Pain and/as Language in German Critical Thought and Literature (NeMLA)
Newport (Rhode Island)
Event: NeMLA
58th NeMLA Convention
06.03.-09.03.2027, Newport, Rhode Island
Format: -in Person
Pain traverses not only the body but also German literature and philosophy. A paradigmatic case is the Laocoon debate involving Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Johann Gottfried Herder, in which pain and its expression are understood as constitutive conditions of the successful work of art. At the same time, the writings of numerous authors are profoundly structured by pain. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s oeuvre, for instance, may be read as a sustained engagement with and through pain, as evidenced in the Trilogie der Leidenschaft as well as in Torquato Tasso.
A comparable dynamic can be observed in German philosophy. Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor W. Adorno, Martin Heidegger, among others, circumscribe pain in their writings, seeking to articulate, displace, and render it into language. In this context, pain is frequently configured in relation to other conceptual categories—such as memory (Nietzsche) or measure (Schopenhauer)—as though this very displacement were already inscribed within the structure of pain itself.
This panel interrogates the modes by which pain may be articulated, the conditions under which it becomes intelligible, and, crucially, the ways in which it persistently resists communication and the production of meaning. It proceeds from the premise that the articulation of pain is constitutive of an emancipated community, in keeping with the conference’s guiding theme.
Please submit abstracts of 150-300 words, including the submitter’s biographical information through the NeMLA website: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22235
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22235
Ioannis Dimopulos