Language and Mimesis in the Work of Walter Benjamin
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22478/ufpb.3086-2396.2025v1n01.76730Keywords:
Walter Benjamin;, Mimesis;, Language;, MysticalAbstract
This essay, authored by Beatrice Hanssen, examines the centrality of language in Walter Benjamin's thought, tracing the trajectory from his early mystical conceptions— influenced by Kabbalah, Romanticism, and a critique of instrumental rationality—to the development of a theory of mimesis that integrates philosophical, historical, and cultural dimensions. By analyzing texts such as “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916), “Doctrine of the Similar,” and “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933), Hanssen highlights how Benjamin’s notion of language relates to the production and recognition of sensible and non-sensible similarities, translation as a pursuit of the “pure language,” and the critique of modernity as an era of linguistic dispersion and impoverishment of experience.
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