Language of Ruin and Consumption

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 examines Freud's approaches to lamenting and complaining, the heart of psychoanalytic therapy and theory, and takes them as guidelines for reading key works of the modern canon. The re-negotiation of older--ritual, dramatic, and juridical--forms in Rilke, Wittgenstein, Scholem, Benjamin, 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.
Language of Ruin and Consumptionadvocates that a fruitful reception of psychoanalysis in criticism combines the discussion of psychoanalytical concepts with an adaptation of the hermeneutical principle ignored in most philosophical approaches to language, or relegated to mere rhetoric: speech is not only by someone and on something, but also addressed to someone.

Juliane Prade-Weiss is Professor of Comparative Literature at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany. She is editor of (M)Other Tongues: Literary Reflexions of a Difficult Distinction (2013) and has published in English and in German on infantile language, human-animal studies, life writing, multilingualism, exile and migration, reciprocity and violence, as well as participation and complicity.

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: Getting a Hearing Consuming Structures of Language Lamenting in Theory Terms of Plaint The Coming Chapters 1. Understanding Plaintive Language: Freud Complaint without a Cause: Treating Hysteria and Forgetting Laments in Modernity Complaining and Wish-Fulfillment Idiom of Plaint: The "Wolf Man's" Speech Mourning, Melancholia, and Consumption Metabolism of Plaintive Language 2. Ritual and Modernity: On Silencing Laments (with Aeschylus, Rilke, and Veteranyi) Tale of Lament's Life and Death Patterns of Looking at Ritual Plaints "The Dead Are Hungry": Metaphor and Liminality Antiphony: Response and Dissent Ta(l)king Revenge: No End to Lamentation 3. Voicing Pain and Destruction: Wittgenstein and Scholem Naming and Claiming Pain Knowing and Doubting Pain Complaint by Response A Nasty Move: Silencing Plaints Relationality and Symbol Lamenting Tradition 4. Lament of Nature: Benjamin, with Herder Trauerspiel and Tragedy: "the ear for lament" Benjamin's "Nature" Language as Such, and Terminology: Looking Away Vanishing from History Lament and Theory, Once Again 5. (No Way) From Complaining to Legal Action: Kafka "with every complaint understanding [subsides]" Understanding, Comprehension, Sympathy, and Inconsolability Complaints, Vanishing into Juridical Action Representation and Betrayal Politics of Outcry: Claiming Justice Conclusion: Transgenerational Trauma and the Inability to Lament Bibliography Index