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3 - The Myth of the Earth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2014

Mathew Abbott
Mathew Abbott
Affiliation:
Federation University Australia
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Summary

[I]ntelligibility has become detached from meaning: with modern science, conceptual rationality weans itself from the narrative structures that continue to prevail in theology and theologically inflected metaphysics. This marks a decisive step forward in the slow process through which human rationality has gradually abandoned mythology, which is basically the interpretation of reality in narrative terms. The world has no author and there is no story enciphered in the structure of reality. No narrative is unfolding in nature …

In the final paragraph of his preface to Infancy and History, Agamben turns Wittgenstein's statement about the right expression in language for the miracle of the world's existence on its head. Referring to it as the Viennese philosopher's version of the experimentum linguae – the experience with the fact of language that occupies Agamben throughout his works – he writes:

[I]f the most appropriate expression of wonderment at the existence of the world is the existence of language, what then is the correct expression for the existence of language? The only possible answer to this question is: human life, as ethos, as ethical way. The search for a polis and an oika befitting this void and unpresupposeable community is the … task of future generations.

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The Figure of This World
Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology
 , pp. 58 - 79
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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