Giorgio Agamben, Adam Kotsko (translator) · 2008 · PDF · Calibre ID 306
Resurfaced in Remember Your Oath (2026-10-24).
Role in the triad
Theory and hinge: oath = affirmation + witness + curse; blessing and curse co-originary; magic born from perjury
Why this book
Turns a folk motif and its descendants into two dramatizations of one structure: the oath binds the speaker’s life to his word, and the curse is that binding when the word fails. It explains why the mother’s curse can do what it does in Kadare and why the vampire’s ‘Remember your oath’ works as a gag.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “The oath does not in any way constitute a remedy against the “Indo-European scourge”; instead, the scourge itself is contained within it in the form of perjury.” (p. 306 / PDF 315)
- “The oath seems, then, to result from the conjunction of three elements: an affirmation, the invocation of the gods as witnesses, and a curse directed at perjury.” (p. 324 / PDF 333)
- “The name of the god, which signifies and guarantees the juncture between words and things, is transformed into a curse if this relation is broken. What is essential, in every case, is the co-originarity of blessing and curse, which are constitutively copresent in the oath.” (p. 328 / PDF 337)
- “The oath is not a conditional curse: on the contrary, the curse and its symmetrical pendant, the blessing, are born as specific institutions from the division of the experience of speech that was in question in the oath.” (p. 333 / PDF 342)
- “It is from the oath—or, better, from perjury—that magic and spells are born: the formula of truth, when broken, is transformed into an efficacious curse” (p. 333 / PDF 342)
- “law and religion are born, both of which seek to tie speech to things and to bind, by means of curses and anathemas, speaking subjects to the veritative power of their speech” (p. 345 / PDF 354)
- “Every naming is, in fact, double: it is a blessing or a curse.” (p. 353 / PDF 362)
- “Precisely because, unlike other living things, in order to speak, the human being must put himself at stake in his speech, he can, for this reason, bless and curse, swear and perjure.” (p. 355 / PDF 364)
Themes
anathema · ara · bene-diction · curse · epiorkos · fides · horkos · male-diction · oath · perjury · sacrament of power · sacratio · technicalization