Very few philosophical investigations nowadays manage to convey political messages without taking an explicitly political stance, but Pisano's study is one of them. Through the work of five German Jewish thinkers, she succeeds in outlining a “diasporic philosophy of language” that can help us resist the resurgence of authoritarianism, nationalism, and idolatry in the twenty-first century. Our resistance will not thrive — Pisano elegantly tells us — until we reject linguistic autochthony (that is, the identification of any language with a “specific geographical definition”). But why is it necessary to venture into the writings of Fritz Mauthner, Gustav Landauer, Margarete Susman, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin to “discover a potential source of insight and guidance”? While the phrase “diasporic philosophy of language” could also be applied to the work of Hermann Cohen, Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, and other renowned Jewish thinkers, the authors selected by this Italian specialist all belong to the German intellectual community of the early twentieth century and were shaped by intellectual dialogues that are absent in the other thinkers.At the origin of Pisano's diasporic philosophy of language is the concept of sprachkrise, which not only refers to a “profound doubt concerning language's capacity to comprehend reality and unveil truth,” but also anticipates the later term linguistic turn that Richard Rorty used to describe the emergence of analytical philosophy. Although that turn occurred as well among continental philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, there is yet another linguistic turn that is distinctively German Jewish. Its origins, as Pisano explains, are manifest in the “linguistic skepticism of the fin de siècle”: Language was questioned through a “continuous critique that became the very task of philosophy.” The autonomy of language, which resulted from this skepticism, is not very different from the autonomy of knowledge in the aftermath of its subjection by modern thinkers to their suspicion of human cognition. In both cases, language and knowledge are freed from their instrumental function to become autonomous and to pursue different paths.This autonomy and those paths are examined in the five chapters that constitute this rich book, full of historical references and linguistic analysis. These chapters demonstrate not only how language loses its conventional role in the works of Mauthner, Landauer, Susman, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin but also what happens when that role is abandoned. According to Pisano, a “fundamental questioning of the meanings of words emerges,” which leads to an “ ‘epoché of meaning,’ made by ‘exilic’ or ‘diasporic gestures’ that bring the word to a terra incognita.” Although these gestures differ among thinkers, they share a common thread involving a more pragmatic conception of language. Mauthner's, for example, conceives language as “pure performance, detached from signifiers”; Landauer's, as a “continuous process”; Susman's, as a “powerful force that cannot be simplified to the ordinary language of the people”; Rosenzweig's, as a “ ‘thread’ on which everything human is strung”; and Benjamin's, as an “integral medium where the spiritual finds expression.” Why are these interpretations of language significant, from a political point of view?The effort of bringing together these crucial authors for the first time should be enough for readers to applaud Pisano's hermeneutic effort. But there is more. The political nature of her diasporic philosophy of language is also essential as it allows us to imagine a different concept of Heimat (homeland) that is finally free from the idolatry of crude contemporary nationalism. Language, as we learn through Mauthner, Landauer, Susman, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin, “cannot be confined by artificial or geographical boundaries; rather, it signifies a ‘portable’ or ‘philological’ homeland rooted in time rather than space.” As a mode of cultural-linguistic belonging without the propriety of ownership, these thinkers’ understanding of Heimat is meant to contrast with Zionism: Rosenzweig, for example, rejected the Zionist account of Judaism, which he saw as an “attempt to make it a people among others,” and Susman rejected it as a “delegitimization of other Jewish national projects.”Political resistance in this first quarter of the twenty-first century must reconsider and return to thinkers who grappled with the inevitable tension of their intertwined identities, like the thinkers Pisano focuses on in this marvelous study. Only they can provide insight and guidance against authoritarian leadership.
Santiago Zabala (Thu,) studied this question.