Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin's Early Reflections on Theater and Language by Ilit Ferber

Author:Ilit Ferber [Ferber, Ilit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

Creation and Loss: “On Language as Such”

Benjamin’s interpretation of Genesis is neither an endeavor to turn the biblical story into an object of inquiry nor an attempt to subject the Bible to objective consideration as “revealed truth.” Rather, it is an attempt at a “discovery of what emerges of itself from the biblical text with regard to the nature of language” (LAN, SW, 1:67). Thus, his recounting of the story of Creation is meant to shed light on his linguistic theory (in the sense of “objects of theology without which truth is inconceivable,” or the famous ink-blotter) and should be treated accordingly—avoiding the sometimes tempting reification of its plot. Benjamin’s interpretation of the first two chapters of Genesis can therefore be taken to manifest what he meant in his essay on Kant, by the peculiar relation between philosophy and religion that he deems essential to construct. That is, he intends to substantiate the historical and linguistic structures of the theological texts, rather than provide a mythical reading of them.13

Benjamin’s reading of Genesis yields a linguistic interpretation that vindicates his theory of language and supplies the foundation for what I will later term an ethical feeling of the linguistic commitment between man and nature. Moreover, this text emphasizes a strong kinship between language and feeling in Genesis, specifically between language and melancholy.

Language—as a realm of potentiality for expression rather than of articulation or linguistic actualization—evokes Benjamin’s argument for the demarcation between the linguistic essence of objects and that of the human. If we extend the aforementioned argument regarding the “language-lamp,” as Benjamin calls it, to the human realm, we find a fundamental differentiation. The linguistic being of man is his language, and he communicates this being in his language. Unlike other objects (such as the lamp or mountain), however, human beings speak in words: “The incomparable feature of human language is that its magical community with things is immaterial and purely mental, and the symbol of this is sound. The Bible expresses this symbolic fact when it says that God breathes his breath into man: this is at once life and mind and language” (LAN, SW, 1:67). Despite man’s obvious sonic advantage over things, however, there exists a unique sense of sharing between humans and nature, an intimate rapport that is “immaterial and purely mental,” as Benjamin writes.

To ground man’s sharing of his language with natural and inanimate objects, Benjamin invokes the biblical story of Creation. There he finds the primal source from which to explicate and clarify his previous proposition regarding the expansion of language so as to include every human being or thing. The crux of the linguistic connection between man and nature lies in man’s communication of his own mental essence (language) in the very first act of linguistic expression, in naming: “Man therefore communicates his own mental being (insofar as it is communicable) by naming all other things” (LAN, SW, 1:64). This inclination or potential to communicate, however, is always entangled with a fundamental incapability to completely

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