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[M]etaphysics is not simply the primacy of the voice over the gramma. If
metaphysics is that reflection that places the voice as origin, it is also true
that this voice is, from the beginning, conceived as removed. . . . To
identify the horizon of metaphysics simply in that supremacy of the phone
and then to believe in ones power to overcome this horizon through the
gramma, is to conceive of metaphysics without its coexistent negativity.
Metaphysics is always already grammatology and this is fundamentology in
the sense that the gramma . . . functions as the negative ontological
foundation.
Four rabbis entered Pardes: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aher, and Rabbi Akiba.
Rabbi Akiba said, When you reach the stones of pure marble, do not say:
Water! Water! For it has been said that he who says what is false will not be
placed before My eyes. Ben Azzai cast a glance and died. Of him Scripture
says: precious to the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints. Ben Zoma looked
and went mad. Of him Scripture says: have you found honey? Eat as much as
you can [other translations say Eat as much as is sucient, which makes
more sense of this scriptural lessonAT], otherwise you will be full and you
will vomit. Aher cut the branches. Rabbi Akiba left unharmed.
notes
1 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 85; see also Giorgio Agam-
ben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casa-
rino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 11, 12.
2 See Adam Thurschwell, Specters of Nietzsche: Potential Futures for the Concept
of the Political in Agamben and Derrida (abbreviated version), Cardozo Law
Review 24 (2003): 1193, full version available at www.law.csuohio.edu/faculty/
thurschwell/nietzsche.pdf.
3 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 4950, 54.
4 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 53.
5 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 56.
6 In the essay The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter
Benjamin, from which this section of Homo Sacer is largely extracted, Agamben
describes deconstruction as a petrified or paralyzed messianism, that, like all
messianisms, nullifies the law, but then maintains it as the Nothing of Revelation
in a perpetual and interminable state of exception, the state of exception in
which we live (in Potentialities, 171).
7 Indeed, as is discussed in the text infra, Agamben has devoted an admiring essay