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Giorgio Agamben — To Whom Do We Address Our Word?
This is my translation of the new Giorgio Agamben’s intervention, original in Italian is here.
Giorgio Agamben — To Whom The Word Is Addressed?
In every age poets, philosophers and prophets have unreservedly lamented and denounced the vices and shortcomings of their times. Those who thus groaned and accused, however, addressed themselves to their fellow human beings and spoke in the name of something common or at least shareable. It has been said, in this sense, that poets and philosophers have always spoken in the name of an absent people. Absent in the sense of missing, of something that was missed and was therefore somehow still present. Albeit in this negative and purely ideal mode, their words still presupposed an addressee.
Today, perhaps for the first time, poets and philosophers speak — if they speak at all — without having any possible addressee in mind anymore. The philosopher’s traditional estrangement from the world in which he lives has shifted its meaning; it is no longer merely isolation or persecution by hostile or enemy forces. The word must now reckon with an absence of addressee that is not episodic but, so to speak, ongoing. It is without addressee, that is, without destiny. This can also be expressed by saying, as is done in many quarters, that humanity — or at least that part of it which is richer and more powerful — has reached the end of its history and that therefore the very idea of transmitting and handing down something no longer makes sense. However, when Ibn Rushd in 12th-century Andalusia stated that the purpose of thought is not to communicate with others but to unite with the One Intellect, he was taking it for granted that the human species is eternal. We are the first generation in modernity for whom this certainty has been called into question, for whom indeed it seems likely that humankind — at least what we meant by that name — might cease to exist.
If, however-as I am doing at this instant — we continue to write, we cannot help but wonder what a word can be that will in no case be shared and heard, we cannot escape this extreme test of our condition as writers in a condition of absolute absence of any appearance. Of course the poet has always been alone with his language, but this language was by definition shared, something that now does not seem so obvious to us. In any…
