The Fall of Language: Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning

by Alexander Stern

Overview

In the most comprehensive account to date of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language, Alexander Stern explores the nature of meaning by putting Benjamin in dialogue with Wittgenstein.

Known largely for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature, Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. This early work is famously obscure and considered hopelessly mystical by some. But for Alexander Stern, it contains important insights and anticipates—in some respects surpasses—the later thought of a central figure in the philosophy of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

As described in The Fall of Language, Benjamin argues that “language as such” is not a means for communicating an extra-linguistic reality but an all-encompassing medium of expression in which everything shares. Borrowing from Johann Georg Hamann’s understanding of God’s creation as communication to humankind, Benjamin writes that all things express meanings, and that human language does not impose meaning on the objective world but translates meanings already extant in it. He describes the transformations that language as such undergoes while making its way into human language as the “fall of language.” This is a fall from “names”—language that responds mimetically to reality—to signs that designate reality arbitrarily.

While Benjamin’s approach initially seems alien to Wittgenstein’s, both reject a designative understanding of language; both are preoccupied with Russell’s paradox; and both try to treat what Wittgenstein calls “the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language.” Putting Wittgenstein’s work in dialogue with Benjamin’s sheds light on its historical provenance and on the turn in Wittgenstein’s thought. Although the two philosophies diverge in crucial ways, in their comparison Stern finds paths for understanding what language is and what it does.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674980914
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/08/2019
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Alexander Stern received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame and works on the philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, and aesthetics. His writing has appeared in the European Journal of Philosophy and Critical Horizons as well as in the New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Los Angeles Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations vii

Introduction 1

Part I Benjamin's Philosophy of Language

1 The Metaphysics of Meaning 29

2 Language Out of Eden 56

3 The Theory Gets Dressed Up 90

Part II The History of Language as Such

4 The Thought of Language 141

5 What Art Means 180

6 The Linguistic U-Turn 216

7 Private Language and Other Nonsense 266

Part III Benjamin and Wittgenstein

8 The Word and the Deed 291

9 The Character of Language 339

Bibliography 367

Acknowledgments 379

Index 381

Editorial Reviews

A comprehensive and rigorous analysis of the intricacies of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language.

Choice

I don’t know any book that gives such a clear account of the tradition of thinking about language that takes off from Hamann—the idea that we are already within language—and then not only shows its relevance for Benjamin’s whole outlook, but also the way in which this approach remains on the outside of the main analytic tradition, but is knocking to get in again, through Wittgenstein. The Fall of Language sheds floods of light on the whole scene.

Charles Taylor

This book provides an unusually comprehensive and judicious account of Benjamin’s theory of language, and in particular it corrects longstanding misreadings of the influential 1916 essay on language.

Howard Eiland