“The Hurbinek Effect,” by Carsten Juhl, originally appeared on July 23, 2025, as part of the fifth instalment (“Exilic Politics”) of the “Letters” series on dabartis.com, accompanied by texts by Abdaljawad Omar, Monika Janulevičiūtė, and Peter Weiss, prefaced by Anacharisis Kloots. It is republished on Communis with the kind permission of Dabartis’ editorial collective and Carsten Juhl. The Spanish translation of this same text can be read here.
“Even when facing the inexorability of extermination, it seems as if thinking has only the intransigence of meaning and language left […] This perspective is pertinent to our time, because it is inevitably preparing philosophy and politics to think what remains of Gaza and to think what remains of Israel, i.e., what remains of an immolation of pure proletarians and what remains of the will to exterminate in a colonial State.”
— Carsten Juhl
Community and language are elements to remain near the possibility of a theory for and of the proletariat.
This text is about recollecting notions such as “common ground” and community. Even when facing the inexorability of extermination, it seems as if thinking has only the intransigence of meaning and language left, at least for a while.
I
In early February 1971 there was a meeting at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, between the revolutionary leader Huey P. Newton (1942–1989) and psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson (1902–1994), which involved several other participants. It started a discussion, which continued in Oakland, California, two months later. The intervention of Newton went by the title “Intercommunalism”, and it presented the ideological position of a militant group, the Black Panther Party (BPP), and most important perhaps, the development of the thinking of these militants from the “black nationalism” of their foundation in October 1966 to their actual internationalism built upon a combined theory and practice called “revolutionary intercommunalism”. This position was defined by the militant life of the members of the BPP, their solidarity with the “lumpen proletarians” of the world and an astonishing sympathy with some governments in Asia which represented peoples “who want to determine their own destiny”. These were the governments of China, North Korea and North Vietnam, i.e., States incarnating the ideology of socialism in one country as it was gradually constructed by Soviet Marxism (Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky and Stalin) after 1926 to replace the intransigent internationalism of the first six years of the Communist International (1919-1925). Nevertheless, the politics of the aforementioned Asian countries was interpreted by Newton as anti-imperialistic and could in 1971 be inscribed in a more general post-colonial framework where post-slavery, neo-colonial, American imperialism played the pivotal role.
Newton and the Panthers were trying to find a place for marginalized social categories within the American proletariat and give them a strong theoretical presence, which was lacking completely in the American Left, from the Unions AFL-CIO to the Trotskyists and the Socialist Party in the tradition of Daniel De Leon. In 1971 their statement was one of international solidarity and participation in Big Politics:
Imperialism has laid the foundation for world communism, and imperialism itself has grown to the point of reactionary intercommunalism because the world is now integrated into one community. The communications revolution, combined with the expansive domination of the American empire, has created the “global village”. The peoples of all cultures are under siege by the same forces, and they all have access to the same technologies. There are only differences in degree between what’s happening to the blacks here and what’s happening to all of the people in the world, including Africans.1
I think it is important to note that the conditions illustrated for intercommunalism here are not simply historically determined. Newton’s argument is not built upon an orthodox historical materialism that would ascribe the role of class-struggle to a scientifically periodizable mode of production, even if a sort of class-struggle is mentioned. The struggle is space-based and not time-based in Newton’s text, with neighborhood and solidarity overpowering the teleological expectations of a philosophy of history in the Hegelian sense.
Now, some words about the possible combinations concerning theories of community: These theories were developed after the season of European uprisings and urban guerrilla movements, that roughly unfolded between May 1968 in France to the Italian Autonomia in 1977. As theoretical reflections of metropole movements in the ancient colonial center, they were very different from the parallel Black revolts in the U.S., even if some European revolutionary groups such as the Situationist International and the Italian Left around party-founder Amadeo Bordiga and the newspaper il programma comunista immediately defended a hypothesis of a common situation of exploitation and the possibility of a common understanding between the postcolonial sub-proletariats defined by Newton and the revolutionary interpretations of capitalism by the ultra-gauche in Europe. And the latter embraced the riots in the American towns of the 1960s, defending them as part of an international uprising. In fact, the very idea of “revolutionary violence” in Western democracies became licit again for revolutionary thinking thanks to the American experiences.
However, ten years after the meeting at Yale and ten years after Big Politics — “anti-imperial” wars and class-struggle in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East — the era slowly came to an end. With the Iranian Revolution and the long war between Iraq and Iran, the whole phenomenon of revolutionary thinking was in need of new philosophical examinations and formulations. It was an eminently theoretical need, and it went under different labels such as “the postmodern condition” or the transavanguardia. So, in November 1980 two French philosophers from the rather new “deconstruction” legacy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940–2007) and Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021), invited philosophers from their own generation and language to restate the role of politics in philosophy. Their introduction to the project was a serene and limpid one: rejouer le politique, or return to the political, to play the political again. This meant a foundational restart; the idea was not to develop a new “political theory” but to reorganize conceptually the competences and the empirical material already at hand. Attention was therefore given to philosophy, because apart from anthropology, philosophy was the only way of thinking based upon la co-appartenance essentielle, the essential common belonging to a “reciprocal” determination between the two “parts”— i.e., philosophy and politics2. “Part” is my term here, because the whole effort of the invited thinkers was to formulate meaning within the “political institution of the (so-called) Western thinking”, while the problem of the part, partiality or party was not included in the work of the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique3.
More or less after three years of contributions to this theme, the discussion stopped in 1982 with examinations of the well-known concept of “totalitarianism” and the rather new one of retrait du politique, i.e., the retreat or withdrawal of the political. This influential concept closed a season of important reconstruction and critique of Marxist and Maoist (Stalinist) traditions, while obstinately resisting any apology for the concept of communism — the trajectory was not, as in other cases of the era, a capitulation to national, bourgeois, liberal democracy. Instead of analyzing the accomplishments or lack of accomplishment of institutional politics, the new notion of retrait du politique could link to the Heideggerian term Verwindung (overcoming), to deconstruction, to a “pas-en-arrière”, a step backwards, but not a retrograde one because the thinking should remain à la hauteur, at the level of … “destitution”. So this concept gradually became a dominant framework for political thinking in the aftermaths of the Berlin Wall and the alter-globalization movement — with its theoretical crescendo in Negri and Hardt’s Empire. The end of this pivotal enjeu, the central problem, for the Invisible Committee and for the ninth and last volume of the Homo Sacer series (The Use of Bodies, 2014), seen in retrospect, was the starting point of the philosophical enterprise in Paris’ rue d’Ulm, in November 1980.
This re-thinking of philosophy in politics and politics in philosophy was opened with the question of community in a text by Nancy published in the Spring of 1983, “La communauté desœuvrée” 4. The first theoretical gesture of the text was to place the Christian preoccupations with historical expectations outside the conceptual context of thinking human community and replace these expectations with a radical immanency without programmatic proclamations. This effort to remain in a thinking able to reconstruct its internal differences was immediately greeted by Maurice Blanchot in a small book The Unavowable Community (1983), where a very contemplative text of literature, La maladie de la mort, by Marguerite Duras, would be a narrative instrument to reformulate the “desœuvrement” in Nancy’s thinking5. Because, even if the inspiration to re-examine the notion of community for Nancy and Blanchot came from Georges Bataille’s work, the fundamental result remained the abandonment of any dialectical dynamics in and for the community6. The community, now actively without a goal, meant the break with Hegelian and Christian thinking was nearly complete, even if the will, if not the intention, to maintain a radical critique remained intact.
Nancy was compelled to produce a long series of books about the community question in the years to come at the end of his life often in a dialogue with Mathilde Girard. Other contributions to the same question were written by Lyotard and Agamben during the 80s. But before we follow that line of thought, it is worth noting that the most radical magazine of the May ‘68 uprising, Invariance, started and remained bound to the question of the Gemeinwesen, the common essence, as presented by Marx in his Parisian manuscripts from 1844. Invariance’s first issue began with the text “Origin and Function of the Party Form” —“Origine et fonction de la forme parti,” published unsigned, although it is known that Jacques Camatte wrote it — where the revolutionary party, according to the teachings of the Italian Left (Amadeo Bordiga), was presented as an avant-garde able to anticipate the material fusion and intentional differentiation of humanity in a future society without money and without exploitation. So at the start, the discussion of a notion of community was also a discussion about anticipation and realization of potentialities. This changed with the notion of desœuvrement (inoperativity), where thinking and language replaced the dependence on a universal project, as it can be said that the project and perhaps even Big Politics are based upon the assumption of universalities. Newton, in the Yale-conversation, clearly holds onto these assumptions:
I think that whether we like it or not, dialectics would make it necessary to have a universal identity. If we do not have universal identity, then we will have cultural, racial and religious chauvinism, the kind of ethnocentrism we have now. So we say that even if in the future there will be some small differences in behavior patterns, different environments would all be a secondary thing. And we struggle for a future in which we will realize that we are all Homo sapiens and have more in common than not. We will be closer together than we are now.7
This description of community and closeness is the contrary of Nancy’s desœuvrement, which is a sort of absence of any politically or economically gratifying result of the being together: the power involved is instead dissipative and deviant, manifesting its presence as an absence of any strong reciprocity. Nothing is returning to you because of your participation in the community without œuvre (operativity), Nancy explains. The only analogy to such an inoperative community is the “community of lovers”, according to Blanchot. And it reminds us clearly of the symbolic exchange and the notion of dépense (expenditure) in Georges Bataille. Descriptions and difference replace the dialectics used by the Panthers or, for that matter, by Invariance.
But what happens to internationalism under such a communitarian condition? Maintaining the contiguity of an experience of the common should be the same, as contiguity still seems the most stable part of being together. Although now the playing between singularity and plurality should become more intense, once the expectations for an ultimate fusion become less imperative. In fact, a lot of initiative and importance has passed from the project of universalism to spontaneity and what I will introduce as the sensus communis (the community of sensation). Instead of Marx, it is Kant who is at stake.
Lyotard, who came from the group Socialisme ou Barbarie and later from its splinter Pouvoir ouvrier, made first a Freudian shift, and after 1979 and his book on the postmodern condition, a Kantian one. Sensus communis is the feeling in operation during aesthetic experiences, when these experiences are commented and communicated to a third party not participating in the same perception that has generated the aesthetic experience. So, it is evocative and spontaneous at the same time, following an impulse to transmit the feeling in some way. By means of words, but also sounds and image-making. That is why Lyotard can formulate the following theoretical somersault about what is at stake in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (Kant’s third Critique):
There would be judgement before the concept, and even before the schema, before that operation of synthesis, which is however very elementary, which brings together the pure diversity of sense-data (their matter) into unities which are apprehensible, reproducible, recognizable and offers them as an experience to the grasp, to the Ergreifen, to the Begreifen (understanding) of the categories of understanding8.
So, the move or gesture is going from the extra-categorical to the category, i.e., from something without form to a form able to document how it is in the making, but not why it is in the making. It is a testimony of a transformative faculty in thinking and the nearest we can come to a common intensity between theory and practice. But not an identity between them. Something remains as long as the impulse of the sensus communis is not incarnated or organized and in a position of presence among some of the potentialities at hand for instance of the proletariat.
It is a tension in a position which may be created during artistic work or during a political mobilization; it is inherent to both and contains a promise of transcendence, which thought can suppose to be felt, but not realized. This is indeed the positive version of sensus communis. But there is also a negative one, i.e., when it is absolutely clear that an action of power is destroying the very possibility of a sensus communis by means of extermination, of the destruction of articulation long before any experience can be presented to an Ergreifen.
We can perhaps call it the “Hurbinek effect”…
II
In Nancy’s notion of desœuvrement there is an element of something happening in vain, not ethically humble but convinced about the difficulties ahead. The absolute contrary to the conceit of power, to the self-indulgence of any exterminator. So, some years after the dialogue between Nancy and Blanchot about the desœuvrement, Giorgio Agamben published his book La comunità che viene (The Coming Community, 1990) as a sort of continuation of what Nancy had been trying to explain. But the tone of his book was that of Tiananmen:
Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear9.
In fact the 80s experienced a crescendo in political thinking, culminating 25 years later with the overwhelming scientific effort of the nine Homo Sacer volumes (1995-2014). The relation between history and politics was completely reorganized during those years, based upon an understanding of power and human potentialities, where all existing institutions were doomed to succumb to destitution after the radical hermeneutic analysis in the Homo Sacer volumes and in the three books of the Invisible Committee (The Coming Insurrection, To Our Friends and Now).
The third volume of Homo Sacer — Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive — is central to understanding the conditions and inherent limits of this reorganization.
The book was based upon the narrative and the thinking of Primo Levi:
“The new ethical material that he discovered at Auschwitz allowed for neither summary judgments nor distinctions and whether he liked it or not, lack of dignity had to interest him just as much as dignity.”10
So, according to Agamben, it was Primo Levi’s work that had made possible the analysis of the human condition after extermination. Therefore, Remnants of Auschwitz also became a book about subjectivity and perhaps especially about the weakening of subjectivity and its possible “withering away”. There is even an example of destitution in the sense that the notion is used in English as utter or absolute need. That example is slightly different from the one elsewhere offered of the Muselmann. But it is an example that concerns what we can archive from reports, and why it is so fundamental to have fates recorded and exposed in the protocols of history when dealing with extermination. It is the anthropological depth in what the Auschwitz experience can bring along at the periphery of all that it must, at the same time, give up in respect to the mass human aspect of the extermination. I am thinking of Levi’s account of the boy Hurbinek, who is perhaps three years old and on the verge of being able to speak, when he is liberated from his state in the camp, but soon after dies from his physical weakness. Levi is occupied by the words — the word — Hurbinek enunciates as he lies on his deathbed. It may be mass-klo, or perhaps matisklo, and in spite of the great number of languages represented among the prisoners in the camp, it doesn’t correspond to the words of any identifiable language. Levi, who is aware that the camp can never be good for anything, and cannot therefore reveal some truth about, for instance, the origin of or basic conditions for language, tries to define what the little boy does with his tongue in his vulnerable situation with his crippled, enfeebled body. There is of course no prior meaning that is about to surface in this person — perhaps the weakest of all the camp’s weakened bodies — in order to come to the expression in Hurbinek’s mouth; nor is Levi able to collect any knowledge about what is going on inside that little head. But it does say something, then: there was a readiness to speak, which now becomes the last “word”. A readiness and a word that may be manifesting itself without some raw memory of the word’s possible philological roots. The readiness resides in the mouth as this word, mass-klo, matisklo. Does it point back as some kind of explanation for Hurbinek, as a sentence might have been able to do in quite different circumstances if Hurbinek had had a childhood? What we sense in Agamben when reading Levi (pp. 37-39) in Remnants of Auschwitz, is something that concerns a degree of independence in the possibility of the speech act, a linguistic embouchure, a first step towards utterance which should not be explained downwards towards fear, or outwards socially towards an indication of some communicative concern11. It is less than language and perhaps more immanent than any indexicality; for instance the intentionality in the utterance of a warning.
Several years ago Michel Serres touched upon this phenomenon in a conversation with the founder of semiotics in Denmark, Per Aage Brandt, a conversation the latter published in the journal Semiotik under the title “Markov og Babel” (Markov and Babel) 12. From this it appeared that language cannot be driven by a promise of a synthesis, by for instance a unifying explanation: we must try from another place in the mouth, the repetition of the sound, the memory of a sound and perhaps the sense of reach when the sound is reproduced, a sense of recollection. Nor is it therefore in any way an aesthetic reflection in some raw, sense-borne version like “tasting the words”; Hurbinek’s distress is far too comprehensive for that, almost equal to a “pure” ontological exposure; “almost” because mass-klo or matisklo is not a powerless imploration bewailing its lot to a god. Rather it is tentative, exploratory: Hurbinek was dying; he probably didn’t “know” that just as he didn’t know that his life was a very small, short and biologically “weak” life. It did not live by virtue of anything but chance, just as it would die in the same way, just before and just after something. Hurbinek was no longer a prisoner, a deportee when life left his very small “frail” and vulnerable body. Instead there was a great non-consummation: even death took so little with it that it did not consummate very much.
All this dark non-articulation does not live by virtue of a great birth of meaning that then crumbles and appears as absurd. Nor is it a beginning without consequences, a sort of negative creation, even though this concept may get a little closer to the heart of the matter. Hurbinek’s testimony consisted of this: the little boy sensed a word; it might give a connection to something, something that lay as the seed of a memory or a sound-borne possibility of recollection in Hurbinek’s brain (and heart); something that he could in any case feel and hear when his own, very young vocal chords and labial barrier were to steer the little puff, the little exhalation, that was felt now as the closure of the lips and now as a little sibilance in the insides of the cheeks, mass-klo, matisklo. Hurbinek was discovering the “discursive instance”, the utterance apparatus that was waiting in his mouth and ear13. But when Hurbinek died, it was perhaps still far more mouth than speech and meaning — perhaps.
In an old Danish text I discussed the negative potentiality that is also investigated in Remnants of Auschwitz. It is a determination of potentiality that is chiefly argued on moral-philosophical grounds: What “ought not” to have happened (Hannah Arendt), happened, and what that involves14. Especially repression, Arendt’s answer goes: “At no point, however, either in the proceedings or in the judgment, did the Jerusalem trial ever mention even the possibility that extermination of whole ethnic groups — the Jews, or the Poles, or the Gypsies — might be more than a crime against the Jewish, or the Polish or the Gypsy people, that the international order, and mankind in its entirety, might have been grievously hurt and endangered.”15 Absolutely the same can be said of what is happening under the conditions in Gaza since October 2023.
So we stay with Hannah Arendt and now with her famous answer to Günter Gaus when asked in October 1964 on German television about what remained in Germany after 1945: “Was ist geblieben? Geblieben ist die Sprache”, the language has remained16.
Recently, in August 2024, Giorgio Agamben published his book La lingua che resta:Il tempo, la storia, il linguaggio, i.e., the language that remains: time, history, semiotic system17 . The seventh and last chapter is devoted to the subject matter of the book, “the language that remains”, and is introduced by the quotation of Hannah Arendt’s answer in 1964. The text tries bravely to avoid having to choose between reduction and retrospection: reduction to a causality or retrospection to a beginning, and instead it proposes a theory of an exceeding reality — a sort of super-now — a notion borrowed from Henri Bergson and a notion capable of elucidating the possible in actual reality, i.e., in the reality which is acting. It is a special awareness, a sharp consciousness, which includes the memory of the present situation. It can remind us of the archaeology of Michel Foucault, and that perspective is pertinent to our time, because it is inevitably preparing philosophy and politics to think what remains of Gaza and immediately after to think what remains of Israel, i.e., what remains of an immolation of pure proletarians and what remains of the will to exterminate in a colonial State.
Notes
1. Huey P. Newton in Kai T. Erikson (ed.), In Search of Common Ground. Conversations with Erik H. Erikson & Huey P. Newton, New York: Norton, 1973, pp. 31-32.
2. The role of an “anthropology” and the structure of the “exigence critique” is not developed very much in the introduction to the project of the Centre. The original goes:
La simple critique serait probablement trop courte et inopérante face à la domination quasiment sans partage de l’anthropologie. C’est pourquoi notre insistance sur la philosophie […] voudrait marquer avant tout ceci : ce qui nous paraît aujourd’hui nécessaire […] c’est de prendre en compte de façon rigoureuse ce que nous appellerons la co-appartenance essentielle […] du philosophique et du politique. [Simple criticism would probably be too short and ineffective in the face of the almost unchallenged domination of anthropology. This is why our insistence on philosophy […] would like to emphasize above all this: what seems necessary to us today […] is to take into account rigorously what we will call the essential co-belonging […] of the philosophical and the political.] Cf. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Rejouer le politique, Paris: Galilée, 1981, pp. 17-18. A slightly different English edition can be found in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Simon Sparks (ed.), Retreating the Political, London & New York: Routledge:, 1997.
The anthropological question here may concern the fact that community as a phenomenon can be analyzed by both anthropology and philosophy. Sociology could also have been included in these remarks.
3. See Jacob Rogozinski, Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière et al, Le retrait du politique, Paris: Galilée, 1983, a compilation of papers presented at the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique between June 1981 and June 1982.
4. Jean-Luc Nancy, “La communauté désœuvrée”, in Aléa, n. 4, Spring 1983. Expanded in book form in La communauté désœuvrée, Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986. See in English: Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Peter Connor (ed.), trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhny, Minneapolis y Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. See also by Jean-Luc Nancy Etre singulier pluriel, Paris: Galilée, 1996; La Communauté affrontée, Paris: Galilée, 2001; and La communauté désavouée, Paris: Galilée, 2014.
5. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988.
6. See Georges Bataille, “La notion de dépense”, in La Critique sociale, n. 7, January 1933. See in English “The Notion of Expenditure”, in Visions of Excess, Allan Stoekl (ed.), trans. Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, pp.116-30, 251-254.
7. In Search of Common Ground, cit., p. 35. An internationalist deduction from the on-going anti-imperialist wars of liberation was rather frequent among revolutionaries in the 60s and the 70s. In French it was called “la position tiers-mondiste”. The most important revolutionary leader in Europe at the time, Ulrike Meinhof, also deduced that sort of internationalism from her anti-imperialist views. See her “Letzte texte”, published by the “Internationales Komitee zur Verteidigung politischer Gefangener in West Europa”, June 1976. I have not commented upon the problem of revolutionary leadership during the 1970s. About the mentioned “position tiers-mondiste”, I think that typical formulations can be found in Partisans, n. 42, May-June 1968, on the theme “Ouvriers étudiants un seul combat”, published by François Maspero. But there was also a juridical discussion going on: In the Spring of 1978 a group of European lawyers published a special issue of the magazine Actes in Paris with the title “L’Europe de la repression ou L’insécurité de l’état” concerning the situation in Germany, Italy, Ireland and France. Concerning the German revolutionaries and the RAF, the real militant positions were those held by the Italians. Cf. “Un raggio di luce del regno delle tenebre – La guerriglia urbana nella Germania Federale”, written by a group of students and researchers from the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Genova, June 1976. And the following, even more militant publication: “Onore alla compagna Ulrike Meinhof, Onore ai compagni caduti a Entebbe”, published by the Comitato internazionale di difesa dei detenuti politici in Europa”, September 1976. In 1977 the French daily Libération in Paris published a large “special edition” with a lot of important documents: “L’affaire allemande. De l’enlèvement de H.M. Schleyer à la mort de Andreas Baader”. Finally, 20 years later, in 1997, the TAZ Journal in Berlin published an updated collection of documents and analyses: “20 Jahre Deutscher Herbst”, also very important.
8. Jean-François Lyotard, “Sensus communis”, in Le cahier du collège international de philosophie, n. 3, March 1987, Paris: Osiris, pp. 67-88. The text was republished in French in Cahiers Confrontation, n. 7, editions Aubier, 1989, with the title “Après le sujet qui vient“, after the coming subject. A third publication can be found in the posthumous collection of Lyotard’s texts Misère de la philosophie, Paris: Galilée, 2000. In this edition the title was expanded to “Sensus communis, le sujet à l’état naissant”. See in English: Jean Francois Lyotard, “Sensus communis”, trans. Marian Hobson and Geoff Bennington, in Andrew Benjamin (ed._, Judging Lyotard, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 4.
9. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press , 1993, p. 86.
10. Giorgio Agamben, La comunità che viene, Turin: Einaudi, 1990. See in English Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazon, New York: Zone Books=, 1999, p. 47.
11. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, cit., pp. 37-39.
12. Per Aage Brandt, “Markov og Babel: samtale med Michel Serres, in Semiotik, n. 5-6, Copenhagen, 1983, pp. 136-144.
13. See Benveniste’s theory of “instances de discours”, which Agamben comments on and expounds in §§3.15-3.18 and §4.1 of Remnants of Auschwitz. It was Benveniste who understood the uniqueness in a “locutor’s” actualization of language in words. Cf. his Problèmes de linguistique générale, París: Gallimard, pp. 251-254.
14. See my “Ondt værre: Et vidnesbyrd ud af arten”, in Passage, n. 58, Winter 2007, Aarhus, pp. 53-56.
15. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, London: Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 275-276.
16. Hannah Arendt, “Fernsehespräch mit Günter Gaus”, in Ich will verstehen, Munich: Piper, 1996, pp. 44-70.
17. Giorgio Agamben, La lingua che resta: Il tempo, la storia, il linguaggio, Turin: Einaudi, 2024.
Featured image: Shalekhet, Menashe Kadishman (1997–2001). Jüdische Museum Berlin. Source: en.wikipedia.org.
