The "place" in the title of Claudia Brodsky's remarkable new book
is the intersection of language with building, the marking, for
future reference, of material constructions in the world. The
"referent" Brodsky describes is not something first found in nature
and then named but a thing whose own origin joins language with
materiality, a thing marked as it is made to begin with. In the
Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent
develops a theory of the "referent" that is thus also a theory of
the possibility of historical knowledge, one that undermines the
conventional opposition of language to the real by theories of
nominalism and materialism alike, no less than it confronts the
mystical conflation of language with matter, whether under the
aegis of the infinite reproducibility of the image or the
identification of language with "Being." Challenging these equally
naive views of language - as essentially immaterial or the only
essential matter - Brodsky investigates the interaction of language
with the material that literature represents. For literature,
Brodsky argues, seeks no refuge from its own inherently iterable,
discursive medium in dreams of a technologically-induced freedom
from history or an ontological history of language-being. Instead
it tells the complex story of historical referents constructed and
forgotten, things built into the earth upon which history "takes
place" and of which, in the course of history, all visible trace is
temporarily effaced. Literature represents the making of history,
the building and burial of the referent, the present world of its
oblivion and the future of its unearthing, and it can do this
because, unlike the historical referent, it literally takes no
place, is not tied to any building or performance in space. For the
same reason literature can reveal the historical nature of the
making of meaning, demonstrating that the shaping and experience of
the real, the marking of matter that constitutes historical
referents, also defers knowledge of the real to a later date.
Through close readings of central texts by Goethe, Plato, Kant,
Heidegger, and Benjamin, redefined by the interrelationship of
building and language they represent, In the Place of Language
analyzes what remains of actions that attempt to take the place of
language: the enduring, if intermittently obscured bases, of
theoretical reflection itself.
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