Disclosure

Just between you and me now, I know you may be wondering what, in these last pages, remains to be said. (But in case you have not read all the way, here is a somewhat lengthy parenthetical remark, for orientation: “I” am addressing “you” here, to pick up where the last chapter left off, and to pick up at a different point, according to the rhythm of repeated reprisal—of “taking up again” and “taking back”...

Introduction

… But often as a firebrandarises conf(used)usion of tongues.1 …… Oft aber wie ein Brandentstehet Sprachverw(irrt)irrung. … In the midst of a fragment from his Homburger Folioheft (Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe 7: 377), a notebook that contains several late elegies and odes and even more notes for poems that would never be completed, Friedrich Hölderlin registers the confusion of tongues....

Language at an Impasse, in Passing: Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Agamemnon Translation

This chapter argues that Wilhelm von Humboldt’s most original insights into the emergence of the word are presented in the preface he appends to his translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. There, translation and language are considered immediately according to their temporality, and the labor of translation becomes recast in dynamic terms that anticipate his famous definition of language as energeia in his magisterial treatise, On the Diversity of Human Language Structure. When does translation and, by analogy, language itself, emerge—and by what force? Only in addressing this question is it possible to delineate the way in which translations might work upon language at any “given point in time,” along the lines of an incommensurable foreign text, where, as Humboldt puts it, one “can always only set against each utterly proper term a different one” (8: 130). And only through such collisions—which, for Humboldt, make up the structure of the symbol—might a given language be renewed through translation, and give rise to language as it had never hitherto been spoken or written. This is what every translation, according to Humboldt, should promise—which turns out to be not the promise of linguistics, but of Aeschylus’ prophetess, Cassandra.

The Pitfalls of Translating Philosophy: Or, the Languages of G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

The Hegelian logos should not be contingent upon the particular language in which it is articulated; translation should therefore be no real concern for Hegel. Yet surprisingly, Hegel describes his Phenomenology of Spirit in a letter to Johann Heinrich Voss as an attempt akin to Voss’s and Martin Luther’s monumental translations of Homer and the Bible. Differently than his predecessors, however, Hegel does not seek to translate a canonical text, but a philosophical language that was never spoken or written before. Taking this letter as a point of departure, the chapter shows how Hegel’s Phenomenology is a translation project, and an oracular one at that. For in the section Hegel devotes to oracular language, the oracle prefigures the absolute language of philosophy that he seeks to translate, while its foreignness renders translation imperative, both at the structural level of Hegel’s argumentation and at the level of his own writing, which is fraught with traces of the Hebrew Bible, Spinoza, and Homeric epic. Because Hegel’s remarks on the oracle can be understood only in tracing his German back through these texts and tongues, however, the oracle also implies an irreducible foreignness that even the most rigorous dialectic cannot sublate.

Empedocles, Empyrically Speaking—: Friedrich Hölderlin’s Tragic öde

This chapter focuses on the poetological prose texts and drafts that make up Friedrich Hölderlin’s unfinished tragedy, Empedocles. In line with Empedocles’ plunge into Aetna, these texts reflect attempts to translate, not a language, but a fire, which elemental force turns out to be both the precondition for speech and its preclusion. For Hölderlin, the tragic logos is the prophetic analogos that follows upon (ana) a moment of burning—be it the fire-sacrifices that a Greek mantic translates, the fires of Aetna, or the fiery “dissolution” of an entire fatherland. At the extreme, however, the language of Aetna’s flames is unspeakable. For beneath Aetna lies Zeus’ last Titanic rival, the fire-breathing Typhon, who has a hundred heads and at least as many tongues, as Hölderlin knew from Hesiod and Pindar. The pure possibility of tragic language is not an ideal totality, but a titanic one, in which all languages speak at once. And although Hölderlin would never complete his drama, its very inachievement demonstrates the perils of an experience of foreignness in language, where the limits and origins of speech are not only thought and spoken—but also silenced, dissolved, and disrupted, in their constitutive plurality.

Prophetic Poetry, ad Infinitum: Friedrich Schlegel’s Daybreak

This chapter revolves around Friedrich Schlegel’s Daybreak, a project that preoccupied him throughout his writing career, from the last days of early Romanticism to his notebooks from the 1820s. Based loosely on Jacob Böhme’s Aurora, Daybreak should have exemplified the genre Schlegel called “prophetic poetry.” Although Daybreak exists only in the form of posthumously published fragments, the first and lengthiest of these notes introduces nothing less than a cosmology on the basis of the mathematical infinite series, perpetually divided between 1 and 0. The order of number, however, does not yield a language purified of semantic ambivalence. Instead, a close reading of the fragment, along with a reconstruction of Schlegel’s engagement with Schelling’s philosophy of nature and Plato’s Sophist, shows the principle from which he derives the cosmos to have dire consequences for language and truth. For it leads Schlegel to the premise of infinite divisibility that Plato’s Socrates contests in order to establish the possibility of a propositional grammar that would allow for veridical distinctions. This divisibility, which Schlegel’s syntax reflects, results in an ontology akin to the confusion of tongues: the language of his prophetic poetry allows being and time to be parsed in many ways at once.

Prophecy, Spoken Otherwise: In the Language of Aeschylus’s Cassandra

No reading of prophetic language, and no reading of Humboldt’s reflections on language, could proceed without attending closely to Cassandra’s speech in the Agamemnon, to which this chapter is devoted. There, it will turn out that translation is the original problem of prophecy, as her utterances cross the registers of vision and speech; Greek and Trojan; human and divine tongues—whereby the divine source that is said to burn through her proves to be itself undecidable, at once reminiscent of the Furies and of their enemy, the oracular God Apollo. While Cassandra’s speech has repeatedly been described in the terms of the sublime, beginning with the earliest Greek hypothesis appended to the play, through Wilhelm von Humboldt’s preface to his Agamemnon, what is most striking about her language is not the past and future horrors of the House of Atreus that her words appear to summon, but, as the chorus will say, her “speaking of an other-speaking city” (1200–1), in another speech that also removes these Argive elders from their proper language.