The Letter ‘Giveth’ and The Letter ‘Killeth’: Language as a Source of Life-Death.
INTRODUCTION
Neil Postman observes that every new technology ‘giveth and… taketh away’.[1] The same is true of the written word. Before a shared system of language, human experience remained, in a sense, inarticulable, and after it, experience was brought into the life of shared narrative and memory. Language preserves, creates, and orders life: that is what the written word ‘giveth’. Yet, as Paul puts it in his Letter to the Corinthians, ‘the letter killeth’:[2] language also has the capacity to drain and ‘taketh away’ life.
This essay will proceed in three parts. First, I will examine what the written word ‘giveth’. Second, I will investigate how the written word, as it ‘giveth’, also ‘taketh away’ or ‘killeth’. Third, I will consider that which language ‘giveth’ and that which it ‘killeth’ to not be in opposition, but characterised by some other inarticulable relation. Part IV concludes.
PART I – What Language ‘Giveth’
‘[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life’.[3] – James Joyce.
A Writing Preserves Life
Writing is a medium that immortalises. To write is to preserve a particular memory, and to give that memory a life beyond ephemeral life. Diary entries, time capsules, and inscriptions on gravestones are all familiar versions of this phenomenon: they freeze moments and identities in time that would otherwise be lost, such that they can outlive the bodies and situations in which they occurred. There is a sense in which writing moves that which it records to a zone beyond death.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 articulates this phenomenon.[4] In this sonnet, the speaker contemplates whether he should compare his loved one to ‘a summer’s day’. Ultimately, the speaker answers this question in the negative: a summer’s day is transient, subject to ‘[r]ough winds’ and the changing of seasons, whereas his muse’s beauty is now granted quasi-permanence, existing in the ‘eternal lines’ of the poem itself. The closing couplet, in characteristic Shakespeare fashion, captures the profundity of this point: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’ The muse’s mortal life will end, but the speaker of the sonnet insists that the written text will continue to ‘give life’ to her insofar as it continues to be read. The written words thus purportedly enshrine the speaker’s muse in eternity, conferring on her a life beyond life.
Beyond the capacity for language to preserve individual lives such as the speaker’s muse in Sonnet 18, Jean Seznec further suggests the written word can operate as a preservative for entire pagan pantheons. In The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Seznec notes that Christian polemicists often attack ‘gods whose existence had been reduced to a mere literary convention’.[5] However, the diminutive ‘mere’ is misleading here: such literary convention is often the basis of these gods’ persistence. Through the ‘allegorical method’, ancient myths about the gods are continually reinterpreted as moral lessons, a process that, as Seznec compellingly posits, ‘offer[s] a means of giving that religion new life and bringing it into line with the modern conscience’. Although these gods no longer survive through active worship, they exist still in modernity via myth as ‘magnificent metaphors’ for the nature of divinity.[6]
In Seznec’s account, as in Shakespeare’s sonnet, writing operates to transport beings to a peculiar afterlife where, no longer alive in the ordinary sense, they nevertheless continue to exist as names and stories animated by language.
B Language Creates Life
Not only can language preserve life beyond life, but particular religious traditions also conceive of language as a generative force: language creates life. In the Christian tradition, God spoke the world into being through the proclamation ‘Let there be light’, with the subsequent result being that ‘there was light’.[7] The act of creation is thus cast as an act of divine speech followed by its material manifestation, and indeed the same pattern repeats in the Bible with ‘living creatures’ and ‘mankind’ itself. The act of divine speech and the existence of metaphysical facts are thus blurred into one cohesive creation sequence.
This concept of the ‘blur’ between language and metaphysical fact is reflected in the Jewish Kabbalah tradition. For Kabbalists, the 22 consonants of the Hebrew alphabet are not arbitrary signs but instead divine building blocks: the ‘stones from which the edifice of Creation was built’.[8] The world can thus be imagined as a kind of poem composed by God out of these eternal letters. Indeed, and comparably, in the Bible, John’s Gospel states that ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’.[9] Here, as in the Kabbalah tradition, language is not simply a tool, it is intimately identified ‘with’ divine forces.
The famous legend of the Golem further concretises this theology of language. One version of the legend presents it thus:[10]
the Polish Jews make the figure of a man from clay or mud, and when they pronounce the miraculous Shemhamphora [the name of God] over him, he must come to life. He cannot speak, but he understands fairly well what is said or commanded. They call him golem and use him as a servant… On his forehead is written ’emeth [truth]; every day he gains weight and becomes somewhat larger and stronger… For fear of him, they therefore erase the first letter, so that nothing remained but meth [he is dead], whereupon he collapses and turns to clay again.
Other versions of the story consider the Golem to be animated, or brought to life, by the placing of a sacred Hebrew name, ‘shem’, in its mouth, with the Golem rendered inanimate whenever that letter was removed.[11] Irrespective of the version, the important premise is this: the life or death of the Golem was contingent on the presence of language. Scholem compares the animation of the Golem via the utterance of the name of God with the creation of Adam in Genesis via God’s breath:[12] the word ‘golem’ was historically used as a Hebrew term for formless matter, and thus the biblical Adam himself was ‘golem’ before the breath of God had touched him”.[13] Language, at least in these traditions, does not merely label existing things, but is the medium through which things can exist.
C Language Orders Inner Life
Alongside its capacity to both preserve and generate life, language is also the vehicle through which our inner lives are calibrated. Language helps us assert and articulate ourselves as the subject of our experiences. Particular grammatical constructions allow us to cast ourselves as agents in our own personal narrative. For instance, the assertion ‘I am grieving’ frames a tragic emotional experience as an active and intentional process, rather than the rarely used passive construction ‘I am grieved’, which would arguably be more appropriate in depicting the way that grief overwhelms us passively.
Language thus not only offers us agency over our inner experience, but also itself shapes our inner lives. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that language influences thought and cognition.[14] For instance, the Australian Indigenous language of Guugu Ymithirr describes direction in cardinal terms: instead of saying my water bottle is to the right of me, a Guugu Ymithirr speaker would say the water bottle is to the east of me.[15] As a result, these speakers are trained to think of the world in a particular way, directionally. This phenomenon also applies to inner lives: our language seems to shape the way we think. This applies especially to emotional lexicon, like the untranslatable Portuguese word ‘saudade’ which refers to a bittersweet longing for an absent person or thing, accompanied by the knowledge it may never return, or the German ‘schadenfreude’ which refers to pleasure at another’s misfortune. German and Portuguese speakers have linguistic access to the acknowledgment and understanding of an emotion other language speakers cannot articulate. Words like these help to order our inner lives: my capacity to understand that I am ‘sad’ or ‘happy’ helps me act accordingly.
Language also animates our personality and gives us vitality as an authentic living organism beyond the mere fact of existence. Just as Jesus’ declarative ‘I am’ sequence in the Bible confers on him a distinct identity and living presence,[16] so too do our own self-referential personality statements – ‘I am a hard worker’, ‘I am shy’, ‘I am bubbly’ – grant us an active way of relating to the world around us. Indeed, the linguistic capacity to refer to ourselves in the first-person arguably shapes the way we navigate our lives. As the subject, we become a life that can be told and cohesively structured as an intelligible narrative. Language thus gives us life: it allows our experience to be made sense of and communicated in ways that are translatable to other minds, such that an otherwise unintelligible stream of impressions becomes an ordered story.
Part II – What Language ‘Taketh’
‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’[17] – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Foregrounded by this thesis of language as a preserving, creating, and ordering force, this essay will now examine the antithesis: language kills and takes as it gives life and creates.
A The Letter Killeth
Indeed, the Apostle Paul states, ironically in his letter to the Corinthians, that ‘the letter Killeth’,[18] whereas ‘the Spirit giveth life’. In the immediate context of this section, the ‘letter’ refers to the Mosaic Law in its written form. That Law is not bad in itself. The Mosaic Law is God-given, setting out commandments meant to guide Israel’s relationship with God, and in that sense is ‘ordained to life’.[19]
Yet, this same Law is ‘found to be unto death’,[20] as it condemns sin without vesting sinners with the strength to overcome: thus, as a result of the letter of these laws, Paul’s response is that ‘sin revived, and I died’.[21] The arrival of the written commandment rendered sin visible and undeniable, but does not itself provide the power to live differently – ‘the Spirit giveth’ this power. The result of this written law is what Paul calls a ‘ministration of condemnation’[22] or ‘ministration of death’.[23] Thus, the written law purportedly established to guide righteous living, in this sense, becomes deadly.
Here, language ‘giveth’ life: it orders and organises a divinely sanctioned way of living, yet language also ‘killeth’, to the extent that the letter of the law condemns sinners without itself providing the capacity for sinners to live differently.
In Paradise Lost, John Milton explicitly connects language with death, against the backdrop of ‘man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/ Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste/ Brought death into the world, and all our woe’.[24] Here, the ‘first disobedience’ refers to the Biblical Fall, wherein Adam and Eve break God’s command by eating the forbidden fruit, thereby bringing sin and mortality into human life. Death is not presented as a biological fact, but rather the narrated consequence of their transgressions. Indeed, the Fall itself is framed by speech-acts, moving from God’s command not to eat to the Serpent’s persuasive rhetoric manipulating Eve to reinterpret that command, followed by Eve’s own self-justifying deliberation before she eats.
As Milton tells it, the boundary between life and death is traversed by language, through the competing stories about the meaning of the fruit. The divine word that orders life in Eden thus also carries the threat of death, and it is by believing the words of the Serpent that mortality is introduced. It is by language that the paradise of Eden is articulated as a living world, and indirectly by language that this life is undone and death enters humanity.
B Naming as Taking
Where Paul demonstrates the capacity for the letter of the Law to both give and take life through a religious frame, Hegel generalises this concept to every act of naming. Hegel posits whenever we name a thing, the thing loses its singularity and becomes subsumed under a universal concept. This process negates the individual character of a thing.
On its face, the act of naming something seems to be a clear act of giving that thing life. Naming something a ‘hammer’ or ‘cat’, or naming a baby ‘Jeff’ allows these things to be remembered and communicated about, giving them lives in thought and language. However, for Hegel, to name a thing is to ‘nullif[y it] as a being on its own account’.[25]
I will investigate this argument against the narration of how living creatures came to be named in Genesis. Adam is empowered by God with the capacity to name living creatures – ‘whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof’.[26] Hegel characterises Adam’s act of naming as an act which ‘established [Adam’s] lordship over the animals’.[27] The individual animals are no longer individuals, but an example of a type. Habib puts it thus:[28]
Naming the animals is not merely an act of categorization but of domination, of control. For it abolishes their independent existence, their being as “natural” signs, their status as things. And it recreates them as ideas in the mind… once the name is created, once the act of naming is accomplished, the name itself now persists, as something concrete, as something that might outlive its creator and indeed the very thing it named.
If I name my child, Jeff, for instance, my child becomes categorisable into a class of ‘Jeffs’ and the act of naming thus ‘killeth’ individuality, just as naming something a ‘hammer’ or ‘cat’ renders these things into particular classes of ‘hammers’ and ‘cats’. The individual becomes a sign type, rather than remaining a thing in itself: ‘[w]hen we use something as a sign, we abstract from its existence as a thing’.[29] Naming things ‘giveth’ them life in the medium of language by giving them a representable sign, yet this process also ‘killeth’ singularity by subsuming these things into universal classes of things. Thus, the name takes away from the thing itself, and the written name perpetuates this separation by acting as a permanent marker.
Indeed, these ‘markers’ we use for writing not only reduce the individual to a class, but themselves are arbitrary. As Ferdinand de Saussure compellingly argues,[30] the linguistic signs we use to class things are arbitrary: there is no natural connection between a sound like cat and the concept of the animal it represents, beyond a link created by social convention. These signs acquire meaning precisely through their difference, for instance, the word ‘cat’ means the particular animal it denotes because it is not ‘dog’, or ‘fish’. Terms are defined by what they are not.
On the one hand, this construction clearly giveth life. The enormous complexity of the world becomes both alive and inhabitable as a shared world, as the 26 arbitrary alphabetical markers of the English alphabet allow us to share stories and lives. These signs thus giveth language, and things, life.
However, despite the capacity for the arbitrary markers that constitute language to create life through shared stories, there is a sense in which these markers also ‘killeth’: it seems inconceivable that the enormous complexity of the world can be fully captured by 26 arbitrary markers. As such, language seems to violently simplify the real world into a finite set of signs. Indeed, there is a reason there are some feelings and experiences we cannot put into words, and that certain words are untranslatable across dialects and cultures. If signs are arbitrary and the system is finite, then real experiences must, awkwardly, be forced into the distinctions available within the limits of our lexicon. Language giveth life through what it ‘killeth’, constructing a world by drawing boundaries around the extent to which things are susceptible to intelligible linguistic expression.
This system of difference, as put forth by de Saussure, demonstrates how language generates life through death. That is, a sign exists and has force only by virtue of it not being other signs, and the shared world we inhabit in language arises from this difference. The life that language giveth – being a structured and communicable reality articulated by the markers of our alphabet – is inseparable from the death it gives to that which cannot be captured within this finite grid.
C Supernatural Language as Shadowing and Subverting Divine Influence
Having established the capacity for language to act as a source of quasi-death, this essay will now investigate the relationship between the language of supernatural literature and the arguable death of divine influence on the collective social consciousness. I argue that this language both ‘giveth life’ to new forms of literary monster, and, in doing so, ‘killeth’ formerly publicly sacred entities by supplementing the social need for terror that divinity once filled.
Nietzsche famously wrote thus:
After the Buddha died, people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave – a monstrous and unearthly shadow. God is dead; but given the ways of men, perhaps for millennia to come there will be caves in which His shadow will be shown.[31]
The social assumption of a transcendent entity or God, due to secularisation, has receded. Yet this assumption has fixed Western society and inner lives for centuries. Such an assumption does not vanish without leaving traces, or ‘shadow[s]’. In Freudian psychoanalysis, traumatic events that alter our relation to the world persist by returning as ‘symptoms’.[32] The death of God functions as a kind of cultural trauma that continues to haunt modern society via particular symptoms in different forms. In what follows, I will investigate how these symptoms manifest in language.
One subterranean symptom of secularisation arguably finds its most vivid articulation in popular culture, in the rise of supernatural horror and fantastical literature. This argument is corroborated by Edward Ingebretsen’s Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell,[33] in which he argues that the archetypal Gothic atmosphere ‘of evil and brooding terror’[34] inherited the religious language of horror. He thus concurs with the view that Gothic terror is ‘at bottom theological’: the lexicon of ‘theological anxiety’, despite the death of God, ‘will not rest in peace; it returns as pulp horror’.[35] In this construction, the lexicon of the horror genre was not independently invented, but instead reworked from the religious rhetoric of fearmongering around the prospects of damnation and eternal condemnation.
Building on this perspective, I argue the language of horror assists in the continued ‘success’ of secularisation, as such forms of literature fill the void of terror left by the absence of active religious worship from collective public life. The genre of horror becomes the new linguistic space for the terrifying dimension of the sacred to inhabit.
The link between God’s ‘death’ and the horror genre as a modern haunting symptom seems tenuous. Yet, there is compelling evidence to suggest this connection: indeed, the Latin root for the word ‘sacred’ – ‘sacer’ – has a double meaning, not only ‘holy’ but also ‘accursed’. Indeed, a ‘homo sacer’ in Roman law referred to a person who was outlawed from a community, who civilians could legally kill without this act being considered as murder.[36] The Christian God is not commonly thought of as a terrifying or horrible figure in keeping with this dual designation of ‘sacred’. Nonetheless, a close analysis of religious rhetoric and the Bible suggests that God inspires trembling as well as fascination. An earnestly religious person can be appropriately described as ‘God-fearing’, God’s wrath is described vividly as ‘fire and brimstone’,[37] and the disciples witnessing Jesus Christ’s transfiguration into his true form ‘fell on their faces and were sore afraid’.[38] Religious language thus both gives life, in the promise of salvation, and takes away life through its vivid descriptions of divine judgment and vengeance.
The duality of religious figures as inspiring both awe and terror can be seen through practice surrounding divine naming conventions. For instance, in Jewish practice, the ‘Tetragrammaton’ refers to the four-letter theonym for God – YHWH – that can only be written and not usually spoken. The terrifying linguistic dimension of the sacred is also invoked in classical Islamic tradition. In Islam, while several of the ‘99 names for Allah’, knowledge of which is a prerequisite for entrance into ‘Paradise’, frame Allah as kind – ‘Al-Muhyi (The Giver of Life)’, ‘Al-Muqit (The Sustainer)’, ‘Ar-Rahman (The Entirely Merciful)’ – other nomenclature for Allah inspires terror – ‘Al-Jabbar (The Compeller)’, ‘Al-Qahhar (The Ever-Dominating)’, ‘Al-Muntaqim (The Avenger)’.[39] Such linguistic practice invokes a sense of awe and terror around the naming conventions for God.
As a result of secularisation, the linguistic practices that once inspired terror in respect of such divine figures as YHWH – rendering God ‘ineffable, unnameable, unspeakable’[40] – have taken new shape. In this vein, Ingebretsen identifies H.P. Lovecraft as the pioneer of appropriating religious terror in the horror genre. The ineffability by which divinities such as YHWH are characterised is redeployed by Lovecraft as a metaphorical device in his story ‘The Unnameable’, where the monster is literally unnameable and thereby occupies the linguistic position once reserved for deities.[41] Here, Lovecraft’s secular horror directly invokes religious terror motifs; his fiction ‘often derive[s] from the same spiritual anxieties’[42] with which religious discourse can be suffused. This appropriation even plays out in children’s fiction, for instance in Harry Potter the central villain, Voldemort, is referred to as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, where the utterance of his name triggers terrible consequences.[43]
It is relevant that Ingebretsen considers that the ‘first-time reader… will find Lovecraft’s fiction oddly familiar’[44] due to its appropriation of familiar theological terror discourse. In his essay on ‘The Uncanny’, Freud characterises a particular species of fear as arising where something that was once familiar and homely, but has been repressed, returns in an altered and frightening form.[45] What is terrifying, here, ‘goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar’: the familiarity of religious fear is terrifying in the world of the Gothic. Lovecraft’s unnameable monster and Voldemort in Harry Potter both, uncannily, act as reinterpretations of the dread of the unspeakable divine.
From this perspective, supernatural horror’s lexicon both ‘giveth’ and ‘killeth’. On the one hand, its language giveth life to new forms of creatures. Yet, in doing so, it killeth the active hold religious terror rhetoric once wielded over public life. The linguistic charge once attached to divine forms of terror is redistributed across the secular horror genre. For indeed, ‘how best to scare the Hell out of a community… than by telling the tales of God?’[46]
In this sense, the language of horror participates in the cultural maintenance of the ‘death of God’ Nietzsche proclaimed. Horror becomes a ‘cave in which His shadow will be shown’ – a forum wherein the linguistic arena of the sacred is repurposed and reattached to supernatural monsters in horror fiction.
The sacred has not disappeared, but survived as a shadow in the words and creatures of the supernatural horror genre: language has thus resurrected or given new life to divine terror, in the wake of the cultural ‘death’ of the divine forces to which such language originally referred.
Part III – Language as the Site of Life-Death
A Jacques Derrida
Derrida’s seminar Life Death both names and complicates the central tension this essay has charted.[47] In commencing by rewriting ‘life and death’ as ‘life-death’, he signals a refusal to treat life and death either as simple opposites joined by an ‘and’, and a reluctance to identify the two by designating it ‘life is death’. In his seminar, the relation between the two concepts is not ultimately clear – life and death are tied together in a way our phenomenological lexicon is not capable of capturing. As language both ‘giveth’ life and ‘killeth’, I argue it is neither a life-giving nor life-taking force, but instead also charts some unclear and inarticulable relation between or within the two.
Indeed, as Derrida notes while drawing on Nietzsche, the point that we have no conception of ‘being’ other than ‘living’ is compelling – there is no ‘being-dead’ within the framework of our language or thought.[48] We can acknowledge death as an inevitable fact, but we do not possess a phenomenological lexicon for what it would be like to be dead. Our language and logic are inevitably tied to living. The consequence is that which this essay identified earlier in discussion of de Saussure: we try to fit the unique relation of life and death into the signage and phenomenological lexicon that is available to us. It is easy to think of simple oppositions like life versus death, or to retreat to designating the relation between life-death as a dialectical narrative in which life ultimately triumphs, as Hegel envisions. We seem to have a tendency to force life-death into conceptual forms our language can handle, even where those forms distort it.
The complex and unique relationship between life and death is seen, as Derrida considers Hegel, across nature.[49] The phoenix rises from its ashes. The act of philosophy, even, is in opposition to our nature: we are not predisposed to think, yet we spend time thinking – which is a painful and life-draining process – in order to reach life-enriching outcomes. Nature thus reveals the capacity for life to sustain itself by draining itself. The point again is as follows: life ‘and’ death are related in a unique and inarticulable way that our language is not capable of grasping.
Calibrated through this lens, the earlier arguments presented in this essay – on the one hand that language preserves, creates, and orders life, and on the other that language negates or takes away life – can be considered as instances of life-death. Language is neither purely life-giving nor life-taking. Rather, its ‘giveth’ is inseparable from its ‘killeth’: the very thing that allows us to both exist and live paradoxically detracts from the life it provides.
B John Donne
The apparent paradox of language simultaneously giving and taking life is also explored in John Donne’s sermon tracing ‘the dying life and living death of the body’.[50] In this sermon, Death’s Duel, Donne linguistically collapses the opposition between life and death in a similar fashion to Derrida’s concept of ‘life-death’, systematically rewriting life in the lexicon of death.
The editorial foreword frames the sermon as inextricably attached to Donne’s own death. It notes that this sermon was, ‘by sacred authority, styled the author’s own funeral sermon’, being preached ‘not many days before his death’ and with the effect that, ‘having done this, there remained nothing for him to do but die’.[51] Donne’s words are thus presented as if they close his life: the sermon is considered the verbal act that both accompanies and finalises Donne’s own death.
Within the sermon, Donne’s language recodes the journey of life as a continuous sequence of deaths. This premise is substantiated by his claim that ‘this whole world is but an universal churchyard, but our common grave, and the life and motion that the greatest persons have in it is but as the shaking of buried bodies in their grave, by an earthquake’.[52] We are all thus diagnosed as terminal from our moment of inception: ‘[o]ur birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and youth and the rest die in age, and age also dies and determines all’.[53] As a result, [t]hat which we call life, is but hebdomada mortium, a week of death’.[54] Donne suggests that a baby’s cries are the earliest celebrations of their own funerals, occurring as we first imagine the inevitable finality of our own lives.
At the same time however, Donne’s consideration of Psalm 68:20 – that ‘unto God the Lord belong the issues of death’[55] – reveals that not only does he conceptualise of life as death, but also of death as life. That is, Donne reconceives of ‘our issue in death’ as ‘an entrance into everlasting life’:[56] thus he linguistically reassigns death as the necessary precursor for true life.
Donne’s sermon thus ‘killeth’ in a dual sense. First, it seeks to kill the ordinary understanding of life as vitality, instead recoding life as a process of continual dying. Second, Donne’s sermon is the speech-act that accompanies Donne’s own literal passage into death as the funeral sermon he effectively preaches over himself. In this sense, his final use of language participates in his own death, as his last public words declare all life to be death, including his own.
PART IV – CONCLUSION
It is now appropriate to draw together the threads that have emerged throughout this essay. The conclusion that arises is that language as a force cannot be cleanly divided into that which it ‘giveth’ and that which it ‘taketh away’. For instance, the same divine word that speaks light and life into existence in Genesis is, in Milton’s narration of the Fall, also the force that ‘brought death into the world, and all our woe’. Language both animates and takes away life.
Derrida’s notion of life-death clarifies this tension. Language occupies the liminal threshold between or within life-death, operating both to sustain and to drain. Language thus discloses itself as the paradigmatic site of life-death: the forum where ‘being’ is preserved by the very act that alters and exhausts it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
The English Bible: King James Version, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Herbert Marks, New York/London: Norton, 2012.
Donne, John. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Together with Death’s Duel, University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Grimm, Jakob. ‘The Golem’. In Zeitung für Einsiedler / Journal for Hermits. 1808.
Lovecraft, H.P. ‘The Unnameable’, in: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi, London: Penguin, 1999.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler, London/New York: Routledge, 2013.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Agamben, Giorgio. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press: 1998.
Derrida, Jacques. Seminar: Life Death, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘Repression’ (1915) in Strachey, James, The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: 2024.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, London: Penguin, 2003.
Habib, M. A. R. ‘Chapter 7 – Hegel on Language’, in Hegel and the Foundations of Literary Theory. Cambridge University Press: 2018.
Hegel, G. W. F. System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/4), trans. and ed. H.S. Harris and T.M. Knox. Albany: SUNY Press, 1979.
Ingebretsen, Edward J. Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King, London/New York: Routledge, 2016.
Joyce, Stanislaus. My brother’s keeper. London: Faber and Faber, 1958.
Levinson, Stephen C. ‘Language and Space’, in Annual Review of Anthropology 25. Annual Reviews, 1996.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Joyful Science, trans. and ed. R. Kevin Hill, London/New York: Penguin, 2018.
Sapir, Edward. ‘The Status of Linguistics as a Science’, in Language 5(4). Linguistic Society of America, 1929.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale, in The Literary in Theory.Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Scholem, Gershom. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Schocken Books, 1965.
Seznec, Jean. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions, New York: Harper, 1961.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. The MIT Press, 2012.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Anthem Press, 2021.
WEBSITES AND ONLINE RESOURCES
’99 Names of Allah’. https://99namesofallah.name/.
Postman, Neil. ‘Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change’. Denver, 1998. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf.
Shakespeare, William. The Sonnets. Online: HarperCollins, 2016. < https://www.proquest.com/publication/4690214?OpenUrlRefId=info:xri/sid:primo&accountid=12528>.
‘The Legend of the Golem’. Prague.eu. https://prague.eu/en/golem-of-prague/.
[1] Postman, ‘Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change’, https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf?ref=icopilots.com.
[2] Marks ed, The English Bible: King James Version, 2 Corinthians 3:6.
[3] Joyce, My brother’s keeper.
[4] Shakespeare, Sonnet 18.
[5] Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The. Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art.
[6] Ibid pp. 86–7.
[7] Marks ed, The English Bible: King James Version, Genesis 1:3.
[8] Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, p. 168.
[9] Marks ed, The English Bible: King James Version, John 1:1.
[10] Grimm, Journal for Hermits, p. 41.
[11] ‘The Legend of the Golem’, in Prague Phenomena, https://prague.eu/en/golem-of-prague/.
[12] Marks ed, The English Bible: King James Version, Genesis 2:7.
[13] Scholem, ‘The Idea of the Golem’, in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, p. 161.
[14] Sapir, ‘The Status of Linguistics as a Science’, in Mandelbaum ed, Selected Writings, pp 207–14; Whorf, ‘Science and Linguistics’, in Carroll ed, Language, Thought and Reality pp. 229–31.
[15] Levinson, ‘Language and Space’, p. 374–5 in Annual Review of Anthropology, pp. 353–82.
[16] Marks ed, The English Bible: King James Version, John.
[17] Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6.
[18] Marks ed, The English Bible: King James Version, 2 Corinthians 3:6.
[19] Ibid Romans 7:10.
[20] Ibid Romans 7:10.
[21] Ibid Romans 7:9.
[22] Ibid 2 Corinthians 3:9.
[23] Ibid 2 Corinthians 3:7.
[24] Milton, Paradise Lost, pp. 56–7.
[25] Hegel, First Philosophy of Spirit, p. 222.
[26] Marks ed, The English Bible: King James Version, Genesis 2:19.
[27] Hegel, First Philosophy of Spirit, p. 222.
[28] Habib, ‘Chapter 7 – Hegel on Language’ in The Language of Metaphysics, p. 123.
[29] Ibid p. 122.
[30] Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale.
[31] Nietzsche, The Joyful Science, 108.
[32] Freud, ‘Repression’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
[33] Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King.
[34] Ibid p. 79.
[35] Ibid pp. 79, 148.
[36] Agamben, Homo Sacer.
[37] Marks ed, The English Bible: King James Version, Revelation 21:8.
[38] Ibid Matthew 17:6.
[39] ‘99 Names of Allah’, https://99namesofallah.name/.
[40] Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King, p. 82.
[41] Ibid p. 133.
[42] Ibid p. 133.
[43] Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
[44] Ingrebetsen p. 133.
[45] Freud, The Uncanny.
[46] Ingebretsen, p. 79.
[47] Derrida, Seminar: Life Death.
[48] Ibid p. 24.
[49] Ibid p. 21.
[50] Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Together with Death’s Duel.
[51] Ibid p. 163.
[52] Ibid p. 171.
[53] Ibid p. 171.
[54] Ibid p. 171.
[55] Ibid p. 165.
[56] Ibid p. 167.
Tom Carne 