PhD student at the Graduate Program in Philosophy at UERJ.

From November 2019 to April 2020, he will make a sandwich doctorate at Technische Universität Berlin, under the supervision of Professor Christoph Asmuth.

Research project: Naming and Translatability in Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language

This investigation consists of an examination of Walter Benjamin’s theory of language guided primarily by the concepts of naming and translatability. Drawing mainly from the essays “On Language as such and on the language of man” (1916), and “The Task of the Translator” (1923), its focus will be exploring the main points of the German philosopher’s theory of language. For Benjamin, language does not refer exclusively to the systems of signs and sounds used for communication between human beings, but to any kind of communication among beings, whether animated or not. The difference between human language and language as such lies precisely in the naming dimension of human language, which is absent in other beings. The act of naming is, simultaneously, communication of the self and interpellation with the world: more than objective content, the proclamation of a name is an expressive movement of participation in a common linguistic medium. The essential condition of language as such is precisely the participation in common mediality with other languages, that is, the imparting of a shared communicative environment. Benjamin calls this phenomenon the fundamental translatability of all language. Thus, naming and translation work in close instances – from this perspective, a name can be considered the translation of a spiritual essence into a linguistic essence. Translatability must, therefore, be interpreted not as a consequence of the equivalence between languages, but as a criterion of intelligibility among languages themselves.