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Homo Sacer #II.3
Das Sakrament der Sprache: Eine Archäologie des Eides
Dem Eid kommt als" Sakrament der Macht"in der Geschichte der abendländischen Politik und Religion eine grundlegende Rolle zu. Dennoch fehlt - ungeachtet zahlreicher linguistischer, anthropologischer und historischer Studien - ein all diese Aspekte umfassender Versuch, den systematisch-strategischen Ort zu bestimmen, den die Institution des Eides am Schnittpunkt von Recht, Religion und Politik einnimmt. Hier setzt Giorgio Agamben mit seiner" Archäologie des Eides"an - und trifft mitten ins Zentrum der Existenz des Menschen als sprechendes sowie als politisches Tier. Im Rückgriff auf griechische und römische Quellen stellt Agamben den Konnex her zwischen dem Eid einerseits und archaischer Gesetzgebung, Fluch und Götternamen andererseits. Dabei gewinnt er eine völlig neuartige Perspektive auf den Ursprung des Eides: Der Eid wird zum entscheidenden Moment in der Anthropogenese; als Sakrament der Macht hat er sich etablieren können, weil er zuallererst das Sakrament der Sprache ist. Indem sich der Mensch als sprechendes Wesen entdeckt, bindet er sich auch an die Sprache und setzt in ihr sein Schicksal aufs Spiel.
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Published August 16, 2010
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About the author
Giorgio Agamben
235 books982 followersGiorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.
In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.
He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.
In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.
He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.
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March 20, 2017
Part IIII of author’s Homo Sacer project.
This is a “philosophical archaeology of the oath” (2), beginning with Lycurgus’ thesis that “the power that holds together our democracy is the oath” (id.).
Author's "hypothesis is that the enigmatic institution, both juridical and religious, that we designate with the term oath can only be made intelligible if it is situated within a perspective in which it calls into question the very nature of man as a speaking being and a political animal" (11).
Adopts Gernet's notion of 'prelaw,' "an originary phase in which law and religion appear to be indiscernible" (16), which is consistent with Prodi's notion of a "'primordial indistinction' in which the process of separation between religion and politics has not yet begun" (id.), laying, apparently, in Dumezil's "fringe of ultra-history," "the terra incognita that lies beyond the area that the patient labor of historians is able to define" (id.).
The old Roman significance is "as a promissory formula of an undoubtedly juridical character" (18). Noting that "the Romans considered the sphere of the sacred as an integral part of law" (19), author notes that "perhaps our entire habitual way of representing to ourselves the chronological and conceptual relationship between law and religion must be revised" (id.).
Readings thereafter in Philo, Cicero, Kant, and so on. Works with Dumezil's thesis that "the fides, which assumed an important role in public and private life, was divinized" in monarchist Rome (27): Fides "thus became a goddess" and "as in the case of Deus Fidius, of whom it is disputed whether he is in origin distinct from Jove, and who, like Mitra, was a sort of 'personified contract,' here religion does not precede the law but rather follows it" (id.).
"The oath represents precisely the threshold by means of which language enters into law and religio" (28).
Ancient writers tend to view "the oath as a form of sacratio (or devotio, another institution with which consecration tends to be confused). In both cases a man was rendered sacer, that is, consecrated to the gods and excluded from the world of men" (29).
The Oath as sacramentum, "an act done with the sanction of oath" (30), implying "the notion of making sacer" (id.). The perjurer as substantially identical to sacer (id.).
Ancient Greek horkos (i.e., oath) as requiring three elements: "an affirmation, the invocation of the gods as witnesses, and a curse directed at perjury" (31). Cites Hesiod for the ancient proposition that the oath is primarily intended to punish perjury.
Invocation of gods as basically universal in the ancient sources: "Ammonius thus distinguishes the oath from the assertion (apophansis) by means of 'the testimony of the god' [...] oath, according to this endlessly repeated doctrine, is an affirmation to which divine testimony is added" (32).
Plenty about Pindar and horkos martys (oath witness). Notes the "double valence (benediction and malediction) of the divine names in oaths and perjury" (38). (cf. Volume VII's destituent reading the witness, however.)
Freud's thesis has blasphemy as "the interdiction of the name of God holds in check one of the most intense desires of man: that of profaning the sacred" (40). But: "One blasphemes the name of God, because all that God possesses is his name" (id.). We see that "the formula for imprecation is identical to that of the oath" (id.), and that "Blasphemy is an oath, in which the name of god is extracted from the assertorial or promissory context and uttered in itself, in vain, independently of a semantic context" (id.).
Lotsa stuff on names and nominatives, leading up to the point that "Every oath swears on the name par excellence, that is on the name of God, because the oath is the experience of language that treats all of language as a proper name. Pure existence--the existence of the name--is not the result of a recognition, not of a logical deduction; it is something that cannot be signified but only sworn, that is, affirmed as a name. The certainty of faith is the certainty of the name" (53).
Proposes that the model of truth "is not that of the adequation between words and things but the performative one in which speech unfailingly actualizes its meaning. Just as, in the state of exception, the law suspends its own application only to found, in this way, its being in force, so in the performative, language suspends its denotation precisely and solely to found its existential connection with things" (56). Locates the completion of ontology in "the name of God withdrawing from language--and this is what has happened beginning from the event that has been called the 'death of God'" (id.).
Plenty more. Likely not the most effective of the Homo Sacer series, but damned interesting. As usual, much attention to detail in classical and medieval sources.
As it turns out, Horkos "is, in the classical world, the most ancient being, the sole potency to which the gods are submitted for punishment" (65).
Some findings: "The attempt to reconcile faith as the performative experience of a veridiction with belief in a series of dogmas of an assertive type is the task and, at the same time, the central contradiction of the Church, which obliges it, against the clear evangelical command, to technicalize oath and curses in specific juridical institutions" (66).
"The interpretation of sacertas as an originary performance of power through the production of a killable and unsacrificeable bare life must be completed in the sense that, even before being a sacrament of power, the oath is a consecration of the living human being through the word of the word" (id.).
"Philosophy begins in the moment in which the speaker, against the religio of the formula, resolutely puts in questions the primacy of names, when Heraclitus opposes logos to epea, discourse to the uncertain and contradictory words that constitute it, or when Plato, in the Cratylus, renounces the idea of an exact correspondence between the name and the thing named, and, at the same time, draws together onomastics and legislation, an experience of logos and politics. Philosophy is, in this sense, constitutively a critique of the oath: that is, it puts into question the sacramental bond that links human being to language" (72). Notes that philosophy has a role when "politics can only assume the form of an oikonomia, that is, of a governance of empty speech over bare life" (id.), which points us ahead to part V.
Recommended for those whose sacred substance variously embodies the waters of the Styx, the scepter of the hero, and the entrails of the sacrificial victim, persons who do not observe the oats of pirates as hostes omnium, and readers whose perjury is not merely more or less punishable but must therefor be accused of lese majeste for violation of the numen of Augustus.
This is a “philosophical archaeology of the oath” (2), beginning with Lycurgus’ thesis that “the power that holds together our democracy is the oath” (id.).
Author's "hypothesis is that the enigmatic institution, both juridical and religious, that we designate with the term oath can only be made intelligible if it is situated within a perspective in which it calls into question the very nature of man as a speaking being and a political animal" (11).
Adopts Gernet's notion of 'prelaw,' "an originary phase in which law and religion appear to be indiscernible" (16), which is consistent with Prodi's notion of a "'primordial indistinction' in which the process of separation between religion and politics has not yet begun" (id.), laying, apparently, in Dumezil's "fringe of ultra-history," "the terra incognita that lies beyond the area that the patient labor of historians is able to define" (id.).
The old Roman significance is "as a promissory formula of an undoubtedly juridical character" (18). Noting that "the Romans considered the sphere of the sacred as an integral part of law" (19), author notes that "perhaps our entire habitual way of representing to ourselves the chronological and conceptual relationship between law and religion must be revised" (id.).
Readings thereafter in Philo, Cicero, Kant, and so on. Works with Dumezil's thesis that "the fides, which assumed an important role in public and private life, was divinized" in monarchist Rome (27): Fides "thus became a goddess" and "as in the case of Deus Fidius, of whom it is disputed whether he is in origin distinct from Jove, and who, like Mitra, was a sort of 'personified contract,' here religion does not precede the law but rather follows it" (id.).
"The oath represents precisely the threshold by means of which language enters into law and religio" (28).
Ancient writers tend to view "the oath as a form of sacratio (or devotio, another institution with which consecration tends to be confused). In both cases a man was rendered sacer, that is, consecrated to the gods and excluded from the world of men" (29).
The Oath as sacramentum, "an act done with the sanction of oath" (30), implying "the notion of making sacer" (id.). The perjurer as substantially identical to sacer (id.).
Ancient Greek horkos (i.e., oath) as requiring three elements: "an affirmation, the invocation of the gods as witnesses, and a curse directed at perjury" (31). Cites Hesiod for the ancient proposition that the oath is primarily intended to punish perjury.
Invocation of gods as basically universal in the ancient sources: "Ammonius thus distinguishes the oath from the assertion (apophansis) by means of 'the testimony of the god' [...] oath, according to this endlessly repeated doctrine, is an affirmation to which divine testimony is added" (32).
Plenty about Pindar and horkos martys (oath witness). Notes the "double valence (benediction and malediction) of the divine names in oaths and perjury" (38). (cf. Volume VII's destituent reading the witness, however.)
Freud's thesis has blasphemy as "the interdiction of the name of God holds in check one of the most intense desires of man: that of profaning the sacred" (40). But: "One blasphemes the name of God, because all that God possesses is his name" (id.). We see that "the formula for imprecation is identical to that of the oath" (id.), and that "Blasphemy is an oath, in which the name of god is extracted from the assertorial or promissory context and uttered in itself, in vain, independently of a semantic context" (id.).
Lotsa stuff on names and nominatives, leading up to the point that "Every oath swears on the name par excellence, that is on the name of God, because the oath is the experience of language that treats all of language as a proper name. Pure existence--the existence of the name--is not the result of a recognition, not of a logical deduction; it is something that cannot be signified but only sworn, that is, affirmed as a name. The certainty of faith is the certainty of the name" (53).
Proposes that the model of truth "is not that of the adequation between words and things but the performative one in which speech unfailingly actualizes its meaning. Just as, in the state of exception, the law suspends its own application only to found, in this way, its being in force, so in the performative, language suspends its denotation precisely and solely to found its existential connection with things" (56). Locates the completion of ontology in "the name of God withdrawing from language--and this is what has happened beginning from the event that has been called the 'death of God'" (id.).
Plenty more. Likely not the most effective of the Homo Sacer series, but damned interesting. As usual, much attention to detail in classical and medieval sources.
As it turns out, Horkos "is, in the classical world, the most ancient being, the sole potency to which the gods are submitted for punishment" (65).
Some findings: "The attempt to reconcile faith as the performative experience of a veridiction with belief in a series of dogmas of an assertive type is the task and, at the same time, the central contradiction of the Church, which obliges it, against the clear evangelical command, to technicalize oath and curses in specific juridical institutions" (66).
"The interpretation of sacertas as an originary performance of power through the production of a killable and unsacrificeable bare life must be completed in the sense that, even before being a sacrament of power, the oath is a consecration of the living human being through the word of the word" (id.).
"Philosophy begins in the moment in which the speaker, against the religio of the formula, resolutely puts in questions the primacy of names, when Heraclitus opposes logos to epea, discourse to the uncertain and contradictory words that constitute it, or when Plato, in the Cratylus, renounces the idea of an exact correspondence between the name and the thing named, and, at the same time, draws together onomastics and legislation, an experience of logos and politics. Philosophy is, in this sense, constitutively a critique of the oath: that is, it puts into question the sacramental bond that links human being to language" (72). Notes that philosophy has a role when "politics can only assume the form of an oikonomia, that is, of a governance of empty speech over bare life" (id.), which points us ahead to part V.
Recommended for those whose sacred substance variously embodies the waters of the Styx, the scepter of the hero, and the entrails of the sacrificial victim, persons who do not observe the oats of pirates as hostes omnium, and readers whose perjury is not merely more or less punishable but must therefor be accused of lese majeste for violation of the numen of Augustus.
August 30, 2018
As far as Agamben's 'little books' go (the ones that hover around a hundred pages give or take), The Sacrament of Language isn't his most compelling. Which is not to say that it isn't an important book in the context of his philosophical oeuvre, but simply that, as far the actual experience of reading it goes, it's a little bit of a slog. Almost the entirely of the book is given over to, as the subtitle announces, 'an archeology of the oath' - which translates as a thorough examination of the linguistic specificity the oath. Against those who read the oath's power as deriving from some mysterious sacred or magic 'force', Agamben instead argues for the originality and self-sufficiency of the oath as that which affirms not this or that statement in language, but the efficacy of language as such. Along the way, Agamben places the oath alongside a whole range of linguistic phenomena including the curse, the insult, the blessing, blasphemy, magical incantations and probably a couple of others I missed. It's interesting in a sort of academic way, and it isn't until the last maybe five or six pages that what's at stake in all of it comes into clear focus.
And what is at stake in it all? Well, as Agamben says, it's nothing less than "the nature of man as a speaking being and a political animal" (!). This insofar as the oath exemplifies the place in which life itself is put at stake in the experience of language (this not being the case, for example, for animals, Agamben argues). Taken in the immediate context of The Sacrament of Language, it's a somewhat surprising conclusion, but those who've followed Agamben elsewhere will recognize the motif almost instantly: it's one that finds expression in almost all of Agamben's works, and read alongside them (I'm thinking here especially of Language and Death, The Open, and (the latter chapters of) Remnants of Auschwitz), The Sacrament of Language slips in easily as another light shed upon the ever evolving, ever interesting body of ideas that Agamben has developed over his career. Would give it another half a star if I could.
And what is at stake in it all? Well, as Agamben says, it's nothing less than "the nature of man as a speaking being and a political animal" (!). This insofar as the oath exemplifies the place in which life itself is put at stake in the experience of language (this not being the case, for example, for animals, Agamben argues). Taken in the immediate context of The Sacrament of Language, it's a somewhat surprising conclusion, but those who've followed Agamben elsewhere will recognize the motif almost instantly: it's one that finds expression in almost all of Agamben's works, and read alongside them (I'm thinking here especially of Language and Death, The Open, and (the latter chapters of) Remnants of Auschwitz), The Sacrament of Language slips in easily as another light shed upon the ever evolving, ever interesting body of ideas that Agamben has developed over his career. Would give it another half a star if I could.
December 23, 2019
"Philosophy is constitutively a critique of the oath: in that it puts into question the sacramental bond that links the human being to language, without for that reason simply speaking haphazardly, falling into the vanity of speech. Politics is governance of empty speech over bare life, it is more from philosophy that there can come … the indication of a line of resistance and of change."
The above paraphrase comes from the last three pages of "The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath," an exemplar of clear rigorous philosophizing that goes a long way, in my humble opinion, of providing the means to resist and "change" our current debasement of thought and language. For this small yet vital work traces the journey, backward in time, of the oath and its dual nature. Taking to task those scientists and thinkers who locate the origins of the oath in the "magico-religious" sphere, Agamben instead finds the source in language itself, its "performative" ability to create, in a bare utterance, a reality that is centered in a profound sense of justice and "ethos." Making reference along the way to Marcel Mauss's (mistaken) view that mana was the divine source of all religions, and also accessing thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, the linguist Bienveniste, and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Agamben firmly but gently takes the reader on a intellectual quest into the past, the better to analyze the present and the future. For a reader whose basis is in the written word, Agamben's argument is both persuasive and highly reassuring. It also has resonances with his other work (the State of Exception is referenced) which makes the reading of this work of a set piece with his other equally essential volumes. Enlightening, essential, and, ultimately, completely humane, "The Sacrament of Language" is a delight as well as being a beacon of hope in our disturbing time, two stellar recommending elements.
The above paraphrase comes from the last three pages of "The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath," an exemplar of clear rigorous philosophizing that goes a long way, in my humble opinion, of providing the means to resist and "change" our current debasement of thought and language. For this small yet vital work traces the journey, backward in time, of the oath and its dual nature. Taking to task those scientists and thinkers who locate the origins of the oath in the "magico-religious" sphere, Agamben instead finds the source in language itself, its "performative" ability to create, in a bare utterance, a reality that is centered in a profound sense of justice and "ethos." Making reference along the way to Marcel Mauss's (mistaken) view that mana was the divine source of all religions, and also accessing thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, the linguist Bienveniste, and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Agamben firmly but gently takes the reader on a intellectual quest into the past, the better to analyze the present and the future. For a reader whose basis is in the written word, Agamben's argument is both persuasive and highly reassuring. It also has resonances with his other work (the State of Exception is referenced) which makes the reading of this work of a set piece with his other equally essential volumes. Enlightening, essential, and, ultimately, completely humane, "The Sacrament of Language" is a delight as well as being a beacon of hope in our disturbing time, two stellar recommending elements.
October 15, 2016
I found this a rather enjoyable and quite readable exploration of the Oath as a pre-religious/pre-legal structure of sociality.
October 15, 2024
Somewhat dry and aimless until the final section which ties everything together and redeems it
February 15, 2022
We swear using the name of God because His name is all we know of Him. God, according to Anselm’s famous argument, is the entity for which there is no difference of essence and attributes. In passing, it is worth noting that there is no difference in Hebrew between the verbs “to be” and “to exist”. So that explains quite a bit, in addition to making Kant’s famous rebuttal of the so-called ‘ontological’ argument mostly irrelevant. When we swear in the sense of blasphemy, on the contrary, we so to speak divorce God from existence, which is why blasphemy is a sin. We use His name in a non-referential, empty way, yet both utterances share the same form of perlocutionary power, insofar as they seek to have effects in the world by the sheer power of the words they employ. But this also means that when it comes to God, the division of subject and predicate becomes irrelevant too. The pure existence of the name therefore cannot be deduced, not even meant; it can only be sworn. Faith, then, is faith in the name, best approximated when we think of how certain we ourselves are of being called this or that. This faith is at the root of our common practice of language. The other way to express this myth at the foundation of language, which has Agamben reversing the preexistence of religion upon (the practice of the) sacrament into the preeminence of the sacrament with regards to religion, is Levi-Strauss’. According to his structural view, the signifier and the signified are always already given, and there is then an imbalance between this initial givenness of the whole and the slow process by which human knowledge ties the signifiers to the various signified. Consequently, there is always a surplus of meaning, which only the divine understanding can do away with (for once again, its essence is its attributes; its other name is plain necessary being). This leads Agamben to make a (slightly Lacanian) distinction between two ways of denoting: one is benediction, full speech, in which the signifier matches its signified, and the other is malediction, empty speech, in which such correspondence is not attained. This, Agamben argues, is the difference between the sacrament “I swear that…” and the act of swearing in the blasphemous sense of the word (“Nom de Dieu!”). Only in this light can we understand how man makes himself through language, while still making a difference between language and life, a difference which gives its meaning to the very practice of the sacrament, and a difference animals can’t make.
The beginning is erudite and boring. Too many quotes, too much Latin. The ending (ie the last 20 pages) is great.
The beginning is erudite and boring. Too many quotes, too much Latin. The ending (ie the last 20 pages) is great.
September 1, 2025
A slow journey to start as he fully solidifies the base of his argument through a history of the oath in religion and law, into one of the most breathtaking conclusions of any book. I hate that my reviews for Agamben's books are so brief, but these ones are so dense and beautiful that to say the conclusions without going through the process of finding them feels wrong.
October 18, 2020
Çevirmen hatalarına yormak istiyorum bu kitapla daha verimli bir ilişki kuramamamı...
January 27, 2011
This is a nice, elegant essay-length book, situated in the middle of Agamben's Homo Sacer (Sacred Human) series*, which basically makes the argument that what constitutes the "oath" as a form is an originary human "experience of language" (the indistinction of the taking-place of language itself with its "content"; what A. elsewhere terms "communicability" itself, as distinct from issues of form vs. content) -- an experience which then subsequently developed into the more differentiated spheres of magic, religion, law, etc., as we think of them today. (This as opposed to the apparently more widespread view that the oath was just a form immersed within, or entangled within, nebulous early religious experience or forces, or within early societies' cultures of pre- or proto-law, etc.) In short, promises, blessings and curses (and thus law, religion, and magic) are shown to have derived from the oath-form itself, which is posited to have functioned historically as a sort of limit case wherein language is really attempting to account for, or to grasp, itself, its own taking-place as language.
This book is significant for readers of A. in that, by all appearances, it's aiming to add a wider historical grounding to some of Agamben's much-earlier claims re: the "experience of language," claims made in previous writings by referring to debates surrounding interpretation of philosophical texts, but not to the level of detailed & variegated cultural-legal sources used here. On one level, this adds depth to A.'s claims, but on another it introduces some quite odd claims here-and-there as well. (For example, A. makes a passing comment that humanity supposedly risks losing its current grasp of language, and could revert back to early humanity's indistinctions between meaning and utterance -- see p. 55's "...the distinction between sense and denotation...is...a historical product (which, as such, has not always existed and could one day cease to exist)." Does simply being a historical product really automatically allow for this sort of imagined reversibility, of (contemporary) humanity's language faculties? Yet, on other occasions, A.'s approach allows him to offer cogent summary remarks as asides, for example casting "the central contradiction of the Church" in terms of the disjunction between veridiction of faith and assertion of dogma [p. 66].)
While the array and depth of sources used is unquestionably impressive, there is very little acknowledgement of other, more recent, historical arguments trying to account for the same basic developments of language/consciousness in relation to culture/society (like the work of Walter Ong, for one, which explicitly grounds humanity's changing experience of language within the history of speech and writing's technological changes, rather than in A.'s unspecified, and ultimately ungrounded and vague, allusions to a somehow reversible human developmental process). Which is just to say that A.'s criticism of cognitivist accounts (p. 68), while completely valid and agreeable, doesn't invalidate other, potentially more insightful, historical accounts.
---
*Homo Sacer series to date (yrs. = published in Italian)
I: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995)
II, 1: State of Exception (2003)
II, 2: The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2007)
II, 3: The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath (2008)
III: Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1998)
[IV: forthcoming book on concept of form-of-life?]
This book is significant for readers of A. in that, by all appearances, it's aiming to add a wider historical grounding to some of Agamben's much-earlier claims re: the "experience of language," claims made in previous writings by referring to debates surrounding interpretation of philosophical texts, but not to the level of detailed & variegated cultural-legal sources used here. On one level, this adds depth to A.'s claims, but on another it introduces some quite odd claims here-and-there as well. (For example, A. makes a passing comment that humanity supposedly risks losing its current grasp of language, and could revert back to early humanity's indistinctions between meaning and utterance -- see p. 55's "...the distinction between sense and denotation...is...a historical product (which, as such, has not always existed and could one day cease to exist)." Does simply being a historical product really automatically allow for this sort of imagined reversibility, of (contemporary) humanity's language faculties? Yet, on other occasions, A.'s approach allows him to offer cogent summary remarks as asides, for example casting "the central contradiction of the Church" in terms of the disjunction between veridiction of faith and assertion of dogma [p. 66].)
While the array and depth of sources used is unquestionably impressive, there is very little acknowledgement of other, more recent, historical arguments trying to account for the same basic developments of language/consciousness in relation to culture/society (like the work of Walter Ong, for one, which explicitly grounds humanity's changing experience of language within the history of speech and writing's technological changes, rather than in A.'s unspecified, and ultimately ungrounded and vague, allusions to a somehow reversible human developmental process). Which is just to say that A.'s criticism of cognitivist accounts (p. 68), while completely valid and agreeable, doesn't invalidate other, potentially more insightful, historical accounts.
---
*Homo Sacer series to date (yrs. = published in Italian)
I: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995)
II, 1: State of Exception (2003)
II, 2: The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2007)
II, 3: The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath (2008)
III: Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1998)
[IV: forthcoming book on concept of form-of-life?]
June 10, 2014
astonishingly explained the paradigm of the oath, not so simple read i must confess.But oath and its meaning is far more complicated than we thought in religious and juridical plane. Perjury, Blasphemy, curse, notion of sacred and profane in their originary form connected with oath that we carelessly utter. Such utterance not only becomes religious matter but juridical matter as well. so there is a sense of in distinction between juridical and religious matter that is profoundly explained by agamben.
September 2, 2013
Agamben's book is an interesting philosophical/historical look at the oath and its relation to law and religion. Agamben argues that the oath is a particular way of responding to the fact of language and as such it conditions the possibilities of both law and religion. Agamben uses the philosophic tradition, and particularly Plato, in an attempt to look at language beyond the oath.
September 7, 2016
This book was assigned in my Creative Non-fiction Writing class. The concept is clever, but it is just a struggle to read, and I will be quite happy to never open the book again.
August 17, 2016
My man Giorgio dropping those quotes in Latin all over the place. Up until the last 10 pages, it felt like a detailed literature review on law, religion and oath, though.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews