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However, this melancholy, at its extreme, touches the thing itself. It saves mortified things, it hears their lament, their breath; maybe it is this hearing which transforms the lanlent into nlusic: nlusic which from then on lets the immemorial and unforgettable gift of language be heard. Melancholic man reaches the limit of his humanity, if his humanitas consists in the task of denomination . Thus, the analysis of the thing's sadness allows this limit upon which denomination always suspends itself to appear: 'Melan­ choly betrays the world for the sake of knowledge.

A surprising affirmation, since he does not deal with the socio­ political implications of language in his early essay. Maybe we should read the text in question as a ' pre-history' [ Urgesehiehte] of these implications. ) In the course of his digressions, Benj amin identifies three languages, or rather three different states of language: God's language, paradisiacal human language and language as a 'parody' of God's language. God's language is the one which gives names to what has j ust been created by the word, by the ' creating word' (das sehaffende Wort) , this word which allows itself to be neither spoken nor written, neither classified nor translated, neither chosen nor refused, neither loved nor hated, since it absolutely precedes all other tongues and languages.

The thing which laments does not become an allegory because the lament does not allow itself to be reduced to its representation or schenlatic appropriation. As lament, the thing does not stand in the actuality of the life of meaning , but equally it does not lend itself to fixation, abstrac­ tion or reification. The lament is neither symbolic nor allegori­ cal, it preserves the thing both fronl the idealisation operated by the symbol and from the mortification which it must suffer to become an obj ect of knowledge and criticisnl: ' Criticism means 1 4 the mortification of the works .