The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath (review)

Dave Tell

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Volume 45, Number 4, 2012, pp. 452-459 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

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The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath by Giorgio Agamben. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. 91 pp. Paper $16.95.

Giorgio Agambens The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath can be read as a radical rethinking of a traditional rhetorical category: ethos. This is not the ethos you learned in school. Rather than a mode of persuasion, Agamben argues that ethos is the distinguishing characteristic of human language as such. In this regard, its essential characteristic is the movement it enables between a speaker and his language. It is this ethical relationshipwhat Agamben calls the articulation of life and language (69)that distinguishes human speech from birdsong, insect signals, and the roar of lions. 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 hollowed-out form that the speaker must always assume in order to speakthat is to say, in the ethical relation established between a speaker and his language (71). This doesnt put it quite strongly enough. Nor does it capture radicalness of Agambens inquiry. Precisely speaking, Agamben is not concerned with the articulation of life and languagethe linkage between the two established formally by ethos and enacted in the oath. Rather, to use one of his favorite phrases, Agamben is concerned with the zone of indistinction between life and language. Thus to the extent that ethos is the fundamental characteristic of human language, to the same extent humanity is constituted and set off from the animal kingdom by the fact that, alone among the animals, humans read their life in their language. Agamben writes, Uniquely among living things, man is not limited to acquiring language as one capacity among others that he is given but has made of
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 45, No. 4, 2012 Copyright 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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it his specific potentiality; he has, that is to say, put his very nature at stake in language. . . . He is the living being whose language places his life in question (69, emphasis his). This is a radical revision of ethos: by moving freely between the two poles of the ancient concept (language and life) and reading each pole within the other, Agamben has turned ethos into a zone of indistinction that explains what it binds together: the specificity of human language and the never-ending task of anthropogenesis. To better understand this zone of indistinction, Agamben turns to an archaeology of the oath. This makes good sense. In both legal and religious contexts, the oath is the genre par excellence for guaranteeing the relation of life and language. In the most conventional sense possible, to swear an oath is to verify the correlation of deeds and words, life and language. As Agamben puts it, the oath seems to guarantee the truth or effectiveness of a proposition (5). For this reason, the oath has thrived in contexts (law and religion most prominently) where questions of truth are paramount. Yet the conventional reading of the oath as a tool for articulating words and deeds is clearly not sufficient for Agamben. To render life and language indistinguishable (not simply linkable), the oath must be more than a rhetorical technique. In its capacity to bind words and deeds together, it must be understood as archetypal of language as such. For Agamben, therefore, an oath is not one genre among many; it is the essence of language, its purest manifestation and a privileged window into its ultimate conceit. Agamben thus approaches the oath not as it exists in legal/religious contexts but as something more fundamental. In fact, his entire methodologyhis archaeologyis designed precisely to foreground the fundamental indis tinction of language and oath. Agambens archaeology must not be confused with Foucaults. Eschewing transcendental categories like origin or totality, Foucaults archaeologist pursues the endless accumulation of historical statements. On this model, the archaeologist does not ask where these statements began, what motivated them, or what drove them to appear when they did. She resists every temptation to look beyond the statement to something deeper, more fundamental, or more originary than the simple historical fact of its appearance. In the sharpest of contrasts, Agambens archaeologist purses an arche that is beyond all historical statements. Following philologist Georges Dumzil (who was also influential for Foucault), Agamben argues that the goal of archaeology is the furthest fringe of ultra-history (9). His example is the so-calledIndo-European language, the entirely hypothetical language from which a great variety of historical
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languages supposedly sprung. His conceit is that the examination of historical statements allows the archaeologist to work backward from history to ultra-history, from specific statements to a force operating in history (10) to the otherwise inaccessible stages of the history of social institutions (9). The distance between the two archaeologies might be measured by the mathematical metaphors used to describe them. Foucaults archaeology is grounded in addition; for him the fundamental archaeological task is accumulation.1 For Agamben, on the other hand, the archaeologist requires an algorithm, a means of arranging historical statements into a formula that produces something more than the sum of its parts (9). In the Sacrament of Language, Agamben uses his algorithm to work backward from a variety of classical meditations on the oath (Philo and Cicero are prominent) to what he calls an originary experience of language (53). This experience, much like the Indo-European language, is something that is necessarily presupposed as having happened but that cannot be hypostatized into an event in a chronology (11). What is this pure experience of language (53)? Here we need to follow Agamben into the details. His first clue that the historical career of the oath might bear witness to the pure experience of language is grounded in the observation that the name of God is a recurrent (even required) aspect of the oath (e.g., I swear by God . . .). To make sense of this formulaic requirement, Agamben turns to the first-century philosopher Philo Judeaus. In his analysis of a lengthy portion of the Legum allegoriae, Agamben stresses the ambiguous function of the name of God within the formula of the oath: It is completely impossible to tell if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God (22). This indeterminacy between the oath and name of God is important to Agamben, and he returns to this fundamental lesson from Philo at critical points throughout the book (48, 51). The indistinction between the oath and the name of God prompts Agamben to turn to Nietzsches one-time teacher, the German philologist Hermann Usener. Now known for his concept of momentary gods, Usener argued that every name of the gods was originally the name of an action or a brief event. Thus there were gods named after harvest, tilling, plowing, and so forth. So understood, there is no distance between the name of a god and activities in the world; the name of a given god was the activity and the activity was the name of the god (46). This, we might say, is the ultimate instantiation of ethos: there is here no distance
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between life and language. Indeed, it is precisely the collapsing of the distance (the indistinction) between words and things that constitutes the oath as an index to an originary experience of language. Here we have something like the foundation or originary core of that testimonial and guaranteeing function of language. Thus, the name of God, essential to the formulaic structure of the oath, attests to the indistinction that envelops words and deeds, the oath and language as such. The name of God is the very event of language in which words and things are indissolubly linked. Every naming, every act of speech is, in this sense, an oath (46). The simple act of nomination, then, points to an original experience of language. On this score, the essential characteristic of nomination is the fact that, in the act of naming, words and deeds are performatively related. As in the oath, the utterance of the name immediately actualizes the correspondence between words and things (49). At this point, Agambens mode of argument resembles nothing so much as Nietzsches On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. As Nietzsche explains in this 1873 essay, originally speaking, language was neither denotative nor semantic. Rather, all words were originally interjections, names imposed on events by the creative whim of the intuitive man (who would soon become the overman). For Nietzsche (and Agamben), in the original act of naming, words and things were related only by the aesthetic preferences of the strong; it was only as the weak repeated the original interjections of the strong that words fell into the realm of semantics, representation, and meaning.2 It is for this reason, Agamben argues, that categories long central to the understanding of language (meaning, representation, and denotation) were not part of the original (performative) experience of language. He even suggests that one day the experience of language might once more escape the paradigm of representation: The distinction between sense and denotation, which is perhaps not, as we have been accustomed to believe, an original and eternal characteristic of human language but a historical product (which, as such, has not always existed and could one day cease to exist) (55). Thus does Agamben revise the speech act theory of performatives. Owing to their nonrepresentational semiotics, performatives point to the original experience of language. They represent in language a remnant of a stage . . . in which the connection between words and things is not of a semantico-denotative type but performative, in the sense that, as in the oath, the verbal act brings being into truth (55). At this point we can begin to see Agambens radical revision of ethos. As he makes the category central
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to the experience of language, he asks us to remove it from the realm of representation in which it functions as a technique a speaker might deploy to guarantee the truth of her words. Rather, Agamben asks us to consider ethos performatively, to see it as indistinguishable from an original experience of language. Much like Nietzsches, Agambens tale is one of degeneration. Once the original performative experience of language was lost (and the paradigm of representation took over), possibilities of truth and falsehood emerged. In the space that now existed between words and things, the space that had been collapsed in the act of naming and in the oath, semantics took the place of performance. It was now the question of meaning that guaranteed the articulation of life and language. But meaning, complicated as it is by rhetoric, proved an untrustworthy linkage. Thus it seemed that falsehood was a possibility written into the experience of language as such. For this reason Agamben argues that it was only after the original experience of language had been lost that law and religionthe two historical guardians of the oathsprang up to guarantee the relation between language and life. No longer an integral part of language itself, the linkage between words and deeds needed to be vouched for by human institutions and an ever-proliferating list of blessings/curses attached to the oath. Agamben returns to this point time and again, suggesting that it is deeply significant for him. Over and again, he insists on the primacy of an experience of language from which followed a number of cultural institutions: And it is in the attempt to check this split in the experience of language that law and religion are born, both of which seek to tie speech to things and to bind, by means of curses and anathemas, speaking subjects to the veritative power of their speech (58). Agamben cares about more than the birth of law and religion. On a more fundamental level, in the split in the experience of language Agamben reads the birth of anthropogenesis. That is, because humanity is the animal that reads itself in its language, the introduction of space between words and things provoked an existential crisis from which we have not recovered. Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being (11). This is why Agamben considers The Sacrament of Language to be a continuation of Homo Sacer. Agamben opened (and closed) Homo Sacer with a quotation from Foucault: Modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.3 He ends The Sacrament of

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Language with the same quotation, adding this comment:So also is he the living being whose language places his life in question. These two definitions are, in fact, inseparable and constitutively dependent on each other (69, emphasis his). In other words, if in the original volume Agamben stressed the political production of bare life, Agamben now argues that bare life and language are structurally related.4 Indeedand this may be his strongest claimAgamben now argues that bare life must itself be considered a product of language. From the perspective of Agambens oeuvre, then, we must consider Homo Sacer and The Sacrament of Language as symmetrical studies: they chart the construction of bare life from political and linguistic origins respectively. From the perspective of the rhetorical tradition, the revision of ethos must now be considered complete: if Agamben can posit ethos as the fundamental category of language, it is because language itself creates the (bare) life to which it is continuously annexed. Now, truth be told, Agamben only once characterizes his inquiry in terms of ethos (on page 68). Ive framed the entire inquiry in such terms to foreground the fact that, despite the difficulty of the philosophical prose, and despite the absence of what might be thought of as a rhetorical cast of mind, The Sacrament of Language is a book that will command the interest of readers of this journal. It is book that takes canonical ideas and concepts, reads them in creative ways, and produces results that are provocative by any measure. At this moment in rhetorical studies, a moment marked by a renewed concern in nonhuman rhetorics, animal rhetorics, and the space of the speaking subject vis--vis language, The Sacrament of Language may prove itself an invaluable tool for rethinking rhetorics relationship to animals, humanity, and language. Id like to register only one qualification. Briefly put, I fear Agamben may confuse articulation and indistinction. More precisely, he tends to read indistinction where a more nuanced reader might see only articulation. A few examples. In his reading of Philo, Agamben concludes that it is completely impossible to decide if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God. This is not true. For Philo, the fact that Gods words are oaths is a corollary deduced from the primary fact of his sure strength (20). Philo is certainly articulating the oath and God, but they remain distinct: one is a corollary of another. Similar objections might be leveled against Agambens equation of law and curse (38) and the various equations of the oath with blasphemy (39), promises (27), or perjury (7). Just because there is a mutually constitutive

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(evensymbiotic) relationship between these concepts (and Agamben is at his best demonstrating these links) does not mean that they occupy a zone of indistinction. My concern is not limited to The Sacrament of Language. Readers of Agamben know that zones of indistinction are absolutely central to the whole of his work. I could point to the zones of indistinction he posits in Homo Sacer between man and animal, law and fact, or, ultimately, life and politics.5 Or I could point to the indistinction between anomie and order that permeates his State of Exception.6 In all cases, Agambens work relies on the careful, meticulous, and complete erasing of boundaries. Agamben reads free movement, indeterminacy, and indistinction where others have read particular forms of correlation. At times, this indistinction is grounded in readings of obscure (Philo, Usener) or extreme (the Nazi documents that circulate in the closing section of Homo Sacer) texts that may (or may not) be sufficient to establish the indistinction he needs. Near the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben makes his commitment to zones of indistinction explicit: It is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, the difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought.7 Whether or not Agamben is correct that zones of indistinction must become a central category of our political thinking, Id like to suggest that they must be central to our evaluation and uptake of Agamben himself. Above all, we must ask ourselves whether or not the zones of indistinction that punctuate his work at regular intervals are justified by the evidence he presents. My hunch is that some of them are and some of them are not. Indeed, zones of indistinction are the great genius and great liability of Agambens thought: by moving freely between historically distinct ideas, by treating mutually constitutive concepts as if they were indistinguishable, Agamben enables us to ask profound questions that cut to the heart of our tradition. There is no denying this is important work. But, by the same measure, these questions only obtain because what might be called a consistent habit of (mis)reading indistinction for articulation. Whether one finds such work theoretically provocative (which it is) or historically slippery (which it is) is ultimately a question of faith. Dave Tell Department of Communication Studies University of Kansas

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notes
1. Foucault 1972, 125. 2. Nietzsche 2001. 3. Agamben 1998, 3. 4. Agamben 1998, 83. 5. Agamben 1998, 107, 171, 188. 6. Agamben 2005, 36, 39, 48, 59, 67, 69, 73, 86. 7. Agamben 1998, 187.

works cited
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2005. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2001. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings From Classical Times to the Present, ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, 117179. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins.