What is at stake in literature? Can we identify the fire that our stories have lost, but that they strive, at all costs, to rediscover? And what is the philosopher's stone that writers, with the passion of alchemists, struggle to forge in their word furnaces? For Giorgio Agamben, who suggests that the parable is the secret model of all narrative, every act of creation tenaciously resists creation, thereby giving each work its strength and grace. The ten essays brought together here cover works by figures ranging from Aristotle to Paul Klee and illustrate what urgently drives Agamben's current research. As is often the case with his writings, their especial focus is the mystery of literature, of reading and writing, and of language as a laboratory for conceiving an ethico-political perspective that places us beyond sovereign power. Giorgio Agamben is a contemporary Italian philosopher and political theorist whose works have been translated into numerous languages. His most recent title with Stanford University Press is The Use of Bodies (2016). The Fire and the Tale By Giorgio Agamben, Lorenzo Chiesa STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 2014 Nottetempo All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-5036-0164-2 Contents § The Fire and the Tale, § Mysterium Burocraticum, § Parable and Kingdom, § What Is the Act of Creation?, § Vortexes, § In the Name of What?, § Easter in Egypt, § On the Difficulty of Reading, § From the Book to the Screen: The Before and the After of the Book, § Opus Alchymicum, Note on the Texts, Notes, CHAPTER 1 The Fire and the Tale At the end of his book on Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem tells the following story, which he learned from Yosef Agnon: When the Baal Schem, the founder of Hasidism, had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later, the Maggid of Meseritz was faced with the same task, he would go to the same place in the woods, and say: "We can no longer light a fire, but we can pray." And everything happened according to his will. When another generation had passed, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov was faced with the same task, [and] he would go to the same place in the woods, and say: "We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayers, but we know the place in the woods, and that can be sufficient." And sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down in his golden chair, in his castle, and said: "We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of all this." And, once again, this was sufficient. It is possible to read this anecdote as an allegory of literature. In the course of its history, humanity moves further and further away from the sources of mystery and, little by little, loses the memory of what tradition taught it about the fire, the place, and the formula — but of all this men can still tell the story. What remains of mystery is literature, and "that can be sufficient," the rabbi comments with a smile. The meaning of this "can be sufficient" is, however, not easy to grasp, and perhaps the destiny of literature depends precisely on how we understand it. If we simply understand it in the sense that the loss of the fire, the place, and the formula is somehow progress and that the result of this progress — secularization — is the liberation of the tale from its mythical sources and the establishment of literature — now autonomous and adult — in a separate sphere — that is, culture — then that "can be sufficient" really becomes enigmatic. It can be sufficient — but to what? Is it credible that we can be satisfied with a tale that is no longer in relation with the fire? After all, by saying "we can tell the story of all this, " the rabbi claimed exactly the opposite. "All this" means loss and forgetting, and what the tale tells is indeed the story of the loss of the fire, the place, and the prayer. Each tale — all literature — is, in this sense, a memory of the loss of the fire. Literary historiography has by now accepted that the novel derives from mystery. Kerényi and, after him, Reinhold Merkelbach have demonstrated the existence of a genetic link between pagan mysteries and the ancient novel, of which Apuleius's Metamorphosis offers us a particularly convincing document (here the protagonist, who has been transformed into an ass, finds in the end salvation by means of a literal mystery initiation). This nexus is manifested by the fact that, exactly like in mysteries, we see in novels an individual life that is connected with a divine or in any case superhuman element, whereby the events, episodes, and vicissitudes of a human existence acquire a meaning that overcomes them and constitutes them as a mystery. Just lik