The truth and the name of God
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, December 5, 2022
It’s been almost a century that philosophers have been spaking about the death of God and, as often happens, this truth seems today tacitly and almost unconsciously accepted by the common man, without, however, its consequences being assessed and understood. One of these — and certainly not the least relevant — is that God — or, rather, his name — was the first and last guarantee of the link between the language and the world, between the words and the things. Hence the decisive importance in our culture of the ontological argument, which tightened God and the language insolubly together, and of the oath sworn on the name of God, which obliged to be liable for the transgression of the bond between our words and the things.
If the death of God can’t but imply the breaking of this bond, this then means that in our society the language has become constitutively a lie. Without the guarantee of the name of God, every speech, like the oath which ensured his truth, is nothing more than vanity and perjury. That’s what we have seen appearing in full light in these last years, when every word pronounced by institutions and media was nothing but vacuity and imposture.
An almost bimillennial era of Western culture, which founded its truth and its knowledges upon the nesso between God and logos, between the sacrosanct name of God and the simple names of the things, is now coming to its final end. And it is certainly no chance that only algorithms rather than the word still seem to keep some connection with the world, even though only in the form of probability and statistics, because numbers, too, cannot but ultimately refer to a talking man, still somehow implying some names.
If we have lost our faith in the name of God, if we can no longer believe in the God of the oath and ontological argument, it is not, however, excluded that another figure of truth is possible, which is not only the theologically mandatory correspondence between the word and the thing. A truth that does not end with guaranteeing the effectiveness of the logos, but saves in it the childhood of man and preserves what is still mute in him as the most intimate and true content of his words. We can still believe in an infant God, like that child Jesus whom, as we’ve been taught, the mighty wanted and want to kill at all costs.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, December 5, 2022
It’s been almost a century that philosophers have been spaking about the death of God and, as often happens, this truth seems today tacitly and almost unconsciously accepted by the common man, without, however, its consequences being assessed and understood. One of these — and certainly not the least relevant — is that God — or, rather, his name — was the first and last guarantee of the link between the language and the world, between the words and the things. Hence the decisive importance in our culture of the ontological argument, which tightened God and the language insolubly together, and of the oath sworn on the name of God, which obliged to be liable for the transgression of the bond between our words and the things.
If the death of God can’t but imply the breaking of this bond, this then means that in our society the language has become constitutively a lie. Without the guarantee of the name of God, every speech, like the oath which ensured his truth, is nothing more than vanity and perjury. That’s what we have seen appearing in full light in these last years, when every word pronounced by institutions and media was nothing but vacuity and imposture.
An almost bimillennial era of Western culture, which founded its truth and its knowledges upon the nesso between God and logos, between the sacrosanct name of God and the simple names of the things, is now coming to its final end. And it is certainly no chance that only algorithms rather than the word still seem to keep some connection with the world, even though only in the form of probability and statistics, because numbers, too, cannot but ultimately refer to a talking man, still somehow implying some names.
If we have lost our faith in the name of God, if we can no longer believe in the God of the oath and ontological argument, it is not, however, excluded that another figure of truth is possible, which is not only the theologically mandatory correspondence between the word and the thing. A truth that does not end with guaranteeing the effectiveness of the logos, but saves in it the childhood of man and preserves what is still mute in him as the most intimate and true content of his words. We can still believe in an infant God, like that child Jesus whom, as we’ve been taught, the mighty wanted and want to kill at all costs.
(English translation by I, Robot)
José Manuel Capuletti, Romeo Y Julietta con una Testigo (Romeo and Juliet with a Witness), 1936. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
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