While I like Agamben I find him largely trying to essentialize things like this without much thought to the relevant literature - in philosophy, anthropology, whatever. Check out like, Leroi-Gourhan on this. I just think Agamben is trying to delimit an ‘essence’ of the human as linguistic, which does not follow from my studies
Dude this is so far from true for biological/physical anthropologists (the ones that do bi-cultural evolution) and even some biologists (Gould, etc)Point taken - though in fairness to Agamben,…
I don’t know him well at all - I’ve read some secondary stuff on Homo Sacer and I picked up “The Sacrament of Language” a little while back (which I’ve just now dug into, as you might surmise from the quotes I’m posting). I can definitely see what you mean by “delimit[ing] an ‘essence’ of the human as linguistic” though. From the paragraph after the quote I posted:
…the specificity of human language with respect to animal language cannot reside solely in the peculiarity of the instrument, which later analyses could find - and, in fact, continually do find - in this or that animal language. It consists, rather, no less decisively in the fact that uniquely among living things, man is not limited to acquiring language as one capacity among others that he is given but has made of it his specific potentiality; he has, that is to say, put his very nature at stake in language. Just as, in the words of Foucault, man “is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question”… so also is he the living being whose language places his life in question.
Emphasis in original. So yeah, that’s happening.
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autochthones reblogged this from interruptions and added:
It’s just a tad too much Heidegger for me. I prefer Stiegler to most others on the question of the ‘human’. Still like...
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interruptions reblogged this from autochthones and added:
I just think Agamben...trying to delimit an ‘essence’ of the human as linguistic, which...
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