GIORGIO AGAMBEN — SEVEN PARTS OF THE NIGHT
GIORGIO AGAMBEN
Sept. 16, 2022, Quodlibet
MY TRANSLATION OF THE ORIGINAL IN ITALIAN
“There are seven parts of the night: the Vespers, the twilight, Conticinium, Intempest, Gallicinium, Matins, and Diluculus.”
Isidore, Etymologies
I. Vespers.
“Vespers is so called from the western star, which immediately follows sunset and precedes the darkness that follows.”
Vespers is the sunset of the West, announced more than a century ago and therefore now definitely accomplished. We are thus in the darkness that follows the sunset, of which twilight is the first figure. It is remarkable that since Spengler penned his irrefutable diagnosis no one among the most intelligent readers has disputed its validity. That the West was ripe for the sunset was then as now a widespread feeling, even if, then as now, we pretend that everything continues as before. Thinking about the end, even just managing to represent it, is indeed a daunting task, for which we lack adequate terms. The ancients and Christians of the first centuries, who expected the end of the world as imminent, even if incalculable, imagined an unprecedented catastrophe, after which a new world would begin — a new heaven and a new earth. The fact is that to think of the end as a punctual event, after which everything — even time — would cease, offers so little to thought, that we prefer to imagine without realizing it a kind of additional time, in which we — who we are to ourselves — are not there. Spengler, for his part, thought of a morphology of history, in which civilizations are to rise and set and especially the West, whose demise would coincide “with a phase of history that will span several centuries and of which we are presently experiencing the beginning.” The hypothesis I would like to suggest is that the West includes sunset not only in its name, but also in its very structure — that it is, that is, from beginning to end a vesper civilization.
Vespers, the star of the West, continues to shine throughout the night that we think we are passing through and in which we dwell instead; sunset — being in every moment at the end — is the normal condition of Western man. That is why his night awaits neither dilucule nor dawn. But the sunset, the interminable crisis that he pursues and uses as a lethal weapon that he tries by all means to master, is slipping out of his hands and will eventually turn, as it is already doing, against him. Security has become his watchword because the West has long since ceased to feel safe.
II. Twilight.
“Twilight is a doubtful light. Creperum means in fact being in doubt, that is, between light and darkness.”
Isidore is copying a passage from Varro’s treatise on the Latin language, where we read that “the things that are said to be creperae are doubtful, just as at twilight we do not know whether it is still day or already night.” We have long been in twilight, long since we have become unable to distinguish between light and darkness — that is, between truth and falsehood. For those who no longer know where they stand, those who are in doubt between day and night no longer even know what is true and what is false, and it is this doubt that one wants to entertain at all costs in minds and souls. Twilight has become in this sense, a governing paradigm, perhaps the most effective one, which mobilizes at its service the apparatus of the media and the culture industry. Thus an entire society lives in twilight, in doubt about light and darkness, about true and false — until doubt itself wears out and disappears and a lie repeated to such an extent that it can no longer be distinguished from truth establishes its desperate dominance in every sphere and in every order. But a life that is constantly growing dim in lies and is lying to itself, destroys its own conditions of survival, is no longer capable of perceiving light, not even the “faint glow” of a match, lit in the night. Even those who thought they ruled the twilight no longer know what is true and what is false, where the darkness is and where the light is; and even if someone persists in testifying about the light, about that light which is the very life of men, they cannot hear him. And if a lie that has become absolute, that condition in which hope is no longer possible, our vespertine and twilight time is in every sense hopeless.
III. Conticinium.
“Conticinium is when everyone is silent. Conticiscere means in fact to be silent.”
Why did you keep silent? That times were dark, but that twilight reigned everywhere, will not justify you. Why did you keep silent? Even if you could no longer distinguish light from darkness, at least this you should have said, you should have at least shouted in the twilight, in the uncertain hour between dog and wolf. Yours was not the silence of those who know they cannot be heard, of those who in the universal lie have something to say and therefore come forward and keep silent. Yours was the conniving silence of those who in the night are silent because that is what everyone does. “It is true,” you will say, “it was unjust, but I kept silent because everyone was silent. Yet the lie spoke and you listened to it. And your silence also covered the voice of those who nevertheless tried to speak, to bring the third part of the night out of its muteness.
IV. Intempest.
“Intempest is a time of the night that stands in the middle and is inoperative, when no action is possible and all things are quieted in slumber. For time is not intelligible by itself, but only through the actions of men. The middle of the night lacks action. Intemperate is the inactive night, almost timeless, that is, without the action through which time is known; that is why it is said, you have come intemperately.”
The time we so carefully measure in itself does not exist, it becomes knowable, it becomes something we can only have through our actions. If all acting is suspended, if nothing is to happen anymore, then we have no more time, consigned to the false stillness of a sopor without dreams or gestures. We have no more time, because in the night in which we are immersed, time has become unknowable to us and the powers of the world keep us by all means in this untimely night, “almost timeless, that is, without the action through which time is known.” “Almost” timeless, because abstract linear time — chronological time that devours itself — is actually present, but by definition we cannot have it. That is why we need to build museums in which to put the past and, as is increasingly the case today, even the present.
What is missing is the kairos, whom the ancients depicted as a winged youth running poised on a sphere, the bald nape of his neck leaving no grip on those who try to catch him as he passes. On his forehead is a thick forelock and in his hand he clutches a razor blade. Grasping the moment is possible only for the person who suddenly stands in front of him, with a decisive gesture grabs him by the forelock and stops his unreal rush. This gesture is thought as grasping in the night the missing time. This gesture is untimely, for it arrests and interrupts the course of time each time. Hence the unexpected conclusion, “you came intempestively ( intempestivum venisti).” Turning intempestivity against itself, Thought stops and surprises time in the “almost timeless” night. And this razor-sharp gesture of thought is primeval political action, opening up the possibility of all action just when in the middle of the night all action seemed impossible.
V. Gallicinium.
“Gallicinium is so called because the roosters announce the light.”
The rooster’s crowing does not announce the dawn. This cry — if you listen carefully — is the heartbroken cry of one who watches in the night and to the last does not know whether day will come. That is why his crowing — or, rather, his cry — is addressed precisely to us, who like him keep watch in the dark and like him ask, “how much longer is the night?” The rooster’s cry is, like ours, merely a probe thrown into the darkness not to measure its depths — that would not be possible — but to sustain and almost calibrate our wakefulness, the duration of which we do not know. And in this there is something like a small light, a spark in the darkness.
VI. Matins.
“Matins is between the fading of darkness and the coming of the dawn. It is called matins because it is the time of the incipient morning.”
Between darkness and light. As vesper was between light and darkness. Inchoante mane, the incipient morning: mane is the neuter of the adjective manis, which means “good,” and applied to time means “early in the morning.” Morning is par excellence “the good hour,” just as the Greeks called “good” ( phos agathos) the first light. “Mature” is what happens at the good time, and Matuta, the goddess of the morning, was for the Latins the good goddess par excellence. Matutino is thought in its birth, before it becomes fixed in the round of formulas and watchwords. It is convenient, in the morning, to not be in a hurry, to linger in the good hour, to give it all the time it needs. That’s why in our world everything instead conspires to shorten the good hour and take time away from awakening. For awakening is the time of thought, poised between dark and light, between dream and reason. And to the thought — to the morning — one tries in every way to take away time, so that today many are awake but not yet awake, lustrous but not lucid. In a word: ready to serve.
VII. Diluculus.
“Diluculus, almost little incipient light of day. It is the dawn, which precedes the day.”
This “little light”, that for now we can only imagine. The diluculus, the aurora, is the imagination that always accompanies thought and keeps it from despairing even in the most barbaric and darkest times. Not because “there are many auroras yet to shine,” but because we no longer wait for any aurora. Compline, complete is the last canonical hour, and for us every hour is compline, is the last hour. In it the seven parts of the night coincide, they are in truth one hour. And the one for whom every moment is the last cannot be caught in the devices of power, which always need to assume a future. The future is the time of power, compieta — the last hour, the good one — is the time of Thought.
