Abstract
Walter Benjamin’s theory of language has ecocritical implications. His panlogue, the idea that everything speaks, includes an ecologue––an understanding of natural environments based on the stories of exploitation they communicate. Benjamin’s ecologue questions the supremacy attached to the uniqueness and superiority of human language. At the same time, it preserves the task of human language to turn the wounds of the past into political narratives that interrupt the cycle of environmental destruction. This article examines Benjamin’s theory of language from an ecological perspective, discussing the objection of anthropomorphism, the sadness and mourning of nature, and the pedagogical impulse of a weak ecological power in Benjamin’s political historiography.
Highlights
A teoria da linguagem de Walter Benjamin tem implicações ecocríticas
These songs are not merely the poetic raptures of starry nights, but often the echoes of violent extraction and exploitation (SMITH, 2001). Along with their unique languages, environments have their traumas. If they would be endowed with language, Benjamin suggests, they would lament
: “To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us” (BENJAMIN, 1996b, p. 338)
Summary
A teoria da linguagem de Walter Benjamin tem implicações ecocríticas. Sua proposta, segundo a qual tudo fala, inclui uma dimensão ecológica - uma compreensão dos ambientes naturais com base nas histórias de exploração que eles comunicam. I argue that Benjamin’s endowment of nature with language is not a traditional prosopopeia that lends voices to non-human beings, but a way of granting all entities their unique ways of appearance and expression, regardless of any human measure of comprehensibility.
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