Anhaltender Verzehr. Zur Sprache der Klage
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
Laments and complaints are among the most ancient poetical forms and ubiquitous in everyday speech. Understanding plaintive language, however, is often prevented by the resentment and fear it evokes: Lamenting and complaining seems pointless, irreconcilable, and destructive. “Language of Ruin and Consumption: On Lamenting and Complaining” examines Freud’s approaches to lamenting and complaining, the heart of psychoanalytic therapy and theory, and takes them as guideline for reading key works of the modern canon. The re-negotiation of older - ritual, dramatic, and juridical - forms in Rilke, Veteranyi, Wittgenstein, Scholem’s reading of the Biblical Book of Lamentations (Eicha), Herder, Benjamin, Ovid, Rousseau, Roth, Faulkner, Bernhard, and Kafka puts plaintive language in the center of modern individuality and expounds a fundamental dimension of language neglected in theory: Reciprocity is at issue in plaintive language. Complaining and lamenting language is expounded as a crucial medium of psychic, social, and political (re-)formation due to its characteristic of stirring up, rather than settling, issues. Modernity and the time of tradition is a crucial topic in the analysis of plaintive language because most current forms of lamenting and complaining are positioned against ritual, liturgical, and other practices defined as belonging to a past, or to a lost and unrecoverable continuous tradition. This temporal model is complicated by the fact that all practices of complaint and lament, ancient and modern, deal with the discontinuity of experience, brought about by loss or pain. Silencing plaintive language is a recurrent practice of divergent socio-political modernizations, be it the classical polis, early and current Christianization, modern Islam, 18th century colonization, 19th century nationalism, or 20th century Communism - all of which consider plaints archaic and revanchist. Not only is ritual lament banned from the public just to reappear in the scene of modernity as a key to subjectivity in neurotic complaint. All of these plaintive discourses also share the aim of voicing conflict instead of achieving unison, thus resonating poorly with political or metaphysical concepts. The theoretical approach and its use of terminological language is fundamentally antithetical to plaintive discourses. Rewrite a complaint as a theoretical statement and the force of the affect and the deformations of language are lost. In order to be heard, laments and complaints are insistent and at times intimidating, in short: they seek to diminish distance from others - a distance presupposed in theory, literally a "beholding". Gender and genre distinctions appear as historically specific organizations of practices and experiences, and they also can appear as means for silencing plaintive language. In the classical Greek polis, for instance, gender segregation went along with genre segregation. Ritual lament and vendetta were associated with femininity on the one hand, while masculinity was associated with elegy, funeral orations, and state institutions of justice, as the "Oresteia" demonstrates. This book does not take genre distinctions between tragedy, elegy, and dirges, for instance, for granted. Rather, I raise the question whether lament is a genre, whether it can be contained in a genre, and whether it already distorted the gender lines drawn so deeply in other parts of Greek society. Political and metaphysical calls for compensation and restoration are at the heart of plaintive language, and at the same time, this type of language calls those ideals into question. Since restorative responses to plaintive language - be it a cure, a consolation, or a promise of justice - rely on symbolic substitutions, all of these compensations in fact repeat loss or pain, and because they are compensations, because justice is being served, one is no longer justified to complain.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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“Reading Violence, Lamenting Language: On Benjamin and Hamacher.” Philosophy Today 61.4 (2017), 1023-1030
Juliane Prade-Weiss
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„Die Toten haben Hunger. Aglaja Veteranyi über Ritual und Moderne.“ Comparatio 9.2 (2017), 235-260
Juliane Prade-Weiss
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„Klage der Natur. Lektüren des Sprachursprungs bei Herder und Benjamin.“ Orbis Litterarum special issue: Materialität und Affekt der Lektüre, hg. von Luisa Banki, 74.1 (2018), 18-31
Juliane Prade-Weiss
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„Meine Todten.“ In Droste-Handbuch, hg. von Cornelia Blasberg et al. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018, 292-295
Juliane Prade-Weiss
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„Rechtskritik und Klage: Szene der Entscheidung in Kafkas Heizer.“ In Theater als Kritik. Tagungsband des internationalen Kongresses der Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft in Frankfurt am Main und Gießen 2016, hg. von Olivia Ebert, Eva Holling, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll u.a., Paderborn: transcript, 2018, 179-188
Juliane Prade-Weiss
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Monatshefte: special issue: Sprache und Rache: Über Antwort und Erwiderung, summer 2019 (111.3)
Juliane Prade-Weiss und Jens Klenner (eds.)
