TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

Notes
1 In an early, unpublished, text concerning the origin of modernist language in
baroque dramatic traditions, Benjamin writes:
The word as the pure bearer of its meaning is the pure word. But alongside
this, we find a word of another sort that is subject to change, as it moves
from its source toward a different point, its estuary. Language in the
process of change is the linguistic principle of the mourning play. (―The
Role of Language in the Trauerspiel‖ 60)
The two word theory of language has its origin, as we shall see, in Benjamin‘s study of
the trauerspiel.
2 Benjamin writes:
The existence of language, however, is coextensive not only with all the
areas of human mental expression in which language is always in one
sense or another inherent, but with absolutely everything. There is no
event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some
way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate
its mental contents. This use of the word ―language‖ is in no way
metaphorical. (62)
3 George Steiner‘s introduction to the Origin of German Tragic Drama describes
its scope, one that emphasizes this concern:
4
From an epistemological-formal point of view, and the two terms must be
seen as interwoven, these cobwebbed texts were the occasion for a chain
of reflections on the nature of aesthetic objects, on the metaphysical
presumptions of allegory, on language in general, and on the problem,
obsessive to Benjamin, of the relations between a work of art and the
descriptive-analytic discourse to which it is the target. (15)
IX
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back
If I stayed timeless time,
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