Gabriel Almeida

Instructor: Patrick Durgin

ARTHI 4060-001 / VCS 4010-003 Topics in VCS: Art, Language, Concept.

December 14, 2017.

Paraphrasing Adorno, we can say of language what he said of art around 60

years ago: that it is self-evident, that nothing concerning it is self-evident anymore,

not it’s inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist. For has not

language acquired an incomprehensible quality, becoming absolutely private,

subjective, on the one hand, or absolutely objective, on the other, a text that speaks?

Is it not actually celebrated on this account? By analyzing a series of text by

Saussure, Derrida, and Walter Benjamin, I pretend to delineate two separate forms

to understand the dialectical relationship between language and society. Benjamin

is the inheritor of the lessons of 1848, in a sense, his theory is practical and

historical: it teaches in its failures; it looks for the conditions for the possibility of

change. Derrida and Saussure1, have a similar debt to 1968. The theory of 1968 is

theoretical and ahistorical. My claim would be that the difference between both

understandings rotates around the category of history and freedom. The former,

since it is practical, was formulated post-facto, while the latter was prior, and both

1I do not pretend to be analyzing Saussure in itself, as I will make clear in specific

cases by notes below, my interest on Saussure in this paper lies merely in the way
he was understood post-1968 by postmodernism.
were incidentally first stated around 1914. I will not try to be exhaustive;

nevertheless certain points should be touched, problems clarify and its terms fixed.

At last, consciousness of the difference is what interests me more.

Saussure, on his paper On the Nature of the Linguistic Sign (1916)2, starts his

investigation on language with the separation between speech and language.

Speech, for Saussure, is “a sound, a complex acoustical-vocal unit, [which] combines

in turn with an idea to form a complex physiological-psychological unit.” (p.14) The

existence of this two forms, idea and unit matter, implies for Saussure that speech

“has both an individual and social side” and also that it is “an established system and

an evolution; … an existing institution and a product of the past.” (Ibid) Language on

the other side, is “a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of

necessary convention adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that

faculty”, a bit below, “a self-contained whole, and a principle of classification”(Ibid).

Finally, I just want to add what Saussure considers to be the connection between

speech and language, and what place the category of parole plays with respect to

this division. To separate language from speech, Saussure imagines what he takes to

be the process of two people talking to each other, he dissects this process into a

psychological and physiological phenomena; a concept on the mind of the speaker

unlocks a sound, the latter travels to the ear of one hearing producing in turn the

concept back. For Saussure, neither the material part, nor the conceptual part

constitutes language, but language would be an abstract system that governs

concretely both. It would be “a homogeneous... system of signs in which the only

2Burke, Lucy, Crowley, Tony. Girvin, Alan,eds. The Routledge Language And Cultural
Theory Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.
essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-images, and in which both parts

of the sign are psychological” (p.14). Speech then is different than language in which

speech is individual, concrete, qualitative, particular, incommensurable (not

reducible to others equals), on the other hand language is social, concrete!!3,

quantitative, general, and commensurable. To make sense of this, we have to accept

the contradiction of a social system as separated from the individual and which at

the same time relates (controls?) individual actions. The question raises about

where does this thing comes from. For, if individuals made it when they first formed

society, how has it become so separate from them so that it now seems they cannot

change it? Language then takes the character of a given, a thing in itself that not only

is strange to the subject, exist outside of its influence, but also has power over it.

Language also takes an eternal or timeless aspect, or even worst, provides food for

bad romanticism, since it appears as a predicate of society, we can imagine through

this theory that “once upon a time…” when there was not society, maybe it did not

exist.

This theory, however, is balance: since it provides form in which society can

illogically relate and not relate with the individual and magically still remain just the

same after its contact, it also provides a safe space for the individual to connect and

not connect with society, remaining the unchanged. This space is called parole.

Above we mentioned that Saussure divided a language act into psychological and

physiological elements; these elements constitute a social act that considered only

3Saussure states: “language is concrete… linguistic signs, are not abstraction;

association which bear the stamp of collective approval – and which added together
constitute language – are realities that have their seat in the brain.” (Ibid)
in its individual aspect are called parole. In his own words: “Speaking (parole), is an

individual act. It is willful and intellectual. Within this act, we should distinguish

between: 1) the combination by which the speaker uses the language code for

expressing his own though and 2) the psychophysical mechanism that allows him to

exteriorize those combinations”. (p.17) In several other paragraphs like this

Saussure is at pains to try to recuperate a connection the individual needs to have

with the social, while at the same time maintaining himself as individual. Since

language was defined as “not a function of the speaker; [but] a product that is

passively assimilated by the individual”, (Ibid) he is constantly troubled to express

how this individual can, at the same time, express his own thoughts and doing it

through something which he has assimilated passively. Another way to put it is that

the individual, while constituted of language, he is unable to regulate it, to

qualitatively change it. On the other hand, language itself appears as unchangeable,

and when it can be change, it would merely do so quantitatively, it would just add on

to an existing structure, without changing it at its core. Language, by overlooking its

essential connection with society, denies itself the possibility to negate its

barbarism, and it merely joints it as another specialize branch. The reification of

language parallels the reification of consciousness.

The key problem I wanted to highlight in these paragraphs is the apparent

irreconcilability between the idea of the social and the individual proposed by

Saussure; the division between parole and language is the central symbol of this

problem; namely, that there something in language that is non communicable, which

constitutes the individual whatever that may mean. But also that both the social and
the individual aspect of language appear not only as separate absolutes, but seem to

constantly confront each other, while remaining the same.4 Derrida takes Saussure

to hearth at this point in “Signature, Event, and Contest” 5 which basic premises are

the separation between communication and writing, communication and meaning.

The essay starts as a critique of Codillac’s On Writing, which Derrida uses as an

example because:

“[T]he analysis, "retracing" the origin and function of writing, is

placed, in a rather uncritical manner, under the authority of the category of

communication. If men write it is: (1) because they have to communicate; (2)

because what they have to communicate is their "thought," their "ideas,"

their representations. Thought, as representation, precedes and governs

communication, which transports the "idea," the Signified content; (3)

because men are already in a state that allows them to communicate their

thought to themselves and to each other when, in a continuous manner, they

invent the particular means of communication, writing.”6 (p.4) [Emphasis in

the original]

4 It can be doubted that Saussure himself meant this, or that this has been only due
to misinterpretations with its legacy. See, Daylight, Russell. What If Derrida Was
Wrong About Saussure? Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Print. In
spite of this, since the influence of this theory in the epoch analyzed on the present
paper remains grounded on this points, the critique here offer rests valid.
5 Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.

Print.
6 I do not want to take much issue with Derrida’s appreciation of Codillac since it

does not pertain to the interest of this paper. However, Derrida’s uncritically is so
outrageous, that I would like to direct anyone interest to Cassirer, Ernst. The
Philosophy Of The Enlightenment; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951.
Print. in which a historical clarification of the what Codillac meant by perception [la
 With respect to the first point, communication, Derrida hypothesizes that

since communication presupposes an addressee and writing more specifically

would presume the latter as absent, this absence would not have to be understood

as a merely absent from the field of perception, merely distantly present, nor as

taking the shape of an idealize presence on the writer’s mind; but, that this

“[D]ifférance must be capable of being carried to a certain

absoluteness of absence if the structure of writing, assuming that writing

exists, is to constitute itself. It is at that point that the différance as writing

could no longer (be) an (ontological) modification of presence. In order for

my "written communication" to retain its function as writing, i.e., its

readability, it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of

any receiver, determined in general.”7 (p.7) [My emphasis]

From the beginning, we can see how Saussure’s absolutization of the

individual and social aspects of language, permits Derrida to conjecture that based

on the presupposition of writing itself, “assuming that writing exists”, there can be

writing that is merely individual, communication that can be solely parole,

remaining outside of language. A text itself writes, that is what différance means. As

if, by overlooking the fact that somebody writes, the text immediately puts up of

nowhere, and changes. Again, this bad consciousness lies in the contradiction

between society and the individual. For Derrida, since merely an individual writes,

then after his death, the text takes a life on its own. Because individual intentions

perception présente], idea and other terms poorly referred by Derrida are more
justly treated.
7 Différance, is a word coined by Derrida, which joins the meaning of both difference

and deferral. [Translator Notes Text Quoted]

and ideas, can be treated as a matter of indifference (more on this below), we can

overlook them, they can change at pleasure by the one who reads. The social value

of writing, thus, the meaning generated by the mutual comprehension of the writer

and the reader, vanishes, and with that, the meaning those words might have

actually had in history.

Additionally, in referring to the idea of absence in his examination of Codillac,

there is a sheer (almost obsessive) concretism in Derrida’s notion of the mark and

the addressee, which most clearly exemplify my point that, in the theory we are

considering, language is granted a life on its own. He says: “The absence of the

sender, of the receiver, from the mark that he abandons, and which cuts itself off

from him and continues to produce effects independently of his presence and of the

present actuality of his intentions, indeed even after his death, his absence, which

moreover belongs to the structure of all writing.” (p.5)

This takes us to his second and third point on his critique of Codillac. Writing,

according to Derrida would be separated both of the subject’s intentions and ideas;

in linguistic terms of the referent and the signified. This is attributed, as you may

guess by now, to one of written language own characteristics, its iterability. Namely,

written language is considered as a repetitive machine (This is Derrida’s own

analogy), which would produce intentions and meaning cheaply as it moves through

time. Some of the underlying issues here are the particularization, and

naturalization, of intention and meaning itself we mentioned above. Meaning and

intention are reified, given an a priori, thing-like quality, both with respect to the

text and to the author. This is equally expected of the relationship of subject and
object in the activity of reading the text, which is portray, if we follow the analogy of

the machine products, as supermarket buying, which would imply an indifference to

that which we buy, in so far as it fulfills our immediate needs. In other words, the

relationship between subject and object is flattened out, consider as the normative

relationship we have with every object, and the differences among objects and

among subjects vanishes, not giving each its own qualitative value, but transforming

them all into mere quantities. Iterability and différance, then, are two sides of the

same coin, from the point of theory, in which both the subject and the object of

study, language and the individuals which relate through, are submitted to the worst

yoke, the of indifference.

Finally, I just want shortly to point out that change itself as a category is

considered as a given, a priori rule of writing, that works independent of any human

relating with it. Since iterability permits the mark to move freely on time, or through

context in Derrida’s term, since différance is to be absolutized “assuming that

writing exists”, and both are considered to change a priori, “no context can entirely

enclose it” (p.9) The identification between repetition and alterity, in this context,

highlights the lack of a qualitative consideration of subject and object hinted above.

That is to say, any qualitative change disappears from history, and a horrifying voice

emerges from the postmodernist myth: “humans have always do the same, they

always will”.
 Good enough for 1968, what is the idea behind 1848? “Every expression of

human mental life can be understood as a kind of language” 8 (p. 62) Benjamin, on

his essay, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, stars by addressing

directly what has been stated here to constitute a paradox between the subject and

language, the individual and the social, etc. He speaks to this in the consideration of

the categories of mental and linguistic being. For Benjamin, language not only

communicates the mental being corresponding to it, but does so in itself, and not

merely through itself. In other words, there is a dialectical relationship of non-

identity between these two categories, which permits them to be the same, but non

identical. Thus,

“Mental being communicates itself in, not through, a language, which

means that it is not outwardly identical with linguistic being. Mental being is

identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is capable of communication.

What is communicable in a mental entity is its linguistic entity. Language

therefore communicates the particular linguistic being of things, but their

mental being only insofar as this is directly included in their linguistic being,

insofar as it is capable of being communicated.” (p.63) [my emphasis]

Thus, since mental and linguistic being are mediated by the category of

language, Benjamin concludes: “For language the situation is like this: the linguistic

being of all things is their language” or what it is to say the same: “That which in a

mental entity is communicable is its language."(Ibid). Let’s stop here a moment. We

8Benjamin, Walter, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”, Jennings,
Michael William, Bullock, Marcus Paul, Selected Writings. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap
Press, Vol.1, 1996. Print.
can immediately notice that Benjamin totally overrides the Saussurrian

presupposition that there is an amorphous incomprehensible “speech”, which can

be divided between parole, a merely individual aspect, and language, a given thing-

like social aspect. Benjamin also surpasses the antinomy of a willful- active vs a

passive property of language, by stating that its is not merely meant that “that which

appears more clearly in its language is communicable in a mental entity, but this

capacity for communication is language itself” (p. 64) This suggests two things: 1)

First, that it is not that something mental is restricted to the language to which it

somehow belongs9, language is not disconnected at all from the mental entity, rather

it is the capability inherent in the latter to be communicated and the capacity

inherent in the former to communicate it, that constitutes language. 2) It is not

willful activeness or passive reception that mediates the production of language,

communication, but a practical faculty, naming. With respect to humans, as a specific

form of mental being, “the linguistic being of man is his language. Which signifies:

man communicates his own mental being in his language.”10 Communication, thus, is

inherent in the concept of language, a predicate of its appearance.

9 This is a predominant issue on Saussurrian-oriented linguistics, especially in fields

of anthropology and ethnology. For a summary see the first chapters of: Steiner,
George. After Babel: Aspects Of Language And Translation. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1975. Print.
10 This is not a hyper-humanistic and one-sided notion that overlooks nature; the

entire opposite is true, it tries to comprehend the form of this mediation so as to not
overstep it ignorantly. In contrast with Derrida, Benjamin says: ““…the linguistic
being of man is his language. Which signifies: man communicates his own mental
being in his language. However, the language of man speaks in words. Man therefore
communicates his own mental being (insofar as it is communicable) by naming all
other things ... It should not be accepted that we know of no languages other than
that of man, for this is untrue. We only know of no naming language other than that
of man...” “On the Mimetic Faculty” Benjamin, Walter, Jennings, and Michael William.
 What is the language then, and how it relates with the issues stated above, i.e.

the relationship between the individual-social? To answer this, we need to make a

little detour to explain the notion of “the mimetic faculty” and “non-sensuous

similarity”.11 For Benjamin, the mimetic faculty is the faculty of human beings to

imitate Nature12, and this faculty has to be understood historically; in a phylogenetic

and ontogenetical form. On the latter, child’s play represents a key function. On the

former, there is a specific distinction to be made between the mimetic faculty of the

ancients and the modern. For the ancients, the mimetic faculty was bounded with

law of similarity, that as he says: “was comprehensive; it ruled both macro and

microcosms”, for example, in ritual dances. For the modern, however, the mimetic

faculty is transformed, takes the shape of non-sensous similarity. The difference is

to be understood as a qualitative change of human subjectivity; a change on the

relationship between Nature and Spirit.13 For the ancients, the meaning of life is

Bullock, Marcus Paul, Selected Writings. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996.
Print.
11 A different paper would be necessary to establish the differences between

Benjamin and Adorno’s understanding of the mimetic faculty and Derrida’s. A poor
explanation can be found in the entry: Kelly, Michael, ed. "Mimesis," The
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 3. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 233.
But I think, that some of the categories here exposed would help demark the
differences more clearly.
12 Natur, in Benjamin, is a special German idealist word which means not only

wildlife as in English, but includes everything that is given, as contrary to what be

would produced as new. So it includes also society, language, etc, in they given
aspect. Their new aspect, their transformation is referred as Spirit, Mind,
Consciousness, which are translations of the German word Geist.
13 For Benjamin understanding of history, see: “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and

Historian”, “On the Concept of History”, “Paralipomena to On the Concept of

History”, Benjamin, Walter, Jennings, and Michael William. Bullock, Marcus Paul,
Selected Writings. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996. Print. Vol III & IV. And
more explicit accounts: Lukács, György. The Theory Of The Novel: A Historico-
philosophical Essay On The Forms Of Great Epic Literature. Cambridge, Mass. : M.I.T.
given a priori, at the beginning of life, i.e. the ancients understood their world in a

rounded, unproblematic form, or as Marx would put it: in “the ancient conception…

man always appears (in however narrowly national, religious, or political a

definition) as the aim of production.”14 In the ancient world, everything a person is

or does is predeterminated by the place, the family, the race in which they are

borned, i.e. in Nature. Customs and practices, tradition, rules the community.

Modern man, on the other hand, is self-concious of its own production, the ends of

life are meant to be created, though to be discovered. “The reproduction of customs

and traditions are not longer the purpose of existence, the idea is not to repeat , but

to change, to move the world forward.”15 Benjamin’s concept of non-sensous

similarity has to be understood in this way, it means that the mimetic faculty ceased

to be an inmediate natural process, a sensous imitation and was transformed into a

conscious, spiritual, process, through which man reflects upon its own relationship

with nature.

Benjamin wrote once: “The deepest task of the coming philosophy will be to

take the deepest intimations it draws from our times and our expectation of a great

future, and turn them into knowledge by relating them with the Kantian system”16

Press, [1973]. Print. and Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On The Advantage And
Disadvantage Of History For Life: 1980. Print. with the helpful introduction of Peter
Preuss.
14 Marx, Karl, Nicolaus, Martin. Grundrisse: Foundations Of The Critique Of Political

Economy (rough Draft). London : Penguin Books In Association With New LLeft
Review, 1993. Print.
15 Peter Preuss introduction, Note 10.
16 Benjamin, Walter, “On the program of the Coming Philosophy”, Jennings, Michael

William, Bullock, Marcus Paul, Selected Writings. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press,
Vol.1, 1996. Print.
and certainly Kant give us a great insight on the notions of non-sensous similarity in

his discussion of the symbol:

“Symbolic exhibition uses an analogy (for which we use empirical intuitions

as well), in which judgment performs a double function: it applies the

concept to the object of a sensible intuition; and then it applies the mere rule

by which it reflects on that intuition to an entirely different object, of which the

former object is only the symbol. Thus a monarchy ruled according to its own

constitutional laws would be presented as an animate body, but a monarchy

ruled by an individual absolute will would be presented as a mere machine

(such as a hand mill); but in either case the presentation is only symbolic. For

though there is no similarity between a despotic state and a hand mill, there

certainly is one between the rules by which we reflect on the two and on how

they operate”17

The non-sensuous similarity between two objects is to be understood as

their symbolic relationship, i.e. that is to say, not between their immediate sensuous

qualities, but between the rules by which we reflect on them. However, non-sensuous

similarity is not a theoretical faculty, but not the recognition of similarities, but their

practical expression. Dire cela, sans savoir quoi.

“Now if language, as is evident to the insightful”, says Benjamin, “is not an

agreed-upon system of signs”, language has to be understood as “the highest level of

mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of non-sensuous similarity.”18 This

17 Kant, Immanuel, Pluhar, Werner S., Critique Of Judgment. Indianapolis, Ind.:

Hackett Pub. Co.,1987. Print p. 227
18 B. “On the mimetic faculty” p.722
implies a change with respect to the object of linguistic studies: for Saussure,

language needed to be defined objectively, separated from change, parole, so as to

be analyzable. Similarly, Derrida’s object of study is the text, which objectively has

the properties pointed above, and has to be decrypted by mimesis, or play. The text

is posed as a thing of Nature, that needs to be deconstructed, but which would

provide nothing more than a play-act. Thus, for Derrida, the subject’s arbitrary

alteration of meaning takes over the aspect of qualitative transformation of the

object. In Benjamin’s notion of language, on the other hand, it is the relationship

between subject-object that constitutes the object linguistic study. The semiotic

symbol, thus, communicates in itself the mental being of the subject, as pointed

above, it contains crystalized in its form, the subject’s reflection upon the rules by

which he understand an object at a specific moment of time. Naming is the moment

of the creation of a semiotic symbol.

This theory, then, permits the study of the qualitative, specific, form in which

language relates not only with the object it represents, but also with the subject,

which produced it: naming. Different from Derrida and Saussure, Benjamin is not

interest in giving an “eternal image” of language’s “past”, but an account of its

“unique experience”. This unique experience is revived from the practical necessity

of the present, its “a memory …[that] flashes up in a moment of danger”; history is

different from merely the past in that it contains a liberatory potential in its

relationship with the present, it engages the historian not in merely causal

connection, “he grasps the constellation into which his own era has entered, along

with a very specific earlier one. Thus, he establishes a conception of the present as
now-time shot through with splinters of messianic time.”19 The intention of the

historian then is to sense a constellation, to be able to reflect on the symbols of the

past, as to recognize the possibility of qualitative change of the whole, a messianic

time, i.e. what it ought to become.20

And again, how does it all relate with the problematic between the

individual-social described at the beginning of this essay? For Benjamin, language

and history, while being produce by the individual, contain the potential of societal

production. The subject, the social individual, not merely by the individual, names.

The freedom of language and that of the individual no longer coincide. Language

does not imitate the stars anymore; we do not call rain through embodying it on a

dance. The mimetic faculty changed both subjectively and objectively. As Benjamin

points, children not only imitate the teacher and the shopkeeper, but the windmill

and the train. Language imitates the totality of society in its contradictory form; thus

its machine-like aspects, its production for production’s sake, which Derrida and

Saussure correctly noticed, but incorrectly attributed to an essence of language,

19 B. W. “On the concept of History”, cited above.

20 Similarly, for Kant, exist a practical notion of cognition, connected with the

idea of symbol: “If a mere way of presenting [something] may ever be called

cognition (which I think is permissible if this cognition is a principle not for

determining the object theoretically, as to what it is in itself, but for determining it

practically, as to what the idea of the object ought to become for us and for our

purposive employment of it), then all our cognition of God is merely symbolic.” Kant,

CJ, p.228
rather than to its historical specificity. By embracing the whole of society, language

can, at least abstractly, negate the whole, showing the potential of going beyond.

This certainly comes with the acceptance that language in itself is unfree, allowing it

possibly to produce in consciousness the contradiction of the whole, but negating it

a priori any concrete possibility of liberation by its own hands. Language is unfree,

because society is unfree, and the latter can only be worked through immanently in

the realm of politics.

That the linguistic turn came about as an interior crisis of philology was

never a coincidence. It owes its appearance to the evolution of language started

before 1789, but with an important difference taken around 1848. Examples of this

can be found, although not only, in literature. To comprehend itself, the linguistic

turn would require the return of philology, i.e. of language considered historically,

albeit at a different level. It would have to consider not merely the change of

meaning and form within language, but the reification of language itself; it would

need to stop ontologizing its machine like quality, and discover its development; it

would to understand how itself its not more than a symptom of bourgeois society

dying out, infected by capitalism. Finally, it would need to comprehend how to make

of its position on the present a necessity for change; how to transform the sickness

into a possibility, like Nietzsche said once, a sickness as pregnancy would be a

sickness, namely, a sickness with the quality to produce actually something new, the

negation of the old, the possibility of change. That language, like life, in 99% of its

forms may appear inconsequential and futile, should surprise nobody, except those

who forget the truth that capitalism was never but a system of waste. The
qualitative transformation would be to go beyond waste; it would be that 1% in

which we actually can make promises.

Bibliography:

 Benjamin, Walter, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”,

Jennings, Michael William, Bullock, Marcus Paul, Selected Writings.

Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, Vol.1, 1996. Print.

---, “On the Concept of History”,---

---, “On the program of the Coming Philosophy”,---

---, “On the Mimetic Faculty”,---

 Burke, Lucy, Crowley, Tony. Girvin, Alan,eds. The Routledge Language And

Cultural Theory Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

 Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,

1988. Print.

 Kant, Immanuel, Pluhar, Werner S., Critique Of Judgment. Indianapolis, Ind.:

Hackett Pub. Co., 1987. Print p. 227

References:

 Marx, Karl, Nicolaus, Martin. Grundrisse: Foundations Of The Critique Of

Political Economy (rough Draft). London: Penguin Books In Association With

New Left Review, 1993. Print.

 Peter Preuss. Introduction. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On The Advantage

And Disadvantage Of History For Life: 1980. Print.

 Daylight, Russell. What If Derrida Was Wrong About Saussure? Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Print

 Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy Of The Enlightenment; Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1951. Print.

 Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects Of Language And Translation. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Print.