A Re-turn that is not a Return

I will begin by expressing my delight at the gesture towards an apparent return to the real and to the human in the texts assigned for this week and my up-set at the realization that this gesture is performed in light of tragedies that marked the human and (so) real history.

Yet, I note that this (apparent) “return” involves not a bracketing or absolute denial of structuralism or poststructuralism (or postmodernism) but a full embracing and completion of it: both Agamben and Didi-Huberman have learned the lessons of difference “(or to borrow Derrida’s coinage) (of) differences” (Didi-Huberman, 121) and of the annihilation of “the One” (totality) – thus, Didi-Huberman calls for “multiple singularities always susceptible to differences, or to differances” (121) while Agamben sees himself as bringing to completion the work of Benveniste and Foucault. In this sense, Agamben’s and Didi-Huberman’s moves represent not a return, but ,rather, a re-turn.

I also observe that both Agamben and Didi-Huberman ground their theories in the reference to exceptional events that recently marked human history (Auschwitz), (re-)turning to that which has been designated as the un-representable and, thus, realizing Lyotard’s concluding demands in the Manifesto for/about a Post-Modern condition: “Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unrepresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.” (Lyotard, 82)

Lastly, I reflect on the impossibility to see and to speak about “that which remains unspoken”/unseen (to extrapolate and “adjust” Wittgenstein) that both thinkers refer to in the readings for this week. In Didi-Huberman’s case, this impossibility is formulated in terms of “that which remains inaccessible as an all” (p. 138). For Agamben, the impossibility is conceptualized as the impossibility to bear witness (which, nevertheless, becomes a possibility with the figure of the Muselmann).

I propose that in order to fill the “lacunas” that these two undertakings of a re-turn open and confront with, a re-turn to and of metaphysics is necessary.