It is from this situation of self-imposed ban (0.17) that Agamben expands upon the fragility of one of the fundamental concepts of modern political discourse: the conceptually problematic and uncomfortable relationship between people and language. For, he tells us,

the relation between Gypsies and argot puts this correspondence radically into question in the very instant in which it parodically reenacts it. Gypsies are to a people what argot is to language. And although this analogy can last but for a brief moment, it nonetheless sheds light on that truth which the correspondence between language and people was secretly intended to conceal: all peoples are gangs and coquilles, all languages are jargons and argot.¹

Seen in this light, every people and every language would be transit zones between cultural identities, thresholds that express the basic indetermination of human culture, and not what they have become in the modern era: “the empty support of state identity”.² The tendency of the modern paradeisos to lock-down their populations into nation-states (0.19) is also palpable in the following context:

On the one hand, the world powers take up arms to defend a state without a people (Kuwait) and, on the other hand, the peoples without a state (Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, Basques, Jews of the Diaspora) can be oppressed and exterminated with impunity, so as to make clear that the destiny of a people can only be a state identity and that the concept of people makes sense only if recodified within the concept of citizenship. In this regard, it is also important to note the peculiar status of those languages that have no state dignity (Catalan, Basque, Gaelic, etc.), which linguists treat naturally as languages, but which practically operate rather as jargons or dialects and almost always assume an immediately political significance.³

The political significance Agamben speaks of becomes undone by the linguistic and cultural displacement of colonization, the main propagator of the paradeisos (6.10), and reveals once again the dislocation in the relationship between language and people. Carolina Sanín on the matter:

I write in a language that was formed without seeing anything on this side. We speak this Latin in the jungle. In the jungle of the jaguar, of the guerrilla, of the broken Indian, of the kidnapped and the giant spider. To write in American Spanish is to be lost and to ask doubly for a place where one can speak. Our language is not our region, nor is it any region. It does not imply a declaration of belonging: it is a testimony of exclusion, the mark of non correspondence… In this language we declare that we want to make a new law and also get rid of the law; we regret having hope and knowing that we do not have it. In every word we want to be enriched and we find death again, like the Spanish in America. 

Our language, in which we have already known what it is like to be dead, is not a mother, nor is it a world.

This language is the afterlife.⁴

The language that results from the colonizing process is not a fatherland, nor a motherland, it is a threshold (a new law and a getting rid of the law) that reveals the fracture between culture and speech.

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1. Agamben, 59-60. ↩︎
2. Ibíd., 60. ↩︎
3. Ibíd. ↩︎
4. Carolina Sanín, Somos luces abismales, 22. ↩︎