strated) is but the very form of the presupposing of self and of

potency. The space between voice and logos is an empty space,

a limit in the Kantian sense. Only because man finds himself cast
into language without the vehicle of a voice, and only because
the experimentum linguae lures him, grammarless, into that void
and that aphonia, do an ethos and a community of any kind
become possible.
So the community that is born of the experimentum linguae
cannot take the form of a presupposition, not even in the purely
'grammatical' form of a self-presupposition. The speaking and
the spoken with which we measure ourselves in the experimentum
are neither a voice nor a gramma; as arch-transcendentals,
they are not even thinkable as a quiddity, a quid of
which we could ever, in Plotinus' fine image, take moirai, any
share. The first outcome of the experimentum linguae, therefore,
is a radical revision of the very idea of Community. The only
content of the experimentum is that there is language; we cannot
represent this, by the dominant model in our culture, as a
language, as a state or a patrimony of names and rules which
each people transmit from generation to generation. It is, rather,
the unpresupposable non-latency in which men have always
dwelt, and in which, speaking, they move and breathe. For all
the forty millennia of Homo sapiens, man has not yet ventured
to assume this non-latency, to have the experience of his
speaking being.
In the only public lecture he ever gave, before the members of
a club self-styled 'the heretics', Wittgenstein reproposes his own
experimentum linguae:
'And now I shall describe the experience of wonderment before the
existence of the world, with these words: the world thus is
experienced as a miracle. I am now tempted to say that the correct
expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world,
albeit as expressing nothing within language, is the existence of
language itself.'
Let us try to follow through Wittgenstein's experiment, by
asking ourselves: if the most appropriate expression of wonderment
at the existence of the world is the existence of language,
what then is the correct expression for the existence of language?
The only possible answer to this question is: human life, as
9
INFANCY AND HISTORY
ethos, as ethical way. The search for a polis and an oikia befitting
this void and unpresupposable community is the infantile task of
future generations.
Giorgio Agamben, 1988-9
NOTES
1. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans!.
Karen E. Pinkens with Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minne~
sota Press 1991.
2. Aristotle, The Politics, transl.]. Sinclair, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1962,
Book l,ch. 2,pp. 28-9.
INFANCY AND HISTORY
An Essay on the Destruction
of Experience
To Claudia Rugafiori
0 matematici, fate lume a tale
errore! Lo spirito non ha voce,
perche dov'e voce e corpo.
[0 mathematicians, shed light on
error such as this! The spirit has no
voice, because where there is voice
there is body.]
LEONARDO DA VINCI