"The oath is, then, a verbal act that accomplishes a testimony - or a guarantee - independently by the very fact that it has taken place. The formula of Pindar cited above acquires here its full meaning: karteros horkos martys esto Zeus, "as a mighty oath, may Zeus be our witness": 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 in the very act of speech. (33)
Oath is the Logos of God, which in Scripture is entirely identified with God himself. The oath is not an addendum of language, a primitive residue of man's impotent attempt to make words powerful. Rather, the oath is revelation: it is a self-reference to language itself. For the uninitiated, this equation between Language Itself and God might sound strange. However, such is simply the transcendental argument, that every use of language presupposes the existence of Language, even as it's not provable only posited. Language cannot exist in the abstract, nor can it bubble up from below into a pragmatic category. The gap between Language and languages is uncrossable, since at no time could a language simply emerge without a preexistent field. Adam does not first speak, but is first addressed. After exposing the limits of reason in a series of linguistic and logical puzzles, Wittgenstein ends his Tractatus with mystical silence: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." But Wittgenstein did not grasp that the oath is precisely this moment of self-gesturing, this threshold of indistinction between Language and language in self-referential language. The platonic agnosticism of Wittgenstein manifests as the revelation of the Logos. The oath is the space through which God appears.
However, this potentiality may fall into corruption. Every oath may be broken and language may be abused to attack language. Hence why the curse on the oath-breaker easily doubled - for Christians especially - with the sin of blasphemy. It was not only evil to break your word, but also to speak falsely of God who is entirely self-identified with Language. But the blasphemous is not primarily false words about God (apparent in Christian creeds declaring false doctrine anathema), but the misuse of the name of God - Language - in abstraction. The name of God is taken out from the context of fidelity into an almost animalistic ejactulation of contempt. If 'o Christ' is invocatory, then 'Jesus Christ!' has stripped the name from self-reference into a curse. Every oath and every blasphemy depend on one another. Language always risks the complete collapse into vanity. The commandment against taking the Lord's name in vain is a curse upon the reduction of language to noise. And this vanity unveils the anarchy of power: magic. The spell is the degeneration of language into raw potency:
"It is from the oath - or, better, from perjury - that magic and spells are born: the formula of truth, when broken, is transformed into an efficacious curse, and the name of God, separated from the oath and from its connection to things, passes into a satanic murmur. The common opinion that would have the oath derive from the magico-religious sphere must here be precisely reversed. The oath presents us, rather, in a still undivided unity, what we are accustomed to call magic, religion, and law, which result from the oath as its fragments" (43)
The Oath is the primary revelation of divinity, the potent domain of language that forms humanity. When it is fragmented under false use, the oath falls apart into the modern categories (a sign of degeneration, not advancement) of religion, magic, and law. Magic ultimately is anarchos, a mysterious and sourceless echo denies language at the same time maximizing its power. A contextless name or string of words, almost in the form of an imperative, turns language into a weapon. It's no surprise that the post-modern "skepticism" of impugning language happens at the same time as magics return. Rather than the quest to find the true name in order to worship the Logos (as the biblical Magi did in their journey to Bethlehem), the modern wizard babbles unintelligible sacred words. Harry Potter is a stockbroker, barking orders to maximize his power. Rather than an intricate web of meaning, these "satanic murmurs" construct a world-order precisely through the anarchic origins of language. Idiots like Derrida and Habermas - both enchanted with empty language-game of democracy - simply cannot understand that their world depends upon this core brutality. The muggles can play-pretend their polite order because a guild of witches sustains them through their babble.
The purest act of language, the originary potency of the oath, is the act of naming. The name (with every name derivative of The Name) denotes the indescribable of quiddity into a quality. Adam's primitive vocation to name all the animals is simultaneously a revelation of man's poetic task as well as Adam's divine origin. For if Man is made in the imago Dei, then the task to name the animals remains. Poetry, man's imaginative self-alienation from the familiar in order to see it truly, is an act of creation. To name the animal is to see it for all its color, shape, and form. The oath, when taken, is a self-referential gesture to this vocation, the sacred potency of language. However, the fracture of the oath into the deracinated categories of law and religion opened the potential for its own erasure. As religion, an increasingly weak category losing hold over the Western world, has also seen the loss of the oath. Like the rusted churches that dot the skyline, so too is the oath in court a residue rapidly disappearing. The result is a complete indeterminate zone between truth/lie, verification/assertion, blessing/curse.
The novelty of this new order - where a zone of indistinction predominates - is the transformation of language into a 'sacrament of power'. The oath, as the primordial structure of man referencing to divine Language, fractured into the several categories of science/logic/law, religion/poetry, and philosophy. The first order deals with linguistic assertion, the second with linguistic verity, and the third with the overlap between the two. The first order deals with things as they should be, the second order with things as they are. However, the zone of indistinction sees the latter order sublimated into the former order. Verification becomes impossible, increasingly reduced to meaningless subjectivism (which itself, through the mythologies of Freud and neuroscience, reduces human consciousness to trauma and hormone electro-chemical shocks). Its unreality is sublimated into the order of assertion, something which law can rectify. Is it any wonder at the proliferation of lawyers? Cretinous warlocks, no longer interested in any sense of divine order, become the instruments of power. Is a man a woman? The law determines. What is in the womb? The law determines. Is it a genocide or peace-keeping? The law determines. The secret of this order is its anarchy, its ability to claim absolute reality at the same moment it excludes it. At the precise moment scientists abdicate any claim on things-in-themselves does the requirement to define, by the truncheon of cop and judge, become all-consuming. It's not "irrational" that evangelists for Science are fully wedded to the Establishment's juridical position (whatever it may be at the current time). Language has simply become a blood-oath for power.
This development is of ultimate significance because language is not merely *a* faculty of Humanity, but its defining feature. The natural coinherence of God and man is precisely at this juncture: to be imago Dei is to use language. Language is precisely what Humanizes, and this humanization is the basis upon all our socialization. Thus Homo sapiens is, by definition, Homo iustus. For Agamben, the threat is absolute:
"Once more, however, the specificity of human language with respect to animal language cannot reside solely in the peculiarity of the instrument, which later analyses could find - and, in fact, continually do find - in this or that animal language. It consists, rather, no less decisively in the fact that, uniquely among living things, man is no limited to acquiring language as one capacity among others that he is given but has made of it his specific potentiality; he has, that is to say, put his very nature at stake in language." (68)
Language allows Man to speak back what is true. The act of naming can reveal what something is and give it quality. However, the act of naming can also lie. In the zone of indistinction towards juridical imperative, there is nothing real but what can be forcibly sustained. Language becomes completely dependent on an apparatus which breeds increasing distinctions, categories, since this alone sustains civilization. It's the same moment that, in the Hobbesian "state of nature" (the fundamental mythologeme for modernity), nature is excluded from civility through the prohibitive law that this anarchy is rein scribed in the arbiter of this order. Death is prohibited, unless the state exacts it. This order is not only in the death-penalty, which has become increasingly rare in the West. It's manifest through the abortion, life-in-prison, pulling the tube on the legally dead, and euthanasia. The Law determines when a life is no longer a life, and thus it may be ended without violating the prohibition on killing. The "law of the jungle" - and its primal freedom to take/kill - is rein scribed at the moment of abolition. Perhaps that's why there's the bizarre enthusiasm for euthanasia and abortion as exercising ultimate freedom over one's body. The logic of self-ownership in bourgeois classical liberalism (transmuted and metastasized through time) contains this perverse desire for anarchic breaking out. The most perverse desire of the juridical order is to break the law. All gods are profaned, every word is blasphemy:
"humanity finds itself today before a disjunction or, at least, a loosening of the bond that, by means of the oath, united the living being to its language. On the one hand, there is the living being, more and more reduced to a purely biological reality and to bare life. On the other hand, there is the speaking being, artificially divided from the former, through a multiplicity of technico-mediatic apparatuses, in an experience of the word that grows ever more vain, for which it is impossible to be responsible and in which anything like a political experience becomes more and more precarious. When the ethical - and not simply cognitive - connection that unites words, things, and human actions is broken, this in fact promotes a spectacular and unprecedented proliferation of vain words on the one hand and, on the other, of legislative apparatuses that seek obstinately to legislate on every aspect of that life on which they seem no longer to have any hold. The age of the eclipse of the oath is also the age of blasphemy, in which the name of God breaks away from its living connection with language and can only be uttered 'in vain.'" (70-71)
Man simultaneously moves towards beast and machine, language reduced to imperative growls and code commands.
Agamben does not outline much in the way of hope in this work. Philosophy, as he adumbrates, still has the vocation to cross the boundary between these two orders. Only love of wisdom may crisscross between denotation and speech-act. However, Agamben's project is not to restore the old-order. Modernity's indistinction is not the product of evil magicians, but the potential in the very appearance of the Human being. Man may conform to the Logos, or become its parody through inversion, a "satanic murmur." This potentiality - standing at a crossroads and precipice - can be resolved differently. The Kingdom of God is ultimately a world where the assertive 'ought' blurs into denotative 'is', where the thing-in-itself coincides with thing-as-appears. Agamben gives a brief gesture towards this good in the evangelical prohibition on oaths:
"The evangelical prohibition of the oath in Matthew 5:33-37 (see also James 5:12) must be situated in this context. Essentially, what Jesus opposes to the oath is a logos that has the form nai nai, ou ou which is usually translated yes yes, no no (esto de ho logos ymon nai nai, ou ou). The expression gains its full meaning if we remember that the Greek formula for the oath was nai dia (or negatively ou ma dia). By extracting the particle nai from the formula and removing the sacred name that followed, Jesus opposed one part of the oath to the whole. What is at stake, then, is a gesture symmetrically opposed to that of blasphemy, which instead extracts the name of God from the context of the oath" (42)
The oath is completed not through its destruction (where everything sacred is profaned), but completion (where everything profaned is sanctified). This task is what Christ accomplishes and is the Human vocation. To be a Christian is to assume the completed vocation of Adam. It's to become a priest of nature, lifting up all things with holy hands and holy tongues to the praise of God. The purpose of the Temple was to link Heaven and Earth, where sacrifices of beasts and bounty were sanctified as language. The world does not become the opaque darkness of The Science, but illuminated with the Light of the Logos. To simply say "yes yes, no no" is to recognize the sanctity of all language. The maintenance of the oath for Christians was perhaps a reflection of limitation, but the Dawn inextricably marches towards the Day. The Word Enfleshed means continued sanctification, continued humanization, of not only man, but all the gifts of creation in his hands. May the poetry of prayer be always on the lips.
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