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 Andr� Gide, and finally, Sophocles, from them weaving new insights on the experience of pain, expression, sympathy, and hearing.
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 Andr� Gide, and finally, Sophocles, from them weaving new insights on the experience of pain, expression, sympathy, and hearing.
Ilit Ferber is Assistant Professor of Philosophy
at Tel-Aviv University. She is the author of Philosophy and
Melancholy: Benjamin's Early Reflections on Theater and Language
(Stanford University Press, 2013) and co-editor of three books on
the philosophy of moods and on the language of lament. She has
published numerous articles on Leibniz, Herder, Freud, Benjamin,
Heidegger, Scholem, and Am�ry.
"Pain seems to place on us a paradoxical demand--it resists
comprehension while simultaneously calling for our understanding
and our capacity to hear someone's pain and respond to it
accordingly. In this book, Ferber shows that, rather than letting
the paradox trap us in an impossible dilemma, we ought to revise
our conceptions of language and the structures that allow us to
make sense of it as a site for communicability. This book is the
perfect example of what it means to be able to listen to
literature, and to let it guide us through key questions in the
history of thought." -- Mar�a Acosta Lopez, Associate Professor of
Philosophy, DePaul University
"Guided by sophisticated analyses of Herder and Heidegger, Ferber
shows how the experience of pain, far from simply being
world-destructive, as has been claimed in some contemporary
scholarship, is an essential and indeed irreducible element of any
language that in its world-making capacity is
community-constructive.� An incisive contribution to the broader
renaissance of the 'expressivist' conception of language that
emerges from Herder's writings, Language Pangs culminates in an
exemplary reading of Sophocles' Philoctetes, where the value of
literature for the advancement of philosophical reflection can be
seen with the utmost clarity." -- Peter D. Fenves, Joan and Sarepta
Harrison Professor of Literature, Professor of German, Comparative
Literature and Jewish Studies, Northwestern University
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