Gadamer and Benjamin on the limits of the unspeakable: an originary world-understanding?

Abstract

This paper investigates the transformations of language in modernity based on the philosophies of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), exploring how hermeneutics and allegory respond to the rise of the image as a communicative paradigm. While Gadamer understands language as the ontological medium of understanding – a dialogical process rooted in historicity - Benjamin sees it as a field of tension between original nomination and instrumentalized ruin, especially in the era of technical reproducibility. The study confronts their perspectives on the limits of language: if Gadamer emphasizes the fusion of horizons in tradition, Benjamin seeks to rescue, in the cracks of history, traces of a mimetic and auratic experience. The aim is to analyse how both think about the relationship between understanding and ineffability, articulating concepts such as expressionless (Kant/Benjamin) and hermeneutic play (Gadamer) to discuss fundamental antinomies: language and non-language, universal and particular, continuity and rupture. At the end, it is proposed that the tension between these thinkers is not mere opposition, but a productive dialog about the crisis of communication in the contemporary world, in which the image often supplants the word without exhausting its mystery.