Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Robert S. Lehman reviews Taste

Giorgio Agamben. Taste. Trans. Cooper Francis. New York: Seagull Books, 2017. 90 pp.

Review by Robert S. Lehman

16 May 2018

In 1979, Giorgio Agamben published in volume six of the Enciclopedia Einaudi an entry on “Taste” (Gusto). About twenty pages long in its original form, this entry was republished as an eighty-page monograph by Quodlibet in 2015 (its increased length the product of a large font and generous margins rather than additional content); it has now appeared in an English translation from Seagull Books. In it, we encounter an Agamben who is, mostly, familiar: prominent are both his sometimes unmoored but always impressive erudition and his mobilization of arguments that one half-recognizes from the writings of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and others. The book takes off from a small, but intriguing, philological point made by Isidoro de Sevilla in the twelfth century and again, nearer to the present, by Friedrich Nietzsche: the word sapiens (wise man), derives from the word sapor (taste) (pp. 4–5). There is, therefore, at least an etymological link between the sort of discernment involved in picking out distinct flavors and the sort involved in adjudging truth claims. Indeed, Agamben will maintain, taste names a kind of middle ground between knowledge and pleasure, between the (hoped for) articulation of a knowledge that enjoys and a pleasure that knows.

With this conceit in place, the argument of Taste proceeds more or less historically, approaching “the ‘enigmatic’ relation between knowledge and pleasure” (p. 22) as it develops from Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium (in which Eros is tasked with reconciling a beauty that cannot be known and a truth that cannot be seen), through the century of taste (when, in the sequence that reaches from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten to Immanuel Kant, the enigma of knowledge-pleasure becomes self-conscious), and up to the moment of structuralist semiotics (where we find again the relation between knowledge and pleasure, now figured as an excess of signification over meaning). Along the way, we encounter brief but captivating discussions of well-chosen passages from Aristotle, Tommaso Campanella, Ludovico Zuccolo, René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others. The book concludes with some suggestive remarks on the relationship between the discourse on taste, political economy—which takes as its object exchange value, the locus of “a pleasure that is not enjoyed”—and psychoanalysis—which takes as its object the unconscious, the locus of “a knowledge that is not known” (p. 69).

Taste covers a lot of ground, and it does so in a way that very much reflects its origins as an encyclopedia entry on a large topic; that is to say, while the argument it presents is coherent, it aims for breadth rather than depth. It seems somewhat unfair, then, to criticize it for failing to work through all of the implications of its claims. Nonetheless, the decision was made to publish Taste as a book, and I want to register just one question that I had upon finishing it. It concerns Agamben’s concluding remarks, wherein the enigmatic relation between knowledge and pleasure comes to suggest not only a historical fact about the development of the Western philosophical tradition but also a kind of utopian prospect: a possible “realization of knowledge” in the “double salvation” of beauty and truth (p. 76). This last gesture seems not so much overblown as strangely familiar, familiar not from Agamben’s congeries of sources but as the hallmark of one tradition that is strangely absent from Taste: the romantic-idealist tradition that developed in Germany around the turn of the nineteenth century. So, for example, we read in one of Friedrich Schlegel’s Critical Fragments (1797) that “the whole history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one”; and a year earlier, in the “Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism,” composed by the young Hegel, or Hölderlin, or Schelling: “until we make ideas aesthetic, that is, mythological, they are of no interest to the people, and vice versa: until mythology is rational, it will be an embarrassment to philosophy.”[1]

What is the status within Taste of this romantic-idealist tradition, for which the goal is, again, both a knowledge that enjoys and a pleasure that knows? It seems to me that an engagement with this tradition might have complicated Agamben’s (similarly chiasmic) formulations of the salvific unity of knowledge and pleasure, or of truth and beauty. For in this tradition, the promise of salvation assumes not only an aesthetico-ethical horizon, but also a political one—it is bound up with the hope for “a new religion,” for example, or an “aesthetic state” in which all the old philosophical oppositions would finally be abolished. The legacy of these political imaginings is, to say the least, complicated, and probably beyond Agamben’s focus. Nonetheless, my suspicion is that his failure to engage with the romantic legacy does something for his argument; it allows him to keep enigmatic what the articulation of pleasure and knowledge might otherwise entail.. The challenge, perhaps, is to think through the relationship between this particular enigma and the positions articulated in Agamben’s more explicitly political writings.

In any case, Taste is an engaging little book, elegantly translated and easier to read than many of Agamben’s other works. It is also, after The Man without Content (1970), Agamben’s longest engagement with aesthetics (in the strict sense of the term), and so it should be of interest to readers concerned with that particular philosophical tradition.


[1] Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, 1991), p. 14, and G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, and F. W. J. Schelling, “Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism,” Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, trans. Stefan Bird-Pollan, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 186–87.