Manlio Sgalambro, Giorgio Agamben: On metaphysical suspension of language and the destiny of its inorganic re-absorption

Fabio Presutti in Italica, vol. 85, nn. 2-3, aprile-settembre 2008, pp. 243-272

Manlio Sgalambro’s analysis of the concept of ‘truth’ and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the categories of human language provide a critical intersection by means of which important aspects of Western metaphysics concerning the problem of metaphysics and language can be reconsidered.

The approach to metaphysics that these two Italian philosophers have developed has never been the object of a comparative study, and although they differ in terms of conceptual means of enquiry adopted, both thinkers represent a genuine example of critical meditation concerning the object of the oldest among human sciences. The line of argument of this article studies the concept of transcendence as informed by the idea of a double counter-transcendence. The first set of concepts which defines counter-transcendence will be found in Sgalambro’s idea of the ongoing process of destruction of the world’s inorganic matter. The latter is understood as that which counters the position of a transcendent principle of the world’s beginning and its organic manifestations. Similarly, the irreducibility of the cosmos’ inorganic events to rational laws opposes the transcendental construction of the intellect through the language as its system of knowledge. The second set of concepts defines the idea of counter-transcendence through Agamben’s analysis of the plane of semantic articulation of human discourse, which also includes that of metaphysics, and that of a semiotic dimension of words (signs) conceived as the pure elements of language. For Agamben, any human discourse counters the forgotten reality of the semiotic plane of unconnected words. The latter, represents the pure potential of language’s transformability beyond the categorical utilisation and fixation of its terms: namely, the state of ‘infancy’ in opposition to that of ‘history’.

1) Writing in philosophy

The philosophical and theological themes of Sgalambro’s works reintroduce an attention to the concept of truth towards which, he says, man no longer feels any emotion¹. Truth, in his view, has become a question of scientific assertions, more or less verifiable by logical procedures². Whereas, for him, its content is not reducible to any alphabetical or numerical codification: “Let us suppose that the eternal truth is this: the truth is against you”³. On this ground, Sgalambro’s work unravels speculatively finally arriving at the individual, sociopolitical being’s incapacity to understand the evidence of this truth. Sgalambro’s stylistic and conceptual thought is that nowadays it is still possible to write⁴ philosophy as an attempt to reestablish a vision of things that avoids political anthropocentrism and the social and technical outcomes that it entails. Philosophy, he says, is not a form of knowledge to be elaborated through a continual series of timely interpretations. The spirit of any given philosophy is unattainable by any other. The idea of a progressive historical advancement of thought threatens knowledge itself. In the Western historical representation of thought there is an erasure of the necessary inexactitude of those few moments in which and by which an intuition is given. In other words, for Sgalambro, philosophy has to be subtracted from the system of positive knowledge that has nothing to do with its content, which is openly contrary to the ideal of life’s conservation. This ‘positive’ aspect of knowledge is reflected in the predominant entrepreneurial and managerial attitude of the academic organisation⁵, whereby the content of what has already been thought (the peace of what is known)⁶ is continually reconfronted with ‘new’ analyses⁷ to which Sgalambro does not attribute a necessary role for the extension of knowledge⁸. On the contrary, he says, the necessity of such presupposed development is only a value induced by the system of ‘Kultur’ in ‘Zivilisation’.
The writer of philosophy does not establish relations between different philosophical systems, but practices philosophy only as a ‘work’: “Always the same matter and absolute novelty of the form, this is the philosophical work, points out Anatol. […]. Thought seen as unlaced from the needs of the insect – social intellect and obedient only to problems of style, rhythm, eternity”⁹. The truth of a system of thought cannot be conciliated with any other system; and for Sgalambro this reflects the principle of its absolute adversity to man. Truth cannot have an author since it hits by chance (the wearing out of the body, the thermic death of universe) and its concept cannot be produced on demand. Truth is ‘objective’ but not as the object of a specific knowledge, which needs the proof of experience to be recognised. It is, instead, ‘objective’ regardless of any principle of experience¹⁰, as it unleashes itself violently near to something, or it carves its evidence onto the cortical elaborations of a brain. It follows that, for him, the historical projection of different philosophies is possible only in virtue of a ‘methodical emanatism’: “Whereby the lining up of enthymemes is no longer simultaneous, but reflects back the faint stages of consciousness, it is scanned through its rhythms, becomes an order, that is a former and a latter”¹¹.

2) Simultaneous contrariety of truth

What is meant by ‘simultaneity of philosophy’? If the autoconsciousness is the subject’s intimate apperception¹², the folding of the awareness in itself which opens up its inner dimension of time¹³, then simultaneity, in contrast, does not imply internal time reference. The conscious element to which the subsequential movement of events has to be referred in order to be perceived is absent. Simultaneity is constant presentiality, the blind state of the asubjective event; it is the form in which any event and its terms are inscribed into the joints of their phenomenic existence. What is more, simultaneity cannot be perceived but, I could say, ‘it perceives’, and that is why for Sgalambro, truth, considered as an empty concept, becomes laughable, since it refers only to motionless content: “It is the world without man”¹⁴.
For him, it is only in relation to human pain that a state of harmony and its brokenness can be measured; and this is when the ‘thing in itself’ bursts in, breaking down the system of representation¹⁵. The idea of ‘interruption’ is unveiled to man as a tremendous thing. The compactness of the representation, in which the subject was enveloped a while ago, frees the annihilating power that it carries within itself. That is, somewhere, simultaneously to the subject’s self presential state of consciousness of a given moment of its experience, conditions for new effectuations of truth’s outgrowth are being prepared (concatenations of lived experiences or processes of geomorphological decomposition). This truth takes form in each simultaneous happening of the world and is a quantum of accumulation (an outgrowth sack) which originates in each of such happenings. Then, abruptly, the accumulation of its material reaches its maximum limit hitting against the extreme peripheral zones of its containing ‘field’ of events and pours out, overflowing into the contiguous perimeter of human-lived experience, revealing all its unknown tremendum.
The impersonal character of truth, says Sgalambro, undermines the so-called ‘world of theoretical contents’, where the products of the subject’s knowledge are simulacra, fainting shadows. The act of knowing a determined thing does not grasp its original form insofar as a simulacrum gives itself impersonally. To know is then to contemplate, as things contain an impersonal region¹⁶ to which the ‘subject’ participates in a limited way. The subject relishes very little of the original and what is given in each element of knowledge, namely in each of its objects, is given altogether with the distance from its ‘in se’. For Sgalambro, even though the subject, in perceiving the object, functions as a theoretical medium it can only touch upon that original world in which the object as such exists. What is left out of the ‘object’ is a marginal fragment, not an original form. This means, according to Sgalambro, that the function of the subject as ‘theoretical-medium’ does not cover that role of ‘subject-of-transformation-of-the-object’ which praxis has always attributed to it¹⁷. Hence, truth is an ‘outside’, timeless suspension of uncognizable elements ready to hit in the infinite power of a constant simultaneity of happenings. Likewise, the living core of a philosophy, for itself, is to be contemplated and not disjointed by means of technical analysis, which fosters a distributive use of its overall content into a historical narration. In Sgalambro’s thought, these two themes necessarily overlap one another. More to the point, for Sgalambro, the threads which compose an initial definition of truth interlace with the aconscious, the element which soothes the ‘spirit’ until this is reabsorbed within the initial inorganic stasis from which it once originated.

3) A renewed cosmological idea of the ‘inorganic”

Sgalambro asks: what would put man back into a direct auscultation of the cosmoses’ tremendous truth? “Being – without images – is the essent¹⁸. Only the intelligence, which deals with inert things, can therefore understand it”¹⁹. But philosophy is not a dialogic discourse around separated and inert ‘things’ that have to be ordered in a system of rational connections; rather, it is a monologic form of expression and being, although traversing the world’s heteronomy of facts, does not allow for any subjective consciousness to legitimate the possess of its threatening entireness. These reflections pave the way to a new cosmological ‘idea’: “It is not us who nullify the world, but it is the world which nullifies us”²⁰. Hence, human events are not to be brought back into the process of history. On the contrary, these should be calibrated to the world and to the cosmos’ greatness, where their ‘essential’ importance vanishes: “The cosmologic experience binds up with the object-like condition of the inhabitants living in the society at its completion, into Zivilisation. Subjectivity is the quick consciousness of being as objects”²¹. The truth of a cosmos where solar systems move clumsily and without order and in which thermic cooling²² will cause the organic absorption into the inorganic transcends man and his praxis on every side.
Along the line of a reevaluation of an unsettled cosmos, irreducible to the laws of the intellect²³, Sgalambro extends his concept of truth’s contrariety to a reflection concerning the role of mathematical sciences²⁴. For Sgalambro, the amount of spirituality²⁵ required to conceive of numbers does not correspond to an equal (or either increased) amount in the ‘real’ transposition from their idea to written numbers and operations and, therefore, from signs to the world’s things. A number in itself is an ‘interruption’ of living flux, a fixation of the ‘thing’ and of nature which, in this way, becomes separated at different intervals which solidify and: “[…] exactly whilst the intellect is operating, spirit is transformed into matter”²⁶. In the passage from the theoretical intuition of mathematical relations²⁷ between beings to written formulae (and to external fixation of beings themselves), the vivified spirit cannot be maintained; the formula does not add any linguistic or numerical meaning to unveil the hidden sense of ‘reality’. Therefore, in the relation between scientific concepts (the intuition of numbers) and their external manifestation as formulae and beings, no subject can be operating and therefore mathematics has to admit that within the signs of its ‘language’ no thought as such has ever been contained²⁸. The universe, says Sgalambro, is what counters thought, and mathematics has to ratify this state of things²⁹. Consequently, man is only a marginal perspective with respect to the cosmos and he can say that mathematical signs are like the dolorous singing of a species³⁰, the vain attempt to understand the immutable and undeterminable laws of reality³¹.
If this is accepted, then mathematics necessarily relates to the process of ‘becoming-a-thing’ where the object, as a solid and lasting being, conforms to its adequate adaptability for scientific use. But, for Sgalambro, it is exactly this reification³² of the thing operated by science that unveils the objective negation of will³³. It is will that attempts to become a thing and to be reabsorbed into what it is not yet, to eventually find the eternal peace of the original inorganic stasis. In one word, the process of objectification, whilst it may appear to be a way of mastering and manipulating the world, is an unconscious echo of the total objectification of the inorganic. This suspension of life, as the actualisation of mathematics’ power to turn reality into things (objects), exemplifies the degree of discontinuity of material information on the base of which science works. One’s own self nullification as an object makes the external world appear conform to the lasting solidity of its beings and, together, extremely fragmented insofar as these beings are necessarily separated from one another. Hence, for Sgalambro, a clear contrast emerges between the forthcoming ‘cosmological idea’ and philosophy of science. In the latter, scientific concepts are exposed as if they represented the homogeneous development and rational interconnection of objects bur, he asks: “What about the abyss around which images of regularity are disposed?”³⁴. This philosophy, he wants to say, conceals the state of irregularity and disorder from which such images derive. These discontinuities, the vacuums generated within the fragmented objects to which scientific formulae would assign a sense (composition) in the theory testify to the destructive element inherent to matter (its ‘in se’).

4) The will’s reification into the ‘thing’ as forthcoming end

For Sgalambro, to take the view that reality undergoes an element of destruction from within does not involve the conceptual problem of the absence of a ‘principle’, but rather the need to elevate to the principle: “A concept – the world’s end”³⁵. Put differently, what kind of value does metaphysics take on when related to the concept of being seen in its unstoppable dematerialisation, rather than related to the concept of its ‘beginning’? The impossibility that the former term of such relation subverts the solidity of the historical tradition in which the concept of beginning resides reflects a ‘taboo’ characterisation of metaphysics: “Its prohibition equals the prohibition of thinking the ‘end of the world’ in place of its ‘beginning’; the real dissolution in place of the transcendental construction”³⁶. The transcendental method, he says, should be oriented by this concept of dissolution rather than by intellectual constructivist claims. But this proves impossible since the nexus between the cosmos and scientific physics no longer exists³⁷. Consequently, the intellect must allow for an experiential space to contemplate the process of universal fragmentation, in order to express its functionability in relation to a principle of decomposition. But it only means that the noumenal content of the world (the cosmos) reflects the dissolution of the reality of consciousness.
As a result, if cosmic events are destined for extinction, the fundamental attitude of science should reflect: “That inorganic towards which its dream of inertia leads. Science – including those branches which take care of the living – acts as if life was not there and, in fact, it will not be there”³⁸. Hence, the inorganic is inevitable; it will come back regardless of any science. This is, in Sgalambro’s thought, the inadmissible verdict of the cosmos. In this light, Western science attempted a ready-made system of technical knowledge and expertises, which exhausted human needs and weakened life. The objective negation of the subject’s will is, in fact, scrupulously actuated in its longing for the products and goods. In this process, will is promptly reabsorbed in what social acts require in order to provide for such goods. These acts symbolise the progressive reaffirmation of the inorganic over the organic world³⁹.
Therefore, Sgalambro asserts that the reality of thought does not change things and leaves them where and as they are, touching upon them only for that little intelligible shadow that it can grasp: “If one submits to the idea of thought that, when thinking, one does nothing, then true reality is given back to thought which, since it is regarded as the more real – in terms of making, creating, producing – it no longer has reality”⁴⁰. In fact, the social subject’s unconditioned attraction to technical goods, the coldness of its machines, the lingering of exchanges, represents exactly the process of the inorganic reappearance as its progressive affirmation, for man only desires to be reabsorbed into matter. “The realm of techniques […] is the long inorganic way to reabsorb life”⁴¹. Sgalambro’s reflections shake the object of metaphysics to its foundation. He addresses his own ‘evidence’⁴² of truth precisely to the core of that speculative knowledge inaugurated in Western thought since the pre-Socratics. His theological eye challenges and changes the meaning of metaphysics right back to its original task: from the explication of the cosmos’ principle and finalistic cause of existence (telos) to the understanding of its counter-finality, from the problem of the origin to that of the foreseen end. This topic opens up onto a greater theoretical perspective when confronted with the following general question: What makes metaphysics possible in any given language? What is the complex relation between the affirmation of the inorganic, exemplified through the will’s reification into the thing-product, and the use of categories as necessary structures for metaphysical discourse and for other forms of human communication?
I argue that such a relation involves a reflection about the double signification of human language. It is at this point that I want to turn to the work of Giorgio Agamben. In his view, the double signification of language results from the fact of a vacuum between the existence of a semiotic plane of language and a semantic plane of discourse. The former refers to words disconnected one from another and whose phonetic element contains language’s pure potentiality to transform its own structure; the latter refers to terms considered in their grammatical and syntactical connections. The space of resonance through which the phoneme (the elementary structure of any word) articulates the difference between the semiotic existence of the word and its passage into semantic discourse (which includes that of metaphysics too) gradually disappears because of the
progressive affirmation of the language of technical goods’ production (inorganic). The practical-technical detour of metaphysical knowledge leads human language towards its reabsorption into that inert matter whose complete possession through technical manipulation coincides, for Sgalambro, with the accomplishment of metaphysics’ noumenal object.
Therefore, Sgalambro’s ideas of truth, science and will converge and, eventually, integrate with Agamben’s analysis of language and metaphysics expressed in the work Infancy and History (1978). Both thinkers analyse the exhaustion of Western metaphysical concepts fostered through the serial production of linguistic categories and technical goods in contemporary industrialised societies. Surprisingly, they never quoted each other’s works and therefore never engaged in direct philosophical discussion. A further main aim of this article is therefore to begin this fruitful and important exchange.

5) The different conceptions of philosophy in Agamben and Sgalambro’s works

Before proceeding towards a more detailed analysis of the concept of the exhaustion of metaphysics in relation to Agamben’s definition of the existence and essence of language, I need to point out some differences between the two authors with regards to their objects of research. In fact, the areas of their studies diverge sensibly in terms of the philosophical problematic from which they move and which they seek to bring to a conceptual development. But if, on the one hand, these thematic differences help us to situate their works into as many distinct theoretical traditions, on the other hand, these diversities urge us to reflect upon metaphysics and language with the intent of superimposing the concepts that the two authors express in their respective investigations. Hence, this paragraph will introduce in short Agamben’s investigation about the concept of language and Sgalambro’s ontology of the counterfinalism of the world (cosmos) to offer an introductive basis for the confrontation of their ideas and terminologies. Their analyses converge towards determined concepts like that of ‘linguistic’ or ‘metaphysical (will) reabsorption’, which can be derived from the actual letter of their texts. Therefore, the present essay is to be considered as an experiment of thought which attempts to cast attention upon the capability of philosophical concepts (mental entities which possess a defined formal structure) to communicate to one another within the field of a theoretical research. It is not a matter of altering definitions which belong to different terminological apparatus of enquiry but, rather, to investigate the potentiality of concepts and terminologies with a view of extending the overall knowledge of the philosophical problem at stake; that is, ah extension of the series of definitions and reflections which form the recognisable basis and matter for such a knowledge.
In what sense, then, Agamben’s and Sgalambro’s approaches to the problem of metaphysics and language diverge? To answer this question I shall discuss briefly Agamben’s work Infancy and History and then Sgalambro’s reflections on the ideas of ‘philosophy’, ‘God’ and ‘death’. In the preface to the English edition of Infancy and History. The Destruction of the Experience (1989), Agamben states the key problem which will emerge and inform his disparate research through this work: what does it mean for language to exist? What does the fact that – I speak – mean? These questions rethink the metaphysical presupposition that the defining essence of man is that to have language. Thus, he proposes that language may be investigated (or experienced) as a being whose precise limit is that of not possessing the word (the concept) which can define its own ‘being’ (essence). For Agamben, the pure selfreferentiality of language⁴³ constitutes a conceptual field for a number of philosophical investigations: 1) Can infancy be studied as a moment in which an experiment of language takes place for oneself and in what way? 2) What is the relation between language and the notion of subject? Is the notion of the subject conceivable without language? 3) What kind of metaphysical experience can be conceptualised from a reflection about the state of infancy, where man does not yet possess language, but is possessed by the inexorable process of formation of phonemes (that is, the basic pattern for his possible apprehension of languages in general)? These questions individuate a part of Agamben’s theoretical background and the kind of research in which he engages with, such as those around the notions of language and death. The problem that he addresses is that of the destiny of metaphysics in relation to its collapse into the ethical sphere understood as nihilism. Now, one of the tasks of contemporary thought, he says, is to find a way of avoiding nihilism through the overhauling of a rigorous philosophy of the experience of language. The latter should identify the
negative status of the human there-being in existence (Dasein) as the result of the split within language between the ineffability or unspeakability of its being (essence) and the fact that, nevertheless, language exists. Although the being of language is irreducible to further linguistic terms of human discourse, it still constitutes the necessary condition for the existence of the speakability of language. Therefore, in an original theoretical attempt to move beyond Hegel’s and Heidegger’s radicalisation of the negative experience of man in relation with the constitutive split between the indefinable being of language and its factual existence (which he sees as a consistent and persistent element of Western thought from Aristotle to Wittgenstein) Agamben foresees the elimination of this duality (which is also the duality of metaphysics and nihilism) by the articulation of the terms of an experience of language that is yet to be: namely, the articulation of the concept of the ‘state of infancy’. Hence, the question he poses becomes: in what sense could metaphysics represent a necessary pattern of thought (structure) for the existence of human discourse (language), and where could man’s language be brought back into if metaphysics disappeared from within the constituting process of the communicability of words? In this regard, it must be pointed out that when I say ‘metaphysics’ I am referring with Agamben to determined linguistic structures such as pronouns or grammatical shifters (indicators of enunciation) more properly known as categorematic expressions, which isolate the selfreferentiality of language because they refer to nothing other than the taking place of language itself. The self referentiality of language opens up the space for the possibility of the discourse of history, that is, for the narration of human events based upon the presupposition of a congruence in terms of what happens in the event (or in series of events). This congruence can be understood as the linguistic means of which man disposes of in order to refer and assign a determined meaning to events.I will develop this point later in this work, but what I would like to insist upon here is the question concerning the eventual destiny of man in a context in which the linguistic means of his expression (the categorematic basis of his language) is no longer operating within his speech. What would be a possible distinct linguistic terrain where man might have to face the constitutive absence of any metaphysical structure and, therefore, experience the impossibility of affirming the necessary correspondence between words and events, language and history? This terrain other than language, for Agamben, is a space which should express the pure potentiality for the existence of language, that is, its potentiality to form the objects and the names which constitute the possibility of its own speakability. Thus, this potential space could coincide either with an age or a time which precedes the formation of language – the state of infancy – or with an age or a time which follows the exhaustion of language: the apex (or completion) of the being of language seen as the conflagration of its own objects. In fact, in Agamben’s analyses, language can lose its signifying capacity and can be reabsorbed into the mute dictionary of signs when the metaphysical structures of human discourse are erased from it. Infancy becomes, in this respect, an original state of presignification in which the disarticulation of words from their meanings individuates the existence of phonematic structures. Phonemes are conceived as the smallest unites of language, systems of sound-pattern relations which bear a correspondence with existing external objects bur cannot yet be identified with determined actual names. Phonemes, then, are like the living material for the existence of words and for the relation of meaningfulness that these have to entertain with their objects of reference. Therefore, in infancy the human mind is said to express a degree of potential variation of the set of official meanings already operating within a given language; infancy is the space for the potential reformability of language itself. Ultimately, the extinction (or reabsorption into the space of mute signs) of the metaphysical structures upon which linguistic meanings are established involves the cancellation of the category of the ‘speaking subject’. The event of the disappearance of the subject of human discourse relates, then, to the accomplishment of the destiny of Western metaphysics, the analysis of which is precisely one of the objects of Sgalambro’s research. However, we can now ask, in what sense does Sgalambro’s approach to the study of metaphysics vary with respect of Agamben’s? A preliminary answer to this question can follow an interpretation of this central sentence from Sgalambro: “I have always considered philosophy as a slow destructive work”⁴⁴. In order to understand this sentence, we must first note that for him the encounter with philosophy revealed a different experience of time. The study of this subject, he felt, requires an enduring effort of attention which cannot be measured by physical time. This experience in philosophy destroys a common sense that assigns a precise role for progression within an established historical tradition. This is a fundamental premise for
Sgalambro’s philosophy. The philosopher does not choose a field of research as presented by a determined historical reconstruction. He has, instead, a disposition to be chosen by a ‘thought’, that is, an inner compatibility to be attracted by the terminological finesses of a concept which, abruptably, becomes the object of an exigency of truth. The lead line, the structural element of philosophy coincides, then, with its terminological tradition. We have, be says, a tradition in the use of philosophical terms which begins with Greeks and still endures. It is this terminological tradition which is common to philosophy as a discipline, more than the historical derivation of its doctrines. The history of philosophy constitutes an important basis for the general understanding of the use that philosophers have made of concepts. Bur beyond a right comprehension of this diverse utilisation of technical terms, one should not attempt to find a unique interpretative set of themes which would identify the development of determined ideas and contents through the history of thought. In the latter, the differences between the various ambits of research (metaphysics, cosmology, logic and theology) and within the doctrines that have been elaborated in relation to them are more numerous than the identities which philosophers have expressed in their systems. Both diversities and similarities intertwine around the complex and leading thread of the terminological tradition⁴⁵. It is inside this tradition that we can forge philosophical ideas.Therefore, Sgalambro’s thought does not belong either to the historical approach to philosophy nor does he write as a philosopher of language: rather, his works aim to reveal the concealed contrariety of a quid (‘a’ something) which acts from within any form of knowledge, any object or material reality; that is, the presence of something indefinable which accompanies and unsettles any human product and any thing. This contrariety demands a different way of thinking of truth in philosophy and actually challenges the thinkers to engage with, what he calls, a strong idea of the concept of truth. By using the adjective ‘strong’ Sgalambro means a concept of truth of one’s own that can never be reconciled with another’s. Truth resides in the very act of saying or affirming a particular concept and not in the process of comparing other definitions of the same object. Sgalambro’s argument is as follows: when anyone thinks that what he/she has to say is only a matter of personal belief, then that single affirmation accumulates until they all become opinions. In opposition to this, he claims that the truth of an affirmation (reflection about a given object) is as such only when what is being said is assumed as ‘true’ in the very act of thinking (posing) its content as true⁴⁶, that is, in the moment in which one thinks of something as a truth it becomes incomparable to and separated from anything which might be argued against it. This is his very particular form of the strong conception of truth: there is no space (or no time) for debating it, so that philosophy turns immediately from being an art of dialogue (maieutic) to a severe form of monologic reflection, which penetrates deep into the object of its study but leaves intact a deadly halo that envelopes it⁴⁷ namely, the halo of its noumenal hard-bark, its zone of unknowability.
There is something hostile and indomitable within the objects that ideas reflect and, therefore, also within the world of which the human mind conceives ideas. This hostile part, which is inherent to the objects of knowledge, counters man’s attempt to capture any definitive reduction of the world to anthropomorphic theories. The recognition of the noumenal character of the world leads the philosopher to embrace what Sgalambro defines as ‘the law of reflection’. This law, he explains, allows us to relate any operation of our thought, any knowing act we produce about the world, to the renewed awareness that its objects are irreducible to the constructs of our mind and that, therefore, it is literally against us. The law of reflection confirms the reciprocal irreducibility of man and world; or, in other words, the fact that we are ‘Parts’ of this world whereas it is the ‘Totality’ standing against these parts. The concept of death relates closely to this part-totality dialectic. Each one of us does not experience death as his natural destiny but, rather, as an unforgivable and tremendous offence perpetrated against our right to live an unlimited life, which we rightfully sense as our proper ontological status. Hence, Sgalambro argues that it is for this reason that men experience death as a pitiless privation of life which instead should belong to them ontologically. The beings (ens) of the world occupy a space in it and acquire their own form because they relate to it in various ways. They occupy a space in the world but not steadily, so that they are continually struggling to keep themselves in this space. But this is because beings are parts of ‘Being’ understood as the concrete existence of the solar system, that is, a cluster of rocks and gases (inert material), a cosmos of opposite physical forces of repulsion and nothing else. The lifeless being of the solar system arouses in man the sense that he is a part of that which does not have a life, and which is indifferent to him: the lifeless solar system is alternative to the image of God of love and charity and to the concept of humanity which mirrors it. Definitive death is, for Sgalambro, the end of the solar system, its gaseous implosion.
This state of aversion becomes the centre of Sgalambro’s analysis about the concept of God. In place of God, to whose undreamed of ‘Power’ one must offer reverence and obsequies, there is now the solar system with its mass of rocks and gases to which no reverence of sort is ever due. For him, when men finally dispose themselves to live in the constant acceptance of the presence of this new God (with the solar system at its apex), then the true ethos of humanity will have been established, that is, men living beings contemporaneous with the common death of the cosmos. In relation to this analysis, Sgalambro reintroduces the historical figure of the theologician but as one who accepts the law of reflection and thus is ready to engage with the object of his research only through a consideration of the contrariety of this object towards him as a mete part. But, how could a theologician retain God as adverse to him and to men? He, says Sgalambro, is in fact more than a theologician: he is an impious theologician. The impious (unholy one) inherits the concept of God and refuses any atheistic (simplicistic) denying his existence. For the impious theologician, God is given as the totality against the parts and thus can be thought under the law of reflection by which the theologician sustains a belief that can only be to God rather than in God. To believe in God is to trust him, to remit oneself to this Principle; on the contrary, to believe to God means simply to justify his mere being-in-existence as a thing (the indifferent solar system, or cosmos) which we call Totality or Beginning. Impietism is the attitude which takes in consideration the banality of the being of God and the fact that nothing like trustfulness can ever link us to him, only distrust.
Sgalambro’s research in theology have brought attention back to concepts which have been rejected by a majority of contemporary philosophies. His reflections on the definition of God situates the latter at the end of the onto-theological experience of Western thought in which God, the metaphysical being per excellence, is lowered down to the level of other mere beings. Therefore, here, Sgalambro’s reflections on the destiny of metaphysics inevitably diverge from Agamben’s in that the former studies Scholastic theology and the Christian tradition, where these present the concept of God in the detailed construction of his determinations, whereas the latter creates a system of concepts to rethink the fundamental relation between man and language in the attempt to avoid the nihilistic consequences which derive from the impossibility to define the position of man with respect of the being of language. Sgalambro’s onto-theology is the outline of a theory of continued decreation, which reverses Descartes’ notion of God as the continued cause of creation, and which bypasses the problem of Western nihilism. God becomes the dynamic ‘Act’ of the annihilation of things: he is the annihilating force, which creates only in order to destroy. In this way, God can be only suffered insofar as he is a mete object of knowledge towards which no love can be felt. In light of this, metaphysics is, for Sgalambro, that form of man’s knowledge which conceals the deadly letter of his destiny. Only from an elucidation of the noumenal content of metaphysics and of the linguistic forms through which metaphysics constitute the possibility of human discourse, will man finally uncover the secret of the being of language which, once revealed, will also coincide with the disappearance of any form of historical narration, hence, with any living form which could ever tell a similar narration.
Building on these last reflections, I will now develop this essay through a close reading of Agamben’s and Sgalambro’s interpretation of the role of metaphysics within the destiny of human language.

6) The overlapping of human language with inert matter

The increasing degree of accuracy that human language has reached in technological research indicates the degree of closeness of men and machines in social community and, particularly, where they overlap in terms of their metaphysical destiny. Human manipulation of inorganic elements into linguistic signs marks the winning destiny of inert matter over life. That is, man, by means of his linguistic apparatus, produces himself in a state of tension towards the ‘object’, where the reconstruction of the thing’s details marks the level of approximation of language’s being to matter.
Moreover, modern technologies deploy specific terms for the elaboration of objects, in which the element of resonance between the plane of human life and that of machine is no longer present. This means that the ‘word’ calculates and recreates the components of a complex of extensions
but drops that symbolic dimension which, for instance, according to a poetic conception of art, would allow for the machine to be thought beyond any practical utilisation⁴⁸. But, when such space of resonance, the distance placed at the heart of linguistic sign⁴⁹, is no longer maintained, then the process of indiscriminate approximation towards the inert essence of machine (hence the degree of will’s nullification into its own products) becomes drastically accurate. The sign’s reality lacks a perspective of distance between the actual meaning of the word (which is a sign) and the belief that the expressive (verbal) act towards external beings also confers to such meaning the quality of a necessary being. As if the object found the ‘rational’ justification of its existence and use in its speakability as such, that is insofar as it is affirmable.
In this respect, Agamben says:

“[…] in the humana separation has come about between predisposition to language (readiness for communication) and the process of realizing this potentiality. In other words, human language is split at its source into an endosomatic sphere and an esosomatic sphere, between which there is (or can be) set up a phenomenon of resonance which produces its actualisation. […] What marks human language is not its belonging to either esosomatic or endosomatic sphere, but its situation, so to speak, on the cusp of the two, and its consequent articulation within both their difference and their resonance”⁵⁰.

That which in the theory of language becomes possible as the passage from the semiotic to the semantic level⁵¹ (resonance) by means of the individuation of the phonematic⁵² element (of phoneme conceived as ‘signifier without signified’ or, also, as that unit which allows for the resonance – passage – o take place) does not seem to happen at the apex of the completion of metaphysics. In fact, the process of human beings’ reabsorption into the inorganic world stigmatizes their unwillingness in the form of a reified ‘will’ which is attempting to snatch the noumenal ‘in se’ away from the thing. Insofar as reason reduces external beings to a multiplicity of objects extraneous to one another, it produces analytical judgements which leave beings separated in their abstract unity, as inert material for technical manipulation. On this ground, the phonematic element of the semiotic plane of words no longer retains that space of resonance which should express the potential of language’s transformability in overcoming the technical exploitation of its terms.
The ‘thing in itself’, once revealed, engulfs, whereas phonemes⁵³ are structural units within which what is produced (realised) is a minimal discard that allows the plane of pure language (the semiotic, or unconnected words) to shift to the plane of discursive dimension (or semantic), where the sense of a discourse becomes primary. In the phonemes’ minimal apparatus of resonance, language finds the unity of its differential articulation, which makes it usable at various levels of human thinking and acting. Nonetheless, this articulation of linguistic unity remains differential precisely because, Agamben says, the utilisation of the name of objects in human discourse is only a momentary extraction of ‘sense’ from the semiotic plane of words. Only on the edge of this latter level, in fact, does the phonemes’ structure retain the differential articulation of a signifier without a signified.

7) The differential element of resonance in metaphysical discourse

For Sgalambro, the completion of metaphysics is revealed through the system of constant reproducibility of beings as purely usable objects, of which thought is the essential and unreal condition in terms of ‘making’, ‘producing’ and ‘acting’. In a similar sense, Agamben has defined the differential structure within the phonemes’ sign as ‘on the cusp’ of the semiotic and the semantic. So, what does the element of resonance become in metaphysical discourse? Is this resonance really traceable in the scientific turn of its semantic articulation since, for Sgalambro, human destiny seems to be reabsorbed into the inorganic progression of the lifeless ‘language’ of things? In a fundamental moment of the history of metaphysics a particular conception of difference appears. Its impact on forthcoming patterns of thought cannot be reduced to a simple matter of linguistic use, where: “From the concrete reality of the word, language comes to be isolated as the pure moment of signification, which equals what Benveniste distinguishes as the semiotic mode in opposition to the semantic mode”⁵⁴. Now, crucially, this ‘particular conception’ is Aristotle’s distinction between words taken singularly in their unconnected reality (aneu symplokés, or syncategoremata) and words which signify on their own (kata symplokén, or categoremata). The latter are necessary structures within which terms couple into grammatical sets in order to signify. For Agamben, this division represents: “The isolation, in human language, of a saying without connection, of logos that is not said in any discourse, but which, as language, makes possible the deduction of categories and the construction of logic”⁵⁵.
Therefore, Agamben goes on:

“[…] Western logic is borne at a suspension, from an epoche of the word that is from the idea that something like ‘man’, ‘ox’, ‘runs’, ‘wins’ really exists in human language. It presupposes grammatical categories and cannot be separated from them. […] Such oblivion of the irreducible difference between language and word is the founding event of metaphysics. It is by means of this forgetfulness that logos can affirm its undisputed dominion”⁵⁶.

In other words, metaphysical thought begins with the suspension (epoche) that the word itself produces as the difference between its own assertive use of an object or act, and its categorical use. This suspension allows for objects or acts to receive a grammatical sense⁵⁷. It is a structure that makes possible the signifying role of communication. Categories are ‘linguistic forms’, systems of meaning’s regularity, which designate spaces of belonging that grant meaning to the combination of terms in expression. They are systems through which particular contents of meaning are subdivided and through which the existence of referential objects happens to be determined. But the composition of each system is given by terms that, taken singularly, constitute the language to which they have to confer a sense (signify). As such, categories represent a suspension, an abstraction from the semiotic plane of unconnected words. Importantly, while this difference of ambits was clear to Aristotle⁵⁸, it failed to remain so in modern thought. This explains why, Agamben says, the building of metaphysical thinking is set up within the difference between ‘saying’ single things without connection (things which do not signify on their own or – syncategoremata -) and ‘saying’ things which do signify and realise the meaning of a discourse (or categoremata). However, on the semantic level of metaphysics (and of any other human discourse as such) the space of resonance is no longer traceable in the unity of the phoneme, in its structure that articulates the difference (the space of its proper particular sign) between the presence of a signifier and the absence of a signified.
In fact, metaphysical doctrines, Agamben says, hold to this separation between language and word, where the categories of thought make the word that element which puts pure language in function. Eventually, the result is the formation of a vacuum between the reality of categories, as they allow for the semantic plane, and the semiotic ambit of language, that is, that of words taken one by one. When words on semiotic level become part of categorical definitions they seem to be granted a different value and role with respect to their previous linguistic space of belonging⁵⁹. But once the word is shifted to its categorical role (metaphysical discourse) the phoneme loses its space of resonance, which is the structure that articulates the differential existence between the semiotic words (pure language) and their semantic assumption (shifting) as necessary names for beings. It drops the element which allows for any word to be affirmed within the symbolic space of resonance where their ultimate scope would not have to be found in their technical reproducibility for practical utilisation.
Given that, what allows for the passage from categories to the semiotic? On what basis are categories regarded as the original place of language where the proper discourse of man puts pure language to work; or where the semantic grants value and sense to the semiotic? Agamben quotes Émile Benveniste’s theory of language as it is expressed in the work Problèmes de linguistique générale⁶⁰ where the French philosopher says that what separates the sign (word) from the sentence (discourse) is a hiatus (moat)⁶¹. So, the question becomes: “[…] why is human language like this, with this moat at its source? Why is there a double signification?”⁶².

8) Infancy and History

Agamben’s theoretical solution to these questions involves the analysis of the potential organisation of language realised in infancy and the contamination that this state undergoes in the passage to the form of history. The latter is understood as the crucial moment in which man’s language accesses the plane of discourse, as his own proper form of communication. But infancy, he says, is the transcendental condition for any possible form of history, any plane of human discourse. Accordingly, Agamben asserts that only in infancy⁶³ does the ‘moat’ divide the pure language of phonemes (signifiers without signified), that is the motionless being of the word, from words ‘put-in-motion’ along each other’s edge in the formation of the discourse outside the semiotic, and from the history of such discourse. “It is the fact of man’s infancy (in other words, in order to speak, he needs to be constituted as a subject within language by removing himself from infancy) which breaks the close world of the sign and transforms pure language into human discourse, the semiotic into the semantic”⁶⁴.
Thus, infancy is the potentiality⁶⁵ of communication in language, as it transforms the system of semantic articulation of signs, each time that this system is subjected to a new emergence of that potential. Simultaneously though, the discourse of historical systems of signs expropriates the pure potentiality of the phoneme, always removing the infant from its infancy, in order to constitute it as a subject. (66) Agamben makes an essential remark about this reciprocal process:

“The semantic does not exist except in its momentary emergence from the semiotic in the instance of discourse, whose elements, once uttered, fall back into pure language, which reassembles them in its mute dictionary of signs. Like dolphins, for a mere instant human language lifts its head from the semiotic sea of nature. But the human is nothing other than this very passage from pure language to discourse; and this transition, this instant, is history”⁶⁷.

By linking the question of duplicity of language signification to the problem of metaphysics as proposed by Sgalambro, it is possible to enquire further about the role of ‘moat’ or hiatus which for Agamben-Benveniste separates the world of the sign from that of the sentence. Why is there such hiatus? How can one recognize it? – Sgalambro’s own definition of hiatus – helps us to understand these questions in relation to the idea of metaphysics’ completion.

9) The hiatus of metaphysics: the destiny of noumenal object

Here is the most important statement on the hiatus by Sgalambro:

“When, in a room, we see the various things that it contains spread around, we can see each of them as a single thing only because of the hiatus. […]. One thing is distinguished from another because of the hiatus’ existence. […] The one who respects the hiatus will never find himself ‘beyond’, but only for this reason: because he respects the hiatus. He will have ‘overtaken’ nothing, but he will have respected the hiatus. […]. We can do nothing to God (if the hiatus exists), but in virtue of the hiatus neither can God do anything to us”⁶⁸.

But what is the relation between this concept of hiatus and the theme of metaphysics’ completion? If man’s over-production of technical goods stigmatizes his will so that it may be reabsorbed into inert matter, then the hiatus seems destined to disappear. Nonetheless, metaphysics is also that particular kind of discourse where the hiatus between the reality of categories’ use and the pure language of single words, between sign and sentence, seems unquenchable. In other words, if the discourse of metaphysics is possible as founded upon the irreducible distinction between language and word, how is it that the process of its ultimate completion, although remaining unresolved by right in terms of such a distinction, is actuated through the inorganic coming back in fact? It means that the hiatus, necessary to the discourse of metaphysics, is growing ever thinner. Therefore Sgalambro concludes: “The last secret of metaphysics concerns that which has not yet happened except – follow me well – except in the word which crystallizes it, materialising it, the memory for when it will happen”⁶⁹.
The words and concepts of metaphysics introduce that which will make man remember what is yet to come. That which the concept of ‘thing in itself’ (noumenon) yields as without pity and as ever other than itself, if not under the synthetic apperception which confines it into a generic possibility
of a limit, will be shown when the category of ‘subject’ is led back to that of ‘object’ which, with regard to the universe, suits it more properly. That is to say, in the process of knowledge, the shadow of the subject will be perceived as the evanescence of the knower in respect to the thing that has to be known (which remains, nonetheless, unknowable). Thus, the ‘thing in itself’ remains in that obscure ‘place’ where consciousness repulses it because it is perceived as unsustainable. The limit established by consciousness is a prohibition whose castrating intransigence is ‘sold off’ as confirmation for the stable validity of what remains known within this assigned limit. But this confirmation is false and, Sgalambro says, the ‘dead letter’ of metaphysics – the secret of its noumenal object – holds to those terms whose content is motionless, but whose signification (the signifying capacity of such content) has not yet been freed in its fullness. For this reason, such signification represents the degree of materialisation of an event of which, for the time being, paradoxically, only the memory is possible as the form of knowledge of what has not yet happened⁷⁰.

10) Realisation and extinction of the principle of metaphysics

In conclusion: if, on the one hand, there is metaphysics, it is because of the hiatus. This allows for categories to exist as realities detached from the language of single terms, which is the base for the formation of metaphysical objects, that is, to exist as a ‘superior’ level of semantic signification over an ‘inferior’ plane of semiotic signs, where these become speakable. But, if on the other hand there is no metaphysics (or there is not going to be) then this is because of the overwhelming reaffirmation of the world’s ‘in se’ and of its terrible and unorderable reality. This latter reality hurls itself abruptly from the noumenal recesses of being, hence, also through the form of the will’s nullification and reification into the ceaseless production of things and machines. As a result, the crystalline content of metaphysics, as the memory of what has not yet happened, pertains to the ongoing process of destruction (in act) of the world’s matter. This is where the hiatus’ action, which allows for any possible distinction between things, is inexorably reduced (made thin) until its final disappearance. Therefore, the hiatus is the true principle and content (the element of resonance) on the base of which metaphysics is possible and not possible together. The destiny of its noumenal ‘object’, in fact, remains accomplished only when the hiatus disappears. Everything that metaphysics contains or has always contained could not have been other than the memory for the ‘not-yet’ of what is still to happen. In fact, when this will have been happened, that which has waited to be freed will also, in this liberation, be definitely destroyed (reabsorbed into the inorganic).
Agamben’s idea of man’s transition from history (the plane of semantic discourse) to the pure language of infancy (the semiotic disconnection of words) coincides, in my view, to the moment which exactly precedes the freedom of metaphysics’ dead letter (its ‘last secret’). It precedes man’s immersion into the ‘semiotic sea of nature’ (reabsorption into the inorganic) as the growing thinner of the hiatus, which separates him from things and, therefore, from his destruction. Agamben does not say that the falling back of language into the ‘mute dictionary of semiotic signs’ relates to man’s reabsorption into the inorganic. However, it remains true that when the instant of the discourse of history will be subjected to a new emergence of the potentiality of language (semiotic) what will come to an end is the categorical construction on the base of which metaphysics exists. But this means that also its object – noumenon – will be definitely accomplished. Therefore, if the latter, as Sgalambro says, contains that unbearable reality which consciousness has always repulsed away from its experience (and in fact, by definition, noumenon is that thing: “[…] which is not to be thought as object of the senses but as a thing in itself, solely through a pure understanding – […]”⁷¹) it follows that when the categorical structures of history’s discourse will reabsorb again into the ‘semiotic see of nature’, also the distance between the ‘thing in itself’ and man’s experience will come to an inevitable collision.
Eventually, since for Sgalambro the ‘thing in itself’ is that which counters and nullifies man, in their collision any linguistic structure of human discourse will reveal its undeniable belonging to the necessary realm of categories. These, in fact, make human language possible, practicable, as they express its distance from the semiotic ambit of pure language in terms of the memory of that (forth)-coming end, which has to remain in a state of forgetfulness, in order for language to exist.

Bibliography

Works by Giorgio Agamben:

Giorgio Agamben, The End of Thinking in Differentia, N. 1, Translated by Peter Carravetta, Flushing, 1986, pp. 57-58
Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity in Theory and History of Literature, Translated by Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, Vol. 78, 1991
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Notes

cf. Manlio Sgalambro, Lettera sull’empietismo e su un recente progresso della teologia, part II, in De mundo pessimo, Milano, Adelphi, 2004, p. 252
cf. ivi.
Sgalambro, La consolazione, Milano, Adelphi, 1995, cit., pp. 23-71-76
cf. ibid. pp. 11-13, cf. also Lo scrittore di filosofia in, op. cit., pp. 13-25
cf. Sgalambro, art. Gli orrori della verità in Il Sole 24 Ore, 15/10/1995, “One philosophy is dangerous whereas ‘the whole of them’ are not. ‘One’ philosopher has a thousand eyes. A thousand philosophers have none. […] All philosophies are equal means: there is no longer philosophy. The History of Philosophy itself […] recalls the idea of a private collection of philosophers”.
cf. Sgalambro, Dialogo teologico, Milano, Adelphi, 1993, p. 26
cf. Sgalambro, ibid. pp. 29-30. With regard to thought and its Tantalus by which it is for ever condemned to come back on itself and re-start thinking, “One has to be capable of not thinking while thinking and to conceive the possibility of thought without thinking”.
cf. Immanuel Kant, Transcendental Logic. 1st Division. Transcendental Analytic and, Transcendental Analytic. Book I. Analytic of Concepts (B89-B91/A65-A66) in Critic of Pure Reason, Translated by Norman Kemp Smith, London, Macmillan, 1990, pp. 102-103. See also Transcendental Deduction. Deduction of the pure concepts of understanding Section 3, (A15-A28) in ibid. pp. 141-149 and Introduction (B15-B18) pp. 52-54
Sgalambro, Anatol, Milano, Adelphi, 1993, cit., p. 74, cf. also, La morte del sole, p. 15, the concept of ‘irreconciled disciple’.
cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson, M. A., D. Sc. (Oxon), London, George Allen & Unwin LTD – New York, The Macmillan Company, 1931, I, [section] 15, [section] 36, [section] 37, [section] 38, [section] 83, [section] 84. See also, Logical Investigations, Translated by J.N. Findlay, From the Second German Edition of Logische Untersuchungen, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, New York: The Humanity Press, 1970, Vol. II, Investigation V, On the Intentional Experiences and their Contents [section] 10, [section] 11, [section] 12, cf. also The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Translated by David Carr, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1970, III, [section] 54, [section] 55
Sgalambro, La morte del sole, cit., p. 20. The ‘methodical emanatism’ (of enthymemes) refers to the historical projection of rhetorical arguments, which reflect the linear perception of the consciousness of time and which involves an ordering of events into a chronological series of stages.
cf. Kant, Transcendental Deduction (A107) in ibid. p. 136 “There can be in us no modes of knowledge, no connection or unity of one mode of knowledge with another, without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuition, and by relation to which representation of objects is alone possible. This pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception”.
cf. S. Augustine, Confessions, Book XI. XVII (35) Time a Distension, and ivi. XXIX (39) Time’s Measure in Mind, Translated by Henry Chadwick, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 242-243. However, S. Augustine says that time is not an epiphenomenon of matter as it is before physical objects come into being and, similarly, it is not a product of the human mind. Cf. ibid., XXIV (31) Bodily Motion is Measured, pp. 238-239
Sgalambro, ibid. cit., p. 31
cf. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Translated by E. F. J. Payne, Inc. New York, Dover Publications, 1969, Vol. I, 1st Book, The World as Representation. First Aspect, The Representation subject to the Principle of Sufficient Reason: The Object of Experience and of Science, [section] 7, pp. 29-30; 2nd Book, The World as Will. First Aspect, The Objectification of the Will, [section] 24, p. 119-121; [section] 25, pp. 127-13s; [section] 26, pp. 130-139, and, Vol. II, The Falcon Wing Press, 1958, Inc. Clinton, Massachusetts, The Colonial Press, chap. XX, pp. 245-268; chap. XXII, pp. 272-292; chap. XXIII, pp. 293-304; chap. XXV, pp. 318-326. See also, Handschriftlicher Nachlass, VI, Neue Paralipomena. Vereinzelte Gedanken über vielerlei Gegenstände, Leipzig, 1892, par. 64, and, On the Suffering of the World, Studies in Pessimism, in Essays from the Parerga and Paralipomena, Translated by T. Bailey Saunders, London Museum Street, Ruskin House, M. A. George Allen and Unwin LTD, 1951, pp. 6-18; The Vanity of Existence in Studies in Pessimism, ibid. pp. 20-23, cf. also, Sgalambro, ibid. p. 49
cf. Husserl, Introduction to the Logical Investigations. A Draft of a Preface to Logical Investigations, Translated by Philip J. Bossert and Curtis H. Peters, The Hague, Martinus Njhoff, 1975, Section 5, <121- 124>
cf. Sgalambro, ibid. p. 31. The subject as theoretical function of mediation: “Is only something which touches upon the thing: the shadow, only the shadow of the subject”. f. also, ibid. p. 107, “The unity of the object of a philosophy cannot be granted on the idea of man’s unity. Man, seen through the impassive eye of philosophy resolves into the anti-human, and therefore is dispersed into the Universe. […] Ethics, Aesthetics, Logic or Sociology: if, on the one hand, subdivide man in parts in order to know him, on the other hand, they work like the dissection of a brain onto an anatomic table. A living man, instead, is a deception for knowledge”.
cf. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, Translated by Ralph Manheim, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1968, Translator’s note, VI-IX, and pp. 30, 33-34, 58, 60, 62-63, 69, 79-80-81
Sgalambro, ibid. cit., p. 48
ibid. cit., p. 49
Sgalambro, ivi.
cf. ibid. pp. 92-93. Here, Sgalambro refers to William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) Physical Considerations Regarding the Possible Age of the Sun’s Heat in The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, IV, Vol. 23, 1862, p. 160, and On the Age of the Sun’s Heat in Macmillan’s Magazine, Vol. V, 1862, pp. 388-93. Sgalambro says that it will be soon necessary for man to individuate and face the truth of the forgotten-removed memory of the thermic death of the sun.
cf. Sgalambro, ibid. p. 64
cf. ibid. pp. 76-77, “The hope placed in the ability of mathematics to ex press the unique possible order of the universe and its coincidence with that which is intuitively given, is followed by the radical judgement by which mathematics, as a whole of signs without meaning, gives a world whose sense is not for us”.
cf. ibid. p. 74 – Here, Sgalambro refers to Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. III, The Phenomenology of Knowledge, Translated by Ralph Manheim, New Haven, Yale University Press, London, Oxford University Press, 1957, pp. 397, “This transposition is unquestionably justified, if only we remember that from the very outset the objects of mathematics are not an expression of any substantially existing things, but that they are intended to be, and can be, nothing other than expressions of function, ‘ordinal signs'”. Sgalambro adds that “[…] the intelligibility (of mathematical formulae) is only a feeble light reflected from the tiny piece of paper where calculations are executed. It does belong neither to universe, nor to intellect”.
Sgalambro, ibid. cit., p. 77
cf. Jacques Derrida, Genesis and Structure in Writing and Difference, Translated by Alan Bass, London, Routledge, 1993, pp. 154-168. See also, Husserl, ibid. Section 4, <118-120> and, Logical Investigations, Translated by J. N. Findlay, From the Second German Edition of Logische Untursuchungen, Vol. I, (Volume One of the German Edition) Prolegomena to Pure Logic, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, New York: The Humanity Press, 1970, chap. IV, Empiricist Consequences of Psychologism [section] 22; chap. VIII, The Psychologistic Prejudices [section] 46
cf. Sgalambro, ibid. p. 90, “[…] in science there is nothing more than a number of operations, […], and the definition of a given mass does not imply the operation of any subject. […] In science there is subject at the same moment in which this ceases to be there, when one finds out that, in reality, it is only an object”.
cf. ibid. p. 65, “[…] science cannot speak about man without dispersing it into the universe. Human brain is not human. […]. Nowadays’ hostility towards science is a hostility for that which nullifies man. However, such nullification is fatal. In fact, it does not represent a limit of science but its unlimitedness whereas, the hostility towards science, this yes, is the human limit of such accusation”.
cf. ibid. pp. 79-80
cf. ibid. p. 78, “All that has become […] all that has died becomes number. Some number is all that is left. Numbers are the inheritance of ideas, what is left of them”.
cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Translated by E. B. Ashton, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, pp. 173-176, 183-189
cf. Sgalambro, ibid. p. 87
ibid. cit., pp. 82-83
ibid. cit., p. 86, cf. also, Sgalambro, Dialogo sul comunismo in De mundo pessimo, pp. 120-121
Sgalambro, op. cit., ivi.
cf. ivi. “Here, the physical sense is entirely missed; the sense of physics not as a method but as state of being. Whereby the lowering of physics to the condition of method is an effect of the loss of cosmic experience. There is physics only of being in decomposition”.
ibid. cit., p. 95
cf, ivi. “The nexus between the irreversible dissolution – the preannounced ‘death of the sun’ – with the electric consciousness which followed afterwards is a nexus of guiltiness. Technical gifts originated from guilt; through them the gloomy conscience of science demands forgiveness”. See also ibid. cit., p. 100. With regards to the conception of science and the fact that its theories can only ratify, “The so-called scandal of entropy: the thermic death of the universe”.
ibid. cit., p. 96
ibid. cit., p. 101. See also ivi. “In the light of physics, not the origin, but the end is the object. To see everything through its light, life already destroyed, everything as in eternal quietness is to see it as it will appear one day”.
cf. Sgalambro, Lo scrittore di filosofia in De mundo pessimo, pp. 17-19
That is the fact that the existence of ‘language’ cannot be justified by anything or any definition which would not fall back into the use of other linguistic expressions at the same time in which these latter are being used.
M. Sgalambro, Nell’antro del filosofo. Dialogo con Manlio Sgalambro by Mariacatena De Leo and Ignazio Ingaliso, Prova d’Autore, Catania, 2002, cit., p. 37, “Ho sempre considerato la filosofia come un lento lavoro distruttivo”.
cf. M. Sgalambro, ibid. p. 41-42, “It is necessary, though, to distinguish between the history of philosophy and the study of a philosophical thematic: for instance, the study of the transcendental deduction in Kant helps us to shed a light upon an important concept of Kantian philosophy and to understand better its significance in relation to the philosophical context in which it has been elaborated. Nonetheless, this concept cannot be referred to the ‘history of philosophy’ but has to be considered as an example of philosophical technology, insofar as what the elaborated ‘mechanics’ of its different parts render to us in their articulation is a particular technique by which we can acquire a given understanding of reality and not a way to uncover or explain the development of a historical interpretation of thought”.
cf. M. Sgalambro, ibid. pp. 55 and 81-82
cf. M. Sgalambro, Trattato dell’empietà, p. 11
cf. Giuseppe Ungaretti, Commemorazione del futurismo [1927] in Vita d’un uomo. Saggi e interventi, 5th edition, Milano, Mondadori, Meridiani, 1993, cit., p. 171, “Futurism believed that, as a consequence of its principles, the mission of art was that of imitating the machine or, rather, the kind of humanity which was going to be adapted to its own last creature. Initial mistake. Machine is only a means of man. Certainly, it can be elevated to a symbol, if, by art means, that is that do not foresee any utilitarian scope, it is unveiled what it conceals of natural, permanent, universal”. See also, Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends, Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 81-83, “[…] the means without end is a game/play (gioco) with the law that frees it completely from its canonical use”.
The space between its signification, that is, the reality of the designation of the object (extended thing) and its verbal expression (locution): its emphasis.
Agamben, Infancy and History. The Destruction of Experience, Translated by Liz Heron, London – New York, Verso, 1993, cit., pp. 57-58. With regard to the concepts of endosoamtic and esosomatic and their complex interrelations, cf. ibid. p. 56
From the pure language of single words to that of human discourse in which these words are inserted into the flux of linguistic communication (sense).
cf. Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique générale. Les fondations du langage, Traduit de l’anglais par Nicolas Ruwet, Paris, Minuit, 1963, chap. V, VIII; Essais de linguistique générale. Rapports internes et externes du langage, Paris, Les Edition de Minuit, 1973, chap. VIII. See also, Selected Writings, VI Volumes, Mouton, Edited by The Hauge, 1971, Phoneme and Phonology, SW, Vol. I, 1932c, pp. 231-233; The Identification of Phonemic Entities, SW, Vol. I, 1949a, pp. 418-425; The Phonemical Grammatical Aspect of Language in their Interrelations, SW, Vol. II, 1949b, pp. 103-114; Quest for Essence of Language, SW, Vol. II, 1965b, pp. 345-359; The Role of Phonetic Elements, SW, Vol. I, 1968, pp. 705-719, and, Sur la specificité du langage humane in L’Arc, 60, 1975, pp. 3-8. See also, Derrida, The Voice That Keeps Silence in Speech and Phenomena. And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Sign, Translated by David B. Allison, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. 70-78
cf. Agamben, ibid. p. 58, “Phonemes, those differential signs that are both ‘pure and empty’ and ‘signifying and non-signifying’, do not strictly belong either to the semiotic or the semantic, language or discourse, form or sense, endosomatic or esosomatic; they are located in the correspondence – difference (in the chora, as Plato would have said) between the two regions, […]”. Cf. also ivi. “[…] in a ‘site” which can perhaps be described only in its topology and which coincides with that historico-transcendental region – before the subject of language and without somatic substance, which we have defined above as human infancy”.
Agamben, Infanzia e Storia. Distruzione dell’esperienza e origine della storia, New and Increased Edition, Torino, Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, 2001, cit., p. 57. This revisited version of Agamben’s work contains an extra-paragraph called: “The birth of grammatic” which is added between two existing paragraphs of the adopted English version: “Infancy and language” and, “Nature and culture, or the double inheritance” pp. 53-56. The quotes reported from this new paragraph of the Italian version are my translations.
ibid. cit., p. 58 (Italian version)
ivi.
At the end of the twelfth century, the development of the so-called ‘terminist’ logic attempted to recognize the difference of signification that each word assumes into a given context: that is, the determination of correct ‘suppositions’ (particular use of words into a context) with respect to ‘impositions’ (higher order of words’ signification); cf. G. R. Evans, Philosophy and Theology in the Middle Ages, London, Routledge, 1993, pp. 39-40, “The first step was to reconcile Aristotle’s rule that there is no need to look beyond nouns and verbs in classifying parts of speech with the eight parts of speech identified by the Roman grammarians. This was done by distinguishing ‘categorematic’ words, that is, words which signify in their own right (nouns and verbs, which signify substances), from words which signify only in conjunction with categorematic terms. These syncategoremata are prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and so on. When syncategorematic words are brought into play it becomes natural to take the propositio rather than the component words as the basic unit of meaning”.
cf. Agamben, (Italian version) ivi. “However, while Aristotle was still aware of the fact that logic’s classifications are valid only within the distinction between language and word, between sayings without connection and sayings with connection (he affirms in more occasions that ‘none of these terms, categories, in itself and for itself is said in any affirmation. The affirmation generates from their reciprocal symploke), this has been forgotten by the forthcoming logic and philosophy, which no longer distinguish between language and word and see in the word only something which puts language in function”. See note 51 to Evans, ibid. p. 39
cf. Evans, ibid. p. 40, “The problem which now becomes interesting is that of the relationship between the meaning which is the word’s essentia or forma (which must always lie behind the signification it carries in a particular context because it is its natural property); and the notion that it is the whole proposition together which signifies”.
cf. Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique generale, Vol. 2, chap. 3, Sémiologie de la langue, Paris, Gallimard, 1974
In Benveniste’s analysis of the concept of discourse, language, which for him was the principal semiological channel, consists of two distinct modes: the semiotic (peculiar to the sign) and the semantic (peculiar to discourse). The semiotic mode is concerned with isolated units of language that is words, considered out of context and without reference when they offer themselves for possible use. The semantic mode is based on the sentence and thus entails reference. For it, the universe of discourse makes the whole of speech acts signifying as a system. Benveniste’s distinction between semiotics and semantics aimed to complement Ferdinand De Saussure’s theory of the sign, where the latter did not distinguish between the sign and its use in discourse, or between the sign and the world of which it forms part.
Agamben, [English version], ibid. cit., p. 54
cf. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Postmodernism Explained to Children. Correspondence 1982-1985, Translated by Julien Pefanis and Morgan Thomas, London, Turnaround, 1992, Letter to Hugo Vermeren, Nanterre, October 20th, 1984, “Address on the subject of the course of philosophy” pp. 115-116, “You cannot scrutinise a ‘subject’ (training, for example) without being scrutinised by it. You cannot do any of these things without renewing ties with the season of childhood, the season of the mind’s possibilities”.
Agamben, ibid. cit., p. 55
cf. Agamben, Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford – California, Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 27-38-39-47, 177-184
With regards to the concept of history as ideological mean for the interpellation of the subject, the ‘becoming-subject’ of an individual as subjected to the coercion of social system, cf. Louis Althusser, Idéologie et appareils idéologique d’État. Notes pour une Récherche in La Pensée n. 151, 1970. See also The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966-1967) Edited by Francois Matheron and Translated by G.M. Goshgarian, London-New York, Verso, 2003, pp. 51-53, 268-275
Agmaben, ibid. op. cit., pp. 55-56
Sgalambro, Trattato dell’età, Milano, Adelphi, 1999, cit., pp. 34-35
Sgalambro, Anatol, cit., p. 40
cf. ivi. It is worth repeating this notion presented in the previous quote, “The last secret of metaphysics concerns that which has not yet happened except, follow me well, except in the word which crystallizes it, materialising it, the memory for when it will happen”.
Kant, ibid. Transcendental Analytic, First Division. Book 2, Analytic of Principles, chap. III, The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena (B 310) cit., p. 271. See also, (B 307-309), (A 249-253) pp. 267-271 – With regards to the concept of ‘pure understanding’, cf. (B 308-309), “Since, however, such a type of intuition, intellectual intuition, forms no part whatsoever of our faculty of knowledge, it follows that the employment of the categories can never extend further that to the objects of experience. […] That, therefore, which we entitled ‘noumenon’ must be understood as being suuch only in a negative sense.