The Gift of Language: Memory and Promise in Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig

Library of Jewish Philosophy

by Alexander Garcia Duttmann, The Gift of Lanuage Arline Lyons (Translator)

This text focuses on the relevance of the proper name in the conceptions of language and history that inform the thought of Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger and Rosenzweig. Their interest in the proper name is because it does not simply operate as a conventional linguistic sign. A specific experience of the Jewish religious tradition (Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig) and a vision of poetry resulting from the reading of Hoelderlin (Heidegger) lead to the idea of an absolute singularity, it is a singularity that resists all conceptual identificaiton and the proper name expresses this singularity in language. In this analysis, history is conceived as a movement that both betrays and tends towards the absolute singularity that manifests itself in the unsayable, i.e. in the name of God, or in poetical language. questions of gesture, translation and melancholia and the moment of apparition in the work of art are comprehensible within Dr Duttmann's discussion, which should be of interest to students of language, philosophy and theology.

140 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Erdem Tasdelen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this book after I read a very interesting essay the author wrote on Proust and proper names, but this book is kind of unbearable. Honestly I couldn't care less about Jewish theology and I really don't like the kind of philosophy that sets up a language for itself and then presents nothing other than semantic tautologies.