Daniel Heller-Roazen is the author of Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language.
Like many others of his time, Kafka called Yiddish ‘jargon’. This was one of various names for the language, and Kafka, who knew several, could have used another had he so wished. But ‘jargon’ was an exact name for the unsettled and unsettling thing he took the language of the Eastern European Jews to be. ‘Jargon,’ he wrote, ‘is the youngest European...
Law drops the missing person once his case is closed by return or death, but myth and literature can follow him in his absence. For Lévi-Strauss myth is a way for a culture to work over social contradictions...
When Germany’s ultimatum – delivered, as the Kaiser had explained, ‘only with the friendliest intentions towards Belgium’ – expired in August 1914, von...
We learn a lot about ourselves at the moment when we lose our balance. In the canon of philosophical pratfalls, a tumble taken by Montaigne, and recounted in his essay ‘On Practice’,...
In his autobiography, Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling tells how he returned to Bombay from public school in England. He had been away for 11 years, but once again walking the streets of...
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