Opening of the final chapter of my book Agamben and Indifference dealing with language in The Sacrament of Language.
One of the earliest
pieces of important Agamben criticism, Düttman’s introduction to Idea of Prose, attempts to delineate the
key element of language for Agamben’s thought: communicability. Düttman
concentrates on the Benjamin source for the term, specifically the idea that
communicability communicates nothing other than language’s capacity to
communicate. It does this only through
its praxis or act, its contingency, context, operativity and intelligibility. Yet, at no point can language communicate
its communicability it can only demonstrate it through its being a communicable
medium or process. This relates to
Agamben’s interest in the Russell-Frege paradox of statement self-predication
although as we shall see an important element of communicability is that it
concerns compound linguistic series, not individual words. Perhaps at this stage we should progress
through an admission of failure. In my own extended comments on communicability
in my earlier work, while I approached this quality and delineated some of its
aspects, I did not arrive at a state of clarity in terms of its definition. I am certainly to blame for this lack of
clarity and so many other dark obfuscations.
Having said that with the publication of The Sacrament of Language, The
Kingdom and the Glory and The
Signature of All Things it is now increasingly impossible not to be clear
over what Agamben takes to be language’s primary characteristic: its
communicability defined in terms of its intelligibility or its
operativity. It has been a long road for
many of us to this refuge point, itself only the gate to a whole new territory
for which we remain woefully ill-equipped and with little to guide us beyond
sketches on the backs of match-books, outlandish stories from the mouths of the
mad, that sort of thing.
Tags: philosophy of language, Agamben, Sacrament of Language, Communicability
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