Interrupting the Origin: Hegel, Humboldt and Hoelderlin's Prophecies of Language

"Interrupting the Origin: Hegel, Humboldt and Holderlin's Prophecies of Language" poses the question of how Enlightenment thinking about the origins of language undergoes a rupture and transformation for writers traditionally associated with German Idealism. Although G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Holderlin and Wilhelm von Humboldt do not compose treatises devoted to the origins of language (as their eighteenth-century predecessors had done), each addresses the "first language," the "beginning of language," or the movement from inarticulate cries to sophisticated speech, in ways which reveal language origins to be central to their oeuvres. This dissertation systematically traces their concern for language origins through broader strokes of contextualization and, above all, close analyses of major texts such as Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Humboldt's Agamemnon translation and preface, and Holderlin's Empedokles project. Throughout the chapters, I accent the way that these writers' thinking on language and its origins is inseparable from their unique understanding of rhythm. For them, rhythm exceeds versification and extends to broader movements that shape both history as well as metaphysical notions of substance and time -- and that always have a theological tenor. Language originates (and can always re-originate) in the rhythmic interruptions that scan speech and history.