Peoples who have lost their language
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, October 11, 2024
What about European peoples today? What today we cannot but see is the spectacle of their getting lost and memoryless in the language in which at one time they had found themselves. The modes of this getting lost vary for each people: the Anglo-Saxons have already completed the entire way towards a purely instrumental and objectifying language — basic English, by which one can only exchange messages that are more and more similar to algorithms — and the Germans seem to be headed down the same path; the French, despite their cult of the national language and perhaps even because of it, lost in the almost normative relation between the speaking and the grammar; the Italians, cunningly settled on that bilingualism that was their wealth and that, everywhere turns into a senseless jargon. And, if the Jews are or at least were part of European culture, it is well to remember Scholem’s words in the face of the secularisation carried out by Zionism of a sacred language into a national language: “We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of the abyss... This language is laden with future catastrophes... The day will come when it will turn against those who speak it”.
In any case, what has happened is the loss of the poetic relation with the language and its replacement with an instrumental relation in which the one who believes he is using language is instead unknowingly used by it. And since language is the very form of anthropogenesis, of the living homo-becoming human, it is the very humanity of man that now appears threatened. The decisive point, however, is that the more a people gets lost in its own language, which becomes somehow foreign or too familiar to it, the less it is possible to think in that language. This is why now we see the governments of European peoples, that have become incapable of thinking, imprisoning themselves in a lie which they can’t sort out. A lie of which the liar is not aware is in reality simply an impossibility of thinking, the inability to interrupt, at least for an instant, the purely instrumental relation with one’s own word. And if men can no longer think in their own language, no wonder if they feel obliged to transfer thought to artificial intelligence.
It goes without saying that this getting lost of the peoples in the language that was their vital dwelling has first and foremost a political significance. Europe will not come out from the dead end into which it is falling unless it first recovers a poetic and thinking relation with its words. Only at this price will a Europan policy — one which today does not exist — become eventually possible.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, October 11, 2024
What about European peoples today? What today we cannot but see is the spectacle of their getting lost and memoryless in the language in which at one time they had found themselves. The modes of this getting lost vary for each people: the Anglo-Saxons have already completed the entire way towards a purely instrumental and objectifying language — basic English, by which one can only exchange messages that are more and more similar to algorithms — and the Germans seem to be headed down the same path; the French, despite their cult of the national language and perhaps even because of it, lost in the almost normative relation between the speaking and the grammar; the Italians, cunningly settled on that bilingualism that was their wealth and that, everywhere turns into a senseless jargon. And, if the Jews are or at least were part of European culture, it is well to remember Scholem’s words in the face of the secularisation carried out by Zionism of a sacred language into a national language: “We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of the abyss... This language is laden with future catastrophes... The day will come when it will turn against those who speak it”.
In any case, what has happened is the loss of the poetic relation with the language and its replacement with an instrumental relation in which the one who believes he is using language is instead unknowingly used by it. And since language is the very form of anthropogenesis, of the living homo-becoming human, it is the very humanity of man that now appears threatened. The decisive point, however, is that the more a people gets lost in its own language, which becomes somehow foreign or too familiar to it, the less it is possible to think in that language. This is why now we see the governments of European peoples, that have become incapable of thinking, imprisoning themselves in a lie which they can’t sort out. A lie of which the liar is not aware is in reality simply an impossibility of thinking, the inability to interrupt, at least for an instant, the purely instrumental relation with one’s own word. And if men can no longer think in their own language, no wonder if they feel obliged to transfer thought to artificial intelligence.
It goes without saying that this getting lost of the peoples in the language that was their vital dwelling has first and foremost a political significance. Europe will not come out from the dead end into which it is falling unless it first recovers a poetic and thinking relation with its words. Only at this price will a Europan policy — one which today does not exist — become eventually possible.
(English translation by I, Robot)
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