ABSTRACT
If this book is to make a single claim about Agamben’s work it will be the centrality of a philosophy of language to his thought. If we are to understand the ways in which Agamben understands areas such as politics, ethics or even film, we need to see his thought as emerging out of his interest in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, philology and linguistics. In this chapter we will move through some of Agamben’s central texts to understand how he uses key categories such as the voice, deixis and ontology to conceptualise the relationship between the human, language and thought. In doing so we will see that in positing the human as the site of language, and of tying the negative foundation of Being to that very capacity for language, Agamben produces a complex yet coherent philosophical foundation upon which we can begin to read his work, a work in which the production of negativity is tied to an originary division that needs to be examined in order to be deactivated.
