Since it is not semantic but exclamatory in nature, blasphemy shows its
proximity to a linguistic phenomenon that is not easy to analyze, that is, the
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insult. Linguists define insults as performative terms of a particular type that,
despite the apparent similarity, are opposed in every respect to normal classify-
ing terms, which inscribe what is predicated into a determinate category. The
phrase “you are an idiot” is only apparently symmetrical to “you are an archi-
tect” because, unlike the latter, it is not meant to inscribe a subject into a cog-
nitive classification but to produce, simply by uttering it, particular pragmatic
effects (Milner, 295). Insults function, then, more like exclamations or proper
names than like predicative terms and, in this, they show their similarity with
blasphemy (the Greek blasphēmia means both insult and blasphemy). It is not
surprising, then, that blasphemy, by means of a process that was already com-
pleted in Augustine, goes from uttering the name of God in vain to taking the
form of an insult ( mala dicere de Deo), that is, of an injurious term added into
an exclamation of the name of God. As a term that is only apparently semantic,
the insult reinforces the “vain” character of blasphemy, and the name of God is,
in this way, doubly taken in vain.
א The special power of the divine name is evident in the institution of Roman war
law (it should be clear why I prefer to avoid the term “sacral law,” which, beginning with Danz and Wissoza, has been used in such cases) known as evocatio. During the siege of a city, immediately before the decisive attack, the commander “evoked,” that is, called by
name the enemies’ tutelary divinities, so that they would abandon the city and transfer
themselves to Rome, where they would receive more adequate worship. The formula of
the carmen evocationis used for Carthage has been conserved for us by Macrobius, without mentioning the proper name of the god: “To any god, to any goddess [ si deus est, si dea est], under whose protection are the people and state of Carthage, and chiefly to thee who art charged with the protection of this city and people, I make prayer and do reverence
[ precor venerorque] and ask grace of you all, that you abandon the people and state of Carthage, forsake their places, temples, shrines, and city . . . that . . . you come to Rome, to me and mine; and that our places, temples, shrines, and city may be more acceptable
and pleasing to you; and that you may take me and the Roman people and my soldiers
under your charge, that we may know the same. If ye shall so have done, I vow to you
temples and solemn games” ( Saturnalia 3.9.7–8).
That this is not an invitation but a genuine binding power tied to the pronunciation
of the name, follows from the fact that we know (Pliny, 28.18) that, in order to avoid the danger of an evocation on the part of the enemy, Rome had a secret name (the palindrome
Amor or, according to Lydus [ Mens. 4.25], Flora). And like Rome, the gods also had a secret name, known only to the priest (or magician), which guaranteed the efficacy of the
invocation: as Dionysius in the mysteries was called Pyrigenēs, Lucina with the foreign
name of Ilithyia, Persephone with that of Furva, while the true name of the Bona dea, to whom Roman matrons dedicated a mystery cult, had to remain unknown to the males
(Güntert, 8). The magical power of the name that we encounter in the formulas and
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amulets of many cultures, in which not only does the name evoke the potency named,
but it can even, through its progressive cancellation, drive it out or destroy it (as in the formula akrakanarba kanarba anarba narba arba rba ba a [Wessley, 28]) has its basis here.
As in the oath (the proximity between the magical formula and the oath is attested by
the verb horkizō, to evoke, to exorcize: horkizō se to hagion onoma [I evoke or exorcize the holy name], with the accusative of the divine name exactly as in the oath [Güntert, 10]),
the utterance of the name immediately actualizes the correspondence between words and
things. Oath and exorcism are the two faces of the “evocation” of being.
21. One can thus understand the essential primacy of the name of God in
monotheistic religions, its identification with and almost substitution for the
God it names. If, in polytheism, the name assigned to [ il nome del dio] the god named this or that event of language, this or that specific naming, this or that
Sondergott, in monotheism God’s name [ il nome di Dio] names language itself.
The potentially infinite dissemination of singular, divine events of naming gives
way to the divinization of the logos as such, to the name of God as archi-event of language that takes place in names. Language is the word of God, and the word
of God is, in the words of Philo, an oath; it is God insofar as he reveals himself
in the logos as the “faithful one” ( pistos) par excellence. God is the oath-taker in the language of which man is only the speaker, but in the oath on the name of
God the language of men communicates with divine language.
Hence, in Maimonides and in rabbinic Judaism the persistency with re-
gard to the status of the proper name of God, the Tetragrammaton. There it
is kept—as šem ha-meforaš, “distinctly pronounced name” but also “separate,
secret”—distinct from simple appellative names ( kinnui), which express this or
that action of God, this or that divine attribute: “the other names,” writes Mai-
monides, “like dayan (judge), shaddai (almighty), tsaddik (righteous), channun (gracious), rachum (merciful), and elohim (chief ) . . . are unquestionably appellatives and derivatives. The derivation of the name, consisting of yod, hé, vau, and hé, is not positively known, the word having no additional signification”
(Maimonides, 1:61). Commenting on a passage from the Pirkè R. Eliezer, in
which one reads, “Before the universe was created, there was only the Almighty
and His name,” Maimonides adds, “Observe, how clearly the author states that
all these appellatives employed as names of God came into existence after the
Creation. This is true; for they refer to actions connected with the Universe.
If, however, you consider His essence as separate and as abstracted from all
actions, you will not describe it by an appellative, but by a proper noun, which
exclusively indicates that essence” (ibid.). What is proper to this name (the šem
ha-meforaš), according to Maimonides, is that, unlike other names that “do
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not signify a simple substance, but a substance with attributes,” it “conveys the
meaning of ‘absolute existence,’” that is an essence that coincides with its exis-
tence (ibid.). The “name” (the term šem in the Bible is often used as a synonym
of God) is the being of God, and God is the being that coincides with its name.
א In his study “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala,”
Scholem has shown the special function that the name of God has in the Cabbala,
in which it constitutes “the metaphysical origin of all language” (Scholem, 10/5). The
name of God, on which men swear, is, according to the Cabbalists, what produces and
sustains human language, which is nothing but a breaking apart, recombination, and
deployment of the letters that compose this name. In particular the Torah “is completely
&nbs
p; founded and built on the tetragram; it is woven from the tetragram and its qualifying
names, that is, from the divine epithets which are derivable from it, and emerge in it at
any given moment. . . . The Torah is therefore a living garment and tissue, a textus in the most accurate understanding of the term, in which, as a kind of basic motif and as
a leitmotif, the tetragram refers back to it in every possible kind of metamorphosis and
variation” (ibid., 50/38).
Christian theologians speak of a communicatio idiomatum to define the communi-
cation between the properties of the divine nature and those of the human nature that
are hypostatically united in Christ. It would be possible to speak, in an analogous sense, of a communicatio between the speech of God and the speech of men, which takes place, according to the Cabbalists, in the name of God. In Philo (see above, §10) the communication between the languages has its place in the oath, in which God swears by himself
and men on the name of God. In Benjamin’s essay “On Language in General and Human
Language,” of which Scholem’s study cited above represents a resumption and develop-
ment, the place of the communicatio idiomatum is in the proper name, by means of which the language of men communicates with the creative word of God (Benjamin, 150/74).
א In Exodus 3:13, when Moses asks him how he should respond to the Hebrews when
they ask him about the name of God, Yahweh responds: ehyé acher ahyé, “I am who I
am.” The Septuagint, produced in a Hellenistic environment, and thus in contact with
Greek philosophy, translates this name with egō eimi ho on, that is, with the technical term for being ( ho on). Maimonides, commenting on this passage, shows himself to be perfectly conscious of the philosophical implications of this name of God: “Then God
taught Moses how to teach them, and how to establish amongst them the belief in the
existence of himself, namely, by saying ehyé ašer ehyé, a name derived from the verb haya in the sense of ‘existing,’ for haya means ‘to be,’ and in Hebrew no difference is made between the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to exist.’ The principal point in this phrase is that the
same word which denotes ‘existence,’ is repeated as an attribute. The word ašer . . . is an incomplete noun. . . . It must be considered as the subject of the predicate that follows.
The first noun which is to be described is ehyé; the second, by which the first is described, is likewise ehyé, the identical word, as if to show that the object which is to be described
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and the attribute by which it is described are in this case necessarily identical. This is, therefore, the expression of the idea that God exists, but not in the ordinary sense of the term; or, in other words, He is ‘the existing being which is the existing Being,’ that is to say, whose existence is absolute” (Maimonides, 1:63).
22. The connection of the theological theme of the name of God with the
philosophical one of absolute being, in which essence and existence coincide, is
definitively carried out in Catholic theology, in particular in the form of argu-
ment that, since Kant, one is accustomed to defining as ontological. As inter-
preters have clarified, the force of Anselm’s famous argument in the Proslogion
does not consist in a logical deduction of existence from the notion of a most
perfect being or “that than which no greater can be thought”; it is a matter,
rather, of the understanding of id quo maius cogitare non potest as the most
proper name of God. To pronounce the name of God means to understand it
as that experience of language in which it is impossible to separate name and
being, words and things. As Anselm writes at the end of the Liber apologeticus
contra Gaunilonem (the only text in which he speaks of a proof, or rather of a vis probationis), “what is spoken of [ hoc ipsum quod dicitur] is proved (as a necessary consequence of the fact that it is understood and thought of [ eo ipso quod intelligitur vel cogitatur]) . . . to exist” (§10). It is a matter, that is to say, above all, of an experience of language (of a “saying”: hoc ipsum quod dicitur) and this experience is that of faith. For this reason Anselm thinks it important to inform us that the
original title of the treatise was fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) and that it had been written sub persona . . . quaerentis intelligere quod credit (in the name of someone who wants to understand what he believes). To
understand the object of faith means to understand an experience of language in
which, as in the oath, what is said is necessarily true and exists. That is to say, the
name of God expresses the status of the logos in the dimension of the fides oath, in which nomination immediately actualizes the existence of what it names.
Fifty years later, Alain of Lille, in his Regulae theologicae ( PL 210:621–84), pushes this special status of the divine name still further, writing that every
name, even that which expresses an attribute, like iustus or bonus, when referring to the being of God is transformed into a pronoun ( pronominatur); that is,
it ceases to indicate, like every name, a substance plus an attribute and, being
emptied of its content, now designates, like pronouns or proper names, a pure
existence ( substantia sine qualitate [substance without quality], in the tradition of classical grammatical thought). Not only that, but even the pronoun, if predicated of God, loses the sensible or intellectual ostentation that defines it [ cadit
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a demonstratione] and carries out a paradoxical demonstratio ad fidem, that is, to the pure act of speech as such ( apud Deum, demonstratio fit ad fidem).
For this reason Thomas Aquinas, taking up again the thesis of Maimonides
on the name qui est, can write that it “names a being that is absolute and unde-
termined by anything added. . . . It does not signify what God is [ quid est Deus], but signifies a sea of existence that is infinite and as if indeterminate . . . and
thus there remains in our intellect only the fact that he is [ quia est] and nothing more: and so it is as though it were in some state of confusion [ in quadam con-fusione]” (Aquinas, d.8, q.1, a.1). The meaning of the name of God, then, has no
semantic content, or better, suspends and puts in parentheses every meaning in
order to affirm through a pure experience of speech a pure and bare existence.
We can therefore specify further the meaning and function of the name of
God in the oath. Every oath swears on the name par excellence, that is on the
name of God, because the oath is the experience of language that treats all of
language as a proper name. Pure existence—the existence of the name—is not
the result of a recognition, nor of a logical deduction: it is something that cannot
be signified but only sworn, that is, affirmed as a name. The certainty of faith is
the certainty of the name (of God).
א At the end of the notes published in 1969 under the title On Certainty, Wittgenstein, in order to clarify what we call certainty and often mistake for “knowledge,” appeals to the example of the proper name and wonders: “Do I know or do I only believe that I
am called L. W.?” (Wittgenstein, §491). He interrogates, that is to say, the particular “security” that is linked to the plane of names. It is a matter of a certainty, or better of a “trust”
( Worauf kann ich mich verlassen? “What can I rely on?” [ibid., §508]), which we cannot doubt without renouncing every possibility of judgment and reasoning (ibid., §494). “If
my name is not L. W., how can I rely on what is meant by ‘true’ and ‘false’?” (ibid., §515).
The security of the propriety of names conditions every other certainty. If someone calls
into question, in language, the very moment of naming on which every language game
is founded (if it is not secure that I am named L. W. and that “dog” means dog), then
speaking and judging become impossible. Yet Wittgenstein shows that here it is not a
matter of a certainty of a logical or empirical type (like the certainty of never having been on the moon [ibid., §662]) but of something like a “rule” of the game that language is.
It is a certainty, or better a “faith,” of this kind that is in question in the oath and in the name of God. The name of God names the name that is always and only true, that
is, that experience of language that it is not possible to doubt. For man this experience is the oath. In this sense every name is an oath, and in every name a “faith” is in question, because the certainty of the name is not of an empirico-constative or logico-epistemic
type but rather always puts in play the commitment and praxis of men. To speak is, above
all, to swear, to believe in the name.
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23. It is in this perspective that one must reread the theory of performatives
or “speech acts,” which, in the thought of the twentieth century, represent a sort
of enigma, as if philosophers and linguists were coming up against a magical
stage of language. The performative is a linguistic enunciation that does not
describe a state of affairs but immediately produces a fact, actualizes its mean-
ing. “I swear” is, in this sense, the perfect paradigm of a “speech act,” and it is
curious that Benveniste, who mentions it as such in his study on performatives
(Benveniste [3], 270/234), takes no account of its special nature in the chapter
on the oath in the Vocabulaire. It is precisely the status of the oath that we have sought so far to reconstruct that allows us, in fact, to understand in a new light
the theory of performatives. They represent in language a remnant of a stage (or,
rather, the co-originarity of a structure) in which the connection between words
and things is not of a semantico-denotative type but performative, in the sense
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