Mogę. Język wernakularny w obliczu spustoszenia ortologicznego
I Can: on the Political Power of the Vernacular

Summary/Abstract: According to a story cited by Giorgio Agamben in his collection of essays: La potenza del pensiero, one day, while standing in a queue, that typical element of the gloomy spiritual-social landscape of Soviet Russia during the 1930s, a certain woman recognised Anna Akhmatova. She approached the poetess to ask her only a single extreme and peremptory question: ”Can you express this?”. After a moment’s reflection Akhmatova gave an equally definite reply: “I can”. Using the terminology of Ivan Illich one could risk the opinion that the language of poetry – a language in which one can say what is happening by extracting events from oblivion – is the vernacular. This is a language that is not taught but obtained from a cultural environment thanks to conversations with concrete persons. In contrast to uniformised languages imposed by the authorities (which could be described as ”orthology”) the vernacular exists so that people could tell each other things straight to their faces. The power of language lies in the ethical experiencing of reality, and by cultivating it the poet wields power more durable than its orthological and ortho-practical political counterpart.

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