Die Willkür der Zeichen

Abstract

In his article “Die Willkur der Zeichen” (originally published in: Perspektiven kritischer Theorie. Festschrift fur Hermann Schweppenhauser, ed. Christoph Turcke [Luneburg, 1988], pp. 124-73) Iriving Wohlfarth retraces the role of the conventionalist theory of language within Benjamin's philosophy of language. In this perspective, the central premise of all modern linguistics, namely what Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Generale terms the “arbitrary nature of the sign”, appears as a symptom of what Benjamin calls “the Fall of the spirit of language”, its reduction to a mere means of signification and communication.