Agamben's language fetishism

Early in Capital (Penguin, 1990 edition), Marx describes Aristotle's valiant attempt to discover the secret of the commodity: "'there can be no exchange,' he says, 'without equality, and no equality without commensurability'. Here, however, he falters, and abandons the further analysis of the form of value. 'It is, however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commensurable,' i.e. qualitatively equal (pg. 151)".

The common element in "such unlike things" that facilitates the process of exchange is, of course, the human labour expended in their production - Marx discovered this, why could a genius like Aristotle not?
The German philosopher is kind to the great Greek, not attributing this failing to any intellectual deficiency, but rather to "the historical limitation inherent in the society in which he lived" - "the secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion (pg. 151)". In so far as slavery and a rigid, hierarchical social structure were entrenched in Ancient Greek society, "the concept of human equality" had certainly not acquired widespread recognition in this setting - in truly historical materialist fashion, Marx is arguing that Aristotle was unable to think outside the limits of his historical context.

We must treat Giorgio Agamben's attempted synthesis of the differing arguments on the origins of language - internal or external? nature or culture? - with the same sympathy (in Infancy and History, 2007: Verso). Indeed, at first sight, he appears to have resolved this debate with ease:

"What marks human language is not its belonging to either the esosomatic or endosomatic sphere, but its situation, so to speak, on the cusp of the two, and its consequent articulation in both their difference and their resonance...We can likewise conceive of endosomatic and esosomatic, nature and culture, as two distinct systems which, resonating in language, produce a single new system (pg. 66)." He notes, however, that "there must be a mediating element which enables the two systems to resonate (pg. 66)" - this is Chomsky's universal generative grammar.

The idea of language transgressing the popularly conceived boundary between nature and culture, between internal and external, was definitely a new one when Agamben wrote this essay in 1978. So how is it that he can think outside the limits of popular opinion, of his historical context?
The question is a false one - in reality he does not, he cannot. Instead, he deflects the struggle between conceptions of the origin of language in nature or culture onto an opposition within the concept of language itself - the semiotic versus the semantic.

The fact that this is a symptom of his inability to surpass the situation of his enunciation is cleverly concealed - he describes the difference between the semiotic and the semantic before his apparent synthesis of the natural and cultural origins of language:

"The semiotic is nothing other than the pure pre-babble language of nature, in which man shares in order to speak, but from with the Babel of infancy perpetually withdraws him. The semantic does not exist except in its momentary emergence from the semiotic in the instance of discourse, whose elements, once uttered, fall back into pure language, which reassembles them in its mute dictionary of signs. Like dolphins, for a mere instant human language lifts its head from the semiotic sea of nature."

We have the semiotic - a concrete, silent system of signs - representing the unalterable conditions of "nature" into which we are born, and the semantic - the supple system employed in discourse - aligning with the less concrete, external (what is speech but an externalisation of language?) cultural conditions of our existence.
This is the nature of Agamben's "language fetishism" - a conceptual contortion, a symptom, produced by "the historical limitation inherent in the society in which he lived".