Kristina Mendicino - Prophecies of Language

Kristina Mendicino

Fordham University Press

New York 2017

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

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Printed in the United States of America

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First edition

... But often as a firebrand

arises conf(used)usion of tongues....

... Oft aber wie ein Brand

entstehet Sprachverw(irrt)irrung....

In the midst of a fragment from his Homburger Folioheft (Smtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe 7: 377), a notebook that contains several late elegies and odes and even more notes for poems that would never be completed, Friedrich Hlderlin registers the confusion of tongues. His words arise among fragments written in several languages: his sentence appears to be written in German; a nearby marginal note in Latin reads, sphere of the ecclesia [orbis ecclesiae] (7: 374); several pages earlier, he records a passage in ancient Greek from Pindars thirteenth Olympian ode, below the bilingual heading Origin of Loyot [Ursprung der Loyot] (7: 365). Thus, Hlderlins sentence stands out, apart from the draft of the poem to which it seems to belong, as though to state yet again what takes place so often in these pages. The passage, Oft aber wie ein Brand / Entstehet Sprachverw(irrt)irrung, might thus be considered the fragment of fragments at this late stage of Hlderlins writing between 1803 and 1807, when he would produce the last poems to be published in his lifetime, as well as his translations of Sophocless Oedipus and Antigone. But it is more than a manifestation of Hlderlins late writing praxis. The excess at issue here, as tongues grow confounded with others and language emerges as fire, also speaks to the issues of translation, the origins of language, and prophecy that would preoccupy Hlderlin and many of his contemporaries, including Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, and G. W. F. Hegel. No sooner does language emerge than the problem of its plurality and translatablity begins. And even before there is any talk of language, firean element associated with ancient prophecy, Pentecost, and the of the Stoicsheralds its coming, and forebodes its end before it can even begin: But often as a firebrand, arises confusion of tongues.

But what does speaking in tongues say? And what could one say of it? Hlderlins fragment speaks to the precariousness of any inquiry into the confusion of tongues and prophecy. For if one takes his comparison of linguistic emergence to a devastating firebrand seriously, one must confront the possibility that it may never be witnessed; that it could not be adequately addressed in any direct way or in any one tongue; and that language, as such, would not at first have been a means of communication, let alone transparent communication. Rather, Hlderlins words imply that, every time it emerges, language will have been radically different from our understanding of words and from any words we understand, and that it will have been, from the start, other in and to itself. Unlike Enlightenment narratives of the origins of language, which also describe primal scenes of emergence for which there neither is nor can be a historical record, Hlderlins poem dismisses the operative assumptions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tienne de Condillac, and, to a lesser degree, Johann Gottfried Herder: namely, that language would have originated in the way we use and know it, and that the first language would have been one. Thus, Hlderlins fragment demands a reconsideration of language as such. And, as I hope to show in the course of this book, the most intensive considerations of language in Hegels, Wilhelm von Humboldts, and Friedrich Schlegels writings similarly call for a radical rethinking of language. Reading philosophical and literary texts of German Romanticism and German Idealism in relationship to Greek (and other) precursors, I argue in Prophecies of Language that a philological response to this demand not only uncovers aspects of these texts that would otherwise remain silent or ignored but also opens the possibility of questioning many tacit assumptions about what languages might mean. But how could this problem be addressed or pursued at all? What method or modus of writing could address it adequately, if the conventions of expository prose, too, must be placed in question by the nature of the issue? With Hlderlins fragment, one quickly arrives at an impasse.

A detour is in order, to sketch a possible way to speak to the problems that emerge with Hlderlins text more precisely. Precisely by speaking of confusion of tongues [