Forlag: AUDIATUR og VAGANT
(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
I read the book, where the preface and the essay text are about the same length. I find myself on a journey through the largest reservation in Arizona and adjacent states. One morning the Navajo-Hopi Observer newspaper could tell that the last so-called code talker was dead, aged 107. The code talkers were recruited from the American armed forces and particularly distinguished themselves in the Second World War, with their unbreakable code language based on the Navajo's own language Diné, which had never before been written down.
We have moved from an animalistic confusion to sounds that are channeled into articulate and grammaticalized meaning production.
Now it is not oral versus written language that the philosopher Agamben addresses in his original commencement lecture at the University of Milan in 2017, which was published last year as a bonus essay to La voce umana ("The Human Voice"), but the voice itself. It is nevertheless plausible to think that oral primitive languages are closer to "the pure human sound", with calls over great distances and interactions with nature. For Agamben, the voice is the arena where Western man has staged the mythologem of his own becoming, in the transition between and in the articulation of nature and culture. Between the living body and Logos. In the living body there is no such transition, for it never ceases to be a living body or pure nature. IN votes, however, this transition will have already taken place. The main thesis is that we have moved from an animalistic confusion to sounds that are channeled into articulated and grammaticalized meaning production. Man is the creature whose nature has been split in two: between the carefully articulated and the irrevocably heterogeneous.
The invocation
Can we talk about humans having a specific voice, a kind of foreword, on a par with the neighing of a horse and the meowing of a cat? And if so, is it in the language? It is here that we recognize Agamben's thoughts about bare life's alternate exclusion from and encapsulation in the political form of life.
Can we talk about humans having a specific voice, a kind of foreword, on a par with the neighing of a horse and the meowing of a cat?
Without Selnes' solid grasp of the translation and dissemination, it would have been more difficult to follow Agamben, who not only takes as his starting point ancient etymology and grammar, with its changes through the Middle Ages and up to the present day, but also refers to modern philosophers, where, among other things, a. Derrida gets slapped on the rope. You must have a philosophical interest in linguistics, because Agamben uses the cases to distinguish what Selnes has translated into calling, i.e. call / to (on) call (call), and naming (nominate). Cases come off to fall, to fall, that's how the words fall in the language, and all belong to naming – except vocative (the direct form: you Jens, doctor, Bob...). The vocative is used for the inquiry, or the summons, which has nothing to do with the formation of meaning. The term vocative is related to the Latin vox, voice, and an invocation not only points beyond a communicative function, it also reminds us of how the voice is present in language, in front of the meaning. We invoke something that has already been "called" by name.
Since the vocative is not part of the sentence logic of the utterance, it does not belong to the language system. Rather, it is the voice's reminiscence. But, and here we are at the core, however developed the language is, the use of vocative cannot be said to be a peculiarity of the human voice either. In animals, the call, voice or sound surpasses our voice to such an extent that Agamben questions whether man can even be said to have a voice of his own prior to language. It is precisely the call that defines the species, and we have handed it over to language, as the call is already articulated. An inarticulate human call would probably work against its purpose, he believes, the 'naked' voice would scare most people away – unless it is an infant. Then we have to resort to sound-painting words, onomatopoeic, and create a phonetic imitation.
The defense's code talkers established, for example, a phonetic alphabet, but not a phonetic one, e.g. got the word "ant", wo-la-chee, stand for the letter "a".
Reconciliation
We are also going to Heidegger's Mood. Agamben has previously written about the connection between the voice and the "mood" – or "mood", which Mood can also mean. Here in the sense of a "reconciliation" prior to the meaning. He enters into a discourse about the metalanguage and the naming of our 'primary language' reality, and the conclusion is, as I understand it, that living man has acquired Logos by displacing one's own voice and taking up residence in society, polis. And thus supplant the bare life as described in Holy man.
Man has appropriated Logos by displacing one's own voice and taking up residence in society, polis.
Homo sapiens has in Agamben's context become synonymous with the naked life. A sacred life, an outsider, which can just as well be killed with impunity from the law. It says something about the original ambivalence towards the sacred, but also about how one politically constitutes a state of emergency. Homo sapiens thus becomes the emblem of how the sovereign power can point out a life that is neither worth saving nor killing.
For Agamben, the concentration camp prisoner is the best example, not because the policy of extermination is the product of a totalitarian regime, but because it requires for this policy lay an opportunity to consider a human life in that way. Agamben claims that the same possibility underlies democracy, as when the authorities operate as a biopower with an emphasis on the population, and not on the individual. A thesis he used when he blogged enthusiastically against the authorities' vaccine program during the pandemic.
Calling and naming
For Agamben, the philosophical problem thus begins with grammar, the formation of language, and he gives a brief genealogy of the relationship phone/vox and Logos. The relationship between the element (the sound) which belongs to the living body, as nature, and the element which is in a certain sense external and which originates from history. He reminds us that the vocative also divides: in calling and naming, onomata og Logos, name and address. In the semantic and the semiotic. One can be translated, the other cannot.
He goes to great lengths to argue that the vocative has no symbolic function, by claiming that to (call on) and to mean (significare) are not the same. As when Rilke in Duino-elegiar writes: "O und die Nacht" (O and the night). The sentence is stripped of any immediate reference, although the "night" is named, indeed, the naming itself is celebrated. Feires also makes the O, then as a pure sign. He does not mention that the O has a long history as a reference background.
Iron fish
The Navajo's code talkers were particularly crucial to the US Navy in the Pacific, and the paradox of them using their own then-forbidden language to fight for the America that had sent them to chains, reservations and boarding schools was bitter. Most of them were forced into the program, and another paradox: in that way they made Diné a written language – and thus preserved it. New words were created: submarine came into being iron fish. But recognition of the war effort was long overdue.
Agamben is not only recognized, he is considered one of the most important philosophers of our time, and with this thin book on the occasion of the online bookstore Audiatur and the magazine Vagant's project Vanishing point, we have been enriched with yet another solid Agamben translation.
