"A=A". Concetto di identità, matematica e linguaggio in Walter Benjamin e Gershom Scholem

Language is at the basis of Benjamin’s critique of knowledge in On Language as Such and on the Language of Man (1916) and the related fragments, in On the Program of the coming Philosophy (1917-1918), in Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1922), and in the Epistemo-Critical Preface to the Baroque German Drama (1925). According to Benjamin, communication is not the ground of language; the essence of language is the pure “form”, language is «a communicability per se». Benjamin’s theory of language is developed in the years 1916-1917 with his friend Gerhard (later Gershom) Scholem, at that time a student of mathematics and philosophy and a scholar of Judaism: they were especially influenced by a peculiar interpretation of the Genesis and of Kabbalah. When Benjamin met Scholem in 1915, he was attracted by Scholem's knowledge of mathematics and judaism, as well as by his anarchist and messianic ideas about politics and history. Benjamin and Scholem were interested in a “mathematical theory of truth”, connected with a concept of identity (A=A), which could explain the world process, in a messianic perspective: the Messia – so Scholem in his Tagebücher – is a mathematician and the “last, first philosopher of language”. According to Scholem, there is a connection between his “mathematical theory of truth” and the internal form of hebrew language: the pure spiritual form (not the empirical content and the meanings) is for both essential. Language is for both, Benjamin and Scholem, at the basis of a messianic structure of world and history, but they have different views of the role of mathematics in this structure.