Ilit Ferber

A philosophical discussion of the emergence of new media cannot be limited to analyzing the structure and inner logic of the different media themselves. It ought to address the abiding philosophical predicaments of human experience, feeling and knowledge. Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes are both famous for their writings about photography; their discussion, however, is not limited to the nature of the medium itself, but provokes important questions regarding the internal connection between photography and feeling, specifically, sadness. This chapter traces the connection between the photographic medium and feeling as it appears in Benjamin and Barthes and argues that the uniqueness of this medium lies not in the way it captures or represents feeling, but rather in its ability to evoke feeling. Benjamin and Barthes’ investigations of the photographic medium may thus be regarded as an appraisal of the nature of human feelings and their intrinsic connection with photography.

The chapter focuses on Walter Benjamin’s conception of physical pain and its important relationship to language and expression, especially to storytelling. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Benjamin’s early texts on pain (the Trauerspiel book and his “Outline of the Psychophysical Problem”) and then moves to close readings of sections from Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Thought Figures, Ibizan Sequence and The Storyteller (all from the 1930s). I argue that for Benjamin, the content of the story is not as important as the practice of story-telling itself, to which he returns in different texts and through usually feminine figures. The chapter also discusses one of the central images Benjamin uses to describe storytelling: that of water (rivers, sea, waves, etc.) and his metaphor for pain as the “staudamm”, a dam, blocking the flow of language. Even though the relationship between pain and linguistic expression seems at first to be contradictory, for Benjamin, pain’s self-definition is inherently dependent upon the establishment of its relation to expression. In Benjamin’s conceptualization of pain, relief or healing is achieved when language has the upper hand, when its flow is powerful enough to tear down the opaque, blocked inexpressibility of pain.

Resumen Ante el dilema de si la Lógica de Hegel debe entenderse como una ontología o como una continuación del proyecto kantiano de la lógica trascendental, el artículo sostiene que no es propiamente una ontología, ni un análisis de conceptos y categorías subjetivas. Su vocación metafísica se basa en el postulado según el cual la reflexión del pensamiento sobre sí mismo tiene consecuencias para la comprensión del ser de lo que no es pensamiento, de modo que resulta ser un proyecto novedoso de ontología mediada por la autorreflexión del pensar.This text faces the dilemma whether Hegel’s Logic must be understood as ontology or as continuation of the Kantian project of transcendental logics. It upholds the thesis that Hegel’s Logic is not properly an Ontology -a direct and immediate description of object’s immanent way of being- nor an analysis of merely subjective concepts and categories. The metaphysical vocation of Hegel’s Logic draws rather on the claim that thought’s self-reflection has necessarily consequences for the comprehension of the being of all that is not thought. Hence, we are facing a groundbreaking project of an ontology that is mediated by thought’s self-reflection.

The article provides a close reading of Jean Améry’s essay, ‘Resentments’ from the perspective of temporality. Although firmly grounded in a specific historical and political context (Améry, a Holocaust survivor, reflects on the aftermath of his experiences during the war), I argue that this essay offers valuable insights into Améry’s philosophy of temporality. After establishing the context and structure of Améry’s ‘Resentments’, the article delves into a discussion of the temporal aspects found in the text: (1) Delay : the emergence of resentments and their connection to trauma. (2) Eternal Recurrence : Améry’s critique of Nietzsche, along with surprising interconnections between their ideas. (3) Natural Time and Forgiveness : Améry’s critique of the temporal structure of forgiveness and the morally questionable prioritization of the future over the past. (4) Moral Time and the Irreversible : the distorted temporal structure of resentments, and Améry’s thought-provoking exploration of the phantasy of time’s reversibility. (5) The Future : Améry’s direct address to the young Germans and his unexpected suggestion on how they should treat their past and history, emphasizing responsibility rather than blame, as the key their past provides for the possibility of their future.

This text pays tribute to Werner Hamacher’s work. It contemplates Hamacher’s thought about language, especially his criticism of views that measure language according to its propositional and referential functions. Instead, Hamacher foregrounds the importance of language’s interruptions, strikes and disorders, in which language operates independently of anything but itself, thus revealing its innermost core. The text examines Hamacher’s “The Second Inversion,” “Afformative, Strike,” and “Other Pains.”

One of the best known and most widely accepted premises regarding the experience of pain and suffering is its singular, private nature. Pain’s violence isolates us from everything else, embedding us completely within our own suffering so that there is nothing else but pain: no world or objects, no relationship with other people, no past or anticipation of the future. An utter withdrawal. But pain’s isolating force is dual: it affects not only those who suffer, but also those who are not in pain. Thus, it is precisely in pain – the exemplary state in which we need others with us to offer their help and sympathy – that we find ourselves in solitude; and it is precisely in the state of pain that we leave others to suffer alone.

Lament, mourning, and the transmissibility of a tradition in the aftermath of destruction are prominent themes in Jewish thought. The corpus of lament literature, building upon and transforming the biblical Book of Lamentations, provides a unique lens for thinking about the relationships between destruction and renewal, mourning and remembrance, loss and redemption, expression and the inexpressible. This anthology features four texts by Gershom Scholem on lament, translated here for the first time into English. The volume also includes original essays by leading scholars, which interpret Scholem's texts and situate them in relation to other Weimar-era Jewish thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan, who drew on the textual traditions of lament to respond to the destruction and upheavals of the early twentieth century. Also included are studies on the textual tradition of lament in Judaism, from biblical, rabbinic, and medieval lamentations to contemporary Yemenite women's laments. This collection, unified by its strong thematic focus on lament, shows the fruitfulness of studying contemporary and modern texts alongside the traditional textual sources that informed them.

We usually think about language and pain as opposites, the one being about expression and connection, the other destructive, "beyond words" so to speak, and isolating. Language Pangs challenges these familiar conceptions and offers a radical reconsideration of the relationship between pain and language in terms of an essential interconnectedness. Ilit Ferber's premise is that we cannot probe the experience of pain without taking account its inherent relation to language; and vice versa, that our understanding of the nature of language essentially depends on how we take account of its correspondence with pain. Language Pangs brings together discussions of philosophical as well as literary texts, an intersection that is especially productive in considering the phenomenology of pain and its bearing on language. Ferber explores a phenomenology of pain and its relation to language, before providing a unique close reading of Johann Gottfried Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language, the first modern philosophical text to consider language and pain, establishing the cry of pain as the origin of language. Herder also raises important claims regarding the relationship between human and animal, questions of sympathy and the role of hearing in the expression of pain. Beyond Herder, the book grapples with the work of other profound thinkers, including Martin Heidegger, Stanley Cavell, and André Gide, and finally, Sophocles, from them weaving new insights on the experience of pain, expression, sympathy, and hearing.

Resumen Ante el dilema de si la Lógica de Hegel debe entenderse como una ontología o como una continuación del proyecto kantiano de la lógica trascendental, el artículo sostiene que no es propiamente una ontología, ni un análisis de conceptos y categorías subjetivas. Su vocación metafísica se basa en el postulado según el cual la reflexión del pensamiento sobre sí mismo tiene consecuencias para la comprensión del ser de lo que no es pensamiento, de modo que resulta ser un proyecto novedoso de ontología mediada por la autorreflexión del pensar.This text faces the dilemma whether Hegel’s Logic must be understood as ontology or as continuation of the Kantian project of transcendental logics. It upholds the thesis that Hegel’s Logic is not properly an Ontology -a direct and immediate description of object’s immanent way of being- nor an analysis of merely subjective concepts and categories. The metaphysical vocation of Hegel’s Logic draws rather on the claim that thought’s self-reflection has necessarily consequences for the comprehension of the being of all that is not thought. Hence, we are facing a groundbreaking project of an ontology that is mediated by thought’s self-reflection.

Philosophy's Moods is a collection of original essays interrogating the inseparable bond between mood and philosophical thinking. What is the relationship between mood and thinking in philosophy? In what sense are we always already philosophizing from within a mood? What kinds of mood are central for shaping the space of philosophy? What is the philosophical imprint of Aristotle's wonder, Kant's melancholy, Kierkegaard's anxiety or Nietzsche's shamelessness? Philosophy's Moods invites its readers to explore the above questions through diverse methodological perspectives. The collection includes fourteen contributions by internationally renowned scholars as well as younger and emerging voices. In pondering the place of the subjective and personal roots that thinking is typically called to overcome, the book challenges and articulates an alternative to a predominant tendency in philosophy to view the theoretical content and the affective side of thought as opposed to one another.

In a diary entry from 1916 entitled “Über Klage und Klagelied” (On lament and dirge), originally written as a prologue to his translation of a collection of biblical lamentations, Gershom Scholem proposes a geographical metaphor to describe what he calls “all language.” The metaphor depicts two lands separated by a border: one land signifies the language of revelation, the other the language of silence; the border between them stands for what Scholem denotes as the language of lament (Klage). This article offers a close reading of this enigmatic text in an attempt to interpret Scholem’s early linguistic theory of lament and its relation to revelation and silence. In order to illuminate Scholem’s insights, I turn to Benjamin’s early fragment on lament (1916) and to his correspondence with Scholem on the relationship of lament to Jewish thought (1918), as well as to Werner Hamacher’s remarks on the linguistic form of lament. I argue that both Scholem and Benjamin portray lament as “a language of the border,” emphasizing its singular capacity to mark the boundaries of language and its expressive limits, while pointing to the possibility of lament to manifest a purely linguistic expression, devoid of any propositional, communicative, or subjective content. In his ambitious attempts to formulate a “metaphysics of language,” Scholem demonstrates the productivity of the intersection between the theological and philosophical, the linguistic and the metaphysical, in early twentieth-century continental philosophy.

This book traces the concept of melancholy in Walter Benjamin's early writings. Rather than focusing on the overtly melancholic subject matter of Benjamin's work or the unhappy circumstances of his own fate, Ferber considers the concept's implications for his philosophy. Informed by Heidegger's discussion of moods and their importance for philosophical thought, she contends that a melancholic mood is the organizing principle or structure of Benjamin's early metaphysics and ontology. Her novel analysis of Benjamin's arguments about theater and language features a discussion of the _Trauerspiel_ book that is amongst the first in English to scrutinize the baroque plays themselves. _Philosophy and Melancholy_ also contributes to the history of philosophy by establishing a strong relationship between Benjamin and other philosophers, including Leibniz, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger.