GIORGIO AGAMBEN - Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

PART ONE
Language

§ 3 Language and History: Linguistic and Historical Categories in Benjamin's Thought

Among the preparatory notes to Walter Benjamin "Theses on the Philosophy of History", we find the following passage, which is repeated in several versions:
The messianic world is the world of total and integral actuality. In it alone is there universal history. What goes by the name of universal history today can only be a kind of Esperanto. Nothing can correspond to it as long as the confusion originating in the Tower of Babel is not smoothed out. It presupposes the language into which every text of a living or dead language must be wholly translated. Or, rather, it itself is this language. Not, though, as written, but as festively celebrated. This celebration is purified of every ceremony; it knows no celebratory songs. Its language is the idea of prose itself, which is understood by all humans just as the language of birds is understood by those born on Sunday. 1
The comparison suggested in this passage between language and history, linguistic categories and historical categories, may seem surprising at first glance. The history of redeemed humanity, Benjamin says, is the only universal history; but the history of redeemed humanity is one with its language. Universal history presupposes or, rather, is the universal language that puts an end to the Babelic confusion of tongues. The figure of this language of redeemed humanity is, however, a language that is not written but joyously celebrated. It is the idea of prose, the "freed prose," as we read in one variant, "which has broken the chains of writing" 2 and is therefore understood by all humans just as the language of birds, accord ing to a popular Christian legend concerning the supernatural powers of "children born on Sunday," is understood by such Sonntagskinder.
In the pages that follow, I suggest a reading of this text, in which Benjamin expressed one of his deepest intentions in an exemplary gesture.
The approximation between historical categories and linguistic categories that is at issue here is not as unusual as it may appear to us today. It was familiar to medieval thought through a formulation that is perhaps even more extreme: "history," we read in Isidore of Seville Etymologies, "pertains to grammar" (haec disciplina [scil. historia] ad grammaticam pertinet). 3 In the Augustinian text in which Isidore's sentence found its authority, this pertinence is explained by the fact that every historical transmission necessarily refers to the domain of the "letter." Having considered what he calls the "infancy of grammar" (quaedam grammaticae infantia), from the invention of alphabetic characters to the identification of parts of speech, Augustine continues:
Grammar might have ended there. But since its very name indicated letters, which in Latin is the root of "literature," it so happened that anything memorable consigned to letters [litteris mandaretur] necessarily pertained to it. This discipline was thus associated with history, which is one by name but infinite in material, diverse, more full of cares than joy or truth, and a serious affair that is more the business of grammarians than of historians. 4
If history is presented here, in the gloomy light familiar to us, as "a serious affair that is more the business of grammarians than of historians," it is because Augustine, with an acute comprehension of the nature of language, understands that the science of language includes not only grammar in the strict sense (the synchronic analysis of linguistic structures) but also the "infinite" dimension of historical transmission (litteris mandaretur). For Augustine, the letter, the gramma, is thus first of all a historical element. In what sense?
Augustine's conception of the matter has its foundation in the Stoic theory of language, which was still expressed, for example, in Varro's great treatise on the Latin language. This theory clearly distinguishes two planes in language: the level of names (or of pure nomination, impositio, quaemadmodum vocabula rebus essent imposita) and the level of discourse, which is derived from it as "a river from its source." 5
Since humans can receive names--which always precede them--only through transmission, the access to this fundamental dimension of language is mediated and conditioned by history. Speaking beings do not invent names, and names do not emerge from speaking beings as from animal voices. Instead, Varro says, names reach humans in descending, that is, through historical transmission. Names can only be given and passed on; the act of speech is the object of an ars and therefore susceptible to a technical and rational science. It does not matter here whether names are conceived as a divine gift or a human invention; what is important is that in every case their origin escapes the speaker.
This decomposition of the plane of language into the two hierarchically distinct levels of names and actual speech constitutes an intuition so lasting and central that we can still find it in perfectly analogous terms in Wittgenstein Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Here names are defined as "simple signs" (Urzeichen) whose meaning must already have been explained for us to understand them. 6 With propositions, Wittgenstein says, we understand each other without any further explanations. (It is worth reflecting on this character of human access to language, which is such that every act of speech presupposes the level of names, which can be reached only historically, through a "thus it is said" that is in fact a "thus it was said.")
It is this primordial historical foundation of language, which resists all purely technical and rational penetration, that Dante, in a passage of the Convivio, presents in an astronomical image as the "shadow" of language. Here Dante compares grammar to the moon's heaven, on account of "the shadow in [that heaven], which is nothing but the rarity of its substance in which the rays of the sun cannot terminate and be reflected back as in its other parts." 7 For Dante, grammar too possesses this property, "for because of its infinitude the rays of reason are not terminated, especially insofar as words are concerned." 8
Reason cannot reach the origin of names (li vocaboli) and cannot master them because, as we have seen, they reach reason only though history, in descending. This infinite "descent" of names is history. Language thus always anticipates the original place of speaking beings, retreating toward the past and the future of an infinite descent, such that thinking can never find an end to it. And this is the incurable "shadow" of grammar, the darkness that originally inheres in language and that--in the necessary coincidence of history and grammar--founds the historical condition of human beings. History is the cipher of the shadow that denies hu man beings direct access to the level of names; history is the place of names. The transparency of language--the ungroundedness of every act of speech--founds both theology and history. As long as human beings cannot reach the origin of language, there will be the transmission of names. And as long as there is the transmission of names, there will be history and destiny.
In this light, the coincidence between language and history stated in Benjamin's text no longer seems surprising. The historical condition of human beings is inseparable from their condition as speaking beings; it is inscribed in the very mode of their access to language, which is originally marked by a fracture. But how does Benjamin understand this cohesion of language and history, linguistic categories and historical categories? In a text of 1916, entitled "The Meaning of Language in the German Mourning-Play and in Tragedy", he expressed it in a striking, abbreviated form: "in human language," we read there, "history is born together with meaning." 9 And yet in this text, the cohesion of language and history is not total. It coincides, indeed, with a fracture in language itself, that is, with the fall of language (Wort) from the "pure life of feeling" (reines Gefühlsleben), in which it is "the pure sound of feeling," into the domain of meaning (Bedeutung). "Along the course of this path [away from pure sound]," Benjamin writes, "nature sees herself betrayed by language, and this immense inhibition of feeling becomes mourning." 10 History and meaning are thus produced together, but they follow a condition of language that is, so to speak, prehistoric, in which language exists in a "pure life of feeling" without meaning.
In the essay "On Language as Such and the Language of Men" ( 1916), the decomposition of language into two levels is clearly articulated by a mythologeme founded on the exegesis of the Bible. Here, as in medieval thought, the original level of language is that of names, which is exemplified in the Genesis account by Adamic naming. What Benjamin defines here as "pure language" (reine Sprache) or the language of names (Namensprache), however, is in no way what we, according to a more and more common conception, understand as language--that is, meaningful speech as the means of a communication that transmits a message from one subject to another. Such a conception of language is expressly rejected by Benjamin as a "bourgeois notion of language" whose "inconsistency and vacuity" he intends to show. The pure language of names, by con trast, appears as an example of a notion of language "that knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication." The name, as "the innermost nature of language itself," is that "through which nothing is communicated, and in which language communicates itself absolutely. In naming the mental entity that communicates itself is language." This is why Benjamin can define the name as "the language of language (if the genitive refers to the relationship not of a means but of a medium)." 11
The status of this Adamic language is therefore that of speech that does not communicate anything other than itself and in which spiritual essence and linguistic essence thus coincide. Such a language does not have a content and does not communicate objects through meanings; instead, it is perfectly transparent to itself: "There is no such thing as a content of language; as communication, language communicates a spiritual entity, that is, a communicability pure and simple." This is why the problem of the unsayable (as a "conflict . . . between what is expressed and expressible and what is inexpressible and unexpressed"), which is characteristic of human language, cannot exist in pure language. 12 Here the philosophy of language has its point of contact with religion in the concept of revelation, which does not admit the concept of the unsayable.
The original sin for which humans are driven out of Paradise is, first of all, the fall of language from being a language of insignificant and perfectly transparent names to signifying speech as the means of an external communication: "The word must communicate something (other than itself). That is really the Fall of language-spirit. . . . In stepping outside the pure language of names, man makes a language into a means (that is, a knowledge inappropriate to him), and therefore also, in one part at any rate, a mere sign; and this later results in the plurality of languages." 13
It is this fallen condition of language, which is confirmed by the Babelic confusion of tongues, that Benjamin's 1921 essay "The Task of the Translator" presents from the perspective of its messianic redemption. Here the multiplicity of historical languages is grasped in its movement toward the pure language that the 1916 essay "On Language as Such and the Language of Men" presented as their Edenic origin. Pure language now appears as what every language, in its own way, means [vuole dire]. 14 "All suprahistorical kinship of languages," Benjamin writes, "rests in the intention underlying each language as a whole--an intention, however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure lan guage." 15 What is meant in language lies in every single language in expectation of flowering, from the harmony of all languages, into the one language that Benjamin defines as "the messianic end of their history." just as history tends toward its messianic fulfillment, so linguistic movement as a whole tends toward "a final, conclusive, decisive stage of all linguistic creation." 16 The task of the philosopher, like that of the translator, is to "describe" and "intimate" this single true language, which seeks to "show itself " and "constitute itself " in the becoming of languages. And at the end of the essay, this pure language is described in the decisive figure of an "expressionless word" freed from the weight and extraneousness of meaning:
To relieve it of this [meaning], to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized, to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of translation. In this pure language--which no longer means anything [nichts mehr meint] and no longer expresses anything (nichts mehr ausdrückt] but, as expressionless and creative word, that which is meant in all languages--all communication, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished. 17
How are we to understand this "expressionless word," this pure language in which all communication and all meaning are extinguished? How are we to think--since this and nothing less is the task given to thinking at this point--of a word that no longer means anything, that is no longer destined to the historical transmission of a meaning? And in what sense can this word--which has necessarily extinguished the Babelic confusion of languages--furnish us with the model of the universal language of redeemed humanity, "which is understood by all humans just as the language of birds is understood by those born on Sunday"? In other words, how can human beings simply speak and comprehend speech without the mediation of meaning?
All historical languages, Benjamin writes, mean pure language. It is what is meant (das Gemeinte) in every language, what every language means to say. On the other hand, however, it itself does not mean anything; it does not want to say anything, and all meaning and intention come to a halt in it. We may thus say that all languages mean to say the word that does not mean anything.
Let us seek to consider this paradox fully. Benjamin writes, "all suprahistorical kinship of languages rests in the intention underlying each sage from which we began and ask: how are we to represent its reality as the universal language of redeemed humanity?
We may begin by imagining this language in accordance with a hypothesis that Benjamin explicitly excludes, that is, as a kind of Esperanto. It certainly did not escape Benjamin that a messianic intention lies at the basis of Esperanto and is expressed in its very name. (In a preparatory note to the "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Benjamin writes: "Universal history in the contemporary sense is always only a kind of Esperanto. It gives expression to the hopes of humankind just as well as universal language does.") 21 The term "Esperanto" means "he who hopes," and it is the pseudonym under which the Polish Jewish physician Ludwig Zamenhof published his Lingvo internacia in 1887, presenting the foundations of a universal language to which the author entrusted his hopes for a lasting and universal understanding among peoples. That he represented his language in a messianic sense (that is, to use Benjamin's words, as the "language in which every text of a living or dead language must be wholly translated") is shown by his tenacious translation work, which culminated in the translation of the Old Testament into Esperanto, published in 1926 (that is, at the same time that Franz Rosenzweig and Buber were preparing their German translation of the Bible).
How is Esperanto formed? It is based on the 4,013 (principally neoLatin) roots deduced from Indo-European, which form substantives through the addition of the suffix -o, adjectives through the suffix -a, and verbal infinitives through the suffix -i. Thus from skrib, which signifies writing, one has skribo (writer), skriba (written), and skribi (to write). Esperanto thus consists in a regularization and extreme grammatical simplification of the structure of historical languages, which leaves intact the fundamental conception of language as a system of signs transmitting meanings. A limit is set on the plurality of languages in the sense not of their messianic fulfillment and transfiguration but of an in-finite conservation of their signification and meaning. It takes only an instant to realize that what is excluded from Esperanto is precisely the messianic fulfillment of which Benjamin wrote. Esperanto is a language of infinite meaning that can never find fulfillment. A conception of universal history with Esperanto as its model could only be a summary organization of the essential elements of all particular histories. But such a compendium would not be the world of an integral actuality freed from all writing; it would, instead, be writing consigned to infinite transmission.
Another interpretation against which Benjamin explicitly warns his readers is that of conceiving universal language (or universal history) as an "Ideal" in the sense of an infinite task traversing all historical becoming. The expressionless word, in this sense, would be an infinite task that could never be accomplished as such and toward which the historical experience of speaking humanity would be directed. Today such a conception of language and history (which is only falsely termed religious) is maintained by a philosophical current that, having emerged out of an interpretation of Heidegger's thought, has gained a position of notable importance in contemporary academic parlance through its marriage with the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition.
According to this conception, "every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning. . . . All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out." 22 This infinity of sense is what all perception of speech must be attentive to: authentic interpretation is interpretation that, in sheltering the openness of the infinite historical community of messages, situates everything said within the historical unsaid that is destined to infinite interpretation. From this perspective, an interpreter who does not want to shelter the infinity of tradition appears, in Hans-Georg Gadamer's words, as "a dog to whom one tries to point something out, but who bites the pointing hand, instead of looking in the direction indicated." Benjamin explicitly warns against such a perspective when, in a single gesture, he criticizes both the Social-Democratic transformation of the Marxian idea of a classless society (which for him was a genuinely messianic idea) into an infinite task and neo-Kantianism's analogous transformation of the Kantian Idea into an Ideal. Just as the classless society becomes what founds and guides all historical development without ever being attained in experience, so hermeneutics transforms ideal language into the unsayable foundation that, without ever itself coming to speech, destines the infinite movement of all language. For Benjamin, on the other hand, "the classless society is not the final end of historical progress, but rather its often failed and finally accomplished interruption." 23
For Benjamin, the true hermeneutics of a text is the opposite of the one proposed by contemporary hermeneutics. If the interpreter looks toward the unsaid and the infinity of sense, for Benjamin the purpose of doing so is certainly not to preserve them but rather to put an end to them. Like the dog in Gadamer's example, he obstinately bites the hand of the historical instant so that it may cease pointing beyond itself in an infinite reference. Authentic criticism is the fulfillment and mortification of the work. Exposing the Idea in the work, criticism reduces the work to a torso; it dazzles the work, it says the work.
The mystical foundation of this conception of language and history clearly appears in another theory, which might also claim to offer a legitimate interpretation of Benjamin's thought. We refer here to the ancient Cabalistic theory of language, which has found its most authoritative presentation in our time in the work of Gershom Scholem. According to this theory, the foundation of every human language is the name of God. This name, however, has no proper meaning, nor can it itself be uttered; it is simply constituted by the twenty-two letters of the alphabet from whose combination all human languages derive.
"For the Kabbalists," Scholem writes,
this name has no "meaning" in the traditional understanding of the term. It has no concrete signification. The meaninglessness of the name of God indicates its situation in the very central point of the revelation, at the basis of which it lies. Behind every revelation of a meaning in language . . . there exists this element which projects over and beyond meaning, but which in the first instance enables meaning to be given. It is this element which endows every other form of meaning, though it has no meaning itself. What we learn from creation and revelation, the word of God, is infinitely liable to interpretation, and it is reflected in our own language. Its radiation of sounds, which we catch, are not so much communications as appeals. That which has meaning--sense and form--is not this word itself, but the tradition behind this word, its communication and reflection in time. 24
With this mystical conception of the relationship between the "literal" name of God and human language, we enter into a horizon of thought that was certainly familiar to Benjamin and that has been secularized in our time through the theory of the supremacy of the letter or gramma (as the originary negative foundation of language), which, starting with Derrida, appears in innumerable forms in contemporary French thought. Yet once again, Benjamin's text excludes the possibility of such an interpretation. While the mystical and in-significant character of the name of God is, in the Cabala as in grammatology, tied to its being constituted by pure letters, Benjamin explicitly states that the language of redeemed humanity has "burst the chains of writing" and is a language that "is not writ ten, but festively celebrated." Here Benjamin opposes the Cabala's writing of what was never said with a "reading of what was never written." If the letters that compose the unpronounceable name of God are what destines human language to historical transmission and infinite interpretation, we may then say that universal language represents the definitive cancellation and resolution of these letters, the definitive and absolute utterance of God's name in speech. (This much also accords with the intention that Benjamin once expressed by likening his own relationship to theology to that of a blotting pad to ink: "It is soaked through with it. But if it were up to the blotting pad, there would be no more ink.")
Having excluded these three hypotheses, we have delineated certain features of pure language, if only negatively. But we have certainly not presented its full figure. That what is at issue here was, for Benjamin, something like the supreme problem of thought is shown by the fact that in the "Epistemological-Critical Preface" to the Origin of the German Tragic Drama he ties the pure language of Adamic names to the Platonic theory of Ideas. "The Idea," we read there,
is something linguistic [ein Sprachliches]; it is that element of the symbolic in the essence of any word. In empirical perception, in which words have become fragmented, they possess, in addition to their more or less hidden, symbolic aspect, an obvious, profane meaning. It is the task of the philosopher to restore, by presentation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the Idea is given self-consciousness, and that is the opposite of all outwardly-directly communication. . . . In philosophical contemplation, the Idea is released from the heart of reality as the word, reclaiming its namegiving power. 25
And it is precisely the pure power of nomination, which is "not lost in the cognitive meaning," that in the immediately following passage constitutes Adam, alongside Plato, as the true father of philosophy.
At this point, the comprehension of the status of names becomes as essential--and as aporetic--as the comprehension of the status of the Ideas in Plato Parmenides (those Ideas that, Plato says, were born precisely out of an inquiry into logoi, words). Do names, like Ideas with respect to phenomena, exist as real things in themselves, separate (khōris) with respect to existing words? Is there a separation (khōrismos) between the language of names and human language? Once again, it is precisely the capacity to think of this relation that will decide whether the language of names and universal language are to be conceived as an unattainable origin and infinite task, or whether instead the actual construction of this relation and this region constitutes the true task of the philosopher and the translator, the historian and the critic, and, in the final analysis, the ethical engagement of every speaking being.
In the "Epistemological-Critical Preface," the exposition of the Idea in phenomena is inseparable from the salvation of phenomena in the Idea: the two penetrate each other in a single gesture. The exposition of phenomena, Benjamin writes, is at the same time that of the Ideas; what is unique in phenomena is saved in the Ideas alone. This unity, however, implies a dialectic in which origin and end are identified and transformed. The origin here indicates not origination (Entstehung) but rather something like Goethe Urphänomen, an "original phenomenon" in which "there takes place . . . a determination of the form in which an Idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history." 26 At the same time, here the end is no longer simple cessation but, first of all, totality ("in the science of philosophy the concept of Being is not satisfied by the phenomenon until it has consummated all its history"). In the Idea, the phenomenon is fulfilled, "it becomes what it was not-totality." This is why the power of the Idea does not lie in the sphere of facts, "but refers to their pre-history and post-history," to their origin and their fulfilled totality. 27
As origin, the language of names is therefore not an initial chronological point, just as the messianic end of languages, the universal language of redeemed humanity, is not a simple chronological cessation. Together they constitute the two faces of the single Idea of language, which the 1916 essay "On Language as Such and the Language of Men" and the 1921 essay on the task of the translator presented as divided.
If we now return to the text that was our starting point, we will understand the sense in which Benjamin writes that the universal language of redeemed humanity, which is one with its history, is "the idea of prose itself, which is understood by all humans just as the language of birds is understood by those born on Sunday." With an intuition whose audacity and coherence must be considered, Benjamin thus holds that the universal language at issue here can only be the Idea of language, that is, not an Ideal (in the neo-Kantian sense) but the very Platonic Idea that saves and in itself fulfills all languages, and that an enigmatic Aristotelian frag ment describes as "a kind of mean between prose and poetry." For Benjamin, however, it coincides with the Idea of prose itself, in the sense in which Benjamin develops the concept of the prosaic nucleus of every linguistic formulation in his thesis on the romantic concept of criticism.
One of Paul Valéry's observations in an article in the Encyclopédie française struck Benjamin so forcefully that he transcribed it in one of his notebooks while working on his "Storyteller" essay. It reads: "the essence of prose is to perish, that is, to be comprehended, to be dissolved, destroyed without residue, wholly substituted by an image or impulse." Insofar as it has reached perfect transparency to itself, insofar as it now says and understands only itself, speech restored to the Idea is immediately dispersed; it is "pure history"--history without grammar or transmission, which knows neither past nor repetition, resting solely in its own never having been. It is what is continually said and what continually takes place in every language not as an unsayable presupposition but as what, in never having been, sustains the life of language. The Idea of language is language that no longer presupposes any other language; it is the language that, having eliminated all of its presuppositions and names and no longer having anything to say, now simply speaks.
In the perfect transparency of language in which there is no more distinction between the level of names and the level of signifying speech, between what is meant and what is said, it truly seems that languages--and with them all human culture--reach their messianic end. But what ends here is only a determinate conception of language and a determinate conception of culture: the conception to which we are accustomed, which founds all historical becoming and transmission on the incurable division between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission, names and discourse, thereby securing the infinity and continuity of the historical (and linguistic) process.
Benjamin criticized this conception without reservation when he wrote that the past must be saved not so much from oblivion or scorn as from "a determinate mode of its transmission," and that "the way in which it is valued as 'heritage' is more insidious than its disappearance could ever be." Or, to cite another statement:" [The history of culture] may well increase the burden of the treasures that are piled up on humanity's back. But it does not give humankind the strength to shake them off, so as to get its hands on them." 28
Here, instead, humanity has truly taken its "treasures" in its hands: its language and its history, its language-history, we could say. The division of the plane of language, which simultaneously grounded the inextricable intertwining of language and history and guaranteed their asymptotic noncoincidence, now disappears and gives way to a perfect identity of language and history, praxis and speech.
This is why universal history has no past to transmit, being instead a world of "integral actuality."
Here language disappears as an autonomous category; it is possible neither to make any distinct image of it nor to imprison it in any writing. Human beings no longer write their language; they celebrate it as a holiday without rites, and they understand each other "just as those born on Sunday understand the language of birds."

Notes:
1.
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-89), vol. 1 pt. 3, p. 1239.

2.
Ibid., p. 1235.


3.
Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum, I, XLI.

4.
Augustine, De ordine, 2, 12, 37.

5.
Varro, De lingua Latina, VIII, 5-6.

6.
The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny ( London: Blackwell, 1994), p. 12; the original is in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, prop. 4.026, in his Werkausgabe, vol. 1 ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 28-29.

7.
Dante, Il Convivio, II, XIII, 8-10; in Dante "Il Convivio" (The Banquet), trans. Richard H. Lansing ( New York: Garland, 1990), p. 69.

8.
Ibid.


9.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 139.

10.
Ibid., p. 138.

11.
Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott ( New York: Schocken, 1978), p. 318; the original is in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 144.

12.
Ibid., English p. 320 ; original pp. 145, 146.


13.
Ibid., English p. 328 ; original p. 153.


14.
[Here "to mean" renders the Italian voler dire, which (like the corresponding French expression, vouloir dire) signifies both "to want to say' and "to signify."--Ed.]

15.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn ( New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 74; the original is in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 13.

16.
Ibid., English p. 75 ; original p. 14.


17.
Ibid., English p. 80 ; original p. 19.


18.
Ibid., English p. 74 ; original p. 13.


19.
Ibid., English p. 75 ; original p. 14.


20.
Ibid., English and original.


21
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1235.

22.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald G. Marshall ( New York: Continuum, 1993), p. 458; the original is in Warheit und Methode ( Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1960), pp. 523-34.

23.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1231.

24.
Gershom Scholem, "The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah (Part 2)," Diogenes 79 ( 1973): 194; the original is in Gershom Scholem , Judaica, vol. 3 ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 69.

25.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne ( London: Verso, 1977), p. 36; the original is in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 216-17.

26.
Ibid., English p. 47 ; original p. 226.


27.
Ibid., English p. 47 ; original p. 228.


28.
Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter ( London: Verso, 1979), p. 361; the original is in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 478.