"The decisive experience--so difficult to talk about, it is claimed, for those who have had one--is not even an experience. It is nothing more than the point at which we touch the limits of language.... Where language stops is not where the unsayable occurs, but rather where the matter of words begins. Those who have not reached, as in a dream, this woody substance of language, which the ancients called silva (wildwood), are prisoners of representation, even when they keep silent.
"It is the same for those who return to life after an apparent death: in reality they were never dead at all (otherwise they wouldn't have returned), nor are they rid of the necessity of dying some day; they are, however, freed from the representation of death. This is why, when asked about what they went through, they have nothing to say about death but find matter for many stories and fine tales about their life."
Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, tr. Michael Sullivan & Sam Whitsitt (SUNY Press,1995), p. 39
"It is the same for those who return to life after an apparent death: in reality they were never dead at all (otherwise they wouldn't have returned), nor are they rid of the necessity of dying some day; they are, however, freed from the representation of death. This is why, when asked about what they went through, they have nothing to say about death but find matter for many stories and fine tales about their life."
Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, tr. Michael Sullivan & Sam Whitsitt (SUNY Press,1995), p. 39
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