Namen
Benennung – Verehrung – Wirkung. Positionen in der europäischen Moderne
[Names. Naming – Worship – Effect. Positions in European Modernism]

Since Plato’s time, the fact that every thing by its very nature has been given its correct name has been a precondition for an understanding of language that is based on a naturally motivated and direct relationship between name and thing. Such a name theory implies that the name already exists in the thing, that it only has to be found and extracted. Religiously motivated name concepts, on the other hand, seem to aim in a somewhat different direction. Here it is rather the name that shapes or even produces the thing or the person.
Mythopoetic and religious concepts of names play a prominent role in the philosophy of language and literature of modernity, and this despite the fact that these concepts stand in clear contradiction to those—since Ferdinand de Saussure tone setting—theories of language that emanate from the conventionality and arbitrariness of the sign. The contributions in this volume examine the flip side of modern linguistics that a philosophy of names and onomatopoetics can represent. The attractiveness of these naming concepts in individual cases will be discussed, as well as the manifestations of these concepts in concreto. Starting from the role of the name (as a language-theoretical concept) in philosophical, literary and political texts of modernity, three dimensions of the name are examined with naming, worship and effect.