Projects

When Avecinna, proposing the experience of the flying man, imagines a dismembered and disorganized human body, showing that, thus fragmented and suspended in the air, man can still say ‘I am,’ and the pure entity is the experience of a body without either parts or organs; when Cavalcanti describes the poetic experience as the transformation of the living body into a mechanical automaton (‘I walk like a man outside life / who seems, to those who see him, a man /made branches or rocks or wood / who is led along by artifice’); when Condillac introduces his marble statue to the sense of smell, such that the statute ‘is no more than the scent of a rose;’ when Dante desubjectifies the ‘I’ of the poet into a third person (I’ mi son un), a generic, homonymous being who functions only as a scribe in the dictation of love, when Rimbaud says ‘I is another;’ when Kleist evokes the perfect body of the marionette as a paradigm of the absolute; and when Heidegger replaces the physical ‘I’ with an empty and inessential being that is only its own ways of Being and has possibility only in the impossible—each time we must consider these ‘experiments without truth’ with the greatest seriousness. Whoever submits herself to these experiments jeopardises not so much the truth of her own statements as the very mode of her existence; she undergoes an anthropological change that is just as decisive in the context of the individual’s natural history as the liberation of the hand by the erect position was for the primate or as was, for the reptile, the transformation of limbs that changed it into a bird.

Giorgio Agamben,

'Bartleby, or On Contingency.'