On the threshold of language: Critique and therapy in Kant, Schlegel, Wittgenstein, and Benjamin (Immanuel Kant, Friedrich von Schlegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin)

An important tradition in modern philosophy, from Kant to Wittgenstein, concerns the critique of knowledge as a basic form of our relation to the world. Many have taken this critique to aim at the replacement of representational or propositional knowledge by non-linguistic practices. However, this critique of knowledge runs the risk of falling into a version of the ineffable since it claims that our implicit non-linguistic agreement in practice precedes explicit agreement in concepts. This work turns to the project of thinking language itself in broader terms as consisting also of affective and performative forms of communication. Language, I argue, is not only a system of representation but also the activity that underlies the forming of representations. This activity, that is the movement of communication itself, cannot be represented since it makes representation possible. The work thus develops an important alternative to the prevalent critique of knowledge. It searches for the conditions of representational language in the performative and affective acts of communication rather than in non-linguistic practices or immediate experience.; I illustrate this thesis with several readings of philosophical texts that themselves encounter the limits of representation and proceed to communicate their massage by way of enactment or performance. These include Kant's Critique of Judgment, Schlegel's Philosophical Fragments , Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations, and Benjamin's Arcades Project ( Passagen-Werk). Each chapter investigates the ways in which non-representational communication is possible. From Kant's critique to Wittgenstein's and Benjamin's therapy the notion of communication in language is extended to include affectivity, performativity, and enactment.; The result of these investigations is twofold. On the one hand, I examine how philosophy becomes affective, following texts that aim to be transformative. And on the other, I elucidate the ability of language in general to communicate by ways other than representational such that we need not look for non-linguistic forms of communication to recover experience, ethics, and aesthetics in language.