Language

pp. 1-60

in: Margarete Kohlenbach, Walter Benjamin, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

Abstract

According to the most comprehensive characterisation of language in "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man", language is, in every case, "not only communication of the communicable but also, at the same time, a symbol of the non-communicable" (156; 74). The central claim concerning language as communication is what I call Benjamin's thesis of linguistic self-communication or (L).