Ludwig Wittgenstein's image of language and Ingeborg Bachmann's language of images

In the paper, Indeborg Bachmann's literary heritage is considered within the context of influence by the early philosophical theory of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The special relationship between language and the world, which is postulated in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, here becomes both the subject of theoretical interest and the leading theme of literary works. The figure of Ingeborg Bachmann is symbolic: it signifies the point of intersection of philosophical searches related to the linguistic turn and language experiments in the field of fiction - the two fundamental cultural processes that mark the twentieth century. The authors use Bachmann's essay on Wittgenstein, on the one hand, and her story "Everything", on the other, to compare the speculative and literary interpretations of the part played by language in the comprehension of the world. The analysis of the first work - "Ludwig Wittgenstein: Toward a Chapter on the Most Recent History of Philosophy" - allows identifying the semantic accents of the ontological image of language, which are later expressed in the fictitious space of Bachmann's poetry and prose. The story "Everything" is chosen as the most indicative text in terms of the selected point of view. It is read as a thinking about the possibility of resistance to the dictates of language and shows the writer's attempt to develop Wittgenstein's ideas in a new key. Wittgenstein himself did not give literature a particular status and perceived it as one of the many facts in the world. Language is capable of containing all facts of the world, nevertheless it turns out to be incapable of expressing the main moral values and verbalizing the meaning of human existence. Bachmann dares to dispute Wittgenstein's ethical pessimism. Bachmann, like Wittgenstein, considers language to be an important optic of the world view, but, unlike Wittgenstein, considers literature to be an existential practice. The truth about the world is obtained here not at the cost of the need to stay within the logic that Tractatus prescribes, but at the cost of personal freedom in word creation. Wittgenstein recognizes this freedom too in his later work. In Philosophical Investigations he retreats from the categoricalness of his previous conclusions and focuses on "language games" - language fragments that represent the unity of thought, word and action. That way speculative concepts and poetic insights resonate with each other, confirming the complementarity of two different language practices - philosophy and literature.

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