Review: Giorgio Agamben, ‘When the House Burns Down. From the Dialect of Thought’
Review of Giorgio Agamben’s When the House Burns Down. From the Dialect of Thought, translated by Kevin Attell (Seagull Books, 2021) 72 pages
Abstract
We live in precarious times. The war in Ukraine and the death and destruction it has visited on a nation, the reverberations felt around the world. The Covid-19 pandemic that swept through much of the globe between 2019 and 2021, the many lives lost to the disease. The millions displaced by various upheavals, in what is now the crises of migration. The cost-of-living crisis; the rising cases of poverty. Crisis after crisis, or the age of precarity. There is a crisis at the at the heart of humanity; indeed, the word ‘crisis’ has become one of the words of the current age. What exactly is going on in the world, with the world? Agamben’s latest publication is a poetical reflection on the current age.
Reviewed by Gabriel O. Apata
Leibniz thought that this world is the best of all possible worlds. Schopenhauer, on the other hand thought that this is a terrible world, full of pain and suffering, where respite is only momentary. Schopenhauer’s pessimism is grounded in the metaphysics of an unconscious will, blind and relentlessly striving but is never completely satisfied. Any attempt to trace its genealogy will find its source right under our feet as the ontological ground upon which we stand. We merely move from crisis to crisis.
For over half a century, Agamben has chronicled as well as analysed human pain, suffering, death and destruction. This is the author of the Homo Sacer, (1995), Remnants of Auschwitz (1998), State of Exception (2005) to name but a few, who popularised the concepts of the Musselman, the Bare Life. The dark side of life has been central to his philosophising, all of which sounds like Schopenhauer territory. But Agamben rejects the label of a pessimist. In an interview with Jason Smith (2020) he points out that his interviewer was more likely to pessimistic than he was. Still there is the need to locate this dark side of life that Agamben depicts. Where does it come from? How do we explain it?
One will not find the answers to these questions in his latest work. When the House Burns Down is about contemporaneity. This slim volume is a philosophical and poetical reflection on some of the crises of the current age. It is an enigmatic elegy where the philosopher-poet invites the reader to sit with him on a mountain top and look down on a world that is destroying itself in a fit of madness. It is the crisis of experience, about lives stripped bare by lack of experience, about word and language and about witness. This work reads like a summary of much of Agamben’s many works.
But to properly understand this book, one must have some acquaintance with some of Agamben’s works and the most readily relevant is What is Apparatus (2009). In that work, Agamben explains that apparatus, an idea derived from Foucault’s dispositif, ‘refers to a set of practices and mechanisms (both linguistic and juridical, technical and military) that aim to face an urgent need and to obtain an effect that is more or less immediate’ (8). Apparatus is facility or instrumentation, a technology of capture and control, like public institutions such as schools, prisons, hospitals etc., ‘but also the pen, writing literature, philosophy, computers, cellular phones and why not language itself which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses?’
The book’s third chapter, What is Contemporary? is key here. What does it mean to be contemporary? To be contemporary is not merely to be present at, or current with one’s age, since one can be present and still lack consciousness of the present. To be contemporary is to be alert and to be a witness. But the witness is not a historian, or a chronicler but a philosopher and a poet. Or ‘The contemporary’, he writes, ‘is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure. The contemporary is precisely the person who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present’ (46). It is where the pen captures reflection on experience.
But why philosophy and poetry? It is because poetry and philosophy can together produce a dialect (not a dialectic) or language of thought. Here Agamben cites the poet Osip Mandelstam’s poem Vek “The Century” (1923) where Mandelstam speaks of a century whose vertebrae is broken and asks who would weld it together. Not the individual who belongs to the age and whose back is shattered and unable to turn cannot see the tracks behind. Yet, it is he who lives precisely at the point of fracture, within the gaping crack where darkness reigns, and a certain blindness like a curtain drops, but where one can still see the flicker of the light appears but remains some distance away. Yet, to be contemporary is not to allow yourself to be ‘blinded by the light of the century’. The slaves in Plato’s cave see only flickers of flame, but never as the consuming fire of their ignorance.
This is the context in which this book might be situated, as an extension of that idea of contemporaneity and apparatus. The book has four chapters: When the House Burns Down; Door and Threshold, Lessons in the Darkness and Testimony and Truth.
The first chapter When the House Burns Down is a metaphor for our time, a time that is present and continuous. Like Dante’s inferno from which the grace of purgation remains elusive and paradise is a long way away. It is a world beyond sensorium but one in which the senses are implicated. We have eyes but we might as well be blind. The house is burning, but ‘Which house is burning?’ He asks. ‘The country where you live or Europe or the whole world? Perhaps the houses, the cities have already burned down – who knows how long ago? – in a single immense blaze that we pretended not to see’ (2-3). ‘How long has the fire been burning? Certainly, a century ago – between 1914 and 1918 that the everything into the flames’ and thirty years later, the flames broke out everywhere’ (5).
The fire is many things, but first it is war. Wars are fires that burn and consume everything in their path. The Iraq war and Guantanamo Bay for example. But the fire is also metaphorical and spells crisis – pain, hunger, poverty, suffering -crisis that burns. For when houses burn, people feel the heat and sometimes they too are burnt. At other times, they seem to be unaware of the fire as crisis or crisis as fire. ‘We live in houses’, he says, ‘in cities burnt to the ground as if they were still standing; the people pretend to live there and go out on the streets masked against the ruins as if these were familiar neighbourhoods of times past.’
About an actual war, we have a contemporary example to call upon. In February 2022, for reasons unclear, Russia launched an unprovoked military attack on Ukraine. Was it for geopolitical reasons, to prevent NATO expansionism, to stop Ukraine joining the EU or the desire to re-establish the Soviet Empire. Whatever the reasons, a nation has been set alight, ablaze and the fire is raging. The house of Ukraine is burning, and the rest of the world is feeling the heat. Agamben does not use the word crisis, nor does he mention Ukraine, but there is a war going on in that country, a war of destruction and death. Wars destroy things, but they destroy experience as well. It is what Benjamin (1933) calls the ‘poverty of experience’ an idea to which Agamben alludes. Benjamin traces this poverty of experience to the WWI. ‘With this tremendous development of technology’, writes Benjamin, ‘a completely new poverty has descended on mankind.’ What experience can exist amidst conflagrations? Word cannot replace the void that non-experience leaves, it can only remind it of that void.
In Infancy and History (1993) Agamben discourses the question of language and the destruction of experience. ‘Today, we know that destruction of experience no longer necessitates a catastrophe, and the humdrum life in any city will suffice…Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience’ (13-14). Daily life in the city is also a kind of fire that is burning, a kind of crisis that does not translate into experience. We either do not know it or pretend not to notice it.
Chapter 2 In Lessons in Darkness, Agamben sets up a series of dialogues among letters of the Jewish alphabet: Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Zayin etc., which revolve around contemporaneity. Every age needs a prophet that would speak to it about its own times. The contemporary is also a prophet, a seer who can discern what is wrong with the age and who possesses the words, the language of expression but one who also shrinks from the enormity of the task. ‘To whom does the prophet speak?’ he asks, ‘To a city, a people’ (33). Even though people have ears but can be deaf to what is being said. The prophet, who is a philosopher and a poet, announces the birth of the Kingdom. But which is the Kingdom? Agamben does not say. All we know is that the Kingdom is the here and now; it is the world in which we live. But if there is a Kingdom, there must be a king or a sovereign. We have taken over sovereignty from any individual; we have become collectively sovereign.
The Kingdom is fashioned by the word. ‘In the beginning as the word’ says John 1:1. The word is factorem. As Agamben puts it, ‘The kingdom always coincides with the announcement’ (34). ‘The announcement then becomes a lament and execration, criticism and accusation, and the kingdom becomes a threatening sign or a lost paradise’ (36). Like Isaiah, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, a cry which no one appears to hear, or Jeremiah mournfully lamenting the woes of the age, a lament no one notices. ‘Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom…’, says Matthew 13:43, ‘Who has ears let him hear.’
Agamben goes on to say that ‘Humankind today is disappearing, like a face in the sand erased on the shore. But that which is taking its place no longer has a world; it is only a bare life, mute and without history, at the mercy of calculations of power and science’ (16). But who is reducing the people to their biological existence and making humankind to disappear? The answer is other people who inhabit or who dwell in the kingdom.
The fire is also power and its effect, power that consumes, including the one who possesses it, who exercises it as well as those on whom it is applied. Power is ubiquitous, says Foucault. We are complicit in totalitarianism. We have become biopolitical. We see this idea already expressed in State of Exception, (2005) where he notes that ‘Faced with the unstoppable progression of what has been called ‘global Civil War, the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics’ (2). But in this new book he repeats the point, ‘Governing bare life is the madness of our time. People reduced to their pure biological existence are no longer human: the government of people and the government of things coincide’ (6-7). Dario Gentile for instance, in the Age of Precarity, (2018) grounds the idea of crisis in governmentality. So, ‘What contemporaries are neither willing nor able to see is their daily intimacy with the Kingdom. And at the same time, their living ‘as though they were not the Kingdom’ (34).
In chapter 3 Door and Threshold Agamben makes a distinction between a door as a threshold or a passage through which one enters and exit from one place to another. He distinguishes between a door as threshold and the door as a panel, made of wood or iron. The door as threshold facilitates movement or crossing while the door as a panel is meant to control passage through the threshold, a structure that can be closed. The two sides of the panel door are designated. One side could be profane, and the other side sacred - santio. The panel as door acts as a threshold that cannot be crossed, a kind of prohibition - a law for example. ‘The law is the panel-door that prohibits or permits the passage of actions among thresholds that articulate relations among men’ (22). Indeed, the idea of transgression or sin, of breaking the law is precisely predicated on the existence of the panel door. He takes issue with Simmel’s notion of connection and separation in the “Bridge and the Door” (1994). But what does this all mean? The reader will have to interpret as they see fit.
The last chapter, chapter four is Testimony and Truth addresses the question witness and testimony. Much of what he has to say here already exist in Remnants of Auschwitz. Again, to be a witness is to be contemporary. Testimony is a form of witness, because for Agamben ‘testimony has to do with a capacity to be affected, at the point in which it is not affected by an external object – or not only by it – but also, and above all, by its own receptivity’ (68). Truth of testimony is not propositional, i.e., cannot be true or false. A witness is someone like Primo Levi who was present, was affected and could bear witness to the horrors of the concentration camps. The words one uses to describe the experience are not abstractly formulated but are derived from experience. Testimony begins with speechlessness or stunned silence which the witness attempts to overcome. Two things stand in relation to each other: the witness and that which is witnessed. The first is affected while the second is affecting. It is about what the witness saw, heard and felt, and articulates.
However, surprisingly Agamben does not mention or address perhaps the most pressing crisis of this age, the environment or climate change crisis. The house could be interpreted as our world, the world in which we live, the environment that sustains and protects life. Every little act of destruction contributes to this burning flame that’s consuming the house in which we live.
So, where does all this come from, this death and destruction, pain and suffering, these fires, these crises? For Agamben, it is not a transcendental blind will that is responsible, but the wilfulness of mankind, consciousness and active yet convulsed by an almost inexplicable madness. That madness is political, hence a biopolitics that reduces people to bare life. To be able to deconstruct the crisis of the age, to bear witness to it is a veritable service to that age. Agamben may not be a Schopenhauer or a Leibniz, he is certainly contemporary.
References
Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. California: Stanford University Press
Agamben, Giorgio (1993) Infancy and History. The Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London, New York: Verso.
Agamben, Giorgio (2009) What is Apparatus? And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. California: Stanford University Press
Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Danial Heller-Roazen. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press
Agamben, Giorgio (2005) State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago Ill: Chicago University Press.
Benjamin, Walter (1933) Experience and Poverty. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Die Welt im Wort. Prague
Gentile, Dario (2018) The Age of Precarity: Endless Crisis as an Art of Government. Verso.
Smith, Jason (2010) “I am Sure that You are More Pessimistic than I am…” Rethinking Marxism. Journal of Economics, and Culture and society. Vol. 16 pp.115-125
https://doi.10.1080/08935690410001676186
Simmel, Georg (1994) “Bridge and Door.” Translated by Mark Ritter. Theory, Culture and Society. Vol. 11 Issue 1. Pp.5-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327694011001002
Gabriel O. Apata is a research scholar and writer whose works cut across the humanities and social sciences. His interests include Philosophy, Sociology, Aesthetics, Religion, Post-colonial Studies, African history and politics and Diaspora Studies.
