The Fall of Language

In the most comprehensive account to date of Walter Benjamins 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 anticipatesin some respects surpassesthe 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 Hamanns understanding of Gods 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 nameslanguage that responds mimetically to realityto signs that designate reality arbitrarily. While Benjamins approach initially seems alien to Wittgensteins, both reject a designative understanding of language; both are preoccupied with Russells paradox; and both try to treat what Wittgenstein calls the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language. Putting Wittgensteins work in dialogue with Benjamins sheds light on its historical provenance and on the turn in Wittgensteins thought. Although the two philosophies diverge in crucial ways, in their comparison Stern finds paths for understanding what language is and what it does.