Wednesday, November 9, 2022

The Young and the Immortal

To the young

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, November 7, 2022

I don’t know if it makes sense to believe that one can address the “young”. Of course youth and old age live together as long as it is alive in each one and we carry always within us the young we used to be, just as the young foreshadowed, lucidly and forcibly, old age. It is just this contemporaneity of times and ages that has got lost, so that today the young become old prematurely and the old believe themselves to be young out of time.
For this I find no other words to address the young than those that on August 23, 1914 a twenty-two-year-old girl, Carla Seligson, wrote to Walter Benjamin a few days after her sister Rika had committed suicide along with her lover, the nineteen-year-old poet Christoph Friedrich Heinle. The two young had decided to take their lives right after learning the news of the outbreak of the world war. I would like the young to reflect on this decision today that the nuclear war talk has become something like a daily chat. But above all I would like that in the words of Carla Seligson they felt vibrating that “regret for a greatness missed” which according to Benjamin is the language of youth. “There are only two ages”, writes Carla Seligson, “youth and death”. It is this intact awareness of the seriousness of one’s own condition that I would like to remind the one who today believes to be young. I translated the short text literally, trying to preserve its harshness(*).

The Suicide
Death takes shape and is shaped, to die is only the end of life, gone, perished. In death, there is a relationship of the dying to the world, from which neither the one nor the other can ever escape. Who dies the death, reaches the state of the perishing world. This happens in a great power over the world, which is a devotion to her who loves him. This death is spaciously shaped, it gives birth to eternity in the omnipresence of what was lived through. Juvenile death is pure, when it becomes the deathbed of the world and appropriates entirely the bodies of things. In such a death there is born a new world, in which only matter dies. The passage to death is a renunciation of creating or working. The young rarely succeed, the old almost never. The one who dies when his time and season are come has no age, and it is only in youth that the passage does swing freely. There are only two ages: youth and death. They limit each other, the brother’s death gives to the young the richness which belongs to the immortal. His brother is thus immortal. The chain of death reaches everyone.


(*) Original German text:
Der Selbstmord
Der Tod wird gestaltet und hat Gestalt, das Sterben ist nur der Schluß des Lebens, Fortsein, Verderben. Es ist im Tode die Beziehung des Sterbenden zur Welt, der keiner der beiden nirgends entgeht. Wer den Tod stirbt, trifft den Weltzustand, der untergeht. Dies geschieht in einer großen Macht über die Welt, die ein Hingegebensein an sie, die ihn liebt, ist. Dieser Tod ist raumvoll gestaltet, er gebiert die Ewigkeit in die Allgegenwart des Gelebten. Der jugendliche Tod ist rein, wenn er zum Sterbebette der Welt wird und der Körper die Dinge sich ganz zu eigen machte. Mit solchem Tode ist die neue Welt geboren, in der nur die Materie stirbt. Der Übergang zum Tode ist Abkehr vom Schaffen oder Abkehr von Werken. Sie gelingt dem Jüngling selten, fast nie dem Greis. Auch hat der kein Lebensalter, wenn er in der Jahreszeit zur Stunde starb und nur in der Jugend schwingt frei der Übergang. Es gibt nur zwei Lebensalter: Jugend und Tod. Einander begrenzen sie ganz, des Bruders Tod schuf einen Jüngling mit dem Reiche, dem der Unsterbliche angehört. So ist sein Bruder unsterblich. Jeden erreicht die Kette der Tode.

Agamben’s Italian translation:
Il Suicidio.
La morte prende forma ed ha una forma, morire è solo la fine della vita, della perdita, della corruzione. Vi è nella morte una relazione del morente al mondo, alla quale nessuno dei due può mai sfuggire. Chi muore la morte, raggiunge lo stato del mondo che tramonta. Questo avviene in un grande potere sul mondo, che è un darsi interamente a colei che lo ama. Questa morte è spaziosamente formata, essa partorisce l’eternità nell’onnipresenza dell’amato. La morte giovanile è pura, se diventa il letto di morte del mondo e si appropria interamente dei corpi delle cose. In una tale morte nasce un nuovo mondo, nel quale solo la materia muore. Il passaggio nella morte è una rinuncia al fare o all’agire. Riesce raramente al giovane, quasi mai al vecchio. Non ha età colui che muore quando è venuta nella stagione la sua ora e solo nella gioventù si offre libero il passaggio. Ci sono soltanto due età: la gioventù e la morte. Esse confinano l’una con l’altra, la morte del fratello dona al giovane la ricchezza che appartiene all’immortale. Suo fratello è così immortale. Ciascuno raggiunge la catena della morte.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Frida Kahlo, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, 1938. Courtesy of WikiArt.

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