| Argamben
Translated | Lanjiang
Excerpt from | When the house burned down
Third, guidance in the darkness
Today, there is little room for the Prophet, and the few who try to seize the prophet's position seem to have little legitimacy. In fact, what the prophet had to solve was how to get out of the darkness of that time, but in order to do so, he had to allow himself to escape into the darkness, not to think that he was intact—people do not know by what gift or virtue—he was intellectually sober. Jeremiah stuttered to the Lord who called out to him—"A, a, a, a, a," and immediately added, "Look, I can't speak, I'm a child."
To whom did the prophet speak? He came to a city-state, to a nation. However, the peculiarity of the "book of Acts" that records him is that these actions cannot be understood, and the language he speaks is mysterious. In fact, the effectiveness of his discourse comes precisely from its unheard function, which, to some extent, is misunderstood. In this sense, prophecy is what a child says to someone else, and fundamentally that person will not be able to hear it. And it is the close union of these two elements—the necessity of "apostrofe" and its meaninglessness—that defines prophecy.
Why can't I hear the words of the prophets? Not because they condemned the shortcomings of his contemporaries and the darkness of his time. Rather, this is because the object of prophecy is the existence of the kingdom, which carefully intervenes in every plot and gesture, and the here and now, the kingdom, exists tenaciously. What contemporary people cannot and do not want to see is their daily intimacy with the Kingdom. At the same time, they live in a kingdom "as if they were not kingdoms."
How did the kingdom come about and does it really exist? Not as a thing, as a group, as a church, as a congregation. The kingdom always happens in parallel with its proclamation, and it has no reality other than to say its words—allegories. Sometimes, a mustard, a weed, a net thrown into the sea, a pearl—but not as something expressed in words, but as their announcement of it. The coming of the Kingdom is the Word that proclaims it.
To listen to the words of the kingdom means to experience the origin of the word, to experience a word that always comes and is always incomprehensible, that appears alone and first in the mind, that people do not know where it comes from and where it is going; that it enters into another experience of language, a dialect or idiom, no longer specified by grammar and name, vocabulary and syntax—and it is only with this effort that it can proclaim and proclaim itself. This proclamation, this insignificant, radically transformed word, is the kingdom.
Experiencing the origin of the word means tracing back a long historical process in which people interpret their existence as having a meaningful language consisting of names, grammar, and syntactic rules. Thus, the result of the patient work of thinking and analyzing is thus projected into the past, becoming a real presupposition, as if the grammar constructed by man is really the original structure of language. In this sense, the kingdom is nothing more than restoring the word to its dialectal and declared nature, beyond or above all languages.
Whoever has this experience of the word, in this sense, who is the poet, and not purely the reader of his word, will see in every small fragment of fact its traces (segnatura) - its existence verified in every event and in every circumstance, without arrogance or emphasis, as if he were clearly aware that everything that happened to himself was commensurate with the proclamation, putting aside all external things and all power, more intimate and at the same time more distant.
The proclamation is obscure, and for those who do not understand it, the pronouncement will be misunderstood, and in the end it will regurgitate those who proclaim it, separating them from his people and from his own life. Then the proclamations turned into lamentations and condemnations, criticisms and accusations, and the kingdom became a threatening sign or a paradise lost—no longer a sweet and living paradise anyway. Its words no longer know how to declare: it can only prophesy or lament.
The kingdom is not a goal to be achieved, not the end of a peace of mind on earth or in heaven. It is not a question of a country that imagines and implements a more just system or less tyranny. Nor is it a question of thinking about a long, brutal transition phase in which the final justice will come to earth.
The Kingdom is already here, everyday and humble, yet the Kingdom is irreconcilable with the power to try to disguise and hide it, to prevent it from being loved and recognized, or to transform it into future events. The Word of the Kingdom does not produce new institutions, nor does it form new laws: it is the poorest of powers, and in every sphere it abolishes powers and institutions, including those churches or parties that claim to represent it and embody it.
Thus, the experience of the kingdom is the experience of the power of discourse. What the word destroys is first and foremost language. In fact, without the first language that created and sustained these forces, it would be impossible to abolish the power that dominates the earth today. Prophecy is the knowledge of the essence, the knowledge of the language in which it speaks. Therefore, poetry is also closely related to the political sphere.
Abandoning one language is the most difficult task. In fact, the language itself is only a collection of dead letters, and it pretends—but it is a practical kind of pretense that constitutes its greatest power—and in it contains the living voice of man, with a place, life, and foundation in the voice of the man who speaks. In each section, the grammar mentions this hidden sound, capturing it in its letters and phonemes. But there is no sound in the language. And our time is an age in which language shows its emptiness and aphasia everywhere, becoming chatter or scientific formalism. Kingdom idioms restore the sound of sounds outside the language.
The language realm is the scene of constant conflict between words and language, idioms and grammar. It is necessary to free us from the prejudice that, according to this prejudice, a word is an act of implementation, a repeated application of language, as if it existed somewhere in advance as a substantial reality, and as if in order to speak we had to open a grammar book or consult a dictionary at every time. Obviously, languages only exist in use. So, if it cannot be a faithful and obedient execution of the language, but, on the contrary, an agreement with it— or rather, with its guardians, both inside and outside us, to ensure that every time what we say to each other is brought back to the form and identity of the language, then what is the purpose of this?
In Dante's case, it was a conflict between the vernacular and the grammatical language, between the vernacular of the city and the nobles. It is a vague and valuable contrast, a contrast that is repeated and taken for granted, and in the process the vernacular always falls back into the language; just as over time the language distorts the poet's intentions and becomes Italian. Faced with this situation, today dialects have replaced the vernacular for us, and they have once again become a word "from a place where there is no writing and no grammar".
What we call dialects—in any language—is the source usage of the word. I think of the nobles' yaguya, which poetically moves the dialect toward another grammar, but toward a language that lacks it, nevertheless like a pantera profumata, which has this ambiguity in all languages and utterances.
If this is not a question of formulating the vocabulary and grammar of the language, not of expressing sound in nouns and propositions, then what do we do when we speak? When we speak, we enter the public sphere, we allow things to appear in their revelation and at the same time be obscured; to speak, but never to say; to exist, but never as objects. Yet we soon forget that the things we are talking about obscure the fact that we are talking about them, that they become objects of discourse and communication, that they leave openness and kingdom. However, this situation of falling into symbolic discourse is not separated into another place: everything happens in language, and in our speech it is both the darling of the kingdom and the objective language, dialect, and grammar. And the comings and goings from one to the other, together in flight, in harmony in different agreements, is poetry.
Names don't tell the whole story: they call them out in public and protect them in appearance. These propositions do not convey a message: snow is not the content of the proposition "snow is white", and we have never pronounced it in such a neutral way. Snow white is its sudden, joyful, flawless appearance on winter mornings. This is an event, not a fact.
In names and propositions, we transcend names and propositions so that things appear nameless for an instant before us, because their names are nameless and indelible, because they are called wise and nameless Gods.