The Recognizability of Recognition: Fragments in the Name of a Not Yet Rhetorical Question

Shot through with Schlegel’s insight that “words often understand themselves better than those who use them, ” Walter’s Benjamin’s 1916 essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” extends an invitation to reflect on those words that speak to the recognizability of language, the name of that in which language abides and discloses itself. For now, a century after it was first composed as an unsent letter, a close consideration of Benjamin’s important essay sheds light on the contemporary question of recognition, the not yet rhetorical question of how the ethical-political stakes of recognition may hinge on the (dis)possession of (its) language.