The Suspension of Experience and Modern Literature

Abstract

In 1978 Giorgio Agamben wrote an important book on experience, Infancy and History, in which he mapped with no uncertain words the zone and the task of modern literature. Discussing the work of Charles Baudelaire, Agamben claimed that: “In Baudelaire a man expropriated from experience exposes himself to the force of shock. Poetry responds to the expropriation of experience by converting this expropriation into a reason for surviving and making the inexperiencible its normal condition. In this perspective, the search for the ‘new’ does not appear as the search for a new object of experience; instead, it implies an eclipse and a suspension of experience.” (Agamben 1993: 41) The concepts that provide this passage a productive originality are “eclipse” and “suspension”. But what exactly does “a suspension of experience” mean, and more importantly, what kind of language and literature “a language and a literature of suspension” are?