Between Silence and Chatter

sketch for a feminine language departing from the “Metaphysics of Youth”

Abstract

Departing from a historical background of Walter Benjamin’s “Metaphysics of Youth”, I intend to comprehend what the philosopher characterizes as a feminine language. Between silence and chatter, a feminine language may be conceived as the experience of the speakability of language itself, of its own communicability, since it is characterized as a wahnwitzigen Sprache, as a “demented language”. In this adjective, I find Witz, the slip. This takes me to Jacques Lacan’s considerations of lalangue, a feminine experience of language, made by slips, misunderstandings and homophones. At the end, I analyze some fragments of Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit and the infantile experience of the mother tongue he presents there in connection to his 1913 considerations on a feminine language, thus showing that this question cannot be reduced to a juvenile and naive period of his writing, but that it rather cuts across Benjamin’s oeuvre.