On this side of language, pain

Abstract

Pain and pleasure, when profound, totalizing, leave one without voice. Under the violence of pure suffering, language is annihilated and therefore the protective falseness of its game vanishes. The impenetrable nakedness of our life, as pain and as pleasure, forces the thought, without protection, to the redde rationem and makes it free of the irreparable unrest due to philosophizing. We can say with Hegel that: "Pain is the privilege of living natures (...). One can say that the contradiction is not thinkable, but the living organisms, while suffering, effectively live". The relationship between pain and language assumes a link between death and pain. There would be no anxiety towards our own death if we did not have an idea of its occurrence, and no idea is possible without language. The soul is the human on the move, the continuous flow of symbolic communication, it is history, it is our acting community. Thought, love and joy are faces of this movement and are in a relation of reciprocity. I, you, we have a dialog; I, you, we love each other; I, you and we have delight in each other. Therefore anyone of us has pleasure since the others have pleasure. Physical pain breaks this essential reciprocity.