, so to speak, atactic,” in relation to the hyphen, the colon, and ellipsis dots in the title of the Deleuze essay “Immanence: A Life . . . ” (P, 221–3). See also Wall’s ground-breaking analysis Radical Passivity: Lévinas, Blanchot and Agamben (New York: SUNY, 1999), 129–30. Henceforth cited as RP. For an analysis of deixis, see John Lyons, Semantics Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 636–7, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and William Watkin, “‘Draft 33: Deixis’ / Notes on ‘Deixis’: a Midrashic Chain an exchange of thoughts,” Jacket 36 (2008), http://jacketmagazine. com/36/watkin-duplessis.shtml. For a remarkable history of this process see Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay. The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 271–3. For a full consideration of all these issues see William Watkin, “The Materialization of Prose: Poiesis versus Dianoia in the work of Godzich & Kittay, Shklovsky, Silliman and Agamben,” Paragraph 31, no. 3 (2008), 344–64. Henceforth cited as MofP. John Milton, Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4. 206

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NOTES 29

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31 32

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40

For the relation of anaphora to deixis in Agamben see Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 92–4. Henceforth cited as CC. See Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 217–30 & 35–40 respectively. See also RA, 137–8. See O, 63–70 where Agamben considers Heidegger’s ideas pertaining to animal captivated being as fundamentally at odds with human privative, self-conscious being. I am thinking most specifically of the arguments put forward in Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, Second Edition, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). For more on this see William Watkin, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 198–226. See Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), 307–30. Henceforth cited as M. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 227. The English translation incorrectly names John Woodhouse as Keats’ addressee. See Michel De Certeau, “Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias,” Representations 56 (1996), 29–47, and my own analysis of these issues in relation to poetry in William Watkin, In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 53. Henceforth cited as IPP. See for example Wall, “Au Hasard,” PMD, 32–5. See Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY, 1999), 28–32. Henceforth cited as MP. The wilful treatment of xenoglossic alterity, a language equal to our own in every way except the specificity of its material signification, as glossolalic, a meaningless noise, is surely the basis of much cultural chauvinism and imperialism through the ages. Xenoglossia implies both a culture as developed as one’s own and a lack of facility within the dominant culture: I know they are making sense but I do not have the capability to understand it. This admits into sovereign domination a double weakness. In contrast glossolalia suggests a reductive animalism and a position of epistemological dominance based on an ontological certitude: they speak like animals and I can designate the significance of this as their being “as animals” confirming my status as civilized and thus human. In Agambenian terms much cultural imperialism is based on the false division between xenoglossia (bios) and glossolalia (zoe), and the subsequent denuding of xenoglossia under the sign of glossolalia. What barbarians utter is mere noise, in other words, therefore they are alive without being human. The importance of passivity and neutrality for Agamben’s post-metaphysical ontology has been noted by a number of critics, but the first serious study of the issue was Thomas Wall’s Radical Passivity. 207

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NOTES 41 42

43

44

45

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47

48 49

Robert Browning, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2004), 188. For criticism of Agamben in relation to otherness see Andrew Benjamin, “Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and Animals,” SAQ, 85; Andrew Benjamin, “Spacing as Shared: Heraclitus, Pindar, Agamben,” PMD, 167; Thurschwell, PMD, 186; Mills, PMD, 211; and Robert Eaglestone, “On Giorgio Agamben’s Holocaust,” Para, 64. Badiou’s manifesto for “affirmative thinking” is mapped out in MP, 113–38. See Mills, PA, 90–1; Josh Cohen, “‘A Different Insignificance’: The Poet and Witness in Agamben,” Para, 36–51; Vogt, PMD, 86; and Mills, PMD, 203. For an interesting consideration of love in Agamben see Julian Wolfreys, “Face to Face with Agamben; or, the Other in Love,” in WGA, 149–63. For a consideration of this term and its relation to the semiotic in Agamben, see Leland De La Durantaye, “Agamben’s Potential,” Diacritics 30, no. 2 (2000), 5–8. Henceforth cited as AP. For further readings of the razo in Romantic and contemporary poetics see William Watkin, “Article: Poetic Dictation,” WWB. For a consideration of the relation of life to poetry see WWB. See Zaraloudis, “Soulblind,” WGA, 144.

CHAPTER 1 LOGOS, THINKING THOUGHT 1

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See earlier comments on Foucault and desubjectivization in RA, 141–2. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 66. Henceforth cited as Prof. Debating the origin of the inter-relation between the ancient legal terms auctoritas and potestas, Agamben approaches the issue of the collusive nature of creation from a different angle, concluding: “Every creation is always a cocreation, just as every author is always a coauthor,” Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 76. Henceforth cited as SE. What Agamben defines as the pseudonymical nature of written selfenunciation, RA, 131–2. Pertinent to a later debate on the actual translation of the key term medio, here Heller-Roazen opts for “mean,” also my preference. De La Durantaye goes so far as to claim they are the same, a consonance I would be hesitant to endorse. AP, 13. Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Winterfield (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008), 344. Henceforth cited as R. “Philosophy of the letter” is the term used here for philosophers who use language merely as a transparent instrument without any regard for its presence as semiotic materiality or its mediality. In fact Plato does not simply “exclude poets” in a single gesture but whittles away at the representational and mimetic bases of the arts within 208

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Greek culture, primarily in an attempt to reject tragedy from the republic. This relentless degradation and attenuation of poiesis occurs in the fourth book of Republic, see R, 70–102. For a consideration of knowability and sayability in relation to desubjectivization, see RA, 123. The Aristotelian saying something about something, P, 107. Alexander García Düttmann, “Integral Actuality,” in IP, 1–28. For more on Agamben’s consideration of the logical aporia that “Discourse cannot say what is named by the name,” P, 107; see also “The Idea of the Name,” IP, 105; “Pseudonym,” CC, 59–62; and “Homonym,” CC, 71–8. See also Wall’s analysis RP, 131. For a consideration of pseudonym and homonym in literature see William Watkin, “Article: Ontological Whisperings,” WWB. Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 4–6. Henceforth cited as LAS. An excellent consideration of the messianic and the term integral actuality can be found in Irving Wohlfarth, “On the Messianic Structures of Walter Benjamin’s Last Reflections,” in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004), 169–231. See also Düttmann, IP, 11–13. Benjamin’s idea of a pure language finds an analogue in his conception of pure violence, which in turn defines the concept of the pure medium of mediality in SE, 60–1. For more on pure, divine violence see Anne De Boever, “Politics and Poetics of Divine Violence: On a Figure in Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin,” WGA, 84–8. For an insightful consideration of the origins of the Idea of Prose in the work of Benjamin, see Nicholas Heron, “Idea of Poetry, Idea of Prose,” WGA, 97–107. In a rare but central moment for Agamben scholarship, this definition of the Idea of Prose comes together with Agamben’s liberationist, post-juridical politics in final page of State of Exception: “To a word that does not bind . . . but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure means, which shows itself, without any relation to an end.” (SE, 88). Add into this Agamben’s definition of living in the category form-of-life as thinking as such (MWE, 11–12), and the three main strands of Agamben’s work, poetry, politics, and metaphysics come together. He also mentions this fragment in IP, 41 and again does not provide the citation. See MofP, where this argument is developed. For a sustained reading of this essay see Deborah Levitt, “Notes on Media and Biopolitics: ‘Notes on Gesture’,” WGA, 193–211. See Bruno Gulli, “The Ontology and Politics of Exception: Reflections on the Work of Giorgio Agamben,” SL, 241–2. The political implications of this occupy Means Without Ends (MWE, 117), revealing a parity between the political and literary Agamben that, unfortunately, I do not have space to develop here. 209

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NOTES 24

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In Means Without Ends Agamben defines “form of life” as the ontic prefigurement of the specific life you will lead in a self-consciously critical manner. The archetypal activity of authentic being, which he calls formof-life, is thought. Thought is not just another form of life but form-of-life as such: MWE, 9. It is indeed the origin of the political and its potential, liberating future destiny, MWE, 116–8. The gag comes to relate to later considerations of the use of the mask in drama which Agamben also defines as a gesture, MWE, 79. See also his comments on the Hegelian grund or ground in this regard in P, 110, as well as his description of the threshing floor of the ineffable as “a light, smooth glowing in which no point can be distinguished from any other” (P, 112). Giorgio Agamben, Idea della prosa (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2002), 21. See O, 83; and Giorgio Agamben, Ninfe (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008), 27–32. Henceforth cited as N. See Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze, Bartleby: La Formula della creazione (Macerata: Quodlibet, 1993). See Edkins SL, 72–3; and Marc Froment-Meurice, “A Sense of Loss: Whatever it May Be,” Para, 76. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 134–8, 248–1 & 309–10. Henceforth cited as BT. He speaks of potentiality in most of his major texts with major statements in CC, 35–8; P, 177–271; HS, 45–7 & TTR, 26–43. See Gulli, SL, 223; Alexander Cooke, “Resistance, Potentiality and Law: Deleuze and Agamben on ‘Bartleby’,” Angelaki 10, no. 3 (2005), 85; and Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 375–85. The final word however rests with Agamben and the relation of this, the ultimate statement of potentiality, to anaphora. Conceding the “to” refers to some act that preceded to which Bartleby refers, he notes: “But here it is as if this anaphora were absolutized to the point of losing all reference, now turning, so to speak, back toward the phrase itself— absolute anaphora, spinning on itself . . .” (P, 255). See also P, 231. For further deliberations on this conception of Genius, see Thanos Zartaloudis, “Soulblind, or On Profanation,” in WGA, 140–44.

CHAPTER 2 POIESIS, THINKING THROUGH MAKING 1

Poiesis, while a Greek word, has also entered into English via the OED which defines it as creative production as well as being a technical term in psychology for the formation of neologisms. This being the case, and because I am arguing for poiesis as a contemporary term covering issues around making as pro-duction into presence, I have decided not to italicize the term and so in effect neologise the very term for the formation of neologisms.

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Plato, Synposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntingdon Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 205b, 557. I consistently use the term modern here in the manner in which Agamben takes the term, and indeed many others. Ostensibly the modern epoch commences in the eighteenth century with the rise of Enlightenment rationalism and continues up to our present moment. Modern art would, therefore, encompass Romanticism and contemporary “postmodernity.” Thus Colebrook’s critique of Agamben’s theory of poiesis as both masculinist and theological is incorrect. See Claire Colebrook, “Agamben: Aesthetics, Potentiality, and Life,” SAQ, 110 & 115. As Agamben says most clearly in relation to the theological tradition of creation ex nihilo out of the void of the abyss: “the hardest thing in this experience is not the Nothing or its darkness . . . the hardest thing is being capable of annihilating this Nothing and letting something, from Nothing, be” (P, 253). The key term here is “letting,” as opposed to praxis or a willed doing. This is the basis of the thesis of Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vols. One and Two, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper One, 1991). Cited in Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9. See Derek H. Whitehead, “Poiesis and Art-Making: A Way of Letting-Be,” www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=216, accessed 17 September 2008. Heidegger famously and importantly differentiates an object which can be the party to subjective statements of knowledge and truth agreement from a thing which composes a phenomenological world around is being. See the essay “The Thing” in PLT, 165–86, especially the phenomenological thick description of jug-ness as thing, 172–3. See PLT, 95; and Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 19–20. Henceforth cited as HI. Charles Bernstein, Girly Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 57. We will find exactly the same structural model in terms of messianic temporality later on so that Potentiality = projective chronos, Actuality = recursive eschaton, and entelechy = chairatic interiorization. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (London: Picador, 1997), 44.

CHAPTER 3 MODERNITY, PRODUCTIVE ANTI-POIESIS 1

2

A solid overview of Agamben’s anti-modernity can be found in William Rasch, “From Sovereign Ban to Banning Sovereignty,” SL, 105–6. See TTR, 62–3, where Agamben makes clear that his messianic temporality and overall method is not eschatological, refuting a criticism often

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and misguidedly levelled at his work. See for example Andreas Kalyvas, “The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp,” PMD, 110–12. This I believe is Negri’s final criticism of Agamben in SL, 120–4, where he takes Agamben’s commitment to productive thought and declares it effectively fatalistic and unproductive. This debate can only be fully appreciated with reference to Agamben’s earlier consideration of “as” in the ontological mainstay “as such” as a form of anaphoric, tautological indication of the anaphoric act of indication as such. “As such” here names the relation itself of relation between denotation (semiotics) and meaning with such-ness being the exposition of as-ness as tensile relation. Such a process negates the age-old consideration of language as primarily metaphoric-symbolic, saying something as something, but of saying the suchness of as itself (CC, 97–100). See Wall, PMD, 31. Two of the most infamous analyses of literature in Agamben are his consideration of Kafka’s “Before the Law” in Homo Sacer and his reading of the work of Primo Levi in Remnants of Auschwitz. While both are important, they pertain more directly to the work around the Homo Sacer project which I have chosen not to dwell on in this study. I turn to the critical material around the Kafka story presently. For considerations of Agamben’s use of Levi, see Vogt, PMD, 74–106; Mills, “Linguistic Survival and Ethicality,” PMD, 198–221;, Paul Hegarty, “Supposing the Impossibility of Silence of Sound, of Voice: Bataille, Agamben and the Holocaust,” PMD, 222–47; David Fraser, “Dead Man Walking: Law and Ethics After Giorgio Agamben’s Auschwitz,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 12, no. 4 (1999), 397–417; Cohen, Para, 36–51; and Esther Norma Marion, “The Nazi Genocide and the Writing of the Holocaust Aporia: Ethics and Remnants of Auschwitz,” MLN 121, no. 4 (2006), 1009–22. See Marin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), 64. Henceforth cited as EHP. And Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister,’ trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 139 & 156. Badiou defines the century as defined by the violence of The Real in Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 19–20. Henceforth cited as C. Transmissibility is one of Agamben’s earliest, centrally important and, to my mind, most troublesome categories. In Potentialities cultural traditional transmissibility is founded first on linguistic transmissibility (communicability), P, 104. While in The Time That Remains it is asserted as the defining feature of tradition: “That which makes each history historical and each tradition transmissible is the unforgettable nucleus that both bear within themselves at their core” (TTR, 40). Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Selected Writings on Art & Artists, trans. P.E. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972), 403. Clearly a development of the idea of sacrifice in HS, 73–83.

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NOTES 12

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An early related analysis of the consumer object can be found in Stanzas where Agamben speaks of fetishism (ST, 31–5). See Jean-Luc Nancy, “Myth Interrupted,” trans. Peter Connor in The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 43–70. For an excellent recent study of this classic theme, see Sean Gaston, Derrida and Disinterest (London: Continuum, 2005). See Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), and The Decline of Modernism, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). See my own consideration of this issue in IPP, 19–34. See my own analysis of avant-garde manifestoes in IPP, 19–31 See Badiou, C, 55–7 for his comments on Malevich. Up until this point the most sustained engagement with the “literary” Agamben concerns his reading of Levi in Remnants and his of Kafka’s “Before the Law” in Homo Sacer. In this second reading, HS, 49–62 Agamben pits his reading against Derrida’s influential interpretation. Derrida’s reading of the same text is to be found in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 181–220. For considerations of the relationship between the two texts, see Simon Morgan Wortham, “Law of Friendship: Derrida and Agamben,” New Formations, 62 (2007), 89–105; Andrew Benjamin, “Spacing as Shared,” PMD, 146; and Mills, “Playing with Law,” SAQ, 18. Agamben’s most recent posting into this dossier is Giorgio Agamben, “K,” in WGA, 13–27. Glossing Hegel on philosophy after its end he speculates on “a humanity that, having fulfilled its past, is now truly prose (that is pro-versa, pro-verted, turned forward” (P, 135). See Vogt, PMD, 98. For a detailed analysis of Agamben’s theory of the museum, see William Watkin, “Article: Under Glass,” WWB. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 84–5; HS 40–4; and my own consideration of these issues in William Watkin, “Friendly Little Communities: Derrida’s Politics of Death,” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics 15, no. 2 (2002), 219–37. See Jürgen Habermas, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices,” Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 115–48. For Weller’s argument in this regard see LPN, 156.

CHAPTER 4 LOGOPOIESIS, THINKING TAUTOLOGY 1 2

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber, 1951), 36. See David Halliburton, Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

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NOTES 3 4

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See Colebrook, SAQ, 109, 111 & 117. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, John Keats, Selected Poems (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008), 177. This is a criticism levelled, unfairly I believe, by Froment-Meurice, Para, 85–6. All English quotes taken from Giacomo Leopardi, Giacomo Leopardi, trans. Jean-Pierre Barricelli (Boston: 1986),147–8, cited in LD, 75. For a consideration of Agamben’s contentious use of the paradigmatic example, see the first chapter of Signatura Rerum entitled “Che cos’è un paradigma?,” in Giorgio Agamben, Signatura rerum: Sul metodo (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008),11–134, which in part refutes the criticism of Agamben’s use of “extreme examples” such as one finds in Alison Ross, “Introduction,” SAQ, 3–4 and clarifies such issues as Norris’s exemplary examples, Norris, “The Exemplary Exception,” PMD, 274–6. I first came across the idea of the tabularity of poetic structure in Julia Kristeva, Σηµειωτιχη [Semiotike]: Recherches pour une Sémanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969). The English here, “thought conceives,” is misleading in relation to the Italian, “mi fingo,” which really means tricks me or feigns for me. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, trans. Jeff Fort (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 17–37.

CHAPTER 5 ENJAMBEMENT, THE TURN OF VERSE 1

2

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Agamben’s elegant formula for poetry is borrowed from Valéry via Jacobson and attributed by Heller-Roazen to Milner (Heller-Roazen, Para, 114). The self-same formula is also placed in a position of some prominence in Heidegger’s essay ‘Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven’ where Heidegger’s translator has him translating the Valéry dictum defining the poem: “Le poème: cette hésitation prolongée entre le sens et le son” (Paul Valéry, Oeuvres II, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris, 1960), 637), as “The poem—this prolonged lingering between sound and sense” (EHP, 176). Here “Heidegger” retains the caesuric and thetic nature of Valéry’s prose by translating prolongée in terms of the more suggestive “lingering,” allowing him to conclude: “the listening to the poem, and even the thinking which prepares such listening, lingers even longer than the poem itself. After all, such lingering has its own lofty resoluteness; it is no mere vacillation.” Lingering, of course, is a significant change to prolongation which suggests stretching as an act of willed extension. Lingering in comparison calls to mind an almost passive, thoughtless hanging around, not due to indecisiveness (vacillation) but an authentic desire to listen to poetry’s call. For a summary of the arguments, see Clemens, “The Role of the Shifter,”’ WGA, 50–1. For an introduction to some of these concepts see Heron, “Idea of Poetry, Idea of Prose,” WGA, 108–10.

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NOTES 4

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10 11 12

13 14 15

16

17

18

19

20 21

See Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct (London: Penguin, 1994), 158–91. Thomas Gray, Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981), 21 This useful term for the material space of the poem usually juxtaposed to e-space or virtual textual space is most often utilized in the work on contemporary poetics in the work of Johanna Drucker. See for example Johanna Drucker, “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to e-space,” http:// www.philobiblon.com/drucker/. For an indication as to how this technical prosodic effect could be interpolated into Agamben’s wider political analysis see his consideration of the hinge in “K,” WGA, 26. The essential bases of poetry, stress-unstress, enjambement, caesura, and rhyme are all dependent on an idea of duality which, however, does not come to view as double until a third element occurs to confirm this duality. This logic resembles in miniature the logic of the epoch and of messianic time in a quite remarkable and universal fashion. See Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” M, 29–69. See Johnson, SAQ, 266. For his initial conception of calling see BT, 269–80. See TTR, 117, 119 & 132; and Giorgio Agamben, Il sacramento del linguaggio: Archeologia del giuramento (Roma: GLF, 2008), 17–19, 35–6, 53–4 & 74–5. See Gulli, SL, 231. IPP, 203–6. It was the poets themselves who called this “retrogradatio cruciata . . . an alternation between inversion and progression” (TTR, 81–2). As one can see, therefore, the essence of poetic structure which is also the basis of our being able to claim that poetry “thinks” has been known for many centuries but had simply dropped out of common usage. Agamben uses the example of Bill Viola’s 1995 work “The Greeting,” he calls it Greetings, of which he says: “Ogni istante, ogni immagine anticipa virtualmente il suo svolgimento futuro e ricorda i suoi gesti precedenti” (N, 9–10). [Every instant, every image anticipates virtually its future unwinding and recalls its preceding gestures] Interestingly, while Agamben gives an example of the caesura he never provides examples of enjambement as such. See BT, 29 for the commencement of a career-long attack on aesthetics in Heidegger. It is typical of all logopoietic thinkers that their analysis of poetry depends on a core of significant examples covering a canon of logopoietic poets, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Rilke, Celan, yet in each case said reading works to develop what is effectively a quasi-universal or transcendental truth about poiesis as such. A useful consideration of silence can be found in Hegarty, PMD, 222–47. See William Watkin, “Poetry Machines: Repetition in the Early Poetry of Kenneth Koch,” EnterText 1, no. 1 (Dec. 2000), 83–117.

215

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NOTES 22

For by far the best and most penetrating explanation of spacing and the trace in Derrida, see Sean Gaston, Starting with Derrida (London: Continuum, 2007), 38–59. While I do not have space to deal with the trace in detail it should be obvious from my comments here and earlier in the text that the trace is not reducible either to time or space, but is the endless collapsing of the traditional metaphysical distinction between the two. Similarly, the trace is not synonymous with language, although for Agamben at least, Derrida’s conception of language is problematically ensconced within the differing and deferring logic of the trace.

CHAPTER 6 CAESURA, THE SPACE OF THOUGHT 1

2

3

4 5 6

7

8 9

10

11

The original Italian is as follows: ‘Io vado verso il fiume su un cavallo / che quando io penso un poco un poco egli si ferma’ (IP, 43). Here the hemistich in the second line breaks it into two clearly separate entities, before and after thought (penso), even if this is not marked grammatologically. For more on Italian versification, see Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov, A History of European Versification, trans. Gerald Stanton Smith and Marina Tarlinskaja (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 122–4. Alexander Pope, Selected Poetry (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008),106. Henceforth cited as SP. On the relation of this to the Benjaminian concept of the division of the division and the caesura, see Leland De La Durantaye, “The Suspended Substantive: On Animals and Men in Giorgio Agamben’s The Open,” Diacritics 33, no. 2 (2003), 7–9. See IPP, 200–6. See De Boever, WGA, 90–1. John Ashbery, A Wave (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), 14. Henceforth cited as W. What he names “a paraexistence or a paratranscendence that dwells beside the thing,” the presence of being to the side, CC, 101, which he also terms the halo, CC, 53–8. See also MWE, 69–70. For more on the gender implications of the appropriation of terms such as womb/khora, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Khōra,’ On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89–130; and, of course, Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25–30 and 239n11 (for her critique of Derrida). For a brilliant attack on the omnipresence of end-directed syllogism as an unquestioned and damaging convention of poetic and prosaic structural coherence, see Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof Books, 1987). For my own analysis see MofP, 355–8. For more on the right-hand margin in poetry, see Watkin, OM, 84–119.

216

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NOTES

RECURSION, THE TURN OF THINKING 1

2 3

For an analysis of poiesis in relation to modernity see Colebrook, SAQ, 108. Weller is in agreement, see LPN, 142. He refers, I believe, to my piece “‘Systematic rule-governed violations of convention’: The Poetics of Procedural Constraint in Ron Silliman’s BART and The Chinese Notebook,” Contemporary Literature 48, no. 4 (2007), 499–529, although I do not remember ever mentioning it. Could it be he knew of my work even before we met? It seems unlikely.

217

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INDEX

“K” 213.n.18, 215n.7 Language and Death 2, 8–9, 13, 20–2, 24, 37, 45–7, 59, 87, 125, 126–34, 204n.1, 204n.5, 205n.15, 213n.6 The Man Without Content 45–6, 71–2, 79–86, 91–7, 100–14, 149, 189–92, 203n.5 Means Without Ends 58, 204n.7, 209n.18, 209n.23, 209n.24, 209n.25, 210n.26, 216n.8 Ninfe 210n.29 The Open 5, 12–13, 169–71, 204n.9, 204n.12, 205n.15, 207n.32, 210n.29 Potentialities 43, 47–9, 54–64, 67, 122–4, 146, 205n.15, 206n.22, 208n.11, 209n.13, 210n.27, 210n.33, 210n.34, 210n.35, 211n.4, 212n.9, 212n.10, 213n.19 Profanations 41–3, 67–8, 98, 206n.2 Remnants of Auschwitz 26–32, 204n.12, 205n.15, 207n.31, 208n.1, 208n.4, 208n.10, 212n.6, 213n.18 Signatura rerum 213n.7 Stanzas 14–19, 32, 47, 141, 174–80, 205n.15, 206n.18, 212n.12 State of Exception 171, 206n.3, 209n.16, 209n.18

abyss between poetry philosophy 45–7, 196 as poetic spacing 137–8, 143–4, 158 actuality 43–4, 64–6, 81–3, 89, 113, 123, 211n.11 integral actuality 54–7, 209n.15 Adorno, Theodor 29, 89–90 aesthetics 16, 18, 45, 72, 83–4, 89, 91, 95, 100–9, 111, 133, 148–9, 157, 215n.18 Agamben, Giorgio Bartleby 210n.30 The Coming Community 63–6 180–2, 206n.29, 209n.13, 210n.33, 212n.4, 216n.7 The End of the Poem 32, 36–7, 48, 123, 135–9, 158, 163, 182–3, 187–8, 204n.5 Homo Sacer 1, 5, 124, 152, 171, 204n.12, 205n.15, 206n.19, 206n.21, 210n.33, 212n.6, 212n.10, 213n.18, 213n.22 Idea della prosa 210n.28 Idea of Prose 33–6, 54, 61–2, 139, 143, 161, 166–7, 205n.15, 209n.12, 209n.13, 209n.15, 209n.19, 216n.1 Il sacramento del linguaggio 215n.12 Infancy and History 4–5, 7–12, 25, 30, 47, 58–9, 92, 204n.2, 204n.5, 229

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Balzac, Honoré de 104 Bartleby 43, 63, 65–6, 122–4, 128, 210n.20, 210n.34 Baudelaire, Charles 95, 102, 212n.10 lieu commun 85, 95 Benjamin, Andrew 207n.42, 213n.18 Benjamin, Walter 9, 50, 54–5, 92–3, 98, 209n.15, 209n.17 Benveniste, Émile 23, 27–8, 147, 206n.30 Bernstein, Charles 78–9, 86, 211n.10 biopolitical 1, 181 bios 1, 3, 99, 107, 152, 168, 171, 207n.39 boustrophedonic 139–45, 178, 184 bringing forth 70, 73–5, 120–1 Browning, Robert 30, 207n.41 Buch, Robert 203n.4 Burger, Peter 103, 212n.15

Agamben, Giorgio (Cont’d) The Time That Remains 88–94, 146–54, 205n.15, 210n.33, 211n.2, 212n.9, 215n.12, 215n.15 Akhmatova, Anna 64–5, 122 aletheia (truth as unveiled or unconcealed) 28, 70–4, 87, 120, 156–7, 176 anaphora 21, 29, 146–7, 149, 153, 165, 206n.29, 210n.24, 211n.4 anaphora/cataphora matrix 21, 128, 133, 144, 146, 155, 193, 197, 200 animal 5–8, 10, 12–13, 20–5, 71, 98, 159, 161, 170, 204n.6, 204n.10, 207n.32, 207n.39 anti-poiesis 83–114, 132, 196 apotropaic 48–51, 105, 174–80 appropriation 7, 16, 31, 90, 98, 117, 119, 122, 132, 175, 197 arche (authentic origin) 49–50, 79, 83–6 arche-presence 86, 134, 145 Aristotle 17, 43–5, 58, 60, 62–6, 73, 79, 81–2, 86, 150, 189–92 Arnaut, Daniel 154, 187 artist 16, 64, 68–9, 71–6, 83–6, 95, 100–14 as if 88–94, 102, 137, 146, 149 as not 68, 82 Ho¯s me¯ 88–94, 144–9, 152 Ashbery, John 102, 154, 178–9, 216n.6 Attridge, Derek 213n.18 aura 92–7, 108

caesura 13–14, 16, 18, 98, 142, 150, 152, 157, 159, 161, 163, 166–93, 197, 199, 201, 215n.8, 215n.17, 216n.3 Calarco, Matthew 204n.9 Caton, Steven 206n.19 Celan 33–4, 215n.19 Clemens, Justin 204n.4, 214n.2 Cohen, Josh 208n.44, 212n.6 Colebrook, Claire 211n.4, 213n.3, 216n.1 communicability 6, 48–51, 53–7, 59–60, 63–5, 94, 135, 164, 212n.9 Cooke, Alexander 210n.34 corn (tip/corner) 186–8 couplet 130, 168–72 creation 16, 27, 41–4, 64, 66, 69, 70–4, 79–91, 95, 97, 101–2, 106, 108, 110–13, 138, 206n.3, 210n.1, 211n.4 criticism 16, 92, 103, 109, 111, 146–7

Badiou, Alain 29, 31, 57, 76, 77, 91, 106, 118, 125, 131, 132, 157, 165, 189, 196, 207n.38, 208n.43, 211n.9, 212n.8, 213n.17 Bakhtin, M. M. 206n.26 230

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enunciation 6, 23–5, 27, 29–32, 106, 208n.4 epoch 53, 87–8, 94, 96–7, 107, 113, 145–6, 149–50, 152–3, 191–2, 205n.16, 215n.8 event 24, 29, 31, 33, 37, 46, 106, 109, 126–7, 129, 131, 134, 145, 147, 150, 156, 165, 170, 173–4, 182, 187, 191 ex nihilo (creation) 69, 73, 112, 211n.4 experience 4, 6, 8–13, 15, 22, 24–37, 45–8, 53–4, 56–7, 67, 92, 94–7, 106, 123, 127–8, 130, 182, 192, 195 expropriation 31, 97, 117, 132

Damascius 61–2, 122 Dante 32, 35, 123, 182–3, 186 Davis, Colin 205n.12 De Boever, Anne 209n.16, 216n.5 De La Durantaye, Leland 208n.6, 208n.46, 216n.3 deixis 20–3, 26–7, 29–31, 43, 60, 79, 86, 88, 125–6, 128, 146, 149, 206n.24, 206n.29 Deranty, Jean-Philippe 203n.4 Derrida, Jacques 12, 13, 19, 24–5, 29, 31, 53, 57, 118, 131, 141, 157, 162, 164–5, 180–1, 196, 203n.4, 205n.15, 205n.17, 207n.33, 207n.34, 208n.18, 213n.18, 215n.9, 215n.22, 216n.9 desubjectivization 23–32, 42, 46, 64–5, 67–8, 76, 85, 88–90, 106–13, 123, 134, 137, 147, 181, 195, 199, 203n.5, 206n.21, 208n.1, 208n.10 dictation 28, 30, 32–8, 42, 47–8, 54, 57, 67, 88, 106, 126, 128–9, 132, 196 différance 13, 19, 141 Dillon, Andrew 204n.3 disinterest 101–3, 105, 107, 109, 212n.14 Docherty, Thomas 205n.14 Duchamp, Marcel 67, 93, 105, 106 Drucker, Johanna 214n.6 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 206n.24 Düttmann, Alexander García 50, 62, 209n.12, 209n.15

fiction 89–90, 127, 146 figural 148–53, 164 finitude 20, 25, 53, 77–9, 82–3, 96, 130, 135, 137–8, 153, 156, 158–60, 165, 168, 170, 172–3, 179, 185, 193, 199, 201 form-of-life 58, 124, 209n.18, 209n.24 Formis, Barbara 206n.19 Foucault, Michel 41, 42, 208n.1 framing (parergon, gestell) 78, 80–1, 121, 144, 159, 173, 185, 198 Fraser, David 212n.6 Froment-Meurice, Marc 210n.31, 213n.5 gag 59–60, 210n.26 Gasparov, Mikhail Leonovich 216n.1 Gaston, Sean 205n.15, 212n.14, 215n.32 genius 67–9, 72, 111–13, 125, 210n.36 gesture 20, 41–3, 47, 58–65, 67–8, 88, 106, 126, 145, 160, 210n.26

Eaglestone, Robert 207n.42 ease 180–5, 188 Edkins, Jenny 203n.2, 210n.31 enigma 176–80 enjambement 14, 51, 135–66, 168–75, 178, 186, 188, 192, 197, 199, 215n.8, 215n.17 entelechy 81–3, 98, 191, 192, 211n.11 231

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hesitation 156–8, 161–2, 165, 174, 214n.1 history 8. 12, 54–7, 94, 96, 212n.9 Hölderlin 47, 77, 102, 190, 198–9, 214n.1, 215n.19 human 5–15, 20, 22–6, 28, 37, 38, 52–4, 59–60, 71, 75, 77, 87, 90, 98, 100, 113, 133, 141, 148, 159, 161, 169–70, 191–2, 199, 201, 204n.6, 207n.32, 207n.39

glossolalia (babble, Babel) 29–31, 55, 178, 207n.36, 207n.39 Godzich, Wlad and Jeffrey Kittay 20, 138, 206n.25, 206n.27 Gould, Glenn 65–6, 122 gramma (grammatology) 140–1, 143–5, 162, 170, 179, 201, 206n.22, 216n.1 Gray, Thomas 141 Guillaume, Gustave 151 Gulli, Bruno 209n.22, 210n.34, 215n.13

Ideal Form (eidos) 80–6, 178, 190 impersonality 30, 32, 37, 67, 125 see also desubjectivization and dictation indifference 17, 19, 37–8, 46, 57, 63, 108, 113, 117, 145, 147, 155, 157, 194–5 indistinction 1, 17, 38, 124, 136, 152, 170 see also indifference ineffable 9–13, 20, 22, 25, 33, 36, 50, 63, 210n.27 infancy 6–17, 20, 22, 25–6, 30, 34, 36, 161 inspiration 32, 35–8, 67, 133–4, 167, 195 integral actuality 54–5, 57, 209n.15

Habermas, Jürgen 109 habit 129–34, 204n.8 Halliburton, David 119 harmonia 47, 174 having see habit and appropriation Hegarty, Paul 212n.6, 215n.20 Hegel, G. W. F. 18, 20–3, 45, 60, 99, 101, 107–13, 125–6, 138, 210n.27, 213n.19 Heidegger, Martin 12–14, 20–3, 30, 35, 47, 51, 54, 57, 63, 70–9, 87, 118–25, 131–2, 134, 157, 165, 196–9, 204n.11, 205n.15, 205n.16, 205n.17, 210n.32, 211n.4, 211n.8, 212n.7, 214n.1, 215n.18 Being and Time 22, 120, 135, 197, 205n.16, 210n.32 Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ 198–9, 212n.7 On the Way to Language 122, 205n.16 Poetry, Language, Thought 70, 73, 74, 122, 146, 205n.16, 211n.8, 211n.9 The Question Concerning Technology 12, 70, 73, 76, 77, 121, 198, 204n.11 Heraclitus 47, 174–5 Heron, Nicholas 209n.17, 214n.3

Johnson, David E. 205n.15, 215n.10 judgement 11, 16, 77, 79, 99–101, 107–12, 120, 146 Kafka, Franz 106, 212n.6, 213n.18 Kalyvas, Andreas 211n.2 Kant, Immanuel 9, 58, 77, 80, 86, 99, 100–1, 107–11 Kaufman, Eleanor 203n.1, 203n.4 Keats, John 26–7, 124 Kiesow, Rainer Maria 203n.1 kle¯ sis 88–9, 145–8, 151, 153, 181 Kommerell, Max 47, 59–60 Kristeva, Julia 214n.8, 216n.9 232

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messianism 16, 54, 57, 82–3, 88–93, 102–3, 144–56, 158, 160, 165, 169, 171–5, 184, 191, 199, 204n.12, 209n.15, 211n.2, 211n.11, 215n.8 Mills, Catherine 26, 203n.1, 204n.8, 204n.12, 204n.15, 207n.42, 208n.44, 212n.6, 213n.18 Milton, John 169, 174 modern art 46, 76–9, 82, 85–6, 89, 92–4, 96–8, 101–14, 210n.3 modernity 1, 10, 16, 47, 69, 80, 83–116, 145, 149, 153, 191, 196, 210n.3, 211n.1, 216n.1 Morgan Wortham, Simon 213n.18 morphe 79–81 Murray, Alex 205n.13 Muse 27, 30, 32, 35–6, 67, 129–34 museum 78, 103, 107, 196, 213n.21 Musil, Robert 83

LaCapra, Dominick 203n.1 Laclau, Ernesto 203n.1 Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe 29, 118, 132, 214n.10 language experience of 10–11, 15, 26, 33, 35–7, 45–6, 48, 56, 67, 128, 195 experimentum linguae 4, 6 as medium 53, 55–66, 122, 128, 144, 145, 160, 193, 195–7, 200, 209n.16 that there is 4–40, 54, 122 thing of thought as such 49–50, 63, 135, 196 Leopardi, Giacomo “L’infinito” 124–34, 179 Levitt, Deborah 209n.21 life 1–2, 8, 12, 25, 36–8, 57–8, 72, 91, 103–4, 123–4, 169–71, 196, 201, 204n.6, 208n.48, 209n.18, 209n.24 logopoiesis 77, 117–34, 144–6, 153, 155, 157, 167, 173, 176–7, 179–80, 188–9, 193, 197, 199–201, 215n.19 logos 8, 11, 13, 17, 22, 28, 41–68, 118–21, 129, 136, 141, 148, 166, 179 love 14, 32, 35–7, 45, 99, 182–5, 208n.45 Lovitt, William 204n.11 Lyons, John 206n.24 Lyotard, Jean-François 52, 110

name 9–10, 21, 49–52, 55, 63, 131, 160, 167, 179, 209n.13 Nancy, Jean-Luc 29, 57, 74, 76, 99, 118, 157, 196, 212n.13, 213n.22 negation/negativity 2–3, 6, 8, 9, 16–17, 20–3, 44–6, 50–1, 76, 117, 129, 133–4, 136, 169–70, 198–9 and modernity 85, 88, 89, 91, 106, 107–14, 196, and subjectivity 25–8, 64–7, 89, 90, 147, 195 Negri, Antonio 2, 6, 203n.2, 203n.3, 211n.3 Nietzsche, Friedrich 42, 69, 72–3, 90, 92, 100–3, 106–7, 113, 125, 128, 206n.20, 211n.5 nihilism 3, 16, 20, 25, 45–7, 53, 65, 87–91, 103, 114, 117, 128–9, 145, 155, 157, 167, 195–6, 206n.20

Malevich 106, 213n.17 Mallarmé, Stéphane 58, 67, 105, 183, 215n.19 Marion, Esther Norma 212n.6 Matisse, Henri “Back” 76 McQuillan, Colin 203n.2 measure 97, 108–9, 11, 131–4, 143, 166, 174 233

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poiesis 3, 5, 27, 35, 58–60, 69–87, 91, 103–8, 113, 114, 117–18, 120–1, 129, 132, 138, 144–5, 149, 157, 163, 191–3, 195–7, 206n.27, 208n.9, 210n.1, 211n.4, 215n.19, 216n.1 anti- 87–116 pop art 85, 93 Pope, Alexander 168–72 potential 13, 30–1, 33, 43–4, 55, 58–9, 61, 63–8, 79, 81–3, 88–92, 94, 106, 112, 123–4, 129–31, 134, 137–40, 145–6, 151, 163, 175, 181, 188, 191, 210n.33, 210n.34, 211n.11 Pound, Ezra 102, 213n.1 praxis 58, 71–5, 96, 98, 144, 192, 211n.4 presupposition 9, 24, 28, 43, 49–57, 120, 169 production 58, 71–2, 74–5, 79–81, 86, 102, 121, 210n.1 prose 15, 20–1, 32, 34–5, 44, 48, 60, 107–9, 126, 128–9, 133, 137–43, 160, 162, 167, 184, 186, 206n.25, 206n.27, 213n.19, 214n.1, 214n.3 Idea of 54–7, 62–3, 122, 145, 166, 175, 191, 209n.17, 209n.18

Norris, Andrew 214n.7 Noys, Benjamin 203n.1 ontology 5–6, 8, 12–13, 21, 23–8, 32, 37, 42–6, 50, 52, 63–4, 67, 72, 79, 87–90, 113–14, 117–18, 124, 130, 137, 141, 145, 154, 156, 169–70, 178–9, 195, 198–9, 204n.6, 205n.16, 207n.39, 207n.40, 211n.4 Pacman 159 parable 148–9, 152 passivity 30, 63–6, 71–3, 100, 207n.40, 214n.1 Paul 29, 31, 88, 90, 146–9, 152–3 periplus 132–3, 198–9 philology 2, 17, 28, 47, 49, 51, 79, 81, 88, 104–5, 125, 146, 153, 186 phone 8, 11, 13, 17, 22, 28, 29, 136, 140–1, 144–5, 170, 179 Pinker, Stephen 214n.4 Plato 14, 17, 44–5, 48–9, 51, 53, 69, 86, 99, 101–2, 132–4, 144, 208n.9 poetry advent 126–33, 167, 170, 173 end of 135–9, 155–62, 164–5, 167, 173, 178, 184–7, line 79, 83, 129, 135, 137–46, 154–74, 178–9, 183–92, 195, 197, 201 metrical-musical element (poetry) 128, 153, 172, 192 poem body 44, 79, 138, 156, 159–60, 170, 173 poetry and philosophy 14, 44–8, 58, 60, 62, 128–9, 132, 180, 195–6 planar 128, 133, 139, 140, 142–4, 155, 163–4, 172, 183, 193, 197, 200–1 recursive-projection 21, 97, 122, 134, 144, 169, 192–3, 197, 200, 211n.11

Rasch, William 211n.1 razo de trobar 32, 35–7, 45, 127, 171, 208n.47 ready-made 85, 93 reproducibility 84–6, 92–8 revelation 52–3 rhetorician 104–6 rhyme 14, 130, 137, 143, 153–5, 168–9, 172, 186–8, 193, 215n.8 Rimbaud, Arthur 26–7, 67, 105–6, 113 234

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Romanticism 69, 71, 113, 208n.47, 210n.3 Royle, Nicholas 203n.5

state of exception 1 Stiegler, Bernard 211n.6 stil novist 14, 182

Saussure, Ferdinand de 17, 24, 27 scission 2, 6, 11, 13–19, 22–3, 30, 46, 55, 57, 83, 97–9, 108–9, 111–12, 117, 133–4, 136, 149, 169, 70, 173, 194 semantic 27–9, 31, 56, 60, 109, 136–44, 158–64, 167–72, 178–88, 199 semiotic 6, 19, 23, 26–32, 34, 48, 53, 56, 60, 106, 127–9, 136–43, 154, 156, 158, 160–9, 172–4, 177–80, 184–9, 195, 197, 199–201, 208n.46, 212n.4 sestina 154–5, 187 shock 94–7, 107–8 sign 17–22, 27–8, 32, 46, 105–6, 133, 141, 149, 161, 167, 170, 175–9, 184 silence 8, 12, 21, 32–3, 54, 57, 59, 105–6, 125–8, 133, 145, 155–62, 164–5, 167, 173–5, 178–9, 185, 199, 215n.20 Silliman, Ron 206n.27, 216n.3, 216n.10 singularity 5, 9, 28, 43, 63–4, 77, 85, 93–7, 99, 122, 125, 127, 131, 134–5, 157–8, 160, 162, 181–3, 188, 192, 194, 196, 199 sovereignty 1–2, 30, 99, 131–2, 206n.21, 207n.39 space 14, 17, 20, 28, 32, 35, 61, 72, 80, 84, 97–8, 125, 127, 131, 135, 137–8, 140, 142, 144–5, 149, 150, 159–60, 166–93, 197, 201, 214n.6 Spinks, Lee 205n.12, 206n.19 stanza 13–17, 19, 28, 32, 35–7, 46, 133, 143, 150, 154, 171, 179, 184–8, 196

tablet 44, 60–8, 122, 124, 138, 160, 185 tabular 64, 128, 130, 133, 140, 144, 149, 155–6, 169, 172, 188, 193, 197, 199–201, 214n.8 taste 99–103, 110–11 tautegorical 52, 110–11, 122, 124, 146–7, 151 tautology 6, 117–34, 146, 197, 199, 200, 211n.4 techne 73–86, 121 tension 35, 47–8, 63, 65, 67, 83, 117–18, 136–9, 142, 144, 149, 152–65, 169, 171–2, 174–5, 178–9, 184, 186–7, 197, 201, 212n.4 terror 99–106 thing, art 75–7 thing as such of thought 49, 51–2, 55–6, 120–1, 174 Thurschwell, Adam 203n.4, 205n.15, 207n.42 time/temporality chronos 145, 149, 150–4, 165, 172, 211n.11 ergon 158–60, 173 eschaton 88, 149–50, 153, 155, 165, 172, 211n.11 kairos 145, 149–53 linear time 87, 150, 154, 192 operational time 150–3, 163 and space 20, 80, 97, 127, 131, 188, 192, 201 tone/tonos 163–4 transmissibility 30, 48, 56–7, 75, 77–8, 84, 92, 94–104, 108, 114, 131, 212n.9 Troubador 14–17, 32, 37, 45–6, 125, 182, 186 turn see enjambment and verse 235

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208n.47, 209n.13, 213n.21, 215n.21, 216n.11 Weller, Shane 206n.20, 216n.2 whatever (quodlibet) 63–5 Whitehead, Derek H. 211n.7 Wohlfarth, Irving 209n.15 Wolfreys, Julian 208n.45 work see praxis and entelechy writer’s block 67–8

uncanny 2, 103, 177, 179, 199, 205n.5 Valéry, Paul 56, 214n.1 van Gogh, Vincent 70, 75, 82, 102 Varro 58 verse as versus 128–34, 135–65, 168, 178, 186, 199, 201 Vogt, Erik 203n.1, 208n.44, 212n.6, 213n.20 voice 3–8, 12, 21–5, 28, 30, 33, 45–8, 59, 125, 128, 133, 140–4, 157–8, 166–7, 173–5, 204n.10

xenoglossia 29–30, 207n.39 Zartaloudis, Thanos 210n.36 Ziarek, Krzysztof 205n.15 Zizek, Slavoj 210n.34 zoe 1, 152, 171, 207n.39 zoon logon echon 5, 7, 8

Wall, Thomas Carl 207n.37, 212n.5 Walser, Robert 122 Warhol, Andy 93 Watkin, William 204n.10, 206n.24, 206n.27, 207n.33, 207n.36,

236

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