PREAMBLE

If language constitutes the philosophical problem for Giorgio Agamben, it's not just any part of language that obsesses him. It is, rather, a peculiar kind of word, which twentieth-century linguistics denominated the ‘shifter’. It is even possible to say that, for Agamben, ‘in the beginning was the shifter’. In demonstrating this here, I deploy a number of words beginning with the letter ‘p’. These include: paradigm, parable, parataxis, paleonymy, potentiality, philology, prose and poeisis. These are directed against other p-words, such as ‘phatic’ and ‘performativity’. (This is admittedly kind of cheesy, but possibly mnemonically providential.) Above all, to miss the centrality of poetry in Agamben's thought is to misunderstand every salient detail of his work. As soon as ‘the question’ of ‘the political’ arises, everyone starts slavering over this signifier, and its crucial nexus with poetry is missed. Yet, as Agamben himself declares, ‘The question is not so much whether poetry has any bearing on politics, but whether politics remains equal to its original cohesion with poetry.’ It is the evidence, logic and consequences of this declaration that I explore here.

THE DOCTRINE

Agamben remains within the ‘linguistic turn’ effected in and by twentieth-century philosophy and, before that, by the great Romantic writers. Being what Anglo-Saxons like to call a ‘continental philosopher’, however, it is not simply a logico-grammatical analysis of propositions to which Agamben turns in order to establish truth-conditions, to demarcate sense from nonsense, meaningful propositions from the meaningless, logic from the illogical, science from art.