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Sprachkritik: The Crisis of Perception

in Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber's Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik

Buber considered the experience of the unity of being to be ineffable. Yet he also appropriated the teachings of the Hasidic masters to address not only central problems attendant to the ... More

Buber considered the experience of the unity of being to be ineffable. Yet he also appropriated the teachings of the Hasidic masters to address not only central problems attendant to the representation of ecstatic mysticism, but also issues pertaining to the Sprachkritik. In his early writings, Buber refracted the relation between language, speech, and mystical experience through the mystical teachings of the Hasidic masters. With Fritz Mauthner, Gustav Landauer, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal as his principal interlocutors, he situated himself firmly in the contemporary discourse on the critique of language. Buber's approach to language resonates with features of the new mode of linguistic analysis introduced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at the beginning of the twentieth century.Less

Coetzee’s Critique of Language

Peter D. McDonald

in Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and J.M. Coetzee

The critique of language at stake in this chapter is Fritz Mauthner’s little-known Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–2), a text remembered in philosophical circles chiefly because of a ... More

The critique of language at stake in this chapter is Fritz Mauthner’s little-known Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–2), a text remembered in philosophical circles chiefly because of a brief, categorically negative aside in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). In comparing Mauthner with Coetzee’s own critique of language, McDonald’s wider interest lies in reflecting upon the way in which scholarship often treats literary texts as the vehicles for ideas that can be unproblematically ‘compared’ with philosophical texts. What is involved, McDonald asks, in crediting the fact that literary texts are not ‘quasi-philosophical essays in disguise’? His answer draws on further questions of literary history and the practice of close reading, and examines the faultlines between philosophical questions and literary experience. In particular, through a reading of Disgrace he suggests that the formal workings of literary texts have the potential to unsettle the very salience of the philosophical questions being posed.Less

‘Independence, Dependence, and Interdependence Day’: and the modern state

Peter D. McDonald

in Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing

This chapter begins by reflecting on various reactions Joyce’s Finnegans Wake provoked during its long gestation, looking in detail at H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Eugene Jolas, and C. K. Ogden. After ... More

This chapter begins by reflecting on various reactions Joyce’s Finnegans Wake provoked during its long gestation, looking in detail at H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Eugene Jolas, and C. K. Ogden. After explaining why it is important to consider the Wake’s place in intellectual history, it focuses on three traditions from which Joyce derived inspiration: the political thinking of the late nineteenth century, reflected in the writings of the Russian anarchist Léon Metchnikoff (1838–88); the linguistic thinking of the early twentieth century, as manifest in the work of the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1860–1943); and the philosophical thinking also of the early twentieth century, associated with the Austro-Hungarian journalist, novelist, and philosopher Fritz Mauthner (1849–1923). The chapter concludes by considering the Wake’s various lessons in reading, the centrality it accords to writing, and the bearing this has on how we think about language, culture, community, and the state.Less