WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

sure, but in the Chaldee language, which he here calls Syriac.” 164 At the precise moment in
which Nebuchadnezzar says that speech cannot speak, cannot represent his visual experience—
that speech has left its ability to represent an idea, Daniel shifts from using speech to narrate
ideas—to tell us a story—to reducing the status of text as a marker of another text. When
Nebuchadnezzar can no longer signify by means of language, Daniel can only use language to
point to yet another language. The biblical presentation of events, like the dream of the king,
becomes purely visual as the Hebrew uses its characters not to mean something when read aloud
but to point to another structural system—to Syriac—and so to demand a strict ethics of reading
and translation and not of narrative continuity when encountered on the page.
Starting from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of time, The Book of Daniel empties its written
Hebrew characters from their oral presence by requiring the reader to understand another
language through them—it is as if a text began in English and then continued in Arabic without
changing characters. This use of language as merely a marker for another linguistic structure
literally makes writing a-personal by removing direct meaning from the function of words, and
figuratively it mimicks the king’s refusal to voice his authority by means of “sermo” ‘speech’ by
making the authority of his narrative rely on the seeing and not the hearing of narrative. The
story does not merely translate Hebrew into Aramaic (one oral way of speaking into another); it
changes a Hebrew language that means what it says into an “Aramaic-in-meaning-and-Hebrew-
in-look” text. In a close parallel, when the king can no longer speak to signify and when his
authority does not guarantee the truth of his narration, the narrative turns into a visual “echo” and
“trace,” a literal dream vision of language, which lacks its own identity except as an
interpretation.
164 Commentary on Daniel 25.
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