The power of Babel: “Pure language” as intertranslation

Abstract

Abstract It is certainly no exaggeration to assert that Walter Benjamin's ‘The Task of the Translator’ is one of the most significant essays in our time, Its importance can be gauged, not only by the number and eminence of the scholars who have engaged with it, but also by the relevance of the issues it deals with for our post‐structuralist, postmodernist world. In this article, I propose a reading of ‘The Task of the Translator’ that aims at pinpointing the four “universes of discourse” Benjamin weaves into his argumentation ‐ a poetics of modernism, an onto‐theological metaphysics, a philosophy of language and a theory of translation ‐ in order to grasp the significance of his crucial concept of “pure language”. Following hints taken from Derrida, Andrew Benjamin and Eve Tavor Bannet, I shall argue that pure language should be interpreted in the form of a non‐essentialist conception of meaning as intertranslation, which provides the basis for a new politics and epistemology of language.