The Voice and the Nothing

the an-archic ontolinguistics of Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

This paper investigates Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of language, highlighting its immanent, veritative, and an-archic dimensions based on his concept of Voice. For the author, language is not merely a means of human communication, but a “having-place” that enables an ethical experience which, paradoxically founded on the absence of foundation, translates into the notion of a form-of-life capable of opposing — and eventually displacing — the traditional ontology in which language is seen as a characteristically human property. In this way, it becomes possible to radicalize the experimentum linguae referred to by the Italian philosopher in various texts, transforming it into an experimentum vocis, that is, a kind of testimony, on the part of living humans, of the self-revelation of language and the dwelling we find in it through its use. One of the distinguishing features of this text lies in the preferential reading of Agamben’s writings prior to his homo sacer project, particularly his Quaderni (1972-1981) published in 2024 in Italy, which reveal how language and an-archy, far from being marginal elements in his work, correspond to its true axes. Thus, it can be concluded that much more than a simple and unspecific “philosophy,” Agamben proposes, over six decades of work, what could be called an an-archic ontolinguistics.