Punctuating Philosophy

As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out in his paper on the last work of Gilles Deleuze: Immanence: A Life…(1995), the relationship between philosophy and punctuation is relatively unexamined, except by a few thinkers such as Adorno (1956). Following Agamben’s line of argument, this paper highlights some of the instances where this relationship might be glimpsed, and tentatively points towards further evidence that punctuation sometimes supports philosophical thought in a deeper way than assumed. The proposition is that we should look more closely, along with these philosophers, at the ways in which such representation of thoughts/ideas, happens within philosophy itself, at the level of the individual marks and gestures which make that thought ‘visible’. This has been called a ‘punctology’ (D’Hoest and Lewis, 2016); bringing together punctuation and ontology in creating a new expression of being; one embedded within the material marks of punctuation as a system of signs.