Description
Book SynopsisKnown for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature, Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. For Alexander Stern, his famously obscure—and, for some, hopelessly mystical—early work contains important insights, anticipating and in some respects surpassing Wittgenstein’s later thinking on the philosophy of language.
Trade ReviewI don’t know any book that gives such a clear account of the tradition of thinking about language that takes off from Hamann—the idea that we are already within language—and then not only shows its relevance for Benjamin’s whole outlook, but also the way in which this approach remains on the outside of the main analytic tradition, but is knocking to get in again, through Wittgenstein.
The Fall of Language sheds floods of light on the whole scene. -- Charles Taylor, McGill University
This book provides an unusually comprehensive and judicious account of Benjamin’s theory of language, and in particular it corrects longstanding misreadings of the influential 1916 essay on language. -- Howard Eiland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
A comprehensive and rigorous analysis of the intricacies of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language. * Choice *
