El juramento tiene una importancia decisiva en la historia política de Occidente. Está situado en la articulación entre religión y política, y testimonia esa doble pertenencia que define la especificidad y la vitalidad de la cultura occidental cristiana. El juramento ha sido la base del pacto político en la historia de Occidente. Como tal, es posible volver a encontrarlo en su función eminente, cada vez que este pacto entra en crisis o vuelve a reanudarse de formas diversas, desde los comienzos del cristianismo hasta la formación del Estado moderno ( )

I have no prior orientation to the larger Homo Sacer project of Giorgio Agamben, in which The Sacrament of Language constitutes part II.3, and it might be argued that this brief text--a mere 72 pages in Adam Kotsko's translation from the Italian--should have been published with other sections in order to justify its standing as an independent volume. But the topic, sufficiently attractive to get me to read this book, does stand on its own, and Agamben's treatment is fascinating, albeit distinctly chewy.

Rather than accepting the centuries-long tradition of viewing the oath as a rhetorical artifact of a primitive "magico-religious" culture, Agamben insists that the discursive spheres of religion and law were themselves produced by reactions to an essential experience of the oath, which he characterizes as "verediction." (57) Although unremarked as such by Agamben, this state is also the point of departure for "How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable" in Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols: "I, Plato, am the truth."

The Sacrament of Language is crucially concerned with the coeval origins of law and religion; it contemplates the tripartite anatomy of the oath as invocation, affirmation, and curse; it details the relationship of the oath to the archaic functions of [con]sacratio and devotio; and it presents the oath and blasphemy as the two sides of a single coin. The theological observations of the book should be of great interest to Thelemites: among other interesting notes about pagan and Abrahamic religions, Agamben references Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas regarding the deity (qui es) invoked in the original anthem of the Gnostic Mass (53).

The supposed context for this entire discussion of the Archaeology of the Oath is a claim advanced by Paolo Prodi in a 1992 work (Il sacramento del potere) that recent generations of the West are participating in "the irreversible decline of the oath" (1). In the final sections of Agamben's book, he outlines a scenario in which the postmodern condition dissolves the substance of Western ethics, and he proposes "philosophy" as the locus of instruction regarding our possible escape from the dilemma. I certainly appreciate and recommend his speculative philosophy, but it will be in vain unless it is seized by ones who are in fact consecrated and devoted, and put to use in the operative philosophy better known as magick.

This is a short book and a meandering one, and it strikes me that it easily could have been a chapter in a much larger volume making Agamben's complete argument in re Homo sacer (this is putatively part II-b of that larger work/series, which seems like one level of division too far to me). Alternatively, a good edit and a stronger intellectual history-type focus on his Greco-Roman materials would have given Agamben a strong article. But of course there is a marketing of Giorgio Agamben as a luminary-prophet of Theory's bronze age going on here too, and the existence of many tracts is an important element of that. The mystics of our time!

Anyway, I don't pretend to have a strong sense of the significance of Homo sacer since I haven't read the other volumes of the series, but he is the man who has been expelled from Roman society for offenses against humanity, and can now be killed by anyone without repercussion--but cannot, conversely, be sacrificed in ritual. He is the personification of the state of exception, the sacred profane.

This book looks at the roots of "exception" in the entanglement of language, religion and law, through a discussion of the oath as a Classical institution. With an impressive grounding in the Greek and Roman canon (that leaves me, at least, a bit at sea), he develops a concept of the oath not as declarative ("I swear that he stole those pears") or promissory ("I swear that I will have my revenge"), but as referring back to the gap between language and reality--as basically saying "words do not describe the world perfectly, and even if they could our perceptions are not reliable, and furthermore when we promise to do something we have essentially perjured ourselves in advance, because we can't make those kinds of statements about the many possible futures that may come". So instead the oath makes the sworn statement good in a way that obscurely papers over that gap by the invocation of the god, whose word, and that exclusively, coincides with that which is. "In the beginning was god and the word was with god and the word was god" etc. In this sense the oath is not declarative, promissory, benedictive, or punitive (since the oathbreaker is not struck down by heaven)--it is hortatory (Gk. horkos "oath"), a recognition that every truth contains a lie and an attempt to garner confidence by acknowledging the inadequacy of the word through an evocation of its limits. In that sense, though Agamben doesn't put it quite this way, a rhetorical, acknowledgment-of-possible-counteraccusations (I know there is a rhetorical term for this; if you know what it is, please message me) move. "Zeus is not a witness of the oath, but rather oath, witness, and god coincide in the utterance of the formula. As in Philo, the oath is a logos that is necessarily accomplished, and this is precisely the logos of God. The testimony is given by language itself and the god names a potentiality implicit in the very act of speech concerning the very signifying power of language." The same paradox as faith, Latin fides, being that which is placed in me by you but also that which you keep, and by which acts are "made good" (fiat).

The curse intrinsic in the oath then becomes the decrying of falsitude, rather than the affirmation that it will be punished. Blasphemy the emptying of the name of God of its semantic meaning, and magic the name of god "separated from the oath and from its connection to things, pass(ing) into a satanic murmur." This is interesting, but at the same time too programmatic and too broad. Agamben pulls it into a proper argument by the end, relating to the human's experience of him/herself as a speaking being; he cites Levi-Strauss: "man has from the start had at his disposition a signifier-totality which he is at a loss to know how to allocate to a signified ... (t)here is always a non-equivalence or "inadequation" between the two, a non-fit and overspill which divine understanding alone can soak up." Magic and religion then represent a sort of shadow on the inadequacy of language to represent the world. And it is in being a failure of language that magic represents a failure of reason--and it is in seeing the inequivalence of language and reality and trying to paper it over with the oath that Homo sapiens becomes Homo adjuraris and as a result Homo iustus.

That is a strong idea. But it strikes me that it is one better attacked with a strong anthropological spine holding up the veridictions of the prophet-theorist. ( )