Peoples who have lost their language

Photograph by Alexander Sokolov

Translation of Giorgio Agamben’s “Popoli che hanno perduto la lingua”, October 11, 2024

What has become of the peoples of Europe today?

What we cannot fail to see today is the spectacle of their getting lost and losing memory in the language in which they once found themselves. The ways of this process of loss varies for each people: the Anglo-Saxons have already gone the whole way toward a purely instrumental and objectifying language — the “Basic” English, in which one can only exchange messages more and more like algorithms — and the Germans seem to set themselves on the same path; the French, despite their cult of the national language and perhaps because of it, are lost in the almost rigid, regulated relationship between speaker and grammar; the Italians, cunningly settled in the bilingualism which was once their wealth but which is being transformed into mindless jargon, everywhere. And, if Jews are or at least were part of European culture, it is fitting to recall Scholem’s words in the face of Zionist secularization turning a sacred language into a national vernacular: “We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of an abyss…This language is pregnant with catastrophe…the day will come when it will turn against those who speak it.”
In any case, what has happened is the loss of the poetic relationship…