What
is philosophy?
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M E R I D I A N
Crossing Aesthetics
Werner Hamacher
Editor
Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa
Stanford
University
Press
Stanford,
California
2018
WHAT
IS PHILOSOPHY?
Giorgio Agamben
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
English translation © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
What Is Philosophy? was originally published in Italian in 2016 under the title
Che cos’è la filosofia? © 2016 by Giorgio Agamben. Originally published by
Quodlibet Srl., Macerata, Italia. This book was negotiated through Agnese
Incisa Agenzia Letteraria, Torino.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written
permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free, archival- quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Agamben, Giorgio, 1942– author.
Title: What is philosophy? / Giorgio Agamben ;
translated by Lorenzo Chiesa.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. |
Series: Meridian: crossing aesthetics | Originally published in Italian in
2016 under the title Che cos’è la filosofia? |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017008916 (print) | LCCN 2017011540 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781503602205 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503602212 (pbk. : alk.
paper) | ISBN 9781503604056 (ebook) |
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy. | Language and languages—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC B87 (ebook) |
LCC B87 .A4613 2017 (print) | DDC 100—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008916
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ix
Throughout the text I have rendered both linguaggio and lingua
as “language,” specifying the occurrences of lingua (which is used
less often) in brackets. Following Agamben, Saussure’s notion of
langue has been left in the French original. Parola is translated as
“speech” or “word,” depending on the context. In agreement with
the author, atto di parola has been rendered as “act of speech” so
as not to create any confusion with Austin’s “speech act” theory.
Significato is generally translated as “meaning”; in some cases I
have opted for “signified,” for instance, when it is paired with sig-
nificante (“signifier”). Senso is always translated as “sense” when
used as a linguistic concept.
In line with my translation of Agamben’s The Fire and the Tale
(Stanford, 2017) and with Adam Kotsko’s translation of his The
Use of Bodies (Stanford, 2015), I have rendered the technical term
esigenza as “demand.” The reader should however bear in mind
that esigenza also overlaps with “requirement” and the etymologi-
cally proximate “exigency.”
Where necessary, citations are adapted to Agamben’s own cita-
tions in Italian. Existing English translations have been consulted
and incorporated as far as possible. Bibliographical references are
provided only when Agamben himself provides them.
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xi
The sense in which the five texts collected here contain an idea of
philosophy, one that somehow answers the question of the title of
the book, will become evident— if at all— only to those who read
them in a spirit of friendship. As has been said, those who find
themselves writing in an age that, rightly or wrongly, appears to
them to be barbaric, must know that their strength and capacity for
expression are not for this reason increased, but rather diminished
and depleted. Since he has no other choice, however, and pessimism
is alien to his nature— nor does he seem to recall with certainty a
better time— the author cannot but rely on those who have experi-
enced the same difficulties— and in that sense, on friends.
Unlike the four other texts, which were written over the past two
years, “Experimentum Vocis” resumes and develops in a new direc-
tion notes I took in the second half of the 1980s. It therefore belongs
to the same context as my essays “The Thing Itself,” “Tradition
of the Immemorial,” and “*Se: Hegel’s Absolute and Heidegger’s
Ereignis” (subsequently collected in Potentialities [Stanford, 1999]),
as well as “Experimentum Linguae,” which was reprinted as a pref-
ace to the new [2001] edition of my book Infanzia e storia.
1
1. The first edition of Agamben’s Infanzia e storia: distruzione dell’esperienza
e origine della storia (1978) did not contain “Experimentum linguae,” but it
was included in the 2001 edition (both published in Turin by Einaudi) and
also in the English translation (London: Verso, 1993).— Translator.
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What
is philosophy?
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1
1
We should never tire of reflecting on the following fact:
although there were and are, in every age and place, societies
whose customs appear to us to be barbaric, or anyway unaccept-
able, and more or less numerous human groups willing to ques-
tion every rule, culture, and tradition; although wholly criminal
societies have existed and exist, moreover, and, after all, there is
no norm or value whose legitimacy everyone could unanimously
agree about, there nonetheless never is or ever was any commu-
nity, or society, or group that purely and simply chose to renounce
language. The risks and damages implicit in the use of language
have been perceived several times in the course of history: reli-
gious and philosophical communities in both West and East
practiced silence— or “aphasia,” as the ancient skeptics called it—
but silence and aphasia were only a trial aimed at a better use of
language and reason, and not an unconditional dismissal of the
faculty of speech, which in all traditions seems inseparable from
what is human.
Questions have thus often been raised concerning the way
in which humans began to speak, proposing hypotheses on the
origins of language that are manifestly unverifiable and lack-
ing rigor; but nobody has ever wondered why they continue to
speak. And yet in practice things are simple: it is well known that
Experimentum Vocis
if a child is not somehow exposed to language before the age of
eleven, he irreversibly loses the capacity of acquiring it. Medieval
sources inform us that Frederick II attempted an experiment of
this kind, but its goal was completely different: not the renuncia-
tion of transmitting language, but a desire to know what the nat-
ural language [lingua] of humanity was. The result of the experi-
ment by itself invalidates the sources in question: the children
thoroughly deprived of any contact with language spontaneously
spoke Hebrew (or, according to other sources, Arabic).
The fact that the experiment of abolishing language was
attempted neither in Nazi concentration camps nor even in the
most radical and innovative utopian communities; the fact that
nobody ever dared to take responsibility for doing so— not even
among those who never hesitated for a moment to take lives—
seems to prove beyond any doubt the inseparable link that appears
to bind humanity to speech. In the definition according to which
man is the living being that has language, the decisive element is
clearly not life, but language [lingua].
And yet humans are unable to say what is involved for them
in language as such, in the sheer fact that they speak. Although
they more or less obscurely sense how inane it is to use speech in
the way they mostly use it— often at random and without having
anything to say, or to hurt each other— they obstinately continue
to speak and transmit language to their progeny, without know-
ing whether this is the highest good or the worst of misfortunes.
2
Let us begin with the idea of the incomprehensible, of a being
that is entirely without relation to language and reason, abso-
lutely indiscernible and unconnected. How could this kind of
idea emerge? In what way can we think it? Could a wolf, a por-
cupine, or a cricket perhaps have conceived it? Would we say that
the animal moves in a world that is incomprehensible to it? Just
as the animal does not reflect on the unsayable, so its environ-
ment cannot appear to it as unsayable: everything in the animal’s
Experimentum Vocis
environment is a sign for it and speaks to it, everything can be
selected and integrated, and what does not concern it in any way
is simply nonexistent for it. On the other hand, by definition, the
divine mind does not know anything impenetrable, its knowledge
does not have limits, and everything— even humanity and inert
matter— is for it intelligible and transparent.
We therefore need to consider the incomprehensible as an
exclusive acquisition of Homo sapiens, and the unsayable as a cat-
egory that belongs solely to human language. The very nature of
this language is that it establishes a particular relation with the
being of which it speaks, however it names and qualifies it. Any-
thing we name or conceive of is already somehow pre- supposed
in language and knowledge by reason of the simple fact of being
named. This is the fundamental intentionality of human speech,
which is always already in relation to something that it presup-
poses as unrelated.
Every positing of an absolute principle or of a beyond of
thought and language must deal with this presupposing character
of language: being always a relation, it refers back to an unrelated
principle that it itself presupposes as such (in Mallarmé’s words:
“The Word is a principle that develops through the negation of all
principles”— that is, through the transformation of the principle
into a presupposition, of the
ἀρχή into a hypothesis). This is the
original mythologem and, at the same time, the aporia the speak-
ing subject clashes with: language presupposes something nonlin-
guistic, and this something unrelated is presupposed, however, by
giving it a name. The tree presupposed in the name “tree” cannot
be expressed in language; we can only speak of it starting from its
having a name.
But what do we then think when we think a being that is
entirely without relation to language? When thought tries to grasp
the incomprehensible and the unsayable, it actually tries to grasp
the presupposing structure of language, its intentionality, and its
being in relation to something that is supposed to exist outside
the relation. We can think a being entirely without relation to
language only through a language without any relation to being.
Experimentum Vocis
3
The interweaving of being and language, world and speech,
ontology and logic that constitutes Western metaphysics is articu-
lated in the structure of the presupposition. Here, the term “pre-
supposition” designates the “subject” in its original meaning: the
sub- iectum, the being that, lying first and at the bottom, consti-
tutes that on which— on whose pre- sup- position— we speak and
say, and which, in turn, cannot be said on anything (Aristotle’s
πρώτη οὐσία or ὑποκείμενον). The term “presupposition” is per-
tinent:
ὑποκεῖσθαι is indeed the perfect passive of ὑποτιθέναι,
literally, “to put under,” and
ὑποκείμενον therefore means “that
which, having been sup- posed, or put under, lies at the founda-
tion of a predication.” In this sense, questioning linguistic signifi-
cation, Plato could write: “To each of these names is presupposed
[
ὑπόκειταί] a distinct substance [οὐσία]” (Protagoras 349b); and:
“How can the earliest names, which do not at all presuppose any
others [
οἷς οὔπω ἕτερα ὑπόκειται], make clear to us entities?”
(Cratylus 422d). Being is what is presupposed in language (in the
name that manifests it), it is that on whose presupposition we say
what we say.
The presupposition therefore expresses the original relation
between language and being, between names and things, and
the first presupposition is that there is such a relation. Positing
a relation between language and the world— positing the pre-
supposition— is the constitutive operation of human language
as conceived of by Western philosophy: onto- logy, the fact that
being is said and that saying refers to being. Predication and dis-
course are possible only on this presupposition: the latter is the
“on- which” of predication understood as
λέγειν τι κατά τινος,
saying something on something. The “on something” (
κατά
τινος) is not homogeneous with “saying something” but expresses
and, at the same time, hides the fact that the onto- logical nexus
between language and being has always already been presupposed
in it— or, that language always rests on something and does not
speak emptily.
Experimentum Vocis
4
The interweaving of being and language takes the constitutive
form of the presupposition in Aristotle’s Categories. As ancient
commentators perfectly understood when they defined the object
of the book (that is, whether it concerns words, or entities, or con-
cepts), in the Categories, Aristotle does not simply treat words, or
only entities, or exclusively concepts, but “terms insofar as they
mean entities through concepts.” In the words of an Arabic com-
mentator: “Logical investigation concerns objects insofar as they
are designated through terms [ . . . ] the logician does not deal
with substance or the body insofar as it is separated from mat-
ter or insofar as it is in movement or has a size and dimension,
but rather insofar as it is designated by a term, for instance ‘sub-
stance.’” What is in question in this “insofar as,” what happens to
the entity for being designated by a name: this is— or should be—
the topic of logic. But this means that the real place of the Catego-
ries and of any logic is the implication of language and being—
the onto- logic— and that it is not possible to separate logic from
ontology. The entity as entity (
ὂν ᾗ ὄν) and the entity insofar as it
is said to be an entity are inseparable.
It is only this implication that enables us to comprehend the
ambiguity of the
οὐσία πρώτη, the first substance of Aristotle’s
Metaphysics, an ambiguity that the Latin translation of
οὐσία as
substantia has consolidated and bequeathed to Western philoso-
phy, which has not managed to cope with it. The
οὐσία πρώτη,
which initially refers to a singularity, can become substantia, what
“lies under” predications, under the “saying something on some-
thing,” only because what is at stake in it is the ontological struc-
ture of the presupposition. But what is the structure of this impli-
cation? How is it possible that a singular existence turned into the
substratum that we presuppose to say what we say?
Being is not presupposed because it is always already given to
us in a sort of prelinguistic intuition; rather, it is language that
is articulated— or split— in such a way that it has always already
encountered and presupposed in the name the being that is
Experimentum Vocis
given to it. In other words, the prae- and the sub - belong to the
very form of intentionality, of the relation between being and
language.
5
The double status of the
οὐσία πρώτη as singular existence and
as substance reflects the twofold articulation of language, which
is always already split into name and discourse, langue and parole,
semiotic and semantic, sense and denotation. The identification
of these differences is not a discovery of modern linguistics, but
the constitutive experience of the Greek reflection on being. If
Plato already clearly opposed the level of the name (
ὅνομα) to
that of discourse (
λόγος), the foundation on which the Aristo-
telian list of categories rests is the distinction between
λεγόμενα
ἄνευ συμπλοκῆς, what we say without a connection (“man,” “ox,”
“runs,” “wins”) and the
λεγόμενα κατὰ συμπλοκήν, discourse as
a connection of terms (“the man walks”; “the man wins” [Cat-
egories 1a16– 19]). The first level corresponds to language [lingua]
(Saussure’s langue; Benveniste’s “semiotic”) as distinct from actual
discourse (Saussure’s parole; Benveniste’s “semantic”).
We are so used to the existence of an entity called “language”
[lingua], and the isolation of a level of signification distinct from
actual discourse is for us so familiar, that we do not realize that
what is brought to light for the first time in this distinction is a
fundamental structure of human language that distinguishes it
from any other language, and that it is only starting from this
structure that something like a science and a philosophy become
possible. If Plato and Aristotle have been considered the found-
ers of grammar, this is because their reflection on language laid
the basis on which grammarians later managed to construct—
through an analysis of discourse— what we call language [lingua],
and interpret the act of speech— which is the only real experi-
ence— as the implementation of an entity of reason called lan-
guage [lingua] (such as the Greek language; the Italian language;
etc.).
Experimentum Vocis
It is only because it rests on this fundamental splitting of lan-
guage that being is always already divided between essence and
existence, quid est and quod est, potentiality and act; the ontologi-
cal difference is first of all founded on the possibility of distin-
guishing a level of language [lingua] and names— which is not
said in a discourse— and a level of discourse— which is said on
the presupposition of the former. And the ultimate problem that
every metaphysical reflection needs to confront is the same that
constitutes the stumbling block where every theory of language
runs the risk of failing; if the being that is said is always already
split into essence and existence, potentiality and act, and the lan-
guage that says it is always already divided into language as langue
and discourse, sense and denotation, how is the passage from one
level to the other possible? And why are being and language con-
stituted in a way that originally entails this gap?
6
Anthropogenesis has not been accomplished instantaneously
once and for all with the event of language, that is, with the fact
that the primate of the homo genus became a speaker. Rather, a
patient, long, and obstinate process of analysis, interpretation, and
construction of what is in question in this event was necessary. In
other words, for something like Western civilization to emerge, it
was first necessary to understand— or to decide to understand—
that what we speak, what we do by speaking, is a language [lin-
gua], and that this language [lingua] is formed by words, which—
thanks to a property that remains unexplainable unless we resort
to utterly unlikely hypotheses— refer to the world and things.
This implies that, in the uninterrupted flux of sounds produced
by using organs mostly borrowed from other functional systems
(the majority of which are linked with nutrition), parts endowed
with an autonomous signification (μ
έρη τῆς λέξεως, the words)
are first recognized, and, in these, indivisible elements (
στοιχεῖα,
the letters) whose combinations form these parts. The civiliza-
tion we know is first and foremost founded on an “interpretation”
Experimentum Vocis
(
ἑρμηνεία) of the act of speech, on the “development” of cogni-
tive possibilities that we regard as contained and “implied” in lan-
guage [lingua]. For this reason, Aristotle’s treatise On Interpreta-
tion (
Περὶ ἑρμηνείας), which in fact begins with the hypothesis
that what we do by speaking is a signifying connection of words,
letters, concepts, and things, has had a decisive function in the
history of Western thought; for this reason, grammar, which is
now taught in primary schools, has been, and to a certain extent
is still, the foundational discipline of knowledge. (It goes without
saying that grammatical reflection has also a political meaning in
addition to the epistemic- cognitive one: if what humans speak is
a language [lingua], and if there is not only one language [lingua]
but many, then the plurality of languages [lingue] corresponds to
the plurality of people and political communities.)
7
Let us consider the paradoxical nature of the entity of reason
called language [lingua] (we say “entity of reason” because it is
unclear whether it exists in the mind, in actual discourses, or only
in grammar books and dictionaries). It has been constructed by
means of a patient and meticulous analysis of the act of speech,
supposing that speaking is possible only on the presupposition
of a language [lingua], and that things are always already named
(even though it is impossible to explain— if not in a mythological
way— how and by whom) in a system of signs that refers to things
potentially and not only actually. The word “tree” can denote the
tree in a discursive act insofar as we presuppose that the word
“tree,” taken as such before and beyond any actual denotation,
means “tree.” In other words, language would have the capacity of
suspending its denotative power in discourse, in order to signify
things in a purely virtual way in the form of a lexicon. This is
the difference between langue and parole, semiotic and semantic,
sense and denotation that we have already evoked and that irre-
vocably splits language into two distinct levels, which, however,
mysteriously communicate with each other.
Experimentum Vocis
The nexus between this linguistic splitting and the ontologi-
cal caesura “potentiality/act,”
δὐναμις/ἐνέργεια through which
Aristotle divides and articulates the level of being is all the more
evident if we recall that, already in Plato, one of the fundamen-
tal meanings of the term
δὐναμις is “semantic value of a word.”
The ontological movement of the presupposition corresponds to
the articulation of linguistic signification on two distinct levels:
sense is a presupposition of denotation and langue is a presupposi-
tion of parole, just as essence is a presupposition of existence and
potentiality is a presupposition of the act. But here everything
gets more complicated. Sense and denotation, language [lingua]
and discourse lie in fact on two different levels and no passage
seems to lead from one to the other. We can speak only on the
presupposition of a language [lingua], but saying in a discourse
what has been “called” and named in language [lingua] is properly
impossible. This is the insurmountable opposition between semi-
otic and semantic where Benveniste’s extreme thought foundered
(“The world of the sign is closed. From the sign to the sentence
there is no transition [ . . . ] a gap separates them”), or, in Witt-
genstein, the opposition between names and proposition (“I can
only name objects. Signs represent them. I can only speak about
them: I cannot express them”). All we know of language [lingua]
has been learnt starting from speech, and all we comprehend of
speech is understood starting from language [lingua]; and, yet,
the interpretation (the
ἑρμηνεία) of the act of speech through lan-
guage [lingua], which makes knowledge possible, ultimately leads
to an impossibility of speaking.
8
To this presupposing structure of language corresponds the
specificity of its way of being, which amounts to the fact that it
must remove itself in order to make the named thing be. This is
the nature of language Duns Scotus has in mind when he defines
the relation as ens debilissimum and adds that it is for this reason
so difficult to know. Language is ontologically very weak, in the
Experimentum Vocis
sense that it cannot but disappear in the thing it names, other-
wise, rather than designating or unveiling the thing, it would hin-
der its comprehension. And yet it is precisely in this that its spe-
cific potentiality lies— in its remaining unperceived and unsaid
in what it names and says. As Meister Eckhart writes, if the form
through which we know a thing were itself something, it would
lead us to its knowledge and turn away from the knowledge of
the thing. The risk of being itself perceived as a thing, and of
separating us from what it should reveal to us, is until the end
consubstantial with language. Not being able to say itself while it
says other things, that is, its being always ecstatically in the place
of the other, is the unmistakable signature and, at the same time,
the original taint of human language.
Not only language but the subject itself is a very weak being—
the subject that is produced in language and that must somehow
cope with it. In fact, subjectivity emerges each time that the living
being encounters language, each time in which it says “I.” But
precisely because it is generated in it and through it, it is so dif-
ficult for the subject to grasp its own taking place. On the other
hand, language— the langue— comes to life and lives only if a
speaker assumes it in an act of speech.
Western philosophy originates from the hand- to- hand combat
between these two very weak beings that consist of and take place
in each other, and in each other incessantly founder— for this rea-
son, they also obstinately try to grasp and comprehend each other.
9
Precisely because being gives itself in language, but language
remains unsaid in what it says and manifests, being destines itself
and unveils itself for speakers in an epochal history. The histori-
cizing and chronogenetic power of the
λόγος is a function of its
presupposing structure and its ontological weakness. Insofar as it
remains hidden in what it reveals, that which reveals constitutes
being as what unveils itself historically by remaining unattainable
and untouched in each of its epochal unveilings. And insofar as
Experimentum Vocis
language [lingua] is, in this sense, a historical being, the
ἑρμηνεία
that has been dominating Western philosophy for two thousand
years is an interpretation of language, which, having split it into
langue and parole, synchrony and diachrony, can never cope with
it once and for all. And just as being and language [lingua] remain
presupposed in their historical unfolding, so the presupposition
determines also the way in which the West has thought politics.
The community that is in question in language is in fact presup-
posed in the guise of a historical a priori or foundation: whether
it is an ethnic substance, a language [lingua], or a contract, in any
case the common takes the shape of an unattainable past, which
defines the political as a “state.”
There are many signs suggesting that this fundamental struc-
ture of Western ontology and politics exhausted its vital strength.
Formulating thematically the obvious fact according to which
“the being that can be understood is language,” twentieth- century
thought only asserted the inherence of language “to every rela-
tion or natural activity of man, to his feeling, intuiting, desir-
ing, and to each of his needs and instincts” that German idealism
had already affirmed and brought to awareness without reserva-
tion. In this perspective, the fact that the birth of comparative
grammar and the hypothesis about the Indo- European language
are contemporary with Hegel’s philosophy— that, actually, the
last book of the Science of Logic was published in the same year
(1816) as Franz Bopp’s Konjugationssystem— is certainly not a mere
coincidence. The Indo- European language— which linguists have
reconstructed (or, rather, produced) through a patient morpholog-
ical and phonological analysis of historical languages [lingue]— is
not a language [lingua] homogeneous to the others, only more
ancient: it is something like an absolute langue that nobody ever
spoke or will ever speak, but constitutes as such the historical and
political a priori of the West, which guarantees the unity and
the reciprocal intelligibility of its many languages [lingue] and
its many peoples. Just as Hegel stated that the historical destiny
of humanity had reached its fulfillment and that the historical
potentialities of religion, art, and philosophy had been dissolved
Experimentum Vocis
and realized in the absolute, so the process that had brought the
West to full awareness of the cognitive potentialities contained in
its language [lingua] culminated in the construction of the Indo-
European language.
Linguistics thus became the pilot discipline for the human sci-
ences between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its
sudden withering away and foundering in the work of Benveniste
coincides with an epochal mutation in the historical destiny of
the West. The West, which realized and brought to completion
the potentiality it had inscribed in its language [lingua], must now
open itself to a globalization that simultaneously marks its tri-
umph and its end.
10
At this stage, we can advance a hypothesis on the origin of lan-
guage that is not more mythological than others (philosophical
hypotheses necessarily have a mythical character, that is, they are
always “narrations,” and the rigor of thought consists precisely in
recognizing them as such, not confusing them with principles).
Like all animals, the primate that was going to develop into Homo
sapiens was always endowed with a language, which was certainly
different but perhaps not so dissimilar from the one we know.
What happened was that at a certain point— coinciding with
anthropogenesis— the primate of the genus homo became aware
of having a language [lingua], that is, he separated it from himself
and exteriorized it out of himself as an object, and then began
to consider, analyze, and elaborate it in an incessant process— in
which philosophy, grammar, logic, psychology, and computer sci-
ence followed one another with many twists and turns— a pro-
cess that has perhaps not yet been accomplished. And since he
had expelled his language out of himself, unlike other animals,
man had to learn to transmit it exosomatically, from mother to
son, in such a way that in the course of generations language [lin-
gua] was chaotically divided and increasingly changed according
to places and times. And, having separated his language [lingua]
Experimentum Vocis
from himself to entrust it to a historical tradition, for the speak-
ing man, life and language, nature and history were divided and,
at the same time, articulated with each other. Language [lingua],
which had been expelled outside, was reinscribed in the voice
through phonemes, letters, and syllables, and the analysis of lan-
guage [lingua] coincided with the articulation of the voice (the
ϕωνὴ ἔναρθρος, the articulated voice of humans as opposed to
the disarticulated voice of the animal).
This means that language is neither a human invention nor a
divine gift, but a middle term between them, which is located in
a zone of indifference between nature and culture, endosomatic
and exosomatic (the splitting of human language into langue and
speech, semiotic and semantic, synchrony and diachrony corre-
sponds to this bipolarity). This also means that man is not simply
homo sapiens, but first and foremost homo sapiens loquendi, the
living being that does not merely speak, but knows how to speak,
in the sense that the knowledge of language [lingua]— even in
its most elementary form— must necessarily precede any other
knowledge.
What is now happening before our eyes is that language, which
was exteriorized as the thing— that is, according to etymology,
the “cause”— par excellence of humanity, seems to have accom-
plished its anthropogenetic itinerary and want to go back to the
nature from which it comes. The exhaustion of the project of a
comparative grammar— that is, of the knowledge that was sup-
posed to guarantee the intelligibility of language [lingua]— was
in fact followed by the emergence of generative grammar, in other
words, of a conception of language [lingua] whose horizon is no
longer historical and exosomatic, but, ultimately, biological and
innatist. And the promotion of the historical potentiality of lan-
guage [lingua] seems to be replaced by the project of a computer-
ization of human language that fixes it in a communicative code
that rather recalls that of animal languages.
Experimentum Vocis
11
We then understand why, since its origin, human language
has experienced a series of splits, which are not paralleled in any
animal language. I am referring to the names/discourse fracture,
which was already clear to the Greeks (
ὅνομα / λόγος in Plato;
λεγόμενα ἄνευ συμπλοκῆς / λεγόμενα κατὰ συμπλοκήν in
Aristotle, Categories 1a16– 18) and the Romans (nominum impo-
sitio / declinatio in Varro, On the Latin Language 8.5– 6), up to
the fractures— which somehow correspond to it— between langue
and parole in Saussure and between semiotic and semantic in
Benveniste. The speaking man does not invent names, nor do
they arise from him as an animal voice: he can only receive them
through an exosomatic transmission and a teaching; on the other
hand, in discourse men understand each other without need for
explanation. The consequence of this split between two levels of
language is a series of aporias: on the one hand, language cannot
cope with its relation with the world, which is conditioned by
names (and the meaning of names— Wittgenstein writes [1961,
p. 21]— needs to be explained to us for us to understand them);
on the other hand, following Benveniste, there is no passage from
the semiotic level of names to the semantic level of propositions,
hence the act of speech turns out to be impossible.
We should reflect on the particular character of the anthropo-
genetic event of which these fractures are the consequence: man
has access to his own nature— to language, which defines him as
ζῶον λόγον ἔχον and animal rationale— only historically, that is,
through an exosomatic transmission. If, in fact, he cannot access
it, he loses the faculty of learning language and presents itself as a
being that is not properly or not yet human (one need only think
of the enfants sauvages and the wolf- children that so much trou-
bled the Age of Reason). This means that in man— that is, in the
living being that has access to its nature only through history—
the human and the inhuman face each other without any natu-
ral articulation, and that something like a civilization can origi-
nate only starting from the invention and the construction of a
Experimentum Vocis
historical articulation between them. The specific service of phi-
losophy and grammatical reflection is that of individuating and
constructing in the voice the place of this articulation.
It is not a coincidence if the collection of Aristotle’s logical
writings, that is, of the first and broadest interpretation of lan-
guage [lingua] as an “instrument” of knowledge, was entitled
Ὄργανον, which means both a technical instrument and a part
of the body. Referring to language at the beginning of
Περὶ
ἑρμηνείας (On Interpretation 16a3 ff.), Aristotle in fact uses the
expression
τὰ ἐν τῇ ϕωνῇ, “what is in the voice,” and not sim-
ply, as one might have expected, and as he would later write,
ϕωναί, “terms” (he writes that “what is in the voice” symbolizes
the impressions of the soul—
παθήματα ἐν τῇ ϕωνῇ— and the
written letters symbolize “what is in the voice”). Language is
in the voice, but is not the voice: it is at its place and in place
of it. For this reason, in Politics (1253a10– 18), Aristotle explic-
itly opposes the animal
ϕωνή, which is immediately a sign of
pleasure and pain, to human
λόγος, which can manifest justice
and injustice, good and evil, and lies at the foundation of the
political community. Anthropogenesis coincided with a split-
ting of the animal voice and with the positioning of
λόγος in
the very place of
ϕωνή. Language takes place in the non- place
of the voice and this aporetic situation is what makes language
extremely close to the living being and, at the same time, sepa-
rated from it by an unbridgeable gap.
12
An analysis of the particular situation of the
λόγος in the
ϕωνή— and, thus, of the relation between voice and language— is
a precondition for understanding the way in which the West has
thought language, that is, the fact that the human living being is a
speaking being. This means that the aim of Aristotle’s treatise On
Interpretation was not only to ensure the nexus between words,
concepts, and things, but prior to that— by locating language in
the voice— to ensure the nexus between the living being and its
Experimentum Vocis
language [lingua]. The analysis of language [lingua] presupposes
an analysis of the voice.
Ancient commentators already questioned the meaning of the
expression
τὰ ἐν τῇ ϕωνῇ. Asking why Aristotle wrote that “what
is in the voice is the symbol of the affections of the soul,” Ammo-
nius answers that the philosopher said “what is in the voice” and
not “voices” (
ϕωναί) “in order to show that saying ‘voice’ is not
the same as saying ‘name and verb,’ and that being a symbol by
convention does not rest with the bare voice (
τῇ ϕωνῇ ἁπλῶς),
but with the name and the verb; by nature (
ϕύσει) we can pro-
duce voices (
ϕωνεῖν), just as we can see and hear, but names and
verbs are rather produced by our intelligence, using the voice
as matter (
ὕλῃ κεχρημένα τῇ ϕωνῇ)” (Ammonius 1897, p. 22).
Ammonius— who seems here faithfully to be following Aristotle’s
intention— suggests that the capacity for signifying things (by
convention and not by nature) does not rest with the animal voice
(the “bare voice”) but with language, which is formed by names
and verbs; and, yet, language takes place in the voice; what is by
convention dwells in what is by nature.
In On Interpretation, after describing the semantic intertwining
of language, the affections of the soul, letters, and things, Aristo-
tle suddenly interrupts his discussion and refers to his book On
the Soul (“with these points, however, I dealt in my treatise con-
cerning the soul; they belong to a different inquiry—
ἄλλης γὰρ
πραγματείας”; On Interpretation 16a9). Here he defined the voice
as “the sound produced by a creature possessing a soul” (
ψόφος
ἐμψύχου), specifying that “inanimate things never have a voice;
they can only metaphorically be said to give voice, e.g., a flute
or a lyre” (On the Soul 420b5). A few lines below the definition
is repeated and substantiated: “Voice, then, is a sound made by
a living creature (
ζῴου ψόφος), and that not with any part of it
indiscriminately. But, since sound only occurs when something
strikes something else in a certain medium, and this medium
is the air, it is natural that only those things should have voice
which admit the air” (ibid., 14– 16). It is likely that Aristotle
deemed this definition to be unsatisfying, since at this stage he
Experimentum Vocis
enunciates a new one, which has then exercised a decisive influ-
ence on the history of thinking language: “As we have said, not
every sound made by a living creature is a voice (for one can make
a sound even with the tongue, or as in coughing), but that which
even causes the impact, must have a soul, and use some imagina-
tion (μ
ετὰ φαντασίας τινός). For the voice is a signifying sound
(
σημαντικὸς ψόφος)” (ibid., 29– 32).
If what distinguishes language from the voice is its seman-
tic character (that is, its being associated with the affections of
the soul, here called “imaginations”), Aristotle does not specify
what turns the animal voice into a signifying language. And
it is here that letters (
γράμματα) acquire a crucial function,
which On Interpretation lists in the semantic knot only as signs
of what lies in the voice. Letters are not simply signs, but ele-
ments (
στοιχεῖα, the other Greek term that designates letters) of
the voice, which render it signifying and comprehensible. In Poet-
ics, Aristotle clearly states that “a letter (
στοιχεῖον) is an indivis-
ible voice, not any voice but one through which a voice becomes
intelligible (
συνθετὴ γίγνεσθαι φωνή). Animals utter indivisible
voices but none that I should call a letter. The parts of the intel-
ligible voice are the vowel (
φωνῆεν), the semi- vowel (ἡμίφωνον),
and the mute (
ἄφωνον)” (Poetics 1456b22– 25). This definition is
confirmed in Metaphysics: “The elements (
στοιχεῖα) of the voice
are that of which the voice is composed (
σύγκειται) and the ulti-
mate parts into which it is divisible” (Metaphysics 1014a26); and in
Problems: “Humans produce many letters (
γράμματα), but other
living creatures no letters, or, at most, two or three consonants.
Consonants combined with vowels produce discourse. Language
(
λόγος) is signifying something not by the voice but by certain
affections (
πάθεσιν) of it. And the letters are affections of the
voice” (Problems 10.39.895a7 ff.). The writings on animals stress
the function of the tongue and the lips in the production of let-
ters: “Language, through the voice, is composed of letters (
ἐκ τῶν
γραμμάτων σύγκειται); and if the lips were not supple, or if the
tongue were other than it is, the greater parts of letters could not
possibly be pronounced, since some of them result from an impact
Experimentum Vocis
of the tongue and the closing of the lips” (On the Parts of Animals
659b30 ff.). Using a word that grammarians would then estab-
lish as a properly technical term of their science, this constitutive
inscription of letters in the voice is defined as an “articulation”
(
διάρθρωσις): “Voice (ϕωνή) differs from sound (ψόϕος), and
language (
λόγος) from both. [ . . . ] Language is the articulation
of the voice by means of the tongue (
γλώττῃ). Now vowel sounds
are produced by the voice and the larynx; consonantal sounds by
the tongue and the lips. And these produce language” (History of
Animals 535a ff.).
If we now return to the statement that opens On Interpreta-
tion, we can say that Aristotle here defines an
ἑρμηνεία, a process
of interpretation that is unfolded between what is in the voice,
the letters, the affections of the soul, and things; but the decisive
function— that which makes the voice capable of signifying—
rests precisely with the letters; the first and ultimate hermeneut
is the
γράμμα.
13
Let us dwell on the crucial operation that is accomplished in
these writings for the history of Western culture— under the
appearance of a description that time has made obvious.
Φωνή
and
λόγος, the animal voice and human language are distinct,
but coincide locally in man, in the sense that language is pro-
duced through an “articulation” of the voice, which is nothing
else than the inscription of letters (
γράμματα) in it, whereby let-
ters are entrusted with the privileged status of being, at the same
time, signs and elements (
στοιχεῖα) of the voice (in this sense,
the letter is an index of itself, index sui). Aristotle’s definition was
adopted by ancient grammarians who turned the observations of
the philosophers into a systematic science between the first and
second centuries CE. Grammarians too begin their analysis from
the definition of the voice, distinguishing the “confused voice”
(
ϕωνὴ συγκεχυμένη) of animals from the “articulated voice”
(
ϕωνὴ ἔναρθρος, vox articulata) of humans. But if, at this point,
Experimentum Vocis
we ask of what the articulated character of the human voice con-
sists, grammarians answer that
ϕωνὴ ἔναρθρος simply means
ϕωνὴ ἐγγράμματος, that is, translated into Latin, vox quae scribi
potest or quae litteris comprehendi potest— a voice that can be writ-
ten, “grammaticized,” and that can be comprehended through let-
ters. The confused voice is the unwritable voice of animals (“the
neighing of horses, the rage of dogs, the roaring of wild beasts”)
or also that part of the human voice that cannot be written, “such
as laughter, whistling, or hiccup[s]” (to which one can add the
timbre of the voice, which the ear perceives but cannot formalize
into a writing).
Therefore, the articulated voice is nothing other than
ϕωνὴ
ἐγγράμματος, a voice that has been transcribed and com-
prehended— that is, captured— by means of letters. In other
words, human language is constituted through an operation on
the animal voice, which inscribes in it the letters (
γράμματα)
as elements (
στοιχεῖα). We find here again the structure of the
exceptio— the inclusive exclusion— that makes possible the cap-
ture of life into politics. Just as the natural life of man is included
in politics through its very exclusion in the form of bare life, so
human language (which, after all, according to Aristotle, founds
the political community [Politics 1253a18]) takes place through an
exclusion- inclusion of the “bare voice” (
ϕωνὴ ἁπλῶς in Ammoni-
us’s words) in the
λόγος. In this way, history takes root in nature,
the exosomatic tradition in the endosomatic tradition, and the
political community in the natural community.
א. At the beginning of Grammatology, after enunciating the program
of a claim of writing against the privilege of the voice, Jacques Der-
rida quotes the passage from On Interpretation in which Aristotle
affirms the “original link” and the “essential proximity” between
the voice and the
λόγος, which define Western metaphysics: “If, for
Aristotle, for example, ‘the sounds produced by the voice’ (
τά ἐν τῇ
ϕωνῇ) are the symbols of the states of the soul (παθήματα ἐν τῇ
ϕωνῇ) and written words the symbols of the words produced by the
voice, it is that the voice, productive of the first symbols, has a relation
of essential and immediate proximity with the soul” (Derrida 1967,
Experimentum Vocis
pp. 22– 23). If our analysis of the condition of the letters in the voice
is correct, this means that Western metaphysics sets in its original
place the
γράμμα and not the voice. The Derridean critique of meta-
physics is therefore founded on an insufficient reading of Aristotle,
which fails to question precisely the original status of the
γράμμα
in On Interpretation. Metaphysics is always already a grammatology
and the latter is a fundamentology, in the sense that, since the
λόγος
takes place in the non- place of the
ϕωνή, the function of negative
ontological foundation belongs to the letter and not to the voice.
14
We can here grasp the fundamental influence of alphabetic
writing on our culture and on the way in which it has conceived
of language. It is in fact only alphabetic writing— whose inven-
tion the Greeks attributed to two civilizing heroes, Cadmus and
Palamedes— that can generate the illusion of capturing the voice,
of having com- prehended and transcribed it in the
γράμματα. To
fully realize the— in every sense foundational— importance of the
capture of language [lingua] that was made possible by alphabetic
writing and by its
ἑρμηνεία carried out first by philosophers and
then by grammarians, we need to free ourselves from the naïve
representation— produced by two millennia of grammatical
education— according to which the letters are perfectly recogniz-
able in the voice as its elements.
In this perspective, there is nothing more instructive than the
history of that part of grammar— phonetics— that deals with
the sounds of language (as, indeed, an “articulated voice”). At
first, modern phonetics focused on the analysis of the
γράμματα
according to their modality of articulation, distinguishing them
as labials, dentals, palatals, velars, labiovelars, laryngeal, and so
on— with such a descriptive thoroughness that a phonetician
who was also a physician could write that if a speaking subject
really articulated a given laryngeal sound in the way described
by phonetics treatises, this would cause his death by suffocation.
Articulatory phonetics descended into crisis when it was noticed
that, in the presence of a lesion of the organ of articulation,
Experimentum Vocis
the speaker could equally articulate the sound following other
modalities.
Abandoning the analysis of sounds according to their point
of articulation, phonetics then focused on their strictly acoustic
consistence, and thus managed to decompose and analyze the
auditory texture of language into a multiplicity of scientifically
controllable data. But the more the analysis of the sound wave
produced by the voice evolved, the more it became impossible
to clearly separate the elements (the
γράμματα- στοιχεῖα) that
the grammatical tradition had identified. In 1916, Saussure had
already observed that if we could reproduce through a film the
movements of the mouth, the tongue, and the vocal cords of a
speaker who produces what appears to us as the series of sounds
F- A- L, it would be impossible to divide the three elements that
compose it— which actually present themselves as so indissolu-
bly interwoven that one cannot isolate the point at which F ends
and A begins. A film made in 1933 by the German phonetician
Paul Menzerath confirmed Saussure’s observation also from the
acoustic standpoint. In the act of speech, sounds do not follow
each other, but become so intimately entangled and bound to
each other that the unities we assume ourselves to be able to dis-
tinguish both at the morphological and phonetic levels actually
constitute a perfectly continuous flux.
The awareness of the impossibility of distinguishing the sounds
of language from both an articulatory and an acoustic stand-
point made necessary the emergence of phonology, which neatly
separates the sounds of words (which was studied by phonetics)
from the sounds of language [lingua] (the phonemes, that is, pure
and immaterial oppositions, which are the object of phonology).
With the severance of the link between language [lingua] and the
voice— which was out of question from ancient thought to the
phonetics of the Neogrammarians— the autonomy of language
[lingua] with regard to the act of speech becomes evident. But
although phonology acknowledges that
γράμματα are not the
trace and the written transcription of the voice, on the one hand,
it treats the phoneme as a sort of purely negative and differential
Experimentum Vocis
archigram [arcigramma], on the other. With this move, the diffi-
culty caused by the aporetic situation of the
λόγος in the ϕωνή is
not solved, but only proposed again at the level of the impossible
articulation between langue and parole, or between semiotic and
semantic.
א. The ungraspable character of the human voice and the vanity of
any attempt to make it somehow comprehensible through the let-
ters were already observed by Plato, on whom, even in this case, the
Aristotelian
ἑρμηνεία of language and the condition of the λόγος in
the
γράμματα depend. In the Philebus, Socrates says: “When some-
one, whether god or godlike man— there is an Egyptian story that
his name was Theuth— observed that the voice was infinite (
φωνὴν
ἄπειρον— ἄπειρον literally means “indemonstrable, impracticable,
with no way out”), he was the first to notice that the vowel sounds
in that indemonstrable (
ἐν τῷ ἀπείρῳ) were not one, but many, and
again that there were other elements that do not properly belong
to the voice but did have a sonant quality, and that these also had
a definite number; and he distinguished a third kind of letters
(
γραμμάτων) which we now call mutes (ἄφωνα). Then he divided
the mutes until he distinguished each individual one, and he treated
the vowels and semivowels in the same way, until he knew the num-
ber of them and gave to each and all the name of
στοιχεῖον. Perceiv-
ing, however, that none of us could learn any one of them alone
by itself without learning them all, and considering that this was
a common bond (
δεσμὸν) which made them in a way all one, he
assigned to them all a single science and called it grammar” (Philebus
18b5– d2).
From this indemonstrability of the voice, Plato deduces, not
the need for the
γράμματα , but rather that for a theory of ideas
(indeed, in the Phaedrus, he blames Theuth’s invention for causing
loss of memory); on the other hand, Aristotle unreservedly follows
Theuth’s Egyptian paradigm and accordingly excludes ideas from
the semantic knot as redundant.
Experimentum Vocis
15
If anthropogenesis— and the philosophy that recalls, protects,
and incessantly reactualizes it— coincide with an experimentum
linguae that aporetically situates the
λόγος in the voice; and if the
ἑρμηνεία, the interpretation of this experience that has dominated
the history of the West, seems to have reached its limit, then what
cannot but be questioned today in thought is an experimentum
vocis, in which humans radically question the role of language
in the voice and try to assume being a speaker anew. What has
reached completion is in fact not the natural history of human-
ity, but that most special epochal history in which the
ἑρμηνεία
of speech as a language [lingua]— that is, as an intentional inter-
twining of terms, concepts, things, and letters that takes place
in the voice through the
γράμματα— had destined the West. It
is therefore necessary always again to interrogate the possibility
and meaning of the experimentum, investigating its place and
genealogy in order to investigate whether there is, with respect
to the
γράμματα and the knowledge based on them, another way
of addressing the indemonstrability of the voice. In our culture,
the experimentum is not an eccentric or marginal phenomenon,
which, trying to say what cannot be said, necessarily falls into
contradictions; rather, it is the very thing of thought, the constitu-
tive fact of what we call philosophy.
In the same years in which he formulated the insurmountable
fracture between semiotic and semantic, Benveniste wrote an
essay on the “Formal Apparatus of Enunciation,” where he inves-
tigated the capacity of language to refer, through the shifters “I,”
“you,” “here,” “now,” “this,” and so forth, not to lexical reality but
to its own pure taking place. “I” does not indicate a substance,
but the person who utters the instance of discourse containing
“I,” just as “this” can only be the object of “an ostension that is
simultaneous with the present instance of discourse,” and “here”
and “now” “delimit the spatial and temporal instance that is con-
temporaneous with the instance of discourse containing the pro-
noun ‘I.’” This is not the place to retrace these rightly celebrated
Experimentum Vocis
analyses, which have transformed the traditional theory of pro-
nouns and defined the philosophical problem of the subject in
a new way. What interests us here is rather asking in what way
we can understand the “contemporaneity” and the “simultaneity”
between the shifter and the instance of discourse (in this regard,
Jakobson speaks also of an “existential relation” between the pro-
noun “I” and “enunciation”) without resorting to the voice. Enun-
ciation and the instance of discourse are not identifiable as such,
if not by means of the voice that utters them. But, insofar as it
refers to the taking place of discourse, the voice that is here in
question cannot be the animal voice, but, once again, the voice
as what necessarily needs to be removed so that the
γράμματα,
and discourse with them, can take place in its non- place. In other
words, enunciation locates the subject, the one who says “I,”
“here,” and “now,” in the articulation between the voice and lan-
guage, between the “no longer” of the animal
ϕωνή and the “not
yet” of the
λόγος. It is in this negative articulation that letters
are situated. The voice is written, becomes
ἐγγράμματος, at the
point where the subject, the one who says “I,” becomes aware of
being in place of the voice. For this reason, as Hegel has shown in
The Phenomenology of Spirit, it is sufficient to transcribe the sense
certainty that is affirmed in the pronoun “this” and in the adverbs
“here” and “now” to see it vanish (“here” is no longer here; “now”
is no longer now), to see the voice on which it was founded defini-
tively disappear. The building of Western knowledge rests in the
last resort on a voice that is removed, on a voice that writes itself.
This is its fragile but tenacious founding myth.
16
Is it possible to think the relationship between the voice and
language otherwise than through the letters? Ammonius suggests
a possible hypothesis when, in his commentary, he fleetingly hints
at the voice as the matter (
ὕλη) of language [lingua]. Before trying
to follow this hypothesis, we need to confront the thesis, articu-
lated by Jean- Claude Milner, according to which the letter and
Experimentum Vocis
matter are synonymous, since matter— understood in the sense
of modern science— is eminently translittérable, transcribable into
letters (Milner 1985, p. 8). Milner adds to this thesis the corol-
lary according to which the letter and the signifier are different
and it is precisely their undue confusion that induced Saussure
to attribute the properties of the signifier to the letter— in the
Anagrams— and the characteristics of the letter to the signi-
fier— in the Course.
We can then say, in Milner’s words, that Aristotle’s operation
amounts precisely to identifying the letter— the
γράμμα— with
the signifier, with the becoming semantic of the
ϕωνή. On condi-
tion of adding, against Milner’s thesis, that matter— at least if we
refer it back to the Platonic paradigm of a
χώρα, of a pure taking-
place— is never something that can be transliterated, that is, it
can never be a letter or a writing.
Let us consider, in the Timaeus, the definition of the third
kind of being, along with the sensible and the intelligible, which
Plato calls
χώρα. It is the receptacle (ὑποδοχή) or an imprint-
bearer (
ἐκμαγεῖον) that offers a place to all sensible forms, yet
without ever blending with them. It is neither properly sensible
nor properly intelligible, but is perceived as in a dream “through
a kind of bastard reasoning accompanied by an absence of sensa-
tion.” If, developing the analogy suggested by Ammonius, we
consider the voice as the
χώρα of language [lingua], it will then
not be grammatically linked to the latter in a relation as a sign
or element: rather, the voice is that which, in the taking- place
of the
λόγος, we perceive as irreducible to it, as the indemon-
strable (
ἄπειρον) that incessantly accompanies it, which, as nei-
ther pure sound nor signifying discourse, we perceive at their
intersection with an absence of sensation and with a reasoning
without meaning. Abandoning every founding mythology, we
can then say that, as
χώρα and matter, it is a voice that has never
been written in language, an un- writable that, in the inces-
sant historical transmission of grammatical writing, obstinately
remains such. There is no articulation between the living and
the speaking being. The letter— the
γράμμα that claims to posit
Experimentum Vocis
itself as the having- been or trace of the voice— is neither in the
voice nor in its place.
17
The “ancient struggle” (
παλαιὰ διαφορὰ [Plato, Republic
607b]) between poetry and philosophy needs then to be thought
anew from this perspective. In twentieth- century thought, the
separation between these two discourses— and, at the same time,
the attempt to reunite them— has reached its highest tension: if,
on the one hand, logic has tried to purify language [lingua] of
any poetic excess, on the other, there have been a number of phi-
losophers who have invoked poetry where it seemed that concepts
were insufficient. Actually, these are neither two rival options
nor two alternative possibilities without relation, as if the speaker
could arbitrarily choose between one or the other: poetry and phi-
losophy rather represent two inseparable and irreducible tensions
within the single field of human language; in this sense, as long as
there is language, there will also be poetry and thought. In fact,
their duality witnesses once again to the splitting that, according
to our hypothesis, was produced in the voice— at the moment
of anthropogenesis— between what remained of animal language
and the language [lingua] that was developing in its place as an
organ of knowledge.
The positioning of language [lingua] in the place of the voice is
in fact the cause of another irreducible splitting that runs through
human language, that between sound and sense, phonic and
musical series and semantic series. These two series, which coin-
cided in the animal voice, separate at each turn and oppose each
other in discourse following a twofold and inverse tension, in such
a way that their coincidence is impossible and, at the same time,
irrevocable. What we call poetry and what we call philosophy
name the two polarities of this opposition in language. Poetry
could thus be defined as the attempt to maximally stretch the dif-
ferences between the semiotic and the semantic series, sound and
sense,
ϕωνή and λόγος toward a pure sound, through the rhyme
Experimentum Vocis
and the enjambement; conversely, philosophical prose could then
appear as tending toward the fulfillment of these differences in a
pure sense.
Against this lectio facilior of the relation between poetry and phi-
losophy, we rather need to recall that what is decisive for both is the
moment when
ϕωνή and λόγος, sound and sense are in contact—
where, following Giorgio Colli, contact should not be understood
as a tangential point, but as the moment in which two entities are
united (or, rather, separated) only by an absence of representation.
If we call thought this moment of contact, we can then say that
poetry and philosophy are actually internal to each other, in the
sense that the properly poetic experience of speech is accomplished
in thought and the properly thinking experience of language [lin-
gua] takes place in poetry. That is to say, philosophy is a search
for and a commemoration of the voice, just as poetry— as poets
continually remind us— is a love and search for language [lingua].
Philosophical prose, in which sound and sense seem to coincide
in discourse, thus runs the risk of lacking thought, just as poetry,
which continually opposes sound and sense, runs the risk of lack-
ing the voice. For this reason, as Wittgenstein wrote, “philosophy
ought really to be written only as a form of poetry” (“Philosophie
dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten,” Wittgenstein 1977, p. 58), on
condition of adding that poetry ought really to be written only as
a form of philosophy. Philosophy is always and constitutively phi-
losophy of— subjective genitive— poetry, and poetry is always and
originally poetry of philosophy.
18
If we call factum loquendi the fact of the pure and simple exis-
tence of language, independently of its emergence in this or that
language [lingua], in this or that grammar, in this or that signify-
ing proposition, we can then say that modern linguistics and logic
have been able to constitute themselves as sciences only by leaving
aside as an unthought presupposition the factum loquendi— the
pure fact that we speak— in order to deal only with language as
Experimentum Vocis
describable in terms of real properties— in other words, as what
this or that language [lingua] is, employing this or that “gram-
mar” and communicating this or that semantic content. We
always speak within language and through language, and by
speaking of this or that topic, predicating something about some-
thing, we keep on forgetting the simple fact that we are speaking
about it. However, at the moment of enunciation language does
not refer to any lexical reality or to the text of the statement, but
solely to its own taking place. It refers only to its taking place
[aver luogo] in the voice that removes itself; it maintains a negative
relation with the voice that, according to the myth, gives rise to it
[gli dà luogo] by disappearing.
If this is the case, we can then define the task of philosophy
as the attempt to exhibit and experience the factum that meta-
physics and the science of language must limit themselves to pre-
supposing; that is, the attempt to become aware of the pure fact
that we speak and that the event of speech occurs for the living
being in the place of the voice, but without any articulation of
this event with the voice. Where the voice and language are in
contact without any articulation, a subject comes about and wit-
nesses to this contact. The thought that wants to risk itself in this
experience has to resolutely situate itself not only in the gap— or
contact— between language [lingua] and speech, semiotic and
semantic, but also in that between the
ϕωνή and the λόγος. The
thought that— between speech and language [lingua], existence
and essence, potentiality and act— risks itself in this experience
must accept to find itself at each turn facing the voice without
language [lingua] and facing language [lingua] without the voice.
9
Philosophy always again finds itself facing the task of rigorously
defining the concept of demand. This definition is all the more
urgent, since we can say— without any play on words— that phi-
losophy demands this definition and that its possibility fully coin-
cides with this demand.
If there were no demand, but only necessity, there could not
be philosophy. The element of philosophy is not what obliges us
but what demands of us; not what must- be or mere factual reality,
but the demand. But, because of demand, even possibility and
contingency transform and modify themselves. That is to say, a
definition of demand implies as a preliminary task a redefinition
of the categories of modality.
Leibniz thought of demand as an attribute of possibility: omne
possibile exigit existiturire, “every possibility demands to exist.”
What the possible demands is to become real; potentiality— or
essence— demands existence. For this reason, Leibniz defines
existence as a demand of essence: “Si existentia esset aliud quid-
dam quam essentiae exigentia, sequeretur ipsam habere quandam
essentiam, seu aliquid novum superadditum rebus, de quo rursus
quaeri potest, an haec essentia existat, et cur ista potius quam alia”
(“If existence were something other than what is demanded by
essence, it would follow that it too would have a certain essence,
that is, something that would be added to things; and then it
On the Concept of Demand
might be asked again whether this essence in turn exists, and why
that one rather than another”). In the same sense, Thomas Aqui-
nas ironically wrote that “just as we cannot say that running runs,
so we cannot say that existence exists.”
Existence is not a quid, something other with respect to essence
or possibility; it is only a demand contained in essence. But how
should we understand this demand? In a fragment written in
1689, Leibniz calls this demand existiturientia (a term formed
from the future infinitive of existere) and it is by means of it that
he tries to make the principle of reason comprehensible. The rea-
son why something exists rather than nothing “consists in the
prevalence of reasons to exist (ad existendum) over those to not
exist, that is, if it is permissible to say it with one word, of the
demand to exist of essence (in existiturientia essentiae).” The ulti-
mate root of this demand is God (“for the demand of essences to
exist— existituritionis essentiarum— it is necessary that there be a
root a parte rei, and this root can only be the necessary entity,
the foundation— fundus— of essences and source— fons— of exis-
tences, namely, God. . . . Essences could never find a way to exis-
tence— ad existendum— if not in God and through God”).
One of the paradigms of demand is memory. Walter Benjamin
once wrote that in remembering we experience how what seems to
be absolutely accomplished— the past— suddenly becomes again
unaccomplished. Even memory, insofar as it gives incompleteness
back to the past and thus somehow makes it still possible for us,
is something similar to demand. Leibniz’s stance on the problem
of demand is here reversed: it is not the possible that demands
to exist, but the real— what has already been— that demands its
own possibility. And what is thinking if not the capacity to give
possibility back to reality, to belie the false claim of opinion that
it is founded only on facts? To think means first and foremost to
perceive the demand of what is real to become possible again, to
do justice not only to things but also to their tears.
In the same sense, Benjamin wrote that the life of Prince Mysh-
kin demands to remain unforgettable. This does not mean that
On the Concept of Demand
something that has been forgotten now demands to come back to
memory: demand concerns the unforgettable as such, even when
everybody has forgotten it forever. The unforgettable is, in this
sense, the very form of demand. And this is not the claim of a
subject; it is a state of the world, an attribute of substance— that
is, in Spinoza’s words, something that the mind conceives of sub-
stance as constituting its essence.
Demand is therefore, like justice, a category of ontology, and not
of morality. Nor is it a logical category, insofar as it does not imply its
object, in the way in which the nature of a triangle implies that the
sum of its angles equals two right angles. In other words, we say that
something demands something else if the first thing is and the sec-
ond will be, but the former does not logically imply the latter or con-
tain it in its concept, nor does it force it to exist on the level of facts.
This definition should be followed by a revision of ontological
categories, which philosophers refrain from undertaking. Leibniz
attributes demand to essence (or possibility) and makes existence
the object of demand. That is to say, his thought still remains a
tributary of the ontological apparatus, which divides essence and
existence, potentiality and act in being, and sees in God their
point of indifference, the “existentifying” (existentificans) prin-
ciple, in which essence becomes existent. But what is a possibility
that contains a demand? And how should we think of existence,
if it is nothing other than a demand? What if demand were more
original than the very distinction between essence and existence,
possibility and reality? What if being itself were to be thought of
as a demand, of which the categories of modality (possibility, con-
tingency, necessity) are only the inadequate specifications, which
we decidedly need to call into question?
From the fact that demand is not a moral category, it follows that
no imperative can derive from it, that is, that it has nothing to do
with a must- be. But, if this is the case, modern morality, which claims
to be alien to happiness and loves to present itself in the categorical
form of an injunction, is condemned without reservations.
On the Concept of Demand
Paul defines faith (
πίστις) as the existence (ὑπόστασις) of the
things we hope for. That is, faith provides a reality and a substance
to what does not exist. In this sense, faith is similar to demand, yet
on condition of specifying that it is not the anticipation of some-
thing to come (as it is for the believer) or that needs to be realized
(as it is for the political militant): the thing we hope for is already
completely present as demand. For this reason, faith cannot be a
property of the believer, but a demand that does not belong to him
and reaches him from the outside, from the things he hopes for.
When Spinoza defines essence as conatus, he means something
like a demand. This is why, in Proposition 7 of Part III of the Eth-
ics (“Conatus, quo unaquaeque res in suo esse perseverare cona-
tur, nihil est praeter ipsius rei actualis essentia”), the term conatus
should not be translated, as is usually done, as “striving,” but as
“demand”: “The demand through which each thing demands to
persevere in its being is nothing but its actual essence.” The fact
that being demands (or desires: the scolium specifies that desire—
cupiditas— is one of the names of the conatus) means that it is
not exhausted in factual reality, but contains a demand that goes
beyond it. It is not that being simply is: it demands to be. Once
again, this means that desire does not belong to the subject, but
to being. Just as someone who has dreamt something has actually
already had it, desire brings with it its satisfaction.
Demand coincides neither with the sphere of facts nor with that
of ideals: rather, it is matter, in the sense in which Plato defines it
in the Timaeus as a third kind of being between the idea and the
sensible, “which offers a place (
χώρα) and an abode to things that
come into being.” For this reason, as in the case of
χώρα, we can
say of demand that we perceive it “with an absence of sensation”
(μ
ετ’ ἀναισθησίας— not “without sensation,” but “with an anes-
thesia”) and with a “bastard reasoning that is barely credible”: in
other words, we can say that demand has the evidence of a sensa-
tion without sensation (as happens in dreams, Plato says) and the
intelligibility of thought, yet without any possible definition. In
On the Concept of Demand
this sense, matter is the demand that interrupts the false alternative
between the sensible and the intelligible, the linguistic and the non-
linguistic: there is a materiality of thought and language [lingua],
just as there is an intelligibility in sensation. It is this third undeter-
mined that Aristotle calls
ὕλη and medieval philosophers silva, “col-
orless face of substance” and “indefatigable womb of generation,”
and of which Plotinus says that it is like “a track of the formless.”
We need to think of matter not as a substratum, but as a
demand of bodies: it is what a body demands and what we per-
ceive as its most intimate potentiality. We then better understand
the nexus that has always linked matter to possibility (for this rea-
son, the Chartres Platonists defined the
ὕλη as the “absolute pos-
sibility, which keeps all thing implied in itself”); what the possible
demands is not to pass to the act, but to materialize itself [mate-
riarsi], to become matter. It is in this sense that we should inter-
pret the scandalous theses of those medieval materialists, such as
Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant, who identified God with
matter (yle mundi este ipse deus): God is the taking place of bodies,
the demand that marks and materializes them.
Just as, according to one of Benjamin’s theorems, the messi-
anic Kingdom can only be present in history in ridiculous and
infamous forms, so, on the level of facts, demand manifests itself
in the most insignificant places and according to modalities that
in current circumstances may appear despicable and incongru-
ous. With respect to demand, every fact is inadequate, and every
fulfillment insufficient. And this is not because it exceeds every
possible realization, but simply because it can never be placed on
the level of a realization. In the mind of God— that is, in the state
of the mind that corresponds to demand as the state of being—
demands have already been fulfilled since all eternity. Insofar as
it is projected onto time, the messianic presents itself as another
world that demands to exist in this world, but cannot do so except
in a parodic and approximate way, as if it were a— not always
edifying— distortion of the world. In this sense, parody is the
only possible expression of demand.
On the Concept of Demand
For this reason, demand has found a sublime expression in the
Gospels’ Beatitudes, in the extreme tension that separates the
Kingdom from the world: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven. [ . . . ] Blessed are the meek, for they
will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will
be comforted. [ . . . ] Blessed are those who are persecuted [ . . . ],
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It is significant that, in the
privileged case of the poor and the persecuted— that is, of the two
conditions that are most infamous in the eyes of the world— the
verb is in the present tense: the kingdom of heaven is here and now
for those who are farthest from it. The extraneousness of demand
from any future factual realization is here affirmed in the purest
way: and, yet, precisely because of this, it now finds its real name.
Demand is— in its essence— beatitude.
Demand is the state of extreme complication of a being that
implies in itself all its possibilities. This means that demand enter-
tains a privileged relation with the idea; that, in demand, things are
contemplated sub quadam aeternitatis specie.
1
Just as when we contem-
plate our beloved while she sleeps; she is there— but as if suspended
from all her acts, involute, and wrapped around herself. Like an idea,
she is there, and at the same time, she is not there. She lies before
our eyes, but in order for her to really be there we would have to
wake her up, and, in so doing, we would lose her. The idea— and
demand— is the sleep of the act, the dormition of life. All the pos-
sibilities are now gathered in a single complication, which life will
gradually explicate— and has already in part explicated. But, hand in
hand with the process of explication, the inexplicable idea goes always
deeper and complicates itself. It is the demand that remains untainted
in all its realizations, the sleep that knows no awakening.
1. “Under a certain species of eternity.”— Translator.
3
1
It is not the unsayable but the sayable that constitutes the prob-
lem philosophy must at each turn confront again. The unsayable
is in fact nothing else than a presupposition of language. As soon
as there is language, the named thing is presupposed as the non-
linguistic or the unrelated with which language has established
its relation. This presupposing power is so strong that we imagine
the non- linguistic as something unsayable and unrelated, which
we somehow try to grasp as such, without realizing that in this
way we are simply trying to grasp the shadow of language. In this
sense, the unsayable is a genuinely linguistic category, which can
be conceived only by a speaking being. This is why, in a letter
to Martin Buber of July 1916, Walter Benjamin could speak of a
“crystalline elimination of the unsayable in language”: the unsay-
able does not take place outside of language as something obscure
that is presupposed, but, as such, it can be eliminated only in
language.
I shall try to show that, on the other hand, the sayable is a non-
linguistic but genuinely ontological category. The elimination of
the unsayable in language coincides with the exhibition of the say-
able as a philosophical task. For this reason, unlike the unsayable,
the sayable can never be given before or after language: it arises
together with it and, however, remains irreducible to it.
On the Sayable and the Idea
2
The Stoics designated an essential element of their doctrine of
the incorporeals with the term sayable,
λεκτόν, on the definition
of which the historians of philosophy have not yet reached an
agreement. Before starting an investigation of this concept, we
should therefore first locate it in the philosophical context that
pertains to it. Modern scholars tend anachronistically to convert
ancient categories and classifications into modern ones and to
treat sayability as a logical concept. At the same time, they know
perfectly well that the division of philosophy into logic, ontol-
ogy, physics, metaphysics, and so on, by the grammarians and the
scholiasts of late antiquity lends itself to all sorts of equivocations
and misunderstandings.
Let us consider Aristotle’s treatise on Categories, or predications
(but the Greek term
κατηγορίαι means in juridical language
“charges, accusations”), which is traditionally classified among
his logical works. However, it contains theses that undoubtedly
have an ontological character. Ancient commentators therefore
debated what the object (
σκοπός, the purpose) of the treatise was:
words (
ϕωναί), things (πράγματα), or concepts (νοήματα). In the
prologue to his commentary, repeating arguments by his teacher
Ammonius, Philoponus writes that according to some (such as
Alexander of Aphrodisias) the object of the treatise is only words,
according to others (such as Eustatius), only things, and accord-
ing to still others (such as Porphyry), only concepts. According to
Philoponus, Iamblichus’s thesis (which he accepts with some spec-
ifications) for which the
σκοπός of the treatise is the words inso-
far as they mean things through concepts (
ϕωνῶν σημαινουσῶν
πράγματα διὰ μέσον νοημάτων [Philoponus 1898, pp. 8– 9]) is
more correct. From here follows the impossibility of distinguish-
ing logic from ontology, in the Categories, where Aristotle treats
things and entities insofar as they are signified by language, and
language insofar as it refers to things. His ontology presupposes
that being is said (
τὸ ὂν λέγεται . . .) and is always already in lan-
guage, he stresses continually. The ambiguity between logical and
On the Sayable and the Idea
ontological is so consubstantial in the treatise that, in the history
of Western philosophy, categories will be presented both as kinds
of predication and as kinds of being.
א. Our classification of Aristotle’s works derives from the edition
Andronicus of Rhodes produced between 40 and 20 BC. We owe to
him both the collection of Aristotle’s so- called logical writings in an
Organon and the notorious location μ
ετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ of the lectures
and notes we today call Metaphysics. Andronicus was convinced that
Aristotle was a deliberately systematic thinker and that his edition
thus faithfully reflected the author’s intention, but we know that he
projected onto Aristotle Hellenistic ideas that were totally alien to a
classical mind. The modern editions of Aristotle, however philologi-
cally updated, unfortunately still mirror Andronicus’s erroneous con-
ception. We thus continue to read Aristotle as if he really systemati-
cally composed a logical
ὄργανον, treatises on physics, politics, and
ethics, and, finally, the Metaphysics. It is possible to read Aristotle
only starting from the destruction of this canonical articulation of
his thought.
3
Similar considerations apply to the Stoics’ notion of the sayable.
In modern studies, it is taken for granted that the
λεκτόν belongs
to the sphere of logic, but this makes assumptions (such as the iden-
tity between
σημαινόμενον and λεκτόν, meaning and sayable)
that are far from certain. Let us consider Ammonius’s remarks,
who critically defines the
λεκτόν from an Aristotelian standpoint:
“Aristotle teaches what the things primarily and immediately signi-
fied (
σημαινόμενα, that is, by names and verbs) and the concepts
(
νοήματα) are, and, through them, the things (πράγματα), and
affirms that we should not think another intermediary in addition
to them (that is, the
νόημα and the πρᾶγμα), such as that which
the Stoics suppose by the name of sayable (
λεκτόν)” (Ammonius
1897, p. 5). That is, Ammonius informs us that the Stoics inserted—
uselessly, in his opinion— a third element between the concept and
the thing, which they called sayable.
On the Sayable and the Idea
The passage in question comes from Ammonius’s commen-
tary on
Περὶ ἑρμηνείας. Here Aristotle defined the process of
“interpretation” by means of three elements: words (
τὰ ἐν τῇ
ϕωνῇ), concepts (or, more precisely, the affections of the soul,
τὰ παθήματα ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ)— of which words are the signs— and
things (
τὰ πράγματα)— of which concepts are the resemblances.
Ammonius suggests that the sayable of the Stoics is not only not
linguistic, but neither a concept nor a thing. It does not take place
in the mind or simply in reality; it does not belong to either logic
or physics, but somehow lies between them. We should map out
this specific location between the mind and things as it may prop-
erly be the space of being and the sayable may coincide with the
ontological.
4
The richest and, at the same time, most problematic source
with which every interpretation of the doctrine of the sayable
should begin is a passage from Sextus Empiricus’s Against the
Logicians:
Some placed the true and false in the signified thing (
περὶ τῷ
σημαινομένῷ), others in the word (περὶ τῇ ϕωνῇ), and still oth-
ers in the motion of thought (
περὶ τῇ κινήσει τῆς διανοίας). And
the Stoics stood for the first opinion, saying that three [things] were
connected with one another, the signified (
σημαινόμενον), the
signifier (
σημαῖνον), and the object (τυγχάνον, “what happens to
be,” the existing thing that is at each turn in question). The sig-
nifier is the word (
ϕωνή)— for example, “Dion”; the signified is
the thing itself insofar as it is manifested by it (
αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα
τὸ ὑπ’ αὐτῆς δηλούμενον), which we apprehend as what subsists
beside (
παρυϕισταμένου) our thought, and which foreigners do not
understand even when they hear the word; the object is the exter-
nally existing substance (
τὸ ἐκτὸς ὑποκείμενον) (e.g., Dion him-
self). And of these, two are bodies, namely, the word and the object,
while one is incorporeal, namely, the signified and sayable thing (
τὸ
σημαινόμενον πρᾶγμα καὶ λεκτόν), which becomes true or false.
(8.2 ff.; 1842, p. 291)
On the Sayable and the Idea
The signifier (the signifying word) and the object (the thing that
corresponds to it in reality; the referent in modern terms) are evi-
dent. What is more problematic is the status of the incorporeal
σημαινόμενον, which modern scholars have identified with the
concept present in the mind of a subject (like the Aristotelian
νόημα, according to Ammonius) or with the objective content of
a thought, which exists independently of the mental activity of
a subject (like Frege’s “thought”— Gedanke) (Schubert 1994, pp.
15– 16).
Both interpretations project onto Stoicism the modern theory
of signification and, in this way, omit to tackle a philologically
correct reading of the text. The fact that foreigners do not under-
stand the
σημαινόμενον when they hear the word could lead
us to assimilate it to sense or a mental image (in Frege’s sense);
but, opposing the Stoics to those who place the true and the false
“in the motion of thought,” Sextus implicitly rules out that the
σημαινόμενον could be identified with the thought of a subject.
After all, the text clearly says that the
σημαινόμενον is not iden-
tical with thought, but “subsists beside” it. Even the following
passage, which seems to evoke something similar to what mod-
erns call meaning (at least in the sense of Bedeutung or denota-
tion), requires a more careful interpretation. The
σημαινόμενον
is here defined as the “thing itself” (
αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα) insofar as it
is manifested by the word (
τὸ ὑπ αὐτῆς δελούμενον— we should
notice the repetition of the article
τὸ, which I have rendered as
“insofar as”).
Like the Latin res,
πρᾶγμα means first and foremost “what is
in question; what is at stake in a trial or in a discussion” (from
here follows its Italian translation into cosa, which derives from
the Latin causa), and only subsequently also “thing” or “state of
affairs”; but the fact that this passage is not about a thing in this
second sense is clear because of its difference from the
τυγχάνον,
what at each turn happens to be (
ἃ τυγχάνει ὄντα), the event
or the real object. However, this does not mean that the “thing
itself” is simply the meaning, or the signified, in the modern
sense, that is, the conceptual content or the intentional object
On the Sayable and the Idea
indicated by the word. The thing itself,
αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα, indi-
cates what is in question in the word and in thought; the res that,
through thought and the word— but without coinciding with
them— is at stake [è in causa]
1
between humans and the world.
As Émile Bréhier observed, the specification “the signified and
sayable thing” does not imply that
σημαινόμενον and λεκτόν are
the same thing, and that the fact of being sayable is the same as
the fact of being signified. In his edition of the fragment, Armin
inserted a comma between
τὸ σημαινόμενον πρᾶγμα and καὶ
λεκτόν, which enables us to affirm both the identity and the
difference of the two terms. Bréhier in fact concludes that “in
general, if the signified is something expressible (this is how he
translates
λεκτόν), it does not follow in any way that everything
expressible is also a signified” (Bréhier 1997, p. 15). Here the inter-
pretation of the syntagm “the thing itself” (
αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα)
becomes all the more decisive: what is in question is the thing
itself in its being manifested and sayable; but how should we
understand and where should we locate such a “thing itself”?
א. Augustine’s Dialectic bequeathed to us an analysis of linguistic
signification in which the influence of Varro and Stoicism is evident.
Augustine (Dialectic, 5) distinguishes in the word (verbum)— which
“in spite of being a sign, does not stop being a thing”— four possible
elements. The first is given when the word is uttered with reference
to itself, as in a grammatical discourse (in this case verbum and res
coincide); in the second— which Augustine calls dictio— the word
is not uttered to signify itself, but something else (non propter se, sed
propter aliquid significandum); the third is the res, that is, the exter-
nal object, “which is not the word or the concept of the word in the
mind [verbi in mente conceptio]”; the fourth, which translating liter-
ally the Stoic term Augustine calls dicibile— “sayable”— is “whatever
1. Agamben is here using the expression essere in causa, “being at
stake” or “being in question,” which contains the term causa, “cause.”
What is at stake is in the position of the cause, or literally, “in cause.”
The paragraph began with a reference to the derivation of the Italian
cosa, “thing,” from the Latin causa.— Translator.
On the Sayable and the Idea
is perceived from the word by the mind, not the ears [quicquid autem
ex verbo non auris, sed animo sentit et ipso animo continetur inclusum].”
Augustine must have found it hard to distinguish between the
dictio (the word in its semantic aspect) and the dicibile, since he soon
after tries to clarify the difference without really succeeding: “What
I have called dicibile is a word, and yet it is not a word, but what is
understood in the word and is contained in the mind [verbum est
nec tamen verbum, sed quod in verbo intelligitur et animo continetur].
What I have called dictio is a word, which, however, signifies at the
same time two [things], that is, both the word itself and what is pro-
duced in the mind through the word [verbum est, sed quod iam illa
duo simul, id est et ipsum verbum et quod fit in animo per verbum
significat]” (ibid.).
We should not lose sight of the nuances through which Augustine
tries to define this difference— for instance, resorting to different
prepositions. What is question in dictio is something (the signified,
or meaning) that remains inextricably linked to the signifying word
(it is a word— verbum est— and, at the same time, what is produced
in the mind— in animo— through the word— per verbum); on the
other hand, the sayable is not properly a word (verbum est nec tamen
verbum), but rather what is perceived from the word (ex verbo) by the
mind. The aporetic location of the sayable between the signified and
the thing is here evident.
5
The phrase “the thing itself” appears in a decisive passage of
Plato’s Seventh Letter, a text whose influence on the history of phi-
losophy we are still far from appreciating. A comparison of the
Stoic source quoted by Sextus with the philosophical digression of
the Letter shows surprising affinities. For convenience, let us here
refer to the text of the digression:
For every entity there are three [things] through which science is nec-
essarily generated; fourth is science itself, and as fifth we must posit
that same thing through which (each entity) is knowable (
γνωστόν)
and truly is. The first is the name, the second the defining discourse
(
λόγος), the third the image (εἴδωλον), and the fourth science. If
On the Sayable and the Idea
you wish to understand what I have just said, consider an example,
and thereby think about all things. There is something called a circle
(
κυκλός ἐστί τι λεγόμενον), whose name is the same we have just
uttered; second is its
λόγος, made of names and verbs: “that which
at all points has the same distance from the extremes to the cen-
ter”: here is the
λόγος of what is named “round,” “circumference,” or
“circle.” Third comes that which is drawn and rubbed out, or turned
on a lathe and broken up— none of which things can befall the circle
itself (
αὐτὸς ὁ κύκλος), around which the other things mentioned
have reference, for it is something of a different order from them.
Fourth comes science, the intellect, and true opinion about these
things; and all this should be thought of as a single thing, which
does not dwell in words (
ἐν φωναῖς), or in bodily shapes, but in souls
(
ἐν ψυχαῖς), from which it is clear that it is something different from
the nature of the circle itself and from the three [things] mentioned
above. (342a8– d1)
Not only do the words that open the digression— “for every
entity there are three [things] through which science is necessar-
ily generated”— duly correspond to the “three [things that] were
connected with one another” with which Sextus’s Stoic quotation
begins, but the “three” here mentioned (the
σημαῖνον or the sig-
nifying word— e.g., “Dion”— the real object,
τυγχάνον, and the
σημαινόμενον) correspond to just as many elements present in
Plato’s list. The first, the signifying word (
φωνή), corresponds
exactly to what Plato calls the “name” (
ὄνομα; e.g., “circle,” which
he in fact locates
ἐν φωναῖς); the second, the τυγχάνον, corre-
sponds to the circle that “is drawn and rubbed out, or turned on
a lathe and broken up,” that is, to what at each turn presents itself
and happens.
The identification of what, in Plato’s list, corresponds to the
σημαινόμενον and the sayable is more problematic. If we identify
it with the fourth element, which “does not dwell in words, or in
bodily shapes, but in souls,” this would be consonant with the
incorporeal status of the “signified thing,” but would entail that
it should be identified with thought or the mind of a subject—
whereas the Stoic source rules out any coincidence with a “motion
On the Sayable and the Idea
of thought.” We are left with the fifth element— the idea— whose
technical denomination (the circle itself,
αὐτὸς ὁ κύκλος) the
Stoic source seems to recall explicitly by using the phrase “the
thing itself” (
αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα). If it is true that the history of
philosophy after Plato, and starting already with Aristotle, is the
history of the different attempts to eliminate the idea or think it
otherwise, the hypothesis I am putting forward here is that the
Stoics substituted the sayable for the idea, or— at least— located
the sayable in the place of the idea.
א. I have shown elsewhere (Agamben 1999, pp. 32– 34) the useful-
ness of reestablishing the text of manuscripts: “Fifth, we must posit
that same thing through which (
δἰ ὅ) (each entity) is knowable” as
opposed to the majority of modern editions that render this as “we
must posit that same thing which is knowable.”
א. The fact that the Stoic source quoted by Sextus is articulated in
direct relation with the digression of the Seventh Letter is discreetly
suggested by the replacement of the name of the character in the
example, which in Aristotle is usually Choriscus or Callias, with
“Dion,” that is precisely the name of the friend Plato continuously
evokes in the letter.
6
The hypothesis that the sayable might have something to do
with the Platonic idea is evoked only negatively by modern schol-
ars, for instance, when one of them writes that the
λεκτά, “in
spite of not being Platonic entities, can nonetheless have the value
of objective contents of thought and language” (Schubert 1994,
p. 15). As always, negation is significant; it is in fact precisely a
reading of the doctrine of the sayable in an accurate and critical
relation to the theory of ideas that allows us to clarify its nature
(and, at the same time, such a reading throws new light on Plato’s
invention of the idea, so often misunderstood). Like the idea, the
sayable is neither in the mind nor in sensible things, neither in
thought nor in the object, but between them. In this sense, what
On the Sayable and the Idea
is enlightening is the Stoics’ use of the verb
παρυϕίστασθαι with
reference to the sayables: they do not exist but “subsist beside”
(this is the literal meaning of the verb) thought or logical rep-
resentation, just as the idea is the paradigm, that which shows
itself beside (
παρά- δειγμα) things. In other words, the Stoics
mediate from Plato the special mode of existence of the idea and
shape on it that of the
λεκτόν; they however maintain it in such
a close relation to thought and language that it has often been
confused with one or the other. That is, the Stoics try to think
together (without confusing them— if Bréhier’s remark on the
non- coincidence of
σημαινόμενον and λεκτόν is correct) the
fourth and fifth elements of the Platonic digression. From this
follows the claim, often repeated in the sources, that the Stoics
would identify ideas with concepts (
ἐννοήματα τὰς ἰδέας ἔϕασαν
[Arnim 1903, 2: 360; see also ibid., 1: 65]).
The sayable does, however, always remain not simply linguistic
but strongly objective. In this perspective, it is important to read
together the two passages that seem to confuse the sphere of the
sayable with that of language, but that actually keep them clearly
separate. “Every sayable (
λεκτόν) must be said (λέγεσθαι δεῖ),
and from this it has derived its name” (Sextus Empiricus 8.80;
1842, p. 304 = Arnim 1903, 2: 167); “Saying (
λέγειν) and utter-
ing (
προϕέρεσθαι) are different: we utter words (ϕωναί), but we
say things (
λέγεται τὰ πράγματα), which happen to be sayable
(
λεκτὰ τυγχάνει)” (Diogenes Laertius 7.56 = Arnim 1903, 3: 20).
What can be said not only, obviously, does not coincide with what
is said, but uttering and saying,
ϕωνή and πρᾶγμα, the act of
speech and what is in question in it are different. The
λεκτόν is
neither the thing nor the word: it is the thing in its sayability, in
its being at stake [essere in causa] in the word, just as in the Seventh
Letter the idea is not simply the thing, but the “thing itself” in its
being knowable (
γνωστόν, knowable, corresponds here exactly to
λεκτόν, sayable).
א. Heidegger rightly stresses many times that λέγειν is not simply
the same as “to say,” but etymologically means “to gather together
into presence” (Heidegger 1987, pp. 266– 69: “Ver- sammlung ist
On the Sayable and the Idea
das ursprüngliche Einbehalten in einer Gesammelheit”).
Λέγεται
τὰ πράγματα does not mean “things are expressed in words by a
speaking subject,” but “things manifest and gather themselves into
presence.” That is to say, we are dealing with an ontological thesis
and not simply a logical one. In the same way, when Aristotle writes
that
τὸ ὂν λέγεται πολλαχῶς, we need to translate it not simply, as
is usually done, as “the term being is said in many senses, has many
meanings,” but as “being gathers itself (‘reads’ itself) into presence in
many ways.”
7
Before the Stoics, Aristotle already confronted the theory of
knowledge contained in the Seventh Letter. In
Περὶ ἑρμηνείας,
a work that has for centuries influenced every reflection on lan-
guage in the West, he defines the process of linguistic significa-
tion in a way that must be read as a precise counterpoint to the
text of the digression— although it seems unrelated to it.
What is in the word (
τὰ ἐν τῇ ϕωνῇ) is the sign of the impressions
in the soul (
ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ), and what is written is the sign of what is in
the word. Just as the letters are not the same for all men, so neither
are the words; that of which they are primarily signs, that is, the
impressions of the soul, are the same for the whole of mankind; and
even things (
πράγματα), of which these are the resemblances, are the
same for all. (Aristotle, On Interpretation 16a3– 7)
The tripartition into which Aristotle articulates comprehen-
sion (in the word, in the soul, and in things) in fact exactly
follows the Platonic distinction between what is
ἐν ϕωναῖς,
in the words (the name and the defining discourse), what is
ἐν
ψυχαῖς, in the souls (knowledge, intellect, and opinion), and
what is
ἐν σομάτων σχήμασιν (sensible objects). Consistently
with Aristotle’s tenacious critique of the theory of ideas, on the
other hand, the thing itself has disappeared. The resumption
of Plato’s list is actually a refutation of his teacher’s thought,
which removes the idea from the process of the
ἑρμηνεία,
that is, of the interpretation of the world by means of words
On the Sayable and the Idea
and concepts. The— otherwise inexplicable— appearance of a
fourth element, the letter, beside words, concepts, and things
is a polemical allusion— discreet, but evident to a careful
reader— to the teacher’s text. While the digression of the Sev-
enth Letter was aimed precisely at showing the insufficiency
of writing with respect to the thing itself, the letter, as sign
and also element of the word, is here the first guarantee of the
intelligibility of the
λόγος.
א. Let us list together the elements of knowledge in Plato, Aristotle,
and the Stoics:
Plato
Aristotle
Stoics
name
words
signifier
defining discourse
impressions in the soul
signified
bodies and shapes
things
object (
τυγχάνον)
science, concept
letters
thing itself (idea)
sayable (thing itself)
While in Aristotle the idea is simply removed, the Stoics replace
it with the sayable.
It is important to remark that, insofar as it includes science
among its elements, the Platonic list is not limited to a theory of
knowledge and aims at something— the idea— that does not belong
to knowledge, but makes it possible.
8
I have so far tried to show the analogies and possible relations
with the Platonic idea in order to clarify the Stoic concept of
λεκτόν. But, if my hypothesis is correct, we should ask why the
Stoics decided to call “sayable” something they intended to locate
in place— or, at least, in the place— of the idea. Does this denom-
ination not contradict the text of the digression, where, affirm-
ing that what he seriously deals with “is not in any way sayable
On the Sayable and the Idea
(
ῥητόν) like the other notions (μαθήματα),” Plato seems to confer
the status of unsayability on the thing itself?
It suffices to situate this claim in its context in the digression in
order to grasp that what is in question is, not so much an absolute
unsayability, but rather a special status of sayability, different from
that which applies to the “other μ
αθήματα.” Shortly afterwards,
Plato in fact affirms that “if we have not grasped the first four”
(among which the name and the
λόγος appear), we shall not fully
know the fifth; he then adds that the knowledge of the thing itself
occurs by “rubbing one against the other names,
λόγοι, visions,
and sense- perceptions, and testing them in kindly refutations and
discussions led without envy” (344b4– 7). After all, this is in agree-
ment with the unambiguous claim made in the Parmenides (135e3)
according to which the ideas are what “can be seized most entirely
by the
λόγος [ἐκεῖνα ἃ μάλιστά τις ἂν λόγῳ λά
βοι].”
An understanding of the digression thus entails a neutralization
of the opposition between sayable and unsayable, and, at the same
time, a rethinking of the relation between the idea and language.
9
An exposition of the relationship between the idea and lan-
guage must start off from the, apparently obvious, observation
that the idea and the sensible things are homonymous, that is,
that although they are different, they have the same name. It is
precisely on this curious homonymy that Aristotle focuses his
summary of Plato’s philosophy in Metaphysics 987b: “He [Plato]
then called these entities ideas and [held] that all sensible things
are said beside them and according to them [
τὰ δ᾽ αἰσθητὰ παρὰ
ταῦτα κατὰ ταῦτα λέγεσθαι πάντα]; in fact, according to par-
ticipation, the multiplicity of synonyms is homonymous with the
ideas [
κατὰ μέθεξιν γὰρ εἶναι τὰ πολλὰ ὁμώνυμα τοῖς εἴδεσιν]”
(ibid., 8– 10). (According to Aristotle [Categories 1a1– 11], the enti-
ties that have the same name and the same definition are syn-
onymous, whereas those that have the same name but a different
definition are homonymous).
On the Sayable and the Idea
The fact that sensible things and the idea are homonymous,
and that things thus receive their names from participating in the
ideas is restated many times in Plato. For instance: “What shall
we say of the manifold things, such as men, horses, cloaks [ . . . ]
and all those homonymous with ideas?” (Phaedo 78e); “The other
things, participating in ideas, receive from them their denomi-
nation” (Phaedo 102b1) (
ἐπωνυμίαν means “name derived from
something else”; Plato uses almost the same words in Parmenides
130e: “There are such ideas, participating in which they receive
the denomination”); and in Republic 596a: “We are in the habit
of positing a single idea for each multiplicity to which we give
the same name.” It is precisely with this homonymy that Aristotle
would reproach his teacher, writing that “if the form of ideas and
that of things is not the same, they will simply be homonymous;
just though one were to call ‘Callias’ both a man of flesh and
blood and a piece of wood, without remarking anything common
to them [μ
ηδεμίαν κοινωνίαν]” (Metaphysics 991a5– 8).
א. The comprehension of the quoted passage from Aristotle (Meta-
physics 987b8– 10) has been partly compromised by a correction in
the Bekker edition that suppressed
ὁμώνυμα, although this term is
present in the most authoritative codex (the Parisinus 1853) and in
all others (with only two exceptions, the Laurentianus 87.12 and the
Parisinus 1876). Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg aptly observed that,
as we have seen, Plato speaks of homonymy and never of synonymy.
The Jaeger edition (1957) thus reintroduced
ὁμώνυμα, yet putting
into brackets
τῶν συνωνίμων. The text of the manuscripts is per-
fectly clear and does not need any amendment: Aristotle, who was
here faithful to Plato, intends to say that the multiplicity of sensible
things that bear the same name (and are therefore synonymous: e.g.,
the flesh- and- blood horses) becomes homonymous with respect to
the ideas (horses have the name in common with the idea, but not
the definition).
As for the sentence
τὰ δ᾽ αἰσθητὰ παρὰ ταῦτα κατὰ ταῦτα
λέγεσθαι πάντα, Harold Cherniss and W. D. Ross rightly remarked
that the usual translation “sensible things exist as separate from them
and are all named after them” is inexact and requires the insertion
of an
εἶναι that is missing in the manuscripts (Cherniss 1944, p. 178).
On the Sayable and the Idea
10
The idea is therefore the unitary principle from which sensible
things derive their name, or, more precisely, what makes it pos-
sible for a multiplicity of sensible things to constitute a set that
has the same name. For things, the first consequence of their par-
ticipation in the idea is denomination. If there is, in this sense,
an essential relation between the name and the idea, the latter is
nonetheless not identified with the name, but rather seems to be
the principle of nominability, that through which, by participat-
ing in it, sensible things find their denomination. But how should
we conceive such a principle? And is it possible to think its con-
sistency independently of the relation with the sensible things,
which derive from it their homonymy?
Precisely because Aristotle’s critiques of the theory of ideas
revolve around this point, it is appropriate to first examine
them. Aristotle interprets the relation between the idea and the
sensible things starting from the relation between “what is said
according to the whole” (
τὰ καθόλου = τὰ καθ’ ὅλου λεγόμενα;
Aristotle also uses the expression
τὸ ἓν ἐπὶ πολλῶν, the one
over the many) and what is said according to singularities (
καθ’
ἕκαστα). We refrained from translating καθόλου as “the uni-
versal” because this very identification of the problem of ideas
with the quaestio de universalibus has marked the history of the
reception of the theory of ideas and its misunderstanding, start-
ing from Aristotle and up to the commentators of late antiquity,
and then the Scholastics.
Aristotle in fact writes (Metaphysics 1078b18 ff.) that Socrates
was the first who tried to find definitions according to the whole,
“but while he did not posit what is said according to the whole
[
τὰ καθόλου] as separate [χωριστὰ], the Platonists separated it
and called these entities ideas; from this, they inferred the conse-
quence that there are ideas of all the things that are said according
to the whole [
τῶν καθόλου λεγομένων].” In the short history of
philosophical doctrines covered in the first book of the Metaphys-
ics, Aristotle summarizes the Platonic theory of ideas thus:
On the Sayable and the Idea
Those who posited ideas in the first place, in their attempt to grasp
the causes of sensible entities, introduced an equal number of other
entities— as though a man who wishes to count things that are small
in number supposed he could do it only by enlarging their number.
For the ideas are in fact of a roughly equal number as, and certainly
not fewer than those entities in search of whose causes these think-
ers set off from. For each single entity of which there is a unity over
multiplicities [
ἓν ἐπὶ πολλῶν] there exists an homonym beyond sub-
stances, both for things of our everyday world and for eternal ones.
(990a34– b8)
For Aristotle, the error of the Platonists lies precisely in this sepa-
ration of the
καθόλου:
And since the one is said in the same way as being [
τὸ ἓν λέγεται
ὥσπερ καὶ τὸ ὄν], and the substance [οὐσία] of the one is one, and
since things whose substance is numerically one are numerically one,
evidently neither the one nor being can be the substance of things,
just as neither the essence of the element or of the principle [
τὸ
στοιχείῳ εἶναι ἢ ἀρχῇ] can be the substance [ . . . ]. Being and the
one should be more nearly substance than are the principle [
ἀρχή],
the element, and the cause; but they are not, since nothing that is
common [
κοινὸν] is substance. In fact substance cannot be predi-
cated of anything except itself and that which has it and of which
it is the substance. The one cannot be at the same time in many
ways [
πολλαχῇ], while that which is common can be predicated at
the same time in many ways. Hence it is clear that nothing that is
predicated according to the whole exists beside and separately from
singular things [
παρὰ τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστα χωρίς]. Those who uphold
ideas [
τὰ εἴδη] are right in saying that they are separate, since for
them they are substances; but they are actually wrong, since they
call idea [
εἶδος] the one over the many [τὸ ἓν ἐπὶ πολλῶν]. The
reason for this is that they cannot explain what are the imperish-
able substances which exists beside those that are singular and sen-
sible [
παρὰ τὰς καθ᾽ ἕκαστα καὶ αἰσθητάς]. They posit these [the
ideas] as, according to
εἶδος, equal to perishable things (for these
we know), and [say] “sameman” [
αὐτοάνθρωπον] and “‘samehorse”
[
αὐτόϊππον], adding the word “same” [αὐτό] to the name of sensible
things. (1040b16– 1041a5)
On the Sayable and the Idea
Aristotle thus reproaches the Platonists for having given a sepa-
rate substance and existence to what is predicated according to
the whole, whereas it is for him evident that the universal— as
τὸ καθόλου was to be translated into Latin— can never be a sub-
stance, and only exists in individual sensible things. Plato would
have therefore substantialized the general term “the man”— or
“the horse”— and distinguished it from individual men and indi-
vidual horses; in order to refer to it in its homonymy with respect
to sensible things, he would have added to the common noun the
pronoun
αὐτό: αὐτοάνθρωπος, αὐτόϊππος.
11
It is precisely starting from an analysis of the linguistic expres-
sion of the idea that it is possible to show the inadequacy of Aris-
totle’s interpretation and, at the same time, gain access to a more
correct understanding of Plato’s theory.
The linguistic expression of the idea through the anaphoric
pronoun
αὐτό must have been problematic for Aristotle, since in
Nicomachean Ethics he states that “those who raise the question
as to what precisely they [the Platonists] mean by their expres-
sion
αὐτοέκαστον would be embarrassed [ἀπορήσειε], since for
both man himself [
αὐτοάνθρωπος]
2
and man [
ἄνθρωπος] there
is only one defining discourse [
λόγος], that of man” (1096a34–
b1). And, in Metaphysics 1035b 1– 3, evidently alluding to the circle
discussed in Plato’s digression, Aristotle writes in the same sense
that “we speak homonymously of both the absolute circle [
ἁπλῶς
λεγόμενος] and the individual circle, since there is no proper
name [
ἴδιον ὄνομα] for each of them.” It is precisely the use of the
pronoun
αὐτό, which was aporetic for Aristotle, that enables us to
2. Agamben here translates
αὐτοάνθρωπος as uomo stesso; in the
previous quotation, he translated it with the neologism stessouomo,
“sameman.” Uomo stesso has in Italian the straightforward meaning of
“man himself”— in the sense of his idea, given the Platonic context—
but the reader should bear in mind that stesso primarily means
“same.”— Translator.
On the Sayable and the Idea
both mitigate the homonymy between ideas and sensible things
and comprehend what was at stake for Plato in the idea.
Let us return to the expression that exemplifies the idea in
the Seventh Letter:
αὐτὸς ὁ κύκλος, the circle itself (and not
αὐτόκυκλος, as suggested by Aristotle). The idea does not have a
proper name, but neither does it simply coincide with the name. It
is rather designated by the adjectival use of the anaphoric pronoun
αὐτός, “same.”
Unlike names, pronouns do not have a lexical meaning (a sense,
Sinn, in Frege’s terms, or a “virtual reference,” in Milner’s). What
defines an anaphoric pronoun (such as
αὐτός) is that it can des-
ignate a segment of reality only insofar as this has already been
signified by means of another term endowed with sense. In other
words, it implies a relation of co- reference and of resumption
between a term that is lacking virtual reference— the anapho-
rizing pronoun— and a term endowed with virtual reference—
the anaphorized name (Milner 1982, p. 19). Following one of the
meanings of the verb
ἀναϕέρω, it “resumes” the thing in its hav-
ing been designated by an antecedent name. Let us consider the
following example: “I see a circle. Do you see it too?” The ana-
phoric pronoun “it,” as such devoid of a virtual reference, acquires
a reference through the relation with the term “circle” that pre-
cedes it.
Let us now reread the passage from the digression:
There is something called a circle [
κύκλος ἐστί τι λεγόμενον],
whose name is the same we have just uttered; second is its
λόγος
made of names and verbs: “that which at all points has the same dis-
tance from the extremes to the center”: here is the
λόγος of what is
named “round,” “circumference,” or “circle.” Third comes that which
is drawn and rubbed out, or turned on a lathe and broken up— none
of which things can befall the circle itself [
αυτὸς ὁ κύκλος], around
which the other things mentioned have reference, for it is something
of a different order from them.
What does the
αὐτός refer to? What is “resumed” in it, and in
what way? First of all, what is in question here is not simply a
On the Sayable and the Idea
relation of identity. This is ruled out, not only by Plato’s explicit
statement, but also by the grammatical structure of the syntagm.
The pronoun
αὐτός (juxtaposed to a name in the sense of “same”)
is constructed in Greek in two ways, depending on whether it
expresses identity (idem in Latin) or ipseity (ipse in Latin):
ὁ αὐτὸς
κύκλος means “the same circle” (in the sense of identity); on the
other hand,
αυτὸς ὁ κύκλος means “the circle itself,” in the spe-
cial sense that I shall now try to clarify, which is the one Plato
uses for the idea. While in
ὁ αὐτὸς κύκλος the pronoun is in fact
inserted between the article and the name, and thus directly refers
to the name, in
αυτὸς ὁ κύκλος it refers to a syntagm formed by
the article and the name. The Greek article “
ὁ” originally has the
value of an anaphoric pronoun and means the thing insofar as it
has been said and named. It is only subsequently that, for this rea-
son, it can acquire the value of the designation Aristotle calls
καθ’
ὅλου: “the circle” in general, the universal, as opposed to the indi-
vidual circle. (The Latins, whose language lacks articles, therefore
found it difficult to specify the expression of general terms.)
It is moreover evident that the fifth element, the circle itself
(
αυτὸς ὁ κύκλος), cannot refer— as Plato keeps on stressing— to
any of the three elements listed in the digression: it refers neither
to the name “circle” nor to its virtual reference (which is identical
to the definition, corresponding to the universal term “the circle”)
or the individual sensible circle (the actual reference). Nor can it
refer to the knowledge or the concept that we form out of it in our
mind— Plato is careful to specify this shortly afterwards (Seventh
Letter 342c8).
What the syntagm resumes can then only be contained in the
phrase that opens the list and, at the same time, remains out of it:
κύκλος ἐστί τι λεγόμενον (“there is something called a circle,” or,
literally, “circle is something said”). That this phrase lies outside
of the list, that it is, as it were, prior to the first element, is proved
beyond doubt by the fact that the name, which is responsible for
the first rank, must refer to it through anaphoric pronouns
ᾧ
τοῦτ᾽ αὐτό ἐστιν ὄνομα ὃ νῦν ἐφθέγμεθα— literally, “to which
is name that same we have just uttered.”
On the Sayable and the Idea
א. Benveniste showed that the original meaning of the Latin potis
(and of the Indo- European pot, from which it derives), which means
“master,” actually refers to personal identity, as expressed by a par-
ticle (often an adjective or a pronoun, like the Latin ipse) that means
“precisely that, he himself” (like the Hittite pet, an enclitic parti-
cle “that returns to the object that was in question in discourse,”
or the Latin utpote, “precisely inasmuch,” which designates some-
body insofar as he is designated by a given predicate) (Benveniste
1973, p. 74). “While it is difficult to see how a word meaning ‘the
master’ could become so weakened in force as to signify ‘himself’,
it is easy to understand how an adjective denoting the identity of
a person, signifying ‘him- self’, could acquire the sense of ‘master’”
(ibid). Benveniste thus shows how the same semantic movement can
be found in many languages: not only does the Latin ipsissimus mean
“the master” in Plautus, but even in Greek, in the Pythagorean com-
munity,
αὐτὸς ἔϕα, “he himself has said it,” designated Pythagoras,
the teacher par excellence (ibid.).
We can supplement Benveniste’s definition by specifying that
potis means “something or somebody inasmuch as he assumes the
name by which he is nominated or the predicate that is referred to
him.” The Platonic use of
αὐτός is in this way further clarified: the
identity in question here is not numerical or substantial identity, but
identity (or, rather, ipseity) insofar as it is defined by having a certain
name, by having been said in language in a certain way.
12
Identifying the anaphorized term is, however, far from simple.
If we locate it in the term
κύκλος, there is a confusion between
the circle and the name “circle,” and the sentence that follows
(“whose name is the same we have just uttered”) turns out to be
superfluous. We are left with the indefinite pronoun
τι, which the
Stoics would transform into their fundamental ontological cat-
egory: but, as a pronoun devoid of virtual reference, in order to be
resumed anaphorically, it cannot be isolated from the terms that
precede and follow it. In all likelihood, it is because he intended
On the Sayable and the Idea
to stress this inseparability that, instead of using the obvious for-
mulation
ἐστί τι κύκλος λεγόμενον, Plato rather writes: κύκλος
ἐστίν τι λεγόμενον (Seventh Letter 342b), “circle is something
said.” A careful analysis shows that the sentence forms an indi-
visible whole, in which what is at stake is neither the circle, nor
the something, nor the said, but “being- the said- circle.” In other
words, Plato does not start off from something immediate, but
from a being that is already in language, and he then refers back
dialectically to the thing itself by means of language. Following
the well- known definition of the dialectical method in Republic
511b3– c2, the non- presupposed principle (
ἀρχὴ ἀνυπόθετος) is
reached only through the patient dialectical elimination of what
is presupposed (“taking hypotheses not as principles-
ἀρχαί, but as
hypotheses”). The circle itself— which Plato also calls the “birth”
(
φύσις) of the circle (τοῦ κύκλου τῆς φύσεως [Seventh Letter
342c8])— is not an unsayable or something that is merely linguis-
tic: it is the circle resumed in and from his being- said- circle.
What is in question in the syntagm through which Plato des-
ignates the idea—
αὐτὸς ὁ κύκλος, the circle itself— is there-
fore not, as Aristotle believed, simply a universal “the circle” (
ὁ
κύκλος): the αὐτός, insofar as it refers to a term already anapho-
rized by the article, resumes the circle in and from its being- said,
in and from its being of language, and the term circle in and from
its designating the circle. For this reason, the “circle” itself, the
idea or birth of the circle is not and cannot be any of the four
elements. And yet, neither is it simply other than them. It is that
which is at each turn in question in each of the four and, at the
same time, remains irreducible to them: it is that through which the
circle is sayable and knowable. If, as Aristotle claimed, it is true that
the idea does not have a proper name, thanks to the
αὐτός it is
nonetheless not perfectly homonymous with the thing: as “thing
itself,” the idea signifies the thing in its pure sayability and the
name in its pure naming the thing. As such, that is, insofar as in it
the thing and the name are inseparably together within and with-
out every signification, the idea is neither universal nor particular,
but, as a third, it neutralizes this opposition.
On the Sayable and the Idea
א. In Phaedo (76e), Plato explicitly mentions the anaphoric movement
that defines the idea: “If the things of which we always speak do
exist, the beautiful, the good, and every essence of that kind, and if
we refer back [
ἀναφέρομεν] sensible things to them . . .”
Plotinus affirms the ontological irreducibility of the anaphor
αὐτός, which is thus paradoxically posited as prior to substance,
in a particularly clear way: “Knowing is something unitary [
ἕν τι],
but the one is without the something [
ἄνευ τοῦ τι ἕν]. If it were
something, it would not be the one itself [
αυτοέν], since the ‘itself’
[
αὐτό] is prior to the something [πρὸ τοῦ τὶ]” (Plotinus, Enneads
5.3.12).
א. Frege, who claims that every sign has a sense (Sinn) and a mean-
ing (Bedeutung), observes that sometimes we use a term intending
to speak not of its meaning, but of the material reality of that very
term (as when we say “the word ‘rose’ has four letters”) or of its sense,
independently of its actual referring to a real meaning. It is in order
to indicate this special use of the word that we use quotation marks.
But what happens if we try to designate the term not in its materi-
ality or sense, but in its meaning something, that is, the name “rose”
insofar as it means a rose? Here language comes up against a limit,
which no use of quotation marks can claim to bypass: we can name
the name “rose” as an object (nomen nominatum), but not the name
itself in its actual designating a rose (nomen nominans). This is the
sense of the paradox that Frege expressed in the formula “the concept
‘horse’ is not a concept,” and Milner in the axiom “the linguistic
term does not have a proper name.” Wittgenstein proposes some-
thing similar when he writes that “the name shows that it signifies
an object,” but it cannot say the fact that it is signifying it (Wittgen-
stein, Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus 4.126).
What is in question in the idea of the rose, in the rose itself, is
this anonymity of the name “rose” (which is why the idea of the
rose is homonymous with the rose). Inasmuch as it expresses the
impossibility of naming the name “rose” if not by resuming it in
the form of the anaphoric pronoun
αὐτός, the idea marks the point
where the naming power of language must stop and the name’s
impossibility of naming itself as naming lets transpire the rose itself,
the rose that is purely sayable.
On the Sayable and the Idea
13
From this perspective one better understands Walter Ben-
jamin’s reading of the idea as a name. According to Benjamin,
ideas, which are withdrawn from the sphere of phenomena, are
only given in the sphere of their name (or of their having a name):
The structure of truth demands a being which in its lack of inten-
tionality resembles that of simple things, but which is superior in
its permanence [ . . . ]. Being withdrawn from all phenomenality,
the only being to which this power belongs is that of the name. It
determines the manner in which ideas are given. But they are not so
much given in a primordial language (Ursprache) as in a primordial
perception (Urvernehmen), in which words preserve their own nam-
ing nobility, as yet not lost in cognitive meaning [ . . . ]. The idea
is something linguistic, and more precisely, it is, in the essence of
the word, that moment at which the latter is at each turn a symbol.
(Benjamin 1977, p. 36)
What is at stake is not simply, as suggested by the quotation from
Hermann Güntert that immediately follows this passage, a “deifi-
cation of words,” but the isolation in language of a sphere alien to
signification and irreducible to it: that of the name— or, rather, of
naming, which Benjamin exemplifies by referring back to Adam:
“This is not only the attitude of Plato, but the attitude of Adam,
the father of the human race as the father of philosophy. Adam’s
naming is so far removed from play or chance that it actually
affirms the state of paradise as such, a state in which there is as yet
no need to struggle with communicative meaning” (ibid., p. 37).
The first philosopher who insisted on the radical dissymme-
try between the two planes of language— name and discourse—
was Antisthenes; he claimed that there cannot be a
λόγος, or
discourse, of primary and simple substances, but only a name.
In Theaetetus, Socrates explicitly refers to this hypothesis, and,
speaking about primary elements, he claims the following: “Each
in itself and for itself [
αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ] can only be named, and
no qualification can be added, neither that it is nor that it is not
[ . . . ] not even ‘itself’ [
τὸ αὐτὸ], or ‘that’ [ἐκεῖνο], or ‘each’
On the Sayable and the Idea
[
ἕκαστον], or ‘alone’ [μόνον], or ‘this’ [τοῦτο] [ . . . ] It is impos-
sible to say in a discourse one of the primary elements, since it
only has a name [
ὄνομα γὰρ μόνον ἔχειν]” (Theaetetus 201e ff.).
(Proposition 3.221 of the Tractatus makes the same point: “Objects
can only be named [ . . . ] I can only speak about them: I cannot
put them into words”).
Plato seeks to confront this dissymmetry. Being located on the
plane of language [lingua] in which there are only names, the idea
tries to think what happens to individual things for the fact of
being named, and becoming homonymous. In other words, the
ideas are the opposite of a generality, and yet one can at the same
time understand why they have been misunderstood in this sense
as a universal. Naming a singularity, the word constitutes it as
homonymous, as defined— prior to its acquisition of any other
characteristic or quality— exclusively by the fact of bearing the
same name. The relation between phenomena and the idea is
defined not by the participation in common traits, but by homon-
ymy, the pure having a name. And it is this dwelling of the thing
beside itself in a pure having a name that Plato tries to designate,
against Antisthenes, through the anaphor
αὐτό: the “circle itself”
(
αὐτὸς ὁ κύκλος) seizes the circle not at the level of signification
but in its pure having a name, in that pure sayability that alone
makes discourse and knowledge possible.
14
In his book Götternamen (On the Names of Gods), Hermann
Usener showed the close implication between the formation of
religious concepts and that of the names of gods. For Usener, the
name is not “a conventional sign of a concept (
νόμῳ), or a denom-
ination that grasps the thing in itself and its essence (
ϕύσει)”: the
name is the precipitate of an impression produced by the sudden
clash “with something that is not the self” (Usener 2000 [1896],
p. 46). The formation of the name of gods reflects the formation
of these linguistic concepts, which proceeds from absolute singu-
larity to the particular and its setting into a concept of kind. The
On the Sayable and the Idea
event of the name— the “coinage” of words, following the image
Usener prefers to use— is therefore, especially with regard to the
most remote ages, the essential tool for investigating the forma-
tion of the concepts and the religious representations of a people.
Usener thus shows how for each thing and each important action
a “momentary god” (Augenblicksgott) is created in language, a
god whose name coincides with that of the act and who, through
regular repetition, is transformed into a “particular god” (Sonder-
gott) and later into a personal god. The Roman indigitamenta have
preserved the names of divinities that correspond to individual
acts or moments of agriculture— Vervactor, which names the first
plowing of fallow land (vervactum); Insitor, which names the act
of sowing; Occator, which corresponds to the harrowing of the
field; Sterculinus, which refers to fertilization . . .
Usener was influenced by the psychological theories of his time,
which conceived of knowledge as a process that through repeti-
tion and abstraction leads from the particular to the general con-
cept. However, he mentions several times that, with the crystalli-
zation of a proper name, the particular god freely expands himself
according to his own law, which leads to the formation of always
new denominations. In Usener’s research, the divine name thus
becomes something similar to the cipher or the internal law of
the birth and the historical becoming of divine figures. Develop-
ing Usener’s hypothesis perhaps beyond his intentions, we could
say that the event of the name and the event of god coincide. The
god is the thing or action at the instant of its appearing in the
name. In the form of a nomen agentis, it is, in this sense, homony-
mous with the individual action: Occator is homonymous with
harrowing the field; Insitor is homonymous with the act of sow-
ing; Sterculinus is homonymous with the fertilization of the land
through manure, and so on; as shown by their evolution into an
autonomous figure, they, however, do not simply coincide with
the individual act, but rather with its being named.
What clearly emerges here is the analogy between Usener’s doc-
trine and Plato’s theory of ideas: just as, originally, the name does
not name a thing through a concept, but a god, so too, in Plato,
On the Sayable and the Idea
the name does not only name the sensible thing (or a concept),
but, first and foremost, its sayability: the idea. The momentary
god, like the idea, is a pure sayability.
15
Here the whole modern theory of signification is called into
question. This theory is founded on the articulation of three ele-
ments: the signifier, the sense (Sinn), and the signified or deno-
tation (Bedeutung), which in turn presupposes the linguistic-
semantic knot of Aristotle’s On Interpretation: words/concepts/
things (“words insofar as they signify things through concepts,”
as the commentators of late antiquity put it). Today, linguists
prefer to call sense “virtual reference” and denotation “actual ref-
erence,” and admit that, while the definition of the former does
not involve any difficulty, explaining in what way a term actually
refers to a concrete object is basically impossible. Here the fact
that the work of the late Émile Benveniste concluded with the
diagnosis— which somehow stands as a failure for the science of
language— according to which language [lingua] is divided into
two separate planes that do not communicate with each other—
the semiotic and the semantic— and between which there is
no passage acquires its full meaning: “The world of the sign is
closed. From the sign to the sentence there is no transition, nei-
ther through syntagmatization nor otherwise. A moat separates
them” (Benveniste 1974,2: 65). Given the sign with its virtual ref-
erence, in what way does the latter, actualizing itself, refer to an
individual object? (In a letter to Marcus Herz of 21 February 1772,
Kant already asked: “How do our representations manage to refer
to objects?”).
At this point, the question we need to ask is rather: How is it
possible that modern logic and psychology have accepted without
reservation a completely arbitrary apparatus, as is the Aristote-
lian one, which consists of introducing in the mind as a concept
a character that actually belongs to the name? The inaugural
moment of naming— which is at the origins of the concept and,
as such, in the knot of On Interpretation, is mentioned first— is
On the Sayable and the Idea
left aside, with a peculiar
ἐποχή, as a mere sign. In this way the
ontological nexus being- language— the fact that being is said in
names— is transposed onto a psychology and a semantics, and, in
this way, always already obliterated. Following a process that has
long marked the history of Western philosophy, ontology is always
already modulated as a gnoseology.
On the other hand, the Platonic model, which is not exhausted
by a word- concept- thing nexus, entails an element— the idea—
that expresses the pure fact that being is said. Here knowledge
does not need to be explained by means of a psychological
process— which is actually a mythology— one that starting from
the particular, through the repetition of the same sensation and
the abstraction of a concept, leads to the general: particular and
universal, sensible and intelligible are immediately united in the
name through the idea. Ontology does not coincide with the the-
ory of knowledge, but precedes and conditions it (the idea is “that
through which every entity is knowable and true,” Plato could
thus write in the Seventh Letter, and specify that “knowledge is
something different from the nature of the circle itself” (342a)).
In this way, following Benjamin’s profound characterization of
Plato’s intention, the idea guarantees at each turn that the object
of knowledge cannot coincide with truth.
For this, resuming Plato’s gesture, the Stoics therefore added
the “sayable” to their theory of signification. For the term “rose”
and the concept “the rose” to be able to refer to the individual
existing rose, we need to suppose the idea of the rose, the rose in
its pure sayability and in its “birth.” Following the correct poetic
intuition of the most Platonic of modern poets, “Je dis: une fleur!
et hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que
quelque chose d’autre que le calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée
même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets” (Mallarmé 1945, p.
368).
3
3. “I say: a flower! and out of the oblivion into which my voice con-
signs any real shape, as something other than known calyces, there
arises musically, the very idea and delicate, the one absent from all
bouquets.”— Translator.
On the Sayable and the Idea
א. We always again need to ponder on the division of the plane of
language [lingua] into semiotic and semantic, whose philosophical
relevance cannot be overestimated. Benveniste, who resumes and
develops the Saussurean opposition between langue and parole, char-
acterizes it in the following way: “Semiotics designates the mode of
signification proper to the linguistic sign that establishes it as a unit.
For the purpose of analysis, it is possible to consider separately the
two sides of the sign, but from the stance of signification it is and
remains a unit. The only question to which a sign gives rise is that
of its existence, which is answered yes or no: tree— song— to wash—
nerve— yellow— on . . . and not *tro— *rong— *dawsh— *derve—
*ullow— *en . . . Taken in itself the sign is pure identity with itself,
and pure difference in relation to any other sign [ . . . ]. With the
semantic, we enter into the specific mode of signification generated
by discourse. The problems raised here are functions of language
[langue] as producer of messages. Now the message is not reducible
to a succession of units to be separately identified; it is not the addi-
tion of signs that produces meaning, rather, it is the meaning con-
ceived globally, which realizes itself and divides itself into particular
signs, which are words [ . . . ]. At issue are two distinct orders of
notions and two conceptual universes, and this can be further shown
by the difference in criteria of validity required by the one and the
other. The semiotic (the sign) must be recognized; the semantic (dis-
course) must be understood. The difference between recognition and
understanding entails two separate faculties of the mind [ . . . ]”
(Benveniste 1974,2: 225).
Every attempt at understanding linguistic signification without
taking into account this splitting that divides language is doomed to
fail— and that is the current attempt of semiology and logic, which
are ultimately founded on the Aristotelian paradigm. It is in fact
totally illegitimate to transfer meaning, which is a property of the
sign, to the mind or the soul, nor is it possible to articulate— as Aris-
totle does in On Interpretation— a theory of the proposition— that is,
of the semantic— starting from a purely semiotic definition of lan-
guage [lingua].
Plato’s idea has to do with this splitting, of which he was aware in
his own way, and which he expresses, for instance, in the opposition
between name (
ὄνομα) and discourse (λόγος). In the idea, which
is homonymous with sensible things and stands as the origins of
On the Sayable and the Idea
their naming, the sign reaches a threshold, where it crosses into the
semantic. The perception of the fracture of the plane of language
between the semiotic and the semantic coincides, in this sense, with
the origins of Greek philosophy. If Ernst Hoffmann’s interpretation
of Heraclitus’s fragment 1 is correct— as we think is the case,
following Enzo Melandri (2004, pp. 162– 64)— such a fracture is
expressed with clarity precisely at the beginning of the Heraclitean
συγγραϕή in the opposition between λόγος (discourse) and ἔπεα
(terms, words). Here we read that men do not grasp the
λόγος both
before and after hearing it, because they stop at the semiotic level of
words (
ἔπεα) and do not experience what is at stake in the fact of
speaking, in language as such.
16
Plato’s strategy becomes at this point more comprehensible.
He did not substantialize or separate a generality— as Aristotle
assumed— but tried to think a pure sayability, without any con-
ceptual determination. The subsequent passage of the digression
clearly specifies it: “The first four [elements] express the quality
[
τὸ ποῖόν τι] of each thing no less than its being [τὸ ὂν], owing
to the weakness inherent in language [ . . . ] of the two things—
being and the quality— the soul seeks to know not the quality [
τὸ
ποιόν τι] but the what [τὸ δὲ τί], while each of the four [elements]
proffers to the soul that which it does not seek” (Seventh Letter
342e– 343a; 343b– c). For this reason, trying to express pure being,
or the “birth” of something, Plato had to resort to a pronoun; in
fact, ancient grammarians already defined the pronoun as that
part of discourse that expresses the substance without quality
(Priscian: the pronoun substantiam significat sine aliqua certa qual-
itate). Yet, unlike Aristotle, Plato did not opt for a deictic pronoun
(“every substance signifies a this- something [
πᾶσα ουσία δοκεῖ
τόδε τι σημαίνειν]” (Categories 3b10) but for the anaphoric αὐτός.
In the quoted passage from Categories, Aristotle distinguishes
the primary substance, which signifies a “this,” since it manifests
On the Sayable and the Idea
something that is one and indivisible (this given man; this given
horse), from secondary substances (the man; the horse), which do
not imply a deixis, but rather signify a quality (
ποιόν τι σημαίνει)
(ibid., 12– 16). In any case, the fact is that, for Aristotle, there is
a point at which language signifies one (
ἓν σημαίνει), that is,
unequivocally touches its referent.
On the other hand, for Plato, due to the “weakness of lan-
guage” (
τῶν λόγων ἀσθενές [Seventh Letter 343a1]), the only—
albeit insufficient— way of manifesting a purely existent thing in
its birth is not by indicating it, but by resuming it in and from
language through the anaphor
αὐτός. In the Timaeus (49d4– 6),
the impossibility of designating sensible entities through a deic-
tic and the necessity of using an anaphor to designate them are
affirmed without reservation: “Whatsoever sensible thing we per-
ceive to be constantly changing from one state to another, like fire
or water, we must never describe as ‘this’ [
τοῦτο] but as ‘suchlike’
[
τοιοῦτον].” Aristotelian ontology ultimately rests on a deixis; Pla-
tonic ontology on an anaphor. But it is precisely this that allows
Plato to invoke, through the idea, an
ἀρχὴ ἀνυπόθετος, a prin-
ciple that is not presupposed and beyond being.
If the name “circle” predicates both the being and the qual-
ity of the circle, in the idea (in the “circle itself”) the name is
resumed from its signifying function and oriented toward the
manifestation of the pure being- said- circle, that is, toward its say-
ability. This means that not only the Kantian thesis according
to which being is not a real predicate (that is, “the concept of
something that is added to the concept of a thing”) is valid also
for the Platonic idea, but that Plato never substantialized the idea
as a universal— which could be located somewhere, in heaven or
in the mind (following a Platonic doctrine reported by Simplicius,
ideas “are nowhere” [Simplicius 1882, p. 453]). What is at stake in a
pure sayability; what is disclosed only through a slow and patient
anaphoric work that “rubs one against the other names, discourse,
visions, and sense- perceptions” (Seventh Letter 344b4) is nothing
other than the event of an opening of the soul, which the digres-
sion effectively compares with a light that is kindled by a leaping
On the Sayable and the Idea
spark: “As a result of continued coexistence with the thing itself
and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a
sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter
it nourishes itself” (ibid., 341c6– d2).
א. Why is Plato concerned with the “thing itself”? Why is it “that
which he seriously deals with”? If what is in question in being is
the primordial articulation between language and world— the fact
that “being is said” (
τὸ ὂν λέγεται)— we should then say that, while
for Aristotle the articulation takes place between words, things, and
concepts, by introducing the idea beyond them, Plato tries to prob-
lematize the very fact that the thing is said and named. If thought
always already moves from a named world, it can nonetheless refer
back to the thing itself in its pure being said, that is, in its sayabil-
ity, through the anaphoric gesture of the idea. In this way, Plato
problematizes the pure and irreducible givenness of language. At
this point— where the name is resumed from and in its naming the
thing, and the thing is resumed from and in its being named by
the name— the world and language are in contact, that is, they are
united only by an absence of representation.
17
The transposition of the doctrine of ideas into the quaestio de
universalibus pursued in late antiquity from Porphyry to Boethius,
and then in medieval logic— is in this sense the worst misunder-
standing of Plato’s intention, precisely because, while it seems to
affirm the “logical” nature of the idea, it actually severs the par-
ticular nexus with the linguistic element that was still evident in
the term “sayable.” In Boethius’s commentary on On Interpreta-
tion, this separation is completed. The Aristotelian
παθήματα τῆς
ψυχῆς, which Boethius significantly renders in Latin as intellec-
tus, become the primary object of the vis significativa of language,
while the relation to things becomes secondary or derivative: “In
fact, while the things that are in the voice mean the things and
the concepts [res intellectusque significent], concepts are meant in
a primary way, and things, which intelligence comprehends, in
On the Sayable and the Idea
a secondary way through the mediation of concepts [per intel-
lectum medietatem]” (In Peri Hermeneias 2.33.27). On the other
hand, developing the Aristotelian claim according to which the
παθήματα and things are the same for all, while words and let-
ters are different, Boethius specifies that, out of the four elements
that form the linguistic- semantic knot, two (res and intellectus)
are by nature (naturaliter) and two (nomina and litterae) are by
convention (positione). This is the beginning of the process that
will lead to the primacy of the concept and to the transforma-
tion of the sayable into a mental reality whose identity is totally
independent of the word in its auditory materiality. The process
of de- linguisticization of knowledge that would lead to modern
science is possible only if the conceptual meaning of the word
is, in this way, made autonomous from its variable signifier. As
Ruprecht Paqué has shown (1970), this is the case because modern
science did not simply originate from the observation of nature,
but was first of all made possible by the investigations of Ockham
and the medieval logicians who isolated, in the experience of lan-
guage, the suppositio personalis— in which the word refers in the
act and only as a pure sign to a res extra animam— and privileged
it over all those cases in which the word somehow refers to itself
(suppositio materialis).
The ancient world could not and did not aspire to have access
to modern science, since, in spite of the development of math-
ematics (significantly in a non- algebraic form), its experience of
language— its ontology— did not allow for a reference to the
world in a way that could claim to be independent from how
it manifested itself in language [lingua]. For this reason, in the
excursus of the Seventh Letter, Plato does not in any way privilege
the concept, which, like the name, is variable and unstable; and,
in the Cratylus, he prefers to leave open the question of whether
names are by nature or by convention. Only the reduction of lan-
guage [lingua] to a neutral signifying tool by Ockham and late
nominalism enabled the expunction from linguistic signification
of all those aspects— beginning with self- reference— that had
On the Sayable and the Idea
always been considered as consubstantial with it and that were
later relegated to rhetoric and poetry.
This does not at all mean that Plato simply intended to con-
form to reality as it manifested itself through language [lingua]
(in his case, the Greek language). It is here that the homonymy
between the idea and sensible things shows its full richness. The
idea is different from sensible things, but it shares the name with
them. The idea, as such invisible and unperceivable, nonethe-
less irreducibly maintains itself in relation to a sensible linguis-
tic element— the name— and, by means of it, to the individual
sensible entities. For this reason, in the aporetic explanation of
the theory of ideas contained in the Parmenides, which calls into
question all possible relations between ideas and sensible things—
separation, participation, and resemblance— homonymy is the
only relation that can never be refuted. Among the absurd con-
sequences entailed by the affirmation of an absolute separation
between the ideas and sensible things, Parmenides in fact explic-
itly mentions that according to which “concrete things, which are
for us homonymous with the ideas, are in relation with themselves
but not with the ideas, and derive their name from themselves and
not from the ideas” (Parmenides 133d).
It is only through its relation of homonymy with things that the
idea can legitimately claim to put an end to the “civil war names
fight with each other” (
ὀνομάτων οὖν στασιασάντων [Cratylus
438d]), and not through the generality of the concept, or search-
ing for “other names, different from these”; it is only by showing,
through the name itself, “what the truth of entities is” (ibid.). The
fifth element of the ontological knot, which Plato by means of
the anaphoric syntagm calls the “thing itself,” is not nameable
through another name of language [lingua] (I cannot call the idea
of the circle “kuboa”; I can only say it “the circle itself”). What
cannot have a proper name is the sayability that is expressed in
the name. As purely and unnameably sayable, the thing itself is
“beyond names [
πλὴν ὀνομάτων, literally, ‘excepted in all names’;
πλήν etymologically means ‘near’]” (ibid.).
On the Sayable and the Idea
א. The problem of the relationship between the doctrine of the uni-
versals and nominalism is complex, and it is not possible— as hap-
pened at times in philosophical historiography— to reduce nomi-
nalism— at least prior to Ockham— to a specific conception of the
universals in mente. The stance of the princeps Nominalium of the
twelfth century, Peter Abelard, is particularly significant. Abelard’s
theory is not a theory of the universal, but of the name, which is
different from both the thing (res) and the word (vox), as well as
from the concept (intellectus). Like other contemporary logicians, he
in fact affirms the unity of the name (unitas nominis) with respect to
the variety of paronymous words (adjectives, verbs, etc.). While verbs
and terms vary according to tenses and modalities, what is signi-
fied in the name is one and immutable in time. This logical thesis
had consequences even in the theological field, since it implied that
the statement “Christ being born” (Christum esse natum) is true at
all times, both before and after his birth. In Bonaventure’s words,
who thus summarizes the nominalist theses: “Others claimed that
the enunciable [enuntiabile] that is true at one time is always true
and is always known in the same way [ . . . ] in this way, some claim
that albus, alba, and album, which are three different words and
have three different ways of signifying [modi significandi], nonethe-
less imply the same meaning [unam significationem important], and
are one name. That is, they maintain that the unity of the enunciable
should be understood not on the side of the word or the way of signi-
fying, but on the side of the signified thing. One and the same thing
is first future, then present, and then past; therefore enunciating that
this given thing is first future, then present, and then past does not
imply any difference of the enunciables, but only of the words [non
facit diversitatem enuntiabilium, sed vocum].”
As has been observed (Courtenay 1991, pp. 11– 48), Abelard’s
nominalist theory has in this sense an evident Platonic origin, and an
equally evident (even terminological) connection with the doctrine of
the sayable, which Abelard calls “enunciable.” For Abelard, the object
of knowledge is neither the word, nor the concept, nor simply the
thing, but the thing as it is signified by the name: “Certainly, when
we maintain that they [the common forms of things] are different
from the concepts [ab intellectibus], we introduce as a third element
between the thing and the concept the meaning of the names
[praeter rem et intellectum tertia exiit nominum significatio]” (Abelard
On the Sayable and the Idea
1919, p. 18). In this sense, he can write that logic “treats things not
considered as such but insofar as they have a name [non propter se, sed
propter nomina]” (Rijk 1956, p. 99), and that, nonetheless, logic and
physics are inseparable, since it is necessary to investigate whether
“the nature of things agrees with the statement [rei natura consentiat
enuntiationi]” (ibid., p. 286).
א. The idea carries the sayable toward the utmost abstraction with
respect to language [lingua], but this abstraction is not that of the
concept, but rather that which still keeps the sayable in relation to
that truth of the entity toward which all the names and all the lan-
guages [lingue] tend without ever reaching it— and not to the names
of a language [lingua]. The idea is the purely sayable, which is what
is meant by all names, but which no name or concept of a language
[lingua] can reach by itself. Arnaldo Momigliano claimed that the
limit of the Greeks was that they did not speak foreign languages
[lingue]— which is true, up to a certain point; however, Plato and
Aristotle perfectly well knew that one and the same thing is named
in different ways according to the various languages [lingue] (this
is implicit in the passage of the Seventh Letter in which Plato says
that names have no stability, and in the thesis of On Interpretation
according to which words are not the same for all men). The name
κύκλος names the same thing that is meant by the Latin circulus and
by the Italian cerchio: but the circle itself is in each language [lingua]
named only homonymously. We could then say that, after all, the
linguistic element that belongs to the idea— the sayable— is not sim-
ply the name, but the translation, or what is translatable in the name.
Benveniste identified in translation the point at which one grasps the
difference between semiotic and semantic. In fact, we can transpose
the semantism of a language [lingua] into that of another (this is the
possibility of translation), but not the semiotism of a language [lin-
gua] into that of another (this is the impossibility of translation). At
the crossroad between a possibility and an impossibility, translatabil-
ity is thus located on the threshold that unites and divides the two
planes of language. From here follows its philosophical relevance,
which Benjamin highlighted. The arduous passage from the semiotic
to the semantic is here looked for not within a language [lingua],
but, through the plurality of languages [lingue], in the accomplished
On the Sayable and the Idea
totality of their intentions. For this reason, as Mallarmé sensed, with
respect to the idea a perfect language is inevitably lacking (les langues
imparfaites en cela que plusieures, manque la suprême). According to
Plato, what replaces it is the logos of philosophy, which takes every
language [lingua] back to its museic roots, philosophy being “the
supreme music” (
φιλοσοφίας [ . . . ] οὔσης μεγίστης μουσικῆς [Pha-
edo 61a]), if not indeed “the muse herself” (
αὕτη ἡ Μοῦσα [Republic
499d]).
18
The problem of the idea cannot be separated from the prob-
lem of its place. The fact that the ideas have their place (
ἔχει τὸν
τόπον) “beyond heaven” (ὑπερουράνιον τόπον [Phaedrus 247c])
can only mean that they “are not in a place,” Aristotle (
οὐκ ἐν
τόπῳ [Physics 209b34]) and Simplicius (μηδὲ ὅλως ἐν τόπῳ [1882,
p. 453]) observe. And yet, although they do not have a place and,
for this reason, run the risk of not being (“that which is neither
in heaven nor on earth is nothing” [Timaeus 52b], ideas are essen-
tially linked— albeit in a “very aporetic way [
ἀπορώτατά, liter-
ally, ‘wholly impracticable’],” which is “most difficult to grasp
[
δυσαλωτότατον (Timaeus 51b]”— with the taking place of sen-
sible entities, which are imprinted by them [
τυπωθέντα ἀπ᾽
αὐτῶν] in a manner that is “difficult to express and wonderful
[
δύσφραστον καὶ θαυμαστόν (Timaeus 50c)].” Given that the
theory of place (
χώρα) developed in the Timaeus has been read in
the history of philosophy— at least starting from Aristotle— as a
doctrine of matter, the question is here, on the same terms, that of
the relation between the ideas and matter.
Let us briefly summarize the exposition of the Timaeus. Plato
begins with the acknowledgment of the insufficiency of the pos-
iting of two kinds of being, the intelligible and eternal paradigm
(the idea), and its imitation, the sensible. A “third and differ-
ent kind” (
τρίτον ἄλλο γένος [48e]) is therefore introduced as a
requirement or an indispensable postulate (the
λόγος “compels”—
εἰσαναγκάζειν— us to “make it appear”— ἐμφανίσαι [49a]).
Its nature, “difficult and obscure,” is not properly defined, but
On the Sayable and the Idea
described through a series of successive qualifications. First of all,
it is the “receptacle” (
ὑποδοχή) of every generation. All sensible
things, which are incessantly generated and destroyed, need some-
thing “wherein” (
ἐν ᾧ) to appear, just as figures modeled out of gold
need metal in order to take shape (from this image, Aristotle prob-
ably deduced that what is in question here is the matter of bodies).
This “nature that receives all bodies” is always the same and
must be in itself devoid of form; it is amorphous, like a “coin-
ing material” (
ἐκμαγεῖον [50c]; the term contains the idea of a
“mixture,” see μ
άσσω, μάκτρα) that can assume the imprints of
all the forms that it receives. This imprint- bearer is thus com-
pared with a “mother”; that from which it receives the imprint
with the “father”; and the intermediate nature between the two
with a “son.” If the mother were not devoid of her own form,
the imprint (
ἐκτυπώμα) that she receives would not be visible,
since her own form “would be shown beside” (
παρεμϕαινόμενον;
Aristotle uses the same verb in On the Soul 429a20 to specify that
if the material intellect showed its own form beside that of the
intelligible intellect, it would hinder comprehension). The third
kind, the mother— a receptacle and imprint- bearer— is therefore
an “invisible species” (
ἀνόρατον εἶδός; in Greek the term is some-
how contradictory) and lies “by nature outside the forms or ideas
[
ἐκτὸς εἰδῶν (51a)]”; and yet it “participates in a very aporetic way,
which is most difficult to grasp” in the intelligible.
At this stage, in a sort of vertiginous recapitulation, Plato
concludes that we have to admit to (
ὁμολογητέον; the verb
ὁμολογεῖν, to confess, designates a truth that must be acknowl-
edged) three kinds of being: (1) an ungenerated, incorruptible
kind that does not receive anything in it, is never transferred into
something else, and is invisible and non- sensible (
ἀναίσθητον),
but can be contemplated by the intelligence; (2) a kind hom-
onymous with and similar to the first that is incessantly gener-
ated and destroyed somewhere (
ἔν τινι τόπῳ) and can be appre-
hended by opinion accompanied by sensation (μ
ετ᾽ αἰσθήσεως);
and (3) eternal, indestructible space (
χώρα), which makes room
(
ἕδρα) for generated things and is “tangible through a kind of
On the Sayable and the Idea
bastard reasoning accompanied by an absence of sensation [μ
ετ᾽
ἀναισθησίας ἁπτὸν λογισμῷ τινι νόθῳ], which is barely credible.
Looking at it as if dreaming, we affirm that it is necessary that
everything that is must be in some place and occupy some space
[
ἔν τινι τόπῳ καὶ κατέχον χώραν] and that that which is neither
in heaven nor on earth is nothing” (52a– b).
19
Carlo Diano was the first to notice that Plato designates the
knowableness of the
χώρα in a very peculiar way. Not only because
“tangible” (an adjective he elsewhere uses exclusively with refer-
ence to sensible bodies) strongly contrasts with “anaesthesia”— or
absence of sensation— but also and especially because rather than
using one of the usual formulas “
χωρίς” or “ἄνευ αἰσθήσεως”—
without sensation— he prefers the paradoxical expression “with
anaesthesia; accompanied by an absence of sensation” (Diano
1973). What do we perceive when we perceive an “absence of sen-
sation”? What does Plato mean when he writes that perceiving
the taking place of something does not simply entail not perceiv-
ing, but perceiving an absence of sensation, feeling an anaesthesia?
While the idea is simply non- sensible (
ἀναίσθητον), anaesthesia
becomes tangible here, and is perceived as such. The “bastard”
character of the reasoning that perceives the
χώρα, as if dream-
ing, derives from the fact that it seems to mix the first two forms
of knowableness, the intelligible and the sensible. If Plato can
write that the
χώρα participates in the intelligible— albeit in a
way that is difficult to grasp— this is because the idea and space
communicate with each other via the absence of sensation, as if
the anaesthesia that negatively defines the idea acquired here a
positive character and became a very special form of perception.
Commenting on this passage from the Timaeus, Plotinus speci-
fies that when the soul perceives matter through a bastard reason-
ing, it nonetheless does not think nothing, but receives and suffers
something: “Is this
πάθος, this passion of the soul the same as
when it thinks nothing? No, since when it thinks nothing, it does
On the Sayable and the Idea
not say or even suffer anything. When instead it thinks matter, it
suffers an affection that is like the imprint of shapelessness [
τύπον
τοῦ ἀμόρϕου]” (Enneads 2.4.10). If Plato used the metaphor of
the imprint, writing that the
χώρα— in a way that is most diffi-
cult to explain and wonderful— “receives an imprint” (
τυπωθέντα
[Timaeus 50c]) from the ideas, here the relation is inverted: it is
the ideas that receive an imprint from what is amorphous.
Leaving aside the mystical nuance that Plotinus seems to confer
on it, what is decisive here is that the
χώρα questions and neutral-
izes the simple opposition between the intelligible and the sen-
sible, which turns out to be inadequate. In the aporetic explana-
tion of the theory of ideas in the Parmenides, Plato showed how
the absolute separation between ideas and sensible things (think-
ing of them
χωρίς, that is, separately; resuming this argument for
his critique, Aristotle speaks of a
χωρισμός, a separation) leads to
absurd consequences. Perhaps replying to critiques already circu-
lating in the Academy, Plato ingeniously answers the aporias of
the
χωρίς and the χωρισμός with the felicitous pun of the χώρα.
At the point where we manage to perceive anaesthetically and
impurely not only the sensible but its taking place, the intelligible
and the sensible communicate with each other. The idea, which
does not take place either in heaven or on earth, takes place in the
taking place of bodies, with which it coincides.
This is what Plato says with unusual resoluteness a few lines
later: “To the aid of what really is there comes the actually true
discourse, showing that so long as one thing is separated from
another [that is, the idea and the sensible], neither of the two can
enter into the other to become one thing and, at the same time,
two things [
ἓν ἅμα ταὐτὸν καὶ δύο γενήσεσθον]” (Timaeus 52
c– d).
א. The term χώρα means the unoccupied place or space that a body
can occupy. It is etymologically connected with words that involve a
privation, what is left when something is taken away:
χήρα, widow,
and
χῆρος, void. The verb χωρέω means “making space, giving
room.” The meaning “to separate” in
χωρίς, χωρισμός, and χωρίζειν
On the Sayable and the Idea
can easily be explained: making space or giving room to something
means separating it.
א. Plotinus dedicated an entire treatise to the Platonic theory of
space, which ancient editions already catalogued as On Matter or
On the Two Matters (Enneads 2.4). He in fact accepts the Aristo-
telian proposition that Plato identifies space with matter (“In the
Timaeus, Plato says that matter—
ὕλη— and the χώρα are the same
thing” [Aristotle, Physics 209b13]); but since he realizes that the
χώρα
questions the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible,
he has to admit the existence of two matters, one intelligible, which
concerns the ideas, the other earthly, which concerns sensible things.
In the “bastard reasoning” of the Timaeus, Plotinus sees an attempt
to think the absence of form of the
χώρα through the idea of the
undefined (
ἀοριστία). The resulting reasoning is of a “bastard” kind
because it is, to the same extent, a non- knowledge (
ἄνοια) and an
aphasia (
ἀϕασία); and yet it still contains something positive: “What
is this indeterminateness of the soul? Perhaps a non- knowledge and
an aphasia? Or rather indeterminateness consists of a certain posi-
tive discourse [
ἐν καταϕάσει τίνί], and, just as for the eye obscurity
is the matter of every visible colour, so the soul, taking away, so to
speak, every light from sensible things, and being no longer able to
define what is left, becomes similar to the vision one has in dark-
ness and identifies itself with that darkness of which it has a sort
of vision” (Enneads 2.4.10). A few pages earlier, Plotinus stresses the
impervious character of thinking matter as a process that takes us to
the abyss of every being. If every being is composed of matter and
form, the thought that tries to think matter “divides this duality
until it reaches something simple that it can no longer divide and, to
the extent that it is possible, it separates it, it gives it room up to the
abyss [
χωρεῖ εἰς τὸ
βάθος]. The abyss of each thing is matter. For
this, every matter is obscure, because language is light and thought
is language. And since thought sees language on all things, it deems
that what lies beneath it is darkness, just as the eye, which has the
form of light, looking at light and colours, deems what is hidden by
colours to be obscure and material” (2.4.5).
In what seems to be an accurate description of a mystical
experience, Plotinus actually seizes the irrefutable fact that the
bastard
λογισμός that gives access to the χώρα is still an experience
On the Sayable and the Idea
of language [lingua] (
κατάϕασίς is the logical term for affirmation,
for saying something about something). Going through signifying
language up to its limit— the abyss— thought touches the
χώρα,
that is, the pure taking place (in Plotinus’s term, the matter) of each
entity. The pure taking place of things corresponds to the pure
dwelling of language [lingua] at the limit of signification, and to
language’s [lingua] bare giving of itself.
20
Just as the misunderstanding of the idea as a “universal” has
compromised the possibility of its correct interpretation, so the
Aristotelian and Neoplatonic identification of the
χώρα with mat-
ter has lastingly influenced the history of its reception. It is signifi-
cant that the misunderstanding of the idea coincides with its con-
fusion with abstraction (
ἀϕαίρεσις) in the same way as the χώρα
is understood as what is left of a body if it is abstracted from its
affections. Aristotle writes in Physics that “insofar as place seems
to be the extension [
διάστημα] of size, it is matter [ὕλη], which is
different from size. It is what is surrounded and defined by form,
as if it were a plane or limit. And this is precisely matter and the
undefined [
τὸ ἀόριστον]. If we in fact take away [ἀϕαιρηθῇ] the
limit and the affections of a sphere, what is left is nothing other
than matter. For this, in the Timaeus, Plato says that matter and
the
χώρα are the same thing” (209b6– 11). It is beyond doubt that
Aristotle is here misunderstanding Plato: not only does Plato not
use an abstractive process to define the
χώρα, but Aristotle him-
self knows perfectly well that, as he writes shortly afterwards,
unlike matter, place can be separated from the thing (“the form
and matter cannot be separated—
οὐ χωρίζεται— from the thing,
place can” [209b22– 23]. Plato is likewise always careful to dis-
tinguish the third kind from the second, that is, space from the
sensible bodies that are generated in it.
It is however the case that the Aristotelian conception of mat-
ter has been so influenced by the Platonic doctrine of the
χώρα,
On the Sayable and the Idea
that it tends to overlap with it in many regards; but even if we were
happy to incautiously accept— as subsequent tradition did, from the
Neoplatonists to Descartes— the hypothesis of their identification,
we should nonetheless specify that Plato thinks of matter not as a res
extensa, but as the taking place of every body. The taking place of a
body is that which, distinct from the body, somehow relates it to the
intelligible: for this reason, the idea— the intelligibility or sayability of
every entity— takes place in the taking place of the sensible.
א. Soon after the passage we quoted, Aristotle adds that “what is
capable of participating [
τὸ μεταληπτίκόν] and the χώρα are the
same thing. Although [Plato] calls in different ways what is capa-
ble of participating in the Timaeus and in the so- called unwritten
teachings [
ἐν τοῖς λεγομένοις ἀγράϕοις δόγμασιν], he nonetheless
claimed that the place and the
χώρα are the same thing. Everybody
claims that the place is something, but he is the only one who tried
to say what it is” (Physics 209b10– 16).
Even though the term μ
εταληπτίκόν does not appear in
the Timaeus (as we have seen, however, with respect to the par-
ticipation of the
χώρα in intelligibility, Plato uses a similar term:
μ
εταλάμ
βανον), Aristotle seems here to refer to a terminology that
was current in the Academy for designating the
χώρα as that which
enables the participation of the sensible in the intelligible. Soon
afterwards, he again uses the same term, this time in order to for-
mulate an objection: “If we are allowed a digression, we should ask
Plato why the ideas and numbers are not in a place, if place is what is
capable of participating, whether this is the big and small or matter,
as written in the Timaeus” (209b33– 210a1).
If Plato does not deny the hypothesis according to which the idea
has no place— in spite of affirming that the
χώρα enables a “very
aporetic” participation of the sensible in the intelligible— this is
because, if the idea took place in the
χώρα, it would then be another
sensible thing beside the generated bodies— which is what Aristotle
believes; he in fact sees in the ideas a useless duplicate of sensible
things. If, on the other hand, one says that the idea does not have
its own place, but takes place in the taking place of sensible things,
the idea and the sensible will then be, at the same time, two and
one (
ἅμα ταὐτὸν καὶ δύο). The idea is neither the thing nor another
thing: it is the thing itself.
On the Sayable and the Idea
21
In the section of his Système du monde dedicated to the Platonic
theory of space, Pierre Duhem suggests that the “bastard reason-
ing” at stake in the Timaeus is nothing other than “geometrical
reasoning, which is founded both on the
νόησις and, through the
imagination that accompanies it, on the
αἴσθησις” (Duhem 1913,
p. 37). Duhem’s extraordinary knowledge of scientific theories has
here grasped, against the mystical interpretation of the Neopla-
tonists, an essential point of the theory of the
χώρα. In fact, it
goes without saying that, like Archytas and the geometers of his
age, Plato knew perfectly well that space is what makes possible
the construction of geometry, whose knowledge he set as one of
the necessary preconditions for entering the Academy. For this
reason, shortly after defining the
χώρα, he shows how the demi-
urge produces in it the elements through isosceles and scalene tri-
angles and following precise numerical ratios (Timaeus 53a– 55c).
We reach here the notions that lie at the basis of the Platonic
conception of science. The “reasoning” of the geometer (following
the prevalent meaning of the term both in Greek and in Plato’s
own use,
λογισμός should more exactly be translated as “calcula-
tion”) is a bastard one— that is, it pertains at the same time to the
intelligible and the sensible— since it does not immediately refer
to the sensible bodies, but to their pure taking place in space.
Unlike the
λόγος of natural languages [lingue]— and yet contigu-
ously to it— the
λογισμός of mathematics enables us to overcome
the “weakness” of names— which always give us the being and the
quality of the thing together— thanks to a pure quantum of sig-
nification, which, however, does not signify a thing or a concept,
but only the giving itself, the pure “taking place” of something.
The essential connection between the
χώρα and language [lin-
gua] is here clearly shown: the
χώρα— the space and the taking
place of each thing— is what appears when we take away, one after
the other, the semantic elements of discourse, and move toward a
purely semiotic dimension of language [lingua], not in the direc-
tion of a writing but in that of a voice. In other words, the
χώρα is
On the Sayable and the Idea
the threshold at which the semiotic and the semantic, the sensible
and the intelligible, numbers and ideas seem to coincide for an
instant. If the idea grasps, in the name, the limit of the semantic,
the μ
άθημα touches, in the χώρα, the limit of the semiotic.
22
A terminological analysis of Greek geometry provides us
with enlightening results. Let us turn to the definition that
opens Euclid’s Elements:
σημεῖόν ἐστιν, οὗ μέρος οὐθέν. The
current translation “a point is that which has no part” does
not enable us to grasp the decisive fact— in all senses— that, in
Greek, the “point” is called “sign” (
σημεῖον). A correct trans-
lation would therefore be: “There is a sign, of which there is
no part.” That is, the notion that founds geometry is that of
a “quantum of signification” (with his usual clarity, Bernhard
Riemann says: “The determined parts of a set, distinguished
by a note or a demarcation, are called quanta”). This is all the
more relevant since we know it was precisely Plato and the
members of his school who claimed the necessity of replacing
the more ancient term for “point,”
στιγμή (the trace left by an
object through the act of
στίζειν, “stinging”) with σημεῖον, in
order to stress the connection with linguistic signification: the
point is not a material entity, but a quantum of signification
(see Mugler 1959).
In Plato’s intention, this implies that while philosophy can
reach the idea— which is homonymous with sensible things—
only by patiently going through names, propositions, and con-
cepts (the Seventh Letter says “rubbing one against the other”),
mathematics rather moves on a “bastard” level, in which quanta
of signification— not of words, but of numbers— enable us to
keep together aporetically intelligible and sensible elements. What
is involved for the geometer is not a sensible body in its name and
its qualities, but its pure taking place indicated by the way a pure
signifier (a “sign of which there is no part”) gives itself.
On the Sayable and the Idea
א. An examination of the definition of the monad in book 7 (defini-
tion 1) of Euclid’s Elements— μ
ονάς ἐστιν, καθ᾽ ἣν ἕκαστον τῶν
ὄντων ἓν λέγεται— yields an analogous outcome. Let us ponder on
the peculiar tautology present in the current translation: “A unity is
that by virtue of which each entity is said to be one.” The definition
stops being tautological only if we understand that what is decisive
here is the “being said”: the monad is not a real entity, but what
results from the pure signifying relation between the word and the
thing. “One” is what is said, if we consider in itself the pure relation
between language and its reference. For this reason, Aristotle could
write that the mathematician “contemplates the attributes, but not
insofar as they refer to a substance: that is, he separates [
χωρίζει]
them. By means of thought they are separable from movement”; and
added that the supporters of the theory of ideas do the same thing
without realizing it: “They separate natural things, which are less
separable than mathematical ones” (Physics 193b32– 194a1). Separat-
ing the attributes from their reference to a substance means having at
one’s disposal a language— the mathematical language— capable of
suspending its denotation, that is, its referring to a given real object,
while nonetheless preserving the bare form of the relation.
23
In this perspective, it is possible to understand why the ideal
of Platonic science could be expressed— following Simpli-
cius’s testimony— through the phrase “saving appearances” (
τὰ
ϕαινόμενα σῴζειν). In his commentary on Aristotle’s On the
Heavens, Simplicius describes the problem that Plato assigned to
science (in this case, astronomy) in the following terms: “Having
admitted in principle that celestial bodies move according to a cir-
cular movement, which is uniform and constantly regular, Plato
posed the following problem to mathematicians: ‘What are the
circular, uniform and perfectly regular movements that we need
to take as a hypothesis in order to save the appearances of errant
planets [
διασῳθῆναι τὰ περὶ τοὺς πλανομένους ϕαινόμενα]?’”
(Duhem 1908, p. 3).
On the Sayable and the Idea
If the task of the mathematician is completed with the saving of
appearances, this means that, once this aim is reached, he should
refrain from identifying the supposed movements of the stars with
the real ones. As Duhem writes, “astronomy does not grasp the
essence of celestial things, but provides us only with an image.
And this image is not exact, but approximate [ . . . ] The geo-
metrical artifices that we need as hypotheses to save the apparent
movements of the stars are neither true nor plausible. They are
pure concepts that cannot be transformed into reality without for-
mulating absurdities” (ibid., p. 23). Simplicius can thus affirm that
the fact that astronomers propose different hypotheses to explain
the same phenomenon does not amount to a problem:
It is evident that the fact that opinions regarding hypotheses diverge
is not an objection. The aim we have is to know which hypotheses
manage to save appearances. We should not be surprised if other
astronomers have tried to save phenomena starting from different
hypotheses [ . . . ]. To save irregularity, astronomers imagine that
each star moves with many movements; some hypothesize eccentric
or epicyclical movements, other invoke homocentric spheres [ . . . ].
But just as the stillness and retrograde movements of planets or the
addition and subtraction of numbers found in the study of move-
ment are not considered to be real, so an exposition conforming to
truth does not consider its hypotheses as if they were real [ . . . ].
Astronomers are happy to conclude that it is possible, through circu-
lar and uniform movements that always go in the same direction, to
save the appearances of errant stars. (ibid., pp. 25– 27)
If, from the stance of Platonic science, mathematical hypotheses
should be satisfied with saving appearances and not claim to be
identical with reality, this is because, in the end, mathematics
refers to quanta of signification and not to real entities. It locates
itself on the semiotic threshold of language [lingua], but cannot
claim to overcome it.
On the Sayable and the Idea
24
It is only this location of numbers and ideas with respect to lan-
guage that enables us to put the controversial issue of how Plato
understood the relation between ideas and numbers into some
order. As in all instances in which the so- called unwritten teach-
ings are at stake, ancient testimonies are no less contrasting than
the opinions of modern scholars. Aristotle himself— who at any
rate informs us that Plato distinguished “beside sensible objects
and ideas, as an intermediate [μ
εταξύ] between them, the math-
ematical elements of things [
τὰ μαθηματικὰ τῶν πραγμάτων],
which differ from sensible things since they are motionless and
eternal, and from ideas since there are many alike, while every
idea is in itself one and singular”— seems to put numbers and
ideas into contact up to the point of confusing them. He affirms
that “like the Pythagoreans, Plato said that numbers are the cause
of the
οὐσία of other things” (Metaphysics 987b14– 25). In his Com-
mentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Alexander of Aphrodisias decid-
edly identifies ideas with numbers: “Numbers are the first entities.
And since forms are primary and ideas come before the things
that exist in relation to them and draw being from them [ . . . ]
[Plato] said that ideas are number [
τὰ εἴδη ἀριθμοὺς ἔλεγεν]
[ . . . ]. Moreover, ideas are the principles of other things, while
the principles of ideas, which are numbers, are the principles of
numbers, and he said that the principles of numbers are unity
and duality” (Alexander of Aphrodisias 1891, p. 56). Not without
reason, Simplicius objects to Alexander that “while it is very likely
that Plato said that the principles of all things are the one and
undetermined duality [ . . . ] from this cannot follow that he said
that undetermined duality, which he called big and small in refer-
ring to matter, is also the principle of ideas, for he limited matter
to the sensible world [ . . . ] and after all he also said that ideas
are knowable through thought while matter is ‘credible through a
bastard reasoning’” (Simplicius 1882, p. 151). The neutralization of
the dichotomy between ideas and sensible things made possible by
the
χώρα— which is also the condition of possibility for geometry
On the Sayable and the Idea
and mathematics— leads Alexander to reduce numbers to ideas,
and Simplicius firmly reacts against this.
Contradictions can be solved if we observe that ideas and
numbers— which are ontologically proximate— are however
clearly distinct insofar as they are located in two different regions
with regard to language. While ideas cannot fully be detached
from names, mathematical symbols are what result from lan-
guage’s pure giving of itself, that is, they are quanta of significa-
tion that express the way the signifying relation between language
and the world gives itself, without any concrete denotation. In
other words, idea and number, philosophy and mathematics, are
located in different experiences of the limits of language; the idea
is the limit of the semantic, whereas the number is the limit of the
semiotic.
In this sense— insofar as it expresses the bare semiotic relation
between language and the world without any semantic reference
to a determined real object— mathematics may appear as the pur-
est form of ontology. From here follow the recurrent attempts to
identify ontology with mathematics, a recent example of which
is Alain Badiou’s thesis that, given that “mathematics is ontol-
ogy” (2005, p. 4), it is possible to rewrite first philosophy in terms
of set theory. Against this confusion of two close, yet different,
planes, we need to recall that, for Plato, ontology— assuming
that it makes sense to define in his thought something like an
ontology— properly begins only with the plane of names. His phi-
losophy, at least to the best of our knowledge, is decidedly situated
on the plane of natural language [lingua] and tries to orient itself
in it, without ever abandoning it, through a patient and prolonged
dialectical exercise aimed in the end at returning to the ideas,
which are and remain homonymous with sensible things. Obvi-
ously, mathematics too presupposes language (we strictly know
nothing of the mathematics of a world without language); how-
ever, it is not simply located— like dialectic— within language,
but maintains itself in the pure relation between language and the
world, in the bare signification without meaning. Sensible bodies
giving themselves in the name is matched by their pure position
On the Sayable and the Idea
(
θέσις), their taking place in the χώρα. Insofar as they both look
at the knowableness of the world, the mathematician and the phi-
losopher are close neighbors: yet, as is the case with the poet and
the philosopher, the experiences of language in which the mathe-
matician and the philosopher move are different and hardly com-
municate with each other.
25
If science and philosophy lose consciousness of their proximity
and difference, they to the same extent also lose the awareness
of their respective tasks. For, if the Platonic definition of their
aporetic relation is valid, they can pursue their ends only by main-
taining themselves in reciprocal tension. As a contemplation of
ideas in names, philosophy most constantly moves itself beyond
them toward the limits of language, which, however, it cannot
overcome with its terminology, just as science, which tries to save
phenomena that are continuously mixed and confused by the
“errant cause” (
πλανομένη αἰτία [Timaeus 48a]), can only tend—
without ever fully succeeding— to translate its discourse into that
of natural languages [lingue]; the experiment is the place in which
this translation is carried out.
Today, the paradigm of Platonic science, which has never
fully disappeared in Western science, is going through a crisis
we seem unable to unravel. Science’s renunciation of a linguis-
tic exposition— which has become evident in post- quantum
physics— goes together with philosophy’s inability to confront
the limits of language. A philosophy without ideas, that is, a
purely conceptual philosophy, which thus becomes an always less
useful ancilla scientiae, is matched by a science that is unable to
think its relation with the truth that dwells in natural languages.
The division of philosophy into two fields— even institution-
ally and geographically non- communicating— that we take for
granted reflects the loss of the element— the
χώρα of language
[lingua]— in which philosophy and science could have communi-
cated. On the one hand, one tries at all costs to formalize natural
On the Sayable and the Idea
language [lingua], excluding from it as “poetical” what constitu-
tively belongs to it; on the other hand— forgetting that philoso-
phy, although it dwells in language [lingua], must incessantly
question the limits of language precisely insofar as it goes back to
its museic roots (it is, actually, itself a Muse:
αὕτη ἡ Μοῦσα)—
one ends up invoking, in a symmetrically opposite gesture, the
deus ex machina of poetry as if it were an external principle.
It is only starting from this aporia, that is, from the loss of the
passage (
πόρος) and the experience (πεῖρα) that could recon-
nect philosophy and science, that we can explain the apparently
unlimited domination of a technology that both philosophers and
scientists seem to observe in dismay. Technology is not an “appli-
cation” of science: it is the consequential product of a science that
no longer can or wants to save appearances, but obstinately tends
to replace its hypotheses with reality, to “realize” them. The trans-
formation of the experiment— which now takes place through
machines that are so complex that they do not have anything to
do with real conditions, but purport to force them— eloquently
shows that the translation between languages is no longer at stake.
A science that renounces saving appearances can only aim at their
destruction; a philosophy that no longer calls itself into question,
through the ideas, in language [lingua], loses its necessary connec-
tion with the sensible world.
26
The theory of the
χώρα reemerges in the seventeenth century
with the Cambridge Platonists at a peculiar crossroad between
theology and science. In the correspondence between the most
visionary of them, Henry More, and Descartes, the term
χώρα
is never uttered, and yet, for More, it is indeed a question of vin-
dicating against Descartes the irreducibility of space to matter.
If, as Descartes does, we identify extension with matter, there
is no longer room for God in the world. On the other hand,
there rather exists an immaterial extension that is an attribute of
being as such. Appropriating his definition of matter in order to
On the Sayable and the Idea
overturn it, More writes to Descartes: “Reason makes me believe
that God is, in his own way, extended, and that he is everywhere
present and intimately fills the whole machinery of the world and
each of its parts. How could he in fact communicate movement
to matter [ . . . ] if he, so to speak, did not touch it, or had once
not touched it? [ . . . ] God is therefore extended and in his own
way expanded: God is, consequently, an extended thing [Deus
igitur suo modo extenditur atque expanditur; ac proinde est res
extensa]” (Descartes 1953, pp. 96– 98). In other words, for More,
there is a “divine extension [divina extensio],” and to character-
ize it he invokes, “along with the Platonists [cum platonicis suis],”
the verses by Virgil that will later become the insignia of panthe-
ism: “totamque infusa per artus / mens agitat molem et magno se
corpore miscet” (ibid., p. 100).
4
This absolute space, infinite and
immobile, in which, like in the Platonic
χώρα, all movements and
all phenomena are produced, is something that we cannot imag-
ine not to exist (“disimagine” [More 1655, p. 335]), and, in More’s
thought, it increasingly tends to be identified with God: “This
infinite and immobile Extension is something that is not only real
but divine [Divinum quiddam].” Not without irony, he observes
that in this way he “gets God back in the world by the same door
through which Cartesian philosophy thought to chase him away,”
that is, the res extensa (More 1671, p. 69). At this point metaphys-
ics and theology coincide, and More can list a series of divine
“names” or “titles” that perfectly suit the deified space: One, Sim-
ple, Immobile, Eternal, Perfect, Independent, Existing in itself,
Subsisting by itself, Incorruptible, Necessary, Immense, Uncre-
ated, Omnipresent, Incorporeal, All- penetrating, All- embracing.
And he adds: “Moreover, I omit that God is called by the cabbal-
ists Makom, that is, Place” (p. 71).
It is legitimate to discern in the definition of this deified space
something more than an echo of the words that conclude the
Timaeus, where the
χώρα, “that has received in itself all living
creatures both mortal and immortal,” is described as “a perceptible
4. “The mind that is diffused throughout the limbs activates the
whole mass and mingles with the vast body.”— Translator.
On the Sayable and the Idea
god [
θεὸς αἰσθητός], image of the intelligible,” that “embraces all
visible things” and is “most great and supremely good, fair, and
perfect” (92c). It is this divine place of all beings, this absolute
space that, a few years later, and using an inventive image, New-
ton will define in his Optics as God’s sensorium: “There is a Being
incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space,
as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately
and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by
their immediate presence to him” (Newton 1730, p. 370; see also
Koyré 1962, p. 201).
27
Four centuries earlier, two exceptional minds, about whom we
know little more than the name, already unreservedly identified
God with the
χώρα. No work by Amalric of Bena has been pre-
served; however, we know from indirect sources and citations that
he interpreted the Pauline statement according to which “God is
fully in everything” in a radically pantheistic sense and, at the
same time, as a theological unfolding of the Platonic doctrine
of the
χώρα. The source that attributes the pantheistic thesis to
Amalric derides its consequences: if God is fully in everything,
then God is a stone in the stone, a mole in the mole, a bat in the
bat, and we should then worship the mole and the bat. However,
the anonymous polemicist shortly afterwards quotes Amalric’s
theses, which enable us to interpret correctly his intuition and
refer it back to their Platonic source: “Everything that is in God is
God; but all things are in God [ . . . ] hence God is everything.”
God is everything since, like the
χώρα, he is the place of every-
thing. God is in each thing as the place in which each thing is:
he is the taking- place of every entity and, for this reason, and this
only, identifies with them. It is not the mole and the stone that
are divine: what is divine is the being mole of the mole; the being
stone of the stone; their pure taking place in God.
An extraordinary fragment by David of Dinant— whose work
was prohibited in 1215 by the Statutes of the University of Paris
On the Sayable and the Idea
together with that of the Amalricians— has been preserved among
the papers of his Quaternuli (which mostly concern questions of
physics and medicine). The editors have entitled it “Hyle, mens,
deus,” “Matter, Mind, God.” Here, with a stroke of genius that
Thomas Aquinas calls “madness,” and invoking the authority of
the above- mentioned passage from the Timaeus, David affirms
the absolute identity between God, mind, and matter (following
the post- Aristotelian tradition,
ὕλη here signifies the χώρα):
From this we deduce that the mind and matter are the same thing.
Plato agrees with that, when he says that the world is a perceptible
god. The mind of which I speak, and which I claim to be one and
unmoved, is nothing other than God. If the world is God himself as
accessible to the senses beyond himself— as Plato, Zeno, Socrates,
and many others have said— then the matter of the world is God
himself, and the form that befalls matter is nothing other than God
making himself perceptible.
Through matter—
χώρα— God and the mind become identical.
The theory of the
χώρα finds its ultimate truth only from the
pantheistic stance of the waiving of the opposition between God
and the world; and, conversely, pantheism acquires its authentic
and unmatchable meaning only if it is founded on the theory of
the
χώρα.
28
The sayable experienced a lasting resurgence in the fourteenth
century through the work of Gregory of Rimini. Philosophers and
theologians discussed whether the object of knowledge was the
proposition (the linguistic- mental knot in which it is expressed)
or an extra animam reality. Gregory brilliantly inserts a tertium
between the two terms of this false alternative: the true object
of knowledge— and, consequently, the truth that is at stake in
language— is neither the proposition (the enuntiatum) nor the
object that exists outside the mind, but the enuntiabile— or the
complexe significabile, or also the meaning (significato) of the
On the Sayable and the Idea
proposition— whose specific mode of being Gregory attempts to
define beyond being and nonbeing, mind and extra- mental real-
ity. In a passage from Categories (12b5– 16), Aristotle wrote that
while affirmation and negation (e.g., “he sits” or “he does not sit”)
are discourses (
λόγοι), the thing (πρᾶγμα) that is in question in
them (which Aristotle expresses through the infinitive: “being sit”
or “not being sit”) is not a discourse. Commenting on this pas-
sage, Gregory infers that it is neither propositions nor real things
that are true or false, but the enunciable or signifiable, which, fol-
lowing Aristotle, he expresses through an infinitive proposition:
“man being an ass” or “man not being an ass.”
What is decisive here is the way in which Gregory conceives
the being of this tertium, which, insofar as it does not coincide
with either the proposition or the external object, runs the risk
of seeming to be nothing. Gregory suggests that the “thing” that
is in question in the true proposition “man is white” is neither
the thing “man” nor the thing “white,” nor their logical con-
junction through the copula, but rather a res sui generis— “man
being white,” which lies neither in the mind nor in reality, but is
somehow beyond existence and nonexistence. In the same way,
even in the case of the metaphysical thesis “God is” (Deus est),
the enunciable (or complexe significabile) that corresponds to it—
“God being” (Deus esse)— “is not something else, that is, another
entity with respect to God [alia entitas quam Deus], and yet, it is
not God, nor in general any entity” (Gregory of Rimini, Sentences
1.1.1.1; see Dal Pra 1974, p. 146).
It is curious that the historians of philosophy who tackled this
issue did not notice the evident terminological connection with
the
λεκτόν and with the sayable of the Stoic tradition (which
through Augustine’s Dialectic were not unknown to the Mid-
dle Ages). They claim that Gregory’s significabile implies a very
specific kind of existence, which “does not coincide with either
the entities of the external world or with the simple mental enti-
ties constituted by the terms or the propositions, but gives rise
to a world of meanings [significati]” (Dal Pra 1974, p. 145). These
historians do not realize that what resurfaces here in terms of
On the Sayable and the Idea
philosophical awareness is the same problem that Plato tackled
through the ideas and the Stoics resumed with their “sayable.”
The truth that is expressed in language— and given that we do
not have other ways of expressing it, the truth that is at stake for
us as speaking humans— is neither a real fact nor an exclusively
mental entity, nor “a world of meanings”; rather, it is an idea,
something purely sayable, that radically neutralizes the sterile
oppositions mental/real, existent/nonexistent, signifier/signified
[significato]. This— and nothing else— is the object of philosophy
and thought.
א. After many centuries, Gregory’s complexe significabile reappears
in Alexius Meinong— arguably in its terminologically most inven-
tive formulation. This disciple of Franz Brentano’s— who chose the
pseudonym Meinong to hide his belonging to nobility— intends
to define a discipline “that was never conceived before,” that is, a
science “that elaborates its objects without limiting itself to the par-
ticular case of their existence” (Meinong 1921, p. 82). He calls these
pure objects of knowledge “objectives” (Objektive); they delimit a
region of reality indifferent to the problem of existence (daseins-
frei) for which the following axiom is therefore valid: “Objects are
given for which it is true that objects of that kind are not given.”
Even if Meinong chooses at times his examples among impossible
concepts such as “golden mountain,” “square circle,” or “chimera,”
he calls “objectives” par excellence those contents of propositions
(“the snow is white” or “the blue does not exist”) whose consistency
he, like his medieval predecessors, locates neither in re nor in the
mind, but in a no- man’s- land he calls “almostbeing” (Quasisein) or
“outsidebeing” (Aussersein). What is at stake in language is a thing
“without fatherland” (heimatlos) that belongs neither to being nor
to nonbeing.
The science of the object, which, as a general science of the
nonreal, we might suppose to be complementary to metaphysics
as a general science of the real (as its inventor suggests), certainly
resembles pataphysics, which, in the very same years, Alfred Jarry
defined as the “science of what is added to metaphysics.” In any case,
it is significant that, at the end of the history of Western philosophy,
the survival of what at its outset defined the object par excellence
On the Sayable and the Idea
of thought must be looked for in conceptions that philosophical
historiography catalogues in a position that is, to say the least,
marginal. And yet in Meinong’s “outsidebeing” there is certainly
an— ephemeral, subdued, and probably unwitting— echo of the
intention Plato entrusted to his
ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας.
91
In the Third Letter (316a), Plato states that he “gave a fair amount
of attention to the proems to the laws [
περὶ τῶν νόμων προοίμια
σπουδάσαντα μετρίως].” That he is referring to an actual act
of writing is confirmed, since he adds: “I am told that some of
you afterwards revised my proems, but the difference between
these two parts [that written by Plato and that revised by oth-
ers] will be evident to those who are competent to recognize my
style [
τὸ ἐμὸν ἦθος].” If we consider that, in the Seventh Letter,
Plato seems to suspect all attempts at writing philosophical argu-
ments to be insufficiently accurate (which could equally apply to
his own dialogues), he may have regarded the drafting of those
proems (which, he asserts, were unmistakably his work) as one
of the few serious acts of writings he produced in his long life.
Unfortunately, these writings have been lost.
In the Laws, one of his late works, playing on the double mean-
ing of
νόμος (“musical composition sung in honor of a god” and
“law”), Plato returns to the problem of the proems to the laws
(and this makes us believe that the letter is authentic). The inter-
locutor of the dialogue designated as “the Athenian” says:
Every discourse and everything in which the voice participates has pro-
ems [
προοίμιά] and tunings- up [ἀνακινήσεις], as one might call them,
which contain a kind of attempt at beginning in conformity with the
art [
ἔντεχνον], and assist toward what will follow. Indeed, admirably
On Writing Proems
elaborated proems precede even the so- called citharoedic
νόμοι and
musical compositions of every description. But for the actual
νόμοι
[that is, the laws], which we designate as “political,” no one has ever
started by making a proem, or, having composed it, brought it to
light, just as though this would not conform to nature. But, in my
opinion, the conversation we have had proves that it does conform to
nature and that the laws we were then speaking about [those pertain-
ing to free men], which seemed to me to be double, are not simply
such, but are two things: laws and proems to the laws. The tyrannical
commandment [
ἐπίταγμα], which we have compared to the prescrip-
tions of those doctors we called not free, is indeed pure law [
ἄκρατος,
unblended]; the part which precedes this, which we have called the
persuasive [
πειστικὸν] element, insofar as it is used to persuade, has
the same function as the proems one makes in discourses. The entire
discourse the lawgiver makes trying to persuade seems to me aimed at
preparing the one to whom he addresses the law to benevolently accept
his commandment, that is, the law. Hence the right term for it would
be “proem” [
προοιμίον] and not “discourse” [λόγος] of the law [ . . . ].
The lawgiver must take care of furnishing proems before every law and
for each of them, whereby they differ from each other like the two laws
of which we spoke earlier. (722d– 23b)
The allusion to discourse in general (“everything in which the voice
participates”) and to musical
νόμοι makes us infer that the special
status Plato assigns to the proem here goes beyond the sphere of
legislation in a strict sense. This is what the Athenian appears to be
suggesting shortly afterwards, presenting the whole dialogue that
will follow as a proem: “But let us not spend more time in delay,
but return to our subject, and start afresh, if you agree, from the
statements I made above— and made not by way of a proem. Let
us, then, repeat from the start— to quote the players’ proverb, the
second attempt is better than the first— and make a proem, and not
a chance discourse (
λόγος). And let us agree that we begin with
a proem” (723 d– e). If the conversation that took place up to this
point was already actually only a proem, now the purpose is inten-
tionally to make a proem and not a discourse.
Just as, according to Plato, we must distinguish in a good law
a proem and a
λόγος in a strict sense (a commandment), so it
On Writing Proems
is possible to distinguish in every human discourse a proemial
element from a properly discursive or prescriptive element. Every
human word is a proem (
προοιμίον) or a discourse (λόγος), per-
suasion or commandment, and it may be appropriate to mix the
two elements or keep them separate when speaking.
If human language consists of two different elements, to which
of them does philosophical discourse belong? The Athenian’s
words (“make a proem and not a discourse”) seem to suggest
without reservation that the dialogue of the Laws— and thus per-
haps every dialogue that Plato has left us— should simply be con-
sidered as a proem.
Just as a pure (
ἄκρατος, unblended) law, that is, a law without a
proem, is tyrannical, so a discourse devoid of proems that is lim-
ited to formulating theories— however correct they might be— is
also tyrannical. This would explain Plato’s hostility to enunciat-
ing theories and true opinions, and his preference for resorting
to myths rather than logical argumentation. The philosophical
word is essentially and constitutively proemial. It is the proemial
element that must be present in every human discourse. But if the
proem of the law precedes and introduces the normative part of
the law— prescriptions and prohibitions— of what is the philo-
sophical word the proem?
According to a tradition that modern scholars have
resumed, esoteric doctrines circulated in the Academy along
with Plato’s exoteric writings— the dialogues— and the phi-
losopher would have formulated these doctrines in an asser-
tive manner. In this perspective, the dialogues we know
could be considered as proems and introductions to the eso-
teric doctrines that scholars try to reconstruct in a necessar-
ily discursive form. However, if what Plato says in the Laws
is to be taken seriously, and the character of proemiality is
consubstantial with philosophy, then it is unlikely that he
formulated the doctrines he cared the most about in an asser-
tive form. Provided that they existed, the esoteric doctrines
On Writing Proems
must themselves have had a proemial form. In the Seventh
Letter— the only surviving text in which Plato addresses his
intimate followers in order to reveal his thought— not only
does he rule out being able to write or even just communi-
cate what he really cared about in the form of a science, but
the well- known philosophical digression (which he calls “true
discourse,” but also “myth and detour [μ
ῦθος καὶ πλάνος]”)
that he introduces at this stage to explain why this is impossi-
ble is formulated in such a non- argumentative manner that it
has always been considered— whether rightly or wrongly— as
a particularly obscure mystical text.
The proemial character of the philosophical word does not
therefore mean that it refers to a post- proemial philosophical dis-
course; it rather refers to the very nature of language, to its “weak-
ness” (
διὰ τὸ τῶν λόγων ἀσθενές [Seventh Letter 343a1]), when-
ever it is called upon to confront the most serious problems. That
is to say, philosophy is not a proem to another more philosophical
discourse, but, so to speak, to language itself and its inappropri-
ateness. But, precisely for this reason— insofar as it possesses its
own linguistic consistency, the proemial one— philosophical dis-
course is not a mystical discourse, which, going against language,
sides with the ineffable. In other words, philosophy is the dis-
course that limits itself to serving as a proem to non- philosophical
discourse, showing the latter’s insufficiency.
Let us now try to develop the thesis about the proemial nature
of philosophical discourse beyond the Platonic context. Philoso-
phy is the discourse that brings back every discourse to the proem.
Generalizing, we could say that philosophy identifies with the
proemial element of language and rigorously abides by it. In other
words, it avoids turning into a discourse or a commandment, and
seriously enunciating theses or prohibitions. (The criticism of the
“commandment”—
έντολή— of the law in Saint Paul’s Letter to
the Romans can be seen as an attempt to purify the law from com-
mandment and restore it to its proemial, or persuasive, nature). The
On Writing Proems
use of the myth and of irony in Plato is to be seen in this perspec-
tive: it reminds those who speak or listen the necessarily proemial
character of every human discourse that cares about truth. The
philosophical element in a discourse is that which witnesses to this
awareness, not in the sense of skepticism, which questions truth
itself, but in that of the firm intention to abide by the necessarily
proemial and preparatory character of what one is saying.
And yet, however scrupulously it tries to keep within its lim-
its, even the proem can in the end only show its insufficiency,
which after all coincides with its preliminary and thus inevitably
inconclusive nature. This clearly appears at the very end of the
Laws, when, after having apparently treated every detail of the
constitution of the city and of the life of the citizens, the dialogue
concludes with the awareness that what matters most remains
to be done. Following a characteristic gesture of the late Plato,
this thesis is formulated in the ironical form of a joke and of a
pun: the Athenian explains that “it is not possible to legislate over
these things before they have been duly framed; only then will
it be possible to legislate over who must have supreme author-
ity. The doctrine of the preparation of these things can in fact
succeed only after being together for a prolonged time [
πολλὴν
συνουσίαν, the same words with which the Seventh Letter sum-
marizes the condition of the attainment of truth] [ . . . ]. How-
ever, it would not be correct to say that things concerning this
matter are unsayable [
ἀπόρρητα]: they are rather un- pre- sayable
[
ἀπρόρρητα; that which cannot be said in advance], insofar as
pre- saying them [
προρρηθέντα] nothing is clarified” (968c– e).
The proemial nature of the dialogue is thus restated, but, at
the same time, it is maintained that only a discourse that comes
after— that is, an epilogue— is decisive. Philosophy is constitu-
tively a proem, and yet the topic of philosophy is not the unsay-
able, but the un- pre- sayable, that which cannot be said in a
proem; only an epilogue would be fit for the purpose, that is, truly
philosophical. The proem must be transformed into an epilogue,
the prelude into a postlude: however, in any case, the
λόγος is
absent, the ludus- ludic can only be missing.
On Writing Proems
Everything that the philosopher writes— everything that I have
written— is only a proem to an unwritten work or— what is in
the end the same— a postlude whose ludus- ludic is absent. Philo-
sophical writing can only have the nature of a proem or of an epi-
logue. Perhaps, this means that it does not deal with what can be
said through language, but with the
λόγος itself, with language’s
pure giving of itself as such. The event that is in question in lan-
guage can only be announced or parted from, but it can never be
said (which does not mean that it is unsayable— unsayable really
means un- presayable; it rather coincides with the way discourses
give themselves, with the fact that humans do not stop speaking
with one another). What can be said of language is only a pref-
ace or a postil, and philosophers are distinguished according to
whether they prefer the former or the latter, abide by the poetic
moment of thought (poetry is always an announcement) or by the
gesture of those who at last lay down the lyre and contemplate. In
any case, what is contemplated is the un- said; the parting from
the word coincides with its announcement.
97
The Supreme Music. Music and Politics
1
Philosophy is today possible only as a reformation of music. If
we call music the experience of the Muse, that is, of the origins
and the taking place of the word, then in a given society and at a
given time music expresses and governs the relation humans have
with the event of the word. In fact, this event— that is, the arche-
event that constitutes humans as speaking beings— cannot be said
within language: it can only be evoked and reminisced museically
or musically. In Greece, the muses expressed this primordial artic-
ulation of the event of the word, which, by occurring, destines
and divides itself into nine forms or modalities, without it being
possible for the speaker to go back beyond them. This impossibil-
ity of accessing the primordial place of the word is music. In it
something comes to expression that cannot be said in language.
As is immediately evident when we play or listen to music, sing-
ing first and foremost celebrates and laments an impossibility of
saying, the— painful or joyous; hymnic or elegiac— impossibility
of accessing the event of the word that constitutes humans as
humans.
א. The hymn to the Muses that functions as a proem to Hesiod’s
Theogony shows that poets are readily aware of the problem posed
Appendix
by the beginning of a song in a museic context. The double struc-
ture of the proem, which twice repeats the opening (verse 1: “From
the Heliconian Muses let us begin”; verse 36: “Let us begin with the
Muses”), is due not only to the necessity of introducing the unprec-
edented episode of the poet’s encounter with the Muses in a tradi-
tional hymnic structure in which it was absolutely unexpected— as
Paul Friedländer has perceptively suggested (1914, pp. 14– 16). There
is another and more significant reason for this unforeseen repetition,
which concerns the poet’s very taking the floor [presa di parola], or,
more precisely, the position of the agency of enunciation in a field
where it is unclear whether it rests with the poet or the Muses. Verses
22– 25 are decisive; here, as scholars have not failed to notice, dis-
course abruptly moves from a narration in the third person to an
agency of enunciation that contains the shifter “I” (the first time
in the accusative— μ
ε— and then, in the following verses, in the
dative— μ
οι):
And one day [
ποτε] they [the Muses] taught Hesiod a glorious song
while he was shepherding his lambs under Holy Helicon: and this
discourse first [
πρώτιστα] the goddesses said to me [με] [ . . . ]
It is evidently a matter of introducing the I of the poet as the
subject of enunciation in a context where the beginning of the song
indisputably belongs to the Muses, and yet is uttered by the poet:
μ
ουσάων ἀρχώμεθα, “let us begin with the Muses”— or, better, if
we pay attention to the intermediate and non- active form of the verb:
“The beginning is from the Muses, we begin and are initiated by the
Muses”; in fact, the Muses tell with consenting voice “things that are
and shall be and that were aforetime,” and “unwearying flows the
sweet sound from their lips” (verses 38– 40).
The contrast between the museic origins of the word and the
subjective agency of enunciation is strengthened by the fact that the
rest of the hymn (and of the whole poem, with the exception of the
poet’s declarative reprise in verses 963– 965: “And now farewell to
you . . .”) recounts in a narrative form the birth of the Muses, with
Mnemosyne coupling with Zeus for nine nights, lists their names—
which, at that stage, did not yet correspond to specific literary genres
(“Clio and Euterpe and Thalia and Melpomene / Terpsichore and
Erato and Polyhymnia and Urania / and Calliope, the most illustri-
ous of them all”)— and describes their relation with the bards (verses
Appendix
94– 97: “For it is through the Muses and far- shooting Apollo / that
there are singers and harpers [ . . . ] / happy is he whom the Muses
love / sweet flows speech from his mouth”).
The origins of the word is museically— that is, musically—
determined and the speaking subject— the poet— must at each turn
confront the problematicity of his beginnings. Even if the Muse has
lost the religious meaning she had in the ancient world, the rank of
poetry still depends on the way in which the poet manages to give
musical shape to the difficulty of his taking the floor— that is, on
how he succeeds in appropriating a word that does not belong to him
and to which he limits himself to lending his voice.
2
The Muse sings and gives singing to man, since she symbolizes
the speaking being’s impossibility of integrally appropriating the
language in which he has made his vital abode. This extraneous-
ness marks the distance that separates human singing from that of
other living beings. There is music; man does not limit himself to
speaking, and rather feels the need to sing because language is not
his voice, and because he dwells in language without being able to
turn it into his voice. Singing, man celebrates and commemorates
the voice he no longer has, which, as taught by the myth of the
cicadas in the Phaedrus, he could find again only if he ceased to
be human and became animal (“When the Muses were born and
song appeared, some of the men were so overcome with delight
that they sang and sang, forgetting food and drink, until at last
unconsciously they died. From them the cicada tribe afterwards
arose [ . . . ]” (259b– c).
For this reason, emotional moods necessarily belong to music
before belonging to words: balanced, courageous, and strict in the
Doric mode; mournful and languid in the Ionic and the Lyd-
ian (Republic 398e– 399a). It is peculiar that still in the master-
piece of twentieth- century philosophy, Being and Time, the orig-
inal opening of man to the world does not take place through
rational knowledge and language, but through a Stimmung, an
Appendix
emotional mood that this very term refers back to the acoustic
sphere (Stimme means voice). The Muse— music— marks the
splitting between man and his language, between the voice and
the logos. The primary opening of man to the world is not logical
but musical.
א. From here follows the insistence with which Plato and Aristo-
tle, but also musicologists such as Damon and even the legislators,
affirm the necessity of not separating music and word. In the Repub-
lic, Socrates argues that “what is language in the song in no man-
ner differs from words not sung [μ
ὴ ᾀδομένου λόγου] and needs to
conform to the same models” (398d); soon afterwards, he resolutely
enunciates the theorem according to which “harmony and rhythm
must follow discourse [
ἀκολουθεῖν τῷ λόγῳ]” (ibid.). However, the
same formulation, “what is language in the song,” entails that there
is something in it that is irreducible to the word, just as the insistence
on sanctioning its inseparability betrays the awareness that music is
eminently separable. Precisely insofar as music marks the extraneous-
ness of the original place of the word, it is perfectly comprehensible
that it may tend to exacerbate its autonomy with respect to language;
and yet, for the same reasons, the concern about not fully severing
the nexus that kept them together is equally comprehensible.
Between the end of the fifth century and the first decades of the
fourth, Greece in fact witnessed an actual revolution in musical styles,
linked to the names of Melanippides, Cinesias, and especially Timo-
theus of Miletus. The fracture between linguistic and musical systems
becomes progressively unbridgeable, and by the third century music
ends up clearly dominating over the word. But a careful observer like
Aristophanes could realize— by parodying this in the Frogs— that the
relation of subordination of melody to its metric support in the verse
had already been subverted in Euripides’ tragedies. In Aristophanes’
parody, the multiplication of notes with respect to syllables is vividly
expressed through the transformation of the verb
εἱλίσσω (to turn)
into
εἱειειειλίσσω. In any case, in spite of the philosophers’ tenacious
resistance, in his works on music, Aristoxenus— who was a disciple of
Aristotle and criticized the changes introduced by the new music— no
longer lays at the foundations of singing the phonemic unity of the
metrical foot, but a purely musical unity, independent of the syllable,
which he calls “first time” (
χρόνος πρῶτος).
Appendix
In the history of music the critiques of the philosophers
seemed excessively conservative (and yet they were repeated
many centuries later in the rediscovery of classical monody by
the Florentine Camerata and Vincenzo Galilei and in Charles
Borromeo’s peremptory provision “cantum ita temperari, ut verba
intelligerentur”). But what interests us here are rather the profound
reasons for their opposition, of which they were themselves not
always aware. If, as it seems to be the case today, music breaks its
necessary relation with the word, this means that, on the one hand,
it loses the awareness of its museic nature (that is, of its being
located in the original place of the word) and, on the other, that the
speaker forgets that his being always already musically inclined has
constitutively to do with the impossibility of accessing the museic
place of the word. Homo canens and homo loquens part ways and
forget the relation that bound them to the Muse.
3
If the access to the word is, in this sense, museically determined,
we understand that for the Greeks, the nexus between music and
politics was so evident that Plato and Aristotle treat musical ques-
tions only in the works they consecrate to politics. The relation
of what they called μ
ουσική (which included poetry, music in
a strict sense, and dance) with politics was so close that in the
Republic, Plato could subscribe to Damon’s aphorism according
to which “musical modes cannot be changed without changing
the fundamental laws of the city” (424c). Men come together and
organize the constitutions of their cities through language, but
the experience of language— insofar as it is not possible to grasp
and master its origin— is in turn always already conditioned musi-
cally. The groundlessness of the
λόγος grounds the primacy of
music and makes it possible that every discourse is always already
museically tuned. For this reason, in every age, humans are always
more or less intentionally educated to politics and prepared for it
through music, even before this happens through traditions and
precepts that are transmitted by means of language [lingua]. The
Appendix
Greeks knew perfectly well what we pretend to ignore, namely,
that it is possible to manipulate and control a society not only
through language, but first and foremost through music. Just as,
for a soldier, the trumpet blast or the drumbeat is as effective as
the order of a superior (or even more than it), so in every field
and before every discourse, the feelings and moods that precede
action and thought are musically determined and oriented. In this
sense, the state of music (including in this term the entire sphere
we inaccurately define as “art”) defines the political condition of
a given society better than and prior to any other index; and if we
truly want to modify the rules of a city, it is first of all necessary
to reform its music. The bad music that today pervades our cities
at every moment and in every place is inseparable from the bad
politics that governs them.
א. It is significant that Aristotle’s Politics closes with an actual treatise
on music— or, rather, on the importance of music for the political
education of citizens. Aristotle in fact begins by announcing that he
will deal with music, not as a form of entertainment (
παιδιά), but as
an essential part of education (
παιδεία), that is, to the extent that it
has virtue as its goal: “Just as gymnastics are capable of producing a
certain quality of body, so music is capable of producing a certain
ethos” (1339a24). The central motif of Aristotle’s conception of music
is the influence it exercises on the soul: “But it is clear that we are
affected and transformed in a certain manner, both by the differ-
ent kinds of music and not least by the melodies of the Olympus;
for these admittedly make our soul enthusiastic [
ποιεῖ τὰς ψυχὰς
ἐνθουσιαστικάς], and enthusiasm is a passion [πάθος] of the ethos
with respect to the soul. And, moreover, everybody when listening
to [musical] imitations is thrown into an empathic state of feeling
[
γίγνονται συμπαθεῖς] thanks to rhythms and tunes, even in the
absence of words” (1340a5– 11). Aristotle explains that this happens
because rhythms and tunes contain images (
ὁμοιώματα) and imi-
tations (μ
ιμήματα) of anger, mildness, courage, prudence and the
other ethical qualities. For this reason, when we listen to them, the
soul is affected in different forms matching different musical modes:
in a “mournful and restrained” mode in the Mixolydian; in a “com-
posed [μ
έσως] and firmer” mode in the Doric; in an enthusiastic
Appendix
mode in the Phrygian (1340b1– 5). He thus accepts the classification
of tunes and melodies as ethical, practical, and enthusiastic, and
recommends the Doric mode for the education of the young, since
it is “firmer” (
στασιμώτερον) and of a virile (ἀνδρεῖον [1342b14])
character. Like Plato before him, Aristotle refers here to an ancient
tradition that identified the political meaning of music in its ability
to put order in the soul (or, on the contrary, to excite and confuse it).
Sources inform us that in the seventh century, when Sparta was in
a state of civil discord, the oracle suggested summoning Terpander,
the “bard from Lesbos,” who, with his singing, gave back order to
the city. The same was said of Stesichorus with regard to internal
fighting in the city of Locris.
4
With Plato, philosophy emerges as a critique and an overcom-
ing of the musical organization of the Athenian polis. The latter,
embodied by Ion, the possessed rhapsode who is suspended from
the Muse like a metal ring from a magnet, involves the impos-
sibility of accounting for one’s knowledge and one’s action, that
is, of “thinking” them. “For this stone [the magnet] not only
attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a power whereby
they in turn are able to do the very same thing as the stone and
attract other rings; so that sometimes there is formed quite a long
chain of rings, suspended one from another; and they all depend
for this power on that one stone. In the same manner also the
Muse divinely inspires men herself, and then by means of them
the inspiration spreads to others, and holds them in a connected
chain. [ . . . ] The spectator is only the last of the rings [ . . . ] and
you, the rhapsode, are the middle ring, while the poet is the first
[ . . . ] and a poet is suspended from a certain Muse, another poet
from another Muse, and in this case we say that he is possessed
[ . . . ] in fact you do not say what you say of Homer out of your
art or science, but out of divine destiny [
θείᾳ μοίρᾳ]” (Plato, Ion
533d– 34c).
Against the museic
παιδεία, the claim of philosophy as the
“true Muse” (Republic 548b8) and “supreme music” (Phaedo 61a)
Appendix
involves the attempt to go back beyond inspiration toward that
event of the word whose threshold is shielded and barred by the
Muse. While poets, rhapsodes, and, more generally, every virtu-
ous man, act according to a
θείᾳ μοίρᾳ, a divine destiny that they
cannot account for, it is here a matter of founding discourses and
actions in a place that is more primordial than museic inspiration
and its μ
ανία.
For this reason, in the Republic (499d), Plato can define phi-
losophy as
αὐτὴ ἡ Μοῦσα, the Muse herself (or the idea of the
Muse—
αὐτός followed by the article is the technical term that
expresses the idea). What is in question here is the proper place of
philosophy: it coincides with that of the Muse, that is, with the
origins of the word— and is, in this sense, necessarily proemial.
Locating himself in this way in the original event of language, the
philosopher brings man back to the place of his becoming human,
the only place from which he can remember the time in which he
was not yet a man (Meno 86a:
ὁ χρόνος ὅτ᾽ οὐκ ἦν ἄνθρωπος).
Philosophy trespasses the museic principle in the direction of
memory, of Mnemosyne as the mother of the Muses, and in this
way frees man from the
θείᾳ μοίρᾳ and makes thought possible.
In fact, thought is the dimension that is opened when, going back
beyond the museic inspiration that does not allow him to know
what he says, man somehow becomes auctor, that is, a guarantor
of and a witness to his own words and his own actions.
א. It is however decisive that, in the Phaedrus, the philosophical
task is not simply entrusted to a knowledge, but to a special form
of mania, similar to the others and at the same time different from
them. In fact, this fourth kind of mania— the erotic mania— is not
homogeneous with the other three (prophetic, telestic, and poetic),
and is essentially identified by two traits. It is first and foremost con-
joined with the self- movement of the soul (
αὑτοκίνητον [245c]), with
its not being moved by something else and with its being, for this
reason, immortal; furthermore, it is an operation of the memory,
which remembers what the soul saw in its divine flight (“this is a
reminiscence [
ἀνάμνησις] of what our soul once saw” [249c]), and
it is this anamnesis that defines its nature (“this is the final point of
Appendix
the whole discourse about the fourth mania, when seeing something
beautiful and remembering the true beauty [ . . . ]” [249d]). These
two characteristics are what oppose it to the other forms of mania,
in which the principle of movement is exterior (in the case of poetic
folly, it is the Muse) and inspiration is unable to go back through
memory toward what determines it and makes it speak. Here, it is
no longer the Muses who inspire, but their mother, Mnemosyne. In
other words, Plato reverses inspiration into memory, and this reversal
of the
θείᾳ μοίρᾳ— of destiny— into memory defines his philosophi-
cal gesture.
As a mania that moves and inspires itself, philosophical mania
(since this is what is at stake: “only the mind of the philosopher has
wings” [249c]) is, so to speak, a mania of mania, a mania that has as
its object mania or inspiration themselves, and therefore draws from
the very place of the museic principle. When, at the end of the Meno
(99e– 100b), Socrates affirms that political virtue is neither according
to nature (
ϕύσει) nor transmissible by way of teaching (διδακτόν),
but produced through a
θείᾳ μοίρᾳ without awareness, and that for
this reason politicians are incapable of communicating it to other
citizens, he is implicitly presenting philosophy as something that,
without following either divine fate or science, is capable of produc-
ing political virtue in the minds. But this can only mean that it is
situated in the place of the Muse and replaces it.
More to the point, Walter Otto has rightly observed that “the
voice that precedes the human word belongs to the very being of
things, like a divine revelation that lets it come to light in its essence
and glory” (Otto 1954, p. 71). The word that the Muse offers to the
poet comes from the things themselves, and the Muse is, in this
sense, nothing else than being that discloses and communicates
itself. For this reason, the most ancient depictions of the Muse, such
as the wonderful Melpomene at the National Museum of Palazzo
Massimo in Rome, simply present her as a girl in her nymphean
plenitude. Going back to the museic principle, the philosopher must
confront, not only something linguistic, but also and especially
being itself as revealed by the word.
Appendix
5
If music is constitutively bound to the experience of the lim-
its of language, and if, vice versa, the experience of the limits of
language— and politics with it— is musically conditioned, then an
analysis of the music of our times should begin by noting that it
is precisely this experience of the museic limits that music is now
missing. Language is today given as a chatter that never clashes
with its limit and seems to have lost all awareness of its intimate
nexus with what cannot be said, that is, with the time when man
was not yet a speaker. A language without margins and frontiers
corresponds to a music that is no longer museically tuned, and
a music that has turned its back on its origins corresponds to a
politics without consistency and place. When it seems everything
can indifferently be said, singing disappears and, with it, the emo-
tional moods that articulate it museically. Our society— in which
music seems frenetically to pervade every place— is actually the
first human community that is not museically (or amuseically)
tuned. The general feeling of depression and apathy only regis-
ters the loss of the museic nexus with language, disguising as a
medical syndrome the eclipse of the political that results from
it. This means that the museic nexus, which has lost its relation
with the limits of language, no longer produces a
θείᾳ μοίρᾳ, but
a sort of blank mission or inspiration, that is no longer articulated
according to the plurality of museic contents, but, so to speak,
goes round in circles. Forgetful of their original solidarity, lan-
guage and music separate their destinies and yet remain united in
the same vacuity.
א. It is in this sense that philosophy is today possible only as a refor-
mation of music. Given that the eclipse of politics goes together with
the loss of the experience of the museic, the political task is today
constitutively a poetic task, with regard to which it is necessary that
artists and philosophers join forces. Current politicians are unable
to think, since both their language and their music go amuseically
round in circles. If we call thought the space that is opened each
time we access the experience of the museic principle of the word,
Appendix
then it is the current inability to think that we need to tackle. And if,
following Hannah Arendt’s suggestion, thought coincides with the
ability to interrupt the meaningless flux of sentences and sounds,
stopping this flux in order to give it back to its museic place is today
the ultimate philosophical task.
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109
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113
Abelard, Peter, 68–69
Alexander of Aphrodisias, 36,
Amalric of Bena, 33, 86–87
Ammonius of Hermiae, 16, 19,
Andronicus of Rhodes, 37
Antisthenes, 57, 58
Arendt, Hannah, 107
Aristophanes, 100
Aristotle, 4, 5–6, 8, 9, 14, 15–20,
Arnim, Hans von, 44
Augustine of Hippo, 40–41, 88
Badiou, Alain, 82
Bekker, August Immanuel, 48
Benjamin, Walter, 30–31, 33, 35, 57,
Benveniste, Émile, 6, 9, 12, 14,
Boethius, Anicius Manlius
Severinus, 65–66
Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, 68
Bopp, Franz, 11
Borromeo, Charles, 101
Bréhier, Émile, 40, 44
Brentano, Franz, 89
Buber, Martin, 35
Cherniss, Harold F., 48
Cinesias, 100
Colli, Giorgio, 27
Courtenay, William J., 68
Dal Pra, Mario, 88–89
Damon, 100, 101
David of Dinant, 33, 86–87
Derrida, Jacques, 19
Descartes, René, 76, 84–85
Diano, Carlo, 72
Diogenes Laertius, 44
Duhem, Pierre Maurice Marie, 77,
Duns Scotus, 9–10
Eckhart von Hochheim (Meister
Eckhart), 10
Frederick II, 2
Frege, Gottlob, 39, 52, 56
Index of Names
Friedländer, Paul, 98
Galilei, Vincenzo, 101
Gregory of Rimini, 87–89
Güntert, Hermann, 57
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
Heidegger, Martin, xi, 44–45
Heraclitus, 63
Herz, Marcus, 60
Hoffmann, Ernst, 63
Homer, 103
Iamblichus, 36
Jaeger, Werner Wilhelm, 48
Jakobson, Roman, 24
Jarry, Alfred, 89
Kant, Immanuel, 60, 64
Koyré, Alexandre, 86
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von,
Mallarmé, Stephane, 3, 61, 70
Meinong, Alexius, 89–90
Melandri, Enzo, 63
Melanippides, 100
Menzerath, Paul, 21
Milner, Jean-Claude, 24–25, 52, 56
Momigliano, Arnaldo, 69
More, Henry, 84–85
Mugler, Charles, 78
Myshkin, Lev Nikolaevich, prince,
Newton, Isaac, 86
Ockham, William of, 66, 68
Otto, Walter, 105
Paqué, Ruprecht, 66
Paul of Tarsus, 32, 86, 94
Philoponus, Johannes, 36
Plato, 4, 6, 9, 14, 22, 25, 26, 32,
41–59, 61, 62–67, 68–74, 75–83,
85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91–95, 100,
101, 103–105
Plautus, 54
Plotinus, 33, 56, 72–75
Porphyry, 36, 65
Priscian, 63
Pythagoras, 54, 81
Riemann, Georg Friedrich
Bernhard, 78
Rijk, Lambertus Marie de, 69
Ross, William David, 48
Saussure, Ferdinand de, ix, 6, 14,
Schubert, Andreas, 39, 43
Sextus Empiricus, 38–39, 41–42,
Simplicius, 64, 70, 79–80, 81–82
Socrates, 22, 49, 57–58, 87, 100, 105
Spinoza, Baruch, 31, 32
Stesichorus, 103
Terpander, 103
Thomas Aquinas, 30, 87
Timotheus of Miletus, 100
Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf,
Usener, Hermann, 58–59
Varro, Marcus Terentius, 14, 40
Virgil, Maro Publius, 85
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9, 14, 27, 56
Zeno of Citium, 87
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Document Outline
- Cover
- Contents
- Translator’s Note
- Foreword
- Experimentum Vocis
- On the Concept of Demand
- On the Sayable and the Idea
- On Writing Proems
- Appendix: The Supreme Music. Music and Politics
- Bibliography
- Index of Names
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