Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: The Figure of This World
- 1 The Question of Political Ontology
- 2 The Poetic Experience of the World
- 3 The Myth of the Earth
- 4 The Unbearable
- 5 The Creature before the Law
- 6 The Animal for which Animality is an Issue
- 7 Understanding the Happy
- 8 The Picture and its Captives
- 9 The Passing of the Figure of This World
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The Unbearable
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: The Figure of This World
- 1 The Question of Political Ontology
- 2 The Poetic Experience of the World
- 3 The Myth of the Earth
- 4 The Unbearable
- 5 The Creature before the Law
- 6 The Animal for which Animality is an Issue
- 7 Understanding the Happy
- 8 The Picture and its Captives
- 9 The Passing of the Figure of This World
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The rustling of the there is … is horror.
Agamben's Language and Death opens with a famous passage from Heidegger:
Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought. It can, however, beckon us toward the way in which the nature of language draws us into its concern, and so relates us to itself, in case death belongs together with what reaches out for us, touches us.
As the position of this citation makes clear, this is an important thought in Language and Death. Why is it, Agamben will ask, that in Heidegger's philosophy human beings are presented as ‘both mortal and speaking’? What is the connection between the ‘faculty’ for death and the ‘faculty’ for language, as Agamben will strikingly put it? In Language and Death, Agamben investigates this connection by turning to the problem of negativity as it presents in Heidegger, Hegel and Western philosophy more generally. He writes:
In the course of our research it became apparent that, in fact, the connection between language and death could not be illuminated without a clarification of the problem of the negative. Both the ‘faculty’ for language and the ‘faculty’ for death, inasmuch as they open for humanity the most proper dwelling place, reveal and disclose this same dwelling place as always already permeated by and founded in negativity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Figure of This WorldAgamben and the Question of Political Ontology, pp. 80 - 105Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014