While
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 14, 2024
To free our thinking from the enticement which prevent it from taking flight, it is best first of all to accustom it to no longer think in nouns (which, as the name itself unequivocally betrays, imprison it in that “substance”, with which a thousand-year-old tradition believed it could grasp being), but rather (as William James once suggested) in prepositions and maybe in adverbs. That thinking and the mind itself have, so to say, a non-substantive character, but an adverbial one, is what the singular fact reminds us that in our language to form an adverb it is enough to add the suffix “ly” to an adjective: lovingly, cruelly, wonderfully. The noun — the substantive one — is quantitative and imposing, the adverb qualitative and light; and, if you find yourself in difficulty, it certainly will not be a “what” that pulls you out of your embarrassment, but a “how”, an adverb and not a noun. “What to do?” paralyses you and nails you down; it is only “how to do?” that opens up to you a way out.
Thus to think of time, which has always put a strain on philosophers’ mind, nothing is more useful than to rely — as poets do — upon adverbs: “always”, “never”, “already”, “now”, “still” — and, perhaps — the most mysterious of all — “while”. “While” (from Latin dum interim) does not designate a time, but a “meantime”, that is, a curious simultaneity between two actions or two times. Its equivalent in verbal modes is the gerund, which is neither strictly a verb nor a noun, but supposes an accompanying noun or verb: “So still go onward, and in going listen”, says Virgil to Dante, and everyone remembers Romagna by Pascoli, “the towm where, as we go on, we follow / the blue vision of San Marino”. Let one reflect on this special time, which we can only think of through an adverb and a gerund: it is not a measurable interval between two times, indeed it is not even a time in itself, but almost an immaterial place where we somehow dwell, in a sort of simple and interlocutory perpetuity. True thinking is not that which deduces and infers according to a before and after: “I think, and therefore I am”, but, more soberly: “while I’m thinking, I am”. And the time we live in is not the abstract and frantic rush away of ungraspable instants: it is this simple, still “while”, where, without realising it, we always already are — our counted eternity, which no worn out clock will ever be able to measure.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 14, 2024
To free our thinking from the enticement which prevent it from taking flight, it is best first of all to accustom it to no longer think in nouns (which, as the name itself unequivocally betrays, imprison it in that “substance”, with which a thousand-year-old tradition believed it could grasp being), but rather (as William James once suggested) in prepositions and maybe in adverbs. That thinking and the mind itself have, so to say, a non-substantive character, but an adverbial one, is what the singular fact reminds us that in our language to form an adverb it is enough to add the suffix “ly” to an adjective: lovingly, cruelly, wonderfully. The noun — the substantive one — is quantitative and imposing, the adverb qualitative and light; and, if you find yourself in difficulty, it certainly will not be a “what” that pulls you out of your embarrassment, but a “how”, an adverb and not a noun. “What to do?” paralyses you and nails you down; it is only “how to do?” that opens up to you a way out.
Thus to think of time, which has always put a strain on philosophers’ mind, nothing is more useful than to rely — as poets do — upon adverbs: “always”, “never”, “already”, “now”, “still” — and, perhaps — the most mysterious of all — “while”. “While” (from Latin dum interim) does not designate a time, but a “meantime”, that is, a curious simultaneity between two actions or two times. Its equivalent in verbal modes is the gerund, which is neither strictly a verb nor a noun, but supposes an accompanying noun or verb: “So still go onward, and in going listen”, says Virgil to Dante, and everyone remembers Romagna by Pascoli, “the towm where, as we go on, we follow / the blue vision of San Marino”. Let one reflect on this special time, which we can only think of through an adverb and a gerund: it is not a measurable interval between two times, indeed it is not even a time in itself, but almost an immaterial place where we somehow dwell, in a sort of simple and interlocutory perpetuity. True thinking is not that which deduces and infers according to a before and after: “I think, and therefore I am”, but, more soberly: “while I’m thinking, I am”. And the time we live in is not the abstract and frantic rush away of ungraspable instants: it is this simple, still “while”, where, without realising it, we always already are — our counted eternity, which no worn out clock will ever be able to measure.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Alfred Freddy Krupa, While Fixing Hair, 2015. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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