Agamben, Experimentum Linguæ and the Problem of Infancy Categories and Paradoxes of the Concept of “Pure Language”

Introduction
In sections 1.14 and 1.15 of Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben reflects on the story of one of the victims recounted in Primo Levi’s documentary novel The Truce (La tregua): a young boy, about three years old, who could not speak, was paralyzed from the waist down, and brought from Auschwitz III to the main camp by Red Army soldiers shortly after the liberation of the Nazi camps on January 27, 1945. Piecing together the disordered sounds that occasionally escaped his mouth, the other survivors named him Hurbinek. He died a few weeks later. What remains of him, in Levi’s memory, is the image of a suffering child, with skeletal legs and a thin, triangular face, from which two eyes stared out, thirsty for words. However, in the days before his death, Hurbinek’s tongue managed to shape a fragment of language – one word, or something close to it: mass-klo or matisklo. Other survivors at Auschwitz tried, each in their own language, to ascribe meaning to the term, but its mystery was never solved. What makes no doubt is the boy’s desperate effort to pass from a vague, inarticulate voice to something syllabic, something that resembled speech.
 
Problematization
It is not clear whether Hurbinek’s word had any external referent – that is, whether it actually signified something. So, before questioning the meaning of mass-klo, one must first ask whether the very possibility of signification exists for this utterance. While such a question might seem extravagant, it finds justification in the preface Giorgio Agamben wrote in 1989, entitled “Experimentum Linguæ”, for the French translation of Infancy and History. In that preface, Agamben describes the experience of language as, above all, a “transcendental experience”: one that reveals language in its self-referential character, independent of external objects. To illustrate this idea, Agamben turns to two seemingly unrelated cases. The first is Kant’s “experience of pure reason,” which Agamben interprets as a kind of linguistic experience involving transcendental objects – objects that can be conceived only through a language detached from empirical reality, employing what Kant called “empty concepts without reference.” The second is the experience of the infant, who engages with language not as a tool directed toward the world, but as a medium that exists in and for itself, in its pure potentiality. This parallel raises a set of critical questions regarding the similarities and differences between the linguistic experience of the infant and that of the philosopher – both at the “ontological-transcendental” level and at the didactic level.
 
Discussion
It appears that the philosophical experience of language is not merely an “ontological” and “transcendental” one – as Agamben suggests in relation to Wittgenstein, Heidegger or Foucault’s encounters with language – but also a didactic experience. This pedagogical dimension of “experimentum linguæ” is highlighted by Dominique Rabaté in his reading of Agamben’s Infancy and History: “For the Italian philosopher, says Rabaté, it is urgent to conceive the human subject not as an animal loquens (as philosophical tradition has always defined it) but rather as a being who never ceases to learn to speak; who continually undergoes the difficulty, the experiment and the apprenticeship of language. No subject can ever truly say that he knows how to speak entirely; he is always learning his native language as well as any new foreign language” (1999: 212). At the same time, if there is a difference between the linguistic experience of the philosopher and that of the infant, it lies in the fact that the philosopher encounters language at the limits of speech – within silence, or when language fails (as in Heidegger) – whereas the infant engages language with a wager on the possibility of saying. This raises a fundamental question: what does “saying” mean, and to what extent can the infant’s articulated voice – in this case, that of Hurbinek – be considered part of logos. Further questions follow: is the infant's pure language the same as the articulated voice? Is it a “naming language”? Where is the Benjamin’s “pure language of names” to be found? And perhaps more importantly: is “experimentum linguæ” an experience of phonemes, of names, of words, or of discourse?
 
Grounds of our questions
Once again, the underlying rationale for our questions lies in Agamben’s own reflections – particularly in his “theory of infancy” formulated in response to the questions posed by Saussure and Benveniste concerning the relationship between the word and discourse. “It is the fact that man has an infancy (in other words, he must expropriate himself from infancy, in order to constitute himself as a subject in language) that he breaks the ‘closed world’ of the sign (see Benveniste) and transforms pure language into human discourse, the “sémiotique” into the “sémantique”. Insofar as he has an infancy; insofar as he is not always already speaking, man cannot enter language as a system of signs without radically transforming it, without constituting it as discourse” (Agamben, 2002: 103).
 
Method
Given Agamben’s “philosophical” – and thus “problematological” (see Meyer) – response to the questions posed by Saussure and Benveniste, and given the paradoxes of his response, our research adopts a dialectical and critical approach to explore various dimensions of the theory of infancy, as well as the concepts of “pure language” and “experimentum linguæ”.
 
Provisional synthesis
This article proposes a form of “non-transcendental problematology” of the “theory of infancy” – a gesture that could, in a certain sense, be seen as a betrayal of the timeless and transcendental notion of “infancy” as articulated by Agamben in Infancy and History. Yet this very betrayal – this act of stripping infancy of its metaphysical aura – may in fact be consistent with Agamben’s own reflections on profanation, understood as the “desacralization” of the sacred, and, simultaneously, of transcendental concepts (see Agamben, 2005/2). The attempt to intertwine the story of Hurbinek with a theory of infancy without infant, thus constitutes both the first infidelity to that theory and the first step toward its “naturalization” – its descent from abstraction into the realm of lived experience.   
 
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