Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction I. Suffering in Truth and Theory 1. To Give Suffering a Language Literature and Medicine Arthur Kleinman's Case of the Little Girl 2. Coverings/Apertures: The Invisibility of Suffering Barthes on Photography The Newsweek Cover of May 10, 1993 P. J. Griffiths' Photograph 3. Suffering as Metaphor Nietzsche's Remedy of Art Freud's Narrative Cure II. Tragic Suffering 4. Job or the Meaninglessness of Suffering Job's Silence Job Speaking God Speaking Job's Restitution 5. Antigone or the Secrecy of Suffering Antigone's Suffering Kierkegaard's Antigone Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Antigone Antigone's Suicide 6. Lear or the Causelessness of Suffering Suffering Love Index

About the Author

Harold Schweizer is Associate Professor and NEH Chair in the Humanities at Bucknell University. He edited The Poetry of Irving Feldman and edited, with Michael Payne, The Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory (a twelve volume series).

Reviews

"This book exhibits cumulatively the vast and deep implications of the notion of suffering. The author shows not only the various ways in which suffering resists analysis by conventional philosophical, scientific, and psychoanalytic categories but examines a broad array of literary endeavors to overcome that resistance. "What emerges from this examination is that suffering occupies a unique position in the universe of modern thought and letters: it is arguably the most private, and most primordial, experience. Its very nature is such that it cannot be communicated to others, except in the most compromised modes of expression: pictures, photographs, gestures, breathing, and the vast heritage of rationally ordered concepts. The author shows that what compromises all of these (especially conceptuality) is their status as language: they are always translations into a public medium of an intimate experience which is in many ways pre-linguistic. The language of translation (whichever of these modes it may be) always inflects the 'pure' experience with its own nature, always absorbs it as an intelligible element into its own falsifying structure." - M.A.R. Habib, Rutgers University