The one who suffers does not talk. The paradox of speaking about suffering is that the speaker does not (only) suffer, he also sighs, sings, and laments, and in these expressions a host of ambiguities are disclosed. A reduplication is taking place between the immediate experience and memory of suffering and its public representation and articulation. Witnessing is in danger of betraying and it represents a risk for the survivor of atrocitity, that the witnessing will cost the life of the witness. The risk of speaking is articulated in Hamlet, “Why must I like a whore unpack my heart?” and Nietzsche’s interpretation of this: only that, which has become dead inside of us, can we find words for.
Pathos of lament not only prevails over ethos and logos, it also anticipates praise of God as its ultimate, theological extreme: the foolishness of the Cross. This topic permeates the written corpus of both Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard. Passivity (Greek: pathos) can be seen as a third element in the relationship between ethos and logos, and hence as a category implying a neglected hermeneutical dimension of ethos and logos. The vita passiva is shown to be a life of creative passivity, a “passivity by passion”, including suffering. Traditional semantics of mourning and lament, guilt and finitude, offer guidelines for how suffering could be included in a society where suffering and lament perhaps has become speechless and unloved or has become all too eloquent. Suffering is a precarious and perhaps ‘unloved’ phenomenon in modern society, yet harboring a potential for individual and social re-orientation. Rebecca Comay addresses the topic of hypochondria, suffering and lament in Kant, Beckett, and Hamlet. Günter Bader and Paul Ricoeur offer points of entry in biblical lament to a possible way of “speaking without speaking”.