I agamben fries an egg |

Ekaterina and Hanna undertook the idea of frying an egg with Giorgio Agamben as a logic-alchemic problem, as a game and an adventure which is constructed as a metaphorical projection of adventures of Alice in «Alice through the looking glass» by Lewis Carrol.

 

The eleven moves of Alice through the chessboard universe where she meets Humpty Dumpty at d6 square, were adopted as a metaphor for interaction with reality, so that this binary dimension mediates events of different systems and at the same timecreates space for reflection.

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The game starts from the moment when the hero utters her will to play

and to transform. It is only after this utterance she is to make a move.

It implies pre-existing rules and codes, but at the same time its unfolding is full of extemporary events, as perceived by the hero. It is of the nature of an alchemic process, where the knowledge of the procedure foreshadows the way, but the inner peripeteias elude predetermined limits. The game is a way of a hero, through peripeties to his arcane self, that already exists in him from the beginning, but needs a way to be accomplished to reveal itself, as a Pawn that already contains a potentiality of a Queen but needs to go through a game to accomplish itself. ‘

 

Alice through the looking glass’ is a metaphor which diffuses its semantic repertoire of images on the structure and the events of the way, where the Wood without Names is an extralinguistic universe, the Shop with Vanishing Objects is an inconceivability of empirical world, Humpty Dumpty is a trickster and a toon who eludes the power of language.

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The journey starts in Norway, where  Wittgenstein found his exile for a while. There a linguistic and philosophic inquiry is initiated by uttering the phrase <Agamben fries an egg>. This utterance triggers the reality in which this specific linguistic construction creates a ‘quantic’ state of things: the extra-linguistic reality to which it refers from this point is that of where he simultaneously fries it and fries it not.

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We meet Agamben in Grado, in hotel Astoria, where we start a series of conversations, initiated by the proposition to fry an egg.

 

By focusing on a mundane act and by an attempt to translate it to a domaine of absent purpose, we are addressing such questions as that of action and gesture, anonymity of names (paradox of White Knight), suspended image and image-movement, being in language and being; and others, in a form of a gag-like situation as that of frying an egg with a philosopher.

 

 

This proposition exists as such - a sentence with subject and predicate. As an utterance, which means being in language, the phrase IAgamben fries an eggI incorporates all potential scenarios of how this phrase could be actualized - but also it simultaneously and radically denies them all. Therefore being in language comprises all possible and impossible scenarios at the same time, making room for hope and for whatever.

 

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