“The Forestial Interior”: The Dislocation of Language in Walter Benjamin's Early Writings

Abstract

This essay places Walter Benjamin's early work at the center of a linguistic turn that differs fundamentally from the one commonly associated with the term. Rather than a theory of language, Benjamin makes the dislocation of language in human thought the central concern of a new topology of critique. Tracing this topology through the canonical early texts as well as their accompanying fragments and notes, especially Benjamin's unconventional solution to the Liar's Paradox, the essay argues that Origin of the German Mourning Play, culminating in the critical terms of allegory and symbol, is as significant an intervention in the theory of logic and language as the Tractatus and Being and Time. The concluding part of the essay, as a demonstration, attempts to reconstruct Benjamin's central insight into the theory of the symbol, seizing on the topological image, also from the Mourning Play book, of the symbol's “forestial interior” (waldiges Innere).