What do you think?
Rate this book
Language and Death: The Place of Negativity
A formidable and influential work, Language and Death sheds a highly original light on issues central to Continental philosophy, literary theory, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and speech-act theory. Focusing especially on the incompatible philosophical systems of Hegel and Heidegger within the space of negativity, Giorgio Agamben offers a rigorous reading of numerous philosophical and poetic works to examine how these issues have been traditionally explored. Agamben argues that the human being is not just “speaking” and “mortal” but irreducibly “social” and “ethical.”
Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Means without End (2000), Stanzas (1993), and The Coming Community (1993), all published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Karen E. Pinkus is professor of French and Italian at the University of Southern California.
Michael Hardt is professor of literature and romance studies at Duke University.
Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Means without End (2000), Stanzas (1993), and The Coming Community (1993), all published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Karen E. Pinkus is professor of French and Italian at the University of Southern California.
Michael Hardt is professor of literature and romance studies at Duke University.
136 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
25 people are currently reading
705 people want to read
About the author
Giorgio Agamben
218 books952 followersGiorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.
In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.
He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.
In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.
He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 4, 2017
An amazing little work on sigetics and thanatology. Spanning so much thought in so few pages, this work is dense and compact. But in loosening the threads, listening to and following its words and thr thought that they trace, yet which ever eludes them, one comes to the empty space of the beginning anterior to any beginning, at the end which never comes to an end.
Thinking in and through an abyssal exilic wandering, a series of divagations, this work seeks the negative, the ungrounded, the lack of any foundation - the origin without origin. Silence, which allows for the voice to grant while withdrawing itself, escaping down lines of evasion, opens onto the thaumazein, the wonder of the infancy of thought, which comes also at the end (though never arriving) to the sacred, the divine daimon, through the rupturous laceration, the divide, the unbridgabpe distance of difference - the daiomai.
How to think this silent heart, which unfolds into the ethical that moves ungraspably, surprisingly, at our origin? Perhaps not the habitual, the everyday, this ethos which Agamben suggests, yet which cannot lead him out of an apparent aporia, but rather through the very sacrifice which he mentioned as the violent foundation, the foundation of violence? A sacrifice to annul the initial sacrifice - to exile the self, excreted unto the outside, beyond the law, the state, and into the atopic space of the divine - face to face with the other, thought this time, perhaps, once more, able to sustain and submit to the silence that calls us to respond, in responsibility, to the silence of the voice, its absenting and effacing heart.
Thinking in and through an abyssal exilic wandering, a series of divagations, this work seeks the negative, the ungrounded, the lack of any foundation - the origin without origin. Silence, which allows for the voice to grant while withdrawing itself, escaping down lines of evasion, opens onto the thaumazein, the wonder of the infancy of thought, which comes also at the end (though never arriving) to the sacred, the divine daimon, through the rupturous laceration, the divide, the unbridgabpe distance of difference - the daiomai.
How to think this silent heart, which unfolds into the ethical that moves ungraspably, surprisingly, at our origin? Perhaps not the habitual, the everyday, this ethos which Agamben suggests, yet which cannot lead him out of an apparent aporia, but rather through the very sacrifice which he mentioned as the violent foundation, the foundation of violence? A sacrifice to annul the initial sacrifice - to exile the self, excreted unto the outside, beyond the law, the state, and into the atopic space of the divine - face to face with the other, thought this time, perhaps, once more, able to sustain and submit to the silence that calls us to respond, in responsibility, to the silence of the voice, its absenting and effacing heart.
July 3, 2012
Hells yes it is! Agamben moves from Heidegger and Hegel back to Aristotle and then up through Augustine and medieval philosophers in pursuit of a central thesis: "According to a tradition that dominates all Western reflection on language from the ancient grammarians’ notion of gramma to the phoneme in modern phonology, that which articulates the human voice in language is a pure negativity.” (35)
Along the way there is of course time for riddles and nothing:
With Agamben's erudition, style, and sensitivity for language this study is an absolute must-read. Readers of Stanzas will in particular find much of interest here, as the central contentions about poetry and philosophy continue to shed light on Agamben's continuing interest in the convergences of language-intensities against disciplinary and traditional categories.
Along the way there is of course time for riddles and nothing:
Albinus. Quod est quod est et non est?
Pippinus. Nihil.
A: Quomodo potest esse et non esse?
P: Nomine est et re non est.
[Albinus. What is and yet is not?
Pippinus. Nothing.
A: How can it be and not be?
P: It is in name and it is not in substance.]
With Agamben's erudition, style, and sensitivity for language this study is an absolute must-read. Readers of Stanzas will in particular find much of interest here, as the central contentions about poetry and philosophy continue to shed light on Agamben's continuing interest in the convergences of language-intensities against disciplinary and traditional categories.
May 2, 2020
جورجو آگامبن فیلسوف ایتالیایی و از نظریه پردازان سرشناس چپ رادیکال در سال 1942 در رم متولد شد.وی در سمینار تورکه هایدگر به دعوت رنه شار در آن شرکت می کرد ، راه خود را در فلسفه پیدا کرد. در این سمینارها به کلاسیک ترین شکل برگزار می شد. شرکت کنندگان بیرون خانه رنه شار که برنامه سمینار را طراحی کرده بود جمع می شدند و در زیر سایه درخت چنار کهن سالی درباره کهن ترین رازهای فلسفه گفتگو می کردند. این جلسات برای آ گامبن سرنوشت ساز شد. وی ان را چنین توصیف می کند: یک گرد- هم – آیی عناصر و چیزها که چیزی به راستی غیر منتظره از دل آن سر می زد. و آن فلسفه بود.مهم ترین کتاب های او عبارتند از انسان بی محتوا، قطعات: کلام و خیال در فرهنگ غربی، کودکی و تاریخ: درباره ویرانی تجربه، زبان و مرگ: جایگاه منفیت، ایده نثر، اجتماع آینده و کتاب های دیگر
January 5, 2021
This work is too dense to write an adequate review under present conditions. To offer something in the way of an enticement, let me make some basic observations that should, if understood rightly, lead readers on to a more developed engagement with this text. First, I will sketch out what a reader should know by way of background. Secondly, I will point to some crucial points in the argument, and then thirdly I will conclude with a recommendation.
1. The published work is actually the summation of a seminar held in 1979/1980 in which five or so people participated. They were attempting to find a common theme in some texts. In order for you, the new reader coming to a work such as this, to get the most out of a reading, I recommend the following reading list:
Martin Heidegger: Being and Time; Poetry, Language, and Throught; On the Way to Language; The Letter on Humanism; Existence and Being; and On Time and Being.
G. W. F. Hegel: Early Theological Writings; Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit; The Greater Logic.
St. Augustine: On the Trinity
E. Benveniste: Problems in Linguistics
R. Jakobson: Selected Writings
E. Levinas: Otherwise than Being, ...etc
2. The works cited above will provide an acceptable context for your reading. To make the most of it, as I say, take a year to read through those works, then come back here to complete my review.
3. Once that is accomplished consider how the two works of recent German philosophy develop from a simple movement of the mind: for Heidegger we begin with Dasein, Being-of-the-There ("Da")- unlike the English "duh" which means something like, "it's obvious." But Da is duh. In other words, if you are reading something "something" must be obvious to you and we begin with "da" as that which is most obvious, your own being-toward-death right now as you read. Death is the limit condition of all those who read. Now compare that to the Hegelian "diese-taking" the "that" as we say in English. "That" is what transcends immediacy, so we have entered into Spirit the moment we leave off being an animal confined in a spatio-temporal inarticulateness. This-taking is the original negativity, the scene of "rape" of the obvious which has now been relegated to the "past," the no longer here because I am now pointing to something that transcends time and space, as you are.
1. The published work is actually the summation of a seminar held in 1979/1980 in which five or so people participated. They were attempting to find a common theme in some texts. In order for you, the new reader coming to a work such as this, to get the most out of a reading, I recommend the following reading list:
Martin Heidegger: Being and Time; Poetry, Language, and Throught; On the Way to Language; The Letter on Humanism; Existence and Being; and On Time and Being.
G. W. F. Hegel: Early Theological Writings; Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit; The Greater Logic.
St. Augustine: On the Trinity
E. Benveniste: Problems in Linguistics
R. Jakobson: Selected Writings
E. Levinas: Otherwise than Being, ...etc
2. The works cited above will provide an acceptable context for your reading. To make the most of it, as I say, take a year to read through those works, then come back here to complete my review.
3. Once that is accomplished consider how the two works of recent German philosophy develop from a simple movement of the mind: for Heidegger we begin with Dasein, Being-of-the-There ("Da")- unlike the English "duh" which means something like, "it's obvious." But Da is duh. In other words, if you are reading something "something" must be obvious to you and we begin with "da" as that which is most obvious, your own being-toward-death right now as you read. Death is the limit condition of all those who read. Now compare that to the Hegelian "diese-taking" the "that" as we say in English. "That" is what transcends immediacy, so we have entered into Spirit the moment we leave off being an animal confined in a spatio-temporal inarticulateness. This-taking is the original negativity, the scene of "rape" of the obvious which has now been relegated to the "past," the no longer here because I am now pointing to something that transcends time and space, as you are.
June 21, 2023
My favorite Agamben, next to End of the Poem
April 13, 2025
a jornada 7 é muito boa, gosto de como ele coloca a diferença da retórica antiga e dos provençais na superação do topos. acho que aprendi mais algumas coisinhas de retórica.
(achei engraçadinho que na jornada 8 ele fala da tragédia grega quase como o torrano, inclusive fala das mesmas tragédias do curso de teatro grego)
(achei engraçadinho que na jornada 8 ele fala da tragédia grega quase como o torrano, inclusive fala das mesmas tragédias do curso de teatro grego)
March 24, 2010
Proper reading order: Hegel -> Heidegger -> [Derrida?:] -> Agamben. Very technical, but interesting nonetheless to the uninitiated (me).
January 6, 2025
La primera vez que intenté leer este seminario, lo dejé después de la primera jornada. La segunda vez que me he atrevido a leerlo, habiendo estudiado algo de Heidegger y Hegel en la uni, he conseguido quedarme con la idea general, y ya espero la tercera lectura que haga para adentrarme más en las reflexiones. Siendo la muerte la experiencia límite del ser humano, inmerso en el lenguaje, como en el presente acto de lectura, es fundamento negativo de su ser. Y así como somos seres-para-la-muerte, somos, como ya decía Aristóteles, seres hablantes. Precisamente, en la Voz se encuentra de nuevo la dimensión negativa, de aquello ya articulado, pues se transciende la inmediatez espacio-temporal de los animales no humanos. Agamben caracteriza la relación entre la muerte y el lenguaje en su fundamento negativo del ser, a través de un análisis paralelo del Dasein y la Ereignis de Heidegger y el Diese y lo Absoluto de Hegel. Los paralelismos que señala me parecen brillantes y no acabaría nunca de ahondar en el minucioso análisis que hace.
March 31, 2019
Good mostly. A little overwrought at times.
January 14, 2024
Done. I liked it to the extent that it touches upon my interests on Dasein and death, as well as connects the Stimmung with voice and language.
July 5, 2023
Appropriate that a Heidegger student would pick up where he left off
January 3, 2023
Das Wesensverhältnis zwischen Tod und Sprache blitzt auf, ist aber noch ungedacht.
Der Mensch ist diese Nacht, dies leere Nichts, das alles in ihrer Einfachheit enthält, ein Reichtum unendlich vieler Vorstellungen, Bilder. In phantasmagorischen Vorstellungen ist es ringsum Nacht, diese Nacht erblickt man, wenn man dem Menschen ins Auge blickt, in eine Nacht hinein, die furchtbar wird, es hängt die Nacht der Welt hier einem entgegen.
Wir bleiben nun in einer Art Dunkelheit der Unkenntnis zurück, durch die wir uns, was den irdischen Zustand betrifft, mit Gott am besten vereinigen, dies ist jene Art der Finsternis, von der man sagt, dass Gott selbst in ihr wohne.
Wenn es stirbt hat das Tier eine Stimme und es haucht seine Seele in dieser Stimme aus. Es spricht und bewahrt sich als Totes.
Das den Menschen Eignende, ist kein Unsagbares, kein Heiliges, das in jedem Tun und Sprechen des Menschen ungesagt bleiben muss. Ebensowenig ist es ein Nichts, dessen Nichtigkeit die Willkürlichkeit und Gewalt des menschlichen Handelns begründen würde. Es ist vielmehr die sich selbst durchschauende soziale Praxis, das sich selbst durchsichtig gewordene Wort des Menschen.
Ich bin das unerreichbare
Schweigen
und der Gedanke
an den man sich oft erinnert.
Ich bin die Stimme,
die viele Laute hervorbringt,
und der Logos,
der viele Gestalten hat.
Ich bin das Aussprechen meines Namens.
Denken können wir nur, wenn die Sprache nicht unsere Stimme ist, nur, wenn wir in der Sprache unsere Stimmlosigkeit bis zum Grund, den es nicht gibt, ermessen. Was wir Welt nennen ist dieser Abgrund.
Was gesagt wurde, kann noch einmal gesagt werden, doch was gedacht wurde, kann nicht mehr
gesagt werden. Vom gedachten Wort nimmt man Abschied für immer.
Wir haben uns der Sprache soweit wie möglich genähert, wir haben sie beinahe gestreift, in der Schwebe gehalten: aber eine Begegnung zwischen uns hat es nie gegeben, und wir entfernen uns nun weiter voneinander, machen uns, unbedacht, auf den Weg nach Hause.
Der Mensch ist diese Nacht, dies leere Nichts, das alles in ihrer Einfachheit enthält, ein Reichtum unendlich vieler Vorstellungen, Bilder. In phantasmagorischen Vorstellungen ist es ringsum Nacht, diese Nacht erblickt man, wenn man dem Menschen ins Auge blickt, in eine Nacht hinein, die furchtbar wird, es hängt die Nacht der Welt hier einem entgegen.
Wir bleiben nun in einer Art Dunkelheit der Unkenntnis zurück, durch die wir uns, was den irdischen Zustand betrifft, mit Gott am besten vereinigen, dies ist jene Art der Finsternis, von der man sagt, dass Gott selbst in ihr wohne.
Wenn es stirbt hat das Tier eine Stimme und es haucht seine Seele in dieser Stimme aus. Es spricht und bewahrt sich als Totes.
Das den Menschen Eignende, ist kein Unsagbares, kein Heiliges, das in jedem Tun und Sprechen des Menschen ungesagt bleiben muss. Ebensowenig ist es ein Nichts, dessen Nichtigkeit die Willkürlichkeit und Gewalt des menschlichen Handelns begründen würde. Es ist vielmehr die sich selbst durchschauende soziale Praxis, das sich selbst durchsichtig gewordene Wort des Menschen.
Ich bin das unerreichbare
Schweigen
und der Gedanke
an den man sich oft erinnert.
Ich bin die Stimme,
die viele Laute hervorbringt,
und der Logos,
der viele Gestalten hat.
Ich bin das Aussprechen meines Namens.
Denken können wir nur, wenn die Sprache nicht unsere Stimme ist, nur, wenn wir in der Sprache unsere Stimmlosigkeit bis zum Grund, den es nicht gibt, ermessen. Was wir Welt nennen ist dieser Abgrund.
Was gesagt wurde, kann noch einmal gesagt werden, doch was gedacht wurde, kann nicht mehr
gesagt werden. Vom gedachten Wort nimmt man Abschied für immer.
Wir haben uns der Sprache soweit wie möglich genähert, wir haben sie beinahe gestreift, in der Schwebe gehalten: aber eine Begegnung zwischen uns hat es nie gegeben, und wir entfernen uns nun weiter voneinander, machen uns, unbedacht, auf den Weg nach Hause.
September 25, 2021
It was a struggle to finish it, but it stroke me deeply. Needs obviously a good previous knowledge of Heidegger and Hegel, but the best thing would be having a bit of experience in linguistic as well (this isn’t a linguistic essay at all, but it can give a lot of prompts I believe).
Read
July 28, 2011This one finished off what was left of my pea-brain.
August 11, 2014
La gioia di un testo che, con la sua fine, ti permette di iniziare a pensare senza la nostalgia di una lettura appena terminata.
March 20, 2023
Some enlightening sections —some too dense to be helpful upon the first reading.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews