In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent

3. ‘‘Sovereignty’’ over Language: Of Lice and Men

3. ‘‘Sovereignty’’ over Language: Of Lice and Men in the discursive terms borrowed from Lanzmann’s demonstration of the arbitrary and absolutely decisive nature of the constitution of the referent, ‘‘here’’—in the Introduction to an analysis of its complex literary representation by Goethe—is the ‘‘place’’ to acknowledge the obvious, that which Lanzmann’s filmed empirical research makes discretely and, because discretely, grotesquely evident, and that is the powerful opposition between his indication of the insuperable, if later imperceptible, difference in meaning and experience that can correspond, at any particular moment in history, to the built difference between ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside,’’ and Giorgio Agamben ’s sovereign conflation of the two under the twin names of the ‘‘sovereign’’ and bios, the latter first distinguished, via Aristotle, only to be rendered indistinguishable by Agamben from zōon.19 Still, because it is so often the obvious that escapes us, like Kant’s ‘‘ground’’ that ‘‘belongs to no one,’’ once terms of analysis, akin to so many pieces of earth, are appropriated, that opposition is well worth articulating , lest the sovereign division of ‘‘inside’’ from ‘‘outside’’ as of life from death be buried by an equally sovereign annihilation of any difference between them. For, while one can appreciate the authenticity of Agamben’s horror at the ‘‘decadence’’ of ‘‘modern democracy,’’ his equation of ‘‘modern totalitarianism’’ with ‘‘the society of mass hedonism and consumerism’’ under the unfortunate rubric, ‘‘biopolitics ’’ (a neologism carried so far beyond as to destroy its original investment with meaning by Foucault, and whose false synthesis, in the all-encompassing scope equated with it by Agamben, is already 19. See esp. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. 17 18 ‡ introduction parsed, and contradicted, again, by Agamben’s model philosopher, Aristotle—not to speak of every philosopher since Plato who has considered the uncertain dynamics of relations among men), may be (with Kafka, we can only hope) the summit of the very ‘‘decadence’’ Agamben abhors, that is, the objectification, in purported theoretical form, of routinized Vernichtung as routine for the human animal, an object of horror, yes, but one already rendered as inevitable as ‘‘the perfect senselessness’’ of ‘‘the society of the spectacle’’ by the relationship of human to animal in the fact of the human animal.20 Now, another word for that relationship may just be ‘‘language’’ (following, once again, Aristotle and any philosopher who has re- flected on the human), but, as primary evidence of that relation, rather than means of its eradication, language provides little meaning to Agamben, whose method of selective quotation cites and juxtaposes bits of old and new language considered theoretically dispositional only to more effectively leave the semantic complexity and contextual historicity of language as such behind. The complementary converse of that instrumental citational method is a flattening rhetoric of repetition carried out in a drumbeat of reiterated equations , foremost among them that of ‘‘inside’’ with ‘‘outside.’’ (‘‘The sovereign power is this very impossibility of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception, physis and nomos. The state of exception is . . . a complex topological figure in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another. It is precisely this topological zone of indistinction . . . that we must try to fix under our gaze.’’)21 While such passages helpfully indicate the importance of nonlinguistic, architectural form to a totalizing, alinguistic equation of human to animal, they also serve to enforce those hymnal evocations of being passing for a theory (to end all theories) of being— oxymoronically conceived as ‘‘potentiality itself’’—in Agamben’s thoroughly non-Aristotelian assertion of ontological nondistinction (‘‘To set in-potentiality aside is not to destroy it but, on the contrary, 20. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 11. 21. Ibid., p. 37 et passim. ‘‘sovereignty’’ over language ‡ 19 to fulfill it, to turn potentiality back upon itself in order to give itself to itself . . . letting itself be . . .’’), the mystical or, at least, mystifying equation of politics to ontology that is Homo Sacer.22 For, it is Agamben’s signature thesis that the history of ‘‘metaphysics ’’ in general; the incomplete, because excessively relational, or, insufficiently absolutist, social theories of Foucault and Arendt in particular; and Benjamin, Kafka, and Hölderlin, in adhering to the textual tradition of the transmission of ungrounded linguistic convention in history, instead of dreaming an end to the history...