Agamben v. Beckett  I’m not actually here (I’m on honeymoon),
but I thought I’d post a puzzler. Reading through Ann
Lauterbach’s On a Stair, I see that she prefaces the book with
two quotes:  The question “where is the thing?” is inseparable
from the question “where is the human?” Like the fetish, like
the toy, things are not properly anywhere, because their place
is found on this side of objects and beyond the human in a zone
that is no longer objective or subjective, neither personal nor
impersonal, neither material nor immaterial, but where we find
ourselves suddenly facing these apparently simple unknowns: the
human, the thing.  Giorgio Agamben   Samuel Beckett, The
Unnameable  And this led me to ask myself: why does the Beckett
quote seem so acute, clearing away entire forests of assumptions
with terse, razorlike words, while the Agamben quote reads to me
like so much word soup? Personal preference, I suppose, but that
begs the question. The Beckett quote begins a novel; I don’t
know the source of the Ag