Giorgio Agamben: Understanding Oikeiōsis

Giorgio Agamben saw in the concept of ‘use’ the term that enables us to understand the oscillation between having and being, property and inap-propriateness, being rooted in one’s own land and being in exile. The same oscillation between property and inappropriateness governs our use of lan-guage. Our mother tongue represents what is the most intimate and most per-sonal, what ratifies our origin, what assigns us to a community. But this famili-arity, this habit or habitude, is illusory: something, at the centre of our use of language, expropriates itself and expropriates us. In order to understand this oscillation, Agamben uses the Stoic concept of oikeiōsis, which preserves the semantic dimension of ‘familiarity’, of ‘habitude’. ‘Use’ and oikeiōsis become the keys to a better understanding of the problem of ‘inhabiting’ our language, our body, and, through the concept of landscape, the world itself.