Rövid leírás:
We usually think about language and pain as opposites: the one is about expression and communication, the other very private, unspeakable and isolating. Language Pangs challenges these familiar conceptions and proposes a reconsideration of the relationship between pain and language in terms of an essential interconnectedness, rather than the common exclusive opposition. Language Pangs brings together discussions of philosophical as well as literary texts focusing on the relationship between pain and language. It provides close readings of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language, Martin Heidegger’s seminar on Herder’s text about language, and Sophocles’ play, „Philoctetes.”
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Hosszú leírás:
We usually think about language and pain as opposites, the one being about expression and connection, the other destructive, „beyond words” so to speak, and isolating. Language Pangs challenges these familiar conceptions and offers a radical reconsideration of the relationship between pain and language in terms of an essential interconnectedness.
Ilit Ferber’s premise is that we cannot probe the experience of pain without taking account its inherent relation to language; and vice versa, that our understanding of the nature of language essentially depends on how we take account of its correspondence with pain. Language Pangs brings together discussions of philosophical as well as literary texts, an intersection that is especially productive in considering the phenomenology of pain and its bearing on language. Ferber explores a phenomenology of pain and its relation to language, before providing a unique close reading of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language, the first modern philosophical text to consider language and pain, establishing the cry of pain as the origin of language. Herder also raises important claims regarding the relationship between human and animal, questions of sympathy and the role of hearing in the expression of pain. Beyond Herder, the book grapples with the work of other profound thinkers, including Martin Heidegger, Stanley Cavell, and André Gide, and finally, Sophocles, from them weaving new insights on the experience of pain, expression, sympathy, and hearing.
If we attempt to know another person’s pain, or understand it, to reach a common language that describes this, we will always encounter the problem that we cannot inhabit another person’s body or think their thoughts. We know in the age of identity politics that this inability to inhabit another person’s body is a political dilemma. But it is also the dilemma of all language. Language may describe, it may perform and communicate, but it always reaches the point where it cannot penetrate another person’s world. This is where Ferber’s book offers striking insights into the fundamental act of sympathy that marks language as attempting to cross an unbridgeable chasm, and in doing so, creating a strong bond of humanityFerber takes us through a clearly described, well argued discussion concerning pain,representation, expression, communication, and the interlocking of selves that is language.
Több
Tartalomjegyzék:
Chapter 1. On Pain and the Origin of Language
Chapter 2. A Language of Pain: Herder and the Origin of Language
Chapter 3. Language and Attention: Herder on Besonnenheit
Chapter 4. Language and Hearing: Heidegger’s Herder
Chapter 5. Pain, Expression and Sympathy: Philoctetes
Chapter 6. Language Pangs
