Giuramento, performatività e istituzioni. Alcune brevi riflessioni sulla natura ambigua di horkos / Oath, performativity and institutions. Some brief reflections on the ambiguous nature of horkos

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to retrace some of the most important lines of theoretical discussion about one of the most important performative acts in the history of ideas and institutions in the West, the oath.

To deal with the subject we take as a basis Il sacramento del linguaggio. Archeologia del giuramento (2008) by Giorgio Agamben, recent text of great importance, around which an intense philosophical debate is developed.

After tracing the essential pattern of the speech on the ambiguity of the word horkos, specific ambiguity of ancient Greece, I will draw attention on the features of the oath and then I will think back to some of the basis ideas of Agamben text with the intent to discuss them, through appropriate criticisms and proposal of theoretical expansion. The criticism moves along three basic coordinates: 1) the Agamben’s reconstruction of the oath notion aspires to have a universal profile but it is limited to an analysis of the Greek-Latin Biblical tradition. 2) reconstruction of Agamben proposes questionable equivalence which collapses the notion of “performative act” (Austin) or “executive utterance” (Benveniste) into that of “oath” 3). Il sacramento del linguaggio supports the idea, resulting of the first two, that in the contemporary world the oath, and perhaps with it the whole sphere of performative utterance, are in deep crisis. Part of the contribution focuses on the discussion of the third