Language of Ruin and Consumption

Juliane Prade-Weiss is Professor of Comparative Literature at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany. She is editor of (M)Other Tongues: Literary Reflexions on a Difficult Distinction (2013).

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