Barthes meets Benjamin? A Relating of their Views on the Conjunction between Language and Literature

Abstract

For Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes literature appears to be inseparable from the language in which it speaks. With their theories of language as the starting point, I discuss how their views on literature meet. Their paths cross, for example, in the antithesis: the idea that the allegorical counter‐image creates the field of tension in the text that is able to release one from all that which is cramped and unfree in existence. This release always comes ‘from within,’ from language's concrete use of emblematic or coded stereotypes. And not ‘from without,’ like the impact of an already existing truth or release in a symbolic indirectness in the text. In Benjamin's critique of the ‘profane concept of symbols’ of classical‐romantic aesthetics and in his indication of the cognitive potential of the dialectic concept of allegory there is an attitude which is fundamentally in agreement with that of Barthes regarding the semiotic way in which both the content and the expression sides of language function.