Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (Zone Books)

This is a superb book. It combines erudition of the subtlest kind with literary finesse. We read it with pleasure and intellectual gain. And it truly makes us think - about the act of speaking, about the languages, about poets. Books don't come any better than this. -Jurgen Trabant, Suddeutsche Zeitung Heller-Roazen blends tremendous erudition in a new form, citing the Talmud, the pre-Islamic poets, Dante, Spinoza, and Elias Canetti with the same acuity and playfulness. He succeeds in making a gesture all too rare today: a philosophical gesture, whose center is the questioning of language. -Lila Azam Zanganeh, LE MONDE Echolalias is a rare find a book about language where the language itself steers a course between the scholarly and the poetic. Difficult, erudite, and full of luminous parables, it is worth multiple readings. -nth position 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 This thought-provoking book contains a memorable aphorism by Kafka that could stand as its epigraph: 'I can swim just like the others. Only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten the former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, being able to swim is of no help to me; and so, after all, I cannot swim.' -London Review of Books