3 - Language and mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s work

Summary

Language is the “alpha” and “omega” of Benjamin's thought, forming an elaborate, ornate mosaic that encompasses all of his writings, from the early essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916) to the materialist work of the mid and late thirties. Even the image-oriented, iconographic Arcades Project, dedicated to the exegesis of dialectical images, was to find its epistemological justification in the statement that the historian eminently chanced upon such images in language. Laboring untiringly on a comprehensive philosophy of language, in which the whole proved larger than its composite parts, Benjamin wove comments on language into almost every single essay, faithful to his early belief that it constituted the “arche,” or origin, of all intellectual expression.

Like the Early Romantics, who used fragments and “mystical terminology,” or Nietzsche, who wrote aphorisms as a way of developing a new, seemingly antisystematic system, Benjamin produced reflections on language that appeared to defy conventional codes of systematization.