ABSTRACT
In a letter Walter Benjamin wrote in 1917, he creates a neologism that derives from the compacting of two words, one derived from thinking, the other from thicket. The aim of this paper is to account for the genesis and consequences of the surprising thesis that expresses itself in this neologism: ‘Truth is “thinkicket-like”’. Benjamin is drawn to merge thinking and thicket because, as the essay shows, his phenomenological and ‘logistic’ investigations have led him to a point where he doubts the existence of the object-pole (noema, cogitatum) in the act of thinking, and these doubts, as he notes in a contemporaneous fragment, express themselves in language (German as well as English), which separate the act of thinking from its thought via a preposition (such as ‘of’ or ‘about’). Thinking, for Benjamin, is thus a ‘transcendent intransitive, just as walking is an empirical intransitive’. The thicket character of thinking makes it impossible for any single thought to form; yet the intransitive activity of thinking continues apace along ever-twisting and quickly disappearing lines.
