From the Creative Word to the Fall of Language

In this lecture, Eli Friedlander offers a close reading of Walter Benjamin's 1916 essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, situating it as a foundational text on the path toward Benjamin's later work. By way of reading the first chapters of Genesis Benjamin establishes language not merely as a means for the communication of contents but as the medium of convergence of God, nature, and man. Man’s task is to name creaturely nature. The central drama of the essay is the Fall: the shift from naming to judgment, or the turn of man away from the goodness of naming. This shift of the relation of man to God and to nature establishes on the one hand the fundamental guilt of life Benjamin associates with fate, and on the other the mood of pervasive sadness of nature (that Friedlander relates to Benjamin’s work on the German mourning play and to his analysis of Dürer's Melancolia I). Along the way, Friedlander draws on Goethe's theory of color, the concept of genius in art, and the role of criticism as reflective judgment.