Peled, Yael

Senior Fellow: October 2021–February 2022

Research Project: Post-Cynical Linguistic Scepticism: Yehuda Amichai’s Moral Philosophy of Linguistic In-Betweenness

The poetic corpus of Yehuda Amichai, the internationally renowned literary figure lauded as a “secular psalmist” and a “poet of faithful humanism,” constitutes a profound exploration of the moral, spiritual, and social philosophy of language, which nonetheless remains strangely under-explored as such. Amichai’s underlying philosophy of language and language ethics encompass a multi-layered perception of the linguistic human experience, and of linguistic alterity, that is centred on an experience of linguistic in-betweenness: between the universality of the capacity for language and the particularity of linguistic identities; between Biblical and Modern Hebrew; between the codified language of sacred texts and the fluidity of secular everyday speech; between his German and Israeli identities; between God’s silence on the holocaust and the linguistic necessity of post-trauma healing; between the grand language of modern political ideologies and the intimate speech of the individual; and between what language can and cannot express, such as the experience of particularly profound emotions. Building on recent work in language ethics and the philosophy of language, this project explores Amichai’s moral philosophy of linguistic in-betweenness. More specifically, it argues that this human predicament of linguistic in-betweenness gives rise to a particularly insightful form of linguistic scepticism, transforming its destructive potential (as linguistic populism, cynicism, and/or nihilism) into a constructive source of ethical engagement with linguistic difference and linguistic alterity instead.

Yael Peled is a research associate in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.