Synopses & Reviews
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 envelops 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. 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,” 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.
Review
"Brodsky provides the basis for a complete rethinking of Goethe's contribution to numerous disciplines and, at a more general theoretical level, means to improve the quality of existing discussion and does so successfully. Her convincing intervention on behalf of the referent has a solid theoretical foundation and her argument relating language and architecture to historical knowledge is extremely strong'an extraordinary work."--Kirk Wetters, Yale University
Review
"Passionately and with abundant erudition Claudia Brodsky turns against traditional ideas of language and prefers to investigate the question of why so many fundamental works of literature and philosophy depend on architecture to demarcate a space in which imagination lingers to discover past and future. Claudia Brodsky intensely involves us in her argumentation, whether she concentrates on an incisive moment in Claude Lanzmann's movie 'Shoah', effectively employs Kant to deflate Agamben or interprets Plato, Rousseau, Heidegger, Benjamin, Proust or Goethe's most important novel and dramas. I know few recent books of such force and rare originality."--Peter Demetz, Yale University
Review
"An outstanding work of scholarly erudition, penetrating analyses, and original insights, Brodsky's book makes a remarkable contribution to the study of Goethe and general literary theory, offering penetrating new readings of two of Goethe's most demanding and philosophically invested works."--Clark Muenzer, University of Pittsburgh
Review
Beyond its stunning synthesis of philosophy and literature this book offers fresh readings of Goethe's two currently most discussed works.-Jane Brown
Synopsis
The placein 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 referentBrodsky 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
About the Author
CLAUDIA BRODSKY is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is the author of
The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge, Lines of Thought: Discourse, Archetonics, and the
Origin of Modern Philosophy and the editor, with Toni Morrison, of
Birth of a Nation 'hood.