【阿甘本】影像与沉默.pdfVIP

IMAGE AND SILENCE GiorGio aGamben In the Roman pantheon there is a goddess named Angerona, represented with her mouth Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s bound and sealed (ore obligato signatoque).1 Her finger is raised to her lips as if to com- most recent work to appear in English translation is The Church and the Kingdom mand silence. Scholars claim that she represents, in the context of pagan mystery cults, (2012). The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth the power of silence, although there is no consensus among them as to how to under- and Mystery of Kore will be published stand this power . Etymologically speaking, myein, the root of the Greek word mysterion, in 2013. means “to close the mouth, to silence.” At the beginning of the sacred rites in Eleusis a Translated by Leland de la Durantaye herald “commanded silence” (epittatei te¯n sio¯pen). It is said that that the initiates into these Eleusinian mysteries were required to maintain absolute silence concerning what they had seen and heard during their initiation. Our question is how to understand this silence. Was it a prohibition aimed at keeping a secret doctrine from the uninitiated? Or did it concern, instead, something truly impossible to say? To begin we might ask what sense there might have been in the obligation to re- main silent given that it was possible for anyone—including slaves, and thus, potentially, the entire population of Athens—to be initiated into the mysteries. In his early work, “On Philosophy,” Aristotle affirmed that, “the initiates do