Abandoning the Animal Voice: Agamben on the Unnecessary Violence of Language

Robert S. Leib, 2010

1

Citation: Robert S. Leib, “Abandoning the Animal Voice: Agamben on the Unnecessary

Violence of Language.” Academia.edu. Unpublished, 2010. Accessed [date].

<https://www.academia.edu/4191232/Abandoning_the_Animal_Voice_Agamben

_on_the_Unnecessary_Violence_of_Language>

Abandoning the Animal Voice:

Agamben on the Unnecessary Violence of Language

I. The Anthropological Machine

Giorgio Agamben does not believe there is such a category as ‘human’ that can be

distinguished from a category ‘animal’ by nature. Rather, it has been Western thought’s

overarching project to produce them, and it has done so up until now by differentiating ‘the

animal’ from ‘the human’ on metaphysical grounds for political reasons. In The Open, he

claims this quite strongly: “It is as if determining the border between human and animal

were not just one question among many discussed by philosophers and theologians,

scientists and politicians, but rather a fundamental metaphysico-political operation in

which alone something like “man” can be decided upon and produced” (O 21). This

metaphysico-political operation of creating and re-creating this categorical scission

between the two is what Agamben refers to as the ‘anthropological machine’.1 The scission

and differentiation creates what Agamben calls a “zone of indifference” between the

human and the animal, which is, at the same time, the postulation of “missing link” between

them. Thus, this zone—what Kelly Oliver calls the “phantom third category”—functions

just as much to join the two sides as it does to separate them (Oliver 8). Conceived in

synchronic terms, it is literally a ‘no man’s land’, but when thought diachronically, it is

1 As Kelly Oliver notes, the machine’s functioning is not simply political, but is the condition for the

possibility of politics in general. Its movement, is ontological, and thus, as she says, “inherently lethal to

some forms of life” (Oliver 1). Besides its effect on animals, which it renders inferior, it creates a further

scission and subjugation within the category of human itself, “which in turn becomes justification for slavery

and genocide”, as well as the politics of biopower (Oliver 2). Agamben wants to determine how exactly the

machine functions so that it may be stopped (O 39). Thus, his project in The Open is as much ethical as

ontological.


2

often supposed to be the historical moment at which the human overcame and came out of

the animal.

Agamben says there have been two incarnations of the machine—an ancient and a

modern—and they differ only in telling a somewhat different story about the relationship

between animals and humans within this middle ground. In the ancient version, “the non-

man is produced by the humanization of the animal, the ape-man, the…Homo ferus, but

also and above all, the barbarian, and the foreigner” (O 37). It creates the worry that there

are creatures walking around and talking that are not human. That is, it produces a figure

that is no longer an animal, but not yet human. The modern version functions

symmetrically but creates worries about humans—i.e. lower races, degenerates—who have

failed to fully overcome their animality. That is, this version works by “excluding as not

(yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by

isolating the nonhuman within the human” (O 37). The figure produced here—our

animality—hangs similarly in a paradoxical in-between state as an already, but not yet

human. In either case,2 the missing link will never be found because the zone is “only the

place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are

always dislocated and displaced anew” (O 38).3 Strictly speaking, Agamben wants to say

there is nothing in the middle; the wolfman is thus as mythical as the animal nature which

rules the inferior race.

In chapter nine of The Open, Agamben formulates this motion of overcoming explicitly in

terms of language. Guided by the discourse of evolutionary biology, one of the latest

applications of the machine’s logic, Agamben says that this zone of indifference has been

created around a postulated Homo alalus, a nonspeaking human (O 34-36). In his

assessment, however, this ‘missing link’ can only exist as a “shadow cast by language, a

presupposition of speaking man” (O 36) because upon consideration, the figure of homo

2 Agamben is arguably more interested in the modern version of the machine for its contemporary political

consequences although, because both versions achieve roughly the same result in schematic terms, he

believes the figures produced in each case are in fact inseparable: “The animal-man and the man-animal are

two sides of a single fracture, which cannot be mended from either side” (O 36). 3 That is, the logic of the machine is resilient to all kinds of argumentation that seeks to abolish the gap

between animals and humans. For instance, in response to any new evidence of animal language or culture,

the criterion of distinction is moved by re-defining language and culture, etc.


3

alalus constitutes an impossibility by definition: if being human means having speech,

there can be no nonspeaking human. However, its postulation serves an important function.

For the ancient version of the machine, it allows animals to be portrayed as something

linked to the human by being something overcome and fulfilled by humanity. For the

modern version, on the other hand, the postulation of this link allows the human to

sequester its (animal) muteness. As Agamben says: “In identifying himself with language,

the speaking man places his own muteness outside of himself, as already and not yet

human” (O 34-35). This operation is problematic for the animal in each case because, as

something on the outside, it takes on the status of a means. That is, it is specifically

‘outside’ in the sense that it lacks a certain degree of ethical consideration.

Through a reflection on Agamben’s early works on language, I focus on this logical space

of the ‘already and not yet’ (or what is the same, the ‘no longer and not yet’) as both the

locus of the machine’s power and the site of its potential destruction. Stopping the machine

will come as a result of our reflection upon and displacement of the ‘already and not yet’

from its current position between the animal and the human to a position within the human

experience of language, made possible by the scission between langue and parole in recent

structuralist discourse.4 Agamben believes the division between langue, or language

thought as a mute system of signs, and parole, language as the vocal appropriation and use

of these signs in speech, opens a space in which we constitute ourselves whenever we speak

(Infancy and History 59). We might be able to live perpetually and non-dialectically in this

space, in an ‘already but not yet’ condition Agamben calls our ‘infancy’ (cf. IH 55). We

will return to this line of reasoning and its resulting issues below. In short, I argue that this

revised understanding of how the human ‘has’ language opens up the possibility of a non-

violent language because it neither requires any link to the non-human, nor is the resulting

motion predicated upon our sequestering, subjugating, or sacrificing any kind of

‘animality’ within ourselves. What Agamben thinks this might mean in its positive

formulation, however, can only be intimated within the scope of this paper. In the following

4 If I were to phrase my position in terms of the traditional Aristotelian definition of the human—as zoon

logon echon, as the animal having logos—the ‘having’ will no longer mediate between the zoon and logon—

between the living being and the word. Instead, the ‘having’ it will describe an oscillation within the structure

of logos itself. Agamben sees the space for such oscillation as having been exposed by the work of recent

structural linguistics, which differentiates logos into two poles.


4

section, I aim to give a reading of Agamben’s work Language and Death, in which he

attempts to highlight the violence of western’s philosophy’s traditional understanding of

its having language through the works Hegel.

II. The Voice

In Language and Death,5 Agamben sees the essential violence of the Western discourse on

language brought out most clearly, though not exclusively, in Hegel’s Jena lectures from

1803-1805. In these, the supposed transition from animal sound to human speech is taken

up as an explicit theme. The way in which this transition is accomplished here, as well as,

Agamben wants to say, in the Western tradition in general, is through the violent sacrifice

of the animal voice. What does this mean? By animal sound, or voice, Hegel means the

bray or the chirp. He describes these as “empty” because typically the sounds an animal

makes express no thought for itself or its being. It is, in other words, non-self-conscious.

An animal may chirp when it is happy or howl when it is in pain, but these are thought to

be immediate reactions to its current physical state. Further, if the animal voice involves

communication in some form, it gives no thought to language itself, but the communication

is merely a direct outgrowth of its needs in the world. These characterizations, of course,

are intended to paint the animal voice as impoverished in comparison to the human voice,

which does give though to being, the world, etc. However, Hegel sees there is one instance

in which neither of these characterizations of the animal voice are sufficient—namely in

an animal’s cries at its impending death, in the swan’s song or in the cries of the

slaughterhouse, for instance. Here, the animal does seem to indicate thought for its self and

memory of its passing life. As Hegel says: “Every animal finds a voice in its violent death;

5 Language and Death is a work that is primarily concerned with the concept of negativity. In the broadest

terms, here Agamben confronts what he sees as the unexamined tendency of Western metaphysics to posit

negativity as the foundation of the human by way of our ‘faculties’ for language and for death. His inspiration

and starting point for the project is a quote from Heidegger that reads in part: “Mortals are they who can

experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation

between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought” (Heidegger, 107-8). While the

means are metaphysics, Agamben’s ultimate purpose here is again ethical. Agamben wants to go beyond the

thought of two monumental figures in the recent history of philosophy—Heidegger and Hegel—by

uncovering the unthought negativity that lies at the heart of each thinker’s work. This negativity is expressed

in a concept he calls the ‘Voice’, and he sees the thinking of this unthought concept as the first step toward a

new notion of community [ethos] in the face of humanity’s essential ungroundedness. As Catherine Mills

puts it: “Agamben concludes that a philosophy that thinks only from the foundation of Voice cannot deliver

the resolution of metaphysics that the nihilism towards which we are still moving demands” (Mills 21).


5

it expresses itself as removed (als aufgehobnes Selbst)” (quoted in LD 45). Here, the animal

voice cannot be a ‘mere natural sign’, but as Agamben points out, it is not yet meaningful

speech either (LD 45). The animal expresses its own death, albeit inarticulately, and thus

Hegel here calls the animal voice the “voice of death” (LD 45). This special instance is

crucial for the possibility of deriving meaningful human speech from pure animal sound

because, if the animal voice were truly empty, nothing would ever result from it. What does

result here, however, is humanization of the animal, as in the ancient version of the

anthropological machine.

But this story of transition can be told from the point of view of the modern version as well.

When beginning from our own voice, we can listen back for resonances of the animal in

us. Here, the transition takes place in the realm of phonetics. Hegel refers to the animal

voice as the “pure sound of the voice, the vowel” (LD 44). This pure vowel, however, is

inarticulate, and thus, must be chopped up through the insertion of “mute consonants” by

which we are able to have phonemes and differences that can be infinitely arranged into

the spoken word (LD 44). This process of arthron (articulation) is that by which

meaningful speech is able to arise at all. In the phantom third category here, however, we

find the same as before. We find the animal voice expressing itself as removed

(aufgohoben). Through the arthron of the mute consonants upon the pure vowel of the

animal voice, one’s animality is sequestered and forgotten. ‘Sequestered’ because both the

animal voice and the ‘violence’ inflicted upon it remain present in all meaningful speech—

in the vowels and consonants that make up its physical presence—but ‘forgotten’ because

these exist, Hegel says, only as ‘entombed’ in speech. They are not typically what are heard

when another speaks, but only the ground upon which meaning is built. Both the vowel

and consonant must go into the ground and disappear, as Agamben says, if meaning is to

take place in speech. In Hegel’s anthropogenic and logo-genic model, then, the animal

voice is not wholly removed, but remains buried within articulated language as a

“vanishing trace” (LD 45).

Agamben reads this passage, thus, as an illustration of the logic of exclusion, of creating a

phantom third category of no-longer but not-yet, as in the postulation of the hypothetical

Homo alalus mentioned above. On the one hand, we have the animal expressing itself


6

inarticulately in its passing—as already gone—and, on the other, as continually expressing

itself as the background, or ground, of everything we say, as a barely present trace. As

aufgehoben (entombed), the animal is both subjugated and preserved as a necessary,

though negative, foundation of language by excluding what is interior to, but somehow less

than, language (LD 45). This negative middle structure is what Agamben here calls ‘the

Voice’. At the heart of the traditional discourse on language as fulfilled animality, we thus

find the scission and exclusion that is characteristic of the anthropological machine.6

According to Agamben, this schema of the Voice runs deeper than Hegel. In fact, he

believes it constitutes Western thought’s solution to fundamental problem of “the relation

and passage between nature and culture, between phusis and logos,” (LD 85), and further,

this passage has always been conceived of in terms of an arthron (LD 85). Given that this

metaphysical tendency runs to deep in the Western philosophical tradition (it is present

already in Aristotle7), where should one turn in turning away from it? Or rather, we should

ask, how can this traditional model can be fundamentally altered such that the constitution

of the human as a speaking being does not harbor this violent foundation of overcoming at

its heart?

6 Agamben sheds light on this obscure relation from this obscure text in Hegel’s corpus by finding in it a tie

to one of Hegel’ most famous texts: the account of the near-death struggle between the master and slave in

his Phenomenology. There, two merely conscious beings struggle for dominance. The one who wins, the

master, learns nothing from this struggle. Though the master gains the recognition from the slave as more

than animal through risking his own natural existence in the struggle, the master believes the slave to be

unequal to him and unworthy of counter-recognition. Thus, he does not achieve full self-consciousness (LD

47). He continues to live as before, fulfilling every desire by the slave’s work. Thus, the master is not fully

human. He is the no-longer animal but not-yet human of the ancient machine. The slave, however, submits

in the struggle and learns to curb his natural desire through work, but all of his work is annihilated by the

master’s enjoyment of it. Thus, Agamben says, the slave’s existence is maintained, but only as a vanishing

(LD 47). Here, we have the slave as entombed animal voice; the human in which the not-yet human [i.e.

animality] is excluded from its being. While posing a difficult analogy, I think this helps us envision more

clearly the violence of the middle space between the animal and human; it has always been conceived of as

a topos of struggle. 7 In the traditional Aristotelian definition of the human as zoon logon echon, the echein that joins the animal

and language engages in this operation of overcoming and subjugating the former for the sake of the latter.

The form subjugates and entombs its matter through the articulation, or actualization, of one of it myriad

potentialities.


7

III. There is Language

Overcoming the concept language as involving the destruction of the animal voice, for

Agamben, has its genesis in the thought of French linguist Emile Benveniste. In

Benveniste, Agamben finds grounding for a concept of the human language that is not

derived from any reference to the animal or one’s animality. After some preparatory

remarks in this section, we will turn to an examination Agamben’s concept of ‘infancy’,

which he believes is able to uncover a non-violent already-but-not-yet structure resting at

the heart of our own linguistic being.

Agamben argues the key to understanding ourselves as beings having language (logos) in

a non-violent manner is, strange as it may be, a methodological one: we ought not to begin

from an account of our coming to have logos—i.e. to say how meaning arises out of

meaningless sound—but to begin from within the very midst of our already having it. We

can immediately see the advantage of this move, for this starting point serves, with greater

fidelity, the position humans must already be in before they can even come to a reflection

upon their ability to speak. But what is the fundamental, in the sense of most basic,

experience of always finding ourselves in language? Agamben’s response is intricate. He

believes this experience is encapsulated the assertion “there is language”, or what amounts

to the same, “I speak” (IH 6). In this phrase, we find both the impetus for and the origin

from which we truly come to understand ourselves in relation to language. This is so

because it contains within it the thought of the event of language itself, or what Agamben

calls the mere ‘taking pace of language’. To ask about what it means to say, “there is

language”, is not to ask first about logos as something we have as emergent from or

appended to our animality, but about speaking itself. It is about what Emile Benveniste

calls énoncé, the utterance, or ‘instance of discourse’. This beginning always presupposes

a speaker who finds herself already in language (LD 25). Agamben goes on to ask about

our ability to reflect on having language from within it: “What does it mean to indicate the

instance of discourse? How is it possible that discourse takes place or is configured, that

is, as something that can be indicated?” (LD 31, emphasis original).

The answer is to be found in the words of the phrase itself. Within the utterance, “there is

language”, the “there” is as important as “language”, and the same goes for the “I” in “I


8

speak”. Where is language? And, who speaks? Grammatically, both ‘there’ and ‘I’ are

grouped, according to modern linguistics, into the category of pronouns, or ‘shifters’. The

grammatical function of such shifters within speech is to denote precisely the taking place

of language. For instance, as Benveniste says, in his essay, “The Nature of Pronouns”: “‘I’

can only be identified by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone. It has

no value except in the instance in which it is produced” (Benveniste 218). That is, the word

ego has no substance or definition apart from its being pronounced in some instance of

speech. This is similarly so with the words here, there, this, now, etc., which, according to

Benveniste, combine with I to “delimit the spatial and temporal instance coextensive and

contemporary with the present instance of discourse containing I” (Benveniste 219). The

shifters are what make it possible for one to take up language as one’s own, and inhabit it.

But what is most important, these delimitations, although able to be defined grammatically,

are never strictly meaningful independent of the particular utterance. As Benveniste writes:

[I]t is a fact both original and fundamental that these “pronominal” forms

do not refer to “reality” or to “objective” positions in space or time but to

the utterance, unique each time, that contains them, and thus they reflect

their proper use. These signs are always available and become “full” as soon

as a speaker introduces them into each instance of his discourse (Benveniste

219).

Agamben employs the concept of such ‘pronominal shifters’ as a means of focusing on the

sheer passage from empty sign to full indication. This is what he wishes to call the “pure

indication that language is taking place”, and it can only occur through the voice that utters,

not through grammatical analysis (LD 34, 25). At this most fundamental level, Agamben

says, the human voice shows itself “as a pure intention to signify, as pure meaning, in

which a mere something is given to be understood before a determinate event of meaning

is produced” (LD 33). The character of the human voice is thus suspended between sound

and meaningful use of language in what the medieval logicians called “the thought of the

voice alone” (LD 34).

In this thought of the voice alone, in the phrase “there is language”, we do, indeed, find

ourselves confronted with something different from the bray or the howl. As Agamben

says, the voice as pure intention to signify is indeed something that can be genuinely


9

distinguished from the “pure sonorous flux” of the animal voice.8 However, this mode of

distinction cannot be allowed to become a comparison. If we are led to think the taking

place of language in reference to the animal voice, as an advancement upon it, we are

immediately confronted with the Hegel’s model of aborted anthropogenesis (cf. LD 35). 9

But what is the alternative? This account of the thought of the voice alone that proceeds

from the position of one who is always already inside of language is compelled to seek its

ground somewhere, or in something. Again, in the concept of the Voice, the animal voice

is the ground of human language in the sense that it must either remain a passing thought

for itself or go into the ground and disappear when it is placed in relation to the human

voice, but what, in this new conception of language, schematically takes on onerous duty

of residing in that middle category? In answer, Agamben calls for an articulation of

something he calls our ‘infancy’.

IV. Infancy

As we saw in Hegel above, the event of language was, in part, the advent of a subject that

is self-conscious, rather than merely immediately conscious. But strictly speaking, this

subject is not created by the dialectic. Rather, it discovers itself as always already the object

of its pre-existent, though poorly understood, subjectivity. Modern philosophy in general

has taken the possibility of speech to be the consequence of a pre-existent and substantial

ego, an ‘I’ to which language belongs by virtue of its special subjective structure.10 In

8 Aganben writes: “A voice as mere sound (an animal voice) could certainly be the index of an individual

who emits it, but in no way can it refer to the instance of discourse as such, nor open the sphere of utterance”

(LD 35). 9 Agamben continues: “The voice, the animal phoné, is indeed presupposed by the shifters, but as that which

must necessarily be removed in order for meaningful discourse to take place…But inasmuch as this Voice

(which we now capitalized to distinguish it from voice as mere sound) enjoys the status of a no-longer (voice)

and a not-yet (meaning), it necessary constitutes a negative dimension . It is ground, but in the sense that it

goes to the ground and disappears in order for being and language to take place” (LD 35, emphasis original). 10 Infancy and History is subtitled, “On the Destruction of Experience,” which plays out through the first half

of it as a discussion of the way in which the modern knowing subject is characterized by existing as divided

from its experience. Agamben sees this in its purest form in the Kantian distinction between the

transcendental subject of experience and the empirical psychological I. Since then, the project of philosophy

from Hegel through Husserl has been to unite the knowing subject and its experience by conceiving of

subjectivity as psychological consciousness (cf. Mills 23). However, the attempt has consistently involved

positing something like a psychological substance, a cogito capable of underlying its thought. Agamben

critiques this for having forgotten the even more basic linguistic determinations involved in the

pronouncement “I think”. He therefore concludes, “The transcendental cannot be the subjective, unless

transcendental simply signifies: linguistic” (IH 54).


10

Infancy and History, Agamben turns again to the work of Benveniste in order to dispute

this assumption. He argues rather that there is no subject, no ego, that pre-exists the

utterance. Given that ‘I’ only ever means “I who am speaking now’, as we saw above,

Agamben concludes: “The transcendental subject [i.e. of modern philosophy] is nothing

other than the ‘enunciator’, and modern thought has been built on this undeclared

assumption of the subject of language as the foundation of experience and knowledge” (IH

53, emphasis original). Through Benveniste, Agamben affirms that the human is, in fact,

unthinkable apart from language. Agamben says: “It is through language, then, that the

individual is constituted, and linguistics, however far back it goes in time, never arrives at

a chronological beginning of language, an ‘anterior’ of language” (IH 56).

However, given that we do not always speak, this must mean there are many times when

we are not constituted as subjects, but exist pre-subjectively; this pre-subjective state is

what Agamben calls our ‘infancy’. By infancy, Agamben understands “a wordless

experience in the literal sense of the term, a human infancy [in-fancy], whose boundary

would be marked by language” (IH 54). By this, Agamben does not mean an infancy of

humanity, Homo alalus, nor does he mean literal human infancy, as in the stage at which

a child has not yet acquired language, “a paradise which, at a certain moment, we leave

forever in order to speak” (IH 55). This latter possible misreading, however, holds certain

features instructive for the concept of infancy he wishes to describe here. It is true, the

human must learn language initially, and she can, in fact, lose her capacity for language if

she is deprived of contact with other speaking humans during the first years of her life (IH

65). The fact that humans cannot develop the code typical of its species simply by maturing

leads Agamben to conclude that, rather than being characterized by having language, it is

more proper to say of the human that she is “the animal deprived of language and obliged,

therefore, to receive it from outside” (IH 65). In this, we can already see the shift away

from thinking human language as an overcoming or completion of the less-perfect other;

having language is, rather, here understood as something of a burden of one’s own.


11

Moreover, this is a burden that is never lifted. Even when having appropriated a language

fully, Agamben says, infancy subsists as constitutive of the subject at every moment.11

Whenever she speaks, therefore, we must say that the human removes herself from her

infancy by constituting herself as a subject who says “I”(IH 63). Thus, infancy can be

described as the human’s state of constantly needing to acquire language, the experience

of which amounts to the sheer difference between the human and the linguistic.12 The point

Agamben wishes to make here is ontological: humans as having the fundamental

possibility of lacking language means they are distinct from the linguistic; the linguistic is

something that humans must have and never are.13

In this condition of constant lack, humans, therefore, are in some sense distinguished from

animals irrevocably, but now, if anything, the human rather than the animal is seen as

impoverished. Agamben interestingly claims: “Animals do not enter into language, they

are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this

single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of

language—he has to say I” (IH 59). As we saw in the previous section, the very possibility

of saying “I” is due to the structure of the shifter, the empty space within the structure of

language [langue] itself which allows for the appropriation this structure in the utterance

[parole]. This split, which achieves a division between language and speech, “marks out

the human from other living beings” (IH 59).14

Living in infancy, then, is still a condition marked by the logic of the already-but-not-yet.

In infancy, we are already linguistic, but not yet/no longer speaking. Agamben thinks that

infancy’s having this structure means that we can use it to supplant the ‘missing link’

rhetoric of the traditional discourse on language. That is, we can use it to jam the machine

by placing ourselves, rather than our animality in the third category. We should recall that

11 Agamben says that infancy “coexists in its origins with language—indeed, is itself constituted through the

appropriation of it by language in each instance to produce the individual as subject” (IH 55). 12 As Mills concludes on this point, “it is in this need to acquire speech, to enter into discourse, that the

experience of infancy subsists” (Mills 24). 13 That is, the ‘having’ (echein) remains a state of the human, but is stripped from its essence, or definition. 14 Agamben writes: It is not language in general that marks out the human from other living beings—

according to the Western metaphysical tradition that sees man as zoon logon echon (an animal endowed with

speech)—but the split between language and speech, between the semiotic and the semantic (in Benveniste’s

sense), between sign system and discourse (IH 59).


12

the difference between the traditional conception of language and this new structuralist one

is a matter of the method by which we discourse. This discourse is violent only when

human speech is conceived of as being in relation to the animal voice as ground—that is,

as exclusion and therefore negative ground. The purpose of citing Hegel was to illustrate

this. In one sense, the human—here, existing as split and in constant need—is still

characterized as divided in contrast to the animal’s complete continuity. But, rather than

explaining this split as the result of the pure animal voice (phoné) being divided by arthron

for the sake of logos, the division here exists within logos itself. In short, as strung out

between the categories created by Benveniste’s structuralist distinction of langue and

parole, the question of language does not require our asking how meaning arises out sound,

as it did for Hegel. It is not a question of using the echein to signify the dialectical and/or

hylomorphic synthesis of the pure zoon and pure logos. It becomes rather a question of

how the human (a zoon? Or not?) makes the non-dialectical transition between these two

orders of semiotic and semantic of which she is always already capable. This would seem

to involve a notion of ‘having’ (echein) that is dynamic, at once a separation and a passage

that is not empty, but in which we find the human herself.

V. Infancy as the Absolute

Although Agamben conceives of Infancy on the basis of structuralist thought, he does not

simply conclude that structuralism is the full, positive articulation of a human’s relationship

with language, for certain aspects of the structuralists’ project, too, are founded upon

negativity. Specifically, structuralism displays the same tendency we saw in Hegel of

trying to explain how meaning can arise out of meaningless elements—i.e. out of

‘phonemes’. In an essay entitled, “Animal Communication and Human Language,”

Benveniste identifies “the distinctive character of human speech” as the following:

Each enunciation made by man can be reduced to elements which combine

easily and freely according to definite laws so that a small number of

morphemes admits of a great number of combinations. Hence proceeds the

variety of human language—which has the capacity of expressing

everything. A more searching analysis of language reveals that this

restricted number of morphemes, or elements of meaning, can be reduced

to even less numerous “phonemes,” or elements of articulation, devoid of

meaning. It is the selective and distinctive grouping of these elements of

articulation which produces the sense units. These “empty” phonemes,


13

organized in systems, constitute the basis of every language (Benveniste 53-

54).

This desire to explain the emergence of meaning from meaninglessness, or what is the

same, the project of analyzing meaningful units into their meaningless elements, continues

to carry with it the same negative foundation of language that we identified in Hegel as the

violent arthron. Phonemes, as the smallest parts of enunciation, represent articulation

itself. They are empty but provide for the infinite possibility of meaning when they are

applied to the also ‘empty’ pure vowel of the animal. Thus Agamben says near the end of

Language and Death that, because the phoneme is a “purely negative and insignificant

particle that opens up and makes possible both signification and discourse”, the science of

phonology can be described in “perfect analogue” to previous systems, such as Hegel’s as

“the science of the removed voice, that is, of Voice” (LD 86).

The concept of Infancy, then, must have an end beyond Benveniste and structuralism in

general. Infancy seeks to think the negative foundation of the Voice itself, in whatever

forms it presents itself, in order to overcome it. In other words, it seeks to wholly exclude

the dialectic incited by the thesis of animal and the antithesis of language, which results

either in the speaking (no longer) animal or in non-speaking animality. In doing so, it seems

the concept of infancy not only cancels and leads us away from the negativity characterized

by excluding and entombing the animal voice within our own, but, as a negative of the

negative, it also holds the possibility of leading us back to what is positively our own.

In Language and Death, Agamben says the mode of philosophy that thinks its own negative

foundation is called the “Absolute”, or the end of dialectic (LD 92). In every case, under

whatever name it appears, “the Absolute has the structure of a process, of an exit from itself

that must cross over negativity and scission in order to return to its own place” (LD 92). In

arguing for this characterization, Agamben turns to etymology, noting that the word

‘Absolute’ is etymologically related to ‘solve’. In its Indo-European root, se-luo, it signifies

‘custom’ (se, suesco, ethos, Sitte) and ‘leads back’ (luo). Therefore, he says, the Absolute

is that which “has been led back to its ownmost property, to itself, to its own solitude, as


14

its own custom” (LD 92).15 Infancy then, if it is a mode of the Absolute, both begins with,

and in the end leads us back toward, what we already have.

If the positive formulation of the Absolute always involves a return, however, what would

it mean in this context to return, and to what would we return? Agamben claims that

humanity’s custom, or ethos is “social praxis itself, human speech itself, which have

become transparent to themselves” (LD 106). He elucidates this, once again, through

etymology. ‘To return’, he says, derives from the Greek tornios—the lathe, and more

generally, that which forms and wears down by turning—but also from the Greek teiro, ‘to

use’, and the English ‘trite’ (LD 94). The trite is what is most commonplace, what we have

and live alongside most closely. Thus, he asks, whether it is not possible that Western

metaphysics, with its negative foundation has no power to explain humanity’s simple

having of language and its habitations: “And what if the dwelling to which we return

beyond being were neither a supercelestial place nor a Voice,” he asks, “but simply the

trite words that we have?” (LD 94, emphasis original).

We must leave it an open question as to what, exactly, it means to return to our trite words,

for we are already dangerously far from the primary aim of this paper, though we cannot

help but wonder whether Agamben’s use of etymology to establish this point gives us any

indication. We can note that, a return to the trite, whether it be of social praxis or of

language, is not a matter of simply undoing some past metaphysical error. In The Open,

Agamben tells us that canceling the dialectic in the Absolute does not involve finding

anything lost or remembering anything forgotten (O 82). Rather, in the logic of the

Absolute, the end must always be achieved by going through and never by going back.

Therefore, if etymology gives us any clue, it would only do so under a very particular

understanding of it. We are not searching for a time before metaphysics, in which trite

words and ways of life directly bespoke being, or some such thing. In Language and Death,

he notes that, although the achievement of the Absolute has something of a “restored

immediacy” to it, such as before all philosophy, what is achieved, or returned to therein,

15 And further, he says: “…it is probable that, in the Absolute, the labor of human negativity has truly reached

completion and that humanity, returned to itself, ceases to have a human figure to present itself as the fulfilled

animality of the species Homo sapiens, in a dimension where nature and culture are necessarily confused”

(LD 104).


15

can only be the Absolute for having been divided and then restored (LD 100). Therefore,

the Western metaphysical tradition was somehow as necessary as its cancellation is now.

Perhaps the loss of our language through placing it against non-speaking beings or through

its disintegration into meaningless sound was necessary before the etymological project

and the special sense of language we can discern through listening to the words themselves

is possible. If this is the case, the end of the dialectic leaves us in a place that looks like

we’ve been there before—with our trite words and ways—but in contrast to those who

lived before Western philosophy, we encounter them now with knowledge of their potential

metaphysical and political power.16 Agamben gives us this sense vividly when he says in

The Open, at the end of history, “Paradise calls Eden back into question” (O 21).

VI. Conclusion

While other beings seem to be always already in language as undivided, it is a question

beyond the scope of this paper whether humans must learn to bear the burden of language

as two-fold, or whether achievement of our own kind of unification in the Absolute is

possible in any positive sense. In either case, the situation in which we find ourselves

regarding our Infancy does not value or de-value humans in relation to other beings. Since

it characterizes only our own way of having language, it ought to hold no political or

axiological implications for the way of existing of other beings. Again, in this rejection of

the need to compare our humanity with the being of other beings—i.e. of hearing our own

voice in theirs and vice versa—we find hope also for the cancellation and destruction of

the anthropological machine, for this exists only as the operation that wishes ultimately to

produce human and animal as two in order to de-cide between them. This seems to be

necessary, not only for our own sake, but for the sake of other beings as well. Thus, perhaps

Agamben thinks of ethics, the having of an ethos, as something we might share with other

16 This characterization of the absolute is clearly present in Hegel. In the final paragraphs of the

Phenomenology of Spirit, in the section titled “Absolute Knowing”, he tells us that self-knowing Spirit,

having united subject and object within itself and grasping this notion, achieves immediate identity with itself

and thereby returns to the certainty of immediacy, or sense-consciousness, which began its experience (Hegel

¶806). However, Hegel says, “In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to start afresh and bring

itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had learned nothing from the experience of the

earlier Spirits. But recollection, the inwardizing, of that experience, has preserved it…So although this Spirit

starts afresh and apparently from its own resources to bring itself to maturity, it is none the less on a higher

level that it starts” (Hegel ¶ 808).


16

beings. In any case, he seems to argue that this recommended change in our method of

discourse is, at least, necessary as an ethical prolegomena to anything we might ultimately

conceive of as a return to ourselves and our own.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz

Heron. New York: Verso, 1993.

———. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Trans. Karen E. Pinkus and

Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991.

———. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.

Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral

Gables: U of Miami Press, 1971.

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. New York: HarperCollins, 1971.

Mills, Catherine. The Philosophy of Agamben. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2008.

Oliver, Kelly. “Stopping the Anthropological Machine: Agamben with Heidegger and

Merleau-Ponty”. PhaenEx 2 no. 2 (fall/winter 2007): 1-23.

Abbreviations:

IH: Infancy and History

LD: Language and Death

O: The Open

Abandoning the Animal Voice: Agamben on the Unnecessary Violence of Language

Documents