A far-reaching philosophical investigation into the persistence and
disappearance of speech, in individuals and in linguistic
communities. Just as speech can be acquired, so can it be lost.
Speakers can forget words, phrases, even entire languages they once
knew; over the course of time peoples, too, let go of the tongues
that were once theirs, as languages disappear and give way to the
others that follow them. In Echolalias, Daniel Heller-Roazen
reflects on the many forms of linguistic forgetfulness, offering a
far-reaching philosophical investigation into the persistence and
disappearance of speech. In twenty-one brief chapters, he moves
among classical, medieval, and modern culture, exploring the
interrelations of speech, writing, memory, and oblivion. Drawing
his examples from literature, philosophy, linguistics, theology,
and psychoanalysis, Heller-Roazen examines the points at which the
transience of speech has become a question in the arts,
disciplines, and sciences in which language plays a prominent role.
Whether the subject is Ovid, Dante, or modern fiction, classical
Arabic literature or the birth of the French language,
structuralist linguistics or Freud's writings on aphasia,
Heller-Roazen considers with clarity, precision, and insight the
forms, the effects, and the ultimate consequences of the forgetting
of language. In speech, he argues, destruction and construction
often prove inseparable. Among peoples, the disappearance of one
language can mark the emergence of another; among individuals, the
experience of the passing of speech can lie at the origin of
literary, philosophical, and artistic creation. From the infant's
prattle to the legacy of Babel, from the holy tongues of Judaism
and Islam to the concept of the dead language and the political
significance of exiled and endangered languages today, Echolalias
traces an elegant, erudite, and original philosophical itinerary,
inviting us to reflect in a new way on the nature of the speaking
animal who forgets.
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