For Hegel the immediate nature of experience, which was still to be categorized if we follow the Kantian system, was something already mediated. “He criticizes immediacy in principle and not merely as being atomistic and mechanical; immediacy itself always already contains something other than itself – subjectivity – without which it would not be 'given' at all, and by that token it is already not objectivity”1 It is this appropriation of the object, even at the level of the particular, which Agamben is then able to point to as the real death of experience within the history of philosophy. “For here experience ceases to be merely a means or a tool or a limit of consciousness, and becomes the very essence of the new absolute subject: its latering structure in the dialectical process.”2 Therefore, experience has become reduced from a notion essential to subject object relations, to something which is seen as the negative process of the movement of consciousness within the Hegelian system. As such a definitive concept of experience “... is always being what it has not yet become.”3 Put this way, the telelogical movement towards knowledge diminishes the active role of experience within epistemic relations.
Following on from this we need to understand what role we can give to experience in the conceptual scheme offered by Hegel. It has already been shown that Hegel's critique of Kant is addressed to the issue of immediate experience as constitutive of epistemic truth. And that experience is represented as the act of negation through which our concepts pass in order to reach a truer concept. As negative acts then, how they are represented is the next issue. “The Now as it is shown to us is one that has been, and that is its truth; it does not have the truth of being, of something that is”4 Particularity is then seen as something which is not 'real', in that particularity's relation to truth is not a direct relation, but rather a process through which the concept passes in its stages towards scientific truth.
In finishing this argument Hegel answers those who would disagree with his thesis by saying “that they had better be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, the ancient Eleusian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus; they have not yet learned the inner secret of eating bread and drinking wine.”5 What is being refered to here is the silence of the Eleusian mystic. Rather than being an invitation to silence Hegel is refering, at this point, to the guarding of a secret, something which was seen as the key role of the novitiate. Agamben asks what secret, or unsayable thing, is it that is in question here.
“That which is thus unspeakable, for language, is none other than the very meaning, the Meinung, which, as such, remains necessarily unsaid in every saying: but this un-said, in-itself, is simply a negative and a universal, and it is precisely in recognizing this truth that language speaks it for what it is and 'takes it up in truth...'”6
We will take up Agamben's theories on language later, but for now we must look further at this truth hidden by language. This negative universal is then the negativity of the experience in relationship to conceptualization, i.e. it is the negativity of the content of experience which is hidden by language. Something which Adorno points out threatens the unity of the Hegelian system; “There is no guarantee, of course, that reduction to experiences will confirm the identity of opposites within the whole that is both a presupposition and a result of the Hegelian method. Perhaps the reduction will prove fatal to the claim of identity.”7 As such, the silence encountered by the Eleusian novitiate is not an optional silence rather it is a silence of necessity, it is the only possible relationship which the subject can have to the full understanding of truth. “For they (animals) do not stand stock still before things of sense as if they were things per se... they despair of this reality altogether, and in complete assurance of the nothingness of things they fall-to ... and eat them up.”8 The truth of language is therefore the inexpressible nature of the negativity of the particular. Language then must be understood as something operative on a different sphere from truth, it is a manner of being which is divorced from the pure truth of things, something mediated by the individuality of the subject.
