Lament in Jewish Thought by Ilit Ferber Paula Schwebel

Author:Ilit Ferber, Paula Schwebel [Ilit Ferber, Paula Schwebel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783110347210
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 38645946
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2014-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

2b Excursus on Benjamin’s and Scholem’s Theories of Language

In this manner Scholem’s Kabbalist theory of language places itself in relation to Benjamin’s theory as a continuation that in a sense simultaneously translates it back: by returning to a point before Benjamin’s transformation of his philosophy of language, as formulated in his 1916 essay’s reading of Genesis, into a cultural history of the mimetic capacity, as set forth in his 1933 essay “The Doctrine of Similarity.” Through this process of translation, Scholem reconstructs the register of Kabbalist, religious language theory from which Benjamin’s concept of “paradisiacal language” emerges. This complicated position vis-à-vis Benjamin’s theory of language does not negate Scholem’s clear proximity to it, above all evident as a structural analogy: in Benjamin’s earlier theory of language magic as well, history and meaning (in the sense of something communicable) are presented as having the same origin – a caesura separating human language from the sphere of divine creation.190 But whereas for Scholem something lacking meaning, the name of God, marks the origin – as indicated, the condition for the possibility of meaning – Benjamin emphasizes the figure of a caesura in which paradisiacal language, as a language that is “completely cognizant” and at the same time is one that names, is replaced by a judging, distinguishing language: by a form of indirect or mediate (i.e., sign-based) communication.

Hence whereas the “central thought” in Scholem’s language theory is lack of meaning as an origin, in his figure of loss Benjamin presumes the antecedence of a “completely cognizant” language. In any event the difference between the two conceptions is not reducible to a distinction between originary semantic absence and originary cognitive abundance: for Scholem as well, the absence of meaning from the divine name is grounded in an abundance, God’s name being both infinitely interpretable and without fixed meaning. Rather, we can understand the difference as one of perspective: Benjamin’s reading of Genesis leads, as has been suggested, to a perspective that is anthropological, a history of mimetic capacity characterized by changes to the magical aspects of language in the course of human development; for Scholem, in contrast, the problem of “our time,” the falling silent of tradition, amounts to a vanishing of a scene of reading whose history he reconstructs in “The Name of God.” What Scholem postulates in that essay is a continuum between Kabbalistic texts and the position within them of the name of God. “For the Kabbalists,” he writes, “this name has no ‘meaning’ in the traditional understanding of the term. It has no concrete signification” (Scholem 1972, 193 ff.; my emphasis). But as found in their respective language theories Benjamin’s and Scholem’s reflections structurally embody the same model: language’s semantic dimension – as already cited from Scholem, “what has meaning, sense and form”; what in “The Doctrine of Similarity” Benjamin terms the “semiotic side” of language (GS2.1, 208) – consists of the inventory of inherited language, which refers to the incommunicable articulated in and with it, designated as mystery by Scholem and as magic or non-sensory similarity by Benjamin.

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