Hogyan tehetünk szert közvetlen tapasztalatra egy tapasztalatvesztett korban? A dialektika kritikája és a tapasztalat destrukciója Agambennél

Abstract

In Agamben’s 1978 book Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, the unusual pair of concepts can be equated with transcendental categories of experience: language and time (or the lack of them), although the question of their relationship to each other is left open. Yet, what stands at the intersection of the two is, for Agamben, initially, the notion of childhood, and afterwards the notion of potentiality, which extends later in his work into a philosophy of possibility. The work takes account of the problem of experience in three chapters: the destruction of aesthetics, then of tradition, and finally of experience itself. While for Benjamin the ‘devaluation of experience’ was caused by a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe, the First World War, for Agamben the loss of experience has become a ‘basic experience’ of the bleak everyday: the loss of personal experience means that it has become untellable and inexpressible. The present paper reconstructs the destruction of experience in Agamben’s essay and attempts to connect it with Agamben’s theory of power, known from his long-run philosophical project Homo sacer thus giving both contemporary theories a new relevance.