Language Pangs: On Pain and the Origin of Language

258 Pages·2019·5.309 MB·

by  Ilit Ferber

Title Pages
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my family for their love that is and always was everything to me.
Most of all, I thank my husband Roy for his support and for being there for me in
all the happy as well as painful moments that accompanied my writing. (p.x)
Without his love this book would not have been possible. To my children who
listened to the story of Philoctetes at bedtime so many times: I thank Ori for our
conversations and her beautiful questions, Adam for his unique sensitivity and
ability to make me laugh also in painful moments, and Yotam whose insights
about empathy accompany this book.
The work was written amid many conversations with Werner Hamacher. I am
grateful for his attention, generosity, and belief in the project. Werner passed
away just a few months before the manuscript was completed and our last
meeting was devoted to discussing its final details. It is a great sadness that he
did not live to see it in print. This book is dedicated to him.
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Abbreviations
Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache. In Werke: Bd. 1: Frühe
Schriften 1764–1772, ed. Urich Gaier, 697–810. Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1985.
Treatise
“Treatise on the Origin of Language.” In Philosophical Writings, trans.
and ed. Michael N. Forster, 65–164. Cambridge University Press,
2002.
Versions of Philoctetes
Gide, Philoc.
André Gide. “Philoctetes; or, the Treatise on Three Ethics.” In
Philoctetes and the Fall of Troy: Documents, Iconography,
Interpretations, ed. and trans. Oscar Mandel, 158–178. University of
Nebraska Press, 1981.
Herder, Philoc.
Johann Gottfried Herder. “Philoktetes: Szenen mit Gesang.” In
Nachlaß veröffentlicht, Sämmtliche Werke. [Abt.] Zur schönen
Literatur und Kunst 6. Theil, ed. J. G. Herder, 113–126. Cotta, 1806.
Müller, Philoc.
Heiner Müller. “Philoctetes.” In Philoctetes and the Fall of Troy, trans.
Oscar Mandel in collaboration with Maria Kelsen Feder, 222–250.
University of Nebraska Press, 1981.
Sophocles, Philoc.
Sophocles. Philoctetes. trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Loeb Classical
Library. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Work by Rousseau
Essay
“Essay on the Origin of Languages.” In Essay on the Origin of
Languages and Writings Related to Music (Collected Writings of
Rousseau, vol. 7), trans. and ed. John T. Scott, 247–299. University
Press of New England, 1998.
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On Pain and the Origin of Language
fully expressed in language, something we can never entirely communicate or
share with others. Its unmediated nature tends to be deemed private, inasmuch
as any attempt to articulate it publicly is doomed to fail. Along these lines,
language seems to be everything that pain is not. Its underlying principles are
those of shareability, communication, and various forms of the self’s extension
into the world and toward others.
Regardless of our theoretical orientation toward language—whether analytical,
continental, or logical—this configuration of language, and the various ways by
which it refers, represents, expresses, and communicates, is common to them
all. Language not only challenges the private and solipsistic structure of pain,
but it also constitutes itself as inherently distinct from everything that is of-the-
body, somatic, or nonsymbolic. In this sense, physical pain and the body as such
must be overcome in order for language to emerge. If the emergence of
language marks humans’ departure from the bestial, then the violence and
intensity of cries of pain are precisely what can turn us back into animals, or at
least—momentarily—expose the animality that saturates our linguistic being.
Language Pangs challenges these already 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. My
premise is both that we cannot truly penetrate the experience of pain without
taking account of its inherent relation to language, and, vice versa, that the
nature of language essentially depends on our understanding of its inherent (p.
2) relationship with pain. I question the assumption that the experience of pain
puts a basic limit to our linguistic abilities, neutralizing us as linguistic beings.
On the contrary, the exploration of the nature and origins of language reveals a
very strong kinship to pain. It is therefore necessary to shift away from
considering this relationship in terms of essential rivalry and opposition and turn
toward a notion of inherent interconnection and profound intimacy between pain
and language, an abiding intimacy. Although it might be irrefutable that in states
of extreme pain, language seems to crumble or collapse, depriving us of words,
considering this characterization in itself is problematic and partial, stemming
perhaps from the way in which pain and language are conceptualized and
defined in the first place.
Although I concentrate mainly on physical and not psychic pain or suffering, my
discussion is not limited to the physical aspects and implications of pain (if it is
at all possible to treat pain as having merely physical implications). The
prevalent use of the word “pain” in the context of mental suffering (the pain of
loss, longing, or even love) reveals the kinship between physical and mental
pain. It is moreover difficult, perhaps impossible, to find philosophical
discussions of physical pain that do not “spill over” into its mental, psychological
effects. Discussions that remain within the boundaries of the merely physical
aspects of pain are, generally speaking, disciplinary and therefore rather limited
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