Although Agamben's Idea della prosa came out almost fifteen years ago (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1985), a short reassessment of its English translation is in order at the rush hour of the author's North American prominence. Agamben's significance in North-American aesthetics, philosophy, literary theory, and political thought has been on the rise since the publication of Language and Death in 1991, followed by The Coming Community, Infancy and History. Essays on the Destruction of Experience, Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, all in 1993, Homo sacer in 1998. That this year Stanford UP has published The Man Without Content, The End of the Poem. Studies in Poetics, and Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, and that there are plans to have his very recent work translated, in particular volumes two and three of Homo sacer, is not promissory of a reduction of the aforementioned prominence.(Also see Elias Polizoes' review of his Categorie italiane in Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, 29 'Spring-Summer, 1998').

Idea of Prose is divided in three sections that collect short, very dense essays on the "ideas of" matter, prose, caesura, vocation, the unique, dictation, truth, the Muse, love, study, the immemorable (section I); power, communism, politics, justice, peace, shame, epoch, music, happiness, infancy, universal judgment (II); thought, name, enigma, silence, language (1 and 2), light, appearance, glory, death, and awakening (III). The book, which ends with a "Threshold," and "Kafka Defended Against His Interpreters,"is introduced by Alexander García Düttmann's apt "Integral Actuality." Throughout the generous scatterings of the book Agamben's rhetoric triggers merciless dives à fonds; yet, rather than voting himself into the essence, rather than being a pro (fond), he confounds the reader with whom he delicately toys, as he does with sophisms and other temptations, not in the least the temptation to play.

The words that make and haunt the title, 'prose' and 'idea,' come into the book with their long histories that Agamben is the least unaware of. These histories, whose threads, when happening tointersect, lead to chiasmi only, come together here. Agamben regards the idea as neither an unqualified Platonic real cum transcendental entity nor a German-idealist grounding horizon of the concept.In "The Idea of Appearance" he invokes the saving of appearances (phainómena sózein), the should-be motto of Platonic science, as the main function of hypotheses."Hypotheses," that are opposed to the first principles, "exhaust their purpose in saving the phenomena."From Agamben's reading of Plato, it follows that:

 

As the idea does not rise above the phenomenon, it is the "thing itself." It therefore engenders neither an idea of the idea, nor a new epoch in thought or art.García Düttmann puts it succinctly: "the 'Idea of Prose' is not an idea among others, it is nothing but the idea itself: the idea is always the 'idea of prose,' 'itself' "immemorable and unforgettable" (19-20).

The consequence for an aesthetics that does not adorn itself into submission is crucial: art is of idea, and beauty - in a twist not unworthy of Plato - the unavoidable manifestation of truth. However, Agamben does not espouse idle optimism: in "The Idea of Glory" he points to "the strange grammar 'and semantics' of 'it appears,'" that can mean either, like in "videtur, 'it seems' (i.e.,'it could be deceptive') or, "like in" lucet, 'it shines,' 'it stands out in its evidence; here, a latency that remains hidden in its very yielding of itself to sight; there, a pure, absolute visibility without a shadow'" (125).While Guinizelli differentiates the two ironically, as if to better exhibit their confusion ("more than the star Diana shines 'splende' and seems 'pare')," Dante constructs the Vita Nuova as "a phenomenology, so to speak, of appearance, 'where' these two meanings are at times intentionally opposed"(ibid.). Saving the appearances, the idea saves itself through their contradictions manifested in a language that Agamben defines as material "non-latency without presupposition.""Those," he adds, "who have not reached, as in a dream, this woody substance of language which the ancients called silva (wildwood), are prisoners of self-representation even when they keep silent" (37).

Agamben's philosophy of language, one of the predilect and overarching themes of his work throughout the eighties, is informed by very fine readings of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Benjamin. It also benefits from the persuasive use of his unique knowledge of the classical and medieval stocks of etymos, parables, and sophisms.One of the central turns that Agamben's thought takes leads the reader to the misty land of 'prose.'

After suffering for a long time of Monsieur Jourdain's symptom - speaking in prose without knowing it (and not giving a dam' after realizing it) - recent scholarship has turned to prose as a savior of materiality from the disciplined grip of structuralists, East and West. In this series figure the inaugural comments of Merleau-Ponty in Prose du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), followed by Wlad Godzich & Jeffrey Kittay's The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987), and by Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson's attempt, in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), to resist the mounting parochialism in Western Bakhtin studies.What about Agamben's understanding of "prose?"
 

 

is perfectly satisfying unless it asserts an identity for poetry against prose through the possibility of enjambement. Quantity, rhythm, and the number of syllables - all elements that can equally well occur in prose - do not, from this standpoint, provide sufficient criteria. But we shall call poetry the discourse in which it is possible to set a metrical limit against a syntactic one (verse in which enjambement is not actually present is to be seen as verse with zero enjambement). Prose is discourse in which this is impossible. (39)

 

The position is partially compelling: while the enjambement subdues the instinctive closure of verse and stanza, it is synecdochical à la Spitzer and Auerbach to boost its status to that of a necessary and sufficient condition of poetry as long as the lire's taming of such fractures and prose itself are passed in silence. Prose, therefore, is to be reconstituted indirectly. Through poetic cons and prosastic pros, prose allows for the consonance of form and content: it emerges as that condition - of their cohabitation and mutual indifference - that comes to itself unhesitantly, as the thing itself (la chose chez soi).

As if to betray the logical bendings of an adolescence spent in structural gaming, Agamben goes on to take a mediating position, and say that "enjambement brings to light the original gait, neither poetic nor prosaic, but boustrophedonic, as it were, of poetry, the essential prose-metrics of every human discourse" (40).Here one would not shun the thought that the postmodern's hops and hip-hops, jumps and meta-jumps, appear to be the too much of Agamben's enjambement. But his argument - then and quickly - turns again to poetry:

the versura, the turning point which displays itself as enjambement, though unspoken-of in treatises on metrics, constitutes the core of the verse.... This hanging-back, this sublime hesitation between meaning and sound is the poetic inheritance with which thought must come to terms. (41)

Verse is the (tautological) product of versification; beyond that and ideally, it keeps producing itself as if it were resisting to make available to us that which it is versifying. These castles of sound that top the turvydom of concepts let the idea bring itself to light: the idea of poetry is as impossible as the idea of the idea. Only in this sense is the 'idea' always the 'idea of prose.'

That "poetry" cannot be put into other (prosaic, never mind poetic) words is the modern version of an excess unknown to the old times when music, as gift and fountain of 'nature,' resolved to bar individualistic propensities towards the miracle of meaning. In pre-modern poetry, the jealousy of autonomy, of giving oneself one's law together with one's name at the expense of dreamy othernesses, certainly did little to further anything but the flux of the impersonal we still associate with ritual. Agambenment would, perchance, be the name of the Italian philosopher's figure of choice: a censoring figure that effects the jump from the said, via the avoided, into the spectacular. And perhaps the chief merit of a book as classically inclined as Idea of Prose, is that its tour de force indirecte compels us to find the language of humans - beyond operatic syntheses like the prose poem - in its constitutive generic difference; that is, in its prosaic and poetic proximities that were never fully socialized unto guilt. For someone as well versed in Kafkian un-exercises as Giorgio Agamben, "shame is the index of the shuddering proximity of man to himself" (84), and of the eventfulness of a prose that hits us here and, maybe, now.