Commas and flames
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, June 19, 2023
When a friend spoke to him about the bombing of 上海 (Shànghǎi) by the Japanese, Karl Kraus argued: “I know that nothing makes sense if the house is on fire. But as long as it’s possible, I take care of the commas, because if the people who had to do it had been careful that all the commas were in the right places, 上海 (Shànghǎi) wouldn’t have burned down”. As always, here the joke hides a truth that is worth remembering. Men have their vital dwelling in language and if they think and act badly, it is first of all because of the corrupt and flawed relation with their language. We have been living for a long time in an impoverished and devastated language; all peoples, as Scholem said for Israel, now walk blind and deaf along the abyss of their language and it is possible that this betrayed language is somehow taking revenge and that its vengeance is all the more ruthless the more men spoiled and neglected it. We all realise more or less lucidly that our language has reduced itself to a small number of set phrases, that the vocabulary has never been so narrow and worn, that the phrasebook of the media imposes its miserable norm everywhere, that Dante lessons in poor English are held in university classrooms: in such conditions, how can we expect someone to be able to formulate a correct thought and act accordingly with probity and prudence? Nor is it surprising that the ones who handle such a language have lost any awareness of the relationship between language and truth, and therefore believe they can use words which no longer correspond to any reality according to their wicked profit, to the point of no longer realising they are lying. The truth we are talking about here is not only the correspondence between discourse and facts, but, even before it, the memory of the apostrophe that language addresses to the child who, deeply moved, utters his first words. Men who have lost all memory of this silky, exigent, loving call are literally capable, as we have seen in these last years, of any villany.
Therefore, let us continue to concern ourselves with the commas even if the house is on fire, let us speak to each other with care, without any rhetoric, paying listening not only to what we say, but also to what the language tells us, that little whiff of air which was once called inspiration and which remains the most precious gift that, at times, language — it matters not whether literary canon or dialect — can give us.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, June 19, 2023
When a friend spoke to him about the bombing of 上海 (Shànghǎi) by the Japanese, Karl Kraus argued: “I know that nothing makes sense if the house is on fire. But as long as it’s possible, I take care of the commas, because if the people who had to do it had been careful that all the commas were in the right places, 上海 (Shànghǎi) wouldn’t have burned down”. As always, here the joke hides a truth that is worth remembering. Men have their vital dwelling in language and if they think and act badly, it is first of all because of the corrupt and flawed relation with their language. We have been living for a long time in an impoverished and devastated language; all peoples, as Scholem said for Israel, now walk blind and deaf along the abyss of their language and it is possible that this betrayed language is somehow taking revenge and that its vengeance is all the more ruthless the more men spoiled and neglected it. We all realise more or less lucidly that our language has reduced itself to a small number of set phrases, that the vocabulary has never been so narrow and worn, that the phrasebook of the media imposes its miserable norm everywhere, that Dante lessons in poor English are held in university classrooms: in such conditions, how can we expect someone to be able to formulate a correct thought and act accordingly with probity and prudence? Nor is it surprising that the ones who handle such a language have lost any awareness of the relationship between language and truth, and therefore believe they can use words which no longer correspond to any reality according to their wicked profit, to the point of no longer realising they are lying. The truth we are talking about here is not only the correspondence between discourse and facts, but, even before it, the memory of the apostrophe that language addresses to the child who, deeply moved, utters his first words. Men who have lost all memory of this silky, exigent, loving call are literally capable, as we have seen in these last years, of any villany.
Therefore, let us continue to concern ourselves with the commas even if the house is on fire, let us speak to each other with care, without any rhetoric, paying listening not only to what we say, but also to what the language tells us, that little whiff of air which was once called inspiration and which remains the most precious gift that, at times, language — it matters not whether literary canon or dialect — can give us.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Mel Bochner, Language Is Not Transparent, 1970. Courtesy of WikiArt.