Giorgio Agamben Quote

Antoine Meillet also noted that imperatives in European languages are typically the morphological root of the verb, and hypothesised that the imperative was the primitive form of a verb: walk! precedes to walk or he walks. This opens up the possibility of an alternative ontology, or pre-ontology, based on commandment rather than assertion, on be! rather than is. While philosophical or scientific statements would fall under the ordinary is -based ontology, fields like law, religion or magic would operate in the imperative mode: let there be…

"What is a commandment?" March 28, 2011