About the Book
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.
About the Author :
Daniel Heller-Roazen is professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. He is the author of Fortune's Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency.
Review :
This is a superb book. It combines erudition of the subtlest kind with literary finesse. We read it with pleasure and intellectual gain. And it truly makes us think – about the act of speaking, about the languages, about poets. Books don't come any better than this.
—Jürgen Trabant, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Heller-Roazen blends tremendous erudition in a new form, citing the Talmud, the pre-Islamic poets, Dante, Spinoza, and Elias Canetti with the same acuity and playfulness. He succeeds in making a gesture all too rare today: a philosophical gesture, whose center is the questioning of language.
—Lila Azam Zanganeh, LE MONDE
Echolalias is a rare find a book about language where the language itself steers a course between the scholarly and the poetic. Difficult, erudite, and full of luminous parables, it is worth multiple readings.
—nth position
In short, I highly recommend Echolalias to the writer, the codeworker, the critic, anyone who works with language, who participates in the assumptions of language. It is brilliantly written, moves subtlety between cases, anecdotes, and cultural histories—through theoretical considerations—while remaining close to the bone.
—Alan Sondheim, American Book Review
This thought-provoking book contains a memorable aphorism by Kafka that could stand as its epigraph: 'I can swim just like the others. Only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten the former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, being able to swim is of no help to me; and so, after all, I cannot swim.'
—London Review of Books
