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It Must Fail: On Language and Freedom in Benjamin’s Early

Philosophy

Élise Derroitte
Centre for Philosophy of Law - Institut supérieur de Philosophie
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
[email protected]

Abstract This essay is primarily concerned with Benjamin’s theory of language in “On
Language as Such and on the Language of Man” and “The Task of the Translator” with
reference to Jewish mysticism and German Romanticism. I seek to show how Benjamin’s
theory of language distances itself from a theory of restoration of a pure, divine language to
propose a theory of the self-expression of the world. I argue that human language translates
the historical attempt and failure to reunite subjective experience and self-expression. Such a
conception implies that Benjamin’s theory of language is based on his conception of human
nature and that it finds its specificity in the free will of the subjects whilst a pure expression
of the truth is never reachable in human language. I conclude in showing that Benjamin’s
theory of translation expresses this theory of language where the self-expression exceeds the
possibility of the words opening space for the creativity for the one who speaks.

Keywords: Walter Benjamin, language, Jewish mysticism, Name, translation

0. Introduction
Benjamin's texts on language are probably part of his most complicated ones. One of
the difficulties comes from the function he allocates to language. His essays “On
Language as Such and on the Language of Man” and “The Task of the Translator” do
not address the questions of the verifiability of speech acts. Moreover, they are best
understood as an anti-theory of communication between the subjects. It states indeed
that even the possibility to communicate is by nature uncertain. Facing this difficulty,
Benjamin tries to redefine the role of language as a mode of relationality that is not
predetermined by the meaning of a message but bounded by the desire of the
subjects to exchange one with another. This definition of language is more
anthropological characterization than methodology of verifiability.
In order to explore this form of language that does not communicate, we will
determine what function language plays in Benjamin’s philosophy. Therefore, we
will reconnect this theory to its sources and underline its particularity. The main
source of this theory of language is the Jewish mysticism; this background is
associated to a second influence: the Romantic theory of poeticization. Our first
point concerns the ontology of language based on this theology of the origin of
language. Our second section analyzes the different conceptions of history this
theory of language implies. In this section, we argue that all the different steps
dramatized in the theory of the Fall of pure language into the non-sense of

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communication are related to different moments of a theory of history. Consequently,

our second point develops the structure of transformation and of resolution of history
included in these ontologies of language clarified in our first point. Finally, our third
point develops a broader definition of translation in order to interpret the
consequences of Benjamin’s theory of language. This last section explains how
translation is what ensures the perpetuation of the process of language – its material
historicization – and how “The Task of the Translator” complements the theory of the
Fall into human language defended in the first essay.
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1. Sources
“On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” is constructed on different
steps where Benjamin develops a speculative genealogy of the linguistic facts at the
source of human language. His theory is close in its form to the Jewish mystic
conception of the Fall of sacred language into human language, and its content is
also derived from the story of Creation. However, its implication with respect to the
belief is profoundly different. This dramatization of the origin of the world – narrated
in the Story of Creation – allows Benjamin to isolate the particularities of the
different phases of the origin of language and, consequently, to consider the different
functions each moment has during this process of Creation.
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1.1. Ontology of Language
In his “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”, Benjamin's main thesis
is that language concerns everything in the world; it is not limited to humankind. As
he puts it: “there is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does
not in some way partake in language.” (BENJAMIN W., 1996b, 62) Language is thus
the system that represents all the different modes of relationship in the world. It is a
principle of mediation between two separate elements. As such, language is not
simply the expression of content into words. Benjamin’s theory of language is
developed on a distinction between the transcendent essences and the material
essences of things, namely the spiritual essences and the linguistic essences of things.
Language, as experienced in the world, is only realized through the linguistic
essences. These essences are only the forms in which the spiritual essences of things
can come to reality. It is not the spiritual essences themselves. According to
Benjamin, everything has a spiritual essence, which is speechless. It can only
communicate itself through its other essence, the linguistic one. This spiritual
essence is an intensive totality. It cannot, as such, be rendered objective. It needs
language to become a material object. Language is therefore the medium in which
spiritual essences can communicate themselves; in which and not through which says
Benjamin, because those spiritual essences need a particular form to become an
object of knowledge. Therefore, every attempt to cognize an object needs a particular
formalization, a historicization. This interpretation explains why Benjamin uses the
story of Creation. This process through which the spiritual essence “becomes an
object” requires a dramatization of the story of the Fall into the material world. It is
inside the process of objectivization that knowledge becomes possible. As such, we
can say that Benjamin follows Schelling’s conception of origin according to which

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“The act precedes the essence.” Benjamin would have said: the act of speaking
precedes the linguistic essence. The world is only cognizable through the act of
naming. As Benjamin explains: “'And he saw that it was good' – that is, he had
cognized it through name.” (BENJAMIN W., 1996b, 68) God himself has an origin
outside himself that explains his Creation. Creation is the fact that renders this act
visible1.
Still, this explanation of language as the manifestation of spiritual essences is, at this
point, constructed as a negative deduction. Benjamin needs to give this structure a
particular form in which it can reveal itself. In other words, this ontological structure
has to be the support of an historical development. The passage from this negative
construction to a historical succession needs a story to support it. This story of the
becoming of the spiritual essence is dramatized in the story of Creation.
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1.2. Dramatization of the Story of the Fall
Benjamin tries to define the problems of language in regard to its origin. This origin,
symbolically, can be narrated using the Genesis. This recourse to the biblical
narrative is therefore a dramatization of his theory of language:

If in what follows the nature of language is considered on the basis of the first chapter
of Genesis, the object is neither a biblical interpretation nor subjection* of the Bible to
objective* consideration as revealed truth, but the discovery of what emerges of itself
from the biblical text with regard to the nature of language; and the Bible is only
initially indispensable for this purpose, because the present argument broadly follows
it in presupposing language as an ultimate reality, perceptible only in its manifestation,
inexplicable and mystical. The Bible, in regarding itself as a revelation, must
necessarily evolve the fundamental linguistic facts. (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 67,
*emphasis added)

This recourse to the story of Genesis is thus a way of analyzing fundamental

linguistic facts2. According to Benjamin’s account of the relationship between
spiritual essences and linguistic essences, this construction of the text on language is
indeed a kind of mise-en-abîme of its own theory into a concrete representation. As

1 This interpretation of the divine creation as a contraction of the absolute into the particular
associates the idea of creation with the concept of melancholy. This idea of the nostalgia God would
have had in creating the world has a Jewish origin, especially in the Cabala of Isaac Luria
(1534-1572) whose studies become famous in Germany during the 18th century through its reception
by the Swab pietism. Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702-1782)
contribute to incorporate Luria’s cabala in the Christian tradition. Schelling is a famous example of
this cabalistic influence in German Romantic philosophy. On the cabalist sources in Schelling,
especially in the corporeity of God, see: BENZ, 1968: 55-67. On God's nostalgia, see: SCHELLING,
2006: 28.

2 It is useful to note here that this Christian structure is completed by a Jewish background of the
theory of language in the Cabala. This construction involves a conception of the stages of the
transition from the Absolute to the Particular, dramatized within Christian theology through the story
of the Creation and the Fall, and in the Cabala through the story of the broken vessels and the theodicy
it implies. This theory explains that the vessels containing the original light were broken by the power
of the divine during creation. This transition from an original unity to the dispersion into multiplicity
inside the world implies the task of repairing this original dispersion. This structure supports the
theology of history of the Luriac Cabala. Gershom Scholem discusses this theory of the breaking of
the Vessels in the seventh lecture of the Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, (SCHOLEM, 1995: 265
sq).

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the spiritual essences of things must be updated by the linguistic essences in order to
be real, the Bible is a way of realizing this process – that is, giving the spiritual
essence a reality in the linguistic essence.
This narrative recourse allows the author to designate two moments in the origin of
language. One of them is ahistorical and the other, a historical one. The ahistorical
step concerns the ideal moment of immediate knowledge3. It concerns the idea of a
complete unity of the subject and the object. The historical one, dramatized in the
Christian idea of the Fall, concerns the principle of differentiation between the
subject and the object within history.
The idea of an immediate knowledge is also what the Romantics wanted to achieve
with the idea of the Self as the beginning and the end of history. These questions
resonate with theological interrogations. They can be expressed like this: 'is a true
knowledge possible in history or is it always already lost? How can knowledge be
attested in the context of constant changes?'
In order to address this problem, Benjamin tries to make an analysis of the Fall as the
story of the origin of differentiation. He first constructs a metaphysical topography of
what an absolute knowledge would be using the story of Creation. In the first story of
the Genesis, God creates the world through the Verb. The particular (the real world)
is created by language. Language is thus the medium that connects the whole to the
particular.
The second story concerns the language of man. Language appears when Adam has
to name the animals. In this case, the Adamite language is the manifestation of a
form of immediate knowledge. The Name he gives to animals is immediately related
to the truth4. Language, in this second story, is thus a process of intensification.
Things reach knowability through the name man gives them. In brief, Benjamin
constructs a sequence that comes from the word of God that creates, the nature,
which communicates itself silently, and the Name which gives Nature a linguistic
expression and achieves God's Creation. The Adamite Name is thus the expression of
language in its absolute wholeness (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 65), where spiritual
essences are expressed by linguistic essences. This is why, in Name, “to express
oneself and to address everything else amounts to the same thing.” (BENJAMIN W.,
1996b: 65) In this second story, the spiritual essence and the linguistic essence are
united5. In the theory of Adamite Name, the intensive totality and the extensive
totality reach their peak, as Benjamin explains: “So in name culminate both the
intensive totality of language, as the absolutely communicable spiritual essence, and

3 Benjamin’s use of these two conceptions of ahistorical theory of language and historical theory of
language is, as we shall see, embedded in his reception of a theology of language. Even if his
interpretation does not call for the restoration of the pure language, he poses this Adamite process of
Naming as the precondition of the apparition of historical language. Therefore, “ahistorical” signifies
here a process that has occurred before the entrance of humankind into history, in a pre-Fall moment.

4This expression “Truth” symbolizes the communion of Adam with the creative divine world. Truth
here signifies that it is related to God. See BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 69.

5 As such, we find here a process similar to the Tathandlung in Fichte's Science of Knowledge. We can
say that the pure reflectibility is a pure intensity and that the positing, at its absolute level, would be a
pure extensity.

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the extensive totality of language, as the universally communicating

essence.” (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 65-66, translation modified)
This conception of language described in the Adamite nomination defends a unity
between universality and absolute; this is why this cannot be a proper historical
theory. Adam is able to give the animal a Name because he is related to God6. As
Benjamin says, theory of pure language is based on the “communion of man with the
creative word of God.” (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 69)
Consequently, he does not believe that the language of Adamite Name is still
possible after the Fall. To the contrary, the theory of Name is reserved to the meta-
archeology of language Benjamin produces. Therefore, we can question the
interpreters of Benjamin who focus their readings on the notion of messianic
restoration of a loss Origin. This Origin is definitively separated from any historical
life. The dramatization of the Fall of language is only a necessary step for the
understanding of the creative power of language but not an attempt to find
redemption7 in this ahistorical totality. Benjamin does not seek to recover the divine
realm of immediate knowledge. This theory of language can be understood as either
as the supremacy of the ideality – as it is formalized in the pure language of Name –
or as a theory of the loss that does not permit to recreate the original process of
Naming and consequently is completely separated from spiritual essences.
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2. Language as the Result of a Conception of History
We now need to analyze what those two ways of understanding language in history
involve. The first one, which Benjamin identifies as the pure language of Name,
stands outside all process of transformation. It does not involve a principle of
differentiation. In this theory, Name is the revelation of the spiritual essence into
linguistic essence. It works as follows: “the thing in itself has no word, being created
from God's word and known in its name by a human word […] Rather, the name that
man gives to language depends on how language is communicated to
him.” (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 69) As such, if it had to be understood in regard to a
historical process, it is a theory that implies the impossible expectation that the world
would remain the same and be completely expressible.
The second conception is the language that seeks a meaning without connecting it to
any subjective reality. This is how Benjamin defines communication.
Communication is the empty language that transmits linguistic essences that are not
related to their spiritual essences. The connection between them is not to be found in
(presumably) objective reality. The connection of the two essences belongs to the life

6 To pursuit our analogy between Fichte's theory of knowledge and Benjamin's theory of language, we
can say that, as Fichte tried to stop the infinity of the reflection using the Anschauung (intuition),
Benjamin stops the infinity of meaning using God’s creative nomination as an instance of absolute
intuition.

7 This is why Andrew Benjamin makes a very strict distinction between theology and religion in
Benjamin's work. According to A. Benjamin, W. Benjamin does not adhere to a religion but he uses
theology as a support of his construction of philosophy. (BENJAMIN A., 2009: 2).

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of the subjects itself. It concerns the intensity of linguistic experience, not the
accuracy of linguistic facts.
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2.1. The Adamite Unity of the Essences
As we posited in our introduction, the Adamite language is a negative mode of
resolution of the problem of the origin of language. It concerns the transcendent
conditions for pure language and cannot be applied to its human use. This
consideration involves two consequences: the first one is that this theory is related to
the particular development of the Story of Creation. It cannot be the exemplification
of historical language. The second consequence is that it is based on a mythical unity
of the linguistic and spiritual essences at the origin. Therefore, it serves only as a
reverse-image of what human language is: it is a negative reconstruction of a
mythical language of unity where every Name creates the object it designates.
First, the unity of absolute and language would not be possible if “were not the
name-language of man and the nameless language of things related in God and
released from the same creative word.” (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 70) This unity of
the language of man and the nameless language of things in God is the origin of the
creative power of the Adamite Name. The Name is neither the communication of an
externality nor the pure spiritual essence itself. It is a performative utterance. It
contributes to the process of accomplishment of the divine Creation8; this conception
of achievement of the truth in its absolute resolution is based on a metaphysical
conception of the Self the Romantics associate to the conception of reflexivity.
According to the Romantics, in opposition Fichte, reflexivity is already fulfilled by
content, i.e. the essence of the Self. This content only needs concrete forms to come
to reality. In the Fichtean theory of Tathandlung, reflexivity is a form without
content, which has to be fulfilled by the positing of content. The empty form
becomes thus the content of an ulterior reflection. This is the way Fichte understands
the relation between the Absolute of a Self and the particular positing of an I. On the
contrary, the Romantics consider that the Self already exists and is filled with
content. This implies that the subject takes part in the process of potentiation of the
Self as one part of the whole. In the Adamite conception of Name, the language of
man is also the medium-of-reflection through which truth is revealed in a concrete
form. As such, at this level, the creation of the world is the manifestation of the unity
in God of spiritual and linguistic essences.
The comparison to the Romantic theory of reflexivity ends here. In fact, the theory of
Adamite Name precedes any principle of reflexivity. It is a unique operation specific
to the excessive moment of the Creation itself. It is not repeatable, neither is it
revisable. This is why the analysis of the theory of the Name implies staying at the
state of the origin and cannot be enlarged into an historical process of differentiation.
The Name achieves divine Creation. This is why this process, if it has to determine a
historical process, would be the yearning for the lost origin and the unreachable
moment where nomination was the synonym to creation.

8There are similarities between this process and the one he developed in his thesis on the German
Romanticism: it involves a dimension of accomplishment of the universal through the mediation by
materialization.

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2.2. The Disunion of the Essences in Language of Man
Hence, the theory of divine Creation and the role Adamite Name plays within this
process cannot be the support for human language whilst the creative power of
Adamite Name is due to the unity of all essences in God, which allows no process of
differentiation. After the Fall, this union is broken. The essences are divided and the
Name loses its privileged relation to truth.
Therefore, the description of the linguistic facts that determine human language has
to acknowledge the rupture with the unity of the origin. The conception of language
as communication is an exposition of this rupture of the unity of the absolute.
Communication, before being the effort of transmission of content, is the proof of the
disunion of the essences. If the essences were still united, the act of naming would
remain creation. In communication, the divine link to the creative origin is lost.
Consequently, the language of man has become incapable to reach the immediate
knowledge of truth. Language as communication is based on a lack, the loss of the
capacity for the Self to express itself. In communication, language is always late
compared to the life it has to determine (DÜTTMANN, 2000: 62). As such, word has
become a parody of itself (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 71). It is the manifestation of the
unfillable gap between the essences.
This decay of pure language into the human languages appears when language
becomes unable to relate to the truth. In the biblical dramatization, this decay appears
with the knowledge of good and evil. This knowledge, according to Benjamin, is
nameless; it emanates from the outside (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 71). This gap
between the knowledge from outside that predominates in communication and the
knowledge from inside that predominates in name indicates a separation9 between
language as pure expressivity and language as ill communication. Language as
communication tries to convey meaning from outside without being first related to
the ontology of the subject. Therefore, all its effort to fill the gap between the truth
for the subject and the linguistic essences exhausts the meaning itself. This process is
what Benjamin calls 'Überbenennung' (overnaming) (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 73).
This process of overnaming is the race against the loss of origin. And its inherent
failure leads to melancholy. Melancholy is thus the trace of a lack that cannot be
filled; it is a form of manque-à-être that language never silences. This conception is
very similar to the conception of the 'master signifier' in Lacan’s conception of the
constitution of the ideal of the I. The signifier is always what represents a subject for
another signifier. In language as communication, Benjamin describes a very similar
process of self-reference of the linguistic facts, one with respect to another.
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9 This divide between spirit and heart is, according to Schelling, the basis of evil or madness, stupidity
and melancholy. In the Stuttgart Conferences, Schelling analyses evil and madness, stupidity and
melancholy as an inversion (Verkehrung) of the potenties of the subject (SCHELLING 1855: 468).
Evil has to be distinguished from the other inversion because it is an inversion done on purpose. It
means to put the understanding before the soul (Geist before Seele and Gemüth before Geist). On this
topic, see MAESSCHALCK, 1991: 16.

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3. Is There a Form of Human Language That Is Not Empty Communication?

The interest of the opposition between the Adamite Name and the communication is
that these two conceptions do not clarify how the subjects could use language to
share something. At the end of this second section remains the impression that all
desire of exchange is impossible after the Fall into history.
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3.1. It Must Fail
In order to understand how the historicization originating in the Fall affects
language10, we have to go further in our understanding of the way language is a
medium between the subject and the object. If, in Benjamin's views, there is no
content to language, it is thus a pure reflexivity. This reflexivity needs linguistic
essences to come to reality. Language has no content except communicability:
“There is no such thing as content of language; as communication, language
communicates a spiritual essence – a communicability per se.” (BENJAMIN W.,
1996b: 66, translation modified)
According to that, the differences between languages are differences of intensity. A
complete language would be the pure equality between two kinds of totalities
(BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 65-66): the first one would be an intensive totality (the
spiritual essences)11 and the second would be an extensive totality (the Name). This
unity between the universality and the intensity is impossible in history. This union
has to be understood as the unconscious ideal of a theory of language where the word
would be the thing itself when the experience of human language, on the contrary, is
the permanent expression of a defeat on the field meaning.
The solution is not in overnaming; it is not in the over-adherence to the expected
role. The solution is to produce a gap, within language, where the relation to others is
not the complete union but where the incapacity to name creates a community of the
downtrodden ones. There is something very particular in the fact of failing. There is
a way to fail in a very particular manner that has a more intensive meaning for the
subject than any communication of the truth. This is this profound unpredictability
that Benjamin searches in human language.
As such, every historical language can be developed as a translation. This operation
is not a pure expression as it was in the Adamite Name. Translation is always a form
of expression of second hand. We will explore this conception of the opportunities
gained by failure in the “Task of the Translator.”
In this text, Benjamin allocates to the translator the task of the afterlife of a work into
history (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 254). Our study of Benjamin’s theory of language
gives a larger understanding of this concept: language of man is always the afterlife
of a purest language that has not survived the differentiation between subject and

10 We can here refer to Brecht's theory of historicization, which immediately involves a principle of
subjective interpretation by reframing the reality by way of deconstruction of the beliefs provoked by
a history of the one in position of power. In Benjamin also, the historicization of language is related to
the way the subjects strive for expressing themselves and the way their failure intensifies their relation
to themselves and to the others.

11This spiritual essence is also what Benjamin identifies in the text on “Elective Affinities of
Goethe,” the Wahrheitsgehalt.

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object. According to this, the text is always late with respect to what it wants to
describe. Moreover, even language itself is subject to a permanent decrepitude and
reinvention. As Benjamin puts it: “For just as the tenor and significance of the great
works of literature undergo a complete transformation over the centuries, the mother
tongue of the translator is transformed as well. While a poet's words endure in his
own language, even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth
of its own language and eventually perish with its renewal.” (BENJAMIN W.,
1996b: 256) This implies that the task of the translator is thus a task of intensification
of the text with respect to his own experience of the attempt of expression. As such,
the translation does not only intensify the work; it also intensifies the specific
experience that produces it. In fact, to translate, the translator “must expand and
deepen his language by means of the foreign language.” (BENJAMIN W., 1996b:
262) The translation is not an operation that only concerns the text; it also translates
the desire of the subjects to express themselves, and latter’s incapacity to do so.
How does this relationship to the text function? According to Benjamin, the point of
junction between desire and incapacity is located within the affectivity of the
translators. The translators, if they have to intensify the experience of the work, have
to “mortify” that work (BENJAMIN W., 1992: 182), to reconstruct the form of their
own historical experiences of it. They have to disclose the unity of the work in order
to give to the translation a provisional form (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 257). “For any
translation of a work [originates] in a specific stage of linguistic
history.” (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 258, translation modified) Thus, translation is the
operation of connection between the desire to express and the objectivity of the
work. This connection is only possible from the experience that the translators make
of their own language. As such, this experience is not an intellectual experience but
also a sensual experience. In fact, one word in one particular language is always
related to an affective constellation of significance, as Benjamin shows: “For this
sense, in its poetic significance for the original, is not limited to what is meant but
rather wins such significance to the degree that what is meant is bound to the way of
meaning of the individual word. People commonly convey this when they say that
words have emotional connotations.” (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 259-260) This
constellation is involved in translation. Therefore, translation does not translate
content; it translates a mode of connection to reality. The difference between
languages is similar to the difference between the two forms of essences in divine
language. One language is one option; one manner for the world to express itself
through the call it addresses to anyone who experiences it. As a specific solution into
the unreachable expression of the spiritual essence, language is always a particular
attempt that always has to be exceeded. This is why we can define this process very
closely to the German etymology of übersetzung. In Benjamin's theory of translation,
the task is to posit further (übersetzen). This definition has of course, according to
what we said, a very Fichtean connotation. Translating is the new positing (Setzung)
emanating from the reflection experienced in the reading of the text. This new
position transforms the real by introducing a new mode of relation to otherness that
intensifies and overcomes the previous modes of relation. This is why Benjamin says
that

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[a] translation, instead of imitating the sense of the original, must lovingly and in
detail incorporate the original's way of meaning, thus making both the original and
the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are
part of a vessel. (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 260)

This definition of translation is at the closest to the cabala’s theodicy (WARRAIN,

1931: 59). In fact, this story of the broken vessel represents the story of Creation.
The task of humankind is to reconnect the pieces of the vessel that broke during
Creation. The underlying theory of translation is thus a theory of community that
determines the history of humankind. In fact, this idea of collective destiny of
humanity is at the basis of the messianic conception of history. The end of history
will be reached when the task of reuniting what was separated at the origin of history
is fulfilled. Nevertheless, Benjamin defends here a weak form of messianism
(BENJAMIN W., 2001, 811) where this conception of history, though it helps
understand the transcendent condition of possibility of the destination of the events,
does not give any solution on the modes or manners by which this task has to be
embodied in the concrete history.
Translation, as a process of intensification of the text, takes part in this
historicization. It is thus haunted by two characteristics inherited from the philosophy
of history that originates in a Fall. On the one hand, it deals with the nostalgia of loss
of the perfect and immediate meaning and, on the second hand; this yearning
(Sehnsucht) (BENJAMIN W., 1996b: 259) calls attention to the way of dealing with
this loss. Translation is not only a transposition of a text into another language; it also
has to construct the specific way of meaning of this language because the immediate
connection between experience and truth is broken in history. The translation has to
accept that the form it gives to a text is always a step in the history of the text and
that this step will be overcome at every attempt to communicate it with others12.
This is why translation is articulated on an interaction between fidelity and freedom.
Fidelity refers to the fidelity of the subjects to their commitment to communicate
themselves. Freedom is the potential for creativity this fidelity opens. And, as it
always fails, the self-communication of the subjects never ends in a definite
determination. The subjects always exceed what they express. Consequently, every
attempt to communicate is a translation of this gap between the experience and the
words that seem inadequate to qualify it. The particularity of the subjects is situated
in this unfillable gap. The subjects are subjects when they fail to express themselves
and when, while failing, they keep trying13. Translation partakes in the same process.
It also has to find a particular way of displacing the loss of the pure expressibility.
!
!
4. Conclusion
The path we took in Benjamin’s theory of language and translation has driven us to a
theory of language and translation articulated on the process of historicization of the

12On the historical character of the translation, we would refer to the very interesting comment of
Antoine Berman. (BERMAN, 2008: 72)

13 As Schelling theorized in On Human Freedom: “The concept of becoming is the only one
appropriate to the nature of things.” (SCHELLING, 2006: 28)

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subjects who use language as a medium. This conclusion implies that Benjamin’s
conception of language is founded on his anthropology. In fact, the idea that
language translates the historical attempt of reunion between experience and self-
expression by the subject explains how the author conceives the specificity of
humankind.
According to what we showed, two hypotheses can be excluded. The first one is that
Benjamin conceptualized his theory of Adamite Name in order to explain concrete
linguistic facts. This theological explanation is, according to what we have presented,
rather the negative conditions of explanation of the subsequent loss of this creative
power. Therefore, if Benjamin must be called a messianic thinker, this assertion must
immediately be tempered by the fact that his messianism is used as an empty form. It
is a dramatization that manifests the linguistic facts but not an effective explanation
of language of human.
The second hypothesis is that Benjamin would want to restore this state of absolute
reunion. Benjamin’s theory of language and translation is a theory of disunion. It
organizes failure. As such, it renders understandable what human freedom would be.
If there were a mode of expression or translation that would, thanks to the right
amount of willpower and effort, exhaust the expression of the subjects, this
expression would lock any other forms of expression. It would reduce the subjects to
silence.
For this reason, we conclude that the only interpretative solution to understand
Benjamin’s theory of language and of translation is to consider it as an anthropology.
The particularity of the subjects is that they are at the source of their own definition.
This task of saying something about oneself is missed in advance. Consequently, the
self-experience of the subjects and the experience of otherness is always preceded by
a doubt, a discrepancy that gives room for the subject to live because, to paraphrase
Benjamin, “no one could live in a fulfilled life”14.

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