Ceaseless Consumption. On the Language of Laments and Complaints

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Juliane Prade-Weiss
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322266445

Laments and complaints are among the most ancient poetical forms and ubiquitous in everyday speech. Yet any reading of them faces a hermeneutic difficulty: Plaintive cries to not indicate any cause of pain, while articulate complaints and laments are often enunciated by means of formulas or ritual texts lending words to those who are besides themselves, which means they are mistaken if read verbatim as statements. Laments and complaints testify to experiences of being overwhelmed which cannot be named, or seized in statements but vice versa overwhelm conventional linguistic structures. This disorganization of language, however, is not meaningless: Laments and complaints speak of what is lost, or past, or should pass since it causes pain. The language of lament speaks by way of a contradiction, as permanent articulation of a passing, as a ceaseless consumption. Affect and emotion theories examine the symbolic constitution of particular sensations but rarely pay any attention to the language of lament. Canonical philosophical approaches to language do not grasp the difficulties of laments and complaints since they understand language as consisting of statements, formulating either true or false judgements. The modern paradigm of performativity serves to raise the question: What do laments want? Laments and complaints want to be listened to. They underline what most theories of language ignore, or relegate to rhetoric: Speech is not only by someone and on something, but addressed to someone. Whatever gives reason to lament or complain (pains, catastrophes, bad news, neuroses, loneliness, or death) casts doubt on the possibility of being heard, and answered. Unlike questions and pleas, laments and complaints do not indicate the kind of response they are after. This is why both Old Testament jeremiads and contemporary appeals to outrage are accused of being meaningless. Yet laments and complaints formulate meaning by decomposing linguistic structures. For this reason the language of lament appears as a disquieting source of concern in theological, philosophical, psychological, and philological studies. A comparative reading of such, as well as literary, anthropological, and psychoanalytical texts of different languages and epochs allows a systematic analysis of the language of lament as a basic form of human speech concerned with being heard. In order to be heard, it seeks to diminish the distance from others, a distance indispensable to theoretical investigations. A critical approach to the language of laments and complaints expounds a structure in language that resists the hegemony of theory.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Paul North, Ph.D.