Conjuring the Phantasm (Review of Giorgio Agamben's Signature of All Things) more

Theory and Event 13.3 (2010). <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae.13.3.html> Conjuring the Phantasm Giorgio Agamben. The Signature of All Things: On Method. Trans. Luca D‘Isanto with Kevin Attell. New York: Zone Books, 2009. 124 pages. $24.95 (hc). 978-1-890951-98-6. The Signature of All Things is an epistemological procession through three dimensions of the ―third area‖ that Giorgio Agamben, in his now thirty-three-year-old seminal work on the phantasm, identified as the site where ―a science of man truly freed of every eighteenth-century prejudice should focus its study.‖1 The three essays conjoined in this volume—―Philosophical Archaeology,‖ ―Theory of Signatures,‖ and ―What Is a Paradigm?‖—are at once a fulfillment of and a reflection upon the practice of this study, a methodological excursus ordered toward its unfinishable end: the historical freeing of the human via a creative-critical ―science without object.‖2 As announced in the Preface, reflection on method in the human sciences ―follows practical application, rather than preceding it‖ and ―is a matter . . . of ultimate or penultimate thoughts‖ (7). The book thus pursues reflection on method, not as retrospection about, but as the proper fruition of practice, as the mode of its arrival. Such revelation of a how as what becomes intelligible only in its having been experienced, only by being pursued and passed through, participates in the essential lesson formulated near the volume‘s end, namely, that historical consciousness, which is constituted by ―access to the present for the first time, beyond memory and forgetting, or rather, at the threshold of their indifference,‖ is achievable only in the archaeological mode of a future anterior or ‗will have been‘ (1067). Like the phantasmal topology mapped in Stanzas, a khoral place ―more original than space‖ providing the where of poetico-philosophic realization, the site of such historically redemptive knowledge (the archē of this logos) belongs to a level of reality that exceeds the terms of modern experimental science which ―has its origins in a unprecedented mistrust of experience as it was traditionally understood.‖3 Renewing his Infancy and History‘s concluding call for ―a new and more primary experience of time and history,‖ one produced via philological destruction of ―the identification of history with a vulgar concept of time as a continuous linear and infinite process,‖ Agamben‘s Signature finishes with an explicit articulation of the ontological imperative of his work:4 The archē toward which archaeology regresses is not to be understood in any way as a given locatable in a chronology . . . instead, it is an operative force within history . . . Yet unlike the big bang, which astrophysicists claim to be able to date . . . the archē is not a given or a substance, but a field of bipolar historical currents stretched between anthropogenesis and history, between the Theory and Event 13.3 (2010). <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae.13.3.html> moment of arising and becoming, between an archi-past and the present. And as with anthropogenesis, which is supposed to have taken place but which cannot be hypostasized in a chronological event—the archē alone is able to guarantee the intelligibility of historical phenomena, ―saving‖ them archaeologically in a future anterior in the understanding not of an unverifiable origin but of its finite and untotalizable history. . . . the human sciences will be capable of reaching their decisive epistemological threshold only after they have rethought, from the bottom up, the very idea of ontological anchoring, and thereby envisaged being as a field of essentially historical tensions. (110-1) What is ultimately and continually at stake within the book‘s thinking on method is thus not simply the question of how human science grounds itself, whether through this paradigm or that, but that it does, the question of its grounding in the first place. In other words: the problem of the alienation of language from its own event, the word from its factical being. An anarchic rethinking of the very idea of ontological anchoring might seek (i.e. wait for) the supposedly ahistorical for itself of its own pleasure.5 By contrast, Agamben‘s archic project is ordered toward realizing the deeper historicity defined by the co-presence of past and present in the moment of their simultaneous intelligibility: the archē [my investigations] reach . . . is not an origin presupposed in time. Rather, locating itself at the crossing of diachrony and synchrony, it makes the inquirer‘s present intelligible as much as the past of his or her object. . . . If one asks whether the paradigmatic character lies in things themselves or in the mind of the inquirer, my response is that the question itself makes no sense. The intelligibility in question in the paradigm has an ontological character. It refers not to the cognitive relation between subject and object but to being. (32) Agamben‘s desire to methodologically actualize the humanistic subject-object intersection, to redeem it from the impoverishment of instrumentalization, corresponds closely to his appreciation of ―the loss of the commentary and the gloss as creative forms,‖ as practices belonging to ―the abolition of the margin between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission.‖6 As Gershom Scholem explains, in terms that resonate earthily with Agamben‘s archaeological situation of future anteriority, ―The Biblical scholar perceives revelation not as a unique and clearly delineated occurrence, but rather as a phenomenon of eternal fruitfulness to be unearthed and examined . . . Out of the religious tradition they bring forth something entirely new, something that itself commands religious dignity: commentary.‖ 7 So Agamben initiates The Signature of All Things by defining the philosophically genuine as ―its capacity for elaboration‖ (8) and by reproposing, in terms that again challenge the generic foundations of contemporary academic discourse, the onto-epistemic relation between thought and interpretation: It is precisely when one follows such a principle that the difference between what belongs to the author of a work and what is attributable to the interpreter become as essential as it is difficult to Theory and Event 13.3 (2010). <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae.13.3.html> grasp. I have therefore preferred to take the risk of attributing to the texts of others what began its elaboration with them, rather than run the reverse risk of appropriating thoughts or research paths that do not belong to me. (8) This is an assertive, decisional generosity of commentary: attributing one‘s own thought to another over taking another‘s as one‘s own—a decision, comparable to Walter Benjamin‘s ―art of citing without quotation marks,‖ whose parameters are legible in what is often the first gesture of reading: writing our own name in a book.8 The reality of what begins elaboration is the essential subject of this book, the contiguous realities of the paradigm, the signature, the archē, each of which exists as a palpable dimension of ―the place where the gesture of reading and that of writing invert their relation and enter into a zone of undecidability‖ (56). In choosing and following this beginning as not original to himself (quodlibet ens), Agamben reaffirms the pleasure and good of thought as the experience of potentiality, its belonging to the originary possibility or ground of its own event. Such is the substance of the signature: ―Signatures . . . are . . . that which marks things at the level of their pure existence . . . that pertain to beings by virtue of the very fact of existing‖ (66).9 Tracing this mysterious and quintessentially actual level of reality across a constellation of topics, The Signature of All Things is suffused by the logic of the third, of the between, of the both and/or neither, above all in its ongoing dialogue with the work of Michel Foucault: ―The astute reader will be able to determine what in the three essays can be attributed to Foucault, to the author, or to both‖ (7). But as this deferral of discernability onto the reader implies, the third is precisely the zone where differentiation is overcome in the midst of its own intensity. Paradigm, signature, and archē, like Ibn Arabi‘s concept of the imaginal barzakh or limit, pertain to a level of intelligibility coincident with phenomena.10 The three terms are hopelessly interrelated, but hold special reference to the domains of the object, language, and time, respectively.11 The paradigm, constituted by the ―tertium datur‖ (20) of analogy, ―entails a movement that goes from singularity to singularity and, without ever leaving singularity, transforms every singular case into an exemplar of a general rule that can never be stated a priori‖ (22). Here the ―idea is not another being that is presupposed by the sensible or coincides with it: It is the sensible considered as a paradigm – that is, in the medium of its intelligibility‖ (26). So the signature, constituted by ―immaterial similarity‖ (71), belongs to a third zone of language wherein the seemingly impassible transition between the semiotic and the semantic is accomplished: ―Signatures, which according to the theory of signs should appear as signifiers, always already slide into the position of the signified, so that signum and signatum exchange roles and seem to enter into a zone of undecidability‖ (37). Yet what thus appears in the mode of a conceptual conundrum is nothing other than the functional, living actuality of the sign itself, which ―signifies because it carries a signature that necessarily predetermines its interpretation‖ (64). Theory and Event 13.3 (2010). <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae.13.3.html> What the signature realizes for language, the archē does for time. It concerns, not historical origin as conventionally thought in terms of causality, but ―the moment of arising,‖ which is something ―objective and subjective at the same time and is indeed situated on a threshold of undecidability between subject and object‖ (89). Archaeology reenters time to leap over it, regressing not ―to reach the unconscious or the forgotten in the past so much as to go back to the point where the dichotomy between conscious and unconscious, historiography and history (and, more generally, between all the binary oppositions defining the logic of our culture) was produced‖ (98). Just as material archaeology is an art of exhumation, of the production of empty tombs, so its hermeneutic process is ultimately not reconstructive but deconstructive: ―it is a matter of conjuring up its phantasm, through meticulous genealogical inquiry, in order to work on it . . . to the point where it gradually erodes, losing its originary status‖ (102). Archaeology ungrounds the past as past, ―it wills to let it go, to free itself from it, in order to gain access beyond or on this side of the past to what has never been, to what was never willed‖ (103).12 And it is in this sense that The Signature of All Things is its author‘s signature, the mark that would render his work effective in a sense clarified in the penultimate section of the book: ―For it is not merely the work of an author‘s—or anyone‘s—life that determines his or her rank, but the way in which he or she has been able to bring it back to the work of redemption, to mark it with the signature of salvation and to render it intelligible‖ (108). In the 12th-century theory of the fourfold senses of scripture, the fourth and highest sense, that which completes and perfects and indeed corresponds to the very movement among the other three (literal, allegorical, tropological), is the anagogic sense. Crossing the gap between word and thing, sensible and intelligible, anagogy is proverbially that which gives a ―foretaste (praegustus) of heaven‖ and a ―foreseeing of hoped-for rewards.‖ Like the ―today‖ of Christ‘s promise (Luke 23:43) to the co-crucified thief, anagogy is constituted by the immanence of a redemptive future that is impossibly already sensible in the fractured terms of the present. Anagogy thus corresponds to the experience of thought as contemplation rather than meditation. As Hugh of St. Victor explained, whereas meditation is an ―assiduous and shrewd drawing back of thought . . . [that] is always about things hidden from our understanding,‖ contemplation is ―a keen and free observation of the mind expanding everywhere to look into things . . . [and] is about things as manifest.‖13 Although this review fails to reflect the wealth of specific things that The Signature of All Things expansively observes, I hope it does suggest a framework for recognizing Giorgio Agamben‘s pleasurable work as that of an anagogic philosopher, all the more so because he holds the traditional significance of such a determination so explicitly open: ―Whether a philosophical inquiry is possible that reaches beyond signatures toward the Non-marked that, according to Theory and Event 13.3 (2010). <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae.13.3.html> Paracelsus, coincides with the paradisiacal state and final perfection is, as they say, another story, for others to write‖ (80). Nicola Masciandaro is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a specialist in medieval literature. He is the author of The Voice of the Hammer (Notre Dame, 2006) as is founding editor of Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary. Recent publications include: with Anna Kłosowska, ―Beyond the Sphere: A Dialogic Commentary on the Ultimate Sonetto of Dante's Vita Nuova,‖ Glossator 1 (2009): 47-80; and ―Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy,‖ Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy (2010): 21-66. 1 Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 59; ―è in questa ‗terza area‘ che dovrebbe situare la sua ricerca una scienza dell‘uomo che si fosse veramente affrancata da ogni pregiudizio ottocentesco‖ (Stanze [Turin: Einaudi, 1977], 69). ―For if in the human sciences subject and object necessarily become identified, then the idea of a science without object is not a playful paradox, but perhaps the most serious task that remains entrusted to thought in our time‖ (Stanzas, xvi). 2 3 4 5 Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1993), 19. Infancy and History, 165. For instance: ―Not until that glad hour when we are at last rid of our delusions about the science of the experts, and are content simply to choose among pleasures, can we face the unknown with a lucid passionate gaze‖ (Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, trans. Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson [New York: Zone, 1998], 12). 6 7 Infancy and History, 162. Gershom Scholem, ―Tradition and Commentary as Religious Categories in Judaism,‖ in Understanding Jewish Theology: Classical Issues and Modern Perspectives, ed. J. Neusner (New York: Ktav Publishing, 1973), 46-7. 8 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), N1.10. Agamben here follows the scholastic concept of the ―passiones entis; that is, the attributes a being ‗suffers‘ or receives from the very fact of being‖ (65). Cf. ―The actualness of the created is not itself actual; it is not itself in need of a coming-to-be or a being-created. Therefore, it may not be said that actuality is something created. It is rather quid concreatum, concreated with the creation of a created thing‖ (Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], 104). 9 Theory and Event 13.3 (2010). <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae.13.3.html> ―Imagination in Ibn al-‗Arabī is an intermediate reality, the reality of the Limit, or what Ibn al-‗Arabī calls barzakh. Barzakh is a term that represents an activity or an active entity that differentiates between two things and (paradoxically) through that very act of differentiation provides for their unity‖ (Salman H. Bashier, Ibn al ‘Arabī’s Barzakh: The Concept of the Limit and the Relationship between God and World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 7. 10 Agamben repeatedly articulates their interrelation: ―archaeology . . . is always a paradigmatology‖ (32); ―paradigm of signatures‖ (38); ―archaeology of signatures‖ (57); ―the gesture of the archaeologist constitutes the paradigm of every true human action‖ (108). 11 12 On the concept of archaeological ungrounding, see also Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008), 43ff. ―Meditatio est assidua et sagax retractatio cogitationis, aliquid, vel involutum explicare nitens, vel scrutans penetrare occultum. Contemplatio est perspicax, et liber animi contuitus in res perspiciendas usquequaque diffusus. Inter meditationem et contemplationem hoc interesse videtur. Quod meditatio semper est de rebus ab intelligentia nostra occultis. Contemplatio vero de rebus, vel secundum suam naturam, vel secundum capacitatem nostram manifestis‖ (In Salomonis Ecclesiasten Homiliae XIX, Patrologia Latina 175:116-7). 13