The Pure Appearance of the Young Girl
Giorgio Agamben, trans. Leland de la Durantaye, The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore
University of Chicago Press, 104pp, £17.50, ISBN 9780857420831
reviewed by Lara Mancinelli
In 1999, Tiqqun, a French collective of philosophers and activists, published Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, a disjointed text whose grating, repetitious ‘trash theory’ attempts to reveal the consumerist body. This is the body of ‘the Young-Girl’. An ageless, genderless subject, the capitalist system, Empire, constructs her as a ‘model citizen’. Moving within the ‘oblivion of Being’, the Young-Girl is the ‘void’ that ‘THEY maintain in order to hide the vividness of the void’. She is, in other words, indistinct, unquantifiable, a ‘radiant slave’ who, as an intermediary to capitalism’s affects, is fully formed from the outside. An ‘invisible war’ rages over her body.
Just over a decade later, Giorgio Agamben, a leading figure in contemporary Italian philosophy and author of the controversial Homo Sacer series, presents us with another girl, the ‘unspeakable’ girl Kore. She, like the Young-Girl, is liminal, resting on the threshold between woman and girl, mother and child, life and death, animal and divine, entirely annulling their distinctions. This figure, unlike the Young-Girl, cannot be spoken, only named. Agamben, in The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore, which includes the complementary artwork of Monica Ferrando, immerses himself in the mythological mystery of Persephone in an attempt to rid it precisely of its mystery through the dissolution of the distinction between form and content, and to thus allow ‘the unspeakable girl’ to show herself in pure appearance.
To confront the much-discussed and debated myth of the rape of Persephone, Agamben traces, in an almost disorienting fashion, the works of Kerényi and Jung, Hegel and various religious figures, as well as Aristotle and Benjamin, lynchpins of his recursive philosophy. But why Persephone? How is she not merely another powerless Young-Girl incapable of speaking and therefore of exposing herself? And how is she to be named? When and how does she appear?
As Kerényi notes in his contribution to his and Jung’s collaborative work ‘Essays on a Science of Mythology’, Kore is the manifestation of the divine in a pure, ‘marriageable girl’; Persephone, who embodies extremes and balances them against each other, is the figure of Kore par excellence. After Hades abducts Persephone, her mother Demeter, goddess of the harvest, wanders, mourning her loss and depriving earth of its fertility, and thereby threatening human existence. Eventually, Persephone is released from the Underworld for a part of the year, appeasing Demeter, and rendering Persephone twofold, situated between the living and the dead. Without a firm existence she, like all archetypes in mythology for Kerényi, is open to reshaping. In her duality, Persephone/Kore is something ‘solid and yet mobile, substantial and yet not static, capable of transformation.’ This shaping is pictorial, not spoken; the figure ‘utters’ its own meaning not through discourse but through images or naming. This unspeakablility of Kore is not - as the title misleadingly suggestions - the inability to speak, a quality that Agamben, in the wake of Benjamin, is trying to eliminate; rather, that the figure cannot be clearly defined through language.
This question of speech and communicability itself, a primary focus of Agamben’s philosophy, reappears in nearly all of his texts, and features prominently in The Unspeakable Girl. As was articulated in his early work Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (1991), there exists a fundamental negativity in language, which Agamben calls the Voice. Language, which is captured in the speaking of the ineffable and the illusion of the unspeakable, is consigned to oblivion; it must be purified by means of the experience or vision of language itself, what Agamben calls infancy – a pure communicating of communicability devoid of meaning, a condition of ‘utterance’, or what Walter Benjamin called the Divine language of naming. In modernity every ‘figure of the unspeakable’ has been ‘liquidated’ and society is left with only ‘absolutely speaking things’ whose existence is entirely founded by this ontological nothingness, the spoken Young-Girl being a perfect example of such. However, in infancy, which etymologically means to be silent or speechless, and which Agamben uses outside of any chronological determination, one can experience mute wordlessness, the pure experience of language before the ruin of meaning. Language as such bears the unspeakable but can also open. The entirely ambiguous, unspeakable Kore represents the visual experience that evades discourse while maintaining an infantile ‘budlike’ capacity to unfold and continuously ‘reveal new worlds’.
As Leland de la Durantaye, the translator of this text, points out, Benjamin plays a decisive role in Agamben’s work, typically appearing at the end of his texts as a sort of ‘antidote’ that elucidates these zones-of-indistinction. The Unspeakable Girl is no exception. Agamben writes that the idea of Benjamin’s image philosophy must be taken literally, since through it that which escapes the possibilities of discourse, or ‘the ruins of language,’ ‘shines’. Image here substitutes language and resonates with what Paul Klee described as a visual thinking. It is a communication that communicates language itself, isolated from meaning. This exposition, where form and content are entirely neutralised, is mysterious precisely because there is nothing left to conceal and discourse loses its power. We face pure appearance, or Kore, in this moment of coincidence, which leads us into new worlds, into new ways of thinking and acting.
Agamben concludes with a final evocation of the unspeakable girl. ‘We are,’ he says, ‘to live life like an initiation,’ where mystery has been erased and Kore appears. With this silent initiation we distinguish ourselves from animals; we ‘lose ourselves in the human so as to rediscover ourselves as alive.’ Man, in order to become human, must through the animal recognise himself as human and ‘raise himself above man.’ In the space between man and animal, on the borderline, where Kore exists and breaks the barrier of separation, man distinguishes himself though an initiation into his life. As Agamben writes in The Open: Man and Animal (2004), recognising this division, this space, we ‘render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man.’ We are told to live life as an initiation – an initiation to life itself where there are no voids, no mysteries, and only the vision of Kore, the ‘harmonious’ ideal form-of-life. This is not merely a ‘what I am’ but a ‘how I am what I am.’ As such, the ontology of ‘how’ becomes the central problem: how to live an initiation to life itself as a form-of-life, and to avoid its capture by the total system of power.
Tiqqun’s Young-Girl is a void where power’s control of her appearance extends to the ‘discipline of bodies.’ Her being rests in stasis; she threatens to dwell endlessly in impotentiality, never initiating herself into life, something that Agamben sees as a fundamental problem – society’s imminent catastrophe. As such, she, along with her vapid experience, must be destroyed. Agamben’s Kore, in stark contrast, exists at this very void as the threshold between the animal and the divine, between life and death, where form and content have been neutralised and we can contemplate pure, inoperative appearance through a visual experience. The charge of The Unspeakable Girl is, through this pure contemplation found apart from discourse, to locate and move into another ‘terreno’, another ‘world’, another ‘reality’, in order to escape the current circular, fracturing entrapments of power and to ‘think another dimension of life’. In Language and Death Agamben writes that ‘only a liquidation of the mystical can open up the field to a thought (or language) that thinks (speaks) beyond the Voice,’ and from which we can emerge free from its representations. We can then experience a vision, Benjamin’s thought-image, of the unspeakable, of language itself and its potentiality.
In Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, he focuses on Kafka’s ‘helpers’, his ‘unfinished creatures’ who have remained in a hazy, indistinct state of existence. These creatures, neither part of the world of all the other characters that cross Kafka’s work, nor excluded from it, are for whom hope still exists. ‘The same norms of behavior that for these messengers are smooth and flexible transform themselves into an oppressive and dark law for the rest of the Kafkaesque gallery.’ These creatures exist outside of the set law, without a fixed place, in movement. Benjamin goes on to note that Kafka’s parables, with their ‘numerous reflections’ unfold, as buds unfold into flowers. For Agamben, in the creation of literature, poetry and renaissance allegories we must try to think of man, like these helpers, as pure potentiality - as Kore, with the power to open language, to be reshaped, and to work to new possibilities.
Just over a decade later, Giorgio Agamben, a leading figure in contemporary Italian philosophy and author of the controversial Homo Sacer series, presents us with another girl, the ‘unspeakable’ girl Kore. She, like the Young-Girl, is liminal, resting on the threshold between woman and girl, mother and child, life and death, animal and divine, entirely annulling their distinctions. This figure, unlike the Young-Girl, cannot be spoken, only named. Agamben, in The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore, which includes the complementary artwork of Monica Ferrando, immerses himself in the mythological mystery of Persephone in an attempt to rid it precisely of its mystery through the dissolution of the distinction between form and content, and to thus allow ‘the unspeakable girl’ to show herself in pure appearance.
To confront the much-discussed and debated myth of the rape of Persephone, Agamben traces, in an almost disorienting fashion, the works of Kerényi and Jung, Hegel and various religious figures, as well as Aristotle and Benjamin, lynchpins of his recursive philosophy. But why Persephone? How is she not merely another powerless Young-Girl incapable of speaking and therefore of exposing herself? And how is she to be named? When and how does she appear?
As Kerényi notes in his contribution to his and Jung’s collaborative work ‘Essays on a Science of Mythology’, Kore is the manifestation of the divine in a pure, ‘marriageable girl’; Persephone, who embodies extremes and balances them against each other, is the figure of Kore par excellence. After Hades abducts Persephone, her mother Demeter, goddess of the harvest, wanders, mourning her loss and depriving earth of its fertility, and thereby threatening human existence. Eventually, Persephone is released from the Underworld for a part of the year, appeasing Demeter, and rendering Persephone twofold, situated between the living and the dead. Without a firm existence she, like all archetypes in mythology for Kerényi, is open to reshaping. In her duality, Persephone/Kore is something ‘solid and yet mobile, substantial and yet not static, capable of transformation.’ This shaping is pictorial, not spoken; the figure ‘utters’ its own meaning not through discourse but through images or naming. This unspeakablility of Kore is not - as the title misleadingly suggestions - the inability to speak, a quality that Agamben, in the wake of Benjamin, is trying to eliminate; rather, that the figure cannot be clearly defined through language.
This question of speech and communicability itself, a primary focus of Agamben’s philosophy, reappears in nearly all of his texts, and features prominently in The Unspeakable Girl. As was articulated in his early work Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (1991), there exists a fundamental negativity in language, which Agamben calls the Voice. Language, which is captured in the speaking of the ineffable and the illusion of the unspeakable, is consigned to oblivion; it must be purified by means of the experience or vision of language itself, what Agamben calls infancy – a pure communicating of communicability devoid of meaning, a condition of ‘utterance’, or what Walter Benjamin called the Divine language of naming. In modernity every ‘figure of the unspeakable’ has been ‘liquidated’ and society is left with only ‘absolutely speaking things’ whose existence is entirely founded by this ontological nothingness, the spoken Young-Girl being a perfect example of such. However, in infancy, which etymologically means to be silent or speechless, and which Agamben uses outside of any chronological determination, one can experience mute wordlessness, the pure experience of language before the ruin of meaning. Language as such bears the unspeakable but can also open. The entirely ambiguous, unspeakable Kore represents the visual experience that evades discourse while maintaining an infantile ‘budlike’ capacity to unfold and continuously ‘reveal new worlds’.
As Leland de la Durantaye, the translator of this text, points out, Benjamin plays a decisive role in Agamben’s work, typically appearing at the end of his texts as a sort of ‘antidote’ that elucidates these zones-of-indistinction. The Unspeakable Girl is no exception. Agamben writes that the idea of Benjamin’s image philosophy must be taken literally, since through it that which escapes the possibilities of discourse, or ‘the ruins of language,’ ‘shines’. Image here substitutes language and resonates with what Paul Klee described as a visual thinking. It is a communication that communicates language itself, isolated from meaning. This exposition, where form and content are entirely neutralised, is mysterious precisely because there is nothing left to conceal and discourse loses its power. We face pure appearance, or Kore, in this moment of coincidence, which leads us into new worlds, into new ways of thinking and acting.
Agamben concludes with a final evocation of the unspeakable girl. ‘We are,’ he says, ‘to live life like an initiation,’ where mystery has been erased and Kore appears. With this silent initiation we distinguish ourselves from animals; we ‘lose ourselves in the human so as to rediscover ourselves as alive.’ Man, in order to become human, must through the animal recognise himself as human and ‘raise himself above man.’ In the space between man and animal, on the borderline, where Kore exists and breaks the barrier of separation, man distinguishes himself though an initiation into his life. As Agamben writes in The Open: Man and Animal (2004), recognising this division, this space, we ‘render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man.’ We are told to live life as an initiation – an initiation to life itself where there are no voids, no mysteries, and only the vision of Kore, the ‘harmonious’ ideal form-of-life. This is not merely a ‘what I am’ but a ‘how I am what I am.’ As such, the ontology of ‘how’ becomes the central problem: how to live an initiation to life itself as a form-of-life, and to avoid its capture by the total system of power.
Tiqqun’s Young-Girl is a void where power’s control of her appearance extends to the ‘discipline of bodies.’ Her being rests in stasis; she threatens to dwell endlessly in impotentiality, never initiating herself into life, something that Agamben sees as a fundamental problem – society’s imminent catastrophe. As such, she, along with her vapid experience, must be destroyed. Agamben’s Kore, in stark contrast, exists at this very void as the threshold between the animal and the divine, between life and death, where form and content have been neutralised and we can contemplate pure, inoperative appearance through a visual experience. The charge of The Unspeakable Girl is, through this pure contemplation found apart from discourse, to locate and move into another ‘terreno’, another ‘world’, another ‘reality’, in order to escape the current circular, fracturing entrapments of power and to ‘think another dimension of life’. In Language and Death Agamben writes that ‘only a liquidation of the mystical can open up the field to a thought (or language) that thinks (speaks) beyond the Voice,’ and from which we can emerge free from its representations. We can then experience a vision, Benjamin’s thought-image, of the unspeakable, of language itself and its potentiality.
In Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, he focuses on Kafka’s ‘helpers’, his ‘unfinished creatures’ who have remained in a hazy, indistinct state of existence. These creatures, neither part of the world of all the other characters that cross Kafka’s work, nor excluded from it, are for whom hope still exists. ‘The same norms of behavior that for these messengers are smooth and flexible transform themselves into an oppressive and dark law for the rest of the Kafkaesque gallery.’ These creatures exist outside of the set law, without a fixed place, in movement. Benjamin goes on to note that Kafka’s parables, with their ‘numerous reflections’ unfold, as buds unfold into flowers. For Agamben, in the creation of literature, poetry and renaissance allegories we must try to think of man, like these helpers, as pure potentiality - as Kore, with the power to open language, to be reshaped, and to work to new possibilities.