Seminar: Expressions of Pain
Expressions of Pain
Dr. Ilit Ferber
Description:
The seminar will be devoted to a philosophical discussion of the experience of pain and the different problems inherent to the possibility and impossibility to express it. The forceful intensity of pain is usually thought of as demarcating the borders of language. Pain is considered as opening up an unbridgeable gap between the intensity of its experience on our bodies or minds, and the evident impossibility to express it in words. This intuition provides the basis for a variety of problems regarding pain: the tormenting continuous struggle between feeling and language, the difficulty to identify and understand other people’s pains, our sometimes instinctive withdrawal from sympathy towards the suffering of others, intense pain turning humans into non-speaking animals, and the list is long. We will discuss these problems in the context of philosophy of language and mind, psychoanalysis and literature.
Requirements:
Our discussion will be based on close-readings of philosophical and literary texts and will therefore require the students to come prepared and read the (sometimes difficult) material in advance. Students will be required to submit two 1-page assignments during the semester, as well as a final paper. Attendance is mandatory.
Grade components:
20% attendance and participation
20% two mid-semester assignments
60% final paper:
Seminar paper: 20-24 pp., (paragraph double-spaced, font size 12). Referat (students taking class as elective course): between 10- 12 pages (paragraph double-spaced, font size 12)
Preliminary Reading list:
1. Elaine Scarry, “Introduction,” The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp.3-23.
2. Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (Paris Press, 2012).
3. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), selected sections.
4. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador, 2003), chapters 1-2, 5-6, 8.
5. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, “Case 1: Fräulein Anna O.,” in ed. Pater Gay, The Freud Reader (Norton & Company, 1995), pp. 61-78.
6. Sigmund Freud, “First Lecture,” Five Lectures in Psychoanalysis, The Standard Edition (Norton & Company, 1961), pp. 3-17.
7. Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Childhood Around 1900 [“The Fever”],” in ed. M. Jennings and H. Eiland, Selected Writings Volume 3 1935-1938 (Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 362-365.
8. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “The Letter of Lord Chandos,” Selected Prose (Bollingen NY, 1952).
