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From Zone Books:
Echolalias
On the Forgetting of Language
Daniel Heller-Roazen
 Table of Contents
Just as speech can be acquired, so can it be lost. Speakers can forget words, phrases, even entire languages they once knew; over the course of time peoples, too, let go of the tongues that were once theirs, as languages disappear and give way to the others that follow them. In Echolalias, Daniel Heller-Roazen reflects on the many forms of linguistic forgetfulness, offering a far-reaching philosophical investigation into the persistence and disappearance of speech. In twenty-one brief chapters, he moves among classical, medieval, and modern culture, exploring the interrelations of speech, writing, memory, and oblivion.
Drawing his examples from literature, philosophy, linguistics, theology, and psychoanalysis, Heller-Roazen examines the points at which the transience of speech has become a question in the arts, disciplines, and sciences in which language plays a prominent role. Whether the subject is Ovid, Dante, or modern fiction, classical Arabic literature or the birth of the French language, structuralist linguistics or Freud's writings on aphasia, Heller-Roazen considers with clarity, precision, and insight the forms, the effects, and the ultimate consequences of the forgetting of language. In speech, he argues, destruction and construction often prove inseparable. Among peoples, the disappearance of one language can mark the emergence of another; among individuals, the experience of the passing of speech can lie at the origin of literary, philosophical, and artistic creation.
From the infant's prattle to the legacy of Babel, from the holy tongues of Judaism and Islam to the concept of the dead language and the political significance of exiled and endangered languages today, Echolalias traces an elegant, erudite, and original philosophical itinerary, inviting us to reflect in a new way on the nature of the speaking animal who forgets.
About the Author
Daniel Heller-Roazen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (2008) and The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (2009), both published by Zone Books.
| "In short, I highly recommend Echolalias to the writer, the codeworker, the critic, anyone who works with language, who participates in the assumptions of language. It is brilliantly written, moves subtlety between cases, anecdotes, and cultural histories - through theoretical considerations - while remaining close to the bone."
—Alan Sondheim, American Book Review |
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| "If there ever was a book like this one, I cannot remember it. Heller-Roazen's gorgeous prose strings together beads of dazzling example into a necklace of allusion. When have such important philosophical and philological arguments about the nature of language and such trenchant critiques been made with such graceful learning? With each turn of the page we pass from amnesia to anamnesis and back again. When we come to the end we awaken, like Circe's pigs, filled with regret that that adventure is over, but filled with a new wonder about human language, from its most humble letters to the heights of poetry. If you read this book, you will not easily forget it."
—David Nirenberg, author of Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages
"Reading Daniel Heller-Roazen's book is an extraordinary intellectual adventure. Vertiginous landscapes of learning open up at every moment, but the writing never loses its aphoristic edge. Much is said and even more is suggested. This book rebuilds whole worlds from the ravages of loss and forgetting, and also discreetly teaches us that there are no worlds that loss and forgetting do not beset."
—Michael Wood, author of The Road to Delphi
"Daniel Heller-Roazen has written a magical and learned story of language. Here the life and death and never-ending mutability of languages, the babbling lost in the interstices of speech, the history of typographical marks, the mysteries of animal sounds and speech disorders, forgotten tongues and mother tongues, linguistic paradoxes and tragedies all acquire a brilliant and Ovidian intensity."
—Susan Stewart, author of Columbarium and Poetry and the Fate of the Senses
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| Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2005.
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