On the Borders of Language and Death

Abstract

On the penultimate page of the Gesamtausgabe edition of Heidegger's essay "Das Wesen der Sprache" ("The Essence of Language"), we find the following brief and enigmatic passage: Die Sterblichen sind jene, die den Tod als Tod erfahren konnen. Das Tier vermag dies nicht. Das Tier kann aber auch nicht sprechen. Das Wesenverhaltnis zwischen Tod and Sprache blitzt auf, ist aber noch ungedacht. Es kann uns jedoch einen Wink geben in die Weise, wie das Wesen der Sprache uns zu sich belangt and so bei sich verhalt, fur den Fall, dass der Tod mit dem zusammenghort, was uns be-langt. [Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between language and death flashes up before us, but remains still unthought. It can, however, beckon us toward the way in which the nature of language draws us into its concern and so relates us to itself, in case death belongs together with what reaches out for us, touches us.]1 The unthought announced here, the "essential relation between language and death," still remains largely unthought today. In his book, Language and Death,2 Giorgio Agamben attempts to begin to think through this relation between language and death, and to explore the implications that a thinking of this unthought might have for a new and different understanding of the ethico-political. Our task in the present essay is not simply to reconstitute the argument of Agamben's text, but to interrogate his thought concerning the essential relation between language and death from the perspective of the question of the animal. Specifically we wish to inquire about the status and the place of the animal in a thought of community that attempts to understand the relation to language and death otherwise. Man's Ethos Beyond Voice and Negativity The introductory section of Language and Death opens with the quotation from Heidegger's On the Way to Language that we have cited above. Agamben isolates one phrase from this quotation by repeating it in italics: "The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought" (LD xi). He then proposes a thematic investigation of this relation between language and death, not only in Heidegger's text, but also in decisive places in the history of western metaphysics, specifically in Hegel, medieval grammatical thought, and modern linguistics. The structure of Agamben's task is fitting since throughout Western metaphysics man's essence has consistently been determined through the possession of one or another distinct abilities or faculties, prominent among them being the capacity for language (e.g., man as noon logon echon in Aristotle) and the capacity for death (e.g., Fahigkeit des Todes in Hegel). Is there any essential connection between these two specific capacities? Anticipating the method and conclusion of Agamben's argument, we can say here at the outset that this question will be investigated through an interrogation of the place of negativity in metaphysical theories of language and death, and that the problem of the Voice will be the clue that leads to the discovery of a common negativity at the core of both of the these capacities. Beginning with an examination of the place of negativity in metaphysics, Agamben looks to Heidegger's discussion of death in paragraphs 50-53 in Sein and Zeit. Here, Heidegger radically reverses the common notion that death is simply an accident that befalls human beings by arguing that death is essential to Dasein's existence. Dasein is not related to death like some chance occurrence that happens to come its way; rather, Heidegger insists, death is Dasein's "ownmost possibility," and as long as Dasein exists it has an essential relation to dying in the form of Being-towards-death. The anticipation of death as the possibility of the impossibility of any existence as such is witnessed or attested to in the call of conscience (Ruf des Gewissens). …