The Agamben Dictionary by Murray Alex Whyte Jessica. & Jessica Whyte

Author:Murray, Alex,Whyte, Jessica. & Jessica Whyte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

IRREPARABLE

Paolo Bartoloni

The title of the Appendix to The Coming Community, “The Irreparable”, deals with “the relationship between essence and existence, between quid est and quod est” (CC, 88). Through a fragmentary, aphoristic style Agamben claims to provide a “commentary” on Section 9 of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Proposition 6.44 of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Agamben’s answer to the old metaphysical conundrum, and other philosophers’ attempt to shed light on it, is to invoke the notion of the irreparable by which he means the “suchness” (talità) of things (CC, 97). “The irreparable”, Agamben writes, “is that things are just as they are, in this or that mode, consigned without remedy to their way of being” (CC, 89). By positing the “as such” of things, essence and existence are mutually appropriated to the extent that the properties of being, be they religious, political or linguistic, are placed under erasure. Revelation is proposed as an example of suchness, in so far as it “does not mean revelation of the sacredness of the world, but only revelation of its irreparable profane state” (CC, 89). The advent of Christ introduces an irreparable caesura between the time before and after the second coming, or eschaton; and while Christ’s sacrifice is the prelude to humans’ salvation, it also implies the impossibility of salvation in the time that remains. Agamben connects this insight to his postulation that hope can only be placed in “what is without remedy” (CC, 101) as further evidence of an existence in which life is propelled by the power “to not- not-be” (CC, 103). With the concept of the irreparable, and the category of suchness, Agamben intends to conjure up a mode of being whose exposure to the world, and the things of the world, is no longer postulated by the opposition and separation of subject/object, predicate and pronoun, but on the awareness of an irreparable belonging based on mutual relations by which the facing of each other as things as such generates an availability that transcends the objectification of the other.

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