having legal names treated by authorities as "real" names has convinced so many people that its bizarre to have more than one name throughout one's life, when the opposite is true.

names are gifts. we receive many throughout our lives. we always give ourself this gift (though many of us lie to ourselves about it). and sometimes we share that gift to ourselves with others.

a name has power given the social world that carries it. remember this every time youre given a name, every time you gift others a name, and every time you share the gift of your name with others.

"Only someone who is enchanted can say "I" with a smile, and the only happiness that is truly deserved is the one we could never dream of deserving.

That is the ultimate reason for the precept that there is only one way to achieve happiness on this earth: to believe in the divine and not to aspire to reach it (there is an ironic variation of this in a conversation between Franz Kafka and Gustav Janouch, when Kafka affirms that there is plenty of hope - but not for us). This apparently ascetic thesis becomes intelligible only if we understand the meaning of this "not for us." It means not that happiness is reserved only for others (happiness is, precisely, for us) but that it awaits us only at the point where it was not destined for us.

That is: happiness can be only ours through magic. At that point, when we have wrenched it away from fate, happiness coincides entirely with our knowing ourselves to be capable of magic, with the gesture we use to banish that childhood sadness once and for all..."

"If this is so, if there is no other happiness than feeling capable of magic, then Kafka's enigmatic definition of magic becomes clear. He writes that if we call life by its right name, it comes forth, because "that is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons." This definition agrees with the ancient tradition scrupulously followed by kabbalists and necromancers, according to which magic is essentially a science of secret names.

Each thing, each being, has in addition to its manifest name another, hidden name to which it cannot fail to respond. To be a magus means to know and evoke these archi-names. Hence the interminable discussions of names (diabolical or
angelic) through which the necromancer ensures his mastery over spiritual powers. For him, the secret name is only the seal of his power of life and death over the creature that bears it.

But according to another, more luminous tradition, the secret name is not so much the cipher of the thing's subservience to the magus's speech as, rather, the monogram that sanctions its liberation from language. The secret name was the name by which the creature was called in Eden. When it is pronounced, every manifest name - the entire Babel of names - is shattered. That is why, according to this doctrine, magic is a call to happiness. The secret name is the gesture that restores the creature to the unexpressed. In the final instance, magic is not a knowledge of names but a gesture, a breaking free from the name. That is why a child is never more content than when he invents a secret language. His sadness comes less from ignorance of magic names than from his own inability to free himself from the name that has been imposed on him. No sooner does he succeed, no sooner docs he invent a new name, than he holds in his hands the laissez-passel' that grants him happiness. To have a name is to be guilty. And justice, like magic, is nameless. Happy, and without a name, the creature knocks at the gates of the land of the magi, who speak in gestures alone."

-Agamben, Profanations, "Magic and Happiness"

https://anarch.cc/giorgio-agamben/

@exiliaex oh shit he’s talking abt the thing i was talking abt