Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 1-12-2017 10:15 AM Can the Undead Speak?: Language Death as a Matter of (Not) Knowing Tyler Nash The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Pero, Allan The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © Tyler Nash 2017 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Language Interpretation and Translation Commons Recommended Citation Nash, Tyler, "Can the Undead Speak?: Language Death as a Matter of (Not) Knowing" (2017). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 5193. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/5193 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CAN THE UNDEAD SPEAK?: LANGUAGE DEATH AS A MATTER OF (NOT) KNOWING ABSTRACT This text studies how language death and metaphor algorithmically collude to propagate our intellectual culture. In describing how language builds upon and ultimately necessitates its own ruins to our frustration and subjugation, I define dead language in general and then, following a reading of Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” explore the instance of indexical translation. Inventing the language in pain, a de-signified or designated language located between the frank and the esoteric language theories in the mediaeval of examples of Dante Alighieri and Hildegaard von Bingen, the text acquires the prime modernist example of dead language appropriation in ἀλήθεια and φύσις from the earlier fascistic works of Martin Heidegger.