MARIA HELLSTRÖM REIMER

Dear Aryan, thanks a lot for sharing; herri is indeed an impressive publication and I am especially intrigued by the way you interweave different kinds of material, how you allow your own (I guess) associations to indicate potential links and digressions. The Agamben text is one of his most interesting, all the more urgent in relation to the media maelstrom balderdash, and the links you provide here are also adding physical force to what might otherwise seem a quite abstract argument. For me personally, it’s fascinating how Agamben relates to the themes of the difficult-to-position heretic Giambattista Vico, the thinking of whom I have been looking into lately… An often-cited passage of Vico appears in the Second Book of The New Science (1727) entitled “Of Poetic Wisdom“ and it is a passage where he takes on the challenge of imagining the origins of human imagining, hence also of language, an imagining that for him is utterly embodied and shared:

In such fashion the first men of the gentile nations, children of nascent mankind, created things according to their own ideas. But this creation was infinitely different from that of God. For God, in his purest intelligence, knows things, and, by knowing them, creates them; but they, in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was quite corporeal, they did it with marvellous sublimity; a sublimity such and so great that it excessively perturbed the very persons who by imagining did the creating, for which they were called ‘poets,’ which is Greek for ‘creators’.

Giambattista Vico
The New Science, §376

So thank you for drawing my attention to the Agamben text. I will also forward info on the issue to colleagues, many of which I am sure will welcome this.
Take care,
Maria