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TRUTH AND THE NAME OF GOD — for Christmas… by Giorgio Agamben
English translation of the original in Italian.
Giorgio Agamben,
December 5, 2022…
“Truth and the name of God
Philosophers have been talking about the death of God for almost a century now, and, as is often the case, this truth seems today to be tacitly and almost unconsciously accepted by the common man, without, however, its consequences being measured and understood. One of these — and certainly not the least relevant — is that God — or, rather, his name — was the first and last guarantee of the connection between language and the world, between words and things. Hence the decisive importance in our culture of the ontological argument, which clasped God and language insolubly together, and of the oath pronounced on God’s name, which obliged accountability for the transgression of the bond between our words and things.
If the death of God can only imply the breaking of this bond, this then means that in our society language has become constitutively a lie. Without the guarantee of God’s name, all speech, like the oath that assured its truth, is no more than vanity and perjury. This is what we have seen appear in full light in recent years, when every word uttered by institutions and the media was nothing but…
