The Omnibus Homo Sacer
Page 54
opposing his language to his actions, can put himself at stake in language, can
promise himself to the logos.
Something like a human language was in fact only able to be produced in
the moment in which the living being, who found itself co-originarily exposed
to the possibility of both truth and lie, committed itself to respond with its life
for its words, to testify in the first person for them. And just as mana expresses, according to Lévi-Strauss, the fundamental inadequation between signifier and
signified, which constitutes “the disability of every finite thought,” so also does
the oath express the demand, decisive in every sense for the speaking animal, to
put its nature at stake in language and to bind together in an ethical and polit-
ical connection words, things, and actions. Only by this means was it possible
for something like a history, distinct from nature and, nevertheless, inseparably
intertwined with it, to be produced.
29. It is in the wake of this decision, in faithfulness to this oath, that the
human species, to its misfortune as much as to its good fortune, in a certain way
still lives. Every naming is, in fact, double: it is a blessing or a curse. A blessing,
if the word is full, if there is a correspondence between the signifier and the sig-
nified, between words and things; a curse if the word is empty, if there remains,
between the semiotic and the semantic, a void and a gap. Oath and perjury,
bene-diction and male-diction correspond to this double possibility inscribed
in the logos, in the experience by means of which the living being has been
constituted as speaking being. Religion and law technicalize this anthropogenic
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HOMO SACER II, 3
experience of the word in the oath and the curse as historical institutions, sep-
arating and opposing point by point truth and lie, true name and false name,
efficacious formula and incorrect formula. That which was “badly said” became
in this way a curse in the technical sense, and fidelity to the word became an
obsessive and scrupulous concern with appropriate formulas and ceremonies,
that is, religio and ius. The performative experience of the word is constituted and isolated in a “sacrament of language” and this latter in a “sacrament of
power.” The “force of law” that supports human societies, the idea of linguistic
enunciations that stably obligate living beings, that can be observed and trans-
gressed, derive from this attempt to nail down the originary performative force
of the anthropogenic experience, and are, in this sense, an epiphenomenon of
the oath and of the malediction that accompanied it.
Prodi opened his history of the “sacrament of power” with the observation
that we are today the first generations to live our collective life without the
bond of the oath and that this change cannot but entail a transformation in
the forms of political association. If this diagnosis hits at all upon the truth,
that means that humanity finds itself today before a disjunction or, at least,
a loosening of the bond that, by means of the oath, united the living being
to its language. On the one hand, there is the living being, more and more
reduced to a purely biological reality and to bare life. On the other hand,
there is the speaking being, artificially divided from the former, through a
multiplicity of technico-mediatic apparatuses, in an experience of the word
that grows ever more vain, for which it is impossible to be responsible and in
which anything like a political experience becomes more and more precarious.
When the ethical—and not simply cognitive—connection that unites words,
things, and human actions is broken, this in fact promotes a spectacular and
unprecedented proliferation of vain words on the one hand and, on the other,
of legislative apparatuses that seek obstinately to legislate on every aspect of
that life on which they seem no longer to have any hold. The age of the eclipse
of the oath is also the age of blasphemy, in which the name of God breaks away
from its living connection with language and can only be uttered “in vain.”
It is perhaps time to call into question the prestige that language has en-
joyed and continues to enjoy in our culture, as a tool of incomparable potency,
efficacy, and beauty. And yet, considered in itself, it is no more beautiful than
birdsong, no more efficacious than the signals insects exchange, no more power-
ful than the roar with which the lion asserts his dominion. The decisive element
that confers on human language its peculiar virtue is not in the tool itself but
in the place it leaves to the speaker, in the fact that it prepares within itself a
THE SACRAMENT OF LANGUAGE
355
hollowed-out form that the speaker must always assume in order to speak—that
is to say, in the ethical relation that is established between the speaker and his
language. The human being is that living being that, in order to speak, must say “I,”
must “take the word,” assume it and make it his own.
Western reflection on language has taken nearly two millennia to isolate,
in the formal machinery of language, the enunciative function, the ensemble
of those indicators or shifters ( I, you, here, now, etc.) by means of which the one who speaks assumes language in a concrete act of discourse. What linguistics is
undoubtedly not in a position to give an account of, however, is the ethos that
is produced in this gesture and that determines the extraordinary implication of
the subject in his word. It is in this ethical relation, the anthropogenic signifi-
cance of which we have sought to determine, that the “sacrament of language”
takes place. Precisely because, unlike other living things, in order to speak, the
human being must put himself at stake in his speech, he can, for this reason,
bless and curse, swear and perjure.
At the beginning of Western culture, in a small territory at the eastern bor-
ders of Europe, there arose an experience of speech that, abiding in the risk of
truth as much as of error, forcefully pronounced, without either swearing or
cursing, its yes to language, to the human being as speaking and political animal.
Philosophy begins in the moment in which the speaker, against the religio of
the formula, resolutely puts in question the primacy of names, when Heraclitus
opposes logos to epea, discourse to the uncertain and contradictory words that constitute it, or when Plato, in the Cratylus, renounces the idea of an exact
correspondence between the name and the thing named and, at the same time,
draws together onomastics and legislation, an experience of logos and politics.
Philosophy is, in this sense, constitutively a critique of the oath: that is, it puts in
question the sacramental bond that links the human being to language, without
for that reason simply speaking haphazardly, falling into the vanity of speech. In
a moment when all the European languages seem condemned to swear in vain
and when politics can only assume the form of an oikonomia, that is, of a gover-
nance of empty speech over bare life, it is once more from philosophy that there
can come, in the sober awareness of the extreme situation at which the living
human being that has
language has arrived in its history, the indication of a line
of resistance and of change.
א In the Opus postumum, Kant has recourse to the mythical image of the oath of
the gods in the process of explaining one of the most difficult points of his teachings, the transcendental schematism, which modern interpreters, developing one of Schelling’s
intuitions, tend to connect to language. Kant writes: “The schematism of the concepts
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HOMO SACER II, 3
of the intellect . . . is an instant in which the shores of metaphysics and physics make
contact Styx interfusa” (22.487). The Latin citation comes from a passage in the Georgics (4.480) in which Virgil evokes the water of the Stygian swamp in grim terms, which refer
to its function as “a great and terrible oath of the gods”: tardaque palus inamabilis unda
/ alligat et novies Styx interfusa coercet [there lies the unlovely swamp of dull dead water, and, to pen them fast, Styx with her ninefold barrier poured between]. Schematism
(language) joins for an instant in a kind of oath two kingdoms that seem as though they
must always remain divided.
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