Einstein’s “Critical Dictionary”

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates Carl Einstein's centrality to the founding of the “Critical Dictionary,” the section at the end of each issue of Documents, the surrealist journal Einstein co-founded with Georges Bataille. The “Critical Dictionary” attempted to rewrite language by collecting words and transforming their meaning. In spite of Documents' putatively documentary ambitions, the Dictionary is a paradigmatic modernist collection that aims to decontextualize words in order to reinvest them with new semantic significance. A close reading of “Nightingale,” Einstein's Dictionary entry, exposes the limitations of this project. By paraphrasing Einstein's earlier work, “Nightingale” performatively highlights the failures of literary language to achieve innovation even in a medium designed to transform it. As the chapter concludes, paraphrasing is an endlessly iterative form of textual collecting that eschews any notion of originality. For an author, the recycling of one's own ideas is both a way of archiving oneself as well as an illustration of the limitations of language.