(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

BENJAMIN’S CRITICISM OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
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language of sounds and names, and finally by the fallen language of the
mute expressions of objects and nature. The human position is especially
privileged in this scheme because it participates in both spheres,
that of God and that of nature.
For Benjamin, Adam’s language of paradise is an ideal point of departure
and, at the same time, the final destination. He therefore relates the
biblical episode of the construction of Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9)
to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise and interprets the Babylonian
confusion of language and humankind’s scattering about the earth
as the actual banishment from paradise. Benjamin here sees the loss of
paradise and the loss of the language of Adam in paradise as one. In the
usual Christian version paradise is lost because Adam and Eve are desirous
of knowledge, both general and sexual. Benjamin now refers to a
Jewish interpretation according to which paradise is lost not because of
sexual desire, but only because Adam tries to use language for his own
purposes and his own messages. For Benjamin, this is the moment when
signs — the relation between signifier and signified — became arbitrary,
a development that leads to language theories like that of de Saussure,
which Benjamin calls the “bourgeois conception of language”:
Diese Ansicht ist die bürgerliche Auffassung der Sprache, deren
Unnahbarkeit und Leere sich mit steigender Deutlichkeit im folgenden
ergeben soll. Sie besagt: Das Mittel der Mitteilung ist das Wort,
ihr Gegenstand die Sache, ihr Adressat ein Mensch. Dagegen kennt
die andere kein Mittel, keinen Gegenstand und keinen Adressaten
der Mitteilung. Sie besagt: im Namen teilt das geistige Wesen des
Menschen sich Gott mit. (GS II.1:144)
[This view is the bourgeois conception of language, the invalidity and
emptiness of which will become increasingly clear in what follows.
It holds that the means of communication is the word, its object
factual, and its addressee a human being. The other conception of
language, in contrast, knows no means, no object, and no addressee
of communication. It means: in the name, the mental being of man
communicates itself to God. (SW 1:65)]
In the Greek and Jewish traditions, the concept of the catastrophe as
the fall of paradise, including the moment when signs became arbitrary, is
deeply ambiguous: every accident carries at the same time a hidden ontological
purpose. In the same way, Benjamin wants to see an ambivalent
and opposite development beyond this fall of the original language, which
caused its dispersal into many different idioms. Because of this common
origin, even in the most distracted and fragmented human idioms something
of the original language still remains. The reasons for the division
of languages and the unintelligibility of the languages to each other lie