ABSTRACT
In his “Introduction” to the screenplay of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Terry Eagleton remarks on the ever-expanding interest of creative artists in Wittgenstein: “What is it about this man, whose philosophy can be taxing and technical enough, which so fascinates the artistic imagination? Frege is a philosopher’s philosopher; Bertrand Russell every shopkeeper’s image of the sage, and Sartre the media’s idea of an intellectual, but Wittgenstein is the philosopher of poets and composers, playwrights and novelists, and snatches of his mighty Tractatus have even been set to music” (Eagleton 5). Alexander Waugh writes: “Thousands of books have since been written to explain the meaning of the Tractatus, each different from the last” (Waugh 146-47). In Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), Marjorie Perloff, who was born in Vienna and claims “a slight connection” with Wittgenstein through his cousin, Friedrich von Hayek (Perloff 2004, xiii), shows the impact of Wittgenstein’s thought, in particular, on such literary modernists as Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett.1 Then too, although Wittgenstein’s taste in music seems not to have reached far beyond Brahms, he seems to have registered an infl uence on the compositions of John Cage (6). Indeed, Perloff catalogues dozens of works that show Wiggenstein’s infl uence on painting, photography, theatre, music, poetry, the novel, and, of course, fi lm.
