Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin

Beginning with an exposition of Hölderlin's rigorous account of interruption in terms of the "pure word," in which the event of representation alone appears, identifies critical moments in philosophical and literary texts during which language itself—without any identifiable speaker—arrests otherwise continuous processes and procedures, including the process of representation and the procedures for its legitimization. The book then investigates a series of pure words: the fatal verdict ( ) of divine wisdom in Leibniz, the performance of Jewish ceremonial practices in Mendelssohn, the issuing of unauthorized arrest warrants in Kleist, fraudulent acts of storytelling in Hebel, the eruption of tragic silence and the "mass strike" in Benjamin, and the recurrence of angelic intervention in Irigaray. At the center of this volume is a detailed explication of Benjamin's effort to transform Husserl's program for a phenomenological into a paradoxically nonprogrammatic, paradisal , by means of which the structure of paradise can be exactly outlined and the Messianic moment—as the ultimate event of arresting language—can at last appear to enter into its own.