390 RüdigerKunow
describe a pain in his [sic] head to a doctor.. ." and failing: not only
does Grace's "language... run dry" (7)—she is driven to resort to ever
more extreme semantics, more somatic, more violent, and more painful
ones. In the end, these semantics even attain an almost exclusive status
when "self-inflicted bodily harm [serves as her essential means of
communication]" (xii). Even in that stage, the hiatus that Wittgenstein
saw between the inside of pain and the outside of pain, representation
could not really be overcome inside the language games provided by
"two-personpsychology"(Nakhla andJackson152).Oneofthereasons
might be that the idea offered by Wittgenstein of pain as mere
conceptual analogy—"if I suppose that someone has a pain, then I am
simply supposing that he has just the same as I have so often had"
(Philosophical Investigations94)—falls apart under the weight of the
urgenciesofGrace'spsychosis(andsimilarsuchcases).^84 Whatremains
is the claim made by the semantics of the pain suffered by Grace and
articulatedbythisnarrative—theclaimmadeonsomeotherperson(her
psychoanalystamongthem)forsomesortofresponse.Itistothisaspect
thatIwillturninthenextstepofmyargument.
TheWeofPain
Pain is in secularized Western cultures for the most part taken to be
an intensely personal matter, a special and perhaps pathological way in
which human beings experience or inhabit the corporeality of their
existence. For Wittgenstein, this means that any pain representation is
essentially areprésentation fausse(my term). Hence, pain could not
really be expected to enter the circuits of communication in which
individuals seek to convey—to bring across, in quite a literal sense of
thephrase—theiranguish.
The work of Stanley Cavell is extremely useful at this juncture, not
least because it starts at a similar point as Wittgenstein while avoiding
the latter's representational skepticism turning into solipsism. Also,
(^84) Onthis point, I disagree with Iris Hermann's extremely erudite reading of the
textas"successfullinguisticrepresentationofanexperiencethatisverydifficult
to verbalize because its pre-linguistic and violence components resist
representation" (Schmerzarten80-120, 109; my trans.). My thanks to Andreas
Barthforalertingmetothisbook.