What is Philosophy?
Agamben’s Reflections on Language: A Reconstruction
Language presupposes being. When we speak, an ontology is already given. There is a powerful sense in which language does not possess a history, for history is written through language. History presupposes language and language presupposes being, but to presuppose being means something very different, because being can never presuppose anything. That which presupposes being has no origin.
So there is something about language that is already done. We are faced with an insurmountable paradox. On the one hand language is self-limiting as it can posit itself as an object of investigation, creating the illusion that it is an object bounded by space and time i.e. by history and its concrete manifestations in various sounds, noises, utterances, speech acts or performatives. On the other hand, the phonetic element of language could never explain meaning.
A certain linguistic idealism is always available, we can always “reside within” language and speak of reality as a construct. There is a sense in which one cannot argue that at one point there was no language, but then language came about. What was reality like before language? Can you explain without using language? So the reverse is also true; if language presupposes being, then being presupposes language. We are never outside of language.
We like to speak of language as distinct from the world. We like to think of logic, grammar and even mathematics as a grid or a net that is tossed over reality in order to name it, label it, measure it or otherwise make it meaningful. But what happens if we remove the linguistic veil? What are we left with really? Being without language? What’s that like? …*Silence*
“Being is not presupposed because it is always already given to us in a sort of prelinguistic intuition; rather, it is language that is articulated — or split — in such a way that it has always already encountered and presupposed in the name the being that is given to it. In other words, … … the very form of intentionality, of the relation between being and language” confirms Agamben.
The point is not to argue that “there is nothing outside of language”, and there really isn’t just one point that either us or Agamben are trying to make. “The point” is to uncover an interesting mystery, which lies within the pure immanence of our lived experience. In order to act as an effective medium, language must remain invisible. The moment we begin to posit language itself as an object of investigation (for language), we are caught in a linguistic-solipsistic nightmare. It’s really like being trapped inside a mathematical equation.
Wittgenstein once noted that the human language is no less complicated than the human body. We could take this further and state that every language is a condensed manifestation of the entire cultural, historical, socio-economic and political reality of a given society. And even further, the complexity of language in general, that is, all real existing as well as possible and fictional languages would reflect the complexity of the universe. Language operates as a crystal ball located at the very center of reality, mirroring being as such.
“at a certain point — coinciding with anthropogenesis — the primate of the genus homo became aware of having a language [lingua], that is, he separated it from himself and exteriorized it out of himself as an object, and then began to consider, analyze, and elaborate it in an incessant process — in which philosophy, grammar, logic, psychology, and computer science followed one another with many twists and turns — a process that has perhaps not yet been accomplished” continues Agamben.
Agamben makes an interesting point when he separates the phonetic from the semantic. The former pertaining to the animal kingdom and the latter to the human. Language in its complex human manifestation is simultaneously the most unnatural and also the most abundant with life. As though the individuation of the linguistic form through its properly human dimension, that is, the fetishization of the medium of communication and its separation from its purely practical dimension has uncovered something that is concentrated; an intensification of being.
A term analogous to the phoneme is Agamben’s concept of a voice. The voice belongs to the material aspect of communication. The voice does not necessarily contain a language, it may be a pure voice devoid of meaning; like a foreign language that sounds like gibberish. Agamben refers to Aristotle, citing the following passage: “[voice is] the sound produced by a creature possessing a soul”. And again: “As we have said, not every sound made by a living creature is a voice (for one can make a sound even with the tongue, or as in coughing), but that which even causes the impact, must have a soul, and use some imagination (μετὰ φαντασίας τινός). For the voice is a signifying sound (σημαντικὸς ψόφος)”.
But what turns an animal voice into a signifying language? Letters. Letters somehow point to the affections of the soul which testify to the complexity, the imaginativeness and the strange creative structure pertaining to human communication. But by “letters” Aristotle also refers to the complexity of the human orifice; the mouth, the teeth, the lips, tongue and cheeks that allow for nuanced articulations of vowels and consonants. The incredibly subtle inflections that can be produced, initially at the phonetic, audible and material levels, later to be mirrored at the semantic, abstract and syntactic level of meaning. These two levels of utterings are referred to in Greek, respectively as Φωνή and λόγος.
“the animal voice and human language are distinct, but coincide locally in man, in the sense that language is produced through an “articulation” of the voice, which is nothing else than the inscription of letters (γράμματα) in it, whereby letters are entrusted with the privileged status of being, at the same time, signs and elements (στοιχεῖα) of the voice (in this sense, the letter is an index of itself, index sui)” reads Agamben. Our language is therefore ϕωνὴ ἐγγράμματος, a “grammarized voice” so to speak. An animal language that was “operated on” by the divine element of the Logos.
